Category Archives: PC

Windows; million dollar bill

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I really had high hopes for today. I found a couple of news items that I really wanted to bitch about, and had a thought for what to put below. Then my father’s twin sister called me on the phone and it all went to hell.

I really wanted to bitch about several news items that I saw today, but I am not able to because of the time.

Well, I may be able enough to give it a go. So here is the first headline;

Microsoft Says Latest Software Flaw ‘Critical’

SEATTLE (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT – news) upgraded a recent security warning to “critical” after discovering new ways in which an attacker could run malicious software on a vulnerable computer, the world’s largest software maker said on Wednesday.

So when is the last time that you heard about a problem with the security on a macintosh system? Is that a rhetorical question or does the Imac team just handle it a lot better? I don’t really know myself, but, I think I may find it out soon.

Was she thinking that they would make change for this or what? I mean it is a Million Dollars. so they would check with their supervisors and give her back over 900,000 in cash? Not a good ruse to try at a Wal-Mart. It is not even a really clear copy of the bill in question, but I would think that even your average “Circle K” employee would notice that it was a bill that far exceeded the twenty bucks or so that they keep in their till. It does look like real american money, but that is what they are going for when they make the fake million dollar bills, isn’t it?

Should we kill the people who made that bill? No way, that is the ‘ignorance of the consumer’ in action. The people will find a way to sucker anyone in for any reason. If your ignorance plays a part then you are less of a person than I thought you were…

Pain; News; FTP

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Well, I didn’t do an update yesterday. The most significant reason for that was that the pain that I thought was subsiding on Sunday came back in full-force on Monday. I am trying not to take the prescribed muscle realaxants, but I have had to take four or five over the last few days. I am not sure if it is actually an issue of building up a tolerence (as I often claim, fearing that if I need to use the pills when I am older and in desperate need they will not help me) or if it is simply a matter of pride. If it is, in fact, a matter of pride then I have to say that I have swallowed that pride, in a convenient pill form, happily a few times.

The pain has been subsiding a bit over the days though. I am now only in pain when I am standing, bending down or laying down. That means that as long as I am sitting I am not in pain, well in less pain anyway. The pain is still here as I again sit typing, but the pain is centralized to just the lower portion of my neck. When I stand the pain tends to spread and make my head and fingers start to throb, as is the same when I try to bend down. I have gotten pretty good at controlling my breathing to take deep breaths when my head begins to pound, and this makes that sensation go away pretty quickly, but feeling that pain for even one second is at least 3/4 of a second longer than I would like to feel it.

Laying down is a bit tricky also. The instructions given to me on the release form from the hospital say that I should lay on my back with a small pillow on each side of my head to keep my neck in line. The inherent problem with that is my neck is in the most pain when I lay flat on my back. That would be sort of like telling someone with a broken leg that instead of a cast, he should just hit the fracture with a big mallet every ten minutes or so. Just not going to happen. Anyway, if I lay on my right side one pillow is too much, where as if I lay on my left side I need two. Either way my neck still hurts, but while laying on my left side it seems to hurt a bit less. I have to move while I sleep though, as, if I lay in one position much longer than an hour my back begins to hurt. Yeah, cry me a river, I know. This will pass and I will look back on this and think that it didn’t really hurt that bad, then I will probably scoff at other people who think that something like this hurts, but I hope not.

This is the first day since the injury that I have actually felt able to do most of the things that I normally do. I mean that I am able to get up and move around, pick things up off of the floor, beat the dogs when necessary. The only time I really feel the pain is, well, not really clear. I went to the bathroom earlier and as I turned to sit it just hit me and a few seconds later it was gone. I had been standing opening my mail when the phone rang, I reached for the phone and it hit me. I am beginning to think that there may really be a god and that he is punishing me for my atheist ways, that or the human body is a very complex system that can not be understood or explained.

But enough about my pain in the neck.

There is a weird news story today that I just absolutely love, on a lot of levels. It is quite a short little story, so I will simply quote it all here;

WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) – For a 73-year-old Canadian man, 20 months in a smoke-free jail looked just too long, so instead he took 24 months in a prison where he can smoke cigarettes.
Angelo Foti was sentenced to 20 months for shooting and wounding a man in his backyard who was trying to repossess a snowmobile sold to Foti’s son, the Winnipeg Free Press reported Tuesday.

