I've been testing out this little speech recognition program and although it has its bugs and limitations, the thing that surprises me the most is just how far the technology seems to be coming along. You can close windows, switch between windows, open and switch between programs, and even dictate documents and most of it works surprisingly well. Of course, it is quite possible to get into corners from which there is no real way out except to break down and use the keyboard or mouse. And sometimes during dictation, the computer will write things that are rather bizarre. The bright side is that you can teach the program to do a better job of recognizing your voice. Over time and with practice, it will start making fewer mistakes.

The syntax can be rather weird. For instance, you have to say each punctuation mark, line break, or new paragraph. All well and good for word processing files, but there is a long way to go before it will be ready for things like complicated emails, databases, programming, or design tasks. For instance, it doesn't even seem to recognize the "Compose mail" link in Gmail so you have to use the mouse to simply open a new message by hand.

I would certainly not recommend this sort of thing for someone who's trying to get real work done on a deadline. But it's amazing to consider the potential and where this technology will be in another five or ten years.

And on another note, I recently bought a fancy new headset with a microphone for my laptop, so I've downloaded Skype now (free PC-to-PC calls and very cheap PC-to-phone calls). If anyone has it and wants to find me on there, let me know or just search for rm_mcgee.

Hackers got into at least one of Governor Palin's Yahoo email accounts, which seems to confirm that she's had a practice of using non-governmental accounts to conduct Alaska state business. Hackers have leaked several of the emails over the Internet.

To add another twist to this story, there have been rumors that Governor Palin is a hacker herself.

I don't know about anyone else, but this definitely reassures me about her ability to handle access to sensitive and classified information if she were to become Vice President.


(cross-posted to theleftunited)

Just spent over four hours trying to get things to work with Windows Vista. First, the desktop wouldn't recognize the network hard drive, then the Vista backup program wouldn't work with it. Finally got the thing to see the drive (so it can be used for storage and what not) but it turns out there's no fix for the backup program issue. Guess I'll have to invest in Norton Ghost or something.

And then I couldn't get Apache installed on the laptop. Installing Apache on Windows XP is trivial. Not so with Vista. Turns out that some of the package programs with Apache + MySQL, PHP, and Perl don't even work with Vista at all--specifically Wampserver and Apache2Triad. Finally got XAMPP to work though and it was even fairly painless. Used to use Developerside.net, but they've gone to a paid version only now.

Bah. I'm exhausted. I think its time to call it a night.

People and companies put up websites for all sorts of reasons: as a point of contact for friends, associates, or potential clients; as a way to promote a business, a skill, or a hobby; or as a platform to sell things. Regardless of the reasons for having a website, what makes a site effective and keeps people coming back is not rocket science. Make it easy for visitors to see where they are and what options are available to them, make it easy for them to find what they want ("don't make me think"), give them reasons to keep coming back, and leave them with a pleasant memory of their visit.

The people who design and manage shopping malls understand this. Too often, the people who design and manage websites don't. Its very easy these days to simply grab some simple tools and throw up any old kind of website with no thought or planning put into it. Its also painfully obvious that a whole lot of sites are actually built this way. But a poorly designed or poorly thought out website will, at best, be ineffective. At worst, it will reflect badly on the person it belongs to.

So here's a few of my website design pet peeves. I'm not talking about nitpicking over obscure and technical details; I'm talking about the things I see over and over and over again that make me want to go and beat my head repeatedly against the nearest brick wall every time I see them. Without further ado...

Vague section titles and file names

How many websites do you see with sections like "About us" or "Contact us"? A lot. Too many. A quick Google search tells us that there are 1,970,000,000 results for "About us" and 1,830,000,000 results for "Contact us". Imagine trying to work your way up the search engine rankings against nearly 2 million other sites.

A website must be able to be found by search engines to be of any value. This means rich descriptive content and keywords. How many people do you know who go into Google or Yahoo and search on the phrase "About us"? Personally I don't know of any--even though there's nearly 2 million results if anyone actually did. Or how about websites that have pages with titles like "Memories"? Memories of what exactly?

