Status Quo

Second Life is notorious for being flaky. It crashes, stalls, red maps you.

But then I thought about the rest of my computer.

My computer runs Vista and it is a struggle everyday which I think I am losing. It regularly cuts my internet connections for little to no reason other than I put it into hibernate mode, or it's 6 AM in the morning, or maybe because I won the crap lottery. Sometimes it blue screens me and drains my battery in class restarting itself. It takes forever to get going upon start up, even though the largest program I have downloaded so far is Second Life, if you discount Vista itself which is about eight or nine gigs of memory. Sometimes it freezes up. I can only assume that the stress of waking up is just too much for poor little Vista. I wouldn't mind the other stuff but when I can't connect to the internet, it annoys me. Half of the point of a computer is the ability to connect to the web and surf.

I used to use AIM and so I have it downloaded. I loved the old AIM interface and package. It was small, simple, and ran extremely fast. The new one is bloated and full of useless features like the lame wallpaper background. It's permanently in my start-up folder and it perpetually crashes upon loading. It takes ten minutes to log in, and it crashes on occasion. I'd uninstall it but for some reason it keeps coming back. I've resigned myself to never seeing it disappear.

The new Microsoft Office is always hitting me on the .docx and .pptx and whatnot. By the way, what is the deal with that anyway? Is this office some new 'experimental' version? How many new features can you add to a spellchecking word processor? All my friends use XP and so there's always compatiablitiy issues. Even when I convert it to a regular .doc .

Gmail is usually reliable except when it isn't. Is it me or does it stay logged on? Sometimes it borks attaching a document and angry professors, group members, and employers demand to know the joke. Why does it still keep my trash after I've deleted it? Or my spam? Of what significance does Google believe this is to me? Sometimes Gmail IMs get to me and sometimes they go nuts and are sent as regular email. It also stacks my email so I often lose the original message I'm looking for and then I'm forced to use the gmail searcher which is clumsy and often brings up every single message in the inbox anyway.

My school's webmail and WebCT BB Vista are regularly down. The usual excuse is 'too many users online'. What? How do you build a system in a relatively large campus that cannot handle the expected load of users? Especially a service that they must use. Jeez, imagine if electricity cut out due to too many users. Although that happens in Southern California or somewhere. Plus, both systems always trigger the pop-up alerts no matter how many times I shut it off/allow it.

Even blogger stinks. I can't add weblinks, spellcheck, or add photos because I did something. I don't know what. This is the sixth freaking time it has done this and it never ceases to cheese me off.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is, that as often as Second Life is down, that this is kind of the norm from my perspective. Sadly enough.