Here’s what I’d appreciate for a birthday present:
Multiple packets, please.
🙂
Whoo-Hoo! (a little joy in Mudville)
Bits n pieces:
Rainy, rainy day. Squirrels line-dancing on power lines, lots of lightning and thunder and hail and rain and nearby tornado… and the power only went down three times. Cable was out for what I believe was about six or so hours (I left after it went down and it was still down when I checked back in). But all’s well. Managed shutdowns on UPS-ed computers, so no real biggie.
Windows 7RC. What can I say? A mixed bag. Although with the ratings changes in the “Windows Experience” index this computer jumped up more than 3 points on the scale, Win7 seems much more sluggish. Notsogood. OTOH, everything works well overall, and… Windows Server Powershell is now included! (Whoo-hoo!) I had missed that before, although I assume it was probably in the earlier beta. Sure, most folks won’t use the command line much, but this is a power users’ command line. Like it. Some other good and notsogood things about this Win7 iteration, but I’ll either remark on them later or not. Who knows?
Mock stroganoff tonight. Just hamburger, onion, garlic, LOTS of freshly-ground pepper and some freshly-grated nutmeg with sour cream and the old standby shortcut, cream of mushroom soup. It’ll be fine over rice, and it’s a quick (less than 15 minutes’ prep time) and easy dinner. Some frozen mixed veggies steaming in a basket on top of the rice in the Wolfgang Puck rice cooker. Easy-peasy.
Gonna hit the sack early this p.m. Pooped puppy.
“If this is Tuesday… “
…well, it sure ain’t Belgium. No, what it is is this: the tail end of a whirlwind trip to (sort of) see my mom off on her trip to Israel. Glad I went to check up on her. She’d taken a fall late last week and hurt her knee but was refusing to see the doctor for fear he’d want to do something that would prevent her making her connections for her trip. *sigh* It’s in the genes. I do the same kind of thing. Fortunately, dragging her to the doctor only resulted in getting the right treatment for a swollen knee (X-Rays said no major damage) and her mind was eased. 85-year-old woman refusing to go to the doctor–NOT because she couldn’t afford to (was a $10 charge!) but for silly reasons. Hmmm, kinda like my reasons, usually. *heh*
Anywho, my dad will meet her there. Right now he’s finishing up a concert tour with a musical group in Armenia. Oldest guy in the group (by a couple of decades!). Still singing 1st Tenor. Go figure. My voice is now able to sing “second growler” (still coughing my lungs up; I’ll either live or die, and either one is fine by now *heh*), so maybe by the time I get to be his age, I’ll be able to get some of it back, should I live that long. 😉 Nicest thing aboiut this trip? Some friends of theirs paid their way. They have some good friends.
Well, that’s all I really know. My Wonder Woman’s back from her librarians’ conference, and we’re both a tad pooped. As soon as Lovely Daughter’s Family Birthday Blowout is over this evening, we’re both looking forward to some crash time.
Y’all be careful out there!
Quick Handyman Tip
I’ve used this idea for years but haven’t actually passed it on to many folks before now.
Have a knife that needs a quick sharpening but don’t have a good ceramic (or other) sharpening tool handy? Well, if you’re the kind of guy who carries a knife, you are also the kind of guy who probably has a coffee cup handy. *heh* The bottom of most ceramic coffee mugs usually have unglazed rings of ceramic. Just turn a handy ceramic coffee mug over, and using the handle as a protective device (thumb through the handle, fingers gripping the mug), use that unglazed ring of ceramic exactly as you would a ceramic sharpening rod.
A few strokes later: sharp knife. I’ve found this works well enough that I gave away my most recent ceramic sharpener and haven’t really missed it. Even my largest chef’s knives are easily sharpened… with a coffee mug.
Banking on the Future
Perhaps that ought to be “banking in the future,” but the clip linked here (found at Jerry Pournelle’s place) is about much more than banking. Nevertheless, one insight into banking is offered in the talk by Juan Enriquez that I thought I’d tickle your interest with…
The eventual topic Enriquez gets to is mind-boggling new tech and how it will affect us, so do CLICK and watch. Lots more at the TED site.
Charles Murray: Tongue in Cheek
Well, he had much, much more to say in his American Enterprise Institute 2009 Irving Kristol lecture, but this comment from his introductory remarks is too sweet to pass up:
…I am so naïve about economics that I continue to think that we have a financial meltdown because the federal government, in its infinite wisdom, has for the last two administrations aggressively pushed policies that made it possible for clever people to get rich by lending money to people who were unlikely to pay it back.
Oh! *ROFL* (and hurting while I do… ) That’s rich.
WWW=Wacky Windows Weirdness
Been over in the Ubuntu side of this computer for a couple of days. “Housekeeping” and other stuff best done from there. Exporting the T-Bird address book I have there into T-Bird Portable, etc.
So, I decided to reboot in Win7 Beta. Weird stuff going on.
1. I was just on an Ubuntu session and all was well, but now the keyboard/mouse are acting weird. Kyboard droppng letters typed (Yp, just like now) and mouse acting herky-jerky. I do NOT have capslock on at any time (disabled the key mechanically), but sometimes, the SHIFT key sticks.
2. Have already had to re-register keyoard/mouse twice–hardware rnegotiaaaae. Again.
3. Can CLCK start orb, but nothing in it s clickable .
No, I have fresh batteries in wireless input devices, and besides, they were jst working fine in Ubuntu, a few minutes ago.
TOO WEID.
(All typos in this post apparently caused by Windoze Weirdness.)
