A-freaking-mazing!

You don’t have to know a word of Chinese to be blown away by this guy.

SSD Drama (Not SS Drama) update

I got an email last Friday from Colleen at MyDigitalDiscount.com in response to my March 17 query about my crapped-out 32GB SSD (solid state drive) for my Dell Mini 9 netbook.

She asked if I’d like an RMA (return merchandise authorization) for a replacement, to which I immediately agreed.

I was about to fire off an email to her this morning to see if it was in the works when an email from her popped in with a pdf attachment to fill out and send in with the defunct SSD.

Their web site shows the 32GB SSD as a back order item, just like it was when I ordered the first one late last year, so I expect it will be awhile before I see the replacement.

I’m at Hastings at the moment, but I’ll bundle the SSD up with the appropriate paperwork when I get home and hustle it off to the post office in time for the 4 p.m. pickup.

Godspeed, Edwin

Edwin O. Park, the most beloved copy boy to ever work at The Indianapolis News, died yesterday in a Hamilton County (Ind.) hospital. He was recently diagnosed with advanced cancer in his liver, bladder, colon and lungs. This seems an appropriate time to reprise the blogpost I did on March 21, 2007 when Maria and I were both working at the Crawfordsville (Ind.) Journal Review:

Last night, as I asked Maria to take a sports page proof that I had just edited across the newsroom to the sports editor, I flashed on the old days at The Indianapolis News when we wrote with typewriters and had copy boys to do all the gopher work.
In that bygone era, before college degrees were considered important, being hired as a copy boy at a large newspaper was a first step toward becoming a reporter. When you finished a story, or in the case of a breaking news story, when you finished a page of a story, you yelled, "Copy!" and a copy boy would hustle over to carry your news copy (hence the name) to your editor for his scrutiny. Copy boys also made coffee, distributed newspapers throughout the city room as the various editions came off of the press, and carried stuff back and forth from the newsroom to the Statehouse bureau about four blocks west when the Legislature was in session.
We had a variety of copy boys in those days ranging from a photographer's young son whose chief interest seemed to be getting drunk as often as he could so he could brag about it the next day, to a scrawny little hillbilly with a tough guy surly attitude, to a gay black kid who dressed up in women's clothing and cruised Indiana Avenue on weekends, to Edwin.
Edwin O. Park was at The News when I started on Feb. 6, 1967, and he was there after I quit in October, 2000. At least I think he was still there. I'd been working in a suburban bureau since 1985 and lost track of the folks downtown to a large degree.
Edwin, I was told, was a graduate of Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis who came down with some horrible fever that left him brain damaged with the intellectual capacity of a 10-year-old. We loved Edwin and reveled in his quirks and habits. And we collected "Edwin stories."
His wardrobe was a kaleidoscope of stripes, plaids, polkadots and odd combinations. One day he showed up with a particularly hideous combination of bowling shoes, plaid pants and striped shirt. Copy boy Tom Healy announced Eddie's arrival, saying, "Do not adjust your set!"
Edwin wore short-sleeved shirts with a pocket protector and a half-dozen ballpoint pens,none of which worked. He used a handcart to haul stacks of newspapers around the building for distribution and kept his distribution list in that shirt pocket.
One day when Eugene C. Pulliam, the owner of the paper and an Arizona resident, was in town to visit, Edwin arrived at the elevator at the same time as Gene.
Eddie had his arms full of newspapers and had no idea who Gene was. He glanced at Gene, who was dressed in slacks and a Hawaiian shirt, and told the owner, "Hit three for me, will you buddy?" Gene, being a good sport, pushed the button for the third floor.
Sometime in the early 1980s, Eddie's dad died. On the day of the funeral, Edwin came back to the office after the services, still wearing a suit. A reporter, expecting Edwin to be overwhelmed with sadness, asked him how it went at the funeral.
"I came out pretty good on that deal," Eddie said, brightly. "I got my dad's watch."
Edwin continued to live with his mother, riding a bus downtown from their home on the far northside.
One morning he was called to the phone. Watching him take the call, we could tell it was something serious. After he hung up, someone asked what was the problem. "That was my mom. I forgot to turn her oxygen on last night."
Wendell Trogdon, who was city editor at the time, was solicited by the author of a popular Book of Lists to offer the name of a distinguished journalist to be included in the next edition of the book. When the next edition appeared, there was a paragraph about Edwin O. Park, full of bogus credits, right after the paragraph on TV newswoman Jessica Savitch.
So it was no surprise last weekend when I got an e-mail from fellow Newsie Skip Hess, who had gone to the funeral of former News television critic R.K. Shull. Shull wrote a TV column and also responded to letters from readers in a sidebar called Shull's Mailbag. In characteristic fashion, the subject line of Skip's e-mail was "Shull's Bodybag."
Skip said he and another News alumnus, Gerry LaFollette, had dropped by the nursing home where Edwin now lives to tell him of R.K.'s passing.
Here's the text:
He was playing bingo in the dining room with 10 others scattered about.
"Got five quarters," he said when we walked up.
"G 48," said the caller.
"We stopped to tell you that R.K. Shull died and we are going to his services,"Gerry said.
"We had one die here," Edwin said.
"B 10," said the caller.
"They're dropping like flies, huh, Eddie?" I said.
"Well, see ya later," Eddie said.
Visiting time: 2.20 minutes

