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Travel, and a MicroRant


September 09, 2006 - 8:13 a.m.

And sure enough, as soon as I mention how well things are going, some dumb stuff happens.

Know all that rain we had last week, the leftovers of Tropical Storm Ernesto? Well, fourteen gallons of it is now in the gas tank on Giselle, the 1969 Volvo 1800 I have. It's sort of hard to explain, but basically, the gas filler is vertical and mounted in the left rear fender in a recess. There's a small drain in that recess intended to keep water from ponding in there and running down into the gas filler neck, but in this case, some leaves blew into the drain, the water rolling off the car went straight down the gas filler and basically completely filled the tank with water. There hadn't been much gas in it, so I assume that stuff floated off and went off into the world. In any case, now I will have to drain the tank and leave it empty for a couple of weeks, or maybe blow air down there to dry it out. Then, put some isopropyl alcohol in there, some new gas, and crank the engine for a couple of hours to get it started.

And inside the house, I got up yesterday to find water dripping patiently from the ceiling in the living room, right about where the feed pipes for the bathtub probably are. I took my shower and then went and shut the water off... I won't be home to fix it until Monday night, so no sense flooding anything. The cats were mesmerized by the drips onto the floor... Bert in particular was amazed and entertained by this much longer than you'd have thought he would be. But that's Bert, who finds great entertainment in things like the windowsill, the trash, or the inside of his own mouth.

I am up at Suzanne's again, and we're preparing to load up and go to New York (the other end of New York) for a visit. My father turns 70 tomorrow, and even as much as I wanted to avoid the train-wreck wedding of my nephew (which is today) I wanted to be up there for his birthday. No big event, they don't go out any more, but I wanted to be up there, and also both show Suzanne the town in which I used to live, and have pizza at Pontillo's in Batavia. Have to enjoy all the good things, right? And Batavia is much cheaper than Manhattan, as well as easier to park in.

I have no idea why I'm up already. I was up until 1am fucking around with goddamn-piece-of-shit Windows... a wireless network thing that worked perfectly well when I was here last weekend stopped working when Suzanne unplugged it to plug some other USB thing in, and then, in typical fucking-waste-of-time-we-write-fucking-shit-software Windows fashion, refused to work at all when plugged back into the same USB port. It demanded a complete removal of all the connection-sharing software and a complete reinstallation and attendant dicking-around, as well as (of course) four reboots.

During this process, I called Suzanne over to the iBook.

I said, "wanna see how easy it is to share a connection on wireless on an Apple?"

Click. "Create Network."
Click. "OK."

That's it.

Four seconds, not one hour and seventeen minutes, which is how much time I had to spend on Windows just to get something that used to work, to work.


PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT


IF YOU WORK FOR MICROSOFT, PLEASE STOP READING THIS PAGE AT ONCE. I WANT ALL OF YOU DEAD. I WANT YOUR PARENTS DEAD. I WANT YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY DEAD. I WANT YOUR HOUSES BULLDOZED INTO THEIR OWN FOUNDATIONS. I WANT YOU ERASED FROM YOUR HIGH SCHOOL YEARBOOK.

You write and sell shitty, shitty software and you should be dead.

That is all. Thank you.

Suzanne, by the way, won't be moving down to Maryland with that computer. She's giving it away to a friend of hers, and we're getting her a MacBook.

Fuck you, Microsoft! You're probably responsible for the leak in my bathroom, too, I just haven't figured out how.


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