aubreyturner.org

I’ve had to be “available” today, since our application is being installed this weekend, even though I’m not the technical contact and I can’t fix anything if it’s broken.  I think it’s one of those “feel good” kinds of things.  Regardless, I’m stuck here until they’re done. 

My company gave me a new laptop yesterday (Thinkpad T30—2GHz/1GB RAM), so I’ve been passing the time transferring all my stuff from the old one (a two-year old Thinkpad T21—800MHz/768MB RAM) and installing all the software that I need to do my job.  I’m currently at my “command center” with three computers in front of me (the old laptop, the new laptop, and my Linux system).  If that doesn’t define geekiness, I’m not sure what would (I suppose I could bring in the laptop from the living room and fire up the game machine to make it five, but that would just be excessive ).

It’s amazing the amount of stuff that I needed to install, and some of it will have to wait for Monday, when I get back to the office and use the CDs I forgot to bring home (I can get to online images that my company has for internal use from here, but I’m not sure I want to download three products that require 400-500MB each).  On the old laptop I went through all the installed software listed in “Add/Remove Programs” and created a Word document with the status of each one (i.e. already installed on the new one, no longer needed, to be installed).  The list is almost two pages long (which would put it around 100 entries, although I’m too lazy to count it ).

If I didn’t have to stay here, I would have gone to an early showing (12:30) of The Matrix.  Oh well, I guess I’ll try again next weekend (maybe some of the crowds will have thinned out by then).

A few quickies…

• Ladies, picking your nose and examining your finger isn’t terribly attractive.  And no, you’re not in a privacy bubble in your driver’s seat.  I’m constantly amazed at how people forget that they can be seen by other drivers.
• Driving on a two-lane interstate is a game that must be played several moves ahead.  I’m amused by people who get pissed off at me and swerve into the right lane, thinking that they’re going to pass me while I’m in the left lane.  What they don’t realize is that I’m not the type to hog the lane, and I wouldn’t be there if I wasn’t passing someone slower.  I’m not terribly patient myself, but I’ve learned that you get ahead more easily by staying calm and driving smoothly than you do by being a jerk (and I’ve plenty of experience as Mr. Road Rage™).  Most of these hotheads end up getting jammed up behind a slow-moving car in the right lane, because they didn’t think far enough ahead.  Besides, it takes too damn much energy to be a hothead.
• I’ve noticed that more women seem to be coming to the range now.  That’s a good sign, but it still bothers me that it’s different enough to notice.  Maybe someday in the near future this will become a non-issue.
• I passed the Rave Theater in Hickory Creek on the way home and the parking lot was packed to the gills.  I guess the new Matrix movie must be raking in cash at a pretty good clip.

This post from Bitter got me to thinking about a related issue concerning firearms.  I’m pondering the ramifications of giving access to a firearm during a training session to a person who has been prescribed antidepressants.  Texas law is certainly not clear (at least to me) on this issue, but more importantly, I want to be as careful as possible.  In fact, Texas law only addresses this issue in relation to the CHL statutes in a section on whether “a person is incapable of exercising sound judgment with respect to the proper use and storage of a handgun” (Section 411.172, Subsection d of the Texas Government Code).  Further, it never addresses the issue of depression or treatment for depression.  Instead, it includes this catch-all phrase (Section 411.172(d)(1)):

has been diagnosed by a licensed physician as suffering from a psychiatric disorder or condition that causes or is likely to cause substantial impairment in judgment, mood, perception, impulse control, or intellectual ability;

This one will definitely require more thought.  On one side, you don’t want to give access to a gun to someone who could be suicidal.  At the same time, you also don’t want to deny knowledge of gun handling to someone who is actually interested (either for safety or self-protection reasons).

Update:  Another thought occurred to me after I wrote this.  I wonder if any gun owners have avoided getting help for depression for fear of losing their CHLs (or even their guns).

Intuit has finally come to its senses regarding its stupid activation mechanism for TurboTax.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based software maker will discard its so-called product activation feature, the company announced Wednesday when it reported third-quarter earnings.

“Intuit has a long heritage of doing right by customers, and some of our customers didn’t have the great experience they expect from Intuit,” Steve Bennett, chief executive of the company, said in a statement. “Therefore we’ve decided to discontinue product activation next season.”

