Wininit.dll, converting to ThinkPad for a week, maybe more.

View 827 Thursday, June 05, 2014

Saturday at Oh Dark thirty I get a limousine to LAX to head off to Hilton Head Island for a conference onf nanotechnology and technology in general. His is a professional conference and they have invited several science fiction writers, including Niven and me, to come talk to them and attend the conference and listen to papers. It would be a lot of fun.

So of course today my main computer seems to have decided that it has no wininit.dll file, and thus cannot open most programs. I can still access the machines files, I just can’t run this program which means I am using the ThinkPad to do that. I do that when at the beach, and I always forget how to do it because LiveWriter remembers what was written on this machine but doesn’t go out and look at the net to see what’s there so I have problems finding the files I have written. This is going to be experimental. Meanwhile if you know how to make a perfectly good machine believe it has a wininit.dll file in windows/systems32 (which it does – I can see the file—and it’s simple –

Actually I am sure one of my advisors know and will be telling me by the time I get up tomorrow. Meanwhile I better learn how to do this because it’s road warrior time again. Haven’t done that in a while.

I am of mixed emotions on the POW swap. I do understand the notion what we leave none of the Legions behind. Even a deserter – technically he can’t be a deserter because he was not gone of his own free will for thirty days. He may have intended to desert but he was caught by the Taliban before his expiration date so to speak. My original inclination was to think well, you bought your own farm, boy, but that doesn’t digest well. I’m glad I didn’t have to make the decision. I still say we surely could have negotiated a better deal than five flag officers for a PFC. On the other hand, I tend to agree that it’s all within the President’s legitimate war powers. Whether it was a good decision or not, it was his decision.

I’m going to post this much just to see if all it working. I’ll try to write more but it’s late. I spent the day working on these sick computes. In the old days I’d have got a good column out of all of it.

Well, it posted, and the local copy knows the title, so all is not lost.  And I have outlook working on this machine – it had managed to corrupt the outlook.pst file and that took time to figure out how to fix, but it was easy enough.  What you need to do with Windows 7 at least is right click the start button, open windows explorer,and search for scanpst.exe.  Run that file on outlook.pst and after much trundling and 8 passes through the system it will tell you the file is corrupt and ask permission to fix it.  Then go have lunch.  It will get it done.  And I suspect my wininit.dll problem is no more difficult than that, once I figure it out.

This is the anniversary of Tiananmen  Square and the fall of the goddess of democracy. Chia tries to forget that ‘incident’ and has suppressed its memory, but the Internet is hard to control.  Arthur Koestler said that the sufficient condition for the end of totalitarianism intellectual power was the free exchange of ideas.  Other ideologies may prevail, but the totalitarian varieties of the mid twentieth century were doomed by the Internet.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.