CULTURE SWAB

What a farking miserable day today was. For one thing, it snowed last night. SNOWED. And then today was rainy and windy and sleety and just out-and-out disgusting. Which wouldn't have been so terrible, as I could have used a nice day cooped up in the house, maybe reading, maybe writing...

...except then the power went out.

At some point, either the wind directly or a tree blown by the wind knocked down a power line, which I wouldn't think was a big deal.

I'd be wrong.

That one power line going down knocked out power at least all the way from Baldwin to Hudson, which is 19 miles. Everything roughly north of Interstate 94 lost power. For hours.

Now, call me crazy, but this doesn't sound to me like intelligent engineering. Do you mean to tell me that one power line keeps us all in electricity? What if it had been thirty degrees below zero when it happened? We would have frozen to death. Even today , in the thirties, it was downright cold in the house.

Plus, I learned that the emergency generator for Baldwin Hospital didn't work, so the life support had to be powered by a firetruck.

*blink*

Which brings me to Windows Vista.

Vista is nice-looking. I mean it. As an inveterate Windows user (with the usual underlying Mac-envy), I'm quite pleased with the many changes Vista makes over XP. But then again, Vista has truly and thoroughly pissed me off.

It's the Windows Updates.

OK. So they come up with repairs and patches and updates like every. single. day. Which automatically start downloading whenever you go online, which is sort of a pain in the ass on occasion, because if you're on a slow wi-fi signal, suddenly Windows is hogging all your bandwidth. Painful, true. But what really knocks is that you can't STOP downloading updates, and resume when you want to (as you could do with XP).

But that's just a minor bit of an issue.

The problem comes in shutting down. YOU CANNOT SHUT DOWN UNTIL THE UPDATES HAVE INSTALLED.

Now this really pisses me off.

Sometimes I go a few days without going online. So when I'm suddenly forced to download and install ten different updates, I'm looking at an extra fifteen minutes of waiting for the computer to shut down... but I don't know it until I start the shutdown. And if I gotta be somewhere in ten minutes? Guess who's gonna be late?

Look, Microsoft. I know you're a shitfuck company. I know you don't give two craps in the wind for your users. But what the miserly hell is this?

All of which prompted me to do a quick Google, which led me to the Criticism of Vista Wikipedia entry. Which I am now reading with care....

[EDIT] Apparently I'm not the only one that hates the updates.