Change of Blog Template.

Youngest son thought the default page color was boring and made my blog look moldy.  So I just changed it. 

Cyberwarfare

Op Ed in today's Wall St Journal calling for new federal laws to harden up cybersecurity.  Author is a Texas Republican congressman on the Homeland Security Committee.  He talks about the risks, which are real.  Then he wants new laws.  Just what he wants to make law is less clear.  He mentions "necessary liability protections" and "streamlining processes" which don't mean much to me.  I am suspicious of "necessary liability protection".  Fear of tort lawyers suing the company down to its socks is a good motivator to tighten up security. 
   In the real world what cyber security means is the computer administrators all across the private and public sectors tightening up on passwords, disallowing login from the public internet, and paying real bucks to buy private lines to remote sites rather than passing everything over the wide open public internet.
  It means Microsoft has to close the gaping holes in Windows security.  Right now you can plug a CD or a flashdrive into a Windows computer and Windows will automatically and secretly load and execute what ever malware is on that media.  This is how the hard hitting Stuxnet worm was loaded onto Iranian computers.  Flash drives with Stuxnet in them were scattered about the parking lot and sharp eyed employees walking from their cars picked them up and took them into work.  There are dozens of other holes in Windows, it's like Swiss cheese.  Any high school kid can break into Windows  without working up a sweat. 

Innumeracy on the Factor

I'm watching Bill O'Reilly on the Factor last night.  He has some blonde Hollywood woman on who is selling "Alternate Energy".  O'Reilly allows that he has a house on Long Island that needs to be heated.  The Alternate Energy Blonde then launched into a long spiel about how to heat with alcohol.  She is sincere, makes you want to run out and pour a fifth of Old Crow into the furnace. 
  But,  O'Reilly never asks her how much alcohol costs.  Furnace oil costs me $4 a gallon.  Whiskey costs  me $20 a gallon at the State Store.  Granted industrial alcohol for fuel is probably less, but is it cheaper than furnace oil? 
  Alternate energy is like alternate medicine.  Quackery.

Hide the menus. Fixing My Deskjet

So one fine day, I click on "print" to get hardcopy of a spread sheet.  The D4260 whirs and thrashes and out comes a nearly blank sheet of page.  One a single number prints, everything else is blank.  I futz around with Excel's format menu, thinking the maybe the text color had been changed to white-on-white or something. Finally I change the text color to blue, and lo and behold, it prints. 
  Ah, the black ink cartridge must have run out.  So, next trip to Wally Mart, I buy an new one.  Only the new one doesn't match the number on the old one exactly.  It's close and I think it ought to work, so I pay $19 for it. 
  Once back home I am happy to find the new cartridge clips right into the printer, so far so good.  I haven't totally wasted $19 on a cartridge that won't fit.  Then I think I might print a test page, just to make sure the new black ink cartridge works. 
  Used to be, you clicked on Start, Settings, Printer and Faxes, and obtained a list of all the printers and pseudo printers on your machine.  And, there was a check box to print a test page for each device. 
  Not any longer.  You have to right click on the printer, select "Printer Preferences" and then "Features" and then "Printer Services" and then "Device Services" to get to a menu offering to print a test page.  It takes a while to find my way this deep into the bowels of HP's user friendliness.  I hit "Test Page".  The printer whirres and thrashes and I get a test page that is all in color.  No black. 
   This has gotta mean that the new black cartridge ain't working.  Does it not?  I remove the cartridge to make sure I have removed the factory shipping seal over the ink holes.  No joy, the seal has been removed and there is even a little wet ink to blacken my finger.
  I decide not to trust the HP test page and open up Word for Windows and print a short document.  That works.  Hurrah. 
  Sometimes I get nostalgic for the good old Centronics 101 dot matrix printers. 

Gas Tax Hike, WMUR

WMUR had a couple of gas taxers on.  They want a $0.15 cent a gallon hike in the state gasoline tax,  The excuse given is that our roads and bridges are all falling down and in need of money.  The real reason is they want the money to finish widening I93 south of Manchester.  That project is pretty much at a stand still. 
  But we had money to replace a tiny little bridge on Three Mile Hill over the Gale River, to replace an elegant steel truss bridge over the Ammonusuc out by Lahout's with a boring  highway style I beam bridge, and we were able to repave US 302, I-93, and NH Rt 18.  All of this work in just in the last couple of seasons.  Far as I can see our roads and bridges are in decent shape up here.  Far better shape than anything around New York City.  
   Another downside, all the revenue dedicated to the highway fund, whether it needs it or not.  Give 'em money and they will spend it.  There is always something you can do.   We would save money if the highway department had to come to the legislature and justify each project they want to do.  Give our legislature a chance to veto some of the real pork projects. 
Everyone wants earmarked money, money they can count on getting, the schools, the highway, the police, all of 'em want guaranteed money that they don't have to justify to the legislature, the taxpayers, and the press. I don't see why they should get it.

Beat the Press

David Gregory was on air, harassing John Bohner about the sequester.  The usual things were said.   What Bohner did not say is sorta interesting.  Bohner did not say that the sequester was small and he did not say that the sequester was all about fake cuts, after sequester the US government will spend more than it spent last year.  In short, the sequester is about chicken feed.
   So John Bohner is perfectly happy to have a not-very-important issue taking up air time and the limited attention span of TV newsies.  Does this mean Bohner thinks he "won" on the sequester? 

Dr. Suess revival

Saturday Wall St Journal, Best selling hard cover fiction.  We have Green Eggs and Ham, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish, Blue Fish, The Cat in the Hat, Fox in Sox, Dr .Suess's ABC, and Hop on Pop. These took places 2,3,5,7,8,10.   The good doctor took 6 out of 10 spots this weekend.  All of these are old favorites that I remember reading aloud to my children back in the day.  Dunno what this means in the larger scheme of things.  AS you might guess, no Dr. Suess books made in the Fiction E-books list.  Which figures, it's hard to imagine reading Dr. Suess to small children off a Kindle.