Musings...

Not exactly a blog or diary -- I'm not going to promise to write something every day, or even frequently. But, when something strikes my mind, I might put something in here. The newest entries will be at the top.

Note:  I generally only write here when I have something lengthy to say.  Brief comments tend to get posted to my Facebook status.


2013-09-14: Some SASSy Commentary

It's been 9 months since I posted something in this section. As I wrote above, brief postings tend to go onto Facebook rather than here. As I wrote below, I'm still not much of a fan of Windows 8, although Classic Shell (see below) makes the experience tolerable. The "improvements" being reported in the forthcoming Windows 8.1 are somewhat underwhelming, too. My four-year-old main computer with Windows 7 is still running like a champ, so I'll probably be sticking with it for a while. It may be time to start thinking about replacing my three-and-a-half-year-old main calling laptop, though...

I've been doing more website work of late. Bob Elling asked me to put together a website for Riverboat Records, so I've been gaining experience with PayPal integration, PHP, MySQL database integration, and a little JavaScript. I then took that experience and applied it to the SDCANC website as well. Bob asked me to do another website as well, and the Riverboat experience carried over directly into that one.

I started getting into Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) a bit before I took over the SDCANC website in 2009. Basically, CSS is a set of rules that govern how certain HTML elements look on a given website, making it much easier to have a consistent appearance on websites that have a number of different pages. They also make it possible to apply realtime effects to elements, such as changing color when the mouse passes over them. The navigation bar on the left-hand side of this website, for example, was created using CSS with a little dash of Apache server-side includes, using techniques that I learned from a website called Listamatic.

One problem with CSS, though, is that it doesn't have a way that you can define constants or variables. Some of the color combinations that I use on various websites use colors that don't have accepted names defined in all web browsers, so I have to refer to them by their hexadecimal color codes. For example, the body text color that I use in the SDCANC website is #630000, and I use it in a lot of different places in the stylesheet -- for text, for borders, for background in areas that are being displayed in reverse colors (such as table headers). It would be so much better to be able to define a constant, such as "bodyFG," to be equal to #630000, and then use that name everywhere where I need that color. (And, if I later have to change that color, I'd only need to change it in one place.)

I looked to see if there was some hidden way that CSS allowed this. No soap. It's being considered for a future version of CSS, but not in CSS 2.0 or 3.0 which are in use today.  However, searching for this turned up something called SASS.

SASS is a "preprocessor" for CSS.  In other words, you have a file containing SASS commands, and you run a program which goes through the SASS file and then spits out a CSS stylesheet that corresponds to the SASS instructions. This is a little less convenient than simply being able to upload the file to the web server and having the web browser interpret it automatically as is done with CSS, but it does add a number of nice conveniences in addition to the constant/variable substitution.

SASS is written in the programming language Ruby, which I did not have on my computer, so I had to download both Ruby and SASS, install Ruby, then install SASS into that. In order to compile my SCSS file into CSS that I could then upload to the web server, I had to open a command-line window and invoke SASS through Ruby.  A bit inconvenient.  However, SASS has a "watch" command that lets you tell it to watch for changes to a source file (SCSS) and automatically recompile it every time it is changed.  Nice, but it still has to be invoked from the command window, which has to be left open until I'm done with SASS. Still not terribly convenient.

Enter Prepros.

Prepros is a program that runs in the background through an icon in the system tray, which has linked into it (1) Ruby, (2) SASS, and (3) several other preprocessors for different web-related dialects, which I haven't gotten into yet and may never explore at all. Prepros allows you to set up different "projects," telling it where your SCSS (SASS source for CSS) files are and where you want it to put the generated CSS files. Once Prepros is started (and it can be set to start automatically), it will watch those project areas for changes to the source files, and automatically compile them. If errors are found, it pops up a little message that you can click for a more detailed error listing; otherwise, it pops up a message saying "successfully compiled." So, with Prepros running, I can edit my SCSS file and automatically get the CSS resulting from that which I can then upload as part of my website files. Now, THAT'S convenient.

I'm still experimenting with SASS and Prepros as of this posting, and haven't put any of the CSS it has generated onto my live websites yet. However, the testing that I'm doing on my private web server here at home isn't showing any problems at all. The only difficulty is that I've had to split up some of my CSS definitions to fit the more object-oriented style of SCSS, which means that some things are now defined in two places which were only defined once before. SASS has some ways to get around that, which I haven't explored yet but will be trying shortly.

The only problem that I've had is that SASS has a tendency not to stick comments in the generated CSS file quite where I placed them in the SCSS file, so in the CSS it looks like they apply to something other than what I had intended. This is mainly a result of where the comments are placed -- I tend to place them on the line above the code they reference, and SASS sometimes has to move that line of code elsewhere in order to properly generate valid CSS. I'm slowly learning where to put the comments in order to keep them together with the code they reference.

Overall, I'm impressed. If all goes as well as I expect it to, I'll be adding those to my "recommended software" page.



2012-12-04: Not Excited By Windows 8

I've been experimenting with Windows 8 for about a month now.  I installed it on a virtual machine (for those who don't know, that's software on my computer that simulates being another computer inside of my main one) so that I could see what it looks like and how it works.

