Goodness, I’m having any kind of trouble with my computer at the moment. It all began when the license of my Norton Internet Security 2005 ran out and I decided to upgrade to the newest version, Norton 360. Boy, that was a downgrade! It was slow as molasses, could not be customized to skip checking certain files or directories (my IMatch image database, one single file of 700 MB, what’s that for a starter?) and would crash once a day.
After uninstalling it (mind you, no trial, I had trusted them and paid immediately!), I tried Kaspersky 2007 with not much success, and then Bitdefender, which looked good for a while. Well, up to some days ago. Then it started to crash, maybe every other day. Today, finally it had crashed, locked up my computer, after a reset the file system had to be checked, and from then on Bitdefender crashed on every startup, leaving the computer locked up again. I guess it crashed upon its self-update. After some reboots (well, hardware resets) I managed to deactivate it before it could crash and immediately uninstalled it. What a way to spend the time between 4am and 5am!
Windows! I really have some investment in Windows software and hardware, but more and more I would love to change to a Mac. Or maybe run my existing hardware under Linux, and probably only the Windows software in a virtual machine? I don’t play any games these days, but Photoshop? In a VM? I don’t know. I guess I’ll try another anti virus product in the evening.
Oh, this site is meant to be about photography? Sorry. Now, I shot this image on my way from work. I left at 7pm, thus it was already getting dark, but that’s no real problem as long as you don’t run out of shops. This, for instance, is from the window of a shop selling caps. The two people are actually mannequins, or - to be precise - these are heads of mannequins. In one window the shop had a shelf with maybe 10 of them in three or four rows, each wearing a different cap. I used the Nikon 50/1.8 at f1.8 and a B&W polarizer to get rid of unwanted reflections on the glass.
The Song of the Day, “Don’t Look Back”, is a duet between John Lee Hooker and Van Morrison. It’s on Hooker’s 1997 album of the same name, actually a collaboration between the two.