Month: February 2008

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Still Avoiding Current Events…

…mostly.

Here’s another diversion.

Unnecessary confession: I use Windoze. Because I have to. (I also use PCBSD and Ubuntu, but that’s for pleasure… and some work/productivity.) So far, I have managed to avoid installing Vista on any twc central computers. *whew!* (Wipes forehead gratefully. *heh*) I have seen enough Vista computers “in the wild” to become convinced that, apart from the eye candy, it’s just not worth the hassle for most folks to switch from XP to Vista, if they must use Windows. And even buying a new computer with Vista installed can be problematic; I’ve already seen enough software incompatibilities in the workplace and problems with drivers for peripherals to know it just is not for most of the folks I know, including me. And this is quite apart from the fact that Vista–even installed new on “Vista-ready” computers is generally–from what I’ve actually seen “in the wild”–*heh*–a resource hog and slower than a properly-configured XP computer.

And, despite the monthly or more bug fixes and patches, Vista’s SP-1 is not really available for general installation–not that it is a definite improvement.

Still, there are a few things about Vista that are nice. The eye candy. 😉 But… all I had to do to get the “AeroGlass” look in PCBSD was simply download a skin. And for various versions of Windows, skinning and other Vista-like functionality is available for free via various downloads(free registration required for download), some of which also offer the 3D “flipping” of cascaded apps, etc.

The screencap above is on a Win2K machine with some of the functionality of PCMag’s “VistaMagicPack” (the first link above) enabled. Not half bad, and no discernable performance hit on a middlin’ old 1.3Ghz machine with only 512MB RAM and a tiny lil 16MB vidcard. Try running Vista with all the eye candy on that machine. Not.

Trackposted to Rosemary’s Thoughts, Nuke Gingrich, Faultline USA, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, , The World According to Carl, Shadowscope, Pirate’s Cove, Celebrity Smack, The Pink Flamingo, Big Dog’s Weblog, Dumb Ox Daily News, Adeline and Hazel, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Real Estate Bust? *yawn*

I’ve been avoiding “issues blogging” for the most part for the past week. (the choice in presidential candidates winnowing down to Hildebeast-ObamaWinfrey-MexiCain can do that to a guy), but one “issue” still turns my crank a bit: the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind’s rampup of economic woes with the mortgage crisis/real estate bust as its poster child.

As a poster child for economic woes, the mortgage crisis/real estate bust has all the appeal of a broken-down whore with leprosy. Firstly, the folks hardest hit by the mortgage crisis/real estate bust are those who went into debt over their heads to buy houses they couldn’t afford. Here are my most sincere crocodile tears for such idiots:

*Boo-freakin’-hoo–yawn*

To all such folks: you reaping what you’ve sown? Good.

Next hardest hit (sorta), the mortgage lenders who shouldn’t have loaned the money to begin with. Again,

*Boo-freakin’-hoo–yawn*

My Wonder Woman asked me what I though the impact would be on our home value. My answer? Who cares? Are we thinking of selling? (Yeh, we still owe a measly couple of grand on the place. Made a 25% down on it and got reasonable rates on a 15-year mortgage–thanks to my Wonder Woman’s money management skillset.)

Rabbit trail:

OTOH, our execrably bad “neighbors” who moved in less than eighteen months ago have their place listed for sale (Yipee and Whooray!). I asked my Wonder Woman how badly I could junk up the outside of our house to drive their selling price down on ’em… *heh* Hmmm… maybe I could buy a couple of junkers from the salvage yard and have ’em dropped in our front yard, ya think? It’d be a few months before the city would ask me to remove ’em, maybe long enough to drive thr price of our “neighbors'” seller down quite a bit…

Nah. Better just to get ’em gone.

But there’s a side to the housing market/mortgage crisis/real estate bust that is getting little play in the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind (and what play it does get is buried on inside pages or whatnot): “Some Cities Are Spared the Slide in Housing”–and this in the Neoo York Slimes, no less! Who’d-a thunk it?

In figures released on Thursday covering 150 metropolitan areas, the National Association of Realtors said that median home prices were falling in 77 markets — but rising in 73.

