Cheshire Cats - David is Fine!

Whew - the procedure went very smoothly and David is fine. It's amazing how something like this makes you reevaluate life.

We sat in the recovery room grinning like Cheshire Cats. It's an oddly beautiful thing to say all those things you know you'll regret if you leave them unspoken, and then have the urgency of loss removed so suddenly.

For the most part, I live pretty comfortably with death. I've lost a lot of friends and family, some very suddenly. Though I grieve those losses deeply, I accept them as a part of life.

All that said - I am very glad "we have some more time" as David put it.

Waiting Room - Cedars Sinai

I'm sitting in the cardiac catheter lab waiting area. They are doing an angioplasty on my friend David. Due to the variety of health issues he has, the Docs have termed this "very risky." They transferred him here from another hospital, as they didn't even want to try the procedure there.

It's been a weird few days. I am struck by how extremely differently folks react to medical situations.... Some with acceptance, others with horror or avoidance.

My favorite was when David asked our most death phobic friend to witness his advance directive /do not recusitate order. Such a kidder, that David!

Roxio Software wins the Golden Cheeseball!

Ok, so it's Roxio, they of the pre-installed, resource hogging, system crashing bloatware.

I have never had a piece of software made by these people that actually worked - or even ran without crashing my system. So why does it come pre-installed on nearly every windows computer in the world?

The most recent Roxio sponsored fiasco came using their "image transfer wizard". I had just gotten back from a trip to Mexico using a friend's borrowed digital camera. I plugged the sucker into my laptop and Roxio's "wizard" popped up, offering to transfer the files for me. I thought - "OK, I'll give it a whirl." One of the options was "delete files from source when done moving" Sounds good - since I'm giving the camera back - I'm sure he'd like to get this card back clean.

The "wizard" began it's work and I noticed it was naming all the files - "ImportedPicture0001.jpg" etc. Let's stop this process and change that to something more descriptive like PuertoVallarta0001.jpg I clicked cancel - and it stopped the import, but it STILL DELETED ALL THE PHOTOS - without moving them!

Wizardly indeed! Roxio's Image Transfer wizard succeeded in erasing 900 megs of my vacation photos in a twinkling of an eye. Not moved to the recycle bin, not in the tmp directory - just GONE! Thanks Roxio!

Who designed this piece of crap?

Not a mention of the problem on Roxio's "support" website.

The good news is that I was able to recover them using ZAR (Zero Assumption Recovery) Software.

I think it is interesting that computer magazine editors and reporters routinely rate Roxio products as "excellent" while in nearly every forum related to Roxio software the users consistently rate the products from "poor" - to "mediocre" to "appallingly bad".

Must be taking a lot of reporters out to lunch, huh?