07:41 – Yesterday was the first “normal” day in a long time. Barbara went to work and came home. We had dinner and watched TV for a while. No phone calls from her parents. No emergencies. No doctor appointments or meetings. We’re hoping for another normal day today.
The weather forecasters say we can expect our first snow of the season, with rain today turning into sleet and snow this evening. We’re expecting one to two inches (2.5 to 5 cm) of snow tonight, which is a blizzard for us. In the mountains not far to our west they’re expecting 5 to 10 inches. She’ll drive her car to work today, but tomorrow she’ll take the Trooper. When there’s winter weather, I like having her in a 4X4. Also, the Trooper weighs about 4,500 pounds (2,000+ kilos), and I much prefer her being in a vehicle that has some serious mass.
I got half a liter of Kastle-Meyer reagent made up yesterday, which I’ll bottle today. I also got 30 sets of Dragendorff reagent A and B bottled, so now I have all I need to make up some forensic science kits. After I get those built, I’ll assemble 15 biology kits, assemble the eight chemistry kits I have materials for, and get started on the next batch of 60 chemistry kits. That’ll probably take me into tomorrow and possibly the weekend.
16:58 – The forecast keeps getting worse. This morning, they were calling for one or two inches of snow tonight. Around noon, they’d boosted that to 2 to 4 inches. As of the 15:41 update, they’re now calling for 3 to 5 inches. It’s just lucky the colder air didn’t move in sooner. When Barbara emptied the rain gauge last night, there were about 2 inches in it. Since then, we’ve had another 2 inches of cold rain. If all of that had come down as snow, we’d have something like a meter of snow on the ground now. More likely around here, though, it would have come down mostly as freezing rain, enough to take down big trees and cause major days-long power outages. So we really have dodged the proverbial bullet.
For my wife’s little company, I finally set up two new machines for the office, with Windows 7 and Office 2010. What an absolutely horrible experience! Who does user testing at Microsoft? Sadists? Masochists?
First, the situation: While I used to run a domain, a couple of years ago I decided this was overkill, so the machines are in a workgroup. Users have mapped drives from an NAS, which is then backed up. Anything on the local machines is *not* backed up, so no user data should be stored there. The big change happening is the update from Office 2003 to Office 2010.
The adventures begin with “product keys”. I did the actual software installation a few weeks ago, but hadn’t actually set up the users’ stuff on them. Start Office – it complains that the product key is invalid. Why? Who knows, it was certainly happy enough when I installed it. To make a painful story short: Our internet connection was down (I was simultaneously upgrading that), and Office complained about the invalid product key until the Internet was reachable again.
When I could finally start Outlook, what I wanted to do was quite simple. The old “PST” file for Outlook is in the user’s mapped directory, and I wanted Outlook 2010 to use this. First, when you start Outlook, it automatically creates a new PST-file that you don’t want. This is an old idiocy, and the old workaround was to close Outlook, delete the file; when restarted, Outlook would ask what file to use.
No more! Now, Outlook insists that all of its files are in a hidden directory under the user’s profile. You can only change this behavior by making manual entries in the registry. It also insists on creating a PST-file for each email address, so while I can keep the old PST-file around, I cannot have Outlook actually use it for anything. Outlook also refuses to copy the contents to the new PST-file. Well, it copies some of them, but not all, with no discernable rhyme or reason.
While fighting this, the machine is as slow as molasses, because “TrustedInstaller.exe” is using 6GB of the 4GB of memory installed in the machine (swap-city). It ran much of the night, and still ran this morning. The only information available about this process is that it is part of Windows Update. Just which updates take so long to install, and why they require 6GB of memory to do so? Who knows? Of course, the updates cannot all install at once; I had to reboot the machine half-a-dozen times, and each time a new crop of updates became available.
There were other exciting problems as well, but that gives a good feel for my life the past two days. My wife has agreed that we can move the company to Linux/LibreOffice the next time she needs any major IT changes.
/rant
Had to get that off my chest. Who knows, perhaps Google will pick this up, and someone, somewhere will be warned to avoid Office 2010 for small companies.
avoid Office 2010.
There, fixed that for you.
Just be glad you skipped Windows 8.
“My wife has agreed that we can move the company to Linux/LibreOffice the next time she needs any major IT changes.”
Oh HELL yeah!
