"Don't you love how websites are so much cooler now than they were three years ago?"

That's not me, that was T-bone said that.

You know what I like? Not Windows. I'm not even about assigning blame here: I don't care if it's down to terrible programming, aim-at-the-biggest-target malware, or stupid user tricks; I just hate the result.

Last night I spent a couple of hours messing with the computer my brother-in-law does his work on. The first part of the problem was down to a bad cable (not to mention one of those "it never should have worked but it worked for months" network setups: the PC was plugged into a hub port that was shared with the hub's uplink port (a Netgear 5-port 10/100), which was in use by the cable modem).

Then came the exciting fighting with the numerous pieces of crapware, a porn dialer, and so forth. The porn dialer or something screwed TCP/IP up so badly that the recommended fix didn't work. And of course, we didn't have the original Windows disks around to do a reinstall or repair. Great.

As a last resort we backed up and used the restore CDs to bring the computer back to a virginal state. Tonight I'll go over there again and set up some the last few bits of the system: new guest account so nobody can install stuff on the system, enable the xp firewall (in the hopes that actually does something) probably an hour of watching Windows Updates install, and so forth.

All this instead of, oh, some much-needed bike maintenance, maybe a trip to the library, or perhaps just kicking back, watching TV, and killing my brain cells with a cocktail. Which would be a lot more fun.

Oh, and did you know that Blow-Up (or "Blowup") is on DVD? Finally see the photography scene referenced in Austin Powers 1! Check out the nice ambient jazz soundtrack! Enjoy the daft ennui of sixties moviemaking at its best! Enjoy the movie that "Blow-Out" (starring John Travolta!) was a remake of! Check out David Hemmings Before He Was Fat and Vanessa Redgrave Before She Pissed Off the Israelis!

And I'm spent.