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So last night the missus and I were sitting in bed playing Point (a card game similar to Briscola) when we suddenly heard the “beep-beep-beep” of a “reverse gear alarm”… you know, the kind usually found on big trucks. Since we weren’t expecting a construction crew in front of our building at 11PM, we got up and looked out the window… only to see two ambulances, a North Carolina state trooper and several civilian cars with emergency lights on their dashboards.

Apparently the old man next door had died. Members of his family soon showed up, one of them in almost uncontrollable tears. Eventually a small white minivan pulled up. I’m assuming that it was the medical examiner, since the guy driving the van got out, pulled a gurney from the back of the van, and then put an empty body bag on the gurney and wheeled it in the neighbor’s townhouse. Eventually he came back out with the body and put it in the back of his van.

So after this happened last night, I was itching to write a post about it. Originally, it was going to be something along the lines of “ding-dong the witch is dead” from The Wizard of Oz. I say that because back when the Old Man first moved in, he and I went around and around about my “noise”. If, after 11:00PM, I decided to watch a sedate BBC documentary about birds – much less anything with explosions or car chases – you could always count on the Old Man to bang on the wall, or come over the next day to complain. One time he even came over and challenged me to a fist fight over my so-called noise (even though he couldn’t specify what noise or when it happened). That instance was so bad that I wrote a letter to the HOA. Apparently the letter set off a chain of reactions that led to him getting his medications changed; after that he ceased giving us so much trouble.

So instead of saying something crass, or something that I don’t really mean, allow me to just say requiescat in pacem, Old Man. I hope you’ve found peace, wherever you are.

For almost four years now, the folks over at Neowin have offered an awesome free utility called Autopatcher. In a nutshell, it was a program that installed all the latest patches and updates from Microsoft.So if you wiped your hard drive and reinstalled Windows from scratch, Autopatcher allowed you to install all the available updates from a CD, rather than having to download them directly from Microsoft. On a brand new system, this could save you lots of time, and Autopatcher was especially handy when you were reinstalling Windows at a friend’s house that was still on dial-up.

Sadly, Microsoft put the kibosh on the whole thing this week. Of course, it’s not entirely unexpected that Microsoft would want to protect its intellectual property; indeed, as far as copyright law goes, MS might have be forced to put the DMCA on Autopatcher. But the mystery is why Microsoft let this project go on for almost four years before shutting it down. Officially, Microsoft has said that Autopatcher was pulled because there was the possibility of malware being shipped with Autopatcher’s updates. Conspiracy theorists think it might have to do with Autopatcher allowing users to install patches with Windows Genuine Advantage. In any case, Autopatcher’s gone.

Hey Microsoft – why don’t you do something that will, you know, actually help your customers. You could whip up something like Autopatcher in what… a day? As someone that often has to reinstall Windows on crappy old computers, Autopatcher was a godsend for me.. why can you man up and make your own version???