2010-04-13:

And what a wonderfully magical day it began as, whilst I went to Durable Medical to see their trouble. Ah, and what a surprise, it seems to be a BSOD. Shock! Amazement! But by some chance it seemed to reference an nvidia file, thus did I go to the HP website to download a newer version. Which of course wouldn't load. Thanks, HP, you're the best.

So I went to nvidia directly and downloaded the driver, which was about 20MB larger, which did install very nicey-nice. No call yet about another BSOD, so that seems to have done the trick.

As I had thought that might take me longer, I now had some time before I had to leave, but fortunately I planned for this and brought along Patrimony, the next Pip and Flinx novel in which Phillip learns the truth about his parentage and past. They're short books, but there's a lot of them, and they're a good read. So I sat in the parking lot and read until it was time to go. Which I then did.

Next up was your favorite and mine, the fake anti-virus product. As expected, it fell to my onslaught of amazingness almost at once, and I moved on to number three. Ah, Ellen. What a treat to look upon your face again. To explain, again, how to save a search in ebay (this is the third time). But a minor mystery was in fact solved, as for months she's been getting corrupted pictures  and I keep telling her to try another card, or get a new camera if it keeps happening. Well, so today she's going on about her crappy kodak software and takes a picture. Then she almost immediately whips out the card, while the transfer light is still flashing. I'm like, uh, you know, you have to wait for the picture to be written to the card before you pull it out. So that solves that little problem.

Then last, my one final AOL dial up holdout. See, there's some weird bug with AOL and Vista that puts these weird entries in the device manager that can only be seen in safe mode. So I have to go over there every once in a while and remove them, otherwise it won't dial up anymore. SOOOO GOOD. I did show her how to do it once, but you know how that goes. Know what I hate about dial up? EVERYTHING. Usually takes about ten seconds to download the Malwarebytes update (5764kb) but it took that machine fifteen minutes. It was like some kind of Chinese water torture- sorry, "interrogation technique" watching the bytes slowly trickle in. Give me thirty seconds on someone's wi-fi. Please!  

Done! Home, dinner. Only one call? Just monitor guy, a guy who needed a bigger monitor, so I'll be hooking that up tomorrow. And I got Bob's FM iPod tuner so I'll deliver that. And I got a call close to 9:00 about a machine not coming on anymore, so I wound up with three places to go tomorrow. I've been sitting here with this laptop from 8 PER guy (who by the way had a very boisterous dog who was just ecstatic to see me, though I take no special pleasure in it as he probably does that with everybody) for hours trying to get his photo collection off. It finally finished, took, what, three hours to make two and a half DVDs. Something my machine could do in, say, ten minutes? Hate PCs SOOOO MUCH. I then got out my Case 'O CDs to reload it, and realized I had misplaced my Vista disk. Ugh. Oh well, burning another as we speak. Weird, I'm pretty good about not losing disks like that. 

While that was going on, I was trying to do the first screen of the character generator and almost went back to just HTML. I wanted a text box, right? Just a little text box someone could write some story notes into. What did I get? A large white block I could write one line in, in the middle. Not exactly what I had in mind. So I searched, and searched, and finally found a person who had subclassed it and made it work right! Hurrah! Then I tried to get the second half of the first screen done, which was a series of radio buttons. How hard can it be to ask a group of radio buttons "hey, fellows, which one of you chaps is selected there, eh?" (Kind of a British Canadian thing going on there I think). Well, in the case of Capp, pretty tough. At this point I was kind of pissed off. I  mean, oh sure, it's easy to write 280slides, and get all kind of snazzy effects, and save and undo and all that, but implement a text box that works? Noooooo. Radio buttons? Don't use them, I guess. What other walls am I going to run into making what is really a very simple thing? I finally decided on just a row of checkboxes. There's only six of them, querying each one to see which is checked is not tough, I just really think the radio buttons look better. But it gets the data, and disappears, so I'm ready for the second screen. So my work continues there.

So close to solving all the Riddler's challenges in Batman, if I can finally get this laptop going in the next century I might play a bit more. Seeing as no Neil this week either (he's moving to Texas and not getting internet until later in the week) so no borderlands. 

Tamara turns Sweet 16 tomorrow- or ~90 in human terms. Seems to be handling it better then some I could name.