Fat Tire in cans

It’s sunny with a temperature in the upper 60s, so I rode across the state line to Mr. T’s Riverside – the supreme liquor store in the area in the Missouri Bootheel.

They have Fat Tire in cans.

Back at Hastings for the first time in more than a week

I parked my old del Sol with its blasted-out paintjob next to this 2-seat Mercedes Benz SLK280 in the Hastings parking lot this morning and had to chuckle over the license plate.

It’s something to celebrate. Maybe we can celebrate it someday…

I took Pete to the vet this morning for a blood test. When he was in for his checkup a month ago, they determined he has a liver problem and put him on a once-a-day pill with instructions to come back after 30 days for a re-test. Turns out he needs to stay on the pills, which cost $84.50 a month. That’s $990 a year. Yikes! I hope he realizes how much we love him.

I turned in my final story for the upcoming Outlook special section yesterday afternoon, so now I have my days back and don’t have to sit around waiting for people to not return my phone calls.

I figured out how to get the most elusive of my sources to return my calls last Friday. I learned she checks her email frequently on her Blackberry, so I sent her an email saying I’d heard the organization she heads has imploded and no longer exists and askied her to let me know if that’s true. I clicked the stopwatch on my Breitling Chrono Avenger as I hit the Send button. She’d been ignoring my calls and emails for a whole week, but she called exactly 12 minutes and 52 seconds later. Heh heh.

I also taught the first session of my Advanced Digital Photography class last night. I only have four students, but they’re all alumni of the introductory class I taught in the fall of 2008 and they’re tech savvy enough that I don’t have to waste a lot of time showing them how to work Windows. Their assignment for next week is to shoot a portrait.It should be a lot of fun. The class meets Monday evenings through April 26.

Roboplow!

The beauty of this will doubtless be lost on my neighbors here in the mid-South where it snows infrequently, but my friends in Indiana will love it.

But we don’t want your “help”

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

C.S. Lewis

Another motovideo

This is Lake Frierson State Park, one of two state parks within 30 minutes of our house. Admission to Arkansas state parks is free.

And indeed we shall

My Dad – a 20th century man

Today would have been my father’s 100th birthday. He was born on the family farm in Carroll County, Ind., on March 21, 1910, the eighth of 10 children. He died on Nov. 24, 1997 at the age of 87.

He was probably about 30 years old when this photo was shot on the east side of the courthouse square in Delphi, Ind., where he lived all of his adult life. Dad was an independent insurance agent, a Realtor, a two-term member and former president of the Delphi-Deer Creek School Board at a time when the current high school was designed and built. He enjoyed a good round of golf and was a Chicago White Sox fan.

Dad’s lifespan included the explosion of technology from aviation to space travel, from rural electrification to the Internet, the fall of the Czar in Russia through the collapse of the Soviet Union, two World Wars, the Great Depression, the sinking of the RMS Titanic and the discovery of its wreck site.

He was also a lifelong Democrat. His father, who was a township trustee and county treasurer was a Democrat. I have the receipt from grandpa’s donation to the campaign of William Jennings Bryan in 1908.

But I am confident that my dad and his dad would be horrified to see how their party has taken a sharp turn to the left and become the enemy of free enterprise and liberty.

Happy Birthday, Dad. I’m glad you didn’t live to see this day.

For my father

Time for a new motovideo

After a week of being held hostage by story sources who lacked the courtesy to return my calls promptly, I seized the chance to get out and do what I wanted to do yesterday.

That included trying a new camera angle for a motovideo. All of my previous videos on the bikes were shot with the camera mounted atop my helmet. The results were okay, but since I tilt my head to keep my eyes level with the horizon in the turns, they didn’t give a true sense of the lean angles. You can only get that by attaching the camera to the bike.

