and we continue the process of uploading entries now, so today is the previous entry and that would make this the start of the second phase of the catch up entries...

and the excitement continues to build...

this is one of those weeks (actually, it was last week, maybe even the week before... just look at the dates that are (or were, or the something like that) missing from the chronological order of the archives and you'll see that this entry most likely started when this month was much younger, just in case you keep track of such trivial things as time, the theory of relativity, the Gaffenberg principle, string theory, or any such explanatory notes on life, the universe, and everything*) wherein I do not have time to remember or check on what entries I've uploaded and what entries I have not uploaded, so if any of the next few entries are repeats or partial repeats or perhaps in some way redundant even if it's only deja vu, then, well, oops and maybe you missed them the first time and gee wiz but nobody's perfect and if I ever win anything for having the most entries or the most words or some other such honor based on volume I'll return the award on account of not having time to verify that I didn't duplicate an entry or few along the way...

yeah, so, consider this a warning or irreverent semi-meaningless information or both, as you choose... like it could be that I take everything altogether too seriously sometimes and at other times, like that time I chewed on a bandaid that was, on good authority, allegedly reported to be laced with LSD while working a double shift in an Emergency room, I don't...

don't what?...

just checking if you're paying attention...

actually, the question is not so much whether you are paying attention, but rather how far along can you read before you lose your way (or your mind) and therein miss essential points of chaos or order or the afternoon tea break...

but since it does not have a question mark, there is, that is, you are under no obligation to answer it... Robert's Rules of Order or some such book must have said that at one time or another somewhere along the way... try Poor Richard's Almanac...

I don't know if you know this, but for some odd years in my little person time, otherwise known as childhood, I wondered if that book by old Ben Franklin was not some secret message to me, kind of like a lot of people in the world think the bible might be some sort of all-knowing answer-book...

I moved on to more reliable tools, like magic eight balls and the tiny print on the bottom of Bazooka Joe comics... you know, the ones that are wrapped around the bubble gum... deprived of such pleasures, I hope you were not...

anyway, warning or irrelevant, you can decide for yourself which is which and what is what and whether you are right or wrong only matters if you want to visit my head and communicate with the people in there to find out if what you think is what I (or they) think and reach for some mutual understanding of this or that or some other thing...

ok?...

yeah, well, all that said and done (or written and uploaded), here's one of the entries in the babbling files (yes, this a priori part was just the introduction) that has that uncertain upload status I was referring to a minute or several weeks ago... it's not your usual behind the candoor entry, being that it is mostly a single topic written in real time and is rather techie for me...

enjoy it if you will...

well, this desktop is ancient, granted, but it was working better before I started using it as my primary computer... maybe that's cuz I was not using it for everything I do online and offline... or maybe it's cuz my increased usage exposed it to some crap (malicious scripts, trojans, worms, viruses, internet poo, and so on) that our fine humanity creates just to turn our wonderful internet lives into the hell that we're supposed to find after this life if we don't follow certain rules that one of those answer-books lay down for us...

not being one to take inconvenience lying down, I explored the underbelly of this computer... the registry (eeek, such a geek) and other stuff... I downloaded and installed the latest edition of Spybot, a program that does a great job at protecting a computer (for free, though it's so good I highly recommend sending it's maker a donation of whatever you can afford)... Spybot identified all sorts of crap on the system and in the registry and I removed the crap (just clicks, no code-knowledge or heavy geek-stuff needed cuz Spybot knows what it is doing and I've used it for years so i can say that from personal experience, but still, it would be unwise to leave out the cautionary reminded to be careful removing stuff from inside the operating system of your computer)...

then I found a program called Registry Mechanic and installed it and it's running now... hopefully it's not destroying anything necessary... it comes highly recommended by several respect review download sites (supposedly millions of people use it), but if I suddenly disappear for a few days then you'll know I was a bit over zealous in my cleaning up of the crap on the hard drive (ironically I sorta did disappear for days on end since writing this and yet it had only a little to do with this registry mechanic program, I think)...

excuse me a moment, the program says I must reboot...

