link to original | source: [Computerworld] | published: 2009 October 28 6:05 ET

Put simply: As an IT professional, I work on whatever hardware is in front of me.

It seems like people ask me which OS I prefer.  I usually answer without too much fuss, but that question is flawed and my answer should not matter.  I've gotten less flack about my choice (Mac OS X) in recent years than previously. However, the natural assumption that my choice should be their choice is incorrect. In fact, for some things, I'd much rather have an old DOS prompt sitting in front of me (WordPerfect 5.1, anyone).

It all boils down to using the right tool for the right job.  I saw a great example of this just the other day at DevDays in DC.  Joel Spolsky had a slide with a picture of a floor board nailer and a roll of duck tape or something like that.  Only a handful of people in attendance even knew what the floor board nailer was.  His point was that when you're putting down a new floor, nothing works as well as a floor board nailer.  But that is all it does.

The laptop/desktop/operating system/word processor/keyboard/mouse/ergonomic workstation that I use is not necessarily the one that you should use.  I can use a whole bunch of different things and (generally) make them work for the task at hand.  The thing to remember is that all of these things really aren't the end, but rather the means.  If you can accomplish what you're trying to do with whatever it is you're comfortable with, then what I use isn't relevant.  In fact, my choice may actually make you go slower and be less productive.

Like the Internet, the fact that there are so many ways to do any given task on a computer can be daunting.  Keep in mind that you don't need to know 100s of ways to print labels, for example.  All you need to know is one way.  Just because I, or some other knowledgeable chap, print labels differently than you does not make your way wrong.  Sit back, pat yourself on the back and smile.  Good job!

A friend called to ask me if I knew a place that printed post cards, with Cyrillic letters. At first I didn't understand, so sent him over to a Russian e-card site.

I remembered that back a long time ago I had sent a few e-cards myself. So I dug through the email archive and pulled out that e-card site. A few hours passed and then when I came back to the computer I started perusing old emails, for fun. And do you know what? A rather important email I sent using the webmail interface of my email provider had the wrong character encoding. Arggh!

A charset of ISO-8859-1 makes for some fine looking Cyrillic — they're all question marks! It took me over nine months to realize my error, and I feel pretty stupid. Oh well, it happens to the best of us.

For your reading pleasure, here's the body of that email. Any idea what I said?

?????? ?????! 
? ???? ??????????! 
??? ? ????? ??????? ???????? ??? ?????? 
????-???? ????????, ?? ???? ??????? 
(???????) ?????, ? ????????? ? ??????????, 
??? ???-?? ?? ??? ????????? ? ????? ?????. 
????? ??????? ? ?????????, ??? ??? ????? ? 
?????. ?????????, ??? ??? ???? ????? ????? 
??????. 
? ??????, ??? ?????? ??????????? ?? 
????????? ? ????? ????? ? ??? ???? ??? 
??????. ? ?????! 
-???? 
PS ??? ??????, ? ???? ? ????????. ???, ??? 
????? ?????? ?? ?????????? ????.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.  Tried to get brother's phone to sync with outlook properly and it wound up deleting stuff.  Fortunately, I pulled the wire, but not before all the events got whacked from the calendar.  As somewhat of a software programmer myself, this underscores the importance of error checking.

Using my high-school progamming instructor's all-to-frequent thought, I may not be writing code for pace makers or any other kind of medical, life-critical applications.  Still, the inconvenience of losing all the calendar events and contacts, is more than a slight annoyance, especially if no proper backups exist (which they didn't).

I suppose that's enough of a rant for today.  The message I'm taking away is that too much error trapping is better than not enough.  And that electronic gadgets have one commonality - they'll all fail sometime.