Taking shots at the dead guy. Stay classy Mr. Stallman.

Lol, the CSRs on the phones were not engineers! They were $10/hr phone-support-with-script monkeys. You would not believe some of the crap we would find stuffed around, behind, under and in the computers. They would pry back the fascia that covered the floppy and CD drive bays (see my original post, we ordered the machines without these drives), and fill them with candy bar wrappers, fast food napkins and whatever else was too difficult for them to place in a wastebasket.

Your wisdom is unimpeachable. Sadly, corporate memory was selective and affected (infected?) by winds of corporate politics.

You will become a billionaire if you can patent that!

Note that boss asked me to incorporate web dev into my job - the raise was due more to added responsibilities. LOL, until that point boss was unaware that my web development abilities had become viable and marketable.

"Infected via flash drives." "Educate the user."

Oh bullshit! Never, _ever_ trust a user.

Seriously, I worked IT at a call center. The first thing you did with the machines when they came in was log in to the BIOS, disable ports like COM & USB, and set a BIOS password. If the thing was shipped to us with a floppy or cd/dvd drive (they were ordered bare but sometimes Gateway f-d up), we would remove the hardware before putting them in service. They were also imaged for whatever floor they were scheduled to be on (outsourced call center - Comcast, ATT&T, Sprint, Hughes Sat.) and out they went.

Once, a Bell South supervisor memo'd and called upper management and said he had to have USB to save and transfer reports, etc. And BOOM, a virus went through the Bell South floor like shit through a goose. That was the end of "educating the user."

Never, ever trust a luser.

I was in a similar situation, and that's exactly what I did. A job opened up closer to my home and on-target with my then new-found interest in web development. I told my old boss that I would be leaving in two weeks, and that I was saddened but explained the circumstances: better pay, less commute, more job satisfaction. He responded by asking how much they were offering. He then matched the salary, told me he would pay for my time commuting, and asked me to use some of my time to develop a web site for the company. Win-win boss. Disclaimer: I did eventually leave years later to form my own company. We're still friends and he's a customer, so yeah, he's still in some ways my boss :)

If I may suggest, try to think of and/or research as many of the questions that kids have as they move through childhood and into adulthood. Perhaps your wife can dedicate part of the limited time she has to being video-recorded answering those questions.

Just had an uh-oh moment.
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=415

I'll install Windows 7 when IT pries Windows 98SE from m'cold dead fingers!

Just kidding - send help, IT is in love with XP.

Seems fair. Virtual money for a virtual visit...

Seriously. Many copies. Multiple, ad-nauseum uber redundancy. And, so what about that DRM crap? Is it _that_ important to preserve pop music? If so, when did DRM ever stop us? Burn a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray and then RIP it, upload the thing. Put it on a hardened RAID, what...ever.

True, technology is an ever more complex cycle. I guess we should try to get the info/code down to lowest common denominator. Text? If so, what language? Boggles the mind..but if the unthinkable happens then maybe we can assist the great minds millenia hence rediscover what we did. What we did right, and how to avoid what we did wrong.

So I repeat, whatever the content is, tech records can be fragile. To paraphrase, "We need copies. Lots of copies."