About an hour ago, I decided that I wanted to print off some BESM character sheets. I don't have a printer myself, but my hotel does, so I went down to the public-use computer which has a printer. I browsed to the White Wolf website and loaded the character sheet. The thing about BESM character sheets, though, is that they are actually designed to fill one-half of an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. Because of this, I wanted to print both halves of the character sheet on one page. This is usually accomplished by setting the printer to print two sheets per page. This particular computer, however, would have none of it. Whenever I opened the properties page to set the printer into two pages per sheet mode, a window popped saying "Unauthorized Function", and the properties window would close.

I found, though, that the amount of time the properties window stayed open was not constant. In fact, it seemed like whatever watchdog program was keeping the window from staying open was simply polling all of the processes and looking for things it did not like. Thus, I kept opening the window and attempting to change the setting before it closed until I was finally successful and printed off 5 properly sized character sheets. Luckily, the program closed the properties window by simulating a click on "OK", so all I had to do was select the appropriate number of pages per sheet. This particular choice was bad design.

The real difficulty came when I tried to change the setting back. I didn't want to inconvience others, so I tried to change the setting back. I had no luck at this, and after a few dozen tried, the machine locked me out with a "Sabotage cooldown". I found this humerous as what I was attempting to do was reset it to standard operating conditions. Apparently, the sabotage-prevention mode reset the page setup on its own, so I didn't have to worry about it.

All in all, I consider this program's behavior to be primarily annoying and not particularly effective at controlling access.

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