The introduction of product activation technology in TurboTax for the 2002 tax year also failed to deliver the additional revenue and profit growth the company had anticipated, Bennett added. Even so, Intuit reported revenue rose by 29 percent and net income more than doubled in the quarter ended April 30, compared with the same period a year ago. The company said growth was driven by gains in its TurboTax business, which brought in $313.1 million in revenue for the quarter.

Product activation is a controversial antipiracy approach that locks a piece of software to a specific PC. Intuit’s version, developed by Macrovision, runs in the background on the PC and checks for a unique activation number generated when TurboTax is installed and stored on the PC’s hard drive. The technology is intended to prevent customers from printing or filing returns from any PC other than the original machine that was used to activate the software.

Customers complained, however, that the technology could make it difficult to continue using TurboTax if they were to acquire a new PC or hard drive. Many customers said they were annoyed that the product activation mechanism continually ran in the background, even when TurboTax wasn’t being used, monopolizing a small chunk of their PC’s memory.

All that the activation feature did was generate ill-will, complaints, and calls to tech support.  I know that I don’t like to pay for the priviledge of being treated like a thief.  In fact, I resolved never to purchase another piece of their desktop software (of any kind) as long as they continued using this activation software (and I only reluctantly used their online tax filing software, after I couldn’t get their competitor’s product to work).

And I don’t like the product activation crap in Windows XP, either, but their market position kind of forced me into using it (that and I didn’t want to have to deal with wiping and reinstalling my new laptop with Linux).

Now, perhaps I’ll consider purchasing Quicken again, since my foray into using Money ended badly.  I’m trying to find a good solution to keeping track of my accounts.  Despite being a techno-geek, I still maintain my bank account via an old-fashioned check register (and such high-tech devices as a pen and a calculator).  I ordered the BankOne branded version of Money (it had a 30-day free trial and was $29.99 if I wanted to buy it, as opposed to $59.99 normally; although now I see that Amazon has it for $19.99 after rebates).  Unfortunately, Money ate my data file after about a week (it was just gone, nowhere to be found).  That really ticked me off, since I’d spent a lot of time entering all of my account information and financial data into it.

Ugh.  I sense that today is going to be one of those looooooonnnnnggg days.  I couldn’t get to sleep until sometime near midnight and I woke up at 4:19 (that number is burned into my brain now) and couldn’t go back to sleep.

I’m now hearing “Your Cheatin’ Heart” in my head, specifically, these lines:

But sleep won’t come
The whole night through
‘Cause your cheatin’ heart
Will tell on you

Not that I’ve been cheating or anything, it’s just that the lyric popped into my head.  My brain on four hours sleep is a scary place.

A final post before I go to bed (hopefully to sleep for a change).

Jeff, at Caerdroia, has a good (albeit technical) explanation for understanding men.

Men are heirarchichal.

We are object oriented.

We define our schema in a file, whose syntax is very simple, but which requires several reboots and much swearing before it will really take full effect – little bits of old schema definitions end up cached somewhere in memory, and only come out when the right branch of a particular algorithm are triggered.

This definitely appealed to my inner geek.  And like computers, fiendish complexity is a function of utter simplicity.

I guess high schoolers are just as randy as ever, but now they’re getting it on tape.

Eight Duncanville band students have been suspended for allegedly participating in a lewd video in which girls showed their breasts.

Duncanville Independent School District says the high school juniors and seniors—7 girls and 1 boy—were suspended even though administrators didn’t see the tape in question.

The band was in Corpus Christi May 3, when a chaperone saw some female band members reviewing a video playback on a camera.

Some of the students admitted participating in the video.

The school superintendent says a chaperone destroyed the tape.

I guess this will teach them to be more discreet if they want to get away with something like this in the future. 

When I heard about this asinine Oreo lawsuit I was appalled.  Apparently, I’m not the only one.  Jeff Soyer has a few choice words for the bottom feeding scum sucking lawyer who initiated the suit.

