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.

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*

I got an external tablet for the laptop a while ago–actually it was the last laptop.

Today I downloaded a trial of a handwriting recognition program to play with.  In fact, this post was mostly entered by tablet.  I don’t think my handwriting is good enough fior this to be faster than typing, though.  But, it’ll be amusing to play with until the trial runs out.

If you already know that Vista sucks, go sign the petition to save XP (hey, it might or might not work, but what’s to mess up by trying?).

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, go read some of the articles.  I especially recommend this one.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/save-xp/

After years of talking about how much qwerty sucks, I’ve finally done something about it.  The Windows system setting has been jiggled, the keys have been pulled off and rearranged (and incidentally some cat hair was removed)–my laptop is officially dvorak.  Now I just have to overcome the 15 years of muscle memory that tells me where the buttons “should” be.

Aargh…once again, it’s not really useable…I’m back on the loaner.  I think it might be a combination of the jack itself and the cord this time.  Really got to get a new one.  I get paid in a couple weeks…I’ll probably go up to Portland and use my sister’s employee discount, so I won’t have to wait for shipping.

I’m also wondering if I might be able to just pull the hard drive from the old one and put it in the new one do that I won’t have to do as much filejuggling and new set-up stuff.  And keep XP because Vista sucks.

Picked it up from the shop and drove it up to Portland for Uncle Robert to look at yesterday.  He messed around with it a bit yesterday, took a break overnight, and finished fixing it today.  Two remaining problems: because of the way it was possible to fix, it’s more like setting the countdown clock back, so I’m putting in for that budget upgrade for a replacement after all…and, the fracking shop somehow managed to not put the power cord and CD drive in the box with the rest of it.  As I said on their answering machine when I found out about the CD drive, the lack of professionalism stuns me.

I mean, I appreciate the use of my uncle’s laptop while mine is in the shop for a fried power jack.  I really do.  It’s going to make stuff so much less evil (i.e. I won’t have to do everything from The Old Dell aka PIECE OF CRAP).  BUT…I’m typing this from IE7 (not impressed) and Vista.  Is it an operating system or a video game?

I just feel congested plus a little bit of a sore throat, not even the right kind to be strep.  But I sound awful; the congestion must be all packed in around my vocal cords or something.  Oh, not a whooooooole lot of energy…it’s a testing day so I don’t have to bounce around or talk a lot, so I’ll be OK I guess.

At least I can get online from school again.  I apparently somehow (I’m sure all the mean things I’ve done to this poor laptop have nothing to do with it) fried my ethernet card; it spontaneously reinstalled itself with a MAC address of FF-FF-FF-FF-FF-FF, which I’m pretty sure means “hopelessly F’d.”  Talked to a friend who knows about this stuff in hopes of it being something like “oh, it’s this virus! run AVG and you need that patch to fix what it did” rather than hardware failure; we figured out that it was hardware and I needed a USB gadget to plug in.  So I asked the school’s tech support person where in Salem would have one of those; he told me to go to Norvac.  Norvac told me to go to Salem Computer.  Salem Computer told me to go to friggling Office Depot, where I got one, no problem, but I probably could’ve come up with that on my own…