The Cat Listener

Cats are not pets. In actuality cats run the house. Humans are placed under some kind of spell that causes them to feed the cat, pet the cat, let the cat in, let the cat out, etc etc.
Cats say many things. The attentive human will understand most of them. Cat sayings:

Meow (plain meow): I want attention.
Meow (with some snarl to it): Don't do that.
Purr: I am happy and contented.
Tail lash: I am loosing my temper, beware
Tail Twitch: Something ain't right.
Siren Howl: Get off the property, Right Now
Mewrrp (soft): Pet me.
Hiss: Watch out you. I am planning violence

"Republicans" who voted AGAINST Right to Work

Right here on Granite Grok

http://granitegrok.com/blog/2011/11/republican_defectors.html#more

I'm sorry to see John Tholl's name on this dishonorable list. We supported him. I went up and poll watched for him one frozen February day.

Cutting the Defense Budget

Now that the super committee has failed to do squat, the Defense Dept is facing up to some deep budget cuts. Aviation Week published a list of big defense projects that might be canceled to save money

1. Joint Strike Fighter, F35. They are outrageously expensive and killing the program would save really big bucks, more than any other program. Cancellation would piss off a lot of allies who have ordered the fighter and who would now have to scramble to find something to replace it with. A compromise would be to kill the VTOL version which is having technical troubles, and proceed with the standard version.

2. V-22 Osprey. This is in production and has entered squadron service with the Marines. It' been in "development" for nearly 20 years. Trouble is, ordinary helicopters, Chinook, Blackhawk and such, can perform the V-22 mission. And they cost less.

3. Next Generation bomber. The Air Force wants a B-52 replacement, without one, the nuclear deterrent mission goes to the ICBM's sitting in silos. Last time the Air Force went for a next gen bomber it got the B-2 stealth flying wing; a cool plane but so expensive that they could only afford 20 of them.

4. Ground based Midcourse Defense. A legacy ICBM based missile defense system that I never heard of before.

5. Ground vehicles (Tanks, Hummers, MRAPS, Bradley's) What exactly do the Army and Marines need after Afghanistan and Iraq?

6. Ford class aircraft carriers. These are super carriers and super expensive.

7. C-27 Light transport. This is a cargo plane that looks like a miniature C-130 with only two engines. Trouble is, the good old C-130 can do every thing the baby C-27 can do; plus carry more stuff farther.

8. Helicopter modernization. A never ending black hole for money. You can spend the price of a new helicopter on add-on gadgets, bigger engines, and "stuff". In actual fact the existing helicopters are flying missions without expensive modernization.

9. DDG-51/DDG1000 new Navy destroyers. As usual, new Navy warships cost more than existing ones.

10. Littoral Combat Ship. I think "littoral combat" means shore bombardment. Do we want to buy warships so specialized that they can only handle a single mission? Warships are so expensive that I expect them to be able to handle more than one mission. Like deep sea escort, raids on enemy oil platforms, and anti submarine work. Put a couple of decent sized guns on existing warships and they could do shore bombardment. A lot of modern destroyers only have a single three inch popgun.

The real defense funding issue. Should we not have more infantry, so the poor infantry men don't have to serve back-to-back tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and other nasty places?

Right to Work vote.

The email lists were buzzing. I received nearly a dozen invitations to go down to Concord and demonstrate in favor of the Right to Work law (HB 474). It was hinted, but no promises were made, that it would be voted upon today. The house speaker, Bill O'Brien, has been biding his time, hoping to scare up a few more votes. But time is running out, and right-to-work will be dead at the end of this session, with out a vote, so maybe it's time.
Any how I passed the invitations along on the up country email list, and set the alarm for 6:45. I set off for Concord thru early morning ground fog and light rain. I parked in the big shopping center, the one with Market Basket, the state Liquor Store, and Burlington Coat Factory. Our side had coffee and muffins and bright green T-shirts in the capitol cafeteria. I encountered a few stalwart north country types, Omer and Henry Ahearn, and Russ Cumbee. At nine o'clock we all file into the capitol visitors gallery. I was pleased to see we had as many of our people in green T-shirts as there were union guys in red T-shirts. Apparently the email gets around.
Business opened with CACR 14, a constitutional amendment having something to do with schools. I'd heard of it, but cannot remember whether it continued Court supervision of schools, or ended it. CACR 14 used up an hour before it was voted down and killed for the rest of this legislative session.
Then Rick Perry addressed the legislature. Perry laid into Wall St and Washington, accusing both parties of engaging in corrupt crony capitalism. Looks like it could be a grim year for Wall Streeters. The union guys were rude enough to boo Perry.
After Rick ran down, Huntsman popped up and spoke as well. Huntsman sounded more mature and less "hot button issue" than Perry.
Finally we moved onto the main event, HB 474, the right to work law. Both sides put up some speakers, and by noontime, the speaker called for a roll call vote (actually a push button vote recorded by computer). In New Hampshire, the push button vote lasts for a mere 30 seconds, unlike the US Congress which can let 25 minutes go by on a push button vote. In New Hampshire the legislators have to stay in their seats and make up their minds.
Too bad, when the red LED stopped blinking, the vote was 240 in favor to 139 against. Since this was a veto over ride vote, we needed two thirds (253 votes) to override Lynch's veto. Close but no cigar.
Too bad. Kiss that automobile assembly plant goodby. Apparently the campaign donations and votes of a mere 9% of the New Hampshire workforce are enough override the needs of the 91% of our workforce who are not in a union. Democracy in action.

