Month: February 2009

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Playing Ostrich

I’ve been emulating the phony meme, “Ostrich Hiding Head in Sand,” this week, mostly avoiding news (it’s all bad) and just getting on with life. It occurred to me that one of the biggest problems in our society today is that we’ve placed far, far too much power in the hands of folks who are far, far removed from our lives, power to directly affect our lives that the “feddle gimmint” (“feddle” rhymes with “meddle” you notice) ought not have and was never meant–at least by the Founders–to have.

WE, the People, have ceded our rights to liberty–freedom from governmental meddling–to people who do not have our best interests at heart. Let me repeat that: anyone who says, “I’m from the government; I’m here to help,” is lying–to you at the very least, and, if they’re stupid enough to be sincere, to themselves as well. Our political masters do NOT sincerely want to solve the problems they’ve created (with our help–we elected these bastards, didn’t we?), because any problem genuinely solved equals less power for the politicians *spit* and bureaucraps *puke* to exercise over us.

So, I’ve been hiding out this week. But that hasn’t stopped the little wheels from turning (be they ever so slowly turning). What if… what if just 10% of taxpayers said, “Enough! No more!” and simply… opted out. What if… just 100 people in every major city banded together and (after first purchasing body armor *heh*) simply drove V E R Y S L O W L Y on their city’s major arteries during rush hour. Every day for as long as they still had a car, in protest against civil governments doing everything possible to screw us blue. (Yeh, pay the tickets, but keep up the Good Work.) What if… people of good conscience (and at least half a brain–100% more than the average Mass Media Podperson) simply banded together and said, “No!” loudly, consistently, without fail, every time politicians lied to us, stole from us, lined their own pockets at our expense?

What if?

I suspect it’d look something like this.

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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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It’s the Little Things (again)

The nice lil built-in touches I use day in and day out in Opera–easily-customized hot key combos, built-in mouse gestures, full-featured feed reader, online syncing* between different versions of Opera on different computers, etc., are among the reasons I keep coming back to it as my fav browser.

Once really nice–and often under-utilized–feature is Speed Dial. By default, Opera displays the Speed Dial page whenever one opens a new blank tab/browser window. The default Speed Dial page includes an example “tile” one can clik to go to an Opera intro page and eight more that are empty. All are editable to add/change to addresses one visits often. New Tab>Speed Dial>CLICK, you’re there. Nice. But nine “speed dials” weren’t enough for me, sooo…

Edit speeddial.ini while Opera’s not running to add

[Size]
Rows=4
Columns=6

…and,

speed-dial

I don’t have them all configured in this Win7 installation, yet, but 24 speed dials is better than 9, right?

🙂

More, but not Opera/browser related:

I miss the multiple virtual desktops Compiz afforded me in Ubuntu. I know of several commercial apps and some freebies in beta for Vista and XP, but why no virtual desktops in Win 7 “Ultimate” (albeit, beta)–built in? Or is the functionality available and I’ve just not found it? Irritating lapse. Multiple virtual desktops is something I’ve found in some form or another in all the Linux desktop Guis I’ve tried for several years, now–heck, even the tiny 95MB Puppy Linux distros have the functionality!

Puzzling. why isn’t it a part of the functionality? It’s a much, much more useful feature than some of the eye candy. heck, more useful than any of the eye candy.

Win7: Lose points for a missing feature.

*Yeh, yeh, I know: there are some add-ons for Internet Exploder, Safari, et al, that allow folks to do something similar, but note the “add-ons”.

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Windows Live? DOA @twc

Well, not quite dead on arrival, just not all that welcome, standing out in the cold and rain catching its death of a cold… *heh*

OK, OK, for purposes of testing ONLY I’ll install some of the “Windows Live” apps on this Win7 beta drive. Given ALL my past experiences with Microsoft’s treatment of email (well, not quite all; Outlook 98 wasn’t half bad), I wasn’t real eager to dump WL Mail onto this computer. I’m sure not using it for important email, though I’ll configure YPops to download mail from my “mostly junk” yahoo email account using WL Mail.

