P.S. A Column On Things

Letters: Walken Reunion, The Highwaymen, Reynolds checks in, Dalton on my Windows troubles, Dan Grobstein File

A friend writes: Here's an SNL clip I think you would enjoy- a Walken family reunion

Fellow MIT alum John Hanzel notes that the Highwaymen played MIT in the fall of 1963:

• ARTS | May 13, 2010
  Dave Fisher, Member of the Highwaymen, Dies at 69
  By DOUGLAS MARTIN
  Mr. Fisher joined with four other freshmen at Wesleyan University to form the folk band, which became one of the most popular groups of the early 1960s.

Craig Reynolds checks in:

• New iPad commercial modeled after classic Newton commercial
• I really liked the showmanship used to demonstrate the speed of Chrome
• Richard Dalton writes about my Windows 7 complaints posted here last week:

But then, you did say you could always get a MacBook. And I have used Parallels Desktop for awhile that supports Windows application. My experience was that it ran everything I threw at it. Costs $79, but you can get it for a lot less in various venues.

If you stick with Win 7, this Win 1 ad by the very same Steve Ballmer should at least give you a chuckle. Ballmer must still be trying to live this one down.

Dan Grobstein File

• Commentary on the decision to limit terror suspects' Miranda rights.
• On the long-term cardiac threat posed by the combination of imperial overstretch and monstrous debt loads: Sorrows and Secrecies
• Kagan Senate Testimony Supports Bush-Cheney Plan To Shred Constitution
• Lowest taxes in more than a half-century
• The last three presidents did drugs and lived to tell about it
• Time for another support group!
  I love this story: Meet a new crop of anti-government House GOP candidates who also happen to be addicted to "Cash for Clunkers."
• Roger Ebert Tweets:
  
  Dear TeePees: No need to tweet that you want me to die of cancer. You fought Health Care Reform. I got the message.
  
  Josh reminds me: If we went back to what the Founding Fathers wanted, as Sarah Palin desires, she wouldn't be able to vote.
  
  Fox News Caught In Massive Nielsen Ratings Fraud
• 4 Big Banks Score Perfect 61-Day Run
  Despite the running unease in world markets, four giants of American finance managed to make money from trading every single day during the first three months of the year.
• Century-Old Dictionary Error Shows That 'Professionally' Edited Reference Books Make Errors Too
• Don't mistake the Tories for the GOP. Their chairman is a Muslim woman and they have nine gay members of parliament.
• John Cole: Speaking of crap floating around in the air, the most depressing thing about the blank slate folks like Elena Kagan is that she is obviously very smart, but has to be careful what she says lest she be punished for her thoughts. Meanwhile, deeply stupid people like Mike Pence, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachman, Joe the Plumber, and so on, are unfettered by similar restraints and in fact rewarded for their idiocy, often with great sums of wealth and power and status well beyond what they deserve. As such, the smart people are quiet, and the morons run around polluting our discourse.
• Rewriting the history of the Credit Crunch
• OP-ED COLUMNIST: Arms and the Airport
  Even in the Old West, patrons checked their weapons at the door. But some southern states are now pushing for guns in bars.
• I.H.T. OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR : A Farewell to a Gentle Swede
  There is no good way to die, but Ray made the best of his last days.
• When all else fails, bring in the scientists
• We don't have news programs, just newsy programs

End of May 17 Column

Windows 7 Sucks

Let me be clear about this. My wonderful new Dell Portable, a gift from my daughters, is, well, wonderful. They took pity on me and my technology (as they do from time to time) and decided that my slow, small, decade-old portable was no longer sufficient, especially since I am going out of town more these days. They wanted me to get a Macbook, but I stoutly resisted. There are still a few Windows aps to which I am addicted . Besides, I have to keep at least one PC in the house for the websites I use to support my wife's psychotherapy practice which require (REQUIRE!) Internet Explorer (they aren't fooled by Firefox's spoof mode either), not to mention the applications my school district runs, which also require IE. The temptation to wipe the portable down to the metal and install XP was significant, but I figured I'd be dragged screaming and kicking into the future. I do mean screaming and kicking.

My first experience with the fact that

Windows 7 Sucks

came when I was installing the cable modem for a friend. Comcast insists that you run an install Wizard application that Windows 7 refused to run. I tried it. It won't run, even in "Run as Administrator" mode, which was readily available to me. If you don't run the ap, Comcast will not activate your modem. After two hours, I desperately pushed the button on the Comcast website for "technician" mode. Turns out there weren't any questions I couldn't answer. But when I was done, Comcast insisted on yet another ap that Windows 7 stoutly refused to run, no matter how far down I set the security mode. Again, fortunately, the friend had an XP machine. Thank God!

