painsthee (is stephanie, scrambled)

My paper proposal, titled “The passion in his heart and the reason in his mind”: Sons of Anarchy as Postmodern Hamlet was approved for the 2012 Popular Culture Association conference in Boston.

Which means rewatching Sons of Anarchy isn’t goofing off, it’s research.

Bonus: PCA is like the nerd rapture—lots of intelligent people with passionate interests and large vocabularies coming together to discuss minutiae. YAY! Also, Boston=favorite city in US. Double bonus!

I’m going to talk about computers for a minute, mine specifically, since it’s what I’m using to write this. This may or may not interest you whatsoever. WHATEVER I AM NOT YOUR MONKEY.

Ahem.

So, I’m a Mac girl. Devoted. Not to the “I have an Apple tattoo and cried of Steve Job’s death” degree, but I love their products. Luckily, so is work–we’re a Mac house. This is all good.

Since the whole migration to iCloud, I’ve been having mega super issues with my MobileMe account–which is what iCloud is replacing. I didn’t upgrade to iCloud because you have to be running Lion, the newest software, to be able to. And I had been holding off on upgrading for one reason–the custom database program we use at work only just barely limps along in Snow Leopard. I think it was built for the original OSX. I mean, YEARS OLD. I think whoever made it died or something. And nobody has been able to find a database program that works the way we need it to. (Mind you, we are a VERY specialized industry.) And finding a replacement database program has not been the owner’s priority at all, because what we had worked.

So, over the weekend, tired of the constant password error messages (THANKS FOR BREAKING MY SHIT, APPLE), I said fuck it and downloaded Lion. And it’s puuuurrrty. And fast. And shiny. And it fixed my password errors. And now I can use the cloud. And it generally makes me happy.

But, guess what no longer works… yep, the database. The stupid stinking antiquated gotta-have-it-to-do-my-job database.

Here’s where I get crankypants about it. When I started my job, I think 6 years ago, it came with a computer–an old (even then) iMac. About 4 days into my job, it died. And I said at the time, “I can just use my laptop until you figure something out.”

I’ve been using my laptop (well, two different ones, actually) ever since. It’s my computer. It has all my personal information. My boss did not buy it, nor does he pay to maintain it. (Except in the sense that he signs my paycheck, I guess.)  The only software he has purchased that is on my machine is said antiquated database and the CAD program we use for drafting (because at $1800 I sure as hell wasn’t buying it).

And I expect that when I go in and point out that MY laptop THAT I OWN AND BOUGHT no longer works with the database because I upgraded to the CURRENT, NOT OBSOLETE OS ON MY OWN MACHINE, that he is going to tell me to just restore from my Time Machine backup to Snow Leopard.

And… I kind of have a problem with that. It’s my machine. I should be able to have what I want on it. I never signed up for providing my own computer for work. My coworker used to have a company-provided computer, but it was ruined in the flood last year and never replaced, so he is also using his laptop. He’s in the same pickle as me–unable to upgrade because of the database.

Ultimately, the database needs to be replaced, but like I said, it’s very specific needs we have–Filemaker Pro won’t really cut it. But where I work we are allergic to change, and I know not to expect that will ever happen.

So, I am trying to enjoy Lion while I have it, because I expect I will have to go backwards and be out the $30 I spent upgrading.

Oh, Lion. It was nice while I knew ya.