Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Mucked-Up Monday

I arise today at a reasonable hour, and decide to reconcile my checking account, which I haven't done in 12 days. At the 'puter, I click open the Credit Union web page, and note that it has been completely re-designed. Hmmmm...the hairs on the back of my neck start to tingle (I am the RivrDOG, after all!).

I find the log-in tab, and click it. It opens very slowly, and so I insert my account number and click on "Password", which fails to take the password I type. Hmmmm. I change from Chrome to Internet Exploder and try again. No joy.

I go back to Chrome and re-enter everything, but now use the "tab" key to get to the password box, and now it takes my password, but when I click "go", it doesn't go, and I get a FUBAR box from Chrome. Back to Exploder, do the same, get the same result. Go back, do it all over again, this time using the keyboard Enter key to enter instead of mouse-clicking on "go". Still FUBAR.

I started to try to access this account (into which ALL my pension deposits are electronically made, and out of which I pay all bills) @ 0745 local, and it is now 0905, and the CU is actually open, but still no fix. I have been on "hold" on the phone for over and hour, and have no answer, just hold ads. I read blogs for an hour to pass the time while on hold.

It's payday, too, and if this keeps up, I will have been denied almost $7K in incoming funds.

This about rips it with me for this CU. I have done business with them for almost 40 years, but they cheap out on everything. In this case, their mistake is obvious: they changed everything to have the newest and latest web-page, but failed to post their IT guy to 24-hour monitoring of it to make sure all the new server links stayed up and working.

This is also the age of robo-calling, and the farging CU COULD have had a robo-call sent out to all the members to advise them of the outage, but they didn't do THAT, either.

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The issue got resolved about 0915, 1.5 hours after I discovered it. I had to redial the CU, the hold music went nowhere, and after the staff took their desks for the business day, no one picked up that line. GRRRRRR! After redialing, I get a staff member, and she discovers that in the last five minutes, the system had just come back up.

Tomorrow is the Annual Meeting, so I might just have to drop by the CU and pose a question from the floor to the CEO of why the CU either does not have a 24-7 IT guy, or subscribe to a monitoring service, or have ANY way to report an online banking outage when the office is closed. Saving the members' money is one thing, but when they are so cheap as to make online banking useless with their inattention because they won't pay for some system to monitor and report to the IT manager, then they're saving TOO many shekels.

 

Android bleg

Platform: Motorola Xoom tablet running Android Honeycomb.

Problem: The installed email app, which I have one each, gmail, yahoo and Comcast accounts on, picks up a "ghost" email, almost every day, always on the Comcast account. It is always dated 12/31/1969, has no subject line, and I never open it, just delete it.

Analysis: This is an android thing, and only for this Xoom tablet, since I also have a Samsung SGH-T989 (Galaxy S2), and that email doesn't appear on it, nor does appear on either of my Windoze boxes, both running Mozilla Thunderbird. Of course, there was no email in 1969. I rate this as likely malware, but why would it appear on just this one device?

Mega-puzzler here. Need a Droid guru. R2d3, where r u?

Garbage collector Galaxy phone

The T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S2 phone. I've only had it a couple of months, and it had accumulated a ton of garbage, mostly logs, etc. I had contributed to that process with over 120 photos and videos, and are THEY data hogs. I just spent almost two hours dumping all that crapple.

I'm having a hard time getting by the fact that I can't slim down the load of apps and processes, though. This phone came with enough bloatware on it to sink an Evergreen containership.

I've been reading up on a process called "rooting", whereby I become the MFWIC, and not Google/Samsung/T-Mobile. Seems fairly straightforward, not much more difficult than editing a Windoze Registry, and I've been doing those for years. I lose my guarantee on the phone when I do, but I will have a phone where I am in charge of what goes on it. These damn phones are for kids who have to spend 100% of their waking hours dabbling in data in some way or another. I need the excellent comms the phone can provide, and the cameras are a nice bennie, but 80% of the kiddie apps are things I'll never use, or there are better apps for the asking. So, I'll put on a better app, but then I'm stuck with the old bloatware app that came with the phone. If I root the phone I can make them go away. I just have to be careful to not jerk out an app which is welded to the core of the OS, and takes the OS down when I dump the app. That's called "bricking" the phone, which then becomes as useful for comms as a Mark One, Mod Zero red clay brick.

