Goddamn Bill Gates anyway.

I’ve just spent the entire night trying to install Windows 98 on a HP Pentium 4 machine that shipped with Windows 2000 installed.

Think it’d be easy? Oh, no, no, no. See, the Windows 98 installer doesn’t support the P4 chipset directly; you need the Intel chipset drivers for that.

And first, of course, you have to get them on the computer. Which you can’t do–not directly, because the machine ships with a “wipe your hard drive and restore it to factory original state” Restore in Place CD, not a driver and Windows installer CD.

Plus, of course, without the IDE drivers, the machine won’t even see the CD-ROM drive.

So:

Put in a second hard drive. Boot Win2K. Install Win98 on the second hard drive. Go on the Web. Download the chipset, IDE, graphics, LAN, and sound drivers. Swap hard drives. Boot Win98. Remove the BIOS system devices from the device manager. Run the chipset driver installer.

Reboot. Run the IDE driver installer. Reboot. “Windows has detected new hardware. Intel chipset to IO controller bridge. Please locate the driver…”

You already have the goddamn driver!

Reinstall chipset drivers. Reboot. “Windows cannot locate the driver for: Intel Firmware Hub.”

*&%#.

Reinstall chipset drivers. Reboot. Reinstall IDE drivers. Reboot. Install video drivers. Reboot. Install LAN drivers. Reboot. “Windows cannot locate the driver for: Intel real-time clock.”

This is getting goddamn old. Swap hard drives. Reboot Win2k. Start from scratch. Reinstall Win98 on second hard drive. Swap drives. Reboot. Install chipset drivers. Reboot. Install IDE drivers. Reboot. Install video drivers. Reboot. “Windows cannot locate driver for IRQ Steering. Windows has detected a device conflict with DMA controller. Windows has detected a device conflict with Intel PCI-to-PCI bridge controller.”

And so on. And on and on and on…

It amazes me that, as poorly designed as Microsoft software is, people will put up with it. The Office “suite”–a bunch of programs with the same menus, but the same commands are in different places in each program! Bad design. IIS–so buggy and riddled with serious security flaws, you have to budget a full-time employee just to administer it. Bad design.

Yeah, Microsoft products work. But badly, and barely. Apparently, that’s good enough.

“Psychic litter” is a term used to describe an act of immorality so small, it falls below the conscious threshold. As, for example, wasting small amounts of time of a large number of people. As, what Microsoft is doing when it isn’t committing large acts of immorality.

Spent part of the evening last night in the darkroom, making contact sheets of the photo shoot I did Wednesday.

You know, even as jaded as I am, there’s something about the girl-on-girl thing that just gets me where I live. Which puts me, I think, pretty solidly in the majority; I don’t think you can ask for a more typical “guy thing” than that.

Yeah, I know, I hate to be cheesy and cliched, and I am at least a reasonably enlightened guy, but, I mean, damn!

So what is it about the “hot lesbian action” thing, anyway? It’s a cliche that guys are into this sort of thing because…well, we are into this sort of thing. It’s depressing, really; there’s nothing rational about it. It just grabs us by the back part of the brain–the part that knows nothing of reason–and says “Hey! Hot girl on girl action! Gimmee some of that!”

I had a cognitive science professor back in my college days who swore it was biological. Said it crosses all cultural and educational lines, and theorized about how humans are the only primate whose females don’t have an obvious outward sign that they’re sexually receptive, but that guy-on-girl action is more likely to raise a territorial/competitive reaction, whereas girl-on-girl behavior is clear and unambiguous evidence that the females are sexually receptive and there’s no male there to represent a challenge…

I dunno. I think that’s a difficult theory to support.

But still. Damn!

So there I was, in the shower this morning, stretching, trying to wake up and face the day…

…and I discovered a few bruises left over from the weekend’s activities, put there by the other girlfriend while she was flogging me.

Mmmm. Love when that happens.

Not all that much going on today. Last night, I was up late doing a photo shoot with a couple of lesbian S&M friends of mine, who’re setting up a Web site; haven’t had a chance to develop the film yet, but when I get an opportunity to go into the darkroom I may post some pictures here.

I really want to see the movie “Training Day” before it leaves the theatres. maybe tomorrow.

The most recent issue of Xero magazine is finished!! It’s done, it’s printed, it looks great, I tihnk it’s the best issue yet, and I’m very, very happy with it.

We brought it to Necronomicon, an annual science fiction convention, last weekend, where it was a hit; we sold a good number of issues.

