Category: FYI

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People Who Cannot Even Speak or Write Their Native Tongue Are Stupid

eye-c-stoopid-ppl

I see stupid people. I see stupid “edumacators” who avoid teaching grammar and stupid students who avoid learning English.

Example: “If [I, they, he, etc.] would have” is a construction that, I suppose, is intended to indicate a class of conditional that should be simply, “If I had.” I am *gagamaggot* sick of seeing the evidence of laziness and stupidity “If [I, they, he, etc.] would have” demonstrates. Now, both of y’all who might comment on this are excused, since I have no doubt such abuse of the English language is off the table for you, but for those folks who may read this and grunt, in their most articulate manner, “Huh?!?” I have only this: *arrgggghhh!*

And that is the kindest, gentlest, most generous response possible. In fact, it is far, far kinder, gentler and more generous than such folks deserve, but that’s just me: kind, gentle and generous to a fault. 😉

N.B. Execrable grammar, word misuse, impenetrable amphiboly, etc., are all completely, totally and absolutely inexcusable* in text written by someone who wants to be PAID for writing. It doesn’t matter what excuse some lame-brained writer, editor or critic (IMO, critics who are writers are few and far between, so I consider the class to be separate, for all “intensive porpoises” *heh*) excretes, such abuse of English is offensive to anyone who thinks these things through, ESPECIALLY when the abuser wants to be paid for the abuse.

*An exception that proves the rule: dialog in a piece of fiction intended to build a character that is an illiterate boob is the one place such things can be marginally legitimate. Anywhere else these abuses occur just demonstrate that the author is an illiterate boob.

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Is It Just Me?

MmmIdunno.

So, the execrable non-service personnel at the non-sufficiently-to-be-condemned Westinghouse Digital LLC, finally got a TV back to us after holding the defective one we sent back hostage for over a month of business days, claiming our replacement was “on back order.”

A credible (and genuine) threat of legal action, along with a commentary on the company’s recent class action lawsuit losses and bad BBB rating (neither of which were in evidence when we bought the product–those happened later) resulted in–surprise! surprise!–a new TV sent out that very day, and. . .

. . .it’s almost a replacement for the one they held hostage for a month of business days. Almost. Was a pain to set up (tuner refused to activate until after several hard resets) and the audio does NOT work as well as the unit this TV replaces. Cannot turn off the unit’s speakers w/o also muting the digital audio–what’s up with that? The previous unit’s TOSLINK digital audio link worked well with the unit’s speakers off. No joy with this unit. And so. . . with digital (or even analog!) audio connected to an external unit, if the TV speakers are on, the lag emulates a bad reverb. So, the TV speakers off: analog works but digital doesn’t (and analog has fewer “tweaks” available, of course).

Oh, and calling back about this, the jackass “support” person who claimed to have a “computer science degree” (which means NOTHING in relation to this issue) insisted that the coaxial digital connection was the same as the TOSSLINK (optical) digital connection on the former TV.

Asshat. Ignorant asshat. Means nothing (and is wrong anyway).
Screwed.

So, just a heads up: if you buy ANYTHING from Westinghouse Digital

1. Make absolutely certain it has ALL the features you want (the defective unit did. . . for 9 months)
2. Purchase a third party service plan and
3. If that 3rd party service plan only goes into effect after the Westinghouse Digital warranty lapses, use the product to assure it works, then BOX IT UP AND WAIT FOR THE EXTENDED COVERAGE TO GO INTO EFFECT. If you’ve purchased a three or four year service plan, you should have two or three years of protection by a reputable firm (SquareTrade is a viable option. We’ve used SquareTrade coverage and been satisfied with the service. We have another company’s extended service plan for the TV, and it covers the replacement. . . and I know people in their corporate offices. *heh*)

You do NOT want to rely on Westinghouse Digital to make you whole should one of its products be defective. Based on my experiences, the company will likely make every effort to screw you over. Just sayin’.

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“It’s going to be fun!”

Bill Whittle on “President Social Proof’s” new clothes and the fun we can have running the naked socialistas into the river. . .

I’m going to operate this year focusing on saying to every Loony Left Moonbat I can, in effect or in fact *heh*, “Although I disagree with you, I will defend your right to say what you believe. . . and my right to mock you for being an idiot. But when you try to COMPEL me to agree with you, you’re in for a fight, mmmK?”

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Life Hacking

With some modification, noted in [], I’d like to start with a comment from a How to be a Hacker site:

The hacker mind-set is not confined to [a] software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music — actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers’ too — and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in.

I’m among those who embrace the universality of hackerdom. 😉 “What would happen if I kludged together X and Y to do Z?” is the kind of question any hacker might ask, in any medium. Basically, it’s just tinkering with stuff to make whatever it is more useful, better in its primary application or applicable to something unintended by its original creator. (And, of course, ALL these things can be done well or poorly, for good or ill.)

So, I “hack” every recipe I come across. I “hack” my car (something that was called “shade tree mechanicking” in days of yore *heh*) and I extend that tinkering to darned near everything I interact with.