I know that the I-phone techies have been "jailbreaking" I-phones ever since they came out, for essentially the same reasons, and I don't hear of all THAT many "bricks" resulting from their enterprise.

I'll keep reading, but I'll probably do this thing shortly...

Then, maybe I'll root my Motorola Xoom tab, which runs the same Google OS, an earlier version of "Honeycomb", although the Xoom didn't come with too many bloatware apps, so it's not quite as much of a problem. The phone has 7 screens full of apps, of which I am responsible for installing maybe a half-screenful. That's BeeEss.

PayPal up to their usual Anti-American tricks

Via Tom Tancredo, former congressman from CO, "Sheriff Mack", who's about to announce for Congress out of TX, was putting on a "Constitutional Sheriff's Convention" in Vegas, apparently last weekend or about now. Donations had been solicited to defray the expenses, and apparently, the Sheriff made the mistake of using PayPal as a medium of exchange.

After $40,000 had already come in through PayPal, PayPal froze Sheriff Mack's money, mumbling some excuse about the legality of his organization to receive donations.

I've got news for PayPal, they likely just committed Federal Wire Fraud, by allowing the donations to come in and build up a sizeable kitty, then seizing the money, without warrant, lawsuit, court order, anything. Good luck getting any Obama-appointed US Attorney to file those charges, though.

This is about par for PayPal, which never saw a Defender of the Constitution they didn't want to screw over. You will recall, I'm sure, the flap a few years ago about PayPal doing the same thing to one or more gun-auction companies.

The ownership of PayPal evidently just hates the Bill of Rights, there's no other way to express it. Next week, I'm beginning to solicit funds for my new political action company which will seek to end the hegemony of the Greens over motorized boating in Oregon. I've spent several hours at my business bank, JP Morgan Chase, with my very patient business banker teaching me the ins and outs of handling money online. One of the first questions he asked me was if I was going to use PayPal. I said no, and told him why. He then said I had made a wise choice, since of the many ways to handle money online, PayPal was the most expensive, at 4% of each transaction. The one I am going to go with will charge me either 1.35% or 1.78%, depending on whether I scan a card or key it in. No one else charges as much as PayPal.

PayPal are not only Anti-Constitution, they are robbers to boot. Make a firm vow now to never use them again, there are too many other good choices. You can start with Google Wallet, for one choice that's about half the price of PayPal, and so far, Google doesn't seek to trash the Constitution with their business dealings. Google Wallet goes both ways, you can pay with it or collect with it. Opening a merchant account takes only seconds (if you are incorporated). There are other choices for taking in funds via the Internet, but you have to watch three things: the percentage fees, any monthly (minimum) fees, and equipment cost. Some, like The Square, throw in the equipment, but charge a higher fee to make up for it, and some, like Merchant Anywhere, charge less fee but the charge for equipment to connect to your smartphone or tablet is substantial.

Whatever you pick to make or take payment electronically, a patriot will never pick PayPal.

Cross-posted at Straight Case gunblog.

H/T To Brother Michael, up on the Mountain.

Thursday Thuds #14

Thud the First: The Fast & Furious hearings, aka "gunwalker", get more interesting, and the price of poker is rising. Rep Issa is about ready to cite Holder for contempt for failing to answer the many subpoenas. My take? If Obama wants to cite "executive privilege" isn't he admitting he has something to hide from Congress? The only thing Obama might have worth hiding is the evidence directly linking him to knowledge of or direction of, the stealth gun-control program which went awry.

Thud the Second: The GOP. The Stupid Party has flamed out and is in a terminal dive. It will make a mighty "thud" when it craters in. Don't invite me to the memorial service, I'll be too busy helping it's replacement, a new Conservative Party, get started. The Conservative Party will first strut it's stuff in the Congressional Elections of 2014, and if it makes a good showing there, the GOP will never be seen again. Good riddance.

