Fooling around with Windows 8. I don’t think I like it. And how did I acquire Bing Travel? And an odd glitch

View 770 Thursday, April 18, 2013

This is a fraction of a kiloton’s worth of fertilizer explosion smoke – before connecting any dots recall that ammonia and ammonium nitrate plants , being on the wrong side of the enthalpy of formation tracks, blow up with monotonous regularity- like the one in Toulose that went off just after 9-11

—

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

That was my first thought, particularly after I heard that the fire department had been called in earlier in the day. Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence. I bet there were a lot of people smoking marijuana just before the Marathon Bombing, and several accidents involving VW automobiles, and someone scratched his head just at the moment of the blast and someone involved in the Waco Massacre caught the flu, and…

I’ve been fooling around with small computers since before the S-100 buss days, since before CP/M and DOS, and I still don’t understand them. I can generally make them work, but that’s a different story.

A few minutes ago I woke up Swan, a very high end Windows 8 machine, and spent the customary time in confusion trying to find the control panel. I also found that BING Travel seems to have installed itself as a kind of virus – I never asked for it – and does not seem to have any kind of off switch. I tried to close the program – it gives some neat travel pictures, but I’m not going to Petra or Turkey or anywhere else just now but when it is running I can’t find the desktop – so I first tried to search for whatever was driving it and was told there was no such app. I finally used control alt delete to bring up task master and used that to close the application. After which I spent the customary time in confusion trying to find the control panel again – the easiest way is to use the Windows key to bring up that screen and just type control which energizes search and I can now leave the keyboard to mouse over the magically appeared control panel icon, poke that, scroll down and find Windows Update, and invoke that.

I remember way back in the early days there was some controversy over whether people preferred Windows and punching icons, or a command access screen where you typed in commands with or without parameters;. Windows 8 seems to have decided to make you use both for reasons not clear to me.

Having done that I found that I had two uninstalled updates. Attempts to let them install failed because I was not connected to the Internet. Actually it didn’t tell me that – I had to punch an error explanation request to get that information. And sure enough I was not connected to the Internet although the cable was connected. The lights weren’t blinking on the switch. I pulled the cable out from that and plugged it into another port on the switch. Still no lights. So I took one of the other cables to the switch and plugged that into the port I’d taken Swan’s connection out of, and it blinked cheerfully away. So go back and pull the cable out of Swan. Put it back in. Put the other end into the port it usually rests in on the switch. Success.

Now go back and install my updates. Trundle, then request for reset. Let it reset. Now I need to go back and see if closing that Bing Travel “feature” takes me off the internet. I’ll do that and go down to dinner.

The story continues later this evening…

Back after LASFS. All is well. Closing the Travel app does not get me off the Internet. Swan is working as sh should. Exactly what happened with that I will never know.  I am still frustrated by the Bing stuff which seems to be active without showing up as closable applications.  It’s not using much CPU or memory or bandwidth, and I suppose it does no harm, but I am old school: I like to know what use my computer is making of its resources, and I don’t want it doing things I haven’t at some point asked for or at least consented to.  I suppose that’s disosaurish.

Swan and Windows 8 work wonderfully when doing some things, and at the same time make some of the simplest things so complex I don’t like them. Just finding the desktop can be a pain. I am contemplating scrubbing Windows 8 and replacing it with Windows 7, but I get the haunting feeling that there’s something about Windows 8 I ought to know, and it keeps eluding me.  I continue to collect stories.

 

I do know that back when I was contemplating changing all Chaos Manor operations to Apple from Windows Vista, only to be interrupted by Windows 7 which seemed preferable, had it been 8 I probably would be all Apple all the time now. Peter’[s observation that with Apple everything is either very simple or impossible remains a fair summary of Apple, provided that you add that if you’re willing to become a UNIX guru you can do very difficult things with Apple. It’s a matter of how much time you want to invest in an operating system.  I gather that Windows 8 wants to move in that direction, but has the problem that a lot of old Users like me remember one way of doing things, and Microsoft wants to wean us away from all that complexity and induce us to accept the Windows 8 default way of working.  Sometimes I like that notion. Usually that’s when I’m thinking about it, not trying it. 

The radio news says there’s still unusual police activity around Boston and MIT and Revere. No one has yet come forth to claim credit for the Marathon bombing, and no suspects in custody yet.

The West, Texas explosion looks more and more like it was just what it seemed to be, fire in a fertilizer plant, dangerous and catastrophic but something to learn operations safety from, not a call to arms.

And just as it’s bed time there are bulletins form Watertown, and the Boston Globe is now reporting a suspect in custody.  No details available. Hits of mysterious explosions and “heavy police activity” in Watertown.  I am unlikely to hear anything before the news media do, and I have never been a breaking news reporter. I suppose I mention such things to show I am still sort of in touch with the world.  And every now and then I do get a few words from people closer to it all than me and who still remember.

And it’s time for bed. For some reason I don’t see at my web site what I can download from my web site.  When I post an updated version I don’t see the updates.  I haven’t time to figure all that out.  It just happened again. I post this, but this section doesn’t appear. What I see ends with the previous section and the words not trying it.  This seems to be some glitch in the system, but I haven’t time to figure out what it is.  I seem impelled to keep doing silly things so you don’t have to…

I fixed it and I have kept copies of the oddly defective posts, but I don’t understand. I’ll see if I can figure it out.  The “cure” was to keep adding stuff like the crazy picture and the little atom and keep publishing, then move text around the pictures and publish again, and eventually it all came our right. Ninety percent of computer genius is keep trying, and no that’s a not a definition of insanity when you’re dealing with these little beasts. They respond to cues you don’t understand. That I suspect is the origin of a number of religious rituals.