Your series of issues sounds about pah for the course with M$ products for a small business; I have to admit that I had zero issues with my Windows 7 Ultimate box for eighteen months until the mobo got toasted recently, and that’s a hw problem. But setting up a small network seems to be a lot more trouble than it should be, and our old friends Outlook and Exchange continue to be total bitches. Also, installing printers and other such peripherals is a time-consuming PITA, whereas, like I demonstrated for my own wife, plug something into a Linux machine and voila! It sees printers immediately. Also showed wife how there are about three mouse clicks for scanning in Linux as opposed to the series of multiple windows and mouse clicks and typing needed to do it in Windows.
She’s kinda stuck with Windows only because she has to use PowerPoint in her gig and the LibreOffice and OpenOffice versions of that sw aren’t able to do a couple of critical things that she needs, although if I ever have time to look at them, I may be able to fix that.
If one or the other or both of us ever set up a small biz where we are, I’d use Ubuntu Server and client machines, with LibreOffice, and WINE for the one or two sw apps that only run in Windows that we might need.
Win 7 really has few problems. I always do the basic setup and then run Windows Update. Set up as workgroup. Map shared resources.
Install Firefox or Chrome; then Thunderbird, then Libre Office. Set text and spreadsheet formats to MSO 2000,XP format for ease of sharing with MSO users.
Couldn’t be smoother.
I think most of your issues are from MS Office.
Bob, got a new show for you if it is on Netflix. “Duck Dynasty”, http://www.aetv.com/duck-dynasty/ . It is about a bunch of rednecks in Louisiana that go around shooting up beaver dams and such things like how to build a flame thrower using a propane tank. Of course, you probably already know about it.
I mostly agree: Windows 7 on my gaming PC is zero trouble. Still, Windows Update is ugly compared to Linux. And as soon as Windows 7 is being centrally managed, the end-users are just flushed down the toilet. I have a laptop from my office, and it takes around 10 *minutes* to be usable after booting. Updates will then be downloaded in the background, and sometimes insist that the machine reboot, sometimes with no option for me to say “no”. Other people I know who have centrally-managed Windows machines from their employers have similar problems, varying a bit from company to company.
But y’all are right, the big problem is Office 2010. Actually, specifically Outlook 2010, just unbelievably bad. What program does not allow you to choose the directory you want to store data in? That is just basic. And to put the data in the user profile – Outlook PST files can get huge – that is just idiotic. Sure, if you are running a domain, you can map the AppData elsewhere with AD, but why should that be necessary? Every other program will let you configure working directories, there’s nothing hard about that…
Any sufficiently technical expert is indistinguishable from a witch: http://erratasec.blogspot.ca/2013/01/i-conceal-my-identity-same-way-aaron.html
Anyone for a good stake burning?
“TrustedInstaller.exe” is using 6GB of the 4GB of memory installed in the machine
Why do you not have 8 GB ram on the new machines? I build my new desktops with 16 GB. USA $85 at Amazon.
Most of those updates are because of the script kiddies in Russia and China. The middle east is a growing area for this nonsense. I was fighting with the Iranians again on my website last night. Again. Be glad for the updates or else be owned. You have been warned.
Duck Dynasty isn’t listed on Netflix streaming. It may be on DVD, which we’re not currently subscribed to. Oddly, I got email from Netflix yesterday offering me a free month of DVDs if I’d sign back up for the combined membership. I’m not sure why they’re doing that, because they’re supposedly trying to get to 100% streaming and are deemphasizing DVDs.
Windows 8 is apparently OK if you load a Windows start button emulator ( http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/ ) .
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/01/16/punting-the-start-screen/
Actually, specifically Outlook 2010, just unbelievably bad.
You do know that the PST file is a SQL database? The developers of Outlook thought that this was such a cool idea that they keep on doing it over and over in new releases. There is a reason why database administrators (the good ones!) are paid so much. When one of these databases frags itself (and it will happen), you lose all your email. A good DB admin will be able to restore your emails, a bad one will lose all your stuff. Outlook = Lookout!
I vastly prefer Thunderbird ( http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ ) for desktops. I have moved most of my staff to it. TB is just like the old Outlook Express except it works. The downside is that the Mozilla boys and girls are shutting down TB development. Which is OK with me as long as they fix broken things that popup occasionally.
I just let Outlook create the new file. Then I go Account Settings Data Files and tell Outlook to use the existing file. I then have two files. I make my existing file the default file. I then delete the file Outlook created when it was first started. This effectively allows you to chose where the file is located. All the machines at my work have their outlook files relocated to a more sane location.
You want to use an Outlook PST file, not an Outlook 97 file. The new file format allows for significantly more space and is not constrained by the 2 gig limit of the Outlook 97 files.
