Year: 2012

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The Wednesday Roundup

Put on your seat belts kids… we’re hitting the ground running today!

– Ah, ObamaCare. The news just gets worse and worse for you.

– And research indicates that liberals are less tolerant online than other people? NO WAY! It’s hardly surprising, given all the liberal crap I see on Facebook and Twitter here in the Madison, Wisconsin of the South Charlotte, but it’s nice to see the actual black and white numbers.

– The Wall Street Journal has this short but sweet piece about Britain’s continuing War on Christianity. The author, in my opinion, quite rightly, states that “Britain’s equality and non-discrimination rules already have more loopholes than a coherent principle can bear”. The author mentions the case of Nadia Eweida, who was suspended without pay from her job at British Airways for wearing a crucifix. Wearing a crucifix, the British government said, is not actually a protected practice of religion, in the same way that Sikhs are required to wear turbans, or certain Jewish men feel compelled to wear a yarmulke. Furthermore, the government stated, Eweida was always free to seek employment elsewhere. However, the same government is prosecuting Peter and Hazelmary Bull, a married couple who own a bed & breakfast and have, for years, refused to rent rooms to  non-married couples (gay or straight). So while Eweida is free to seek employment elsewhere, people wanting accommodation at the Bulls’ B&B are not free to seek lodging elsewhere. Yeah, it makes perfect sense.

– I don’t know if this is true or not, but some rich Nazi supporters in California allegedly built a huge compound for Adolf Hitler in the hills above Los Angeles. It seems that these Nazi nutters were so sure that Hitler would conquer America that they had the compound built in hopes that Der Fuhrer would rule America from there (the property is in the news because it’s going to be bulldozed soon and made into a picnic area).

– This is also highly suspect, but the footage is kind of cool: there’s a grocery store in Adelaide, Australia that’s supposedly haunted, and CCTV captured candy flying off the shelf all by itself. So the story goes, the alleged ghost is a former customer known for having a sweet tooth.

– Artist Paul Cadden makes some incredible drawings using only a pencil. Check them out: you will seriously think you’re looking at B&W photographs!

– Speaking of art, scroll down this page to see a bunch of iconic album covers reproduced using Pantone swatches. I especially like the one of Roxy Music’s Country Life.

– Aaron Parecki is an iPhone app developer. He developed an app that tracked his movements via GPS for a year. The results are pretty… and pretty cool!

– And lastly, today’s “Cute Animal Pictures” involve a German Shepherd dog who has become friends with some Lynx kittens.

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Top 10 Tunes

As always, from the home office in London… here’s the Top 10 song chart for the week ending March 18, 2012:

1) Marsheaux – “Faith’
2) Marsheaux – “Thirteen/True”
3) The Ultrasonics – “Perfect Girl (Marsheaux Remix)”
4) Marsheaux – “Summer”
5) Marsheaux – “Stand By”
6) Marsheaux – “The Promise”
7) Saint Etienne – “Tonight”
8) Marsheaux – “Ghost”
9) Two Door Cinema Club – “Something Good Can Work”
10) Marsheaux – “Breakthrough”

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-03-18

Continue reading “Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-03-18”

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone!

Happy_Saint_Patrick's_Day

My birthday is on March 11 and, for various reasons, we decided to not “officially” celebrate it until St. Pat’s this year. And so, because it’s both my birthday and St. Pat’s, I’ve decided that today will be known as “The Drunkening”.

I’m gonna live tweet The Drunkening from Sir Ed’s. If you wanna keep up with the festivities, click here.

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Congrats, Illinois!

The state of Illinois is the first state in history to have two former governors in prison at the same time… and consecutive governors, no less. George H. Ryan is currently serving his sentence after being convicted of federal corruption charges, and Rod Blagojevich entered prison this week after being convicted of (wait for it) corruption charges.

