On Christmas Day in the Morning -Thursday, December 25, 2003 -11:20 pm-
Well, today was Christmas. Woo-hoo and all that. Or something. Mom
and I delivered corn souffle to the firehouse today since Jeff had to work this year. We were standing in the bay and the dog wondered off into the equipment repair room. It was am
azing how good the smoke coming out of the gear smelled. With how much I hate most smoke, I find it amazing how much I like the smell of house-fire smoke. Well, not the roof or any plasticized stuff. It makes me wonder if I can escape my heritage and n
ot become a firefighter.
I ended up doing tech support for almost the entire time I was at my cousin's house this evening. They have a Dell WinXP box. Kelsey, the daughter, got an MP3 player for Christmas and it wasn't working. Upon trying to do anything with their computer , I was struck by how amazingly slow it was. Checking out it's hardware config, I was amazed that it's a PIV 1.3GHz with 512MB of RAM and it moves slower that a Celeron 333MHz. After waiting forever on Windows Update, I rebooted only to discover that Wi ndows Update had killed the video card driver. So revert to previous state it was (the only time I've ever used this feature). Meaning I had just waisted an hour of my life running Windows Update. So back to W.U. to grab the updates other than the driv er for the GPU. Reboot again, fight through the pop-ups to AdAware, DL and run AdAware. 218 instances of spyware/adware found. Get a virus warning, attempt to fix virus, find that McAfee has been compromised by said virus and cannot remove the virus. Sigh. Eliminate virus by hand, clean up Registry, reboot. Computer now boots in 1/4th the time, but is still godawfully slow. Process manager says there are now only 44 processes running (down from 75), memory usage is ok. Don't know what's going on. Set up MP3 player. The online music buying service works, the transferring to p[layer software works, the player doesn't. The player will play the included demo MP3 but not any WMA content. Surprise, all the purchasable content is in WMA. Hmm... MP3. com is out of business, other services provide RM or WMA. Fuck. Give up, go home, mail Mandrake CD to cousins.
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