Whining and Procrastinating

[captainsblog]

The Computer gods (sorry, Bill, I'm not capitalizing you) were displeased with my last offering, so they proceeded to smite me with the most powerful firebolt in the heavens: a weekly Windows Update.



I hate these things. Hate that they're necessary in the first place, hate how the programmers make every one of them sound exactly the same as every other one in a deadly-yet-couched sort of way (An attacker could exploit the vulnerability by constructing a malicious Web page that could potentially allow remote code execution if a user visited that page and spoke way too much in the subjunctive), but above all, I hate the delivery method. That little yellow shield shows up, only after the Update's been slowing down your downloads for hours without telling you, and then goes, Hi! Stop what you're doing and install me!

The novice will, at the screen's own prompting, select "express install (recommended)," which will put in things without even asking you- they've tried propagating IE7 and Genuine Advantage crap using this weekly delivery. Those of us with at least rudimentary brain growth will select "custom install (recommended for advanced users)," which differs only in its letting you see which products are being proposed and the cheery little descriptions of the "critical" or "important" security breaches they're intended to fix. If any.

All of this so far is only mildly annoying, and since it was right before bed last night, I looked at the latest crop of nastyblasters, gave my permission, hit "install" and went off to sleep (I was in a Mafia movie where I had to fake my own death; the dream ended several hours into a very long prison sentence after I got caught). And awakened to the little yellow shield still sitting there. Yes, it's one of those installs, where You Must Restart Your Computer. Fine, no problem. You waited this long, can I at least write up my All-Star Game piece for the other blog?

No I cannot. That thing springs back up like a Bozo Bop Bag every 90 seconds. Finally, surrender came and I rebooted. We didn't even get as far as Windows. No keyboard present or keyboard error, screamed the BIOS. Press F1 or DEL. Right. If no keyboard is present, what, exactly, do you want me to press? I performed the PC equivalent of jiggling the keyboard's handle and got XP to start, whereupon the f-bleepin' MOUSE stopped working.

With security updates like this, who needs viruses?

One more reboot and all seems well. Unless my screen suddenly goes





































(heh, made ya look;)
----

Perhaps, though, all this is punishment for forgetting to do birthday posts despite now actually getting the LJ reminders to do so. Let's see if we can get through two of them without crashing SOMETHING.

Celebrants this time of year have that little celestial image problem, what with their star sign being named for a dread disease and shaped like the sign of another dread (if less fatal) disease. At least one newspaper in my past couldn't bear to name it and its horriblescopes between Gemini and Leo listed MOON CHILDREN, itself not the kindest term. Still and all, the stars have produced some pretty nice Carcinogens over the years. I happen to be married to one of them, but that's next week's post. For our purposes today, I might suggest we rename the constellation MENCKEN, the sign of the Curmudgeon, for our belated and just-on-timers answer to that in the nicest of ways.

The older (by at least a day) is traveling, as is his custom, but his curmudgeonry comes out with much gentleness, originality, and always humor of the finest kind. As he himself often says, Hippo Birdy Two Ewe, glenmarshall!

Today's recipient of Honourable Mencken is a bit sweeter, definitely hotter (a necessity in a country where they think 30 degrees is a hot day), but just as gentle, original and funny. I love her shortest of remarks and her longest of tales, and am pleased to have her among the cast of this daily sideshow. Happies to lindapendant! ::hugs::

----

Kewl, nothing's broken. Now to hit the "post" button. Even better, save everything, THEN hit it.

Comments

[targaff.livejournal.com]

For future reference, this may be beyond the geeky pale, but if you ever need to reinstall in the future then I highly recommend taking a look at RyanVM's post-SP4 stuff. All you have to do is slipstream SP4, use the tool there to integrate the most recent addon and then burn the resultant CD, which installs all of the updates to date. It saves hours of time on OS installs.

[lindapendant.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the birthday wishes ! Very kind of you sir.

[bluesilverkdg.livejournal.com]

How did you get your birthday notifications to actually work? I just have a list of everyone's birthday (and I still forget to look half the time), but I've yet to actually be reminded.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

They re-enabled that feature in your profile preferences a month or so ago.

Go here

http://www.livejournal.com/manage/subscriptions/

and one of the choices is for birthday notifications.