Saturday, September 30, 2006

Snake-Bit

I’m feeling a bit snake-bit of late. The latest glitch in life: my CD/DVD drive will not recognize blank discs, therefore I’m unable to burn CDs/DVDs. The drive wouldn’t recognize any discs, at all, until I did a system restore to a “known good point,” which I arbitrarily selected as the day before I got my last automated “update” from Bill Gates and Co., which, more often than not, appears to completely hose my system. So…I can now “read” CDs and DVDs, but I still cannot record. And all this after aborted on-line troubleshooting with Gateway. I say “aborted” because I made three attempts, only to have my wonderful semi-reliable network connection go belly-up in mid conversation with Gateway. THREE frickin’ times! As I said, snake-bit.

And why does this matter? Because I was going to mail SN3 a CD with all the Flat Stanley pics I took during Stan’s week-long visit. But I cannot. Thank God for the web, because there’s always the blog with the small versions of the pics I took…but only half of the pics. {Sigh}

As Roseanne Roseannadanna said: “It’s always sump’thin!”

No news, no politics. There’s more than enough frustration in life today without adding to it. So I’ll spare you my rants and raves…about politics, anyway.

That said, here’s a cute comment on some Moonbat blog I read yesterday:

richard mcenroe @ 9/28/2006 08:12:55 PM:

The FDA definition:

"Reality-based": less than 10% actual reality by volume...

LOL! Gotta remember that one! I left the link intact on the comment, in case you want to see what I was reading. The post is typical of the “reality-based” community and the comments are, too.

Goes without sayin’, but I’ll say it: It’s Saturday, so it’s football. All other issues, problems, and frustrations are put on hold for the day.

Today’s Pic: The flag poles at the entrance to Cannon AFB and an F-100 on a stick. Taken Thursday, 9/28/2006. There’s just something that stirs my blood about seeing the National, New Mexico, and Air Force flags waving proudly in the breeze.

5 comments:

  1. Never, ever, allow Microsoft to automatically download updates to your computer. It’s for the very same reason that you had problems. Always wait at least two weeks (from the date of the update) before down loading and when you do download do it manually. Auto downloads is most often used for spying and God only knows there’s enough of that going on.

    ReplyDelete
  2. What? You mean Bill GATES is spying, too? I thought it was just Dubya, Cheney, Rummie, Mueller, Negroponte, Heyden... Hold on, What's that noise? It's getting LOUDER! Omigawd! There's a chopper over the RV! No, two of 'em! They're BLACK! Arrrgh!

    :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Verry Funny.... The most important reason is because many of those fixes have not been proven to be safe. It requires a couple of weeks for them to be installed before the feedback is out. There are a number of sites that report problems that people may have with the fixes. Your system setup and installed software may not have conflicts that others have because the software and versions they are using, and vice-a-versa. I’ll send you couples of site’s I use that have proven reliable. And Microsoft does want to know what you’re doing. I recently upgraded my desk top and as soon as I started it and opened Visio I had to reregister because of “Major changes to the computer”. Each of my MS apps required the same. That irritates me because I don’t see what business it is of theirs of what I do to my personnel property. Don’t get me wrong, I like MS Apps because they work very well together and I find them reliable. But don’t get in my business. Know what I mean? Next thing you know they will have a finger sniffer to see if I have roach residue on them.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Understand completely, Dan. As you well know, I spent a Helluva lot of time working with the corporate desktop environment, from the infrastructure side. Every standard desktop configuration I worked with had automatic updates disabled. But we also had our own software distribution systems and we "pushed" verified OS system updates and patches down to the desktop, after checking (and proving) there were no conflicts with our standard image. The fly in *my* particular ointment (these days) is the discipline required to go out and check for updates on a periodic basis, i.e., it's all on me now, not my friendly corporate IT guys. So...the logical conclusion is automatic updates are easier in the long run, even given the hassles I get with periodic and often "bad code" and/or conflicts.

    My "humor" was probably a lil bit over the top, eh? ;-)

    Next thing you know they will have a finger sniffer to see if I have roach residue on them.

    Aieee! Maybe I will change my mind! Ah...but that would require a hardware mod...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Actually, I thought your original comment was pretty funny. I made the roach comment and now there's two guys watching me. oh well, I,ll just suck the juice off my roach fingers

    ReplyDelete

Just be polite... that's all I ask.