I would never condone violence against anyone, and I certainly would not encourage anyone to do same. But in my opinion, that is, just speculating—fantasizing as all of us do—on what would make this a better world, and in excercising my First Amendment rights to speak on someone who has through his own actions become a public figure, I hope Stephen Joseph trips on a clump of dirt somewhere and falls into a bottomless pit.

But he also has some important things to say about the whiny baby culture that we seem to be turning into.

If that’s what our society has come down to (and apparently that is what most liberals would like) then life isn’t worth living. We will never explore the stars because no agency could possibly afford the liability insurance for such a project. We will never again become strong as a species because no lawyer or politician (aren’t they both one and the same) will allow us to. If we now need to ban Oreos cookies because they represent a threat to us, we will never amount to anything.

This is something that’s been bothering me as well.  Only if you’re hurt through no fault of your own should you be able to sue, and then only for whatever is needed to make you whole again (or the equivalent, if it’s not possible to do so).  Otherwise, shut the hell up and deal with it.  The world is a dangerous place and to try to make it otherwise will turn it into a lifeless dull hell of endless regulation and prying nannies.

Update:  Little Green Footballs has picked up on this, and Laurence Simon left this in the comments.  That St. Claire safety sign maker comes in pretty handy.

In my previous post I mentioned my friend with the computer problems (who also happens to be the one I wrote about on Sunday).  She’s been under quite a bit of stress for the past few months as she has been finishing up her undergraduate degree.  I’ve known her for nearly 14 years now, since we met when we were both in school at East Texas State University (now Texas A&M-Commerce).  She quit school about the time I graduated and went out into the “real world”.  A few years ago she decided to go back to school.

We’re both the same age (10 days apart) and sometimes we think spookily alike.  But what’s more interesting is that sometimes I just get a sense that something’s wrong and shortly after that she’ll either send me an email or call.  Or more interestingly, one time I had a dream that she needed my help and it was at the exact time she ran into the problem (it woke me up around 11:00pm one night, just a few minutes from the time she sent me an email). 

I know that a lot of people refuse to believe that these sorts of things are possible, writing them off as coincidence or delusions, etc.  However, I’ve encountered enough weird stuff in my life so far as to think that it’s the height of hubris to think that we know it all or to completely rule out such things.  My belief is that these things are actually natural phenomena, it’s just that our science is not yet advanced enough to understand them (hence the title of this posting).  Of course, that’s just a belief, and I can’t prove it.

I also commented the other day about coincidence, concerning getting an email from a friend I’d been thinking of contacting.  When I mentioned this in my reply to him via email, he replied:

You know, I don’t know if I’m so quick to dismiss things as “coincidence.”  I’ve seen some things that have concretely made me believe that there are things at work that we’re not aware of…whether it’s God or temporal distortions or little green men screwing with our heads who knows (but, any of these answers would be fascinating to KNOW for certain that they exist).

It would certainly be fascinating to know that they exist, but I suspect that that would open up a whole new set of questions to ponder.

The ways of technology are mysterious, but one rule that you can count on is that the chance of technology failure increases in direct proportion to the importance or need for that bit of technology.  When I turned my cell phone on at 7:45 this morning it almost immediately buzzed and beeped (causing me to nearly drop it), indicating that I had a voice message.  Since I tend to use the cell mostly for outgoing calls, it usually means that something’s gone wrong if I get a message on it.

A friend of mine had left me a message at 11:30 last night wondering if there was any way to recover a file.  She was working on her last paper (at least until grad school) and her laptop appeared to have lost it.  When I called her, it turned out to be worse than that.  The file was corrupted and portions of the paper were missing.  At that point, the only suggestion I could offer was to try to recover from the .TMP file left behind by Word.

I feel bad for her, because this laptop has been a pain since she got it about two years ago.  It’s a Sony Vaio that came preloaded with Windows ME.  It tends to freeze, it has trouble writing CDs with my Iomega Predator USB burner (the Predator worked fine on my laptop, though), and sometimes it doesn’t want to shut down (one time I had to pull the power cable and remove the battery pack to get it to stop).  I think the thing’s possessed by some kind of malevolent computing demon.

Now that school’s over, she’s asked me to reinstall it in the hopes that it will be more stable.  I’m going to exorcise that demon with a dose of XP and the latest BIOS updates and drivers.