“Gwnewch y pethau bychain mewn bywyd”*
“Be joyful, and keep your faith and your creed. *Do the little things [in life] that you have seen me do and heard about. I will walk the path that our fathers have trod before us.”–reputed to be the last words of St David–Dewi Sant— patron saint of Wales (the only Celtic patron saint native to the land of which he is considered patron), said to have died at age 100 on March 1, anno domini 589.
See the (surprisingly) decent short bio at Wikipedia for more on this remarkable man, and wear a leek or daffodil in his honor today if you will. (A day of bread and water–and “herbs” if you like–wouldn’t be out of line, either, in honor of the monastic rule he established for his order. :-))
Tomorrow, St Non’s Day–another Celtic saint, also Welsh, and St David’s mother.
Update: this short hymn I wrote several years ago, hymn tune DEWI SANT, in honor of the early missionary work of St David and his fellows. Just click on it for a larger view:
(For fun, take this short quiz at the BBC website. You already know how I scored, right? ;-))
Who’d-a Thunk It?
There’s a kind of hush all over twc today. The unthinkable has occurred. A decade and more has passed since the last such “once in a blue moon” event has come to pass.
I have a doctor’s appointment.
*yawn*
Yeh, yeh, I’m too lazy and impatient (and easily bored) to manage my blood pressure consistently with (regular) exercise and slow breathing exercises, though the slow breathing exercises alone pretty reliably bring my blood pressure to within normal range. Have a mole that’s undergone a dramatic change this week. Really ought to get a PSA done. (Old–and I do mean old: a year older than I–college roomie has pressured me to do this ever since his prostate cancer, so all right already, Dave! Yeh, go figure. Roomies with the same name. We had answering the phone down pat. “Speaking.” *heh*)
Little things add up, I guess. I can put up with a knee killing me when I walk regularly. Missing sleep I can work around. All the other aches and pains of encroaching age are just background noise–kinda like my tinnitus. But my laziness and impatience are incurable, so it’s off to the doctor I go to tell ’em to gimme some pills, etc.
Putting a crimp in my day, though. *grumble, grumble, gripe, complain*
Oh, well.
Hey, maybe I can get the doc to take a look at my cat who’s losing weight at the same time, you think? 😉
*d’oh!* Moments from America’s Third World County
So, for the past several days, the “nag bar” insisting that I upgrade WordPress to 2.7.1 has been a big yellow distraction. “Been busy,” I told myself. Truth? Been lazy. Spoiled by the “Automagic” Upgrade plugin I’ve used for the past year or so, and so, when automatic upgrade failed drmatically on the first two tries, I thought to myself, “Self, just upgrade whenever ya have the time and mental spizzerinktum (plenty of good, fresh COFFEE!) to do it,” knowing full well that what I meant was, “When is someone gonna fix the plugin?!?!” *heh*
This ayem, with plenty of coffee in me, I started the lil trek to backup twc and manually install the upgrade when… “Hey! Why not search on the error message?” *d’oh*
Oh. The plugin I’d used for the past year is incompatible with the built in WP Automatic Upgrade function in 2.7!
Disable plugin. Upgrade automagically. Done. Actually fewer clicks than with the plugin. Got an error message, but blog appears to be working fine, I see no weird anomalies. Go with it.
*sheesh!* Found another thing I Do Not Like about Win7. GREATLY disliked same thing in Vista. It’s a little thing, but one of those little things that make life easier for lil ole me. ALL toolbars seem to be ONLY “sprouted” from the taskbar. Now, from Win98 through WinXP it was easy-peasy to create a SEPARATE custom toolbar on ANY side of ones desktop, just by dragging content there and dropping it. In Ubuntu, it’s easy to move the placement of the two built-in toolbars (not as easy as in Win98-XP, but easy. Easy to specify a new toolbar on any (unused) side of the desktop, too.
Not so with Win7 or Vista. *d’oh* (I’d seen this already with Vista but hoped against hope for a different behavior in Win7) Want a separate toolbar completely unlinked to the taskbar? Go fish. For some add-on app to enable that.
*feh* Me$$y$oft ‘s not even channeling Apple well with this one.
Another negative check mark.
*sigh* And I so wanted to like this OS. Really. OK, so I still mostly like it. But it still has too much Vista in its bones n blood. Oh. *duh*
I don’t have full access to my Ubuntu drive from Win7. Funny. NTFS drives aren’t a problem to access from Ubuntu…
Another negative check mark, I suppose. Oh. Well.
Have I mentioned enough times how much I hate, hate, hate Windows’ DRM crap? No, I have not. Not enough times at all, at all.
Oh. Well. There are ways around it.
*d’oh!* Need some OS relief! VMs to the rescue?
Later today (or this evening), off to VMWare to pick up a copy of VMWare Server so I can install a few more OSes on this drive and see just how well Win7 works with VMWare Server hosting other OSes. Should be interesting. Let’s see… what do I want to install? WinXP-64, Win2K, Win98, Suse Linux, Ubuntu, PCBSD and maybe an on-disk Puppy Linux? Sounds about right. 10-15 GiB disk space (with room to grow if needed) each should make ’em happy enough. See how VMWare Tools work here.
Oh! Another *d’oh” moment: why haven’t I installed some “Will only work in Win98/95” apps in compatibility mode, already? Needed to be fully caffeinated, I guess.
Here comes the last version of Encore I was really happy with… sometime after the VMs are installed. One in the Win98 VM and another in compatibility mode in Win7. Let’s see which one really works, eh? (Now, where did I put my midi controller/keyboard when I was cleaning off my desk… )
[Addendum] Habañero peppers are pretty hot, my lunch is telling me… *d’oh* (But *yum* too.)
About time I got back outa here. Almost time for my Wonder Woman to drop in for her lunch (long weekend for her starts today). Booyin’ now. Buh-bye!