Captivity - Day 37 My boobies lie over the ocean

Hiya - it's a joy-filled day!
If you like gray/green cover from clouds the size of the northern hemisphere.
We're taking a great leap of trust by listening to the weather forecasters.

Don't forget: the first symptoms of the Flying AIDS is something. One group of experts says the toes. Another group of experts says loss of taste (I better shut the blog down). Yet another groups says a temperature. I'm beginning to think these experts flunked out of weatherman school.


Doctors and therapists are using conferencing services as appointments. This leaves a huge market for the rest of us. Get ready for DriveBySarcasting - Had too good of a day? Get a raise? We'll drive by, observing social distancing  norms, and blast out a genuine single serving of sarcasm! By the time your spouse sees you, you'll you're in Big Trouble!  Also available: blow up beds, for those nights your spouse would prefer you sleep elsewhere!


Brief News:
Scientists have come up with another wacky phrase: quarantine fatigue.
Use your imagination.  This is based upon your cell phone data - stolen directly from you. So we add this to shelter-in-place, covid, the Flying AIDS, and flatten the curve. Your homework: use them all in a sentence.

Chicken plants scramble.
Shouldn't that be eggs?

Couples are getting married on Zoom.
Nobody should be using Zoom, but the bigger concern is whether they will be broadcasting the wedding night. Followed by divorces on Zoom.


Speaking of which, I'm finding out there's a morass of legal issues when working from home. If you have sex with your SO, that counts as having sex at work. It is ok to have sex with your SO, provided one of you isn't supervising the other.



The joke is on Mrs lefty: she got a motion sensor light for the back yard. I had no idea it was in the Neighborhood Instruction Manual. She probably figured she could sail it by me when I wasn't looking. I showed her.... I didn't listen. She kept saying something about lights, deer, spaghetti, moles, and bunnys and the dog. Here's how it works: keep in its box for a year. Take it out of its box for a month. Refer to it repeatedly while he stares forward. Now here's the good bit: apply on a sunny day, without rain.... I WIN!  I WIN!


I hate when my friendly neighbors float by my house; some in crash position, some with small improvised craft. I was thinking of a tennis thingie across the street, so we can catch them as they go by. The problem is that we only like one of our neighbors.


I got a present from Satan Claws the other day. Is it a tablet with a keyboard you can attach. So you can sit there, in Starbucks, looking like you're working on the Next Big Idea. On in class or work - people will check your tech and you'll get a raise or an A in class: all for watching pr0n on your. Pro Tip: mute the volume, always.  Where was I?  Oh the tablet, yes.... It has a touch pad. You either love or hate touchpads, which isn't the point in this paragraph. There are no instructions. Normally we all deal with it and just get computing. But this becomes very difficult when you can't right click, left click, drag, or tell the tablet's manufacturer how you feel about this genius idea'

It would be nice if maybe you could find the instructions.
Looking for the manual would be a lesson in frustration. Lotta lessons here, right outta the box. This sort of pad is vaguely popular, so there is info (and reviews) in many place. Most of the answers are downright stupid. It took quite a while to get around to asking how to work the mouse.  What is wrong with this brand? I've never had a portable computing device with no trackpad buttons. My short ride on the internet produced a manual. Unfortunately for another model. Eventually I scared something up, figuring it out by an older manual.


* First you turn it on: this is the MAIN step and we cannot stress it enough.
* You might also want to see if the device is charged. Hold down any of 12 switches and look for a small light. I think it was blue.
* If there is no light, you bought the cheap version. Do you research things, or randomly throw money at it?
* In the event that the tablet comes up, we will not be responsible for it. Look for some garish goog graphic, take a few days off work, and get that thing off your machine.
*Now we're going to play hide and seek. The only one in the house who can operate the trackpad hides for a few days. The joke is on him, as the locks are changed.
* Back to the net, where we discover there IS a manual... they just didn't want us to FIND it. In order to left click, just move the mouse left. Same for right click. If you want to grab and drag, hold the most steady part of your body on the trackpad and yell GRAB - GRAB! It won't work. Try it again. By God you people are hysterical!  Left click, drag, put on your ruby slippers and say "OUCH - these things hurt." So, very quietly, put one finger on the trackpad, lift, and move your arm over your head, like an antenna. A very stupid antenna. If this doesn't work. we're going to recommend the Lego Computing Set.



Here's some stuff I want... I am not asking you for anything.. just the info on where it is:

• I drink Peet's French roast. I checked and they don't make a French roast in decaf (the bastards). So I'm looking for an absolutely nasty, dark roast that's so strong, eats the cup it came in (Keurig)
• a left handed Fender Stratocaster - up to the year 1959

Thanks.

You guys are the best.

HP 8760w Unboxing

I just received my HP EliteBook 8760w.  This thing has the biggest power supply adapter I have ever seen.  It's over twice the size of every other adapter.  It can be used as a weapon (and probably will, but more on that later).

