Month: September 2012

Posted on

Was reading my 9/11 blog from last year… Not much has changed.

Really as I think about it, not much has changed at all.

Our politicians are as ineffective and self absorbed as ever. 

We still are at war.

Images 1

That progress is in “Winning Hearts & minds”American lives are still being lost. Although according to some people, progress is being made in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Perhaps…

I’m not convinced that our troops or politicians are seeing anything more than the smiling mask of duplicity.

Culturally the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq are so far from us I question whether they see our form of government or the reasons we are in their countries as any “Better” than we see theirs.

Most Americans can’t conceive of a life without running water, indoor plumbing, the 24 hour news cycle, and electricity 24 / 7. I’m not even going to try to discuss what an American would think about not having a telephone, 500 channels of Cable TV, or internet.

How many Americans could accept Total Religious control of their lives?

Can you see someone telling an American that they couldn’t listen to “The Who” or Elvis, or “Nine Inch Nails”.

How about not being able to see a movie because that movie contained music from one of the “Forbidden Bands”?

Women of afghanistan

Can you see an American woman submitting to wearing a garment that allowed them to show only their eyes? How about being whipped with a switch or slapped in the face because she mouthed off to her husband?

Can you imagine what an American woman would do to someone that said “Get in the kitchen bitch and make my dinner“? I guess there are some women here that would take that. But the majority wouldn’t.

I shudder to think what my Mother would do.

If you look at our culture from the perspective of the folks in Afghanistan or Iraq what would you see?

Lasvegas1

A culture of excess, with too many religions, most perceived as polytheistic idolaters?

0516recovery effo

Women and children allowed to running amok because they’re not allowed to be disciplined?

How about a place were the temptations to sin are so prevalent that even the most pious cannot avoid sinning?

I think we’re, at best winning cooperation in hopes that soon we’ll be gone and things in their countries can return to normal.I don’t think we’re winning hearts & minds…

It doesn’t matter to these people if America, the Taliban, or al-Qaeda are winning, or even in control.

Mujahideen afghanistan 1984

The only thing that matters is cash. One of these players paying the bills is good, two or all three pumping money into their country is fanfuckingtastic! 

We have made previously poor tribal leaders wealthy. I believe that as soon as we leave, “Normal” will mean those leaders purchasing  the best weapons they can afford and settling old scores.

The tribal leader from the next valley over who used to demand unfair tribute will suddenly end up looking up the barrel of a brand new AK-47 while his daughters are being raped. Then he’ll meet Allah.

No matter what, when we leave these countries will return to the “Old Order… The one that’s about the point of a sword”.

So why not leave now? Get it over with, let them settle old scores and when the dust clears whatever is left of al-Qaeda or the Taliban we can take out with a few well placed daisy cutters. 

It sounds brutal and cold.

BLU 82 Daisy Cutter Fireball

But it’s a cost effective solution.

Yeah, I guess I’m still hostile. Last year I asked the question “How do we move forward?”

I think the answer is getting the fuck out of those shit hole countries and leaving them to their own devices. I guess I’m just sick of hearing about the latest fucked up bombing or shooting carried out by a “Friendly”.

“Friendly” is a matter of who’s paying better.

Posted on

Still tweaking

When I have to rebuild my system from scratch… I’m always amazed at just how customized it really is.

It’s the little things. Where a particular application is… the aliases on the desktop.

These things you do to your computer over time and each one of them is a minor thing by itself. All of these little things add up to a computer that is very personalized and specific to you and the way you work. And they’re a pain in the ass to lose. 

The odd thing is that when you’re faced with a machine that doesn’t have these little tweaks, you’re off balance. Your machine isn’t yours, it’s an alien cyberscape that has certain recognizable features… and yet it’s not home.

Off & on this weekend I’ve spent hours re-tweaking my rebuilt OS back to being my comfortable machine. In many ways it is like putting your home back together after a disaster albeit not quite as traumatic. (Been there done that!)

I’ve also solved problems that I inadvertently caused.

Note: If you’re a Mac user with a TimeCapsule. Don’t forget to tell your anti-virus to exclude the backup drive from scanning. Yeah think about that one for a minute and you’ll go OHHHH!!

I’m planning to get some real work done today.

IMAG0138

Writing, practicing, and a nice dog walk that should help me work the kinks out of my joints and my new big camping pack.

Last week didn’t go at all the way it was supposed to. 

I’d planned to get a lot more of the book written, and I wanted to experiment with breaking the book into more manageable discrete chapters.

This will take some time and I’m not exactly sure if I can manipulate the file that way and still have it printable in a simple way when I publish.

I’d also planned to test flight a new pack with a short hike.

As the dogs and I have been working our way higher onto the mountain I’ve discovered some really cool places where the phone can’t ring.

I’ve thought “Gee, it would be nice to get up here with the computer, and sit on a rock just typing.” The dogs would like it and I could use the peace & quiet.

With no internet connection, no email, and no phone, I wondered how much progress I could make.

This has led to me heading higher on the mountain, because just over the next rise there always seems to be a more amazing place.

Which led me to realize if I was to get hurt, or If it rained or if one of the pups was to get hurt I really didn’t have the kind of supplies with me that I’d need, to hunker down for a storm or for the night if that became necessary.

IMAG0152cropped

Sure I carry the radio so I could call for help if I was really badly hurt. But that does nothing to deal with something simple like rain, The forestry service takes a very dim view of you asking to be flown out by helicopter just because you din’t want to get wet.

I own a slick little tent which would be big enough for me & the dogs if it rained. But I had no really convenient way to carry the thing. My normal day pack just isn’t the right size to carry it, a little food and plenty of water.

