I think I have some trust issues. 😐
As a pastor, I rely heavily on my laptop computer and having just been the victim of some theft, I asked my son, a computer engineering student, to create a program that will help track down stolen PCs and devices. He handed me the prototype and said, “Dad — execute this code and see if it works.”
So, as he stood behind me, I began backing up my “Current Documents” folder to my USB drive. “Dad,” he said, “this isn’t going to delete your data. I’m a little insulted.” I laughed and told him the data was very important. After all, this Sunday is Christmas Sunday and I have my sermon almost completed.
Then he said the funniest line I’ve heard in a while: “Dad — this would be like if every time you got up and preached I prayed, “‘God — please protect me from false teaching!'”
He got me there! I really need to begin to trust my IT guy. 😉
You’ve got a great IT guy.
IT guys sure get a bad rap!
Him you trust. But we all know that something that works great in every other computer will screw up the next one. How do you know your computer won’t like the dialect the code is speaking and throw a shoe at it?
😛
Ha! Shoe throwing computers! Too funny. You know that the next time my PC crashes, I will say, “My computer threw a shoe!” 🙂
He wrote this code in Java, so it should work across a variety of platforms. In fact, he wrote it on his linux box, carried it to my Vista machine and it worked great.
When I get time (maybe after Christmas), I will write instructions for it and make it available.
In all changes (IT or other) I always look at risk of failure, cost of failure, cost of reducing risk. If the risk is high they I do what I can to reduce it, but even if the risk is small, but the cost to reduce is small I still try to reduce it. Now days a back up is cheap so I do it for any change by an IT guy even if I am the IT guy and I am installing something I wrote.
As for Java, Sun used the slogan “Write once, run everywhere” but my real world experience is that the slogan should be “Write once, test everywhere”.
Just out of curiosity…when your IT guy is your son, if something he does doesn’t work or, worse yet, makes things worse, what do you do? You can’t exactly refuse to pay him, or sue him…
Nope. You just take it. Of course, he’s not done anything that has cost me. And he’s saved me tons of time.