#1.

What if horny was short for “hormone-y“.

It makes sense.  In the same way that Emeril’s “Bam!” is actually short for “Bank of America”.

oh, btw, rip wamu.  As a shareholder, I will miss you.

ugh.

more like, bill GREATs.

With everyone criticizing the new Microsoft commercials, it’s hard to look at them in a good light anymore.

Yes, they’re somewhat arbitrary.  Yes, they don’t mention vista.  Yes, they have nothing to do with Microsoft anymore.

But what they don’t have, I feel, doesn’t even come close to what they do have: a sense of humor!

I’ve been accused of being a microsoft-lover, and maybe this is true: I’ve been using windows ever since I was a little kid.  Hell, I used 3.1 nearly up until 98 came out.  And when 98 came out, I was using 95 until ME came out.  Really, I was one step behind, but this is a discredit to my character and no fault of the ever-improving microsoft.

Gates and Vista, bffs.

Perhaps that last statement is too optimistic.  Microsoft, when it came out with 95, essentially hit the top of their game.  They were scottie pippen in the mid-90s.  They were AOL in 1997.  They were Michael Phelps like a month ago.  But then when 98 came out, everyone whined and wanted 95 back.  When ME came out, everyone whined and wanted 95 back.  When XP came out, everyone whined and wanted 95 back.  When Vista came out — the shit hit the fan.

Not only does Vista have permission issues [it took me about 12 hours to get all the data off of my old harddrive, because I wasn't the "owner" of said data, according to vista.  The fix was easy and tedious enough, but vista had a lot of trouble moving and shaking that data.] but it also has issues MOVING, DELETING, and COPYING files.  These are things that DOS could have done — so really, what the fuck, Vista?

It only took me a little while to figure out how to shut off that “DO YOU REALLY WANNA DO THIS SHIT?” screen that pops up, but countless friends of mine had no idea how to do it until I told them.  Yes, security is a big issue, but when you can barely do anything without getting pissed off, I say that Security takes a backseat to nerves.  But security, apparently, is a big deal nowadays; as it should be.  Google Chrome, for example, had numerous security problems, but that didn’t stop me from beta testing.

Maybe this is why my old computer fried.

I got a bit side-tracked, but my point is: Vista sucks.  And there’s really no need to advertise it with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld — but that’s not what I think is going down.  In fact, Vista has a completely different ad campaign running: the mojave experiment.  Warning, you’re going to have to download yet another microsoft (beta!) product if you go to that site.  Oh well.

Maybe it’s Bill Gates trying to be funny.  Maybe it’s microsoft trying to get a new “nice-guy” appearance after the re-popularization of mac laptops as “the commonman’s laptop” and after so many people have bitched and moaned about vista.  Maybe it’s Jerry Seinfeld trying to make a comeback after a lukewarm response to his much-advertised Bee Movie [his one GOOD move was going on 30rock to advertise it.  If Tina Fey were stock, I'd buy, buy, buy.].  There are many possibilities, but, as always, I’m going to try to see this commercial not as product placement ["You've connected billions of people..." With what?  "What's next for microsoft?" Nothing specific, but it's gonna be moist, apparently.] but as just art. And as art, I think it succeeds: it tries to be funny, and it is funny.  At least, I think it is.

After Bill Gates’ last-day-at-microsoft video, I think this might be Gates’ way of saying, “Sorry for Vista, everyone.”

A guy can hope.

I need to stay away from the stock market.

Biggest financial breakdown in some ridiculous number of years.

I lost a lot without even having a lot invested.

I really feel bad for those people who actually *worked* there and had their retirement funds in their stock.

AIG was at 60.  Now it’s at 6.  That means if you had $30,000 invested, you now have $3,000.

Not to say I told you so or anything, but, really, as soon as you get a 401k, you ought to figure out what exactly it means to have a 401k.

Maybe I’ll invest in blood next.

First beam.

First beam shot today.

edit.  and we’re not dead.  so, maybe we’ll die october 21st, but I, for one, don’t think we will.

if we die, who’s gonna give candy to all the kids on halloween?

friend or faux?

I’m sitting at my father’s kitchen table, working on my new laptop.  Which means that I have a laptop again.  Which means that I have some privacy again.  Which means that I have — Vista.

Now, Vista is nowhere near as terrible as I’ve been hearing.  After some two hours customizing it to look like XP [which, in turn, looked a little like 98 when I customized it...], it seems to be not all that different from XP.  There was that stupid “do you trust our ass?” pop-up whenever I try to run a program, but I got rid of that quickly enough.  Really, I can’t see too much of a difference between Vista and XP after I customized the hell out of Vista.

