It's Time Again for ... Open Letters!

Dear Microsoft,

While I appreciate your concern for my safety, please be advised that I really, truly do know how to use my own machine properly. I did at one point in the not too distant past work a technical support job, and I have also been known to consort with Windows programmers that are wise in the ways of your voodoo.

So the fact that I don't want to use the Windows Firewall (because I have a hardware firewall of my very own that is working just fine, thank you) is not something for you to get your panties in a knot about. Really. It's not necessary to pop up help balloons at every turn telling me OMG WTF FIREWALL!!11one.

Really. I do know what I'm doing. Promise. Now kindly tell me how to shut off those help balloons. You're letting me monitor my own antivirus program, for which I am very grateful - you know, letting me be responsible for MY OWN COMPUTER and all? But the help balloons have to go, man.

I'm sure you remember what happened LAST TIME I got dissatisfied with the behaviour of your programs? You know, the time I tore out Office and IE and replaced them with Staroffice and Firefox and Thunderbird?

I'm sure you don't want that to happen again. And while I'd never entirely go over to the Mac Side for reasons of my own (involving lack of present accessiblity, hardware incompatiblity and problems I see with iTunes and its DRM), Linux is looking remarkably tempting ....

In Yours We Anti-Trust,

Leah

Edit: You're lucky. I managed to disable those stupid help balloons.

Yay. Or something.

Good: no more block. Things aren't going as well as I'd hoped, but at least things are working again.
Bad: Some jackass ordered (I swear) almost $900 worth of (I swear) fiberoptic material on my debit card. So guess who gets to go to the bank on Wednesday (because the charge hasn't cleared yet) and get that nastiness cleared up? Blah. At least the fraud protection people caught it. *wishes horrible death to nasty piratey people*