Month: April 2008

Can anyone help with this?

Recently, MS decided to run its automatic update for several service packs:

–Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 (KB110806) –Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1 (KB929300) –Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework, Version 1.1 Service Pack 1 (KB928366)

These updates have failed several times. no amount of re-downloading and running the install works. The result is that certain mission-critical software applications won’t open (e.g., QuickBooks). I’m stuck in a cycle of turning off the computer, rebooting, waiting for updates to install…and then no avail. Repairing the software doesn’t work.

Ideas?

How do they get away with this scam?

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2279347,00.asp

It’s supposed to be illegal to make autodialer calls to mobile phones. In addition, it’s illegal to call a telephone number with a recording unless you have a prior business relationship with the caller, or else if it’s a non-profit or a political candidate. Yet I have received no less than forty recorded messages over the past two months telling me “your warranty is about to expire or has already expired”. If I try to ask questions, I get hung up on. If I try to say “put me on your do not call list”, I get hung up on. In fact, if I do anything other than roll over and give them my VIN number and personal information, I get hung up on.

This is illegal and unethical. I am finding myself wishing I were with Verizon so that I might have someone on my side tracking down these abusive telemarketers.

And I have a sneaking suspicion this is not just any old telemarketing scheme. From reading various forums online, they ask several innocuous questions before getting to the meat of the matter: your credit card number, security code on the back of the number, last four digits of your social security number, etc.

It just makes me so angry that I’m paying for their damn telephone calls every time! I don’t know what to do except rant here. Thanks for putting up with me.

EDIT: Seems similar to this report on ripoffreport.com: http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/317/RipOff0317034.htm

In my inbox this morning, I ran across an article relating the sad economic truth regarding stay-at-home parents in What’s a Homemaker Worth? The Shocking Truth.” on MSN.com.

The email chain says a homemaker is worth $500,000 a year.

The actuarial tables say $30,000.

Now, I agree that having a wife and mother stay at home with the children is wonderful. The kids get more love and more treats, more hugs and more kisses, and who can deny the value of raising great kids with a parent at home rather than out in the workplace? But those values are personal and intangible… not financial.

But the article ended with some helpful hints that, despite the gloomy reality of the financial value of a stay-at-home parent, there are a few options to mitigate it:

Go forth and get your ducks in order You should understand just what youre giving up, though, in order to make a rational decision about whether to stay at home and for how long. You also should do what you can to make sure your finances, both short- and long-term, remain sound:

# Disaster-proof your finances. Pay off debt, contribute as much as possible to retirement funds and keep a hefty emergency fund. Single-income families typically should have at least six months living expenses in a safe, liquid account.

# Get insured. You almost certainly wont be able to buy disability insurance for a stay-at-home spouse, but you should be able to get life insurance coverage — and if you have children, you almost certainly need some. The younger your children are, says former insurance agent Catherine Gretta, corporate vice president for New York Life Insurance, the more insurance you need to cover their care. To determine how much insurance you should have, you can talk to an agent or use MSN Moneys Life Insurance Needs Estimator; increase the estimate of your current living expenses by the amount your family would need to pay for child care and housekeeping services.

# Make sure you have retirement savings in your own name. Your spouse can contribute up to $3,000 a year to an Individual Retirement Account for you. (You also can claim half your spouses Social Security benefit if youre married for at least 10 years, and may be able claim a portion of his or her workplace retirement plans as well.)

# Consider working at least part-time once your children reach school age. You may lose much of your wages to the costs of working — taxes, child care, commuting costs. (For more views on this subject, read ” Second incomes: twice the work, half the return,” and “Cost of being a stay-at-home mom: $1 million,” on MSN Money. And try MSN Money’s Second Income Calculator. ) Those losses, however, could be offset by other benefits, such as keeping your job skills current and being able to contribute to a retirement fund or earn pension credits.

The case: e360 vs. Comcast.

Judge James B. Zagel issued a landmark summary judgment against notorious spammer, e360. Basic findings in his “you have no case” dismissal: spam is not protected free speech. Filtering spam is not tortious interference in business. Filtering spam is normal, everyday business practice and e360’s spamming campaigns deserve to be blocked under the Communications Decency Act.

Now I just have to figure out how to refine my email filters to stop the latest round of throw-away-account spam coming from major email providers…

I have a smart phone that incorporates, among other things, internet explorer. I recently ran across a couple web based applications that can be run from my PDA. The two great applications work with Windows Mobile for mapping and finding locations, and both work with or without GPS. Using Internet Explorer on your mobile device, just go to the following websites. (These links only work on your PDA.)

Google Maps google.com/gmm

Local information, directions and maps

Get Google Maps with My Location and find out where you are. Find the nearest…cup of coffee, late-night pizza or last-minute bouquet. Find out if there is traffic up ahead and how to avoid it. Type your destination and get directions

Windows Live Search wls.live.com

Local information and navigation

Find local businesses and restaurants, and click to call them. Get turn-by-turn driving directions. Explore interactive maps with satellite imagery. View current traffic information and find cheap gas stations. See movie show times by theaters.

I thought you all might find these useful.

Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of the repeal of prohibition! Historians note that Prohibition officially ended on December 5, 1933, with the ratification of the 21st Amendment. But earlier that year, newly-elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt took steps to fulfill his campaign promise to end the national ban on alcohol. He spurred Congress to modify the Volstead Act to allow the sale of 3.2 percent beer in advance of the Twenty-first Amendment being ratified. Thus on April 7, 1933 there was legal beer once again!

