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I've recently changed employers and now I use a Windows workstation at work. Outlook, even. (At least putty's pretty unhateworthy. And it turns out you can configure Outlook to send blissfully ordinary plain text mail, if you try, even if it is a pain in the ass to work around its damn-near enforced top-posting.) It's been tolerable. I mean, I find it irritating and unnecessarily difficult at certain times, but I shut it down at least once a week and run my little software updates and it has been alright enough, I guess, for a kludgey hack of a window manager. Except sometimes you have to work with the kludgey hack of an operating system instead of just the window manager, and that's when the illusion starts to break down. Situation: I have a memory stick. I have some files on my machine at home that I'd like to bring to work. I have used my personal memory stick in the past to transfer files to work this way. This week? No worky. Plug it in to the USB port, nothing. Doesn't mount it. Device Manager insists nothing is wrong. Yet, if I look at my Event Viewer, there it is: "[Removable Storage Manager] could not load media in drive Drive 0 of library Sony Storage Media USB Device." Well, why not? It used to work. It used to work great! Could you at least give me a hint? Okay, well, maybe it's the memory stick. They are awfully small and, although I've never broken one yet, presumably it's possible. I was wearing shoes the other day that apparently really hated our office carpeting so I was shocking everything I touched; maybe I fried it. Good thing I've got another memory stick. (Get home, the memory stick is still perfectly fine as far as Mac OS is concerned. Now that's shocking.) So, take the work memory stick home. Mac OS says "hi! how are you! oh, your name is 'widget,' that's amusing. those are lovely files you've got stored on you. would you like some more?" I blithely copy over most of a gig of files, umount it, and drop it in my bag to take it to work. Work computer: "What is this 'usb memory stick' of which you speak? I know not of these things. Begone with you and your filthy removable media ways." Event viewer: "RSM could not load media in drive Drive 0 of library Sony Storage Media USB Device." Cheers. So, okay. I give up. Device Manager: "This device is working properly." Clearly! "If you are having problems with this device, click Troubleshoot to start the troubleshooter." Okay. Troubleshooter: "Well, is your hardware supported? Yes? Well, have you changed your driver recently? No? Well, have you reinstalled the driver anyways yet? Okay, have you called the manufacturer of your hardware device? Well then, 'this troubleshooter is unable to solve your problem.' IOW, HTH, HAND, FOAD, $user." Seriously. It's a usb memory stick. It's not rocket science. Not only is it not rocket science, it's barely science at all. It's third grade earth science where you think the hamster cage in the classroom is the coolest thing ever. Turns out, though, I got it figured out. It had decided that the USB memory stick wanted to be drive E:, as I discovered when I went into "My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management." Trouble is, I had a network drive already mapped to E:. Rather than, say, generating a warning saying I had two things wanting to be drive E: and I should probably do something about it, it apparently just happily mounted the USB stick as E: under the network drive E:. As soon as I unmapped the network drive, my E: window refreshed, happy and ready to give me my files. Stupid, steaming pile of shit. If you're going to auto-allocate drive letters to removable storage media, maybe you should consider allocating drive letters that aren't already in use? Just a thought. hatefully re-secured in mac-pwns-windows snobbery which I thought I'd grown out of, --s.
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