Older People’s Sense of Humor….

A Doctor was addressing a large audience in Tampa. "The material we put into our stomachs is enough to have killed most of us sitting here, years ago. Red meat is awful. Soft drinks corrode your stomach lining. Chinese food is loaded with MSG. High fat diets can be disastrous, and none of us realizes the long-term harm caused by the germs in our drinking water. But there is one thing that is the most dangerous of all and we all have, or will, eat it. Can anyone here tell me what food it is that causes the most grief and suffering for years after eating it?" After several seconds of quiet, a 75-year-old man in the front row raised his hand, and softly said, "Wedding Cake."

---

An elderly gentleman of 83 arrived in Paris by plane. At the French customs desk, the man took a few minutes to locate his passport in his carry-on bag. "You have been to France before, monsieur?" the customs officer asked, sarcastically. The elderly gentleman admitted he had been to France previously. "Then you should know enough to have your passport ready." The American said, "The last time I was here, I didn't have to show it." "Impossible. Americans always have to show their passports on arrival in France!" The American senior gave the Frenchman a long hard look. Then he quietly explained. "Well, when I came ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944 to help liberate this country, I couldn't find any Frenchmen to show it to."

---

Bob, a 70-year-old, extremely wealthy widower, shows up at the Country Club with a breathtakingly beautiful and very sexy 25 year-old blonde who knocks everyone's socks off with her youthful sex appeal and charm. She hangs onto Bob's arm and listens intently to his every word. His buddies at the club are all aghast. At the very first chance, they corner him and ask, "Bob, how did you get the trophy girlfriend?" Bob replies, "Girlfriend? She's my wife!" They're amazed, but continue to ask. "So, how did you persuade her to marry you?" "I lied about my age", Bob replies "What, did you tell her you were only 50?" Bob smiles and says, "No, I told her I was 90."

---

A group of Americans were traveling by tour bus through Holland. As they stopped at a cheese farm, a young guide led them through the process of cheese making, explaining that goat's milk was used. She showed the group a lively hillside where many goats were grazing. "These" she explained "are the older goats put out to pasture when they no longer produce." ; She then asked, "What do you do in America with your old goats?" A spry old gentleman answered, "They send us on bus tours!"

---

Enjoy!
//Steve//

The Female Genie*

While trying to escape through Pakistan , Osama Bin Laden found a bottle on the sand and picked it up.
 
Suddenly, a female genie rose from the bottle and with a smile said, "Master, may I grant you one wish?"
 
Osama responded, "You ignorant, unworthy daughter-of-a-dog! Don't you know who I am? I don't need any common woman giving me anything."
 
The shocked genie said, Please, I must grant you a wish or I will be returned to that bottle forever."
 
Osama thought a moment, then grumbled about the impertinence of the woman and said, "Very well, I want to awaken with three American women in my  bed in the morning. So just do it and be off with you."
 
The annoyed genie said, "So be it!" and disappeared.
 
The next morning Bin Laden woke up in bed with Lorena Bobbitt, Tonya Harding, and Nancy Pelosi at his side.  His penis was gone, his knees were broken, and he had no  health insurance.

God is good.

//Steve//

---

*This is probably an old one, but still funny….

Stardock Fences & Fences Pro (Mini-Review)

If your desktop is like mine, you tend to stick pretty much everything there that you’re working on instead of in the My Documents folder like good little boys or girls.  Unfortunately, that means clutter – big-time!

As a long-time Stardock customer, starting with WindowBlinds and moving on through many of their other non-game products, I’ve become quite fond of a little tool they have called “Fences.”  In short, Fences allows me to set up little fenced-in enclosures on the desktop where I can stick pretty much anything to keep them corralled-up and organized.  Simply right-click on the desktop, drag to select an area, then let go.  A prompt appears to “Create new Fence here.”  Give it a name, and there it is.  From there, I can drag and drop files on the desktop into the fence, and they stay there.  Drag it around on the desktop to put it wherever you like.  Once fenced-in, my desktop looks like this:

(The items down the right side of the desktop, except the one labelled “Backups,” are Windows 7 desktop gadgets, not part of Fences.)  I tend to keep my Fences of relatively uniform size, but you can size them to whatever dimensions you like.

