Melantrys’ Page

These pictures I took yesterday during my lunch break. I had been sorry in the morning about being in my routine hurry as I’d never have thought it would stay like that all day long. But it did. So there you go. Hope you like the pictures.

Today it snowed and the temps went up to around 0°C, and what with the sun and all this beauty started to disappear under snow and to melt a bit.

Hm, I haven’t been posting much lately, except for the mountain/forest pictures last weekend.

A week ago Johannes Rau, one of the few good politicians, has died. From what you heard on the radio half of the Nordrhein-Westfalen county had had the pleasure of meeting him personally at one time or another, which is something I don’t share. But still I was sad to hear of his death. He didn’t really have time to enjoy his retirement (about a year ago I think), which is a real shame.
I remember - as well as senile me can, that is - him doing this radio show on a youth station once. Every week they had some VIP (mostly musicians) doing that two hour evening show, talking about whatever they liked and playing their favourite music. And one week it was him doing it. I don’t even really recall what he talked about. He did talk politics a bit ( “To make the young people realize how important it is that they participate.”) but not just politics. I only remember that the show was one of the best. Thankfully he didn’t play his fave music (except for some classic I seem to recall with dread) - he was already pretty old back then - but played what his daughter had advised him to play.
Maybe this all doesn’t make much sense but I felt like mentioning it.
Yes.
Um.

I apologize to all my faithful readers for discussing something totally off-topic with Nathan in the comments section of my last post, which I didn’t feel like discussing in his.
I am still a tad miffed about the whole thing, but as of today I am feeling a whole lot better.

I am drinking woodruff flavoured wine and…. not listening to any music. Why am I not listening to any music?! *puts on “Two sides” by Clawfinger*

Furthermore I am… very disappointed with the support forum of my favourite Anti Virus Freeware AntiVir. Due to extensive virus warnings (they could have mentioned a tad earlier though that it mainly spread through sex mails; that would have saved me some trouble…) I decided to upgrade my software before today.
Instead of the simple virus info upgrade I got a de- and re-install, as they had a brandnew version out. That version’s virus info was older than my latest update so I tried doing another update, no worries. Thanks to this major upgrade though the servers were not able to handle the massed requests. I couldn’t get a connection for more than 24 hours. Other people were having the same problems, some even over a longer period of time, as I found out when checking out the support forum after a loooong absence.
I read a couple of days worth of posts and comments and noticed one very sad thing. Trolls repeatedly ridiculed the people asking for help, with hardly anyone minding, and some even defending the trolls.
This is the official support forum for the privately used freeware version as well as for the business Premium version. I remember from a year back or so when I read the forum on a more regular basis that there was the occasional AntiVir programmer logging in at night and at times spending hours to solve some helpless n00b’s problems. That was extra. It said nowhere they’d do that. They “hire” moderators, knowledgable forum users, to keep an eye on people and to help with the occuring problems of users. Other, non-mod users with some knowledge used to try and help out when no mod was around, so that sometimes the problem was already dealt with when the mod appeared. Not that everyone was one big happy family back then, but I hardly ever saw registered forum users telling people asking for help that the fault lay with the “chair keyboard interface” - which was among the nicer things they were saying. In a particularly bad thread it took two days for a mod to appear, close it and advise users seeking help to open a new thread.
The mods always used to be overworked (they’re doing this for nothing after all - or possibly a free Premium version? - and all have regular jobs as well) but, well, other people used to help out then. Also in dealing with trolls.
*sighs*
Good manners are going down the drain everywhere, eh?

*ends this post while listening to “Do what I say” by Clawfinger*

This entry was posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2006 at 11:50 pm and is filed under ramblings, freaking morons, photos, nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.