In court Monday, Angelo Foti was agitated when he realized the sentence would mean he would be in a provincial jail, where smoking is banned, the newspaper said.

Foti’s lawyer pleaded for a 24-month sentence instead, which means the man will go to a federal prison, where smoking is allowed.

In accepting the longer term, Foti, a dedicated pack-a-day man, ignored the wishes of this family.

“Dad, they’re just cigarettes — give them up. Quit smoking: you’ll be healthier,” his son Angelo Jr. said in court. “Just take the 20 months.”

I just love that story. The guy is 73 years old FFS, he is not likely to change his day to day behavior just since he is in jail. He has likely smoked since he was ten or twelve years old -since they only really started to care about the age restrictions on tobacco within the last decade or so. He just wants his smokes. The amazing part is that he is that old and still smoking. At his age, and being a smoker, either term 20 or 24 months could be a death sentence. He chooses to defy all logic by taking a longer sentence so that he can kill himself just a bit more.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a smoker myself, and I would love nothing more than to be able to quit. Being locked in a cell in a local jail for twenty months would likely be the spur that I needed to achieve that end. Perhaps I am just not seeing his point of view.

Now, why the hell is he in jail anyway? The article clearly states that “Angelo Foti was sentenced to 20 months for shooting and wounding a man in his backyard.” it does go on to explain that the man was trying to repossess a snowmobile, but it was not in Angelo’s name. I think that if someone is in your yard, trying to take a snowmobile -whether it is yours, your son’s, or even the neighbor’s bastard son’s step-sister’s, he is taking it from your private property-, he is fair game.

That article doesn’t mention whether the person announced that they were ‘repossessing’ the snowmobile, nor do I think it really matters. If that guy shows up in my back yard, he is gonna get shot again. And, knowing that I am going to go to jail for protecting my property I may just shoot to kill, as opposed to shooting to injure. -I do know that the story is out of Canada, but I thought that our judicial systems were pretty similar….Until now-

FTP Clients

When I began doing these updates I had no FTP client. I searched through download.com to find one. I was quite worried about having to put the username and password for the ftp server into a program that I was not sure about. There are literally thousands of these programs out there, and you don’t know which one/ones may be malicious. At first I took the high road and picked one of the most popular ones, which had a free trial period and some pretty cool features. Also if you lie about whether or not you are a student you can get a bare bones version of it for free. That program is at this website WS_FTP PRO LE

I did not pay any attention to how long was left on my trial period of that, since I am on like day 1,226 of my thirty day trial on other programs, but that one just quit working on the 30th day. I was forced to go back and try to find a freeware ftp client.

Here is the information for any of you who really need a freeware ftp client. I downloaded and installed more than a dozen freeware ftp clients, more than 90% of them had some sort of tracking software bundled in the installation files. This one client is the only one I found that does not freeze a windows 98 system AND does not have any tracking software (to my knowledge, none that I have been able to find anyway). It also has a very small file size. You can find it Right here. It takes a few minutes to get used to the interface, but that is a lot better than actually having to pay for an ftp client.

I am currently using this ftp client, if I find a better one I will let you know.

Renaissance festival; keyboards

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I was not able to finish updating all of my existing pages with the fancy new SSI thing, but I got the majority of it all working properly. At least that all went well. One of the very first updates that I did on this site said that I was sure there was a way to update the navbar on a macro scale with a micro effort, and that is exactly what the SSI does. I am still able to continue to do all of the html in notepad, which makes me smile, but that navbar thing would have been death if I had to update every single page. That was the biggest factor in why I had always used frames in the past. I just did not know that there was such an easy solution available, now that I know I don’t think I will ever turn back.

Now for some personal news. I said yesterday that I was the jack-ass who didn’t have any candy or flowers for my love on Valentine’s day, and it went over about as you would expect…Not good. The agreed upon terms for my penance were a visit to the annual reneaissance festivel where My lady and I could take in the sites and sounds of the period (which is a bunch of crap since its all normal people watching actors, but still the point is there).

