July 4, 2003

Microsoft is still trying to get people to use the Microsoft Reader to read books. I don't really understand why they think that people want a reader that forces you to treat reading on a computer like reading a physical book. I don't want page numbers, they don't really mean anything to me when a book is just a continuous stream of text, yet the Microsoft Reader presents a book as a series of pages. You can't just smoothly scroll through the book. Personally I prefer reading in Notepad. I downloaded quite a few large texts (like the Lord of the Rings) and read them in Notepad - and I enjoyed that more than reading in Reader. I got to pick my own font, pick my own window size, and actually delete text that I'd already read so the next time I wanted to continue reading, I could just double-click on the .txt file and I was ready to read. I bought a number of books for the Microsoft Reader when it came out. I paid more for them than for the physical paperback versions, and I can't lend them to my friends. Part of having a nice library of books, or music, or movies is being able to lend them to your friends. Until digital rights management figures that out, I'll stick with the traditional distribution mediums. 3:39:01 PM    comment []

I'm having a problem with my work system. This is a something that has happened to me from time to time, and every time, it's a pain. A process, in this case dfrgntfs.exe, is consuming 100% of the CPU on my system, and there's nothing I can do to stop it. Trying to end the process doesn't work (no error is given, the process just doesn't end), and trying to change it's priority to something lower so I can get on with my work gives me "Access is denied.". Why am I, the Administrator, denied the right to change the priority of a process running amok on my own system? It's this sort of loss of control that makes people consider switching OS's. I've never had a process on a Unix box that I couldn't kill. So now what? If I reboot, this process will come back (I've done this already). I can't find any useful mention of it in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, nor on Google. Hmm. 3:25:56 PM    comment []

To do list: Figure out how to get access to pictures sent from MMS phones. Is there a standard for this or does every wireless carrier have their own way for their subscribers to get their photos off their cameras? 8:34:44 AM    comment []