So I removed the tank bag from my K1200GT and used the industrial-strength suction cup mount to secure the camera in a position that showed the instrument cluster as well as the road. I wasn’t sure I could get the windscreen clean enough for a clear view and I also worried that the curvature of the plexiglass would distort the view. I needn’t have worried.

Here’s about 10 minutes of a romp up Ark. 351 and west on Ark. 358.

The time is now

Saturday morning

It’s 11 a.m. Saturday and we’re having a late breakfast at Cracker Barrel.

Austin is in Indiana this weekend, so we’re enjoying our temporary empty nest status.

My Mini 9’s webcam doesn’t know how to deal with the lighting in here.

A whole week shot to hell

I put out calls and emails starting on Monday for this story I’m supposed to write and, so far, I’ve only talked with one person who is no longer on the board of the organization about which I’m writing.

The president is a woman who is notorious for not returning calls. I left a voicemail on her office phone on Monday, followed up on Tuesday and sent her an email (which I know she saw because a source told me she always checks her email on her Blackberry).

I left a message on the organization’s voicemail on Monday, but have since learned the organization ran out of money months ago and terminated its administrative assistant, so there is no one to listen to or respond to that message.

I should have guess that when I noticed their web site hasn’t been updated since June 9, 2008.

I now have a call out to a Realtor in hopes that she can say something useful to the story.

Because nobody answers their phone anymore, I have wasted an entire week waiting for people – mainly the organization president – to call me back.

I like to be helpful, but this is just not something I ever want to do again. Increasing difficulty in reaching sources is one of the things that made early retirement from The Indianapolis Star attractive. Well, that and the fact that Gannett practices Management By Fear and I was too old and too professional to put up with that crap.

So this will be the last of these pieces I agree to take on. My time is worth more to me than the modest compensation this work will bring.

Jesse James cheated on Sandra Bullock for this?

Another item for the World Gone Mad File

I don’t ordinarily give a rat’s ass about the Hollywood marriage-go-round or celebrities’ chronic inability to keep their lives between the guardrails, but I like Sandra Bullock. She’s beautiful, smart and witty. So this week’s revelation that her marriage to Jesse James is on the rocks because he shacked up with another woman makes me wonder why she married such an idiot. Here’s what FoxNews says about the other woman:

Jesse James’ self-proclaimed mistress Michelle 'Bombshell' McGee told In Touch magazine she first contacted the “Monster Garage” star via MySpace, and it turns out McGee is indeed quite web savvy.

The tattoo model is featured on a site called SoCalGlamourGirls.com, where viewers can pay to see her on a webcam, or chat with her on the Internet.

FOX411: Tattoo Model Says She Slept With Sandra Bullock's Husband.

"I am the hottest busty tattoo and fetish model you will ever meet on a webcam,” her profile reads. “Come have a hot and steamy affair with inked girls like me on live video."

On the site, McGee claims that she’s currently working on her Masters degree in biochemistry.

SLIDESHOW: Meet Michelle 'Bombshell' McGee.

Stating that she has a BS in biology, the Internet performer also claims to have completed two years of medical school.

However, she’s listed as 24 years-old on the site, so unless she’s some kind of leather-clad Doogie Howser, her college curricula just barely adds up.

Noting that she’s “really wild in the sack” and “looking for the right sugardady” [sic], Michelle, continuing her medical theme, says she especially loves “to have affairs with doctors.”

The inked Internet entrepreneur also mentions her foot fetish and dominatrix work, stating “I mostly wear leather and chains for my video chat customers.”

SSD Drama

The RunCore 32GB Pro PATA Mini Zif Solid State Drive I bought from My Digital Discount has crashed and died.

It was on back order when I made my purchase last Nov. 2 and it finally arrived Dec. 21. I followed the enclosed instructions and cloned my Windows XP operating system and files from my original 8GB drive onto the new SSD. It worked pretty well for a month or so.

Then it started giving me the Blue Screen of Death with increasing frequency. I re-cloned the old drive onto it and it worked ok for a few days before reverting to the BSD routine.

So I bit the bullet, bought an external CD drive (since my Dell Mini 9 has no CD drive) and did a clean install of XP and reloaded all of my programs and files. It worked like a champ and my Mini 9 was faster than ever. I was a happy camper.

For two weeks.

Then last Friday morning I fired up the computer and the motherboard searched and searched and finally reported it could find no operating system, i.e., no SSD. So I put the old 8GB SSD back in and it runs fine, albeit slower and with less than 700 megabytes of free space.

