CheeseMaker Upgrade

Appeared in Volume 6/4, November 1993

I've just spent a considerable amount of money on a software upgrade (to Mac CheeseMaker 5.1), and spent an equally disagreeable period of time shopping around for a generous educational discount, and yet now that the gargantuan box has arrived, I've hidden it behind some unmarked exam papers.

I don't believe that I'm the only person to suffer from software-phobia. I've seen similar packages (of similar proportions) in other people's offices. The trouble is that software products are the modern-day equivalent of Pandora's box - beneath their glossy but bland exteriors, beneath the inflated quotes claiming several orders of magnitude improvement in your (i) productivity, (ii) creativity, (iii) sex appeal, there lies all manners of misery (and a little hope).

What academic can cheerfully open a box the size of a small TV set and not become a tad crestfallen by the stacks of papers, stickers, deodorant cans, and 20+ diskettes that come tumbling out?

Installing the software is reminiscent of a joy-ride down Niagara Falls in a barrel. At any moment, the excursion may abruptly end with a torrent of warning messages about incompatibilities or disk write-head errors, all explained clearly in Patagonian.

Another analogy: installation is like an over-weight, over-eager property developer who wants to concrete over the delicate computer ecosystem which you have nurtured into frail life, and put up an air-conditioned shopping centre in its place.

If you're lucky installation will finish happily, and you can emerge, dripping but smiling, from the barrel (first analogy again). However, within a few hours, you'll begin to notice signs of pneumonia. All those personalised macros that worked like charms in Mac CheeseMaker 5.0 will just glumly sit there refusing to do their stuff. Perhaps Cheesy (as you call it) can now generate Camembert nodules 1.5 times faster, but the Parmesan function is so slow that it starts to grate on your nerves.

So you turn reluctantly to the manuals - a hefty rain-forest of nouns, verbs and adjectives, which are infrequently in the right order.

I've often found that reading a manual upside down will improve its clarity tremendously. Other people have recommended lightly boiling manuals before use, to bring out their fuller flavour. I believe this to be a fairly common practice, and hence why most manuals come in plastic wrappers. This prevents the pages from getting soggy during cooking.

Andrew Davison