Is OCD in alphabetical order, as it should be.

George Strait's latest is called Twang. It twangs alright. Like a broken guitar string. George is getting old and this CD shows it. He sounds like a grandfather trying to use current slang. The words might be right, but they still really aren't right. KWIM? Even the most wonderful grandfather in the universe does not sound right using phrases that should be coming out of a 19 year old's mouth. Dude! Stop it! Act your age, not your son's age. And your son writing songs with you? It's a wonderful bonding experience, but not a great listening experience. Sing for the family, they'll appreciate it. I regret spending my birthday money on this one.

Skip Twang. Unless you like listening to an old fart pretending he is still able to stay out half the night drinking and dancing in honkytonks, when he is really in his PJs and asleep by 8:30.

I got "Sounds Like Life" as part of a birthday present from a friend. (Thanks Mary!) Finally I ripped it to my laptop and I've been listening to it. Lotsa good dance music on it. It would be a thumbs up.

I used Add/Remove Programs to remove iTunes and I still had iTunes data floating around in my computer. The configurations that were giving me trouble were not removed, so when I did a re-install, I had the same problems. It didn't fix anything. It just annoyed me. The Microsoft Uninstall clean-up tool did not work. I ended up downloading a fancy, high powered, uninstall application. But, in order to get the high powered uninstall tool to work, I had to re-install iTunes! Then the fancy tool could find it and do what I hope is a clean remove.

FWIW, not only do you have to clean up files in your \Program Files directory, you have to remove files in your \Application Data directory (it's a hidden directory) and then you've got about 100 entries in the Registry that you have to deal with. Yeah. All that is left behind after you've already done the Remove Program thing. That Remove program thing doesn't remove much of anything. I don't know why folks bother with it.

Now that I know I've got a much better tool for removing applications, I think I'll take a few that I installed to test off my machine. I'll bet I end up with improved performance.

Oh, if you want to completely remove Bonjour, let me know. I can point you towards a link with directions to remove it in three easy steps. The trick is getting the service completely off the service list. You can remove the files, with a bit of high handed renaming and a reboot or two. But the service will hang around forever unless you do a complete remove in the correct order.

I do not want to have my music folder sorted out by iTunes. They use an alphabet that I do not. They can't keep all of the songs together in a single folder named according to the album. I don't want to have three of the songs from an album filed in a completely different folder. I want the album kept together, dag nab it!

I have three different copies. Three. One by The Academy of Ancient Music, one by The Academy of St.Martin-in-the-Fields and one by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

Can anyone guess what my absolute fave classical music might possibly be? Anyone? Go ahead, take a SWAG.

It might possibly be  The Dance of the Sugarplum Faeries. It could be the 1812 Overture (always with real cannon!) But there's a slim chance that I like Handel. A lot.

Remember 'Hooked on Classics'? People were always surprised by how much classical they really knew. Usually it was from movie soundtracks.

However, one of the first children's records I remember listening to was 'Tubby the Tuba' a child's introduction to the orchestra. And then there was 'Peter and the Wolf.' Then, we leaped into 'The Barber of Seville' and it was downhill from there.

None of this was hindered by the training on piano my father had received at the Boston Conservatory. Being able to play Rachmaninoff, Mozart and Beethoven on demand for your kids is everyone's lifelong goal, right? "Play the noisy one, Daddy!" And he would. Even when he was suffering from Alzheimer's and couldn't recognize his daughter, he could play the noisy one.

A forum I hang out on underwent a cosmetic overhaul. The engine underneath is exactly the same, they just stuck some new graphics on top. The new graphics are larger than the old ones, so I have to scroll more to read the same number of threads. My screen real estate isn't occupied by content, it's occupied by graphics. And they aren't even navigation graphics. They are purely decorative.

Out of all the comments on how 'nice' it all looks, I'm the only person who has commented on the negative change in function.

Are we a culture so entertained by what it looks like that we don't care what it actually does?

