Yes, I'm here, I'm still alive, but believe or not, still fighting an absolutely Don Quixotic fight against computers both here and there. My trusty portable is being repaired and the computer I got as a replacement here at ITU refused to do anything sensible last week and had to be rebooted and only now am I getting it to work properly - on top of everything the systemsadministration is updating fileservers, mailservers etc, so system at ITU is fairly unstable. So don't expect regular postings here quite yet.

TCP/IP protocol didn't work in Windows 95 at home (most likely old bug) and all Windows 95 CDROMs in my close environment seem to have vanished (including the one I borrowed a friend :(), so now I'm desperately trying to install a newer version of Windows and make that stable and the netcard work with that bla, bla, bla. I dream in bits and feel I'm turning into a complete nerd as I browse through help pages of updates and weird cab.files extraction instructions on the internet, desperately trying to find the right answer to all my troubles somewhere...

The most humilating - or rather amusing?!? experience - that have so far come off this update-adventure was, when last week I had to go to a local computer cafe to download a driver that the internet provider support had sent me. It was early evening and the room was full of boys in all ages playing network games,as I entered the cafe and went to the desk wearing the dark suit, I had worn for fun at work that day - - and the young guy behind the desk took one look up and down of me and said a bit arrogantly "I suppose you just want to use the internet". Which I had to agree to and he showed me the way to one of the few spare computers, while he asked me something very close in meaning to "Do you know how to use a computer at all" (i.e he said something along the lines of "Are you an experienced computer user?"). I was VERY close to telling him, "yes, as a matter of fact, I'm a ph.d.student at the IT University so I think I know a thing or two about computers..", but I just couldn't be bothered. Sometimes it's just not worth the energy and why should I need to prove myself to him? So I just said yes and went and did my thing. - It's been a long time since I experienced that attitude, but guess there is still a lot of prejudice to deal with before this world is freed of those males that think that just because a woman dresses well and doesn't look like she knows the difference between RAM and R.E.M, in effect it is not actually so...
# posted by Lisbeth at: 19:03