In short, I don't care for it very much.  I would never "upgrade" a Windows 7 or Windows XP computer to Windows 8.  Vista, maybe, but not without a lot of tweaking. And, I'm afraid that the visual differences from older Windows versions may drive customers to Apple or Linux equipment — even as complex as Linux can be, when it's working right it's much more appealing than Windows 8.

What's so bad about Windows 8?  They've grafted a new, non-windowing interface on top of the old Windows desktop.  Called variously "Metro" (which they had to discontinue because it violated someone else's trademark), "Modern," and "Live Tiles," it replaces the Start Menu that has been a staple of Windows since 1995 with a screen full of rectangular buttons or "tiles."  Some of the buttons contain text that updates constantly (such as weather conditions).  Others are merely a means to start other programs by clicking.  Settings are accessed by putting the mouse cursor in a corner of the screen; a "charm bar" will fly out of the edge of the screen with various things you can click on; one of them will take you back to the "start screen."

Programs written to use this new interface will take up the entire screen, and mostly can't be rearranged to have more than one on the screen at once.  Worse, there's no apparent way to close a program once opened -- you have to go to the charm bar and go back to the start screen, leaving the program open and running in the background.  Switching between running programs is similarly difficult, because there's no taskbar.

The whole thing looks like it was written for a phone or touch-screen tablet device, because it was.  It's possible that on such a device, using finger-swipe gestures might make some of the processes easier, maybe even more natural.  But, on a regular desktop computer with a mouse, it's convoluted to the point of being almost unusable.

Microsoft also wants you to create an online Microsoft account as your computer's main logon account (or use your existing Microsoft account if you have one).  When you do this, it allows you to synchronize some of your settings between multiple computers.  If you don't do this, and simply create a "local account" to log onto your computer, some things don't work.  For example, the built-in email program (which seems fairly decent in spite of being a "modern" interface program) does not seem to work at all from a "local account." It won't let you set up an email server account to your own ISP's email server if it's not logged into a Microsoft account.

The good news:  The Windows desktop is still there, and available to be opened via clicking on one of the "tiles" on the "start screen." Any program written for prior versions of Windows will still run through the desktop.  The old Control Panel is still there for changing settings. The taskbar is still there at the bottom of the desktop, so you can still easily switch between programs running on the desktop.  Microsoft has removed the "Aero Glass" transparency in window borders that was introduced with Vista and carried over to Windows 7, and has slightly changed the shapes of some of the control buttons — the effect is similar to Windows 3.1 from the early '90s.  But, it's all usable.

The bad news associated with said good news:  the Start button is gone from the taskbar.  You can create icons on the desktop to start your programs, and there are icons pinned to the taskbar for IE and the Windows File Explorer, but you're expected to use the tile-based Start Screen as your Start Menu.  And, there are some functions (including some Control Panel areas) that are only available in the "modern" interface and cause Windows to switch abruptly from the desktop-style interface to the full-screen tile-based interface, which is visually very jarring. (Not to mention that it takes some work to find your way back to the desktop!)

There are a number of third-party programs available which will add the Start Menu back to the Windows 8 desktop, and will set Windows 8 to boot directly to the desktop, making it work more like earlier versions of Windows.  I've been using a free one called Classic Shell which seems to work quite well.  All of the underpinnings to support the Start Menu are still there in Windows 8, so programs will show up on the Classic Shell start menu when they're installed.  You can even add "modern" programs to the Classic Shell start menu (although they'll still switch out to the tiled interface when you run them). And Classic Shell will optionally set the Windows key on your keyboard to always take you back to the desktop rather than the tiled "start screen."  It WON'T prevent you from ever entering the "modern" interface, but it'll make it much less necessary.

If I got a new computer with Windows 8 on it, the first thing I'd do is probably to install Classic Shell on it. However, I doubt that I'll be doing that any time soon.  My three-year-old main computer with Windows 7 is still doing great.  My almost-three-year-old laptop that I use for calling came with XP, and I put Windows 7 on it this year when I replaced the hard disk with a 128GB solid state drive, and it's still doing great as well (apart from minor glitches with the touchpad).

2011-07-02

I got home from the National Square Dance Convention in Detroit at 3:00am Monday morning.  I had a great time there, sharing a room with Joe Saltel and seeing folks from all over the country.  (And outside the country as well -- I got to meet Darren Taylor from Australia and Heiner Fischle from Germany.)

I flew all night Tuesday night, leaving Sacramento Airport at 12:30 Wednesday moring and arriving in Detroit at 11am local time on the same flight from Houston as Joe.  (We didn't deliberately plan it that way, it just worked out.)  After checking in and picking up our registration packets from the convention, we ended up following a couple of Joe's friends out to Greektown and eventually had lunch/dinner at a place Dana Schirmer recommended, called Five Guys Burgers & Fries.  (Opinion:  it reminded me of In-n-out Burger, with higher prices, althought the Cajun Fries were very good.)  Joe was invited to call at the Plus Trail-In dance by Bear Miller of Mountain Magic; I hung around there and later got to share a tip with Joe.  Great fun!

