A Day In The Life

I don't often bother to contact my local elected officials.  The few times I have done so in the past got me responses that either completely ignored my issue, or got it backwards and thanked me for supporting the vote I was complaining about.

But today I got interested in obtaining genetic testing.  I had thought about it for several years, so it wasn't exactly an impulsive decision.  My delay had been the cost a few years ago ($1,000) and limited results offerred. 

But when I drilled deeply into one of the provider's websites (and found the cost of $99 and the list of results very lengthy and detailed),  I decided to purchase this genome test.  Imagine my surprise when I was informed by the website that Maryland is the ONLY State that completely prohibits such "direct-to-consumer" transactions (New York State has a partial ban).

I decided to complain.  From what little I could find out about the original regulation, it was aimed at preventing people from being suckered by fly-by-night scammers and those who might sell your genetic information to insurance companies and employers.  But the professional companies doing this now seem to protect you from that. 

And even if that wasn't true, it doesn't matter to me anymore.  I'm retired and my federal health insurance has worked like ObamaCare for 30 years and it is WONDERFUL!  I can switch insurance companies every year (I don't) and pre-existing conditions don't matter.

But back to genome (genetic) testing...  Alone, Maryland will not allow me to just send a spit sample to a genome testing company and get results.  So I looked up all my elected representatives.  I emailed them all demanding they allow me the RIGHT to get my genetic results directly from a qualified lab the same way my fellow-citizens in OTHER States can.

I bet all the responses from the politicians are vague and promise agreement even when they say they support the law I am complaining about. 

But I'm still glad I spent a few hours contacting them.  Sure made ME feel better.

Blast From The Past

I got my old PC up and running in order to play Civilization 2 (aka Civ II), which I haven't played for about 10 years.  I knew I would be rusty at it, so I started he game at the lowest level. 

For those who are not familiar with the game, you and several players (human if online, computer bots if not) each start with  their own single barely historic settler and decide where on a random map to create a first city.  You slowly work up to modern times by learning weapons, governments, and knowledge advancements.  There are politics involved.  The goal is to be the one who launches a spaceship reaching Alpha Centuri.  It is wicked tricky and complicated.

I reached a point in my first new game where I was getting to build a spaceship.  And when I say "build" I mean you really had to construct your spaceship from parts you built/bought/stole in your own constructed cities or your opponents.  You needed some various precise combinations of "structural components", "propulsion units",  "habitation units",  "fuel",  and "energy".  Different combinations had different consequences.  Some made the spaceship fail.  Some caused the inhabitants to die.  Other combinations affected the likelihood that the ship would arrive, and others affected the years of the flight.

It is an AWESOME game!

I recalled that I had once worked out many of the best combinations of the spaceship parts, so I googled "civilization II spaceship formulas", figuring someone had posted them.

You won't BELIEVE what I got at the top of the list...

MY OWN LIST.  Still considered part of the Civ II bible after all these years...

In a site for info for Civ II players  by various categories (like how to defend a new city, when to use a spy, and when to break an alliance).  And THERE, in a page of its OWN, was a page titled "Optimum Spaceship Configurations"  by Cavebear.

I blushed...

But yup, that's me, Cavebear.  I even recognize my usual typos and unmatched parentheses.

I'm stunned. 

You don't expect to see anything you did a decade ago still meaningful, especially in a game.  It brought tears to my eyes...

I can't quite get a screenshot, but it is HERE. 

And I sure hope I get to use that decade-old info on the winning spaceship tonight.

Camera Troubles Fixed!

 On Sept 21st, I used a program called MacKeeper.  It cleans, defrags, and checks for viruses, but the main feature I was interested in was finding duplicate files, foreign language options, and leftover bits of deleted programs.  It found quite a lot of them.  Of course, it doesn't just go and delete them.  You have to check of a box for each file.  I examined the first dozen or so carefully and it seemed accurate, so I just started checking all the boxes of files it offerred and clicking submit.

Apparently, it moved seamlessly in my applications folder, and none of the names I saw at first seemed relevant to me (seeming like leftover bits of deleted programs) and I continued checking boxes and deleting them.  On one page, after I hit delete but before the screen cleared, I saw one was iPhoto (an Apple program for processing camera pictures).  I realized it was deleting programs and stopped.