Windows 7 Sucks

Not since we went from DOS to Windows back in 1991 have I seen a Microsoft operating system that broke more aps than 7, even in so-called "compatibility" mode. One of my favorite word games, E-Words, simply will not work in 7. The software company is long gone, so there won't be an upgrade. None of the other (free or paid) word games I can find does it for me like E-Words did. There's another ap gone; if Microsoft keeps breaking them, there won't be any reason for me NOT to convert to a Macbook.

Did I mention that Windows 7 sucks?

And the file system! Don't get me started on the file system. The default is an absolute refusal to let you anywhere near the Documents and Settings directory. And you're told, even if you're the administrator, that you can't chance the permissions. After a LENGTHY Google search, I found that you need to change the OWNERSHIP of the directory, under the advanced button. How messed up is that? In trying to be more like a Macintosh, Microsoft has succeeded in creating a nearly unusable operating system. As Steve Ballmer used to say, BOGU (you can look it up).

Windows 7 and HP Laserjet 3015 printer and Networking (Network)

Here is something important. I have a 12-year-old, no longer supported by HP Laserjet 3015. It's a beautiful printer. Never given me a lick of trouble. If I hooked it directly to my new Dell, Windows 7 recognized it and installed it automatically. I spent three hours trying to install it as a network printer. All was futility. I could see it on the network, but I couldn't connect to it, no matter how much software I installed. I checked several dozen websites using various search terms. The last one I tried finally worked (isn't that always the case?).

The advice was simple, clear and brilliant. I am putting the link here in case you are having trouble (difficulty) creating a network connection between Windows 7 and an HP Laserjet 3015. That is, you cannot set up the 3015 as a network printer [that ought to be clear to all the search engines]. The only solution that works is Win7 Pro x64 bit HP LaserJet 3015 driver problem.

I am putting that link here, in my column, as a separate item, with a descriptive headline, in the hopes of boosting the Google rank of the helpful link above, since the solution it describes actually works. So, if you Google here looking for a solution, go have a look, and you're welcome.

Political Briefs

• Who's Got The Pitchforks?
• Larry Summers Lies; Sun Rises In East
• BP's $75 Million: years of lobbying or one giant oil spill
• Will There Be Senate Toadies? Sucking up to Wall Street, again.
  Audit the Fed now.
• Halliburton: We Worked To Spec
  They just followed orders.
• Forty Years Ago: Kent State
  Murder Inc.: Blackwater's secret war in Pakistan
  Good Thing This Was Not Maricopa County: Immigrant reports bomber
• Fake Debate: The Senate Will Not Vote On Big Banks
• Ready For Internet and Electronic Voting Especially Without A Paper Trail? What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
• Galbraith, Baker et al to Obama/Summers: Audit The Fed
• A Republic If You Can keep It
• Louisiana Republican Governor Jindal Plans to Make a Bad Situation Worse
• "The Ghosts Of Gandamak," by William Dalrympale, NYT, Week In Review, p. 9, May 9, 2010
  
  "In 1839, the British invaded Afghanistan on the basis of dubious intelligence about a nonexistent threat: information about a single Russian envoy to Kabul, the Afghan capital, was manipulated by a group of ambitious hawks to create a scare about a phantom Russian invasion, thus bringing about an unnecessary, expensive and wholly avoidable conflict."
  
  Ring any bells?

• The Latest On Elena Kagan
  Why she is an extraordinarily bad choice. Elections have consequences. The consequence of the last election was not intended to be that the aggrandizement of Presidential power and abrogation of civil rights and civil liberties advocated by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would continue and be advanced by the winner but, given the positions advocated by Elena Kagan as Solicitor General, it looks like that's what will happen and what Barack Obama intends to happen.

Letters: Cat Column, Collapse of America?, Craig Reynolds Checks In, Dan Grobstein File

Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle has done it again: another wonderful cat column.

A friend wrote:

Just today I was listening to (the BBC's) World Have Your Say, which was about Greece, the EU loans and its broken democracy and some callers’ calls talk of revolution, and I started to think that considering where this country is there is very likely going to be a revolution sometime in my children’s lifetime followed by a carving up of country. This country is so big and complex. This blog post by Clay Shirky a few weeks back keeps coming back to me.

Craig Reynolds Checks In:

• Computer Science Shows How "Twitter-Bombs" Wield Influence
  Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline
• Speaking of timelines, cool visualizations of the slow-starting, exponentially accelerating rate of evolutionary change
• Speaking of evolution, this interesting note will have special significance to readers of Greg Bear's novel about human evolution: Darwin's Radio: Prehistoric Gene Reawakens to Battle HIV
• FCC chairman proposes increased regulation of Internet service providers

Dan Grobstein File

• No Principled Advocates of Small Government in An Oil Spill
• 92Y Video: Eliot Spitzer With Jeff Greenfield
  The third and best Jeff Greenfield interview I've attended this year.
  
