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2009 Resolution-Per-Day

No, not “2009 ResolutionS per day.” That’d just be silly. Although I do engage in goal setting, I just think that since I’ve not made any “New Year’s Resolutions” in some time, perhaps a little taking stock and goal setting of the “New Year’s resolutions” type might be in order. So, herewith my first “New Year’s Resolution” of 2009.

It occurred to me that stuff temds to multiply to fill whatever space is available, and not just in the “nature abhors a vaccuum” kind of way. For example, I had a new 400GB hard drive about six or so months ago. It’s now about half full. Of what? Just–mostly–stuff. Heck, I regularly scissor out and toss several gigs of stuff, and yet still stuff proliferates.

Take my desk. Please. *heh* I try to clean it off every now and then. The last time was about a month ago. But does that help? Nope. It’s crammed, piled high, stuffed with stuff.

Storage shed. Garage. Store rooms. Stuffed with stuff.

A goal for 2009? For every new piece of stuff brought into twc central, TWO pieces of stuff must go–preferably of like stuff. I’m not talking about increasing twc central’s use of the landfill, necessarily (although it may come to that from time to time). Most of the stuff we are plagued with is useful stuff, but might well find a more useful home elsewhere.

So. Yard sales. Donations. Want ads. Friends, neighbors and relatives: all potential new homes for stuff over the course of 2009. For example, how many CD/Radio/cassette tape “boom boxes” do we really need? The kids have stopped using them. I no longer use them (as I once did for ed purposes–amazing the usefulness of those lil items). Sure, some no longer have full functionality, but…

And then there’s my closet. How many boxes of “five-to-seven ‘gold stripe'” silk ties do I need, anyway?

And my techie hoard. Yes, I can and do use all the teeny lil bits and pieces I’ve stripped off of innumerable discarded computers, but how many of those old cases (still left after discarding more than a dozen computers last summer) and power supplies and CDROM drives and etc., do I really need to hang on to? How many can be made into perfectly serviceable hardware firewalls to give away? Well, it pretty much depends on how many spare 100mbit network cards I find I still have and how many people might find they really need a hardware firewall.

And the sheet music, books, magazines, manuscripts, records (both paper and LP), tapes, tools, materials of all kinds that is gathered in both organized and topsy-turvy, ramshackle disorganization–all still in need of digging into, even after the major cleanup of the BIG store room last summer.

Tons (possibly literally tons) of stuff that has simply bred and multiplied in the dank, dark storage places where it’s been consigned must go.

And the same goes for my digital stuff. Boxes and boxes of old floppies, CDRs, old hard drives: sorted, cleaned, recatalogued and either re-stored (this time with a digital library catalog and perhaps even bar coding) and that which is to be discarded either run through a degausser (for the floppies and other magnetic media) or shredded (for the CDRs) or melted (NOT burned). Some of the old hard drives, suitably and securely erased, could well find new homes in file servers, but this stuff must either be used or it must go.

So, that’s “Resolution Number One”–no more wildly proliferating stuff. LESS.

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Pondering Tomorrows

In the days running up to Christmas, some chest pains brought Gerald Finzi’s remarkable setting of Shakespearean passages to mind, particularly, “Feare no more the heat of the Sun,”

Feare no more the heate o’ th’ Sun,
Nor the furious Winters rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast don,
Home art gon, and tane thy wages.
Golden Lads, and Girles all must,
As Chimney-Sweepers come to dust.

Ah, when I sang this for my senior recital as a lad, I knew the meaning of the words in a shallow ay, but a few decades later, they ring with a calm assurance they did not have… when I had the voice to sing them properly. *heh*

So think, then: what do your tomorrows promise? Today’s as good a time as any to think that through.

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Blagojevich Seeks to Appoint Illiterate Boob to Senate

I don’t care what “color” or “race” or whatever someone is, nor do I care whether a person is able to sound out the words on a printed page and otherwise mimic functional literacy, any person who says he’s eager to get to work in Washington “to face a convergence of parallel crises”1 is an illiterate boob, and we have more than enough of those in the Senate already. (OK, he heard someone somewhere get the plural of “crisis” right and aped that well enough.)

Roland Burris may be a nice enough guy, and he might even be an honest guy (Hey! It could happen, even in Illinois politics! It could too!) Heck, he might even possess a modicum of intelligence (although Howard University certainly can’t take any pride in his alumnus status given the assinine statement above). But he’s illiterate and butt stupid if he thinks parallels can converge. Heck, even taking its loosest meaning, if he can converge parallels, then HE should be our political messiah, not Obama.

The Dhimicraps should refuse to seat Burris on the basis of how much stupidER he makes them look, if for no other reason…

Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, The World According to Carl, Right Voices, and DragonLady’s World, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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CompGeeky: OSes, Browsers and Word Processors, Oh My!

