10/13/03’s illustrious band:

Furphy

Brought to you by A Word A Day (www.wordsmith.org) and my weekend adventures with technology.

Furphy (rhymes with Murphy) means a rumor or false story. According to AWAD: “From John Furphy, an Australian blacksmith and engineer, who designed a galvanised iron water-cart on wheels, displaying the name FURPHY in large letters. In World War I the Army bought many Furphy water and sanitation carts for camps in Palestine, Egypt and Australia. When soldiers gathered around them, the carts became centers of gossip.”

“Plug and play,” the phrase used to describe how you should be able to plug in a new computer device and immediately begin playing with it, is a furphy. It’s never plug and play. It’s plug and uninstall and reinstall and download and uplink and call tech support and curse fluently in a variety of languages and yell at the cat, then play. If you’re lucky. Ah, computers. Life with these labor-saving devices is never easy.

Warning: Geek-speak ahead.

I'd been wanting a printer/copier/fax/scanner combo for a while and finally got around to pricing them last week. It also developed that I would need a multi-port USB hub if I wanted to hook up both the printer and my high-speed DSL modem at the same time, and I'd need a new USB cable to do that. I was also introduced to the flash memory disk for archiving and decided I could use one of those, too.

I went back to Best Buy yesterday and bought all those things, along with a power strip, since my home office room has only one outlet. Silly 1949 construction! But I hauled the computer into that room anyway -- and discovered that my Internet connection no longer functioned the same way it had in the living room. Qua? I had to call Qwest support, and they walked me through the process of reminding the computer to use the DSL connection as its default, not the old dial-up. Why this happened in one room but not the other, I still don't know.

I thought I'd try the flash memory first and archive all 428 of the BNDs I’ve produced over the past couple of years. But even though the package said plug and play, I plugged but could not play. My 5-year-old laptop didn't have the right device drivers installed and therefore didn’t know what to do with the new device. Since I'd finally gotten myself back online, I went to the flash memory manufacturer's web site to download and install the appropriate driver. (In the course of doing this, I also downloaded several fixes/upgrades for my Windows and Explorer software, which took nearly half an hour.) Once I finally figured out that the memory disk was indeed working, I was able to archive quite a lot of material. It’s good to have backup.

Then it was time to try the USB hub. Again, I plugged but got no play. The setup wizard walked me through a process of looking for device drivers in all the wrong places. No luck, and no luck with the customer support line (closed weekends). Also no luck on the hub maker’s web site, where I was informed that if I was running Windows 98, I already had the drivers on my computer. But if I already had them, why weren't they working?

Back to the setup wizard. This time, instead of telling it where to look for drivers, I didn't specify a location -- and lo and behold, it found what it was looking for without me! Silly me, trying to follow directions. The drivers did indeed reside in my computer, they just hadn't been awakened yet. With that done, I found that I could plug in both my modem and my flash memory, so I figured it would work for the printer, too.

At last I hauled the big, pretty, shiny, surprisingly lightweight unit out of its box and plunked it down on the filing cabinet. Nothing smells quite like new electronics. Or comes with as much Styrofoam packing material.

This unit, to my great relief, really did plug and play: As soon as I plugged it in I was able to make photocopies (black and white or color) and scan documents. The fax function seemed to be working fine, too, but since I didn't have anyone to fax to, I haven't tried it yet. Once I fed the computer a setup CD, I was able to print from the computer as well. I discovered that I can even edit the text of scanned documents if I use the optical character recognition (OCR) function. That's pretty cool.

With all the furphies debunked, and my entire Sunday afternoon devoured, I’m finally happy with my setup. But don’t let the packaging fool you. To paraphrase Mark Twain, there are lies, damned lies, and marketing materials.

E-mail the Media Sensation: BandNameoftheDay@hotmail.com

Visit the BND archives at http://jugglernaut.blogspot.com.