Summer

There's just not much to say these days. Every day seems almost the same. I don't have a job yet (though after I decided not to go to Chicago, the NU library decided they wanted to interview me -- figures). I'm suffering from sleeping problems, so half the time I'm up all night and sleeping almost all day. It's partly jet lag from being on the second shift in California time but also partly myriad other problems I have with sleeping all the time.

Scott came to visit over the weekend, which was fun. We saw Harry Potter 3, him for the first time, and tried to go to a Bosnian festival but missed any good parts of it by arriving late. We also went to a picnic at my grandparents' house, at which they made Scott dinner way before everyone else arrived because we were expecting a call from his friends driving through to pick him up at any time. He ended up being able to stay until 3:30 p.m. Sunday, longer than expected but still not long enough to see everyone.

Otherwise, I've been working on a few projects. One is applying for jobs. One was refining this web site. I'll have to expand that to include getting the archives up and redesigning the other pages. Another is trying to spread around my Gmail invitations. I have seven of them, and while I know most of you people use Blogger and can get Gmail anyway, if anyone doesn't, let me know because it's getting harder to get a decent Gmail address all the time.

Most recently, I spent yesterday at my grandparents' fixing their computer. Windows Explorer kept crashing on them. (aside: Why did they name their file browser "Windows Explorer" and their web browser "Internet Explorer"? That causes immense confusion -- it took me a while to figure it out back when we first got a Windows computer, and to this day, when I say, "Explorer kept crashing," people think I mean IE.) Whenever it quit, their desktop would disappear -- it seems that under Windows 98, Explorer doesn't automatically relaunch. The only way to get the desktop back was to restart, but whenever you did anything after that reboot, even just emptying the Recycle Bin, the dialog box would pop up again informing us that Explorer had encountered a fatal error.

This was making it extremely difficult for me to download and install anti-virus software, since I couldn't connect to the Internet in safe mode and I couldn't do anything basically in normal mode. Then as luck would have it, a vague memory of simply ignoring those "Explorer crashed" dialog boxes and still using the computer back in the days of my buggy Windows Me notebook came back to me. I dragged the box out of the way on the screen without hitting any of its buttons, and indeed, the system continued to work as if nothing had happened. At least now they could use their computer, if I couldn't figure out how to stop this altogether.

I ran Spybot and Ad-Aware. I had run Spybot on the computer the previous day, and I thought maybe something I had removed was causing the instability, but restoring the spyware didn't help. So I trashed it all. I also ran the anti-virus program and got rid of a dozen or so viruses lurking on the machine. Still, the error message kept coming back. I hit upon the fix when I downloaded all the neglected critical updates from Microsoft's web site. One of them repaired whatever was wrong, I think; I don't know which.

So now their computer is faster for having all the muck gone and no longer crashes on start-up. I also installed Firefox so that they wouldn't get any more drive-by installations invading the computer. We'll see how well it works.