I’ve worked as an IT professional for the past 12 years. I’ve seen lots of changes and lots of updates. I used to like updates. Hey… they usually made things better… usually making things load quicker, giving me faster throughput and making things more reliable.
The problem is that most of my time now is spent with some kind of update. If I leave my laptop off for a few days and boot it up, it will take 10-15 minutes to get the latest Microsoft or Apple updates… download them and then want the usual reboot. This is before I fire up iTunes or other software that needs an update.
And just when I think I’m done, a little tray icon will pop up and remind me that Flash, Java, or Acrobat is feeling a little outdated and needs some attention. A few clicks, a download, an install and a reboot and I’m finally ready to get to work.
Ahh the silence of a spun down hard-drive… but wait… now that things are silent the background notifications are starting to work… It’s the dreaded e-mail that there is a new WordPress blog software upgrade that should be installed right away. This little chore takes about 15 minutes and now I’m ready to start working.
Ooops… not so fast says the WordPress dashboard… a slew of updated plug-ins are now available and some of them are really important… another 20 minutes this time and now I’m surely ready to get started writing.
I start to type and upload my first draft to the web and I notice that my site is suddenly down. How could this be… I wonder? So I login to the site status web site and notice that my web host is doing a 12 hour maintenance. Thanks for letting me know I mumble under my breath.
I start to write in my local blog editor and now I’m starting to get mad. I take a vacation for a couple of days and I come back to this update hell… arrgh. But wait… now that I have to wait 12 hours for my blog site to come back up I can download the new Vista Service Pack 1 and load it on my computer.
A few clicks and a 20 minute download and I’m ready to go. I fire up the update and now it says that my computer will be unavailable for at least an hour and will reboot multiple times… well hey… I’m not doing anything else…
The computer grinds away and the screen goes blank multiple times… I grab some refreshment and watch a little TV. After an hour of a mindless reality show I come back to a computer that is just finishing up… now I can start writing, I say to myself.
One last reboot and the computer is ready… ready for a defrag since a huge amount of files had been installed and moved around. I click off the defragmentation notification and I set it to defrag overnight and go to bed… knowing that everything will be better Saturday morning.
I wake up Saturday morning, ready to go. I click the mouse of my computer and the screen comes up and notifies me that the defrag is done… I’m on my way now. I fire up my web site and get ready to post… but the dreaded “site unavailable” message appears.
What!!! My site is still down??? I login to the site status web site and notice that the screen is bright red with urgent notifications. It seems my current web host had multiple problems overnight and the 12 hour window may have to be extended… This is actually funny as I had just moved my blog over to this web host because my other host had had continual problems since moving my site to a new server in December. Double arrrghhh!
So here I am writing this post, waiting for things to come back up. I did read a great message this morning on Copyblogger about Three Sure-Fire Steps to beat the Boring Content Blues. This post is a result… Hopefully it’s not boring. I’m now starting on another new post for later in the week.
Hey… someday we’ll all be updated or die trying 🙂
Ooops… hang on… Now Microsoft is alerting me that there are updates to the service pack… will it never end???
