Tag: Open Trackbacks

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Yet another vote against “upgrading” to Vista

*heh*

Installed Turbo-Tax on the Vista machine. The execrable Vista will not recognize any of my DVD drives as CD drives, and thus would not install; so I shared an XP drive, mapped to it on the Vista machine, and installed using a networked CD. Vista is not really ready for prime time, and nothing I can do will get it to believe that either a read only drive, or a perfectly good Plextor R/W drive, is also a CD drive. DO NOT “UPGRADE” your XP machine to Vista!!!!

Oh, yes. Every time I have to work on a client’s Vista machine I have to watch my BP. I’m glad (I think–I have annual B&Ms about TurboTax) Pournelle did get TT installed finally, but I understand his frustrations. ANd there are multiple reports that Vista SP-1 “breaks” apps that once worked with Vista pre-SP-1, along with driver issues continuing (and in some cases worse) from pre-SP-1.

But mind you (from Pournelle again) Apple’s iPhone has some issues. Here’s one:

If there is no service — when there really is service — this is potentially serious, is it not? I have no idea of what to do about it, except that if you get no service, try restarting the phone. Note that reboot is the usual remedy for many Windows problems. Is Apple learning from Microsoft? Stay tuned.

*heh* “Is Apple learning from Microsoft?” Very funny.

In other OS news, Kubuntu 7.10 has a few more wrinkles to iron out and hoops to jump through than plain vanilla Ubuntu 7.10, but I like the interface better, so I put up with it. Still, installing WINE is a snap in either, and using my Windows version of Portable Opera (on a Memorex TravelDrive) is transparent. Oh, a minor puzzle for the Portable Opera under WINE: for some reason all web pages display in a non-proportional, seriffed font that is NOT the way it dosplays in Windows–nor does the Linux version of Opera on the same machine display that way. I’ll puzzle that one out later.

(Duh. The fonts specified under Windows aren’t available. Simply had to specify fonts that were installed on this box. Shoulda remembered that. Oh, I can make the Windows fonts available to WINE, but it’s just easier for now to use the fonts already installed.)

For the proverbial Aunt Tilly, I believe plain vanilla Ubuntu 7.10 is really about ready for prime time, but Kubuntu 7.10 is for folks who are just a little more ready to dig into the thing and do some of the scut work of getting it set up juuuust so. “Out of the box”–so to speak–plain vanilla Ybuntu 7.10 is a easier for a non-techie to tweak–the Synaptic installer is easier to use than the Adept Package Manager (and much easier for non-command line folks than apt-get *heh*).

I like either.

But for ease of setup and just using the computer, PCBSD 1.5 is just about as good as it gets, IMO. From bare drive on an old 1.3 Ghz compute to installed and up and running in about 20 minutes? Yes. Installing apps is easy-peasy, too. Easily passes the “Aunt Tilly” test. And yes, you can give it all the eye candy of Windows Vista or OSX, if you really want to. With less hardware overhead.

Interesting times.

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Comparisons

I love the web. Chesterton sprang to mind today and I found and downloaded another couple of his books. Along the way, I ran across

Comparisons
G.K. Chesterton

If I set the sun beside the moon,
And if I set the land beside the sea,
And if I set the town beside the country,
And if I set the man beside the woman,
I suppose some fool would talk about one being better.

Indeed.

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More from “The Underground History of American Education”

Reading the book yet? Here’s another teaser:

Full literacy wasn’t unusual in the colonies or early republic; many schools wouldn’t admit students who didn’t know reading and counting because few schoolmasters were willing to waste time teaching what was so easy to learn. It was deemed a mark of depraved character if literacy hadn’t been attained by the matriculating student. Even the many charity schools operated by churches, towns, and philanthropic associations for the poor would have been flabbergasted at the great hue and cry raised today about difficulties teaching literacy. American experience proved the contrary.1

Think about it. “Reading specialists” throughout our nation’s prisons for kids have a vested interest in making the art of teaching reading as arcane and difficult as possible. There are those, however, who have had universal success with a program that essentially lets kids teach themselves.

Storm the “bastilles’ of public education! Rescue the children! Save our future as a nation!

Those are not too strong. If anything, all those exclamation points are too few, too weak.

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Thought for Today

From John Taylor Gatto’s, The Underground History of American Education,

I’ve yet to meet a parent in public school who ever stopped to calculate the heavy, sometimes lifelong price their children pay for the privilege of being rude and ill-mannered at school. I haven’t met a public school parent yet who was properly suspicious of the state’s endless forgiveness of bad behavior for which the future will be merciless.

I’ll just keep on posting these teasers every now and then until y’all start reading the book. *heh*

Hmmm, maybe I should do the same with this book…

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RCOB-health tip

“RCOB”–“red curtain of blood”–is a term I was first exposed to by Kim duToit referring to a spike in BP (near berserker rage? :-)) usually brought about by exposure to obscene assaults on liberty by statist goons (mostly leftist statist goons, to be sure).

I’ve been trying to avoid confronting such things for the past month or so.

But, there are other things that can bring the RCOB about that are even less pleasant in some ways. This monster cold I’ve been fighting has robbed me of much sleep and exacerbated my tinnitus, a sure sign that my BP has been negatively affected as well. This a.m., upon waking, the ringing in my ears was a shapr “pinging” such that with every step or movement, a sharp stab of sound was impinging on my hearing.

Not good. Sure enough, BP was stratospheric.

Took a page from relaxation techniques of years gone by: slow breathing for about 15 minutes. By “slow breathing” I mean just under two full breaths per minute.

Sure enough, by the end of 15 minutes, I was back down into prehypertension range on the systolic and normal range (OK, high normal) on the diastolic.

Most folks may only be able to handle going as low as 6-7 breaths per minute, but the next time you feel a RCOB moment coming on, try concentrating on your breathing for a minute.

I may have to do that for about 15 minutes an hour come Fall, though, if things like this keep going on…

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Change is good?

We have all heard the mantra, “Change is good,” and probably let it pass with a polite nod, all the time knowing that it is simply a verbal plastering over, an attempt to make palatable the truth underlying the lie: “Change is inevitable.”

Let me prove to you that “Change is good” is a lie.

Ask your parents or grandparents (or if you’re old enough, yourself *heh*) whether the physical change from a vital, active healthy 25-year-old body to a vital, active, arthritic, as-healthy-as-can-be-expected 65-year-old body is a good thing.

How about a change from $1.00/gallon gasoline to $3.00/gallon gasoline? For most folks, the change hasn’t been a Good Thing.

How about the change that occurs when a hurricane or tornado sweeps through your home?

What about the change you might experience when a dumbass driver thinks he can make it through a red light and t-bones your car?

Good things? Oh, with effort and with careful thought (and sometimes lots of outside help from friends, family, healthcare providers, etc.), we can make silk purses from sows’ ears, but does that make the change events good?

Nope.

Think about that the next time you hear B. Hussein Obama-Winfrey or his wife, Michelle “…for the first time in my adult life, I’m proud of America” Obama declaim for change.

What kind of change?

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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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“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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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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“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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