Sounds like a good reason to raise a glass today.

I’ve had barnson.org on register.com for a very long time, but all good things must come to an end. Their prices are three times as much as godaddy.com and I simply don’t use their advanced services enough to justify the cost. So I’m moving!

Unfortunately, there may be a brief disruption in service as a result. The web server isn’t going anywhere, but I’ve rarely had a seamless transfer of domains.

People sometimes ask why one would want to go with A123 batteries for radio-controlled aircraft, rather than Lithium-ion Polymer batteries. A123 batteries are heavier, lower voltage, and lower capacity than comparable LiPo batteries. Well, in addition to their tremendous cycle life (more than 1000 recharges, compared to roughly 300-500 for a LiPo), faster recharge times, and slightly lower cost, there’s this reason.

Our move from Tooele to Riverton has not been without its traumas and dramas. Establishing entirely new friendships is part of that. I’m affable enough, but I really miss my old friends and find it a little harder to make new friends than when I moved into my old house ten years ago. But at least in my case I have one easy way to make friends: my interest in model aircraft. We are passionate, close-knit community, and have a wonderful organization to unify via the Academy of Model Aeronautics.

So the closest club field is a huge field behind a schoolyard, used by the Intermountain Silent Flyers. They are a sister club to my main club, the Ute R/C Association. I went to a competition with them today, and despite only four fellows competing, I had a blast. And there were donuts.

Sailplane competitions are an entirely different animal from the usual “fun fly” competitions I’m used to with the Utes. With the Utes, it’s a different format every time: an egg-drop this time, a climb-and-glide dead-stick competition the next, and perhaps a balloon-pop or limbo after that. With the IMSF, it’s all about flying for a certain amount of time — using only the wind and thermals to keep you aloft, as there are no motorized competitions in this club — then sticking the landing within a certain radius of a marker.

These IMSF folks track their points throughout a flying season, and give kudos (and modest rewards) to the winners. They are serious about their goal, and although it sounded boring to me at first, it’s really not dull at all. The winds are ever-changing, and each flight is unique. You have to think on your feet, manage your energy, and above all be observant of changing conditions to react accordingly. The difference between sailplane thermal-duration contests and just flying a powered airplane is… it’s like the difference between shooting hoops with a buddy where each of you has a basketball and you’re just putting up shots to show off and goof around, versus playing 1-on-1 with money on the line or perhaps a full-court game.

It’s challenging, sporting, and a heck of a lot of fun. Even though I feel as if it’s slow-motion compared to the speed demons I’m used to racing around the flying field, it’s still a great time and the guys at the field couldn’t have been more friendly.

Well, maybe if they’d told me where the donuts were.

I am a chronic late-run-movie-watcher. That is, I wait until something is a new release on DVD, or else very late in the theater, before seeing it. I’ll maybe pick up one movie every few months in the theater; the rest, I wait until the furor has died down and enjoy watching at my leisure.

But before I break into my review of “I Am Legend”, I must first comment on the environment in which I watched this movie. Yesterday, our new Samsung 50-inch Plasma TV arrived*. I spent WAY too long monkeying with the thing, but I finally got the image pretty much where I wanted it for composite, VGA, and broadcast input. I need to buy a nice antenna, though, so I can pick up some of the several dozen HD TV stations in our area.

Suffice to say that watching a scary movie in the dark on such a large screen is transforming. It turned a movie that I’m sure would have just been “Ho-Hum, that’s fun” into a freaky experience that made me take two bathroom breaks due to the suspense.

So, my review of I Am Legend? Fun movie, pretty scary, watch it in the dark on a big screen with the sound turned up for maximum effect. Make sure your black levels are beautiful.

My ancient DVD player showed its age a bit on this film. There are several very dark scenes, and if I turned up the brightness enough to distinguish the dark colors from one another, the overall image was washed out. The black levels on this TV are BEAUTIFUL with an HD source like over-the-air or a Blu-Ray player, but a DVD player from 1999? Yeah, it doesn’t do the job right.

However, now that I have a big screen, I can see the difference in the mastering quality of releases. They did a fine job with the DVD release of I Am Legend. It’s much better than many among the sampling of DVDs I compared it against, and on-par with the latest Disney stuff (which seems to have some of the clearest mastering among anything I own).

So if you like scary movies, but aren’t big on gore, I Am Legend is probably right up your alley like it was mine. I liked the movie a lot, and am certainly going to watch it again before it goes back to Netflix.

And when I get a Blu-Ray player one day… this will probably be one of the first discs I test it against. Particularly the scene where Sam chases the deer into the building. That scene was intense and claustrophobic, I loved it!

(* Yes, I know this is a 720P Plasma screen, and people will tell me that I should have gone with 1080P, or LCD instead of plasma, or 120Hz, or projector. See my previous post on this topic. The viewing distance for this TV is 10-14 feet; for human eyes to see the benefit of 1080P, I would need to have had at least an 80″ screen in this room. That’s too rich for my blood unless I went with a projector, and in such a bright room during the day a projector’s just not an option. (With 720P and an average viewing distance of 3x screen size, I can get away with 40-52″ screen and still have a wonderful viewing experience for average content. One day, I may do a projector out in the garage or basement for a more THX-compliant experience. But for now this screen is so much better than my old 27″ CRT that there’s simply no comparison.)