Country: 198.71.179.134, North America, US

City: -111.8906 Arizona, United States

Ever since Easy CD Creator became Roxio, I have had trouble with their software. With Creator 2010 I got crashes so frequently that I would typically save after every two pictures I would add to a spreadsheet. Even though the web was full of people with similar problems, Roxio technical support claimed that they had never heard of such a problem and continually suggested that I do things to change my system like defrag my harddrive, or remove and reinstall the software over and over again, all the time ignoring the fact that I had a repeatable crash of their software.

A selling point of the Best American anthology series is that a guest editor makes the final selection of pieces from a larger pool that has been winnowed down from all submissions by the permanent series editor. Quite often the selected works do indeed mirror the guest editor's interests, style, genre, and political and world views. Given that, I braced myself to be less-than-thrilled with the 2010 Best American Short Stories volume, since the guest editor is Richard Russo. I did not care for Russo's supposed masterpiece "Empire Falls", and couldn't understand what the Pulitzer judges saw in it when they awarded it the Pulitzer Prize. To me, "Empire Falls" never made any grand observations or statements about the human condition and was nothing more than a chronicle of fairly trivial lives being led by downtrodden inhabitants of a city in decline.

I've tried a lot of anit-virus/anti-spam software. Most take too long to load and use too much resource. Kaspersky is fast, accurate and reliable. Well worth the price.