Thud the Third: The Facebook IPO. It's like Chinese food. You can fill up on it, it's tasty, but you'll be hungry again in a couple of hours. Chinese food doesn't stick with you and neither will Facebook and their IPO. Facebook will NOT have even the influence Apple has, and Apple isn't saving any planets that I've heard of. The fact is, the script-sorcery that brought us Facebook will bring us something better soon, and Facebook will slip into obscurity, just as all the others before it have done. Time, of course, with their gushing over the IPO, is so overblown that it ought to have a Saffir-Simpson rating.

Thud the Fourth: The idea that the Nanny State wants to ban sugar by classifying it as a "toxin". Most people who walk the Earth are NOT diabetics, for which sugar is a problem, and those who ARE diabetics have the personal choice to make, as I made it, to either control sugar intake and control their disease, or not control it and have their bodies fall apart. That's where the decision lies, with the individual diabetic, not with the over-reaching Government. The "thud" you hear on this one is just one of the many jackboots pounding the pavement enroute to taking over your life. Let's say no to the sturmtruppen on this one, and make those jackbooted Government thugs about-face and march out of our health and well-being decisions. Besides, isn't the definition of a "toxin" that of a substance that when anyone is exposed, the bad effect happens? All those non-diabetics have zero effect from exposure to sugar. It's not a toxin.

Thud the Fifth: We get final proof that taxation is harmful to all the world's economies, and it seems that the harder the world's governments try to levy taxes, the more commerce is done "off the books" and goes by untaxed. Fair Tax/Flat Tax, whatever you want to call it, a minimalist, but all-encompassing approach to taxation works best, and the usual socialist "if it moves, tax it" approach works hardly at all.

Windoze 8 hype starting...

...and this Windoze user is not impressed. It's a bigger version of my wife's Windoze Fone, the Nokia 710. Her OS for that phone is fine, far as it goes, and it uses little battery energy to run, so she can go several days without having to recharge the phone.

According to Kim Komando,  the "Digital Goddess", Windoze 8 looks like, well, (take your pick) either Android Tablet OS or I-Pad. It's made for touch-screens, and will debut on a tablet, so says Kim. But, she cautions, prototype Win8 OS' have overheated the tablets they've run on, and battery life is miserable. I can hammer apps for 10-12 hours on my Motorola Xoom tablet before needing a recharge. That's the standard for me, a full day of use.

Will MS try to pull a "Chevy Volt" on us and try to sell us a tablet next year that never lives up to it's battery-life hype? Wait and see, but I wouldn't bet against it. Maybe extended batteries will now become the rage, like they were on the early Cell-based phones before CDMA came around. Or, maybe you'll have to lug a battery pack around. I saw one such device sold at Fry's Electronics, a little backpack to hold your I-Pad, with a compartment at the base for a battery to recharge it, battery extra.

I hope the approach of Windoze 8 finally prompts Google to hammer out their computer OS and get it on the market. They trot out new Android tablet and smart-phone OS' frequently, and by the look of the OS on my Galaxy S-2, I'd have to say they're ready for full-duty computers by now.

"Payola" 2

Most folks are not old enough to remember the original "payola" scandal. The word Payola came from "pay to play" + the maker of the-then most popular jukebox, "Rockola". Aside from home vinyl records (45 and 33 rpm, with still quite a few 78s left over), you listened on (non-stereo) radio, played records (only stereo if you were a rich kid), or dumped quarters into Rockolas to hear music. That was the music I grew up with. In that era, a pay-for-play system (Payola) first started with the jukeboxes (every cafe, restaurant and bar which wanted the under 25-crowd's money had to have a Rockola), then spread to the radio stations. If you were a new musical group starting out and you wanted to actually rise up the charts and sell vinyl, you paid to have your music played. The scandal around the pay-to-play system grew until Congress held hearings, and banned the practice.

Payola tried to make a comeback amongst the gangsta rappers of the '90s, but when they started shooting at each other, it got too visible and that practice stopped.

Now it's back, and in the worst knock of the late Steve Jobs' Apple, Inc, it's all about an I-phone and I-pad app. While you are watching the TeeVee, you have your smartass Apple gadget sitting nearby, with the Viggle app running. It listens to the sound from your speakers, and determines what you are watching, then keeps track of how many minutes you've watched. You are "rewarded" for installing the app and using it, at the rate of two reward "points" for each minute watched. After you have watched 62 hours of TeeVee and used the app to monitor it, you are sent a $5 Burger King certificate.

