My computer came back from Toshiba this weekend, so I’ve been getting it back into something reasonably resembling the shape it was in before it went crazy on me. Can’t quite get rid of all the crazy, though. You know how these things go–once you start installing programs and they start talking to each other, all kinds of bizarre things happen. I am now the proprietor of a machine on which

• iTunes has alphabetized my Madonna songs after the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and before 10,000 Maniacs. This state of affairs is so plain weird that I’m tempted to go to the Apple store to ask whether Madonna’s first initial is now assumed to come after Z in the letters or before 0 in the numbers and other characters, just to satisfy my curiosity. Maybe something wacky happened when I sneaked my tracks back into iTunes from my iPod, which was the only place they’d been backed up? But why only Madge?

• no browser wants to open google.com or gmail.com. I’ve tried making a special permission in Norton 360, turning off the firewall temporarily, and using every conceivable alternative URL. Nothing works. Good thing Gmail Lite is around.
• the brightness refuses to stay set at three levels below maximum. It reverts to full-on lightbulb-in-the-interrogation-room setting whenever I restart the computer. Now that I think about it, maybe it did that when I first bought the machine three years ago and I’ve just forgotten what I did to fix it.

These modern conveniences–such a time-consuming chore to work with. Should be back as normal soon.

(BTW, speaking of Madge, the title of that newest single captures with exquisite, if obviously unintentional, perfection the strident haranguing tone she adopts when she gets going on one of her moral crusades. And please–no one whose personal dressing room and gym probably consume more energy per day than Sierra Leone should be preaching at us to…uh, actually, I’m not sure what the hell she’s telling us to do. This is not one of her more incisive sets of lyrics.

But of course I can’t help liking it anyway.)

Added on 28 August: Speaking of Windows-related woes (which started this whole situation), I just got this from a colleague. The parody of Word–I hate that damned paper clip!–made my day.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 09:48 and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.