Pictures

Was it here that I mentioned my fascination with photos of abandoned places? In any case, let's pretend that it was, and I am following up on that meme with another link.

Modern Ruins was the first link I discovered in this genre, and I believed it was gone until I stumbled into it again this afternoon via a link from GoodShit. That I spotted it among the parade of undressed young women attests to the fact that my brain and eyes are not yet totally ruined.

Christ almighty, can the fucking cursor stay in the edit box long enough for me to type one goddamned sentence?

I had to switch back to windows, because the sound drivers in linux didn't allow the microphone to work on my laptop, and Sweety-pie disliked the Chinese input system it had (I didn't mind it, but I could list all the Chinese I know on one page, and still have enough space for the source code to said input module). So, I archived everything onto DVD-RWs, found the restore discs (that I made myself because Sony can't afford to pack them in with the $2500 computer), and spent all. damn. day. feeding the same two discs in...and swapping to disc 2...and swapping back to disc one. The progress box would show one program that I didn't want being installed, then we switched the discs, and one program I dreaded trying to uninstall would be put on, etc. I swapped the damn things at least eight times, then spent three hours uninstalling shitware, and rebooting after every. single. action. Then, something made all those little icons next to the clock go away. I tried searching for some good way to fix that, but I still don't know the proper term for them, and all the search results were to pages that said to restore from a previous backup. So, I got the DVDs back out, and started the restore procedure. Did I mention yet that it's Summer? I mean, hot enough to melt the flesh off one's upper body? I went in the other room for a cold drink and to spray myself with water, and when I came back, the machine was just asking for the first swap. I removed Disc 1, and noticed that all the stuff appeared as it should on the desktop. The menu bar also looked correct. So I clicked "cancel" on the box that requested the other disc. I clicked that about 37 times, noticing that it did change what it was asking for each time. Finally, it told me I was done. The machine rebooted, and I had essentially a clean install of XP. No free trial anything. No fucking symantec buggerware. I looked at every directory, turning on the "show hidden files" and "show system files" to make sure they weren't hiding backups of the "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy" games someplace.

Of course, now I don't want to install anything. It's like that first snowfall that covers everything. It feels wrong to make the first set of footprints, especially if the ground beneath is as-yet-unfrozen mud. But if the mud isn't frozen, the snow will melt and turn to filthy slush, and so I went ahead and loaded the anti-virus and firewall and other accommodate-the-weakness programs. Even on the way to work in the sewers, you might glimpse a beautiful sunrise.