Thursday morning, I was the opening MC for the Basic hall.  As I expeced, turnout was light -- I eventually called about 5 minutes of 2-couple dancing for two callers and their partners.  When Heiner Fischle took over at 10:10, we had 3 couples; fortunately, Heiner knows how to call to 3 couples!  We picked up a fourth couple before the end of Heiner's tip, and kept 1-2 squares dancing for the rest of the hour.  Later on, I called in the Youth hall and in the Plus hall; I shared my Plus tip with my friend Andy Allemao from the San Diego area, which is always fun.  Andy and I live at opposite ends of the state, so the only chance we get to work together is at the National.  He's very energetic with a very good singing voice, and is always fun to work with.  (And, he can sing harmony!) In the evening, I got to call a tip with the Ghost Riders Band for the first time in 11 years --  not counting Eric Henerlau's anniversary party a couple of years ago, my last time calling with them was at the USAwest Convention in Las Vegas in 1999.  I also got to call at the afterparty in the Solo hall that evening -- thanks, Tom Manning and Bob Asp!

Friday, I had a lighter calling schedule, so I got to dance quite a bit.  I had a tip in the Youth hall in the afternoon, and a dinnertime Aide slot in the Plus hall.  (Aides call the last tip of the hour at the National, while MCs call the first tip of the hour.)  Joe Saltel walked into the Youth hall just as I was finishing my patter, so I asked him to come up and do the singing call with me -- another treat!  From there, I went down to the big hall where the band played in the evening, to watch Scot Byars do a High Energy Plus tip; Scot invited me up to do the singing call with him.

I ended up being 5 minutes late for the start of my Aide hour in the Plus hall Friday night.  All of my calendar appointments were 3 hours off due to the time change, but that wasn't why I was off -- I'd just misrecorded the time and thought it was an hour later than it really was.  Since I was to call the last tip of the hour there was no real harm done, but I was embarassed about it because I always try to be well ahead of time.  I thought I was getting there almost an hour early, not five minutes late!  At the last minute, I changed my mind about the singing call I was going to do, and used "Accentuate the Positive," which garnered some very nice compliments.  I do love big band music!  I also stayed into the next hour to watch Cody Pearce (son of caller Scott Pearce of Sacramento) call his first National Square Dance Convention tip.  Great job, Cody!

Because of that slot, I didn't have time to go back to the hotel to change or eat Friday night.  I went up to watch Andy Allemao teach a square dance intro session to some convention visitors -- a great idea that I haven't seen previous conventions use -- and ended up helping to fill out a square.  I finally grabbed a sandwich from a place in the convention center's main loby about 9pm.  I looked in on a couple of afterparties, but didn't see any singles to speak of, so I figured my best chance to dance was to go up to the afterparty in the Solo hall again.  On the way there, I ran into Andy and Tami Allemao again, who were headed to the Youth hall to hear David Heffron call a tip.  David wasn't there -- he'd gone over to the Solo hall instead, so Andy and I stuck our heads in to listen.  As soon as we did, the lady at the front table who was signing up callers for the afterparty beckoned us in -- they were coming to the end of their list and needed more callers!  So, Andy and I ended up calling at that afterparty, and closed out the show with two singing calls: our normal "Brown-Eyed Girl" and "Long Train Running."  (So we've now doubled our repertoire!)

Saturday morning, Andy asked me to share his opening MC tip in the Plus hall.  Half an hour later, we both helped Bob Elling sing "Good Friends." (Bob is a good friend.) I watched Jack Pladdys teach an A1 Intro session while working on some files for Wade Morrow at CALLERLAB, then had lunch with Scot & Erin Byars.  (The on-site restaurant at the Cobo Center was pretty good, but pricy.  Convention center eateries usually are expensive, though.)  After lunch, I had a high-energy Mainstream tip in the big hall.  I was nervous, because I don't call that style very often -- for a lot of the dancers I normally call to, simply getting out on the floor is high energy!  I think I did okay, but once I got off the stage and started putting my computer away, the shakes set in. Randy Dougherty couldn't understand why I was shaking -- well, neither could I!  After all, it was over!

I had two tips in the Youth hall that day: one in late afternoon, one right after the dinner hour.  That made four total for the convention. I was a bit bothered by that -- I enjoy calling for the Youth and am more than willing to do it, but I don't think I'm any great shakes at it.  Meanwhile, someone like Scot who excels at calling for youth only got one youth tip during the convention.  He and I were going to share one of my Saturday tips, but the timing didn't work out.

I had the last Aide slot in the Solo hall for the convention, so Andy and I called the last tip there together.  Afterwards, I didn't call at any of the afterparties, but I sat in at the USDA afterparty in the Youth hall and watched a BUNCH of great callers come through.  The highlight, though, was Andy and Joe doing "Soul Man" -- they did a sort of tap dance while they were doing it, and the Youth Hall stage was kind of rickety.  So, while Andy and Joe were performing, Hunter Keller had both hands on the table at the front of the stage to keep it from bouncing off, and Cody Pearce and Ashley Parker were both holding onto the Yak Stack to keep it from falling over!  If only I'd thought to take a picture...