Consequently, I sent the following message to My Digital Discount’s Customer Service Department this morning:

I purchased a RunCore 32GB Pro IV 50mm T-Style PCI-e PATA Solid State Drive SSD on 11/2/09 and received it 12/21/09. I initially cloned my 8GB drive to it and it ran fine for a month or so before it started crashing. I did a clean install of WindowsXP and it ran perfectly until last week when it crashed to the point where my Dell Mini 9 can't even see it. I have since gone back to the old drive.
What are my warranty options?
Sorry about the lack of an order #. It's not on the confirmation email I received when I ordered the SSD.

I’ll let you know how they respond.

Benjamin Franklin on entitlement programs and the poor

…I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means.—I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.

In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

There is no country in the world [but England] where so many provisions are established for them; so many hospitals to receive them when they are sick or lame, founded and maintained by voluntary charities; so many alms-houses for the aged of both sexes, together with a solemn general law made by the rich to subject their estates to a heavy tax for the support of the poor.

Under all these obligations, are our poor modest, humble, and thankful; and do they use their best endeavours to maintain themselves, and lighten our shoulders of this burthen?—On the contrary, I affirm that there is no country in the world in which the poor are more idle, dissolute, drunken, and insolent. The day you passed that act, you took away from before their eyes the greatest of all inducements to industry, frugality, and sobriety, by giving them a dependence on somewhat else than a careful accumulation during youth and health, for support in age or sickness.

In short, you offered a premium for the encouragement of idleness, and you should not now wonder that it has had its effect in the increase of poverty. Repeal that law, and you will soon see a change in their manners. St. Monday, and St. Tuesday, will cease to be holidays. SIX days shalt thou labour, though one of the old commandments long treated as out of date, will again be looked upon as a respectable precept; industry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them.

[From Benjamin Franklin, "On the Price of Corn and the Management of the Poor" (1766), Writings (New York: Library of America, 1987), 587-88.]

Just in time for the riding season

The 2010 BMW Motorcycle Owners of America Anonymous book was about the only interesting thing in today’s mail.

Now that I’ve scanned it for this blog entry, it’ll go into the tank bag on my K1200GT.

The Anonymous book is a 5”x7” 222-page paperback that has a state-by-state, city-by-city list of BMW MOA members who stand ready to help you if you have trouble on the road. Each listing is anonymous, in that there is no name – just a phone number – and codes like c (camping or tent space), ws (space to work on a motorcycle), wt (tools for working on a motorcycle), ss (storage space), or t (truck or trailer available). It also lists all of the BMW motorcycle dealers in the U.S. and Canada (including the recently defunct dealership in Little Rock), as well as important contacts worldwide. There are lists of phone numbers for motel chains, airlines, car rental, railroads, traveler’s checks, and on and on.

I never leave for a trip without mine. Last year’s will go into the saddlebag of Maria’s K75S.

Ooops!

Somebody at American Advisors Group didn’t get the memo to pull the commercial featuring Peter Graves.

The actor died yesterday, but the commercial is still running today.

Monday, Monday

This headline probably doesn’t strike anyone around here as humorous, but it made me snicker.

We passed a quiet weekend at home and now. I took the rest of the week off from my writing assignment that’s due on March 22. Now that the new week is upon me, I’m back in procrastination mode. I do, however, have semi-firm plans to make some phone calls in search of information starting after lunch today. Unless something more interesting comes up.

I discovered a new (to me) blog this morning that, if you’re of a conservative inclination, is a fun read. Of course, now that I’m on board as a reader, she’ll probably abandon it, but Bride of Rove is worth the effort.

Also, friend Lauri has invited me to contribute to her blog: Mad Meanderings. That’s incredibly flattering and I’ll have to give some thought to what I should write.

And it’s cold and cloudy too…

It’s 1:20 p.m. and I’m having my first cup of coffee of the day. I’m at Books-a-Million, having hit the post office and the Parker Road Walmart pharmacy and Kroger.

The entire medical insurance world has figured out that I turn 65 on July 14 because they’re flooding our mailbox with offers for Medicare supplemental insurance. I suppose I should start thinking about it, but not today.

There are two Walmarts in Jonesboro – an older store on Highland and the newer Super Walmart way the hell down south on Parker Road. (We live about 8 miles north of town.) I would rather have a rat in my mouth than go to the Highland Walmart. So when I asked my doctor’s nurse to phone a prescription in for me, I specified the PARKER FUCKING ROAD WALMART.

When I showed up to claim it the pharmacy tech checked and reported they had not received a prescription from my doc. I asked her to check with the Highland store and, sure enough, it had been called to that pharmacy. Did I want it transferred to the Parker Road pharmacy? Well, that’s where I’m standing with charge card in hand, so the answer is yes. Actually, it’s FUCK YES, but there’s no point in taking it out on her.