Real estate statistics must be interpreted with caution, especially when sales volumes are declining, as they are all over the country. But an analysis by The New York Times of three distinct data sets — mortgage data from the government, sales figures from the Realtors’ group and courthouse records from a company called DataQuick — produced a list of 17 metropolitan areas where all three sources of information agree that prices were still rising as of late last year, the most recent figures available.

For another 43 cities, two data sets, from the Realtors and the government, suggested that prices were still rising late in the year. DataQuick could provide no information on those cities.

Of course, since the article is in the Neoo York Slimes, the ariter spends quite some time making sure the reader doesn’t interpret these rosy facts positively. *heh* Still, facts are facts, and the housing market (and mortgage market) in my part of the country, for example, is strong to super-strong right now. Because of strong economic growth in other sectors, of course. Heck, it’s stating to get so built up in America’s Third World County that I might just have to answer my own question to my Wonder Woman (“Are we thinking of selling?”) with a “I want to live somewhere quieter. Wanna sell and move out into the piney woods?”

*heh*

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Compy Fun

(Y’all may have noticed I’m mostly avoiding politics/current events for the last few days? Good reasons, among them my disgust with the electorate for being stupid enough to validate the current crop of presidential candidates with their votes.)

Well, it had to happen eventually. The ten-year-old computer (ten years old? Yep) I had running the most stable windows OS in the house finally started developing some… glitches. Yeh, it started out as a Win98 comp, but Win2KPro was soo appealing (for a Windows OS. I had retired WINNT 4.0 off an earlier computer gladly; Win2KPro–WinNT 5.0–proved to be a bird of a different feather) I switched the OSes out fairly early on in the computer’s life.

Anywho, last week, Win2K began complaining the MOBO on which it had happily resided for no few years was not fully ACPI compliant and told me to update the BIOS. OK. Found an updated BIOS and attempted the install. Oops. My German isn’t that good. *heh* Back to the drawing board.

I may just decide to retire the comp… or convert it to Ubuntu or PCBSD. Probably the former for the old guy. I do need to maintain one Win98 computer for my fav music transcription software, but it dowsn’t have to be on that comp.

Or maybe I’ll find another BIOS update elsewhere.

Still, a 10-year-old MOBO (with a slightly newer processor, granted) still doing credible work on things that don’t require much processor-intensive stuff (web, email, word processing, etc.) tickles my tightwad side. It’s not like I don’t have more “modern” comps with other OSes (like the one I’m writing this post with) to handle other tasks.

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OTOH… Mac OSX gets much-needed update

Earlier, I wanred y’all to watch out for the Vista SP1 from Microsoft. Now, word is well and truly out (and Apple’s servers being well, urm, serviced): news of much-needed “updates” (*cough* fixes) to OSX:

Sundry changes improve the performance of, or fix bugs in Dashboard, iCal, iChat, Mail, Parental Controls, Preview, Safari and Time Machine, while iSync gains support for Samsung D600E and D900i phones. The Finder has also been updated, with fixes for eight issues, including a couple that could cause unexpected quits.

Yeh, yeh, I know: MacCultists insist only pure, pristine and perfect code issues from Apple and all the crap code is limited to Me$$y$oft. Move along. Nothing to see here about “fix[ing] bugs in” various things in OSX folks depend on daily or things in Finder (Finder, fer heaven’s sake! You’d think they could fix the dumb name for the thing, too… *heh*) that “could cause unexpected quits.” (Yeh, “Crash Different” indeed.)

I will hand it to Apple for having created an atmosphere where its bug fix releases are viewed as something other than… bug fix releases, patches, fixes for their own “shrink-wrap betaware”.

Once again,

Crash Different

(On the gripping hand, Apple does fix its broken products, eventually. Mostly. Well, they are computers, aren’t they? ;-))

Well, at least I’m not counseling you to avoid this round of fixes, as I did with the Vista SP1. 😉

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Vista SP1 Available *yawn*

Vista’s not exactly Micro$oft Bob, but it’s vying for position to edge Windows Muppet Edition and DOS 4 out of top spots for Micro$oft’s worst OS offerings.