Probably my favorite memory of the convention was Friday afternoon, when I walked into the C1 hall just before Eric Henerlau was scheduled to call.  Shozo Nishimura from Japan was on stage calling, and there were several squares of Japanese dancers around the room dancing perfectly with no difficulties.  In almost the exact center of the room, Eric was dancing in a square with no Japanese dancers in it at all -- and Eric was working his rear end off trying to keep that square from breaking down!  He was directing traffic here and there, and he was repeating everything Shozo was saying for at least one couple in the square who couldn't understand Shozo's accent.  (I wasn't having much trouble understanding Shozo -- I just don't know the C1 calls.)  It was certainly a sight to behold, and I should have thought to take a picture of that as well.

All in all, I had a great time.  I think I had an exceptional calling schedule -- I told the program chair that I was willing to do whatever they needed to help the program along, thinking that she would ask me to run some errands for here when I was in the callers' break room; instead, she gave me a BUNCH of slots!  I doubt I'll be getting a schedule anywhere near this good next year in Spokane...

One thing I noticed was that food wasn't as evident this year as it was last year in Louisville.  There was a buffet in the vendors' hall that I didn't try, but the menu looked good.  The convention center had a (pricey) restaurant and a small shop with sandwiches in the main lobby.  That was it.

In 2008, Wichita had a buffet and lots of snack bars around the convention center; they had a relatively inexpensive cheeseburger that was good-sized, and I used those for lunch and dinner most days.  The other two convention locations I've been to, 1994/2005 in Portland and 2009 in Long Beach, were very close to multiple restaurants and didn't need on-site food (although the Long Beach Convention Center had snack bars, too).  Detroit didn't have anything right nearby, but Greektown (and lots of restaurants) was right along the People Mover route between the Cobo Center and the hotels, and the Renaissance Center Marriott had a food court in the basement with a variety of fast-food choices.  Those took time, though; the on-site restaurant in the Cobo Center always seemed to be doing a brisk business despite its high prices ($9.50 for a cheesburger).

The food choices last year in Louisville, though, were great!  There weren't any restaurants to speak of close to the convention center, but on site they had a buffet (I tried it once, and it was good) and booths like you'd see at a fair from the Kentucky Cattlemen's Association, the Kentucky Pork Producers, and one other that I can't remember -- I only patronized the beef and pork.  No need to leave the convention center, and the prices were fairly reasonable.  There was an ice cream vendor, too.

We'll have to wait and see what Spokane brings to the table next year.


2011-05-26

300K
On my way down to Santa Rosa last night (Wednesday night), my odometer turned over to 300,000 miles.  The miles are all mine — it had under 20 miles on it when I got it at the dealership.  Still no major problems. (I had to replace the alternator last month due to a squealing bearing.)  Hopefully, it'll keep going for a while yet!

Squaw Rock
Where was I when it turned over?  Just north of Squaw Rock on US 101, between Hopland and Cloverdale.  (Actually, I was right by the Rock Shop when it clicked over — it took me a bit to pull over so that I could photograph the odometer.  Sorry for the image quality — the camera in my Blackberry isn't very good.)

As I said, I've had no significant problems with my Saturn Vue.  It'll be eight years old in August, and it's still doing great (although the mileage has dropped a bit since I put new tires on it in March).  This is my second Saturn; my first was a 1996 SL-1 sedan, which I kept for seven years and sold with about 220,000 miles on it.  My friend Nate Bliss had a Saturn before I did and got very good service from it, which was what convinced me to get a Saturn in the first place.  I've had great experience with my two Saturns.  Of course, I have a very good mechanic, and take my cars to his shop every 3,000 miles (4,000 at the most) for service, and I'm sure that his care has a lot to do with their longevity.

So, with that in mind, would I buy another new Saturn?  The answer, surprisingly, is...probably not.  And not just because GM discontinued the Saturn line last year.

When I first got interested in Saturns, they were making relatively inexpensive, reliable vehicles that got very good gas mileage.  My original SL-1's EPA sticker claimed 40MPG highway, and I actually got around 37-38MPG most of the time.  My Vue regularly got 27-28MPG until I got new tires earlier this year; it's now getting 25-27MPG.  Both of them gave excellent service; the SL1 had to have the upper end of the engine rebuilt at about 110,000 miles due to a cracked cylinder head, but the Vue has had no significant problems not caused by other cars (or animals) running into it.

However, somewhere along the way, Saturn's management decided that they had to attract a different customer base.  At the time I got my Vue, I was also looking at their replacement for the SL series, called the Ion.  I didn't care for it for a number of reasons, partly the styling, partly because the instrument cluster wasn't in front of the driver.  (They relocated it to the center pedestal.)  The Vue at the time still had the old Saturn lines and instrument panel.

After I got my Vue, Saturn changed all of their designs to look more like sports cars.  And, they just didn't seem like Saturns any more.  A year before he passed away, my father bought a Saturn Aura sedan on the strength of my positive experiences with Saturns.  It worked fine, but it was loaded with electronics and other extras like a hybrid automatic/manual transmission, and the mileage wasn't as good as my Vue got.  All in all, I wasn't impressed by it.

