MUHAHAHAHA! 10 years of geekdom pays off again!

A few days ago I updated my iMac to 10.6. Everything went smoothly except for two things: One, my printer broke up with my iMac and said they weren’t speaking anymore. Some nice drivers and a glass of wine fixed that.

Two, Adobe Acrobat whined that it wanted an upgrade. Every time I ran the upgrade, a dialog appeared behind the main upgrade window telling me that it needed to repair the print to PDF components. The upgrade wouldn’t run until the box was clicked….. but it was impossible to activate the window the box was in to click the buttons.

I knew I was in trouble when I force-quit all running applications (including the Finder) and the box was still there. I had to reboot to get rid of it. I knew it wasn’t a fluke when it happened twice.

After the 2nd reboot, I started wracking my geek brain for answers. I’ve seen a repair dialog like this one before, when I was providing tech support for Adobe Reader in my day-job. It popped up if you were using or installing Reader and the plugins for Safari weren’t in place. It could also be launched from a Reader menu inside the application.

This wasn’t the exact same dialog as the one I’d seen at work, and the work dialog box was never totally inactive in its own bubble world, but hey, Adobe = Adobe. Instead of trying to restart the upgrade, I launched Acrobat. Lo and behold, the same dialog came up, and I was able to actually process it this time. Right after that, I got the upgrade prompt, which ran just fine.

I’m gloating not because I defeated Adobe’s dumbass upgrade installers, but because I wouldn’t have known what to do if I hadn’t spent 7 1/2 years supporting Reader.

Some days, I miss that job. I get to solve all kinds of cool problems in my new job, but they’re almost all design-related. I rarely get to “get my geek on” anymore. In fact, I’m frequently discouraged from thinking about the geek challenges of creating my designs, because one of my roles as an architect is to challenge the status quo by pushing the developers to find new solutions to existing problems.

Today I proved geek-girl isn’t dead, and remembers her geek-tools. When I get to exercise geek-girl, I’m a happy geek girl.

I think I’ll go recode the whole blog as a reward.