I was sort of hesitant when I started loading programs into my new computer — the necessaries were easy and went first: firefox, thunderbird, tex, soulseek, spybot, itunes, aim, … — since I wasn’t exactly sure if I wanted to put Google Chrome on my shiney new hp.

I decided to read up on it.  Oh.  Security is terrible on it.  Oh.  Tons of patches.  Oh.  Really fast.

I couldn’t decide.  I just held my breath, flipped a coin, installed it, but didn’t use it.  I made firefox my default browser.

But speaking of my new computer, I simply ADORE it.  It is really cute.  It’s got a fingerprint scanner and all.  For all’ya’ll who want the specifics: it’s an hp pavilion entertainment pc, special edition.  Yeah.  It’s cute.

I usually go for compaqs, but since compaq was bought by hp, I figured, “eh, what the hell.”

The only thing that I don’t like about the computer so far is just where some of the keys are on the keyboard — I’m just not used to it.  The ‘q’ key is about 0.3″ over from where I think it should be, and the delete key is kind of curved and strange.  But the MOST irritating thing is the shift key: it is HALF the size of my other shift key, and where the other half of the key should be is the UP key.

Oh.  Great.

So everytime I try to capitalize a letter, I run a 50% risk of accidently hitting “up.”

And I’ve done it about a hundred times so far.  It’s just that drilled in to me; and, really, it should be: I’ve had my old computer for something like 3 years.  We go way back.

But the breath-and-soul of my old computer — the harddrive — has been taken out of the decaying corpse of my old laptop and inserted in a new-blood ide 2.5″ to usb2.0 external drive cover.  For any who aren’t in the “know”, this is just something to make an internal harddrive into an external harddrive.  It’s like when you take out someone’s heart and make it into like.  I don’t know, some kind of external heart.  No, that’s a terrible analogy.  It’s like when you…well, okay, there’s really not much that’s similar to it.  You just take the drive from inside the computer, and make it work on the OUTSIDE of the computer.  Crazy stuff.

I haven’t tried it yet, but assuming it works, I’ll have ALL of my old files from my old computer.

but i’m not gonna try to see if it works on my new computer.  Because this shit is brand-spankin’-new.  I’m not soiling it up if the drive gets messed up.

btw, I’m going back to chicago sometime during the 20th-24th of this month.  Which is september.  So, expect me.  I’m not really looking forward to it, since whenever I go back, I always have MOUNTAINS of bills to take care of, and like, a billion things to do that I never, ever, ever get around to.

Moreover, I have to make Comcast work.  And that will be the hardest challenge of all.

Chrome.

I got google chrome.  It’s really not bad.  It’s a web browser that is…well, I don’t know.  Pretty neat.  It only came out today, so these are just initial complaints.

Pros: Clean.  FAST.  Not crashing every few minutes.  Nice interface.  Nice tab-crashing options.

Cons: No middle-button scrolling.  No “refresh” on the right-click menu.  No add-ons yet, so it’s kind of bothersome to go between this and firefox.  No customizable themes that I know of.  Download menu is attached, at the bottom, so it’s kind of irritating (I’m not sure if that’s fixable, or, you know.  I’m just putting it down anyway.), and it’s not as “cute” as firefox — ’cause firefox has that fox-and-world thing, and google, well…has google.

My life is okay.  At home.  I invested in stocks.  I made some money.  I’m trying to build a good portfolio.  You know how I do.  

Oh, big: my laptop is totally fried, so I’m on my desktop now at home.  My new laptop comes in a few days.  Expect a bigger update then.  For now, I’m gonna go back to testing chrome.

edit: Chrome doesn’t do quicktime\realmedia too well when it’s embedded in a page, but it does do flash pretty well.  It’s REALLY fast, even for javascript-heavy pages.  Java loads fairly quickly [for a demo, check out some of the wolfram things on the mathematics page].  And, oddly enough, there is almost NOWHERE to put questions, comments, etc.  You figure google, of all people, would put up an easily accessable forum.  Maybe they’re waiting a bit for the major complaints to come in.  I don’t know.

Also, when you close the last tab, unlike firefox, the whole browser closes.  Kind of annoying.

It also almost crashed when I opened a pdf.  It just went REALLY slow, but as soon as I closed the tab, it was fine.