Moderately long rant below that cites nothing dispositive but just notes a couple of minor data points that fall along with my observation that our culture is in the crapper and on the point of being–rightfully!–flushed.
Read it or don’t.
Wallpapering My Season
*whew* Really late start to my Monday. I know! I’ll waste some more time fooling with meaningless crap on my computer!
OK, so it’s not winter yet, but it’s getting there, so my desktop now reflects the changing season with a snowy Norwegian country lane.
Lil Things to Be Thankful For
So, my fav “Big Box Computer” went belly up about six weeks ago. Mobo issues. Yes, motherboard. Trust me, I am (have been, was; whatev’) a professional; I know these things. *heh*
So, the question was, “Buy identical mobo or a minor-to-moderate upgrade?”
You know what I chose. But why not go all out and upgrade to a mobo/cpu/memory combo like Son&Heir’s (really fast) i7 quad core, 16GB Barn Burner Christmas Build of a year ago? Well, for one thing, I don’t really need that kind of power. A little boost? Nice. Supercomputer? Notsomuch. *heh*
So, after waffling and wavering and deferring (heck, procrastinating) for more than a month, I finally ordered a nicely-featured mobo and a dual core AMD Athlon II that is significantly faster than the Athlon dual core I’ve retired (a lil epoxy, some gold-washed chain and it’ll make a nice keychain fob). Not a big boost in capability, but Good Enough for my uses–web browsing, image manipulation, editing/watching videos, writing, editing, playing music, etc.
So, I broke one of my own rules (don’t do computer work when my eyes are propped open by toothpicks) and popped the mobo/cpu, etc., together last night, booted the thing and…
Win7 found all the hardware and loaded “Good Enough” drivers. I loaded the driver disk from the mobo manufacturer (MSI this time; I like Asus a lot, but just decided to go with this) and had better drivers in no time flat.
Played around a bit, then finally (after the “a bit” turned into a couple of hours and it was past 3:00) shut it down and sawed some “Z’s”.
Booted this a.m. and Win7 told me that I needed to validate my Windows install, since I’d changed hardware. Clicked the lil button. Validated. Bob’s your uncle.
Soooo much nicer than the crap so many folks had to put up with when they changed hardware on an XP machine. I know. I talked to M$ tons of times for these folks whose Windows installs stopped working on them (cos they just couldn’t get through all the hoops, it seems, or were intimidated by the process).
So, thankful this was such an easy micro-mini-upgrade/fix. I needed one of those right now.
Update: Well, “easy fix” until… no boot last night. No, seriously: nothing, nada, zilch, a big zero with the rim kicked off. Not even fans stirring. Hmmm… Lots of stuff later (just followed a typical diagnostic tree), a screwdriver jumping the power switch pins on the mobo started the power supply. Attached hard drive, etc., and booted to Windows. Powered down and added another hard drive. It balked, giving a memory error. Swapped memory out. Booted just fine.
So, two problems: poor mobo/power switch connection and a bad memory module. Been fine since, as I have added peripherals in one at a time. Almost completely “rebuilt” now and working PDG.
It’s always (well, usually) the little things. One of Pournelle’s laws is that 80% of computer problems are bad connections, but that was formulated before Windows, I think. *heh*
Oh, and THAT reminds me of a problem recently with the sound on someone else’s computer. It took fixing
- A corrupted Windows Update process (so I could block updates to drivers)
- .NET Framework (on a Vista computer, no less *sigh*) and
- COMPLETELY uninstalling the “right” sound drivers–both the one Windows found (it was a Windows Update that “updated” a working driver into oblivion) and the one the computer manufacturer INSISTED would fix the issue, and yes that meant digging Registry references out and nuking them manually, AND
- MANUALLY editing the Registry in a way, urm, not recommended by Microsoft to effect some permission changes Vista did NOT want to allow
to get sound working on the computer.
Yes, it really took all four of those things. Really. Oh, and fixing the .NET Framework components? Nothing more than discovering that EVERYTHING on the computer had been set to be denied permissions invoking .NET. *sigh* Then? Reset ALL those permissions.
Thankful that wasn’t one of my computers… 🙂
Super Thanksgiving
Double Celebration. It’s usually pretty easy to remember our wedding anniversary, since we were married the day after Thanksgiving (the rehearsal dinner even doubled as a Family Reunion Thanksgiving meal, served in the poshest of posh settings at my fav aunt & uncle’s home :-)).
