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.

Speaking of kicking anthills.

Now, I get that there’s no one right way to blog and people can write whatever they want to. In practice it seems like this ends up meaning that people mostly write about themselves, with varying amounts of other stuff they’re interested in. One could argue that the extent to which the author assumes their life will be interesting to others is a measure of self-centeredness; I don’t think it’s an absolute measure but a correlation seems likely. This would explain why most teenagers blog.

However, even aside from the issue of self-centeredness, how do people decide which things about them are important enough to blog? Scanning my own blog quickly for something to go off of, I see a bit of religion, a gas price that doesn’t look that bad any more, my car going crazy, more political commentary than I’d like but it is that year (%@#*&), some overdue housecleaning and how much better it would be with a helicopter, a lolcat, something that looks like a D&D session, an obnoxious test, my rant on taxes and the economy, some blathering about the meaning of life or something, a triscuit, and a series of posts involving my stolen cell phone. That’s not an exhaustive list; it’s more like the low-hanging fruit. So basically, I notice a lot of stuff to rant about, and a lot of quirky stuff. Other people would probably say that noticing funny stuff and going off on annoying stuff are reasonably typical of me. So, within certain limits, the stuff I think and talk about becomes the stuff I blog about.

Here’s where the anthill comes in.

My sister got married about a week ago. I can’t point you at it in her blog because she hasn’t posted anything about it. Her haircut, however, got two posts. Maybe this is just my crazy idea, but I’m pretty sure that getting married should be at least as important as a haircut. I hereby present this as evidence that society’s values are fracked.

(Full disclosure: Yes, I did once blog a haircut. Once. And I haven’t gone and gotten married.)

Just a quick update: I picked up two packages from the leasing office today.  One contained a cheap copy of the standard pilot’s manual (and wow that book is packed), while the other was…drumroll please…my “new” phone.  Same kind as the one I had, but with a little cosmetic damage to the front screen cover (the screen works fine).  If my students even breathe on it…*growl*

For those who missed the previous post, two weeks ago today (yeah, that’s right, on my birthday), my phone disappeared, probably with one of my students.  When I go through that class list, there’s not one of them that I think would be the one…and yet…my phone didn’t evaporate.  Sigh.

So, I ordered a replacement, from eBay so it wouldn’t cost soooooo much.  It shipped a couple days ago and as of now it’s in Phoenix, scheduled to be delivered tomorrow.  I’m considering taking bets: will it be left in the rental office or will I have to go to a UPS office to pick it up?  Will I be able to get it activated tomorrow, or the day after, or will I have to wait until Friday?  Will I get hit with an activation fee?

Ah, all the mystery of it all!  Stay tuned…

As a bit of a comupter geek, this frightens me.  It can’t be easy to debug and it has to be blocking some airflow.

It also, however, looks a bit like a Triscuit.

So I don’t know whether to be afraid or hungry.

I tried a new test generation program. Instead of printing 31 copies of the same test, it made 31 versions of the test with different right letters even in the multiple choice section. I didn’t catch this until I was partway through grading it off of one version of the answer key.

I have to grade this. Which means I have to work out all these problems on all these tests. GAH!!! WILL TAKE FOREVER!!!!! *dies of frustration*

The service is suspended. The battery’s gone by now. It short, it’s a paperweight. There’s a reward out.

So I don’t think “turn my cell phone the frack in already” is that much to ask.

Watch kids take a test.

Yell at seventh graders. Again.

Phone goes missing and gets across campus (I tracked it with Bluetooth from the laptop a bit) but never quite turns up. I find out how to suspend it to keep from having to pay for calls to China.

I get a refund for a book that I bought off Amazon and never got because they used a type of shipping where it was returned instead of forwarded. I provided an updated address before the book shipped, and they said they’d be in touch if it was returned, and they weren’t until I asked for an update because it had been two weeks. I got 39 cents back, they got to keep $3.99 and the book. Now I’m impressed with their customer service.

I get a year older; 24 now. I wasn’t even really used to 23–it was already just a little bit older than I thought I could ever be–so this is going to be interesting to try to keep track of.

In short…woooooooooooooooooooo…

Check out the theme on my cousin’s blog, then my sister’s. Let me add that, although I’m hosting them, I didn’t inflict my design taste on them. I did help my cousin dig through the main WordPress themes database but the did the actual choosing stuff. All I did was point my sister at the themes database since she was all about wanting to do it herself.

So yeah…it’s like we’re related or something.

Playing with a MySpace profile made my sister think she knew web coding, when she didn’t even know what I meant by FTP.  She’s on the real internet now, let the reeducation begin.