self flagellation

so i muckered up my laptop, and there’s no one to blame but myself. what happened was that my subscription for my copies of norton personal firewall and norton systemworks (including antivirus) had run out, which means that i was no longer getting virus definition updates. bad idea. it turns out renewing the subscription for both was only like $25, which is not unreasonable. however, i also figured out that i could upgrade to the 2004 version of norton internet security, which was firewall *and* antivirus, for only $30, which would give me the new version of both products, and new features like spam blocking, etc. never mind that i already had a relatively effective (and free) spam blocker running. so i threw down, and upgraded. and that’s when all hell broke loose. the install kept hanging, i tweaked it through, it didn’t work, i uninstalled some things, i mucked about some other things to get it to work, and then for a while nothing norton-related was working. finally, to date internet access (firewall and antivirus) is working, but now none of the other systemworks stuff works (protected recycle bin, speed disk, etc.). and the spam blocker doesn’t work. and the ad blocker no longer works. the problem is that i know a little too much about all this stuff, so i end up trying high difficulty exercises, and sometime end up messing things up beyond what normal people would be able to do. this is the down side of being a tinkerer.

on the other hand, it’s interesting to see ads again on webpages after a couple of years without them. not necessarily better, but still interesting…