Overlooked

Republicans in the USA say they don’t like regulation. I call bullshit. They LOVE regulation if it supports the status quo.

The cleanest example is the case of Kansas meatpacker who wants to test ALL slaughtered cows for mad cow disease. Agriculture Department went to court to stop them, and the federal appeals court agreed with them. I always thought my America was a capitalistic country where competition was king. No so.

France, both left and right, has no issue with regulation. But in general they are looking out for the people and not business. A good example of of this telling French competition council telling France Telecom they are not allowed exclusive rights to sports and movie content. They want to be sure there is competition in the Internet and IPTV market and that this competition is based on the data service  and not the content an ISP can contract for.

diane has been a faithful server for about 5 years. Before that it was a general purpose laptop for 3 years until its screen died.

I have been using as a file server, podcast server and backup server all this time.? Only need to restart the Real Audio application, time-to-time due to memory leaks.

The OS never caused a re-boot. This proves that NT based Windows can be very stable if your drivers are stable and you pay attention to your applications.

diane is being retired. She has been replaced by a younger and faster ex-laptop.

csw

System information for \\diane:
Uptime:??????????????????? 609 days 22 hours 53 minutes 47 seconds
Kernel version:??????????? Microsoft Windows 2000, Uniprocessor Free
Product type:????????????? Professional
Product version:?????????? 5.0
Service pack:????????????? 4
Kernel build number:?????? 2195
Install date:????????????? 06/02/2002, 22:12:56
Activation status:???????? Not applicable
IE version:??????????????? 6.0000
System root:?????????????? C:\WINNT
Processors:??????????????? 1
Processor speed:?????????? 365 MHz
Processor type:??????????? Intel Pentium II or Celeron
Physical memory:?????????? 192 MB
Video driver:????????????? NeoMagic MagicGraph256AV driver

Nowhere as funny as his Thunderbolt Kid, but still a pretty good read about his travels in Europe. Europe has changed a lot since he did his trip, but there are still truths in this book.

My four year old Dell Insperion 610? was having power supply issues, so I asked our system manager for a new laptop–same as all the sales guys. WRONG.

He gave me a Dell Vostro 1520.? In addition to the total wrong name, Vostro, the design of this laptop is wrong for sales guys and wrong as a laptop.

1. Too big and heavy for sales guys/
2. While being too big, Dell shrunk the keyboard for no reason.
3. The big nice space in front of the keyboard to rest your hands get too HOT to rest your hands. The left side will cause damage to your hand–there should be a law against this.
4. The four USB? connections (4 is good) are in the wrong place. Two should be on the back and two should be on the left or right side, but closer to the screen. They get in the way (e.g. of the mouse).
5. Speaking of getting in the way, the headphones and microphone connectors are on the front. Again dumb place.
6. There are some nice buttons to control the media player and sound volume.? But the only feedback you get is a pretty blue light which your finger covers. Dumb.

I’ve told my system manager to get me a smaller, not hot, anything. This Dell Vostro (dump name) 1520 really should not be bought by anybody.

After using Bloglines for a few years, I have switched completely to Google/Reader.

I spend way too much time getting my news, politics editorials, F1 updates, latest gadgets, funny pages, Google Alerts, software updates, LinkedIn changes–everything, via RSS feeds. Bloglines was my RSS reader of choice and I spent hours using it.

Google/Reader’s user interface never appealed to me. Actually, I really like the Beta Blogines UI and could not figure out Google/Reader’s.

Over the holidays I got fed-up with Bloglines slow performance and outages.? I forced myself to try again Google/Reader. After a month, I am a happy convert.

I still don’t like how Google/Reader groups feeds when you read a entier folder, but the keyboard short-cuts for navigating folders (shift-n, shift-p, shift-o, shift-x) which started as a workaround have become the killer feature for me. Also, Google/Reader/Mobile is clean and fast.

I am sure that if Bloglines did not have operational problems I would have never switched–to much momentum. Now that I have, I am one happy puppie.

So long Bloglines and thanks for the fish.

Here are a few more Windows Mobile Applications I Cannot Live Without to add to my previous list.

• ceTwit
  is the best way I have found to upload photos from my phone to the web. It uses twitter and a site called twitpic. As a site affect, the link to the photo gets sent to my Facebook status feed. Works with SFRWAP too!
• iSkoot
  keeps me in touch with my Skype contacts. The IM part works fine, but the updates are a bit slow. The phone part works great for calling your Skype contacts. With my SFR subscription it costs nothing to call my Skype contacts. Works with SFRWAP too!
• playlistmgr
  is the Swiss army knife of the playlist world on Windows Mobile.
• klaxon
  is a basic alarm clock program that will ring until it wakes you up.

:-)

I cannot remember if I ever read a book which made me laugh so hard. I mean, laugh out-loud into tears funny.

There is plenty of his story I could relate to growing up in small-town Vacaville in the mid-1960’s.

:-}

Well written, easy to read, interesting subjects.

:-{

Not all that Science Fiction nor a great story. Mostly a Greek Island travel log.

:-}

The next Grisham.