by cg on October 31, 2009
Halloween dinner for 7 (plus Grace), 3 InMenlo assignments, carving pumpkins, blogging, baking altar bread – well, we’ve had a full 36 hours. We started cooking white chili from scratch yesterday, searing and pan-grilling 4 pounds of skinless chicken breasts, soaking the navy beans overnight et al. – we even baked flax-meal bread, a flavorful, much less carb-laden alternative to cornbread. The resulting dish was nonfat, low carb and healthy enough to stop the hearts of most of us geezers used to less virtuous victuals.
But hours of standing in the kitchen, prepping, shopping, jetting to assignments etc. took their toll. We were dragging today, before granddaughter Grace arrived, dressed as a ladybug, with Uncle Patrick from New Jersey in tow. Grace, upon arrival was the antithesis of exhausted and she, who turns two next week, figured out the Halloween drill in about 3 cycles: door bell rings, ’scary monsters’ appear on step, candy arrives, yay!. After that, a delighted little girl (pictured) ran to the door each time the bell rang, as it did perhaps 20 times for a recorded crowd of 44 ghoulish visitors. Grace is definitely into Halloween, I’m definitely into bed…
by cg on October 30, 2009
Saints be praised! A mere 10 or so hours into the travails of installing the new ‘easy’ Windows 7 (”Trust us” sayeth Microsoft, as did Cain speak to Abel), we now have (Amen! Shout Amen!) a working version of Windows 7 that can – be ye amazed – access the internet – and, yea, event print the scriptures and holy screeds that cometh upon our dual displays.
Though we walked through the shadow of the valley of the Windows installer (Shout ‘Brain Dead’ unto the heavens my brethren!), Mac OS X and VMware Fusion 3.0 have walked by our side, keeping us, verily, from going totally postal while we were aflicted with the slings and arrows of a thousand dependencies, mostly having to do with ‘no genuine Windows installed.’ Why our gods choose not to recognize our perfectly legal (and expensive) Windows XP install, nor our NIC or common peripherals, we know not. Surely we are being tested by a greater power, and we trust we shall not be found wanting.
Truly I say to you, no greater friend is there than VMware tech support and Forums, who, despite their name, actually labor long into the night solving not the problems of their own tribe, but those of Microsoft. Yea, that same kingdom of Balmer, he who screameth, and sweateth, mightily, as recorded in the Book of YouTube.
As it is written in The Manual: “Blessed are they who solve install issues, for they shall gain traction among the faithful.” And, yea, verily, the faithful immediately downloaded Google Chrome and made it the ‘defaulteth’ browser…
by cg on October 29, 2009
Short answer: yes! I spent another four hours getting Windows 7 to install on my Intel Xeon-based computer.
True it’s a Mac, and true, I’m installing under a brand-spanking new version of VMware (3.0), but it shouldn’t be this hard. A lot of the problems stem from Microsoft’s brain-dead approach to software – compared to the laughably simple $29.95 Snow Leopard upgrade to Mac OS X, the $129 (’beta-testers discount’) Windows 7 upgrade is just a nightmare.
For one thing, it refuses to upgrade to 64-bit because my XP install is 32-bit (as were most initial XP installs – it’s 2 revs back, remember) even though I have 64-bit hardware, I have to install 32-bit Win 7. The installer looks at the previous OS, not the hardware. Sound like an informed, forward-looking choice to you? We think not.
The good news is that we now have Windows 7 running on our Mac. It’s just fine, unless of course, you’d like to connect to the Internet. Win 7 can’t find my network interface (funny, my XP VM can find it, and of course Mac OS X can find it) but oh well – maybe another 4 hours or so and we’ll have a bona fide OS that can help us do some actual work.
Win 7, BTW, looks a lot like Vista and XP, with the usual, random GUI changes here and there, and yet another re-shuffle of the start menu. Laughably, ‘Connect to a projector’ is the #2 item, and this on an OS that installed on workstation/server-grade hardware. While we’ve all watched Windows laptop-toters struggle for 30 minutes to get an image on a conference-room projector the installer should know that laptops don’t have 8 processor cores, as does my machine.
Otherwise, Win 7 is another warmed-over Windows ‘upgrade,’ complete with the need for all new drivers – every peripheral I have that worked under XP – printer, scanners, camera, external drives have, of course, stopped working in Windows 7. Makes us wish Google would hurry up with their ‘Chrome OS’ or whatever they’re calling it…
by cg on October 28, 2009
But, I made the fatal mistake of believing Microsoft’s ’simplicity’ TV ads about Windows 7 (my ‘discounted’ beta-testers version arrived yesterday.) Win 7 install is at least as big a nightmare as any previous version of Windows. Its many patently stupid dependencies and insistence on ‘genuine Windows’ make it (so far) impossible to install, on VMware, anyway. This is Intel hardware we’re talking about, folks.
