J'ever had one of those days?

I sat at the computer this afternoon with an idea of posting some post-seventy blues. I have felt crappy all week and, as a result, have had multiple Doctor visits, some so gross that I can't discuss them on the blog. Just when I was settling into a reasonable feel sorry for myself state, I got a notice, down in the right hand corner of the computer, that McAfee was about to install an update, did I want to get out of all the stuff I was doing, and let her rip, or did I want to do something stupid. I did something stupid, I let her rip. It took a surprising amount time to download it, so the dear wife and I offed to see the matinee of Pirates of the Caribbean, which was rather funny even if I did get tired of Davy Jones and his locked box.

When the movie was over and I came home to find that McAfee wanted me to shut down the computer and reboot, so that all the good stuff they had done would become effective. I did so, and again was treated to a surprisingly long installation (followed by an installation that I wasn't prepared for of Adobe 7.0 or 7.5 or something.)

When it was over, I found a little green button in the upper left corner of the screen called McAfee site advisor (with some of the stuff that I had put on that toolbar having disappeared.)

"Oh," says I, "I wonder what kind of advise I will get?" What I found was that the speed of my computer was cut by one third, and going through my regular blogs was virtually impossible. Some times on a blog itself and always on the comment section as it arose the computer gave a loud BOINK, and I began to aquire pages of McAfee site advisor pages. (At one time, fourteen of the darn things). As I shrunk, minimized or signed out of the pages, new ones would crop up to plague me. I finally found that the only way to get rid of the blarsted things was to control/ALT/Delete the whole thing (I have 2000 Professional on my main computer so I can do that. I am not sure what I would have done on the computers that have XP and don't recognize Control/Alt/Delete.)

"OH!" says I, I will now go to programs on the Start Menu and uninstall "Site Advisor", but I found that I couldn't seem to do that without uninstalling all of McAfee, and as much as I shlepp around on the web, that's not a good Idea.

Anyway, I have figured out how to read your blogs, but it won't let me into the comment pages for awhile (at least) so don't expect any witty repartee from me.

A fun computer experience was teaching my (almost totally) computer illiterate eldest daughter how to do Email (by long distance telephone). She is the only one of my children who isn't head and shoulders above me on the computer (she went away and got married young and only has access to a friend's computer). I set her up an Email address on my web-page, then, because she's using a borrowed computer and I couldn't set her up on Outlook or a regular mail program (for some reason our attempts at Hotmail went down the tubes) so, by telephone (She lives in Florida) I had to teach her to access her Email by Webmail. It was great fun, took a ridiculous amount of time, and was a learning experience for both of us. (She just got her second grandchild, and wanted to be able to send pictures, so our next lesson will be photgraphic attachments.) Our phone conversation was almost as silly as Pirates of the Caribbean, but not QUITE as long.