Hardware Troubles

My ancient desktop rebooted after Linux applied a patch; result was a power down and no further response to buttons etc. I'm borrowing Stella's computer for the moment, but will have to quit using it when she gets home. Meanwhile I'm playing the only game in town, "What will Donald Do Next?" Electrical power is unstable here after some work yesterday by people installing a new concrete walkway; I don't know exactly when I'll be back to regular blogging.

Blog Break

Not me... I mouse left-handed
and my hair is gray!

Before I had a smartphone, I always imagined it would be much more convenient to do research for blog posts when I'm away from home if I had a mobile device literally always with me. As it turns out, that aspect is true... but the phone does not provide me with any more time or energy actually to write those posts. I made a new folder  in my email called BlogThis and began sending myself links and notes each time I ran across an article or post worth my time (and presumably my readers' time as well). Indeed I blogged a few of those, but the rest of life goes on... significant weather events, my health and that of my friends, household matters, etc. ... and at the moment I have a backlog of 33 articles in the BlogThis folder.

In short, I'm getting the research done, but the blogging is going by the boards. Many of the pending BlogThis entries are obsolete by now, so I believe I'll take a break of a few days, let them all obsolesce, and start fresh, knowing how the presence of the new phone changes things. Please bear with me; I'm not ready to quit blogging yet. But there's this article I found that I just have to make notes on for a future blog post...

The Dreck Is In The [E]Mail, OrFirefox 41.0 Kills My Webmail Service

For about a decade I've used a commercial email hosting service at everyone.net, a service and a company reliable enough that I can forget it for months at a time, which is certainly more than I could say about my previous service. The change to everyone.net was relatively painless and was, as it turns out, a good decision. I recommend this service to any individual or company requiring exceptionally great reliability in email to and from customers (in my case, contract IT clients). everyone.net delivers what it advertises, and I am grateful for that.

everyone.net includes in its service an excellent webmail site, good enough that I long ago switched to it for all my email management needs, in preference to (say) Mozilla Thunderbird, which gave me lots of grief for the few years I relied on it. That's right: I use no client-side email software on any of my computers; this webmail fulfills all my email needs. (Pro forma, I have Thunderbird installed, but I seldom use it.)

But every ointment has its resident fly, and this is no exception. Last week, Mozilla released Firefox 41.0, distributed (at least in the Linux world) through the usual software update service which your distro (I use Ubuntu) provides with the OS. It was automatic, seldom gave any trouble and required virtually no individual attention to install the patches. So Firefox 40.0.3 (I think) was seamlessly replaced with Firefox 41.0, no muss, no fuss...

... until I tried the everyone.net webmail and found it completely dysfunctional under FF 41.0 .

Fortunately, the webmail continued to work under the latest Google Chrome, so I was not completely dead in the water. But I had a lot of my personally valuable links stored in Firefox, and not all of them were replicated in Google Chrome. So I opened a trouble ticket with everyone.net, explaining that although I understood the problem likely was not in their software, the most direct route to a solution probably involved their efforts testing their own product on FF 41.0, and indeed that proved to be the case. They determined that the problem is NOT just a Linux matter: it occurs on every OS on which FF 41.0 runs and which everyone.net supports.

As those of you who blog probably know, if you use a webmail service, you often must do your email work and your browsing for the web material on which you base your blog content on the very same browser... i.e., all on Firefox or all on Google Chrome or Chromium or (Dog forbid) MSIE. It's not an absolute requirement, but it can be truly inconvenient to switch browsers 10 times in developing a simple 3-paragraph post. So I am now getting used to Google Chrome as my new single browser, at least until everyone.net resolves its problems with Firefox.

Now... wasn't that exciting? NOOOO... but if things look a bit shaky on the YDDV blog for a while, at least you know why.

Firedoglake Ends; Shadowproof Begins In Its Place

The End of Firedoglake. The Beginning of Shadowproof. The Bookmark you'll need for Shadowproof in your blogroll.

Thanks to Jane for starting this wonderful site (Firedoglake; farewell!) for people like me, a place where the Democratic Party may be necessary but is unfortunately not enough in our world. Thanks to Kevin Gosztola for grabbing and lifting the torch (Shadowproof, welcome!) on behalf of all that's right Left and decent in American politics. Both of you deserve more than just our thanks for a job well-done... and a job yet to be done. Best wishes in your new endeavor!

(SP will appear here in the blogroll on the left as soon as I can construct an entry for it.)

— Brief Blog Break —

My AT&T connection is off, not because the DSL is down, but because they needed me to shut it down while they work on the landline phone, which is indeed down. I am posting this from Stella's completely separate connection. With luck I should be back later today... with Stella's truly charming newest pics of the kitties. Sorry for the involuntary interruption.