Mystery Meat Navigation

I've seen websites where the only navigation available was a series of tiny little pictures that could mean almost anything. Some sites will even add insult to injury by making these little pictures into Flash or Javascript rollover effects that appear seemingly out of nowhere in random places on the page.

If I click your little picture of a camera, am I going to a place on your site that sells cameras, a gallery of photos you've taken, or some videos of your Aunt Bertha's latest trip to Maui? Making me guess what's on your site is not something I find amusing and is probably just going to make me go elsewhere.

Poorly thought-out navigation

A lot of web designers seem to have lost sight of the fact that you can make anything on the page into a link, not just the menu bar. I've been to websites that will actually say something like "To contact us or to request more information, please select the "Contact Page" link from the left-hand navigation menu". This to me is just bizarre. Why not just say "For questions or more information, contact us" and make "Contact us" a direct link to the Contact Page?

Or how about the people who write "For more information, click here". "Click here" contains no information whatsoever, either for the user or for the search engines indexing the site. Even worse, for a blind person viewing the site with screen reader software, there is no "here" to click.

Using graphics for text

Yes, the web has a limited number of fonts that you can safely be sure will show up as you intended. That's just a fact of life and at most its a minor inconvenience. There's other ways to brand your site besides use of a particular font. Using graphics--or worse, hundreds and hundreds of inline images for your site text--is no solution, its just incredibly annoying. My favorite sites are the ones who do this on their contact page--I'm sure their potential customers really enjoy having to type in email addresses and other information instead of simply cutting and pasting the text into their email program.

Frames

Wonderful way to send the message that "Hey, I designed this site in 1996 and haven't learned a damn thing about web design since." Frames break, they don't always show up right in some browsers, and more often than not, as a user, I'm going to come across at least one "orphaned" page in your site--that is, a page that shows up outside the frameset that I therefore have no idea what to do with and I'm simply left to guess about where it fits in with your site or how to navigate to anywhere else.

And as for search engines, given a choice between an index page that's nothing but a bunch of code on how to display other html pages and an index page loaded with descriptive text and keywords, which would you suspect will be ranked higher by Google or Yahoo?

There's no good reason to use frames anymore, as there is always a better way to do something. And with the advances in web technologies over the past decade or so and the huge amount of (often free) help available online, the ease-of-use argument doesn't even work anymore. If frames were not a web tool, I would say they need to be taken out back and shot--just do yourself a favor and stay away from them.

Flash introductions

God, please, just...don't.

Flash can be a very useful and powerful tool, but unfortunately it seems to be one of the most commonly abused technologies out there. Which leads us to...

Abuse of Java applets

At one time, there was this fad of people putting Java applets on their websites that showed this 3-D looking shimmering lake with twinkling stars overhead or other such nonsense. Yeah, really cool effect there--that is, until about the fifth time that you have to wait for the damn thing to load. Not even counting the five thousand other websites I've already seen it on.

Fortunately--praise be to whatever deities may exist--Java applets, largely thanks to such widespread abuse, seem to be on their way out these days. So this one's not so much of a complaint anymore.

And on a related note, unless you want to be pegged as completely clueless when it comes to the web (in other words, one of the people who keep me in business), don't confuse Java with JavaScript--they are two entirely different things. In fact, they were developed by two completely different companies--Sun Microsystems in the case of Java and Netscape in the case of JavaScript.

Page layouts with tables

At one time, it might have been a cool little hack to design pages with tables to get around some of the limitations of HTML in the web's ancient past (circa 1995). Actually, I used to do this myself back in the late 90's. But again, this is a great way to convey to everyone who comes to your site that you haven't learned a thing since that time.

This isn't to say that tables must be discarded. But tables have a purpose: to convey information in tabular form. Statistics, data, anything that you might put into a spreadsheet in other words. Page layouts are simply messy and limiting when done with tables and CSS layouts are far more flexible anyway.

