But I digress. In this morning’s email was this missive from Cablevision.

A MESSAGE FROM CABLEVISION

We regret to inform you that News Corp, in an act of corporate greed, has pulled Fox 5 and My9 from your Cablevision channel lineup. This is an unfortunate attempt to extort unreasonable and unfair fee increases from Cablevision and our customers.

News Corp is demanding more for Fox 5 than we pay for every other broadcast channel. In fact, they want more for Fox 5 than we pay CBS, NBC, ABC and Univision combined and are asking for more than $150 million a year. That’s an $80 million increase for the exact same programming! In these tough economic times, an increase of these vast proportions is irresponsible and unfair.

We have made numerous fair and reasonable proposals to News Corp and they have refused every one. And now, News Corp has pulled the plug on Fox 5 AND My9. This was News Corp’s decision, not ours. We want to keep these channels on the air while we negotiate a fair agreement.

As a result of News Corp’s refusal to negotiate, Cablevision is willing to accept binding arbitration to resolve this matter fairly. We are confident that an independent third party will agree that what we are offering to pay News Corp is fair. We call on News Corp to accept binding arbitration, and return Fox 5 and My9 to the air until an agreement is reached.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by News Corp’s actions, and we ask for your help. Call 1-877-NO-TV-TAX (1-877-668-8829) or visit www.cablevision.com/fox and tell News Corp to put Fox 5 and My9 back on the air, and to keep you out of the negotiations.

Thank you for your patience, your patronage and your support.

(The link in their message eventually expired. I removed it, but note that when it appeared in Cablevision’s email it actually pointed to an internal tracking link before being forwarded – deceptive at best.)

[sigh] Who’s the bigger liar? If you take Cablevision’s statements at face value then News Corp looks like the dick. I’m sure that if I sought out News Corp’s take – I didn’t bother – I’d find that Cablevision looked like the dick.

It’s the customer that takes it on the chin. Pam‘s grumbling that some of the television shows she likes are affected. I told her to watch ‘em over the ‘net. Me? I don’t watch television, no time for that, so I’d dump the subscription and not miss it in the least. (Sure, I’d lose the multi-product discount I get for the Internet service portion of the bill but the benefit is so small it doesn’t matter.)

Well, here’s to hoping those profit-mongering bastards resolve their differences.

http://www.vhemt.org/

“May we live long and die out”

Remember The Jetsons?

The cartoon aired in the early sixties. It painted an image of the future that was just so fantastic, so far-out, that it could only exist in the cartoon world. Certainly, we would never live to see it.

Well, this is the world we do live in today.

Okay, sure, we don’t have flying cars – probably never will – but so much of what they showed is so commonplace today it isn’t funny. Go check out excerpts from some episodes on Hulu. Think about what you see.

I’ll soon need to use the air conditioning in my home. It’s been so cold this spring and summer that I’ve used it exactly once so far this season. And that was only because I had changed out a thermostat and needed to test the system. So the other day I ran it all day and night. I awoke to find it running full-bore, the suction line frozen and little, if any, air moving through the ductwork.

I spend a bit of time with Google and soon learned more than I had ever known about air conditioning systems, more than enough to troubleshoot my system.

It reminded me of that old movie, The Matrix. Remember Neo’s famous line? “Jiu Jitsu? I’m going to learn… Jiu Jitsu?”

“Air conditioning? I’m going to learn about… air conditioning?”

We live in an unparalleled age where most of what you need to know is just a few clicks away. I swear, sometimes I gotta pinch myself.

Don’t take it for granted, my friends. Think and contribute what you can.

Actually, this is a pointer to video, not something to read.

http://blasphemes.blogspot.com/2009/04/global-warming-swindle.html

“The environmental movement has evolved into the strongest force there is for preventing development in the developing countries. I think it’s legitimate for me to call them ‘anti-human’. Like, okay, you don’t have to think humans are beter than whales, or better than owls or whatever you don’t want to. Right, but surely it is not a good idea to think of humans as sort of being scum, you know, that it’s okay to have hundreds of millions of them go blind or die or whatever.  I… I just can’t relate to that.”

Patrick Moore
Co-founder, Greenpeace

I think I may start selling t-shirts.

Proving once again that there are statistics to support just about anything you’ve got to say.

