09:41 – Sankie’s funeral is Thursday. I’ve arranged with the neighbors to walk Colin while we’re gone and keep an eye on our house. Barbara is heading over to her mom’s apartment this morning to meet Frances and get the place ready to meet people after the funeral.
Meanwhile, it turns out that the Opera workaround for getting labels printed on the USPS website was not the permanent fix I’d hoped it was. I had kits to ship yesterday, so I fired up Opera and entered the data for the labels. When I attempted to pay for them, I got the old “payment method denied” message. So I fired up Chrome or Firefox, I forget which, and clicked on the link to pay for the labels in my cart. This time it worked, and I was able to pay for some of the labels, get them printed, and get the kits shipped. Not all of the kits, though. The USPS web site choked on the foreign shipments, so I have two kits going to Canada that are still sitting in the cart.
So I tried using PayPal shipping for the Canadian kits. No dice. It appeared to work normally. It let me pay from my PayPal balance. But PayPal uses Pitney-Bowes, which doesn’t produce a downloadable PDF label. Instead it runs a script that is supposed to send the label to your printer, but doesn’t allow you to save a copy of the label. Long story short, I could not get the label to either printer no matter what I tried. Bastards.
I decided to give up trying to make this work. I checked the Costco site for Windows notebook systems. Barbara is going to pick one up for me while she’s out today. Assuming that solves the USPS label problem, I will dedicate that system to printing labels.
13:19 – Barbara called from Costco to say they had literally no Dell laptops. Apparently, they’re in the midst of a model-year changeover. They did have a few Toshiba and HP laptops, but I told her I wasn’t interested in any of those and that I’d just order on-line.
I checked Amazon, which of course had slews of laptops, but everything they had in Dell models was more expensive than Costco. And Amazon doesn’t have the doubled warranty or the easy return. I ordered a model that was a couple steps up from the bottom model Costco carried. It has an Intel Core i3 rather than a Celeron. Only a 500 GB 5400 RPM hard drive and 4 GB of RAM, but that’s fine for what I want it for. No touch screen, which I explicitly didn’t want. The total, with $30 shipping and sales tax, was just over $400. Not bad.
It comes with Windows 8.1. If there’s an option at first boot to choose Win 7, I’ll do that. Otherwise, I’ll probably install the shell program that several readers have recommended.
Oh, and a guy just showed up at the front door with flowers for Barbara. I called to see how her day was going, and mentioned the flowers. I also made it very clear that they’re not from me. (Barbara has told me in the past that if I ever buy her flowers she’ll know I’ve been up to no good…) She claims that she doesn’t think I’m funny (although just about every other woman I know does think I’m funny…) but she did laugh at that.
Netflix is raising prices…
http://money.cnn.com/2014/04/21/technology/netflix-prices/index.html
I’m surprised Opera and Chrome had differing results as both are Webkit-based browsers. Opera ceased using it’s own proprietary parsing/rendering engine (Presto) about a year ago and has been using Webkit since version 15. So, at their heart, Chrome, Opera, and Safari are all the same browser. Smart move on Opera’s part as the biggest complaint from people using it was that pages wouldn’t render properly and client side scripting didn’t work correctly. Web developers actually make an effort to make their pages look right and function in Webkit browsers, but never made that effort for Opera Presto.
It’s about time that Netflix increased their streaming price. Every time I’ve talked to them during the last two or three years, I’ve suggested that they boost prices so they could afford more content. But they’re talking about increasing by only a buck or two per month. That’s not enough. I suggested doubling the price for streaming. Yeah, they’ll lose some subscribers, but not many.
I’m not. As I said, this problem is apparently random. For example, yesterday I did the payment page (I forget using which browser) and clicked to pay. I got the error message “payment method denied”. So I re-entered my CVV number and clicked again to pay. That time it worked. Same everything. The only difference was the couple seconds it took me to enter the CVV and click the icon to pay.
It’s about time that Netflix increased their streaming price.
Unfortunately, part of the increase is passing on Comcast’s extortion fee to provide Comcast customers the bandwidth they are paying for.
Rick (who fired Comcast years ago) in Portland.
Bob
RE: Windows notebook systems
You might want to check this site on how to run Windows for free on linux:
http://xmodulo.com/2013/07/how-to-install-and-run-microsoft-windows-for-free-on-linux.html
I’ve tried a couple of the different versions and they seem to work fine. It might be a way to verify if Windows will solve your label problem.
