Someone tried to hork my license plate. It was obviously a poorly planned theft since it failed only for lack of a screwdriver. I guess they were after my sticker, which was partially peeled off. Failing to secure the sticker, the thief tried to take the plate itself by pulling really hard. This merely resulted in a rather bent and distorted plate which still remains attached to my car by two rusty screws. And somewhere out there a desperate and unregistered man is stumbling along in the darkness cursing himself for not bringing a pocket knife. What I have learned from all this, is that "hork" is not in the dictionary. Well, not in most dictionaries. It can be found in the Urban Dictionary and other shady sources.

For work I needed to update my windows machine and naively allowed IE to scan for updates. It suggested that I urgently need Service Pack 3. Why not, I figured. It's Microsoft's damn operating system, they probably know what's best for it. With Service Pack 3 and several other important updates selected I clicked through about 10 billion agreements and finally gave the update wizard permission to do it's thing. It began to "inspect" my hard drive, but I suspect it really took the CPU out for dinner and a movie because it wasn't until several minutes later that it reported back on the gross lack of disk space. Wait a second, I have 500Mb of free space and you claimed to take up only 16Mb! Starting again I carefully scrutinized each step until I figured out that deselecting the "Archive every useless file you have" option solves the problem. Ok, click through another 10 billion agreements and start the download. The download finished quickly and I watched the installation begin. Did it freeze? No, it's just moving slowly. Very slowly. How long will it take? 5 min? 10 min? 15 min? No, how about 2 freaking hours! Damn, what's it doing, shaking the hand of every one and zero it finds? When it finally finished with my poor machine I learned that it installed Service Pack 3 and nothing else. So, I had to go once again to the update page and start the other installations. But, at least I have Service Pack 3. I've noticed two primary improvements over the older version:

1. The hard drive now has 150Mb less free space, sparing me the worry that the space might be allocated to some useful purpose.
2. Shutting down now takes 30-45 seconds instead of 4 or 5. This gives me time to reflect on my hatred for Microsoft before I start the next task.

So, kids, today's lesson is always wear clean underwear.