Hey look at that.  It's been a few years since my last update.

A lot has happened.  And yet also--so little.

I hereby decree that when I am making observance of the Discordian tradition of violating Discordian tradition by eating a hot dog bun on a Friday that I may use a piece of bread in lieu of a hot dog bun because it's easier for me to keep those in stock as they're multi-use.

P.S. If your mouse or touchpad buttons get swapped in Windows, this might be cure you've been looking for:
https://www.majorgeeks.com/content/page/how_to_fix_windows_mouse_buttons_reversed.html

I Am LEAVING Facebook

Ish.

I am not currently planning to delete my account, and I'm still on Facebook Messenger.

So really what I'm saying is: I'm going /dormant/ on the >timeline< side of Facebook indefinitely.

Do not expect more posts or comments from me. Do not expect me to respond to mentions.

The reasons for me to do this are easy to guess. But so that you don't have to guess, I will state them explicitly:

1. Facebook not only encourages conflict (as does most social media), it encourages it *specifically* between friends and relatives. This is a terrible thing.

2a. Facebook is run by M. Zuckerberg. Once, long ago I thought he was probably just a bit rude. Then I thought he was an opportunist. Now I think he might style himself as a Roman emperor.  ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/12/what-attracts-mark-zuckerberg-roman-hardman-augustus ) ( https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-haircut-explained-augustus-caesar-2019-10 )

2b. But even if that's not the case, Facebook's platform has repeatedly been cited for allowing and furthering the spread of misinformation. So much so that on the rare occasion that they /do/ move to block some piece of misinfo, they are decried for it by people who have lost the ability to tell the difference between a valid point of view and a conspiracy theory.
2c. Facebook, through Zuckerberg. Does. Not. Care about the harm they do.

The only time they act is when they perceive that the negative public backlash will be significant and long lasting. Then, and only then, do they act.

So in other words, the only check-and-balance on Facebook is the opinion of the zeitgeist of the American people-- and that's actually not a very good form of oversight for a company with global reach.

Americans Do Not Care about wars and bloodshed overseas, and so neither does Facebook.

I can't stop that, but I'd like to be at least slightly less responsible for contributing to it.

If I knew of any one chat app that is not so invasive, and that all my friends were already on, I would delete Facebook completely.


( https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-employee-leaks-show-they-feel-betrayed )
Podcast -> ( https://podbay.fm/p/behind-the-bastards/e/1600768800 )
Podcast -> ( https://podbay.fm/p/behind-the-bastards/e/1600941600 )
( https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebook.html )

[ Note - I may or may not edit this later for looks or minor content changes.  But I want to put this up before midnight local time. ]

[The following is just a copy of a Microsoft page as accessed on 11-5-2019 -- it's useful to have a copy around, I think. ]

Common HRESULT Values

• 05/30/2018
• 2 minutes to read
• • 
   
  • 

The following HRESULT values are the most common. More values are contained in the header file Winerror.h.

Here are the values listed alphabetically by name.

Name	Description	Value
S_OK	Operation successful	0x00000000
E_ABORT	Operation aborted	0x80004004
E_ACCESSDENIED	General access denied error	0x80070005
E_FAIL	Unspecified failure	0x80004005
E_HANDLE	Handle that is not valid	0x80070006
E_INVALIDARG	One or more arguments are not valid	0x80070057
E_NOINTERFACE	No such interface supported	0x80004002
E_NOTIMPL	Not implemented	0x80004001
E_OUTOFMEMORY	Failed to allocate necessary memory	0x8007000E
E_POINTER	Pointer that is not valid	0x80004003
E_UNEXPECTED	Unexpected failure	0x8000FFFF

Here are the values listed in numeric order by value.