So, even if Saturn was still around, I probably wouldn't buy a new one unless they went back to their old philosophy of building inexpensive, reliable, economical cars.  Since they AREN'T around, I don't know what I'll be looking for when the time eventually comes to replace my Vue.  I don't really need another SUV, as I don't need to carry three people and equipment — that was my original reason for getting the Vue rather than a sedan.  So, I'll probably be looking for a small sedan or wagon.

Now, if I could find a low-mileage, well-cared-for, used SL-1 or SW-1 wagon...that would be worth considering.


2010-10-30

Odometer: 275,000!

I drive a 2003 Saturn Vue, which has given me very good service.  How good?  Well, apart from 3 times that other people have run into me, and a new wheel bearing and front struts at the beginning of this year, it's needed nothing but standard maintenance over the 7 years I've had it.  It still gives me 27-29 MPG overall, and runs great.

Three weeks ago, on the way home from Santa Rosa, I snapped the above picture of the odometer with my Blackberry's camera.  It's a little fuzzy, but I think you can make out the big number...

...and still going strong!  (3 miles from 277,000 as I write this.)



2010-08-30

Watch out for kamikaze deer!


I was coming home from Eureka on Monday the 16th and got hit by a deer.

No, I don't mean that I hit the deer.  Quite literally, the deer came bounding across the road from the left-hand side and ran into the side of my Saturn Vue.  It took out three of the four major panels on the left-hand side, missing only the driver's door.  Cosmetic damage only, as the vehicle was still perfectly drivable — and I put about 1300 miles on the car between the time I was hit and the time everything was ready for me to take it into the body shop this morning.  (It now has 270,000 miles on it since I bought it in August of 2003, and still runs great and gets 27+ MPG.)

Summer has been unusually mild this year.  There have been only about 3 days above 100° so far, where there are usually many more than that in July and August — one year, we had almost two weeks straight over 100°.  Also, Cloverdale is usually the hottest spot in the area, but every time I've gone through Cloverdale this year, it's been about 8 degrees cooler than Ukiah.


2010-01-25

It's been quite a while since I've added anything here. Not much to say, really.

I was going through some things last night and ran across my divorce papers. While reading through them, something jumped out at me that I'd never noticed before. The ruling came out on July 15, 2003 and took effect a month later. August 15? That sure sounds familiar.

Being a World War II history buff from way back, my first thought was that it was one of the atomic bomb detonations. However, when I looked up the date, that wasn't it at all. I can't believe that I never made this association before — it's so appropriate!

My divorce from Julie became final on VJ-Day!


2009-08-22

I've been a bit out of it this month. On the last Thursday in July, I came down with what may, or may not, have been the H1N1 flu. (My doctor said they weren't screening for it unless the patient required hospitalization.)  I was pretty much housebound from that time until August 8 -- starting with fever, chills and headaches for the first few days, and then continuing with severe chest congestion and coughing.  I finally broke down and went to the doctor on Wednesday the 5th, and they gave me antibiotics for the chest problems.  I was feeling good enough to go to the Joe Saltel dance on Sunday the 9th, and was back to a normal schedule by Wednesday the 12th -- but I lost nearly half a month's work (and income) to this illness.  I also had to cancel an entire week of calling engagements, and I apologize to the Lucky Steppers of Santa Cruz for being unable to call their Slab Dance on the 1st.

A lot of people in the Ukiah area seem to be coming down with these symptoms, which certainly resemble what is reported in the paper as H1N1 symptoms.  My boss at Pacific Internet and his daughter both came down with it about the same time that I did, but recovered more quickly.  (Well, his wife is a doctor...)


2009-05-02

More on AVG 8 vs. AVG 7

I figured that since my AVG license doesn't run out until August, I'd install version 8.5 on my main machine when the company stopped making updates for v7.5 on April 30, and then run that until the license ran out before getting NOD32. Now, I'm not so sure I want to do that.

I installed 8.5 on my main machine on Thursday. So far, I haven't seen any noticable slowdown from the realtime shield protection. This morning (Saturday), the first automated system scan took place -- I only scan my machines once a week, and I set it to go early in the morning on Saturday (4am) so it'll be done when I get up.

My first shock was when I got up and went in to my computer at quarter past eleven and found it still scanning!

When it finally completed, AVG 8.5 had taken 7 hours, 41 minutes to do the same scan that AVG 7.5 had taken 2 hours, 54 minutes the previous weekend.

That's just not acceptable.

So, if I've got extra money available at the end of the month, I'm going to go ahead and switch to NOD32 then. Wish I'd known this at the end of April, because I did have the extra money then, but it's gone into savings now.

AVG 8 has now gone from my "it's okay, but I recommend something else" category to my "not recommended" category. I'll still recommend the free version to home users, but not for paying customers.


2009-04-09

iCarbon

I have an inexpensive HP PSC 1350 all-in-one device that I bought several years ago. It includes a copier function, so to make a copy all I have to do is put the paper on the scanner glass and press either the "Black" button or the "Color" button. Simple, efficient.

