Right Wing Nation

When I got back from class, I installed Firefox, MS Office, and Palisade Decision Tools. I haven’t used it enough to give a review, but Windows 7 is really fast. It should — but does not — come with virus protection. It popped up a little red flag to tell me there was none installed.

So I installed the updates, and now, the computer is stuck in a “configuring updates” loop on boot. According to everything I’ve seen, the only solution is to undo the updates, but then, I can’t install Win 7 and keep all of my files and programs. So, I’m going to just install the OS and […]

“Installing 14 of 57 …”

It won’t let me install and keep my files and programs unless I install Vista SP1, so I’m doing that now. Grrr!

I just started installing Windows 7 Ultimate on my desktop. Supposedly, you can install it and keep your files and programs. I backed up my files just in case.
It’s searching the internet for hardware driver upgrades now.

What happens when a math geek wonders which line in the supermarket is fastest? He collects data and runs a regression! There are a lot of variables he doesn’t take into account, such as the sex of the shopper, which I discussed here, but others can take the baton and run with it.
Thanks to Darren […]

Bad Science has an excellent article up about how we are hardwired to find patterns:
But we have an innate human ability to make something out of nothing. We see shapes in the clouds and a man in the moon; gamblers are convinced that they have “runs of luck”; we can take a perfectly cheerful heavy […]

About a month ago, I deactivated akismet. It was catching nearly no spam comments compared to wp-spamfree, and the really annoying things was that the comments get sent to akismet before the wordpress blacklist, so even if you have a spam site and put the domain name in the wordpress blacklist, all of the comments […]

I am one of Ed Driscoll’s biggest fans, but I am just as profoundly uninterested in the latest, hottest web 2.0 gimmicks as I am pop culture. I’m not sure what the excitement about Twitter is about; from what I’ve seen, it’s nothing more than individual sentences, blogging reduced to its tersest and least communicative, […]

i want one! (h/t der blogvater).

Ken has a story about streamlining processes (we call that operations):
Last year, we used a scoring template built by a math teacher at one of the participating schools (a GREAT GUY!) which required sorting to find the individual and teams scores after. Being a bit of a “Spreadsheet Jockey” (dubbed so by a former coworker) […]

I said:
Apple is the quintessential liberal OS. Steve Jobs knows better than you do what you should and should not be able to do, and he’s going to control what you can and cannot do on that idiot icon idiot box because you’re too damned stupid to know what you should and should not be […]

I’ll stop bitching about the weather, but not today. Now, you’d think after a high of 60 (!) yesterday, and nearly all of the snow gone (yes!), I’d be happier. The guys at Pensblog report gale-force winds in Pittsburgh during the game last night, and we got them early this morning. Not a storm. Just […]

It’s screwed me again. It was supposed to record the Pens - Sharks game last night. So I get up this morning, turn on the NHL channel, and find out that against all odds, the Pens beat the Sharks — the top team in the NHL — last night. I wonder how the hell that’s […]

The Best Page in the Universe:
I don’t know why Mac users get so defensive when you call them idiots. I mean, Apple is a company that has built its entire user base around the fact that its users can’t do simple things like turn their computers on.
My side! My side! It hurts!

Here’s another really annoying thing about that DirecTV DVR. If you set up a season pass — all episodes of a show — on DirecTiVO, if it can’t record all first-run episodes due to a scheduling conflict, it will tell you. This one does not.
So we started to watch this week’s Lost episode, but […]

From Ann Althouse. A news story from 1981.

This one, from 1969, is even more interesting, and is, in some ways, a better prediction.

Slideshow, season three of Future Weapons.

Wordpress allows you to start something and save it as a draft, and I found this in my drafts. I should have finished and published it in May. Better late than never.
MOGS has posted a good response to my latest Sci-Fi article, a really good response, and it may very well spark a couple of […]

I think.

It just has to get done. I’ll be done very soon.

Remote no programee cause IR on receiver no workee. So DirecTV is sending me a receiver, which will get here in 2-5 business days. Until then, the only way we can operate the satellite is from the front of the box.
Grrrrrrrr!

Best Buy sent me to DirecTV (it’s leased equipment). The tech has had me reset the remote, but we can’t program it to operate the DVR. I’m on hold.
We bought this DVR on June 24 2008.
Grrrrrrr . . .

I like Chrome, but there’s one problem, and unfortunately, it’s not a small problem. The screenshot below is from my Wordpress post page. See the blue bars with the + signs on the right corners?

Those use Javascript to open them (they’re all closed), and one of them is trackbacks. In Chrome, the Javascript doesn’t work. […]

It’s very fast. Really, really fast. It hasn’t hung or crashed, which Firefox would have done at least five times by this time, and it doesn’t hog my resources like Netscape Firefox:

It has no interface to speak of, however, and no options I can find. And WP-Spamfree doesn’t seem to like it. But it does […]

I thought I’d try out Chrome. I’m using it now, sort of.
Where’s the damned menu? Look:

Do you see a menu? Where do I change my options? Flush my cache? Access my bookmarks? Do anything at all?

Shell tectonics on Mars.
Ice volcanoes on Titan.

SnagIt screen capture utility. Fast, easy, and automatically dumps your screendump into an editor. It beats the hell out of PrtScr to Photosuck.

Testing embedding a google docs spreadsheet.

Did the Geek Squad instead of formatting the HD, since the only software CD I own but cannot find is the XP CD. It’s running faster now.
Note: Install no new software!

I’ve started my power Excel series, now that I have Office 2007 on this crappy laptop. Check it out and tell me what you think before I drive myself nuts creating more screenshots (i.e., dealing with Photoshop).
Off to do errands, and see if XP is on sale anywhere in town.

After months of failed attempts, I have finally installed Office 2007 on this crappy laptop.
Yay!
This machine is a mess. I’m thinking of backing up the data, then wiping it entirely, and starting from scratch, assuming I can find the XP CDs that came with it. That might solve the firefox problem.

The first extrasolar planet photographed with light.

I couldn’t figure out why there was an HDMI cable with the new monitor. It just hit me. The reason the monitor looks like an HD set is because it essentially is.
I have no idea if there’s an HDMI port on the desktop. I’ll look later.

I got a monitor and hooked it up. So much for Vista plug-n-play. The computer had no idea it was a different monitor. I’m running the setup now, though.
UPDATE: Setup ran fine, it looks great. Crisp, great color.

The monitor on my desktop is dead. You’re no doubt visualizing an LCD monitor, but that’s because you don’t know me. I used to take a lot of flack from my colleagues at the business school because they were (stupid jargon alert!) “first adopters,” people who will buy the latest toy to come out just […]

Last night, with five minutes left in the third period of the Penguins game, my DVR froze. By the time it rebooted, the game was over.
But right after that last goal.
The TiVO never froze. This one freezes about once a week. I should start rebooting it regularly, I guess.
And so far, no BSOD on the […]

The first BSOD happened last night when company was here, so I just rebooted it. This morning, I went into the office to see another BSOD. I rebooted, and didn’t get past the initial screen. I rebooted again, and again, couldn’t get past the initial screen. Four times.
He plugged it in and it came right […]

I plan to be sitting in front of the door at Best Buy when they open at 11. I want that machine to be the first one they look at, because I am not going to put up with them keeping it for a couple of days.
And get a camera battery.

to hate Apple, that is: Environmentalists Cheer on Apple for Getting Greener.