Bewildering Stories News

Living with a computer’s rogue personality

A new PowerBook G4 is great for traveling when you need to take all your files with you. I’d have used my old one, but I had to lend it out: it has the OS and memory needed by a programmer porting a Windows application to Mac for an on-line course.

Now I have OS 10.4.2, lots of RAM and a double-partitioned hard disk with “Donald” as the admin. But in the process of migrating my files, I made a big mistake: I created a new user, “Don.”

Upon arriving at my destination, I discover that some of my files are missing. No, not exactly: “Donald” has some and “Don,” the others. Okay, give “Don” admin privileges. No, the files are still half and half. Repair the permissions. No luck. Switch from one “personality” to the other? How much more confused do I want to get?

Call the 800 number help desk. Get bumped to a higher-echelon technician. Oh woe. I’ll have to delete one of the “personalities,” as I like to call them, but that will lose data, and who knows what will happen? Best solution: erase everything and start over. But I can’t start over: all the original files are 3,000 miles and even more kilometers away. And they also have two personalities. Jörn Grote’s open-minded AI’s are positively congenial in comparison; this calls for high-tech virtual therapy.

Okay, sighs I, workaround time: set the second partition to “ignore ownership.” Cool move: now both personalities can access all the files on that disk. Tinker with file permissions and user identities until nothing seems to go wrong. That I know of.

But in the meantime the e-mail is doubling some messages and missing others. Duplicates are showing up in the Backlog directory, and some things — especially attachments — seem to be missing. My copy of the Bewildering Stories schedule is three weeks old. I’ll just have to update it while waiting to collate it with the later version after I get home on October 4... and ask for everybody’s patience.

Nonetheless, I swear by my PowerBook G4. After all my tinkering it should have raised a mushroom cloud you could see on the horizon from wherever you are. Instead it chugs along, scratching its virtual head and wondering what on earth “Don” or “Donald” is up to this time... and I can still find and do stuff.

The computer has a “rogue personality,” all right. But it’s not the computer’s: it’s mine. The question is now: which is it? “Don” or “Donald”? As I’ve said, a bio sketch implies that we know who we are. And as my bio sketch says, that may not always be the case... Whoever my Powerbook says I am today, that’s good enough!