Well, I went to my backup program, Time Machine, but I couldn't restore the program.  Actually, I couldn't get it to work at all on even small test files.  After messing around with that for a couple of days, I reread the instructions an discovered I was doing part of it exactly backwards.

So I restored iPhoto.  It was back in my applications folder, but I still couldn't upload pictures from the camera.  It worked for looking at old pictures and other functions, just wouldn't upload new ones, saying "camera not found".  I tried everything for another couple of days, until I noticed it was an old version of iPhoto.

So I went to the Apple store online to upgrade it.  Can't do that.  The old version was TOO old.  OK, I bought the new version.  That didn't work either!  I tried restoring the camera software.  That didn't solve the problem.  I went to the Canon site and downloaded the camera drivers and software.  That didn't solve the problem either.

I was (correctly) positive it wasn't the cameras.  Too unlikely both would good bad at the same time, and I had used a new cable AND tried different ports in the computer.

I gave up and got on live chat with Apple.  After 2 hours, the problem remained.  The technician said there were some more complicated things to try but I would have to call the Apple store in the morning because there were some things he could not access (it was late night).  So, I scheduled a call from Apple for 1 PM Thursday.  At 2 PM Thursday with no call, I went grocery shopping.  Naturally, I discovered they had called 5 minutes after I left.  They sent me an email saying I could reschedule online or just call a number.

I called the number Saturday and had a tech on the phone in 2 minutes.  We spent a merry 30 minutes searching various screens and programs until one said "camera device present", whereupon he said "Aha, you've lost a piece of your operating system"!  Somewhere apparently (a partition on the hard drive I surmise) hidden and protected, is a copy of the operating system.  It took a few minutes to navigate there, and then it said 50 minutes to restore, so the tech gave me a direct number to him in case it didn't work, and I hung up.

It worked!

I'll be a LOT more careful with MacKeeper in the future.  And I'm going to have to study Time Machine preferences/options because for some reason, the only application program it backed up since Jan 2012 was iTunes!

I Hate To Break The Bad News

Bad news, kitties...

Just think "cans of stinky goodness" and "thumbs"...

A Cautionary Tale of Sad Computer News

A long post, and I won't blame you for not reading it to the end.  But there are some lessons that may be worth reading...

No, I haven't gotten a diagnostic call from the computer repair shop I mentioned in the last post.  Instead, I messed up my own working Mac Mini computer.

Over the past few years, I have tried out several anti-virus/disk management programs for the Mac, and not been really happy with them.  Viruses aren't really a problem for Macs, but they are good about detecting viruses that could go on to infect PCs that I communicate with, so I want to keep the anti-virus protection up to date.  Mostly, I want the programs for hard drive management and they are S-L-O-W.   Several hours to read all the files looking for viruses, and a lot of one-at-a-time decisions about most programs.

I like Macs, but it seems there are a couple of weaknesses.  They don't "hold" your name/passwords to some websites as well as PCs do.  So when I actually have to shut down the computer, I have to sign in again.  A minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things, but it does get tedious when you have several program updates the same night and have to restart the computer after each one.

That wouldn't be too bad, except that I play computer games that use adobe flash a lot.  For some reason, Macs accumulate some files than clog the system.  Even THAT's not too bad; on my older PC, I would simply crash in mid-game.  One the Mac, things afterwards slow down and it locks up while searching something on Firefox or writing a letter and I have to restart the computer (meaning all those sign-ins again afterwards).

So I found a program called MacKeeper that promised to do all that better and great hacking protection (and had good reviews).  And since I had just run into a person who I thought intended to do me ill (old story, I won't go into that now except to say never blow up at a former friend whose past malicious behavior shows they know a LOT about computers).

I used the program and it seemed to work well.  Fast scanning of all files, etc.  No problems with hack attempts.  A couple of nights ago, I noticed some additional features.  The were sub-routines to identify and delete unused apps, find and delete "leftovers" (orphaned files related to deleted programs),  etc.  It wouldn't just do it automatically, I had to check each file to be deleted.

After tediously checking boxes carefully for an hour, I got a bit casual and just started taking its advice.  You can guess that was a BAD move...  It was in the applications part of my directory, and just after I clicked OK for the latest batch, I saw Firefox was on the list.  It was too late to stop it!