Value	Name	Description
0x00000000	S_OK	Operation successful
0x80004001	E_NOTIMPL	Not implemented
0x80004002	E_NOINTERFACE	No such interface supported
0x80004003	E_POINTER	Pointer that is not valid
0x80004004	E_ABORT	Operation aborted
0x80004005	E_FAIL	Unspecified failure
0x8000FFFF	E_UNEXPECTED	Unexpected failure
0x80070005	E_ACCESSDENIED	General access denied error
0x80070006	E_HANDLE	Handle that is not valid
0x8007000E	E_OUTOFMEMORY	Failed to allocate necessary memory
0x80070057	E_INVALIDARG	One or more arguments are not valid

11-5-2019 -- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/seccrypto/common-hresult-values

Meta-memes Must Transcend.
--
Furry cows moo and decompress.

Under Whose Eye?

[I don't want to bother with formatting this much right now.  I might fix it later. Also the links worked at the time of writing, but they might break later as the statewide bill might not have become law yet. -- IC 6/22/2017]


There was an anti-discrimination ordinance in St. Louis-- passed Feb 2017-- that deemed it discriminatory:
` ` For an employer to fail or refuse to hire, to discharge or otherwise to discriminate against any individuals with respect to compensation or the terms, conditions or privileges of employment, because of their reproductive health decisions or pregnancy status (including childbirth or a related medical condition).  However, nothing in this ordinance shall require a religious institution, corporation, association, or society to provide reproductive health benefits of any kind ' ' -- bottom of page 3 and top of page 4

https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/internal-apps/legislative/upload/Ordinances/BOAPdf/BB203CS-wd15.pdf

The new statewide MO bill, that I'm not entirely clear if it's law or not yet, seeks to overrule that ordinance as an extra added bonus.  The state wide MO bill's main focus is to make it extra difficult for women to get abortions.

It took me about an hour to find the section in the statewide bill.  The key phrase is "a political subdivision of this state":

` ` 5. A political subdivision of this state is preempted from enacting, adopting, maintaining, or enforcing any order, ordinance, rule, regulation, policy, or other similar measure requiring a real estate broker, real estate salesperson, real estate broker-salesperson, appraisal firm, appraiser, as such terms are defined in chapter 339, a property owner, or any other person to buy, sell, exchange, purchase, rent, lease, advertise for, or otherwise conduct real estate transactions for, to, or with an abortion facility or for, to or with a person for the purpose of performing or inducing an abortion not necessary to save the life of the mother, if such requirement is contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions of such real estate broker, real estate salesperson, real estate broker-salesperson, appraisal firm, appraiser, property owner, or other person. ' '
-- pg 8 and 9 http://www.senate.mo.gov/17info/pdf-bill/S2/perf/SB5.pdf

On Windows 10, get LibreOffice to show up in search box

(another pastebin type entry)

This is to get "LibreOffice" to appear in the search results for "Office" on Windows 10:
1. (After LibreOffice is installed (watch out for the spam)) Go to 

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs

2. Find the LibreOffice... folder (maybe rename it so it doesn't have the version number on it)

3. In the folder, rename all the files from "LibreOffice*" to "OfficeLibre*"  You can actually use the console command "ren" for that if you use an admin console.

Rebuild search indexes
4. Open Control Panel, search for "indexing"
5. "Change how Windows searches..."
6. Click "Start Menu", Advanced... Rebuild.
7. Wait a minute, then test.

In future versions of windows, it's likely the tool for rebuilding search indexes will be moved.

Also, next time it would be nice to experiment with creating symlinks with all those alternate names--or maybe just copying them.

Unix has a useful command named 'uptime'.  Of course, it tells you how long your computer has been running. 

Windows doesn't have that command per se though it does have various ways to get the same info.  But I don't want to use those, I just want 'uptime'.  I used to have a binary .exe that did that, but no more.

This workaround gets you pretty much there:

1. download PsTools.
2. from the zip, you could just run psinfo.  It gives you several pieces of information including the uptime.
3. or if you really want to be pedantic about it, create a one-line script with this command very carefully typed: 

echo @psinfo ^| find "Uptime:" > uptime.cmd

That should get you a one-line script that runs "psinfo", but only displays the uptime line.

