I’ve managed to succesfully reinstall Windows and all of my apps and smoothly upgrade to Windows Vista. I decided to just install the 32 bit version this time, and ALL of my hardware works, even my cell phone. Sweet. About the only issue right now is that I can’t sync my ipaq with Outlook, and supposedly they are working on that.
When I get home I still have to set up my email accounts, if you have sent me an email in the last 24 hours, that is why I have not answered.
I may be offline for a few hours. I am slightly pissed off at my OS, so I am going through the upgrade path for the 32 bit versions of my OS up to Vista, hopefully that will take care of some of my current issues (except for the ones in my head).
When I was still running XP I generally used firefox. I like the tabbed browsing, and it seems to load pages much faster. Since I have upgraded to Windows Vista, I have taken to using IE 7. It also finally offers tabbed browsing, and I like it more. Unfortunately, for some weird reason, I can’t get Army Wife’s site to load in IE, so after a bit of troubleshooting I went ahead and loaded firefox onto this damn thing again so that I can visit her site. After having used IE for a month I think I will continue to stick with that though, except for the couple of sites that I can’t use it on. Oh well, sometimes shit just doesn’t make sense.
Damn it, I want a natural gas generator and a whole house surge protector. Anyone have an extra 30k or so laying around they wanna send me? Perhaps I should sell barbie on ebay.
Recently I rebuilt my PC and reinstalled windows. I think I may have posted a bit about the crap that was going on. Anyway, when I did, I installed the Windows XP 64 bit version in order to take full advantage of my CPU. There are a few drivers that will no longer work, such as my scanner, and my cell phone USB cable. No big deal, I can live with that. I moved the scanner over to Stephanie’s PC, and will just live with the fact that I can’t transfer the shit off of my phone. About the only thing that I couldn’t get to install and work properly was iTunes, and Quicktime, which pisses me off to no end. I did a bunch of searching on the Apple site, as well as other places, all of which came to no avail. Apple won’t support the 64 bit version of Windows XP. Fine, fuck you.
I then put Windows Vista Beta 2 on there, running a dual boot system. I had a few problems with my sound card and network card, but just swapped those out with some others from my basement that are compatible with both OSes. No problems there. There are a few glitches, I have a hard time processing converting DVD’s to Divx under Vista, right now I am running under XP to convert a couple so that I can send them back to Netflix and watch later. For the most part, I really like Vista. This is the first time I have even rebooted to XP in a couple of weeks.
The big kicker is that iTunes and Quicktime install under the 64 bit version of Vista with NO PROBLEM. Not only that, but they run just fine. Ok, so what the fuck is the deal? Apple, you are a bunch of fucking assholes. I started iTunes a couple of days ago and got the message that there was an update, so I downloaded it and tried to install. It gives me a message that iTunes will only install on 32 bit versions of Windows 2000 and XP. What the fuck? Is that the purpose of the fucking upgrade? You guys want to be assholes about what you have to support? It’s not like I have ever called you for support, and then only two times that I have tried to get Quicktime support (yes, I am a registered Quicktime Pro owner) nobody ever bothered to fucking reply anyway.
Software designers need to leave a loophole in their installation routines, such as advanced installation, so that assholes like me that want to fuck up their systems, can install their software on unsupported systems.
Maybe if I try to run it in compatibility mode that will work. Vista will still not report itself as being XP, but I have done this in the past with other stuff and it has worked.
I am still having damn problems with the spam. Now too much is getting through the filter. I wish my site was hosted in my basement like I used to do, so that I could shoot the fucking server. I have deleted 450 spams since I got home, just from the last 13 hours.
Last night just completely sucked. I had to go back to work to handle shift change, picked Chris up from work after that, had to run him around and drop him off at a friends house so he could spend the night. Once I got home I stayed up for awhile blogging, hit the sack around midnight. Kind of late for me on the weekend, but I can handle five hours of sleep. At 1:15am one of my cooks called me to let me know that he didn’t appreciate being the only one there that did his job and he didn’t give a shit if I fired him, he was not going to cut any onions. Stupid fucker was geeking out on something. All of my people know that I have a very hard time sleeping, almost to the point of insomnia. They used to be very bad about calling me with stupid bullshit in the middle of the night, until one morning I came in and raised hell, and would not pay them early. I told them that they could drag themselves out of bed at 2pm if they wanted to get paid. They quit calling me at night after that unless it is truly important, in which case I have no problem with it.
As I said, I got to sleep at 12am, received this call at 1:15am. I finally managed to get back to sleep at 3:15am or so, and got back up for work at 5:30. Needless to say, I was not the most happy person when I got to work. I have been putting up with this dumbass and his decreasing performance for several weeks now. He is hitting something hard, possibly ice from what I have been told. I might have even put up with his shitty job for a little while longer in hopes that he would see the error of his ways. That is, until last night.
I cut his pay by 1.25/hr (almost 20%) and turned his 35 hour week into a 14 hour week. I won’t fire him, but if he doesn’t quit this week, next weeks schedule will see him on saturday night from 1am to 4am and that will be it.
My boss is going out of town on Wednesday for a week, so I get to run my store all week, as well as the other two on thos managers two days off. I can already tell what kind of week that this is shaping up to be. Maybe I will get really lucky and it will be nice and uneventful.
There are several different types of what I call computer people.
