08:59 – We started watching The Grand last night on Netflix streaming. It’s set in an English hotel, with the first episode opening on New Year’s Eve 1919. The cast is good, as are the writing and production values. It’s reminiscent of Upstairs, Downstairs. The one thing I found jarring was that more than once they had characters laughing and joking about WWI. In 1919, that wasn’t a subject for levity. Britain had just lost literally most of a generation of its young men, and nearly every family had lost a young man killed, blinded, or crippled in the war. If not more than one. The scale of the slaughter was almost inconceivable to us today. On the worst day of the Battle of the Somme, for example, there were more men killed than the US lost during the entire Viet Nam war. And that battle went on for months, with more than a million total casualties. No joking matter.
I got email Sunday from a homeschool mom who really wanted to do a forensic science lab course, but her budget wouldn’t stretch to $247 for our FK01 forensic kit. She asked if there was any way we could break up the FK01 kit into smaller, less expensive kits. Hers was by no means the first similar email I’d gotten, and I was already thinking about doing exactly what she wanted. I decided to break up the FK01 kit into three kits:
The FK01A Core Forensic Science Kit sells for $165, and includes the specialized equipment, chemicals, and specimens needed to do the 25 lab sessions in the first six groups in the book. The other two kits require the FK01A kit if the user doesn’t already have the equipment and chemicals on hand. The FK01B Forensic Science Kit Supplement 1 sells for $51, and includes the specialized chemicals and specimens needed to do the 7 lab sessions in the Forensic Drug Testing and Forensic Toxicology groups in the book. The FK01C Forensic Science Kit Supplement 2 sells for $79, and includes the specialized chemicals and specimens needed to do the 7 lab sessions in the Gunshot and Explosive Residues Analysis, Detecting Altered and Forged Documents, and Forensic Biology groups in the book.
10:52 – Barbara called earlier to say they’d had an offer on their parents’ house. Their agent suggested they counter-offer, but Barbara thought the amount he suggested was a bit high, in particular because the latest real estate valuation reduced the tax value of the house by 20%. I suggested that they split the difference on their counter-offer between the listing price and the price offered. On the one hand, they don’t want to leave too much money on the table. On the other, they don’t want the potential buyer to walk away and end up having the house sitting on the market. On the gripping hand, homes are starting to sell a lot faster than they had been.
Last week, I ordered 360 glass Petri dishes, all my vendor had in stock. UPS delivered them about 6:00 last night. As usual with UPS, the boxes were a bit banged up, so I was a bit concerned. I’d ordered 100 of the same Petri dishes earlier, which Barbara packed last weekend into groups of three, padded with bubble-wrap. Of those 100, there were two cracked. A 2% breakage rate is no big deal. Almost any glassware order has some breakage.
The problem is, it’s not convenient for us to discover the actual amount of breakage because that involves unpacking every box and examining each Petri dish. The boxes are small cubes, each with four stacks of five Petri dishes, and having to repack undamaged dishes would be time-consuming and inconvenient. So I called Katie, who’s our rep with that vendor, and explained the problem. Ordinarily, vendors expect buyers to report damage or shortage quickly, usually within one to three days of receipt, but that obviously wasn’t going to work. Katie understood our problem and said just to keep a running total of breakage when we pack up the dishes for kits. She’ll issue a credit to apply towards the next order.
I also suggested to Katie that they contact the manufacturer about improving their packing. It’s a long boat trip from China, and the only protection they use within the boxes of 20 is a sheet of tissue paper between the halves of a plate pair and another sheet between plate pairs. That’s no real protection against breakage, and I suggested to Katie that they get the manufacturer to start using thin sheets of bubble wrap between halves and between pairs. If that means the boxes have to be a little larger and the cost of the plates a little higher, fine. Better that than having to deal with breakage.
Blackhawk down in Afghanistan. Five more troops lost. Hello, Obama, anybody care? Yawn.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_AFGHANISTAN?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-03-12-07-36-54
I suspect that Obama cares just as much as Bush did, which is to say not at all.
You just can’t make this stuff up:
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/feds-spend-15-million-study-why-lesbians-are-fat
More $ down the toilet.
“…On the worst day of the Battle of the Somme, for example, there were more men killed than the US lost during the entire Viet Nam war. ”
IIRC it was more *casualties*on that one day, not necessarily more KIA. Around 60k casualties, most of them wounded, and again IIRC, about 20k KIA. I could look it up but am too lazy and also on the Plantation today. Still, the whole point is valid; no Brits alive in ’19 would have been jocular and devil-may-care about the war; hell, even aristos got waxed in that one, nobless oblige, and all that.
