And speaking of the weekend...

No, I didn't get to see "Signs," though one of the brood did, and he says it's scary and great. Bastard. I'll have to flog him later. The rest of us might get to go tomorrow evening, because starting next week my life will be entering a typhoon. Rather excited about it, truth be known.

Meanwhile, I did a flock of updates to my Windows 2000 boxes, including installing Service Pack 3, which installs (quit without my permission) some new gimic that wants to always check for "critical updates." I was doing that manually, thank you very much, leave the automatic crap out of my system. The MS update site has been saying I need to install this for the last month or two; I kept telling it, "No, go away." It didn't, and now MS has given it to me anyway. The install wizard allows me to tell it to shut up and drop into a coma; we'll see if it stays that way.

I also go Mandrake Linux 8.1 installed (again) on my old PC. Can you say s-l-o-w? At least with the GUI. Whenever they talk about the speed of Linux on old iron (mine is a Pentium 166 with 80MB's of RAM) they must be talking about the command-line interface (CLI), because at the GUI level it borders on useless. No better than Windows 98 SE runs on this same box (dual boot setup), and sometimes worse.

Nonetheless, my foray into Linux resumes...as time allows. All I immediately need is to install Word Perfect.