The Path of the Bookseller

One thing that drive me utterly nuts is when software does something on its own, ignoring my directions, just because it wants to do it.

I’ve been getting messages for the past few days about the new format of this blog. Since I hadn’t looked at the blog in several days, I wasn’t sure what people meant. When I went to the page, I found, to my dismay, that the formatting that I had carefully created was gone. The large, very readable serif font was gone, replaced by the current tiny sans serif font, and the margins were wrong. (If you look at the pages with full posts, you’ll see my picture overlapping and obscuring several character from the left end of the paragraph next to it.)

The maddening thing is that I haven’t changed anything–I hadn’t even logged on to the site at the point that it changed. Something has changed out from under me. I don’t know if it’s the WordPress software or the template that I use, but I hadn’t touched either of them. And it’s not a browser or platform issue: I’ve checked it under Windows and Linux, and in Firefox and Opera, and it’s all broken the same way. I don’t think the hosting company could have changed anything that affected this, since I installed WordPress from scratch on my site, specifically so I could modify things to a more readable form.

So it looks like I’m going to have to spend some time in the next few days digging through configuration files and trying to see if I can fix things.

Things like this threaten to unleash my inner luddite. I have a fairly regular routine (is that redundant?) of things that I do in the morning (well, relative morning, between when I wake up and when I head to work), all of which should be quite automatic. But delays keep introducing themselves, by an email program either deciding to upgrade itself rather than immediately give me my messages, by the program completely tossing its cookies and forcing me to delete its index files before I can read my mail, or, even more frequently, by iTunes having grabbed unexpectedly large podcasts overnight and forcing me to move stuff around so it will fit on my iPod. (And, no, having iTunes decide what it wants to put on my iPod rather than letting me choose isn’t an option, since I use the iPod for work and most of my listening, and would hate to discover that it didn’t have something I needed.)

So here I am, about to rush off to work, and having spent too much time trying to figure out what tasks my software has imposed on me (and taking about fifteen minutes to write this post). I have other stuff I gotta do, but that’s going to have to wait until tonight, if I I’m awake enough, or the next few days.

Remember that someone once said that insanity consists of expecting different results to identical processes? In the days of current software, insanity consists of the delusion that you have enough control over all the variables in your life that you can expect anything to go according to plan.

Grr.