08:33 – Barbara is due back around mid-afternoon. They’ll probably be driving back through wind and rain, although we haven’t seen much of either here yet. The forecasts have the weather from the hurricane moving in here tomorrow and Tuesday and then blowing through by Wednesday. It’s supposed to cool down here later in the week, with highs in the mid-40’s (~ 7C) and lows near freezing.
I plan to spend some time today labeling bottles for the new batch of 30 chemistry kits while I watch Heartland re-runs. I’ll also spend some time cleaning up before Barbara gets home. She always does a quick scan when she arrives home, counts the dog to make sure it’s not missing, and so on. (Bill, the boyfriend of the woman who lives across the street, restores old cars. He’s always offering to trade me one of his cars for one of our Border Collies. I once actually had a deal worked out with him to trade him Malcolm for his fully-restored 1951 Packard, but then Barbara heard about it. Yesterday, he offered to trade me his Porsche for Colin. I told him I would, but Barbara would notice.)
08:47 – Well, just as I posted that, Barbara called to say her dad is in the hospital. He was having trouble breathing due to his chronic congestive heart failure. They called 911 around 1:00 a.m. The paramedics transported him to the hospital, where of course they immediately put him on diuretics. They want to keep him at least overnight, and possibly longer. That means Barbara has to stay down there with her parents. She just got back to the beach house around 7:30 a.m. She’s pissed. For weeks now, it’s been obvious from the edema in his legs that her dad needed to go to the doctor or hospital, but he simply refused. I told Barbara before they left that I thought it was a big mistake to go to the beach with her dad in CHF. She agreed that it was an accident waiting to happen, but she allowed him to push her into taking them down. But this is the final straw. She said that from now on her dad is going to do what she and her sister decide he’s going to do.
If it was a 911, I would have traded. After all, the 911 still can shake it’s tail!
Sorry to hear about Barbara’s father, again. I hope she has better luck telling him what to do, than the doctors have had!
Before she left, I asked Barbara if she and her family really grokked that CHF in a man of 90 is a life-threatening condition, not just something that they could periodically have treated and have her dad be good as new. This is something that could kill her dad at any moment, and his refusal to watch his fluid intake or get treatment makes that all the more likely to happen. She said they knew that, but her dad was stubborn. I told her that was fine. Let him be stubborn, but that doesn’t mean she has to enable his stubbornness. There’s only so much he can do on his own, and driving down to the beach isn’t within his abilities. He wasn’t going unless they took him. But they took him. It’s just lucky he made it to the hospital. He could have died in the middle of the night at the beach house.
May I ask if he’s been prescribed diuretic/s? Does he take them. People that age can be mighty stubborn.
I think he has diuretic pills, which I don’t know if he takes or not. He’s also supposed to limit his fluid intake to something like a liter a day, which he doesn’t do. Barbara said this morning that his weight was up to something like 240 pounds instead of the (IIRC) 185 pounds he’s supposed to be.
As I said, he can be as stubborn as he wants to be. It’s his life. But Barbara and her sister shouldn’t be enabling his behavior, and they certainly shouldn’t have to keep picking up the pieces. I’m sure he doesn’t realize how much stress he’s putting his daughters under. Or, if he does, he must just not care. If he keeps this up, one day (soon, I’m afraid) he’s going to drop dead.
Bob, sorry to hear about Barbara’s father.
Anyone purchase an entry-level monochrome laser printer lately? I have an older Samsung that’s been reliable but this particular model has been discontinued. Inclined not to go with HP but open to suggestions. Print volume will be in the neighborhood of 400 – 500 pages a month. Thanks.
A litre a day? I can easily go through 10-15.
Yeah, but you don’t have CHF.
Not all that lately, but I bought a Brother HL-5250DN for $230 from Costco back in March 2008. I’ve been very happy with it. Good print quality, duplexing, handles labels well, good Linux support, etc. Last week, I finally got a low toner warning from the starter toner cartridge, so I ordered a replacement. I jiggled the old one and it’s still going strong, so it may be a while before I actually install the replacement.
One thing we’ve noticed here at Chez OFD is that whenever we need to print, scan or copy stuff via the Windoze boxen, we still have to jump through a bunch of hoops. Linux laptops, netbooks and other desktops do it in a jiffy with no fuss, no muss, now; didn’t used to be the case a few years ago.