If your Outlook PST file becomes corrupted run SCANPST against the file. You may lose a couple of emails otherwise that program does a pretty good job of clearing up any problems. Most problems arise when more than one copy of Outlook is running at the same time.
Who care if Outlook files are stored in a profile. The files take space on the disk regardless of where you store the files. Large shops run Exchange and there are no mail files on the desktops. The files get large when you start storing lots of attachments. You can delete files and then shrink the database occasionally which will reduce the size considerably.
I find just as much idiocy in other programs as I find in MsOffice. The propeller heads that do this stuff don’t really think about real world environments. Also when you allow too much configuration control by the user the support problems, and costs, can get quite significant.
We are currently in the process of migrating most of our email to Google. The boss like Google and I have to do what he says. We still maintain an email server for our applications that send out email and I continue to use Outlook. I am familiar with it and it does fine for me. I don’t really trust the cloud, especially Google which wants to own all your data.
” The propeller heads that do this stuff don’t really think about real world environments.”
There it is. I would imagine we’ve all noticed this over the years. It doesn’t seem like many products actually get tested out in a real-world setting. WTF? This would seem like common sense to me.
As for Google Mail, I’ve been using it since it first came out and have had nearly zero issues with it. I figure anything connected to the net and buggers out there know all our stuff already anyway.
“Duck Dynasty” looks to be yet another ‘real life’ program that shows us slavering voyeurs how weird and goofy some other group of people are and how they live day to day. Like “Buck Wild,” this one is a snorting guffaw at ‘redneck’ peasants, a variation on “Jersey Shore,” etc., etc. Nothing like contributing to ethnic and racial stereotypes for boffo laffs; when will we see programs on inner-city gang-banger families, Detroit hadjis or Megalopolis Lubavitchers?
That ownership of data is going to be a significant factor, IMO. Just like M$ changed the shape of the landscape and moved software from something that you once bought and owned—like a car—to something you rent, I look for—and I mean this quite seriously—service vendors to own all data at some point in the future. My small hope is that when something goes wrong, those idiots will get the pants sued off them and be as liable as the company who did the wrong, and just chose to put their files on Google servers.
All I can say about a boss who wants data stored in the cloud, is that s/he is so far removed from the thinking of the most advanced companies in the world, they have to be an idiot. The Chemical Company not only stored stuff locally, to get into the rooms where they physical servers were located, required a second employee accompanying the worker (2 employees accompanying somebody like me who was not an actual employee, but a contractor), in addition to remote visual check by camera and voice through the security office, then an in person visual check by somebody already present and working in the server space. And this was merely the accounting office where receivables and payables for Europe were handled. I was told that the company headquarters down south had much tighter security.
I think I already mentioned that when I started working there (at the same time the office was opened), they allowed employees to bring flash drives of music, and listen through headphones at their workstations. A couple years later, that was prohibited—all USB access to the computers was disabled and employees had to bring their own iPods if they wanted music. Scanning was moved to the copy machines, where one inputted their employee number and the scan was automatically transferred to your employee file space.
Wow. Give that data away. Because the lawyers and legislator lawyers are going to be on the side that increases litigation costs. And that is going to be the side that says you do not own data stored outside your property.
Hi OFD, “Duck Dynasty” is the only reality show that I have liked to date. They do crazy things (like getting in a john boat without a stern plug) but I really like the fact that they pray once per show over a group meal or in thanks for something good. The head of the clan is an Elder in the Church of Christ ( http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/arts/television/duck-dynasty-lures-a-growing-audience-on-ae.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 ) also. And they wear camo everywhere (yes, I know people like this and am related to some of them). And there are no cuss words (I am working on stopping cussing again).
” And that is going to be the side that says you do not own data stored outside your property.”
What would they say about, for instance, backups to the “cloud?” Let’s say I take all my family pictures and back them up both to an external hard drive and then also to Dropbox or some other similar service. What about my ownership rights then, in both locations? Can I own both sets of data? Or only one? If so, which one? Would it really be possible for me NOT to own the pictures stored on Dropbox but I DO own them on my external drive even though exact duplicates? Or do I not actually own either set?
Looks like it will always be a great thing to be a lawyer in this culture.
Until we kill them all.
It’s that ‘free’ storage you probably need to worry about. Use paid storage like Amazon S3 and then all the data belongs to you. You pay them to store it safely, not take it from you. Same with backups like Mozy and Carbonite, use the paid options.
