September 10, 2007: Had my first real VISTA crash yesterday, out of a total so far of perhaps 15 hours use. Not a very good average, but the sample is pretty small. I did a normal cold boot, got through the password and then nothing, nada, zilch, just a black screen. I had to hold down the on/off button for ten seconds or so to restart. I get that kind of lockout
An idea in search of a plot... This is all related to a story that came to me last night. I was thinking about my lack of communication with the opposite sex, and how every attempt at conversation seems to end up as some kind of power contest, and I wondered what I would do if there were two boats, one filled entirely with women and the other with men, all
A few minutes later... Whoa! See below. More interesting glitches... When I started checking my Yahoo groups, I noticed that all the new messages in several of them stopped yesterday, which is VERY unusual. The kind of high-level hack that would be required to stop me from getting any contact thru yahoo central would seem to require authorization on the highest l
Update: July 17th, 2007. Last week Evryx ran a couple of contests, both here and in Japan, to promote use of their image recognition system. The local Pulitzer Prize Winning "Orange County (OC) Register" gave the company a whole page of free coverage in their business section, so it wasn't for lack of people knowing about it. The results of the promo, acc
Some notes from an ongoing novel: Had I only listened to Mom. "Don't take chances. Go with the crowd. Stick your head up and it will get chopped off." Live and learn. Or, in my case, "Die and forget," perhaps. It started with the font wars. You recall when fonts broke free of simple 2D shapes of a single color. Oh, yes, of course there wer
The first encounter that I recall with my Uncle Clark (my dad's brother) was probably one Christmas season, when, as usual, the family trekked to Shrewsbury, MA, probably from Millton, VT, but possibly from Rome, GA, in the early 1950's. I recall that when the entire extended Osborn family sat down to eat breakfast, Clark set a silver dollar, roughly $20 in today's
First and up front, to set the context, here are the main players in my little personal drama: Me, born 1948, mostly straight "A" scholar thru high school, National Merit Scholar, IQ 145, computer nerd (web designer), social activist, libertarian, atheist, identified a few years back as likely having Asperger's syndrome, no known kids. My dad, (d
Some notes from an ongoing novel: Had I only listened to Mom. "Don't take chances. Go with the crowd. Stick your head up and it will get chopped off." Live and learn. Or, in my case, "Die and forget," perhaps. It started with the font wars. You recall when fonts broke free of simple 2D shapes of a single color. Oh, yes, of course there were early
When I post, I usually am writing from memory. Occasionally I get details wrong, and am happy (if chagrinned) to be corrected. When I have the time, I try to include as many references and links as possible to assist the reader in checking my story. Then there are the people who simply don't want certain things said, certain subjects examined, or who are si
Sorry drmiler, sounds like trolling to me. I started with computers on an IBM 360 in 1970 using punch cards, and I was an early adopter with personal computers in the late '70's. I also instigated the Watts Computer Gang Project, out of Sheenway School and Cultural Center and financed by Richard Prior in the late '70's. I consulted with schools on educational computers in the early and mid '80's, and I worked as a free-lance journalist covering cutt
I note that a similar situation, perhaps not quite so violent, but certainly having that potential, existed under the Roman Empire, which kept expanding as other countries or factions within those countries kept pleading for Rome's military assistance to settle their problems with the nasty neighbors or native troublemakers. So you ended up with Yugoslavia under Tito, or Iraq under Saddam, a lid kept on the mess by shear brute force majure, bu
drmiler: I wouldn't mind paying a fee for library use. I already am via my taxes. Same for "public" (state) "schooling" (indoctrination). The local universities offer access for a significant fee of ~$100/year. If it weren't for the parking and long walks to get there on my bad knee, that would be attractive. I pay three times that for my gym access. There's an idea! If I could just combine gym and library, with internet termina
I really think that this should be a separate forum and suggest making it one. There are various forums that impinge upon the topic - romance, homo, parenting, psychology, but no direct focus on the issues that seem to inevitably arrise. The immediate impetus for my bringing this up was mention on today's Digital Village radio program (audio availa
Would Allah allow Mecca to be nuked? If terrorists nuked a city in the U.K., U.S., France, India or Russia, in the name of Allah, then one possible response would be interesting - as a thought experiment at least. Suppose the country suffering the nuclear attack by the Jihadists announced that two days hence they planned to turn Mecca into a nasty radioactive crater, uninhabitable for the next ten thousand years. They were giving all the faithless t
Cactoblasta: Ideals are nice to point to, but socialism is about top-down state power as means to get there, and means determine ends in the real world. At one branch, the Costa Mesa Tech Library, which is an ongoing experiment with about 30 computers and a nice color printer, the staff is very focussed on helping the users get the most out of the system, and various staff members there have essentially echoed many of my own concerns and objections.
If minimum wages actually worked to the positive, then why stop with a low minimum wage? Logically, we should set the maximum possible minimum wage, whatever that comes to. Why $7? Why not $50? $500? $5,000,000,000... . Then we could all do one pico-second of work and retire forever on infinite wealth. (Of course, the union dues would be killer. ) The minimum wage laws w
Usually, a large organization that uses hundreds of computers would rely upon maintenance via an in-house technician, rather than paying the high prices that a home or small business would pay for the insurance of a store or factory warranty and service contract. The version of Word that the libraries here use has only the very basic options of cropping, sizing, positioning relative to text, etc. My experience yesterday, which led me
Update: 08/29/09 The Tu
Here's the crux of the issue: We know that the universe operates by strict causality. Miracles and other alleged exceptions, such as the Heisenburg Uncertainty Priciple, quantum mechanics, etc. simply extend causality to the "Spiritual" realm, or add additional facets such as extra dimensions whose workings may lie beyond our immediate ability to know. In
I'm mirroring this, BTW, from the "Return to Reason" objectivist site, as I keep having the sad experience of losing files that I don't put in multiple locations... I'd like to first focus upon a real anomoly in the objectivist experience: "The Fountainhead" vs. "Atlas Shrugged" (TF vs. AS) Now please don't assume that I'm taking so
Did they perchance finally put in something equivalent to the Amiga's incredibly useful ASSIGN command that let you on the fly tell the OS to consider any arbitrary set of folders or drives to be a single logical device? As in, having fonts scattered around on CDs, floppies, USB sticks, the local HD, etc. I'll bet not. I'll bet that you still can't even grab a set of filenames off the folder display. Or, what about setting aliases on the fly that
Some people think that I'm crazy. I nurture this impression to some degree, mostly for amusement value. Or perhaps they are right, in which case I likely wouldn't know, would I? Q. If I were crazy, then would it be better to convince people that I was trying to act crazy? After all, many truly crazy people can maintain a show of sanity day by day, until they lose
So, what exactly does it mean that Warren Buffet has decided to give $10 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? What does charity actually accomplish, if anything? First, note that the world of goods and services exists as a kind of continuous auction. There is a limited supply of just about anything and everything at any point in time. We either
I've been unable to get to most of my major articles for the past week. I can get to the first section, no problem, but trying to access the list of my articles, or go to the "next" section invariably brings up an error message screen. http://philosborn.joeuser.com/ If I use the "more" option on the "Top Articles" section to the right side of the main screen, I can get to a few more articles, but still several of them return the error screen
Oh joy: Now, even though I can't get to half of my own articles, guess what? I CAN get to other people's articles, which are now showing up as mine, and apparently edit them, as the edit feature is not ghosted or anything. 7/5/06 The up side is that whatever goofs you may have made, admitting to strange sexual habits, threatening the execu
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