Apophenia

I hereby award the slimy booger award to Adobe for making pdf copy protection tied to a particular machine, so that when you change machines you have to jump through hoops to get access again (assuming you still have access to the machine, which you may not, in which case you're out of luck). That's fine for software, maybe, but absurd for documents.

"Alot of the times I feel very tired and don't want to go out.."
"Almost every time I feel negative about pretty much everything.."
"I've been depressed lately and felt very lonely, plus I didn't get a reply from you in a while, makes me feel bad :/
what you been up to ? I'm not that good with computers, been trying to figure out what's wrong with my Outlook and it's really
getting on my nurves, I asked Nikki but she doesn't know anything about computers either. Anyways I been going to the gym lately
to releave my stress and it's working alittle, I still don't know why i feel this way"
";)"

In good news, the new free upgrade to Mailwasher catches just about all spam that previously wasn't caught, including the above. Don't think it has had any false positives yet.

Win XP has a limit of 12,000 GDI objects system-wide. (Allegedly the limit is 65,536, but in practice my machine likes to crap out at 12,000.) It was theoretically worse under Win98, but if that is so, why did they only improve it slightly? Half my resources are used up as soon as I start up, and a single web page can use hundreds. I have a gigabyte of RAM, and have to keep quitting programs so that other ones can run even tho I'm usually only using half of my memory. Someone should outlaw 16-bit values.

Agh! It's Ad-Watch/Ad-Aware that's changing my home page. It appears to be trying to protect me from me.

Grrr.

I post to the Dell support board:

I spent a few thousand dollars buying a new Dell system, and they appear to be trying to earn a few dollars more from the My Way web site ad revenue.

Every time I change my home page to what I want it to be, something changes it back.

Add/Remove Programs shows "My Way Search Assistant". There is no button to remove it, apparently because Dell doesn't want it removed.

Interestingly, the My Way terms include this statement: "The My Way Software and the Services are not intended for use by or availability to persons under the age of 13. IF YOU ARE UNDER 13 YEARS OF AGE, YOU MAY NOT DOWNLOAD, INSTALL OR USE ANY MY WAY SOFTWARE AND YOU MAY NOT ACCESS MY WAY SERVICES."

So Dell is shipping home/family computers that kids are not legally allowed to use? And a browser hijacker? With no way to uninstall it? Classy. I can see they don't want me to purchase from them again.

Tech support has not been helpful so far, sending me instructions on removing the My Way Speedbar, which is not what is installed, and trying to convince me that it's really not bad that they've shipped a browser hijacker.

I've looked at the Hijack This log but didn't see anything obvious. I tried disabling two Dell things with Spybot and restarting, but after restart they were enabled again so something is keeping me from disabling them.

Dell is now installing very hard to remove adware / browser hijacker with its new systems, and has the gall to call it "My Way".

I haven't been so pissed since Apple changed the System icon to a suitcase.

Dreamed that SimIsle 2 was coming out. Just $317. Bad graphics.

As you were.

Is it my imagination, or has the drug spam decreased since the big online drug bust?

What is it that causes Windows to associate random icons with random things? Right now it's showing VectorWorks documents as applications, and URLs as VectorWorks documents. It's usually URLs that I notice it in - different random icons appear at different times.

Way long ago, there was a Mac app that was supposed to be clever. It could watch what you did, and notice any repetitive actions, and then automatically do the repetitive actions for you.

Unfortunately (according to the review I read), it turned out that very few repetitive operations were predictable enough for it to do a good job.

Microsoft Word seems to be a gorilla cousin of that app. It keeps helpfully automatically applying screwups to my document, sometimes useful but usually wrong. I then have to fix it up manually to do exactly what I had told it to do and not something different, or find one of the myriad preferences to turn off if I have the energy to search through them all and consult help on the ones that don't make sense immediately.

At least Clippy doesn't bounce into view and say "Hi! You seem to want me to automatically screw things up for you!" anymore.


In related news, once upon a time I could double-click the end of a line to select the paragraph mark (and its paragraph style). Now that inserts a new tab instead. Anyone know how to get back to the previous behavior? Not that the previous behavior seems very useful anymore, since pasting over a paragraph mark no longer modifies the pasted-onto paragraph style alone but also whacks out the following paragraph.