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.

Yard work Sunday

It’s warm and sunny today and our new neighbors are burning debris and staking out their foundation, so we felt motivated to get out into the yard and do something.

I cranked up the fire pit and Austin cleaned up the chaos from the monster oak tree that died last year in the wake of the ice storm. Specifically, that means he organized the trunk sections into an area nearer the fire pit for splitting and burning.

I was going to press the lawn tractor and wagon into service, but the battery came up dead, even though it ran fine yesterday. Fortunately, the guys from Greenway are coming tomorrow to take the John Deere in for spring service.

Ships ahoy!

Want to know where the ships of the world are and where they’re going?

Check out marinetraffic.com. It’s fascinating. At least I think so.

At least I got the shirt

This shirt from BMW Motorcycles of Daytona is about as close to Daytona Beach Bike Week as I’m going to get this year. The long range forecast still calls for unacceptable overnight low temperatures.

This makes me wish for snow

Pizza man

Last night’s dinner (and my lunch today) came from Papa John’s Pizza in Paragould. It’s the best pizza we’ve found since we’ve been here.

Another BMW motorcycle dealer gone

The Little Rock BMW dealership is going out of business after 6½ years.

Saturday will be the last day for the multi-brand motorcycle dealership that serves BMW riders in central Arkansas.

I got the word this morning from a guy in the Indianapolis BMW Club who I suspect saw an item about the closing on the BMW MOA Forum.

I called the dealership and they confirmed the report. They’re sending all of their inventory back to BMW rather than try to blow it out in a sale.

The word on the street is that they needed a new investor to stay afloat, but couldn’t find one.

Herb Anderson, who owns Grass Roots BMW Motorcycles in Cape Girardeau, Mo., told me this morning this has been the worst winter for motorcycles sales in the 15 years he’s been in the business.

All of the motorcycle manufacturers saw a drop in sales last year, including BMW. But, Herb said, BMW lost less ground than anyone else. Suzuki is hurting the most, he said, having sold only a third of the bikes in 2009 that they sold in 2008. Suzuki has closed 20% of their dealerships in the last year, he said.

On the bright side, there is huge interest in the new BMW S1000RR superbike, he said. He’s sold two of them and thinks he can sell as many as he can get.

The post office box nobody wants

 

I was mailing some stuff this morning that involved a total of $6.66.

The postmistress shuddered and we ended up talking about the post office box that is forever vacant here.

“Nobody wants it,” she said, suggesting it might make more sense to just skip the numbering from 665 to 667, kinda like a lot of hotels don’t have a 13th floor. She said it’s not uncommon for Box 666 to remain unrented in lots of post offices.

The only drawback I can see to that is that it might throw off your sorting pattern for 667 and above if you’re on the other side of the wall, tossing mail into the numbered boxes.

While “666” is widely considered to be the Mark of the Beast in the Book of Revelations, some Biblical scholars think it was actually a coded reference to the Roman Emperor Nero. Apparently Nero’s name in Aramaic could be reduced by a numerological system to “666,” giving early Christians a way to write disloyal stuff about Nero without getting busted.

And there are some who think the number actually should be “616.”

All that aside, the Satanic suggestion is enough to creep out most postal patrons and make it the most unpopular box in the post office.

Your opinion counts – Vote now!

What to do about the killer whale who killed his SeaWorld trainer? Vote in the poll on the right of this column.

Just because I like it

The Ting Tings on Saturday Night Live.

What happens to competitors when the government gets into the car business

Here’s an interesting piece from Hot Air on the zeal with which the government (which owns a big piece of General Motors) is pursuing Toyota safety defects.

It ends with this:

The larger issue is the Obama administration’s crony capitalism, and the way it erodes trust in our government. The administration staffed up with the people who caused the financial crisis. It cut backroom deals to turn our health insurance into a public utility. And it bailed out Government Motors to aid its Big Labor muscle. Against this backdrop, when the feds start investigating the steering on Toyota Corollas and Matrixes, one wonders whether the same zeal will be given to the Chevrolet Cobalt, which has more than ten times as many NHTSA complaints.

Hostage situation

I have several writing assignments for a special section of the paper involving profiles of local businesses or organizations.

Naturally, all of these require that I have conversations with spokespeople for these entities.

And that leads me to the thing I hate most about these assignments – playing phone tag.

That’s because our culture has reached a point where nobody in anything remotely resembling a position of authority answers their phone.

So the routine is to put out the calls, leaving callback messages, and then sit and wait. And wait. And wait.

You get the idea.

I’m stuck here until they call, and I freaking hate being held hostage like this. That was part of why I got out of the newspaper business 10 years ago.

Photography is a different story. You just go out and shoot. But writing (responsible writing, anyway) requires getting people to talk to you and it’s almost always at their convenience.

Happy accident

Discovering this movie on Netflix was a happy accident.

We watched it last night and loved it. I can say no more.