The convention was fun, not the least because I got to make my friends lenda and Kiersten run around passing out flyers for the magazine…something about making cute chicks do what I want just really does it for me. Does that make me a bad person? 🙂

Saturday night we gave a demonstration of Symphony, the Internet-controlled sex toy…which generated a lot of interest. Lots of fun, too!

Sunday after the convention, my wife and my second girlfriend and I had sushi with a group of friends, then went to a local S&M club. THAT was a good time. I brought the girlfriend up on stage and lingered over her with a violet wand for a while; it’s always so much fin to see her wiggle and hear her yelp… Later, she returned the favor by putting me against a St. Andrew’s cross and giving me a very intense flogging while my wife watched.

It was incredible. For the second time, she made the entire world fold up flat and disappear. I was on such an endorphin rush by the time she was finished, I could barely walk. I felt like I was floating for the next half hour.

And Monday was back to work. Pity, that…

Well, let’s see. With four days left until the new issue of Xero magazine has to be out the door, and no sign yet of a printer who can do the job, and a few pages still left to write, things are coming right down to the wire…

Well, hell. I work best under pressure anyway. Right? Right?

And a client who’s having a whole nest of network troubles, because they went with a network vendor who underbid me, and those people screwed the pooch, and naturally now it’s my problem…and the fact that it looks like we’ve been done wrong by the manufacturer who was supposed to be making the plastic case for the Internet sex toy we’re trying to get finished…

Surely would be nice if someone, somewhere, would actually do the job they said they would do.

Doesn’t help that I didn’t get any sleep last night–I spent a good deal of the night having a good, but exhausting, and perhaps overdue, talk with the other girlfriend.

And stuff.

I will be very, very happy when this week is over.

Ha! I’ve climbed back on top now.

She’s been on top for about two months now, which basically means I have to do whatever she says. Like, for example, “Go get the wooden spoon so I can watch your girlfriends paddle you on the backside.”

But last night, she was feeling a bit itchy, and I was feeling a bit aggressive, and I just flipped her over and told her to submit, and…she did!

Now I get to be very, very cruel indeed. (Rubbing hands together, chortling evilly…)

Hmm. Where did I put that rope?

Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the right-wing Traditional Values Coalition, urged relief agencies working in the aftermath of the September 11 tragedies to withhold assistance to surviving partners of gay people who died:

“(Relief organizations) should be first giving priority to those widows who were at home with their babies, and those widowers who lost their wives,” Sheldon said. “It should be given on the basis and priority of one man and one woman in a marital relationship.”

Sheldon added: “This is just another example of how the gay agenda is seeking to overturn the one man-one woman relationship from center stage in America, taking advantage of this tragedy.”

Finally have a chance to catch my breath. Almost two weeks of nonstop 11 and 12 hour days…it’s really been getting to me.

Although i suppose I shouldn’t complain. If you own teh business, it’s better to be too busy than not busy enough. Besides, the work paid for the nice, shiny new iMac I’m typing this on… Now if only I could get my router to work, so the rest of my computers could use my cable modem as well.

In any event:

What is it with women, anyway?

A couple of years ago, I had a friend who did something that kind of let me down. She was supposed to do something for me, which she didn’t do, and it ended up costing me a couple hundred dollars.

Fast forward to today. She’s dropped back into my life again, contacting me by email, and has made what appears to be a sincere, good-faith effort to get back into my good graces. She’s acknowledged that what she did was wrong, and she’s made an effort to reach out. I’m skeptical, but I’m willing to at least reciprocate her good-faith gesture, and see where it goes. This is a person I sincerely believe has a great deal of potential.

My wife is furious. Absolutely, positively, well and truly pissed off. She seems to think I should never even
consider speaking to this person again, under any circumstances.

So: What is it with women and grudges? Man, I swear, women in general often seem to behave as though everyone should be held to a perfect standard of behavior at all times, and the first time you cross then, that’s it! Nothing can ever make things right again.

I don’t think that’s realistic. i believe that as human beings we are all flawed, we’re all born of frailty and error, and that sooner or later, no matter how good a person you may be, you’re going to do something that pisses someone off. The real test of a friendship, and the real test of who you are as a person, is in how you behave after this happens.

I also believe that, all other things being equal, a person who makes a genuine good-faith effort to rectify something done wrong should be rewarded for it. It isn’t ealways easy to say syou’ve screwed up.

But then, I’m a guy, so what do I know?

…which means we can return to our normal lives. The toys can come back out, the floggers can be put back where they belong…

And my new computer arrives On Wednesday. Things are looking up!