Dirty Jobs, Cleaning the oven

My oven, has been happily cooking stuff for about a year, getting cruddier and cruddier as time went on. It finally got so bad as to offend even me. I'm not a real neatnik. Christ on crutch. I needed a 1/4" Spintite, pair of long nose pliers, razor blade window scraper, shop vac, mechanic's trouble light, to say nothing of the old standbys, Easy-Off, rags, Brillo, and newspapers. Took all afternoon. It's gonna have to get really cruddy before I do this again. The Eazy-OFF does awful things to your hands.
Just out of curiosity, why, after doing the outside of the range in white, can't they do the inside of the oven in white, giving you half a chance to see what you are doing while cleaning? I had to use one hand to hold the trouble light so I could see, and the other hand to wipe the brown slime of spent Easy-Off out of the oven. If the damn thing was done in white porcelain instead of dark gray, so you could see something, I could have used two hands to wipe off, and not needed the trouble light that I use working underneath cars.
Why not have a plug and socket for the bottom oven heating element? To remove said element, so I could d0 the oven floor, I had to undo a pair of sheet metal screws with the Spintite, reach both arms into the dirty oven to wrassle the brass terminal lugs off the heating element, and then go fishing for the wires which immediately buried them selves in the fiber glass insulation behind the back wall of the oven.
Granted, it's a 24 inch range, a size only purchased by builders, which means it's made as cheaply as possible. Real consumers who buy ranges, always have enough kitchen to take a 36" standard range. So all the fanciness, automatic cleaning, continuous cleaning, stuff is only available on the larger range. If you have a compact kitchen, that needs a 24" mini range, you are SOL for auto clean ovens. Back to the Easy-Off, you peasant you.
How about some clever designer doing a removable oven. Make the oven liner is a one piece steel stamping that slides clean out of the oven for cleaning. Take it outside, spray on the Easy-Off, and then take the garden hose to rinse the slime off. Is that so hard?
Women do the bulk of American oven cleaning. Does the fair sex have some secret for cleaning el cheapo ovens that they are hiding from us bachelors? Do they have the tools to pull the bottom heating element or do they just wipe around it?

Makers of Childrens movies just cannot win

Back a Christmas or two ago, Disney released The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, a film version of the well loved C.S. Lewis tale, now on its second generation of readers. I read it as a child, and read it aloud to my children. Back at release time there were a few learned Grinches who complained about the Christian content of the story. According to some , it was an abhorrent violation of the establishment clause of the US constitution to have Aslan resurrected by the Deep Magic from before the dawn of time.
This Christmas, Phillip Pullman's Golden Compass is getting the same treatment from the Atlantic Monthly. Only from the other side. Pullman's tale is at best anti clerical, and treats God with little respect. The movie makers get dissed firstly for making a child's movie promoting atheism, and secondly for watering down some of Pullman's more pungent atheistic remarks.
Hollywood cannot win for losing here. Make a movie from a Christian allegorical tale and get dissed for promoting Christianity. Make a movie from a not-so-Christian tale and get dissed for promoting atheism.
As a reader of both books, the ideological/theological/allegorical elements never caught my attention. Both stories are adventure tales with likable and plausible protagonists, making for enjoyable light reads. I, and my children, enjoyed the adventures and the ideological freight sorta just passed everyone by.
For more intellectual angst I suppose we could proceed to diss Harry Potter.

Immigration Reform; Green cards for veterans

One small step for US. The attraction of America is so strong that we have non citizens enlisting in the US armed forces. Any one of these who gives honorable service to the United States ought receive at least a green card, if not actually citizenship. We owe these brave people something and legal entry to the US is the least we can do to square that debt.
In the same vein, Iraqi's and others, who serve our armed forces overseas as interpreters, informants, and as agents ought to get a fast track toward a green card.

