For the record, this is definately the most unfocused post ever, but I have a lot on my mind:

Topic #1: Employment – Thursday, I went to get a data entry job at this little shop in town. I filled out about 5 different forms, waited for 20 minutes for the guy to come back, and then left after being told that it was lunchtime. So, for an hour, I sat in the local Dairy Queen and enjoyed a double cheeseburger and a HUGE cone. (I hadn’t had any of that soft serve in several years. Good stuff!) After my hour of waiting, I head back to take the typing test portion of the job interview, and just as I was warming up, some dummy knocked over a power pole near the building. After some smoke and flame, the power goes out. I was instructed to come back Tuesday. So much for getting a job in a timely fashion.

Topic #2: Formatting – I formatted my Dell rig for the first time since I got it. I have done this so many times in the last 8 years that I have it down to a science. It had been over a year since I have done the procedure to one of my own machines. I had this one up and going at full speed in about 6 hours (which would have been about 2.5 hours had it not been for dial-up Internet access). I’m certainly glad to have 2 hard drives. I used to have to do all my backup on a parallel port Zip Drive…I didn’t lose one piece of important data and it only took about an hour to transfer all my keepables (including tons of video and MP3s). I decided to go with a crazy partitioning schemes that involves setting up different partitions for different stuff. It makes defragging so much faster and more efficient. My roomate set his rig up like this awhile back and it does prove handy if you need to wipe the OS clean.

Topic #3: The Wonders of NOD32 – Since my Norton anti-virus subscription is about to run out anyway, I decided to forego Norton with this clean Windows install and instead opted for NOD32 Anti-Virus. Norton is notorious for slowing down a system: One benchmark indicated a 10% performance hit, and I know from personal experience that the memory footprint is about 30 megs or so. NOD32 has, for years, been considered the best performing anti-virus program; however, it has also been regarded as not very user friendly and complicated. Maybe it’s because I’m a CIS guy, but I found nothing to be further from the truth. It updates fast and there’s nothing confusing about it. The NOD32 Control Center controls 3 or 4 modules that control different aspects of virus detection. Modular is a very smart design if you ask me. Anyway, my system is hammering and very responsive. I believe part of this is due to NOD32. I highly recommend it. By the way, it has already caught 3 email viruses for me, so I know it works.

Topic #4: Win32 Programming – Today, I started fooling around with Win32 programming in C++ again. Data structures has really helped me, because I think it’s not so scary now. If the summer doesn’t get too hectic, I’m going to finish that journaling program I’ve been threatening to write for the better part of 2 years.

Topic #5: Website Fun – I’ll probably have the control center to my website finished by the weekend. I haven’t had this much fun programming in a long time. My readers (all 2 of you) won’t notice much of a difference in the site, but administering it will be a blast for moi…I sometimes forget how much I love this computer crap even though I decided to teach.