So instead of a simple grab-and-pay, like I would normally experience when dealing with alert, competent people, I got to piss away 20 minutes while the pharmacist filled the prescription from scratch. Oh, and when I was talking with the doc’s nurse yesterday, I asked her if this stuff was on Walmart’s $4 generic list. Yes, she said.

So imagine my surprise when the charge was $8 and change.

How can this be so hard?

And I should also mention that the 32GB Solid State Drive (SSD) I bought a few months ago for this netbook died yesterday after working wonderfully for a week or so on a clean install of Windows XP. The system can’t even see the drive.

Consequently, I put the original 8GB SSD back in and will limp along with less than 700 megabytes of free space until I figure out a new solution.

It’s always something.

Happy Birthday, Lauri

Here she is with the flowers we sent.

Freakin’ Frog

My son Steve on bass at Tuesday open mic night at the Freakin’ Frog in Las Vegas. It’s good to see him playing jazz again.

Sunny Thursday

It’s 61 degrees and I’m on the bike for the day.

My first stop was the post office where I noticed someone had dropped their ear plugs. I left them there on the pavement. Using someone else’s ear plugs is like using a stranger’s toothbrush. Besides, I didn’t want to get hearing AIDS.

After not enough thought, as it turns out, I decided on breakfast at Waffle House.

Even though I was wearing my fluorescent lime green riding jacket, I was apparently invisible to the waitress for several minutes. When she brought my silverware, she apparently noticed a problem with the knife – or else figured I couldn’t be trusted with it - and left only the fork and spoon on a napkin.

I ordered coffee and a 3-egg ham and cheese omelet with hash browns and toast. Naturally, the meal showed up with a packet of mixed fruit jelly. Who the hell likes or buys mixed fruit? I’ve long contended that Mixed Fruit is what they package at the end of the day with the leftovers.

When the waitress brought my check, I asked her for a packet of strawberry jelly in exchange for the mixed fruit. She brought it, but still hadn’t noticed that she’d shorted me a knife. Have you ever tried to apply jelly to toast with a fork or a spoon?

And, by the way, Waffle House coffee is fucking awful.

Now I’m at Hastings sipping some real coffee and using their free Wifi.

I thought long and hard yesterday about driving up to Indiana for my cousin’s memorial service this afternoon. I don’t know that my presence would have made that much difference to her sisters and brother. They might have been impressed that I’d care enough to drive all the way from Arkansas, but mostly their minds would be on other things and 14 hours is a long time to spend in a car for a short event like that.

Instead, I sent flowers and resolved to make time later this year to drive/ride over to Nashville and spend time with her brother, Sam. Sam is close to my age and at various times in our lives, we could pass for brothers, or maybe even twins.

From the post office bulletin board

This flyer showed up on the post office community bulletin board this week.

Midnight Cowboy isn’t a particularly imaginative wrestler name, but I kinda like Family of Pain and Loose Cannon.

Godspeed, Cousin Susie

Edens, Suellen G.

Suellen Groninger Edens 70, Indianapolis, died Mar. 8, 2010. Memorial service: 2 p.m. Mar. 11 in Myers Chapel of Memories, Lebanon. Interment: Deer Creek Cemetery, Deer Creek, IN.

Suellen Groninger Edens

Ms. Suellen Groninger Edens, 70, of Indianapolis, died Monday, March 8, 2010, at Westview Hospital in Indianapolis.
Suellen Edens was born January 4, 1940, in Flora. She was the daughter of the late Herbert U. and Ruth L. (Dietz) Groninger. She graduated from Lebanon High School in 1958 and attended Purdue University.
She married Tony Edens in 1959, in Indianapolis; they later divorced.
Ms. Edens lived in Lafayette, Bloomington and Grand Rapids, Mich. She moved to Indianapolis in the early 1980s, and  remained there.
She was a member of Tri Kappa Sorority in Lebanon.
Survivors include two children, Kimberly S. Faison of Santa Barbara, Calif., and Kent A. Edens of Hoboken, N.J.; one brother, Samuel H. Groninger and wife, Mary Ann, of Nashville, Tenn.; two sisters, Kay L. Boatman-Sampson and husband , Richard, of Lebanon and Jo Anne Sutter of Elkhart; and one grandson, several nieces and nephews, and several great-nieces and great-nephews.
Memorial funeral services are to be held at 2 p.m. Thursday, March 11, at Myers Chapel of Memories, 1502 N. Lebanon St., Lebanon, with the Rev. Vey Kidney officiating. Interment will follow cremation at the Deer Creek Cemetery in Deer Creek.
No Visitation is planned.
Memorial contributions may be made to Heartland Hospice, 931 E. 86th St., Suite 208, Indianapolis, IN 46240.
Online condolences may be made at www.myersmortuary.com.