...and a bonus pet peeve, which isn't limited to just web design.

"The computer made a mistake"

No, it didn't. Somewhere along the line, someone operating the computer made a mistake. Computers don't make mistakes. They are simply stupid machines that follow the instructions programmed into them by stupid human beings. Computers are tools, nothing more--and certainly not a substitute for critical thinking skills.

In the days before computers when businesses kept their records in paper ledgers, would an employee have responded to a customer complaint by saying that the ledger made a mistake? And if he did, would he have kept his job for long?

There's no more common new years resolution than "getting organized". For the most part, I'm a fairly organized person. That is, I know how to be organized, but sometimes I have to work on the self-discipline to keep up with it all. Now my business partner, he's not organized at all, but I digress.

Anyway, we're in this reorganization/re-evaluating phase with the business, simply because its good for all businesses to go through those phases periodically. Part of this is that we've been trying out some new software to help us keep track of everything that's going on.

I've looked at a lot of organizing and collaboration software over the years. But recently I found Egroupware and I'm impressed, to say the least. It has everything one might need to keep track of things--project management software, file management tools, a wiki, calendars, a knowledge base system, and a lot more all integrated into one package with a well-organized, attractive, and intuitive interface.

The website and user manual are nice as far as getting help. The installation instructions could use a lot of work, especially with explaining how to deal with the numerous problems that seems to come up. To put it bluntly, installation is a complete pain in the ass. It took me most of this evening, in fact (would have been a lot easier if I knew MySQL better). But the program is well worth it.

It requires a server and a database to run, but all that is easy enough to get with one of the all-in-one packages like DeveloperSide.net. Egroupware runs fine on your standard WAMP* or LAMP* configurations, so if you've had any experience running applications like WordPress or Drupal, you'll already be familiar with a lot of the installation tasks.

And you can synchronize it to use along with programs like Outlook, Thunderbird/Lightning, and iCal. The best part is that its completely free and open-source. By the way, if you were wondering about Outlook--what the hell are you doing still using Microsoft products for anyway?



*(Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP or Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP, respectively. For the non-techies out there, this refers to a standard configuration of operating system, server software, database, and PHP, a programming language that's particularly good for database applications. Many of the projects we work on in my company are built with programs that run on these configurations.)

The main computer system for my business has been in the shop for the past week due to needing some work done on it. Unfortunately, some issues came up that led to the work requiring a complete reinstall of Windows Vista. I've been spending the past few hours reinstalling programs and restoring all our data from backups, which is, I must say, tediously boring process. And as near as I can figure, there's at least a few hours left to go. Sigh.

I got home late tonight and to relax a little before hopping online, I watched a Science Channel special on time travel I had on the DVR. While it didn't cover a whole lot of new theoretical ground that I wasn't already familiar with, it was interesting nonetheless. And it got me thinking about an important point.

Perhaps our real problem in exploring not just time but also the vast distances of interstellar space isn't so much relativity or the light barrier or time dilation at all. Rather, the real problem is that so far in human history, we've been irrevocably chained to our physical, organic bodies. The human body, by nature, is imperfect, even though medical science is making some astounding progress in extending its usefulness. Medicine might be able to lessen the impact of the inherent flaws in organic tissues, but it will never be able to eliminate such flaws entirely.

Organic bodies will likely always age. They will always be prone to diseases, accidents, and all sorts of other unpleasant things. Without extensive modifications that are currently beyond the scope of our technology (at least so far), there is only a limited range of environments in which the human body, or for that matter, most familiar forms of organic life, can exist. We can't withstand the tremendous pressures of the ocean depths or the vast irradiated vacuum of space. While medicine might be able to continue applying band-aids that will extend our limits, the limits themselves will always be there. In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld, if your body were a car, you wouldn't buy it.

