Windows 10 not playing nice...

Staying connected to the network all the time has the downside of letting Microsoft have its way with my operating system and working tools (Office). As a result, I end up not having the slightest idea of what might be the cause of a problem, and since the "fixes" offered by Microsoft often are too arcane even for me... well... there's little to do other than grit one's teeth.

The latest "fun 'n games" started a couple of weeks ago, with Windows 10 showing me a sad face emoticon upon shutdown, further informing me that a problem has been found, but that I shouldn't worry, because information was being collected, whereupon the system would go ahead and restart for me.

Did I mention I was shutting the machine down? Sure I did. So why does Microsoft propose restarting my machine?

It turns out it doesn't matter, because several hours after informing me that the information-collection effort was complete, the machine had not restarted, requiring me to shut it down hard, with the old hold-my-finger-on-the-power-button trick.

That said, Microsoft does try to be helpful, by letting you know what error you might want to learn more about. Over the course of several days, I was informed of the following errors:

• BAD POOL CALLER


• KMODE EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED


• IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL


• REFERENCE BY POINTER


• UNEXPECTED KERNEL MODE TRAP

Hey, make up your mind, why don't you?

Or better yet, figure out how to fix it and Make. It. Stop.

I would be... grateful.

Client education...

In an earnest effort to use standard international abbreviations for currencies, I've endeavored to use, for example, "USD" to denote United States Dollars, "RUB" to denote Russian Rubles, and "BYR" to denote Belarusian Rubles (worth, I notice this morning, about 1/4 of a Dogecoin, but I digress...).

Now, I've always held that the end client has the right to do with my translations anything that may occur to them. The client may elect to randomly delete letters from the text, and I would not squawk. The client may elect to replace my "USD" with the good old dollar sign.

But it really pains me to see documents returned from the end client edited so as to render dollar amounts as: "USD $ x,xxx... ."

It hurts to look at it.

Cheers...