I’ve spent 4 hours now, with a brainless $200 ‘upgrade’ installer that, especially compared to Apple’s $30 Snow Leopard installer, is a complete and utter piece of the proverbial fecal material. Linda, sitting next to me at gulker.com World HQ, listening to my extended grumping, finally said, exasperated, “Why do you do this to yourself?” Good question… we passed on Vista after neither I nor a veteran corporate IT expert could install it on a Thinkpad… at this rate, we’ll pass on Windows 7, too…
by cg on October 27, 2009
Yup, it’s official; the Commissioner of Major League Blogs (MLB) has granted gulker.com an official bye this evening. Move along, now, nothing to see here… but come back tomorrow for some heated commentary, likely on the topic of faith (good) and religion (bad, very, very bad)…
by cg on October 26, 2009
We have to admit that the troops at gulker.com have had a wonderful time these past two weeks in Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas and Southern California. We do now however, both of us, find ourselves a bit road-weary at the same time as we have to face all the stuff we didn’t do while traveling these past two weeks.
Email inboxes are close to critical, not to mention our actual postal mailbox, likewise prodigious (though it was very well managed by our neighbor’s third-grader in our absence.) Today’s morning errands (which lasted until 3 PM) included everything from major grocery shopping to carwash to finding the right cartridges for our inkjet printer to filling and mailing all the insurance and government forms that awaited us. Some still await.
So, I was going to ‘lay low,’ but, then, thinking that that choice of verb was probably incorrect, I looked it up (every Mac comes with an electronic version of the American Heritage Dictionary.) Sure enough, the entries for both lie and lay contained a usage note explaining that people commonly mix up the two terms. I had, or, at least, was about to.
Lie means ‘to recline’ and lay means ‘to place’ among other things, so ‘laying low’ wouldn’t really, correctly express my sentiment. Anyway, we’ll be heads down for a couple days getting through all this stuff. You do the blog thing, you better get serious about your syntax, know what I mean?
by cg on October 25, 2009
Dear gulker.com readers: it pains us, or, maybe, amuses us to report that, for the first time in this blog’s history (at least we think it’s the first time) we have knowingly pulled the digital wool over our reader’s virtual eyes. We told a deliberate fib.
At issue is the post we offered more than a month ago about a presumed very expensive, ultra-overweight SUV favored by the local nouveau riche, a clan famously given to wretched excess as a lifestyle.
The 4-ton, 5-mpg, $140,000 heavy Chevy (or Yukon, or Escalade) does not, as far as I know, actually exist. I made it up, partly as a writing exercise, and partly to see if anyone would swallow a new high in Silicon Valley extremes. As it turned out, no one batted an eyelash: even my wife Linda and good friend Scott were more than prepared to believe the tale.
We also wondered if we could spawn an urban myth with this fabrication, but heavy Chevies didn’t, it seems, have enough sex appeal to go farther than a few indignant comments left on the blog. You know you’re bad when even your made-up stuff doesn’t budge the hit meter…
by cg on October 24, 2009
So we’re back on the road after a few days in Menlo Park, this time staying in San Marino, just south of Pasadena. It’s a relatively short jaunt, the main purpose of which is to attend the 50th anniversary of dear friends Bob and Carol McCrary. And don’t ask how old it makes us feel to be attending a 50th. Yikes.
But, to get to the point I started out to make, I didn’t blog yesterday. And it’s all Linda’s fault. You see, we’re traveling with one laptop, and Linda worked yesterday, ensconced in a very nice room at the old Huntington, now Langham Huntington, hotel. Linda dutifully wrote and edited and emailed and engaged in phone communications from her ad hoc branch office, with its lovely view of Mt. Wilson and the rest of the San Gabriel crests.
Not wishing to interrupt this serious commerce by demanding custody of the computer for mere blogging purposes, I did what any dutiful spouse would do, and took a nap. Kind of a long nap.
True, there’s a public computer in the lounge on the floor above us, but it runs Windows, maybe even, gods forbid, Vista, and anyway the lounge offers free booze, including decent wines and a large buffet of tasty but non-oncologically-sound snacks. I could see myself becoming very ‘comfortable’ in that lounge, and the spouse becoming distinctly unhappy upon arriving and finding a slightly tipsy mate flirting with one or another of the many young, blonde women who somehow always seem to be present in upscale L.A.-area hotels. The nap was clearly the safest route. So I don’t have to write “the dog ate my blog post” since it’s so obviously all her fault…
by cg on October 22, 2009
We have been thinking about statistics a bit recently (indeed it was the root cause of the letter, as was expounded in yesterday’s post.) As we pondered the topic, our focus drifted (can one focus and drift?) to the famous quote that inspired the title of this post.
