What an interesting day.

Sal has been complaining for the past few days of a sore shoulder. It has gotten progressively worse each day, so yesterday she saw a doctor about it. He theorised that she has a condition known as "frozen shoulder". When I heard this, I thought he'd made it up, kind of like a brain cloud or something, but it turns out it's real.

Sal decided shortly thereafter to get a second opinion, and spent last night sleepless and in constant (and, apparently, intense) pain. I took the day off today to take her to her second doctor's appointment, which her work had made for her because they're worried it might be a work-related injury.

Someone from her work showed up at the doctor's office too, so after waiting for nearly an hour (!) Sal let me go home and said she'd get a ride home with her workmate.

Bizarrely, she ended up back at work, and they made her stay there for the entire workday, so that really pissed us both off. She's incapable of even moving her arm, so she was pretty much useless.

Anyway, since I had the rest of the day to myself I decided to go over to my folks' place and set up their new Dell Dimension 3100. What a nice little machine! Only AU$1100 and it came with a nice-looking 19" flat-panel monitor!

After connecting it all up, I spent probably 20 minutes uninstalling all the crap that Dell ships with their standard install. For starters, I'm not interested in that 90 day trial of some anti-virus program (my folks aren't online, and they're unlikely to install anything unless I give it to 'em). They have no need for Google Desktop. They don't need the "Digital Line Detect" and other useless modem-related crap. So much crap!!!

Anyway, dad is kind of a technophobe so I spent the afternoon with him explaining iTunes to him. I'm not a fan of iTunes by any stretch, but he has an old iPod shuffle (guess who bought that for him?) so it was reasonable to centralize his music-management there. iTunes 7 is pretty neat - it has some album-art visualizations which look so good they could have been designed by Microsoft. Bravo for keeping a close eye on the competition and introducing some of their nicer ideas into your otherwise crappy software, Apple!

I left dad late in the day, manually typing in track and artist names. What a bitch it is to import CDs when you don't have an Internet connection! I'll have to investigate whether it's possible to keep an offline version of the CDDB.