jonathanhickman.com

Light blogging

Obviously, blogging will be a bit light this week, because we’re on vacation (insert obligatory note about having a house-sitter). I knew our beach house would have wifi (although it took us a good hour to get it working after we got here), but I didn’t realize how little time I’d be on the computer. Basically, I’ve turned it on to read my daily comics and to use pandora, and that’s about it.

But we’re having a blast - an absolute blast. This is what vacation’s all about.

In a way, this is a good thing

My computer is starting to act up, and I’m not talking virus. It’s a laptop, and the left “mouse” button is broken and clicks if you just touch it. I was starting to adjust to that but now the “t” key is on the fritz. It turns out that “t” is a very popular letter … I mean, look back and see how many t’s there were in this paragraph.

I’ve got another two or three months on my warranty, so in a way it’s good that it’s having problems now. But this is a laptop, and I’m not looking forward to having to send it in, if that’s the solution.

Yuck.

I hate Windows

Yes, I’m talking the OS, not the kind made of glass that helps brighten up the room.

Yesterday, I finally got around to running Windows update on my computer. It turns out, yesterday’s update was a biggie - service pack 3, as a matter of fact. And thanks to that lovely update, M$ turned automatic updates back on for my computer.

I hate this. Frankly, it makes me extremely angry that they feel the need to do this without my permission.

Why do I care so much? I’ll tell you. Yesterday, I started working on a new client from Poland, and there’s a lot of stuff I’ve yet to learn about taxation of aliens. Currently, I’ve got a few dozen firefox tabs open and numerous pdf files. I’m running several tax programs and Excel.

But because Windows turned automatic updates back on (and I’ve obviously turned it back off now), my computer downloaded new updates a few minutes ago. Big whoop, right? Wrong. Now that the computer is newly updated, it wants to restart to make the process official. And that means that every five minutes I have to tell the computer that I don’t want it to restart. Grumble. And if I don’t happen to see the notification, it’ll just restart on me. And all of my work and research will be lost.

Grumble.

Because of M$’s penchant for junk like this, I rarely do updates on this computer. I can’t always just restart the computer at the drop of a hat because M$ wants me to. Why can’t it just install the updates the next time I turn the computer off?

Why does Windows have to be such a lousy OS? When will my tax software be usable in an OS that cares about its users?

Starting anew

In my spare time this week (ha!), I upgraded my linux installation on my personal computer. From the get go, I decided to completey reformat the drive and start anew. I wanted to get rid of any junk remaining on the computer. But I had planned on reusing all of my old bookmarks and feeds in my feed reader,  but I somehow failed to get the bookmarks or feeds backed up. It wouldn’t take too much work for me to recreate them, but I just made the executive decision not to. I’m going to start anew and only recreate what I need to. W00t.

Now I just need to get some blank cds

A few weeks ago I complained about my bad luck with cd burners in my current Dell laptop (essentially, I’ve had it for about 18 months and have gone through two optical drives). Well, to make a short story even shorter, someone at Dell read my little complaint and had pity on me:

Today’s mail brought not one but two new optical drives; try them both and keep the one that works best. I can’t say enough how wonderful this is.

And now I’ve got to get some more blank cds and get to testing. Anybody got any suggestions?

Oops!

The mute button on my other keyboard is right where the off button is on this one….