Douse me in alcohol.

There’s certain painful things I must endure in my day to day wanderings along Geek Alley. One of which is that I must interact with a dreaded environment known as Windows XP. Painful as it it, there are things I must do that that loathsome environment can only provide.
I make the best of this unfortunate situation though. My second monitor is my WinXp desktop, and is an excellent place to park either unchangeing or automatically updating pages I’d like to keep an eye on. I have a set of windows showing me network status of all the machines I interact with (You’d think, working at home, I wouldn’t have that large a network – but there’s 2 main servers and a cloud of support machines that really all need to be working to keep Homeport and all the associated domains and services running). I also run a live video session there via OpenWengo. The combination of my Linux desktop (where I get real work done), and the Windows desktop (which is really just an auxiliary display) works well for me.
Occasionally though, I need to do maintenance on the XP box. To give you an idea of how loathsome I consider this, I haven’t even -named- that machine. It’s just ‘the xp box’, whereas all my Linux machines and servers have nice names to personalize them (hunter, endor, myth, boomer, etc). Anyway, today’s task was replacing Firefox 1.0.7, which had gotten fairly unstable (for no knowable reason other than it being old), and upgrading to FF 1.5.0.1. Of course, this means uninstalling the old FF, and getting the new one… since Firefox wasn’t even runnable, there’s only one other option. Run IE.
Now, I’ve never really hidden my dislike of this browser. Not just because the experience of using it is bad, but because it is so riddled with bugs, security holes, and bad design decisions. It is a browser locked into 1998-style thinking. Microsoft has made much noise about IE7 being all new and wonderful and things, but everytrhing I’ve heard, it’ll just be Firefox with an IE label on it. Gosh, tabs! What a concept!
Anyway, I needed to run IE to download the new version of firefox. I feel somehow sullied now, and have the urge to go shower and scrub. Fortunately, it was a short exposure, to a known set of websites. Chances of serious damage or inection are small.