I used to take pride in working for an ISO 9001 certified company. We were all regularly given training on how to produce quality software and the like. Never, ever, should one person have to pull long shifts and 'save the day'. That's a fast way to lose certification and you just don't get quality like that. You can't. If you've been pulling a 72 hour shift, somewhere in the middle of it, you got tired and start to make poor decisions. Then you had to fix those errors and you made more bad decisions. You lost the ability to communicate clearly, you couldn't follow or give good directions. It's not conditions under which anyone produces quality anything. Except temper tantrums.

I've been trying to communicate with a lady who is at the end of a 72 hour shift. Over time, her attempts at communication have gotten less and less clear and she's been flip-flopping between claiming she has the answers and claiming she's only a messenger. Well, if she thought she had the answers, they were not right and if she's only the messenger, she should have shut up a long time ago. Were I this lady's manager, I'd have pulled her off the job at least a week ago. Perhaps even earlier. The problem is that these communications are happening in public, as I'm one of her customers that she is trying to assist through forum posts. The number of times she's passed out bad information does not reflect well on the company. She was trying to provide an e-zine that wasn't ready. When things failed (again!) and the customers didn't get what she promised, (she's the second name on the masthead) the company looked awful. There are a lot of us who are trying to get to the zine and have not been successful. It's not just me.

After over three weeks of this back and forth, it will be tomorrow, it will be this URL flim-flamming, the e-zine was thrown up on a partially configured shopping site, running on a server that was known to have problems handling a load. So when she posted the new link, it immediately went down. It's back up again and the e-zine is (as far as I'm concerned) crap. I can get better for free. More interesting, better edited , higher quality graphics, and more to my taste. And to throw salt in the wound, the price for the thing increased by 20%! Yep, it went from $5 to $6. It isn't better packaged, the content sucks and the download isn't any faster on that wobbly server. OK, the background page for the web store is now pink, with tasteful pale gray stripes. So? I'm not buying a background page. They have no hook. They have nothing to set themselves apart as better and more interesting than the free stuff. I didn't buy it and I don't think I ever will.

There are folks that like this e-zine. There are folks that have realized that it isn't a reliable publication and they refuse to subscribe. It has been off and on for two years. I give it one more, at the most. If they can't stabilize production, they will fold. With a price increase and no change in content? Yeah. Not a plan for success.

A good friend treated Bud and me to dinner in the kitchen at Lightfoot. We got to eat what the chef chose to prepare for us. Yum, yum and double yum. I hope I can remember it all. Fresh french bread, with tomatoes and olive oil and herbs. So fresh, you could taste the garden. Amazing. Then a ham and corn chowder. Crunchy corn, not mushy, with smoked ham. I could have stopped there... Nope. A salad of mixed greens with raspberries, raspberry viniagrette, (sorry, I can eat it, but I can't spell it!) something braised done to pears, cheese and cashews with brown sugar and a bit of cinnamon, other spices and even cayenne on them, with some other dressing as well and Boursin cheese. That was the hit of the meal. Absolutely the hit. Then asian, in a duck roll thingamabob with cilantro, cucumber and a few other tasty bits. To the side of the duck was asian noodles with peanuts ground fine, but not to butter state, and sesame. The last was beef short ribs that had been slow roasted for at least 24 hours (I think that was what she did...) along with polenta that was fluffy, fine and buttery. Dessert was either something with blueberries, chocolate and I think a brownie, or a bread pudding with nuts and a Wild Turkey sauce topped with a small scoop of ice cream inside a scoop of whipped cream and topped with pecans. I adore bread pudding. Bud adores blueberries and chocolate. We traded.

Reservations for the kitchen have about a 6-8 week waiting list.

Yes, we sat in the kitchen. We watched Ingrid prepare our plates. We could watch pretty much everything that went on in that kitchen, depending on where we were seated at the table. The displays of food that swept by our noses made us want to head back again and again to order the different things that we saw go by. "Wasn't that lamb?" "Ooo, that looked like a roast loin of something." "I want that." "Whatever just went by, smells like it would be incredible!"

Every single dish that came out of that kitchen went past Ingrid. If she didn't approve of it, it didn't go out. Period. At the beginning of our meal, her directions were calm, firm, audible and you knew she was in charge. Later, she had to 'instruct' a couple of her employees and the calm was still there, but the firm got firmer. Taking a break when there was an order that she needed was not done. Period. Not even a drink of water. Hey, it's her show.

