And I helped! I went with my shitashi tomodachi from Japanese class during the record-setting event (11,538!!) and we got shot together. I'm going to be riding my bike a lot this winter, so I need to remain flu-free :)

University of Minnesota makes flu shot record try - MSNBC Wire Services- msnbc.com

President Obama, here we come!!

"Jesus, dude."

That's what the guy at the DMV said when he saw my double-plus-expired driver's license today. Let's just say it was probably closing on felony territory. Anyhow, his response was pretty funny, I think even he was surprised that he said it--it was sort of under his breath--but then looked up at me a little startled, like, "oops, maybe I shouldn't have said that." I just said, "Don't worry, I drive a bicycle. Usually." :D

I have several large USB drives for storing my media. Since I've got my Thinkpad X61 docking station hooked up to the TV, I leave the drives connected to the machine. In order to undock from the station, the drives need to be in a state where they can be safely removed by the OS. Fine, no problem; just close any apps that have open files on those volumes and press undock. Oh noes, I get the following error:

Huh? OK, close every app on the damned machine...same error? WTF? This is ricockulous. So I grabbed a cool USB removal tool that's capable of displaying something more meaningful than the stupid windows error, and I get this back:

Yesssssssssssss!! Finally some useful information! Oh wait, what the hell is all that crap? The svchost and system processes are holding locks on files in the $Extend folder?? Holy cows is this ridiculous. After some research I can say that these hidden files and folders represent NTFS metadata:

• $Extend\$RmMetadata\$TxfLog\* is related to 'transactional NTFS' features that are new with Vista
• $Extend\$ObjId is related to distributed link tracking
• \System Volume Information\tracking.log is related to system restore

No locks on NTFS metadata exist when I attach a removable NTFS volume after the system has booted. So, Vista just locks up any NTFS volume that happens to be attached to the computer at boot time, and there's no way to remove the volumes to undock my laptop without yanking the USB cable. Who in their right mind on the Windows Storage Team thought this behavior was a good idea? Whoever you are, die in a fire.

I make a point of not booting from the docking station anymore, because I enjoy being able to press the undock button and have it actually work. Eff, this is so dumb, I can't believe other people haven't complained about this already. Once again I found out firsthand about a sucky team at Microsoft. They should stop these people before they cross-breed with the Windows Installer Team and accidentally create software that deletes all your data and then kills you in your sleep.