Windows Notepad

Engineering Potpourri Pat's Pub
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#1

I have a habit of breaking software.
Obviously, all the software I write is broken. So I don’t do that often.
Then there is the software I use long after its expiry date, so it’s broken.
I am also the guy that takes those week-long training courses with professional software packages like ANSYS and Autodesk and Solidworks, and every time I go, something breaks and I put the instructor on the spot saying “I’ve never seen it do THAT before”.

But the other day came as a really big surprise, when, of all things that could be broken on my workstation, it was… Notepad.

It took a while to convince somebody in IT that a problem existed (and, yeah, that it wasn’t “PEBKAC”, you know).

Notepad_is_Broken
Notepad_is_Broken1920×909 102 KB

Here’s my IT guy, accessing my workstation remotely, trying to reinstall Notepad and having no luck (see the little error on the left).

I shrugged and walked away from my workstation for a while while he struggled. When I came back, he had completely deleted my user profile and started me up with a totally new user profile. Now THAT broke a lot of other software. All my personalization settings in Office and CAD programs, gone. And Notepad still doesn’t work.

At least I like to use Notepad++ from time to time, and it’s filling the gap (though it’s like swatting a fly with a hammer.) So I kinda wish I hadn’t put that ticket into IT to fix Notepad, and just gone on with Notepad++.

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#2

Birds of a feather . . .

More than once, I’ve been passed to the “senior IT guy” to solve my problem, only to be told, “here’s a work around” or “here’s a software on our bookshelf that almost does what the old software won’t”. Sigh!

Most engineers abandoned some really neat DOS programs we have/had as we marched from W3 to W7 to W10 over the last 2 decades. Not I! I got our VP to twist IT’s arm and let me install and use vDOS, which isn’t perfect, but runs >98% of the old DOS programs we had. It has a hard time with color graphics. If I had had the source code I would have converted it to Python and everybody would be running it on W10 Enterprise now, but . . . it wasn’t meant to be.