11/12/12

Y'all almost didn’t get a rant today.  The screen on the top of my lap suffered a… malfunction.  Well, the malfunction was with the router/modem thingy, the laptop just suffered from it.  Needles to say, the screen on the top of my lap doesn’t work anymore.  I'm debating telling the story in chronological order or just jumping straight into the rant against Windows 8.  Ok, W8 wins.  When an operating system is SO bad that it make Windows Vista look good… something is very wrong.  Long time readers, and I mean REALLY long time readers… ok, John may remember back in May of 2008 when I posted a rant where I said, “Windows Vista sucks ass!” 541 times.  Windows 8 is worse.  Here’s the poop.  Last night I bought a new laptop since the old ‘top is borked.  I sent John a text as I was leaving Best Buy saying, “I haven’t even unboxed it yet but I'm sure I'm going to HATE Windows 8 on this new laptop.”  Upon unboxing, I learned I DID in fact hate W8.  I hated it so bad I took the thing straight back to the store.  I wound up buying a monitor for the house and a KVM switch so I could use the monitor, mouse, and keyboard for the work computer with the old Windows 7 laptop.  The new monitor at the house required putting a table and chair in my room, which necessitated the shuffling of several other things, but it worked out really well.  It is nice to have a really big monitor when looking at… um, not porn… uh, e-mail… yeah!  That’s what I use it for at home.  Well, the KVM switch was not such a great investment.  It didn’t work.  It pissed me off and got thoroughly destroyed.  Sure, I could have returned it and gotten my $34.00 back, but smashing the ever living shit out of the motherfucker felt so much better.  But back to how W8 sucks even worse than Vista.  I ranted when I got Vista that they changed how everything worked.  Well, I was wrong.  Going from ME to Vista to XP to W7 was like talking to a Yankee, then a Tennessee Colonel, then a California Valley Girl, then an Australian… they are all speaking English but with different accents.  Going from any of those to W8 is like talking to your best friend then trying to talk to a Klingon… with a speech impediment!  Sure, there are geeks out there who speak Klingon and can work through the rhotacism and lisp to finger out what he’s saying, but for us normals… Windows 8 is incomprehensible!  I was willing to go so far as to say that it MIGHT be acceptable on one of the touch-screen laptop/tablets for which it was designed… until I spoke to a dude who said it is just as bad on them.  Apparently he had the same problem I was having in that when you try to scroll the thing side to side, it chooses one of the “tiles” and opens that program.  Oh, then you can't just shut down a program, it runs in the background eating up processor speed.  I complained about that and was told something to the effect of, “You go back to the main screen then put the cursor at the top of the screen and highlight the program you want to shut off and click on it then drag it to the…” and I forget the rest.  I looked at him incredulously and said, “Because a little ‘X’ in the corner was SO hard to use?”  Well shit, I have to go across the street right quick.  I'll be gone for a while so I might not come back to talk more.  We’ll see.  I'm back.  I've lost all momentum on the anti-8 rant so I'll move on to the travelogue of the weekend.  Friday evening when I got home from work, I parked Fiona on the back patio.  We’d watered that morning and the back yard wasn’t quite as dry as I'd hoped it would be.  I didn’t sink to the axles or anything, but I did spin the tires more than I'd like to have.  I went inside expecting to see my sister there.  She was no but her car was.  Turns out, she and my brother-in-law were flying out to Alabama for the A&M feetsball game and had left her car at our house.  So, there’s that.  Saturday morning I hopped in Fifi and headed to the shop at around 0745 h.  I'd brought Mentok, the Mind Taker, AKA my new Judge, so I could go shoot it later in the day.  I called John to see if he’d left yet and invite him to bring a hog-leg if he hadn’t.  He was already at the shop.  I roll up to the shop and unload the drinking water into the fridge then park Fifi in front of the trailer.  As I am walking back in the shop, John asks if I'd go let some dude in at the gate.  I hop back in Fifi and do that.  John parks him right in front of the trailer even though I shouted out the window, “NOT IN FRONT OF THE TRAILER!”  I sat there in the middle of the parking lot, in reverse, thinking they’d catch the drift.  They were totally oblivious.  It kind of pissed me off.  I backed up into a totally asinine location, again thinking they might finger out I wanted to get to the trailer, but they just went about their own business.  I looked over the dude’s 210 and then went in to get to work on something.  John joined me and we discussed what we were going to accomplish.  It was decided that we’d install the 510 cross member.  I said I'd need to finish welding it first and got to work on that.  When I was done, we got tucked in to removing Lil' Wiggly's cross member.  With that out of the way, we had a look at what was going to be necessary to line up the mounting holes.  “Drill them bigger” was the decision.  I drilled them and we took it to the car.  Yeah, it still didn’t quite fit.  It was decided that we’d drill the holes in the frame bigger as well.  This we did and got the bolts to line up.  We removed it again and John hit it with some paint.  We removed the suspension bolt/stud thingies from Lil' Wiggly's cross member and installed them in the one from the 510.  We reinstalled it and hunkered down on the bolts.  While I wasn’t looking, John replaced the 280ZX hubs with 300ZX (I think) units.  We bolted on a pair of Gram Lite wheels and lowered the car to the ground.  It is looking pretty good.  We didn’t try to hang the engine in there and left feeling like we’d made some progress.  After the dude in the 210 left, I backed Fifi on up to the trailer and hooked up then John and I went to have bait for lunch.  From the bait shop, I went to the gun range in Whiskey Flatts to shoot Mentok.  I'll tell y'all about that tomorrow.