Category: FYI

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“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:

DEWISANT-1.jpg

(For fun, take this short quiz at the BBC website. You already know how I scored, right? ;-))

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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? 😉

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*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!

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No Soup for You

Busy Monday. Read another post.

I am not here; this is not me
No matter what you think you see.
I am not here; this is not me.

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Maleable words

So, after two–regularly scheduled–days off, Son&Heir drove in to work on (state) roads that are clear of ice. That our street, and the streets connecting to the first state road here around America’s Third World County Central, are still sheet ice covered with packed snow is immaterial: he can drive on three day old stuff like that. It’s a 30-minute drive, but traffic’s usually only bumper-to-bumper for about 2.5-3.0 miles of it, so it’s not too bad.

Of course, fellow “workers” who live right down the street from his place of employment “couldn’t make it in” and so he’s alone at work today.

He says he now knows why that town’s motto is, “Come to visit; come to stay”. Because the roads are so bad you can’t get out. I’m thinking it may be another reason: because staying too long makes folks too stupid and lazy to find a route out.

Interesting motto. Lots of ways it could be read…

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2009 Resolution-Per-Day

No, not “2009 ResolutionS per day.” That’d just be silly. Although I do engage in goal setting, I just think that since I’ve not made any “New Year’s Resolutions” in some time, perhaps a little taking stock and goal setting of the “New Year’s resolutions” type might be in order. So, herewith my first “New Year’s Resolution” of 2009.

It occurred to me that stuff temds to multiply to fill whatever space is available, and not just in the “nature abhors a vaccuum” kind of way. For example, I had a new 400GB hard drive about six or so months ago. It’s now about half full. Of what? Just–mostly–stuff. Heck, I regularly scissor out and toss several gigs of stuff, and yet still stuff proliferates.

Take my desk. Please. *heh* I try to clean it off every now and then. The last time was about a month ago. But does that help? Nope. It’s crammed, piled high, stuffed with stuff.

Storage shed. Garage. Store rooms. Stuffed with stuff.

A goal for 2009? For every new piece of stuff brought into twc central, TWO pieces of stuff must go–preferably of like stuff. I’m not talking about increasing twc central’s use of the landfill, necessarily (although it may come to that from time to time). Most of the stuff we are plagued with is useful stuff, but might well find a more useful home elsewhere.

So. Yard sales. Donations. Want ads. Friends, neighbors and relatives: all potential new homes for stuff over the course of 2009. For example, how many CD/Radio/cassette tape “boom boxes” do we really need? The kids have stopped using them. I no longer use them (as I once did for ed purposes–amazing the usefulness of those lil items). Sure, some no longer have full functionality, but…

And then there’s my closet. How many boxes of “five-to-seven ‘gold stripe'” silk ties do I need, anyway?

And my techie hoard. Yes, I can and do use all the teeny lil bits and pieces I’ve stripped off of innumerable discarded computers, but how many of those old cases (still left after discarding more than a dozen computers last summer) and power supplies and CDROM drives and etc., do I really need to hang on to? How many can be made into perfectly serviceable hardware firewalls to give away? Well, it pretty much depends on how many spare 100mbit network cards I find I still have and how many people might find they really need a hardware firewall.

And the sheet music, books, magazines, manuscripts, records (both paper and LP), tapes, tools, materials of all kinds that is gathered in both organized and topsy-turvy, ramshackle disorganization–all still in need of digging into, even after the major cleanup of the BIG store room last summer.

Tons (possibly literally tons) of stuff that has simply bred and multiplied in the dank, dark storage places where it’s been consigned must go.

And the same goes for my digital stuff. Boxes and boxes of old floppies, CDRs, old hard drives: sorted, cleaned, recatalogued and either re-stored (this time with a digital library catalog and perhaps even bar coding) and that which is to be discarded either run through a degausser (for the floppies and other magnetic media) or shredded (for the CDRs) or melted (NOT burned). Some of the old hard drives, suitably and securely erased, could well find new homes in file servers, but this stuff must either be used or it must go.

So, that’s “Resolution Number One”–no more wildly proliferating stuff. LESS.

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Inertia

So, a week ago today, my Wonder Woman explained the mystery of why she’s stayed with me so long. Inertia. Seems, according to her, that once we got going together, it was just easier to stay on the wagon and keep moving along together.

