Duct Tape

We are expecting rain in the Bay Area tomorrow and so I went out to my Jeep and applied Duct tape to a rusted section of the roof. This is a very temporary fix as the tape will only accelerate the oxidation process. I really should remove the rust, weld a piece of sheet metal over the hole, and properly paint the repair. All of that will have to wait until my Christmas break when I can get the Jeep back to my home garage in Utah and take the time to do things right.

My duct tape fix is all I have time for this evening and is symbolic of a number of technological fixes we apply to problems. Sneakernet is one such example that a number of us old-timers used to use. Instead of taking the time to set up a network between two computers, we would copy files to floppy disks, walk the disks to the second computer, and copy the files off the floppies. For large amounts of data, this was a painfully slow process and it would have been better to take the time so put the computer on the network.

Duct tape fixes are fine for certain problems but should be used sparingly. They only become a problem when we use them too often and are unwilling to look into more elegant solutions. So if you find yourself constantly doing something on your computer, take the time to do a quick Internet search and see if there are suggestions for a better way to do things. You may just save yourself some time.