In my last post, mere minutes ago, I mentioned the spam associated with downloading PerfectDisk from their website. This morning I received one such spam mail in my inbox, from the South African distributors of PerfectDisk (http://www.foster-melliar.co.za/), asking me how my free trial performed and how many licenses I’d be needing. A pretty standard sales pitch email, but I got up feeling rather snarky and chipper and decided I’d respond to the poor guy;
Good morning Gavin,
PerfectDisk performed amicably. The download was smooth (South Africa’s internet deficiencies aside), the program ran like a dream. In fact, the only bad thing about it (and unfortunately, I consider this to be rather a large fault) is that I had to enter my email address to access the free trial and the disclaimer that comes with it; ‘you acknowledge that you may be contacted via email regarding this or other Raxco products.’.
The world needs less spam.
No licenses, thank you.
Delyth
I didn’t expect a reply, much less an amicable one, but a reply is what I got-
Good morning Delyth,
Thank you for the feedback regarding PerfectDisk.
Regarding the disclaimer, you will not receive any emails from me regarding the Raxco product set.
I get copied on the downloads of the software.
I will forward your email to Raxco and request them to remove your email off the system.
Impressed by both the speed of the reply (especially considering I’m not a buying customer) and the amenable nature, I overcame my snark (after all, it’s not the sales guy’s fault, right? He’s just doing his job…);
Gavin,
Thank you kindly! Much appreciated.
Have a nice Wednesday!
Delyth
And received one last, friendly reply –
Hi Delyth,
It’s a pleasure.
I have emailed Raxco support and requested that they remove your email address.
Enjoy the rest of you day as well.
Thank you.
Gavin
Hurrah 
Thank you, Gavin of Foster-Melliar, for adding to the awesomeness that I have decided this Wednesday will contain.
Before I introduce the first tool, I’ll explain a bit about drive fragmentation, in layman-ish terms.
Your hard drive’s space is split into fragments, like ’slots’. When you save something to the hard drive, your computer looks at how much space that thing needs, and allocates it a suitably sized slot. Unfortunately, your PC is quite incapable of allocating related data sequentially – so as you’re filling up the disk, deleting things and freeing up slots only to fill them again with something else, your hard drive gets quite messy. This slows down the speed at which your PC can access the files on your hard drive, because it needs to find them first – and they’re not in any order. This also affects your PC’s performance, because when you’re running something, your PC will use a part of that free space as ‘temporary memory’ to store the information about the program you’re running. The more full your disk gets and the more use it’s seen, the worse this phenomenon becomes. You may have 40GB of your 250GB disk left, but that 40GB isn’t in one ‘chunk’ of free space. It’s spread out all over the place – it may even be in 40 1GB slots.
Defragmentation tools scan your drive, look at the types of files on there and the space available to work with, and re-organise everything to get those chunks of free space in more manageable locations and to organise what’s stored on there so that it’s easier for your PC to read. Effectively, it improves your PCs performance.
Ever used the Windows defragmenter? It’s crap. Sometimes necessary, but crap all the same (it’s Windows, after all; what did you expect?).It takes ages, it’s not particularly user-friendly, and it’s very basic.
Rusty pointed me to another option called Perfect Disk. As well as your normal fragmenting, it offers something called ’smart placement’ – simply put, it organises your files so that the ones that need accessing the fastest for best PC performance are strategically placed on the part of your hard drive’s disk that is easiest to get to. If you’re a gamer, you can specifically ask it to put your games near the center of the disk and that’ll give you a performance boost when you run those games.
Perfect Disk isn’t free, but it does have a free 30 day trial – even if you only use it once, it’s worth it because you don’t need to defrag your drive often. If you buy it, it’s only $40, which I think is worth it for a good defragmenter that kicks the crap out of the Windows one!
This is their website – www.perfectdisk.com
However, downloading from their website requires you to put in your email address with this nasty disclaimer: ‘you acknowledge that you may be contacted via email regarding this or other Raxco products’ – so I’d recommend downloading from CNet instead:
http://download.cnet.com/PerfectDisk/3000-2094_4-10654012.html
The second piece of software is called CCleaner (‘crap cleaner’). It does what it says on the tin – cleans up all the crap on your ‘puter; things like cookies, temporary files and folders, leftover installation files, etc. Usually you’d accomplish this in a Windows OS by lots of clicking around hunting for things, but CCleaner does it all from one neat little free application. I cleaned my PC the ‘hard way’ on Saturday by manually removing temp files and stuff, but when I installed and ran CCleaner it still managed to find and delete 2GB of crap.
http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/ – give it a go 
(As if a story like this could originate anywhere else in the world!)
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/01/oral-sex-defininition-prompts-school-district-to-pull-dictionaries.html
This is absolutely crazy. I wonder how many of these people have read 1984 and how many of them see the irony in their actions. I’m willing to bet it’s a minimal percentage. Here’s the article -
‘Oral sex’ definition prompts school district to pull dictionaries
January 24, 2010 | 7:49 am
A school district in Riverside County has pulled the Merriam-Webster’s 10th edition dictionary from school shelves because it includes the term “oral sex.”
