Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, May 11, 2016
“This is the most transparent administration in history.”
Barrack Obama
Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.
Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under Socialism, the powerful become rich.
Under Socialism, government employees become powerful.
I continue to recover from the death of the D: drive in Alien Artifact, the formerly Windows 7 system converted by stealth to Windows 10. The conversion by Microsoft had nothing to do with the D Drive dying; it was time and past time, and in fact we were about to replace both drives in Alien Artifact when the disaster happened. Actually it was more major annoyance than disaster; everything was backed, up it was still time consuming. Alien Artifact had a relatively small SSD C drive because when he was built SSD drives were expensive; we put Windows and program files on the C drive, and everything else on a big spinning metal drive; in particular all the Outlook data files, the .pst files, were on D.
When the D drive died, Alien Artifact still worked, but Widows gets seriously annoyed when it can’t find the Outlook data files, and searches everywhere it can see; and this can take quite a long time. Other programs also experience serious delays. Alien Artifact was seriously unusable; so today we got a large spinning metal drive, formatted it in Eugene, the new main system, and inserted it in place of the dead D drive. Worked like a charm. Alien Artifact is his chipper old self again, at least until you call for files from the D drive and they aren’t on that blank disk. This won’t be long. Tomorrow we’ll put a large SSD C drive cloned from the present C Drive in there, and the D will hold only movies and other downloads, no critical data at all. That’s the scheme we use for Eugene, because his SSD C drive was bought this week, and SSD drives big enough to hold both programs and data are cheap enough to make that practical. Silicon is cheaper than iron, after all’ of course if you want 5 Terabytes that isn’t true, but you don’t need a 5 TB C drive; at least not yet.
We did get a 5 TB spinning metal drive to add to Eugene; that drive will hold a backup of everything taken daily, from the main machine and also the Surface Pro. I hope to avoid losing a week to a dead drive ever again. Of course I didn’t actually lose a week to that dying drive; we had various other plagues of locusts eat several days here at Chaos Manor; I’m pleased to say those are over as well.
One way to spend time is learning the tricky ways Windows 10 and Office 365 work. They’re just enough different from earlier versions to drive you toward madness if you let them. They are almost never explained. Once you find out how you do something, you’ll be amazed that you didn’t think of it at once – which I think is the problem. They seem obvious once you know them – well most of them do – and I’m sure it never occurs to the Program Managers that they’re not obvious to someone who is used to doing the same thing but a different way for years. That’s the charitable way of looking at it, anyway.
I have to conclude that Windows 10 is usable and learnable. It takes effort, and for the work I do I’d as soon have Windows 7, but it is fast, and it tries to make your work easier – and the sooner I accept that it’s going to try things the way it thinks I will want them, the better off both of us will be. Word and Outlook now have features I will never need, and I liked Word 10 better, but I think it futile to resist; and I’m finding ways to make life easier for a two finger typist who has to stare at the keys after a lifetime of being a touch typist who looked at what I was typing. I can’t do that anymore, and some of my complaints about the “improvements” can be traced to that. Bottom line: equipment is getting faster, and software is trying to keep up with it. Live with that.
Also live with SAI taking over many jobs, Some do it pretty well. Others do it horribly. Over time the obvious failures are going to be eliminated, and one day you’ll wonder how you got along without all the AI in your life. Younger people already know that. Us old codgers are just going to have to learn
This is Pledge Week at KUSC, the LA Good Music radio station, and so it’s Pledge Week at Chaos Manor. Pledge Weeks are the only time I will bug you about Paying For This Place. We operate on the Public Radio model: it’s free to all, but if there aren’t enough subscribers I’ll turn my attention to more lucrative efforts: I do have to eat and pay Internet fees and build new equipment every now and then, and time spent on this isn’t spent on other activities. So far there are enough subscribers to make this place worth while.
If you can’t remember when you last subscribed, it’s very likely time to renew your subscription. If it’s been a year, it’s certainly time to renew. A subscription doesn’t cost that much, and I try to get something up every day; I certainly manage every few day, and I don’t think I’ve missed a week even when I had my stroke. Be a patron of the arts. Subscribe!
Trump is still the candidate. For some that’s good news. For others it’s various degrees of bad. But surely it’s better than Hillary or four years more of Mr. Obama? Mr. Trump may not be able to end the depression we have been stuck with for 8 years, but he says he’ll try, and his model is Reagan and his tax cuts, which were modeled on Kennedy’s tax cuts (from marginal rates of 90% for Heaven’s sake!), and both of those produced booms that lasted for years.
I’m going to post this so it has a Wednesday date, but I’m not through; I’ll be back in a few minutes.
Scott Adams: “If this were poker, which hand looks stronger to you for a national election?”
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Roland Dobbins
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
