Future shoe-in for the debate team

Dinner earlier tonight:

[Hamburger patties and pyrogies growing cold.]

Declan: RAWWWWRRRR!

Tavish: RAAAWWWWRRR!!

Simon: Dex!  Tav!  Quiet, please, and eat your suppers.

[beat]

Declan [deadpan]: I can shoot stuff from my eyes!

Simon: [Keels over dead, laughing.]

********************

I promise to update the banner and post more, soon. 

Computer was in the hospital getting wiped for the past several days after it went all "HAL 9000" on us last week.  It locked me out of the office, even after I started banging on the door.  It kept asking me where Dave was, and the best I could come up with was, "Dave's not here, man!"

I finally shut the breakers off to the basement, kicked in the office door and yanked the PC tower out from the morass of USB cables that had been slowly engulfing the squeaky chair in front of the desk.  So now it's a more mundane machine, and currently twitches to my every whim.  I've spent the last hour and a half re-installing Firefox (take THAT, Internet Exploder!), my printer driver, as well as various versions of anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-adware and Auntie Beru, just for good measure.

The worst part is that Amy has been largely without her Facebook and related Scrabulous games, so I just KNOW what she's going to be doing for the next few days while I'm at work.

Comments

[Mark]

It's about time I re-formatted our computer and started over. Sorry you had to by force instead of by choice.

Loved the Cheech and Chong reference, by the way. That's one of the funniest comedy bits ever.

The Declan bit about shooting stuff out of his eyes? Awesome.

[Moksha Gren]

Cheech and Chong meets Stanley Kubrick....only on the Simian Farmer. However, I've found Aunti Beru to be less effective against desktop sentience than Auntie Em. It not only puts up a good fight, but can whisk you away to safety should the battle go south. Auntie Beru on the other hand tends to go up in smoke pretty quickly.

So you countered Declans eye shooting power by shooting food from your nose? I'll bet that put him back in his place ;)

[marian]

you should just save up your pennies and get a mac.

[Simon]

Mark,

The thing is, I shouldn't HAVE to reformat on any sort of regular basis. Windows frustrates me. See Marian's comment below. And yes, Declan's off-the-cuff comments are coming more rapidly now, and are always amusing.

Moksha,

Auntie Em probably *IS* a better defense. I'll keep her in mind if I need to do digital battle again.

Marian,

It's bonus time at work here next month, and I've been discussing that possibility with my wife. We shall see...

[Émilie B]

Trust Simon Fraser to add interest to a boring puter crash/reformat.

Get well soon, little pc. (It just needed a little love.)

[Tasha]

Glad you're back online! Been wondering what's going on over there. Dex is hysterical!

[Mark]

Si - For me, it's not so much a have to, but a self-inflicted want to format and re-install.

My computer's running fine. I tend to load the next cool freeware app that comes down the pike, and then if it's lame, I inevitably forget to uninstall it. Formatting and starting over is sort of like getting something brand new.

Save for an incompatibility between Adobe Premiere Elements and my AMD processor (not Windows' fault), I have had absolutely no problems with my computer, and it befuddles me frankly why so many Windows users do.

I'm not making this a "Mac vs. Windows" debate, because I think Apple makes great computers and has married them with a great OS and, finally, a more affordable CPU. I just think a lot of the criticism of Windows comes from earlier versions that truly blew chunks (my jury's still out on Vista, because I haven't had time to give it a good look yet).

As far as the "more secure OS" debate? If Apple ever gains a huge market share, it also will draw its fair share of attacks from malicious hackers. The freaks and geeks always want to humble whoever is popular. The "more stable" debate holds no water with me, because when I worked with Macs at a newspaper, they were the buggiest, most unstable computer I've ever had. To be fair, that was before OS X. And, I've never had crashing problems with Windows XP.

Whoa. My $.02 turned into $.50. Sorry about that.

[Dave]

Loved what Declan said..! *LOL*

Hey, Dave's right HERE!!!

[tom]

where the heck are you? haven't seen a new posting in almost weeks?

[Moksha Gren]

So...six commenters up there. Continuing our previous conversation...how many of these fine folks do you think are still waiting on pins and needles for your next post? I mean...do blog readers really have a month-long attention span? Time for a test, I say.

[Paula]

Intermittent (unpredictable) reinforcement really is the most effective way of training (as my psych profs used to say.) Since Simon is a polite Canadian who will never leave for good without saying goodbye, I patiently wait for a return and check in daily. There's a treat for me somewhere around the corner, I'm sure.

[Psychfun]

Just went over Schedules of Reinforcement with my students Ha! You have to gradually work up to that though.

I'm sooooo glad someone even remembers "Dave". My students have no clue! Some don't even have a clue when I say, "Ferris? Ferris? Ferris?" So sad!