The first was, that for my wedding, I had gotten the groomsmen pewter flasks from the Walsh Brothers in England. Although most of the flasks were in great shape, they screwed mine up. The front was caved in, and there were some scratches around the engraving. My supposition is that the engraving machine pressed a little too hard, pushing in the flask and scratching around the letters as well. They promised to replace it, and claim to have sent one, but it never arrived, and repeated email requests since then have gone unanswered. Since I finally needed it again for jon's wedding, I had it out today. I finally decided to think about the problem, and realized that all I had to do about it being caved in, was to increase the pressure on the inside relative to the surrounding atmosphere, so I poured in a little water, and stuck it in a pot of water which I proceeded to heat. It popped out the back as well, but that was much easier to press back into shape than it had been to pull the front out. So although I will never buy from the Walsh Brothers again, I can at least now fit the full complement of whisky into my flask.

The second, less physics inspired, solution was that I haven't been able to run Apple System Profiler on my machine for a while. So I finally did my Macintouch search and found out that Norton now sucks more than I had originally thought, and even when uninstalled it hadn't cleaned up after itself, leaving a link in the /System/Library/Extensions/ directory to an entire directory in /Library/Application Support/, this was causing Apple's System Profiler to crash.

I feel much better....as Adams once said "their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."