Recent Reads

Just finished Neil Gaiman's Stardust, which is just a delightful book. It's a fairy tale, pure and simple, but very well and wittily told. There's no deep meaning, other than perhaps "I had the means to my heart's desire all along." Perhaps that's why it's so reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz in spots, to me, anyway.

While in Maine I read Raymond Chandler's Playback, the final Marlowe book (unless you count Poodle Springs). It's a bit less complicated than some of the earlier mysteries. Marlowe is hired to meet a mysterious woman on a train, and things escalate from there, but never to the level of some of the earlier books. It's more a ride through the dark side of a posh San Diego suburb. Still, it's Chandler and it's an enjoyable ride.

I've started Len Deighton's The Ipcress File. I saw the movie a long time ago, but have never read the book.

New Drives

So, I have well and truly frelled my Mozilla and Firefox installations somehow. I made the mistake of downloading a patch for the baseball game I've been obsessing over lately. The patch wasn't the problem. The game works great. But to get the patch, I had to register at a games site that only lets you download stuff if you install their download manager plug-in (KDX). That was fine, because Mozilla just ignored the pop-ups that came with it, but suprnova has a policy of not allowing downloads through a download manager so all of a sudden I couldn't download any torrents. Not good. (I really did try to find a less obnoxious site, but unfortunately, the game is a couple of years old, and the company that made it (3DO) folded earlier this year.)

I tried deleting the software, and the registry entries about it, but that didn't work. Finally, I saved my bookmarks and completely uninstalled Mozilla. Upon reinstalling, suprnova still didn't work. I uninstalled Mozilla again, this time deleting my profile as well, then reinstalled again. Still no joy. suprnova still works fine in IE, but it's still telling me that I'm using a download manager.

It's been a couple of years since the last brainwipe, so I decided it's time. But since I needed to add some more storage anyway, I decided that rather than brainwipe the old hard drive, I'd just get a newer, larger drive, and do the install on that. So tonight I went up to Best Buy and bought a new 120 GB drive. They were also clearing out Sony 12x DVD±R-±RW drives for under $100, so I got one of those, too. Digital video r us. I'll probably do the installs on Saturday. This should be interesting.

One last thought. The new LiveJournal posting interface sucks. And for chrissakes why did they have to put the fucking "spell check" button where the "post" button used to be. Wankers. (Turns out the "Post to Journal" feature of the picture galleries doesn't work with the new interface, either. Pillocks.)