“Helping others may be as primal a human pleasure as food or sex.” – Nicholas D. Kristof, NYTimes

In an op-ed by Nicholas D. Kristof, the act of giving is equated food or sex in their ability to provide human pleasure. It is a post that introduces the premise of a new book titled, “The Happiness Hypothesis“, and it’s one that I can agree with.

Throughout time, people have given to help those in need. They still do, as is seen in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. People also give to feel good about themselves. It’s a euphoric feeling that is not only one-sided, but has benefits for the receiving end.

Kristof ties this to a humanistic need to be social and to contribute to society. It’s an old idea, but it’s always a good read.

Years ago, I read an article that found the average number of websites a user actually visits, frequently, is six.  Recently, I’ve been thinking about that and have decided to write down my top 6 sites.

Gmail – ‘Where I enter my cloud in the sky and hop about for e-mail, chat, suggested news, and online documents. I don’t know why I don’t use iGoogle. Yes, I do. It’s the look and feel of iGoogle. Of course, I can change it, but the default Gmail settings- with a slight modification by moving my chat contact list to the right-hand side and enabling docs and calendar- is all I need. It’s simple and it works.

The New York Times – I find the front page of the New York Times to be very effective in getting me the latest news and the most popular as read by other visitors. Whether it’s educational, international, technological, political, etc. I can always find news that’s important to me. Their op-ed section also make for good reading with Friedman, Krugman, Kristof, and Dowd.

ESPN – I love sports. ESPN delivers.

VGChartz – I love video games… and numbers. VGChartz is where I go for the latest sales numbers. Sometimes, I go there for news, but I prefer IGN for video game news, even though it didn’t make it in my top 6. The news at VGChartz is sufficient.

GoNintendo – Even though I don’t play much of Nintendo-branded games, nowadays, I’m still interested in what they have in store for their key franchises. I think a lot of their third-party games on the Wii are fun and go unnoticed by the general consumer. This is where I go for my Nintendo fix.

Reddit – Recently, I’ve been annoyed with the Reddit submissions that pop up on the homepage, but I keep coming back. Visiting the site is more entertainment than intellectual but, every now and again, you can find a gem that is worth reading. I hear that subscribing to sub-reddits is better than visiting the homepage.

Those are the top 6 websites that I visit daily. Here are others that I get to once a week or, at least, once a month.

• The Economist
• Hulu
• YouTube
• IGN
• Forbes
• BusinessWeek
• Idealist
• The Chronicle

What’s your top 6?

Now that’s what I call a deal.

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks can be bought from Wal-Mart’s online store, walmart.com. Who would’ve thought we’d get such a great price this early in the product’s life? If you haven’t purchased your copy yet, this is the time to do it. $25 shouldn’t be passed up. The site didn’t say when the sale would expire.

Update

It looks like Amazon.com has the better deal. For $25, you get the game plus free shipping.

Note: This information requires you to edit your registry settings. Please take caution when doing this. Proceed at your own risk.

I spent the better part of my day fixing my sister’s computer problems. First it was a virus that disguised itself as an anti-virus solution with constant warnings of the laptop being at critical risk. Then, after successfully completing her installation of Norton Antivirus- which always came up at log in to remind her to finish it, but she didn’t- the Internet connection was killed. (Norton did it.) After disabling Norton, the Internet roads were open again.

From there, I was able to download Avira Antivir, PC Tools Spyware Doctor, and Ad-Aware to begin cleaning. Antivir did most of the cleaning, but after restarting the machine as instructed by the anti-virus program, the laptop would not let me log in. I logged in, and it would log me off. I tried again, and got the same result. Repeat a few more times and you get the picture. Microsoft has documented the problem, here.

Using another computer I searched for the problem and the solution was to get a live CD, preferably BartPE. After downloading an image and burning it to a CD, I was able to boot from the CD and go into the registry settings using ‘regedit’. Here are the instructions I used: http://windowsxp.mvps.org/peboot.htm

The link says to only change one key, but check to make sure that these two keys are correct. This will save you time if you have the annoying “Can’t find logon.exe” error message that pops up after you disinfect your computer. Navigate to the following keys and make sure that their values are as indicated below.

Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell
Value: Explorer.exe

Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\UserInit
Value: C:\Windows\System32\Userinit.exe

Restart your computer and log in as normal.

While researching this problem, I found a large number of forum threads and posts about it. The best post that contained the problem and solution was here. It provides an additional solution.

After that, I still had some cleaning to do. (First, I uninstalled Norton. I’ve had bad experiences with Norton.) In my experience, one anti-virus program doesn’t always find everything. The second anti-virus program I used was the Spyware Doctor. It was able to pick up some of the overlooked crumbs. To be on the safe side, I’ve installed Ad-Aware and will be running it now. When that’s done, we should be back to normal.

Or for me, on to the next computer-related problem. All of this started when I woke up this morning and was greeted outside my bedroom door with my sister saying, “Can you fix my iPhone? All my contacts are deleted. I tried hooking it up to my computer but my computer doesn’t recognize it…”

It’s never just one problem in the world of IT.