Tuesday, August 01, 2006

I'm Back

...and really tired. I mean I'm sleepy, it's not that my arms are sore or anything, although it was a long flight.

I don't know what everyone has been complaining about; the weather seems warm enough. Man, those crybabies in July sure whined, apparently about nothing.
Kwand..(I'm shortening our names to K... for now- you can pronounce the 'k' or not as you like): Kwife was very happy and excited to see KAlex but he didn't really seem to recognize her. He was willing to be picked up by her but didn't spend much time looking at her.

We took advantage of the weather this morning. After walking KwandongWife to the bus stop for work, KwandongAlex and I went to the beach. The water was clear and refreshingly cool. The little guy took a few moments to get used to the water but was happy to stay and play.
Getting him ready to swim and later ready to go home was much less pleasant. It's a real challenge for a single adult to change a baby into and out of diapers and swimsuits and all the rest. One thing I liked in Canada was the availability of diaper changing stations; there's room for improvement here.

In other unpleasant news, my computer decided today to give up on Explorer. Last night, I was able to visit every site but Yahoo. I would sign in to Yahoo, have two seconds to see how many messages I had, then the window closed. This morning, Explorer closed itself immediately after being opened.
Which leads me to a question. I was a computer expert and taught my high school teachers what to do in the old days but not many people used Commodore 64's now and my current knowledge is self-taught with many lacunae. Added to this, my computer has a Korean OS and I never did follow through with learning Korean with the vigor I'd imagined when choosing the OS. The computer has little or no anti-virus protection either. Still, I wonder if one reason for the computer's moodiness is the number of downloads (mostly from reputable sites) and possible conflicts. When you get a new computer, what are the minimum downloads you expect to install? I figure the following, unless these are now part of the package installs:
Flash
Quicktime
Real
Firefox (which I'm currently using but not usually)

Now, my computer has a lot of redundant programs. I-tunes loading with something else but Korea didn't have I-tunes at the time so I picked up I-podder-lemon.
Serif-photo plus is another good download.
I have some codecs and such for converting files.
If you don't understand which ones I felt were necessary - then we are in agreement. Anyway, comments and assistance are welcome.

4 comments:

PAKA said...

Weather...you weren't here for all 26 days of rain during the month of july. anyway, welcome back.

Anonymous said...

Brian,

Hopefully you're some kind of antivirus program? If not, then do yourself a big favor and either buy or download one. In the meantime, download and use the following programs: BHO demon http://www.majorgeeks.com/download3550.html
Also go here: http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads29.html and grab a few of those programs. Some of the antivirus and trojan/adware programs are free.
And, hopefully you're not accessing the internet without using some kind of firewall, either one built into XP, or a router. You wouldn't believe how vulnerable you are without something to protect your computer.
Hope that helps

Anonymous said...

Welcome back, Brian!

I second the Nomad's advice: you really need a serious anti-virus program, and you ought to have a firewall and some kind of anti-spyware program. Many companies will package all three of these into one. The non-free ones can be expensive, but I'd rather have problems caused by an overzealous firewall than ones caused by viruses. You may need to do a clean install on your computer.

kwandongbrian said...

Thanks for the advice.

I know that I am seriously exposed. I use Yahoo's anti-spyware but never set up a firewall - again, I am the primary user of the computer and the OS is Korean so there are challenges. I'll have a look at majorgeeks - thanks.