The 20 worst Windows features of all time

Man, so many memories! I do so enjoy writing this from a Mac. :-) Sadly, I'll be a Windows user for as long as I work as that is the platform that the database system that I know runs upon.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,133191-page,1-c,electronics/article.html

Last weekend was fun

And since this weekend is nigh upon us, I figgered I'd better write now!

Russet was in a play last weekend, a children's musical called Mother Goose Tales. She played Terrance "Fiddler" McDiddler, Mother Goose's personal personal fiddler, late of King Cole's court. She was on stage playing for most of the show and played violin and harp when off-stage. I got to Alamogordo just in time to catch the first performance and we hit Applebee's for dinner afterwards. We had a bit of a problem Saturday: we decided to leave her car at the university where the play was being held, and the next afternoon she accidentally locked her keys in the car when getting things out of it. So I had to drive back up the mountain to get my set. The battery was stone dead when I returned. So it spent another night down the mountain and we got it jumped Sunday.

The battery might have survived if I'd gone straight up the mountain and gotten my keys, but I was on a mission -- the valve cartridge thingie for the master bath tub was dying and I needed a replacement. The problem is that this is a manufactured home and it's hard to find parts for at times. Lowe's was absolutely zero help: "We don't have it." That was about all the manager said. Home Depot didn't have it either, but the guy was able to suggest two other stores. One of them was strictly a Monday to Friday operation, but the other was not only open, but also had it!

So I headed up the mountain, installed the new thingie, accidentally over-tightened it (plastic threads in a plastic base), and when I turned on the water main, it blew right out of the fixture. Unfortunately the store only had one, I had hoped to get four of 'em so that both hot and cold could be replaced, plus I'd have a spare or two. Fortunately I had already devised a B plan!

Quite simple, and quite elegant. The bad thingie didn't leak, it was just insanely difficult to turn off. So I took one out of the second bath, which is almost never used, and put the bad one in there and took the good one for the master bath. After being careful to not over-tighten the cheap li'l bastard, SUCCESS!


My other triumph of the weekend was to get Russet's laptop backed up on to the half a gig external drive that I'd purchased recently, so her data is now as safe as I can conveniently make it. As soon as my new laptop comes in and I've copied this one to it, I'll copy her laptop and she has a mostly-new box!

But the sphincter-tightening moment was re-connecting and powering up my desktop, that of the replaced power supply. I breathed a mighty sigh of relief when everything booted just fine -- the power supply had sacrificed itself to save its bretheren and the sacrifice had not been in vein! It took a while to copy everything across, but it looks like I have a good copy of everything but the C: drive, and since the only thing that I install on it are utilities, I'm not concerned.

A nice, lazy 4th of July

Russet was in the middle of a work shift, and I was kinda beat, so I stayed down here for the day. And did pretty much nothing! I stayed up late Tuesday night watching Be Cool, the semi-sequel to Get Shorty. Lotsa fun, particularly with The Rock playing a gay bodyguard who wants to be an actor. Cedric the Entertainer was a blast! He got to play a heavy and did a good job. I just hope they don't go for a third, this one was definitely weaker than the first, a third one would be awfully dilute, unless they get a killer script somewhere.

So I slept late, but still woke up about 7.5 hours after I went to bed. Got up, breakfasted, went back to bed! Didn't have to work! Got up, played some WoW, watched Clerks II, went back to bed. I did talk to my parents and to Russet, but mostly I did nothing.

I like productive days!