Updates should be illegal

After my relaxing weekend, with the extra day for Martin Luther King day (read the details on the TeamHenley blog)I spent the rest of the week dealing with the latest shared catalog upgrade. Some combination of networks conspired to make any automatic transition impossible - only one computer in the entire library was able to succeed. Apparently the download was traveling through mud - it would time out before completing. I was finally able to download the file (what should have been 2 mintues took 10), save it to a flash drive, and install it on individual machines.

But it's never that simple! Installing the update completely removes any settings. We realized this when the first machine no longer printed date due slips - all the information for the slips had to be re-entered. Luckily we could get all that from an un-updated machine. So we thought real hard to make sure we didn't miss anything. One last setting was discovered this morning, but I think we've finally done it.

But wait! There's more! Recently a volunteer and I installed the latest Adobe Reader (v.9!) on our public internet machines. What could be bad about that? Strangely, people suddenly weren't getting an entire .pdf document when they tried to print, only the first page (or whatever page they selected). Another stroke of luck here - a class was being held in the lab, so those machines didn't get the upgrade and, funny thing - they still worked! So this morning we downgraded Reader to v.8 (and that's a fun experience, trying to find an older version - it takes some real digging to find those!). Problem solved.

I don't know if I can take any more upgrades and updates. When things are working nicely, they should be allowed to continue. Don't tell me a little improvement will make things so much better. Maybe there was a time when that really happened, but I sure can't remember it.