it's nice when applications update themselves you get that nice feeling that they're being nice to you in such a way that they might need to protect your from a spam king or a 12-year-old in oregon who's trawling IP for a quick hack but when they update themselves in such a way that they don't update themselves because they can't update themselves because something you're doing isn't to their liking but you can't figure out what that is then that's just annoying and leads me to waste my time writing this about it which I never would have done and really don't need to but you know I work from home and I don't think if I interrupt the cake making downstairs to let everyone know I'm in the middle of a thunderbird software update FAIL that they will be particularly interested in why I might want to update a bird.

my fault for not unchecking the box the says 'allow me to update yo ass' but here I am in a FAIL loop that may only stop if I throw something heavy at my computer which began as I was reading mail and google reader at the same time (thunderbird + firefox) which rudely interrupted my perusal of alec's giles coren comment tree which I finished and then agreed to restart. restart now. can't. you've got something running or you're not allowed. I'm allowed dammit. ok, I'll stop firefox I guess you might have dependency on that, ok try again. FAIL. you're running something or you're not allowed. I'm allowed allowed allowed. allowed. I've only got a pesky sun virus scan running now which is an equally annoying 12:00 popup. I guess that might be doing something you don't like. I'll close it, just for you. FAIL FAIL FAIL. you're running something or are not allowed. ALLOWED ALLOWED ALLOWED. ADM1N15R4T0R HaX0R r0X0r 733t d00d. I'm not running anything now. oh, except YOU, software update FAIL who is now in an infinite FAIL loop because I don't have anything to stop running and did I mention I'M ALLOWED. I HAZ PERMISSON.

I'm giving you one last go. thunderbird is installing your updates and will start again in a few minutes. good. FAIL! not good. if you think I'm going to reboot just to fix your problem then you're very wrong. Software Update Failed. DAMMIT. ctrl-alt-del.

© Tim Caynes. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Disclaimer: I work for Sun Microsystems, but this is nothing to do with them and it's all my fault, even though I might sometimes mention Solaris or something.