I like a manly laptop.  Thus far, it is a very manly laptop, largely as it is very large.  Incredibly large.  About the size of my Hyundai large.  It's the land yacht of laptops (no, HP, you can't use that as an ad slogan).  Although it does weigh slightly less than my Hyundai, most people would say it is very heavy.  That's what makes it manly (that and the humongous 17" screen).  I mentioned it was a bit heavy: my wife tried to lift it, failed, and stared wide-eyed in agreement.  Again, this is a desktop replacement laptop, not a litebook.

Since the laptop is so bloody wide, they managed to put in a keypad and a really interesting backlit keyboard.  Of course I'd prefer the keypad on the left but that's because I'm a lefty (I do have an external USB number pad).   There is a laptop bag on order but I don't anticipate a lot of travel with this computer.

As you well know, I like things done a certain way, which makes ordering a laptop an exercise in frustration (but hopefully an exercise in hilarity for you).  All I really wanted was a large, manly linux laptop.  This, of course, was strictly impossible.  The success of ordering linux on a computer is approximately slightly less than the success of a voting a libertarian into the White House.  And even if you succeed, it's the wrong distribution of linux (although Dell will preinstall Ubuntu on certain models).   So I had no choice but to pay the Microsoft Tax and get Windows 7.  Yes, regardless of whether you are going to use Windows or not, you pay for it.

Since I occasionally have to use Windows for work, I figured I'd leave it installed and dual-boot with a real operating system (Xubuntu 12.04).  In the past I have just run Win XP virtually under linux, where it is more stable.

I started the task by booting into Win 7 and setting up the laptop for Windows use.  I was immediately reminded of why I hate new computers by HP's painful (and offensive) setup routine.  I realize HP needs to make everything as Idiot-Proof as possible, but apparently HP isn't aware of Murphy's Corollary which states "If you make something idiot-proof, they'll just make a better idiot."  In fact, at work we refer to ourselves as The Home of the Better Idiot.  Perhaps they should have a selection for Live Brain Cell Install, which would cut out the BS.

And speaking of BS, do you have any idea how much crapware comes with an HP laptop?  To be fair, the great amount of it is HP crapware, but still....  one of my favorite utilities, Revo Uninstaller, got put to work for the better part of an hour.  I removed such things as HP QuickWeb, HP Setup, HP Wallpaper, HP Defaults, HP Connection Manager, HP Client Automation Agent Preload, File Sanitizer for HP ProtectTools, MS Silverlight, Office 2010, and the ubiquitous Bing Bar (go Bing yourself).  I began to wonder if blowing out the entire laptop and reinstalling Win 7 would take less time.

Dear HP:  We aren't idiots.  We don't need our installs managed.  Some of us don't even need our security, tools, or internet connections managed.  Really.

Once that crap was out of the way, another software favorite from the past came in handy: Hijack This. Hijack finds all the startup crap, browser crap, and services, allowing you to select what really starts up.  Normally this barely fills a page.... the HP list filled three pages.  Three pages of crap that didn't really need to be started up with the computer.  I'll bet Windows starts up much faster now....

Prominently figured on the list of people who need to be seriously punished is the Microsoft guy who decided that sound must be enabled by default.  If I want to hear a DING every time I do something, I'll stay at work all day.  XP didn't even allow you to turn sound off until it was completely installed, which drove many a technician up a tree.

Making Win 7 usable for me involves another long stretch of hard labor.  It's not so much an operating system as a virus.  Sometimes for fun, I bring up Services and randomly turn stuff off.  It's just that there are so damn many of them... starting with Firewall.  And Themes.

Apropos of nothing, Firefox just updated on my desktop and informed me that it was incompatible with ZoneAlarm so it was shutting it down.  WTF?  I don't have these issues on linux.


At this point, it was time to play with the hard drive partitions and install linux.  I booted the Xubuntu cd into live mode and opened Gparted.  I wound up with Win7, HOME, and linux system partitions.  I told it to install linux and a few minutes later, I had a dual boot laptop.

What I neglected to specify was that I wanted a functional dual boot laptop.  When I went to go into linux, I got all sorts of screen scrambling, which got fixed in recovery mode.  Once in Xubuntu, I saw the notice indicating I had 267 updates to download and that it had discovered some proprietary drivers (ATI/AMD FGLRX).  During the live cd boot, it discovered the webcam.  No word yet on what's going to happen with the fingerprint reader.

Bravo for linux: the OS had discovered not only my video card, but bluetooth and the wireless chip.  This wasn't always the case, requiring lots of jumping through hoops to get things to cooperate.

True to form, I'm having trouble with the touchpad.  Every laptop I have had recently has discovered the touchpad ok but the cursor jumps around like mad.  I know there are a few solutions for this so it's time to go looking.  The first solution is to (as root) type `syndaemon -t -d'.   Seems to be helping.

At this point, the laptop was fully functional with both OSes.   More as I find it.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

The screen is beautiful.  And large.  The audio seems plenty loud and of good quality, although I still need to test it with some decent input.  So far it's been streaming stuff.

I don't expect to use the battery too much, if at all.  And good thing, as 20 minutes of low-quality streaming video ate about a third of the battery.