The one in my head, I mean.
Forgot to renew the domain. Obviously back now.
Sorry ’bout that.
Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category
Memory Hole
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010Gunpal
Monday, February 8th, 2010PayPal prohibits payments for transactions involving guns.
Gunpal “is an alternative to PayPal™ that does not discriminate based on the nature of your transaction, requiring only that the merchandise or services you purchase legal.”
Good on them, and I’ll try to use them everywhere I can.
Paypal? Piss off and die, or embrace the Second Amendment.
DIE IN A FIRE
Saturday, December 5th, 2009I just threw away about 6 hours of work by forgetting that Excel likes to sort just the selected column rather than the entire row. (I use Excel about once every two years, except this time it’s the first time in about four years, so excuse me for letting this little quirk slip past me.)
This was in the midst of inventorying a collection of fire bottles (”valves” to you Brits) as I carefully wrapped and packed them, so now I have to do it all over again.
This is one of those incredibly boneheaded decisions we all know and love, that made Microsoft the biggest and most influential software company in the history of the world.
The really funny part is that I almost did this as a table in Access, which I’m far more familiar with. But, no, I thought, Excel is a bit simpler, and I won’t have to waste time creating a table layout…. I’ve learned my lesson. Access would never, ever sort a given field without sorting the records it was in as well.
Ah, that other problem I mentioned, about my laptop throwing away Firefox tabs? I think it has to do with forgetting to turn off the touchpad when using an external mouse.
Here’s a funny thing about using my Logitech wireless via USB mouse with my Toshiba Satellite laptop: I have to be careful to turn the mouse off before stowing it, because if the mouse is on, any movement will cause the damn thing to wake up after I’ve put it in hibernation with the On/Off button.
Intolerable, Tosh. If I’ve pressed a button, or even clicked an icon, to put my machine in hibernation, I want it to stay there until I do something very damn deliberate, like pressing that button again.
Attention FTC: I would like to thank Linus Torvald, Dell Computers, and Kensington for their generous contributions in support of this review.
Something’s Throwing My Posts Away
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009I haven’t figured out if it’s Win 7, Firefox or the Toshiba laptop, or some evil combination thereof, but sometimes I type something, some accidental keystroke combination, that causes tabs in Firefox to disappear, poof, without a trace and no recovery. (I don’t think it’s the ctrl-w close-tab hotkey, although it’s possible. The shift-ctrl-T undo-close-tab hotkey didn’t bring it back.) That just happened again, and it threw away about an hour of work. (Not my toxic right wing ranting, but a mostly positive review for the anime movie Summer Wars, which you should not see the spoiler-laden trailer for.) And not on this site, so it wasn’t in WordPress, which does save drafts, which is good, because I just did it again for this very post. Damn it!
I wish FF saved automatic drafts, and I also wish I knew when a quick, short paragraph was going to blossom, so I could write in an off-line editor that would save.
It’s a damn good thing I’m in a place where my rabid, shrieking curses can’t disturb anybody else.
God damn it, I was about five minutes from packing up and going home to bed, and now I have to do it all over again.
Mousies
Saturday, November 14th, 2009I finally broke down and bought a mouse for my new laptop. I had planned to force myself to become proficient with the touchpad, and I got a lot better at it, but in the end it became a nuisance while doing any kind of extended typing. My thumbs tended to rest there, and triggered all kinds of unwanted events.
I ended up with a Logitech V450 Nano Cordless Laser Mouse with the “plug and forget Nanoreceiver”, a USB unit so tiny that I can leave it plugged in all the time. (Or at least, that’s the advertising claim. I’m still concerned that it might provide enough leverage to eventually damage the laptop jack.)
There’s a storage jack for it inside the mouse, but you have to remove the battery cover. Better than nothing, but.
My Toshiba laptop has a tiny button just above the touchpad that turns it off, which makes using the mouse very convenient.
Mousing action is fine, and I think this might be the good combination.
Hey, FTC? As always, none of your damn business what may or may not have gone on between Logitech and me. Please feel free to stab yourselves with used mucking-out forks.
Not, of course, that they or any one else cares about my pissant little blog, but it’s the principle of the thing, something some folks seem to have a problem with. Means, ends, and all that.
Visualizing Health Care HR3962
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009Computational Legal Studies, a fascinating site I’d spend more time at if I didn’t have to eat and sleep, has a zoomable visualization of the structure of HR3962, the version of the “Affordable Health Care for America Act” that just passed the House.