--
Furry cows moo and decompress.

Joo Janta 200 Mode

You know it's a bad deal with darkness is actually comforting.

The fear of the Dark stems from the uncertainty of not knowing what monsters might be lurking there.

The comfort of the dark comes into it when you, in fact, already know full well you're surrounded by monsters, and you'd just as soon have a few moments peace where you can forget about it before they eat you.

"Hello, Darkness, my old friend..."

The Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. They follow the principle "what you don't know can't hurt you" and turn completely dark and opaque at the first sign of danger. This prevents you from seeing anything that might alarm you. This does, however, mean that you see absolutely nothing, including where you're going.-- Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy

The ignorant and corrupt Congress's attempts to repeal the ACA could screw up my child's Medicare in time.  Meanwhile, Betsy DeVos's ignorance of what the IDEA act even is could eventually crystallize into a weakening or repeal of that law which would mean I'd have to depend on good ol' Missouri law makers to make sure my deaf, blind, autistic son receives an education.

Hello, Darkness, my old friend.  My good ol' cancerous, ever-growing Darkness friend.

Protip:  bottles of alcohol might make a good barter currency post-apocalypse.

--
Furry cows moo and decompress.

T minus 18 or something

In regards to this article: Daily Beast -- 75 Lawsuits Against President-Elect Trump

It's nice to have a few things be fair (Perhaps even more so since the actual reason is partisan response to a Bill Clinton scandal.) Trump's Presidential immunity to civil suits will only apply to any scams he engages in after he takes office.

` ` [Bill] Clinton and his defense team then challenged Jones' right to bring a civil lawsuit against a sitting president for an incident that occurred prior to the defendant becoming president. The Clinton defense team took the position that the trial should be delayed until the president was no longer in office, because the job of the president is unique and does not allow him to take time away from it to deal with a private civil lawsuit. The case went through the courts, eventually reaching the Supreme Court on January 13, 1997. On May 27, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Clinton, and allowed the lawsuit to proceed.[3] Clinton dismissed Jones's story and agreed to move on with the lawsuit. ' ' -- [ http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Paula_Jones#Initial_lawsuit ]

My main point of interest in this is the cases related to Trump University. [ Trump University’s Star Student: ‘It Was a Con’ and Trump University of Utah ]  Given my general and often justified lack of faith in the system, I have zero confidence in the prosecution's ability to make anything stick.  I suspect Trump will say that he had no knowledge of how the operation was actually running.  In a just Universe, this would not so easily let him off the hook because gross negligence that allows for the defrauding of a whole bunch of people is surely almost as bad as intentional malfeasance of the same.  But it's clear we don't live in that Universe.  In a Universe that valued facts, running a scam of this kind would surely count against a supposed "man of the people" since he, at the very least, rented his name to nefarious companies that defrauded "the people".







The bad part of that will probably be:  the continued American tradition of mostly ignoring the victims of these scams.  And if the public is briefly forced to acknowledge them, then they handwave a say that the victim "deserved it" -- they "should have known better".  And the thing is--this completely shifts the focus away from the con artist.  It creates a safe space where they can continue to run their scammy games.  It allows them to get elected President, for example.

Note-- the 75 lawsuits part is a bit misleading: article points out that *most* of the 75 are basically junk and meritless for example:
` ` More than a dozen of the 20 ongoing federal cases where Trump is a defendant are actual nonsense, filed against the future president along with co-defendants Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and even Walt Disney, on behalf of seemingly mentally-ill plaintiffs. (Anyone can file a lawsuit.) The complaints in the wildest cases include allegations of kidnapping by the president-elect and his son—members of the supposed Illuminati. ' '



--
Furry cows moo and decompress.

This entry is kind of like a pastebin.  I recently managed to successfully install Cockatrice on my machine.  This is a lot more elaborate than your standard Windows install as it requires building it from source.  

