Mostly about my amusement
It’s getting really complicated now. The Guren Ni-Shiki has gotten upgraded and Karen Kouzaki was released to save the day.
The show is beginning to get into Gundam Seed mode with lots of people dying and mecha becoming leaps and bounds better than any of the other super next generation mecha.
It’s fun but getting really hard to follow.
Today was an odd day. Not bad exactly, but definitely odd.
I went to work for a scheduled systems upgrade. Lily and the kids went to Central Park and after work we met in Chinatown. When we returned to Long Island we found my front passenger window was broken and my GPS unit stolen.
Now I didn’t exactly leave the unit out, it was in the center console. But the window mount was sealed to the window so I left it there. The round rubber from the suction cup is still there, just not the rest of it.
According to the police there has been a rash of break-ins with people looking for GPS units. They smash the window and look into the console for the unit. If you don’t have a GPS then you’re just pissed. If you do have one put away then you’re also out a GPS unit.
I’m not really angry about it since these things happen. I’ll take the car to the dealer and hope that my insurance covers most of it. Other than this, today was pretty good.
Things sure are weird in this country. People will just accept the oddest things.
I wonder how long it will be before DHS can copy all photos and papers you take on a trip? They can seize and copy your entire laptop every time you cross the border. Next time you come back into the U.S. you lose all privacy regarding any electronic device you have. A misinformed TSA monkeys will decide if you are a criminal or not. Or they can take their time, since they can copy all your data to examine at a later date.
Remember kids: in the United States if you are not guilty and have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to be afraid of. No need to count on suspicion of actually breaking the law or protection of your rights against unreasonable search and seizures.
The 4th amendment does not apply because the government says it doesn’t. the important thing is not that we are developing a police state run by brown shirts, the important thing is Security Theater.
This is insane. This sort of thing is supposed to happen in other countries; we’re supposed to have a history of protecting our citizens rights. It makes me wonder if the conspiracy nuts are actually on to something. Papers please.
My Vista 64 bit OS has been acting a little flaky for a long time. The latest symptom was my DHCP client not working. When Dell did the free motherboard swap upgrade, I was supposed to re-install the OS then. But I procrastinated and just waited till the pain got bad.
My XPS 700720 came with Windows XP Media Center Edition. When the upgrade came out, I purchased it from Best Buy. I sent in the $19 and received the Vista 64 bit version DVD in the mail. For months I’ve been using the Vista 64 bit version.
My plan was to do the following:
That was the plan. Except the DVD would not install software, no way no how.
The bootable DVD HATED my 4 GB of high performance RAM. I kept getting the BSOD before I could install anything. Now Vista running has no problem with my RAM upgrade. But the installer on the upgrade DVD refused to do anything except BSOD. Lucky I kept the old slow speed 2 GB or RAM so I was able to get past that problem.
The upgraded DVD did not like my drives. It’s not exactly a clean install that it does. The target drive has to be formatted and a WINDOWS directory, or something in the WINDOWS directory, needs to exist. If it’s not then the installer will refuse to copy files onto your disk.
I had to insert step 3.5 into my plan. I was able to get around this by booting off of my Windows XP install DVD that came with my PC and began to install the old version onto my system. I did not have to complete the install. Once files started to be copied I rebooted with my Vista SP1 upgrade. Then I was able to proceed as planned.
The one piece of unexpected good news is that the fresh upgrade install activated online successfully. I was sure I’d have to do the 1-800-NOT-EXTORTION-EXACTLY call to Microsoft just to activate my software.
Microsoft might be good with apps (debatable) but their OS’s always requires a rebuild after a period of time. It’s just how it is since the registry just collects garbage from adding and removing hardware and software.
If my PC came with Vista then in theory I should have had an easier time of it. Just pop in the vendor supplied rebuild DVD and off you go. In the past that’s always what I did. With this Vista upgrade, I should be able to install cleanly without the tricks.
