Gina wrote a great blog entry describing the steps she took to clean and bullet-proof her mother-in-law’s Win98 computer.

Did the whole AdAware, virus protection, ZoneAlarm etc routine. Great reference for anyone who has to do same (and I’ve done my share of this, as well – believe me).

Yet the comments thread dissolved into (*sigh*) a whole “Why didn’t you just buy her a Mac?” pissing match. Even down to the “Gina, how much is your time worth? If you spent X hours at a $Y/hr rate, you could have bought a Z Mac for that money!”

It’s folks like this that give Mac users the reputation as being a little too religious, shall we say.

Come on folks, let’s look at this a little more rationally:

• Would mom’s computer have been as hosed if it was a Mac? Probably not, but that’s hindsight. Let’s deal with the hand we’ve currently been dealt.
• Mom doesn’t want a new computer – she wants her existing one fixed. If I brought a Yugo into a garage for a transmission repair, I’d be pretty pissed if the mechanic suggests I just buy a BMW instead. WTF?
  
• The whole discussion of putting valuation on time spent cleansing the machine is just….icky. It’s family. With family/friends and so on, you just do stuff. The clock isn’t running. You’re helping out. As they’ll help you when they can.
• Let’s pretend the discussion of valuation of time spent had merit. OK, you might be able to get a Mac for the price of your time spent fixing the Windoze box. But what about the cost of the software? A browser is one thing, but to work effectively today (and this may well change) you need MS Office. Pricey. And did mom have Photoshop on the Win98 box? You going to buy her a copy of Mac Photoshop (and so on…)? And installing and configuring same…the cost of converting just went up…
  
• Mom’s used to a Windoze machine. You really want to have to have her learn all the new things she’s going to have to do to get stuff in and out of the Mac? She might even ENJOY the solitaire game.
  
• If mom has a computer at work, it’s probably a Windoze box. Why learn two different systems? (Fun for geeks, not for non-geeks)
  
• Let’s say mom’s up for a change to Mac: Want to transfer all her data and guarantee nothing will be lost in the transition?

And so on.

The comments on Firefox vs. IE make sense (and this is what Gina did): It’s a discrete piece of software that is free, looks and acts like IE and can automagically import all the IE bookmarks and so on. Beautiful. More secure, more versatile and no learning curve for user.

OK, over at arts.telegraph they’ve listed the 50 best cover songs of all time.

Obviously, this is an exercise in futility to some degree – no one will ever agree with the list in it’s entirety. But that’s part of the fun of such a list – to disagree, make your own list, support your choices and so on.

On the other hand, it seems to be a pretty good list. No, I don’t agree with all the listings; I’ve never heard some (actually, many) of the covers, and they certainly missed some important ones, in my mind. But they caught some good ones, and it’s tough to disagree with their top choice: Jimi Hendrix’s cover of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”. This was so well done that Dylan started playing the song this way.

But – just off the top of my head – here are some covers that are missing from the list that probably should be on there:

• Highway Patrolman, Johnny Cash Cash takes Springsteen’s sparse tale of family and morality (from the Nebraska album) and makes it his own.
• Mrs. Robinson, the Lemonheads Making immorality sound like fun! Very commercial in a very successful manner.
• Satellite of Love, U2 Bono and the boys tackle the Velvet Underground song and make it work
• She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, Joe Cocker Part of the Mad Dogs and Englishmen album, Cocker and a band of renown put a whole new power behind the Beatle’s staple. Actually, this whole album is rich with great covers: The Letter, Leon Russel’s Delta Lady, Leonard Cohen’s Bird on a Wire and so on. Seek out. Listen to.
• Percy’s Song, Fairport Convention Everyone seems to have covered Dylan, and this English folk-rock powerhouse did several Dylan covers. Percy’s Song is just a favorite, mainly for the beautiful, strident voice of Sandy Denny on this piece.
• Good Morning Little Schoolgirl, Muddy Waters and Van Morrison Not a duet; two different covers of the Sonny Boy Williamson classic. Both approach it from roughly the same direction, with Waters’ version more leering, Morrison’s more questioning.
• Wang Dang Doodle, Koko Taylor Chicago’s queen of the blues just kicks the everloving shit out of this Willie Dixon number whenever she sings it. This is her song now, much like Aretha Franklin’s cover of Respect has made it her’s.
• Wooden Ships, Jefferson Airplane Grace Slick and crowd take the CSN tune and, with Slick’s wonderful voice, make it a more mystic, ethereal song.
• Whiter Shade of Pale, Annie Lennox Lennox’s Medusa CD is an album of cover songs. It contains many gems, but her take on Procol Harum’s most famous song is the most precious of all. A great version of Talking Heads’ “Take Me to the River” here, as well.

Obviously, there are many others; these are just off the top of my head (and I think I own them all).

One interesting note: Who gets covered?

