pseydtonne | Geek post, with some health update first

Since many of you have no desire to read my geek stuff, I'll put that part behind a cut. I do need some advice, so I'd appreciate all the geeks hitting the link.

I went to the dermatologist on Tuesday. She said, as Maggie had, that my back zits are cystic -- in other words, hard inflammations. The answer to this is Doxycline, an antibiotic. I was reluctant to go on an antibiotic on a permanent basis because it throws off my immunity. Now I'm reluctant to stay on Doxy because it turns me into a piss fiend.

You get a bunch of warnings about Doxy -- stay out of the sun, go off the drug 24 hours before going anywhere tropical, use sunblock, take with food. It turns out it has some diuretic effects, too. Since I already hydrate well, I'll just switch to a bigger bottle (I found enough water bottles when I cleaned the kitchen).

Losing my Bladder of Steel privileges really annoys me. One of my favorite tests is driving to New York City without stopping (especially without going below fourth gear through Connecticut). Will I lose this thrill?

The thing about back zits is that it's hard to tell when they're getting better. What I can tell is that I've gotten hung up about what my taste buds feel like and the nasty breath I get in the morning. Nasti-er, that is.

And now, for you geeks, . I'm fixing this Dell Optiplex GX100 that some company must've given to my coworker's daughter. It's a Celeron 566 MHz (what kind of company would put Celerons on the desk then burden them with Netware?) Anyway, this box is running 98SE and a record 715 items found on an Ad-Aware run in safe mode. I had forgotten that safe mode meant no USB drive mounts, so I had to split Ad-Aware into pieces and sneakernet it in.

Now it's working, but it still has some cruft. The simple act of opening the Control Panel involves at least a ten-second delay. I want to wipe the drive completely, but I'd need to reinstall Office XP afterwards. This one seems to have a legal license, so I'll just slap the old codes back in. However, does anyone have the disks for Office XP? I never liked Office enough to consider getting a copy.

I'd love to know what some of these processes are that I found. One is called "M". That's it. "Nprotect" is Norton, "Explorer" is the file manager (it's the only thing on when you boot into safe mode), and "systray" is that thing in the lower right corner. What in the fuq is M?

I'm going to ask my coworker if her daughter is still telecommuting with Netware. If not, I'm wiping.

-tiny brave steps, Ps/d