…Just because I haven’t posted in, like, forever.
Hi folks…
*crickets chirp in response*
Okay, well I’ll ask this anyway… I’m taking some online courses, one of which happens to be a Psychology “virtual classroom.” Every few weeks, we’ll be getting discussion topics, and I thought I’d share to see if I get any interesting ideas to throw at the group.
SO… since I can’t peek over anyone’s shoulder for ideas, I thought I’d enlist my dear readers. 
Here goes:
Is it necessarily true that all stereotypes are bad? Given our ‘global’ exposure through world travel, international trade, communication and immigration, do stereotypes still have an effect on our daily attitudes? What say you?
Any takers?
Poor Goob.
We were working on trying to revive the guts of my old machine as a gaming rig for the boys (no use – it’s dead Jim!), and he’d had just about enough of the frustration…
He said, and I quote:
“If it doesn’t work this time, I’m going to have to go commit Sudoku!”
You can imagine how perplexed poor Goobster must have been at the sight of his father doubled-over in gut-busting laughter at the suggestion he was going to end it all by subjecting himself to a ritual number puzzle. He stammered, “wait, that’s not right, is it? It’s supa-choo or something like that…”
At which point I fell over again… I didn’t even have time between gales to suggest he’d better get a pencil, ’cause he’ll get no help from this heap o’ circuitry that was once a PC.
I can’t wait until this saga of teen angst and emotional scarring comes up in therapy.
I wouldn’t be a certified certifiable IT geek if I weren’t having some hardware or software crisis on a given day. If things get slow, I can always find a problem to gnaw on. If I get bored, I’ve even been known to invent them.
Then, along comes Microsoft Vista.
I’ve resisted running it, even though I have to in order to be familiar enough to support it. I should have been running it eight or so months before it was first released when I got my first RC1 “Release Candidate” disc from MicroSquish. I admit, I did load it. In fact, I ordered a new hard drive just for my pre-release copy of Vista. It wouldn’t run on my then, practically brand new, 64-bit Intel processor PC with a gig of RAM and an nVidia 6800GTS video card! It checked out perfectly in the “pre-flight” compatibility tests. It was official. I had the right CPU, the right amount of memory (bare minimum, IMHO), and the right GPU (graphics processor).
GREAT! We’re set!
Nope. Wouldn’t run. Period. Slick Aero interface? Never saw it. BSOD was all it would give me after telling me it wasn’t compatible with this or that – and that was AFTER I managed to hunt-down drivers for my motherboard JUST SO THE INSTALLER WOULD RECOGNIZE THE HARD DRIVE.
I figured, “no problem – it’s an early release-candidate. I’m sure they’ll fix that.” *cough* I stowed the disk and waited for the next “release candidate” to arrive. Somehow, I had to download that one on my own or pay for shipping. MS wasn’t going to foot the bill this time for shipping. (Could that have been considered foreshadowing?)
Fast-forward to the present.
This past week I rebuilt my water-cooled machine. It had developed problems that weren’t entirely unforeseen… In stripping my old video card to water-cool it, I believe it may have become damaged, and the motherboard that I was using had a voltage regulator module that was reliant on heat-pipe cooling, but with so little air moving through my machine due to the very silent and mostly passive water cooling, I think the VRM was developing heat-issues of its own.
The boys are happy; they get the old innards – sans water-cooling, of course. This means they finally get to upgrade from the old Pentium-III “zombie-PC” that they’ve been using since forever. They never dreamed they’d be getting my “high-performance” hand-me-downs. Usually, the technology upgrades follow the pecking-order cascade, but Mrs. Who doesn’t want me touching her machine, since it’s working. *cough*
Anyway, I’m impressed with the new Intel Core-2 Duo processor. It runs so much cooler than the old Prescott chip, I may not even need to water-cool it… until I get bored with running at stock speeds, that is… I had originally turned to water-cooling because it was 1.) something I always wanted to do. 2.) The original Intel stock CPU fan/heatsink was so inefficient it was practically useless on that hot Prescott chip. 3.) Over-clocking! Because the chip had such a tendency to run hot, however, I seldom OC’d it – but remained happy that with my passive water rig, my processor temp stayed at only a few degrees above ambient at idle and rose only six to ten degrees above that under full load. 
So, with a new C2D chip and updated NVidia graphics and 2 gigs of RAM (hey, I’m on a budget – talk to Mrs. Who!), I decided to finally break-out my “release” version of Vista to give it a try. Better news, this time: I did manage to get it installed and running… (Of course I did have to hunt drivers again to get the Vista installer to RECOGNIZE MY DAMN HARD DRIVES!! *spit* Guess they didn’t fix that part before releasing it.) And it runs okay, for the most part.