This left me looking at packs and doing research on the different brands. I caught a deal on a nice Osprey pack, it  arrived last week,

I’ve managed to do some test packing and think it’s exactly what I need. I’ve also been thinking about stuff like; a disaster, or having to bug out due to fire, as well as actually using it for overnight camping.

Hey I’m nothing if I’m not a planner.

Sometime this week the plan is to pack light, but load up the new pack & take to the heights. I figure, this computer can easily run for 6 hours on a charge. A day on a rock might be a good thing for me.

I think I’m going to do the experiment about splitting the book here at my desk on the big screen before I go all mobile.

The next thing is some nice solar panels… 

Posted on

Arrrrhhhhggggg!

Sad Mac 400x400

Two days Ago I had an event in my Computer.

I was running along nicely having a pretty normal day when out of the blue my machine started asking me for passwords to email accounts.

This made little sense because those passwords are all stored on the system and shouldn’t be required.

I entered the first password without thinking then the second one, the the third one and that’s when the event caught my attention.

I thought Whoa! Something bad is happening. So I saved my work, closed the programs I had open and told the computer to reboot.

That’s when all hell broke loose! What I got back after that reboot was a system that had been mostly reset to it’s factory defaults. 

I don’t have esoteric settings in my systems. For the most part I’m an average kind of user.

I work at being just an average user I’ve spent so much time being a “Test Jocky, Monkey, Software Quality Assurance guy” that when it comes to my home systems I just want to sit down turn the computer on and do what I’d planned to do without a lot of drama. God save me from endless updates and reboots.

That’s why I use a Mac.

99.998% of the time I fire up my Mac and don’t think anything of the fact that I’m using technology, because it’s not in my face.

Well, two days ago was the .002% of the time when I was reminded.

This machine is barely 3 months old and it’s possible it was experiencing a hardware issue. So I pulled up the console logs and saw some very weird stuff. As I was stepping through the log I realized I didn’t know enough about the way Apple does things, to really be able to tell if the errors I was seeing were do to the failure or due to normal errors (Yeah… there is such a thing as a “Normal” error).

So I called Apple. I figured that the data was toast and I was looking at minimum at a restore of my system from my backup. I had a couple of questions, the first of which was how do I send log files to Apple?

After dealing with a first line phone rep for all of about 2 minutes (Thank you BTW for realizing that I wasn’t calling with anything ordinary.) I got transferred to this really great guy whose initials are RR.

RR listened carefully to what I said and we started walking through some items. This makes sense because he couldn’t see my screen and he must get 1000 calls a day from people who’ve forgotten to plug their system in.

Within a few minutes of talking, I’ve got a log collection tool running and he’s looking at my screen. (He can’t actually click on anything or control it… that must be maddening.)

After poking around for a bit he admits he’s never seen anything like what happened to me ever.

The logs get sent to the Gurus in Apple engineering.

Then I’m pretty much ready to call it a day and restore my whole system from the backup. When RR says, “you know… that might not be a good idea.”

I think about it and don’t like at all where he’s going, because he’s absolutely right.

Since we’d pretty much ruled out a hardware problem. That means that software has to be to blame. (Hardware Engineers around the world are rejoicing… Industry inside joke.) 

If I simply restore my system from the backup, it’s likely that I’ll be resetting the conditions that created this problem in the first place.

Which leads inexorably to a complete format, & rebuild of the system. Including reinstallation of every single piece of software. Then we get to pick and choose the bits from the backup that we absolutely can’t do without. Like the data!

As much as I don’t want to… RR is right.

Best to bite the bullet, reformat the drive, reload a completely pristine copy of the OS, then reload copies of the applications and then make a backup of the computer in this new pristine state.

You’d think that given the age of the machine I’d have a pristine backup… Well you’d be wrong.

When I got this machine a few months ago, I moved all the programs from my older MacBook to this one. Then I upgraded the Operating System on the new machine, so god only knows what bits of incompatible flotsam and jetsam may have been floating around on the disk.

Approximately 20 hours of work later I have a system that is mostly like what I had before. I know that I will be stumbling over bits of unlicensed software for weeks to come.

When I stumble over one of these applications I’ll have a choice. Find the license key… or toss the software. Realistically if I haven’t used a bit of software for weeks… I probably could do without it.

I like a clean system that works. So I’ll probably be tossing these little bits of software.

I did notice while reinstalling software that there are an awful lot of applications that ask for access to my contacts list. I understand Word asking… It’s trying to make writing letters easier by linking contact data. But some of the other applications made no sense at all.  Needless to say they were denied access.

I’m kind of a fan of Apple, NO… I’m not a rabid fan boy. But I like Apples machines.

IMAG0253

Honestly, Apple does it right most of the time.

There are some things that they screw up on in big ways but in general they do a good job in design, implementation, and support.

If you’re thinking Apple for your next computer purchase. A word of advice…

Buy the full boat machine. Max Memory, Max hard disk, top of the line… You’ll never be sorry and the machine will probably have a usable lifespan of at least 5 years possibly more. Think about it, you and your Mac go to College and graduate with a Masters degree 6 years later. Can you say the same of Windows?

As I’ve been reading email & writing this blog, my machine has been backing up to a different TimCapsule drive. I want to keep the old backup for a few weeks in case I need to go pick something out of it that I can’t recreate or live without.

I’m back online, back to working and Hopefully this is a “One Off” event.

RR wherever you are… Thank you!

Talk about great service! RR called me several times to see how things were progressing and was always there when or if I hit a snag. He’s the consummate professional and genuinely knows his stuff. Even if I did make him a bit nervous by fiddling with the UNIX underbelly of the Mac OS.

I hope that if he reads this he’ll take what I say next, the right way. I hope I don’t have to talk with Apple again. But If I do I’m going to see if I can have a chat with RR.

Now on to the next thing…