:: Check that/update ::

No, I rethought the “I’ll use Ypops/Yahoo account” thing. A Gmail account I don’t use much, instead. Only has about 4,000 messages to import, so should be an average test…

Back again. Took about a minute to import the nearly 4,000 messages. Easy-peasy setup of the email account, easier than Vista’s Windows Mail by a tad. Crappy default display of mail, have to fiddle with that. Not bad, but certainly not to my taste. I’ll see how it handles import/export of various contact files, mail, etc. and how easy (or not) filtering is. May be Good Enough for most folks, though.

:: Update/off ::

The other apps–Silverlight, Movie Maker beta, Photo Studio–all have perfectly good replacements from third parties, but I’ll try out the current iterations anyway, just to be fair.

If they install. That’s going to be the ticklish thing: will the WL apps that MS left out of Win7 install on the beta? We’ll see.

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So, Finally a Windows 7 Update with Content

…from twc use, though not much content yet.

Just installed Win7 Beta and… first impressions:

Someone at Microsoft has at least a budding sense of humor. Win7 Beta-Default deskop background is a Beta swimming in a blue field. Cute. *sigh* (I don’t do “cute” well… )

desktop

Installed quickly for a Windows OS. Under 30 mins to a working desktop. Not all that bad. Reboots for parts of the installation process were all under one minute. Seems more responsive than Vista systems I’ve been on, but that’s purely subjective.

Internet Exploder 8 seems to suck a little less than previous iterations of Internet Exploder.

I dislike the default system sounds, but that’s purely idiosyncratic.

The eye candy is nice. Not necessary but nice. Comparable to my default Ubuntu setup.

Recognized all my hardware, set my display to its native resolution.

Small printing problem from within a Control Panel applet, but printing from other apps seems to work fine. Printing over the network’s another story. Seems I need to install a patch to the WinXP computers, as is neccesary for many with mixed Vista/XP networks. Funny, that. Network printing in Linux has been relatively simple, apart from the problems after the upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 that eventually sorted themselves out (Right: long story; see previous posts on that :-)).

So far, this is just about the best beta (shrinkwrapped or not *heh*) I’ve seen from Microsoft, of any kind.

More later.

Update: OK, I have a bit of time for one of my gripes, now. Granular control of security settings is a pain. UAC, for example, allows users to set the security settings to only four simplified, general settings (unbleieveably irritating, two degrees of sorta irritating and off). No granular control. For that, one has to dig around in Win 7’s innards–which I’m perfectly satisfied to do, but which Aunt Tilly and Bubba Billy Bob Joe Jim can’t (shouldn’t) and probably don’t know anyone technically adept enough to do for them. So, the dumbed down training wheels approach is fine for Aunt Tilly and Bubba Billy Bob Joe Jim (by which I mean Academia Nut Fruitcakes (and [darned near] all Prisons for Kids administrators, recent liberal arts graduates, etc.), Big Box-High Dollar “Tech Support” Personnel, as well as the average, innumerate, illiterate computer user). But it’s decidedly NOT OK with me that the GUI doesn’t have an “advanced” tab that allows advanced, granular settings. It’s as though Me$$y$oft is trying to be Apple. *heh*

However, that said, there’s a neat lil app from the WinVistaClub, The Ultimate Windows Tweaker, that very nearly satisfies my desire for a decent GUI to handle digging into some innards (without doing Registry edits, etc.). It appears to work the same for Win7 as it does for Vista, so it’s making my life a tad easier and more comfortable. 😉

Then there are the silly things like no “browse to” button for navigating to files for changing the desktop background. No. Have to select from a “theme” or use Explorer to go to a folder with appropriate graphics files, right click on one and then select “Set as Desktop Background”. *feh* Silly time waster.

Little things, but it’s little things like this that either irk or please me. ‘s’way I am.

BTW, I’d forgotten, after just eight months or so of daily Ubuntu use, just how much I hate Windows’ DRM crap. Watch a TV show or movie online at a site that a.) does “own the rights” and b.) has made it available for free (with ads or whatever) for streaming and… Windows intrudes and says I don’t have the rights to watch it? *feh* yes, *feh* I say! Pain in the tuches doesn’t begin to describe it!

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Innumeracy

With insincere apologies to Mark Twain, a society that doesn’t count is no better than one that can’t. Consider the wisdom of the internet:

Over 3 in 2 people in the world are completely innumerate.

Eh? Come again? *heh*

Or better yet, consider this:

I don’t even know where to begin… *sigh*

One cent=$0.01

$0.01X0.002=$0.00002

$0.00002X35893 (the kb use cited in the video above)=$0.71786

It’s very, very, very simple arithmetic. “Do-it-in-your-head” arithmetic. Doesn’t even qualify as “math,” IMO.

