Do not watch The Criterion Collection: Night and Fog right before going to bed.
I do recommend that everyone get a DVD and watch it at least every 10 years. Just to remind us…
Category Archives: General
Bags rock
Every Rock Band needs at least one set of Bagpipes.
Bad backouts
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I removed Weather Bug, since it appeared to be malware, and replaced it with Weather Pulse. What was really neat about WP was that it allowed me to select the weather map of my choice and save it as a desktop background. I selected the Pueblo Doppler Radar picture and it would be updated during the day so I could see the storms moving through the area.
Unfortunately, I started some PC frezing symptoms that I associated with Weather Pulse. The problem seemed to start when it notified me at boot-up that an upgrade was available and I asked it to upgrade the app. then the PC would freeze up and I would be forced to power off the PC to proceed. Not Helpful. So, I reluctantly went to Uninstall WP and it announced a successful uninstall. But it still tried to start up, various errors messages shoed up saying modules weren’t available and the weather map stayed in the background. But no temperatures would show up in the tool bar, just n/a. Turns out the the directory was still in Program files with the .exe file. So I deleted the directory and will see what happens now.
While browsing the program files, I noticed that the Yahoo Messenger and AOL onDesktop directories were still there. I had deleted the software a month or two ago. So I deleted those directories, too. amazing how much the uninstall process doesn’t uninstall.
But my current Weather tracking tool is a Firefox extension – Forecastfox. I have it set to report on the Monument weather from weather station USCO0276. It appears at the bottom of my Firefox screen, it’s sunny and 27 degrees (F) at the moment.
Stand up to the Man
U.S. Tells D.C. to Pay Inaugural Expenses (washingtonpost.com)
As the WP reports, DC is supposed to pay for the Bush Inaugural Security. Don’t do it. Only spend the money that Congress has allocated for it. (About a third of the total)
On top of it all, it’s a federal holiday in the District so the District loses $66M. (I assume that’s all the city vendors combined and not the tax revenue. )
Maybe not. $66M per business day, 260 business days a year. $16.5 B a year. What is DC’s annual tax revenue? Runs about $3.5 B a year I guess that is the expected general business loss for a federal day off.
COSine science fiction convention
COSine science fiction convention
I’m chairing a convention shortly. The tag line is:
COSine – A Science Fiction Convention
Coming to a Colorado Springs Near You!
And January in COS is usually quite pleasant.
A dissertation on the TABOR Amendment
pdf_paulson0704a.pdf (application/pdf Object).
This is a semi-scholarly document, in that my first impression of the author is that he is an anti-taxist. But it does seem to cover a lot of the details of what TABOR has imposed on the Colorado legislature’s spending authority.
I think that Colorado voters need to be more upfront about their state and start publicizing things like “Welcome to Colorado, where the education of your children is YOUR business, not ours. ” (All publicity to be done without spending any tax money.)
Put These Words Out Of Our Misery
InformationWeek > Business Technology > Business Technology: Put These Words Out Of Our Misery > January 3, 2005 Some of these words I have never heard of, so I doubt I will miss them (What is BlueSnarfing?)
On the other hand, I think google is a perfectly respectible verb. It gets across the the intent and action, quickly and simply. What more can you ask of a word?
Some Perspective 5 Years After Y2K
Some Perspective 5 Years After Y2K An interesting article to remind us of the remote past, lo these five years ago. Check out the links in the article to remember what was being said back then.
I never did get that power generator I was coveting….
The 2000’s
I just thought of a great generic term for the first decade of this millenium, the 2K’s. I would pronounce it “the too-kays”. I think it rolls off the tongue easier than “the Oughts” or “the Naughts”. When we get to the the 2010’s someone else can label that decade.
Single Government ID Moves Closer to Reality
This WP article,Single Government ID Moves Closer to Reality (washingtonpost.com), discusses the new NIST ID card and raises some of the objections some workers might have. One objection I don’t see addressed is the federal employee that doesn’t want to carry the card when not at work. Are they going to have a bank of safety deposit boxes at the door for the employees to leave the cards in?
What’s the problem? Tracking the cards off-premise. Not only is it a potential privacy issues, but those with the right scanners can track government employees from afar and indiscriminately. There needs to be an off switch on the card, or maybe the users can put the card in a lead-lined holder off-premise and block any RF.
I’m sure that the ‘powers that be’ will think of all this. It’s kind of silly to think of a squad of soldiers sneaking about in the dark and the enemy watching the IDs broadcasting their location, surprise.