I have to admit the program is thorough.  When I could control the computer again, I found I had deleted Firefox.  OK, no real problem, I have TWO backup systems.  One is an external drive called FreeAgent, the other is a built-in Mac backup called Time Machine.  Both save your hard drive initially and changes to it thereafter.

Well, FreeAgent had told me last week that it was full and I should delete some older backups, and I had just done that, saving backups from Jan of the previous several years and a quarterly one for this year.  I didn't examine The Time Machine (I find it a little confusing to use).

So I examined my computer dock (graphic sidebar of active applications) and Firefox was gone.  So was the Mac word and spreadsheet suite called iWorks.  So was the MS Office Word and Excel.  I have NO word-processing or spreadsheet programs, and the only browser I had was Safari  (which seems to fight me all the time).

After spending a good part of yesterday and this morning trying to find the lost programs in the two backups, I gave up.  I downloaded Firefox (at least its free), but there were no bookmarks.  I had about 13 years of some useful and unusual bookmarks saved.  Well, at least I knew that I had seen a boormarks.html file in the backup list.

Yeah, it was from 2008!  Both backup programs had faithfully saved one old bookmark file for 5 years.  I checked both backups programs "every way from Sunday" (as my Dad used to say) for 2 hours before I gave up.  There was just that old one.  So I imported it.  The first thing I did was open every single bookmark.  Most were no longer working and I deleted them.  Some were still working but were "repurposed" and I deleted them.  Some I could not imagine why I bookmarked them and I deleted THEM!

It didn't leave me with very many bookmarks, but at least I still had the organization of the folders (blogs, reference, hobbies, garden, pets, etc).  The first additions were my blogs.  And you know, it was hard to get those.  It was easy to SEE my blog, but it took some thought to find how to get to my dashboard (my blog has "blogspot" in the url, but the dashboard has "blogger").

I slowly used Safari to get the urls of some other sites (like cat blogosphere) and bookmark them into Firefox.

I've lost a lot of bookmarks, but I had too many old unused ones anyway.  Old ones I want, I can find again easily enough and bookmark them.  And my Feedly bloglist RSS is safe because I set it up as my home page on Safari (open up Safari, and there it is).

I had the Mac iWorks and MS Office word and spreadsheet programs downloaded rather than owning the reloadable CDs, so I think I would have to buy them again.  Fortunately, I don't need the MS suite programs with their advanced features anymore.  The simpler Mac Page and Numbers apps will work fine.  And it seems they are only about $20 each.  MS Office for Mac costs $140. (and I'd rather not have any MS crossover programs on the Mac for security purposes).  And I used to make CD backups of some programs, I might find them.

But not tonight!  I'm worn out and (as calm as I may seem), very angry and frustrated.

Those backup programs (as I understood them) were SUPPOSED to allow me to completely restore my hard drive in case of failure.  I HOPE it was just my fault in not setting them up properly, but my recollection is that I was pretty darn careful about doing it right.  But I'm going to really triple-check it when I dig into them both tomorrow!

If you have a backup system, I suggest you really examine it carefully.  Make sure that what you think is a saved program isn't just the sidebar graphic or the desktop shortcut.  Look at "properties" or "info" or whatever gives you file size amounting to MBs.  You may not actually have the actual program saved.

I got fooled because my older computers had a full-sized 2nd drive and when I copied the main drive to the 2nd drive it WAS a real copy of the whole drive, applications and all.  I was used to that.

It seems to me that, not matter how careful you try to be, a train wreck will occur on your computer every few years.  And something you assumed worked, won't work the way you think it will...

Computer Happiness

I dragged the old PC to a local PC repair shop.  I mainly want to use it to play Civilization2.  Its a 90's game.  My Mac is too modern to play even the old Mac versions and my attempts at downloading Mac-to-PC crossover platforms failed utterly.  So I brought my old PC in for cleaning and rebooting.  They said they could do that, though getting a Windows 98 reboot might take some research.

Fine.

But then I casually asked them if they could clean a Mac.  Not work on it, just clean it enough so that the evil Apple Store (who considers a little cigarette smoke a "toxic violation of OSHA working conditions") would repair one.  And I'm not defending smoking here, I hate it myself.  Lets not get into that.