Why did the two Verizon reps just not get it? Well, not only is adult literacy on the decline in these (dis)United States, but a growing number of folks just can’t count… largely because they’ve not been compelled by education and experience to do so. Heck, even this otherwise thoughtful article at Money Instructor.com uses a model that is part of the problem, a big part.

There is nothing wrong with using a calculator, of course. Calculators are useful in that they save time on arithmetical computations. But in a modern society where most citizens have graduated from an advanced system of formal education, one would expect that educated people would have an understanding of what the calculator is doing. To be sure, the four basic operations are well understood by people who consider themselves educated, but recent studies show that a majority begin to have difficulty when faced with such concepts as square roots, simple algebraic terms, and grade school geometry.

Did you catch that? “To be sure, the four basic operations are well understood by people who consider themselves educated… ”

It doesn’t matter one bit whether people “consider themselves educated” or not. Those who cannot tell the difference between $0.002 and $0.00002 can’t perform “the four basic operations” and indeed do NOT understand them. They are innumerate. And their numbers are legion. And it is they who combine their illiteracy (“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”–Twain) with their innumeracy and thus allow the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind, politicians, illiterate and innumerate Academia Nut Fruitcakes, so-called educators and all their ilk to fill their minds with illiterate, innumerate, toxic sludge.

When a people cannot measure the impacts of public policies in clear and meaningful ways, then that people can fall prey to all kinds of flim-flammery. And such is the American public becoming.

Millions of Americans engage the services of income tax accountants every year because they are unable to perform the simple calculations themselves. Many others have difficulty interpreting statistical information, percentages, or any kind of information expressed in terms of graphs and charts. When it comes to calculating areas, capacity, or weights and measures, the average North American is not sure where to begin. For a modern society, this should be an intolerable situation, yet it seems that for most people it is quite normal and acceptable.

In short, millions of Americans are enstupiated sheeple, ripe for shearing. Worse, these same people cannot really blame the failures of “public education” (AKA “prisons for kids”), because almost anyone who wants to, who puts in a little effort, can become literate and numerate. Well more than half the population of enstupiated American sheeple are self-made enstupiated American sheeple.

In a representative republic, such is a recipe for disaster. In an ever more democratic (rule by mob) representative republic, we are beginning to reap many of the ills feared by the Founders, largely because a lazy, illiterate, innumerate electorate enables the obscene autoeriticism of politicians who gain almost orgasmic pleasure from misusing tax monies as yet uncollected from future generations.

I met a woman in her 60s the other day who declaimed that “We older people will lose all our benefits if the Republicans gain power.” *huh*?!? What benefits? Social Security has long been bankrupt, stealing from younger generations to buy older folks’ votes. Medicare and other “benefits” are likewise nothing but Ponzi schemes writ large. “Benefits” that steal from my children and grandchildren (and yours) to pay me are beyond obscene; they are simply wrong. Dhimmicraps/Repugnican’ts: makes not one bit of difference. The Ponzi scheme remains. And people who can’t or won’t do the math to see behind the smokescreen are the problem–or at least a large part of it–that keeps the government’s shameful Ponzi schemes going. For now. But someday, numbers will force an accounting, and when that happens, katie bar the door.

“There are three kinds of people in the world: those who count and those who don’t.”

*heh* Which are you?

Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Political Byline, Wingless – Belgium Says Israel Uses Child Soldiers, Refuses to Sell Weapons, Democrat=Socialist, and DragonLady’s World, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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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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Annual “Illiterate Boobs” Month

This month I have to once again suffer through a month filled with people who either cannot or refuse to pronounce “February,” preferring the illiterate “Feb-YOU-ary” mispronunciation because, I suppose, they are simply too stupid or too butt lazy–or both–to pronounce the first “r”.

Stupid, butt lazy, illiterate dolts. Gives me a rash, chaps my gizzard and makes me wish for a “Magic Dope Stick” to whack ’em all upside the head with. Unfortunately, it seems all of ’em who deseve a swift whack upside the head have already performed their own self-lobotomies and so even were such a magic stick available, I doubt it would do any good.