WARNING – Don’t come crying to me if you hose your system beyond belief, because for the uninitiated messing with the Windows registry directly is somewhat akin to performing open-brain surgery. In fact, I’m not going to tell you how to perform edits on the thing, back it up in whole or part or anything like that. You should already know how to do those things. If you don’t, well, please move along, nothing to see here.

With that out of the way, I’ll state what should be obvious. The registry keys mentioned below are each one line. Sometimes embedded spaces will cause wrapping that shouldn’t actually be.

The default responsiveness of the Start menu is designed for effect, not utility. Adjust it to your liking by adjusting the value here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\MenuShowDelay

This has a default decimal value of 400. 100 usually does it for me.  The ever-so-popular TeweakUI utility adjusts this, too, but it’s easy to just do it this way.

If you’ve got enough memory in your system you can pull the Windows kernel into RAM. Absolutely don’t do this if you’ve got less than, oh, 256 MB.  But who doesn’t have 2 GB or more these days?

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\DisablePagingExecutive

Choose one of these values:
1 = disable paging and run kernel from RAM
0 = normal, paged operation

It should be obvious that you want to set it to 1. You’ll need to reboot to make it take effect.

Did you know that NTFS maintains standard 8.3 file names that are compatible with DOS conventions? Those are the ugly looking all-caps things with the tildas and such that you may have seen in a file list every now and again. Creating and maintaining them is an overhead you can live without if you never have a need for this compatibility. Nice that you can easily disable it and keep your MFT a little less cluttered at the same time.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation

0 = enabled
1 = disabled

Set to 1 to gain some file system performance, at the expense of compatibility with that older file system you probably forgot about long ago. You’ll need to reboot to make it take effect.

Oh, and before you ask: no, I’m not sure whether it cleans up existing 8.3 junk or not. I never bothered to check, but I’d suspect not.

Windows XP helps speed its bootup with a prefetch cache, located by default at C:\Windows\Prefetch. Some folks say that every now and again you should delete the contents of that directory, and the system will rebuild it cleanly. I personally wouldn’t bother with that, just let Windows deal with it. But you can control what gets prefetched with this adjustment.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters\EnablePrefetcher

0 = disable prefetching
1 = prefetch application launch files
2 = prefetch boot files
3 = prefetch as much as possible

Setting this to 3, of course, is a good idea.

The Disk Cleanup utility doesn’t actually clean up all of your temp files as you might be led to believe. Instead, it checks the last access of these files and if it’s 7 days or less it keeps ‘em around. Fortunately you can fix this.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Temporary Files\LastAccess

# = number of days of retention

Personally I like 0 days. One good reason is that it’s nice to have the slate as clean as possible when defragmenting. (But if you’ve got an SSD you might want to leave this one be, as small writes exact a serious performance hit.)

Add a Copy To command to Explorer’s context-sensitive menu, where it’s always ready for use.

Just add the following key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Copy To

with a default value of
{C2FBB630-2971-11D1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}

And, while you’re at it, add a Move To command as well. Add this key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Move To

with a default value of
{C2FBB631-2971-11D1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}

Of course, neither of these do anything for system performance but may help your performance.

But no, it’s Columbanus, an Irish saint who lived from 540 AD to 615 AD. Recurring themes in the stories of Columbanus are virtue, women and beer.

There’s much to be found on the Web about Columbanus, here’s one to get you started. And, of course, there’s a Wikipedia article.

But near as I can tell there’s no Saint Alphonzo – as in Saint Alphonzo’s Pancake Breakfast, a zippy little number by the late Frank Zappa.