Also check out their article on the size of HR3962:
The purpose of this post is to provide a perspective regarding the length of H.R. 3962. Those versed in the typesetting practices of the United States Congress know that the printed version of a bill contains a significant amount of whitespace including non-trivial space between lines, large headers and margins, an embedded table of contents, and large font. For example, consider page 12 of the printed version of H.R. 3962. This page contains fewer than 150 substantive words.
We believe a simple page count vastly overstates the actual length of bill.
…
Basic Information about the Length of H.R. 3962Number of words in H.R. 3962 impacting substantive law:
234,812 words (w/ generous calculation)Number of total words in H.R. 3962:
363,086 words (w/ titles, tables of contents …)
Number of text blocks: 7,961
Average number of words per text block: 24.18
Average words per section: 267.03
Then there are the comparisons with Harry Potter, other legislation, and the Entire US Code (42 Million words, if you’re interested).
And this:
Relative Size of H.R. 3962: H.R. 3962 is roughly 1/2 of one percent of the size of the United States Code.
All You Got In Your Bottle is a Ship?
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009And it’s not even remote controlled?
What?
It doesn’t even float?
Lamer.
Here’s what Real Mean put in their bottles these days.
[And I have to admit, this guy loses points for cutting into the bottle, rather than putting the whole thing in through the neck. Still.]
In The Lap of the Gods
Saturday, October 31st, 2009I’m typing this on my new Toshiba laptop, a Satellite A505-S6980, which is running Windows 7.
Purchased from the Best Buy in Green Bay, WI. I undoubtably paid a premium, but frankly, I’ve never bought a laptop before, know absolutely nothing about them, and the saleslady who helped gave very good advice. I didn’t have to wait for delivery, and I got an extended service plan which covers me when I spill a drink into the keyboard or break the screen.
I also plumped for the Microsoft Home & Student version of Office, which was only $70 to permanently license the pre-installed trial version.
I’m probably going to go ahead and get the Pro version, because I need to be able to run Access. (Still far and away the most flexible and powerful database design tool I’ve tried. It might not be what I’d choose for a high-performance enterprise solution, but for my needs, it works great.) That’ll be $250 to upgrade at Amazon.
At 2.2 GHz dual core, with 4GB memory, it’s more powerful than my desktop, running Ubuntu.
Still getting used to the keyboard.
Still getting used to the touchpad. I hate touchpads, and was hoping for a clit-mouse, but didn’t see one.
I wish the display lid was a little stiffer; it flexes too easily and feels flimsy.
Win7 is pretty nice, actually, although there’s a couple of things that I haven’t figured out how to do yet. (No easy right-click way to put up a new wall-paper, for instance. Yes, I see how to do it, it’s just not quite as convenient. It seems you can’t set the display behavior of particular folders as you could in Win XP; if there’s no workaround, that’s bad. I can’t get the Details view to show me a column listing the number of files in each subfolder.)
Again, there’s probably fixes for all this; I just haven’t found them yet. And it looks like there are other cool features as well to compensate.
I don’t often drop more than a thousand bucks at a throw, and it was hungry work. I pigged out at Grazies, a local Italian place. Their “ITALIAN SAUSAGE FETTUCCINE” was perfectly spiced, excellent flavor embellished with a touch of heat. I ate too much, and didn’t have enough room for as much of their “WOOD-FIRED APPLE CRISP COBBLER” as I would have liked, but managed to stop myself soon enough to have a good lunch-sized serving to bring home.
My waitress mostly stayed out of my way and let me enjoy my food without the intrusive chatter and false friendliness that’s so common. Instead, she simply paid attention, and delivered what I wanted when I wanted it.
If you’re in Green Bay, highly recommended.
Oh, and FTC?
It’s none of your fucking business whether I got anything from Toshiba, Best Buy, Microsoft, or Grazies to write this little review, so eat my perfectly-seasoned shit and die in slow writhing agony.
The Trap of Ideology
Friday, October 16th, 2009A long, long time ago, when my parents first asked me to set up their first Windows machine (can’t remember which version, the one just before XP, I think) I thought long and hard about which word processor to use — and settled on what I considered the then-best option to MS Word: Lotus Word Pro. My overriding consideration was, No Microsoft.
I was an idiot.
Word Pro is dead, now. Nobody uses it. My parents do not know how to trade documents with Word users. (It can be done, they just don’t know how, despite several attempts.)
It was very nice in its day, but it’s way behind now. Mom’s putting together a family history album, with scans of old photographs and other documents, and inserting images is hellish complex and touchy as nitroglycerin.
And there is no support. Google searches turn up nothing.
Word Pro is dead as Aramaic. It’s graven in stone. Nobody but Mom and Dad use it.
I was an idiot. I chose the wrong principle to drive my choice for them, and now they, and I, are paying for that.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.