Only a handful of artists get a vast majority of the covers: the Beatles (both the song when then were together and on their own); Dylan; Velvet Underground; old blues singers, such as Willie Dixon (cover by Led Zeppelin and the Stones, for example).

For the first time in years, I actually hit the woods to do some photography. An example of what I found there is on the right; click for a sampling of some of the pics that I took today.

It was a beautiful day – a fall day: cool (high not breaking 60 degrees), little breeze, clear as a bell. Leaves starting to change and the flowers all, for the most part, done for the year. (I should have gone out last week, when the flowers were still popping to a degree.)

Nice day, nice area – Ryerson Conservation Area. Forest, prairie, a working farm (currently closed for renovation, unfortunately).

This really drove home a point I already knew: I need a better camera. The one I’m using is great for snapshots and such, but … I don’t do snapshots. I do heavy backlighting, extreme close-ups, document the division between water and terra firma.

For example, I grabbed three shots of a heron wading in the water in the middle of the Des Plaines River. With full telephoto (I don’t even know what it is, but it’s only a 1:3 ratio, so maybe 80mm equivalent?), the heron was just a dot. Blowing up the pic didn’t help, as the low light in the picture resulted in a slow shutter speed, which (in turn) results in a blurred bird.

Damn. I hate when that happens.

Was fun to see the critter, however.

The more computers change and improve, the more they don’t improve the overall (non-geek) user experience.

Yes, I could write until I ran out of disc space about this, but my latest hiccup was one that was good but ungood.

I’ve been using FireFox, and they just came out with an alert for a critical patch. OK.

I tried installing it, and it just wouldn’t take. No message, just a spinning graphic with “downloading and installing patch” message.

OK – be patient. Take shower.

Still spinning. WTF?

I went to /. to see if others have been having this problem, and I got the anwer: I have to enable web site downloads (on a per site basic) through FireFox preferences.

While this is a good thing – block trojans and so on – it’s not intuitive. And the installer message never said (even after a half-hour [shower] of trying), “uh, dude, must allow installs or I can’t help ya…”

Once I enabled downloads for the site, the install took about < 5 seconds. Again, excellent. But this is not a good user experience, overall. Most people would just give up and say, “This browser is hosed – it tells me to install this patch but it won’t install. Back to IE..” Which would be a bad thing…

There are so many things wrong with this post by Katherine at Obsidian Wings that I don’t quite know where to begin.

No, it’s not that the post is flawed, it’s just what is reported it so wrong in so many ways it makes one’s head spin.

Read. Be very dismayed. This is a bill – giving all but implicit approval to torture (so long as it’s not done by us…that would, of course, be wrong…) that specifically exempts itself from judicial oversight.

That old Marbury vs. Madison thingee??? Ancient history; dusty.

It’s also designed to be retroactive, which is troubling as well. Again, musty old ex post facto laws…

And this wonderous bill is sponsored by the third highest ranking Republican in the US: Dennis Hastert. Yes, the same Hastert who intimated – and refused to repudate his comment – that George Soros was being funneled money from drug cartels.

And Kerry’s losing?????

I just installed WinXP SP2.

I’m either very brave…or very stooopid.

Actually, I have positive results to report.

• Caveats first: I’m a computer geek and get this stuff; the download is huge, my broadband pipe (cable) is huge, and it still took about 20 minutes; this is a new box, with little installed (fewer chances of conflicts).
• Install was pretty painless; the only conflict was with Norton Anti-Virus, and it was not a “conflict” – MS sorta recommends getting another virus protection program. Which? I dunno. Didn’t care.
• So far, everything came back after the second reboot (first for install completion, second my own choice to see if it all took).
• As noted in caveats, not a lot installed here, but the Apache server and so on that I do have here are behaving nicely.
• The update attempted to block start of an FTP server I have running here; I allowed to run and the second reboot honored this request. Good.

Bottom Line: Big honkin’ update, but went extremely well as far as I can see (in 20 or so minutes…).

This surprises me, but in a good way.

Keep your fingers crossed….

As I’ve finally (finally!) gotten around to setting up my new (sigh…Windoze) box, I finally also go around to downloading Firefox.

Hey, it’s a full release – OK, v1-PR, but let’s not get picky.

Impressions, having never used it before:

• Wow, it looks just like IE! But that might be a good thing, as that’s what people are used to.
• It’s a much better look than Mozilla – I always used Mozilla with the classic (i.e. Netscape) skin. Just worked better. But this is nice
• Having not really read anything about Firefox, it’s fun to see the almost Easter Egg like items. The RSS and style switching items in the status bar and so on. Not incredibly useful right now, but points towards good things in the future.
• I have tab issues – I think Mozilla handled this better. I like Mozilla, where you had the icon on the left to “add new tab” instead of having to right-click on the tab bar. In Mozilla you could right-click, as well, but had the option of the icon. I personally miss that. One click, instead of right-click | menu selection. Hope this is addressed. (see Update)
• All the other tab goodness from Mozilla seems intact. Excellent.
• Yay! The Javascript console is retained. This is something that just kicks IE’s ass all over the place. Indispensible for Web developers (uh, like me….)
• Can’t really say how standards’ compliant this is, other than to say I haven’t run into any sites where weirdness showed.
• Alt text not displayed; interesting. I’m sure that’ll be fixed. Weird that it does not display….(see update)
  

Well done Mozillians!