It seems, then, that if we're ever going to fully explore the universe, we're going to have to, at some point, come up with options of not being trapped in our physical organic existence. It doesn't necessarily mean that we have to leave our bodies behind entirely for all time (since I rather doubt anyone would want to do that), but it does mean we need to at least have other technologies and other options at our disposal. The thing is, such options are not at all far-fetched to those who follow current scientific theory. In fact, leaving our physical bodies behind might well prove to be far more feasible than building massive faster-than-light spaceships or time portals.

A lot of people are impressed at how far and how fast computer technology has progressed--and rightly so. But in the grand scheme of things, our computers are still very primitive. For one thing, in most cases, its still obvious when you are working with a computer instead of having computers seamlessly integrated into our lives. Its true that in many cases, computers help us in our lives without us even being aware of their presence. But that trend is going to have to get much further along before we're truly equipped to take full advantage of the potentials of computer intelligence.

At the same time the computer revolution is progressing at astonishing speeds, we're also making amazing progress at understanding the human mind itself. Physicists have spoken of the need to understand the "physical processes" of information, mind, consciousness, and intelligence. While this term is by necessity extremely imprecise--since its meaningless to speak literally of physical processes at the same time you're heading toward leaving physical existence behind--its the best we've got for now. And the principle still remains. Once we gain a fuller understanding of mind and how it works, we're no longer limited to the physical, no longer bound to the organic.

Of course, this all brings up some very practical questions for those who spend their time searching the stars for signs of other intelligent life. The question of whether we would even be able to recognize such life if we ever found it is a very real one. Would we even know what form such life might take? Will they have long since left their physical existence behind? Would they be able to store vast amounts of information within the very fabric of space-time itself? While we might theoretically be able to grasp an intelligence a few centuries more advanced than our own, one has to wonder if it would be even be possible to communicate at all with a civilization that was, say, one thousand or one million or one billion years ahead of our own.

I've always believed that its likely there's other life in the universe. It could even be possible for intelligences far beyond our own to already be on this planet today--or at the least, all around us in the cosmos. Skeptics tend to look at me funny when I mention that particular guess. People will ask where the evidence of such life is. But my question would be, if we were staring the evidence right in the face, would we even be able to recognize it? After all, one could hardly expect a cave man who found a radio antenna to have any idea of what to do with such a thing, aside from perhaps sharpening it to use as a spear.

For countless thousands of years, humans have looked up into the quiet vastness of the night sky with its blinking lights and strange shapes and wondered about the nature of what was out there. Just as intriguing, we wonder how it is that globs of relatively ordinary matter consisting of not much more than long chains of various carbon-based molecules have managed to become self-aware enough to ask the question. What, exactly, are these mysteries that we call mind, intelligence, consciousness, space, time, and reality?

Maybe one day--maybe even within our own lifetimes--we'll be able to start discovering the answers to our oldest questions.

I should have known the run of good luck couldn't last. I discovered this afternoon that every website hosted with the company that we contract with for web hosting was completely down. Then I logged in to our account at the company only to find that it didn't show any domains registered at all, After putting in a support ticket, we get a reply that says that BOTH the primary and backup servers have completely crashed and that no recovery is possible.

Now we have to set up all the domains again and reconstruct the sites. Of course, we have backups locally, so this can be done, even though it will take a lot of extra work that no one has the time for. But the bigger problem at the moment is that the company hasn't yet set up a new account and sent us the information to access it. Its been eight hours and that's just since we discovered the problem. No telling how long everything has actually been down.

Its going to be such a fun Monday morning when our customers get to work and discover they have no websites, that they can't access their email accounts, and that the email they had stored on the servers is all probably lost.

I know, in the long-term, this is all going to work out OK somehow. But that does nothing to reassure me at the moment as I watch the clock tick away and still no word on when we will be able to start getting everything fixed. For the moment, its all incredibly frustrating as I contemplate the prospect of angry customers, lost business, and hundreds or even thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

For the first time in a few weeks, I finally had a day without ten million things going on at once. In addition to some much needed rest, I've spent the day taking a walk and enjoying the weather, watching Ocean's 13 at last (excellent movie), and some general repair and cleaning tasks.

