NIS2009, iTunes cleanup, library date

(posted from home)
(This post covers 30-31 January, 2009)

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Saturday, 31 January –

Today was library-date day. Labashi and I drove into the library in York to exchange some magazines and read the city newspapers. We then went looking for lunch. We were surprised to find so many restaurants closed today in downtown York. We drove south out of York to Jacobus, where I remembered passing a coffee shop near a furniture store—someplace to browse after lunch. But the coffee shop didn’t look special so we ended up heading back to York and stopping at a Five Guys for lunch. The Five Guys wasn’t especially nice for our date but by that time we were hungry enough not to care. Lesson learned—figure out where we’re having lunch before leaving home. (You’d think that I would have learned this lesson somewhere along the way from having dated this woman since 1967!)
The afternoon was a lazy one but I did manage to install Norton Internet Security 2009 on Labashi’s PC and get it thoroughly checked out.
That evening we watched a few episodes of ‘Flight of The Conchords’. Wow.

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Friday, 30 January –

Last evening I installed Norton Internet Security 2009 but didn’t have time to check it out. I spent a few hours this morning getting updates, running scans, checking out the options and double-checking that everything seemed to be working with my applications. So far so good. Once I’m confident of it, I’ll also install it on Labashi’s machine. I do see something I’m not fond of buried in the license agreement. If you don’t renew your subscription, the product quits working. That’s a good way for Symantec to lose my business forever. The old version (2008) continues to run and protect your PC; it just doesn’t get the latest anti-virus updates. But now if I happen to miss a subscription deadline (like when I’m on a trip and don’t have a mailing address or reliable Internet connection) or I have some problem getting it installed, their approach is to expose my PC to the Internet. So I’ll be looking for another security product next year.
Today was also my day to get my iPod ready for my trip. The iPod itself is fine but I needed to get podcasts under control in iTunes. I had over two thousand podcasts taking up so much space on my laptop that I had to do something. There were a few I’d have liked to keep—like the CBC’s business editor’s podcast in December 2007 in which he confidently predicted the end of recessions. He said the world’s financial systems, particularly that of the US, were so stable that we’d never again have a recession. (And since November 2007, the S&P 500 has lost 40 per cent)
I had listened to all the ‘This American Life’, ‘Bill Moyers Journal’, ‘This Week in Saskatchewan’, ‘This Week in Manitoba’, ‘This Week in British Columbia’, and ‘This Week in the North’ podcasts and many of the ‘CBC Editor’s Choice’ podcasts. I had many more—over a year’s worth of ‘This Week’ broadcasts for Ontario, Alberta, and The Maritimes plus ‘The Wildebeat’ (a backpacking and outdoors podcast) which I rarely listened to. So I’ve deleted the episodes I’ve heard and unsubscribed the podcasts I rarely listened to, then bought a few more songs and I’m ready to go.
I didn’t walk today and we didn’t have a movie.

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