The inevitable Wikipedia plunge revealed, to no great surprise, that the phrase’s authorship, variously bantered as belonging to Disraeli, or Twain or Dilke, or even an unnamed judge who once reportedly said that there were 3 kinds of unreliable witness: ’simple liars, damn liars and experts.’
On the witness angle, we feel we must point to an experiment done by Daniel Simons (U of Illinois) and Christopher Chabris (Harvard). Few will value ‘eyewitness’ accounts as highly after they’ve considered this result.
The Wikipedia article also pointed, serendipitously, to Stephen Jay Gould’s article “The Median Isn’t the Message” which he wrote in 1984 after being diagnosed with abdominal mesothelemia, a serious ‘terminal’ cancer in 1982. Confronting the statiscally-significant median survival rate of his cancer – then 8 months – he wrote:
The problem may be briefly stated: What does “median mortality of eight months” signify in our vernacular? I suspect that most people, without training in statistics, would read such a statement as “I will probably be dead in eight months” – the very conclusion that must be avoided, since it isn’t so, and since attitude matters so much. …
If the median is the reality and variation around the median just a device for its calculation, the “I will probably be dead in eight months” may pass as a reasonable interpretation. …
But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature’s only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions.
Statisticians, in my experience, concur with Gould and will tell you that statistics only apply to populations – they are meaningless when applied to the individual. The average American male may be 5 feet, 10 inches tall, but, if you happen to be Shaq, the statistic is all but meaningless.
In any case, Gould lived for 20 years after receiving his 8-month prognosis. I mention this, of course, because my cancer, glioma, comes with a 4-year median survival rate. According to this datum, I have a 50% chance of being alive this time next year (I was diagnosed in October, 2006), and have indeed, used that as a yardstick for planning events. Two years ago I started putting ‘things in order,’ which has resulted in me being better organized I’ve ever been.
Thus I had planned, in the countdown to my presumed expiration date, to inform the old school that I would be relinquishing a (visitor’s) board seat and possibly other responsibilities and proclivities as I focused on the important things, like my not-quite-2-year-old granddaughter and good Pinot Noir.
Gould’s tale has given me welcome pause to rethink the letter, which still sits, unsent, on my Mac’s right-hand monitor, the one reserved for serious projects. On the one hand, a recent, rigorously-conducted study tends to discount Gould’s contention that ‘attitude matters:’ on the other hand, every serious MD/PhD I know, people who deal daily with the terminally ill, believe, almost to a soul, that Gould is right. I hope these aren’t the judge’s ‘experts’…
by cg on October 21, 2009
There’s a – yes – letter on one of my Mac’s screens – a project I’ve been pecking away at for most of the afternoon. It’s a message to the head of my old school in Hudson, Ohio.
A letter, I should explain, is a printed document that is also sometimes written out – a process of putting pigments on a thin sheet of fiber called paper with a manual instrument, sort of like putting paint on a wall with a brush.
Said letters are packaged, mainly for in-transit security purposes, then shipped, for a fee, to a recipient by a third-party logistics management service. Letters are, of course, largely deprecated, being the forerunner of another medium, itself rapidly nearing extinction, called email. Some gulker.com readers are old enough to remember, and even use email (your author certainly is and does.)
Younger readers of this site (there are a few) are largely eclectic adventurers who have peeled themselves away from their preferred social medium and cell phone to go slumming in the dim, mist-shrouded back alleys of archaic tech, where a few wizened characters still hunch over gigantic machines called computers – loud, hot, furniture-sized devices that contain mechanical components, like magnetic (!) storage devices.
These living relics (the authors, as well as the machines) produce blogs and web pages, recording information in the cloud much the same way that medieval monks copied out manuscripts (see written out, above) for monastic libraries, thus preserving a great deal of information for posterity, most of which is useless, though a tiny percentage has been found to be interesting, and even important, by certain modern scholars.
But I digress, and have to admit that we’re cheating a bit… our recipient has an administrative assistant (from the old English form secretary) who will print out PDF attachments – a PDF being a digital representation of a printed document that can be attached to email. We are avoiding the logistics service, but, nevertheless, recording the process, for posterity, in this post (see blog above)…