Default!

WordPress used to be such a friendly place to blog. The vast majority of themes were free, and functionality was not an issue. Now, it seems like everyone wants money for their themes, and the few seemingly slick-looking ones I’ve tried do weird things. The last one would justify text by cutting words anywhere. A lot of them clutter the header with page-links. Even the default theme (which I’m using here — as of this writing) puts the nonsense “#b3c0a9# @print(“”); #/b3c0a9#” at the top right corner.

I’m not happy with the narrowness of the format, and I have hardly any ability to customize the appearance, but it beats having paragraphs that end l
ike this. That really sucked. On the upside, the ugly page-links are gone and my search function is back.

Enough procrastination. I promised myself I would try to get some writing done this morning.

. . . Right after I fold some laundry and find a good pot roast recipe.

D.

Well, this sucks

As I suspected, the problem here was incompatibility between the old theme and WordPress 3.6. I’ve had to change to a new WP3.6-friendly theme, and this is the best I can do on short notice.

I was on my feet for nine hours today, and I’ve already fielded two calls from my post-op patients. I’m anticipating a troublesome night.

In other news, if you’re curious what I’ve been working on lately, check it out. Bear in mind, please, that this is very much a work in progress, and still quite rough (aesthetically rough, that is. I stand by the writing).

D.

Internet down

Cut out on us a couple of days ago. The (modem?) (magical thingie that provides us with the bounty of the internet?) has all the right flashy lights, but it’s not working, so go figure. We’re all suffering here. I took the precaution of locking away the cutlery, but you’d be amazed at how many common household items can be converted to weapons when a family’s internet is down.

I’m writing this on my office computer. On company time, no less (my 8:00 patient is late). I suspect I’m violating any number of company policies, but doctors are allowed indiscretions that would get lesser mortals fired. I’d have to do some pretty serious sh!t to get into trouble . . . I recall hearing that one doc was fired for using his office computer to look at kiddie pr0n. Serious yuck. But I wonder whether the unforgivable sin was the kiddie pr0n itself or using the office computer to view it.

Our 4th was uneventful. We were back in the heat and we stayed indoors, listening to the explosions outside. From our front yard, we have a decent view of one of the local displays, so I did watch for all of about a minute before yawning and going back indoors. It wasn’t so special that I felt like standing outside and sweating. Yeah, it was still that hot.

D.

Now I’m smart

We bought new phones yesterday, and Jake and I upgraded to smart phones — Androids. Mine’s an EVO HTC. And as with any new technology, I have no idea what I’m doing.

I owned a Blackberry for a short time three or four years ago. The internet access was useful to me once. Once. Jake and I were hanging out in downtown Seattle and we decided to find a haberdasher. Turned out we were only a few blocks from Byrnie Utz Hats, a wonderful place by the way, definitely worth a visit if you’re in Seattle. I can’t remember that Blackberry being useful on any other occasion. Eventually, I decided it wasn’t worth the extra money and I changed back to an ordinary cell phone. The precipitant cause of the change? I suspect it was the usual ATD*.

Smart phones weren’t all that smart back then. (Knowing me, though, I doubt that I exhausted its capabilities.) I don’t recall there being a whole lot of apps. And I don’t recall my Blackberry having camera or video capabilities. Smart phones have come a long way since then, but I’ve done fine with my dumb phone and thought I could live without. But then tragedy struck — T-mobile got bought out by AT&T, whom we despise because they donate to teahadists and other radical righties, and who routinely used to pull slimy maneuvers on us when we had them as our carrier. You know — fees would unexpectedly (and mistakenly) show up and then we’d have to spend forever on the phone getting them to undo what they had done. Creeps.

I’m not sure if Sprint will be any better, but at least it’s not AT&T.

And now I need to figure out how this sucker works. Thus far, I’ve determined how to change my wallpaper. I know there should be a way to sample mp3s to create custom ringtones, and I know that Karen and I should be able to do video chat with our two phones, and I know there are supposed to be thousands of apps out there, but I haven’t found any of this stuff yet. The app market directly accessible on the smart phone links only to a few dozen apps. WTF?

Maybe I should read the manual, or look for tutorials on the web. I’m a manual/tutorial kinda guy.

D.

*Accidental toilet droppage.

If I can fix it, anyone can

Far be it from me to call myself computer savvy, but I weathered a malware attack yesterday, resisted the urge to reinstall Windows XP, and managed to rid my computer of its nasty disease.