This year, Thanksgiving falls on THE day, so it’s a double celebration.
33 years, 13 years on “second chance” (October 1998 was when my Wonder Woman “died” three times in one day and I got to practice CPR on a Not Dummy).
I’m a lucky, lucky guy, and proof of that old law of nature that states that the uglier the guy the better the woman he’ll end up with. *heh*
Son & Heir will be here. Lovely Daughter and her Estimable Spouse will be visiting his relations in Alabama this year. We’ll see them on Sunday. Heck, by then I may even have started assembling my Grolsh beer bottle Christmas “tree”. Or not, since the bay window’s full of my Wonder Woman’s plants this year.
Riddle Me This
You’ve probably heard it said, “You never see the bullet that takes you down,” but does that mean you do see the ones that miss? I mean, bullets are pretty darned small and move really fast. Heck, star baseball players with really, really great batting averages can just (really) see only most of the balls pitched their way–the absolute greatest only hit in the 40% range–and baseballs are much, much larger than bullets, and the fastest fastballs travel less than 1/5 the rate of speed of a “slow” .45.
And most pitches are not aimed at the batter, so looking at the balls isn’t quite so dangerous. *heh*
I dunno… “seeing” the bullets that miss would seem to be a low probability event. 🙂
Now, Isn’t That Special?
OK, so marble backsplash essentially finished in the kitchen. Sure, lil niggling things left–pickling the trim and a few lil touchups. Piddlin’ stuff. So, my Wonder Woman looked at it as it was progressing last week and brought out the paint samples. *sigh* OK, OK: buy paint; hold in reserve until backsplash finished and… oh, wait, that’s pretty much now.
So… applied paint to walls (starting with one half of wall from backsplash to ceiling, 2′ wide and then door to the laundry room & pantry and past that the door to the garage). Oh. Joy.
Not.
On the wall, great coverage, but. Yeh, doesn’t look like the paint sample OR like the paint dried on the can. *huh?!?* Waited for drying. Another coat. Nope. Same. Not the “Cafe au lait” we (she *heh*) wanted but a kind of light pea greenish/brown. Not right.
Will have to shop around for a fix, I think, but just not this week.
Oh, the trim color we bought for the door trim and molding? Works. Looks pretty good.
I am so looking forward to repainting the thing again in a couple of weeks. Not. Masking, removing things from walls–including the pot rack and everything stored on/in it–and all the rolling and brushing and cleaning up, oh my.
Something to look forward to, for sure.
Tomorrow evening: sanding the backs of a bunch of (extra) marble tiles to harvest some marble dust for use in another kitchen project. *sing-song* “I’ll never tell… ” (Though of course I probably will)
Advice to Ponder
“Meddle thou not in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and good with ketchup.”
This sentence from a book read some time ago popped back up from whence it had sunk, and I thought the voices in my head were telling me to post it, so… 😉
Words Used to Have Meaning…
But now, words mean… whatever. It’s not just normal pejoration of words over time, anymore. Ortega’s Mass Man controls the decline of our increasingly debased tongue.
FROOMB! (Trust me or not, it relates… *sigh*)
Parents: Cursing baby doll should not be sold
I really do tire of this kind of thing. The doll apparently says, “Hey, crazy bitch.”
*yawn* The “Outrage Factory” is at work full time on this one, it seems.
This is marginally interesting as an indicator of the normalization of vulgarity in popular speech (but then, “vulgar” does mean “common, base” and our society is increasingly base–“morally low; without estimable personal qualities; dishonorable; meanspirited; selfish…
of little or no value; worthless”). Only stupid, subliterate, neovictorian bowdlerizers would consider “bitch” a curse. It’s vulgar, of course, but a “curse word”? Hardly. Of course, in today’s increasingly alliterate society, such pejoration of words (such as “curse”) has become common.
*waits for “outraged” subliterates to react negatively*
“Now there abide these three: phonemes, syntax and semantics, and the greatest of these is semantics.”
“I’ll take ‘Contemporary Society’ for $1,000, Alex”
I could see this on Jeopardy…
A: Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox
Q: What is “Poverty in the United States Today?”
Do the right thing: cut the apron strings, already. Oh, and get the “feddle gummint bureaucrappy” out of areas where it has no honest constitutional business operating. Like so-called “welfare”.
Racists
That’s all these white kids are, of course. Racists. The one kid of an Asian heritage doesn’t count, of course. By The Zero rule*, he’s also racist.