UPDATE about 12:50pm: both landline phone and DSL are working again. As much as I hate to admit it, AT&T did a fairly prompt job of locating the problem... no, it wasn't at my residence... and getting someone out to fix it. One would almost think such self-diagnosing systems could also be self-repairing, as in some of the old s/f movies, but I know that's too much to ask.

Kitty pics in 2 or 3 hours, Blog willing...

It's Stella's Birthday...

... and she's somehow arranged to take a week off work. I have a feeling I won't be blogging a lot for the next couple of days.

Your Comments On This Blog

My Blogger settings allow anyone to comment on this blog, even Anonymous or an empty name field, without entering any kind of word or number. That means I can't stop you from comment-spamming. It's the price I pay for the openness; some of my commenters have said they like the lack of hassle. So be it. But I can and do take steps to minimize any exposure your spam may receive to the world...

If you comment anonymously (or with an empty name), Blogger puts your work straight into the spam folder. This happens automatically; I didn't have to do anything to make it happen. Once in a while I open the spam folder and, without looking at the contents, delete everything there. Your comment is visible on the web for a duration of perhaps three seconds. Or less. Google Search very likely will never see it. If you're spamming to boost your page ref counts, you're really wasting your time.

If you comment with a name I haven't seen before, your comment goes into the moderation folder. I look there about every week or two, or month or two, or not; it isn't a priority for me. But if you're real (e.g., if I've seen you on other blogs I visit) and you offer a salient comment, I will engage you. If not...

Once in a while, I turn off incoming comments for a day or two. This is as random as I can make it. Please do visit again, unless you're the repulsive vaguely meat-like stuff in a funny-shaped can opened with a key...

Glenn Greenwald Appears To Have Moved...

... to The Intercept, along with a dozen other stellar lights. Nothing fancy there, just a much-needed group of genuine reporters. See blogroll.

No Black Friday For Us — But It Was A Close Call

Stella and I, as a matter of principle (not to mention a matter of sanity), don't shop on Black Friday. We are fairly relentless in our determination not to do so.

But when I started to back up my bills-paid file to a probably five‑year‑old external laptop‑friendly (i.e., tiny) hard drive, I found that it was unresponsive. Ruh‑roh!

The drive was plugged into an external USB 2.0 hub, on which the power light was cheerfully bright; the drive itself was powered from the USB hub over its one and only cable, and its light was similarly bright. A reboot didn't help. Unplugging/replugging the drive cable from/to the USB hub didn't help. With a big sigh, I contemplated the possibility that I would have to go against my principles and head for Micro Center on Black Friday (shudder).

Suddenly I realized something looked funny about the whole apparatus. Where was the signal cable from the computer to the USB hub, which usually goes into the back of the hub? Sure enough: it was plugged into the big box, but not into the hub! The connector on the hub end is one of those square-shaped USB connectors, good and sturdy, the kind that doesn't simply fall out on its own, and indeed it never has fallen out before. I looked on the floor beneath my feet... sure enough, there was the cable with the connector! Plugging it in restored the external HD, and I could do my backup.

The connector surely had some help unplugging itself. I don't know if the help's name was Esther or Lily; I suspect Lily, but I really can't pin the deed on either of them. Hey, it's the day after Thanksgiving, and they're wonderful cats; there's no way we would deprive them of their treats on a holiday for such a minor offense!

Blogger's Proactive Censor

At least three of you (Enfant, BadTux, c) left comments in the past week which Blogger saw fit to dump in the spam bucket. Apologies. I can see how NSA might have pressured Google into whacking comments critical of NSA from overseas readers, but two of you are American citizens presumably commenting from within the US ("stateside," as old-timers used to call it). My apologies. The comments have been restored, but I doubt I will have time to answer them today; I need to spend a couple of hours applying for a Medicare supplement. Maybe tonight...

Comment CAPTCHA, Removed At Request, Now Restored... And Removed Again

At the request of NTodd, I removed the CAPTCHA filter (the word and number you have to type to leave a comment). That was four days ago. For whatever reason, during those four days, I received no comments at all... none. On the chance that the changed CAPTCHA setting caused some sort of blockage on comments, I am restoring the CAPTCHA filter. I don't like it either. Sorry, galz & guyz, but just in case that's the problem, I have to try it.

UPDATE: some comments arrived while CAPTCHA was on; now I'm trying it again with CAPTCHA off. Give me a shout, please.

Brief Break

Welcome to Our World!

