jramble

I ran into something interesting on iTunes today.  I had put a Chris Rea album (Road to Hell) in my shopping cart last week and went to pay for it and it's now listed as unavailable.  I wonder if the new pricing arrangements also affect licencing in different markets.  I wonder what other album I suddenly won't be allowed to download up here in deep dark Canada...

Logged into my account at aeroplan.com

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My one and only post this winter in the glovebox lost glove blog.

You are sooooo lucky.

OK, I'm going to work really hard to keep myself from swearing here...

Here's what I want to do:  I'm trying to edit a configuration file in my program application directory:  c:\Program Files\MyApp\MyApp.ini

I opened it in notepad and it wouldn't let me save it after I made changes.  OK, I thought, the permissions on the file are wrong.  Fine, I reset the permissions so my user can update the settings.  Then it would let me save the file. 

Seconds later, my ini file is gone!  It had moved it into the VirtualStore.  No shortcut to the file, no indication that it was going to move the file, just boom, gone.  No program that hasn't been explicitly written to deal with its ini file in the VirtualStore will know that's where the file is.   Plus, I had expressly said that anyone can read and write that file.   Leave the flippin' file where I put it!!

I then go to search for my file.  I click on the start button and type its name into the Search field.  My file shows up in the list and I click on it.  It looks strange and I doublecheck where it's from.  It had searched another machine on the network and shown me that as a file on my system ... again with NO indication that it wasn't on my machine!   I had opened this file previously but it should not be searching remote machines and present results from them as if they're files on my local computer!!

I finally get the settings close to what I want and then copy the file from the VirtualStore back to where it belongs and reset the permissions.  I start my program and realize that I need to add something else.  I open the ini file again but the permissions have been RESET.  I.SET.THE.PERMISSIONS.LEAVE.THEM.ALONE!

I'm trying to do things the 'right' way and not turn off UAC completely (I have it set for default) but it's this kind of thing that drives me INSANE!

Me and Windows 7 are not getting along at all.

An article at autos.yahoo.com suggests that a persons astrological sign has an effect on the likelihood that they'll have car accidents.  Apparently, I'm in the worst group (Sagittarius).  A quote from the article:

David Neave, director of general insurance for The Co-Operative Insurance, said: 'The results show that certain star signs are unluckier than others.'

I was born in '61, which is interesting for more than being the birth year of Barack Obama.  It's also a year that is either one of the last years of the Baby Boomer generation or the beginning of Generation X.

An article about Baby Boomers and social networks includes the quote: "Younger Boomers (ages 43 to 52) and 39% for Older Boomers (ages 53 to 63)" which puts me well into the boomer group, whereas Wikipedia suggests "the Canadian boom took place from 1946 to 1962", putting me right at the tail end.  Wikipedia also suggests that Generation X envelops "the birth years as 1961 to 1982" so I get a GenX membership card too.

I'm content enough to be following the boomers: I figure by the time I need all the geriatric facilities they'll be ultra modern and have all the kinks worked out of paying for them on a lower tax roll.  Not to mention they'll be begging for clients after the big bulge of them start dying off... 

'61 rocks.

I'm anxiously awaiting new stock of the Panasonic Lumix LX3 arriving in a camera store near me.  Yes, it's expensive but it shoots RAW files and it's tiny ... just slightly bigger than the Canon SD870 that I cart around now.   I had been previously lusting after the original LX but had heard that it didn't do that well in low light. The new one does better, plus it has a wider angle lens: 24mm vs 28mm!

I upgraded an older computer (a first generation Asus Pundit) to Windows 7 from Vista.  The update went quite well ... it was surprising how cleanly it managed to migrate the settings and preferences to the new OS.  It took some time but when it was over I had Windows 7 installed and working. 

Well, almost working.  Apparently the video card (a PCI ATI 9250), which worked fine under Vista, was not supported by the new OS.  I was able to get an image but it was stuck at such a slow refresh rate as to be painful to view.  I searched for updated drivers but it was so old that neither ATI or Microsoft had any intention of writing updated drivers for it.   I went on a quick search for alternative video cards but most stores I called either no longer stocked PCI video cards at all or didn't have one that supported Vista / Windows 7.

So, I was left with a machine that ran Windows 7 just fine but I couldn't look at. 

This bothers me.  The computer works fine for what I want to use it for (essentially anything other than Photoshop or games).  In fact, I've reformatted the drive and reinstalled Windows XP and am typing this entry on it.  But, because Microsoft has decided that they want to push Windows 7 and discontinue updates for Windows XP at some point I'm going to have to abandon it.  If the people over there in Redmond are so smart why can't they create a driver system that doesn't have to be completely replaced every time they do an update?

We have one cat who eats tape, one who eats envelopes, one who eats hair and one who eats too much.