Still incredulous that anyone would try to make a go of a real Internet café in this town, I biked over and took a look at the reported new spot on Young Circle. It is called the Megabite Cyber Café. It was closed when I arrived an hour before noon. Inside the darkened interior, I could see two terminals. Both were those monstrous 21” CRT monitors I used to use, the ones that are like another television in your house. These offer no privacy and can be viewed from the street. They have webcams and headphones to encourage people to stay longer. I’ve long considered that tactic.
There is an espresso machine and a space with living room furniture. The sign says live music and I noted a piano and drum set in house. When I returned at 7:00 in the evening, the place was still closed. They are on the “settled” side of the circle and while having no direct competition they are still quite near bars, restaurants and the ubiquitous Starbucks. If Megabite is already defunct, my guess would be because that location must charge some $4,000 in monthly rent. I did notice an upsurge in walk-ins recently and attributed it to the ice cream parlor (across Federal Hwy from Megabite) folding up. There was, er, a little too much ice cream on their computer keys.The newest generation of viruses sailed right through the best defenses I have. I do not understand the mechanics of virus infections other than they are malicious scripts and they are getting smarter. They can use spyware to invite themselves in. You can’t leave these seemingly harmless infections in place. I cannot open my email and I’m flooded with false positive virusware ads. I’m redoing all my equipment, one at a time. The local whiz kid was in and I tried a product he recommends called SuperAntivirus and all it did was make things worth. It throws pop-up advertising and triggers any latent Trojans.
There is also a touted replacement for MS Office called SoftOffice. It works, yet has a cheap feel to it. Worse, it activates itself in task manager, a total no-no in my books. I decided to get rid of it as soon as I saw that (although there could have been other causes) and the thing proved to be one tough uninstall. It wants to log on to their home page in Germany before it will purge, and I’m just a mite too smart to fall for that one. Anything that connects without permission gets a rating of “substandard” from me. It is too bad each new software contender that comes along insists on pulling every dirty trick that worked for MS. If just one honest company out there offered an honest product and stuck with it, the computer world would be theirs within two years.
I should mention the exception of OpenOffice, which is doing a credible job. However, I find it as needlessly complicated as Linux. The manufacturers go on about how flexible it is, which is true, but that also appears to be preventing them from offering a stable version. The major components of an office software suite, that is, a word processor, a spreadsheet, a database and some presentationware have not changed much in thirty years as far as coming up any truly new features. Yet every time I use OpenOffice (or Linux) there is another upgrade or another edition or another tweak available. That is okay for games but gets annoying for browsers and downright smells for business applications. Plus Linux code and terminology come from Mars.
Mike finally threw the gypsies out the door, a metaphor. He told them they could come back to say hello but no more business. This is the family that brought in the expensive Sony laptop and they also had an old Dell laptop. They were back every day with that Dell, constantly implying it had worked better before we touched it. Saying that the hard drive had been replaced with a smaller unit, saying it ran slower than it did before, et cetera. Everything Mike did to show them otherwise, they would just start over again with the insinuations. I was amazed it took Mike so long to give them the heave-ho.
A good example was the RAM. They implied it had 1 Gig of RAM when they brought it in where it really had 128K. When Mike showed them this model did not have the physical space for 1 Gig and also that the original specs from the Internet said it came with 128, they would say things like “I don’t know.” That, to me is an insult and an accusation because you do know once you’ve been informed and don’t have any proof otherwise. I was raised around such morons. Seriously folks, you don’t bring us a laptop with six Best Buy stickers on the case and try to tell us it has never been opened before. What, were they using the Geek Squad for practice? They essentially got five free hours out of Mike but just five minutes out of me.
The big screen TV is heading back here tomorrow. Jimbo’s only uses it twice a year. That will be a treat for the huge collection of movies I’ve never seen. All those classics the middle-class wasted their lives viewing enough times to go on a trivia show, I will be watching for the first time. I don’t care for the affected acting styles of the ‘30s and ‘40s but give me the classics any time. I’ll need some help moving it. At the old place it would not even have fit in the door.
I have a prediction to make. Wallace will gain some weight here, you watch. Several times he has commented on the speed at which cooked meals appear on the table after I walk in the door. Yes, there is a trick to it. Always make extra the first time around so as to create fresh leftovers for a quick casserole or snack. I appreciate having someone around who likes home cooking for I don’t have to freeze as much which, in turn, increases the diversity of our diet. While everything here (except fruit) already exceeds contemporary guidelines, I still like a variety. And that is plain easier to do with more people.