Those are the obits from this morning’s Indianapolis Star and yesterday’s Lebanon Reporter for my cousin Susie. Her mother and mine were sisters and she was my favorite girl cousin when I was a little kid. She doted on me and I had sort of a crush on her.

She was all flash and glamour as a teenager and a young adult. She modeled and did TV commercials, but her marriage fell apart when she was in her 30s and she struggled with mental illness and alcoholism for the rest of her life.

It’s hard for me to get my brain wrapped around the image of her as an old woman, suffering from emphysema in an Indianapolis nursing home. She turned 70 in January and I guess she decided that was enough.

She’ll be buried tomorrow in the little church cemetery north of Deer Creek, Ind., where our Dietz and McCain ancestors lie.

I love these commercials

This is the new wallpaper on my netbook.

Successful operation

My granddaughter Lisa had outpatient surgery this morning to have tubes put into her ears. She’d become so congested that she could hardly hear.

Here she is with her mom, Nicky, after the surgery. Steve says everything went well.

Gorgeous!

This is Lauri’s latest creation. See it and others at http://www.etsy.com/shop/madmodiste

You gotta see this

Happy work

Church Women United has an annual project to sew Easter dresses for little girls in the area.

Maria has wanted to participate the last few years, but has been too busy. Until this year.

She’s been holed up in her sewing room for several evenings and weekends. I can hear her giggling over the hum of her Bernina. She calls me in every now and then to show me the latest frock, pointing out nifty little details that I might not have noticed or appreciated.

She took six of her creations – all made from leftover quilting fabric – to work this morning to hand over to the church ladies. She was smiling when she left.

Hygiene for idiots

I was left speechless last night when I saw a commercial for this no-touch hand soap dispenser.

It shows people touching the pump of a conventional hand soap/hand sanitizer dispenser which, on closer inspection is teeming with cartoon germs. Horror of horrors. Why would anyone want to touch this disease ridden surface?

Now for only $16.95 (the best Amazon.com price), you can just wave your hand under the spout and catch a squirt of soap.

But wait a minute.

Why does it matter if there are germs on the conventional pump, since they’re about to be washed off of your hands anyway? And people who wash/sanitize their hands frequently probably have fewer bacteria on their hands to begin with, making the conventional pump marginally cleaner than most surfaces you touch during the day – like money or door handles.

This, then, is a product that meets a non-existent need.

This is the kind of thing that makes people in the Third World think we’re imbeciles.

Steppin’

I found this story, with an Arkansas connection, over at Ace of Spades HQ:

An all-white girl group from the University of Arkansas performed at the 2010 Sprite Stepping Contest and came in 1st place. The audience was not happy about this and booed the Zeta Tau Alpha team. Sprite huddled and decided that hey what do you know the 2nd place, all-black team also won the contest and were co-first place winners. Sure a black man can be president but everyone knows that white girls can't step.

Burrito on the porch

It’s a delightful sunny 68 degrees here on Crowley’s Ridge at midday and I just finished a burrito on the screened porch.

I knew it was going to be a nice day when I was able to walk out to the newspaper tube this morning in shirtsleeves and listen to the cardinals singing.

I think the worst of the nasty cold weather is behind us. Now it’s time for tornado season.

In the meantime, I’m watching the time ticking away until my 5 p.m. deadline and waiting for calls from the chairwomen of a couple of local charitable foundations. If worse comes to worst, I can throw something together with what I have so far, but I really do want their voices in this thing.

After that, I can procrastinate two whole weeks before my next and final deadline on this project.

Arkansas chain saw massacre

Maria shot this last weekend, but the weather is the same today.

THE Painted House

The temperature is in the upper 50s and there’s not a cloud in the sky.

I’m finishing a late lunch at Wendy’s in Jonesboro, having made a 80-some mile loop out into the flats of the Delta.

The bike seems to enjoy getting out of the garage and it feels great to get back into the saddle after a ridiculously cold and snowy (for here, anyway) winter.

There are signs at the Wendy’s cash registers saying you have to ask for tomatoes if you want them because the record cold in Florida has cut deeply into the quality and quantity of tomatoes on the market.

I had no particular destination in mind when I left home a little after noon. I took CR 762 east across U.S. 49 to the U.S. 49 Brookland business route, then turned south and quickly east to Dixie. By the time I had covered the 7 miles or so to Dixie, I decided I wanted to ride to Lepanto and look at the “painted house.”

