Coming Soon to a World near you

© March 2011

Something is coming.

It's coming like a T-Rex comes
   to the research trailer on the edge of the cliff.

The lying, thieving raping bastards who run this dying world are calling it.
They dance naked under a full moon,
calling it,
offering to exchange our lives and our future
   and our children's inheritance
   but not their own, if they can help it
   just ours
   for the power they can gain.

and it comes crashing through the trees
  snarling and biting
  and we don't notice the tree tops getting snapped aside
  like so many weeds
  because CBS and CNN sing their soothing lullaby
  Hush li'l baby, don't you cry,
  Mama gonna throw you to the Rex

The world changed when the towers fell into Pearl Harbor in 1929
And it's about to change again.
The beams are going to break
The restraint is going to give way

And it will come
And the image will explain it to us
as we're eaten.

Daylight Savings: end it now!

Today, once again, we observed the pagan ritual of Daylight Savings Time.

We do this twice a year, forcing the sun to advance in the sky the length of a time zone in the spring, and then forcing it to actually move backwards in the fall. This cannot be good for the sun!

So I did some research. It turns out that NASA and our government are aware of a phenomenon they secretly call "Sun Fatigue," but of course they aren't going to tell us about it. And when this gets out, they will deny deny and deny some more. But here are the photos.

First, the sun just before the government began requiring DST:

Notice the healthy yellow glow coming from our friend, the yellow sun, which gives Superman his powers.

Now notice the sun five years after they began tampering with the Universe itself:

You can see that the yellow has faded, and old sol is a little closer to being a Red Dwarf, and a little closer to imploding from exhaustion, absorbing our Earth in a black hole of utter destruction.

But a couple of years ago, they made it worse, much worse.

DST is now the law a full half of the year, leaving the sun even less time to recover from the enormous strain of going backwards every other half-year. And, because of new TSA regulations requiring the sun to also go through a security scanner every time it reaches a new time zone - after all, it is in our air space - our sun, our faithful friend, the source of our energy, is actually ill.

Just look at the sickly green that is infecting the face of our best friend in space:

Forget about global warming. This is the real danger. Something must be done. Write your congressman now, and demand that our sun be given its freedom once again.

Maddening phone tree systems

You've navigated through them. We all have. You call a large mega-company, and you press one for English. That's the cliché, but it never stops there. And by the time you get what you want done, you're at least a little irritated.

I've been doing the finances for GA's parents, because they're no longer able. I pay bills for them, take care of address changes, and help them call companies who need to be called. I'm kind of a problem solver for them. Recently, my father-in-law lost his health insurance card sometime during one of our trips to get medical visits done. It's not a terrible problem, because we can always use a recent statement from them to get the numbers required. But he needs something to carry in his wallet, and an 8 x 11 monthly statement isn't the best thing to carry in your wallet.

So I called the insurance company, and began my journey through the labyrinth of their phone tree.

Press "1" for English.

OK.

Do you have a current policy with Mega-Giant Health Insurance Corporation?

Yes.

Please enter the contract number.

I did so.

If you are inquiring about an existing claim, or a potential claim, or a denied claim, press "1".
If you are inquiring about a....  

...and on and on, but of course without any option for a live person. Eventually, at about number four, one of the offers had to do with requesting a form. "Aha! I thought. An insurance card might be considered a form. I'll go there." I pressed four.


If you are requesting a form ***, press "1" - if you are requesting a form ***, press "2" - if you are... and so on. None of the options was an insurance card, but one of the options was a blank space for about a second. Should I go for that one? I decided to chance it.

If you are requesting... and they named yet another form and another blank space. So I took a chance. I said to the phone computer, in a clear, firm voice, "I need a replacement insurance card."

I'm sorry, I didn't understand that, said the polite computer voice.

I said it again. "I need a replacement insurance card."

I'm sorry, I didn't understand that, said the polite computer voice again, with the same tone.

I said, with absolutely no irritation in my voice, "That's because you're an idiot."

And it said, "Would you like to speak to a customer service representative?"

I should have guessed that they would have the program listen for the word "idiot" as a clue to the customer losing his patience. Duly noted. I'll bet this works everywhere.

Things I love

In no particular order:

Enjoying the company of good friends. They can do the talking if they want to, and I'll listen.

The rich smell of earth carried gently out of the entrance of a cave.

The clean, non-earth smell of a limestone cave with no mud.

A good rehearsal in a production with good, committed actors.

A warm hug that lasts longer than the don't-misunderstand-this limit, because they know I won't misunderstand it.

Picking a perfectly ripened fruit from the garden. This goes for fruits, beans, whatever.

Solving a problem successfully. Computer, printer, you name it.

Getting a phone call from someone I love for no reason.

Long walks on the... well, anywhere. A hiking trail, a beach, a sidewalk.

Children laughing and playing with each other.

Moms and dads playing with their children.

Hearing wives say good things about their husbands.

Being appreciated. Oh, don't we all, though?

Hearing the hedgehog giggle on Frontierville.

Hearing the words "It needs more butter."

Eating in a foreign country. That little ham sandwich bagette thing in Paris tasted better than escargot at home.

Old photos

Lately I've been on a project.

It's been rewarding, and time consuming, and my eyes are starting to cross.
I've been scanning family slides, dating from the 40's to the 80's. Slides that old look monochrome, either blue or green or yellow, depending on the film used, and you would think that it would be impossible to coax true colors out of them. Sometimes it is impossible, but often you can get amazing results with a little patience.

The first set I tackled was my dearly departed dad's collection. There were slides in there that I had never seen, probably because on those occasions when he set up the projector, he mostly showed the ones that we were most likely to enjoy seeing. But he never threw away anything, and so there were some rejected slides that I am thrilled to discover - though, granted, I probably wouldn't have appreciated them as a ten year old lad.

