Yet More Presidential Leadership

And Obama wants to hike the minimum wage.  What a great idea.  Would you rather have $10 a hour or unemployment?
   Minimum wage workers are the entry level, the summer worker, the less than diligent, the not very employable.  They are hanging onto their jobs because the little they produce brings in a little more money to the business than their pay and benefits cost the business.  
   Raise the pay and suddenly these workers cost more than they bring in.  And they get laid off. 

Don't get cocky Dept

Going into the Wisconsin recall election, all the polls predicted "Too close to call".   Instead, Scott Walker, the Republicans and the Tea Party scored a 6 to 7% victory,  somewhere between really decent and land slide. 
Right now the national polls call the Obama-Romney race "Too close to call".  Suppose those polls work out like the Wisconsin polls? In that case Romney gets a solid win. 
  Save this warm thought.  But don't count on it.  This is the year to work really really hard on beating Obama.  Any slacking off and he might win.

Innumeracy on NPR

The clock radio came on at the usual time this morning with news that Scott Walker had won in Wisconsin.  That's a good thing, I have been hoping that would happen.
But.  I listened to the same news item repeated three times.  They never did gave the vote totals.   That would require dealing with numbers, something that strikes terror into the hearts of journalism majors.  Part of the story is how much did the winner win by.  Was it a skin of the teeth squeaker, a decent margin, or a landslide?
   This was an important election, said by many to foreshadow outcome of the November presidential election.  Was it just a fear of numbers or was it a bunch of democratic NPR newsies so unhappy about a Republican victory that they decided to conceal an important part of the story?
   Follow up.  I never did heard the vote count on the radio, but the Manchester Union-Leader gave the margin of victory as 6%, which is a solid win.  Not a landslide, but decent.

Is it a typo or a ripoff?

Flemington NJ.  Nice place, I've driven thru it quite a few times on my way to Pennsylvania.  At Hunterdon Medical Center in Flemington they are working on reducing hospital caused infections.  They are into housekeeping, scrub everything down to kill off lurking bacteria.  They have a fancy new scanner that can detect  bacteria on doorknobs, bed railings, tray tables, water faucets etc.  They are issuing stronger cleaners and disinfectants, trying to kill nasty bugs like Clostridium difficile and MSRA. 
  Not a bad plan.  Better to kill 'em off with Clorox on the mop than with antibiotics inside patients.
  Then we get to the "hard-to-clean" stuff like computer keyboards.  According to the Wall St. Journal article, Hunterdon is paying $15,000 EACH for washable computer keyboard.
   Wow.  $15,000 for a KEYBOARD!
   Google tells me I can get a washable computer keyboard for $19.99. 
   Either the WSJ has a typo or Hunterdon is getting ripped off big time.

Presidential Leadership

The newsies all agree that we need more of it.  Today we got some.  With the economy well and truly trashed, Europe about to collapse, China entering a recession, the Middle East in chaos, the US deficit out of control, we are getting some presidential leadership.  Obama is leading the charge to pass the "Paycheck Fairness Act", a law requiring equal pay for equal work for women.
    It's a worthy cause I suppose.  But is this what the country needs this year?   Let's hear it for leadership.

What would you say?

High school dropouts.  You have a kid, 16 or 17, wants to drop out of high school.  He has a decent job lined up, construction, or building trades, or factory work or driving a truck. Something with a better future than McDonalds.   He isn't much of an academic, doesn't get into book learning much. 
   Do you say OK?  Or do you insist that he/she sit thru another year or two in class to get a high school diploma? 

Keeping score as you tweak Windows for speed

Windows has many faults.  It's a virus magnet, it's too plump, its flaky and it's slow.  We poor Redmond victims can't do much about the first three items, but we can do something about the the last one.  You can make Windows somewhat less sluggish.  It can be hard to tell if your tweaks are helping or hurting.  You can keep score with  Windows Task Manager. 
    Task Manager is easy to start.  Just hit control-alt-delete and Task Manager will open his window.  He has five tabs, Applications, Processes,Performance and Networking. 
   Applications shows what "real" programs you have running.  A "real" program is one you started with a mouse click, which displays a screen window and has code taking up RAM and CPU run time.  About all the Application window is good for is shutting down applications (End Task in Winspeak)  that have frozen up and no longer respond to mouse or keyboard.
   Processes is a more interesting tab for the tweaker.  Process is Winspeak for any program that takes up RAM and needs CPU time.  All sorts of things take up RAM and CPU time but don't show a screen window.  My Blackbox has 26 processes burdening the hardware.  When he was new from the store he had nearly 50.  The only good process is a dead process.  Any tweaks you can do to shut off unneeded processes will make your machine run faster.  Most processes are actually part of Windows and you can't do anything about them. All the Applications running in the Application Window will also show in the process window.  The code part counts as a (sometimes more than one) process.  Along with the process name, you want to see how much memory each process is using, how much CPU time it uses and how many I/O writes (disk writes) it is doing. 
If these numbers don't show in the process window, click on "View" on the taskbar and then "Select  Columns".  Put a check mark on the properties (there are dozens of properties) that you want to see.   The organized Windows tweaker will keep notes.  Note down the number of processes, and keep track of it. Fewer is better.
  Process window will show any virus you may be blessed with.  As of this writing, anything running will always show up in the process window.  The trick is to identify the virus amid the blizzard of  ordinary processes.  Especially as many virus take the name of perfectly legitimate parts of Windows. 
   The Performance tab  gives score on memory usage.  Physical Memory  Total, is all the real RAM on your system.  Available is what you think it is.  System Cache is used as a disc cache.  Windows keeps recently accessed disk data in the cache on the idea that it might be needed again soon.  It saves a time consuming disk access each the cache hits.  When RAM runs low, windows can reduce the size of cache to make more memory available.  Kernel Memory Total is RAM taken for Windows use and cannot be used by programs.  Any tweak that reduces Kernel Memory Total makes more RAM available to your programs.