Save the Intern |

Did anyone watch Michael Phelps and the rest of the Olympic swimming team last night handle their business? USA is on a tear in the Olympics and now have more medals than any other country.

But the one that excites me the most of course is the Men’s soccer team having a chance to advance from a round where nobody thought they had a chance. And what a BS call against Stuart Holden in injury time to let Holland get the equalizer on Sunday, I was screaming at my television at 7am waking up the neighbors. Dissapointing since we could have advanced with the win.

So now we need to get at least a tie against Nigeria and we will be without Freddy Adu (who was on FIRE againt Holland) and Michael Bradley (who has been dissapointing dating back to the friendlies against Spain, England, and Argentina… he seems to be a standout in the dutch league because the pace of play is slower, not so sure he’s ready for the EPL). So here is the formation I think Nowak will field:

—————Guzan———-

–Wynne—–Parkhurst–Edu——–Orozco

Rogers—Klejstan—-Holden—–Szetela–

———-Altidore—Mchead———-

Hopefully Mcbride can step his game up and Altidore can show what he’s amde of as well. Jozy might not be 100% but sometimes you have to suck it up. Orozco has been dissapointing as of late and Wynne has completely outplayed him on the other side. I am hoping for a big game from him, he played well in qualifyers and is capable of a lot more.

I am also really looking forward to lunch with the Microsoft folks later this week. Hopefully I’ll have enough energy after waking up at the buttcrack of dawn tomorrow morning to see our boys advance to the next round. USA!!

So this is kind of crazy. I don’t know if you guys have been following the comments over on my post here but a couple people from Microsoft have contacted me because of this blog! Apparently they’ve been following my posts about my tech troubles at work and through their commenting have offered some helpful solutions. In particular like their free online training site which includes training videos. Pretty helpful stuff. I really didn’t expect Microsoft of all companies to reach out like that. I guess they figure it’d be good PR for them or something. But, what I REALLY didn’t expect was their offer to take my buddy Josh and I out to lunch and give us a private tour of their office in Irvine! Kinda badass right? Needless to say I’m pretty excited about it.

The first guy that contact me (Edwin) left a bunch of info about online training resources for MS products and the other guy (Sam) reached out and asked us to come visit him at their Irvine offices. Which works out well since Josh and I are in LA. We’re going to go over there at around noon next Thursday. Initially wanted to do it on Friday but I guess Sam surfs and reserves Fridays for sessions at Salt Creek in Dana Point. He said that if we wanted to we could join him which I thought was really nice of him to offer.

Anyway, should be an interesting trip and hopefully bring some resolution to my tech problems at work. Maybe this could lead to a real job!

Is it Friday yet? Seriously. I am already sick of this job, why couldn’t I have gotten an internship somewhere cool where I could be outside all day instead of in front of a stupid PC?

Okay so I’ve been reading a lot about how people hate the DRM setup in Vista. I would love to agree but… what the heck does it mean??

Some people are saying they can’t play videos they payed for on Netflix, can’t record American Gladiators, and can’t play their video games fast enough.

I went to Wikipedia to try to find out more and my head is still spinning.

Apparently, for most media types in Vista you have to own the rights to play them. I guess this is a good thing? I guess it’s good if DRM limits piracy (not really actually, if I can’t burn my copy of the Kim Kardashian video(s) so I can watch them on my flatscreen! BASTARDS!), but if this is why Vista runs so slow at work and my boss is always bitching about not getting work done on time then can I just get rid of it?

What an awesome weekend. Met up with some friends who I haven’t seen in forever, took a lot of shots, went to a cool show on Sunday and, as predicted, spent almost my entire two weeks pay in 2 days. Oh well, looks like I’ll be eating PBJ until next Friday.

I did decide to come in early this morning and try to tackle all of the issues I’m having with Vista so I can try to be more productive. I think I was able to figure out one of the big ones. Know those stupid “Windows needs your permission to continue” popup windows that come up every time you want to do something? Right after that scary 2 second black screen that makes you think the computer crashed all of a sudden? Like this one:

Apparently this is called User Account Control. It’s new in Vista. So now that I’ve finally figured out what it is, how do I turn it off??

Okay so it’s pretty obvious that I’m new to this whole Vista thing (I miss and used to LOVE XP). I’m trying to get this project done and I’m spending more time looking through folders trying to find files that I saved than I am doing the actual work. Is it really necessary to have a “Downloads”, “Documents”, “Pictures”, and all of these other folders? Why not just a “My Documents” like previous Windows versions?? Stupid lack of Windows orginizational skills, I feel like I’m trying to arrange my dorm room.

You would think it would just be easy for me to tell my boss that this PC is a hunk of crap and I would like to downgrade to XP, but then he’ll probably find out that I’ve been looking at pictures of that hot pole vaulter from Cal every fifteen minutes and fire me. Allison Stokke.

In other news, I better not get too hungover for the Gnarls Barkley, Youssou N’Dour, and Deerhoof at Hollywood Bowl on Sunday. Who remembers this Cee-Lo video before he and Danger Mouse? He’s on some other ish.

I came in to start my PC, and as SOON as Vista started I got this (this isn’t the actual screenshot but it’s the same error message I got):

and I had to restart.

I ended up doing nothing yesterday but play on Youtube all day and read up on West Ham to get ready for tonight’s All-Star game, and now my boss needs that Excel spreadsheet by end of business today. Hopefully this POS PC decides to cooperate with me and I can actually focus on my work for a few hours, I dont want my boss screaming at me first thing on a Friday morning.

Does anybody know any free programs I can install to see if there is something slowing up and causing problems with my PC? A friend of mine mentioned something about spyware?

So this morning when I came in and my boss had another awesome task for me to spend 8 hours on. I basically sit here and copy and paste a buttload of data from a word document to an excel spreadhseet. But then, of course, after spending 30 minutes on it… I go up to click save to make sure I don’t lose any information in case my PC locks up (which has happened about 4 times this week), and I can’t even click anything on the top toolbar. Then, I can’t even click on the Windows icon on the bottom of the screen to restart.

I didn’t know what to do and didn’t want my boss thinking I’m an idiot so I had to power off the PC and power it back on, and pretty much start all over. Of course the files didn’t show up in the auto-recovery option so, a half an hour of work down the drain. Luckily this will only take me about 3 hours to complete, then I dick around on Facebook and Youtube all day.

I’m sitting at work and I have had to reboot my computer three times already. It’s bad enough I came in hungover, now I have to keep dealing with this stupid POS OS. I brought my iPod in the other day and plugged it into my work computer, not only did it takes 10 minutes to get the driver info, but now it looks for the drivers every time I plug it in.

Anyways, I decided to look for other people who are having problems with Vista, and found this really funny video. It made my Friday so I thought I’d share it. It’s Hitler raising hell about the flaws with Vista and how he couldn’t install his printer drivers and the new version of Office, hilarious.

People have been giving Microsoft crap for years. It’s easy to pick on the big guy. But, you know what? We have a lot to thank Mr. Gates and his company for. We just don’t, because we assume this shit has been here forever. For example: The Two Button Mouse. Right-click for choices, Left-click for action. Sweet. And, do you enjoy the scroll wheel? Because I do! I try using Mac’s mouses and it’s the fucking worst! Perhaps, most important of all, we can thank Microsoft for the reason why tech has gone as far as it has: a computer on every desk. This idea was birthed from Microsoft and it is why I can sit here on my couch with my box of cheez-its and write this garbage. So, next time you go and bash things like Vista and that ridiculous paper clip in Word, remember all the good the Microsoft Corporation has done for you.