Kennyblog Redux

I realized that I hadn't installed (and then gotten angry about) a new web browser in a while. So, since I was at work on a windows machine, I thought I'd go ahead and try installing the latest version of Internet Explorer (v7). I think the last time I installed a version of IE on something is when I worked at CUNY Graduate Center, in 2002. So presumably it's come a long way since then. Here's what happened.

Install goes very well. I download it, I run it, everything is happy. Except I have to reboot my computer. Since it's towards the end of the day, I have no interest in rebooting my computer. It can wait until tommorrow morning.

The next morning: I get into the office, still having not rebooted. I sit down, log in, and try to look at my Outlook calendar. Outlook doesn't run, with some relatively esoteric error messages about not being able to open some file or another. I get annoyed, and reboot my computer.

5 minutes pass, and I'm at the login screen. I login.

Another 5 minutes pass, and the computer has finally stopped grinding so much that everything is unusable. This is just general windows annoyance, and I can't really say that it's anything having to do with the browser. I work for a little while, and remember that "Hey! I have a new web browser installed!" Which I then bring up.

Since it's the first time I run it, it goes to a setup web page. One of the first options is selecting my default search engine. And it says "Hit the Apply Settings button below to choose an engine" or somesuch." OK. Just as I'm hitting the button, I notice that there's a little arrow on the side, which says 1 / 4 right under it. So by hitting the arrow prematurely (which it very clearly tricked me into doing), I am now stuck with 3 pages of Windows default browser settings. I don't know what's in there, but I suspect that it made IE my default browser, uninstalled Firefox, corrupted my Opera install, and sent a message to an MS intern to come around to my desk and stick a shoe in my butt.

But that's alright. It's almost my fault. Then I start to get a bunch of balloon popups. Do I know that their anti-phishing software isn't set up? Do I want to set it up? Under "No, please do not setup this anti-phishing software" it says "If you select this, the web pages you visit will not be sent to Microsoft to determine their safety" or somesuch.

Really, guys? That was an option? Sending you a complete record of all the webpages I visit? And you're tying that into a portion of the application which purports to increase the safety of my web browsing? At least when the TSA violates me, they are doing it for something which has no dollar value. How much are you guys getting out of the absurd amount of personal information you are collecting from this "Anti-Phishing" tool built into to your browser? And when is that guy with the shoe getting here - I don't want to be away from my desk.

Also what I learned is that I have to get plugins to support inline find and mouse gestures. This was the last ten minutes. I'll keep you updated if I can keep myself from beating unconscious myself with my keyboard.

Update:
I also think I just learned that installing it screwed up a bunch of my Outlook defaults. Nice.

Update II
And I just saw the first Netflix popup that I've seen in almost 5 years. Holy crap.

Arin (wife of Ben, friend of Kennyb) started a tumblog called placenta does not belong in your hair. We'll leave aside for the moment that this is an unfortunate name for a blog, and note only that so far it has been an incredibly good record of why I love her so much. Her most recent post points out the humorous potential of the Simulscribe service:
placenta does not belong in your hair - Where has Simulscribe been all my life?

In a follow up GChat with Ben, we were discussing what sort of hits "chicken shit punch" would return on a google search. Turns out that TWO of the total three hits were about Carmelo Anthony! This is definitely an interesting kind of data to know about your internet presence, and something that is really hard to find out. Any data analysis company can figure out where you stand in searches that make sense, and you want to be showing up in. But I think there is a market opportunity for a business to get into SEO on this sort of thing - highly negative, but unlikely searches for which you are the primary result.

Up until last night, I was a tortured man. There are so many things that I want to buy, and only a limited amount of money I have to spend on those things.

Wanna see something with absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever? Something that will not only suck all the fun out of your night, but will actually reduce the amount of fun you had in nights past?

I hadn't looked at icanhascheezburger.com in a while, and found this. For some reason I thought it was the funniest one ever.

I recently just went through a drama that started with me trying to upgrade my Networked Attached Server from having 1 harddrive to having 3, and ended with me throwing out the computer.

