it’s a micro$oft world some days
Spent the first part of my day in the world’s most confusing C++ class with my Chinese teacher. She was going through the text so fast that I didn’t even have to time to highlight, much less take notes on all the material that she covered. THANK GOD for my friend B.-, who programs for a living. (and lives for a-programmin’) (He’s a damn fine teacher, too, which is a plus.)
Spent the rest of the day trying to set up my stepfathers new Gateway 3.2 Ghz, 1 gb RAM, 80 gb hd machine with the DVD burner and the cherry on top. He’s running XP on it. Jesus, I hate Windows. Why is it so hard to get two machines to see each other on a local network? Between networking Linux machines and Macs, I have gotten spoiled. How do you network a couple of Macs? Plug ’em in. Boom, instant network. It’s not much more difficult than that with Linux. I don’t know what the deal was with XP today. I have set up peer to peer networks with XP before that didn’t take ten minutes, but for some reason, my stepdad’s machines just didn’t feel like talking. I did waste about two hours trying to get LapLink to work until I checked their website and found out the version that I had doesn’t work with XP.
One very cool thing- my stepfather has a mindspring.com email address that he has had for years. He gets his weight in spam a day. I set him up with an account at Knowspam.net. This is probably the best service out there for keeping spam out of your inbox. I wasn’t going to suggest it to him because it costs $20 a year, and then he told me he’s probably pay that a month to stop the insidious flow of spam into his inbox.
All the same, I was so glad to get out of there tonight. Somewhere between finishing installing all of his software and then setting up his peripherals, the machine lost its sound card drivers. All of a sudden, no sound. Windows is always pulling some shit like that. Makes me want reach across the internet and slap Bill Gates so hard that $200 falls out of his pocket to reimburse me for my time.
As nice as this smoking hunk of iron that he has bought for himself is, I hope that it’s more stable than it appeared to be tonight. It lost its DHCP assignment for no reason, too. That I don’t get. I had to reboot to get it back on the network. Hours and hours I spent on that machine. Feh. I am not impressed with Windows XP. It looks like the same old crap in a candy colored wrapper.