In the last category, I was able to sit down and get make sure all of my computer equipment was fully recovered from the system crash I wrote about nearly three weeks ago. In spite of inexplicable blue screens of death and worries of failing hardware, all it took was repairing the Windows XP installation and now everything works again. Aside from running some updates, backups, and other tweaks, I still have all my programs and data (and even most of my personal settings), so now I'm just relaxing and writing this on the other computer while I wait for Windows to finish updating itself.

In other computer-related news, for the past two months I've been taking a video production class in which I've had my first extensive experience with Macs in quite a while. And I have to say, in spite of how much Windows drives me up the wall sometimes and the cult-like following of Macs--I'm really not a big fan. Sorry, I know that statement borders on heresy for a lot of people. Hey, at least I use OpenOffice and Firefox so at least I've eliminated most of my reliance on Microsoft products.

One thing that being a part of a technology company for the past six months has definitely taught me, though, is that most technology really does have a long way to go in the realm of user-friendliness before it will reach its full potential. However, there's great strides being made, so I feel pretty good about it overall.

And actually, I'm feeling pretty good in general these days. The mildly depressed funk I've been in that has made off-and-on appearances since about August seems to be a thing of the past now. Things are hectic, but I think I'm getting back to the point where it doesn't bother me so much anymore. I'm doing better at keeping organized and just focusing on what needs to be done, one task at a time--something I've often struggled with. I'm looking forward to whatever comes next.

In the short term of what comes next, I need to get some application materials faxed up to a friend of mine who's applying for a county position here as a director of homeless programs. Orange County can actually move fast when it wants to and the position closes December 21. And I've been promising a local friend that I'd take her out for coffee for what seems like forever and we haven't been able to get our schedules to sync (and why the nerves when its only coffee?), so hopefully that happens soon too.

So there's the highlights of what's been happening here. And now, some more of that much-needed rest before the chaos starts again Monday morning.

Just thought I'd throw this out there and see if anyone has any more of a clue about it than I do:

I have a computer running Windows XP. The other day, it randomly shut down and came back with a blue screen saying "BAD_POOL_CALLER". I tried restarting the computer, same thing. I tried booting into safe mode--in fact, I tried booting into any other mode--and it won't do that either, just takes me back to the blue screen. I tried restoring the system to an earlier point, no luck. Then I figured I'd try running a repair installation of Windows XP. It gets about a third of the way through it and then goes right back to the same blue screen. Basically I can't even get into Windows.

I've spent an absurd amount of time sifting through information on Google, most of which appears to be useless. There are hundreds of forum posts that all point back to the same few articles which are totally unhelpful. The articles say that it could be any one of several different vague things and then don't tell you any practical way to narrow it down. The few specific suggestions I have found don't work; I've ruled out the memory, the modem, etc. Other suggestions don't apply; for instance, there are numerous posts talking about getting this error when upgrading from Windows 2000, but there's no upgrade involved here. Probably the most common possibility I see is "Its probably a bad driver" with no further information. But I have no idea what to even do about this when I can't even boot up the computer.

If worse comes to worse I guess I'll have to try to do a clean installation of Windows. But I'm trying to avoid that because I have data on this machine that hasn't been backed up yet (since the error hit randomly) and that would be an extreme pain in the neck to lose.

If anyone has any ideas at all, I'd greatly appreciate being pointed in some direction or other. You can comment here or email idealistagain [[at}} gmail dot com.

Is anyone at all familiar with Adobe's Bonjour program? This is a little piece of software that automatically installs with the Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium package and its function is supposedly to allow the CS3 programs to communicate with Version Cue servers on your local network. This is a program that I have no use for and would prefer to not even have on the machine but there's no way to choose to not install it, and, once installed, its next to impossible to get rid of.