But you can't just throw out computers, because they end up in Chinese rivers, or being broken down by 8 year old Korean children who then grow up with solder scars and odd genetic defects. So you have to recycle them. But then only recycling program I know of is the one in Union Square twice a year. Do I have to wait for that?

The answer is yes and no. Yes, I should wait for it. But no, I don't have to wait at all. It's tomorrow!

So huge!

How embarrassing is this? My wife gets herself a tumblog, and in the first two days has put up more posts than I've put up this entire fiscal quarter. Such a disaster.

I'm actually really psyched about it. She makes me laugh all the time, but I don't get nearly enough of the laughing when I'm at work. With any luck, soon she'll be shirking her work responsibilities to blog about the most recent icanhascheezburger pictures, and I will use this as a focal point for my shirking workly duties.

Also, since she'll be following her tumblog dashboard, she will be able to keep up with Arin, Ben, Jeremy, and Joshy, and will therefore know what I'm talking about when I refer to chicken shit punch, or Joshy's basketbear.

Also, how am I supposed to deal with multiple blogs? Have this one for long form, and the tumblog for linking videos of Filipino prisoners rehearsing Thriller?

I just watched Arrested Development for the first time last night. Funny stuff! Ally and I watched it on Hulu.com, which is the combined NBC/Fox effort to keep people from bittorrenting their content or posting it to youtube.

The quality is fairly good (good enough for a laptop screen, not good enough for a projector), and we haven't had many technical problems (during one episode, the video froze and we had to restart, but we could jump right to the point where it broke).

Of course, the problem is that they intersperse commercials - there's two or three commercial breaks (each of which has a single commercial) in a 22 minute episode. Not bad by TV standards, but by the standards of my modern life? Holy crap, I had completely forgotten how horrible commercials are. What a waste of my time.

In any case, hulu is worth checking out. They've got a bunch of good movies (Lebowski, The Jerk) for viewing, and three complete seasons of Arrested Development. I gues I'll watch it there, until my bittorrent completes until I buy the DVDs.

I don't know if I've written about this before. I've definitely discussed it with Ally. I think maybe I didn't write about it because it's another story about my experiences in the bathroom. But since I last rejected the idea of posting it, we've had a US Senator have significantly more public and inappropriate bathroom stories blogged about him, and also an internet phenom involving two girls and some number of cups which also took some things out of the bathroom that should have stayed there. So really I'm not going to be pushing any boundaries here.

It's not too inappropriate anyway - it's more of a social awkwardness thing. My mind tends to wander a lot when I'm not performing a task that requires real attention. My body just kind of runs on automatic for a bit, until I have to have my head involved in decision making again. This is a good thing, and allows me to fill my time on the walks from my desk to the bathroom with visions of sugar plums, or whatever it is I think of. It's usually not a problem to be brought back to a task that requires some action on my part, since most of the interactions we have start out pretty slow, and don't require attention strait off. "Hey Ken!" "Oh, hi - how's it going, man?" That's a couple of seconds that are totally scripted, and my lips can just do right off of muscle memory.

The problem comes around when I actually get into the bathroom and head to a urinal, without having my head request conscious control of my actions. My body if very capable of sidling up to the urinal, getting my pants sorted out, and whatnot. Generally speaking, it's usually a few seconds before this point that my head gets involved again, so all is alright. However, every once in a while, my brain lags on that request, and I actually become fully aware of my physical state before I get a full appreciation of my surroundings. My muscle memory was doing the right thing, but I start my comprehension of what's going on in the wrong order.

At which point, I briefly panic. Because I realize that I'm standing in a room, inappropriately exposed, possibly with some dude standing next to me. And until my brain catches up with the rest of the situation (. . . and I got into this state because I walked into a bathroom and up to a urinal and this is a completely alright situation to be in), I'm completely freaked out that I've just done something fairly outrageous that will definitely get me fired, and possibly have an entire thread devoted to me on thevault.com.

Doesn't happen that often, but when it does it's really worrisome.