On the Blackhawk down in The Suck: yeah, don’t bother our fearless chickenhawk leaders with this stuff, man. Or the populace at large, for that matter.
A multi-million-dollar study on why lesbians are fat; have we seen many gorgeous lesbians over these last decades? The ones I’ve known all have had or have major self-image “issues” and other stuff flying around inside their heads that I don’t even wanna think about. Gay men have proved to be significantly easier to deal with. And this is all while noting that the actual percentage of them in the population is a lot closer to one percent than ten percent, but man, the attention and acclaim has been nonstop for so long.
I would rather have seen that $15-million divided among the surviving spouses and children of those troops lost in that latest chopper “mishap” in The Suck. But then again, hey, they enlisted, the attitude goes, so tough shit.
Yeah, you’re right. It was almost 60,000 casualties in one day, with about 20,000 KIA. But that was only the British casualties. The French and Germans also lost thousands dead. Also, IIRC, the British KIA count was only those killed outright. Wounded who later died were not counted among that day’s dead. And, given the primitive medical assistance available, I’d bet that a large percentage of those wounded died sooner or later, mostly sooner.
I’ve known a lot of lesbians over the years, and it never struck me that they were fatter than straight women, on average. I’d also say their physical attractiveness was no different on average than straight women. Yeah, I’ve known a few lesbians that were not even slightly pretty, but probably no higher a percentage than straight women. And, just as with straight women, lesbians tended to cluster around average, with many pretty ones and some who were simply stunningly attractive.
Netflix explains why they might suck:
http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2013/03/new-netflix-site-ranks-internet-providers-streaming-connections/
Because your ISP sucks.
I’m still looking for a replacement ISP for my home. Comcast still wont do business with me and AT&T still wants $199 installation and equipment charge for a DSL line. But I rebooted my Clear Wimax modem and it is back to sucking only a little bit.
“California Seizes Guns as Owners Lose Right to Keep Arms”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-12/california-seizes-guns-as-owners-lose-right-to-bear-arms.html
““The prohibited person can’t have access to a firearm,” regardless of who the registered owner is, said Michelle Gregory, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office.”
This gun seizure by the state of California is bothersome on so many levels that I just do not know where to start. Please note that I did not state “The Great State of California” as I do not respect that particular state anymore. At least two, maybe four amendments to the USA constitution are being violated here.
Is anyone seeing excess memory usage in Windows 7 x64? I have 16 GB of ram with no virtual memory and no hibernation on my SSD.
When I boot, I start with 1.9 GB of ram. I do have Windows Visual Studio and Act! installed which both drop a Microsft SQL server on your pc. I then start Thunderbird, 7 command prompt windows and Firefox. My ram usage goes up to 4.9 GB.
I am beginning to wonder if Windows 7 x64 has some fairly awesome ram leakage somewhere in open and closing Firefox.
BTW, I will be upgrading my primary office pc to Windows 8 x64 soon as several of my customers are starting to enquire about it. We need to have at least one pc in the office running it (why me?).
I will probably be running the Start button addon though:
http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/
Wouldn’t it be much easier to install it inside a virtual machine? Especially now that Virtual PC is available for Windows 7 Professional for free?
Best we now go by the pejorative “The Late Great State of California”.
http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/california-at-twilight/
They don’t call it Mexifornia for nothing, soon to be Aztlan and La Reconquista, etc. Mrs. OFD has just spent ten days in central and northern Kalifornia and is returning tomorrow; she likes northern CA and if we had to live somewhere else says that is the place; I reminded her of the state’s various catastrophic levels of status on multiple fronts. Next week she’ll be in Colorado, also on-schedule for reconfiguration as reconquista. Habla Espanol, Senora?
Doesn’t Windows 8 have a regular desktop option already available? So you can switch back and forth or use one or the other primarily?
Doesn’t Windows 8 have a regular desktop option already available? So you can switch back and forth or use one or the other primarily?
I do not know as I have never used Windows 8 to date. That is one reason for installing it. However, the start button product for Windows 8 does not exist for no reason???
This article does talk about desktop mode: “A new app subverts Microsoft’s vision for Windows 8”:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/6/4071720/modernmix-windows-8-resize-apps-for-desktop-mode
Again, you can’t make this stuff up:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2013/03/09/admiral-samuel-locklear-commander-pacific-forces-warns-that-climate-change-top-threat/BHdPVCLrWEMxRe9IXJZcHL/story.html
have we seen many gorgeous lesbians over these last decades?