Couldn’t pass this up this deal… $30 with free shipping…
http://www.buy.com/prod/samsung-ml-2955nd-mono-laser-single-function-printer-duplex/224174879.html?listingId=-1
Indeed. For $30 with shipping, I actually considered ordering one just as a spare. But I already have a Brother monochrome laser, a Brother color laser, and an antique HP LJ5P that still works.
So, is it the considered opinion that maybe Brother has had the best pro-Linux support for its products? Used to be Lexmark, if memory serves, but no more, I hear. (I’m a little behind the times on almost everything these days; we’ve had refurbished HP multi-function machines for a while now and they’ve been OK.) I rarely print anything in color so at some point I may consider a nice mono laser again.
One odd thing that has occurred here: I have wireless working OK on the Windows 7 box and I HAD it working on the RHEL 6.3 machine but now it isn’t and doesn’t even see the wireless option anymore. Deuced odd.
OFD, if the RD machine is a laptop, might you have slid the little “disable wireless” switch?
If it were Windows, I’d say something just got stupid, on account of that’s what happens on every Windows box which gets regular MS updates. That hardly ever happens on Linux boxes, so I’d guess hardware or you bodged something without realizing it. (Though you’re a pro *nix admin, so I’d guess it isn’t the latter, so I’d guess it’s the former.)
I have mentioned a couple times that I have bought from these guys:
http://www.cheaphpprinters.com/content.asp?id=1
It is a mom and pop operation in Madison, WI that refurbishes and sells HP printers they get from the variety of places: UniWI/Madison and US Army installation/Madison among others. Bought my LJ1200 from them after the return from Germany, and have a lifetime and a half supply of toner. Laser printers have not improved since the earlier HP ones, and the manufacturers (including HP) have tried to lock out competitor’s toner, so the older models are cheaper to maintain. I spit out about 150 pages/mo—mostly for work. No problems. Had an LJ1250 in Berlin. NEVER a paper jam. Get a printer with a built-in dust cover for the paper. Dust collecting on the top sheet during periods of no use really screws up the works.
I am happy with the LJ1200—except the US models are always on with no on/off switch. EU outlawed that. I would shut it off if there were a switch. Only use it a couple times a week.
There is a place close to me that refurbishes laser printers from businesses. I picked up two HP LJ printers (don’t remember the model here at home) with duplexing, large capacity tray and networking options, both with less than 25,000 pages. Cost each was $100.00. They have served me at work quite well for 5 years. They do have on/off switches.
We also have an aging HP laser that many years ago passed 250K pages. Got a message on the display about needing a rebuild. Ordered a kit from HP that consisted of a new imaging roller, paper feed rollers and some ancillary parts for $250.00. That printer is now close to 400K pages produced.
Most of the printing at work is now done with a Konica copier with network printing cability. It will also do color. Cost, beyond the initial $8K purchase price, is $50.00 a month and that includes toner cartridges. That cost includes maintenance. That is based on X number of copies per month that we only exceed one month out of the year. The copier also faxes (both directions) and will scan documents into multiple formats and store them on the server.
For home I use a couple of Kodak printers. Cheap, do a good job, and supplies are cheaper than HP. HP color printers are two expensive but their lasers from years past were well built, worked very well and were durable. My how HP has gone downhill.
Thanks due to Carly Fiorina.
ISTR that HP was declining already and that they brought in Fiorina for her fresh ideas or great people skills or whatever. While she certainly drove off a lot of talented people, I’m not sure HP’s entire problem is her fault.
That sounds about as likely as my 85 year old mother listening to me…
I’ve got a Brother color inkjet hydra machine (MFC-J825DW) which works flawlessly with my laptop (Suse 12.1) and desktop (Suse 11.0). Print, scan, copy, fax, all work just fine; it supposedly has wireless capability but I’ve never tried. I stick to wired Ethernet & USB connections. I would *assume* that their other printers are just as happy to hang out with Linux; it was certainly a crucial factor in my purchase.
SteveF. and others, thanks; even a super-dooper guru ‘nix pro can botch something up anytime; I see it every day almost, and we basically laugh at it, and brag how in trying to fix something we “broke it even more.” It is a RHEL desktop and wireless was working fine one day and then the next it was not, not a clue why not, but I hear tell that RH machines are not so nifty when it comes to wireless. I’m not gonna waste any time on it; in line with what I should know myself by now and what Bob and pcb_duffer just said, I will hardwire it with cat-6 at some point this week. The Windows 7 desktop and netbook are fine with the wireless, and my Ubuntu laptop in the basement only needs the net once in a blue moon and I will just temporarily hook up a cable to it when I need it; we have nearly zero wireless or cell down in the basement, which is rock and concrete and mostly dates back to 1830.