Stella and I are both exhausted (don't ever imagine that artists or their mates lead easy lives) and about every 2 hours the skies dump barrels of water on us for about five minutes as if [insert name of favorite deity here] is pissing on Houston and both of us feel slightly ill as often happens to us when the barometer goes up and down like a wasp trapped in your window-screen (no, we don't have one of those) and kitty Esther has decided that my office chair is hers and kitty Lily has decided that one corner of the den, a different corner every day, is her new litter box and [BIG GASP] I NEED A BREAK! I'll be back to the blog in a day or two.

Long Day Wednesday, Blogging Late

My Wednesday contains an early doc appointment, a pharmacy run and a grocery shopping trip, separated by a total of four (4) METROLift™ rides and the usual interminable waiting. Oh, and an exercise session. I'll be back to the blog when I'm able. Thank you for your patience.

Blogger Comments Flaky Lately

Blogger is apparently making changes to its commenting mechanism, possibly as part of merging Blogger comments and Google+ comments. I'm a Blogger user but not a Google+ user. Twice this week I've lost outgoing comments, one to ellroon a couple of days ago, one to Bryan just last night. To all appearances, they're gone forever, and the Blogger dashboard is behaving peculiarly and serving exceptions for breakfast today.

My advice: don't write your magnum opus in the comments here, or if you do, back it up somewhere else. We have to live with this fact: every app has bugs, but when Blogger has bugs, it affects millions of people. A word to the wise...

Robert Reich...

... appears to be blogging only on tumblr now. The old blog seems to have a persistent technical problem, so I'm changing the blogroll as soon as I publish this post.

UPDATE 6/30:  Reich's blog is back at robertreich.org; blogroll restored. Sigh.

Bang!

A transformer blew out with a loud report, leaving my block with a brown-out. At first I didn't realize there was a problem; I just reset a breaker and restarted my computer. But repeated attempts to connect to the 'net failed with modem problems. Eventually I noticed the lights were flickering, so I promptly shut down all computers... I once lost an expensive copier due to a brown-out.

About an hour later, the Kilowatt is Reddy again, and I'm back on the net. Some problems never really go away...

A Bit Busy Here Lately...

... apologies for infrequent posting, but stuff has been happening.

Of course I have my usual twice-a-week physical therapy; this week they're teaching me to balance from the hips to distribute weight more evenly between my natural (left) leg and my prosthetic (right) leg when I'm walking; yes, that takes longer to say than it takes to go through one cycle of "shift weight; step (sometimes step up) with the foot not bearing the weight; step down (if necessary); redistribute the weight for the next cycle."

Then on Wednesday I had my MetroLift™ in-person interview in the course of applying to be eligible to use the service, also known as the "are you a cripple? prove it!" interview. I passed. It's hard to miss when I let my shorts leg ride up the way a very flirtatious woman might do, only in my case, what shows is the carbon-fiber top of my prosthesis. Sexy? no. Proof that I'm a cripple? Well, yes. The MetroLift ride downtown to Houston Metro headquarters, the interview, and the MetroLift ride home took, altogether, nearly the whole business day. No one said assisting disabled people was quick or easy. I should receive my MetroLift ID in about a week; then I can begin scheduling some of my daily trips for which I've depended on friends (thanks, George! thanks, Stella!) on public transit.

An aside about MetroLift: if you ever wondered whether the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 had any significant positive consequences, the answer is an emphatic yes: the law requires, say, the City of Houston to provide to people with disabilities transportation comparable to mass transit for non-crippled people... at a comparable price... and that's what MetroLift is all about. Houston goes a step further, equipping all city buses and MetroRail with handicapped-friendly facilities; that doesn't help me because the nearest bus stop is almost a half mile from my home... and I can't walk a half mile yet, if ever. So I spent a day of my life arranging to receive the same functional benefit you can get by walking to the bus stop (rail stop, whatever) and getting on the proper public transit vehicle.

As vehicles have a sixth sense about such things, Stella's auto wound up in the shop yesterday and today, because the brakes were behaving oddly. Diagnosis: master cylinder. Resolution: either replace it or make your plans to run into a car, a wall, a post or whatever in the near future. Of course we replaced it.

With luck, I'll return to actual political blogging soon. I've been thinking about it; I just haven't had time and energy. Thanks for your patience.

Removed From Blogroll

Secession or expulsion? Neither!

The Hoffman Post (The Drudge Retort) has been removed from the blogroll. Active efforts to remove Texas from the Union are unwelcome on the YDDV. Hoffman of course has a right to say whatever he wants on his own blog, but I will not assist him in promoting an expulsionist agenda. In fairness, I also refuse to promote the secessionist views of insane Texans such as Governor Perry.

Whatever problem America faces, fragmenting the Union is no part of any rational solution. It is, in fact, a terrible idea. Believe in it if you will, but please take it somewhere else.

