My Dogs are Barking

I put in an eight-hour shift at the store today. Even though I changed registers fairly frequently, it's a long time for me to stand.

Feet are sore, but now I'm home, so that will be getting better shortly. Ah, well, it's a minor inconvenience and affords a goodly portion of the income I lost when my old job evaporated.

Things could be a lot worse, after all.

Another Day, Another Glitch

Those who are on-line usually come to dread the foreboding "yellow shield of update" that tends to appear in the system tray on random Tuesdays or Wednesdays. Usually, however, the updates are small and relatively benign.

In my case, I've learned to dread updates to my display driver. I have an NVidia GeForce 8400 GS, which does well on my machine. Vista, on my machine, doesn't like QuickTime, and won't play those nice high-quality movies that my digital camera shoots. An I.T. friend was kind enough to provide a program called "QuickTime Alternative" which works okay.

But yesterday's update did the one thing which drives me up a wall: it eliminated the resolution setting which I use on my wide-screen monitor. It gave me a couple of new, higher-resolution settings which might be appropriate for a screen half again as large as mine. Not much help there.

Then this morning's boot-up brought another surprise: the monitor retained the resolution choice I made, but dropped the color to an 8-bit display that looks like something a cat would barf up.

I wasn't able to read my e-mail because the display was nearly illegible, so I went to work & checked those pithy comments that all bloggers wait for ...

I had forgotten about NVidia's control panel, though, as was able to reinstall the resolution I wanted, as well as reset the display to 32-bit color. All's well again in my little corner of Das Unterwebz, at least until the next update comes tumbling over the DSL.

Ain't life in the digital age exciting?