An Occasional Ecuadorian
I’m pretty sure this breaks the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090123/ap_on_fe_st/odd_goat_thief
In other news, Statute is a really hard word to type. Happy Friday.
Update 2/13/2021: I have revisited this post multiple times over the years, and the news story keeps getting moved around, so I finally just added a screenshot of the story since the link is dead.
All day today, everyone’s been writing news articles and blogging about planes. And not to intentionally join the trend, but a comment on a blog about airplane safety caught my eye.
Turns out Popular Mechanics put to test the myth about every airplane seat being equally safe. You can read the article if you want the ins and outs of the statistical data, but in jet crashes with both fatalities and survivors (as opposed to one or the other only) the back seats are generally safer.
Out of 19 crashes between 1971 and the present with sufficient data to analyze, the front, middle, and back of the plane had 49%, 56% and 69% survivability in a crash. And while they made a big deal out of it, I’m not changing my ticket over 20% higher chances. Which brings me to my next point.
One of the commenters on the article wrote that a lot of things affect the safety of each seat and each passenger. While this person listed off proximity to the wings and engines, as well as the overall structure of different parts of the plane as being factors, he/she ended with another important safety factor: and individual’s “belief in God…”
I don’t know whether they were joking, or if they were seriously making statistical implications about prayer. But I do know that next time I get on a plane, the reason I’m not worried about that extra 20% average survivability rating is that I’m safe. If I get there at the end of a long life or a short plane ride, I’m going to the same place.
I don’t usually make a big deal out of my birthday. I tend to be proud of myself when I make it through the second week of January and nobody at work has realized it’s gone by. But since I’ll never get around to writing anything meaningful to every person who sent me some kind of message today, I figured I’d make a mention of it here.
By the time I came home for brunch between church services today, I had birthday messages from 5 countries on three continents. Yeah. By 10:15. I won’t even list off States, but they streched from California to Vermont and Florida to Washington state, representing friends, family, and friends that feel like family.
Sophia and I were talking the other day about getting facebook messages from people you’d otherwise hardly ever talk to. But much as I laughed at some of them, it was really cool to realize how many places and times and stages of my life were represented by the pile of little “Happy Birthday” and “Feliz Cumpleaños” posts, e-mails, and phone calls I got. There were even text messages from Mississippi, California, and Taznakht, Morocco in there. A text message from Morocco, people. Holy crap.
I also feel like twenty-three is a good age. Seems like every third rock band writes a song about (or at least mentioning) age twenty-three. Plus I got to play guitar all day and eat quesadillas three times within 23 hours. And it’s the last birthday I’ll celebrate in this country for at least 729 days. So all together, it was great. Thanks for all the birthday wishes.
So about 60 hours after I just reinstalled Windows XP Professional on my desktop, Windows 7 is getting released as a Beta. If I’d known that, I would have just waited two days.
Oh well. I may still put it on my second hard drive. I need a new project, and I’ve never Beta tested a new operating system. And if anyone else is interested, you can download the Beta from Microsoft here, starting tomorrow (January 9, 2009) afternoon.
My desktop computer is about 4½ years old. As I told John once, when he asked me what brand it was, it started out a “Dell,” but now it’s a “Dan.”
In the time I’ve owned it, I’ve upgraded the RAM (still not enough, but more than my laptop that runs Vista) and the monitor, added a second hard drive, dual booting with Fedora Core 2 Linux, and installed a DVD burner, a legacy Zip drive (for kicks) and a superfluous amount of peripherals (did I really need a Skype phone? I’d like to think so). And once before, and now once again, reinstalled the operating system.
Most people either don’t need to do this or they don’t know that they do need to do so. Or, like my parents, they’re lucky enough to live with one or two people (in this case Colin and me) who recognize when this is a viable option. As for me, I reinstall my operating system instead of paying for anti-virus software. I figure I come out monetarily even and intellectually better for this strategy. Thirty bucks a year that I haven’t paid for the last 3½ years is worth more hours of my life than the relatively short time it takes me to 1) keep my Registry and Microsoft Configuration in an organized, virus/mal/spy-ware-free state and 2) give the operating system a fresh start twice (and hopefully never again) over my computer’s life. Even if it wasn’t worth it simply in time, I get practice in doing things manually and identifying what really needs to be on my system and what doesn’t.
In fact, just in the time it took me to write this, I’m up to 96% of my primary hard disk drive formatted and ready for a new copy of XP Pro. It hasn’t slowed down my blog writing, and this time through the reinstall preparations, I learned where some of my favorite programs store their files and managed to back up a huge amount of files, correspondence, and other writing, aside from over 20 gigs of music and 14 gigs of pictures that needed to be added to my archives anyway.
My procedure is down to a science at this point:
Two things I forgot to do were uninstall Microsoft Office from my computer and to write down my computer’s name. I don’t think Microsoft is going to notify me that I’ve exceeded my licenses for Word since still only two computers will be using it (desktop and laptop). We’ll see how that turns out. And it’s not overly important to have the same computer name. In fact, I have a couple of friends who would specifically not recommend it. I just don’t like having to learn a new computer name for those times when I’m searching for files, shared drives, or printers on the network (although if I needed to write it down, I guess I didn’t learn it very well). However, it was easy to retrieve from my laptop. Just looked up my laptop’s default printer, which was the one attached to my desktop, and took my desktop’s Computer Name out of the address.
Now the reason for all of this is that I had a very obnoxious virus on my computer. I know how to remove it both with automated software and manually, but I don’t like clogging up my system with one-shot anti-malware programs any more than I like clogging it up with the actual malware, and I’m just to lazy to remove such a huge chunk of information from the Registry as that which “XP Antivirus 2009” puts in there.
Aside: If any of you ever see “XP Antivirus 2009,” don’t believe anything it tells you. I was fortunate enough to be able to recognize it as fake anti-spyware that puts more fake malware on your computer and then claims your computer is infected and asks you to pay for the full version to remove the fuax adware. It’s also hard to eradicate, and annoying as sin with its little pop-ups on your desktop. Add this to my laziness, and here I am reinstalling my OS. I also figure that it’s probably not the only thing that has slipped through my (very tight, but not impervious) manual computer security.
Annoying as it is to wait for 3 days or so as Windows update catches up to the current level of updates (there are good and bad things about strictly successive updates), it’s refreshing to look at my clean desktop and know that even with half a decade of dust built up inside it, it’s basically functioning as a brand-new right-out-of-the-box machine. But this time around, I’m definitely putting at least some free anti-virus software on it like a normal person. I hope the next operating system I install is Windows 7.
UPDATE: Here I sit at 2:49 am watching update 13 of 48 install itself. And all of these have to install before I even get to XP Service Pack 3 and the updates since then. But so far, so good, and the only thing I’m still fighting with is the display settings. Amazing what this thing does on its own.
UPDATE 2: And here I am at 3:07 am, downloading Service Pack 3. And believe it or not, I’m typing this from my desktop, not the laptop. Already functional.