Study: 245% of Numbers in Inflationary Rumors Totally Made Up

Well that's what I heard, anyway.

-The Gneech

Upgrades a Go-Go!

Okay, I've found a quirk in Win 7, which is very similar to a quirk Vista had early on: programs sometimes forget that they're running, or I should say, forget that they're starting.

For instance, I tried to start OpenOffice. I double-clicked the icon, the computer went "Bzz bzz bzz!" and then ... nothing happened. Double-click again, same deal. Start the Task Manager: OpenOffice is not in the list of running programs. Double-click again, same deal. Ponder. Look in "processes" and find a long list of OpenOffice processes that are just sitting, apparently waiting for a signal to go. Stop the top one on the list, and POP! go half a dozen instances of OpenOffice all over the screen.

Whoops.

As I say, Vista used to have this problem too, but it got fixed by an update, so hopefully updates will fix it w/ Win 7 too.

Also in the land of upgrades, a little wheedling at work got me a nifty little laptop cradle that, instead of folding the laptop underneath where you can't get to it, sits the laptop upright, so you can open it up and use the monitor. So, plugging my regular monitor into it and doing a little fiddly adjusting, I finally have that dual-screen setup I've been wanting since 1991. Woohoo! Not only does that increase my screen real estate by 65% or so, it also gives me a convenient place to put comparison windows, such as when I'm copying text out of Word documents to paste into webpages (which I do a lot of, here).

There are rumors that we're getting new laptops here with Win 7 on them, as well. We'll see. Given that I've got XP going on this machine, I'm in no hurry for that day.

-The Gneech

Oh Yeah, NaNoWriMo.

I was hoping to do that this year, but until SJ gets wrapped up, I don't think it's likely.

That said, if work stops battering me over the head with a sledgehammer, SJ might be done in the first week of November; I might jump on board just to see how much I can get done. But given that I don't have so much as a plot idea, much less an outline, it's iffy.

Next year, Nano, yer goin' down!!!

-The Gneech

EDIT: Well, I set up an account, just in case. :) If anybody has a request for a hurriedly-written book by The Gneech, now is your time to ask! Note that suggestions of Suburban Jungle novels will be roundly ignored. ;P

Life's Little I.T. Lessons, #476

When more of your code is commented-out than is actually working, it's time to nuke it and start with a blank page.

-The Gneech