OK, I promised I won't go all health-nut on you, suffice it to say that those who would get excited about being rewarded with free fast fatfood will be indirectly deciding what the rest of us will watch, and that's a bad, culture-busting (waistline-busting and pall-bearer busting) idea. Just how many Ruben Studdards does the entertainment industry need?

An even worse idea is that the entertainment moguls would allow this system to install itself in their empires. I don't give a fig about "American Idol", because, despite the fact that the yearly winners have mostly had good voices, none of them sing the kind of music I like to hear. None of them.

This new system is Payola all over again, pure and simple, this time a bit different, putting the keys to music success in the hands of the fast fatfood generation, and that's a BAD thing.

Samsung Galaxy S-2 - first impressions

Just finished about 5 hours with the new smartass phone. It has more "do" in it than all the rest of the computers in my house put together.

Where is Google with their computer OS, by the way?

Lot of bloatware on this phone, and you can't dump it, so it reduces the memory by about a gig and a half. No worries, the phone will take up to a 32-gig Micro SD card, and you can move all the real big storage items to the card, and leave the 16-gig of memory to operate as RAM, which it will. Whatever you don't want to leave on the phone, it can access from the Google-Fog (not a "cloud", they still call their servers, servers)

Some things aren't really intuitive, so when I'm loading contacts today, I farged one up, and couldn't, for the life of me, figure out how to erase it and start over OR edit it. Turns out you have to go to the "menu" hard Key on the phone and hit that while in the Contact to be Deleted. That makes NO sense, and it wasn't in the "quick start" guide, either.

My bad luck. I go to open my Internet account (I have the account, I just can't access it from the phone or desktop), and the page to register is hosed. Support finally admits that it will be down for DAYS while it is being re-done. That just SUCKS. Of course, you have to go through your "my account" page to access synching...I probably WILL wind up entering all 400 or so of those contacts by hand, unless "Cell-Bright" is working at the phone store and someone is there who knows how to run it. "Cell-Bright" apparently will synch any exportable data from any phone to any phone. Sounds like majik to me. Verizon quit offering that service several years ago.

The other thing I just found out is that the wi-fi radio is a TWO-WAY radio, will broadcast wi-fi as well as receive it. Have to pay a premium on my broadband bill of $15/mo, so I'm wondering how often I'd use that capability.

Fairly steep learning curve with this one, but there's no limit to what it will do, and it's actually FUN surfing with it, as opposed to the giant PITA it was with the LG eNV-3 I just retired.

Whatta toy! Whatta tool! Almost as much fun as a new gun!

 

"USA Today" firearms poll re-do may be a scam - UPDATED !

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UPDATE: 011211 1303 PST: Thanks to Joe and Uncle, my fears are somewhat relieved on this old, moldy poll. Joe explained it in comments, below. I guess that means that the only real worry, if you want to spare some, is that USA Today has a garbage dump where they should have a Web bureau in their org chart. However, since neither Joe nor Uncle could say that data is NOT being mined from the responses to the old, moldy poll, we should still be on our guard about it. My advice is stay away. We gunnies proved 4 1/2 years ago that we can put more fingers to more keyboards faster than the anti-2A crowd, and for the life of me, I don't see any value in continuing that fight. We WON for Christ's sake! The Brady Bunch KNOWS we won. Put that trophy back in the trophy case, people, we don't have to keep playing the 2007 playoffs over and over again.

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I've gotten an email which purports to link to the USA Today poll on support for the Second Amendment. Since I knew that this was a pre-Heller poll taken back in 2007, I began to sense something might be wrong.

Someone is probably collecting/trapping the IPs of those favorable to the Second Amendment. It COULD be a beneficial organization, but it also could be a nefarious one. I suspect the latter.

