Joe's New Blog

Nothing special, this is just my third effort at writing a blog about my life and what goes on in it: Hobbies, cooking, work, maybe the occasional book or DVD review, and so forth. Nothing really noteworthy, but this is sort of a little subset of my world...

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

My Vista experience. Round One.

So, four days into the Vista "Experience," the first bomb drops. I woke up this morning with the computer's little power light blinking at me. I wasn't sure why, but when I started it up, it told me that it had installed an update and had to turn off the computer when it did. Okay, that was a bit annoying, because I don't know if it finished copying all the files I had it copying before it rebooted. That's not really something specific to Vista, but happens with pretty much any of the operating systems since Autoupdate has been available.
Anyway, I figured I'd just check the folder where I was copying the files against the CD I was copying from and make sure they were the same sizes and such to tell me if the process finished. But, wait!, there's no DVD drive in My Computer. It was there yesterday. So I restarted the computer, thinking that if it did a reboot while installing updates, it might have had some little kink in the works there. No, rebooting doesn't help. I try logging off and logging in as a different user, but that also doesn't help.
I went to the control panel, and it told me that it couldn't load the driver. I reverted back to my old tech support thoughts and tried uninstalling the driver and letting it find the device again. But it tells me the best driver is already available, so it doesn't update it. Of course, it can't load that best driver. So I tried rolling back the updates it did last night. So far, no luck with that. If this is how Vista regularly works, I guess I can understand why so many people despise it so much. I wish I'd just ordered a damned computer with XP on it. Maybe that move to Linux isn't so far off after all. Fucking Microsoft...

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Friday, April 17, 2009

Sometimes I feel like I just can't win...

One of the things the girlfriend asked if I'd do today was to go shopping. We came up with a bit of a list, mostly just the basics and a few things that I thought would go a long way on not too much money (like beans and pasta). She left me $20 which she had budgeted for groceries, but after a few additions, she went ahead and left another $20 just in case it was more than $20 total.

So, between periods of the first hockey game of the day, I headed off to Kroger to pick stuff up. I got pretty much everything on the list, trying to keep the spending down to a minimum. In all, it wound up being right around $30. Instead of breaking the other $20 bill she gave me, I went ahead and paid part of it with ten bucks that I've had in my wallet for a few weeks.

She got home a little bit ago and saw the $20 I left on the counter. I told her that, yes, I'd gone to get groceries. "Oh, it was all under $20?" she asked. So I told her that I just used the extra money I had to pay for it. And now she's pissed that I spent the money that she wanted me to keep for emergencies. I told her I could go ahead and just use one of my credit cards in case of an actual emergency, but she said that she wanted to avoid using those. So do I, but if it's an emergency, I don't think it really matters all that much if I have to pay a little interest. Anyway, we live together, and all the money pretty much goes to the same places regardless of whether it's originally mine or hers, so what difference does it make? I should have just lied and told her it was all under $20... Sigh...

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Friday, April 10, 2009

Spamming bastards...

I woke up to a shitload of spam, most of which were autoreply and bounce messages back from the mailbox at synthreal.com, which can't actually send out any outbound mail. So somebody decided to use my domain name in the reply-to field of their damned spam attack, and leave me to get the crap that comes back from it. Bastards. There were a total of 578 messages in the spam box, plus probably 30 in the inbox that weren't caught by GMail's spam filter. I hope they catch some of those bastards and hang them by their nuts...

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Saturday, April 26, 2008

The daily rundown, April 25

So I've decided to write a little daily entry on here, in addition to my updates on some of the 43Things.com goals that I do, and possible other entries as I see fit. So, what's happened over the past 24 hours that's really of any interest, even to me?

Yesterday was mostly just a stay-at-home day. After the girlfriend* went to work, I checked my e-mail and such. Nothing very interesting going on. I was going to head up to the market and get a copy of the Denton Record-Chronicle to look through the ads, but I wasn't feeling all that ambitious about it. I did update my resume and such on the WorkInTexas.com website, and it wound up giving me a match for a Systems Admin job in Corinth. I checked the "how to apply" section and it was just an e-mail in your resume type deal. So I wrote a little cover e-mail and sent it to the appropriate address. I probably should have spent a little more time on the intro e-mail, because I think I kind of downplayed my skills and concentrated too much on my shortcomings relative to their job requirements. But, what the hell. The worst they can do is turn me down for the job, which isn't necessarily that horrible.

In between adding stuff on that website and sending off my C.V., I also read through a few days' backlog of e-mail and finished organizing my 43Things.com list. I moved a bunch of stuff down on the list that I'm not going to be able to do right now because the necessary items are stuck somewhere at the back of my storage unit, and it's going to take me a while to dig them out. Also, I moved down some of the long term goals and some of the things that are just going to take money. Can't throw money at any of the goals until I actually have a job, after all.

