Activation Hell

I haven't posted in a few days for a couple reasons. It's been a bad few days...I crashed my computer a total of 3 times. I had a Win 2000/Vista dual boot setup...not anymore. Here's what happened.

1. Decided to install a new burning program on Win2000 partition
2. Got a blue screen and thought, no big deal I use Acronis I will restore the image
3. Started Acronis restore, got an error, ignored it, it deleted my Win2000 partition, but didn't restore
4. I was frustrated, thought about just not using a computer anymore, 5 minutes later decided I would take this opportunity to upgrade to WinXP...I've been holding off for awhile now
5. Installed WinXP on the former Win2000 space
6. It booted fine, but couldn't get to Vista anymore
7. Attempted to fix Vista boot by booting to Vista CD and doing a repair, no luck
8. Thought screw this I'm going to get rid of Vista and wait until the final version comes out
9. Deleted Vista partition
10. Could no longer boot Win XP
11. Repaired XP (sort of) by running repair off the CD
12. Programs didn't work right, things were strange, ran chkdsk and blue screen of death again
13. Keep in mind I activated XP when I first installed, after I repaired and now I was going to have to activate again (hold my breath and hope it works so I don't have to call India and read a gazillion numbers)
14. I again pondered not using a desktop computer anymore and sticking with my laptop
15. 5 minutes later started a reinstall of Windows XP
16. Finished reinstall and started to activate and no such luck
17. I entered Activation Hell with Microsoft, so I did the phone thing and got that worked through..as a side note this was the 2nd time in one day I had to call Microsoft to Activate, earlier in the day I had to call for a customer
18. Spent forever reinstalling programs and such
19. Backed up the computer
20. Now I'm back :)!

Remember, most of our posts are now taking place at Design Ninjas!

Firefox vs. IE

Here at Design Ninjas we are big Firefox fans. Mostly because there are so many extensions to choose from and ways to customize your browser with Firefox. My favorite extensions are Adblock and Adblock Filterset.G Updater. You can see in the two pictures above how different the same web page, www.tvmegasite.net, looks. The top one was a screen shot taken in Internet Explorer. The bottom picture was a screen shot taken in Firefox. The difference in the look is caused by the Adblock extension in Firefox.


I understand tvmegasite.net is a nonprofit organization and needs to make enough money to support the site, but the amount of advertisements and the ugliness of them all violate my sensibilities! I don't mind text advertisements, like Google does. It's the moving, flashing, dancing, bouncing ones that make me nuts. When a company puts advertisements like these on their websites I assume they are looking to sell to people who aren't tech savvy, because people who are know how to block that crap automatically!


You can find this same post at Design Ninjas. We will continue to post here every once in awhile, but most of our posts you will find at the Design Ninjas Blog.

Official Launch of DesignNinjas.com

This morning a cat came up to our back door and we let our dog Buster out to meet him. There was barking and a claw to the nose, but they made friends and Buster shared a saucer of milk with Sam the cat.

And today is the official launch of our new site DesignNinjas.com where we will be doing most of our new blog posts. Click on over there to see a clip of Buster and Sam making friends.