However, the 1350's printer is an inkjet printer, and I usually use my Brother laser for printing. If the HP sits for a month or so between uses, it takes several cleaning cycles to get it printing properly again so that I can run a copy. There have been many times that I've wished that I could make it print the copy on my laser printer instead of the built-in inkjet. Up until now, that's been a cantankerous process of scanning, saving as a picture file, then printing the picture on the laser printer. All of that required hands-on at each step in the process. It worked, but it was cumbersome.

A week ago, I started looking to see if there was a program available to automate all of that. A Google search turned up a large number of hits, but most of them turned out to be alternate download sources for two programs. I downloaded both and tried them.

In my opinion, the better of the two was iCarbon by Frederik Schaller, available from iDev.ch for free download. It has the normal copier functions (number of copies, scaling percentage), and allows you to pick the type of scan (B/W, grayscale, or color) and the scanning resolution. (It tops out at 300dpi, while my printer and scanner are both capable of 600dpi, but that's minor.) While the program hasn't been updated since 2003, it does exactly what I was looking for and does it well.

-------------

AVG

I'm still using AVG Antivirus, but I'm using version 7.5. AVG came out with version 8 last summer, and has recently upgraded that to version 8.5. I'm running that on one of my computers here, but I've been less than impressed by the performance. A scan of my computer that took 2 hours under version 7.5 takes about twice that with the new version. The new version also is larger than the old one (which is to be expected), and doesn't run well on older computers, and seems to have some problems updating itself automatically for people on rural dial-up internet connections. The LinkScanner function introduced with version 8 also has had reports of causing increased internet traffic, and I never install it.

I'm still recommending the free version of AVG for home users, especially those with newer and faster systems. To that, I've added the free home edition of Avast! Antivirus -- it's a little harder to set up and register than AVG, and its user interface is a little harder to figure out, but it's smaller and faster. For business customers who have to pay for antivirus, however, I'm currently recommending Eset's NOD32. It's extremely small and fast, and has a very good reputation in the industry for customer service and for catching new viruses even before definitions are updated. (If you listen to Leo Laporte's radio show, you've already heard a lot about NOD32; I first encountered it through the store where I used to work.) It's a bit more expensive than AVG, and the subscription renewal process is a little bit more complicated, but overall I like it -- and I'll be switching to it when AVG stops distributing definition updates for version 7.5 at the end of April.

-------------

I just got back from the CALLERLAB Convention in Kansas City, MO. I didn't get to see much of KC -- the airport is outside of town, and the hotel where the convention was held was right on the edge of the airport. However, I had a great time and learned some new things, so it was well worth the trip.

One of the best things about attending the CALLERLAB Convention is being able to actually meet and visit with some of the great names in the square dance calling activity. I've been able to talk with people like Bob Osgood (yes, he's gone, but I got to meet him at a past convention), Jim Mayo, Marshall Flippo, Wade Driver, Elmer Sheffield, Jon Jones, Tim Marriner, Jerry Jestin and Jerry Story -- not to mention people I've already known but seldom see like Deborah Carroll-Jones, Don Beck, Clark Baker, Bear Miller, Jeff Palmer, Stephen Cole, Mike Seastrom and Mike Callahan.

My friend Scot Byars, chairman of CALLERLAB's Ways and Means Committee, is planning to put out a yearbook for the Convention this year. He was going to have Hunter Keller take pictures at the convention but Hunter, like many people this year, couldn't afford to go. Since I have a camera, Scot asked me to take pictures -- not that I know anything more about photography than "point the camera, click the button." So I made a general nuisance of myself, taking pictures at the meals, at the sessions I attended, and in the hallways between sessions. I also took the opportunity to have my picture taken together with a couple of the people I admire:

Me and Deborah Me and Marshall Flippo
Thanks, Deborah! Thanks, Marshall!
(I just don't feel right calling you "Flip!")

I also got to meet Cal Golden, who was there to receive his 50-year award. At the fundraiser auction Tuesday night, Marshall Flippo bought a painted cane made by a young lady named Lenka Olivera (who was in one of my beginners' classes about 10 years back when she was in grade school) and traded it to Cal for his metal one. Here's a picture of Cal with Lenka's cane:

Cal Golden and cane

(As you can see, Cal got his original cane back as well!)

What a great time! This was my fifth time at the convention since I started calling in 1994, and my third in a row. I don't know if I can afford to go every year, but I'd sure like to!


2008-12-20 Foxit Reader

PDF files (Adobe's Portable Document Format) have become a standard way to post ready-to-print information (such as flyers) on the Web. The most common way to read these files on your computer is with the free Adobe Reader program (formerly known as Adobe Acrobat Reader).

When it was first introduced, Adobe's reader was a small, lean program that did one thing and did it well. Over the years, however, it's grown and become more elaborate. Version 5.05, dating from around 2003, was an 8.7MB download, while the current version 9.0 is 33.5MB. As it's grown, it has gotten much slower to load, even on today's faster computers.

Several years ago, I ran across another program for viewing PDF files: FoxitReader. Like Adobe Reader, it's free to use. (There are some advanced functions that are only unlocked with an inexpensive paid license, but I haven't run across a need for them.) And, harkening back to Adobe Reader's early days, it's lean and fast. The first version I came across, v1.3, was a 1.6MB download, and version 2 eventually grew to 2.6MB. It's quick to load and feels faster in general than Adobe's reader.