It all began during a search for Ipswich clams. These are the delicious little bastards that are damned near impossible to find on the west coast. One of the top links on a Google search is Digger’s Choice Seafood; the moment I clicked on the link, a Flash Player video kicked off, and even though I exed out pronto, the damage was done. Half of my desktop icons disappeared along with most of my C drive files, and I began getting error messages warning me of a “Critical Error, RAM memory usage is critically high, RAM memory failure,” and, “The system has detected a problem with one or more installed IDE / SATA hard disks.”

Odd thing was, I could still surf the net and even kinda sorta play games, except the computer kept booting me out of the games with every pop-up error message. The computer also claimed that McAfee had detected and eradicated a Trojan, and when I ran the McAfee scan, it didn’t find any threats. This was after updating McAfee, btw.

Which says something about McAfee, methinks.

The odd thing is, this particular malware is supposed to insist that I need to buy some software NOW NOW NOW! to eradicate the virus from my hard drive, and it’s all a scam to get my credit card information. But no such scam materialized. So I think McAfee must have partially disabled the malware, though not well enough to fix the system. Fortunately, I recalled that I had done good things in the past by searching for my error message word for word, and that’s what saved me this time.

I found my particular problem discussed and solved on bleepingcomputer.com, a site dedicated to just such issues (and they have a nice write-up on Wikipedia, so I figure they have to be legit). I had been infected with something called System Defragmenter. Bleeping Computer gave me step by step instructions that successfully kicked System Defragmenter’s ass in no time.

And soon enough I was back playing Dragon Age 2, in one night managing to bed my pirate wench and a possessed mage (who told me he loved me, isn’t that sweet?), and freeing my zombified mother from her mortal coil.

Don’t say I never done nothing for ya, Ma.

D.

Boom Boom Butt-dialing

I really like my iPod. I don’t have all that many albums on it, maybe a dozen, and I’ve only downloaded a few games, but I’m still quite pleased with this very cute toy. And I can surf the net with it, too — for free, apparently. And I could use it as an eBook reader! Amazing.

But yesterday at the gym, I noticed three albums on my list that I had not put there, all by the Boom Boom Satellites. Curious, I listened, and my response evolved from, “Interesting,” to “Didn’t I just hear that one?” to “Oh PLEASE GOD MAKE IT STOP.” I began to wonder if this is what a rave is like: hopelessly repetitious dance beat-electronica made tolerable only by drugs, and no drugs were in sight.

So I clicked on over to Claire Voyant’s “Love is Blind,” something I found through Pandora and is currently my favorite thing to listen to whilst working my legs into a lather. And I began to wonder where all this Boom Boom had come from. Can an iPod accidentally download music the way my cell phone likes to butt dial my parents? Or are the Boom Boom Satellites randomly spraying the iPodiverse with their albums as a clever marketing ploy? Most importantly, have I paid anything for this shit?

It occurs to me: I should be able to stream Pandora on my iPod. Project for another day.

D.

“All the blooms are off that tree.”

So said my Dean Witter stock broker back in 1982 when, for the first time in my life, I had more money than I knew what to do with. With my six-month internship at a Richmond, California herbicide company, I earned something like $2000, and it was burning a hole in my pocket. I wanted to put my money into what was then one of the sexier young stars on the horizon.

Alex specialized in penny stocks — itty bitty companies that would wither and die in less than a season, but would often run up a double or triple before they inevitably plummeted. After making a quick few hundred on my first transaction, I developed some misplaced trust in Alex. Turns out he was lucky, not good. If he was good, he wouldn’t have dissuaded me from investing my money in a young company that thought it could market personal computers to the masses. At the time, they were torn by infighting over whether to market first the Lisa or . . .

Yeah. The Macintosh.

Berkeley undergrad Kyle Conroy has tabulated what your money would be worth if, instead of buying an Apple product, you had invested in Apple stock instead. $5700 on the Apple PowerBook G3 250 in 1997 would be worth over $330,000 today. That’s 1997. And I wanted to buy Apple in 1982.

Apple stock has gone through a lot of swings in 30 years, so there’s no telling how long I would have hung onto my shares. But now, this very week, Apple stock has a net value greater than that of Microsoft stock. Apple is huge, and I could have gone in on the ground floor.

Reminds me of my thesis adviser, who did some consulting work for a little known biotech company back in the early 80s. They had yet to go public. He was offered cash or potentially worthless shares. He took the cash.

In 2009, Hoffmann-LaRoche bought them out for $46.8 billion. Guessed it yet?

Genentech.

D.