It’s been a long week for yours truly and his battle with technology. Since building a new computer, I’ve been gradually installing software as I need it. Earlier this week I wanted to download some photos from our digital camera. To make these images web-ready, I used to use a combination of XP’s Image Resizer and Albert Bertilsson’s Renamer. With a couple right clicks of the mouse, I could batch resize and rename an entire directory of digital photos.
I can’t get the Renamer freeware to work like I once had. The instructions (which I’m sure are for Windows 98/2000/NT) tell you to:
- Select “folder options” in explorer.
- Select “File types”.
- Find the type “File folder” in the list, and select it.
- Select “Edit”.
- Select “New”, to edit add a new action.
- Name the action “Renamer”, and select Renamer as application.
- If you rightclick a drawer, a “Renamer” option will appear,
selecting it will start Renamer with that directory.
Doing this in XP will make the search utility open when a folder is double-clicked. Very frustrating. I explained my frustration to Elise and told her that this is why I want an iBook – for iLife (as well as overall OS stability). I figured she’d empathize because she’s the photographer of the family and photos are, well, very important – especially in their digital format and should be handled very carefully with computers made by Apple.
Then comes the hacking. Janicek.com was hacked early this morning. Damn script kiddies. HartzVictims.org has been hacked twice in two weeks. Damn damn script kiddies.
Then there’s my recent online banking experience. I “forgot” to pay our Jeep payment last month. Well, I remembered somewhere around April 17th. The payment is due on the 1st. To make sure that that didn’t happen again, I scheduled an automatic payment using UFCU’s BillPay. I “forgot” that I implemented this time and energy saving system so I also manually sent our Jeep payment this month as well. I sent two Jeep payments in May. Since I’ve only been paying our bills online for a couple months, I watch my payment history very closely. I’m lucky I do this because both instances of the Jeep payment had, what they call in the banking industry, “errors”. I called our credit union this morning to get things squared away. I’m still not sure what’s going on. I called our credit union in Temple (Jeep lien holder) and told them that their money was on its way. Somehow.
We were also to become part of the elite, prestigious, pinkies-up, high-nosed Advantage-Plus Checking members at our bank. Again, this was an oversight, or an “error”, and we were still in the peasant-like e-Checking bracket. Because this change hadn’t been made in our wear-on-our-sleeve banking status, we were charged $4.95 for what would otherwise be free BillPay services provided for Advantage-Plus Checking members. The horror. I got our $4.95 back.
The Big Kahuna of annoyances. The Mother of Reasons to Put a Fist through your Monitor. Omegasearch. My browser was hijacked by
Omegasearch. That sucked. My homepage was changed, a nifty search bar was added to Internet Explorer, I got loads of new bookmarks as well as a huge banner added to the bottom of my browser window. If your browser is ever hijacked by Omegasearch, go here, download Hijack This, run the utility and post your log file here. Dexter will help.
But wait, that’s not all. My Outlook at work is hosed. I have two messages in my outbox that appear to not be sent, but they’ve sent. They’ve sent a lot. Like 19 times they’ve been sent. This is, of course, after Outlook refuses to open or when it does, it hangs for 10 minutes. This happens once a month. I’ve embraced it.
I love computers.