Jodie Foster has more or less come out of the closet. There are no doubt many more in Hollywood that are closeted for PR reasons. And lots of leading men that are gay have to remain closeted. My brother has come across that in some of the films he’s worked on.
(Since he’s a set decorator, he’s learned the art of letting the people he’s worked with that he’s straight so there are no awkward moments. When he was married, his wedding ring helped. His boss on one recent film saw a picture of my niece in the production office, on my brother’s desk. My brother explained that though his daughter was Asian, she was adopted, but he was now divorced. His boss, who is openly gay, said: “You straight guys don’t know how to do it. I’ve been married to the same guy for 30 years!”)
I concur that jokes about the Great War in 1919 would have been very uncouth, especially in Britain. A couple of years ago, our local theater did a production of Journey’s End a 1928 play about trench warfare in WWI. The author had a hard time getting it produced, because it was “too soon”. It also was a problem that there was no leading lady.
Then there is Rosie
http://hunting-washington.com/smf/index.php?topic=53120.0
it really was an rotflol when I saw that yesterday
Then there is Rosie
Or Ellen Degeneres.
I don’t usually know which women are lesbians nowadays. When I was at uni in the Seventies they were usually pretty much in your face with it. Lesbians come in all types, some were really quite easy to get on with, some treated men like leeches and rapists, some were really out, some discrete. One woman I knew back then was a communist, feminist and lesbian and she and I got on just fine. A male student on the moderate left said that Vaia made a deliberate attempt to avoid the ugly, aggro lesbian stereotype. Then there was Loine, who looked like Paris Hilton on steroids. She was a feminist, and on the left politically, but the other feminists hated and distrusted her because she used so much make up and came to uni in party frocks. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure if she was straight or gay.
I’ve never noticed that lesbians are much different from the general population. Nowadays I wouldn’t usually know the orientation of any woman or most guys, nor do I care greatly. But I agree, what the hell is the government doing studying this?
BTW, I will be upgrading my primary office pc to Windows 8 x64 soon as several of my customers are starting to enquire about it. We need to have at least one pc in the office running it (why me?).
Wouldn’t it be much easier to install it inside a virtual machine? Especially now that Virtual PC is available for Windows 7 Professional for free?
I would prefer a native install. That way if there are any problems I can diagnose them directly. Although, I do not expect any problems, shudder. Please no problems.
I have zero experience with virtual machines. I like having native machines for testing as the problems that we typically have are hardware based (that are not problems with our software on every platform out there). However, several of my customers are running them. And virtual machines are a source of friction as some customers are trying to use virtual machines to share a single user license amongst several users.
My desktop is running W-7/64. Right now it is running almost nothing besides Firefox. I have 8 GB of physical memory. The Performance tab shows 3.04GB on the graph. The Physical Memory (MB) box says:
Total 8109
Cached 4201
Available 4083
Free 862
What does Windows Task Manager tell you about where it is being used? Processes (with Show processes from all users checked) shows a table sortable by memory usage.
Note that SQL Server, especially when idle, may hold onto memory until the system needs it back; it keeps things cached if the memory is otherwise not going to be used.
What does Windows Task Manager tell you about where it is being used? Processes (with Show processes from all users checked) shows a table sortable by memory usage.
I am showing 5.3 GB memory usage on the Performance tab, Memory window.
The Physical memory box is (MB):
Total 16301
Cached 10885
Available 10831
Free 77
The Processes box shows usage of about 600 MB of memory by various processes. SQL server (system) is using 62 MB. The other three SQL processes are using 10 MB.
I am showing 5.3 GB memory usage on the Performance tab, Memory window.
Don’t be too concerned. In my system with 8 GB of memory I am showing only 1.5 GB free. That is no big deal. The number you really need to be concerned with is the available memory which in my case is 5.1 GB. W7 caches a lot of pages that it may need quickly returning that memory to the system if it is needed. Otherwise W7 will use that memory to it’s advantage by storing pages in memory. This saves much disk I/O.
You can also use Resource Monitor which is found on the Task Manager dialog under performance. There is a button to start the Resource Monitor. In that you will get a better breakdown of the memory uses. Also don’t be worried about hard faults in memory. Those are nothing more than W7 requesting some code and the code is no longer in memory indicating a page fault. W7 uses excess, and unused memory, to minimize those faults.
