Windoze Crash

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sat, 29 Jan 2005 13:00:00 GMT
From smith2004:
"Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent." -- H. L. Mencken

From drugsense:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

# When I turned on my laptop at work yesterday, it took a very long time to get to the login screen, and then neither the mouse nor the keyboard worked. I booted with a Knoppix CD, and everything was hunky-dory, so I concluded that I had an operating system problem. Fortunately, file sharing was turned on and it worked, so I was able to snarf the bits from my machine (8 gigs and 100,000 files worth). I wiped the disk, reinstalled Windows XP, restored my bits, and reinstalled most of the programs I use. Groan...

One nice thing about my new installation is that I configured my machine as a member of a workgroup instead of connecting it to the office domain. This means that multiple people can be logged on at the same time using XP's Fast User Switching. I'll get to the office network via VPN, even in the office. Unfortunately, I've discovered a flaw in the K-Meleon browser. It stores all its configuration data, including password-containing cookies, in the application directory instead of in each user's "Application Data" directory. Bummer.

For the past few days, my car's trunk has been difficult to close, and the front end, near the back window, stuck up about a half an inch when it was closed. Yesterday morning, in the office parking lot, in -10 degrees fahrenheit, I figured it out. The trunk is held up by two posts connected to air cylinders. There was ice in the slot in the sheet metal in which the air cylinders sit when the trunk is closed. I had cleaned everything out with my gloved hand, multiple times, but I hadn't noticed that there was a quarter inch of hard ice there. I attacked it with the awl from the combination shovel / saw / awl that I reported on a while back. Now the trunk closes properly.

# Sunni Maravillosa - Why I Like Men, and What I Like about Them - not all males are men. Sunni likes men. Don't know if this little (er... big) geek qualifies, but I appreciate the sentiment. [sunni]

# The Reload Bench has lots of information about various rifle and pistol cartridges and reloading. [clairefiles]

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