07:11 – Still working heads-down on the forensics book. Today I need to order a few square meters of each of several fabrics to supply in the kits as specimens for the hair and fiber analysis lab sessions.
09:34 – Colin just had his first up-close-and-personal encounter with a baby bird. When we went out the front door to go for a walk, there was an adult robin and what looked like a leaf in the middle of the yard. Colin pulled over to see the robin, which of course flew away. Then he noticed the baby robin. It wasn’t moving, and he wasn’t sure what it was. He circled it cautiously several times at some distance. Apparently, he finally located the rear of the baby bird because he cautiously approached it from that direction until his nose was almost in contact with the baby robin. Apparently deciding that Colin must be its mother, the baby robin opened its mouth wide, asking for a worm. Colin levitated up and backward, ending up a meter or so from the baby robin. Then Colin repeated his approach, but the baby robin opened its mouth wide again. Not wanting to be fanged by such a vicious opponent, Colin leapt back again. I finally managed to get him away from the fledgling and took him for a walk down the block. When we returned a few minutes later, the baby bird was gone, although Colin spent several minutes bloodhounding to locate it.
32 in northern VT this morning, and more cold, blustery early March weather on the way. Keeps the riff-raff away. Snow in the hills. And then at some point, in late May or June the weather will suddenly turn to instant high summer with temps in the high eighties. Or we could have another summer like the recent one where it rained more or less continuously from April until October, with record floods. Or a drought. Algore, phone your office.
FYI, no change whatever in the behavior of Firefox after the upgrade to v12. Still a huge memory hog, as ever. Still essentially locks up the computer with hard drive thrashing for minutes at a time.
Just got my copy of The Home Biologist: How to Grow Things in Your Refrigerator, or whatever that book is called. Looks pretty good, on a quick flip-through. Smells like a book. I was briefly confused before I opened the package because the form factor is different than that of The Home Chemist: Dissolving Your Sister’s Stuff when She Annoys You, or whatever that other book is called.
Now all I need is the kid who was supposed to be using one book (and kit) or the other. He’s decided that a one-week swim camp and chance at a part-time lifeguarding job where his mother lives is more important than education in what he says he wants to do for a living. Grr. Teenagers: can’t put up with them, can’t hit them with a baseball bat.
Chuck we told ya to bag FF and go with Chrome. Get on it.
SteveF. Yes, teenagers, esp. the grrls, in my experience, cannot be countenanced in any shape, manner or form, but also cannot be beaten with baseball bats, car aerials, or knuckle-dusters, nor can they be flogged with barbed wire, waterboarded or given electric shock treatments. Also, psy-war is a waste of time, too, because they have mastered that.
Best just to hunker down, keep a low profile, and wait patiently for the horrors to pass.
“Just got my copy of The Home Biologist: How to Grow Things in Your Refrigerator, or whatever that book is called.”
Heh, just got mine too.
“FYI, no change whatever in the behavior of Firefox after the upgrade to v12. Still a huge memory hog, as ever.”
The latest Chrome on my Mac uses 135MB.
Yes, I’m an Apple user. Sniff. lol
Chuck, how much physical memory in the computer where Firefox is giving you fits? Can it be expanded? How much memory does Task Manager show FF is using?
And thanks everyone for the translations.
I hadn’t noticed, but there is a little smiley face at the bottom of this page.
Best just to hunker down, keep a low profile, and wait patiently for the horrors to pass.
Or take their away their primary form of communication, the cell/smart phone.
I have 4gb of installed memory, but with Microsoft XP, only 3gb is addressable. Of that, when I do not open FF, memory usage never goes above 750mb–even with lots of video and audio program open and running. Open FF and all hell breaks loose. Within an hour of opening a half dozen FF windows, mem usage is 2.75gb or more, and the hard drive is thrashing frequently.
OFD is right. I need to get over to Chrome. Project for the weekend. Somehow, I have managed to preserve a lifetime of username and passwords in FF, with nary a blip. Hope I don’t have to reconstruct all of those for Chrome.
If that life-guarding job is for the state of Mass., it may be worth it. My son guarded for all but his summer after graduation at Sandy Beach in Winchester, Mass., and he made enough money to send himself through 4 years of in-state tuition at my alma mater, Indiana University. Not only that, but he had state retirement benefits that he was allowed to cash out of, that had accumulated into the thousands by the time he took it. Gotta love those Mass. state jobs. And I do, when the pay goes to my kids.
Speaking of going absolutely mad, I am almost there. One of the brick walls I keep hitting has to do with what I would say is a cultural difference between Germany and the US–although it is part of the legal realm. I keep having to revisit documents proving various things like Jeri’s death via German documents, our registration as residents there, my de-registration as a resident there, etc. Somehow, it is just impossible for Americans to conceive or accept that what certifies a document as legal, is different outside the US. But such thinking never, ever occurs to an American: the whole world operates exactly as we do, don’t cha know.
