Blue Screens

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Man, I’m sick of Windows. The secretary’s machine at church got infected with something a couple of weeks ago. I was only able to get rid of it by reinstalling Windows. I got an antivirus solution set-up and spent, well, a couple of hours, but it seemed like a month, uninstalling all the crap-ware and getting everything down to the bare minimum. My next project was to make a Ghost-type image, to avoid all that work the next time. But I don’t know how to make a Ghost image on Windows, so I put it off until I had a couple of hours to figure out what to do.

That was a bad decision. Today, we got this:

Crash 1 - Windows PC

The infamous Blue Screen of Death

And we got it every time we rebooted, early in the boot process. So early, I don’t know any way past it. So now I need to come up with some kind of recovery media and boot off that, and save all her data.

Then I need to migrate us away from using Quicken and replace it with some kind of cloud-based Web 2.0 service in its place.

And, honestly, if I get that far, then we’re replacing Windows with Linux, because Quicken is the last Windows-only app we use.

Playing with Evernote

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It’s been popular for 2 years, so I’m trying to figure out if it’s worth getting excited about Evernote.

I like Dropbox a lot. (A whole lot, but that’s another story.)

I’ve experimented with Google and Yahoo sites as a way of storing information online, and it’s just too much, because they’re not really filing systems as much as authoring systems. I want something like Dropbox, but for odds and ends.

Posterous and Tumblr aren’t really filing systems either, and, at a glance, they don’t really work for private information.

So I’m experimenting with Evernote. I’m intrigued with its purported ability to OCR text off the images I upload.

(D’oh! that reminds me: I figured out, eventually, how to get Tesseract working. It was about a half day of work, but when I finished, for the sample documents I fed it, it did better than I.R.I.S. Your mileage may vary. I need to locate and write up my notes.)

One less Linksys WRT-54G in the world

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Well, actually, no. We still have it. But it’s unplugged. At the next garage sale, we’ll get rid of the carcass.

I replaced my Linksys WRT-54G wireless router with an ASUS WL-520GU. Out of box, the ASUS is a better deal with far superior features. These include using static IPs, so I can permit individual machines rather than allowing all my neighbors to crack my WPA key at their leisure. Another useful feature is meaningful logging. The Linksys and my Westel DSL modem don’t work well together; I have to reboot the pair of them about 2-3 times a week. If the Linksys had logs, I could tell whether the problem was in it or in the Westel modem. Now I can find out.

But that’s the out-of-box firmware. The ASUS router also works with Tomato, an aftermarket firmware upgrade, that provides a slew of additional features. There are similar projects for Linksys routers, but all the Linksys routers I’ve ever found are cost-reduced emasculated versions too lacking in RAM or Flash memory to work with any of the replacement firmware.

So. I’m a happy ASUS customer for three reasons: better out of box features, the potential for even more features when or if I get around to upgrading the firmware, and (best of all) I get to retire a blue Linksys router. What’s not to like?

Wall of Moisture

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Wall of Moisture

Driving west on I-10 Sunday, I saw again why California has a desert. The moisture from the coast rarely makes it very far inland. This is at the San Gorgonio pass, about 100 miles E of Los Angeles. See the windmills? They’re there because there is usually an east wind (i.e., westbound). When there’s weather in the Inland Empire and it wants to go east, it can only get this far.

The Lives of Others

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I finished watching The Lives of Others. That makes two subtitled foreign films this century! Awesome. It’s the story of a secret policeman with the East German Stasi and a couple he is assigned to investigate.

I’m no good at movie reviews, so I won’t try. I think the story and the characters were both excellent. There is almost no “action” — and yet at moments your heart is pounding because of the intensity. (More like a thriller or old-school horror movie, in that way.) No special effects, no CGI.

The main character is Gerd Wiesler, played by the late Ulrich Mühe. His life story is interesting in its own right.

I’m glad I saw this movie. It’s an excellent critique of the totalitarian state — the best I can remember; perhaps as good as Animal Farm. But it’s also an enjoyable movie to watch.

Child Sacrifice?

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This makes me sick:

Argentines Francisco Lotero, 56, and Miriam Coletti, 23, shot their children before killing themselves after making an apparent suicide pact over fears about global warming.

(There was, incredibly, a survivor.)

Salt Science

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This was interesting, in the NY Times science blog:

Dr. McCarron and his colleagues analyzed surveys from 33 countries around the world and reported that, despite wide differences in diet and culture, people generally consumed about the same amount of salt. … The results were so similar in so many places that Dr. McCarron hypothesized that networks in the brain regulate sodium appetite so that people consume a set daily level of salt.

The rest of the article is about efforts to regulate salt in foods. What if that finding were correct? Imagine trying to set up a regulatory environment to achieve “safe” salt levels if there was a neurological trigger in the brain to get a different amount. When we prohibit alcohol and drugs, it doesn’t work, but at least it fails differently for different people.

(RT Instapundit.)

Cool Tool – Irritating Co-workers Edition

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The Evil-Tron is an electronic gadget not much bigger than a quarter. It’s got a strong magnet, so you can attach it just about anywhere, like under someone’s desk, or in framework rigging for the suspended ceiling.

What it does is make sounds — “unidentifiable scratching sounds,” or “eerie whispering ‘hey, can you hear me?” — at random intervals, and so mess with someone’s mind. Just the thing to get your coworkers.

I have got to get me one of these. Or … perhaps … the economy pack: get three for just $18. Hmmm….