Don’t get me wrong, Lynn; I am not dissing the people, just a show that uses them, knowingly or not, as cheap entertainment. I feel the same way about the folks in “Buck Wild” and “Jersey Shore” and am aware, nonetheless, that they accepted money to be thus portrayed. It still grates on me. I see it as just a step or two removed from paying money at the old carnivals to see the “geeks” and “freaks.” Or even further back, to the money paid by visitors to London insane asylums to gaze at the inmates.
And I can’t say too much, honestly, because I haven’t seen the show; you indicate that there is respect there, so I will get off my rant-box for now.
“(I am working on stopping cussing again).”
Good luck with that; it’s pretty much one of the only one or two nasty little habits I have left, having given up tobacco, dope, booze, coffee, tea, singing and dancing and going to the movies. I know I should cut down but find it really fucking difficult.
If you are storing your stuff in the cloud then someone else owns it:
http://xkcd.com/1150/
I dislike all lawyers except mine.
OK, we will kill them all except for yours. Any relation?
Why cannot one have Outlook 2003, Excel 2010, Word 2010, Access 2010 & PowerPoint 2010 c0habitating?
I kind of like A&E’s Storage Wars, the original. Originated locally and some of their second hand stores are nearby, in Costa Mesa.
Also, the Trooper weighs about 4,500 pounds (2,000+ kilos), and I much prefer her being in a vehicle that has some serious mass.
Get ready to kiss off heavy vehicles. The 2015 Ford pickup will be made of aluminum for a weight reduction of 700 lbs. I’m wondering how much the price will increase?
http://news.pickuptrucks.com/2013/01/star-of-the-show-fords-atlas-concept.html
BTW, my 2005 Ford Expedition has a plastic hood and rear hatch to cut the weight. That vehicle will probably hit 120K miles this weekend with lifetime average of around 15 mpg.
Why cannot one have Outlook 2003, Excel 2010, Word 2010, Access 2010 & PowerPoint 2010 c0habitating?
I have successfully installed and run both Excel 2003 and Excel 201o on my office pc. The trick is that you install one to the non-default directory. It may need to be the first one to be installed.
On Windows 7, to make Excel 2003 the default:
rem Enter this first to disassociate an excel version…
“c:\program files (x86)\microsoft Office2003\Office11\Excel.exe” /unregserver
“c:\program files (x86)\microsoft Office\Office14\Excel.exe” /unregserver
rem Then enter this to specify the default version…
“c:\program files (x86)\microsoft Office2003\Office11\Excel.exe” /regserver
On Windows 7, to make Excel 2010 the default:
rem Enter this first to disassociate an excel version…
“c:\program files (x86)\microsoft Office2003\Office11\Excel.exe” /unregserver
“c:\program files (x86)\microsoft Office\Office14\Excel.exe” /unregserver
rem Then enter this to specify the default version…
“c:\program files (x86)\microsoft Office\Office14\Excel.exe” /regserver
I’m sure that making Lookout 2003 default is the same methodology.
What would they say about, for instance, backups to the “cloud?” Let’s say I take all my family pictures and back them up both to an external hard drive and then also to Dropbox or some other similar service.
Have you been following Instagram? They claimed full rights to anything put on their servers. Ultimately, they backed down—but not because they were afraid there was any problem in winning, but because they have always been on the verge of bankruptcy, and decided they could not afford the legal costs of litigating their claims to your pictures. SOMEBODY will take it further, and as possession is 9/10ths of the law, they WILL win. Whether you paid money for the service or not, will not make any difference, because—IMO—the issue will be decided involving the free services, and the decision will not discriminate over payment. Heck, decades ago, there had to be money exchanged for certain contracts to be valid—$1 in many cases,—but that has no longer been the case around here for a long time.
Looks like it will always be a great thing to be a lawyer in this culture
My dad always claimed that one is a second-class citizen if not a lawyer (one of his arguments in trying to get me to go to law school). Aside from the fact you will always have permits to carry automatically approved without any further checks, he said he could go into my bank, and as a lawyer, could find out more information about me than my bank would release to me—the account holder. And he was right.
He once had the case of a retired couple where the husband died unexpectedly. It was one of those situations where they were not legally prepared for either of them to die. They had one bank account and their emergency reserves were in a lockbox in that same bank. They locked her out of the account and lockbox because the state wanted an inventory of the lockbox before they would release anything to her; they would not even tell her how much was in the account while it was ‘inaccessible’ (husband had always handled the finances). As a lawyer, my dad had no trouble getting every bit of information about the account—and he was also able to examine the lockbox if she were not present. Bottom line: she could get no information out of the bank; he got everything. Now you might think this would be easy to resolve, but it wasn’t. It took over 8 months before the account was released to her. The poor woman had extraordinary expenses in view of the death, with no way to pay them with the reduced SS after the husband’s death. My dad was even unable to get a judge to disperse some of the plentiful cash in the lockbox to cover the death expenses.