But OMG, OMG, OMG, they will work on Macs too.  They even have "a Mac guy"!  So after I returned home to retreive the Civ2 CD I meant to bring at the start, I brought them the old $3,500 Mac Pro that has been a doorstop for some years.

They said "sure, we can clean and fix that".

THUD!  I'm not kidding.  "THUD!!!"

I think there are the old pictures of Skeeter and LC on that hard drive.  There are old letters to Mom and Dad.  There are old family pictures.  There are old games of Civ2.  There is stuff I don't even know is on there!

And when I pick up the old PC and the original Mac, I will bring them the previous Mac Mini to clean.  I'll sell the old (working) Mac Pro (minus the hard drive) and will add the newly working Mac Mini with a wireless connection (I hope) so that I can visit our cat friends away from the desktop.

Assuming they can really fix Macs.

You have to understand that the nearest Apple Store is almost an hour drive away, AND you need an appointment you dare not miss by a minute (or you stand in a long line), AND its in the middle of a BIG CONFUSING MALL so you have to carry a 20 pound Mac Pro around for an hour, etc...

Man, if these local guys will actually clean and work on Macs, they have a customer for LIFE!!!

But we'll see...

Strange, Sad People

I play online compute games a lot.  Not arcade-style games, just calm strategic kinds like Risk and Backgammon.  Still, sometimes you meet really angry people.  Sometimes you can tell they are adults, sometimes you can tell they are teens.  I try to be really careful around teens.

I'm not talking about chat rooms.  I stay far away from them.  But just in games, you can tell sometimes when someone is REALLY angry.  I feel sorry for those people, whether they are teens or adults.  On very rare ocassions, I offer to just talk.

It doesn't usually work out.  Angry people are hard to talk to.  Just tonight, I came across a backgammon player who almost immediately accused me of using a cheat program.  Right, my rating is in the lower 20% I would guess.  If I was using a cheat program, I would have to be about the most inept cheater of all time.  You START at 1500 and my rating is 1274.  Some high level cheating going on THERE, right?

After being informed that he was reporting me for cheating (I rolled doubles once and that really upset him - and never mind that he did several times himself).  And never mind that he won 2 of 3 games.  But then he mentioned "reporting me" several more times.

Everything about this player says he is a teen (unreasonableness, anger, and lashing out), and I really don't want to ruin the slight personal validation that some teen gets by winning a game if he is alone in a basement or bedroom struggling to get some feeling of success in his life.

But still, I'm kind of pissed off about it all.  I'm thinking a game site for those only 30 and older might be a good idea.

Mark

Good Gardening Days

Some days, you just cant seem to get any useful work done.  You vacuum and it just looks the same a day later.  There are always dishes and pots to clean.

But outside, the effort of work seems to last longer.  I spent some time watering the gardens the past several days.  I have a tripod I built (my own design) that lets me just set the hose spray on and let it run for 10 minutes at a spot.  Its easy to move to a new spot to water.

It takes 5 movements of the sprayer to do the flowerbeds, 3 to do the veggie gardens, and 3 to do the hosta bed.  Plus random local watering for the odd places too small to water largely.  Which usually means 120 minutes or 2 hours.

But September has actually had virtually no rain, so I gave each spot 20 minutes of watering instead of just 10 and spent the time waiting by weeding the watered flowerbeds.  I pulled out 3 wheelbarrow-loads of weeds.  Fortunately, them being deeply soaked, they came out with the roots.  There is something very satisfying about seein a weed pulled up with the roots still on!  Even if they survive, they are annual weeds and won't have time to grow again to produce seeds.  So THEY are GONE GONE GONE!

It was a very good 2 days.

Washington DC Pro Sports

Well, actually, the only two I really bother with are baseball and football.  My apologies to fans of other sports, but basketball is too much a contact sport these days, soccer is too boring to watch (and I even played it), hockey is unfathomable to me, tennis just doesn't seem to work as a team sport, and my interest in my alma mater (Univ of MD) is pretty much gone since they are moving to an out-of-area conference where they will be cellar-dwellers for a decade until they leave in shame.

And neither of the two I have followed are looking promising.  The Nationals are setting themselves on fire at the very end of the season, but it's too little too late.  Something like a 5% chance of them getting into the playoffs.  And with Atlanta coming to town next, that should pretty much end it. 