So I have written down the method that just worked in the hopes that I won't have to re-guess it next time.

Note:  See the date-time of this post.  This worked on my system at this time.  This may not work years into the future as it often happens that different bits and pieces of different Linux distributions get updated (or not) in different ways.

Also, I haven't done a lot of these.  Use at your own risk.


-------------------------

Mon 14 Sep 2015 11:49:38 PM CDT ------------
On Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, these are the packages that you have to have installed before you can build cockatrice *including* servatrice:

sudo apt-get install build-essential g++ qtmobility-dev libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler libqt4-dev libgcrypt11-dev

You probably need this repository added:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-sdk-team/ppa && apt-get update

You want to be able to build with the cmake-gui  so you need the 'cmake' package and then probably also the package 'cmake-qt-gui' if installing the first package does not automatically install the gui.

sudo apt-get install cmake cmake-qt-gui

You also need Qt5.  To get it, you have to search for an offline installer (b/c the Online installer is rubbish) here:

http://www.qt.io/download-open-source/

After d/l-ing the file, chmod u+x and run it because the Qt people seem to think this is Windows.  Whatever, it makes no real difference.  You wind up with a folder in your home folder with the necessary code to compile/link against.  (You will need to know if your OS is 32 or 64 bit.  But you should know that, really.)

You might also need the package

sudo apt-get install libqt5sql5-mysql

The install directions say you need that to run servatrice with a database. Don't know what that means yet.

For sound to work, you also need
 

sudo apt-get install libqt5multimedia5 libqt5multimedia5-plugins

I don't care about sound right now, so I have not bothered with it.

------------

d/l the cockatrice source from the button on the right side of this page

https://github.com/Cockatrice/Cockatrice

extract it to a folder, then cd into it in terminal

mkdir build

cd build

cmake-gui &

Then, in the gui, click Generate.

Then, for the Qt5Widgets_DIR setting, specify the path to the Qt5 stuff you previously downloaded via the offline installer.  And click to put a checkmark  in the box for WITH_SERVER setting, then click generate again and  cross your fingers.

If no errors, then in the terminal cd into the build directory and

make

and cross fingers.

if success, then 

sudo make install 

and you're golden.


You should now have the new commands:  cockatrice, oracle, and servatrice.

oracle is what you run to build your local card database .xml file (no pics yet, wait for the next part)

cockatrice is where you build a deck, and the actual game client itself.  Card artwork is downloaded on an as-needed basis.

servatrice is what you'll need to run in order to host a LAN game.

-- 
Furry cows moo and decompress.

The following is my reply to Veit's comment which was a reply to Kos on Veit's blog post at
http://www.onlinerule.com/the-salty-droid/

I originally replied to him on his site.  But I'm guessing he didn't like what I had to say.  So I think he decided it would be better to delete it.  That's cool.  I'll just post it here:

Wyrd says:   
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
April 12, 2013 at 5:37 pm   
 
Veit wrote

maybe I should highlight the bit where I say that I disapprove of what they’re doing with their marketing.

Maybe I should quote a great line from one of my favorite music groups:
“You can’t shake the Devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding.” — TMBG

Veit wrote

I have ‘invested’ $2k in Product Launch Formula when I was a complete newbie, and boy, it was useless for a newbie without a list or a product or even any clue how to sell stuff online.

I have ‘invested’ thousands on dodgy coaching, I’ve had all the phone-calls from the boiler rooms, believe you me, I’ve been there.

Maybe you should ask for your money back. Or at the least, maybe you should call out those that scammed you.

Veit wrote

All I’m saying here is this:

don’t take the existence of “the Syndicate” and boiler rooms and IM-scams as an excuse for dumping babies, bathwater ‘n all that good stuff.

Frank Irwin Kern and his ilk are not babies floating in icky bathwater. There kinda like… little baby anti-christs floating in the blood of their victims… or something.