As my dad used to say, judges work for the government. They know who signs their paycheck, and they will not go against the wishes of the state, whatever the situation might be. It took the state all those 8 months to inventory the lockbox, examine the bank account, decide there was nothing due to them and release the account and lockbox to her. In the 8 months meantime, she had to sell their house and move to a rental with those funds, because her SS alone was not enough to continue living on. Although that was one of the lengthiest he had to deal with, that case was typical of the stuff my dad handled in his practice every week.
Personally, I rank insuring one is in control of their property as much as some people here value possession of firearms. You want ownership of your digital files, don’t hand them over to somebody else. When the day comes that the courts rule that the holder owns those files, including any copyright to them,—and that day IS coming,—it will be too late. Furthermore, since places like Google never erase anything you entrust with them, you may not even be able to recover your rights by ‘erasing’ or ‘deleting’ them from the cloud server, because Google does not really delete them.
I would venture to say that I doubt there is a lawyer working on the staff in Ray’s office, because if there were, I am confident s/he would never allow company files to be stored in the cloud. When I worked in Chicago, a couple years into my tenure there, a lawyer was hired to work fulltime in the building. You think small things don’t matter, one of the first things she did was to make us change our copyright notices to use Roman numerals, because—at that time—Arabic numerals were not protected by courts. I think that has changed, as I see Arabic numerals on movies these days, but have a good look at anything produced before 1990 and you will see the copyright year is always in Roman numerals.
Years ago when I was still doing totally thankless street cop work, I thought about going to law school part-time, evenings, like my first wife did. But then I saw what was involved and that a person has to essentially rewire their brain and nervous system permanently, to the point that it closely resembles those of sharks, scorpions and Gila monsters.
I would imagine that if and when the State gets to the point it can effectively sift through billions of emails and blog posts electronically and pinpoint treasonous sons of bitches like me, they will start sending round the geheimstatzpolizei, probably on the additional word of neighbors in my ‘hood who get extra rations or something. And I will be taken away and shot out of hand.
But I suspect that they won’t get to that point for any one of several possible reasons and we will all have much bigger fish to fry or worry about or whatever in the next decade or so.
I kind of like A&E’s Storage Wars, the original.
A lawsuit by one of the participants claims that A&E “salts” some of the rooms with valuable stuff hidden behind junk in order to get good stories.
I’ve watched one episode of the show about the guys from the Marshall, Alabama called “Rocket City Rednecks”, led by a PhD from there. Think of a cross of some of the unusual vehicles from “Top Gear” crossed with “Mythbusters”.
While on the subject, check this neck out:
http://forum.delorme.com/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=21461#p260495
Red enough for y’all!
I want it blue!
Mixed units error —
Rain in inches, snow depth in meters?
Sorry. I’m bilingual.
But it’s not just me. If you go out to buy an eyepiece for a telescope, you’ll find that the focal length is shown in millimeters and the barrel size in inches.
Same in the paper industry. I used to order 11″x17″ 100 GSM paper all the time.
I use metric for everything except height. I’m 6’1″ which I think is 185 cm. I have very little idea what Fahrenheit is.
OFD wrote:
“I thought about going to law school part-time, evenings, like my first wife did. But then I saw what was involved and that a person has to essentially rewire their brain and nervous system permanently, to the point that it closely resembles those of sharks, scorpions and Gila monsters. ”
Expect a lawsuit from the shark/scorpion/Gila monster anti-defamation leagues.
I could throw in some lawyer jokes, but I’ll pass. There are now two lawyers in the family and I don’t need aggro from two female lawyers.
Two guys watch a bus full of lawyers drive off the cliff. First guy says, “That was sad.”. Second guy says, “Why?”. First guy, “There was an empty seat.”.
It was so cold yesterday, I saw a lawyer with his hands in his own pockets!
Converting to Metric
Cute; it is gonna be FUCKFUCKFUCKCOLD here this next week. But we don’t say that. It’s just a nommul wintuh day.
Let me guess. All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray.
Where do you go when LA is cold?
http://unofficialnetworks.com/news-coverage-los-angeles-cold-snap-people-real-115380/
Fifty, huh. Brutal.
I weep.