In other news, I’m giving up installing Windows on the external drive. I’ve passed the point where the expense of time and effort has bypassed the expected benefit. I can’t help but be annoyed–doing this with linux takes no effort–but I guess I can’t be too disappointed. Microsoft software is designed to make profits for Microsoft, not to benefit the user. It’s useless to be disappointed each time this manifests itself.

It’s been a convenience, but like most things chosen for price alone, robustness was not one of its qualities. Last week its power jack died beyond my ability to wiggle the plug into a workable position, and last weekend the final dregs of battery gave out. Given that I had a Best Buy gift card from christmas, I took it in to see if they could do anything with it. They pointed out that shipping alone would cost a quarter of the price of a new computer, and that replacing the motherboard would eat the rest. Replacment was the more practical option.

I’m typing this on a new computer, whose numerical statistics are (with astonishing precision) precisely double those of the computer this is replacing. However, like any other brand new machine, it was practically uselses out of the box: it had a crappy OS (Vista Basic) and a hard drive full of adware and demos. The ideal scenario would be for me to just throw the old machine’s hard drive into an external enclosure and boot from that, but Microsoft in its infinite wisdom has installed logic to prevent that from happening. After all, if the boot disc for an XP license was portable, a user could just carry that disc around to whatever machine happened to be handy at the time, losing MS the OS sales for each of those machines.

Luckily for me, in software there is no such thing as having the last word. If there is incentive to do a thing, no force in the world will prevent someone on the internet from figuring out how to do it. Wait long enough, and the knowledge will even be refined into tutorial form.

The process isn’t perfect. I’ll have to back up everything of importance, then customize, format, and reinstall windows onto the portable drive. Then I get to reinstall all the applications. It’ll probably eat at least one weekend to get things running properly.

Still, the result is what matters: I’ll have a Windows installation in a wallet-sized drive that I can plug in whenever I need it, and whenever I don’t, there’ll be nothing preventing me from using this nice new ubuntu box as my general-purpose portable. It is hard not to see this result as being an upgrade in all respects.

“It’s kind of bittersweet,” one mentioned. “I kept hearing during training about how much fun my officers had back when they were lieutenants. Now it’s halfway over, and I’ve spent the entire time here.”

Another chimed in: “You have to admit that it’s not always so bad here. You really can’t beat SERE detail.”

“Yeah, no, you’re right; I just expected to come out of training and have fun doing Army things.”

*  *  *

The only appropriate word for last Monday’s checkride is ‘terrible.’ A bunch of extraneous factors combined to provide the worst possible conditions, but in the end, I just flew badly. In light of that, it really doesn’t make sense to go into the other stuff. Still, it is a new and uncomfortable feeling when during the debrief, the two major statements from the check officer are “The main reason I didn’t fail you was that I never got the impression that you had lost control of the helicopter,” and “You know, if you study hard and really work, maybe for your next checkride you could get into the high B range.”

I honestly think the low expectations for my next ride hurt more than the score I got on this one.

*  *  *

The army uses for flight planning a baffling collection of software components, mostly developed independently, some designed to work together. We have had no less than four different introductory classes on the basics of how to install and use certain of the features of this software suite. That would be ok were it not for the fact that each of these four classes have been identical.

I feel kind of bad for the instructors of these classes. It’s not their fault that they’re required to teach a random set of features in mind-numbing detail (“To change the color of the ellipse we just drew, right click on it, choose the ‘Edit Ellipse’ option, then choose the ‘Color and Position’ tab, then click the ‘Color’ button to open the color chooser…”). It’s very difficult for me to pay any real attention; there are few aspects of anything they teach that aren’t already intuitive for any skilled user of Windows programs, and we’ve already covered the rest of it in previous iterations of the same class.

I can wish all I want for a proper teaching staff, composed not of ex-pilots who want a cushy civilian DA (Department of the Army) job after having retired, but of proper subject matter experts. It still won’t happen until I get out of this and back into some sort of normal academia. Even so, I can’t help contrasting my experiences at WPI to those here as “higher education done right, and done wrong.” It makes me think that I’d really enjoy getting some sort of postgraduate degree once I have the freedom to, after the Army.

Let me say this again: It removed all stored playlist settings, including the 5000 or so song ratings I had set to tell it which music I liked and which I did not. Generating 5000 song ratings was a process that has taken me two years so far. It was not one that I hoped ever to have to repeat.

Does anyone know of a good, non-iTunes music player for Windows? I’m willing to strip the DRM from the music I bought from the iTunes store and never use that store again. All I want is a low-resources player with good playlist support.