This in itself is enough to fall under my definition of malicious software, but Adobe disagrees--I spent a half hour debating this with one of their techs, actually. Even more interesting, though, is that Adobe claims the damn thing only accesses your local network and not the Internet. Sounds good, but my firewall keeps giving me alerts that it is trying to access the Internet. Searching on Google through a bunch of tech forums, it seems that I'm not the only one who's noticed this.

It also is mystifying to me why it takes so long for the Adobe CS3 package to install or un-install--over an hour in most cases. As if that's not enough, it seems rom the research I've done that its rare to experience a trouble free installation of the program--one woman posted a lengthy account of it taking 39 hours to install the software. And then Adobe's tech notes all seem to contain totally unreasonable "suggestions" like creating a new user account or doing a system restore or even reinstalling Windows (no, I'm not kidding).

Of course, I'd prefer to just give Adobe the finger and not even bother with all this hassle. Unfortunately, there's no much in the way of alternatives to the programs Adobe makes. And people though Microsoft was bad....

Also, on an unrelated note: Could The Onion please get back to writing satire???

The good news is I guess Adobe isn't watching you after all. After some investigation and a long conversation with Adobe tech support, it turned out the problem was a Windows system file. I'm not sure how exactly a system file ends up corrupted on a brand new installation of Windows, that's Microsoft (damn Bill Gates to hell for all eternity) for you. The Adobe files that had to be cleaned up were from my original installation that didn't work (thanks to the corrupted Windows file) and not files that somehow survived a reformatting of the hard disk.

The bad news is that I now can't find my serial number for Fireworks so there's no way I can tell the program that I in fact have a paid copy and not a trial version that's supposed to expire in 30 days. Adobe claims they have no record of Fireworks ever being purchased even though I have a printed out copy of a receipt with an order number. A record of the serial number has to exist somewhere, since I don't have an installation disk for Fireworks (I added it on after purchasing other CS3 programs). But in spite of giving Adobe about ten different numbers (customer number, account number, order number, phone number, and a 256-digit number that I believe the President orders to launch nuclear strikes), they still are not able to pull up a simple piece of information from a database.

Now, naturally, customer service is closed since they were not able to fix my problem during the obscene amount of time I've been on the phone with them so far tonight.

Sigh. Guess I'll have to try this again tomorrow.

So why am I writing so much about this? Because frankly it pisses me off that I have to spend so much time on the phone with tech support departments (over a period of days, no less) simply to get bought and paid for software functioning properly. Judging by the Google searches I've done relating to various technical errors caused by Microsoft and Adobe, I'm not the only one who has these kinds of problems. Its apparently rather common for people to go through endless aggravation trying to get their software to work.

You know, I've never had all this trouble with open source software. I would probably expect open source software to be buggy and have problems since its developed basically as a hobby by people who aren't getting paid to do the work. But in all of my experiences with open source programs, I've never had any issues. It works like this--I download the software, install it in a matter of minutes, and its working fine and ready to go. If there's something I can't figure out, there's an endless wealth of help documents, technical notes, and support forums where 99.99999% of the time, I can quickly find what I need to solve the problem and move right along.

Case in point: On a recommendation from a friend, I recently installed the OpenOffice suite on my machines and I've been playing around with it quite a bit. Frankly, if there's much of a difference between OpenOffice and MS Office 2003/2007, I haven't been able to tell. Oh wait, there is one huge difference I've noticed: OpenOffice has a much better and more intuitive user interface.

And yet, in the professional world (even in nonprofits which don't exactly have money to burn), I can't count the number of times I've heard that people don't want to risk using open source software because they're worried about a lack of support for it. This baffles me, because I can't think of any examples of commonly used open source software that have anything that could be described as a lack of support. Ironically, open source programs probably have even more support than they need because it always seems to be the obscenely expensive software developed by billion dollar corporations that constantly has things going wrong with it.

Software people who work for these billion dollar corporations will tell you that putting out software that does what its supposed to (make your life easier) is some kind of monumental task and that its not realistic to expect that you won't have bugs and technical difficulties.