  The Village Voice coverage (linked) is very good. The Daily News print edition sucked.
  
  Coincidentally I'm in the middle of one of his recommended books (The Big Short) -- very good. He said that "Bonfire of the Vanities" got Wall Street exactly right.
  
  He's the go-to guy for financial reform & I wish that the President would bring him onboard. Spitzer said that Obama should be listening to Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz so I guess that isn't likely barring a complete meltdown.
  
  Spitzer said that we are in as bad an economic mess as we've ever been in.
• Too Important to Fire, in which the overpaid masters of the universe are hoist on their own petard of flimsy, ungrammatical and illogical argument.
• Usury
• Going Nativist On BP Jason Linkins scratches his head. Mudflats piles on. And Todd was employed by BP for eighteen years. Who goes from blanket support for off-shore oil-drilling to racial profiling the companies? You know who. The person John McCain believed could be president at a moment's notice and the de facto leader of the GOP.
• An Open Letter To Anyone Who Ever Said "Drill, Baby, Drill"
• It's Not That You're Racist... [it's that your stupid]
• OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR: The Last Days of the Dragon Lady. Remote-controlled drones have their merits, but can’t measure up to the manned U-2 spy plane.
• From Daily KOS: More than four decades after the civil rights movement and the second wave of feminism delivered two new paradigms to the nation, my survey of the past 16 months of six Sunday television talk shows found them still to be dominated by men, whites and Republicans, particularly right-wing Republicans, with a geographical bias for the East and Midwest. This was true of the guests, reporters and pundits.
• The Class Divide
• How Big is the Spill? and Al Gore: Spill could change everything

End of May 10 Column

A Weekend in Napa

I went to the Napa Valley this weekend with my older daughter Marlow, and what a delightful time we had. We stayed at the Napa River Inn, which is a converted former mill. We had lunch Saturday on the Wine Train and dinner Saturday night at Ubuntu, which the New York Times once said was America's best restaurant outside New York City. Sunday, we got up early and rode 50 miles in a diabetes fundraiser. Thanks to Marlow's pacing, we completed it in four hours, including rest stops. What a daughter! What a weekend!

---

Posted at 04:06 PM in Personal | Permalink

Reblog (0)

Political Briefs

• The Consensus On Big Banks
• Sickening Abuse of Power
• Bouncing The Rubble: Deaths You Can Believe In
• Wake The President
  
  "The White House did not see this coming - and the Treasury's attention was elsewhere. The idea that we can leave this to the Europeans to sort out is an idea of yesterday. Today is very different and much more scary.President Obama is wide awake and working hard. Someone please tell him what is really going on."
• Goldman Failed To Report Arguably Material Information To SEC Or
  Investors In Timely Manner
• What Could Ever Go Wrong? Who Could Ever Foresee A Problem?
  
  They are so safe, let's put the next two BL4 labs in Congress (one on the floor of the Senate and one on the floor of the House) and
  the next two in the living rooms of GW Bush and Dick Cheney who advocated starting this unnecessary expansion on or about Sept. 11, 2001
  right after they started taking Cipro that very day (according to the AP) for as yet unexplained reasons (at the time no one, other than the
  perpetrators, knew about the mailings which did not arrive until late September and early October).
• Q: Who Pays For BP's Tortious Conduct?
  A: You Have Mostly Already
  
  The so-called tax on oil companies is passed directly to consumers. The law should be changed, the oil companies should have
  unlimited liability and consideration should be given to making their shareholders assessable (contrary to the usual rules) if the company has insufficient funds (i.e., declares bankruptcy as Texaco did a number of years ago after committing a different type of tort - civil wrongdoing) to pay for their wanton damage to the public good, public property, private property, public income, and private income. If the shareholders were assessable, they would have more incentive to supervise their employees (e.g., the chair and chief executive and other executives of the company) and their activities.

The Secret In Their Eyes

4 stars out 5

Sometimes you scratch your head at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences over their selections. On Oscar night, I wondered how some obscure Argentinian film could beat White Ribbon, which was truly amazing. Then, last week, the film caught up with me in the local art house (and how grateful I am that we still HAVE a local art house). It is an impressive piece of work. The aging makeup used on the two main stars is distracting in places and the murder mystery plot is obscure here and there. To enjoy and understand the film, it helps if you know about the "disappearances" of regime opponents via death squads in Argentina in the 1970s. Despite its (minor) flaws, the film does a masterful job of portraying love, death and obsession. And there's a few arty scenes, thrown in as a bonus. It is subtitled.