*grumble, grumble, gripe, complain*

Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Wingless – American Teen Killed By Released Guantanamo Detainees, Nuke Gingrich, Wingless – Belgium Says Israel Uses Child Soldiers, Refuses to Sell Weapons, and Wingless – Hamas Steals Aid Meant For People of Gaza, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Weird Eyes?

I use this lil bmp file, tiled, as the desktop background in a Win2K VM I run fairly often, hosted on this Ubuntu box:

coffee_bean

The fun thing about this lil graphic on my background is that when I look at it just so, my desktop appears to become three-dimensional, the background “recedes” an apparent two feet or so (to about where the wall is behind my display) while the icons “float” on the surface of my monitor. Move my head and the background appears to move… while the icons stay still.

Weird eyes or just an interesting optical illusion?

I’m going with weird eyes for now.

😉

Anywho, it’s kinda relaxing for these old eyes to ALT-TAB over to that Win2KVM and just let ’em rest in 3-D comfort for a while. A “2/3-yard stare” instead of a 1,000-yard stare” kinda thing.

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Certifiably Loony

Certification madness. Once upon a time, a college degree meant something: the holder had at least a minimal literacy (no, not mere functional literacy but knowledge and awareness of the richness of Western culture and history, at least minimal ability to do critical analysis, a comfortable numeracy, etc.) and a known knowledge base. Now? notsomuch.

Trades used to have apprentices, journeymen and masters, and some still do, but the practice is falling away in preference to certifications by both private associations and quasi (or actual) government agencies. And certifications of that sort do serve useful functions.

But a plumbing or mechanic or teaching or computer certification doesn’t measure anything beyond a specific knowledge set. It does not measure what the certification holder can and does do. There are many certified and licensed plumbers, teachers, mechanics, computer techs, etc., who passed a certification exam and/or acquired class hours for that certification who are worthless in their fields. But employers want the certs to demonstrate their hiring standards are… standard.

A couple of innocuous examples from a wealth of material:

Here in America’s Third World County, there are few certified computer techs. I am fairly frequently called upon to correct issues not addressed by or caused by one (or more) of the other certified techs. In almost every case, the cause of the lapses have been twofold: greed and laziness, not a lack of knowledge.

Son&Heir’s car was inspected by an ACE Certified Mechanics’ shop before we purchased it, nevertheless, I–a reasonably intelligent amateur–have corrected several obvious mechanical problems that popped out to my eyeball inspection (and were confirmed by a trip through the car’s manual), problems that boded well to cause serious issues down the road. Why didn’t the ACE shop catch these plain to see mechanical problems? I suspect the common “laziness and greed” factor were at the root of the poor inspection.

Certification madness–shopping to the certification rather than to demonstrated competence–among employers and consumers is a recipe for mediocrity at best. A certification should be one among other more important criteria folks should look at when seeking specialized skills work. The single best criterion for measuring a certified person’s skillset and work habits is, of course, examples of their work that you can see for yourself. Whether it’s a few cars a mechanic’s worked on, some networks a tech has installed or configured, past students taught ot untaught, examples of the certified person’s work are better meaures of what they may do for you than their certification. Of course, this kind of measurement requires you do your own homework on what good examples of work in their field are, and that’s just too hard for some folks to tackle (“too hard” as in requiring some effort, any effort).

The next best criterion is the experience others have had with their work. Ask around. Find out how the prospective skilled worker’s work has held up over time. This isn’t a sure check. Some folks may not know, for example, that adding a wireless network card to a desktop computer whose wired connection is already working, more reliably and at a higher speed than the wireless connection, is just a way for a tech to add an unnecessary $100 padding to an already padded bill. So, when using this criterion, you have to weigh the user’s knowledge and experience as well as their comments about the work done for them. That’s more work for you, work some folks are simply unwilling (or feel unable) to do.

But HR people who rely strictly on certifications (and PC hiring quotas) have no excuse for hiring certified incompetents or lazy bums. It is (ought to be, but really isn’t) their job after all to hire the best candidate for the job. That often they do not speaks volumes to their own (lack of) committment to excellence. We, as consumers, have a responsibility to our own pocketbooks, to our children and grandchildren (and not just for immediate financial reasons) and to society as a whole to seek the best–not just best paper-qualified–candidates for work we pay to have done.

Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Nuke Gingrich, Woman Honor Thyself, Democrat=Socialist, and The World According to Carl, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.