Anyhow, after fighting with a few ill-behaved installers, everything’s running.

I removed all the plugins and extensions from Firefox that I don’t have in a clean-slate install, figuring maybe one of the ones in my profile horked things.  It seems to work, but I haven’t really pushed it.

Still bad that a single app (or an extension to same) can take the OS out.

Still investigating.  Further news as events warrant.

Not so check.

So I’m running Mozilla, doing the morning surf, and the window blinks and freezes.  What follows next is a system fail of epic proportion.  Yes, a 32-bit app Brought a 64-bit operating system to its knees.

So, not believing that this could possibly be the case, and figuring it must be hardware because both times it happened my RAID wanted to rebuild, I tested the drives.  They’re fine.  And Mozilla under 32 bit Fedora worked fine.

To test my hypothesis, I installed Opera and ran that all day.

The system’s still up.

You do the math.  And yes, I googled, and found reports of Mozilla crashing on Win 7 x64, but not blowing Windows completely the fuck away.

What a pain in the ass.

Installing software is easier on 7 than XP as a limited user, I’ll grant that.  But this arrangement only points out just how far behind the times software developers are.  I mean, this has been an “official” best practices thing for the better part of a decade now, and software still doesn’t get it.

The big hitters (Office 2007, Visual Studio 2008) work fine when installed as “Administrator” but used as “BrianC”.  In fact, most stuff does.  FOSS like Pidgin and 7-Zip work fine.

But then there’s the exceptions.  Quickbooks itself worked without an issue.  But the Quickbooks Outlook Sync program only works for the user that installed it.  So simply elevating to Administrator doesn’t cut it.  So it’s log out, go back in as admin, bump my domain user to local administrator, go back in as me, and install.

Same thing with the Palm software.  Desktop installed fine, but then started Hotsync in the Administrator context, rendering the first (bluetooth only, no USB drivers for you 64 bit folks!) sync useless.  Where it gets worse is all the related apps.  Documents To Go didn’t install itself properly (since it didn’t see a profile), Smartlist To Go wouldn’t install at all until I was a local administrator myself.

Come on folks, get with the times.  Microsoft is trying to make an operating system that doesn’t get hosed by users running with Administrator privileges because you clowns can’t get your shit together and write software that allows people to run with lower privileges on their machines.

Today it occurred to me that she could step on the switch and shut the computer off.

So she did.

The progressive socialists thought that Obama’s election was a mandate for full-bore socialism in America.

They were wrong.

November’s gonna be a bad time to be a Democrat.

2010, here we come!

I’ve tried calling Senator Lieberman’s office this morning, but I’m more likely to get through to Rush on Open Line Friday than I am to get through to his office.  Ditto Senator Dodd.  So I’m sending them both a polite e-mail demanding that they withhold their cloture votes unless Connecticut gets the same deal Nebraska got.

If enough states do that, then they either cave in and blow the budget up (although they can strip the Medicaid funds out later, which they’re certain to do to Nelson), or they can kill the deal with Nelson and lose his cloture vote.  Either way, this abomination goes down in flames and America wins.

I encourage you to write your senators today and let them know you won’t stand for just one state getting a free ride on Medicaid.  We’ll either get the bill killed, or force the federal government into receivership.  Either way, they won’t be able to bother us much any more.

I’d like to know just how many lives are being saved and at what cost with these ads warning people about seat belts and drunk driving – and their associated check points.

Specifically, I want to know the marginal cost to save one life versus the marginal cost in lost liberty from enduring East German-style checkpoints.

Because it’s gotta be way more than they intend to spend per person on this new health-care abortion.

So I put in one of those filters that has its own faucet, and I split the output to go to the icemaker.  The water is indistinguishable from what was coming from the Pur filter.

Mating plastic and brass is a TOTAL PAIN IN THE ASS.  You don’t want to over tighten it because you will tear the threads right off the plastic, but you put it all together and it leks, so you tighten, and tighten, and tighten some more.  Now I’m just hoping nothing goes BANG and sends water all over the house.

I’m now watching the Giants in SD because Fox can’t keep the HD feed from dropping.

I would have tweeted about it, but Twitter is down.