If you find the S word offensive then definitely don’t read on. Otherwise…

Shit

Shit is a powerful word. Just think of all the concepts and ideas you can communicate with it. Shit may just be the most powerful word in the English language. Consider: You can be shit faced, be shit out of luck, or have shit for brains. With a little effort you can get your shit together, find a place for your shit or decide to shit or get off the pot. You can smoke shit, buy shit, sell shit, lose shit, find shit, forget shit, and tell others to eat shit and die. You can shit or go blind, have a shit fit or just shit your life away. People can be shit headed, shit brained, shit blinded, and shit over. Some people know their shit while others can’t tell the difference between shit and Shineola. There are lucky shits, dumb shits, crazy shits, and sweet shits. There is bull shit, dog shit, cat shit, bird shit, whale shit, rat shit, and horse shit. There is tough shit, hard shit, soft shit, slimy shit, rough shit, limp shit. You can shit a blue streak, shit bricks, shit pink Twinkies, shit marbles, or shit your guts out. You can throw shit, sling shit, catch shit, or duck when the shit hits the fan. You can take a shit, give a shit, keep shit or serve shit on a shingle.  You can find yourself in deep shit, or be happier than a pig in shit. Some days are colder than shit, some days are hotter than shit, and some days are just plane shitty.  There is funny shit and sad shit, bad shit and good shit. Some shit doesn’t stink while other things really smell like shit. Some music sounds like shit, things can look like shit, and there are times when you feel like shit. You can be faster than shit or you can be slower than shit. Sometimes you’ll find shit on a stick, sometimes you’ll find shit everywhere, and then there are times when you can’t find shit at all. You can have too much shit, not enough shit, the right shit, the wrong shit or a lot of weird shit. You can carry shit in a bucket, put shit in a barrel, have a pile of shit, have a mountain of shit, have a river of shit, or find yourself up shit creek without a paddle. You can slice shit, spread shit, dunk shit or jump shit, and some people just can’t cut the shit. There is fun shit and dull shit, silly shit and serious shit. Sometimes you really need this shit and sometimes you don’t want any shit at all. You can stir shit, kick shit or stick your ass out the window and shit on the world. Sometimes everything you touch turns to shit and other times you swim in a lake of shit and come out smelling like a rose. Shit! When you stop to consider all the facts, it’s the basic building block of creation. This means the universe did not begin with a BIG BANG but rather with a BIG DUMP. Keep that in mind the next time you flush the toilet. And remember, once you know your shit, you don’t need to know anything else!

Take the term from which this entry derives its title: ‘loss’. I’m thinking that this is one of the most misused terms around – especially today, as it applies to business and economics. It seems to be deliberately chosen to create a feeling of sympathy for the ‘lossee’, and I think that the feeling is completely misplaced.

Let’s first look at a perfectly accurate usage. “Joey Psychotic lost his home and all of his possessions to fire this morning, believed to be started when his hungry cat kicked over an unattended prayer candle…” This makes sense – Mr. Psychotic had a home. But it was consumed by fire, reduced to a wet, smoking pile of rubble, crawling with investigators. Not a home by any stretch of the imagination. You feel sorry for Mr. Psychotic, and you should (even while questioning his religious rituals).

Now, how about this one: “The Acme Prayer Candle Company lost forty billion dollars over the last three quarters of this year due to slacking demand. Stockholders fear bankruptcy as…” Nope, I don’t buy it. That which you do not have cannot be lost. Acme didn’t lose anything – they never had it in the first place. See the difference?

Let’s take a stab at writing that a little more accurately: ”The Acme Prayer Candle Company failed to realize forty billion dollars in profits over the last three quarters of this year. Acme executives cite slacking demand as the cause of their failure to deliver promised value to stockholders, who fear bankruptcy as…” Acme didn’t lose, they FAILED.

Fail brings a whole different set of emotions than loss. It’s not that failure is necessarily bad, either. After all, failure can be a very powerful teacher – well, provided one can grasp its message, which isn’t a given.

I don’t feel much sympathy toward anyone that can (mis)direct their company to failure, and yet still pull down six million greenbacks. I won’t bet on their learning anything, either, unless it’s something along the lines of, “hey, look what I just got away with!”

Maybe the companies that are failing should be allowed to fail, their directors along with them. A multitude of companies, built on good ideas, managed competently, would certainly spring up in their place. I’m not denying that there would be great steaming heaps of economic pain along the way, the likes of which most alive today have never seen.

But America, still the greatest land on Earth, would emerge stronger than ever.

“Fold!?!  A bra is like a beer can!  The only correct thing a man can do with ‘em is empty ‘em, & toss the empty asside………….8^)”

Infinitely better it is to try, no matter how feeble the effort. You have a chance. No matter how small the odds of success, it is opportunity measured as something greater than zero. And no matter how it turns out, you will have gained experience and probably a bit of knowledge as well.