Veit wrote

There is a reason why they’re so successful,

Yes. The reason is because they lie and misrepresent themselves in order to sell people a dream that can’t ever really be delivered. And then they take the money and run. And you apparently envy them for their sales success. And for some reason you think it’s possible to have the one without the other. (false)

Veit wrote

and it’s worth studying what they’re doing (e.g. very effective use of sales-psychology), and then use it for good, not evil.

You remind me of Boromir making his case for how they should take the One Ring and use it for good. I think you’ve been seduced by the siren song of POWER.

Veit wrote

I’ve seen far too many people who say they want to learn how to sell, but they run the moment they sense there’s a pitch coming at the end of a seminar or a webinar.

As well they should! If I go to a seminar to learn stuff, then I expect to *just* *learn* *stuff*. I do not expect or need to have gone to a seminar only to be sold something at the end. That’s not right.

Veit wrote

Fer cryin’ out loud, if you want to learn how to sell,

Wait, I’m confused–was the mission here to have a successful online business or was the mission to learn how to be good at selling? The two things are related, sure, but they are definitely not the same thing.

Veit wrote

observe what successful sellers are doing and learn from it. And if it’s unethical, then don’t do it. But don’t say “selling is evil” and use that as an excuse

The reason why people often say “selling is evil” is that the reality is that selling, when it’s not in service of some actual valuable product or service *is* evil. And that’s what the Sturgeon’s Law 90% of sales is all about: selling you noisy shiny crap (or noisy, shiny, crappy ideas) that have no real value to anybody ever.

So: You’re right. Selling, in and of itself, is not evil. But the vast majority of those that rely heavily on salesmanship and selling are doing so because they don’t really have a product or service of value to sell. In this case, they sell the sizzle because they have *no* steak.

Veit wrote

for not doing anything or worse – complaining and whining about those ‘evil guys’ that are responsible for your lack of success (btw, that comment wasn’t directed at you Kos)

I often agree that complaining and whining are not very helpful. But actually vocalizing that “Hey! That guy over there! He’s a scammer!” or “dude! That thing I bought from that guy was utterly *useless*! Don’t buy from him.” That kind of thing is called: the market voicing its collective discontent.

Now, c’mon, Mr. Veit Business Professional: don’t you know that old maxim, “The customer is always right.” ?

And yet here you are.. trying to silence the customers and telling them that they should learn from the corrupt business practices of evil people. Shame on you. A wizard should know better.

–
Furry cows moo and decompress.

Copy error messages to clipboard

I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't just tested it. In the (should be) immortal words of the poster "From Windows 2k onwards you have been able to copy the text in error messages to the Windows Clipboard by pressing Ctrl + C, but Microsoft forgot to tell anyone."

Yes, it's true. I tested with an error message from my own code:

When that popup has focus, if you Ctrl+C, then Ctrl+V into a text window, you get:

---------------------------
AutoKeys.au3: HlprMkREWinActive
---------------------------
Unable to set The Raiser's Edge as active.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

I haven't checked to see if it works with all MsgBox( ) type things, but it probably does.

Oh--also it turns out Windows NTFS since maybe NT 3.0 does support something like the Unix symlink. (Symlinks are different than .lnk files because, for most purposes, they are treated as a real file or folder. It allows for one file or folder to appear to exist in multiple names and/or locations within the filesystem without crufty wasteful copying.) In NTFS, they're called Junctions, and they only work for folders. (Apparently, in Vista, MS added some new feature that finally allows for full symlinks.) Google for 'sysinternals junction.exe'. Be very careful with them though--since they're transparent to most all the programs on the OS (i.e. treated as actual folders), it's easy for a lot of accidental damage to happen.

--
Furry cows moo and decompress.

It's that time of year

VLC tells us it's that time of year again...

It's kinda cool. And kinda weird. It changes its icon from the standard to this with the Santa hat on sometime around the start of December and it'll stay this way for, I think, the whole month.