I’m still blaming Carly. She destroyed R&D there. I had friends working in that area who were ejected—regardless that some had worked there over 20 years. Out on the street with you! And the stuff they have produced since she arrived is nothing but crap, IMO. She also made sure to kill their broadcast products division deader than a doornail. It only made a living, not a killing, and we can’t have that in corporate America. Fluke has picked up some of the slack, but their prices are 2 to 3 times what HP’s were. So the British are filling in the holes. Also expensive because it has to be shipped here.
Something like that is happening with my favourite game, City of Heroes/Villains. NCSoft is closing it down on 30/11, it launched in 2004. Rumors are flying, one is that they’re trying to force people into buying and paying a monthly fee for their new offering, Guild Wars 2. It’s said that Co* is still profitable, just not profitable enough. I’ve heard that GW2 subscriptions have already peaked and are sliding already. I’ll buy another NC Soft game about the same time hell freezes over.
I’m playing World of Warcraft now, and have Skyrim and Diablo 3 DVDs to install, and may get Star Wars The Old Republic (‘WoW with light sabres’) next month, when it goes free to play. There are usually incentives to subscribe and pay real money, so I’ll use f2p to see if I like it. But I’ll never trust NCSoft again.
Windows is doomed I tell you, doomed !
http://www.cringely.com/2012/10/28/steve-ballmers-dilemma/
Nice analogy to pre WWII non-turbocharged/non-supercharged airplane engines.
I am wondering if I should be shorting Microsoft stock. Heck, I am wondering if we should start the port of our software product for Windows to the cloud tomorrow. Design II for Windows, meet iDesign II.
I used to love HP printers. They were robust and they “just worked”. HP software has always sucked.
Things do seem to have changed, though. The next-to-last printer we bought from HP was just a disaster. Unreliable, because it had a brain-fart of a concept: Even though it is sold as a low-end network printer, it apparently has no real internal processor or storage. Instead, it relies on every individual computer to do the full rendering for its own print-jobs.
The same for scanning: It is incapable of scanning a document by itself, even though it has a button labelled “scan”. Instead, your individual workstation does the scanning, reading raw data from the scanner unit. So you walk to the printer, put a document on the glass, walk back to your desk, start the scan, walk back to the printer to get your document, walk back to your desk. What an efficient workflow!
Unfortunately, my periodic experiences with non-HP printers are even worse, so we still buy HP.
I have an HP CM1415fnw color multifunction laser jet here in my home office. Works OK except printing CD labels. It can only print about 10 CD labels before the laser fuser gets hot and does not fuse the ink to the paper anymore. So we only print 10 CD labels at a time.
I have a old HP 1150 B&W laserjest duplexer at the office. Just works. However, I print at the office to a HP CP2025DN color laserjet with duplexer. Works OK and is cheap for limited printing.
The computer market is now mature, world-wide, I believe, and clearly that means a leveling off of the GROWTH of computer sales, but IMO Cringely’s assessment that people are going to quit using computers and therefore Windows is doomed, is pretty far off-base.
Analysts and economists I keep up with, maintain that the floods in Thailand, closing all hard drive production there, have hit the entire computer hardware market hard, and caused Intel’s recent massive billion-dollar drop in revenue. Looked at the shelves in computer stores lately? They are bare and Fry’s in Indianapolis still has their 1-drive-to-a-customer-per-month policy in effect. I just bought a 1Tb WD 2.5” drive from Amazon: it was manufactured 1 Oct 12 and made in Malaysia. Does not look like there is much, if any, production coming out of Thailand, yet. At this rate, there may never be.
But let’s look around. Everybody I know has a computer assigned to them at work. That is not going to change. Size is changing. The tower computer is already history—my doctor’s office uses the slim-cased Dells mounted on the wall of examining rooms and on the back of monitors for the secretaries. They have no optical drives. Even if devices like the Raspberry Pi’s—or smaller—become commonplace, then it still will not change the workplace from having a large monitor, keyboard, and mouse, IMO. The nurses move info from things like EKG machines to computers with thumb drives, so even constantly on-the-move nurses have a computer assigned to them. And so does every single office worker there.
