TooMuchGreen

I set up a workgroup print pool for the surf camp office today, and of course being Mac based as they are now it was a breeze, mostly, until I tried to get the shitty old XP box to play too.

The camp has moved over to a predominant Mac base in the admin office (wisely) which makes everything not only more funky but inherently more stable and easy to work with (apart from the lone shitty PC and Rafas grotesque laptop) as such the print share from Joes 20″ iMac was shooting sheets of A4 out from Larrys Gmail in no time, all thanks to Bonjour.

Apple have had proprietary zero-config file & print share protocols going on since the days of Appletalk in the 90′s and Bonjour (formerly ‘Rendezvous’ ) is their present incarnation. Bonjour has been included since OSX 10.2 and I’ve been a huge fan since first using it for the design office printers at the National Railway Museum (where I discovered it by accident…!), it really is as simple as clicking the + sign in the add printer utility and selecting your desired unit from the list, if it’s pre-shared (configured by clicking Printer sharing under ‘sharing’ in System Preferences on the Mac it’s connected to – duh..) it appears just the same tagged to the machine name, one click, installed, sorted, no local driver stupidness required and you’re off and printing.

Ok I thought, that’s the Macs sorted, I’ll just install Bonjour for Windows on the XP box and set that up too…..HAHAHAHAHAHA.

HA HA indeed…..after F1-ing past the ‘CPU Fail’ message, ignoring the random 2004 system date, waiting for the virus checker to load (or whatever it was doing) and clicking through various error messages in Spanish once the mouse decided to work I finally managed to get the Bonjour app installed and fired up (it always feels odd running Mac software on a PC, even Quicktime feels wrong), right then, there was the printer…..Ok, connect…ah….I need the .inf file from the XP driver, no problem (break….search, download, extract), click, click (again) there we are, all installed, says it’s ready (I think, in Spanish?)….let’s try a test print…..click…..hmm….nothing, nada, zilch…..fk all….no lights, sound, movement, nothing in the print queue on the iMac….nope….Ok…let’s try again (and so it continued)…..after an hour I gave up, my life is too short and PC’s are just something I still find myself spending too much time with….why do I even bother? Why does anyone? I keep trying to convert them and it does work to some degree but for fucks sake…..look, here’s how it is, Windows computers are problematic in the extreme and deliberately designed to make your computing life as complicated and frustrating as possible, just don’t go there, they will without a doubt go wrong and you’ll lose evenings, days, full weekends and cumulative months just trying to get the fucking things running correctly without even getting close to using the programs (that’s if you can actually manage to get them installed), if you own a PC just cut your losses, sell it now and buy a Mac, you really won’t regret it I promise you 100%, I mean come on….OSX is built on UNIX…..that should be enough in itself, and you do have an iPod don’t you?

Jesus, how many times……