Misc. Thurs. Ramb.

Yes, it is time for another edition of Miscellaneous Thursday Ramblings.

Windows 7 has been good and stable. We've had it for about two months now. I did see one BSOD, but I'm not worried. Our trial version of Norton Security MumboJumbo expired, so I installed Microsoft Security Essentials. It seems to be working out well.

In other computer news, my in-laws' laptop got hosed up last week. The hard drive was filling up very quickly. Out of about 60GB, they had 16MB free. You read that correctly. Culprit was the AVG Free software. Something was triggering a gotcha and it would create a dump file. That was about 100MB in size. Every four or five minutes. You do the math. They are now running Microsoft Security Essentials.

A co-worker's home desktop also got hosed this week. Windows XP Pro Antivirus 2010 rogue program. Basically it hijacks your computer and makes it unusable until you buy their software to tame it. Or, you can use the instructions here.

It made the user look like this.

On the reading front, I've been working on Donald Honig's A Donald Honig Reader, Neil Lanctot's Negro League Baseball, and Sue Macy's A Whole New Ball Game.

On the TV front, Angie and I have been enjoying Big Bang Theory and Castle.

Just because I like his humor.

Blackberry fusion

Yes, Angie did buy this at the store a few weeks ago. But I'm talking about the new cell phones that Angie and I have.

Blackberry 8330 Curve

Okay, I started this post back in September. You can see that I'm up on my blogging. Actually, I've been rather busy, with Buddy Walk, football games, life in general.

We decided at the end of August to hop on the "phone as a data device" train. We had some bar phones that we got from Sprint. They worked well, but we cut out texting from the plan. Didn't need it back then. With Edison in football and a different church schedule that Angie or myself (he's a teen, don't you know), we opted for the Family Data plan. More minutes, no extra cost for all the data and texting one could want.

The Blackberrys work well. Until this Wednesday morning. I got the "JVM error 102" on mine and it wouldn't boot. I spoke with Sprint technical service. Three technicians and 35 minutes later they replied with, "Yes, we're aware of that error. No, we don't know what causes it. No, we don't know how to fix it. Please take it to a Sprint service center for repair or replacement. Oh, you don't have insurance on the device, so you'll probably have to buy a new one. Good luck with that."

Actually, they were kind and helpful. I selected the Sprint store in west Knoxville, signed up for an appointment (online) and headed out the next morning.

About 25 minutes after my arrival, I had a new Blackberry in hand, already activated. I was fortunate to have backed up my old one the night before it died. Weekly backups are now going to be standard operating procedure.

Edison also got a new cell phone. I've forgotten the model, but it is centered around texting. He likes it. He likes it so much that he got in trouble for using it. The details don't matter, but the phone was just returned to him last evening. I think that he learned his lesson.

So, text me if you want to. Although the Blackberry has a QWERTY keyboard, my thumbs don't move very fast. Don't hold your breath waiting for me to reply.