One thing to keep in mind: these Fences are not folders.  If you look in Explorer at the contents of your desktop, they’re still all individual files as far as Explorer is concerned, so once you start using Fences you might want to forget about looking at the desktop contents in Explorer.

I use Fences semi-frequently.  Normally I don’t have any fences set up on my desktop, but if I notice that things are starting to get a little cluttered I set up some fences to impose some semblance of order on my usually chaotic life, then when the number of items on the desk get down to a more manageable size I get rid of the fences until they’re needed again.

The basic Fences program is free.  The Pro version, which offers some additional features to make organizing easier, is only $9.99 (as of the time of this post, normally twice that) so even though I don’t use those features all that often, having them on tap was worth the very nominal cost of the program.

The Stardock.com web site for Fences has all the details about what features are available in each version, so I won’t go into all the details here.  Check for yourself.

Also, there are a number of reviews – professional and otherwise – on the Web which you might find interesting.  I will list them here, but note that I did not read any of them before putting this online.  I didn’t want any bias from those reviews to filter into my thinking as I wrote this.  A few of the reviews are:

• http://download.cnet.com/Fences/3000-2072_4-10909535.html 
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eS2JJ2G6ww
• http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/02/05/neowin-review-fence-your-desktop-with-stardock-fences
• http://stardock-fences.en.softonic.com/opinion/good-program-but-has-a-major-shortcoming-46651
• http://geeks.pirillo.com/video/software-review-stardock
• http://www.theaveragelife.com/2010/01/01/stardock-fences-review
• http://www.snapfiles.com/get/fences.html

The above were just some of the results of a Google search for “stardock fences review” (click the link to recreate the search).

In short: Fences is well worth looking into.  The free version has nearly all of the features I use, so start with that and see if it helps you as well as it’s helped me over the past several months.

-- //Steve//

 

It’s tragic when a church implodes…

Tuesday this week, our church business meeting started out routinely enough, then degenerated into character assassination, charges of blackmail, and calls for the pastor to resign.  Despite the best efforts of both the regular moderator and a “stunt double” moderator brought in from outside the church, there was no possible way to maintain order.  After about two or three hours of excruciatingly painful debate, it finally became obvious to most that there was no way anything further was going to be accomplished that night, so the meeting was adjourned around 9pm.

I’m so brokenhearted over the whole thing – seeing friends attacking each other, falling on to each other like cannibalistic wolves, flinging all sorts of rumors and innuendo – that I wonder if I will ever return.  I know I’ll be taking this Sunday “off” but it remains to be seen if I’ll be searching for a new church home soon…

//Steve//

PS: Those who know me from church know what church I’m talking about.  Those who don’t, I’m not going to mess things up further by identifying either church or members involved.

New laptop: Dell Inspiron 1545

I purchased a new laptop a couple of weeks ago to replace the trusty Dell XPS M1210 laptop. It served me well for four years, and was still more than adequate for my needs until it suddenly gave up the ghost.

After having spent some time with the Dell Inspiron 1545 – purchased at Best Buy for around $500 with tax – I’ve noted some great features and some shortcomings. Perhaps my experience will help others in their buying decisions.

First, I have no regrets about my purchase. It’s a great system and well worth the money. Let’s get that out of the way first off. This isn’t a trash-job “review” like I’ve read elsewhere over the years, posted by someone who really has a hidden axe to grind. Quite the contrary, I’m happy with the system and have been a long-time satisfied Dell customer. And to clarify that, let me say that if I were honked off at Dell for some reason I’d be just as willing to share that information as well as sharing the viewpoint of a satisfied customer. In this case, I found just a couple of quirks and some very stellar features.