and we are back... apparently there was some sort of access violation that shut the program down... that sucks... it had found 6 problems so far at the time, alas, so we're starting again... I did have a registry rebuild while rebooting and it doesn't seem to have done any damage as the computer booted up and is working again... the rebuild is supposed to help the computer run smoother and faster by sorting out old registry items and reorganizing them... sounds kind of like a defrag of the registry... hopefully we'll see better running now... time will tell (and I'll add some more info later that I think started right here)...

meanwhile, I've got Registry Mechanic running again... it's looking through the CLSID folder now... there seem to be a gagabizillion registry entries in that folder and I have no idea what any of them do, but they are all being scanned now... well, actually, I do have some slim idea of what some of them do and I'm kinda sorta sure I know what a few of them do, but anyway it's all part of Custom Controls, whatever that means... and we're up to that 6 problems found point again and hopefully it'll finish scanning this time without an access violation...

wow, we're up to 55 problems found now... since this computer is going on at least eight years old, maybe older, and it's first six or seven years it belonged to somebody else doing who knows what, I'm not surprised... there are all sorts of programs on it that I do not use... some programs have been deleted leaving unnecessary registry entries...

minutes later, we are up to 108 problems found... now what this means (I think... feel free to geek me up if you know better, please) is that there are, at the moment, 108 registry entries that are either meaningless (referring to programs no longer on the computer) or pointing to some device or operation that makes no sense... in some cases a malicious program may have written something into the registry and hopefully this registry mechanic will help me remove them... these have all been found in custom controls, whatever that is, and there are eleven more categories to be scanned...

this fascinating (yawn, a little) process continues as we are now up to 131 problems found and ten of those eleven other categories are scanned, leaving custom controls as the big leader in problems... we are now entering the deep scan portion of the process and supporters of custom controls are rooting for deep scan to have more than 109 problems because deep scan is their last hope of not being the problem kings...

yes I know, I am taking this registry mechanic scan much too seriously... or appearing to... actually, this is what I do with any tedious task I must complete (or wait for) and most of life itself, turn it into a game...

doesn't everybody?...

well, for the silly people who don't I'll continue explaining... I don't want to open any other programs until the scan is done so it doesn't have any problems getting it's job done...so far, so good, and hopefully that access error was caused by the programs and web pages I had open during the previous running of this program... this probably should have been done ages ago but I've been busy and still remain quite ignorant about the care and feeding of these mechanical electronic contraptions (computers)... and I've never truly bonded with this one since it was a $100 machine pick up at a computer show that was never meant to be a primary computer, but rather mostly a depository for all the junk mail...

the deep scan continues and has us up to 175 problems found now... I am getting unduly excited about the potential speed and function of this computer once all these problems are fixed, though I don't want to get too excited because the program might not fix it or could crash or something (see, Bill Gates has me trained well... like Pavlov's dogs, I cringe (instead of salivate) at the sight of the computer doing some technical thing because I know the blue screen of death (as opposed to the bell) could be popping up at any moment...

and the green bar that seems to be revealing how far the overall process is along has just two little bars left (out of many dozens) before it fills the bar box as the problem found count is up to 198... 199... 200... 201... 203... ok, 205... no wait, 207 (can it get more exciting?)... and the blue bar that seems to reveal how far along the specific process (in this case, the deep scan) is along, you know, the blue bar below the green bar, pay attention now, is about a third along it's merry way... and we're now up to 229 problems found... I wonder what the record is... it would be cool if this program had some way to keep a high score record of problems, maybe on the website that downloads the problems or something... 236 problems... I wonder how many registry entries there are in total... seems like tens of thousands...

and now, at 238 problems found, that green bar above the blue bar has not moved along at all, so we still have two little green bars to go to complete the top bar, but the blue bar below the green bar is just now passing it's halfway point... the 109 problems found in custom controls seemed like a lot, but the deep scan is up to 107 and still seems to have a way to go, so the lead for custom controls is in jeopardy... the supporters of custom controls are going nuts with cheers, rooting for deep scan to have more problems so the onus of most problems can be taken off custom controls...