I did a little bit of organization around the computer room here, but not all that much. I did dig out my cross stitch stuff and did a little work on the 4th day of Christmas, which I'm now way behind schedule on. I don't really know if I'm ever going to be able to get myself caught up on that kind of thing now, but I at least managed to get a little bit of stitching done. I also posted messages to the cross stitch list on Tribe.net and my own little cross stitch forum on StumbleUpon. Thus far, however, no replies to either of those messages. While I was on Tribe, I also updated my profile to indicate my new residence and all.

One thing I found while organizing the room was that I actually did have the battery charger for my camera sitting in one of the boxes over in the closet. I thought that was one of the numerous things buried down in the storage unit, so I wound up ordering one from Amazon.com a few days ago after my camera started telling me the battery was low. Now I either need to deal with having an extra or I need to return the one I ordered. Decisions, decisions... It is nice that I'll be able to take pictures sooner than I expected, though.

As it started getting toward evening, I wandered downstairs and had myself some leftover turkey curry for a lunch/dinner sort of thing, and I turned on the hockey game, Montreal vs. Philadelphia. That was pretty much the end of any productivity for the whole evening for me. My girlfriend got home from work and after changing her clothes joined me to watch hockey and Battlestar Galactica, which is sort of a Friday tradition in the house. Her roommate was sleeping, though, and the friend who usually comes over had an important paper to finish, so it was just the two of us. We finished the evening watching the Stars beat the Sharks in overtime. I'm pulling for the Sharks, because they've always been one of my favorites. Of course, the Stars are the hometown team around here, so I'm sort of the outsider, but that's all right. However this series goes, I'll wind up rooting for the winner to go the rest of the way in the West, at least. If Montreal wins the East, I'll have to go with them to win the Cup, as they've been my favorites for as long as I've been watching hockey.

After the game, we came upstairs and I figured I'd check my e-mail before retiring for the evening. There was one message of particular interest to me. It was from my ex-wife. She had written this: "You need you to close out the joint checking account at [the bank]. As per our divorce agreement we were supposed to close all joint accounts. I think I have given you plenty of time since I discussed this with you. As I am authorized to close this on my own, I am asking you to do this within two weeks or I will do it. I am still liable for this account and would like to remove all ties I have to you. So if I haven't seen evidence of this by May 9th, 2008, I will go to [the bank] and close out that account."

I find it rather interesting that she didn't seem to think that the specifics of our divorce settlement were all that critical when our house sold for over a hundred thousand dollars less than we anticipated and I let her keep 90% of the portion of the profits that I was entitled to by that same settlement. And she didn't seem to feel that need to remove "all ties" to me when she asked me to give that reference so she could get into her new apartment, or when she needed to have some free work done on her computer. But, she is technically right that I should have closed the account earlier. I didn't because it was the account that I had all of my automatic bill deductions linked to, and to which my direct deposit paychecks were posted. But, since I'm now between jobs and such, it seems like it's a good time to do it anyway. And, since she's choosing to be a pissy little bitch, it's a good time to do just like she wants and cut all the ties to her. So, I sent her a similarly terse message saying that I'd do it on Monday, then I sat here and drank a bit before heading off to bed. Not the best night ever, but life goes on...



* I refer to my girlfriend by that sort of impersonal sounding term not because I feel impersonal, but because she doesn't have her name posted on all of her websites and such like I do. So I don't really think it's my place to go spreading her actual name over the internet. Just so you know...

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Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Thoughts about StumbleUpon's forums

Almost three years ago, I joined StumbleUpon. It took me about a year before I really started getting somewhat active on the forums on SU. I've never really been all that much of a forum poster, but I've enjoyed myself. I've enjoyed the slight sense of friendly anarchy that has pervaded a number of the forums.

One thing I never really understood though was why the developers of the system felt the need to limit any thread in those forums to 1000 posts before locking it automatically. As a database developer, I don't believe that there is any kind of performance reason to create a limit like that. And for space, it's useless to create that limit, because there's no limit on the number of threads that can be created in a forum. So, rather than have one thread with 10,000 entries, users simply create ten threads with 1000 each.

On a few of the forums, people have found some ways around this 1000 post limit, mostly by opening multiple tabs in Firefox which point to the end of the thread in question. This allows you to enter something in one tab, post it, close that tab, enter something else into the next tab, post it as a new forum entry, and so forth. There was no real checking to make sure the thread wasn't closed, so that trick allowed some threads to extend into the multiple thousands of entries on some forums. It was basically just a good-natured sort of challenge to see how far we could push that particular envelope. I've not noticed any particular performance problems or anything in any of those extended threads.

Now the developers have implemented a change on the forums which prevents any post beyond the 1001st. It just drops anything else quietly. Not a really huge deal, and I suppose it's their prerogative to set the rules and enforce them, but it really seems that they've been taking a fun place to play around and enjoy myself and turning it into somewhere that I'm no longer quite enjoying so much. Why do they think that a fun little site like that needs to be ruled in such a hardcore manner? And, more importantly, why do they have to spend the effort stopping something like that instead of trying to prevent the spamming and crap that goes on in the forums and in people's inboxes on a daily basis?

Oh, yeah, it's because eBay bought them, and eBay is all about trying to turn everything for a profit...

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