--
Furry cows moo and decompress.

Household with Children Complexity Calculation Formula

I just came up with a way to calculate the complexity of your household based on the number of children in it.

First, take the average of all of your children's IndividualComplexityValues (see below) in years of all of the children in your care, including those that are only there part time. This will form the base. (Note if the result comes out to a value less than or equal to 1, then add 1 to it, then multiply it by itself, and use that as the base.

Now, raise that number by powers based on the IndividualComplexityValues of all of the children in the household.

IndividualComplexityValues are calculated like this: For children aged 1 to 10: it's just their age. For very tiny children/babies aged less than one: it's 13 minus the number of months old they are. For children age 11 and above, it's one tenth their age.

For example, let's suppose you have three children in your household of the following ages:
11 months, 4, 16. Then the average would be:

(0.9166, + 4, + 1.6) / 3 is approx = 2.1722.

So, to figure the Children Complexity Value we would perform:

2.1722 ^ ( ( 13 - 11 ) ^ ( 4 ^ 1.6 ) ) .

So that would mean that your over-all household complexity is just about... 5.212 times 10^196. And of course, in my case, the Complexity calculation comes out to something far beyond perl's ability to calculate so it just answers with "inf" for infiity. Seems pretty accurate to me.

--
Furry cows moo and decompress.

Mary Anning lyrics, Artichokes, Skeptic Mix Tape

There's a Skeptic Mix Tape in existence now at Skeptics.com. As you might guess it has skeptically themed songs from a variety of artists. This one song, Mary Anning seems particularly furry to me right now because of it's, for lack of a better term, Beatles-esque sound. I checked out the artist's site, and initially couldn't find any lyrics there. (Later, I did find them, but that was after I'd already taken the time to write them all down. And mine are more complete than theirs.) So:

"Mary Anning" by Artichoke


Do you know Mary Anning?
Born on a southren shore.
Her father, Richard, was a cab-i-net ma-ker.
And Richard died too early.
And left the Anning's poor.
But lucky Mary Anning found an ich-thy-o-saur!

By circa 1820,
She ran a fossil store.
She put the bones together
For the col-lect-ors.
And science was the province
Of men of noble birth.
But I'd take Mary Anning
Over those stuffed white shirts!

// Ancient life that sleeps as fossils... //

She was walkin' the cliffs
On her own by the sea.
She was wonderin' if
There were shapes underneath.
There were men with their cash
But that's not what it took.
She could read every line
On the ground like a book.
She assembled the bones
Of the past
In cement.
And she sold them in town
For a couple a pence.
And she showed all the men
How the bones could connect.
Though at first some would scoff
They would grow to respect...

Do you know Mary Anning?
Born on a southren shore.
Her father, Richard, was a cab-i-net ma-ker.
And Richard died too early.
And left the Anning's poor.
But lucky Mary Anning found an ich-thy-o-saur!

"How did you get in here!?
Show me what you've found, Dear.
Hello, isn't that queer?
Do you have any more?"
"How did you get in here!?
Show me what you've found, Dear.
Hello, isn't that queer?
Do you have any more?"
?reeuq taht t'nsi ,olleH
?erom yna evah uoy oD
"How did you get in here!?
Show me what you've found, Dear"

About the reversed lines: I used Audacity to un-reverse the reversed/back-masked part towards the end of the song. :-)

--
Furry cows moo and decompress.

Who Moved My Cheese (review)

I've been hearing people mention this book for quite some time now. I finally read Who Moved My Cheese yesterday. I skipped the intro and the afterward, but the meat (or cheese) of the book was pretty good.

(SPOILERS, sort of)
It's really an allegory about how once we have things easy in life (in business, personal, or just all-around), we ought not get too complacent and comfortable, lest we miss the signs that the "cheese" (the thing(s) that makes life worth living for you) is getting used up and will be gone soon.