First, the German-speaking countries have what is known as a short signature (“kurz Unterschrift” in German). That is an official signature. For most people, it looks like an illegible short scribble, usually not more than a centimeter long. This signature is the one used by most people as their legal signature. Because it is a gibberish scribble and undecipherable as representing letters or a name, Americans (bureaucrats, at least), cannot believe it represents a legal signature.
Furthermore, in America, for some strange reason, an embossed stamp with a legible signature across it, is considered legal. In Germany, there are no embossed stamps, just plain old rubber stamps, which–together with a kurz Unterschrift scribbled across them, makes anything official.
So here is how the latest round with a US bureaucrat went.
Them: “This is not an official document; there’s no embossed stamp on it. This is just a copy.”
Me: “No, there is no such thing as an embossed stamp in Germany. A rubber stamp is all they use. That document is an original; it is not a copy.”
Them: “Well, we need an embossed stamp to accept it as official.”
Me: “How am I going to get that, when such a thing does not exist?”
Them: “Have them send us a letter explaining that they do not use embossed stamps.”
Me: “Can you read German?”
Those bureaucrats gotta just be bustin yer ballz, Chuck. Jeepers. No wonder we seem so bloody stupid to the rest of the world, and this is the country that practically owns the world and invented much of the stuff that makes it work nowadays.
“OFD is right. I need to get over to Chrome. Project for the weekend. Somehow, I have managed to preserve a lifetime of username and passwords in FF, with nary a blip. Hope I don’t have to reconstruct all of those for Chrome.”
You should be able to import all your bookmarks and settings to Chrome from FF when the time comes, usually either as a simple GUI option or by having saved your bookmarks.html file.
That “OFD is right” made me laugh, recalling a great snarky line from Nick Nolte’s character in The Thin Red Line:
“I don’t need you to tell me I’m right. We’ll assume it.”
Here’s another one for the anti-Steve Jobs brigade:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/04/steve-jobs-reportedly-pushed-for-ad-supported-version-of-mac-os-9.ars
:The limited details of the idea were posted to MacRumors on Thursday, who noted that the relevant patent application owned by Apple, citing Jobs as the lead inventor, was published in 2009. The patent describes a way for the OS to present ads to the user while disabling certain functions while the ad is being shown. “At the end of the advertisement, the operating system again enables the function(s),” reads the description. The ads being considered were both audio and visual, and would allow the user to obtain the OS either for free or at a discount.”
I suppose there are many Apple fanboys who are going to maintain that being subjected to video ads to use an OS is a market alternative.
We were discussing learning from others a few days ago. Funny that Apple owns a fanatical corner of the market because of wonderful, incredible, astounding engineering and execution, but yet nobody in the non-proprietary opposing camps can even come close to equaling Apple’s lead. I have tried practically every MP3 player I see on display in the box stores, and nothing even comes close to the beauty and flawless operation of my iPod 5g cracked with Rockbox. NOTHING!
The Apple people are working for salary, stock or whatever. The non-proprietary people are doing it for free. Less incentive.
“wonderful, incredible, astounding engineering and execution”
Ummm.
As a coder who just taught himself to “provision” an iPad this week, I can tell you that a prolonged and merciless beating for whoever came up with the process would probably be too kind.
Ah, hah! You’re trying to make money off Apple. Of course they make that hard.
We users just send money and either it works or you can’t do it on an Apple. Lots and lots of money. Much more than the competition. Even if it breaks, send them even more money and they fix it. Don’t ever run out of money while dealing with Apple.
Maybe it’s not in vain …”lots and lots of money” … I do like the sound of that.
Just wondering if the biology book is downloadable as a free PDF?
In my experience, Apple products tend to work very well at a certain range of prescripted activities, and offer little to those who would do more. Their iPod range seems good; their Mac range seems bad. I haven’t properly tried an iPad.
Thanks for ordering the book, guys. Let me know what you think.
“Just wondering if the biology book is downloadable as a free PDF?”
Email me and I’ll send you a link to the PDF, .mobi, and .epub versions.
Which reminds me; I just got an .epub and a .mobi file sent to me. New to me, these extensions. Haven’t tried opening them on a Linux box yet but they sure won’t on Windows so far. WTF.
More blustery early March weather this morning, temps in the 30s, sideways spitting freezing rain and hail. The usual: winter slides into Mud Season, Spring is skipped, and we will probably burst right into hot and humid summer next.
Epub is the “standard” ebook format that just about everyone other than Amazon uses. The .azw Amazon format is basically .mobi with a DRM wrapper. Kindles happily read .mobi files. Any general-purpose ebook reader for Windows or Linux should be able to open unprotected files in either format.
OFD, for future reference, when you see a file extension you don’t know, go to http://filext.com/ and type the extension in the search box at the top right.
Chuck,
For passwords, I use LastPass these days,
LastPass
.mg
Thanks, guys, and a tip of the helmet.
Thanks, Mike. I will give it a try.
I’ll ditto MikeG’s suggestion of LastPass. LastPass bought Xmarks and rolled that into their package, as well. So it syncs passwords and bookmarks across multiple computers. There is a free version, and a paid version. I like it enough I pay for it.