I found myself at my printer’s this morning waiting for a press check. If you have ever done a press check you know it is both incredibly worth while and a sometimes frustrating waste of time. You need to be there to make sure the job is printing the way you want. It’s your last chance to make adjustments. “Can I go a little deeper on the magenta?” I asked. “To warm up her face?” Sure, but I have to wait a bit while they do that.
That waiting kills me. And I knew I would have it, so I brought something I was supposed to read on my thumbdrive. But the only available-to-me mac in the shop was the dinosaur on OS9 and my thumbdrive was incompatible. I know, all your jaws dropped, but if you think about it, it makes sense for them to have a workstation on OS9 if even only one of their long time clients is still sending them legacy files. So instead of work, I thought I would check our blog and see if I could do some blog hopping and commenting.
Our home page, on I.E. 5.0 for the mac. Yikes!
But this is what I found when I went to our site! This is what our site looks like on an old version of Internet Explorer. Yikes. And the choose your mood feature didn’t work.
Our designers upgrade their browsers immediately. (I always stay one step behind them so we can test on both versions in the studio.) If you don’t upgrade your browsers you will eventually start having a lot of problems, especially as all new sites are launching in CSS and so many sites are converting their old design to CSS or at least a hybrid. And at first you won’t even know you are having problems. Things will load slower and with gaps. You may not know… until it looks like this.
To be fair, this is an egregious example. This is a browser so old I can’t imagine that anyone is still on it. I couldn’t even access my webmail on it. But sometimes with examples you have to be hyperbolic.
Staying updated is important. As a rule I never jump in on the first upgrade of any system software. I let the gotta-have-it-first-bunch work their way through the bugs. I prefer to wait a few months until whatever needs to be patched is patched. Plus, with system upgrades, invariably some of my essential software chokes and suddenly half my fonts go missing or my accounting software freezes — things I have to stop everything to deal with.
And stopping everything to deal with crashes makes me really, really cranky.
So for some things I say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. My studio is still on OSX 10.4. I know, I know. 10.5 is the coolest and Oh, the features! But our essential time tracking software would require an upgrade and I hate the new version. LOATHE it. Every time they upgrade it it gets worse for us. I still miss the version that ran on system 9.
So we are waiters. But not with browsers. Never with browsers. Except for me (see above).
Anyone else wait to upgrade? Or do you jump right in?
1996 was my first 
A finalist again for the GH with my second manuscript (I didn’t win again), I went back to conference in 1998. I knew many more people; I had joined my local RWA group and I was much more active (for the time) on email with other authors. Nevertheless, I still had plenty of time during the conference to catch rays by the pool.
