Susan Rice UN Ambassador, Master of evasion

Susan Rice was on Meet the Press with David Gregory this morning. The morning NY Times story saying that Iran had all the know how needed to build a bomb was the topic. Rice was talking about "serious" sanctions on Iran. "Such as" asked Gregory. "Very serious" replied Rice. Rice talked about important deadlines. "What date is that deadline" asked Gregory. "Soon, very soon" replied Rice.
All in all, Rice managed to fill up 15 minutes of air time without divulging a thing. Gregory asked all the right questions and Rice evaded each one.
Translation. The Obama administration doesn't know what to do about the Iranian bomb. Time is running out. Once they get the bomb, taking it away from them is dangerous. Much easier to deal with Iran BEFORE they get a bomb.

Congressman admits he never reads the bills

This congressman explains that they work with a plain language version of the health care bill and someone ( staffers? elves? brownies?) translate the plain language version into "legislative language" which is too opaque to be read.
If this is true, then the Congress critters have turned control of the legislation over to the brownies. He who translates something can make the translation come out any way he wants. Especially if he has 1100 pages to hide stuff in.
We should forbid Congressional passage of long long bills. Say what you mean and boil it down to 1000 words or less.

Wide Screen Monitors

Problem, new widescreen monitor everything looks stretched out sideways. Circles become ovals, people look chunky, text looks wider than normal. The old CRT monitor width to height ratio was only 4:3, the new LCD monitor is 16:9.
Fix. Click Start->Settings->Control Panel. Click on the "display" icon. Click the "Settings" tab. Adjust screen resolution up till it matches the resolution of the monitor, in my case 1440 by 900 pixels. Works on my middle aged Compaq with a Radeon 200 Xpress video chipset on the mother board.

Fixing Firefox

My Firefox has been acting up. It stopped remembering passwords and logging me into password protected sites like Facebook, Model Railroader, and this blog. Tried one thing and another thing. I just found a fix.
Firefox maintains for each user a "profile". Profile is a hard disk file folder that holds your bookmarks, your saved passwords, and a grunch of other stuff. Files in the profile can get corrupted and then Firefox starts doing weird things.
The Fix is to start up a pure clean profile. The only thing in your old profile that you care about is your book marks. So export your bookmarks to an html file and import that file into the new profile. Do this from within Firefox. Click on Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks and then click on "Import and Backup" tab. Select "export html" There is a "backup" option but that does something different and will not work here.
Exit Firefox and restart it from the "Run..." selection on the Start Menu. Enter
"firefox -ProfileManager" in the run box. This will present you with a little window with some choices in it. Pick "Create New Profile" and you are done. This starts up a new clean blank profile. All you need to do now, once you get back into Firefox proper, is import the bookmarks.html file that you created earlier.
The new clean profile lacks any saved passwords, so you will have to present your password to each website that needs a password. Keep a sharp eye on the Firefox window and you will see an inconspicuous gray bar appear briefly asking if you want to remember the just entered password. Click "yes" and Firefox will remember the password and present it automatically for you next time.

47% of US citizens pay no income tax

Article is here. This is a scandal. Every citizen should pay some income tax. The poor shouldn't pay much, but they ought to pay something. How can anyone be a responsible voter if they cannot feel the bite of the taxman?

Migration, computer to computer

Good old Blackbox, a Dell SR1750 desktop is finally back in action. It's been a couple a months. Nothing wrong with him that a new motherboard AND a new CPU didn't fix.
So now to migrate off the back up laptop. Want to get my email, my checkbook, my bookmarks and my photos back over onto Blackbox. Plus I need to do a backup anyhow. So I burn all the photo and spreadsheets to a CD. Trickier is getting the email and email address book out of Thunderbird. Thunderbird hides his stuff in c:Documents&Settings/MyUserName/Application Data/Thunderbird, where MyUserName is whatever user name Windows has for you. This way Thunderbird can have a whole separate set of files for each user.
Open the file profiles .ini. Inside it you will see something like this
[ProfileN]
Name=default
IsRelative-1
Path=Profiles/xxxxxxx.default

This means all the active stuff is in a directory named Profiles/xxxxxxx.default.
Just back up the whole directory to CD. On Blackbox I copied xxxxxx.default into the Thunderbird/profiles directory and then hand edited the profiles/ini file to point to xxxxxx/default. Note well. The Name= must be the same as the extension of the file you just loaded. This will get your address book, your email and your spam filters.
Thunderbird is user friendly. Trust me. All this backup tedium, has a reason. Not that it makes any sense to me, but I'm sure the Thunderbird folks will tell you all about it. If you mess up editing the profiles.ini file you draw an absolutely opaque error message and a suggestion to reboot windows.
For Firefox all I really want is bookmarks. From within Firefox I exported the bookmarks to a file. On Blackbox I imported the same file into Firefox.
Isn't backup fun?

Health Care according to the Wall St Journal

Good editorial on malpractice here. And another good one on selling health insurance across state lines here.

If the law that allowed inter state sale of health insurance also specified that the insurance offered only had to comply with the law of the home state, then the state mandate problem would go away. Insurance companies only have to comply with the mandates of their home state. Some state in the union has fewer mandates and hence cheaper premiums than the rest. Companies based in that state will have a competitive advantage over companies based in high mandate states.

If we just fixed malpractice and interstate sale of insurance we would lower health care costs a lot. Certainly enough progress for one year.