The fact that I have to install an upgrade on top of a clean install that I just did is bizarre. It shows that either the clean install was a mistake on their part or they put it in because they knew this scenario would exist.
They should include and support this for their upgrade too. A little online documentation would have been helpful.
From the UK Timesonline website:
The remarks appeared to boost Mr Obama but left the White House and the McCain campaign with a dilemma. The Republican candidate’s representatives found themselves in the extraordinary position of implying that the Iraqis did not really mean what they were saying.
So what’s the story here? Last week it looked like a German magazine caught the Iraqi Prime Minister endorsing a schedule. Then the Iraqis via the U.S. said “No, that was a mistranslation.”
Can’t they get their stories straight?
Update: I re-installed Vista 64 cleanly (wiped out everything) and I am using the Nvidia video drivers from Microsoft. Flickr is still misbehaving on FireFox 3 for me.
On the upside, adding these lines to Adblock Plus’s whitelist did fix my problems with Facebook:
@@|http://*.facebook.com/ @@|http://*.fbcdn.net/
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On some of the installations I have, Firefox 3 and Flickr do not get along with each other. Here’s a screen shot of what’s happening.
What happens is that when new content comes from Flickr’s website, the whole page does not get re-drawn. I drew a red box around the new page. Switching tabs forces the page to be redrawn but this is happening often.
This is not limited to Flickr. Facebook has problems where I click on something and nothing happens. This only occurs in Firefox 3, in Firefox 2 I never had any issue. The mozilla support forums are pretty looking but not really useful.
I hate to say it, but Flickr and Facebook are more reliable in Internet 7 than Firefox 3.
This! Is! FORIEGN POLICY! Before coffee I was sure that Senator Obama was getting advice from Frank Miller.
The President of Iran is a nut. But apparently our government now realizes that sometimes we have to speak with nuts to move things along. It worked with North Korea, wonder what took them so long?
This morning Lily was going to head to LaGuardia airport and catch a plane to Detroit. I was going to head to the office at my regular time and put in a fully productive day at the office.
The person who was going to pick her up forgot. I ended up getting dressed in record time and driving her to the airport. She was running late and had to leave NOW.
She made the flight but it was close. I headed back home and called my boss to apologize for the last minute change in my schedule. If I headed to the office I’d have gotten into the city almost 2 hours late and I was not sure if I had any conference calls. I don’t like making changes to my work schedule all off a sudden. Do it too often and it’s abusive.
The day worked out but the high point was my being on a call with my 6 year old son stage whispering “Daddy, can I play with the Nintendo DS?” and me pantomiming the reply of “LEAVE NOW OR FACE THE AWESOME WRATH OF DAD”. All this while replying to people on the call with “Sure, that change should work. Let’s do it Friday after hours”.
Sign language is a parenting tool.
With Lily not coming back until the evening, I had to bathe both kids. I need to install a power washer; did you know that little girls need hair conditioner? Boys are much easier. Ivory soap can double as shampoo and no one ever notices on a boy.
Later on it was her turn to play a game but she kept giving the game to her brother. She also complained often that he’s not letting her play. This is a life lesson for my son: watch out for girls. That she just gave him the game did not stop her from trying to get him in trouble.
I’m really glad Lily came back today.
Well I ripped the band-aid off and did the upgrade. It feels like 2.5.5 or something, not as big a deal as 2.3 to 2.5 was.
I keep almost all of my files in wp-content so upgrading was not difficult. I shut down my web server, renamed the old directory for the blog root, and used SVN to get a copy of 2.6 and moved the old contents to wp-content.
Once that was done, I started up the web server and ran the wp-admin/upgrade.php. It was quick and painless. Everyone should backup their 2.5.1 installation (files and database) and do the upgrade once 2.6 is tar’ed up and placed on the web site.
Some changes:
There are lots more changes of course; I’m just using it now. So far it’s definitely worthwhile upgrade.