Oh, yeh, it’s got some nice eye candy and some neat features, but it’s measurably slower than XP and has been plagued by driver issues that have “bricked” more than a few computers. (Which is why many have “upgraded” their Vista machines to XP… even though that is not, IMO, the best of Micro$oft’s operating system offerings. YYMV, of course.)

And here comes Vista SP1 (lately the credo of savvy computer users has evolved from “Microsoft early buyers: shrink-wrap beta testers” to “NEVER buy a Me$$y$oft product before the first service pack!” *heh*)… which some tests show is slower in file copy operartions than pre-SP1 Vista and which “fixes” the driver issues by… making them worse?

*heh*

Still, if you’re a glutton for punishment, Windows Vista SP1 can be officially downloaded NOW – but don’t do it! outlines how to download the 1.13GB update (only available at this time as a pack including both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions, along with some “fixes” for the installation process–read for “fixes,” “new processes that may well break something else” *heh*)… if you dare.

Oh, what the heck. Here’s the direct download link, but let me repeat, “Don’t Do It!” 😉

You have been warned.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, A Newt One, Conservative Cat, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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“Snow” Day Again

Late start today. Not that the whole county shut down, but since my Wonder Woman had a “snow” day, I’ve kept things close in and we’ve worked on a little advance Spring Cleaning. I’ve been in storage areas of my office that haven’t seen the light of day for years. Two whole drawersfull of stuff I simply dumped in a box for later sorting (and yes, I will do that!) and labeled, “Junk from 2 drawers”–*heh*

Once whole LARGE file cabinet drawerfull of ancient floppies. Need to sort through them all, archive (and enter into database that’s stored in the same place!) all the data I should/want to keep and burn to multiple CDRs or a couple of (duplicate) DVDs for archiving, then format or toss (or even archive, sorted and labeled) the floppies in a more easily accessible fashion.

To give you an idea: I have 3.5″ and 5.25″ floppies going back through all the DOSes to about DOS 3, back further to TRSDOS floppies–and even some Mac software/archives.

That stuff really needed sorting out!

(My paper files were mostly sorted some weeks ago.)

Then, there’s the “surface” storage… shelves and such like. Most of the old music, language, history, etc., books have already been boxed (and labeled and etc.), but there’re still five very, very full shelves of books n such that need sorting out.

Then, of course, I need to clean and sort out the bookshelves in the living room for refiling with previously boxed books…

This Spring cleaning thing is pretty heavy stuff (book boxes, get it? :-))!

Oh, well, at least I had some “deck beer” to lighten the load. (“Deck beer”–over-sugared some beer for bottle conditioning. Temnps outside have been mostly below freezing for a while… so, placed a bunch of bottles of this beer outside for conditioning after only 3 days. It’s all turned out very, very good. Whatta save!)

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Macs are sooooo easy! (Not)

Page on down on this post at Chaos Manor (View) for the rest of the comments excerpted below:

I am beginning to hate Macs. I cannot empty the trash. I get a message saying that “Send to” is blocked. To empty everything in the trash including locked items press the option key while selecting Empty Trash. Needless to say I have pressed the option key until I am blue in the face. It won’t empty the trash…

…NOW I CANNOT MOVE SOME OF THE ITEMS from the trash to the foo folder. I do not have sufficient privileges!!! The MAC is protecting me from deleting old Windows backup files. I don’t have sufficient privileges. This may be the stupidest operating system yet with the possible exception of Vista.

Ye gods!!!

After consulting with 6 Unix gurus, active Mac users, he finally ended up with…

Plugging back in the external hard drive I was informed that it is unreadable, and disk utility opened. It offers to reformat…

…Macs are great if you’re me, with access to lots of advisors. I am not so sure about Aunt Minnie.

Macs are “intuitive” and “easy to use” if you already think like an Apple programmer (and sometimes that’s not even sufficient *heh*). If not, they can be terribly frustrating machines, largely because with a Mac it’s “The Apple way or the highway, bud,” and that’s that.