Only one very minor problem that makes me want to drag my machine from Mojo’s trailer hitch down a rutted, red-clay Alabama road after a hard rain… Vista won’t recognize my optical mouse unless I UNPLUG IT and re-plug it EVERY DAMN TIME I REBOOT THE MACHINE! It’s just a damn generic (actually IBM) optical mouse that I’ve had for years. Nothing fancy – nothing “legacy” about it that Vista shouldn’t be able to handle. Microsoft’s “USB Human-Interface Device” driver simply won’t activate the mouse until it’s “recognized” by the PnP subsystem. Every. Damn. TIME.
Microsoft’s solution? Use the manufacturer’s driver. One problem with that: the manufacturer’s driver – uh… doesn’t exist. It’s just a generic effing damn optical mouse for chrissake!! What’s so hard about that? How can Microsoft afford the arrogance to say the manufacturer should have to provide a driver for their damn P.O.S. operating system? Their credit is wearing pretty thin… The Vista release fell way below expectations. And I have no doubt that Microsoft is collectively shitting themselves to see their “pretty” Vista Aero interface being compared this way:
Mind you, I also installed Linux on the same machine in a fraction of the time it took to install Vista, and with not one hardware recognition problem. (It’s a dual-boot system using GRUB that defaults to SuSE Enterprise Linux Desktop, or SLED.) I’m also using the XGL interface, though I’m not using Beryl… yet. So I do have a similar 3D-box-desktop and quick-display features for window selection. Oh, and the best part – it’s only $50 per year or FREE if you don’t want the support subscription. Ubuntu is an awesome product, too – I recommend it highly.
Oh, and as for Microsoft Vista? I found this tech-support video covering installation support very, very helpful:
Heh.
Because Mrs. Who did it – I had to see for myself. I kinda had a hunch before I finished when I answered the questions, “Were you adopted,” and “Are you good with weapons”… 
Your results:
You are Worf
|
You are trained in the art of combat and are usually intimidating.  |
(Unfortunately, I got sidetracked with other things, but I finally decided to finish this – my original Google Earth post.)
I finally got around to downloading Google Earth. I played with it for a couple hours, looking at places that interest me, places where I used to live and work, places I remember from childhood. And even places that haunt me…
All I can say is… Wow!
Among searching my many geographical and personal interests, I found the mountain property in Utah that we owned where my adoptive father would take us hunting when I was a kid.
Wow. Really, wow. With 3-D terrain, I was able to position my point of view to where we used to sit on the mountain face to hunt. It was kind of surreal, looking out over the valley toward the Interstate, many miles below. Of course the scrub-oak was “flat” to the ground – and the terrain isn’t quite as steep as I remember. Oh, and the Aspen are missing from the view. But have a look:
Oh, the memories of that mountain property. We would only visit it a few times a year, but every time it was a fantastic adventure!
I remember blowing-up the beaver dam – seeing the whole thing lift into the air before crashing down in pieces amid a downpour of obscenities as Dad realized they (my BIL and his ‘little’ brother) had used WAY too much dynamite, and the immediate realization that the sudden wash of the whole pond releasing at once was going to do some serious destruction. It did – we were lucky to get out. The road that Dad had spent a year constructing with heavy equipment was just gone. We also were lucky not to have been killed by raining debris.
I remember freezing my ass off the hunting season that it began snowing on the season-opening eve. We went anyway – in the snow. It snowed until late morning – and since we were on the mountain before sunrise, trying to to get our kill out of the snow-covered mountains when every step through the waist-high stuff was a battle. But it was the smallest of our worries. We still had to get off the mountain. Later that afternoon, I remember laughing hysterically as the four-wheel-drive Suburban that Dad was attempting to pilot inch by treacherous inch along a deeply rutted road along the side of a mountain suddenly slid laterally into the deep ruts. Of course there was nothing funny about the nerve-wracking ride, or the possibility that we had just become irretrievably stuck. But the sudden jarring lateral motion of the truck had dumped my exhausted, sleeping brother out of the door he was resting on, where he suddenly found himself wide-awake, and shocked to be lying in a snowbank. The look on his face was priceless.
Then there was the time I got stung by a wasp that flew-up my pant leg one summer as we waited for Dad to come back with help – our van had broken a drive line, leaving us stranded for hours as he hiked out of the mountains on foot in search of a tow-truck that could – or would climb a mountain on short notice. I even remember being afraid to look at my knee after missing the log I was chopping at with my new hatchet (heavy, loose pants saved me anything more serious than a nasty bruise.)
The sensation of having one’s head in the muzzle-blast radius of a .30-06 as my idiot BIL excitedly swung his rifle just past my head before pulling the trigger… That was scary. The sensation of screaming – and hearing nothing… That was scarier. (We went home without a deer that year.)
I remember plinking with my .22 – and Dad furious when I shot at his six-pack of Schlitz from across the pond – where it was cooling in the stream – killing three of the cans in a spectacular splash of water and beer-foam. Then there was the live beaver I saw from only a dozen or so yards away, slapping his tail on the muddy stream bank and emitting angry-beaver (!) sounds. There was the time I stood watching as my idiot BIL and his little brother stormed the beaver den with scores of rounds of ammunition – and hating them for being such jerks (and that was before he tried to blow my head off!)
