Insert Relevant Title Here

Sorry, sometimes no relevant title occurs to me.

I was just sitting here in the living room, reading This Alien Shore, and thinking intermittently about a problem at work. I have been working on the installation of a piece of software for some time, and it's only been about a month since the PC part of it started working. Now today I got the news that the mainframe portion doesn't seem to be entirely compatible with what I have on the PC. I have to apply maintenance to it. That's not something that I normally do, and it scares me a little, but its not that big a deal. Still, if I can avoid it, I would. I was trying to remember where I got the software that I have on the mainframe, and I just remembered that I got it from the same source that the people doing the same thing at another location got theirs. I was a little concerned that perhaps, in my flailing around when I was starting this project, I had picked it up from one of the many places that could have had it -- when my company bought the company that makes this software, we dispersed the knowledge and support of it to the four winds, and then some. So it was possible -- but no.

So that's good. Still, I need to update this, or replace it with something newer. How to do that? Well, the suggested way is to apply maintenance - but it turns out that a) that maintenance is locked up in a system that I can't seem to get into -- another of our Know The Secret Handshake systems, and b) the first page of that site says, coyly, that not all of the product that I'm looking to update is there -- so even if I get in, it might not be there. Or it might be there, but be old stuff. I can't tell.

Then I thought Aha! Wait a second! I got another shipment of this code from a completely different source, and that source is known (or at least believed) to be newer than the source that fed me originally. Perhaps that will be current enough that I don't need to apply maintenance! Not terribly likely, but not out of the question. And then I remembered that when I had gotten the update for the PC, that site -- whose existence I hadn't even suspected; one of the many dispersed locations I mentioned above -- also had mainframe software. Perhaps that was even newer - again, I can't tell. And I can't remember that site name, so I can't sign on from this laptop (our home one) because, though I could get to our internal system from here, our internal search engine is fairly poor, and the odds of finding that particular site aren't too good.

But, I thought, I do have a pointer to that other site, buried in my browser bookmarks on my work laptop, which is sitting over against the wall in its bag. Ah -- but that piece of junk takes about fifteen minutes to start -- and its got to be plugged in, because its battery is just about shot -- and then longer to start up the browser, and then find the entry. And longer if I wanted to use that browser to get to the site, and actually look at it.

And I thought about the book I'm reading, which is populated with people who are linked cybernetically with computer systems, so that they can push and pull data at will, as needed, instantaneously.

And I sighed.