Reasons to be kind to your ex

#2,613: Occasional free food.

In fact, my first wife* and her third husband invited me over to a cookout today: steaks and the stuff that goes with them, and it went very well indeed. My daughter was on hand for a while, but then headed off to work. The happy couple complained a bit about their stodgy old PC, and I figured the least I could do was see if I could get it to behave itself. The following High Truths quickly presented themselves:

• The only thing worse than a version of McAfee is an AOL-branded version of McAfee.
  
• You do not let kids install P2P stuff.
  
• There is high-speed Internet, and there is high-speed Internet.
  

I figure any machine that takes nine minutes to bring up the Control Panel Add/Remove Programs applet is in serious disarray.

A couple of hours later, I had banished the offending stuff, installed AVG antivirus and OpenOffice, and gotten the start time for that applet to twenty seconds or so. (You can do only so much with 256 MB of RAM on an XP box.)

The steaks? Just fine.

* This is not intended to indicate that I have, or have had, or expect to have, a second wife.

Posted at 9:19 PM to World Tour '07