Life's Irritations

It is one of those mornings. The rain continues. Frisco is getting much more rain than Beaumont. It is time for it to end.

 

My Norton anti-virus software started to hound me to renew. I made a mistake by not paying Sony for a two years subscription for $70. I paid up this morning. It cost $54.11 for one year. At least I did not have to install any more software on the pc. The troll collected the toll and hopefully I will be not be bothered until next year. What is peculiar is all of sudden all the cookies seem to have disappeared from my computer. None of the standard sites such as gmail, Yahoo, Amazon, Pricegrabber nor Travelocity remember me. I have been fumbling for user names and passwords. Did Norton do this to me?

 

I tried to make an online purchase from Lowes to pickup at the closest store. I attempted the checkout process 3 times and got close to the part where I enter the credit card information and kept getting an error message that said the page I was requesting did not exist. This was the first and last time I try to place an online order with Lowes. This happened before I renewed Norton so I can't blame this on them. Earlier I renewed my Sam's Club membership without difficulty. I wonder if anyone else has their hand out that I have overlooked.

 

My computer survived the Microsoft monthly updates. Six updates were installed. I do not have a clue as to what they were supposed to fix. I have not read anything about more security holes in Vista so I hope these updates fixed some of the bugs that have been plaguing me. I have that hope everytime updates are installed. I have had no problems since the latest updates were installed, but that does not prove anything. Sometimes this computer goes for days with perfect behavior and then for no reason it has a problem.

 

The one bright spot is my new printer. I figured out how to print an envelope using Microsoft Word 2007. It is actually easier to feed an envelope into the new printer than it was with the old one. The only problem was I could not find the place to enable the printing of the postal barcode that I used in Word 2002. I searched the Word help. Microsoft says they have omitted that feature because periodically the post office changes their programs and they cannot keep Word updated. I sent a test fax to a friend from the pc over the network to the new printer. It worked without problem I set the printer up so it will not answer the phone. A fax has to be received manually. The problem was the manual does not tell how to manually receive a fax. The printer has an unbelievable number of buttons. I could not find one labeled receive. I finally searched the reference manual that is supplied on disk. This manual said press the start button when the phone rings. The start button is the biggest button on the printer. It is so simple. Why did they have to bury this information? Am I just stupid?