Coyote Blog

Without really knowing what I was doing, I bought a Sandisk flash drive with "U3" on it.  This is an application that when you plug the flash drive into your computer, spoofs the computer into thinking it is a CD-ROM drive, so programs can be run from it.  I presume this might be useful if you compute from a lot of public computers and want to carry your own email client around, but for me, this was useless functionality. 

All that U3 did for me was radically slow down the process of plugging my flash drive into the computer and getting my damn files on and off.  There is sort of a boot up process, and on several occasions it crashed my whole system, despite trying to update the software to the most recent version.  Unfortunately, the built in uninstaller does not work, so, like spyware, the U3 has become impossible to remove.  Despite paying $50 for this thing, I am seriously considering throwing it in the trash and getting a new one without U3 on it.

Update: Downloading this finally got rid of it.  Again, this might be a cool tool for folks who use public computers or other people's computers a lot.  However, if you don't need this functionality, and just want to move files around, you will not want the instability and incompatibility problems U3 brings.

In a previous post, I discussed decision anchoring in judged events.  This week I have a simpler question:  Whose idea was it to give out CD-ROM's this time instead of regular medals?

Is this some kind of weird prelude to a Microsoft takeover of the games?  Or maybe these are just remaindered "Glitter" DVD's.  By the way, this picture does not do her justice, but Tanith Belbin is pretty hot.  She came in third in ESPN's page 2 hottest female athlete survey.  Better pictures here.