Month: June 2014

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Stompy Foot Can’t catch a break

I’ve been watching with some amusement the blowback from the deal to release Sgt. Bergdahl.

While the jury isn’t in yet on if Bergdahl is a deserter, (It seems likely that he is, based on various published reports over the last few days) I can’t believe that ol’ Stompy engaged in a trade in the first place. 

I think it sets a bad precedent that the exchange rate is now established at 5 Taliban to one American. All that has to happen now is for a tour bus of Americans in Egypt to be hijacked and 200 Gitmo detainees are suddenly free.

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Worse yet as was observed in an article this weekend at Real Clear Politics The President no longer enjoys the absolute tightlipped loyalty and respect from his military.  In times past, the President as Commander in Chief of the Armed forces enjoyed silence in the ranks.  Obama has managed to break even that long tradition and now has commanders speaking out about his policies.

It’s sad that President DIVIDER has alienated the troops as well as the citizens.

On the plus side, I suspect that if he were to give an illegal order to the troops today, that there’d be no infighting or discussion about refusing to comply. I’d bet the military would simply say “No”.

The blowback over Bergdahl will intensify to be sure. However I doubt that it will result in the impeachment of the President.  As I’ve commented before if Obama is impeached the country would rapidly devolve into a racially charged civil war of words if not deeds. 

This too is part of the Obama legacy. 

I think he’s going to be safe and will finish out his term in office. 

I’d love to see him given what the Japanese call a “Window Seat”. Essentially this is what happens to high ranking failures in Japanese companies who do not have the good graces to resign. They’re given a beautiful office with no responsibilities or power what so ever. He’d just be trotted out for official photos but the real power would be outside what is now thought of as a horribly corrupt administration.

The really sad thing is that Stompy could have done things so much differently.

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Hoo boy! The Follies continue

I’ve been busy.

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Turns out my computer was dying a slow graceful death. I’ve seen this before with Apple Machines. I don’t know if it’s by design, or I’m just damn lucky, but I’ve had machines that developed serious problems continue to operate when by rights they should have folded.

My computer had been glitchy and getting glitchier but I figured it was something I’d done during one of my forays into writing code. I’m a terrible hack and it’s a wonder that my code doesn’t cause machines to burst into flame. 

(I’ve actually seen that; a machine bursting into flame, but it wasn’t due to my poor coding skills. Another story for another time.)

My computer told me it was having problems when the camera failed.  I probably wouldn’t have noticed for a long time except that I wanted to make a FaceTime call and couldn’t.  As I investigated I came to the conclusion that whatever the problem was, it was something that I couldn’t fix without help.

This led to the call to Apple. During that call, I discovered that the internal diagnostics were apparently corrupted and the Apple support person said I needed to return my baby to the Mother Ship.  The internal diagnostics are part of the firmware of the machine. If they’re not available, it suggests that something really bad has happened to the firmware which means it’s sort of amazing that the computer is still booting or running.

This unexpected turn of events led to a mad dash to backup everything, and finish then publish some things I’ve been working on riky-fuckin-tick.

Which explains my lack of posting. I’m writing this post on my iPad. My computer is expected back sometime next week.

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^&*%@&^% iTunes

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I have a love – hate relationship with iTunes, the application running on my computer, not the store.

Mostly I think it’s a hate relationship but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

When iTunes works I’m happy with it although I’ll admit in the most recent iterations I’ve become very distrustful of the application and am more likely to listen to music from my iPad or iPhone.

Distrustful? Why you ask?

I fully expect iTunes to crash at least once, if not two or three times a day depending on what I’m doing. Three times if I’m downloading a video from the cloud.

If it were just the application crashing I’d probably be ok with it. But it has a very nasty habit of taking my entire system down.  First iTunes becomes unresponsive, but if you’re listening to music you might not notice because it’s continuing to play.

You’ll find out though when you try to save a file in another application, or try to open a webpage, or another application or file. Then and only then will you realize just how well and truly fucked you are.

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In my case, to regain control, I have to disconnect the USB, and External monitor. Then I have to pull the laptop from it’s cradle, then I have to press and hold the power button.

I shouldn’t have to do all this but by the time you notice symptoms, the OS is so corrupt and the CPUs are so busy that they’re no longer processing any user input.

Then the computer informs me that I shut it down because of a crash and asks do I want to reopen the applications that were running? UHHH NO! Since that’s how we came to be in this situation in the first place.

After the reboot things are usually pretty normal and it’s only very rarely that I have lingering issues.

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Sunday is a case in point.

iTunes was up, I’d been syncing my iPad and iPhone then I was chatting with a friend on the phone, and at some point asked my computer to do something.

Locked up! Zero response.

Aww shit! How much of what I was working on got saved? Doesn’t matter… The reboot is inevitable, might as well press the button.

When the system came back, it still wasn’t right, Four reboots, a permissions repair, and a trip through recovery disk, and safe boot later. My computer came back mostly normal.

But then again, maybe not.