The Menifee Union School District took the action last week after a parent complained about the dictionary.
The Press-Enterprise reported that some parents are angry about the move and want the dictionaries returned to classrooms.
“It’s just not age-appropriate,” said school spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the newspaper. “It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature.”
The school board will decide later whether to return the dictionaries to the classrooms. One board member told the Press-Enterprise that there are probably more objectionable terms in the dictionary.
– Shelby Grad
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, here are some choice comments:
To the School District in Riverside County – thank you, thank you, thank you! I am so pleased that you are taking this kind of action. If some parents are angry about it, let them teach their own children about “oral sex”. I am disgusted with parents that want to push that kind of agenda for any age of children
Somewhat more farcical -
I support the school in this action.
All material that references sex and another degrading acts that can affect our your children should not be readily available to students.
We send our children to school to learn and not to be made into sex objects by some of the teachers and other non God fearing educational officials.
All books and other such material should be taken out from any where in the school and destroyed. It is not the government job to teach our kids about sex, that is not where was want our tax dollars being spend.
This takes ‘insane religious nuts’ to a whole new level. Christianity is fine. I have no qualms with it, on the whole. No – my beef comes from idiots like this person who seem to surround themselves with these absurdly ignorant notions and preach them as if they’re fact. Preach them to every bloody person they can find in an attempt to get them to ’see the righteous path’. I don’t care what faith you are. I’m happy that you’re finding happiness in and having faith in something. But LEAVE ME THE F**CK out of it. Dictating your wacky ideals in a manner that will ultimately lead to the degradation of education and intellectualism? Get a grip. Get a life. Get an effing clue – and if you can’t do those things, lock yourself in a room and never come out.
I was going to spend today in a blissfully ignorant haze of computer gaming with nothing more tedious to occupy my wee brain cells than ’shall I do some trade runs between space stations or go pew-pew some space pirates?’. Then I visited the Twitter page of a friend, followed through on some links, and came upon this -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/17/cruise-ships-haiti-earthquake
In a conveniently compact and chocolaty brown nutshell, cruise ships are facing the dilemma of whether or not they should dock at ports in Haiti.
Now, I like to think I’m a fair thinker. Considering all perspectives and all that jazz. So my beef here isn’t with the cruise ships, their captains and crew. No – as the article points out, a large proportion of Haiti’s income comes from tourism, and after all, the captain of a cruise ship is just a human with a job. A job that places him or her in a very awkward position with hefty decisions to be made, numerous options and weights to consider and so on. I can’t blame a man for his decision to respond to a situation that I’ve never been in – I don’t know how I’d react in the same situation. But I do believe that their decision to go ahead and dock at Haiti was the right one.
I’ll explain. There were, in a rather black-and-white sense, two options available. To berth, or not to berth (ahahaha). If they had turned away, it would have spared (some of) the passengers from having to deal with with wracking guilt. It would, on the face of things, have appeared the more sensitive of options to have chosen (though I firmly believe that in this instance, ignorance would be more telling of selfishness than bliss). But it would also have meant that all those people on board the ship would not be spending their doubtless copious quantities of cash at Labadee. Alternatively, as they chose to do, they did dock. A lot of passengers got off the ship and proceeded to pour afore mentioned cash into Haiti’s economy. They did more good than what they would have done had they been denied this spending spree. Who knows; maybe some of them even took the opportunity to donate to the cause. It has also been mentioned that the ships were carrying food aid and even donated proceeds from the visit.
Some of those passengers, however, decided to stay on board, ‘disgusted’ at the decision to dock. Did I hear someone whisper the ‘g’ word? Yes, I’m sure guilt was a lot to do with it. There they were, on their shiny big boat with their shiny big wallets hoping to lavish themselves with finery as only the rich know how – and suddenly they’re faced with earthquake-ravaged Haiti.
“It was hard enough to sit and eat a picnic lunch at Labadee before the quake, knowing how many Haitians were starving,” said another. “I can’t imagine having to choke down a burger there now.”
That’s what disgusts me. This person admits to being well aware of the dire situation in Haiti even before the quake, and yet still took the cruise – still made that conscious decision to conveniently ignore the poverty on their sunbathing doorstep in favour of a beach picnic. Wouldn’t you think that someone who admits to it being ‘hard enough to sit and eat a picnic lunch at Labadee before the quake, knowing how many Haitians were starving’, would do no such god-damned thing and would instead help? Oh, how hard it must have been to be sipping cocktails and gorging on fresh seafood with poverty just around the corner. How absolutely horrid to have to go through that – as if they were being forced.
Buddy, whoever you are, you volunteered to put yourself on that beach with starving Haitians conveniently out of sight. ‘It was hard enough’? I should effing coco.
(Click for full size)
Took a few short vids too, will upload later or tomorrow after stringing them all together
