T'is the season for bad pop Christmas music

Christmas really brings out the worst in creativity.  One of my co-workers brought in a CD of mixed Christmas music that he burned from his library at home.  Most of it is okay - Bing Crosby and Nana Mouskouri singing various holiday classics - but mixed in with that are Disney Christmas (I think I've heard enough of Goofy and Mickey sining to last me a lifetime) and various pop singers doing their own original Christmas tunes.  These are the worst.

I think I may vomit the next time I hear Christine Aguilera, or George Michael or one of the various clones thereof singing one of their lame Christmas songs.  I don't know if they are under contractual obligation to do at least one Christmas song for their record labels, but I think I could probably encapsulate all of the songs in just a few lines.

"It's that special time of year, oh ya.
It's all about love and family.
It only comes once a year.
Can you feel it?  Oh ya.
Hug your children."

It's not all bad, mind you.  For instance, who can forget the classic by Ray Davies that starts with:

"When I was small I believed in Santa Claus
Though I knew it was my dad
And I would hang up my stocking at Christmas
Open my presents and I'd be glad

But the last time I played Father Christmas
I stood outside a department store
A gang of kids came over and mugged me
And knocked my reindeer to the floor"

(etc)

(no subject)

Windows 2000 has a way of making simple things complicated.

I got a fancy new video card on Friday with multi-monitor support, and digital video out for my new flat-screen monitor.  Installing a new video card should be a fairly simple process, right?  Plug in the new card, fire up the computer and install the drivers when prompted.

The first problem I had was with the system BIOS.  It initially complained about the new card and, after fifteen minutes of tweaking and spontaneous reboots, it arbitrarily wiped all of its own settings and made me reconstruct everything from scratch.  I don't suppose I can rightly blame Win2K for that one, though.  Thanks IBM.

On Friday I spent the better part of two hours fighting Win2K, trying to get it to recognize the new hardware and drivers.  I ran a series of cycles through both safe mode and regular mode, enduring system hangs and spontaneous reboots before I finally managed to get a working display on one of the two monitors in regular mode.  Thirty minutes later I had a reasonably functional system with dual monitors.

This morning when I rebooted, things started to fall apart again.  The software that came with the video card stopped recognizing the second monitor, and its display was rotated 270 degrees.  Hmph.  After a bit of work, I managed to get Win2K to stop recognizing the drivers.  Actually I can't really claim credit for that - Win2K managed to do that on its own.  I took another trip to the world of Safe Mode, and after removing the devices and reinstalling the drivers off the network (that is, Windows did that for me without prompting), I managed to achieve nothing.  I downloaded the drivers from the manufacturer's website and installed those.  While I was at it, I also un-installed the utilities that came with the monitor.  All told it was about 90 minutes of work.

I don't know if it was the drivers, or the monitor utilities that were at fault, but it is finally working - or at least it's stable; quirky, but stable.

It should not take 3 1/2 hours to install a video card.