Words of the Weasel Part 25

Impact, used as a verb. On NPR this morning "The tornado impacted Joplin Missouri". Proper English is "The tornado hit (or struck) Joplin Missouri".
Impact is a noun (the impact of a bullet) or a condition of teeth (the dentist extracted four impacted wisdom teeth.)
Bureaucrats love "impacted" because it sounds so benign. "The regulations impact business" sounds so much better than "The regulations hurt business."
I dislike people who say "impacted". I figure they are attempting to conceal something unpleasant from me. The common word for people like that is "liar".

It's still COLD

It's four below zero F this morning. Colder than yesterday. If I have four below up here, then it will be 8 below down in the valley. Fortunately the cars have gotten much better at starting in cold weather and my car is snug in my garage where it's always 20 degrees warmer than outside.

Federal Flood Insurance

Way back when private companies used to sell flood insurance. After loosing barrels of money, private companies stopping writing flood insurance and changed home owner's insurance to exclude flood damage. Floods are not insurable because they are predictable. Any place that flooded in the past is bound to flood again in the future. Since the hazard is predictable, only people in flood prone areas buy flood insurance. People with hilltop lots don't buy. This results in a situation where EVERY policy holder is going to make a claim. Nobody can afford that. And so no private company will write flood insurance.
This resulted in a hue and cry from waterfront voters for the government to do something. And so Uncle Sam offers flood insurance. And looses barrels of money doing so. Tax money paid by everybody is going to rebuild the property of the few.
Truly we ought to get Uncle out the the flood insurance business. Unfortunately we don't have the votes to do that.
What might work, is a "one-flood" policy. Once property suffers a serious flood, Uncle pays off and then refuses to renew the policy on that property for ever. The owners get paid once, but if they rebuild in the same flood prone place, they do it at their own risk. They ought to rebuild on higher ground so they won't need flood insurance.
Keep this up for long enough, and we won't be insuring flood prone construction and reconstruction.

It's COLD today

Thermometer read zero F this morning. It's 11 oclock and it still reads zero.

Taking down the Christmas Tree

Well, you gotta do it sooner or later. But taking it down is never as much fun as putting it up. Then there is the "which ornament goes in which box" dilemma. I've begun labeling each little box. Then there is a flimsy box problem. The ornament boxes are ultra cheapo with huge cellophane windows and they just sort of disintegrate sitting in the attic waiting for Christmas again. Egg cartons last longer. How do I know? Simple, a fair number of my boxless ornaments now live in old egg cartons, and have been living there for several seasons now.
Then the light people need to sharpen up. The damn things come with a 10 conductor cord thick enough to moor a cabin cruiser. Even though it's tastefully dyed green, it still looks humungous up on the tree. Sort of "Santa comes from PSNH" looking.
Then we have the bubble lights. My grandmother gave us a couple of bubble lights for Christmas back in the dawn of time. We kids loved them. Mother thought they were tacky and plastic and she made them disappear. Years later I see boxes of bubble lights in the store and buy a couple for old time's sake. Trouble is, the lights only bubble when they are straight up and down. The cheapo plastic clips on the sockets are mostly busted off, and this year the lights hung every which way and didn't bubble at all. Next year either no bubble lights or I make some kind of clips (twisted paperclip wire?) to hold them in place.

Snowmageddom

They put on a winter storm warning for midnight last night. Things sounded so scary that they cancelled a session of the state legislature in Concord. They predicted three to six inches. So far we got 3/4 of an inch and the snow has let up. The town snow plow went by once.
What they will do for a real snow storm?

Zapped another one

The January version of Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, (MWMSRT) helpfully downloaded by Windows Update, ran and detected a virus. MWMSRT called this fellow "Trojan:Dos/Alureon.E" which is probably Microsoft speak for "It's a Trojan Horse, it doesn't run under any flavor of Windows so we will call it a DOS virus and Alureon.E is it's name.
MWMSRT claimed to have winged it but not killed it dead. MWMSRT recommended I run a regulation anti-virus to get rid of it.
So I did. I have two anti virus programs and I ran them both. Then I reran MWMSRT to make sure Alureon.E was good and dead. No such luck. The slippery little rascal was still in my system.
Arrgh.
So I googled for him and turned up a lot of chit and chat. You have to be careful googling on viruses, cause all sorts of Internet slime will offer to fix it for you, just download their program. Avoid those.
There was no clear cut "how-to-kill" posting. There was a hint that Alureon.E hides out in a special 2 megabyte "disk partition".
So for Windows XP, open "Administrative Tools". On my machine "Start->Settings->ControlPanel" gets me there. On your machine it might be different.
Once inside Administrative Tools, click on "Computer Management". Inside Computer Management find "Storage" and under "Storage" click on "Disk Management".
Look at the "Volumes". There ought to be a big one with a name containing "C:" and perhaps second one with a name that corresponds to a disk drive that you recognize from Explorer.
Those are good guys.
The bad guy is a partition with no name and 2 megabyte size. That's where Alureon.E lurks.
Right click on him and delete him.
Presto, Alureon.E is toast and MWMSRT will run clean.