Wednesday, November 25, 2009

a sight to raise you up (on the last day)

I love the many annoyances of Vista: from the beautiful dialog boxes that tell you nothing in eye-pleasing fashion to the extra barricades laid to make even an evening walk seem like a hop and skip in Purgatory; from the refusal to come to terms with whatever works to the insistence of let even the simplest task be left unencumbered. After having nearly given myself a homemade Ghajini cut (right down to Aamir's evil Spock-ian sneer of constipated rage), I can only resign myself to chuckles at the silly creativity in the error message I saw most often while I tried to get a laptop to understand what "being on the network" meant (it was only a reboot that rendered this melange of metal incapable of sending its packets across over the fence of the modem to named parties on the outside -- that I can ping it on the local network is an example of black humour in Class C). Some creative dunderhead decided to exacerbate the pain of having to switch to Administrative mode by giving it a phrase of its own. To see this phrase, all you have to do is run something like "ipconfig /flushdns" in the command window you managed to open after searching high and low for a shortcut. Since you didn't bother to use the intuitive "Run as Administrator" option in the context menu, you will now see the beatific message the requested operation requires elevation.

This suggests several possible things: perhaps administrative commands can only be run in a rarefied environment much like that in hill stations or up in the stratosphere or perhaps even in space (where no one can hear you installing updates); perhaps such commands require a bust uplift; perhaps one needs to be in an elevator going up to the penthouse when one attempts to effect a clearing of the DNS cache; perhaps one needs to be free of all vestiges of the disgust that one has been feeling so far -- flush with a smile.

Just give me some unbleached bathroom tissue instead.

PS: if anyone knows how to fix my problem, drop me a line. Until then don't even tell me that Windows 7 is better. Escaping with multiple fractures is likely to be preceived as better than death, but it ain't holdin' no candle to whooshing through life without a scratch.

3 comments:

skeptic optimist said...

Nice Rant - I guess you may have realized that those Mac vs PC ads indeed mean something. Your piece should be made into one of those ads man.

BTW This site tells to disable user access control

http://gaskell.org/the-requested-operation-requires-elevation-in-windows-vista/

You can do that as an Administrator but I have the feeling that this might need like service pack or something. Let me know if this works

George said...

Shriniwas,
Thanks for stopping by. The rant was about the text of the error message. I knew it was going to be a problem because I had not run "Command" as Administrator.

The problem I was dealing with (still am, 24 hours later) was with the inability to do anything after getting an IP address from my wireless router. I can't believe how much irrevocable damage one reboot can do. I guess it's time to do what fixed all things in Windows for years -- a fresh installation.

Anand said...

Aha, that's a vexing problem but an easy one for us techie-types

Use another pie pan, the same size as your pie and place it gently inside the empty pie shell. Turn both pans upside down on a baking sheet, place another baking sheet on top of the pie shell.

That should make it work just fine.

 
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