Democrracy is not the natural state of man, (NPR)

Listening to NPR this morning. Actually my clock radio comes on at 0630 playing the local NPR station. Somewhere they dredged up a leftist to give the old "Democracy is not natural, we should not intervene to establish democracy, let the natives do their own thing" mantra. This clueless speaker then proceeded to tell us that democracy was not established in America until the 20th century.
This guy had managed to be both racist and disloyal to the United States, all within 2 minutes. It is racist to suggest that other peoples (say Iraqi's) are incapable of operating a democracy. It is equally racist to suggest that only people from "Northwest Europe" (his phrase) are capable of running one. Either way you say it (and the speaker said it both ways) you are saying some people are better than other people. I don't buy that.
I stand with Jefferson. All men are created equal. That includes Iraqis, Iranians, and all the other manifold peoples on this earth. That means they can all operate a democracy. I also stand with Churchill who said "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
As for the other slam, "America did not become a democracy until the 20th century" the speaker demonstrates near total ignorance of US history and the English language. I wonder shere he went to school. The constitution written by the founding fathers is a true democracy, the first in the world, at a time when all the other nations of the earth were ruled by kings. Since 1789 the US has continuously broaden the freedom's of the constitution, some times at enormous cost.
This speaker totally discredits NPR.

Recycling at the town transfer station, aka dump

It's not a dump, it's a transfer station. Just ask the folk who work there. They charge $1.50 a bag for plain old trash. Recyclables are free. That's bottles, cans and paper. They have a humunguous pile of glass bottles. Mostly beer bottles, with a good leavening of liquor bottles. If we just gave up on drinking that would solve the glass recycling problem.

The many panes of Windows, Pt 2

Windows is a server operating system, which is a big contributing factor to Windows' fatness. 99 out of 100 Windows systems are client, not servers. Being a client is simpler than than being a server. Client operating systems support just one owner/operator. They keep our hard disk in order, launch our programs off our hard disk, work our I/O devices and the internet. We own the whole computer, so we own all the files on it. Clients don't do work for other computers. Servers on the other hand spend their life sharing stuff, printers, hard disk, internet connections with other computers. At the office, when you click "print" and your stuff pours out of the central printer, a server makes that happen. Your client machine sends a message to the server machine connected to the printer saying "Print this as soon as possible". The key difference between clients and servers, is servers have to the smart enough to accept requests for services over a comm link (LAN, dialup modem, or other links), and accomplish them. Servers have to serve a number of clients, and so must keep various clients separate. Servers allow clients to store files on the server's hard drive. For this to work, the server must remember which client owns which file and only allow the owner access to his files. It won't do to have Joe reading and writing Sally's files.
So, servers must remember who owns what files, and each time a file is opened, it must check to be sure the opener of the file is the owner of that file. Both providing services upon request and keeping files private make a server substantially more complicated, bigger and buggier than a pure client.
Servers are inherently more vulnerable to malware. "Load this program and run it" is a basic service provided by Windows. This is how malware spreads across the internet, a virus running in an infected computer asks another computer to load the virus and run it. Windows calls this feature "Remote Procedure Call", or "RPC" for short. "Telnet" is another such feature. There are more such features in Windows, too many more to count. What's worse, in Windows you cannot turn RPC off. If you do, Windows won't boot.
Since Windows ships with the RPC "kick me" sign prominently displayed, Windows needs a "firewall" program to protect it against RPC spreading viruses. A "firewall" intercepts all incoming traffic and blocks the dangerous stuff. It is said that an unfirewalled Windows system will be infected by malware within ten minutes of going onto the internet.
So, for being a server, something no one wants, Windows is burdened with all the code to respond to client requests, and then more code to block those requests. A pure client, which doesn't offer services, would be leaner, faster, and more robust.

Bye Bye Etrade

Seems like discount stock brokerage house Etrade is hosed. Not content with running a fairly decent business as an on-line ultra low cost broker, the Etrade suits decided to play the sub prime mortgage market and got burned. According to the WSJ, a hedge fund, Citadel Investment Group, has "loaned" Etrade $1.75 billion AT 12.5% interest.
Wow. Nothing, but nothing makes 12.5%. For the loan to be real, Etrade would need to make MORE than 12.5% in order to pay the loan back. That's not going to happen, no legal activity makes 12.5%. Citadel will own Etrade outright, and this "loan" is merely a paper device for moving what's left of Etrade's money into Citadel's coffers.