For the price of a tip!
Happy holidays.
We had booked a table for late lunch at ‘Thee Bungalow’, a so-called ‘upscale’ restaurant at Ocean Beach. One of the Cohn family restaurants, it seemed to have a good reputation, and had a ‘prix fixe’ meal at $49 plus taxes and tips.
I dug around for reviews and discovered that ‘Yelp’, in particular, had a bunch of really not very good ones of the place. Checking a little further, I noted that several of the entrees were, in fact pre-cooked by their vendors. This set off big red flags and we canceled the booking.
Now what? Off we set to Valley View casino. At the door the doorman asked if we were first time visitors. ‘Yes’, we said. He said, ‘If you want a free buffet and $20 to start you off in the casino, sign up for the Player’s Club, it’s free.’
So we did. It was a stress-free process. We went to the buffet line. One couple in front of us. We were showed to a table within seconds. The waitperson was attentive, and for a buffet, the food was awesome, with an incredible range of choices. Seafood, beef, steak, ham chicken, turkey, lobster, as well as Mexican favorites, pasta, etc. The vegetables, incredibly, were not overcooked and there were many choices for dessert (by which time we were both overstuffed, anyway).
What’s not to like? for a 10$ tip, all this was ours. The only downside is that, like a tv remote control, I couldn’t figure out how to use the Player’s Club card to spend the $20. Oh, well.
Apparently I’m in good company …
Remember my dismay at discovering that our former domain name registrar had information about me that far pre-dated my dealings with them?
Well, it seems this practice is more widespread than I had thought …
*shrug*. Oh, well. The internet is *not* private. Never was. Never will be. You *will* be intruded upon at some point.
Caring for the innocent
Last week, I got a call Monday from my pal J., who had apparently let the smoke out of his computer. Not being able to capture the smoke and replace it, his quandary was what to do about it.
So pal Br. and I met with J. and had lunch and talked about stuff – like what J. should do. Br. was all for him getting an Apple Mac. J. was initially thinking about repairing his old clunker PC. I couldn’t care less as long as I didn’t have to oversee the repairing.
Now J. is a very smart person, he made a lot of money from engineering consulting, but he can’t seem to get his head around some of the underlying concepts in computing – not being able to differentiate ‘the Internet’ from his local area network, for example. I am sure that many people are like that. The problem is that it leaves him prey to computer technicians who generally charge $200 for doing a half-@ssed job of solving his problems, leaving him no wiser. Therefore I was kind of sympathetic to what he wanted to achieve – the restoration of his computing facilities and the retrieval of his data.
To cut a long story short, after a trip to Fry’s to get a ~$400 Compaq dual-core PC ‘stripper’, a USB 3.5 inch disk enclosure and a $30 network print server, several hours of explaining things and several hours of problem-solving, we had a newly working WPA2 secured wireless network (in anticipation of his daughter’s new laptop) and a working network printer. J. had his new computer adorned with all the Windows 7 updates, MS Office 2007, AVG anti-virus (he was about to buy Norton), Lavasoft’s AdAware, iTunes, Flash, and had a re-install DVD set for the computer (something not at all highlighted in the instructions), and I left him copying all the files he wanted from the disks of the old ‘smoke-free’ computer.
The next day I got a call from J., saying that SWMBO couldn’t ‘pick and place’ an image into an outgoing email. It turns out that she had been using Outlook, but J. had her try to use Yahoo web mail, and she couldn’t copy and paste an image into web email. Over Skype chat, I sent him a URL to the AT&T support page about how to set up Outlook 2007 email to work with an AT&T ISP. Later, after an email saying that he could now receive, but not send email, I dropped by (he doesn’t live far away) to see what was up.
He had followed the instructions to the letter. Every single setting was correct. Apparently, he had agonized over this overnight, getting very little sleep. After I had checked the settings, my reaction was to call AT&T (via internet chat). After a laborious scripted chat, it turned out that the AT&T web page was incorrect (in two places).
Problem is, if you are a naive user, if you follow an ‘authoritative’ web page and it’s still wrong, you think it’s you rather than the web page instructions.
So now all was OK with ‘pick and place’. Meaning, they could send Outlook email.
Next morning, I get an email. The printer on the print server isn’t working on the ‘mule’ computer on which I’d done the testing.
At J.’s I discover this fact to be true. It doesn’t work. After testing the print server on J.’s new computer (it worked), I have him delete and then reinstall the printer on the ‘mule’. It then works.
Yep, it worked when I installed it on Tuesday, and then it didn’t on Thursday. Now it does, again. WTF?
