Category: *heh*

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News of the Weird–Compgeeky Version

Well, not so much “news” as just a weird lil collection of personal compgeeky events. You have been warned.

ISP sent someone by to check my service outages/slowdowns. I offered to hand the guy a script, since he was new to the area (the regular tech who lives in the area was also in the neighborhood and I visited with him earlier). He gave me a “Huh-what?!?” kind of look. I then explained to him exactly what he would find with his test equipment. What he would find the current state of my connection to be–if it hadn’t already taken one of its sporadic nosedives–and what he would tell me when he was finished.

He gave me another look, then proceeded to directly verify everything I had already told him. He even did as others have done and escalated the situation to his supervisor and was told what I already knew he would be told.

“We’re working on it.”

Yeh. Since July.

I’ll just hand the script to the next guy. *heh*

Now, if that weren’t weird enough (it sure was for the poor tech. He seemed to wonder if perhaps I were psychic or something. *heh*), how about the little issue I had the other day patching MS XML 4.0 (needed because I–reluctantly–installed M$Office 2003). M$ Updates couldn’t see that I needed it, although Belarc Advisor and Secunia PSI both flagged the version that came with the software–and the version that was in place after ALL M$ Update patches to M$Office had been applied–as needing a specific patch. So, I tracked down the file that was necessary to effect the patch and downloaded it.

It refused to install. Bogged down unpacking the compressed install file.

*feh* M$.

Used 7Zip to unpack the thing and it installed just fine. Why the M$ exe couldn’t unpack–completely bogged–makes no sense, but having 7Zip around sure proves handy. (BTW, I never use Windows 7’s built-in compressed file viewer. Too inelegant and missing too many features. YMMV)

And then Thunderbird refused to start. Now, I run Thunderbird Portable off a flash drive. All my archived email in one handy folder, easy to back up by simply dragging the folder from the flash drive to an external hard drive. Can carry it around with me and access my email–with full archives–from any computer with USB ports enabled, which includes our local library.

Nice.

But after a reboot (following the M$ XML 4.0 install, but that likely had no connection), invoking thunderbird.exe wouldn’t start the app.

Weird.

Oh, me oh, my. What to do?

Simple. Reinstall the lil Thunderbird Portable app. The installation routine is very well-mannered and retained all my mail archives and customizations.

Then there was that strange little graphic artifact that appeared in the smack dab middle of my Win7 desktop the other day. Nothing I did seemed to affect it. All running processes were known to me. Multi-scans of the computer by installed and web services found no issues. Yet the artifact remained… until I rebooted. Computer was operating normally throughout. Logs on the router firewall noted no unusual traffic during the time it was present. Just a lil green box that went away on reboot. Sort of reminded me of,

Yesterday upon the stair
I saw a man who was not there
I saw him there again today
Oh my, I wish he’d go away

Gotta love Windows. *heh*

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Paper Plate Breakfast

This is a drive-by post, cos today’s scheduled up.

Breakfast today: toaster oven pizza served up on a “paper plate” quickly manufactured with 9 staples and the box the pizza-like “food” came in. Could have done w/o the staples, but at least this way it was sturdy. and eminently tossable.

Well, at least it was semi-tasty and filling. And fast.

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Question for the Weak

Joe Sobran:

I’ve never understood… why Darwinians are so militant about spreading their faith — wanting it taught to children in public schools, for example, with competing theories banned. Isn’t this the one idea, of all ideas, that ought to be able to take care of itself, without official support and coercion?

Hmmm, Darwinianism is anti-darwinian: can’t survive competition? Apparently that’s what contemporary Darwinians believe. Strange, that.

“Let [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter.” –Milton, “Areopagitica,” 1644

Or, as that 19th century proponent of Classical Liberalism, John Stuart Mill put it in his famous essay, On Liberty,

“[T]he peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

So, why then do Darwinians get their panties in a twist about Intelligent Design (not to be confused or conflated with so-called “Creation Science”–as both disingenuous Darwinians and disingenuous Fundamnmentalists are wont to do–and no, I did not misspell “Fun-damn-mentalists”)? If it’s the bunkum Darwinians say it is, then a lively debate on the merits of both Darwinianism and Intelligent Design would be good for classrooms, since, IF the arguments of Darwinianism hold water, then ID shouldn’t have a chance in a fair fight.