and the totals are in and the scan is done... drum roll, if you like... we finished with 265 problems, leaving custom controls off the hook (their supporters go mad with joy, though a few turned over a car and set it on fire) and deep scan as the big loser in number of problems found with 134... it is now time to follow the instructions for the next process, which seems to be pressing a button that fixes the registry by deleting all the problems found in the registry...

unfortunately, this is when the program demands money... yes, money... it did not mention it before I downloaded it... it did not mention it during the installation... and it did not mention it during the hour it took to scan the registry... after finding all those problems it decided it would only delete a few of them and if I want the rest deleted I have to pay... of course I could head into the registry and manually delete these problem entries, but that is such tedious time consuming work... I don't know how much the program costs yet because I chose to run it again (that's going on right now) and see if it'll delete more entries the second time cuz if I can get the number of entries I have to delete manually down to a reasonable number, then I don't need to buy the program (is that cheating?... maybe it's just being cheap... thing is (question is), do I really need this program for this ancient computer since I'll probably only run it this once since it takes so long and I hope not to be using this computer for too much longer)...

yeah, cheap...

wisely frugal?...

ok, frugal, or so my budget director, who was let out of the closet recently, if you recall, says... and unfortunately, I must continue to remember to listen to the budget director (who really knows his stuff since he got me a lot of time off from the working world, half of my supposedly adult working years so far in this life, actually, which is pretty good for a poor kid from the streets of the suburbs of NYC)...

and a little while later, we find out that the program could not be fooled because it's set to fix six of the categories and not fix six of the categories so the last 150 problems remained... so I went into the registry and started fixing things (with a touch of breath-holding, since deleting registry entries could be worse than the blue screen of death, it could be the ultimate death of a computer)...

ah, living dangerously...

I'm not sure if the computer is going to run better, faster, or crash less, but heck if it isn't a psychological boost to have done some geeky work and not blown it up...

and what did you do today?...

update some time later that day, or week: the computer works no better or worse...

I did go into the registry and deleted a whole lot of stuff that registry mechanic and I deemed crap waste meaningless command code (and the computer still works, amazing, huh?)... the only lingering annoyance is now the Windows Registry Checker runs at each reboot and that takes ten to fifteen minutes which is quite annoying since I still have to reboot this computer regularly (like several times a day when in maximum use mode) and that frustrates the writers as they have no patience for machines and demand my hand be put to use again (as in writing with a pen), however the hand pleads pain as the permanent callous remains a bumpy example of how much the hand is and has been used in this life and how deserving it is of being penlessly (and painlessly) retired from writing several hours a day as it did for most of this lifetime so far, so the budget director is pressed for a decision about a new computer again and since poverty is strong at the moment the new computer idea is laughed at and therefore I am not writing as much because frustrated writers do not write as much...

maybe you noticed...

sheesh, was that prophetic or what?... I mean just look at how few entries have been uploaded so far this month sinc this registry operation which occurred somewhere around the 6th or perhaps even earlier... I checked the 'run' folders in the registry and neither scanreg nor scanregw is in it and the options on the registry mechanic program have autorun disabled and there's nothing in the startup folder, so I wrote to the people who created the program and asked them for a solution and I await their response...

further updates when and if I have any and when and if I remember to come back here to update this**, or perhaps in a future entry...

maybe...

still having fun out there?...

there's always hope...





* love has nothing to do with it and everything to do with everything, but some of the people actually are fooled all the time, so it's probably best we have multiple theories even if it's just a love song...

** weeks later I received no help from the registry mechanic folk, so I certainly will not buy or recommend the program and have since deleted it, but the quite nagging problem of the Windows Registry Checker running at every reboot and start up is a killer to the creative flow and is one of the primary reasons I've not been uploading updates or leaving notes or messages much and I've gone nowhere near email this month because opening the email program when the browser is open is a sure fire crash... anyway, I'm still hoping I'll solve this and all the world's problems, so stay tuned and optimistic like me and you'll be bound to find fun out there...

. o O ( NOTES ARE THE NEW HAPPY PILL ) O o .
(just let me know you were here)