RANDOM, FREE-FLOATING, NON-POLITICAL WHINING THREAD….Tired of politics? I’m not. But how about a break for some miscellaneous pet peeve airing and audience brain picking? Three topics today:
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A couple of months ago my computer started freezing up two or three times a day. The symptoms were always identical: after some action on my part (starting an app, closing an app, looking crosseyed at the monitor), the hard drive would thrash and the mouse would freeze for about 10 or 15 seconds. After that, everything was fine. Annoying, though not debilitating.
Then, three days ago I uninstalled Google Desktop, an indexing and hard drive searching app from the Google empire that I had installed, um, about two months ago. My problems vanished. No more freezing. So a word to the wise: it’s a handy program, but despite what they say, it doesn’t work only in the background. Far from it.
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Speaking of freeware, I’ve noticed that Firefox has a peculiar tic. Like Internet Explorer, it remembers text you’ve previously typed into text boxes and then presents it to you automatically when you start typing the text again. Very handy. However, if you accidentally type in something incorrect, it seems to stay in Firefox’s memory banks forever.
For an example, see the screen shot on the right. At some point in the dim past I typed my email address incorrectly, and now the bogus address shows up every time I start typing it. With IE, you could just delete typos, but with Firefox they seem to be embedded permanently. Does anyone know how to eliminate its memory of my typing boo boos?UPDATE: Hooray! Just press Shift-Delete and your typing detritus disappears. Thanks, Kathy!
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Like Abu Aardvark, I really hate the modern TV tradition of running shows in tiny spurts: two or three new shows followed by two or three reruns. Dammit, run the whole season and then fill in the summers with reruns or tryouts. If it was good enough for my childhood, it’s good enough for my adulthood.
UPDATE: In response to the Aardvark’s specific complaint (when the hell is Lost going to start running new episodes again?), the answer is here at the unofficial fan site. Next Wednesday is a new episode, and there are five more after that. Warning: site includes brief plot summaries.
That’s it. File your own pet peeves in comments. But please note: no religious wars from the Mac zealots. Just….shut….up. You have better things to do with your time than indulging in fantasies that Macs never break and always work perfectly. And that goes for you Linux folks too.
