Yak Shaving

Whether they are a programmer or not, anyone who uses technology in this modern world probably has a yak shaving story. (For those unfamiliar with the term, yak shaving refers to the need to perform a series of small, seemingly unrelated tasks in order to complete the task you started with.) Here's mine.

A few months ago, I got an email from a former student requesting a copy of the syllabus that I had used in an introductory language testing course. Apparently, she was starting a graduate program and was trying to prove that my course should count as a pre-requisite for a more advanced course that she was trying to take. Because I had used several computers (and lost several hard drives) over the years, it took me a while to locate the appropriate file on a Linux desktop that I hadn't been booted in ages (and suffered from all kinds of hardware issues that caused it to crash after a couple minutes of use). 

After several attempts and restarts, I managed to find  the file I needed. The syllabus had been an Open Office document (created prior to the release Libre Office, for those who care about that sort of thing), so I decided to save it as a PDF to make things easier. I put the file on a thumb drive, transferred it to my laptop, and sent it to the student.

A couple of hours later, I got an email from the student asking if I could change the date on the syllabus. It turns out that I had a typo on the original syllabus, and I had inadvertently transposed some of the digits in the course number. Because I didn't have a program capable of editing PDFs on my laptop, I decided to tweak the file first thing in the morning at work, as I had access to an Adobe suite there.

The next morning at work, I opened the file and tried tweaking the number, only to get a message that the particular font that the original file used was not available on my computer. I read up on how to add new fonts in Windows and tried to find a place online where I could download it, which I did. The download site included a SHA 256 hash to verify the integrity of the file, and because I was a work computer, I wanted to make sure that I wasn't inadvertently downloading anything malicious.

Of course, that meant figuring how to do a checksum on a Windows machine (which, as it turns out, is the fciv command). I did manage to install the font, correct the course number, and send the syllabus to the student.  But had anyone walked in on me during that process, this could have been the conversation:

A: Hey, why are you reading up on checksum?
Me: Because a former student needs a copy of my syllabus, obviously!