Long ago, I stopped being flabbergasted by folks who have no idea what their operating system is. Some, when asked, will respond “Microsoft” or “Word” or “Microsoft Office” (or just “Office”) or “Internet Explorer” or some random word/phrase based loosely on “Windows” or variation of whatever program they use most often, usually just whatever came installed on the computer when they bought it, and they’re usually obstinately vague about whatever version of that most-used program is. Most don’t know (seriously–I’m not kidding here!) any difference between whatever web browser or email client they use (not that they know what email client they use) and their operating system.

And they don’t really care, as long as things look familiar, they can type and mouse and click to get wherever their stubby lil brains can manage to go on the internet using whatever browser they have been trained however poorly to use (usually by default Internet Exploder, but more and more often now some other browser, installed by a friend or relative who is simply tired of being bothered by a naif who gets in trouble using Internet Exploder).

So who really needs “upgrading” to Microsoft’s latest-greatest OS offering?

Microsoft will claim more than 300 million installations of Vista since its release, but most of those are consumer PCs sold through retailers and direct distributors. According to a recent survey by ITIC and Sunbelt Software of more than 700 senior corporate executives, only 10 percent had deployed Vista on their desktops, whereas 88 percent reported Windows XP as their primary client OS.1

Most software and hardware works well enough with XP, and software that won’t you probably don’t really need anyway. WinXP 64-bit, for those who have made the move to 64-bit computers, is as stable as Win2K (M$’s best overall OS to date, IMO) and more nimble, less hardware demanding, than Vista. Not that Vista is a particularly bad OS, but why retrain for a new OS (with new, not always better and often more obscurantist ways of doing things) that is far more demanding of hardware when an existing OS is just “good enough”?

That’s probably one reason so many folks who’ve bought one of those new comps with Vista on them have called on techie friends or paid some tech to “downgrade” ’em to XP, and it’s certainly a big reason why nearly 90% of computers used in businesses still use XP. (Another reason many have downgraded or kept XP is likely just that they can’t handle the learning curve Vista requires them to climb–a learning curve that is in some ways steeper than simply switching to a modern Linux distro with a nice Windows-like GUI.)

Continue reading “CompGeeky: OSes, Browsers and Word Processors, Oh My!”

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The Road Ahead 4.1

I gave “The Road Ahead” and other posts a rest through the Christmas season, but now that it’s the last day of the year, it’s time to start a new thread in the series: issues that face us.Already, I feel the urge to simply drop a laundry list of issues that need cleaning up in ur society, but I’ll try to be disciplined enough to simply mention briefly one issue per post. Today’s issue: anarcho-tyranny.

What are the classic, time-honored reasons that legitimize government? What benefits do citizens rightly expect from obedience of the law and submission to a “ruler”? Hobbes put it this way,

Obedience is exchanged for protection. …It is sufficient for each citizen to know that anyone who intends to injure him has more to fear from punishment by the sovereign than he has to gain from his crime

In arguing that Christians owed respectful obedience to civil government, the Apostle Paul made this argument,

Romans 13:1 Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. 2Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. 3For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. 4For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.

But what can we say of the legitimacy of a government that does little (or nothing) to protect its citizens from miscreants, because miscreants have no cause to fear the government, but instead that government encourages evildoers by persecuting its own citizens and at most simply handing out mild slaps on the wrist to those who do others harm? What can we say of the legitimacy of a government that goes even further and persecutes citizens for simply being prominent or for doing their duty or for being different or standing up for their God-given and supposedly constitutionally-protected rights?

Well, we can be honest and admit such a government has surrendered any legitimacy; it has become an outlaw government that simply uses its power to afflict the powerless and expand its own power.

Under anarcho-tyranny, criminals aren’t punished (which is why it’s anarchy), but the innocent are (which is why it’s tyranny).– Sam Francis

Examples of state-fostered anarcho-tyranny abound in today’s (dis)United States.

Continue reading “The Road Ahead 4.1”

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Never Got Under the Tree @twc

Well, my Wonder Woman had a couple of small surprises up her sleeves, I suppose because Barnes & Noble wasn’t as quick to deliver as Amazon.com was (similar packages ordered at virtually the same time–the B&N actually first–arrived at hugely different times). Listening to one right now, Yo-Yo Ma & Friends: Songs of Joy and Peace, and enjoying the living daylights out of it. Have to do it in my office with the door shut, of course, since I like music at performance levels. It doesn’t mean I actually get the air movement of a live performance, but it’s closer than listening at “background music” levels, as far too many people do. But–even more “of course”–it’s worlds and worlds better than people who listen to stuff at excessively loud levels that are impossible without electronic amplification taken to its most hideous extreme.

Of the 22 cuts on the album, I count only two that I will NOT rip for storing on my mp3 player. That’s moderately to partly amazing, but then Yo-Yo Ma has made some amazingy musical decisions in both pieces to include and arrangements/performances of those pieces–few of which he uses as a showcase for his own considerable talent and skill on the cello. In fact, one of the ensemble pieces featuring Yo-Yo Ma, Dave Brubeck and Matt Brubeck is pretty wonderful itself, simply for the ensemble work of the two cellists playing together (No, Dave Brubeck doesn’t play cello :-)).