This kind of crap is what makes users fearful, and makes me think that he should really have bought a Mac. Except that none of these issues were OS dependent, they were just general flakiness in the case of the print server*, and not enough emphasis or attention to detail in the instructions supplied with the Compaq (amongst many other manufacturers) to matters like ‘what the heck are you going to do if the computer loses its smoke?’
I can’t count on my fingers and toes the number of people who have come to me and said, ‘Save me, I’ve lost everything.’ There’s often, in the case of a disk failure, nothing much you can do without spending big $$$ on disk bit engineering. A little forethought would have paid dividends.
Just to show that I’m not all ‘mouth and trousers’, we have attached to local machines here (in our den) a variety of USB secondary storage devices, and a tertiary 1 terabyte network attached storage RAID array. And we have the original DVD re-install set for all of the operating systems and application software that we are running.
* It turns out that the print server software assembles a UNC name for the destination printer that is longer than some Windows software can handle. Duh.
Freeway or not?
Let’s be clear, I have some foibles. One of them is that I don’t like heights. It used not to be a problem, I’d be happy as a clam on a suspension bridge, swinging away so that others lost their lunches.
But now, not so much. I’ve been told that hypnosis could solve that problem, and I’m sorely tempted to follow that up.
But, today it was Freeways. I headed over to J’s house on the motorcycle, the plan being to have lunch at that great Thai restaurant at the northern extent of India Street, after picking up Br., in Clairemont.
So we hurtled down I-15 and onto SR-163, to take SR-52 to I-5, and then off at Balboa Ave. Then we went south on I-5 to the north end of India Street.
All the while there were cars and trucks whizzing by at 85 mph, and all I want to do is get to my destination. Let’s be clear, I have no problem with the 85 mph, my problem is that these jerks seem to want to use their cages as ‘weapons’ to ‘nudge’ me out of their intended path.
It really is like that: folks in cars and trucks seem to want to sideline anyone on a motorcycle as if they don’t count. Can you say murderous?
So, on the way back, I took the surface streets. Balboa to Kearney Mesa and Black Mountain Road. Relative bliss.
Question to all you car and truck drivers out there: Do you realize how threatening your behavior is to motorcycle riders?
Where can one get Christmas crackers in San Diego?
Christmas crackers are a long time UK tradition at this time of year. Fact is, most Americans have never heard of them.
Basically, they’re a long paper tube with a couple of constriction points, a chemical and very tiny firecracker, and they contain a little novelty, a paper hat and a ‘motto’ – a little like a fortune cookie.
In the past we had got them from Shakespeare’s on India Street, but when we went there on Friday, they were all hugely expensive, like $20.00 and more for a dozen.
Also in the past we’d noted that you could get them from Cost Plus (World Markets), so when we went to the mall at 4S Ranch we took a look. No crackers.
Well darn, we’ll just have to use the tiny ones we already have stocks of.
Shame that Linens and Things has closed in this recession.
Thanksgiving – a food overload
I tried, unsuccessfully, to get one or more of my friends and their families to join us at Thanksgiving, but it’s a cultural thing, only family will do.
Last year, we helped out at the equivalent of a soup kitchen, but B. was reluctant to do so again, it turns out, by her own admittance, because the eight hours or so of social exposure was just too much.
So, we were on our own.
Ordinarily, I am accustomed to grabbing a 3 lb frozen turkey breast from our local supermarket, and whacking it into a crockpot for about three hours or so to make material for lunch turkey sandwiches for the bride. Way better than the slimy sliced turkey from the said same supermarket.
So, this time I used the same tekneek, but with added root vegetables. Roasted sweet potato, carrot and parsnip, together with the onions I had added to the crockpot, as well as sauteed leeks and microwaved beets. The apple smoked bacon over the turkey breast imparted a slightly smoked flavor to it.
Oh, and Yorkshire pudding (pop-overs, to the unwashed).
And sausage stuffing and Paxo sage and onion stuffing with added ground pecans (this was a disappointment).
We ate about a quarter of it.
So now we have pie 🙂
Multiple users of Parallels – a MacPuzzle
It’s all Microsoft’s fault, of course.
I recently upgraded a file-server from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008. Only to discover that one of the things it could no longer do was talk to the CanoScan 3200F scanner which was plugged into it. M$ says that Canon are no longer supporting it, and Canon remains completely silent on the matter.
Darn it, the thing is only lightly used and is only about 5 years old, why should we have to go out and buy another one? That’s obsolescence gone mad!
So, I tried Vista, with the same result (but at least it was a little more informative, instead of sullenly refusing to install the driver).
Well we know that it works with Windows XP, and there look to be some MacOS drivers on the Canon site, so we give it a go on the Mac. Ooops, supported only up to Leopard, and we have Snow Leopard. Dang!