On the plus side:

• Very easy-to-use keyboard, comfortable for a 40-year speed typist.
• Color options available were nice, although there are more options available through the Dell website – naturally, since the ones ordered through Dell (except those in the Dell Outlet) are built-to-order. Best Buy carries the most popular, which makes perfect sense. I opted for the sky-blue model, which is blue only on the lid, with the rest being glossy jet black.
• The resolution on the display is spectacular!
• It came with a built-in webcam, which I haven’t had occasion to use yet but I like having it, since in the past I’ve had to use external ones which are cumbersome, easy to misplace and just plain ugly.
• Video processing speed is great, well beyond what I’m used to, even though this particular model doesn’t have the dedicated video memory of the nVidia adapter (it uses the Intel chipset which shares memory with the regular system RAM). As I write this, I’m watching an episode of Caprica on Hulu.com, which is running smoothly despite being a “background” task, and a couple of other apps are also running in the background.
• The system came with Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-bit, on an AMD64 processor. Nice! 32-bit Windows makes use of almost all the 4Gb of memory, but not quite. Going with 64-bit Windows gives it just that much more usable memory. Originally, my XPS came with 32-bit Vista, but later on when I popped for a Microsoft TechNet Plus subscription, giving me access to all of Microsoft’s non-development software (servers, operating systems, applications, etc.) and I found out that my little XPS could support 64-bit, wow! Performance took a serious boost, even using Vista! OK, I’m not quite a Microsoft “fanboy” but I still like their products. But even Microsoft admits – now – that Vista’s performance could have been better, and Windows 7 proved it. I can’t fault them for waiting to say so, since everyone in the industry with more than a few years’ experience remembers the lessons that Adam Osborne taught us back in the early 80s. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me know and I will enlighten you.

On the minus side of the ledger:

• The glossy jet black case tends to pick up fingerprints
• Whatever the material is that they use for the case – or for the coating – the skin oils from the fingerprints are difficult to clean off without using some kind of solvent like Windex, and I’m reluctant to use anything at all for fear of marring the finish.
• Maybe I’m an old fart, but I miss the little flickering light that indicates hard drive activity. All my previous systems, both desktop and laptop, had indicators that showed when the computer was grinding away at the drive. Without it, if the computer display pauses for some reason and I don’t see the drive activity light, I get concerned that something’s hung up somewhere.
• They picked an odd memory configuration: 3Gb instead of 2 or 4. The out-of-box configuration is a 2Gb module for DIMM A and a 1Gb module for DIMM B. This pretty much guarantees that I’m going to have to replace the B module to take the system up to the documented maximum of 4Gb. My XPS fairly leaped in performance when I upgraded it from 2Gb to 4Gb a couple of years ago, so as soon as I can spare the $$ I’ll be popping for a 2Gb DIMM.
• For some wholly-unfathomable reason, the BIOS settings are configured so that the function keys are set not as Windows-type function keys (F1, F2, etc.) but as the Dell-specific keys to toggle wireless, change sound, play media files and so forth. In that mode, if you want to rename a file, you have to hold the blue "Fn" key down while pressing the F2 key, or you'll accidentally turn off the wireless network! It's necessary to go into the BIOS settings (press F2 while the power-on splash screen is showing) and toggle it so that the opposite is true. Then the F2 key actually renames files, while holding the Fn key and pressing F2 toggles the wireless (and so forth). [Added this information after the original blog entry was posted, as I forgot about it. Mea maxima culpa, my bad, etc. Sorry.]
  

Two items that are neither plus nor minus are the hard drive size and the choice of operating system. It came with a 250Gb drive, plenty adequate for home or small business users but nowhere near enough for me. Hey, I have three Western Digital one-terabyte hard drives hanging off this thing when I’m at my desk, so a little quarter-terabyte is piddly.

So…

First thing I did was to salvage the 500Gb drive from my XPS (which was an upgrade in that system, originally only coming with an 80Gb drive – a sizeable chunk of laptop storage four years ago!) and swap that out in the 1545; the 250Gb drive went straight into an external USB hard drive case for portable storage. I haven’t touched that drive yet, just in case I have to put it back in the laptop for some reason (knock wood).

Second, Windows 7 Home Premium is perfectly fine for most people, but I prefer Windows 7 Ultimate. Thanks again to my Microsoft TechNet Plus subscription, I have the use of up to 10 licenses for each of just about everything Microsoft makes, so it was of no financial impact to go with the upgrade. (And hey, if you had the choice between a Honda and a Harley for the same price, which would you choose?)

