Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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Well, THAT’S Certainly a Relief

My Wonder Woman needed another car. Not a new car, because we only buy something that fits our “cash in hand that’s not dedicated to anything else” to purchase a car. Period.

Found a nice used car, paid cash for it, she drove it back home–130 miles from the place of purchase–and we’re pleased. Thankful for Autotrader.com and Carfax. LOTS of info there.

So, we made our moderate contribution to stimulating the economy today, I’m relieved I have one summer project off my back (though I still have to sell her old car–I’m thinking to salvage *heh*) and it’s well and truly time to move into a more relaxed pace for summer, now.

How’s your summer going?

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For the Fourth of July

Just a reminder of one reason why the Founders established a republic, not a democracy:

“Democracy is the most vile form of government … democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention, have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property, and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”–James Madison, Often referred to in The Founders’ day as Father of the Constitution

And in speaking on how a republic differs from a democracy, Madison (in Federalist 10) makes an interesting observation, based on his own extensive knowledge of history,

The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.

The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose. On the other hand, the effect may be inverted. Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.

I rather think I know which effect Madison would observe in today’s “feddle gummint”–don’t you?

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More on Upgrading Windows 7

Woody asked a question in comments on Win 7 Upgrade, so I thought posting PC World’s chart showing the feature sets of different versions might help folks out:

167444-windows7_editions_guide_original

CLICK on pic to enbiggen. 😉

Do note: to upgrade Windows XP or 32-bit Windows Vista to Win7, at the present time, the only way is to install a fresh copy of Windows 7, requiring a backup and restore of your current data. Fortunately, the Win7 install routine will do a “files and settings” type “transfer” of your current data to a folder in your new Win7 installation, from which you may later “import” your data. Applications will require reinstallation in almost all cases. Vista 64-bit users are in luck, though, since Win7 64-bit will simply upgrade your computer w/o needing to do a “transfer” of files and settings. Backing up before ANY Windows upgrade is just the right thing to do in any case.

And again, for those who want to sniff the flowers from across the divide, here are links to PC-BSD and Ubuntu. (PC-BSD still holds the record in my personal use for easiest and fastest installation of an OS–even easier and faster than a hard disk install of Puppy Linux, which nevertheless is still my fav OS for older, under-powered machines.)

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Win7 Upgrade

If you “preorder” Windows 7 by July 11, 2009, you can upgrade to the best Microsoft OS (for the average user) since Windows 2000 Pro. I’ve been using Win7 since the general beta release early this year and it’s been an overall pleasant experience. Right up there with a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.04, IMO. For someone who’s committed to using Windows, for whatever reason, if your hardware meets the basic requirements, the deal’s a steal. Better, IMO, than either XP or Vista, at $50 to upgrade there’s little reason for a dedicated Windows user to skip this one.

Win7-upgrade

(CLICK on pic to enlarge)

See the M$ order page here. And no, M$ doesn’t give me a dime for my opinions or for your purchase, should you buy.

If you want to jump ship from the M$ juggernaut, try Ubuntu or PC-BSD.

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Using Windows Live Writer

We’ll just see how well Windows Live Writer does in writing blogposts. Hmm, seems all right, now how about publishing the thing?preschool squabble kitteh n tortoise

Inserting pics is easy-peasy. Once more requirement met.

Some really messy code that I cleaned up in “source” mode. But then, I got used to that sort of thing when I used FrontPage for a while.

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This is cool!

For non-technical users who nevertheless want to have access to their home computers when away from home (or easily share pictures with Aunt Sadie or whatever), Opera has announced Opera Unite:

Opera Unite is a unique technology that turns any computer or device running Opera into a Web server. In other words, your computer (running Opera Unite) is truly part of the fabric of the Web, rather than just interacting with it, and it’s something anyone can use. With Opera Unite, everyday non-technical users can serve and share content and services directly from their own computers in the form of intuitive applications.

Easy-peasy access to ones files from anywhere? I’ll be testing this out over the next few days and weeks to see how different (and better for non-techies?) this is to other remote computing/file sharing options like VNC.

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Movie Maker Beta

The collection of Windows Live apps available for XP, Vista and Windows 7 is a grab bag of useful and useless (to me) apps that I’d avoided for some time since my last exposure to the collection in the Windows 7 Beta. But. I have a growing collection of unmanageably huge wtv files from Windows Media Center recordings, and wanted to burn the things to DVD in a usable format, so…

Of to the M$ Windows Live download site for the Windows Live Movie Maker Beta. Sure, it meant telling the installer app “Hell no!” when it wanted to install the crappy Windows Live mail and other useless junk, but the photo management app and Movie Maker (which, strangely, does not come in ANY version with Windows 7) were what I wanted to try out, so off to the races.

And with just a lil fumbling around, the Movie Maker Beta converted a wtv of the season premiere of Burn Notice to wmv format. OK enough, I suppose, for archiving. But it’s really, really slow and borked on me once, requiring a retry. Not only that, but the one-hour show is still more than a 3GB file size! What will I do with 2 hour shows? *mpph* Not good enough. Worse? “Editing” capabilities in the app are almost non-existant. Very “not good enough”.

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The Wasteland

Passing observation…

To me “oldies” refers to Purcell, Palestrina and des Prez. Contemporary music after Duke Ellington mostly… isn’t. Music that is. Yeh, there are some truly remarkable exceptions–including a few in rock music. But on the whole the latter part of the 20th Century anno domini was a musical wasteland–especially in the “serious” music category, IMO. And it’s not gotten much better in the first decade of the 21st Century. Still even the worst music can perform a useful function, serving as very good bad examples. Unfortunately, it seems the moral decline in our country (and generally in the Western world) is matched or even overmatched by a decline in musical perception among the masses.

Jose Ortega y Gasset’s “mass man” strikes again…

Writing in 1930 or so, Ortega y Gasset said, “The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.” And it is even more so today, as the lowest common denominator in morality, in knowledge and in reasoning yields us such nightmares as crap rap and Barack Hussein Obama… Ortega y Gasset’s observations echo the reasons the Founders did NOT structure the United States as a democracy. And yes, I do certainly believe that crap “music” and crappy government are related in a society that has come to think of itself as democratic.

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Celebrate Flight!

Today, June 18, is the Women’s Transatlantic Flight Anniversary. In 1928, Amelia Earhart flew from Newfoundland to Wales in 21 hours. In 1932, she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Now, of course, we have the TSA strip-searching lil old grandmothers. My how times have changed…

For something more on the spirit of flight,

The music is

The Mass

The Mass