Case in point, a simple “hack” performed on a very, very nice knife given to me by my Lovely Daughter and her Redoubtable Husband. A very nice Ka-Bar knife, frankly even better than the WWII version I had on hand from a great uncle who used it for many years skinning deer. This is a seriously nice knife, but. . . it had two very, very small–minuscule even–things I thought could be improved by a very, very simple hack. Lovely blade; the guard was just right; the full tang hand with stacked leather plugs was perfect; but the pommel had two extremely small flaws to my eye: a small gap where the tang and pommel joined and another very small depression where a pin passed through the pommel and tang to secure them together.

Simple, less than 5 minute hack: mixed some JB Weld and filled the very small gap and depression, smoothed the JB Weld level with the surrounding surface and I’m now a happy camper. The JB Weld is even almost exactly the same color as the pommel.

Bonus knife hack:

When you need to tune up the edge on a knife but for some inexplicable reason do not have an appropriate stone, steel or ceramic sharpener available, turn that ceramic coffee mug in your hand over (WHAT?!? You say you don’t have a ceramic coffee mug at hand? Get outa here! I have no further use for you! *heh*). There on the bottom of your ceramic coffee mug you will likely see an unglazed ring of ceramic. Yep. It’s just like a ceramic sharpening rod. Make sure it’s smooth so that you won’t create a problem on your blade and then just use that ring as though it were a ceramic sharpening rod.

There you have it: an easily tuned up edge from a coffee mug. You’re welcome.

Now, go forth and apply simple creativity to whatever little things are bugging you. Hack your life.

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BrokeBlog Mountain

[If this sounds just a bit queer, well it is.]

So, had a call from Bluehost saying I needed to move to a more expensive hosting service, which they very naturally had on offer, because my lil “let the voices in my head duke it out here” blog was exceeding a reasonable bandwidth usage.

WTF?

OK, now why would that be, since I have seriously scaled back on traffic by deliberately working for several years to drive idiots away (leaving the 0.01% of blog visitors as acceptable traffic *heh*)? The guy–not tech support but sales–surmised a broken plugin or some such, once I clued him in on the site’s usage.

MmmK. . . No new plugins recently, but I let him deactivate ’em all for testing.

Right. Everything except the built-in left sidebar and the blog title–*poof!*–disappeared.

Oh, joy. *sigh*

Re-enabled plugins one-by-one, checking bandwidth usage as I refreshed the site. One plugin re-enabled yielded the restoration of the right sidebar (as expected) and also–surprise, surprise!–ONE post, the most recent.

But no more.

Have now re-enabled plugins to match pre-disabled state. Still no spikes in bandwidth usage. Still only most recent post visible (we’ll see what posting this one does, eh?). I’ve tried to access the database optimization and repair tools available via cPanel at Bluehost, but no joy. Won’t let me log in with known good credentials and when the credentials are reset, still no login. :-/

I’ll cogitate on this a bit. I have my two most recent database backups (in three locations) I can use–once I can log into the database management tools–so all my head voices’ crap is still around. . . somewhere

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Hate It When This Happens. . .

. . . as it seems to be doing more and more often of late.

*sigh*

I just determined that my right mouse clicking problems on this computer aren’t entirely the fault of the mouse. *sigh* I live by the right mouse click! *heh* Dam*ed twitchy-finger. . . *grumble-grumble-gripe-complain*

Olde Pharte Body Fail.

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An Etymological Wonder

Back in the day when Britain still had an empire (and a queen with bigger balls than all but perhaps two or three living Republican politicians), some Brit, unhappy with “eggplant,” mugged a poor Frenchie for “aubergine”.

True story. No, really. Would a face like this lie to a face like that about a thing like that?

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How to Waste Your Time

A fact based, reasoned argument presented to a contemporary faux liberal (progressive, leftist, etc.) is like attempting to teach a pig to sing. All it does is waste your time and annoy the pig.

Ditto with the porker.

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Well, About Time!

I needed several days in a row of sub-90 degree weather to get some more painting done on the exterior of the house and. . . finally, weather cooperated and a good chunk is done (with much more to do, yet *sigh*). The thing is, i’s been 35 years since I managed a paint brush as high off the ground as this has to be, and I’m not as well-balanced, *cough* graceful *cough* and sure-footed as I was then.

I also don’t have my former youthful sense of invulnerability. *heh*

Plus. . . this time, I have a wall that I can only approach with a ladder from a sloping yard below. So, digging footings every time I move the ladder, wearing a safety harness and using a safety lanyard/rope attached to one of the safety anchors I left on the roof when I re-roofed last summer.

Cumbersome. Slow going. Especially since the paint I’m using has a STRONG warning to NOT THIN, so I MUST use a 3″ paint brush on the siding instead of spraying as I had wanted to do. Oh, well.

Must remember before next bout to take the ibuprofen BEFORE ascending the ladder. *heh* Hands’ll probably work a bit better.

Annnnnd, after this lil chore is finished, it’ll be back to downing and cutting up a few trees that have to go. Firewood, anyone? (It took me a couple of months last year to get someone who needed firewood to haul off a goodly-sized tree I had cut up into ~18″ chunks that still needed to be split. I’m sure if I’d split the wood for ’em it would’ve gone sooner. *heh*)

*sig* I seem to remember being much, much younger last year. . . 😉

Of course, since it’s going to rain for the next two or three days, I’ll have some time off from yard work and work on the outside of the house. Love it when a plan comes together. . .