Intersection Logs

Because I dislike the "My Documents" nomenclature MS foisted on us from Win95 on, and particularly dislike the way they resurrected it in Win7 after killing it in Vista, I rename those folders back to just "Documents" and so forth -- which is what the DOS paths are anyway. Then I rename the "Favorites" links in the Explorer navigation pane to ~Documents etc., because it won't let me have just Documents (that being reserved for the Documents Library, which as far as I'm concerned is just a completely unnecessary layer of imaginary folders). That all works fine -- until a Windows patch changes them back and disappears the links. That's happened twice now -- the second time yesterday.

Customizing with extreme prejudice, part 5 Now that's what I call a Start Menu!

Win7 has something called "Homegroups" which is supposed to let you share your files with other Win7 computers on the same home network, with a special password. The stupid thing about this? At least for my situation (one person, many computers of various vintages and operating systems) good old-fashioned filesharing on the network works just fine for that. I'd got[ten] used to the convenience of having (password-protected, but that's mostly transparent) write-access to the files on the desktop from whichever laptop happened to be in use in the living room. (Except the little Eee, which was so intermittent and flaky about it that I eventually threw in the towel and resorted to what we used to call "sneakernet" at work, though in my case it was usually slippernet or barefootnet; put the file on a removable medium and walk over to the destination computer with it.)

Homegroups, it turns out, doesn't let me do that. Once the silly thing was set up, I suddenly found that I could only see the files on the desktop that Windows thought I should be allowed to see -- and only with read-access, and organized by libraries. (I told you libraries were evil.) The XP machine, meanwhile, could read and write everything just fine.

The solution? Leave Homegroup, on both Win7 machines. Then I'm back where I was before, with full access to all my own files, not just the ones in stupid "Libraries." (ETA, with added growling: but I had to share the printers manually, and add them again.)

So what exactly was the point?


I'm a PC, but Windows 7 I'm having second thoughts about.

I know I'm trying to do too many things at once when I pour myself a cup of coffee, put it down, and ten minutes later wander past the kitchen and do the same thing again -- only to find the earlier, undrunk cup sitting looking reproachfully at me.

This afternoon's mission is chaos reduction and de-grungification, with particular focus on the bathroom. Now that the tub is no longer filling with other people's dubious waste water on a daily basis, I am somewhat more motivated to try to do a decent job on it. I have also acquired a nice new shower curtain, liner, and mat. The old mat was pretty much past it anyway, the rubber backing having gone the way of all rubber that sits around for long in the desert, but the workmen completed its demise. As soon as the floor and fixtures are clean, the new stuff can go in, and I'll have a respectable bathroom again, albeit still one with a messy book-sized patch on one wall.

Yesterday's big project, which wasn't meant to be, was the backing-up of the newly-Sevened desktop computer. I can't tell now whether my initial hypothesis that Win7 was being pickier about mixed-up permissions than Vista was correct, or whether it started with a bit of corruption on the destination drive; I just know that laboriously making everything in my personal directory inherit the top-level permissions didn't help, and CHKDSKing the drive (which found ONE 32kb spot of trouble) finally let it finish. (The other grump about 7 is that there isn't a working driver for my HP laser printer yet; otherwise it seems to work fine.)

And I can't find my small straight-nose pliers.