It's a pity that today has to end on such a sour note. I mean, a day in which this cold Ma passed on to me is taking hold, and when lzh presses the buzzer and I let her in the main door downstairs, I hear the old Canadian guy who lives downstairs hurling abuse at her and lzh giving back at least as good as she got.

Yeah, the bloody stupid bicycle wars are back on. Our bikes were always parked under the stairs out of the way with everybody else's. Then one day my bike was found broken, then a new notice appeared on the door telling people to put their bikes outside. Nobody obeyed. Then mine and lzh's bikes were put outside, but no other bike was so much as touched. lzh put her bike back inside, but I left mine out. I mean, it was free and a piece of junk. Mine disappeared, having been met by the stupidest bicycle thief in the world.

Then everything was fine until this evening when, on her way home, lzh bumped into the old Canadian who rumour told us may have been the one who broke my bike and pushed both bikes outside. He tried to close the door on lzh- real gentlemanly- and told her to stay outside. She asked why. He said she can't bring her bike inside. She asked why. He said he tripped over it and hurt himself once.

Wait....

The bike is put safely out of the way under the stairs and he trips over it and hurt himself? And so he develops this grudge against the bike and its owner? What?

Note: The other bikes were never touched. Only lzh's (and mine before it got stolen) were ever touched. This even though all the bikes were tucked as safely under the stairs as was humanly possible.

I mean: How drunk do you have to be to fall over a bike that is tucked under stairs that are significantly lower than your head?

And how pathetic do you have to be to start a fight over it with a woman half your age and half your size? As I lifted up the intercom, I heard this fight and thought, oh shit, I'm gonna have to grab my shoes and keys and sprint downstairs to defend my wife from a guy who's considerably larger than me. I ain't much of a fighter. Fortunately things did not come to blows. 

Oh, and start that fight months after the fact? 

But what frustrates me most is that it's all so utterly ridiculous. Had he tripped over my or lzh's bikes and told us, we would've been more than happy to apologise and promise to be more careful about how we store our bikes. Is that not how disputes between civilised people are resolved?  

So I guess the only thing to do is find some appropriate channel to resolve this. I mean, I'm not going to stoop to his level. We called up the accomodation management to complain about this guy's behaviour and check on what the rules are and ask why only one person is expected to put her bike outside. lzh took quite some time to explain the situation, and eventually she was told that there is no rule banning bikes from being stored inside- so long as they don't block the corridors, of course. We were told to contact the International Affairs Office, or whatever it's called, but they aren't back at work until the day after tomorrow. Typical. Anyway, that's my job for the day after tomorrow.

Gah, such a stupid, pathetic, little issue. Of course, little issues like this have a habit of developing into even stupider, big issues. I would like to avoid that, if at all possible.

Oh, and how much should I read into lzh telling me she thought he was drunk when he started picking on her? Or into him refusing to come out and discuss things with her after he'd locked himself inside (and if we have to argue about safety and blocking corridors, shitferbrains can learn to close his security door). Or into the fact that foreign teachers' bikes are left alone (apart from mine), while a tiny (but tough- dumbarse miscalculated big time) Chinese woman's bike is thrown outside? Or that shitferbrains considers waiting until lzh is safely home before sneaking down and throwing her bike on top of the others, bending her basket and twisting her handlebars in the process?

Let's get this straight: old Canadian nutjob looks to be about 60 and a hundred and something kilogrammes. Surely he can find a more mature way to deal with those  little frustrations that form a large part of life in an apartment building?

And really, picking a fight with someone half your age and literally half your size, and then sneaking out and throwing her bicycle around. Need I say more?

Alright, I've done more than enough ranting lately, and I'd rather not. Just want to get this off my chest, that's all. Of course, if anybody has any constructive suggestions about how to deal with this guy, speak up. 

Really, how much technical trouble do I have to put up with in two days? First it's destroying the bathroom ceiling in the process of changing two ridiculously stupidly hard to remove light bulbs. And then, well, the university supplied big ugly box computer has been giving me trouble...

It started  yesterday. Four times yesterday one window of Firefox froze. See, I usually keep two windows open- one for news, one for blogs. Works for me. Anyway, four times yesterday one of those two windows froze, meaning I couldn't do anything with any of the tabs open in that window- couldn't switch between tabs, couldn't follow any links in the open tab, couldn't do anything. The weird thing was I could move between windows, and the non-frozen window worked just fine. I could also minimise the frozen window- changing the size of it being about the only thing I could do- and any other programme running was, like the non-frozen window, unaffected. That meant that four times, to follow up on what I was doing in the frozen window, I had to ctrl-alt-del crash Firefox and restart it. The annoying thing about that is you can't crash only one window, because that will stop Firefox completely. Fortunately Firefox's cool restore session feature kicks in when you start up again.

Then this morning Firefox crashed soon after I started it up. Grrr... Oh well, get it going again, and then the same one-window-freezing thing happens again. Crash, restart.... I'm sitting there wondering what the problem could be. Two obvious answers: Some kind of malware, or it's time to defrag again (something I have to do far more often with this computer than any other I've ever used- and just for the sake of using some stupid gung-ho term from crappy Hollywood war films- Screw defragging, I should just frag the computer. Solve me a lot of hassle, right up until the university checks the apartment and asks why there are random bits of its computer embedded in the walls and ceiling).

Alright, so AVG does a pretty good job of keeping computers virus free, even the free edition, and the free edition updates and scans automatically once a day. AVG Anti-Spyware free edition, on the other hand, gives you a one month trial period of full service, then reverts to the free edition, which needs you to manually update and scan the computer. So if there's a malware problem, chances are it's the kind that AVG Anti-Spyware is supposed to deal with. So I update and start scanning. The whole computer freezes, leaving me with no option but to crash it and restart. 

So as the computer is restarting I get out the laptop and see if I can rejig the network settings so I can plug into the university network, and I get that going ok, although I have had the dial-up pop up and pretend I'm not online (if I need to dial-up, why are websites opening fine and MSN messenger working normally?) a few times- minor annoyance, though.

Then, because I haven't used the laptop for surfing for quite some time, I made sure the AVGs were updated. And of course, I've bookmarked a lot more sites since I last got online with the laptop, so once the big ugly box was properly disk-checked and started
up, I got the bookmarks and discovered the hard way that when you import bookmarks into Firefox, they don't replace the old ones, they add themselves to the bottom of the list. Once again, minor annoyance, especially compared to the trouble the big ugly box is giving me. Alright, got that cleaned up, and the laptop is good to go.

But then I ran an anti-spyware scan on the big ugly box, and nothing beyond the ordinary tracking cookies showed up. Alright, so I'll defrag. Doing that now. It's taking forever and making a huge amount of noise. We'll see if it actually improves the situation. Based on past experience, though, I think I should just use the laptop.

After all, every time I open the laptop, I'm reminded how much more pleasant it is to use my own computer than the big ugly box. If only the screen were as big... or even better, as big as the office computer's screen...

It's frustrating because apart from this one big ugly box, all my experiences with Lenovo have been overwhelmingly good. I mean, my laptop and the office computer are simply beautiful to use. The big ugly box, though, is at best useable. Still, I suspect it's getting a bit old (not that my laptop is young in computer years), and, perhaps more importantly, has taken too much abuse and neglect at the hands of less technologically savvy former occupants of this apartment.