Take a look at this one:

OK, you can tell that it was shot from an airplane, sure. But where is it? That, my friend, is the city of Tokyo, in 1945, before the end of the war.

Here is one taken in Alaska, in the Aleutian Islands, where he was stationed. Did you know we had bases set up in Alaska during WW2? Well, it made sense. When you hop from island to island on the way to Japan, Alaska is a great place to start.

 Anybody know what kind of plane that is? I didn't care back in the day, but now it looks kind of interesting.

Look at these guys trying to stay warm. They were all Air Force buddies of my dad, but of course I didn't care. I didn't know them. I didn't try to stay warm with them. I suspect that one could really learn to appreciate a hot cup of coffee when it's this cold all the time.






Now, here is another one, from 1946, at least I think it is. This was in the rejects box, and I did some serious color correction to bring out the natural colors. I have no idea who these people are, except that they are relatives of some kind. I wasn't even born yet, so I didn't know them until they were grown up. But it doesn't matter. Look at the stuff on the table. Look at the appliances in the background. I think it's a great little photo.

I'm probably not doing as great a job as a professional might, but then I'm giving each slide a lot more individual attention, so who knows?

But now, take a look at this slide, taken in Morocco after the war.

Look at the way the locals are dressed, sure, but notice the guy on the bicycle! I think I saw this movie.

But here is one that I think I remember seeing when I was a kid, but probably when Dad returned from Morocco, and not again, because it was in the reject box. Thing is, at that time, it was strictly forbidden to take pictures of women because - I don't know, but whatever it was, it didn't really hurt anybody, and so he slyly took a shot as he walked down the street in front of the gas station, and he somehow managed to not get beheaded for it. By now, the woman in the photo has been stoned to death for sneezing wrong or something. Or she's died of old age before reaching 50. You know how it is.

Tech Challenge

I am so proud of what I managed to do this morning.

I have been trying for almost a year to make it possible for GA's laptop computer to send files to our printer. In theory, it's supposed to be easy. She just looks at the network, selects the printer, makes it the default, and off she goes. The instructions published on the MS website say so.

But this is Windows XP fighting with Windows Vista. You see, I have Vista on my desktop in the study, and she has XP on her laptop in the living room. The printer is connected to the router via an ethernet cord, not tied directly to the desktop machine. The Vista machine can see it, and has logged it as the printer with no problems. But the XP machine... nope, can't even see it.

I Googled and Googled, looking for any possible solution, and I found dozens and dozens of people trying to find a solution on various forums. They were given all sorts of suggestions - make sure both the printer and the laptop have a share name with eight characters or less with no spaces, have it look for the location as \\computer\printer substituting the network share names, have it look for the IP address, make sure the IP address of the printer and laptop match the address that the router assigns them (how in blazes would they not? It's the router that assigns this!), install the printer driver on the laptop before trying to see it on the network... the list goes on and on. And nothing works.

Then I dug deep into the help files on the Vista machine looking for this problem. There, I found an article that explains that the XP machine has to have an LLDT installed. It's basically an overlay or hotfix or upgrade that lets the XP machine respond to a Vista inquiry. If you Google that, you'll find several uses of the acronym, but you have to disregard everything that doesn't mean Link Layer Topology Discovery. And you'd better be prepared to do a lot of research, because Microsoft doesn't make this one easy, though it should have been obvious that this was going to be a problem.

Seems that they produced a fix that you could simply run in Service Pack 1 and 2, but if you have Service Pack 3, as most people with XP do by now, it won't work. You'll try it from several different directions using the MS website, but after a while you realize that their website is linking to itself in a circle, and you're going round and round following their crazy instructions.

But at least now I had the information I needed. I knew that I somehow had to get that LLDT installed on the XP machine - I just couldn't do it using Microsoft's instructions.

The solution? Download and save the file they offer for SP1 or 2, ignoring the link for SP3 provided, then find a geeky website that explains exactly how to manually extract the various files from the darn thing. You'll be running the command line from outside Windows, and moving various files to various folders under Windows sys32. And you'd better do it exactly as the geek tells you, which I did. And I'll be darned. It worked. Oh, granted, it still didn't find the printer using XP's printer search function, but it did allow me to enter \\computer\printer (substituting the share names of course) and thus make it work with the laptop.

But I still wonder why the wizards at Microsoft felt that the most up to date version of XP would never be used with a Vista machine in the same home. They were so sure about this that they didn't bother to even give us a way to do this upgrade without finding a geek somewhere to guide us through it. The good news is that it gets us used to finding geeks and ways of getting around the crap they sell us. See "hacking" for more details.
Heh heh.

TV Death

I was watching a show on the Spike channel today, a series called "1,000 ways to die." Many of them were bizarre, most were good Darwin Award candidates. One really caught my attention.

Assuming they didn't just make these up out of thin air (which is possible), there was a grumpy old Scrooge sitting in his house during the Christmas season, when a group of carolers came to his house to sing for him.

He went to the door with a bowl of fruit, and began throwing apples and oranges at them. They didn't say whether he actually shouted "Bah! Humbug!" at them. As they ran away, a two pound hailstone fell from the sky and hit Scrooge in the head, killing him.



I wonder how I could find out if that really happened. I know at least one of them was likely made up, simply because - well, I'll relate that one.

Two drug dealers get shipwrecked, and are washed up on shore on this island, and are then eaten by cannibals. Now, who was supposed to have reported this incident? Not the drug dealers. Not their business associates. Maybe the cannibals?

 At the time I assumed that the idea was to simply list the ways to die, and being eaten by cannibals made the list, so they fabricated a possible scenario. But what about the Scrooge? That would have to be specific. I kind of want it to be true. Ya know?