Category: Blame it on the voices in my head–I do

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So, Who Really Cares That There’s Nothing Worth Watching on Any Channel?

Checked the listings for Thursday. Yep. The best the lineup has to offer is “Battle: Los Angeles”–aliens invade LA. It seems the only likely responses from the rest of the country should that actually recur (OK, the first alien invasion was obviously just from south of the border, I guess this one’s talking about “aliens from another planet) would be,

“How can one tell it’s been invaded by aliens from another planet?” or

“DGARA.”

Fortunately, even if I didn’t have some good books to read, there’s always Amazon Prime. 😉

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PC Sales: Doom and Gloom from Hivemind Tech Writers

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! It’s the end of the world!

Bloomberg noting a “causation” that. . . may be just in the “mind” of Bloomberg’s editorial staff:

Microsoft Windows Weak Demand Spurs Worst PC Slump on Record

Correlation does not equal causation, Bloomies. Try to keep that in mind.

How about some breathless hyperbole?

Microsoft has no fast Windows fixes as PC sales crater

Oh, *yawn* IMO, just as a casual observer with access to the same sets of facts as the authors of the two articles linked, this is just a blip. I fully expect PC sales to stabilize after a while at a very naturally lower level than in recent years as more and more causal “content consumer” users find that tablets and dumb phones work just fine for their casual web browsing, listening to mind-numbing mp3 crap, watching cute cat videos and sending/receiving one-line emails that might as well just be text messages, complete with iPho-nono typos.

Folks who need to do more will still buy and use PCs, and more and more users who were once destined for Assisted Computing Facilities (“Here, dearie, let me make that mouse click for you. . . “) discover that their meager “computing” needs can be met with meager computing devices.

Of course, that could put a dent in the livelihoods of folks who assisted those “meager needs” users in fixing problems they’d caused themselves, but in days of yore buggy whip makers had to find other ways to make a living, too.

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That Certain Glow. . .

This AM while I was trying to get a wee bit more sleep, I heard a shout of dismay from the next room. My Wonder Woman was prepping for her day with about an hour to go before she left for work and. . . the power had gone out (LOTSA storming last night and through the day).

Doing makeup by in the dark just doesn’t cut it, apparently.

I thought she looked lovely by “Kindle Light”. 😉

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Well, I Had Been Enjoying the Book

Not sayin’ the title, but really?

. . . there’s enough (plural noun)s on the. . .

Linguistically innumerate. *gagamaggot* And,

“Ah.” He smiled, and even drunk as he was it was the kind of knowing, sarcastic smile that set my teeth on edge. “Jealousy.”

OK, I’ve not necessarily given enough context for the second, but people who use “jealousy” when they mean “envy” really set my teeth on edge. There’s a clear and useful distinction between the two that poorly-read folks seem all to have missed, and now subliterates are forcing their destruction of a useful distinction out of English. I just hate that.

So, as much as I’ve enjoyed the rest of the book to this point, if this sort of thing continues, I may end up putting this one down just because of the annoyance factor.

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Now, see, if he could count on a literate audience. . .

. . .the author of this awkward line,

“. . .the lovely scars he had from the one leg being severely fractured to the point of bone poking through the skin after. . .”

. . .could have saved a whole lotta words with “compound fracture“. But because he can no longer count on his readership being much more literate than the typical eighth-grader nowadays, he had to go all around the barn to use something like ten words (no, I’ve not actually counted) to say what a literate* person could vividly grasp in two.

No, I am not using “literate” in its least form here. I use it in the sense of,

“1 a : educated, cultured. . . 2 a : versed in literature. . . 2c : having knowledge or competence. . . “

And NONE of those apply to someone who cannot read “compound fracture” and either understand the term at once OR have both the intellectual curiosity and competence to either winkle the meaning on their own from context (not necessarily easy to do in this case) or LOOK IT UP! (N.B. When I was a kid, we had a monstrously huge two-volume dictionary–which I still have–that spent most of its time near or under the head of my bed, because I not only looked up EVERY word or term I did not immediately understand from context or simply learned new words and terms from reading the thing for pleasure. And I still do not consider myself as literate as either of my grandfathers were.)

More and more folks today have vocabularies limited by what they HEAR via the Hivemind, and more and more folks today do not even understand the words they hear from that propaganda machine. And so otherwise moderately literate authors HAVE to dumb down their text. (The one who cobbled up the abortion I cited above does still have ALL his characters use “there’s” with plural objects. *sigh* It’s. . . “interesting”–in a gagamaggot kind of way–to hear characters with multiple doctorates in the sciences who are linguistically innumerate. *profound sigh*)

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Oh, Freakin’ Heavens *sigh*

And to think I actually used to subscribe to the e-rag this column title appeared in:

The malware wars: How you can fight it

“It” above refers to what? “Wars”. Hello! “It” is singular; “wars” is plural.

OK, so the article does actually contain a few useful tips. . . for folks who’ve not been paying any attention for the past 10 years or so, like,

Tip: You can preview shortened URLs to see their true destination. For example, with bitly addresses, simply paste them into your browser, add a + after the URL (for example, //bitly.com/13LRaF4+ [Solera Networks page]), and press Enter. Adding the plus sign takes you to the bitly site first, where you’ll see a stats page for the destination site.

For tinyurl addresses, add “preview” before the address. For example, enter //preview.tinyurl.com/{xxxxx}, and the uncloaked address will appear at the tinyurl site.

For snipurl addresses, add “peek” before the shortened address. For example, //peek.snipurl.com/26kl5qy takes you to the Snipurl site and displays the full URL:

https://windowssecrets.com/top-story/surviving-your-first-hour-with-office-2013/

Of course one should always preview shortened URLs for safety’s sake. What? Doesn’t everyone know that already?

But, *meh* even though the article’s semi-useful, someone should have corrected the headline’s egregious grammar error.

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En Passant

Ever notice that when a wildflower volunteers in a garden it’s a weed, even though it’s the same flower that’s viewed with pleasure in a meadow? Why? Is it not still as beautiful when it blossoms in the garden as when it grows in the wild?

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A Blurb Only a Mother Could Love. . .

. . .probably written by the author of the book. Here’s how the blurb starts out (read it with a faux “Texas” redneck accent in your mind’s ear, wouldja?):

No matter how hard she tries to escape her Texas roots–and her mother–Jolene Jackson finds herself dragged back to Kickapoo to deal with both. . .

Oh, please. Please, someone, stop me before I “buy” the thing (for $0.00) and read it. “Jolene Jackson” is NOT going to “escape her. . . roots” until she changes her name, publishes “Jolene Jackson’s” obituary and moves above a garage in Buffalo (where Really Leary, Timothy Leary’s brother *cough*–according to George Carlin–taught that our souls go when we die).

*sigh* Too late. Now, I just have to know what “turkey ranch road rage” is. It’s now become essential to my continued sanity, urm, something-or-other–I’d say “Je ne sais quoi” but that just doesn’t go down well with a dose of protest rallies, naked lizard girls in cages, iced tea and a chicken basket.

I do these sorts of things so you don’t have to. Thank me. Thank me very much.