It has taken a couple decades to move work from manual paper and file drawer systems to electronic ones. Work everywhere is now done on a computer; hardly anything is done with paper systems anymore, and what manual schemes still exist, will eventually be moved to computer. The need for computers as a way of life is not going away. Only the size is changing. But nobody around me is substituting a smartphone for their laptop. For the last 3 years, almost every attorney I work with has brought a laptop to our video sessions. The ones that did not, already had Blackberries (iPhones nowadays), but those who did bring netbooks, still do—and every office (lawyer and doctor) provides open wireless Internet access in their conference rooms.
What is more, except for servers and network distribution, most work around the world is done on Windows with programs especially crafted to be used on Windows. Specialized office systems—like the massively complex and integrated programs used in my doctor’s office—run on Windows.
I was teaching English to an IT class at The Chemical Company when M$ forced them to move from W2k to XP, and the gnashing that went on over that was significant. They considered moving everything to Linux. But in the end, they did not. To me, that was a watershed, and demonstrated that Linux really is not much of a threat to M$. Forcing changes in work practices will be a problem for M$, because re-training for complete make-overs, like Win8, is a substantial PITA and cost to business. But big companies, like the chemical one, write their own programs to get work done, and that is not moving off Windows anytime soon—if ever during my life.
Cringely acts like computers are a fad. There is nothing I do except mow the lawn and wash my clothes that does not use a computer. Even my recipes are in the computer for cooking. I am NOT going to be entering my financial data for the week on a tiny smartphone, nor am I going to be composing letters and email on troublesome touchscreen tablets.
Yeah, computer GROWTH is over (as are productivity gains from using computers, IMO). Nobody in that business is going to be profiting wildly from the world’s massive acquisition of computers, now that everybody has at least one. The growth line has leveled off, but that does not mean the end of either Windows or Microsoft. or the programs that run on Windows.
Cringely always has been out in left field, IMO,—more so than Dvorak,—and on this one, he is completely out of ballpark sucking on that Dreamsicle, as my college roommate used to say.
Is here much point to getting Windows 8? Is it much different/improved from W7?
*there
Probably the single neatest thing about Windows 8 is that the application icons on your desktop now have the ability to update themselves. For instance, your gmail icon might say that you have 12 new messages. And then automatically update to 13 in the next minute.
The weirdest thing about Windows 8 is the transformation between mouse and touch mode. I have yet to see or play with this but I am given to understand that the transition has a solid *clunk* in it.
Here is Paul Allen’s review of Windows 8, very detailed:
http://www.paulallen.com/TemplateGeneric.aspx?contentId=21
Lynn
Paul Allen is an unbiased reviewer?
Here another Paul fanboy to review Windows 8:
http://www.winsupersite.com/article/paul-thurrotts-wininfo/windows-8-144606
http://www.windowsitpro.com/windows-8
Wow, 660 million smartphones this year! I look at my Motorola Bionic and am just amazed. Dual 1 Ghz cpu, 1 GB ram, 16 SSD hard drive running unix. I would have killed for this much power 20 years ago when I was writing code on unix boxen.
BTW, the pc desktop market has leveled off and sales are dropping. Not a lot yet but as more and more people move to tablets, the laptop sales will drop precipitously. The question is, can you get your work done or your blogging done using cloud apps? If the answer is yes (and apparently that number is 80% of laptop users), then most of these people will probably move to tablets. That is the crisis for Microsoft and HP and Intel.
I still take my netbook on the road with me but last time I did not even turn it on. I just use my Bionic for email and surfing. No serious emails, it is a total joke for typing.
Is there much point to getting Windows 8? Is it much different/improved from W7?
I have been using W8 for about 6 months since the preview version. I now have a fully licensed release version running. It sucks.
There is no way that we are going to convert any workstations to W8. We may get a tablet to try it but the lack of applications will be an issue. The IPAD just works as do the Droid tablets. There is no reason to change what works.
MS is too little too late. I don’t need a keyboard as I am not going to do any significant typing on a tablet. They mostly seem well suited to referencing information and the occassional typing. The desktop, dual monitors and full keyboard still rule for any significant production.
The MS fanboys will convert, real people with real jobs will not.
With Linux not really gaining market-share and the fragmentation of Linux UIs (e.g. Unity vs. KDE etc.) which drives the distro choice causing confusion, why not use the one OS that is giving Windows a run for its money? That would be Android; thus,
Android-x86 Project – Run Android on Your PC
Android of course is Linux-based, open source under the Apache License and developed by Google. Well, you can’t have everything :p
Thanks for the Android x86 port. I will look at it.
But Android is touch based, right? Does Touch translate very well to the desktop?
It looks as though the laptops are going go touch in order to fight off the tablet market.