Here's my evidence:

First, the link location, and do NOT paste this link, just remember it. Break out a medieval quill pen and parchment if you have one, and ink it down.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/quickquestion/2007/november/popup5895.htm

Now, go to a real USA Today site and look for polls; you'll find that there is no way to access any. The paper (at least the online edition) doesn't have a web page devoted to a daily poll. There IS something called a USA Today/Gallup poll. Here's the latest one of those which I can find using Google and Ask.com, and it's a month old:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2011-12-12/2012-election-swing-states-poll/51844930/1

OK, compare the two URLs I have on this post so far.

The URLs are NOT similar in any way.

Now, search on "usa today quick question polls". There is nothing on that search page to indicate that USA Today ever ran a "quick question" poll after the 2007 firearms poll, and I suspect the reason for that is because the huge response from gun owners (and anti-gunners) thrashed their host so badly they quit doing it.

Now, I'm not a real geek. I have ZERO technical training in this area of Internet technology (and I slept in my own bed last night, and didn't get close to a Holiday Inn Express, heh). That disclaimer aside, I suspect that this latest "re-issuance" of the "USA Today" poll is a fake.

Some evidence of the fake.

All the previous REAL USA-Today polls come up as a full page when you visit their site, but this one does not, it comes up at about a one-sixth page or less, tucked into the top left of a large, otherwise blank page. Also, it is unusual for ANY poll to be presented just as a simple "yes-no-no opinion" box. Any outfit with a reputation to uphold, like USA Today has, would have some other writings and explanations on the page, and probably some links to take you back to a page with more of their content (and some ads, which pay the bills). Survey Monkey is the standard for polls you don't want to pay for but need to post nowadays, and their poll page will always link to back to their website.

I firmly conclude that this is not an actual re-issuance of the 2007 USA Today poll, but is a fake, and that leaves the Big Question: whose fake is it? Also another important question: when you visit a page, any page, you leave a trail to that page. Who is mining the data from these trails to that page? Are they friend or foe?

Unless you know the answers to the above paragraph's questions, don't punch the "send" button on this ersatz "poll".

Now, if some REAL geek wants to set me straight, and offers the science to refute my suspicion here, I will gladly publish that information, with or without retribution at the request of that author, whatever is desired.

Until then, take warning and don't fall for this phishing attempt.

Cross-posted at Straight-Case gunblog.

 

 

Liturgical music

If you've ever studied music, you know that in Western Civ, there is a wealth of music that was composed to Praise the Lord. In fact, until the Renaissance, most music had that purpose, because music with other purposes (i.e., to please the ear NON-religiously) was considered a sin.

In those days, if you were gifted enough to be able to write (poetry or prose), compose music, or render images in any art form, you did your work in the Name of the Lord. When you did, you were broadly supported by the wealthy and powerful members of whatever society you were a member of. The aristocracy took it as their duty to support the arts, and by doing so, they also supported the clergy and the spreading of God's Word.

Not so much anymore. Today's liturgical music is a small niche of popular music. Christian music attempts to cover all the bases, venturing into every genre from rap to rock and roll, and I've even heard of Christian Punk (but I haven't listened to any). Some current Christian music is quite traditional, some is even historical (Gospel music which originated within groups of black slaves, for example).

It all has it's place, and today and tomorrow is the main place for it.

In Portland, we have listener-supported Classical music on FM radio and streamed on the Internet. I awoke to my Eton S360 radio some post-Medieval liturgical music this morning, and I will play it most of the day. It just suits the Holy Holiday, it seems to me.

You can listen with the Rivr Family, right here. I hope you have a decent sound system that you can connect to your computer. I only have that in my office, so I will listen to the FM presentation on my home-theater set-up (formerly known as a "stereo") on FM 89.9 mhz.

At some point during the evening today, I might even turn the TV to Oregon Public Broadcasting, which traditionally plays the Yule Log, an endless video loop of a fire in a huge wood-burning fireplace (one of the three massive central fireplaces in the central lounge of Timberline Lodge).

Liturgical music is a part of me, I used to sing it during my private school's Christmas Pageants (they don't have them now, not PeeCee to celebrate Christmas, even if you are a private school). I've listened to it forever.

Liturgical music represents the Peace on Earth and Goodwill to Men that the birth of Christ is supposed to represent. Listen to some as you prepare for your family's Christmas celebrations.