Month: October 2009

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“President Pantywaist” Gets “Tough” With Fox News

Yeh, yeh, it’s been all over the place for a week or so. The 0! picking a fight with an organization that doesn’t even have to buy ink by the barrel (cos electrons don’t need ink). Well, Mark Steyn chimes in, too:

We were told that Obama would use “soft power” and “smart diplomacy” to get his way. Russia and Iran are big players with global ambitions, but Obama’s soft power is so soft it doesn’t even work its magic on a client regime in Kabul whose leaders’ very lives are dependent on Western troops. If Obama’s “smart diplomacy” is so smart that even Hamid Karzai ignores it with impunity, why should anyone else pay attention?

The strange disparity between the heavy-handed community organization at home and the ever cockier untouchables abroad risks making the commander in chief look like a weenie – like “President Pantywaist,” as Britain’s Daily Telegraph has taken to calling him.

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Walking Ears Down Memory Lane

(Yeh, if you don’t like that metaphor, I’ve got worse ones. :-))

If you only remember this from The (old) Dating Game, then you are a johnnie-come-lately, not nearly “olde pharte-ish” enough. *heh*

Gotta love the album cover, eh?

Ah, here’s another, just for the sheer brass of it:

BTW, While I appreciate a neat lil command line script that lets me download YouTube videoa in Linux, I have to say that YouTube Downloader for Windows edges it out in functionality. Download YouTube videos, convert them to another video format or even extract the audio and save as mp3. Neat lil app. Hmmm, I need to see about installing it in Ubuntu using WINE…

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Stolen Humor

I saw this at Woody’s Place and warned him I was stealing it…

Obama And The Cowboy

A cowboy from Texas attended a social function where Barack Obama was trying to gather support for his healthcare reform plan. When he discovered the cowboy was from President Bush’s town, Barack started to belittle him by talking in a southern drawl and single syllable words.

As he was doing that, he kept swatting at some flies that were buzzing around his head. The cowboy said, “Y’all havin’ some problem with them circle flies?”

Obama stopped talking and said, “Well, yes, if that’s what they’re called, but I’ve never heard of circle flies.”

“Well Sir,” the cowboy replied, “circle flies hang around ranches. They’re called circle flies because they’re almost always found circling around the back end of a horse.”

“Oh,” Obama replied as he went back to rambling. But, a moment later he stopped and bluntly asked, “Are you calling me a horse’s ass?”

“No, Sir,” the cowboy answered, “I have too much respect for the citizens of this country to call their President a horse’s ass.”

“That’s a good thing,” said Obama as he began rambling on once more.

After a long pause, the cowboy, in his best Texas drawl said, “Hard to fool them flies, though.”

Y’all be sure to head on over to Woody’s for more of his wit and wisdom, ‘K?

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Techie Woes and Wins

Fair Warning: this is a light “techie post”. Nothing heavy, just an equipment upgrade yarn.

So, my very nice Netgear WPN824 802.11b/g MIMO router began being a bit finicky about accessing its web management interface, and, wanting to demonstrate excessive over compliance with keeping my own network equipment up to snuff, since it gives me extra ammo to rub in my ISP’s face *heh*, I purchased a Linksys WRT160NL 802.11b/g/n router to upgrade my lil network with.

Note: the Netgear was showing no packet losses across my home network, and was seemingly rock solid otherwise; in fact, it will serve nicely, I think, as a “breakout” switch, with the DHCP and wireless functionality turned off. Oh, and I’d switched my cable “modem” (it’s no such thing. It doesn’t modulate/demodulate; it’s a specialized router, for heaven’s sake!) earlier as well. The “old” one still works perfectly well, but my ISP can’t complain about my equipment.

Well, the Linksys router seems to be nice enough and all. Son & Heir has a snappier connection via the wireless n adapter in his Asus G71Gx-A1. (*sigh* I have to watch the envy factor. It’s a seriously cool machine 🙂 Oh, the link’s to the “A2”–whose only real difference is Win7 instead of Vista.)

Still, it could have been a better experience setting the thing up. *sigh* It took nearly an hour–yes, an hour!–to configure wireless connectivity on my Wonder Woman’s Toshiba. Don’t ask. OK, since you did (in my dreams nightmares *heh*), I’d been using the Intel Proset Wireless Management tool to manage the Intel chipset 802.11b/g adapter in her notebook. Why? Because Windows wireless management tool sucked dead bunnies through a straw on that adapter, the Toshiba maagement tool that came with the notebook… worked well on a different adapter that had come embedded in the original motherboard (which was changed out by Toshiba last year under warranty), but was even worse than the windows tool for the Intel adapter in this mobo.

Well, the Intel Proset tool could NOT negotiate with the Linksys WRT160NL any better than the built in Windows tool or the Toshiba tool could. That meant… installing the Linksys tool. And THAT meant installing the WHOLE Linksys management router management package, NOT just a wireless config tool. And for some reason, it took 30 minutes to install the frickin’ Linksys software! Un. Be. Lieveable.

