theMediaman.com

Last week I performed my annual “Windows Clean Install”. Something I needed after a particularly crappy day at work (”Why hasn’t this been done yet?” repeated over and over after three weeks of working my ass off). So on my way home I grabbed the beer, then drank and installed an OS from scratch. What a geek.

I had my first run-in with Microsoft Product Activation… aka, “yet another dep’t outsourced to India”. I’ve done a number of system upgrades to my comptuer since buying it back in 2001, including a RAM upgrade just hours before the clean install. However, that wasn’t the reason I needed to do the Activation “the old-school way”. It seems that there’s a maximum number of times you can Activate a perfectly legal copy of XP Home, installed legally, on only one legal PC.

(Note that I’m capitalizing “Activate” and “Activation”, because MS is probably just around the corner from copyrighting another generic word like “Word” or “Windows“).

I’ve had a difficult time finding any documentation on this element of MSPA. One page that I’ve found states (only in a sidebar) how you have a maximum of 8 to 11 installs before the key will no longer work through Internet Activation.

Seems less to me.

My last installation was just over one year ago. Before that, it was over one year, and I know that I did one clean install in under one year. That makes this the fourth time it’s been installed.

Another kick in the pants was how I had to recite a 50-digit number to them over the phone (verbally, not using the keypad), then wait for someone to talk to, then repeat the first 6 numbers again, get the fifth degree, then type in a set of 36 numbers that they recited to me.

While on the phone to MSPA, the guy asked the usual “are you a criminal” questions, like “For how many computers are you using this licence”, which is a trick question. An answer of anything other than “one” will immediately black list you, your parents, your dog and your neighbourhood will be carpet bombed.

The other question I expected - but was still upset with being asked - was “why have you installed this copy of XP Home multiple times?”

I do it regularly so that I can clean out all the crap and software configurations that are slowing down my computer, jackass (actual answer excluded the “jackass”).

The whole experience would have been more entertaining had I remembered to use my Northern Ontario Accent there, eh? Unfortunately I was already well into the conversation before I thought of it.

Again, I encourage everyone who has to call technical support to use a fake accent. Even if it’s poor, they can’t tell. It’s more entertaining for you, and they won’t treat you like some “Stupid American” which - face it - most Canadians sound like.

So now I have a clean install on my machine. I feel like going through the Hell of a re-install again (Service Pack 2 takes over two hours to install… which is longer than the original XP install + manual Product Activation) just so I can call up MSPA and get them to activate my XP again.

“Why have you installed this copy of XP Home multiple times?”

“As a sleeper-cell terrorist, I need to wipe my hard drive clean of incriminating data on a regular basis. But it’s still installed on the one and only CPU and hard drive it’s ever been installed on, so what’s my Product Activation Code(TM)?”

Here’s a clip from an article on MSN’s web site about the Sundance Film Festival:

If sex sells, as the advertising saying goes, the independent film world should be pleased with this year’s Sundance Film Festival that features a slew of movies with explicit sexual themes and scenes.

Teen sex, elderly sex and gay and oral sex fill a range of movies…

Hmm… sexual themes without any “normal” sex in the bunch??? At an Independant film festival you say???

When even Independent film is predictable, it’s time for some new blood in the movie industry.

After the most recent tax increase on beer put forward by the McGuinty government (it’s getting harder and harder to understand their strategy) as 2-4 of Sleeman is now in excess of forty bucks. There’s no way I can justify that, so I’ve decided to start looking at the discount hooch.

There’s a number of beers that are selling for or around $1 per beer. The biggest one to note is Laker, which crawled into the top ten beers sold in Ontario (not there currently, but it sometimes shows up on the list), most likely because of the price. Lucky Lager is also sitting comfortablly in the top 10, but quite simply, it’s crap.

Laker brews a lager, lite and a red, so I decided to give the red beer a try last night. It cost me $13.20, which reminded me how we must pay for deposit on the bottles. Takes a little bit of the fun out of returning thirty bucks worth of empties to know that it’s money I had already given them.

The Review: There’s sometimes a kind of medicine-y taste at the end, but certainly up there with the mediocre Reds. It doesn’t replace Rickards, and it’s no Sleeman Dark, but I’d put it in the same class as Mick’s.

So, it’s not as good as Sleeman, but I would say that’s it’s more than 60% as good as Rickards Red, for only 60% the price… so I guess on a price-per-quality basis, it’s better(?).

The one surprise came from the label, which says that it’s brewed by Brick Brewing in Waterloo. In other words, I’m staying away from the lager. Brick lager turns my stomach whenever I have beers-plural.

Just found out that - once again - I missed National Pie Day *sad*

Weird things that you sometimes learn well after the fact. The History Channel has a page with “This Day In History“, and it outlines how Russia came the closest it ever had to launching nuclear missles only ten years ago today.

Apparently, a missle was launched from Norway with scientific instruments. The International community was notified well in advance, but with in an underpaid, shattered civil service like the one in Russia at the time, it’s little wonder that the early-warning center wasn’t given this info. Apparently “The” suitcases with “The” button were activated for the first time in history. They were only minutes away from launch when they confirmed that the missle wasn’t heading for Moscow.

I don’t remember this in the news, but of course, I was just starting to date Rebecca at that time, and was probably lost in Love </cheesy>

Part of my duties this week is to research weblog technologies for work. One of the key ingredients is to try and make this work on an ASP backend. However, the only two pre-packaged programs is a SourceForge program (still in beta) called FactoSystem and Microsoft’s entry, SharePoint. The latter looks like a better-executed version of what MS wanted FrontPage 2000 to be. Oh yeah, that’s the big problem with it. You have to use FrontPage XP or 2003. I’m gonna go with “nope”.

The other possibilities are the PHP-based MovableType and, of course, Blogger. The viral nature of LiveJournal appeals to me personally, since I can link directly to other people I know (could only find two links so far).

However, that doesn’t do much good for the project I’m looking at for work.

Building a journal from scratch was a project that was out of my scope of coding kung-fu. I was too anxious to achieve the same status as Hwan and He Who’s Site Must Not Be Linked To, but alas, I am not as l33t. However, I’m seriously looking at something called Wordpress, which is apparently similar to Movable Type.

Haven’t played with Wordpress much, so I don’t know if it has certain features I’m looking for. But for the time being, I’ve allowed Comments in my Blogger posts. I’m gonna wait and see if 1) it works, and 2) I start getting SPAMmed.