Should I call in the correction?

From a local newspaper story on the death of a distinguished Albanian:

Daniel and Millie Grossberg live next to the Miyashiros on Stonehenge Drive in Albany. They said Miyashiro loved nature, and had a beautiful garden and a goldfish pond loved by neighborhood kids. A blue herring recently ate the goldfish, Millie Grossberg said.

Keenan pointed out that an eagle could have dropped a live fish into the goldfish pond, which then proceeded to eat the other fish. But, as he noted, herrings are not predatory.

Windows Vista: a Thought

The other day a friend told me that her computer had crashed and tech support had told her there was no hope; she'd never be able to get her prized photos off her year-old Fujitsu laptop. I asked what she was running and she said Vista. I've never had the opportunity to use/misuse Vista, so I offered my services.
The box didn't boot in safe mode or any mode. The bios functions said the drive was working properly, so I concluded that Vista was hosed.

The laptop came with a 'recovery disk' to be inserted in such circumstances. I did a 'repair', which in a hour or so announced it had failed. It then advised me to reinstall Vista, and of course added the text line that I should have backed up my files beforehand- the eternal loop error of the Microsoft system-- I wouldn't be here if she had backed up her system, obviously.
I would have hung the drive off another one as a slave, but I didn't have any such parts lying around; I was going to have to try something else.

An internet search turned up Ubuntu as a possibility. I ran Ubuntu (a freeware linux kernel) from the dvd drive, had to do a few tricky things to force mount the folders (command line style) so I could see them, but I was in-- I was seeing her picture folders.
I was not as successful in having Ubuntu to see my external (mac formatted) drive to write to it, but no matter, I copied her data with a flash drive.

In conclusion, I keep wondering how Microsoft gets away with this, the closed, crashing operating systems, combined with people who don't back up their data. Millions of computers come shipped with this operating system, and from what I've read/experienced, it's just a bunch of bloatware. I could go on and on, but I will end with saying, you can use linux to recover your Windows data if Vista is hosed. Viva Ubuntu!

Faking Suicide

Samuel Israel III is missing. He may have jumped off a bridge or faked his own suicide. His car was found on the bridge, keys still inside. He wrote "suicide is painless" on the windshield. He left a bottle of pills in the car. This is complete overkill. I think the removal of any two of these four clues would have more convincing. For example; car not on bridge,nothing scrawled on windshield, but keys in car and bottle of pills in glovebox.

Valentine's Day Dilemma

Here's my Valentine's day dilemma. Please tell me what you think.

I've been on three dates with a woman whom I'm at least moderately interested in. There's nothing going on between us - it could wind up being a friendship or something else. Any of those are fine; I'm looking for something serious and am fine going slow. I've asked her out to a few things and she's asked me out to a few too. I do have the sense that she might be involved with someone but the subject hasn't come up yet and it's not something I feel the need to approach just yet.

A band I love is playing on Thursday night. I'd like to ask her to go. But Thursday is Valentine's day, and things are not at a point where I would be looking to ask her out just because it's Valentine's day. So do I mention Valentine's day in the invitation or just ignore it? The only thing I'm concerned about here is that she forgets it's Valentines day, says yes, and then realizes it and feels trapped into it. So what to do?

Wow. Just read this back and am amazed at how wimpy it sounds. For you married people, maybe it'll remind you of neurotic it can be to be single and make you oh-so-much-more grateful for your marriages.

Oh. When I asked John if this was appropriate to post here, he said yes, but said make it entertaining. I'm not sure if this was entertaining enough. So here's my unrelated favorite kid's joke:

Q: What did the fish say when he swam into a wall?

A: Dam!