Phishing nearly caught me

So I'm doing a little leisurely Sunday web surfing.  I leave the machine to make a cup of hot chocolate.  When I get back, I have a new window open, one I've never seen before.  Looks official.  And it says there is an emergency browser update, hot off the presses, and I ought to click right here to install the update.  It will only take a few seconds. 
  I nearly clicked.  Which probably would have been a big mistake. 
  But I hesitated, and thought.  This isn't the way Firefox updates.  They never do a full screen window, their update routine looks different.  In fact, I just updated Firefox to version 27.0.1  a couple of days ago.  And it didn't look anything like this.  So, I closed the window, closed Firefox.
   Restarting Firefox, I clicked on the "check for updates" button inside Firefox, and lo and behold, Firefox reports himself all up to date.  So much for emergency browser updates.
   The scary part is, that update browser window managed to force itself onto my PC with no help from me.  That's kinda unusual.  Then it wanted me to click on a button.  I wonder why.  Here is a hostile website, powerful enough to move into my computer all by itself.  Anything that powerful can do pretty much anything it pleases.  Why does it want to get a mouse click from me? 

Scoring presidents on executive order count.

Doing so reveals true ignorance, or rabid partisan ship on behalf of the newsie.   There are plenty of legitimate reasons to issue executive orders.  Some presidents were more administratively minded and liked to have policy set down in writing.  Others accomplished their jobs in a more informal manner, face to face or over the telephone. 
   The sticking point is executive orders that address matters assigned to Congress or the courts by the Constitution.  For instance Article I Section 8 says that Congress shall have the power to establish a uniform rule of Naturalization thruout the United States.   When Obama used an executive order to establish the "dream act" he is issuing an executive order that should be rights be an Act of Congress.  Especially as the "dream act" had failed to pass Congress only a few months before. 
   Obama has been able to get away with this one for two reasons.  First nobody has standing to sue him over it, and second, many people think the "dream act" is a good idea.
   It's not the number of executive orders, but the content of them. 

National Ignition Facility claims break even hydrogen fusion

National Ignition Facility is the laser fusion project.  Zap a hydrogen or deuterium droplet with very powerful lasers and maybe it will fuse.  Article here.  They are only claiming laboratory break even, where laser energy actually delivered to the fuel droplet is counted.  Practical breakeven is where fusion energy is enough to power all the equipment, lasers, magnets, whatever.  Needless to say, prectical breakeven is a higher bar than laboratory breakeven.
  However this is the first time anyone has claimed to reach laboratory breakeven. 
  It's the first step toward realizing the Mr. Fusion device from Back to the Future.  Long way still to go, but we seem to have accomplished that first step. 
  Much druther have Mr. Fusion than a clean burning wood stove.

How DO you make a wood stove burn cleaner?

Wood fires, pretty simple tech, you pile some logs up and watch 'em burn.  Dry hardwood burns a little cleaner than softwood, but other than that, what's to do?  And a wood stove is just a wood fire in a fire proof iron box.  Ben Franklin invented them.  So they have been around a long time.  Not much you can do to change the amount of smoke and soot. 
   Anyhow, our ever vigilant EPA thinks regulations can make wood burn cleaner.  Stove makers have to submit their stoves to EPA labs for testing, at their expense.  In January the EPA decided to lower the limits on soot emissions.  They claim that wood smoke and soot is a terrible health hazard, nearly as bad as second hand cigarette smoke.  By making it impossible to make a compliant wood stove they will save the country untold dollars in medical costs.   Right.  Compared to Ben Franklin's time, when everyone heated with wood,  wood smoke is just not a problem in the 21st century. 
   If you heat with wood, you have a problem.  More people heat with wood than heat with furnace oil.  12% of American homes  heat with wood, only 7% heat with oil.  Since you won't be able to buy a stove, you will have to make one.  An old oil drum makes a nice warm stove.
   And then the greenie controlled states are passing laws forbidding the sale of home with "non compliant" woodstoves.  You have to take the stove out and scrap it to make the sale.  Practically no woodstoves have passed the tighter EPA soot limits. 
   If you regulate it they will come....
  

Who knew the Obamacare website wasn't working?

