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PDF Bluescreens in XP and more tech frustrations
September 20, 2005 ( geek )
I've come to the rather sad conclusion that I can't read academic papers on my computer -- can't easily annotate, underline, and write long arguments in the margins. The tech isn't there. And especially with some of the policy reading, it's so incredibly dry and info-dense but insight-sparse that I find myself scrolling through it instead of reading it, and I come to the end and have no clue what I've just read.
Two of my 3 classes give out pages of URLs for each class, links to online journal archives, etc, so I spend an hour or so searching, downloading and printing. I appreciate being able to access these documents online, for sure (well, except one prof's links are all to scanned pages, not OCR'ed into text, so no searching, copy/pasting, etc., blah), but resent the extra hassle and time pushed on to me by this. I'd rather they go thru whatever University printing system they have and produce a photocopied book at the beginning, honestly, or use their duplication abilities and student workers to make copies for the class, it's not like it's a huge class, less than 20 people. If you're assigning 10-15 hours of reading, please don't add 2 more that is printing said reading.
Anyway, this means buying printer paper and carrying my laptop into the office room when no one's using it and hooking myself up to the printer there and printing many many files every week. Many of which are huge and annoying PDFs. Whih there's now a bug in Windows that causes a fucking bluescreen of death when printing (some) PDFs. Yay. Oh, it's a known bug, and Microsoft has a "hotfix" for it -- but they won't give it to you unless you call their support line. And guess what? You have to pay $$$$ to call their support line.
So, I've gotten all but one article printed out for next week. Since I've found that this is indeed a PDF error, ,and not some horrible hardware problem that would really send me too the looney bin right now, and the PDF I still need to print is thankfully not the photos-of-text variety, I can technically prolly copy it into Word and print from there. So all is well, but I think I'll wait on printing that article for now. I can potentially print it in Linux, but as much as I hate printing in general, I'm not sure I want to play with getting that working in Linux, either.
Today is not a great technology day. My Georgetown netID won't work, so I can't connect to the "blackboard" system for my tech/culture/dev class, I still haven't been able to get support on connecting my Linux laptop to the GWU wireless network VPN, my computer is being annoying, and my bed is broken, which, after so much effort to drag the damned thing out here, is not nice of it.
Grr. And it's noon and I've not read a page yet. Guess I should go do that.
Posted by griffjon at September 20, 2005 11:01 AM
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