Ubuntu 12.04 Mostly Pleasant To Use - UPDATED

Ubuntu Linux 12.04.2 LTS continues to be mostly satisfactory to use, enough so that I can foresee using it for the approximately 4 years remaining in its support period (if I live that long).

The interface is attractive. Somehow I could never find it in myself to say that about any Windows system. This one is colorful and (depending on how you set it up) relatively tasteful. Does that matter? Ask anyone in the arts if it matters. Things I like about the interface:

• The Dash, a launcher after my own heart. Type a few letters of the name of the app; The Dash shows you icons for all apps matching what you typed. Click one; Dash disappears and the app starts. For elderly command-line jockeys like me, this is just about the ideal blend, and a lot less fussy than a large main menu stuffed full of entries.
• Thanks to the Workspace Switcher, I am actually inclined to make use of workspaces for the first time. Before, it was too easy to lose track.

Things I don't like about the interface:

• The main launcher bar (I don't know the proper term yet) is a single column of buttons that holds perhaps two dozen or fewer launchers. Within limits, you can set the size of the buttons, but if you want more than will fit in that one column, you have to place the launcher on the desktop instead. Windows users will be fine with that; Linux/Unix users are generally less inclined to clutter the desktop.
• When you use any given app, its navigation bar, document information (e.g., URL textbox), etc. are across the top of the app's main window... all except the app's main menu. That appears at the very top of the display, and appears only when you're running that app and hover the mouse there. It's a little disorienting if you do much with the menu.

The office suite, LibreOffice 3, does things a little differently from MS Office, but most of the functionality is there. As with most Linux software, it's free; just install it and use it.

The default browser is Firefox, currently version 19.0, so far satisfactory. This box is just enough faster than the old one that there's no longer a "Firefox penalty" compared to Google Chrome. That said, I'll still install Chrome before long; it is always good to test things in at least two browsers.

The only email software installed is Thunderbird. If you have a major email provider, it's probably great. If you have a provider too small to be in Mozilla's database, the auto-account-creation tool is so dysfunctional it will send you screaming when you try to create an account. I've put it aside for a rainy day, and am using my email host's (very well-implemented) webmail for everything at the moment.

The photo manager, Shotwell, is new to me as of tonight, but it is a great improvement over their previous offering. You could call it "F-Spot done right" and not be far off the mark. It isn't exceedingly feature-rich, but it does the things a manager needs to do, and makes it easy to offload genuine editing to a real editor. I chose GIMP for that purpose... appropriate for a cripple, eh? ... and familiar to me from a couple years' use. Note: tags, an essential tool, are done right, something F-Spot could never claim.

I'll post interesting things as I find them. Perhaps when you get old, you, too, will want to change to a truly free operating system with free software. I did, and I have few if any regrets.


UPDATE:

LibreOffice 3 Writer, like its OpenOffice predecessor, will produce various MS Word-format files, as well as .PDF files.

Google Chrome works like a champ (no surprise there), but for various reasons I'll probably keep Firefox as the default browser.

I resolved the problem with Thunderbird: I had misread something in my mail host's documentation, so it's not really Thunderbird's fault (though that auto-account-creation process is a PITA unless you use a major email host... at the recommendation long ago of the NearlyFreeSpeech guy, I use Everyone.net, a commercial (and industrial-strength) mail host, which is not tiny and is very reliable, but not major enough to make the cut to be in Mozilla's database. Thunderbird made another major improvement: they ditched that combined-inbox feature; each account now has its own inbox and every other folder, corresponding to the IMAP setup of each account. Whew! I don't miss the combined inbox!

Now I need to find a suitable calendar... it doesn't have to be Thunderbird-integrated, just clear and reliable. And free!

Computer Dilemma

My old Ubuntu Linux computer seems truly dead, and believe me, it's too old to bother repairing. This may take a while to resolve. I could...

1. download a new image, probably Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, install it on another retired computer from my garage, and start from scratch,
2. switch to Windows (ugh), buy a cheap machine and again start from scratch, or
3. buy a nice Ubuntu laptop at a tidy price (there are some nice ones out there, aimed at developers), and again start from scratch.

I'll probably live with this decision the rest of my life, so I want to get it right. If I buy a new machine, it will have to be online. If I take an old box from the garage and install Linux in place of Windows, it will cost me the price of a blank DVD at the local pharmacy (I'm out at the moment) and a bit of time. I do hope to continue posting on Stella's computer in the meanwhile, but with my rehab sessions starting tomorrow, I may not have a lot of time to search for topics for the blog. (Based on recent comment frequency, that won't be a big deal.)

The one thing in common among all approaches is the "start from scratch" part. Some things are recently backed up, but not everything... major medical woes involving many weeks in hospital tend to impinge on one's best habits and replace them with neglectful ones. Time will tell what is here and what is gone. Patience, readers; patience...