Novelist John Grisham was born here in Jonesboro and spent his early years living out in the Delta. Although his first novels were courthouse crime stories, he returned to his roots with “A Painted

House.” It’s the story of a young boy living in poverty out in the Delta who longs to live in a painted house, a sign of affluence in a time and place where most houses went unpainted.

A Painted House was published in 2001 and was made into a movie in 2003. And the house used in the movie is at the south edge of Lepanto.

So here I am with the Painted House and the Lepanto water tower behind me.

Troubleshooting a video problem

My new (late last year) desktop computer has a video problem.

Whenever I run a video fullscreen and, for the first time today, when I run Skype close to fullscreen, the monitor blacks out after a random period of time and cannot be coaxed back to life short of a hard reboot.

I initially thought it might be a conflict between Windows 7 64-bit and my three-year-old 24” Dell monitor (Model 2407WFP). So I went to the Dell site and looked for a newer driver for the monitor. But the closest I could find was for Model 2408. So I went to the Dell tech chat to see if the ‘08 driver is compatible with the ‘07 monitor.

The response:

Agent (BE_PR2_Rep_John_Frederick): "Let me transfer you right away to our Tech Support Team for better assistance. Please hold on a sec."

I waited, but the chat connection dropped out and, despite the fact that they have my email address and phone number, I never heard back from them.

I put the question to my computer Guru Tim Balough and he opined it is more likely a video driver issue.

Consulting Windows Update, I was assured that I have the current driver for my NVidia GeForce GT220 video card. But the NVidia web site shows an updated driver that was released on Jan. 20 and the log of my Windows Updates shows no video driver update since then.

Consequently, I downloaded and installed the latest NVidia driver and am waiting to see how it works. I’m resisting the temptation to bang on it with a fullscreen video to see if it breaks because of the anxiety of watching my screen go black. But sooner or later it will get tested.

3 U.S. citizens here

I was sitting at my desk in the upstairs office this morning when my peripheral vision picked up some movement on the sidewalk in front of the house.

I went to the front door and found an old guy (you know he’s old if a 64-year-old calls him old) standing on the porch, apparently unable to find the doorbell button or to make an audible knocking sound on the door.

He introduced himself, confirmed our address, and extended a clawlike, liver-spotted hand clutching our 2010 U.S. Census form.

I took it, thanked him and wished him a good day as he shuffled away to the neighbors’ house.

The form is pretty straightforward. It asks the principal resident’s name and then age and race for everyone living there as of April 1, 2010. Obviously, this requires some guesswork at this point since an asteroid, tornado, fire or a major rupture of the New Madrid Fault between now and April 1 could cause this address to cease to exist.

I expected more questions, one in particular. Like “Are you a citizen of the United States?” It isn’t there. I know there’s been controversy over the issue and I naively supposed that the Bureau of the Census would like to have this valuable piece of information.

What this means, of course, is that illegal aliens get counted and lumped into the population figures along with those of us who are here legally. Yes, this will theoretically tell us how many human beings are in the U.S. as of April 1, 2010. It’s how those numbers will be used that I find troubling.

Congressional districts are apportioned on the basis of census figures and I think it’s wrong to let the presence of non-citizens skew that process.

The Democrats, who are also want to extend voting privileges to illegal aliens because they think illegals will vote for them, are using the White House’s control over the Census to game the system.

So, by participating in the Census, we’re helping the left rig elections for the next ten years. I suppose we could refuse to participate, but then bona fide U.S. citizens would be underrepresented in the final count.

At least it wasn’t someone from ACORN who showed up on my doorstep this morning.

Oh, by the way, the Canadian Census does inquire about citizenship status.

Starting over with Windows XP

I think I have my netbook back in good shape. I broke down and bought an LG GP08 CD/DVD drive and used it to do a fresh install of Windows XP SP2.

I never had a lot of confidence in the process of cloning my old smaller Solid State Drive onto the new 32GB SSD and after a series of crashes that were probably related to Photoshop it was clear that there was no way around it. I had to wipe the drive and start over.

Now we shall see how long I can go before I have a problem.

The foundation is in

The landscape is changing in our neighborhood. A construction crew laid the foundation for a new house behind our place yesterday.

Now that we know what the footprint of the house looks like, we see how close it is to our home and it has us thinking of some kind of screening shrubbery. I suspect they’ll appreciate it as much as we will.

In the process of getting this image (which shows the back of our house on the far right) from my Olympus point-and-shoot camera to my netbook, I discovered that my Windows XP operating system suddenly doesn’t like Windows Explorer, the program that launches when you click on My Computer to see the hard drive and peripherals, like the memory card reader.

