Lessons learned...

...and not even the hard way.

Well, barely. It all started with a blue screen of death on my home machine.

First lesson learned: "Last Known Good Configuration" works in Windows XP. Or at least it worked this time. That's still better than the "never" I experienced with Windows NT or 2000. I'm sure there are cases where it's still useless, but when I found my home machine booting into a blue screen and "Safe Mode" didn't help, going to "Last Known Good Configuration" got the machine to boot up.

Second lesson learned: The idea that I wouldn't use the "One-touch" features of my new Maxtor One Touch III was bullshit. After I got the machine back running, I set up the Retrospect Express HD to back up my boot drive to the brick. If I blow things up again, I just do a bare install of the OS, reinstall the One Touch disk (for the Retrospect Express HD software) and restore my system from the brick. My boot volume is only about 11gb of data, so it barely puts a dent in my available storage.

I always thought...

...LED marquee belt-buckles were trash-bling. My opinion hasn't changed.

On the other hand, this has to be seen to be believed. It's almost elegant.

Almost.

I wish I had an "Oh! The Horror!" tag...

...but "random junk" will have to do.

I read SomethingAwful every day. Photoshop Phriday exhibits occasional flashes of brilliance. Fashion SWAT is a great whorehouse of bad fashion photos and bad clothes.

The forums I avoid like the plague; the dink factor is just out of hand. We're talking a web forum, though. What do you expect?

The news, though? Today's news article is just horrific. Read it. Read it quickly before all your good taste and sense gets sucked out of your brain, just before your brain gets sucked out of your head.