Return to Harvard Square

I love Harvard Sq. I've been going there all my life. I visited it again yesterday, after an absence of a year, due to living in upcountry New Hampshire. Drove down on I-93. New Hampshire is widening I-93, making that four lane strip between Manchester and Mass, into 6 lanes. They are building the new lanes in isolated bits and pieces, so that they won't do us motorists any good until all the road is widened, in maybe four to five years. Smarter would be to start the widening at one end and build methodically toward the other end. That way as sections are finished they can be placed into service.
Harvard Square is still there, but it saddens me to think of all the great places that are no longer there. Ferranti-Deggi, that great camera store, where once upon a time I acquired a Kodak Retina SLR is gone. The Sunflower, with it's magnificent copper topped bar down stairs, got turned into a Pizzarria Uno. The Crate and Barrel in the three story concrete building out Brattle St, is now a ladies clothing store. The great book store that used to be across the street from it is gone. Wordsworth books in the basement of that strange round brick building on Brattle Sq is gone and the space is "For Rent". Abercromby and Fitch wiped out The Tasty and the Wurst House. Now Abercromby is gone and the space has a bank and a Starbucks. Boring.
The Starr bookstore in the Harvard Crimson building is gone. Brine's Sporting goods is gone.
There are a few survivors from the old days. The Million Year Picnic is still there and so is Charlie's Kitchen.
After three hours of Christmas shopping all I found were some comic books (aka graphic novels) for daughter, and a used Andre Norton paperback for myself.
Pretty soon it won't be worth going to the Square at all.

Lack of skilled workers says WSJ

Front page piece on the terrible troubles finding skilled workers, welders, heavy equipment mechanics, repair technicians, network installers. To read the piece you would think the entire world was devoid of skilled workers.
Sorry about that. Those are the workers companies are failing to train. Every company needing highly skilled workers has a bunch of entry level guys on the payroll who would do just about anything to get some training on the job. If the company needs skilled workers, it ought to be training up it's unskilled workers.
Companies bitch that after training someone, the newly trained worker then leaves to take a job with some other company. Tough. Maybe after training someone, you ought to pay him enough to keep him around.

I got infected. System Fix is a PITA

I paid my Bill Gates tax today. A virus drove right in thru Window's wide open barn door and set up shop on Blackbox, my Compaq desktop. This one turned the screen black and issued an alarming series of messages indicating hard drive failure, RAM failure, file system meltdown, and urged me to download a "fix" program. It turned off TaskMgr, and hide all my files.
I was able to use the Start menu's run option to start up Firefox and go out to www.BleepingComputer.com. Wonder of wonders, good old Bleeping Computer had a fix for this baby. I printed out seven pages of detailed instructions for killing this sucker off. Too bad the instructions only worked halfway.
Step 1 is to download and run a program (rkill.com) to kill the active virus out of memory. While running, this virus keeps throwing up whole bookcases of scary error messages that sit on top and make in difficult to run anything else, cause the damn error messages (all false) block your view of the screen. Rkill reported the filenames of the two programs it kills.
You ain't done yet, Rkill just zaps the virus out of memory. The sucker is still alive on disc and will load and execute next time you boot. What you should do as soon as rkill finishes, is use Windows Explorer to zap the two filenames rkill reports, clean off your disk.
Bleeping Computer's seven pages of kill instructions don't mention this. They direct you to download and run antivirus "Malwarebytes". This baby spends 2 hours scanning your disc for bad stuff, finds a few, but doesn't find the damn virus.
So reboot and the "System Fix" virus comes right back to life. Repeat the rkill run to zap it, and then use Windows Explorer to delete all the files and Regedit to zap all the keys the virus planted in the Registry. This works.
Total virus zap time, 6 hours.
Thanks Bill, so glad you gave us WindowsVirusMagnet XP.