May 21, 1997

Yes, today is normally Comics Day, but not for me. I"m gonna have to wait till I cash (FIND) mom's check and get money from Jason back from our deposit.

I know I just let my debts pile up until I couldn't afford them anymore. I had a 300 dollar electricity bill left over from the old apartment. Current apartment has a 45 dollar a month bill. Previous one? 180 or so. (whew)

I paid most of it, and the late phone bill. Next month will be toughter, since I've got to pay the 300 dollar pet fee. Jeez. Why'd I move into this place?

Carl told Gary today that we had a work to keep us busy until monday. Maybe he thinks he does. I don't think so. Oh well. Monday is good, I guess. At least it's soon.

Later
Well, I spent two hours on the phone with the customer today. Guess we have some work to do, now, and I'm pretty glad. That wasn't all I did today, but it's enough.

Look, I don't have a basic dislike of Microsoft. I don't hate them because they are big. I don't hate them at all, really. I really just don't like the fact that they seem inept at times.

Two things bugged me in the last day, and I just thought I'd talk about it.

I have Office97, and word does html, and will display it,and let me edit it. I thought I'd give it a go, and see what it was like.

It changed all my tags! Moved things around, and changed the basic way I do these pages. It almost doubled the size of yesterday's page. I was royally pissed.

Now, I had the exact same problem with Netscape's Gold editor. I don't use it either. I'm using a text editor now, and have been known to make major changes in notepad.

I wanted access to a spell checker, that's all i wanted from Word. I guess I can still use it, by disabling most of the html 'features'.

The other thing was just braindead. I guess no one at Microsoft ever had this happen. Right. Maybe they just didn't care.

Windows crashed. Not really great, but it happens, especially when you run old dos games, and try to trick them. I'm not mad because it crashed, I was doing something wierd. (Whether or not it should have crashed so spectacularly is the subject of a later rant).

So I rebooted my pc, and went to the kitchen to work on dinner while my PC powercycled. I expected to walk back, and enter my password, start the dialer, and get back to it.

When I got back, my computer was still sitting in DOS. It said basically, that since Windows had crashed, it wanted to run scandisk, so press a key to run it.

Not, Press enter to run scandisk and escape to abort. Just press a key. So I did. It ran scandisk.

Now check me if I'm wrong.
The computer was going to run scandisk, no matter what I did.
So, Why did I have to press a key? Why did I even have to be there? Just run it ok?

Of course, scandisk can't do its job withouth human intervention to tell it to fix errors, and not do undos. Maybe this was their logic. Of course, it would be pretty easy to set scandisk up to do the obvious thing when it is run from a crash. And to let the user set it up to tell it what the obvious thing is.

There is a program under unix, called fsck. Without going into great detail, one of it's purposes is similar to scandisks, it might do more than that, but it's automatic. Runs every so often...just does its job.

Why couldn't Microsoft do this?

Are they that incompetent?