*sigh* Once it installed and I jumped through a few (well, a BUNCH of–man! I’m not trying to make off with the crown jewels here!) hoops, all was well. Finally. But. Getting Son&Heir’s ASUS notebook on the wireless Netgear network had been a major pain in the neck (well, actually an anatomically lower region, if you get my drift), so what, thought I, was this going to be like?

Toddled off and got his password (again–I always forget the thing and I will NOT write it down :-)), fired up the monster and… yep. Windows found the wireless network and volunteered to attempt to log on. I clicked to insert the password (which I had handy on a thumb drive) and… that was all. Muuuuch easier than the last time on his computer. Tearing my hair out on my Wonder Woman’s–a computer that’s always managed to negotiate credentials relatively simply in the past, once I used the right management tool to do so.

Well, all is well now, except for my ISP’s woeful service. On again/off again. Good stuff, then, packet losses apparently out the wazoo (well, they can’t say where they’re lost, that’s for sure–or at least haven’t bothered to find out where *sigh*).

Now, if only I could figure out why the storage link on this thing is not configuring the way the documentation says it should… Yeh, neat lil function–if I can get it working correctly: a USB connection for an external drive. I can “see” the drive I installed and create shares, etc., from the router, but not from any of the computers. Yet. Just one more thing to tinker with. (It’ll be a media share when I get it working correctly, a place to dump shows I’ve recorded so others can view them on their computers. Oh, and a bunch of mp3s and such for Thanksgiving and Xmas family time. Just pump ’em through whatever computer’s set up in living room, kitchen/dining room, etc. Easier than burning another mix CD and playing it through the EC in the living room only.)

Ah, *thumps head*. The external drive issue? *sigh* It’ll require a reboot over to the Linux side of this box and a session with PartED to fix the issue. See, although the pdf “manual” that came with the router said Not One Word about it, the NTFS formatting on the drive I connected Will Not Do. No, it MUST be formatted using FAT32! What?!? That’s an extremely inefficient file format for large hard drives! Did I say “extremely”? Oh, I can attach the thing to an older computer running an older version of Windows (XP, even) and reformat the drive as FAT32, but I want a non-destructive format. There’s data on that drive, after all. Sure, sure, I have that data duplicated–backed up–elsewhere, but really, a destructive format? That’s for the birds!

So, since I no longer have a current, good non-destructive disk management software that can reformat an NTFS disk to FAT32 on anything but a Linux box, and because this is the fastest Linux box in the house (when it’s booted on that “side”), it’s

  1. detach the drive from the router
  2. reboot into Ubuntu
  3. attach the drive to this computer
  4. start PartEd and go to town.

Now, that’s not an onerous task, but it would’ve been n ice for the documentation to say so up front, and not require that I dig through a bunch of obscurantist support pages to find it out. Oh, well. Wait. I have another drive the same size (and make and NTFS file format *sigh*) attached. I guess I could just switch those out after reformatting “this” one (which has very little data on it). Then *sigh* swap out data. But of course, I’ll still need to either take it to an older Windows machine to reformat the drive or boot into Linux, because Win7 (and Vista) disk management will NOT format a drive using FAT32. Nope. The only choices are NTFS and exFAT, which will NOT be seen as FAT32 by the router. Or, and I suppose this would be the most efficient tack, I could simply clean off the little data on “this” drive, swap it out for the other and use the Linksys management interface to format the drive. I suppose. *sigh*

Oh. Well. Another day. 🙂

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Shocker! “Fake But Accurate” CBS News Rediscovers Some Degree of Journalistic Integrity

Swine Flu Cases Overestimated?
CBS News Exclusive: Study Of State Results Finds H1N1 Not As Prevalent As Feared

Well, duh! CBS investigates to discover that dogs still bite and governments still lie through their sharp, pointy, cannibalistic teeth.

(CBS) If you’ve been diagnosed “probable” or “presumed” 2009 H1N1 or “swine flu” in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn’t have H1N1 flu.

In fact, you probably didn’t have flu at all. That’s according to state-by-state test results obtained in a three-month-long CBS News investigation…

…In late July, the CDC abruptly advised states to stop testing for H1N1 flu, and stopped counting individual cases. The rationale given for the CDC guidance to forego testing and tracking individual cases was: why waste resources testing for H1N1 flu when the government has already confirmed there’s an epidemic?

Anyone who’s been following the blatant pattern of mendacious effluent issuing from government orifices concerning swine flu is unsurprised by this. My severe cold this week actually met most of the clinical diagnostic criteria for flu, but seeking a doctor’s help, perhaps resulting in a Tamiflu prescription to do what nasal rinses and gargling with salt water could do just about as well, was just silly. The course of the thing–whatever it was–would run about the same no matter what: sick for about a week and then recovery. Well, recovery’s started, although it seems I’ll need some serious but slow reconditioning to regain some stamina. Par for the course, though.

So? Was it “swine flu”? Who flippin’ cares? I was (still am a bit) sick and I’ll either recover or not. Either way is pretty much fine by me.

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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.