Yelling at the computer

I should know by now that yelling at my computer doesn't help the situation, although it does make me feel better.

Last night I was fighting with Windows Live - apparently it wanted to validate my email address, but insisted that it validate the one associated to my Windows Live ID, which is a defunct email address. I'd created the ID years ago and never found a way to correct the email address, but since the ID provided the access I needed, I didn't worry about it.

Unfortunately Windows Live Blogging DOES care whether the email is valid, and if your cookies are cleared, it'll suddenly insist that you validate your email address - without providing the option of corrrecting said email address. On top of that, every time the page refreshed, it would ask me about 10 times if I want activeX or a script to run.

That's when I started yelling a the computer - if I'm returning to a page I was just on and I already said that it was OK to run ActiveX or a particular script then don't ask me again about it, just run it. After about two hours of fighting with Windows Live and IE's incessant popups, I gave up. It may have won the battle, but I was determined to win the war.

This morning, I logged onto Windows Live using a more obediant Windows XP computer (I suspect that this one behaves better because I have the Hosts file tuned to alias most advertising / annoyance URLs to 127.0.0.1), and magically stumbled upon the page I was seeking, namely the one that allowed me to change my Windows Live ID email address from defunct email address to a current email address and to kill that blog once and for all.  All that without the incessant "do you want me to run this script?" popups or the yelling. There was a small amount of evil laughter, followed by "Die! Die! Die!", but I digress.