Fox News Five spent some time debating this one last night.  "Of course Obama knew."  "Sibelius certainly knew." "Somebody knew, why didn't they  tell him?"  
   From the sounds of it, nobody on the Five has the slightest idea how software projects work.  Only the techies, programmers and engineers actually on the project have any idea of how things are going.  And, in some cases, nobody on the job has the slightest idea what's going on.   On a big job, you have to divvy up the coding to a large number of programmers.  All of whom settle down at their keyboards and furiously punch in code.  Ask one of these guys how he is doing and he will say "Great".  You don't really know anything until you put some (or all) of these guy's code together and test the whole system.  This doesn't happen until pretty late in the job.  And, unless there is a good project engineer who insists on serious testing, it won't happen.  Nobody likes testing, it's hard, it's dull, and it shows up flaws in YOUR code, and nobody likes that.  If the project engineer doesn't push testing, it doesn't happen.  In that case, the customer serves as beta tester, and nobody knows how broke the system is until they release it.
   There was no prime contractor in charge of the whole Obamacare project.  They divvied up the work inside HHS and let contracts to companies them selves.  I seriously doubt that any GS type at HHS knows squat about software projects.  If there was a project engineer, he has laid really low since SHTF.  It's most likely that nobody at HHS had a clue as to where the project really was. 
   And the suits anywhere have a problem knowing what's happening.  Only the best of project engineers has much of a handle on his project.  If a suit tries the "management by wandering around" bit, and talks to the guys on the project, he will find a couple of doom sayers, a couple of polyanna's, a bunch of "duhs" and he won't be able to identify the few techies on the job who actually know what's happening.  You have to be a techie yourself to tell one from the other. 
   It is entirely plausible that nobody at HHS knew what was going down.  In that case, Obama wouldn't have known much either. 

Cannon Mt Ski Weather

We had about an inch of snow Monday night.  It stayed good and cold all week.  
It started to snow yesterday around noon.  It snowed all night.  It's still snowing.  I have 9 inches on my deck right now, it's nice medium powder.  Skiing should be outstanding this weekend.

Whither the wired phone?

It's clearly on the way out.  I just bought a new one.  My phone service had been getting noisy and staticy with drop outs.  My children all insisted their phones were fine, it must be Dad's phone going bad. Phone in question was an AT&T (made in China) Trimline Princess model, maybe 7 years old.  Coil cord was looking a little frayed, but other wise it looked OK.  But, I took a trip to Staples in Littleton looking for a new plain old telephone.  I used to get phones at Radio Shack, but the Littleton Radio Shack died four years ago.       Staples did not have any standard desk phones anymore, you know, the ones with just 12 buttons to dial with, and the handset plunks down on top of, and crosswise to the bottom unit.  Like Western Electric used to make back in the good old days. Staples did have several humungous "office" phones, a zillion buttons, four lines, takes up your whole desk.  They had some more Princess phones, and just one desk phone.  It was an all electronic, speed dial, push button, speaker, caller ID, AT&T model CL2909, made in China, phone, in white, for a mere $32.  It was the only real desk phone in the store.  All the rest were either humungous, or radio phones, or tiny little phones that won't stay put on your desk.  So, if you have some phones around the house getting old and flaky, now would be a good time to replace them, while you still can. 
   All electronic wonder phone comes with a 43 page instruction manual, needs four AA  batteries, has a three line LCD display that includes a clock, a calendar, and a directory.   It wanted to be programmed for language, area code[s], clock set, calendar set, and some other stuff.  I managed to get thru all this with numerous retries.  A day later I find the clever little clock doesn't keep very good time.  It looses three minutes a day, which is pretty bad for an electronic clock   I have a 100 year old wind up pendulum mantle clock that keeps better time than that.  After a couple of tries I managed to program a couple of speed dial buttons.  And they worked.  I looked at the "directory" feature and decided it just wasn't worth it.  You have to enter the phone number, (not too bad) and then enter the name, using the number keys.  That was so complicated that I decided not to bother.  My desk computer holds my phone numbers anyhow.  The speaker button not only turns on the speaker (Living alone, I really need a speaker phone) but lifts the hook switch and leaves it lifted, which is equivalent to leaving the phone off hook.  Shortly you will hear that automatic voice from the phone company prompting you to put the phone back on the hook.  Useful feature that is.