Szone.berlinwall.org

Recently my middle child turned 10 and on that birthday, she
received a Nintendo DS game called Nintendo Dogs.  The game is pretty neat and I can tell that a
lot of work went into developing the product. 
The object is to train, raise and compete with your virtual dog.  It takes a lot of time and thought to be successful
at the game, but I have to wonder what kind of psychological damage/depression it
is going to cause to our real pet dog, which is quite alive and fun to play
with.  Instead of playing with the real dog,
she is playing with this simulation for hours at a time. Meanwhile the real pet
is looking at her with her canine eyes and wondering what it is that is making
that barking noise.  Occasionally the
real pet will bark in response to the noise that the Nintendo game is making,
which is comical and at the same time it make me wonder where the inclusion of technology
of this kind in society is going to lead...

The last couple of months I have been banging my head against the problem with windows updates not being applied via the web or the internal update server.  It is because the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) is failing to start.  I tried all of the recommended things in the Knowledge base articles (reregistering .DLLs, setting security descriptors, adding update.microsoft.com to trusted sites, etc...) none of them worked. So as I received a new laptop from dell to setup yesterday I was wondering why the updates would not work.  So on a whim I unjoined the computer from the active directory domain, rebooted, ran windowsupdate and all 22 updates were downloaded and installed.