So how do you pronounce Buttigieg?

As in Mayor Peter Buttigieg just announced as running for president.  Seems like a nice young guy from what I have seen of him on the tube.  Me, I would pronounce his last name butty-gig from the spelling.  The TV newsies are pronouncing it Booty-judge which sounds better.  Poor guy must have taken a lot of flak over his name back in grade school.

Spring computer migration

I finally bought a new computer.  Trusty Desktop, a Compaq Presario SR 1750 NX, is ten years old, and is still running Windows XP.  My web browser and my anti virus and my TurboTax vendors all say they don't support XP any more.  It's time.  I found a used Dell Optiplex on the net at Amazon for $206 delivered.  Came with Win 10 Professional, the fast I5 processor, and acres and acres of RAM and disk space. Hardware is ten years faster than poor old Trusty Desktop.  The Dell keyboard has nice key feel.    Win 10 is so much slower than XP that the new machine is little faster than the old one.   Migration was sluggish.  My photos filled THREE DVD disks.  Thunderbird took most of the day to get working on the new machine.  The menu entry to point Thunderbird to your email file is deeply hidden and concealed beneath an obscure label.  And what little documentation Google found on the web is wrong. 

    I looked at my patch file from Win 10 laptop and put in most of them.  Some of them, mostly removing frill programs, were unnecessary on Win 10 Pro.  Most stuff is now working EXCEPT control C, control V. and Delete (strike out forward) doesn't work.  Web searching turned up a number of fixes, none of which worked.  Web fixes, re install keyboard driver and update keyboard drive didn't fix it.  I'm still working on it.  

Picking your college major

Everyone has to pick a college major, English or history or French or chemistry or so on and so forth.  Colleges usually ask you to commit to a major by the end of sophomore year. To do this important choice right, you have to have some idea as to what you are going do to make a living after graduation.  Except for the very lucky and the very few who are independently wealthy, or stand to inherit some real money, you gotta make a living.  You will spend much of your time, for the rest of your life, making your living.  Life will be better and happier if you like your career choice.  When we are little kids we all have ideas of what you want to be when we grow up, a fireman, a railroad engineer, a pilot, a nurse, a cowboy, etc.  By the time we get to college, a lot of us have no idea what we want to do for a living after graduation. 
   Get over it.  Do some research.  Start with friends and family.  Ask them what they do at the office.  Read up on the career.  Read some biographies, see if  what they did sounds interesting.  Pick a career that will be fun to do.  Temper the fun to do with some practicality,  being a Hollywood actor is good fun, but the competition is fierce and your chances of making it work are low. 
   After you have thought about your career, pick a major that makes you employable in that career field.  Colleges offer a lot of majors that are of no use what so ever in any field at all.  For example, gender studies, black studies, just about any kind of studies, sociology, art history, anthropology,  won't get you a job, anywhere.  Political science won't get you a job in business or industry, although it helps if you plan to go to law school, or into politics, or both.  All the STEM subjects  are good for employment. 
   College is expensive, you owe it to yourself to come out of college employable at something. 

NH Senate Ed Committee hearings 9 April

Tuesday, Ed Committee hearings.  We heard four bills, none of them very important in my view.  There was HB 689, a bill to set up a system of educational savings accounts for most, perhaps all students in New Hampshire.  The state would kick in $250 per kid.  This would be funded by a $100 per account tax on brokerage houses.  This is enough to drive most brokerage houses out of state.  Advocates claimed that kids with an educational savings account were seven times more likely to go to college than kids without.  Tied in with the savings account deal was a requirement to teach “”financial literacy” starting in SECOND grade.  I asked about that, when I did second grade we were still learning to add and subtract.  How do you teach balancing your checkbook, or discuss how interest hurts you on loans and helps you on savings (when the banks pay interest on savings, which few do today). 

Next was HB 489 setting up rules and procedures for children to change schools.  The system in HB 489 seemed unobjectionable.  I asked why we needed this bill this year.  Surely kids have been transferred over all the years the Republic has stood.  Why do we need to re write the rules now?  No good answer was forth coming.

And yet another fund creeps out of the woodwork.  There is a “Public School Infrastructure Fund”.   HB 357 would extend the life of this fund.  From the testimony, the money has mostly gone to hardening school buildings against school shooters. 

And another house keeping bill that should have been handled administratively.  Apparently the state collects as stores higher ed transcripts, in case the higher end institution goes out of business, graduates will still be able to get a couple of their transcript.  The state has been keeping the transcripts forever.  HB356 would let the state throw the transcripts away after 40 years.  We amended that to 50 years. 

  So fresh bills all heard, we went into executive session and declared previously heard bills HB 357 HB 171 HB 356 and HB 719 ought to pass. 

   I went to the afternoon senate commerce committee meeting and spoke in favor of HB 540, a deal to finance restarting the Balsams resort up in Dixville Notch.  The entire North Country is in favor on account of the jobs and the tourists involved.   After hearing all the testimony, Commerce voted it Ought To Pass 5-0 and put it on the Fast Track calendar, which means to bill is almost sure to pass the full senate. 