Update

Trying to add a picture (the Firefox logo) to this post, I found a bug: Through Blogger, the upload doesn’t work. (JS error, but works in Mozilla. Odd.) Update 9/23/2004: I’m an idiot. Firefox was blocking pop-ups ( the JS window to load pictures). Allow pop-ups on this site and all works fine. MY bad.

Alt tags don’t display, but title tags do. While this may be standards compliant, still seems a serious oversight: Title tags are, to most, new and/or optional. Alt tags have been around for a decade. Don’t ignore the mass of the current web just to stick to principles. Bend a bit where necessay, as it is here…

Still – after one day – my firm browser of choice.

Update Deux

Once I bothered to look, I found there is a keystroke for new window: Ctrl-T – excellent; I’m all about keyboard shortcuts (which is one of the reasons I’ve really dug Gmail).

This browser keeps getting better and better in my estimation.

OK, I’m twisted, but the headline below just caught my eye (especially when it was on the main page with just text, but same headline):

So Bill, stressed out over the Longhorn delays? Losing sleep over this “linux” thingee (what’s with the Penguin??)?

Fire up a doobie! Science is on your side!

[Uh, Back to our regularly scheduled Blog….must…have…Doritos…]

As Kasia has noted, the new computers just are not as exciting as the old ones.

The updates are pretty much incremental, nothing like in the past.

Two computers ago, I went from a 368 with about, oh, 1M (yes, one frickin’ MEG) of RAM to a smokin’ 128M, 200 Mhz Pentium Pro. Now that was a jump worth getting excited about.

And my last computer – hit the 1Ghz mark. With 512M RAM – and a 80 GIG hard drive. Wowzers Batman!

I just recently bought another computer – a *sigh* Windoze box (why? One word: Photoshop. Gimp doesn’t cut it yet….).

Yet it’s sitting in three boxes, right behind my current work station. Too much work to do this weekend (yes – and it’s a weekend and I’m not diving into the boxes) and – to be honest – not enough excitement about the new box to warrant going there.

It’s a nice system, will last a few years, but…it’s the same as my current system, with each area a little bit better. I did spring for a flat screen this time, so that’s worth getting excited about, but that’s about it.

Basically, I got the new one to get more room, some more speed and more backup capability (RAID 1).

But no sea change. No paradigm shift blah blah.

Bleh.

I guess computers really are becoming mainstream, when even computer dorks don’t get excited about new hardware.

LISTENING TO:
Mudanin Kata
David Darling & The Wulu Bunun

Vocal music of a Taiwanese tribe with a master cello player.

Sounds odd; it is. Sonic, atmospheric.

I heard about it on NPR; had to get.

Got it today; glad I purchased same. I won’t play this every day/week, but this is a great CD. In a “sounds of the whales” type way.

Lovely.

All music

OK, here is my concept for what could be at least one of the presidential debates.

Yes, it’ll never happen, but … I can dream can’t I?

And I don’t think it’s really a bad concept.

Basic rules of the debate:

• Panel must ask questions that can be answered with either Yes, No or Pass – This eliminates the question within a question question that is sometimes necessary but still a pain in the ass overall. Example: “Mr. President, you recently said X and Mr. Y said Z. How do you respond? And how does this affect the thickness of ice on the Antarctic’s Ross Shelf?”
• The first word out of the candidate’s mouth must be Yes, No or Pass – Obviously, allowances will be made for “Can you please repeat the question” or whatever, but – basically – answer the question Yes, No or Pass (a blanket I can’t / don’t want to answer response, which is fine and an answer in itself).
• If – and only if – a candidate answers either Yes or No, the candidate can then qualify/defend this answer – This allows someone, for example, to go on record as favoring abortion but quickly following up with “Only in the case of incest/mother’s life in danger yada…”.
• If the candidate answers Pass, that’s it – mike cut off or whatever – Hey dude, you passed on the question. So shut up!

What’s gained from this? Mainly an avoidance of the following (completely made-up and yet totally believable exchange):

Q: Do you support a woman’s choice to terminate her pregnancy?

A:Now [panelist], that’s a great question. This touches upon the whole role of the child in our society. Under the Education Plan I’ve published, it makes it possible for…..

Yes, where is the answer?

Not there.

Yup.

It’s also a good method for our sound-bite, attention-deficit generation(s): A quick score card can show what was Yes, what was No, what was Pass for each candidate.

And it can apply some pressure to the candidates – if one keeps doing a Pass, the other can start answering Yes or No and sort of force the other(s) to put something on the record.

I dunno; not great concept, but makes it easier for the average voter, whomever that may be…