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.

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