  And for my last trick of the day, I testified in favor of SB 138 over in the House.  This bill would grant degree granting authority to Signum University, a small new startup offering courses over the internet.  I have spoken with the Signum people, and they mean well, they are not a diploma mill. 

   It was snowing north of Concord.   I 93 was unplowed and slippery.  I spun out, did a 360 and wound up in the ditch.  Luck was with me, I didn’t hit anything, car was unbend, and I was able to pull out backwards onto the shoulder.  It got worse; snow was 3-4 inches deep at Plymouth. 

737 MAX, the engine swap that become a nightmare

The Boeing 737 is the plain vanilla single aisle airliner that flies most airline routes, the ordinary routes that don't, will never, generate enough traffic to fill up a bigger plane.  It's been in production for decades.  Under competitive pressure from Airbus, Boeing decided to do an engine swap on the trusty long serving 737.   Metallurgists have come up with better hot section metals over the years, the better metals allow the engine to run hotter, which gives better fuel mileage, as much as 10% better.   And, Boeing and the FAA promised that the re-engined 737 would fly just like the good old 737 and not require retraining pilots to fly the new aircraft.
   The new engines are good, and do deliver better fuel economy.  They are also bigger, so much bigger that they almost drag  on the runway.  Which means the new engines mount lower beneath the wings.  Which means you get a stronger nose up motion when the throttles are advanced.  Boeing, with FAA approval, decided to modify the autopilot to apply some nose down force using the trim tabs to make the 737 MAX fly like the good old 737.   And something went wrong, and two brand new 737 MAXs dove into the ground right after takeoff, killing all on board.   Aviation Week hasn't told us just what went wrong, but two smoking holes in the ground are enough to convince most of us that something is wrong. 

NPR talks about lowering drug prices

NPR did this piece a few days ago.  They described a number of complex deals that might or might not work.  They totally failed to talk about one simple act that would lower US drug prices a lot, right now, and it is 100% legal. 
   All we have to do is allow duty free import of drugs from any reasonable first world country, Canada, Britain, the EU, Japan, probably some others.  Drugs are cheaper overseas because the national health authorities are permitted to bargain over price.  The US medicare and medicaid are not allowed to bargain, by law they have to accept whatever price big pharma asks.  Result, a lot of drugs, many of them manufactured in the US, are a lot cheaper overseas, like half the US prices.  If we allowed import, we could take advantage of those lower prices here at home.
   FDA will cry and scream, but they don't get to vote.  They will claim that foreign drugs haven't been inspected, and their makers haven't been  harrassed by FDA.  Far as I am concerned, if the authorities in any reasonable first world country think the drugs are good enough for their own citizens, I think they are OK for US citizens as well.
   Big pharma would go into orbit.  but they don't get to vote.  They do spread a lot of money around in DC, and they would threaten the pols with a cutoff of  "campaign contributions/bribes".  The intelligent pol would vote his district, and with some support from the MSM, the districts would be in favor. 
   That NPR totally ignored this issue is a measure of either their ignorance, or big pharma has got to them.

Migrating Thunderbird Email to a new computer

I wanted to bring years of  Thunderbird email, addresses, mail folders, macros to sort incoming email in the proper folders, lotta stuff over to the new computer.  Thunderbird keeps all this stuff in “profiles”, disk files, stored in each users space.  This way each user of the computer can have his own email, address book and all that other stuff.  The executable Thunderbird code is kept in Program Files (86), but the mail and address data are kept in a folder name Thunderbird in Documents and Settings in XP renamed Users in Win 10.  The Thunderbird profiles are folders in the Thunderbird folder. Along with a key file named profiles.ini.  Profiles.ini has a pointer to the profile that Thunderbird has been using.  There may be more than one profile, but the one you want to move to the new computer is the one Thunderbird is using at the minute.  The other profiles are older ones, or ones copied in from other computers, or just plain obfusticators.  No matter, bring them all over to the new computer.  I assume you understand how to move files from computer to computer using flash drives or CDs or DVDs or network connections.  Assume the new computer is running Win 10.  Put the Thunderbird folder in the users/your name/appdata/roaming/ directory on Win 10.  Copy the entire Thunderbird directory. 

   Now you need to get the Thunderbird code, the executable, onto the new computer.  I would just download the whole thing from the Mozilla website (Google will find it for you).   That way you get the latest code.  If you are migrating off something really ancient like Win XP, you want the latest version, which they probably have not been making available to ancient OS’s.   Run the new Thunderbird.  It will pop you to a new accounts page.  Cancel that.  Click on the nameless “Bars” button to get to the Thunderbird functions.  Click on Help.  Click on Trouble Shooting.   This displays a bunch of obscure data about Thunderbird.  Go to “Profile Folder”.  Clicking on “Open Folder” opens a window with explorer.  Navigate to the Thunderbird folder on the new machine’s hard drive, the folder that contains profiles.ini.  This points Thunderbird to your profile.  Then exit Thunderbird.  Count to ten.  Start up Thunderbird again.  Navigate  Help/Trouble Shooting Info like you did before.  Check “profiles” the very last entry.  Click on “about: profiles” and you ought to see Profile Home pointing to the Thunderbird folder you brought over from the old machine. 

This ought to be all you have to do to get Thunderbird to see your old email, your email addresses and start working like it always did.