Today's mysterious quiet has been brought to you by: Microsoft, who's decision to make the time zone patch a "roll-up" instead of a critical update resulted in none of my users getting the thing automatically sent to them last month. You see, in the Land of Microsoft critical updates are the best-tested, most-important updates. All others (including fruit security roll-ups) tend to have things like "new features" (bugs) or "new software" (beta tests) included in them, so I never bothered to select those categories for download, let alone automatic install.

Discovering why, exactly, the automated install hadn't actually automated or installed, when the auto update widget had been steaming along happily for the past 18 months, took about four hours. Implementing the fix took about 2 more, and now I'm chasing down the broken or somewhat schizoid computers which won't take the update at all.

This time I really do blame the Bush administration, along with busybody congress critters who quite clearly need to be kept much more busy than they are at present.

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