Category: software

There are still some weird things going on with my desktop computer, but it’s mostly good now. I may let it do a full backup tomorrow, while I sit in front of the TV and play Final Fantasy VII. (I really need to finish that game.)

For years I’ve been using a desktop sticky note program called Stickies, by Steven De Toni. It’s freeware, and it’s always worked fine, doing exactly what I want it to do. Unfortunately, after the last reformat/reinstall on my desktop machine, it started acting weird. When I was typing a note, the cursor would always jump back to the beginning of the line every time I pressed the space bar. Sometimes, it would jump back to the end, and sometimes it wouldn’t. Urk. I investigated quite a few possibilities, but couldn’t figure out what was wrong. It’s exactly the same executable I use on my work machine, so the problem has to stem from some outdated DLL somewhere that it’s referencing. If only I had an easy way of figuring out which DLL it was.

I eventually gave up and decided to find a new sticky note program. Maybe I’m just really picky, but I must have tried out 20 programs without finding even one I liked enough to keep. I think I’ve settled on Magic Notes. It’s shareware, so it’ll cost me $15, but that’s pretty reasonable. In some ways, it’s still not as good as Stickies, (for instance, you can’t bring one note to the foreground without bringing them all to the foreground) but it’s OK. So, on with my life!

Lots of stuff has been going on with my desktop computer over the last week. To make a long story short, I would up reformatting the drive, reinstalling XP, and reinstalling all my applications. Lots of work, but the thing’s mostly better now. I still can’t run chkdsk/f or Norton Disk Doctor without hosing things up, but I guess I can deal with that for a while.

I did a lot of pointless screwing around with the computers today. Drive defragging, virus scanning, software updating, that kind of thing. It’s relaxing.