I still have some older programs I use, such as QuickVerse 7.0 Deluxe (a costly product to upgrade to the current release), which won’t run under Windows 7 but which runs just fine under Windows XP. Windows 7 Ultimate gives me the Windows XP Mode, basically a Windows XP machine contained within Windows 7 (based on Microsoft’s VirtualPC technology).

Ultimate also lets me join a network domain, which is of little use to most home users but of vital importance to IT professionals like myself. Throw in the BitLocker encryption technology and some extended backup capabilities – both of which should be standard for all versions of Windows 7 in my opinion! – and the decision to go with Ultimate becomes a no-brainer.

(I don’t use HomeGroup – yet – so that’s not an issue. It’s only available in Home Premium or Ultimate, but not in the Windows 7 Professional version. Also, the support for an additional 35 different languages in Ultimate wasn’t a factor, as I have a hard enough time just with English…! A complete comparison of the three different versions is available here.)

So that’s pretty much it. Looking at both sides of the balance sheet, I’m confident that this was a good purchase decision. If you’re considering a similar purchase, it’s worth looking into.

Incidentally, my unit was purchased at the Best Buy store #110 on Tyler St. in Riverside, CA. I can’t say much either way on the purchase experience there, since I knew that this was the unit I wanted. I pretty much just went in, picked out the color and plunked down the cash. One thing of note, though: I had to ask for the basic system – the ones that were on the sales floor were “pre-configured,” meaning they had been bench-checked and equipped with a few extra items like a full-version anti-virus program (and an additional $69 tacked onto the bottom line). I didn’t need any of that, so the salesman had to go into the back-room storage for an un-touched unit. Something to be aware of when shopping anywhere, as this is a common practice at full-service retailers.

Questions and comments welcome, as always.

//Steve//

Press-Enterprise customer service…?

On Wednesday this week, I called the Press-Enterprise newspaper here in Riverside, CA to subscribe.  At the time I called, they said it was too late in the day to arrange to start service the next day, but it would be no problem to have the paper start arriving on Friday (that’s today).

This morning, no paper.  Customer Service doesn’t open until 7am, but their website was up 24/7 so I put in a note on their online service form to indicate that I had not received my paper that day.

7:30am rolls around, still no paper.  I called them directly, and was told that it should have arrived not later than 6am on weekdays, 7:30am on weekends, they apologized and said they would notify the delivery supervisor and get a paper right out to me.

9am rolls around, still no paper.  Another call, another round of apologies and promises of a delivery.

11am, still nothing.  Another call, a promise this time of notifying management that there was a problem.

It’s after noon now, still no morning newspaper.

If this is any indication of the level of service I can expect from the Press-Enterprise, my next call will be to demand a refund.  I think I’ve been patient enough…  Argh.

//Steve//

Changed pharmacies

Here's what I sent to Walgreen's just now:

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I tried to do the survey on my pharmacy receipt, which would have been a glowing one had I been able to get past the first step, but it wouldn't recognize the fact that I had selected a category for the first comment even though I =HAD= chosen "Pharmacy" as that category. Therefore, I could not complete the survey. Therefore, I could not be entered in the drawing for the $3,000! You guys had me 110% satisfied up to that point. Too bad you had to tarnish the record by a bummed-up survey page.

Here's the deal. I went to two different pharmacies for my prescription. Neither one had it in stock. One -- at the doctor's office -- would have it in two days, but I thought maybe my regular Rite-Aid pharmacy would have it.

Wow, not only did they not have it in stock, but the only person who could order it was the pharmacy manager, and he was out on vacation! They wouldn't attempt to contact another Rite-Aid to find out if one of their own stores had it in stock, either.

Hmmm, there's a Walgreen's right down the street by where I get on the freeway, maybe THEY have it....

Not only did they have it, they said it would take just a few minutes to get it done. And they offered to have their system automatically text my cell phone to let me know when it was ready. So I could just go out to the car, kick back with a magazine or even take a nap. The only disappointment was that it was ready SO FAST I barely had time to get comfortable in the car before I had to go back in and get the Rx!!!

So all of this would have gone into your survey, but I couldn't get past the first page of the survey site. Bummer, guys!

Hey, you still have me as a customer, but I was really disappointed about missing out on my chance for the money.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

What can I say? :) //Steve//