Really nice stuff–especially all the varied treatments of Dona Nobis Pacem, long one of my all time favs. Do yourself a favor and check this album out. Next up, The Priests. We’ll see how they fare…

Remarkably well. I didn’t want to see the PBS program earlier, because of several reasons, so all I knew of this buncha guys was what had come out in Mass Media Podpeople comments. Since Mass Media Podpeople are universally idiots, that was no help. Not bad voices (OK, very, very good, though not to the quality of Placido Domingo or Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, et al), very good arrangements and choral/instrumental performances. Sucker that I am for well-performed vocal and choral music, I know I’ll spend a lot of time with this one.

Continue reading “Never Got Under the Tree @twc”

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The Fifth Labor of Hercules

–the Augean Stables. Hercules was a piker.

My office is worse. Again. If I seem absent for the next few days, maybe that’s the reason.

🙂

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Inertia

So, a week ago today, my Wonder Woman explained the mystery of why she’s stayed with me so long. Inertia. Seems, according to her, that once we got going together, it was just easier to stay on the wagon and keep moving along together.

Maybe that’s because it’s been all downhill for her… *heh*

Whatever; as long as she’s comfortable with it, I’m staying on the wagon too.

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Under the Tree at TWC

Notalotta outrageous gifting going on @twc this year. Biggest deals: My Wonder Woman okayed the purchase of a new (VERY inexpensive–cheaper than WallyWorld 17″-ers; gottalove Amazon.com) 22″ Acer LCD screen for my “old eyes computing,” Son&Heir and I exchanged (used) Xboxes (originals) for conversion to media servers–a fun lil project–and Lovely Daughter got a very nice new coat.

No biggies. Some other lil things.

Oh, one (very inexpensive) “biggie”–for a couple of years now, my Wonder Woman’s been kinda limping along with her otherwise exceptionally nice Toshiba Satellite A105 running on 512MB of memory. It was a compromise at the time of purchase, but memory prices have tumbled since then, so now it’s doing very nicely indeed with 4GB of memory. Which reminds me of a tip for those of y’all running 32-bit Windows with more than 3GB of RAM. Since 32-bit Windows doesn’t really see more than 3GB (oh, M$ claims it can see up to 4, but they can just pull the other one), it has to be tricked into seeing more. And even with (legitimate) trickery, it can still be a tad stinky about the 32-bit limits. But if you are one of those folks who added more RAM to a 32-bit Windows installation than the OS can see, here’s a workaround that at least partially works:

Enable DEP.

Yep. “Data Execution Prevention” is a M$ method of providing at least some OS protection against some malware. It’s not all that effective, so some folks don’t even bother to have it enabled. But the interesting thing about DEP is that enabling it also enables Physical Address Extension (PAE), “a feature of x86 processors that lets 32-bit operating systems overcome the 4GB memory limit.”1

To enable DEP, simply go to Control Panel>System>Performance>Advanced>Settings>DEP and enable it… if it’s available on your hardware.

If PAE is not enabled on your system, you can do a teensy lil hack to enable it using Notepad (or some other PLAIN TEXT editor):

* Step 1. Choose Start, Run.
* Step 2. Type notepad c:\boot.ini and press Enter.
* Step 3. Under the [operating systems] heading, look for a line that contains the /noexecute switch, which turns software DEP. For example, it may be /noexecute=optin, /noexecute=optout, or /noexecute=always on. Place the cursor directly after that switch and type a space followed by /pae.

Save the file and reboot.

This neat lil trick is from Windows Secrets Newsletter. But be warned: if you’re not comfotable editing system files like boot.ini, leave it for your friendly local techie to do, ‘K?

OK, that lil diversion was all in aid of saying simply that my Wonder Woman’s lil Toshiba needed nothing in order to recognize and use the memory but a reboot and wipeout of a bum “System Restore Point” that wanted to insist she still had 512MB. (“System Restore” is a utility whose time has come… for being eliminated. Piece of junk, IMO.)

Looking at our laid back gift giving this year, I must admit it’s little different from other recent years since the kids gained adulthood. As a family, we have MORE than enough “stuff” and need very, very little. It’s nice to simply reflect on the Reason for Christmas apart from all the shopping and wrapping and all the other material effluvia.

But I will admit that it’s nice to see my Wonder Woman taking more pleasure in her computer use, Lovely Daughter dressing warmly (and stylishly) and Son&Heir having fun approaching his XBox/computer hacks. (OK, OK, we’re doing software mods/hacks rather than hardware hacks at this time. If the hardware hacks become necessary to get the performance we want, then we’ll look at that. Well, a couple of small hardware hacks to controller cables, but those’re trivial.)

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Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring

I’ll be tapering off on Xmas-related posts over the next week or so; no need to go cold turkey when that’s about as long as it’ll take to get rid of the rest of the real cold turkey, eh?

Here’s Celtic Woman again–and yes, it is Christmas-related.