A Few Minor Irritants and One Good Thing

First things first: an apology.

I’ve had to enable word verification for comments. I was spam-bombed again last evening with another 44 character-based comments… from the same asshat that nailed me night before last, no doubt. I’m also a lil bit ticked with Site Meter in that I wasn’t able to correlate the date/time stamp on the comment e-mails with a specific visitor as recorded in SM. The reason I’m ticked is I seriously wanted to send an abuse report to the spammer’s ISP but I can’t do so without a smoking gun.

I’ll run word verification for about a month or so and then try and remove it again. Once again: apologies.

―:☺:―

I used to think buying a house was one of the worst experiences in modern life, what with trying to find something that meets your needs and desires, is within your budget, and in a neighborhood that’s safe, attractive, and within reasonable distance of things you need/places you have to be. Then comes the offer process, the negotiating, inspections, the closing, and frickin’ paperwork out the wazoo at each and every step. It's misery personified.

As far as negative experiences go, buying a house is closely followed by buying a car, but for different reasons… most of which revolve around car dealers and salespeople, who are the slimiest people one will ever meet in an ostensibly legal endeavor. I think drug dealers are more honest and respectable than car salesmen. (Minor digression: let’s not consider divorce lawyers, who are in a category unto themselves and have a special place reserved in Hell. Except for mine, of course. He was OK. That said, I remain amazed more of those bastards aren’t shot dead in the street on any given day.)

But we’re talking about negative experiences… or we started out that way. I’m thinking of adding “buying a computer” to my short list. I’ve had my first two experiences… ever… with the dreaded “blue screen of death” phenomenon this past week, followed up with the curt but scary “Windows needs to examine your hard drive for errors. Run check disk now.” message (or words to that effect) upon the subsequent start-up. It doesn’t help matters that I’m nearly a year beyond the usual, customary, and reasonable three-year refresh period, and that fact contributes greatly to my angst. Along with the heretofore unknown Blue Screen events.

So… we began our day looking at various desktops in what we consider to be our current price range. And…

Too much frickin’ choice.

I suppose that’s a good thing… and really, it is. But I have “issues.” I don’t like what I’ve heard about Vista, but there aren’t any real alternatives for a technically-challenged individual… read as: don’t say a frickin’ thing about Linux. I don’t wanna hear it. And Macs are out of my price range, so don’t come at me with the wonderfulness of Mr. Jobs Magical-And-Oh-So-AWESOME products. I don’t like white or cream-colored computers, either. Nope… I want a garden variety PC that’s as close to plug and play as possible and costs less… preferably much less… than a thousand dollars. There appears to be at least 1,463 boxes in that category and we have begun the arduous task of sifting through the alternatives.

The good news? My current box… which is within a whisker of four years old… has an older Pentium processor (duh), a 180 gig hard drive and a gig of RAM. Contemporary boxes have much faster quad-core processors (Intel only, please), four times the RAM, and six times the hard drive for a couple o’ C-Notes less than I paid for my current El Cheapo Gateway… AND they carry brand-name nameplates, too. I (heart) progress!

But I hate making choices.

We’ll keep you informed.

―:☺:―

Just an observation: I think we’re going through the wettest Spring I’ve experienced here on The High Plains of New Mexico, but that’s only going back six years. It pretty much rained all night and well into this morning… and the skies remain overcast and leaden gray as we speak. Our forecast is for scattered showers all day and moderate temps, something I most definitely can live with. This would be our third consecutive day of rain, an event unknown to me since I’ve been in these parts.

Maybe The Goreacle was right about climate change. If so, this is the kind of change I really can believe in. And like. As opposed to… well, you know.

―:☺:―

I don’t get today’s Ramirez:

Please enlighten me if you have any idea what he’s on about, Gentle Reader. Never mind... I didn't see the caption below the drawing. It doesn't pay to post before you're fully caffeinated. I'll learn this lesson... someday.