But wait, we have Parallels and an instance of XP on the Mac. What if we install the TWAIN drivers and Canon software on that? Miraculously, and somewhat mysteriously, it worked. Straight out of the box. The mysterious thing is that Snow Leopard has to communicate backwards and forwards with the Windows TWAIN driver, so how is it that Snow Leopard can’t work directly with it, it’s plugged into one of the Mac’s USB ports?
Some time ago, we created an account for me on the Mac, and after a bit of fiddling about, used VineServer (VNC) on the Mac (yes, I do know that MacOS has VNC built in, but it didn’t do what we wanted) and VNC Viewer on my Vista PC. Across the Gigabit network, it works spiffily.
So now, I wanted to load the Parallels image of XP to be able to scan stuff from my desktop. I made a copy of the XP image and put it in /Users/Shared/Parallels, and from the Mac, started it up and made sure that it was running OK. Great 🙂
Then I tried from the PC/VNC Viewer. Uh oh, the message appears “Access denied. You do not have enough rights to use this virtual machine.”
Long story short. Known problem at Parallels, and is all about execute permissions for the XP virtual image folder. Good times, I had to get down and dirty with terminal, sudo and chown. How very 80’s?
I guess that I could have put a virtual Windows XP on the 2008 Server, but this solution has more cool points, I think.
Check out the solution here at Parallels.
Oh, and if you are wondering about all these Windows licenses, I have a recently expired MSDN Developers license, so it’s all legal.
The Sting
Here’s a news item that leaves me nonplussed, it’s exactly the same plot as the movie ‘The Sting’:
It comes from NPR and it’s about those investment banking bastards being able to hold up ‘regular guy’ (i.e. yours and mine) transactions for enough milliseconds for those bastards to get a better bid in. How is that different from betting on a certainty? These fucking guys seem to be sucking billions of dollars out of the economy, without adding a single whit of value to it, all the while draining all our 401k’s value. Why is this even legal?
Especially as much of it has been done with our taxpayers ‘bailout’ money.
Torches and pitchforks, anyone? Either that, or how can I get some of this action? Like ‘The Sting’, it doesn’t take too much effort to predict the outcome of the horse race if you already know who the winner is.
Boxee – a work in progress
A friend of mine was ruminating about buying a MacTV simply to run Boxee so that he could get rid of……
“Wait a minnit, wot’s Boxee?”, sez I.
“It’s a video content aggregator” sez he, “It allows you to draw together all your on and offline video content from streaming, such as Netflix or Hulu, or physical sources such as DVDs or downloaded movie files.”
“Huh” sez me, “This sounds interesting, but why wouldn’t I simply go to the individual sources and use whatever application I preferred to interact with it?”
“Because you have just one interface to learn, you can even turn your iPod Touch or iPhone into a remote control for it, so any thirteen year old can use it, and if your computer has HDMI (or DVI to HDMI conversion capability) you can feed your HDTV. With all the included sources of content, Boxee could free you from the cable company”
B.’s relatively new Vista laptop has an HDMI output, which we’d occasionally used for watching streaming Netflix on the HDTV (great experience, by the way, except for having to fiddle with the default sound device to be able to hear anything). So, I thought I’d give it a try.
Sign up and download at Boxee was straightforward enough, as was installing the software. Where it went horribly wrong, was in trying to use the software. Everything is in huge ‘Microsoft Bob’-like fonts, and the interface, whilst clean, is hardly intuitive.
The first thing I tried to do was run a wmv file I had on the desktop. That seemed OK, but the aspect ratio was completely out of whack. Eventually I found the menu item to change it, buried deep within the administrative tools.
Then I tried to stream a Netflix vid. After hooking Boxee into our Netflix account, it connected, and I waited. And waited. Oh, OK, here’s what Netflix looks like in Boxee. I tried to start a movie. And waited. And waited. Eventually, it started. I could pause it but I, for the life of me, could not find out how to stop it.
I tried to start up a dvd in a local drive. I couldn’t. It insisted on continuing with the Netflix stream. It seemed that the only way out was with the three-fingered salute and Task Manager.
I restarted the laptop, and tried again with the DVD. Even though it was set up to recognize a video dvd when inserted, Boxee didn’t do anything with it (this could be because of the lame way that HP has set up the default, and it would seem only, way to play a DVD – windows media player doesn’t work, either).
To be fair to Boxee, the application was clearly marked ‘alpha’. For Windows, some work is needed. It’s glutinously slow, and there’s no way to exit the application from within the application, which, in my mind, is an absolute fail.
An idea worth watching, though. Its time is coming.
Trod Bogs Sadly - Oddstray's Blog 
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