The Washington football team (with the team name I will not use) looks like it is setting up its fans for a seriously depressing season of falling behind at first and mounting a great comeback attempt that falls short each game.

So it looks like my evenings will be free of baseball until the World Series and the next 14 Sundays will be free for shopping at "guy-stores ".  Seriously, the best possible time to shop at a home project store is during a local NFL game!

Weird Visitor Spike

Did I almost have a post go viral?

I don't often check the statcounter chart for this blog because it doesn't get very many visitors, I don't post there regularly, and the bookmark is set to open the site to the Mark's Mews chart.  So imagine my surprise when I saw THIS!

The Sept 11 post was a rather dark angry fantasy about having the 911 attackers alive today, and I can see why it might have gotten more attention than my usual home project and personal life posts.  But who would have ever found it to begin with?

If anyone spread the link around, please let me know so I can thank you for the excitement!  It really did make my day.

I can't go back and check the visitor list or other records because statcounter only displays the last 33 hours for free and I don't feel a great need to pay for 2 months of records every month, LOL!

Its also curious that I had so many on Sept 10th, when the only post of interest was the following day.  I considered that some hackers had gone into old posts to leave messages among themselves (that happened to me with a previous blog), but I've looked back at a bunch of the older posts at random and didn't find any weird messages.  I also have the blog set to require approval of any comments to posts more than 3 days old, and I didn't see any of those.

So if anyone has an ideas about the spike, I sure am curious!

That Darn Ceiling Lamp

Minor rant...

Well, I finally got in touch with a place that repairs old ceiling lamps.  I should have given up calling them every few days for 3 weeks and just emailed them to begin with.  I would have if their website actually OFFERRED an email address.  I had to find it the hard way, indirectly (through their white pages sales office).

But at least I got a rapid response assuring me they could do the work.

So I drove up there yesterday morning.  Only got lost once.  I had to stop at a paint store to ask directions.  They asked "where are you from" and I gave the name of my town, but then they said "No, where is your CAR".  (It's in your parking lot DOOFUS, why do you think I'm in HERE).  But I'm very polite when lost and said it was right by their front door.

Like good little locals they gave me directions according to local landmarks.  You may have sufferred that yourselves ("drive out past Smitty's barn and turn left where the old oak tree used to be").  I finally got "first right, 2nd left and about 2 miles" and went on my not-so-merry way.  I did finally find the street I needed and figured that if I needed more directions someplace else, at least they could only tell me to go left or right.

It took 1.5 hours to get to the lamp place (but only 30 miles). I should have FedExed it!

The front counter folks LOVED the lamp and guided me to the repair specialist.  Do I need to tell you what specialists in moderately arcane specialties are like?  First thing he did was demand to know why I hadn't answered his email question (I checked the email when I got home and it only said "what you need is a canopy kit, which consists of a canopy, a crossbar, a loop, and a threaded nipple or pipe. I have crome, black, white, and brushed brass finishes").

Then, when I didn't know what nipples, ceramics and canopies were, he became insulting.  I finally had to just beg him to "Please just do whatever an electrician requires to mount the damn lamp on the stairway ceiling".  Not satisfied with THAT victory, he further said that "any damn good electrician could get all this stuff from Home Depot".  Well, apparently, electricians these days don't have a price box to check off for "rebuilding old lamp".

He scribbled wavy lines on a list of repair items on a receipt ticket  and wrote $55 at the bottom.  I left with the ticket stub and a promise he would call in "a couple of days".

You know what "staircase wit" is right?  The killer comeback you think of as you leave the room after a dispute?  I didn't even have THAT...  I just drove all the way home pissed.

I didn't ever even WANT the damn lamp.  It was Gramma's lamp and my mother and a sister of hers fought over it for years thinking it was real Tiffany.  It isn't.  But my mother won the fight and she was so proud to hand it down to me, her eldest son...  She's dead, and while its a pretty impressive lamp, it not worth anything, but I still have to show it off for MY generation.  Click white elephant.

But I will have the lamp in a condition an electrician can install and my siblings will be able to visit and go "ooh, ahh" and be grateful they didn't receive it.

The only good parts are that I probably WILL like it once installed AND I get to choose who to inflict it on in my Will.

That's assuming I can FIND the lamp store again to pick it up.  No, I don't have a working GPS device...