Back early in the summer, I was literally attacked verbally via email by some unknown juvenile deliquent, regarding my capacity to “spell” a certain word correctly, in context…the offending words? Then and Than…

When I’m writing a dozen or two pages, in a fit of creative passion, normally at 3:45 am, I am as bound to make mistakes as ANYONE, when it comes to the human language.

Well, this “BubbaBoy’ who calls himself ” themaroon ” chose to chastise me for close to three days, in an attempt to win a fruitless battle of wits on CORRECT USAGE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

He assailed my overall intelligence…he belittled my attempts to help my fellow man by offering REAL authentic digital versions of government documents…he even called me…snif, snif….a “paranoid nutcase”….

Oh, boo-hoo. I feel so sad now…useless…a simpleton who knows no better of what he does “than” a common household pet…

Right.

I blew him off, and forgot about the lackluster diatribe a few days laters.

Lo and Behold…he appeared out of the inky blackness of a starlit Wyoming autumn evening…just minutes ago.

“Hello, Rabbit” ( to quote Bobcat Goldthwaight greeting Bill Murray witha shotgun, ala Elmer Fudd, in “Scrooged”)

While googling “SurvivalRing” this morning, to see what kind of new sites might be linking to me, I came across “Rabbit’s” blog this morning…

http://www.cleartherail.com/archives/2004/07/index.html

…in which BubbaBoy details his “visit” to my site, echoes his mental acuteness against my horrible grammer abuse, and tells me to basically “rent a 4th grader” to edit my verbiage.

I felt a ping of recollection, of those dark days in late July….recovering from the horrible virtual tongue lashing of this mental giant…

That is, until I read the previous post he had added to his blog, not two days before “the event” now known as “Dark Mid July Tonguelashing Day”…

Seems BubbaBoy’s previous post *documented* his love life with, of all things, *BEER*. He even mentioned he longed for the good old days of high school where he and his buddies used to drink a case of beer EACH.

My, my…I am SO glad that we have DUI and DWI laws in effect all across the nation now…

I think I’ll begin talking to my congressmen about passing laws about using the INTERNET while intoxicated.

DUI = Dufus Using Internet
DWI = Dumbass While Internetting…

I think you get my meaning…

You, sir, (as Fonzie once said to Batman Number 1.0….er..uhmm…Henry Winkler said to Michael Keaton, in the movie ‘Nite Shift’, way back in the 80’s) are an ASS. (Be sure to TAPE record that and play it back time after time, hopefully laying in your own town’s morgue).

Now, go away or I will taunt you a second time.

…on getting this system o’mine back to speed. It’s an HP 864N, and is about 6 months old, having purchased it new (actually, recertified) from TigerDirect.com in mid March.

I’ve been happy with the hardware, speed, and all the bells and whistles, but my oldest son managed to try to hide his ‘net tracks in mid May, and in so doing caused a full meltdown (complete reinstall of applications and operating system WITH reformat, as all that good stuff is on a separate partition on the big drive). Spent most of the summer trying to recover files with just about every file recovery tool known to man, and simply had so many things going on with THAT, that I didn’t get any real projects of mine done, save for one ( production of another CD Rom for my website). I’d hoped to get a lot more than that this summer.

Anyway, reinstalled the operating system last friday, after backing up the registry. Recovered in non-destruction mode (meaning NO reformat of the drive), and after a couple of days of CONSTANT rebooting, messing with some windows settings, reinstall of Office XP, Norton Internet Security with Live Update of EVERYTHING, reinstall of all spyware and firewall programs, and downloads of a few system fixing thing-a-ma-jiggers, as of today everything seems DONE.

Last thing I did this morning was start running Norton Utilities 2002 ( free with my purchase of N.I.S online last year) and run a full WinDoctor profile…it found about 1600 problems, about 1500 of which were bad .lnk files from my mirroring my laptop drive onto the big 160 gig main drive, as well as quite a few registry issues.

Everything I want to be running, accessable, and usuable is now there and ready…almost a week after starting to fix this darn thing…and NO LOST DATA this time.