Bob,
If you get a system with Windows 8 (need to upgrade to 8.1 immediately) I highly recommend that you try a program called Classic Shell.
http://www.classicshell.net/
It brings back the Windows 7 start button and desktop as well as all the Windows features you are familiar with. I have tried all the others and this does the best job, is stable, and free.
FWIW, some of the laptops Costco is selling now give you a choice of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. Not dual boot, you have to choose one or the other and keep it.
For those that are interested I present to you images of my car and what an impact at 45 MPH will do. The engine is pushed back, battery busted leaking acid on the the transmission, steering and knee bags deployed. Lots of damage. I left out the pictures with the blood.
http://www.raymondthompsonphotography.com/Accident
Wow. It’s a good thing that cars nowadays are built to crumple and absorb the impact forces.
Unlike my 1979 Jeep CJ-7, which was body-on-frame. Basically a steel I-beam structure. Back before I met Barbara, I was out on a camping trip with my then-girlfriend, who’d apparently watched too many Jeep commercials. She wanted to try off-road driving, and against my better judgment I let her. She went plowing through the woods at speed and ended up ramming a tree. That brought us to an abrupt stop. Fortunately we were both wearing full harness. She broke down in tears, apologizing profusely for hitting the tree and bending my front bumper, which was basically a steel I-beam. I told her I was glad she’d hit the tree, and I was. If she’d gone another few meters, she’d have driven literally off a cliff.
I realize you want something soon, but when I checked Dell notebooks a couple of years ago, their business line was much better than their consumer line at the local stores such as Costco. Lower prices, too.
“I-beam”
I’m sure you know the difference, but the frame is a c-section. Serious off roaders here box them in or replace them with square tubing, increasing the bending strength considerably. Didn’t matter in your minor tree encounter.
I have decided to leave Costco. I renewed my membership at Sam’s Club last Saturday and got a basket of water and TP. The 36 roll TP for $18.99 (not the 30 roll that Costco sells for $20.99). I also got my free cookie from the Ladies in the bakery (yup, that was the deal killer).
For some reason, both the wife and I like Sam’s Club much better than Costco. Sam’s does do a better job presenting their books in a rack rather than a flat table which allows more scanning and perusing. And the Sam’s broiled chickens are bigger and better tasting. Or maybe it is just the free cookie for me.
I must admit that Costco does have a better frozen desert with strawberries from the in store food sales counter.
Or maybe it is just the free cookie for me.
I am betting on the free cookie.
I am just the opposite as I like Costco better than Sam’s. Can’t really say why. I do not need membership in both operations.
In regard to this chat about Linux and Windows stuff; I was just looking at RHEL 7 here, and the claim is that it will now work with M$ Active Directory and has no problem running Windows 8 or Server 2012R2 as virtual machines inside it. And a whole bunch of other neat stuff; I have the .iso and DVD so may take the plunge.
While still hanging here on possible RHEL gigs back at IBM, or, once again, the local near-obsolete-Windows site job.
Off shortly to bring one of the cats to the vet for initial shots and workup; wife bringing daughter back to Montreal (supposed to have been done early this morning, but par for the course here) will allegedly occur “this evening.” They slept late, and as is also par, whatever would take me an hour to accomplish takes them three or four.
Overcast, sixties, minor precip on the way.
Last I checked, Costco was cheaper than Sam’s for our regular buys. I may need to check that out.
They slept late, and as is also par, whatever would take me an hour to accomplish takes them three or four.
You state this like it matters. Women are women and have their own variant of the space-time continuum.
Lost my head there for a minute and was hallucinating that they were at least occasionally in the same dimension.
Daughter was supposed to go back this morning; it’s almost 17:00 and they haven’t even started to think about planning to get ready. So they’ll leave hours from now and wife will get back very late, exhausted and grumpy, and we have to be up early to take a second stubborn and angry cat to the vet.
Glad you’re alright! What a clean car on the inside! I shudder to think of what the photos of mine would look like.
Virtual is the way to go. I work with too many companies that have IE-only intranets. So all of my Linux machines have VirtualBox installed, with a Win-7 VM I can fire up to run IE.
There are a couple of irritating tricks required to get Windows installed and activated, but once it’s running, nary a problem. Of course, you need some source for a valid Windows license key, but that’s a lot cheaper than buying a special machine. Once you install the client extensions on the VM, the Windows applications are “almost” integrated into your normal Linux environment: the mouse and focus move correctly in-and-out of the VM, copy/paste works as expected, etc.. Highly recommended over a separate, isolated machine.