Lynn, that’s nothing to worry about. One of the reasons to have lots of memory is so the system can use it to best advantage, so memory otherwise unused does some caching of pages that do not have to be written to disk. Such pages can be re-used as needed without incurring overhead; if and when there is demand for the memory they will be assigned to a task.
I really tried to like Win8, but as my grandson said one day at 4 years old on tasting a new dish, “I can’t like that.” I spent a couple of weeks with Win8, but you know, after losing over 45 minutes just trying to find out how to adjust only one problem—and many more came—I already paid my dues with Win95 to 98, doing reinstall after reinstall, when the actual order you installed things made a big difference. Why should I pay those dues all over again? Life is too short. All I can say is that my Win8 machine is gone, that now being an Ubuntu 12.04 without the new Unity.
I never found any native configuration that made Win8 agreeable—or even slightly more navigable. Those in charge of all OS’es these days believe full screen is the wave of the future, because of smaller and smaller screens. Impossible to show more than one screen at a time on my Android, and very few screens in Win8 have more than one pane; it is primarily a whoosh switch from one full screen to another. What’s more, if you actually want to see more than one screen at once for some reason, they have made that very, very difficult to achieve. Some windows do not even respond at all to the old resizing conventions.
Lynn, I would be interested in a report on how you find Win8 before and after installing “Start8”. I just reached the point that I just did not have more time to futz with Win8; I needed to get work done. At least you get paid (in a way) to experiment, so it is not time completely lost. Back in the Win95/98 days, there were not that many tasks relegated to the computer yet, so there was more time to experiment without compromising one’s life. I’m trying to think what I do besides cook meals, drive, and mow the lawn that is NOT done on the computer these days. Having a well-working computer is essential to be productive, and Win8 gets in the way of that big time. We will never know for sure, but my feeling is that Win8 will be the end of Steve Ballmer at M$.
We will never know for sure, but my feeling is that Win8 will be the end of Steve Ballmer at M$.
I do not think so. The computer world is splitting into content users and content creators. Contents users are probably 80% of the marketplace and moving mobile as fast as they can. Content creators will stay with the desktops but their desktop hardware will grow increasingly expensive over time since the content users are moving to smartphones and tablets. Make drastically less of something and the price will go up as the R&D expenses get split over fewer and fewer white/tan/black boxes.
So, IMHO, Microsoft, and their copartner Intel, are going mobile as fast as they can. But can they catch up to Android and ARM? I am not thinking so at the moment.
I’m not gonna care much; how many years do I have left? And will the Grid stay up? Could all be moot. I have two desktops here and one laptop. I am gonna be buying a new phone soon, a real honest-to-goodness smartypants phone, but not sure what type of plan I can get that has coverage up here in Retroville.
Picked up Mrs. OFD from airport and 35 miles south of here it was in the fifties; coming back, it’s been sleet and freezing rain, and now 34 here in the Bay.
Moving mobile or just adding mobile? So far, I don’t know anyone who is giving up their desk/laptops for strictly an Android or iPhone—or even a tablet. People who bring a tablet to my jobs are always commenting that they can’t do this or that until they get back to the computer in the office.
One thing that has changed in the few short years I have been doing this work: smartphones are allowing research on some topic during the middle of testimony. Either via a browser on their phone or from text messages with their office. Not long ago, somebody testified that a trip they made to Italy was at the time the previous Pope was being inducted—but they could not remember the year. Quick google by one of the attorneys on their iPhone got the year established almost instantly.
People who predict the end of the desktop, or even the laptop/notebook either haven’t used an iPad or have incredibly tiny and nimble fingers.
“…smartphones are allowing research on some topic during the middle of testimony. Either via a browser on their phone or from text messages with their office.”
This is also affecting juries and lawyers and judges, while trials and other court actions are underway in real time. Stuff that isn’t allowed inside court testimony can get blasted all over the internet/media that people can then see and hear outside the court.
In Indiana, they take your phone and tablet away from you—no calls, no Internet, no pictures, no recording. Actually, my understanding is that—while court proceedings are normally open in Indiana,—the information is not technically 100% public until after a judgment has been rendered. I know we could broadcast news about various trials, because we had artists doing sketches and reporters attending sensational cases for the evening news. However, one cannot get transcripts of the court proceedings until after a judgment has been declared.
In Mass. we were not even allowed to take notes and had to hand over all our pens and pencils we had on our person, before entering the jury box. We could take notes once the trial was over and jury deliberations began, and were even given legal pads and pens, but all that was confiscated after the verdict was reached. Not sure if they kept that stuff or destroyed it.