In all, Illinois has had four governors serve prison terms: Ryan and Blagojevich, Dan Walker (governor from 1973 to 1977) and Otto Kerner, Jr. (governor from 1961 to 1968). Two other Illinois governors have been indicted but eventually acquitted: William G. Stratton (Kerner’s predecessor, governor from 1953 to 1961) and Len Small (governor from 1921 to 1929).

Only two other states – Louisiana and West Virginia – have had two incarcerated governors ever. And in both those cases – Richard Leche and Edwin Edwards of Louisiana and William Barron and Arch Moore of West Virginia – the convictions were decades apart.

Maryland also deserves a mention, as two of her consecutive governors – Spiro Agnew and Marvin Mandel – ended up as felons. Agnew pleaded no contest to accepting bribes, under condition that his main punishment was resigning from the office of Vice President of the United States. Mandel, the state’s only Jewish governor, was convicted of mail fraud and racketeering.

Arizona also has a notorious history. Evan Mecham, governor for just over a year, was impeached on charges of misuse of funds and obstruction of justice, but acquitted of criminal charges in the matter. Fife Symington III, who served after Mecham, was convicted of extortion, making false financial statements and bank fraud.

So… way to go, Illinois! You make America proud!

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Win7: Task Scheduler and Weekdays

In Windows XP, it was easy to configure Task Scheduler to run a certain event on weekdays only:

shutdown2

Windows 7, however, doesn’t have a “weekdays” option, just “Daily”, “Weekly”, “Monthly”, “One time”, “When the computer starts”, “When I log on”, or “When a specific event is logged”:

w7_ts_01

So… how do you configure tasks to only run on weekdays? It’s totally counter-intuitive, but you choose “Weekly” and then choose which day(s) you want the task to run on:

w7_ts_02

It doesn’t make a lot of sense at first, but new method is actually far more powerful than the old “XP way”. You could, for instance, easily create a task that only runs on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays using this method, whereas in XP you’d have to create three individual daily tasks that run on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Or if you had a business that was open every day but Sunday, you could easily schedule a backup to run Monday – Saturday with this method.

Play around with it – I think you’d like it better in the end!

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HUGE BREAKING NEWS!

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has announced that he will resign at the end of this year. He is to become master of Magdalene College, Cambridge next year.

This is OMG HUGE news! On the one hand, the Anglican Communion will be free of a spineless technocrat who refused to stand up to the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. But, on the other hand, his replacement could be even worse.

The early favorite to replace Williams is Dr. John Sentamu, the current Archbishop of York. Sentamu, who fled Uganda in 1974 due to his criticism of the dictator Idi Amin, is a former attorney (barrister) and judge who is known for his strong stance on social issues. He once cut up his clerical collar as a protest against the regime of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and he also once spent a week living in a tent in York Minster, fasting for victims of violence in the Middle East. Sentamu is vehemently opposed to same sex marriages, but supports civil unions, which should put him on a collision course with KJS and her minions in TEC. Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London (known for his environmental activism, but opposed to the ordination of female bishops), Tim Stevens, the Bishop of Leicester (who recently took a very public stance against benefit caps), and Nick Baines, Bishop of Bradford, are some other names mentioned as possible successor.

Let’s all pray that +++ Williams’ replacement is a faithful steward of the Anglican cause. As someone else said, Williams “rubbed his fevered brow with his fevered hands while everything burned around him.  History will not be kind to the Archbishop who did so little and yet wrought so much devastation”.

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A (Dumb) Virgin Mobile Tip

Virgin Mobile USA, the Sprint-owned prepaid cellular company, has three product lines: “Beyond Talk” (for smartphones and advanced feature phones), “Paylo” (for basic feature phones), and “Broadband2Go” (for mobile adapters and hotspots).