In the story, Hem and Haw are shocked to discover one morning that the cheese they had worked so long and hard to attain is suddenly gone after it had been right there where they had found it for years and years. Of course the mice, Scriffy and Scurry, they were well aware of what was happening, and they've already gone racing off to find a new supply because, really, what else is there to do? But the humans, they're not so quick on the uptake because they have all these complex belief systems in their heads that get in the way. They get to thinking like, "Who moved my cheese!?" "Wait and it will come back," "We deserve cheese," etc.

The venerable Professor J. R. R. Tolkien said something to the effect that he detested allegory in all its forms. I guess I am not like him. I feel I understand what he is driving at: that allegory is icky insofar as it's someone else's rather blatant attempt to tell you what to think. Mr. Tolkien is correct--that's bad. However, allegory isn't always like that. Sometimes it can be a (admittedly heavy handed) way to explain something, or a way to remind you of something that you already knew or ought to know in a memorable way.

Now, I will be remembering the mice and littlepeople with their running shoes and track outfits zipping through the maze of life in pursuit of The Cheese for a long time. And hopefully it will remind me to not be complacent, to not get too comfortable with my cheese, and to know when to read the Handwriting on the Wall.

--
Furry cows moo and decompress.

Puppy Linux / Firefox font

I'm waiting in the hospital right now with a family member. Seems like a great time to work on the laptop!

I'm still running Puppy linux. I've been thinking about switching to Ubuntu, but then there is this whole if-it-aint-broke thing. If I use this much more, I really need to figure out how to set up sudo rather than running as root all the time. Still, I always (improperly) run windows in a similarly powerful way, so I'm not too worried.

I've switched from a usb flash drive to an IDE hard drive that's connected via a USB drive caddy. Yeah, I know, but it's what I've got to work with right now. The laptop takes SATA and I don't have that right now.

I'm writing mostly to remind myself this: I found out the easy fix to the font problem in Firefox. X comes with almost no tolerable fonts, but it does come with Helvetica. So just go to Edit -> Preferences -> Content and set the default font to Helvetica. All of a sudden the awful Times will be replaced with the slightly less bad Helvetica.

--
Furry cows moo and decompress.

Install Hell

It seems these days that on those rare occasions where I have to install an OS come along, it always turns into a long, protracted, excruciatingly painful experience. It's sort of like trying to pass medium sized kidney stones.

The hard drive died on my wife's computer. This probably has a lot to do with the amount of abuse this computer suffers on a daily basis.

So I really wanted to obtain an XP SP3 because trying to reinstall the Vista that it came with feels like a step backwards rather than forwards. Procuring the disk was difficult and, it turns out, ultimately futile as the computer failed to read all of the files. Nothing's more fun than staring at the blue windows install screen and watching it fail to copy multiple files, all of which have varying degrees of importance. On the low end, there's the files which I know I don't really need like "arial.ttf". On the high end, there's the files which I'm sure I really do need like "driver.cab". That one's so important it wasn't even compressed on the source cd.

So what did I do? Well, I wound up trading back and forth between the SP2 cd I had procured and the SP1 cd I already had. Wanna guess how well that worked? I wound up with a system that boots fine, everything comes up, yay. Only when you try to actually do something, like choose Start -> shutdown, explorer.exe crashes and restarts itself.

Currently, I have this same computer running using the very, very cool Puppy Linux. Why is Puppy so cool? Well, because it's really, really tiny and you can get to a vaguely-usable desktop in just a few minutes. I mean--this system that I'm on right now has no useable OS other than Puppy, and yet just with that I'm able to browse online and make this blog entry. I call that cool.

Now, back to the install... "Once more into the breach, dear friends..."

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Furry cows moo and decompress.

Daily Words of Wisdom (or Whatever) #1

fortune(1) tells us:

Cynical? Well, maybe. However, it does turn out to be true rather frequently.

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Furry cows moo and decompress.