Nero

I just bought the newest version of Nero from Best Buy. As with a lot of software that comes out these days, it seems to be a bit bloated with unnecessary features, and it (of course) wants to take over nearly every file type imaginable. Really, I just want decent software for burning CDs and DVDs. I don’t need ANOTHER music player or photo organizer! On the plus side, it does come with a nice video player that does a decent job of playing DVDs. (My DVD drive didn’t come with decent DVD software, strangely enough.)

New computer guts

I went ahead and ordered a bunch of new parts for my computer from Newegg today. I’m getting a new motherboard, processor, video card, DVD burner, power supply, memory, and hard drive. Hopefully, good enough to hold me for the next three years. (The last time I did this was in late 2002.) I should be OK for Vista, too, whenever that comes out. (I checked the compatibility list for video cards, and I’ve got one that should work with all the new fancy Vista graphics stuff.) Let’s hope all the parts play well with each other, and I don’t break anything trying to put it all together.

weird things

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 It’s exactly the same executable I use on my work machine, so the problem has to stem from some outdated DLL somewhere that it’s referencing.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!