Maybe that’s because it’s been all downhill for her… *heh*

Whatever; as long as she’s comfortable with it, I’m staying on the wagon too.

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I’d say that’s a problem…

Here it is, 9:00 on a Wednesday morning. I’m looking at a full plate of “work” to do (why the scare quotes? Because it’s all “work” I can approach as play… when I finally get off my fat… fundament and do it), and yet here I sit with four browsers open in three machines (one “real” and a couple of VMs hosted in it), with something over 100 tabs open among the four browsers…

Now, that’s a problem. I’m not doing real multi-tasking but semi-background serial semi-multitasking in a major ADHD/schizo fashion. Sure, things from nearly all the tabs are perking in the background while the foreground is being dealt with (as I write this, things from John Ringo’s rants page and thoughts from Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor Musings are mixing it up with Thomas Sowell and John Agresto over at NRO, while some XBox geek is whispering in my third ear about XBox modding and my gripping hand is grappling with the weird pre-emptive sound problem that’s cropped up in Linux again and my first and other hands are juggling a Mercedes Lackey book and a Dean Koontz book and an Ann Coulter book–offline/online, mix n match).

I think I need to take a break from the computer. Except part of the “work” I need to do is right here sitting on my fat fundamental.

I blame it all on the fact that this is the most comfortable chair in the house. Riiiiiight. *heh* (Well, maybe some of it is due to the fact that I seem to have developed the attention span of a gnat with ADHD. NEED MORE COFFEE!!!)

Maybe it’s time once again to look to Wordsworth (open another tab… ;-))

THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Trackposted to Rosemary’s Thoughts, Political Byline, Faultline USA, Right Truth, The World According to Carl, DragonLady’s World, Rosemary’s News and Ideas, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, CORSARI D’ITALIA, Democrat=Socialist, Dumb Ox Daily News, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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DST: R.I.P. for 2008

“Spring forward, fall back.”

Yep. just a heads up for those of y’all still wondering about the silly changes in DST. This year, at 2:00 a.m. Sunday, November 2, most of the U.S. will roll clocks back to 1:00. That means, for those of us who don’t plan on being awake at that time, rolling clocks back tonight before heading off for some shuteye.

Personally, I plan on making tonight a “storage battery” night and heading off to get some much needed rest even earlier than usual. Ginormously pooped out already, and it’s only 8:00 (DST) in the ayem here. Sure, been up since 5:00, but that’s no real excuse, now is it? As a matter of fact, I think I’ll go take a nap now, too.

Buh-bye!

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How many “uninsured” are there, really?

Note: I am NOT going to link to the facts below. Why? Because unless you do your own digging to either verify or attempt to prove this post a bunch of hot air, you’ll never learn for yourself. This is an issue it’s important to get right, and anyone reading this who doesn’t care to do their own homework is simply a part of the problem. So there. Besides, I got all the info I needed from a few clicks: a google search and a search of US Census reports. It’s so easy a Geico commercial would be harder. *heh*

The “47 million uninsured” meme has been bruited about so much, and without specific all too often, that I begin to wonder if the spirit of Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels isn’t infusing the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind.

First, subtract from that inflated number at least 10 million illegals Obama and the Dhimmicraps want us to pay for. Those folks should be denied ALL health care save for genuine and extemely urgent and life-threatening emergencies. Period. Without exception. Let them go back whence they came, get in line and enter the country legally, and then maybe social services of ANY kind might be properly made available to them.

That’d whittle the leftards’ and Hivemind’s number down to around 37 million right there.

Now, subtract the number of folks making over $50,000 a year who are just too cheap to buy their own insurance. How many? About 17 million.

Oops. We’re down to less than half the brutal numbers leftards are whining about.

But the hits keep on coming: according to the Congressional Budget Office, between 40% and 50% of “uninsured” are transitory uninsured who are simply between coverages. Yep. Within three months or so, nearly half the “uninsured” at any one point are simply on their way to different coverage.

Now, we’re down to the 8-13 million the Kaiser Foundation estimates to be the range of those who are uninsured and unlikely to be able to afford their own insurance.

So the next time you hear an Obamaniac or other leftard weep and wail and gnash their teeth over the need to take YOUR money and use it to provide health coverage for illegal aliens, deadbeats or folks who are simply between coverages, just blow ’em a big fat raspberry.