Once again, may I offer PCBSD, which has essentially the same (BSD) Unix underpinnings as Mac OSX without the quirky Mac straightjacket?

At least it’s not Mac OSX…

*heh*

Trackposted to The Midnight Sun, The Random Yak, A Blog For All, Shadowscope, The Pink Flamingo, Big Dog’s Weblog, Wake Up America, A Newt One, Dumb Ox Daily News, Adeline and Hazel, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Hobson’s Choice

“A Hobson’s choice is a free choice in which only one option is offered, and one may refuse to take that option. The choice is therefore between taking the option or not taking it. The phrase is said to originate from Thomas Hobson (1544–1630), a livery stable owner at Cambridge, England who, in order to rotate the use of his horses, offered customers the choice of either taking the horse in the stall nearest the door—or taking none at all. It is analagous to the expression ‘my way or the highway’.”1

Well, the presidential field is narrowed even further, it seems. Now, we have a choice between candidates who want to drive the country off a cliff to its doom at 120mph and candidates who want to drive the country off a cliff at a sedate 75mph…

Not really much of a choice.

Makes the case for striving to see congresscritters, state and local pols elected who give a damn about more than just their own personal power and their “Surrender, America!” ideologies. (And if you think for one minute Juan McCain’s “surrender America’s sovereignty at the borders” position isn’t fundamentally the same as the other candidates’ “Surrender America” positions then you are sadly deluded.)

Look closely at candidates for Congress, for state and local offices. Vote “Hell no!” against those whose positions fail to defend the U.S., your State or locality against the evils of alien invasion and… invasive government. Vote for people with the [intestinal fortitude] to tell “Surrender America!” judges, executives and bureaucrats to take a quick ride on the express train to hell.

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More from the illiterate alien invaders…

On May 1, 2006, I posted “The Proper Display of the Mexican Flag on American Soil” in partial response to alien invaders disrespecting the American flag and displaying the Mexican flag above it… on American soil. I have left comments open for that and for another post in response to the alien invaders partially because I enjoy gleaning dumbass reactions like the one above (from a computer logged on via the Tallahassee, Florida, Broward County Public Schools… of course *heh*)

Victoria Garcia | www.teardrop_13_SG@hotmail.com | IP: 169.139.119.16

All american are some stupid a** who think that you belong here. First of all we were here before you all so if you think that we should go back to our country we R already here. WHITE poeple should hop back on to the MayFlower & go back to BRITIN!
OH AND WE R MEXICAN 4 LIFE NOT LATINOS, LATINOS R RICANS

Feb 6, 11:33 AM

The illiterate boob styling herself (?) “Victoria Garcia” fisks herself; I need make no further comment… but I will, of course.

If you check the comments on that post, you’ll see a sizeable number who share the illiterate boob’s sentiments, essentially, “Gringo, go home!” Of course, that begs the question, if the gringos “go home” how long will it take for the illiterate boob alien invaders to turn America into… the country(ies) they fled? Couldn’t make a success in Mexico, so they came here where the “gringos” had built the most productive, prosperous society in history. Now they want to turn it into the economic and social failure they fled?

Dumbasses.

Be sure and send teardrop_13_SG@hotmail.com a note of thanks for the entertainment “her” idiocy brought you (and, what the heck, visit the Broward County Public Schools website and congratulate them on the fine, fine job they’re doing “edumacatin'” this alien invader… *heh*).

And while you’re at it, why not make up a bumper sticker or three reading “Surrender Our Borders: Vote for Juan “SNake” McCain”

😉

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Allie is Wired, Woman Honor Thyself, The World According to Carl, A Newt One- BIG THURSDAY GUEST!, The Pink Flamingo, Big Dog’s Weblog, Cao’s Blog, Dumb Ox Daily News, A Newt One, Conservative Cat, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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“Super” (disgusting) Tuesday

Well, I’ll cast my vote a little later today in my state’s participation in the “Super” (disgusting) Tuesday event. Don’t worry about my vote; I’ll find some way to cast it for “None of the above”…

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