Windows XP Service Pack 3: General Public Release

XP Service Pack 3 has been released both as a separate download as well as over Windows Update. I guess MS kept their word and released it in 1H CY2008, as they cryptically put it.

Unlike Vista though, XP SP3 can be slipstreamed.

Filed in Windows.

The Disgusting State of Health Care and Hospitals

I read this post about someone whose father was hospitalized for heart trouble and his experience with one of the premier hospitals in the country. It’s disgusting. The post was appropriately titled Hospitals are No Place for Sick People. The callousness, carelessness, lack of training, and so on in health care is frankly horrifying, especially when the person hospitalized is so helpless to do anything about it.

Filed in Outraged.

J K Rowling: The Case of Money and Fame Getting into an Author’s Head

I guess some people can’t really deal with the fame and fortune that comes when they rise from rags to riches. Orson Scott Card joins the ranks of the many people who have criticized J K Rowling for her lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon. And he makes lots of very accurate and damming comments too.

Some of the points he raised were:

1. The lexicon is a commentary on her work that adds value to it. Rowling herself had consulted it in the past.
2. Rowling’s Harry Potter books has borrowed lots of stuff from others’ books, including Orson Scott Card’s own Ender’s series.
3. She is now out of ideas and steam, and has nothing to do. Idle hands are a devil’s tools and all that.

Learn the lesson before you get rich and famous, and don’t get struck by Rowlingitis.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion.

Woman Who Married 4 Times Before 24 in Interesting Circumstances: And You Thought Soap Operas Were Unrealistic

The Scottish Daily Record has an article about a woman who married 4 times before the age of 24. That’s not the unusual thing though.

Her first husband ran off to marry her mother. The second person who was to be her husband got cold feet, and left before the marriage. His best man married her in the end. At that time, she was pregnant with either the best man’s child, or the second absconded prospective husband’s child, or perhaps the best man’s friend’s child. Her third marriage was to a man who was a bigamist, and so the marriage was annulled.

At the fourth wedding outside the registrar, a local teenager saw her and shouted, Alison, is that you at it again? Arbroath will run out of men if you keep going at this rate.”

And you thought soap operas were ridiculous.

Filed in Humor.