First, there are those folks that want nothing whatsoever to do with computers or any technology at all. Rotary phone types. Not really part of the discussion at hand, but I have to put them in here.
Next on the food chain are people like my daughter and grandmother. They don’t particularly give a shit HOW it work, they just need it to. They are willing to learn simple tasks (like creating fire) such as opening the web browser, etc. The are the end users that create havoc. Download garbage, spyware, generally fuck up their computers within a couple of months. The only reason I have my daughter in this list is because she is eight. I am pretty sure that she will progress as time goes by. This group of people, although I end up making money off of them, is a big pain in the ass. I have driven the 60 miles to College Park more than once to fix the sound on my Grandmother’s computer because the fucking speaker wire was unplugged.
Third on my list are the sterotypical Mac users. Secretly all serious computer geeks want to be Mac users. Just have the shit work right, but not be afraid to ask questions and try and fix it. They can also be pretty dangerous, viruses, spyware, but overall, they are the perfect end users. If it don’t work right, pop in the fucking restore CD and be done with it. Most of the people that I do small jobs for fall into this range. My wife is one of them. Over the last couple of years, I have stopped building PCs for people, and just recommend buying compaq or macintosh. Easy to use, comes with a restore CD. Just make sure you get one with a burner and backup your important docs and pictures.
I am going to leave the Professionals out of this. Most of the full time pros are very good at what they do, but when they leave work, either they are the previous group that just wants the shit to work right, or they hate computers completely.
I belong in the last group. Semi-professionals who think they know everything and have to tweak shit all of the time, usually to their detriment. Recently I had a hard drive crash and had to rebuild everything. I finally got everything right, running under Windows XP, everything was moving along smoothly. Microsoft has released their Windows Vista beta 2, so I downloaded both the 32 bit version as well as the 64. I tried to upgrade to the 32 bit version and something went wrong with the install. Damn. I booted to the 64-bit DVD that I had burned and proceeded to install. Can’t do an upgrade this way (it is disabled) and I don’t think that I would be able to upgrade from 32 to 64 anyway. I installed the 64 bit version and found that it didn’t support the 64 bit Abit drivers from XP for my damn NIC. I formatted it again, and loaded the 32-bit Windows Vista. Everything seemed ok for a couple of days, then it started freezing up on me. Then I lost sound. Dammit. Reloaded the drivers and that didn’t work. I figured that I had screwed something up messing around with the Vista settings, so I tried a repair. No good. So I formatted the drive and have now loaded the 64-bit evaluation of Windows XP. Sound STILL didn’t work, and after a bit of troubleshooting (which I should have done a week ago) I found that it was mainly locking up when accessing the sound hardware. Goddam onboard sound. I disabled it in the BIOS and found an old SB Live card in my basement, popped that in, and everything is hunky dory.
Now I am just waiting for compatible 64-bit drivers for my NIC and I will upgrade back to Windows Vista beta 2, haha. I am a damn glutton for punishment sometimes.
Whether it be screwing around with my operating system, or skinning my desktop, or seeing if I can run some bad-ass AS400 fans in my desktop, I am always tweaking. Sometimes it can be a real pain in the ass and at those times, I wish I were just an end user. I just want the shit to work right.
Lisa made a comment in one of her posts that had to do with communication and modern day marriage. She mentioned BBSes and that sturck a cord. I have posted before about how my site started and just got to thinking about it.
During the time that I was calling BBSes and ran my own, I met some really nice people both in person as well as online. My wife and I both had a couple of nice friendships that started as a result of being online. I was into BBSes for several years and finally took it offline sometime around 2000. I know that the last year or two that I ran it I was strictly telnet only.
One of the things that I missed after that was the ability to converse with people online. I know that I can chat, but I hate chat. I use AIM, ICQ, and Yahoo, but prefer not to use them except rarely. I have used IRC as well. It’s ok, but I lump it in with all of the other chat programs. I guess maybe there is something psychological about it, but I prefer the Bulletin Board, or blog format. I have your undivided attention (you had better be listening dammit), and you can’t talk back, at least until I have had my say. It also gives us more time to think about what is going to be said, rather than having to come up with witty one-liners in two seconds flat. Not that having more time makes me seem any less retarded, give me ten seconds or ten hours, and I will pretty much come up with something related to poo.
I am looking forward to meeting some new friends soon. I have conversed online with a few of you, I have even spoken on the phone with a couple. I think that this fall, if they have it again, I am going to try to make it to the blog meet in Helen. Hopefully it won’t be on a holiday weekend. Other than that, as long as I know ahead of time (at least a few weeks) I can take my fall vacation. Consider that time-frame a friggin request to the gods-that-set-blogmeet-dates. Time to have a couple of brews with some bloggers.
No, not THAT green button. The one that is a community about Windows MCE (Oh No! Another fucking media center post. I know exactly what is going through your damn mind). Anyway, looks like they re-did the site, and maybe moved it to a new server, cause it’s a damn site faster than the last time I was there.
I have temporarily taken down the meedio setup. Unfortunately it doubled my monthly bandwidth usage in one week, I hit about 80% for the month, and am not currently willing to pay for more bandwidth, as keeping my blog online is more important.
I don’t have a problem keeping it online, but will have to search for some other solutions. I may mirror it at a couple of different places, and then re-link to it.