One of your humble Blog Goliard’s personal categories that helps him make sense of the world is: “things that are very good, yet still wildly overrated”.

It can be a tricky category to maintain and explain. When we try to argue that something is wildly overrated, people can automatically presume that we’re saying they’re mediocre or bad. But even excellent things can be overrated and overpraised, and it can skew our perception. Absolutely anything human, from the greatest to the humblest, can be overhyped.

As a big college football fan, my current Exhibit A in this category should come as no surprise. It is none other than Florida’s Tim Tebow.

Your humble Blog Goliard has had the privilege of spending multiple hours on multiple computers this week, fighting with one of the gazillion Windows XP updates that were recently pushed out. The security update for .NET Framework 1.1 would not install properly; and it was loads of fun ripping out .NET and reinstalling it to fix this problem.

If, perchance, anyone who stumbles across this page finds him or herself in the same situation, here is what worked for my machines, along with links to the tools used.

Step 1: Open up the Add or Remove Programs Control Panel. Remove all instances of Microsoft .NET Framework (all versions). There appears to be a certain order in which it prefers to work, but I never seemed to hit upon the exact right one, so I can’t give detailed advice there; just keep whacking at it until they’re all gone.

Step 2: Download the .NET Framework Cleanup Tool from this site and run it to remove any stray bits of .NET Framework that may remain.

Step 3: Download All in One Runtimes from this site. After rebooting, run this tool with the boxes under “Microsoft .NET Framework checked” and other boxes unchecked, and it will automatically reinstall .NET Framework versions 1.1 through 3.5, with service packs.

Step 4: Reboot again, then run Microsoft Update. Any remaining updates not already rolled into All in One Runtimes should now install.

Good luck!

Dormant blogs exist in a vicious cycle of not-happeningness. Nobody comes around because there’s not much new content and the blogger isn’t doing much to promote the site. Less gets written and less promoting occurs because nobody’s coming around. And so on.

So your humble Blog Goliard—when he’s got the time and energy, which seem harder to come by all the time—has been doing more writing these days in the form of comments on other, more-travelled sites. Bigger audience and more chance of instant gratification. He should really do more with this site too, though, so that those who wander by here because they like what he has to say in com-boxes (maybe that describes you right now, dear reader) find more timely goodness here and bookmark it.

Surely he will. Surely he will also find a way to fix what the newer versions of Internet Destroyer borkened in the blog template. But he’s busy and distracted a lot these days, so hard to tell when that will be exactly.