Wayne D's Blog

I am returning to my previous blogging practice of mashing two disparate topics together in one posting.

I had a combined Christmas Party/Open House just before Christmas and the afternoon of the party my kids came to me to let me know that they had broken the light fixture in our mostly unfinished basement. It's the type of light fixture with the pull chain and string attached. I didn't have time to get a new one that afternoon so I dug an old one I thought worked out of my stash of junk and installed it. It worked for about 5 minutes before it stopped working. My Home Depot phobia has prevented me from replacing it until today. I just kept forgetting to buy a new one and there are no hardware stores located on my route to and from the office. In fact there are no hardware stores in the town of 160,000 I live in. I finally felt good enough this weekend to add it to my list of Saturday chores. I decided to consciously avoid the big box home improvement warehouses and instead head to the one surviving old fashioned hardware store in my neighbourhood. It's actually 6 kms. away but I was heading that direction anyways to buy some new memory at TigerDirect. When I reached the store and walked inside I was aghast, it wasn't the cluttered warren I remembered but it was positively barren. The older couple who had ran it for years also weren't there. The store was so empty of merchandise that I asked the woman in the store if they were closing and she said no. They might as well close, there isn't any reason to go there anymore.

The reason I was going to TigerDirect was because we noticed our Windows computer was running terribly slowly recently. It would be running Linux except that Apple still hasn't released a version of iTunes for Linux. We got the computer three years ago and so far other than replacing a fan it's performed quite well except for the inevitable byte rot that seems to affect all Windows installs. The longer you keep them the slower they get. When I decided to try to fix it up I realized that it only had 256Mb of memory installed. How can a computer that worked fine three years ago be such a slow pig today? A couple of Windows service packs, a bazillion security patches, and the ever present virus scanner have rendered it under sized and underpowered. Instead of reformatting it and starting with a fresh install I decided that I should first bring it up to the minimum memory requirement for Microsoft Vista 1Gbyte. Don't worry kids I don't expect I'll ever have a machine running Vista in this house. After adding the new memory, turning off a few items in the startup list things seem to be working much better. It just goes to show that the old computer max "You can never have too much memory" is still true.

After whining at Yahoo 360 for not having a spell checker they recently introduced one. Today I finally installed the latest version of Firefox, version 2.0, which has an integrated spell checker. Another good reason to use Firefox.