Rogue One 2016

There is talk about yet another Star Wars flick coming out for Christmas.  So I thought I might re watch the last batch of them, the later ones after the three "revival" ones of some years ago.  Started with Rogue One.  I had the DVD.  I saw this one live in theater, with my daughter, back in 2016 when it came out.  Medium speed for a Star Wars movie.
   No names.  Watched the whole thing and when the credits finally rolled, I could not think of any character's stage name.  Not like the good old days when names like Leia, Skywalker, Obi-wan, Vader, and Han Solo were on everyone's lips.  Major problem is no character ever addresses another one by name.  Secondary problem, junior sound men who aren't very good at their jobs and the dialog is often inaudible.  Good sound requires good microphone placement, good mikes, and actors who don't mumble their lines.  And good sound mixing.  They must mute the score and the sound effects when dialog is happening.  Anyhow, the sound in Rogue One was mediocre to poor.
   As bad as the soundtrack was , the camera man was worse.  It was 2016 and the cult of the unlit scene was raging thru Hollywood.   A good third, maybe a half, of the scenes were dark, so dark I could could recognize who was in the scene.  Just plain annoying. 
   And the writers missed a few good ideas.  Opening scene where slimy Imperial Count whats-his-face, dressed in white, swoops in to arrest the father, a high powered scientist involved in Death Star development, who has fled the project and is living on a remote farm with wife and young child.  Didn't get his name either.   If the old man is such a hot shot scientist, he should have brought some wonder weapon into play and vaporized Count whats-his-face, rather than submitting to arrest.
   Young chick protagonist acts a pretty good part.  Didn't catch her name either.  Handsome guy is OK but his acting is no better than ordinary.  The writers left out a scene that I would have enjoyed, a scene were the two of them get a chance for a quiet talk, uninterrupted by bad guys with guns,  where we hear what she thinks of him, and vice versa. 
   The was an A movie, huge budget, great box office.  But re watching it makes me understand why Hollywood is dying. 

75 miles of Mueller

Yesterday (Thursday, Mueller report release day)  I set out for Concord.  Turned on the car radio.  NPR talked about Mueller and his report, steady, all the way down, some 75 miles.  I'm tired of Mueller.  Surely something important has happened somewhere in the world?  All we get is Mueller talk.  The newsies love the Mueller story, it's easy to cover, since little has happened.  All the newsies have to do is sit down at the keyboard and pontificate.  That's easier than getting out of the office and talking to real live people.
  I hear the released report, after strikeouts, is still 450 pages.  I don't have the energy, or the interest, to plow thru 450 pages of legal gobble-de-gook.  It would be nice if some trustworthy newsie would do a nice evenhanded summary.  Trouble is, about the only newsies that I see as trustworthy are Brett Bair and Britt Hume.  Somehow I don't think either of them will take on the read-and-report-Mueller job.  Too tedious.  

NH Senate doings.

Senate session 18 April.  Started off with the Fast Track (consent) calendar.  18 bills, including HB 540 which sets up a complex deal to finance the Balsam project.  We pulled HB 369 off the Fast Track.  It allowed HHS workers access to the prescription drug monitoring program.  We felt it was a big privacy violation.  NH keeps a list of people obtaining opioid prescriptions largely so that doctors can check to see how many opioid prescriptions a patient has before writing a new prescription.  Needless to say, opioid prescriptions are something of a black mark with employers and others, so we ought to keep this information confidential.  Allowing HHS people access to it doesn’t help the patients, and may well hurt them. Five of the Fast Track bills were to set up more study commissions.  And then a quick voice vote passed all 17 bills left on the Fast Track.   

   Then we ran thru the 14 bills on the regular calendar.  Passed them all on voice votes.  Only bills of interest were HB365 which raised the amount of power a net metering generator can get paid for to 5 megawatts, up from 1 megawatt.  And HB 572 proclaiming second Saturday in June as Pollyanna recognition day.  Very important bill, trust me on this, cause Pollyanna was written by a Littleton author, and we put up a Pollyanna statue in front of the Littleton public library. 

 After all this heavy lifting we finished up and adjourned by 11:30. 

  

Fixing Win 10 shutdown failures

Fix shutdown failure.  15 Apr 2019

This problem has been with my laptop, Flatbeast, since a Windows update a year ago.  Flatbeast would not shut down all the way in software.  Right click on the Windows icon,( lower right hand corner of screen) select  "Shut Down or Sign Out"  and then select "Shut down" and Win 10 would tell you he was shutting down and the screen would go dark.  But the LED in the power button would stay on.  You could not restart with the power button.  Only way to get the machine running again was to hold the power button down for the count to 9, and wait for the LED to go out. 

Fix.  Turn off "fast startup".  Here is how.  Go to control panel.  Select System and Security.  Select Power options.    Select "Choose what the power button does".  Select "Change settings that are currently unavailable.  Uncheck "Turn on fast startup"  .

Finish up by clicking on "Save Settings".  Done.  Now clicking on shut down makes Win 10 really shut down.  Another Micro$oft "feature" fixed.

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.