But, as the Sobran quote illustrates, apparently Darwinians’ faith in their theory is not really all that strong…

Just an obseervation: much more often than not, when one voice in an argument seeks to exclude another voice from arguing at all, the one seeking to censor speech often has a weak argument. See: The Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming or the Obama White Cafe-au-lait (Grande, with a twist!) House.

As for me, I’ve always found such hand-waving and shouting down of opponents to be an incentive to dig into their opponents’ arguments to learn WHY such unfair or disingenuous actions are being taken against them.

And as form Darwinianism, that chief exponent of survival of the fittest, “Isn’t this the one idea, of all ideas, that ought to be able to take care of itself, without official support and coercion?”

Hmm, must have a weak argument.

BTW, for some of the “weak links” in Darwinian arguments, see chapter three in “Kicking the Sacred Cow” by James Hogan.

Kicking-the-Sacred-Cow

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All Downhill from Here…

Now that The 0! is hitting roadblock after roadblock in enacting his agenda to remake America as a third world banana republic–heck, even Repugnican’t congresscritters are taking a hint from a million+ Tea Party protestors and looking at conservatism as a viable option for the first time!–his White Café-au-Lait (grande, decaf-with-a-twist!) House theme song is probably

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Well, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time…

And it seems like that’s a common statement after the fact whenever someone engages in some form of jackassery.

[Toyota Spokesman Chad] Harp said Toyota cannot discuss the legal aspects of the case, but marketing agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi are always thinking of new and innovative ways to attract consumers for clients like Toyota.

Well, it didn’t work very well in this case.

Lawsuit Claims Woman Believed She Was Being Stalked Thanks to Toyota’s Marketing Prank

Oct. 9, 2009—

A Los Angeles woman is suing Toyota for $10 million over a marketing campaign that she claims “punked” her into incorrectly believing she was being stalked.

The bright idea of the advertising campaign was to “punk” people into believing exactly what this woman came to believe. Looks to me as though she has a good argument. Kinda stupid to fall for it, but then it was aimed at stupid people, apparently.

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And… Not Far from America’s Third World County

Step down from America’s Third World County into the land of our 42nd president:

weiner

Of course, the lovely lil village of Weiner (feel free to revert to junior high humor and snicker to your juvenile heart’s content) is several steps up from the sewers that bred our 44th “president” (who, strangely, is still running for office… ).

h.t. to JS for pointing this out to me.

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If This Is True, Heads Will Roll…

*heh* The LA FBI office is going to come under some scrutiny from its D.C. masters, and if the caller in the video below is representing a factual response from that office, heads will almost certainly roll…

‘S’all right, though. Probably 90% of the laws the FBI is involved in “enfarcing” nowadays have no real constitutional justification. (I have no actual figures, but it’s a fair shirt cuff guesstimate given what the congress and federal bureaucrappy have been up to for at least half a century.)

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The Joys of Being Married to a Literate Woman

Gotta love my Wonder Woman. Relating a news event (no, real news) that someone in our neighborhood had been shot, she correctly used “contretemps” in her dialog (yes, I was her interlocutor; I had a few questions as the news unfolded).

Well, as it turns out, the news was one of those good news/bad news situations. The guy who was shot had kicked in a door and entered a home uninvited. He was shot by a guy who lived there. So far, good news. The bad news? The guy who nailed the attacker is being charged for his possession of the gun. Yeh, he’d been convicted of a felony in the past, and so under the laws of our state was denied a firearm as a means of self-defense.

Absent any clear information on what sort of “felony” he was once convicted of, and given the growing prevalence of criminalizing behaviors that were once simply the domain of free men, I have to tentatively label his arrest for unlawful possession of a firearm “bad news”.

Oh, and how I missed the huhurah? *pshaw* I hear gunfire all the time. Guys tooling up for deer season and whatever. (We do live w/in a couple hundred feet of “city” limits and there’s no county ordinance against the discharge of firearms on ones own property–as is rightly so.) We also live just a few short blocks from the county ambulance service (it’s based at the one 24-hour emergency clinic–a new thing–in the county), so I’ve also come to pretty much ignore sirens. And the local LEOs rarely use their horns, so I’d probably not have even heard them arrive. Heck, once, when I made a report of a disturbance next door to me (during the gladly brief years of “the bad neighbors”), six county mounties showed up with nary a peep between ’em.

So, good news/bad news that I might not have heard about for a couple more days were it not for my literate and very well “plugged in” Wonder Woman cluing me in.

Oh, and on top of the news, I got to hear a word I rarely hear in conversation, used appropriately–and pronounced correctly to boot. Gotta love her.