I was composing a response to buckofive's post about his dope new house when suddenly my machine stopped responding and the screen started flickering on and off at one second intervals. It took me a while, but I eventually figured out that my KVM had gone in to some auto-scan mode and was now flipping channels between the PC and the Mac Mini. I just got this KVM yesterday, and it came with no instructions or anything, so I had no idea how I'd gotten it in to this state, nor (more importantly) how to get out.

Fortunately, there's another machine on my desk, so I went to the manufacturer's site and found the manual for the KVM. Unfortunately it, like many other documents, is a PDF. I hadn't installed Acrobat Reader on that machine yet, and I couldn't remember the site for the PDF reader that warrend had sent me a couple weeks ago, so I started the long process of installing Reader.

Man oh man what a piece of fucking shit! First off, it wants to install a bunch of extra shit that I don't need at all, like Yahoo toolbar and some lite version of Photoshop. Dude. I need a READER. NOW. I uncheck that bullshit and then proceed with the TWENTY MEG download. After the download finally finishes, the 5+ minutes of install time starts. Yeah, that's right. It took over five minutes to install the fucking Reader. Four of those minutes appeared to be spent installing "Performance" tools or some shit, which I guess is Adobe's way of making their hellishly slow application perform somewhat less hellishly slow. Well, they failed, because it still took forever to start Reader and load my 12 page document. Way to go with that great product there, Adobe. Fuck.

So I finally get in to the manual and I find that the key combination that started the scan mode on the KVM was Left Shift and then Right Shift. Are they fucking kidding me? Left Shift, Right Shift??? Dude... the chances of hitting those two keys in that order are way too high. You don't make that the combination! You make it like CTRL-ALT-Right Shift or something that is hard to hit. Idiots!

The button to cancel the mode was Spacebar.