For some reason, Virgin has chosen to sell prepaid cards for each service. And the market for such cards – at least in the Charlotte area – is oddly segmented. For example, my local Walmart used to sell Beyond Talk cards next to other prepaid cellular cards from Boost Mobile, Net10 and Tracfone. But Walmart stopped carrying them for some reason, and now only sells Broadband2Go cards in the computer accessories section. Walgreen’s still has $25 or $50 Beyond Talk cards, while the CVS across the street only sells the “you choose” $10/$30/$50 Paylo cards. Lowe’s, across the street from CVS and next door to Walmart, sells Paylo cards in $10, $20, or $50 amounts.

So here’s the tip: it’s not a secret – in fact, it’s printed right on the front of the cards – but you can use any Virgin Mobile prepaid card to add funds to any Virgin Mobile account. If you have Beyond Talk, you can use a Paylo card. Or you could use a Beyond Talk card to add money to your Broadband2Go account. As I say, the front of the cards clearly states “adds money to any Virgin Mobile account”. But it wasn’t that long ago that I didn’t know there wasn’t a difference between them. I figured someone out there might not know either, and have the same question.

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Restarting Aero

I have a desktop computer running Windows 7 Ultimate with Aero enabled, and a netbook running Windows 7 Starter without Aero. So when I use my netbook to connect to my desktop over Remote Desktop, the desktop has to switch from Aero to Classic mode. And when I log back in to the console session on my desktop, Windows is supposed to switch back from Classic to Aero.

Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Just the other day I was in bed and decided to use the netbook to connect to my desktop so I could go through some RSS feeds and tweets in Outlook. But, after I disconnected, the desktop remained in Classic mode… which is just ugly. I knew from previous occurrences that I could just reboot the computer, but I had a lot of stuff open and didn’t want to do that. So I tried shutting down and restarting Explorer (the shell, not the web browser), but that didn’t help. I had a flash of inspiration and tried restarting Desktop Window Manager session service… and it worked!

If this happens to you, all you need to do to fix it is open a command-prompt with admin privileges and type the following (be sure to wait for the “service stopped successfully” message before entering the second command):

net stop uxsms
net start uxsms

If you know of a more elegant way to fix this, please let me know!

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That’s Mean…

As you may know from a previous post, I collected records in middle and high school. In fact, it was something I was known for. When a friend would bring a new friend I didn’t know to my house, they’d want me to show the new guy my records. And, believe it or not, it was such a common thing that I had a sort of “presentation” ready to go:

“This is a Japanese Duran Duran album… and this is a German Duran Duran single… and this is an Italian single from The Police … and this is a Venezuelan Madonna album.”

It may (or may not) surprise you to learn that people would often ask if the artists sang in Japanese on the Japanese records, or German on the German records, etc. Almost always I’d just say “of course not.. that’s silly”.

But there was this one time… I was trying to date a girl from Dacula, GA (and back then, Dacula was “the sticks”). The girl came to my house one day, and she brought a “friend” with her. This friend wasn’t a “real” friend, in that she hadn’t sought out this girl for her friendship. Instead, the friend was a girl from next door she’d grown up with. So while the girl I was trying to date was cool, but a little bit country, her “friend” was as REDNECK as the day is long. I don’t think she’d ever seen incandescent lighting or indoor plumbing before, because she looked at everything in my house and was like “GOAH! GOAH! GOAH MAN!” [Editor’s note: You know how Gomer Pyle used to say “Gooollllyyy”? “Goah” is the author’s attempt at spelling the first syllable of that word. “Gaw” or “Gaahh” also work, but don’t have the “redneck flair” that “goah” seems to.]

The girl I was trying to date told her friend about my records, so I gave “Redneck Girl” the presentation. Of course, she asked about Duran Duran singing in Japanese. I don’t know why, but I looked at her, and with absolute sincerity I said “Why yes, they do sing in Japanese. In fact, the reason Duran Duran are so popular worldwide is because Simon LeBon speaks 191 languages!” Redneck girl was like “Goah! I just though he was a purty boy British faggit, but he must be SMART!”

I wonder if the poor girl still thinks Simon LeBon speaks 191 languages.