Last evening was an interesting “police” callout. One computer had mysteriously quit working. It was a five minute job but I was there two hours. There are files there from 1985 that still need work. Although I have never been a policeman, anyone who looks at their organization recognizes that their files and mine share an uncannily similar format. That is why I can solve their really difficult problems. They have a position for a tech who can recover deleted files. I said no.Cookienator works, and it works well. It deletes the files placed by search engines, such as Yahoo! and Google. I don’t mind cookies from reputable companies, but no thank you when it comes to search engine cookies—there is one and only one reason these companies would place cookies. And they use nastiest type, those flash cookies, some of which have shelf lives on your computer of up to 27 years.
Most are installed by Adobe Flash player; if you noticed that particular software seems to need an update every other week, now you know why. Furthermore, these virus-like cookies are placed in the “Application Data” directory of your C: drive, which is difficult to view even if you know how. Another serious offender is AOL, who seem able to replace their flash cookies without your computer even indicating it has been on-line. Fred reports over 2,000 flash cookies on his computer, my average is 43.
In one of those details that probably will never mean anything, last evening I invented a new bass riff. I was playing “Can’t You See” and made an error that sounded right. That’s how I know it is probably new—because it is wrong, that is, it is played in the wrong key. It can be more than difficult to find good bass riffs for descending chord patterns but I tried it in all 13 keys and it works. What can I say? Putting novel bass runs in a tune isn’t always obvious to the listener.
Add to my words that the current AT&T wireless routers are some of the worst material I’ve dealt with lately. There are several configurations for every router, I know them all. But after four hours of trying to hook a single Netgear wireless adaptor to said router, I had to give up for lack of sleep, a recently precious commodity.
I was attempting to set up a wireless printer and several wireless computers using the AT&T wireless router as the common network point. It would seem straightforward to connect one device, then simply configure the remainder in the same fashion. Not so easy at all, and all the difficulty keeps coming back to that router. One has to exhaust all chances of it being consumer equipment before calling the AT&T help desk, or they’ll send you the big bill.
Last, I had some exposure to the WinXP “Media Edition”. My overall impression is that MSoft shot themselves in the foot again. Nothing about said edition seems novel enough to put up with the huge learning curve and setup requirements. I’ve never used Media Edition or had time to check out why it is sold separately.