The only reason that I did not switch from Adobe Reader to Foxit Reader at that time was that Foxit didn't offer one of the features that I use constantly: the ability to view a PDF file directly within your web browser's window. With Adobe Reader, if you click on a link to a PDF file on a webpage, the file would open right in the web browser, with a border around it showing the PDF navigation tools provided by the reader; with Foxit, the file would open up an instance of the reader in a new window and display it in front of the web browser.

Recently, Foxit Software released version 3.0 of Foxit Reader (a 3.7MB download, by the way). When I tried it, I found that it now has the ability to show a PDF file within the browser window as Adobe does. That removes my last objection to the program.

I've now replaced Adobe Reader with Foxit Reader on all 3 of my main computers, and haven't had any problems at all in the week since I did it. And, PDF files come up a lot faster than they used to.

Recommended.


2008-12-08 Vexed with Citibank

After my father passed away in October, I notified his credit card company (he had an AT&T Universal Card through Citibank) of his passing, then waited for them to send me a final statement so that I could pay off the balance.

It never came.

Instead, it appears that Citibank immediately turned the account over to a collection agency. I won't name that agency here, because they did nothing wrong. However, when they began contacting me, there was nothing to indicate that they were legitimately acting in Citibank's behalf. My first reaction was that identity thieves had gotten hold of Dad's social security number after his death and were trying to make a fast buck off of a bereaved family, so I had nothing to do with them.

I attempted to contact Citibank about the matter, which proved impossible. However, one of my attempts eventually got forwarded through Citibank's phone system to the collection agency. This indicated to me that the agency was acting legitimately, and I went ahead and paid them.

However, this practice of immediately turning the account over to a collection agency strikes me as being a very poor business practice, not to mention being completely insensitive to the deceased's family. Since I have one of those AT&T Universal Cards myself, I am very seriously considering whether or not I wish to continue a business relationship of any sort with Citibank. I've had the card for fifteen years, but I don't really care to do business with a company that shows such poor judgement.


2008-06-24

Lots of thick smoke in the Ukiah area this week, from fires around Northern California sparked by lightning strikes over the weekend of June 21. Look at the view from our front porch:

Smoke toward dam Looking east toward Coyote dam -- you should be able to see the yellow grass on the face of the dam over the tops of those trees behind the trailers, plus the hills across the lake. Today, we're doing well just to see the trees!
Smoke to south Looking to the south. The knoll is just across the river from our trailer park -- just a couple hundred yards away. Look how the smoke is making it hard to see details even at that short a distance!

2008-06-03

I've got my calling assignments for the National Square Dance Convention in Wichita, and have put them on my Schedule page. There's always the possibility that I might pick up more when I get there, if some callers are unable to attend, but I won't be able to show them here.

I'm staying at the Holiday Inn Express West, which threw me for a loop temporarily -- that didn't match any of the names on the hotel list on the back of the registration form. Google Maps to the rescue -- it's practically on the airport itself, but about 4 miles from the convention center. That's actually fortunate for me, as my flight is on Frontier Airlines, and they eliminated the early-morning flight I had originally booked as one of their cost-cutting measures. I had intended to get into Wichita early Wednesday afternoon and maybe go to the Cessna factory to see if they give tours -- but now I'm not getting in until late Wednesday night. No time to see either Cessna or Beech. :-(

We're still waiting to try to find out what caused the seizure that Dad experienced about a month and a half ago. 45 minutes after the ambulance had him at the hospital, he was pretty much back to normal, and the CT scans and MRI that the hospital took didn't give any clues as to the cause. It took a month for him to get in to see a neurologist, who wanted an EEG that was just performed yesterday. Hopefully, it'll give some answers. In the meantime, nothing of the sort has happened since then, which suits me just fine -- it was a very frightening experience for me, even if Dad doesn't remember it at all.

Note to AVG Free users: the new version 8.0 of AVG Free has come out. You can upgrade to it by downloading the installer from their website (free.grisoft.com) but you don't have to hurry -- they will continue to supply updates for the old version (7.5) until the end of the year. If you aren't comfortable downloading the new version and would like me to do it for you, you can call me for an appointment. (Lake/Mendocino/Sonoma counties only -- I do charge travel time one way, after all!)

If you do download it yourself, be careful what you click on -- they will present you the option in several places of downloading the trial version of their commercial product side-by-side with the free version, and you have to be sure you're clicking on the free version if that's what you want!


2008-01-10

I've been using a program called Mailwasher for years, ever since my friend Nate Bliss told me about it. It's a program that sits in your system tray and periodically checks your mail server to see if any mail has arrived, and lets you know (via a flashing icon and a sound) if it has. It also does more than that; it

I've used it since about 1998 or so, and it's worked great. Until I installed Internet Explorer 7.

After installing IE7, I noticed two things:

  1. Mailwasher is supposed to pop its main window up when you double-click the icon in the system tray. After IE7 was installed, it usually takes two double-clicks to wake it up.
  2. When the main window pops up, the window frame will sit there empty for several seconds before it fills in with the mail list. It used to fill in immediately, if not sooner.

