Friday, June 28, 2002

i hate microsoft

(originally posted at pixeljuice.livejournal.com)

playing civ3 out in the living room, donnie darko on in the background. i'm on the sofa, wireless laptop. chatting through trillian behind civ3.

i lose track of time, without warning the laptop goes into standby mode. i rush back into my room and give it the AC, but it's too late. it's gone to sleep.

rather, microsoft put it to sleep, along with my wireless settings.

that's right. after waking my laptop up, no more internet connection. the little wireless NIC is flashing green. ipconfig tells me: media disconnected.

no big deal, tcp stack crashed. i'll log out, log back in. this is windows xp, i shouldn't even have to reboot.

three reboots later...

i still hate microsoft. thinking of the moment in the south park movie where they shoot bill gates in the head. wondering if i'll ever be able to save enough money for one of those gorgeous apple powerbooks.

this problem solved itself. i don't know why. the NIC configuration GUI (using MS API's btw) showed me that my preferred network was still configured properly... while the available AP had wrong settings. no sweat, i can fix that.

or can i? apparently, i couldn't. MS wouldn't let me. so what CAN i do? i can remove the preferred network entry and hit refresh on the available network list and see what happens. ah. it brings back my preferred network entry. lovely.

so... i remove my preferred network entry again. this time i don't hit refresh, i try to configure the available network entry. will it let me? YES! it let me! rock! does it connect? nope. hit apply, hit ok, go back in... and the wrong settings are back, as is my removed preferred network entry.

so i give up. i say fuck it, hit ok, ok, i'll just shut it down and worry about it later. staci can find someone else to play scrabble with tonight... and just when i'm ready to shut down...

it connects.

for absolutely no reason.

i wonder how long i would have to whore myself out in order to afford a powerbook.

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