I wouldn’t say that I have an obsessive personality. I don’t get engulfed in everything that I have a taste of, and one of my many faults is that I often don’t finish what I start. This frustrates Katie because, for example, she doesn’t like starting to watch new TV shows if we already have a bunch of box sets that we’re halfway through.
However, there are certain things that I do obsess about. I’m writing this from work because I stayed up late (against Katie’s very intelligent and sensible advice). We recently bought a new printer and it was delivered to us from Amazon yesterday. Hooking it up to our main desktop took very little time and we were soon able to scan and print to it. Great!
However, I then became obsessed with trying to get the printer sharing to work so that we could print from Katie’s Macbook wirelessly. I stayed up until about 3 AM with little to no luck. This happens from time to time.
I’ve noticed that it happens most often with some kind of computer “project” that I start setting up in the evening. I’ll often stay up until an unreasonable hour even though I usually don’t make much progress. It happened when I first was trying to put together my MythTV box and it sometimes happens when our computer runs into problems and I have to find a way to restore the boot sector correctly or something similar.
Why do I obsess about these little things so much that I ruin my sleep cycle? Especially when experience has taught me that it would actually be more helpful to sleep and come back to it? I think it’s because it frustrates me to stop; it feels like I’ve lost and the computer has won. Losing to a human, I can accept. A computer? I spent four years learning all the different ways to make a computer do exactly what I wanted. How can a machine outwit me? The Internet tells me that other people got this working! Why can’t I? What am I doing wrong?
Warning! Boring printer stuff ahead!
That said, does anyone have any ideas on what could cause a shared printer connected to an XP Pro computer to not be printable from a Macbook? My hunch is that it has something to do with the Mac not having the right drivers, but I’m not actually sure how to get them on there. I tried using the setup CD that came with the printer and it installed something on the Mac, but I can’t select the right model when attempting to set up the networked printer.
What’s more, the Mac can see the shared printer through Windows networking and even thinks it can “print” stuff to it. The document will appear in the printer’s queue (on the XP machine too!) and the printer’s little LCD screen will say “Processing…” – but then the document will sit in the printer’s queue, saying that its status is “Printing” which is nothing but a vicious lie. Eventually, it will disappear from the queue if I don’t cancel it first. Sigh.
UPDATE (3/3/09): I got it working this morning! With the help of these fine instructions, I was able to set up a redirected “fake” postscript printer on my XP machine that pretends to be an Apple printer but really redirects print jobs to the actual printer. So, I can’t use all the settings of the Canon through the Macbook, but printing a test PDF this morning came out just fine. I consider this a victory.