I feel pretty bad for not blogging for so many days. I've been insanely stressed because of the pending move. After the Penske rental prices went up so drastically, my bf & I tried to look for another company that can offer a comparable price we were quoted by Penske a month ago. We finally found Budget, and made a reservation to move this Friday (today!!). But the rental location just called me 2 days ago and said they had no truck! I thought it so fucked up to give people such a short notice since I made the reservation almost 2 weeks ago. Since I rent an apartment in a high rise, I also have to schedule our move out in order to reserve the elevator. That really messed me up. I mean, what the hell is a reservation for if you're not guaranteed anything? So I had to reschedule everything and pay an extra day of rent because my building won't let me move out on the weekends or the holidays (labor day). So now, I'm set to move on the coming Tuesday. And god I hope there's gonna be a truck for me. Other than that, we've had to sell a lot of our larger furniture. The cheap stuff is going quickly, but the more expensive stuff, which also happen to be the largest items still have not been sold. On top of that, my right eye suddenly got really poofy when I woke up (like an eye infection almost), and I was totally freaked out. Since I feel so helpless and things seemed so out of my control, I coped by testing out at least 10-20 pieces of software in the past few days. I know this sounds kinda weird, but software is much more controllable than my life at this point. With the given options, they usually do what I tell them to do (the keyword is "usually"). So here's what I've messed around with:

• JAlbum  *FREE*

• Ultra Edit

• ExplorerPlus

• xplorer² 

• PocoMail

• The Bat

• Incredimail

• ACA Capture Pro

• SnagIt

• Total Uninstall

• Encrypted FTP *FREE*

• Ewido Security Suite

• Master Converter

• ACDSee

• BlogJet

• Kolorgenerator *FREE*

• Top Style Pro

• Free Download Manager *FREE*

• Notepad+++ *FREE*

• Visual Thesaurus

• Acronis True Image

• Rename Master *FREE*

There may be others I didn’t list because I probably erased them from my hard drive and I don’t remember their names cuz they sucked. I’m not gonna bother writing a review for each of them. First, because I’m lazy. Second, I may not have tested them thoroughly if I didn’t find them useful or interesting right after install. Third, I have not used them long enough to make a judgement (although some of them were revisits). The ones I would recommend to others or worth checking out are the colored ones on the list. All of them are pretty good software, but maybe not exceptional. The ones I highlighted I would definitely recommend to friends.

Oh, I just forgot to mention that other than my moving & health woes, I actually had a undetectable trojan released onto my computer when I was uninstalling Kaspersky. It was hiding so well from all the virus scans (Kaspersky, BitDefender, McAfee, Norton, and all the big anti-virus names you can think of), that I had no choice but to reformat my C drive and do it ALL OVER AGAIN! After everything was set and done, my computer functioned much better (it was getting quirky before). But when my bf ran Ewido on my computer when everything seemed fine, it found 200+ infected objects (such as worms, spywares, keyloggers, and trojans). Now that sounds very scary as I always have a good antivirus program, am behind a firewall, only use Firefox, and run Microsoft AntiSpyware, Spyware Blaster, & Spybot on my computer religiously. That made me extremely paranoid and made me wonder if a person who is as anal as me still have so much gunk on my computer, how much crap would there be on a normal person’s computer?