7/16/08

Sunday morning was almost the last day for this laptop. I got tired of the thing getting slower and slower so I “fell for” the advertising shenanigans of Finally Fast dot com. They have a really good scam going. First off, they target those of us who really have no business being on the computer by telling us they can make our systems work by clearing up superfluous files and registries and bits and bytes and mega-flippy-floppies and whatever else the dumb assed programmers at Tiny and Flaccid have saddled every version of Windows with to keep us replacing software. Secondly, they make you pay in advance for the download. Ok, I know this isn't all that sinister and is probably a pretty sound business model, not to mention fairly standard I'd imagine. I really shouldn’t fault them for that part, but it is my blog so they are asses. Now here’s the beauty of their scheme: they make the system so hard to use that only the geeks who already know how to remove all the bullshit which slows down a computer can use it! The rest of us, the ones who really need a simple system but on the other hand really shouldn’t be on computers in the first place actually, are stuck trying to ham-fist our way through their maze of “help” screens and such. The thing that pissed me off the most, and I recognize it as a Tiny and Flaccid issue not a Finally Fast issue but roll with me here, was the fact that the new software wanted to run on computer startup but Vista wouldn’t let it without my approval. Then, to top it off, I could find no way to give it pre-approval! So every time the FF software wanted to restart the computer, which by the way was every fucking time it did anything, I had to sit through five minutes of reboot bullshit and then another five minutes of approving the software so Vista would allow it to run again. After the third request to restart the computer, the laptop flew across the room and I went to take a shower. After I had cooled off, I went in and deleted, or so I thought, all of the FF software I had downloaded. Of course Monday morning when I fired up the laptop the message saying something like “An unrecognized program attempted to run during startup. Click here to… blah blah blah” popped up and sent my blood straight to a boil. I worked on that for most of the day Monday and Tuesday trying to find and delete that last bit of crap. I was just about ready to wipe the hard drive and find a bootleg copy of XP to load on here. Good thing I don’t know how to do that. Of course if I did I would have known how to delete all of Tiny and Flaccid’s bullshit by now and this whole rant would be moo. So, having said all of that, I will say that they did refund my money with no questions asked when I called them. Although, it did annoy me a bit that they didn’t ask why I wanted to cancel. I was going to tell them that when they asked for the third restart, the laptop got thrown across the room and now I don’t need to make if faster. “By the way,” I'd continue, “y'all owe me for a laptop and some drywall.” But alas, they didn’t ask. So now that I've got that story out of the way, even though it blows the chronology of the weekend, I'll tell the rest of the Sunday tale. John had invited me to go shoost pictures of a car Sunday evening and I'd agreed. He texted me asking if I was still in. I said I was and we agreed on 1545 h at his house to head for Not Texas. I knew Gregg wouldn’t call so I blew him off. I waited for mom to come home from church and we went to lunch. As we were about to leave, Kevin called to say that Barbara had finally crapped the clutch hydraulics. They wanted to install the new bits I had collected for her after all. I said I'd hide them under the hood of a 1200 as mom and I were about to go to lunch and then I was going with John to Not Texas. That was fine with him so mom and I headed for the shop. I dug out the two master cylinders and clutch slave then left them under the hood of Johnny. Mom and I then went to Johnny Carino’s for some pasta. I had a really nice Jalapeño Garlic Tilapia over angel hair. It was very tasty. After lunch I had about an hour to kill before heading to John’s so I watched some TV. I picked John up and we rolled to Not Texas. We met up with the dudes and went downtown to shoot the pictures. As John was shoosting, one of the dudes came up to me and asked where I had bought the Renault. He was truly impressed with it and looked it over a few times. After he came back a second time to say he couldn’t believe he was actually seeing one, I showed him the Nissan Versa key fob. “Oh man!” he exclaimed. “Are you serious?” He walked around it again and I went into how Nissan rebadged the Clio as a Versa so I just went back the other way. Oh, and replaced the headlights and taillights to compound the effect. One of the other dudes, who hadn’t heard the truth came up and asked about the car. First dude let him in on it and we all had a good laugh. Pretty soon we headed up the freeway for some rolling shots of the cars and finally John called it a shoot. Since John knows Not Texas better than I do nowadays, I let him drive us to dinner. At some point, I think it was when the fire truck stunk up the air in front of us with diesel zorst, John flipped the A/C to recirculate. I hate running the A/C on recirculate. I like fresh air, especially when the car has two MOG* who have been out in the sun all afternoon, one of which had garlic for lunch! Besides, recirculation doesn’t seem to make any difference in the cooling except first thing in the afternoon when the interior is 140°. Then it does seem to help suck out the heat a bit. About a mile later, when the fire truck had long gone, I flipped it back to fresh. He looked at me and made some comment about my preference, or was it my parentage? Anyhoo, we tried to eat at El Fenix on, um, whatever road that was, but they were closed. We rolled on towards Texas. We wound up at Cheddars on 183. I had a chicken fried steak. It was tasty. I'm usually disappointed with CFS but this one was decent. I dropped him off at his house and headed home. Like I said earlier, I spent much of Monday trying to delete Finally Fast dot com’s software and yesterday… well, I'll tell you about it tomorrow.

*Men Of Girth