(no subject)

ok... at work, I'm too busy to LJ, and at home, I'm too mired in my computer's weirdness, or in Second Life, to post anything. So I'll ask some more technical advice.

Not that I'm helpless, of course. I managed to track down the remedy for a really obscure problem my video card was having -- I had to dick around in the BIOS to fix it. But, alas, some things are still going weird, and I'd like to take care of them now before I have too many programs installed to isolate the blame.

First of all, when I select "log off" or "shut down" in Win2k, it doesn't do anything. It just dumps me right back on the desktop, and doesn't even try to close any programs. I can't find anything on the MS knowledge base about this specific problem, though there are plenty of articles about what to do if it crashes. Does anyone know what might be causing this? It only seems to happen when I'm logged on as Administrator.

Second of all, how do I get a new install of Mozilla to use all the data from my old install of Mosilla? I backed up my C:\Windows\Application Data folder, but Windows 2000 doesn't seem to have an analogue. I'd hate to lose all my archived mail, so how do I import all that stuff back in?

And, finally, when I decide I want rid of Windows 98, is there a way to uninstall it without touching the Windows 2000 installation?

Things that reming me of Fight Club.

I watched "I'm with Busey" recently, specifically the "Fear" episode, and it strikes me as the reality-show version of Fight Club, in which a timid pushover admires a crazy alpha male who doesn't give a fuck. The pushover dismisses the alpha's lunacy, or perhaps mistakes it for the machismo he seeks, and becomes his apprentice.

Throughout the episode, rugged actor Gary Busey tries to cure his apprentice, Adam de la Peña, of his irrational levels of fear, through a series of nonsensical exercises in which Adam completely fails to refrain from panicking. In the climactic final act of this episode, Busey takes the timid host, to a demolition derby, and they both get a car. And Adam's car gets the shit beaten out of it. And afterwards, Adam is just livid, and comes out flailing at Busey. He thinks it's fear, but it's really anger, from what I could perceive. And Busey fails to get the point across that he survived, and hence had nothing to worry about in the first place.

Just the week before, I'd seen an episode of Conquest, in which host and rugged British actor Peter Woodward learns how to win at Demolition Derby, and found out that these cars are not only rigged to be very safe for the driver, but can often be salvaged for future competitions. I don't know whether that bit of knowledge would have helped Adam out, or whether Busey would have found that knowledge to defeat his purpose.

On a lighter note, the entire film "Adaptation seems to be lashing out against Fight Club, through the attitudes of the screenwriters. In it, Nicolas Cage's Charles Kaufman criticizes his brother's screenplay in which we find out, at the end of the script, that the policeman, the serial killer, and the girl he's kidnapped are actually all the same person. The screenplay writing seminar rails against writers who rely too much on voice-overs to convey the thoughts of the characters, though up to that sentence there's been voice-overs throughout the whole movie. They stop immediately, because Kaufman is so distraught that he takes that advice to heart immediately. That sentence makes slightly more sense if you've seen the movie.

(no subject)

"It's too hot," I thought to myself, "so I'll wait until after dark and then go out for groceries."

And now, rain and thunder and lightning.

Maybe I'll just have them delivered from Basha's tomorrow or something. I haven't had groceries delivered since I moved out of my parents' house, and if there were ever a time to do it, it would be in the middle of July.