But if its so hard to do, how is it that large groups of hobbyist developers who don't have access to the huge amounts of money and resources of huge corporations manage to do it for free?

I've finally got the computer that's been giving me problems for two weeks working again. It now has a new video card, new power supply, new power cord, a fresh and clean installation of Windows XP, and a few other little things I can't recall offhand.

Still not sure what was wrong with it to begin with. My guess would be one of the things we replaced. And I'm nearly done with the pain in the ass work of reinstalling all the software and setting everything up. Just have to set it up to work with the printer on the network and adjust a few more settings and it'll be good as new.

Oh, except for installing Photoshop and Dreamweaver of course. Is there a software company any more aggravating than Adobe, with the possible exception of Microsoft, may Bill Gates be damned to hell for all eternity?

So I put in the installation disk for Adobe CS3, waited a half hour for everything to install, went to open up Dreamweaver and...oops! Says I'm not allowed to use the program because the licensing has expired. OK then. I go and do some research on Google, find that this is a problem that's becoming fairly common. Its apparently caused by Adobe's install/un-install utility leaving behind files that were part of old installations and those files conflicting with the new installation. Makes sense, so I'll just run the cleanup scripts and everything will be....

Wait a minute. This is a brand new installation of Windows. As in...I reformatted the hard drive. Then deleted all the partitions. Then created a new partition to install Windows again. Nothing at all was on the machine until I started installing programs again. The registry is brand new.

What files can Adobe have possibly left on the machine that would have survived reformatting the hard disk? I download and run the cleanup scripts because at this point, I'm really curious to see. Sure enough, the scripts did find several old Adobe files.

I wonder if I'm alone here in finding this incredibly spooky. What the hell is Adobe installing on people's computers?

You know, when you get these high school and college whiz kids who go running around writing malicious software to sneak onto people's computers hidden in some legitimate program, these billion dollar corporations tend to get in a huff and act all self-righteous about their right to prosecute. But when the companies themselves do something that's not all that different, its...well...just business.

So what the hell has Adobe put on my machine? Any guesses?

Hmm. Who is General Failure and why is he reading my disk? Anyway...

One of my computers (the one running XP) has been having some major problems lately, randomly freezing up and things like that. After having it checked out at the local computer repair place we use for the business, there's been no improvement and they found no real problems with the system itself. I suspect it could be a virus, because there's a hell of a lot of processes running in the background (over 40) even when there's no programs running, including multiple instances of the same process and so forth. None of the virus scans I've run have turned up anything, nor did any of the stress tests they did at the computer place.

Bottom line is that I've decided to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows. Naturally, the most annoying thing about that is jumping through all of Microsoft's hoops. Somehow I misplaced the installation disk, plus I'm going to have to call the bastards at Microsoft to reactivate since I can't seem to find the damn product key. I'm half tempted just to install Linux on the thing and I probably would if I didn't need it to have Windows to be able to work with other computers that I use.

Yes, there could be other, easier things to resolve the problem and reinstalling and then setting up everything again can be a pain. But the computer's been in use for quite some time and a lot of clutter and junk files and what not have built up over time, so starting fresh with a clean version of the operating system is something that appeals to me anyway. Plus its probably guaranteed to fix whatever the problem is, instead of having to keep trying different things and losing use of the computer while I'm doing all that. And it'll get rid of any corrupted files in the process. With the setup I have, its easy enough to back up everything, so except for the minor annoyance of reinstalling programs and getting all the settings back the way I want them, the inconvenience of reformatting will be minimal.

However, I'm bored. Needless to say, I'm doing a full system backup before reformatting the drive and even with a fast wireless network, that's taking some time (almost 13,000 files on the computer, and that's not even counting the Windows folder and other files I'm not even bothering to back up). Fortunately, there's people around on AIM to amuse me in the meantime. Of course, after the backup's done, then comes the real work.