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. 

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.