The Gallery of Windows in our Lives.

Ah, remember that blissful time before every facet of our modern lives was in the control of computers which, if movies are to be believed, will either try to kill us, enslave us, or both? Neither do I. I was born some 11 years after Moore made his conjecture about the density of transistors on microchips.

Of course, those movies are probably far from the truth, as a computer would never be able to effect a global take-over without a human stopping to press CTRL-ALT-DEL every few minutes. That many simultaneous threads running is bound to cause some memory leaks and conflicts.

But anyways, barring the complete and utter destruction of the earth, computers are here to stay. And now that they're here, mankind, as always, adapts to its changing world in much the same way as Algore adapted to life without Bill, or Barry Bonds adapted to baseball without steroids. So now when some piece of equipment horribly malfunctions and tries to kill its user, we just accept it and move on.

I can't seem to figure out where I'm going with all this, so lemme just get to the point: presenting the Gallery of Windows in our Lives. This gallery is an attempt to document various crashes and malfunctions of public computers, in what is surely the silicon equivalent of walking out of the men's room with your fly unzipped (particularly if you're a woman).

Firstly, this was taken in the building with terminals 21-24 in Long Beach airport. It's a public announcement monitor that shows the text for whatever current safety announcement is being broadcast over the PA, so the hearing impared can also know that the white zone is for loading and unloading of passengers only; there is no parking in the red zone.



It's blurry because my pancreas creates sugar instead of insulin, but it says "There are unused icons on your desktop. The desktop cleanup wizard can help you clean up your desktop. Click this balloon to start the wizard." It's nice that the Windows designers found it necessary to clarify what the "desktop cleanup wizard" does. Without those further instructions, I thought it might be used to land an airplane or something.



This warning was up for months! I flew out of LGB in August, 2004 and that's when I first saw it. I again flew out of LGB in February 2005 and it was still there! You'd have thought that at some point the poor computer would have realized that no one was listening to it and commit the computer equivalent of seppuku (downloading nothing but Britney Spears MP3s). As of my last flight out of LGB in June 2005, the message was no longer there.


Our next gem comes to us from Islands of Adventure at the Universal Resort in Orlando, FL. They, as do most modern theme parks, have computerized lockers. So now instead of having to worry about accidentally impaling yourself with the old-fashioned locker key, we have to worry about Skynet taking over the locker system and crushing your head in the locker door when you lean in to get your stuff. What's that you say? Locker doors don't have motors? Well, shift-levers on cars don't have electric motors either, but that didn't stop Skynet from taking over the police cars in Terminator 3. Skynet is that powerful!



So anyways. Lockers. On two of these particular locker terminals (at least, two that Dave and I found), if you selected your language as "Svenska" the program would crash to Windows with a series of errors. The first one is "PayPoint. Run-time error '9': Subscript out of range."



The next error was "Paypoint. This programs has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If the problem persists, please contact the program vendor." Notice the inconsistent capitalization of "PayPoint" between the two error messages. For some reason, you would only get this error if you selected "Svenska" as your language. Maybe Skynet or the programmers have something against Swedes. This occured on two different terminals. Interestingly enough, the two terminals had different firmware versions, as Dave and I discovered during our investigation.



Speaking of investigation, our next move, as any true gamer would know, was to try and find minesweeper. Not only was it not in the Start menu, but it wasn't in the Windows directory, the Windows\System directory or the Windows\System32 directory. Oh yeah, hardware designers, by the way, if you ever design a public terminal where the software program that runs on it might crash to the desktop, try not to have it run as a system administrator. Bad Things could happen if the nerds who discover the problem are not benevolent nerds, like Dave and myself. We good nerds found the paypoint icon in the Startup group in the Start menu and restarted it. And then crashed it again, just to make sure it was repeatable. As it turns out, after 4 or 5 times of crashing from trying to communicate in Swedish, the program simply stopped asking for languages and became an Imperialistic American. Skynet is that smart.


Lastly, on our trip home from Flori-duh, Rie and I found a public display in the Delta terminal at LAX-itive. There were four screen (two for departure information, one for arrivals and another as a map) that were obviously part of a multi-monitor display, as the error message was spread across all four. Interesting enough, the top left corner of the error was on the top left monitor and the bottom right was on the bottom right monitor, but the top right corner of the error was on the bottom left monitor, and the bottom left part of the error was on the top right monitor.



The error reads something to the effect of "Windows Visual Basic Script runtime error" with a path of \\[network server]\...\patchinstall.vbs. The error is in line 43 at character 1, for those who have to know.



This isn't the first airport departures/arrival terminal that I've seen with an error. At Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, I saw, spread across several monitors, "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Alas, I did not have my digital camera with me. Curses.

Anyways, that's all for now. Reader submissions welcome. I'll post a link to this in the sidebar so I can post updates.


---UPDATE 9/11/05---

Disneyland, for their 50th Anniversary celebration, has created photo-mosaic murals depicting scenes from various Disney movies, made from photographs sent in by ordinary people, and placed them in various locations around the park. They had a period some months ago, where you could submit a picture.

Now that the murals are up, you can find if your picture was used by going to one of the kiosks they set up. You just enter your first and last name, or your e-mail address, and the kiosk will tell you if and where they used your picture. These kiosks are running Windows XP and the database front end is just Internet Explorer, as I found out.



You can make this error appear by clicking the left and right mouse buttons at the same time.