neurological dryer lint

so we had our ASP.Net exam yesterday. i sincerely hope i got a 100% on it, because i worked pretty long making the two problems we had to do work correctly. basically i beat them like they owed me money.

renee and i were gonna watch samurai last night but she had too much work to do. i think the reason i liked it so much (rereading the entry i wrote right after seeing it) was looking at algren, someone hopeless and lost and tormented and wanting to escape from the evil things he'd been a part of, and seeing his life take a new direction, watching things change. there are parts of that resonate with me. there are certain elements of me you understand better after watching that movie. must be why i hype it so much to so many people.

anyway. i put in her air conditioner and sealed the window, and then did a little wireless maintenance, finally adding WEP to her access point so the kids around her would stop leeching their connection. i noticed a few things:

- OSX is the least intuitive thing i've ever used. i'm sorry but the interface hasn't gotten less annoying since system 7.5. emily (one of renee's roommates) has a G4 powerbook that was running fairly sluggishly while i was trying to dig through the useless interface to find where to put in the frickin WEP key for her wireless connection... it clearly wasn't where you would expect (in the wireless settings). their 'simplified to make life easier' fisher-price playskool interface made it impossible to know what to put in for the WEP key. the box is labeled 'password'. so do i put in the ASCII key? the 26-character hex key? oh wait, neither of them work? i'm gonna THROW YOU ACROSS THE ROOM. and the 'help' (or the 'assist me with this item' wizard) were both useless.
- windows isn't much better. granted, on my laptop and renee's, adding the wep key was easy. but meagan's box, well, i opened up Network Connections, and NOTHING was listed. there was an ethernet card and a USB wireless adapter installed. when windows gets jacked up, it gets REALLY jacked up, you feel like you're on drugs trying to figure out how to fix the random problems it dreams up. thank God for google groups. :) so after some manual registering of DLL's i got hers working.

and honestly, setting up wireless on Fedora Linux Core1 was a pain, too. truth is, there is no perfect desktop platform.

well. there was one.