Uncle Roger's Notebooks of Daily Life


Monday, April 25, 2005

Kung Fu Windows

There is a whole genre of video games that involve controlling an animated character in a martial arts battle. These are often extremely graphic and always very violent. Frequently, the characters are given some special power that they can use against their opponents -- spitting hairballs, making armpit farts, tap dancing poorly, and so on. You have to figure out how to avoid your opponent's special powers so you can get on with the business of destroying them.

Upgrading (and I use that term loosely) to a new version of the Windows operating system is very similar to encountering a new opponent in one of these games. You have to figure out how to deal with or disable all the new annoyances that have been added so that you can get your work done. So far, Windows XP is winning, but I'm not giving up just yet.

Oh, and can someone please explain what's up with billyboy's obsession with "cute" (read as "incredibly annoying and more of a hindrance than a help) animated assistants? First it was the hated paper clip and now it's a stupid dog in the file search function. Which, by the way, seems to be mostly worthless now -- anyone have any suggestions on where to get a functional replacement? (And please don't say "MacOS", because sometimes the truth really does hurt.)



Journal Description

My life is, to me, ripe with frequent challenges, occasional successes, spontaneous laughter, adequate tears, and enough *life* to last me a lifetime. To you, however, it surely seems most pedestrian. And therefore, I recycle the name I used previously and call this my Notebooks of Daily Life. Daily, because it's everyday in nature, ordinary. These conglomeration of events that are my life are of interest to me because I live it, perhaps mildly so to those who are touched by it, and could only be of perverse, morbid curiosity to anyone else. Yet, I offer them here nonetheless. Make of them what you will, and perhaps you can learn from my mistakes.

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