Windows tells me that Windows Explorer encountered a problem and needs to shut down. If I persist, I get a message that Dr. Watson has a problem and must shut down. After that happens, I get no response when I click on the Start button or anything in the tray at the bottom of the screen. All I can do is launch Task Manager with ctl+alt+del and click on the Shut Down option to restart the computer.

So maybe we have finally reached the point where I’m going to have to go over to Best Buy and get an external CD/DVD drive and use it to reinstall Windows XP.

Thinking back, it appears this machine started getting wonky about the time I first installed Photoshop CS. I’ll not make that mistake again.

Maybe next year

Wouldn’t you know it.

After a frigid week with overnight low temperatures in the 30s and 40s, (there’s a wind chill advisory out from 3-8 a.m. tomorrow) making Bike week absolutely miserable for campers, the forecast calls for a warming trend.

And it begins next Monday, the day after Bike Week ends.

I guess I picked a good year to skip Daytona.

Where’s the cape?

You know there has to be a story behind this license plate that I spotted earlier Monday afternoon in Jonesboro.

I’m having a mocha at Books-a-Million and breathing a little easier now that my immediate journalistic chores are finished. I filed my third and final story a full 90 minutes before the 5 p.m. deadline. I’ve always prided myself on meeting or beating deadlines and I certainly don’t want to add to Maria’s challenges.

My break will be short-lived since I have another piece that’s due Monday evening and I haven’t started on it. And there’s still one more after that.

Somewhere in there I need to give some thought to the advanced digital photography class I’m scheduled to teach at the Senior Services Center, beginning March 22.

Never a dull moment here.

Send a free greeting to someone in uniform

It only takes a minute or two and it's free.

Why isn’t it in the manual?

I got a new LG Lotus cell phone from Sprint back on Jan. 8 and figured I was pretty much up to speed with its features by now.

But one thing baffled me. Is there some kind of shortcut to the voice dial feature?

The User Guide has this to say about Voice Control:

1. Highlight [Home}and press [OK]> Tools > Voice Control.

2. After hearing the message “Call: please say a
command,” simply say, in a natural voice, “Call” and
the name of the person you'd like to call. (For
example, you can say, “Call Jane Smith work,”“Call
John Bakermobile,” or“Call Bob Miller.”)

3. Your request will be repeated and you will be asked
to verify. Say “Yes” to call the number or person.
(The number will automatically be dialed.) Say “No”
if you wish to cancel.

That’s the User Guide’s entire explanation of the Voice Control feature.

The whole point of voice dialing is to be able to place a call with a minimum of taking your eyes away from the road or whatever you’re doing to look at the keyboard and menus. It is clearly pointless to have to highlight the Home icon, press the OK button and navigate to Tools and then to Voice Control. Especially, since I need my reading glasses to see the freaking menu.

Maria got a new phone last week. It’s a different model, but it’s also an LG and has a similar menu architecture. And guess what. Its User Guide lists a shortcut to Voice Control. Just press the Speaker key and the Talk key simultaneously and voila, there’s Voice Control asking you to speak the name of the person you want to call. I tried it on my LG Lotus and it works like a charm. Who knows, I may be the only Lotus user who knows the trick and can use Voice Control safely.

Zumo

Local BMW friend Charlie is selling accessories on the R12000GS he bought for his wife earlier this year.

(If you’ve been following this blog, you may recall that I drove down to Louisiana with him in early January to complete the transaction and trailer the bike home.)

Among the accessories his wife didn’t want was a Garmin Zumo 550 GPS unit with the optional XM radio receiver. I offered to take it off of his hands and he brought it over yesterday afternoon.

Happily, it (A) slips right in to the R.A.M mount that I had installed a couple of summer ago for my Garmin Nuvi 200W. The mount for my now defunct XM Roady II satellite radio and antenna works nicely as a platform for the Zumo’s XM receiver (B). At present, I’m using a BMW-style power plug to connect it with the outlet on the fairing dashboard. Eventually, I want to have it hard-wired into the bike’s electrical system as was the 6-volt power cord for the XM Roady II, but I think I’ll leave that up to the pros.

I did, however, get the XM receiver activated and deactivated the
Roady that I installed last August to replace a unit that drowned in a rainstorm. Unfortunately, the replacement unit never did function properly. The XM folks generously waived the activation fee for the Zumo XM unit, since I was never able to use the Roady I tried to put into service last August.

If I didn’t have a plate full of writing assignments for the next couple of weeks, I’d be tempted to reconsider my decision not to ride to Bike Week in Daytona Beach, just to play with the new equipment.