At first, I figured that it was because I was using an old version of Mailwasher. I hadn't updated since 2003 or so, because the program worked so well already. So, I downloaded the latest version of Mailwasher -- and it had the same behavior. So, I reverted back to the 2003 version -- it worked fine except for the slowness in popping up.

A couple of months later, I added a service called Postini to my Pacific Internet email account. (Pacific and some -- but not all -- other ISPs have it available as a free add-on service.) Postini is a spam filtering service -- it weeds the spam out of your email BEFORE it ever gets to my mailbox @pacific.net. I found that it did a VERY good job -- so good, in fact, that almost nothing was getting through that Mailwasher would flag from being on one of the blacklists.

Flash forward another couple of months, and just for the heck of it, I was browsing the area on TUCOWS devoted to email checking tools. There was a free, open-source tool called PopTray that got their top "Five Cows" rating. And it was written in Delphi, which attracted me because I develop in Delphi myself. Reading through the documentation, it appeared to have almost all the same features as Mailwasher, except for checking the remote blacklist sites. Since I wasn't using that feature of Mailwasher any more, I decided to download PopTray and give it a try.

I've been using PopTray for about a month now, and overall I'm pleased with it. Its message preview feature isn't quite as convenient as MailWasher's -- in MailWasher, you just press the spacebar to preview the selected message, while PopTray makes you either click a button or right-click the message and choose "Preview" -- and it seems to have trouble previewing a few more messages than Mailwasher does (usually ones that are written in HTML and don't include equivalent plaintext). But, it performs the functions I want -- delete mail from the server, checking for faked "from me" messages, and previewing selected messages -- and it handles multiple email accounts, unlike the current free version of Mailwasher. (The paid "Pro" version of Mailwasher handles multiple accounts, but not the free version.)

PopTray 3.2 -- recommended.
MailWasher -- also recommended (and hopefully Nick will fix the slow popup problem with IE7)


2007-12-21

Products I use personally (and recommend):

AVG Antivirus (home users, try the free version!)
Spybot Search & Destroy spyware removal utility
Mozilla Firefox web browser
Pegasus Mail (inexperienced computer users may prefer Mozilla Thunderbird)
FileZilla FTP client and server software
SyncBack file synchronization software
CCleaner file system / registry cleanup utility
PSPad text editor
UltraVNC remote control software
Dimension 4 clock synchronization software
Winamp music playing software

Apart from the commercial version of AVG (which I use because I use my computers for business purposes), all of the above are available for free. (There is a commercial version of SyncBack with more features, but the free version suits my needs. I do use -- and paid for -- the Pacemaker tempo/pitch control plugin for Winamp.)

It's amazing how much software is legitimately available for free on the Internet, and the high quality of much of that software is impressive as well. I'm not talking about illegal, pirated copies of store-bought software -- I'm referring to software that the authors have decided to make available without charge, and software which was created by open-source projects. A lot of these are in the categories of system utilities (like SyncBack and CCleaner) and software development tools (such as the WinMerge file difference viewer and the TortoiseSVN source code version control system, both of which I use) and, as such, are of more interest to "computer geeks." But, things like antivirus utilities, web browsers and email clients are of interest to everyone, and there are even free office applications like OpenOffice available which rival commercial programs such as Microsoft Office in both features and usability.


2007-09-16

I've got a domain name!

Not one of the big, well-recognized domains -- I wanted my initials (LOJ) like I use for my email address, but loj.com and loj.info were already taken. But there was one domain that GoDaddy said still had my initials available, and I took it. So, as of two months ago, you can also access this web site by typing the following into your web browser's address bar:

www.loj.name

Yep, that's right -- "name." Never heard of it before? Neither had I -- but it works! (It still shows the "real" address in the address bar once you get there, though.)

--------------------

We had a successful Sunday dance with Joe Saltel here in Ukiah last month -- five squares. Hopefully, we'll be able to do it again next year when Joe passes through the area. It's always great to be able to dance to Joe -- he's my favorite caller, and one of my biggest inspirations.

Looks like the worst of the summer heat may be behind us -- high temperatures in the mid 80s are all that the 10-day forecast at weather.com shows for us. This summer has been nothing like last year, when we had a stretch of two weeks straight over 100 degrees -- but to me, anything much over 80 is too hot. (And, anything much under 70 is too cold, so I'm almost never happy. :-)

We've had a spat of health problems recently in my extended family -- an uncle and two aunts have all spent time in the hospital after falls. One aunt is still recovering in a care facility, but is doing much better than she had been doing before her fall -- she was diagnosed with anemia in the hospital, was given several transfusions, and is much more like her old self than she was before the fall. You can find silver linings in the oddest clouds!

I'll be traveling up to Mount Shasta next weekend to call a dance. That's just north of where I spent the largest portion of my childhood, a wide spot in the road on I-5 called Gibson, in the Sacramento River Canyon in northern Shasta County. It's always nice to get back up into that area again, even though much of my childhood home and haunts are now gone -- victims of widening I-5 in the '80s and '90s.