Last year my wife had to literally drag me to this event. This year I was a bit less reluctant, since we had acquired a really cool picture and a nice rubbing (of the symbol for a saint, in theory, but it just looked really cool) the previous year. I was a little bit more in the mood for that sort of thing this year, and it was actually quite a good time.

The same shop that we got the rubbing from the previous year was set up again, and I went ahead and got the guy going on another of the saints (how the picture of a bull with wings and horns can be the symbol for Saint Luke escapes me) and then went to look at the other wares. It is sort of like the state fair, with all of this cheesy crap that you would never buy if you saw it in Wal-Mart, but for some reason, in the heat of the moment maybe, you will go ahead and pay three times what it would cost you online to get the same damn thing. I guess there is a bit of sentiment involved with that as well, I mean if you were to buy some trinket online that will be just a trinket that you bought online. If you buy the same trinket at a festival such as this you will probably remember things that happened while you were there (good or bad) that make it seem more like a family heirloom than the shoddy piece of crap it is.

What we bought there, this year and last, could certainly not be considered shoddy crap, but as I do not have a digital camera that is worth using I will wait until I have photographic proof to go into any more detail. Suffice to say that most people give up on their whole “gothic” point of view in their late teens or early twenties, our house has no images on the walls that are not of dragons, or fantasy (with the exception of an engagement photo and a wedding photo). We have our walls adorned with wrought-iron candle sconces, even a gargoyle on a pedastol guarding the entrance to the room where we have the computer. It is certainly not like S&M bondage type of crap, just that both of us seem to love images by Boris Vallejo Those images always have dragons and wizards and that is sort of what our home adornments look like…Almost completely forgot, we also have a queen size bed that has wrought Iron posts(about seven feet tall, and very dark green(couldn’t find it in black or navy blue) lace hanging from it(held back much like an open curtain is, with ties around the middle).

Okay, now that I have proven that I am a freak I can calm down a bit and get back to what I do best. I must Bitch On.

Keyboards:

Keyboards are a lot like assholes in a lot of ways. 1)you only like your own, everyone else’s stinks. 2)No one really talks about the good and the bad of them. 3)Once you know your way around it you would not likely trade it in on a newer model. 4)Like everything else, Microsoft is the biggest, and most useless. (take it for what you want, I am working for free).

On the way to the festival which I went on about above, I wanted to buy a new keyboard. The escape key had not worked on my previous keyboard in, oh, about three years. I had (what I thought) some pretty reasonable goals with the new keyboard. 1)it must be the split-v style. 2)It really has to have a double-sized backspace key. 3)The left, down, right arrow must all be in a row, with absolutely no deviance in the heigth. 4)The ‘insert’, ‘home’ and ‘page up’ keys must be in a single row above the arrows(and single sized buttons). 5)The ‘Delete’, ‘end’ and ‘Page Down’ keys must be in the same format directly below them. That sounds like a standard keyboard to me, but guess what?
You can’t get one like that anymore. At least not at OfficeDepot, Staples or BestBuy(which are not linked because they pissed me off). I am going to throw in a break here, before I start killing children.

It took me a long time to come up with this analogy, so please take a few seconds to read it:

There are thousands of manufacturers who make guitars. None of those manufacturers try to move the frets around on the guitar, because it is impossible. The tone can not be acquired if the fret is not in the right place. It is thankful that they are not able to do it, since, can you imagine having to learn to play the guitar again because some asshole changed the neck around? Why are keyboards so different?

Microsoft has the least logical and most difficult to use keyboards in the entire world, yet they charge double for them. Perhaps some idiots assume that Microsoft will make a better keyboard? All I know is that we had to drive around the out-skirts of Phoenix for a while to find any store that was stocking a split-v keyboard that was not made by Microsoft. When I finally found it, I paid 29 dollars for it, and will get ten back on a mail in rebate. I am not required to install any software to use it, it was just plug and play. The Microsoft version of the same keyboard requires you to use your disk space to carry their drivers for their inferior crap, and was 79.96 (sure I could have gotten it cheaper, but the name Microsoft will make me back away from any purchase).

Since I now have a site where I do not have to fear repercussions for my actions, I am finally able to say what I have said all along: “Fuck you, Microsoft”.