I had mentioned in this post what an awesome shot my father was. Google Earth helped prove my memory for me – and though my original estimates were a little high, it’s still pretty damned phenomenal. Though the ruler-line appears to bend with the curvature of the terrain, I believe it is still only calculating aerial (point to point) distance, as it is the same figure with terrain turned on or off. (i.e., a bird’s-eye view on a flat map measures the same as the “curved-line” terrain-view.) I looked at several different sight-lines (it was hard to judge the near-site with ‘flattened trees’.) From the approximate sitting position to the various target areas was measured by GM to be between 457 and 568 yards. And my dad routinely bagged deer from that distance. Usually with a single shot. On the rare occasion when the animal was only wounded and managed to run, it would only be lost to us if it went up the mountain and over the crest, where we’d hear gunfire erupt in the distance from the hunting camp on the next ridge over. Otherwise, I was the blood-tracker. Dad would stand and direct me from his “spot” on the mountain.
More than five hundred yards. Wild mule deer. No baiting feed stands. No tree stands – the only foliage was scrub-oak and wispy aspen, so we either had to shoot through it or over it. Gutting and field-dressing the deer. And Dad sampling the raw liver to see how ‘sweet’ the meat would be, to decide how best to process it. (Something I think he picked-up from my Russian grandmother. She would be eagerly waiting for us to return with the cheesecloth bag that contained the stream-washed organs; the liver, heart and kidneys. Ugh! He routinely did that. A trip to the butcher shop was always an adventure!)
When I listen to the stories of the “incredible one-shot, 80-yard” kills from a tree stand to the outer edges of the area where the hunter has been putting out deer-feed all year long, I can’t help but think – that’s not hunting. That’s barely even shooting. It’s not even close to “incredible.” Poser!
Dad – you made it look so natural and easy, that at the time… I was unimpressed.
You were one hell of a man.
Well, Buck’s Science Fair experiment is done and presented. It’s unfortunate they don’t judge at his grade level – he has to wait another year. However, he did get top marks AND much interest in having the ‘coolest’ project in the class – even though our hypothesis wasn’t supported. We were testing the anti-microbial effects of colloidal silver – but our tests didn’t show any bacterial growth prevention, retardation, or elimination. We did some microscope observation of protozoa that clearly was affected by the addition of silver – within 15 to 20 minutes, our silver-treated sample was all but completely lifeless. However, that wasn’t part of our original project submission, AND we don’t have a microscope camera, so those results were irrelevant and not presentable. 
He’s now officially been exposed to my love of micro-biology – and potentially some nasty stuff as well – nastier than I had thought! We also, therefore, used proper lab procedures, cleaning and sterilizing as we went along. As each of our cultures was completed, we not only doused them in denatured alcohol, we incinerated them as well!
One of the most startling revelations is the nastiness that is living on our money…
Above, Buck is culturing a sample from a moderately-used dollar bill…
And here’s what we grew. The samples are (clockwise from top left): dollar bill, computer mouse (kids PC – ACK!), X-Box controller and TV remote. Note that while the X-Box looks like it’s sporting the least growth – it’s the only one that’s hairy! (i.e., along with bacteria, we cultured fungus!) But THIS is what really scared me:
This nasty little spot hid a surprise that didn’t reveal itself readily under the microscope until I applied bacterial stains. Unfortunately, I can’t show you what I saw under the ‘scope (a CCD ‘scope camera is on my wish list), but what I discovered is that that large spot actually consisted of two species: one was a common coccal (in all likelihood, a fecal bacteria). But the other was nearly invisible until I applied an alcohol-based stain for an extended time. It looked faintly like strands of super-fine hair at lower magnifications, but under the oil-objective at 1600x magnification, it was clearly a mycobacterium – forming chains of rod-shaped bacilli, and because it did not take the water-based stains, it was also hydrophobic – meaning it has a waxy outer hull that repels water.
I’m not a professional, but I do know that generally, anything that forms chains is often pathogenic. Hydrophobic bacteria are also very bad news – they’re the nasties that are hard to kill, due to their tough, turtle-like, almost impenetrable outer shells. Add the two together, and odds are, you’re looking at something bad. Like, tuberculosis, leprosy and anthrax bad. Fortunately, (hopefully!) it is unlikely that we got anything so terribly nasty on the medium and under the conditions we used, but needless to say, this wasn’t one of the samples we continued to culture! Oh, and just to clarify, I didn’t let Buck directly handle any of the incubated cultures!
The moment I was done, I made a break for an improvised fire-pit in the woods with plenty of fuel in the form of alcohol and shredded paper:
I’ve never liked nor appreciated my debit card so much as I do now. Cash? No thanks, just credit it to my account!
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