Just wish that all those dang computer manufacturers out there STILL sent out a REAL operating system CD with every computer purchase. This would make is so much easier to fix OS problems when they occur, instead of having to run recovery software and risk loosing registration info, links, data, setups, configs, and who knows what else…

Now, my next guess for the NEXT needed full reinstall of windows xp pro media center edition on THIS computer? April 15, 2005…roughly.

Those cool geeky guys Burt Rutan and his cohorts just won $10 million bucks….

How? Click the pic…

Read more about the story here…

Rocket soars 2nd time, claims $10 million

Really amazing technology…

Ray ( the station manager ) from KTRZFM in Riverton, Wy gave me a call this week. Seems one of the other part timers (Mark) gave notice and will be leaving the station for good. Ray needs me to come back on the air and take care of the weekend weather, the weekend day show voice tracks, and the weekday overnite shows…

Guess I’m back in real show business again, at this 100,000 watt classic rock station….

I still want some tickets to a GOOD concert….

Well, my 6 month old HP desktop computer has been having some problems lately, first with Windows XP media center disappearing, and then gradually not running programs *I* wanted it to, such as GetDataBack XP ( to recover a crashed 10 gig usb 2.0 pocket drive that got lunched a couple weeks ago in the student lab ), Norton Utilities WinDoctor ( to fix multitudes of problems ), and a few other things.

Having done this once already this past summer on this system, I knew I could recover apps and OS from the system recovery tool, without deleting my data or formatting the drive.

I did it the smart way, I thought….backed up the Registry by exporting it, before getting started. Also backed up about 15 gigs of files to the exteranl 80 gig drive. Ran recovery, and no major problem EXCEPT 6 hours of waiting for it to “Finish, click to return to windows”, where it must have been doing SOMETHING. I left and went to work without it finishing, but when I got off and came home, it had finished.

So, made sure the data was there and checked several shortcuts ( MS Office, Norton Internet Security, etc) and got the normal errors I’ve seen several times, stating pretty much that registry data does not exist (which is the reason I exported and saved the registry before starting.

I clicked over to My Docs, where I’d saved the exported registry, and reimported it. At this point, I haven’t reinstalled anything…yet.

Office is now there but ‘needs to install?’ Norton Antivirus is a no go. Spy sweeper is still dead….and GetDataBack STILL won’t install….but Windows Xp Pro Media Center Edition is working fine again….now I can hook up the newly available cable tv cable and watch tv and record to the drive or dvd burner.

I suppose I’ll have to go thru about 300 programs one by one and reinstall a large portion of them again…just to make sure they work.

It still pisses me off that Windoze, even at this late date in microsoft history, is STILL so buggy, NOT dependable to stay running, and so ridden with security problems that you HAVE to run more than a half dozen virus, spyware, and firewall programs JUST to stay safe while on the web….

Ric

As if we haven’t had ENOUGH excitement lately…there’s ANOTHER disaster on the way….after 4 hurricanes, two big SoCal earthquakes, and that tornado nearby here yesterday….

Scientists say Mt. St. Helens ( ya know, that big pissed off rock in Washington? ) is making noise, having swarms of hundreds of earthquakes, and causing rock slides and growing literally inches a week now. They think it will pop its top again, though not nearly as bad as 1980. A few ash clouds…some flying rocks…and a hardy hi-ho silver. Keep an ear out for any loud noise in your neighborhood. And hey, if you see any geologists running, TRY to stay caught up with them.

Here’s the MSH webcome….watch it closely now.

(NOTE: If it’s dark, that means NO LAVA is flowing at nite. The camera uses ambient lite, so during daylight hours you’ll see the mountain, and at nite, well…you’ll see ‘dark’.)

And here’s the site to check it out and stay up to date with it….

http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/

And, so you can learn more about “falling rocks”, why not visit Slashdot.com and see what they have to say…those big bunch of geeks!

Whew! THAT was close. It ALMOST hit us. Really…you haven’t heard?

A 3 mile wide asteroid just flew by….out there!!! Didn’t you see it? It was HUGE. Got a picture of it…

Its name? Toutatis…

Next time… DUCK!