Category Archives: Uncategorized

Went out trick or treating with Glenn, doesn’t he look cute?

He got lots of compliments and candy. It was a little cold, but he was a real trooper. Chocolate is a great motivator.  People were very impressed with his outfit.  The costume is very well made and looks pretty legitimate.  We picked up the costume (with helmet) last year and added the axe.  It is about he safest costume I have ever seen, with the green stripes be actual retro reflective material like the real thing.

The funniest costume we saw when we were out was this one:

Yep, that’s a real monitor shell and Dell keyboard. Tiff and I had a good laugh at that one. The man inside was an adult with a full beard.

Loaded up Windows 7 on Tiffany’s computer, she is very happy with it.  It only took Mircosoft 8 years to produce a decent operating system.  It is slick, nice, and steals ideas from just about everyone.  But, I guess imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  It is one of the few times we went with the latest anything.  XP was getting too old.  With my computer, I am still typing happily away with Mandriva Linux 2008.1.  I think I will wait for 2010 to come out before I update again.  I am looking forward to trying KDE 4.3. or 4.4, and there are no plans to backport it to 2008.1.

I must say, I really like being on the lagging edge of technology.  My 19″ LCD monitor is 8+ years old and has outlived 5 computers!  No 16:9 for me, 4:3 baby.  My computer case has seen 3 motherboards and processors, 4 power supplies, a 52X CD-ROM, a 16X CD-RW, a DVD-ROM, and 2 DVD-RW’s.  It has seen a floppy drive come and go (replaced with a card reader). All in the same steel case.  No aluminum here.  The case weighs about 18lbs, empty, and has 4 5.25″ bays,  8(!) 3.5″ bays and spaces for 4 80mm fans.  They don’t make ’em like this anymore, sonny.

Our netbook is not the latest and greatest, but very mature when we purchased it, with lots of reviews. 

My LCD TV is no name and works just fine.  I just got rid of my surround system, never used it.  My newest game console is a PS2. 

My point is, don’t go with the bleeding edge.  I wish I could find the article in Wired about always buying 2 year old technology, if you can.  It makes sense.
You know what this all adds up to?  Reliable technology and money in the bank.  I would much rather collect some more watches (that last damn near forever and will never be outdated) than the latest gadget.

With the demise of Geocities, I remember back to my first web site, which was hosted on Geocities, back in 1996/7.  I can’t even remember the address, to be honest.  It was a simple site, with little original content.  But, it reminds me how transitory the internet really is.  It is always changing, which is a great strength and weakness.  This is why, through it all, I have kept Cyberphreak.com.  Yeah, it costs money, but since I am paying for it, it is much less likely to disappear some day.  Myspace, Facebook, Bebo will all be gone eventually, along with all that content.  This is why books and magazines are still printed.  The death of a website does not wipe out that knowledge.
In other news, I don’t know about your area, but Chicagoland had no summer this year, and, so far, a really cold fall.  It dipped near freezing with frost everywhere this morning.  I think Halloween will be a cold one this year.
I have been keeping busy, work is going well.  Things are picking up, to the point that overtime has come back for the hourly people and a few people who were laid off are back.  It is a good sign if the electronics industry is looking up, since electronics is in everything.  I have never seen a recession this long or deep.  I hope we never see one like this again.

I really feel sorry for the typical windows user.  You are surfing the web, and you come across this rather scary looking window which loads in your web browser:

It has changing numbers, a moving status bar and everything.  Notice one other little thing, that is not a  windows taskbar running under there.  That’s KDE, and I don’t have a “C” “D” or any other lettered drive on my computer since I run Linux.  I am sure for a typical windows user, this looks pretty convincing.  It tries to download some ‘antivirus’ software, which I am sure either costs $100 a year or is actually a virus or trojan.  Here lies the problem with everyone running the same operating system with the same theme, it is very easy to trick uneducated users.  By the way, this is what my file browser actually looks like:

No drive letters, thank goodness.  Drive letters are a really stupid hold over from Q-DOS from 1979.  It really restricts how many partitions and drives you can have.  Make everything a file or directory and be done with it.  It has worked for UNIX for 40 years.  I would show you what a virus alert looks like for Linux, but, alas, there are no in the wild viruses for Linux.

I had to add this blog post since Facebook doesn’t allow comments this long:

Turning now to the rest of the agenda for XXXX, the time is at hand this year to bring comprehensive, high quality health care within the reach of every American. I shall propose a sweeping new program that will assure comprehensive health insurance protection to millions of Americans who cannot now obtain it or afford it, with vastly improved protection against catastrophic illnesses. This will be a plan that maintains the high standards of quality in America’s health care. And it will not require additional taxes.

Now, I recognize that other plans have been put forward that would cost $80 billion or even $100 billion and that would put our whole health care system under the heavy hand of the Federal Government. This is the wrong approach. This has been tried abroad, and it has failed. It is not the way we do things here in America. This kind of plan would threaten the quality of care provided by our whole health care system. The right way is one that builds on the strengths of the present system and one that does not destroy those strengths, one based on partnership, not paternalism. Most important of all, let us keep this as the guiding principle of our health programs. Government has a great role to play, but we must always make sure that our doctors will be working for their patients and not for the Federal Government.

Now that you have read the above paragraphs, guess who wrote them and when.  If it sounds like Obama, you are dead wrong.  It was written by President Nixon, in 1974, for his State of the Union address.  35 years later, we still don’t have comprehensive health care in this nation.  If you read about Obama’s and Nixon’s plans, they are very similar, and still just as needed.