Lightfoot is in a former bank building. Don't wear your jeans.

I decline to aquiesce to your request. Means no.

New glasses have arrived. I had to wait almost 6 weeks for my eyes to calm down to we could get a good prescription, then it took almost 4 weeks to get the actual glasses. But they are here and I can see!!!

Some days, you haul your butt out of bed long before sunrise, and the sunrise is 'eh'. Overcast, low clouds, it just doesn't seem worth it.

Relationships can be successful even if they don't meet the standards of the people not involved in the relationship. The fact that it would not work for you has no impact on whether or not it works for them. It ain't yours, so you don't get to say what works. That being said, there are relationships that are not working and the folks involved don't seem to notice. This is often because they have no idea what defines a successful relationship, so they don't know that theirs is not successful. Once you have had a successful relationship, you are not willing to settle for less. The reverse is, sadly, not true.

"May the blessings of the Lady of Spring fall upon your head, young sir, in the same spirit as your bounty to a roadside vagabond, and as little begrudged."  Lois McMaster Bujold in 'The Curse of Chalion'   I'm feeling a bit like Caz at the moment. In the book,Caz is thanking a young man who dropped a coin by accident and then was too proud to say that he had erred.

Will said to me that he wanted a gamer laptop. There was this really great game out that wouldn't run on on his dad's old laptop, which is what he's using now. To replace it, he wanted something that had some 'muscle' to it. I asked Will what game it was that he wanted to be able to play. KOTOR. Which was released in 2003 and at a minimum requires a 1.0GHz processor. A single 1.0 GHz processor. I guess if it plays games, it's a gamer machine.

Nope. The security, sneaky angle was a fail. Will has no interest in learning how to use a computer better. Once I sat and thought about it for a while, I realized that he has no reason to need to learn. He doesn't shop on-line, because he knows that he is an impulse buyer. No private data to protect. He doesn't keep significant files, like a music collection or photos.

Why does an elephant never forget?

What does an elephant have to remember? His mother's birthday? What to bring home for dinner?

As much as it disturbs the geek in me, I'll let this one drop.

Will grew up with a computer in the house that nobody knew how to use really well. There weren't interesting kid games on it for sure. Then he hit high school and had a horrible experience with his first 'computer' class. His early web browsing was locked down so tightly that he didn't have access to much of anything. Now, he isn't  motivated to do much with a computer and he isn't interested in learning how to use one any better. He can play games, play music and he does minimal web surfing. 

I taught my mother how to walk a directory tree by putting a game she loved (Elf Bowling) onto a floppy, instead of pre loading it to her hard drive and creating a shortcut on her desktop for her to click on. I think I'm going to teach Will a couple of security, hide your tracks type of tricks for when he is doing something or wants to see if anyone has been doing stuff that they shouldn't on his computer. Nothing illegal, just some logging and file properties tricks. It might be interesting enough that he will start looking for other things to teach himself. He's not all that good with the directory tree, but he's not a complete beginner.

If the LJ BrainTrust can think of things that might be interesting to a guy who is currently happy with the Folder View, I'd appreciate it!

If you have a photo of yourself and you look like the morning after a really bad night, don't make it your profile photo. Really. You aren't cute, tough, sexy or smart.

When answering someone else's cellphone because they are (ahem) indisposed, you need to identify yourself immediately and explain where the phone's owner is. Saying, "Yo," and falling silent is not appropriate. Even if you want to hear the intimate details of someone else's life.

Once it has been established that you are not the person to whom the caller expected to be speaking, some polite chit-chat would be nice. Weather is an always appropriate topic, as is sports, if the callers are both male. If you are incapable of pulling an appropriae topic out of the depths of your brain, simply asking how the other caller is works wonders.

If you ask for help with a computer problem and only get one response, which you disrespect using faulty logic and don't try to use, perhaps that was the right answer. Nobody else will offer assistance, because they know you won't bother to try what they suggest. If you slap down my neighbor when they offer help, I'm not going to offer help next. If you slap me down when I offer help, I'm not going to offer anything else.