I use Windows Live Messenger, the latest beta, and it has some fiddly habits.  Like it sometimes doesn’t connect right unless I jiggle my antivirus’s settings (AVG 8.0 Network Edition doesn’t frack around).  Last night, that didn’t work, and it threw a firewall-related error code (8100030d).

So…I dug into the Windows Security Center to check firewall settings, and disabled the Windows firewall (kids, don’t try this at home) to see if that would help.  It still didn’t work but gave me a new clue: apparently without Windows Firewall running, Windows was able to tell me that McAfee Personal Firewall was running.  I don’t use McrApfee products. So…time for a scraping-off operation.

Problem: No McAfee stuff was apparently installed on my computer.  I went through the start menu, I checked under Add/Remove Programs, I used RegEdit to poke around in the registry (kids, don’t try this at home).  NOTHING.  At this point I was getting annoyed.

Then I found this page.  Apparently enough people want McrApfeee off their hard drive, and it’s enough of a pain in the neck to make that happen, that 1) it’s worth it to people to make whole web pages about it, and 2) McAfee makes a product just to remove it.  That should be a clue to the company that their product sucks.  I ran the free program, it apparently scraped some other associated crapware off (I still don’t know from where…), and shazam!  Icky program is gone and my WLM works again.

All I can figure is that it somehow piggybacked in on an update of something in the last few days, since there have been a ton of updates lately.  Still not sure what activated it it though.  But, it’s gone.  Ding dong the witch is dead.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a cute kitten!

Someone please explain to me why every single piece of spam that’s slipped past Akismet in the last few months has been on one of my Wall of Shame (i.e. anti-spam) pages. Because this makes no sense.

I’ve reactivated the OpenID plugin because an upgrade came through.  People who don’t log in here, please let me know if it works.

First of all, I still despise Volde*Mart’s business practices that put other companies out of business and force their manufacturers to cheapen things down.  That hasn’t changed.  However…in the interest of unbiased reporting…Wal-Mart apparently hasn’t completely sold out to the cornspiracy.  Their tomato sauce does not contain high fructose corn syrup.

Now there’s really no excuse, if even Wal-Mart can get it right.

I don’t know what this is actually called, but other migraine peeps will know what I’m talking about.  The headache with the distinctive migraine feel, and maybe the spots and flashes, light sensitivity, and all that other stuff, but it really doesn’t hurt that much worse than a moderately craptacular tension headache.  It’s technically a migraine but doesn’t require one to stop everything and wait for it to go away.

At least it’s an excuse to eat chocolate.  However, I can do that without an excuse.