What is Wrong Here?

I don't understand why everyone in Chattanooga is sick all the time, especially me. When we lived on the boat, we were happy and healthy. We came back to Chattanooga, and suddenly we're facing headaches, sinus infections, and chronic insomnia.

The late and beloved Forrest Cantrell always called it "the creeping crud," that raspy throat and tight cough that everyone in my household has been living with since November. I can count the days I've felt well--really well, as in "I feel like going mountain biking or hiking!"--since Thanksgiving on one finger. Every few weeks we go get antibiotics and get better for a while, but pretty soon we're back in Marlboro Country.

Maybe we can survive until the seasons finish changing, and summer burns all the germs and allergens into oblivion. Until then, I might as well buy stock in Rite Aid because I'm giving them half my paycheck anyway.

How Not to Install a Garage Door Opener

Here is a partial list of all the ways you can maximize the fun of replacing a garage door opener.

First, order the exact same model as you are replacing because you think you can just bolt the motor unit in place and be done in less than five minutes. That won't work, because the design will have changed just enough to make the new unit incompatible. Of course you could have simply replaced the faulty circuit board in the old opener, but that would have cost $80, which is far less than a whole new opener, but too much money for one little board. So yes, definitely stick to the higher ground and buy the whole kit and kaboodle.

Be sure not to read the instructions that say you have to put the rounded bolts on one side the track, and the flat bolts on the other. And please do NOT pay any heed to the warnings about removing that plastic tie wrap on the gear, because what harm could that do...unless perhaps it allowed you to rotate the chain and get the entire system out of whack so that the motor was trying to open a door that was already open. Finally, be absolutely sure that you do NOT check that the chain is on the sprocket before bolting the motor and track back into place. This way you'll get to take the entire shabang back down again to thread and tighten the chain after you just spent 20 minutes getting it bolted in place.

I you are careful to follow all of the steps above in just the right order, you can make what would have been a thirty minute job into an entire day of installing, uninstalling, installing, uninstalling, and finally collapsing in exhaustion.

One final hint: if you have been typing for five minutes on a post as I have, and then by some inexplicable combination of keystrokes manage to highlight everything you've typed and delete it in one stroke, try Control-Z. That much, to my amazement, worked.

Okay, I give up, the Mac is better!

So you make one mistake (buying a PC instead of a Mac) and you end up paying dearly. Took delivery of a new desktop PC today and Microsoft was so thrilled that I had a non-pirated copy of Windows XP that they offered a free download of Media Player 11. Not sure why I agreed to that, but I did (maybe because I thought it might include an actual codec that would one to watch DVDs--imagine that!--using something called "media player"). Suddenly Roxio Update started popping up every two minutes, asking for a CD that Dell didn't send me, and so I started googling and trying various fixes and the box hadn't popped up for a long time so I thought I'd start the LONG install of Adobe CS3. I was on DVD #4 when the Roxio box popped up and evidently killed my installation.

Say what you will, pay what you will, but this would never happen on a Mac.

Okay, I give up! Mozilla is better!

I've never really had a choice but to use I.E. Whatever you think of Microsoft, most of the world is married to their products, including their browser, and a person in tech support needs to stay familiar with what his customers are using. Yet I find myself clicking on Firefox more and more lately for my personal browsing (except for checking my mail on Exchange, which understandably works better in I.E.).

What's next? Where will this end? Will I be running Ubuntu as my OS tomorrow? Once strayed off the path, there are no boundaries in sight.

No WiFi in Walt's Vision of the Future

So I'm sitting in Tomorrowland at Walt's park here in Anaheim, California, eating a $7.00 slice of pizza, and I decide to check my mail on the old iPod Touch. Scanning, scanning...whoops, there is no wireless Internet in Walt's vision of tomorrow! In fact, I haven't found reliable WiFi anywhere at the Disney resort, even in the hotel, despite the fact that the management claims it does exist. On my devices, an open Disney network does come up, but always at zero strength, useless.

If Walt were here today, I'd ask him about this issue. I'd also ask him what happened to the PeopleMover, my favorite Disney ride. It was evidently dismantled here at the California park in 1995, but I could see the tracks there yesterday when we visited. Rumor has the PeopleMover may return to California someday. I say, bring back the Tomorrowland Transit Authority: when they were running things, you could hop on a pod and ride it right through Space Mountain!

It is interesting to compare the park in California with that in Florida. In Orlando the castle is the center of the park, but here the castle is no larger than a typical McMansion in Tennessee. Instead, you've got the Matterhorn as a centerpiece. Amazingly, the Captain Nemo submarine ride that disappeared from Orlando twenty or thirty years ago (until recently the lagoon still sat there, empty) is here in California, but Nemo is a fish, not a Captain! Plus there's no Hall of Presidents or Country Bears. But for the most part, Disney has tried to keep the attractions (and the prices) at the two parks in synch.

I was amazed at how Disney had been able to redevelop huge parcels of what has to be some of the most expensive real estate ini America to make a Downtown Disney and California Adventure theme park next door to Disneyland, but was told that the land was previously a parking lot.

FMS Ushers in New Era of Communication and Rivaly

Just got off the phone with my old friend Michael Torres (he is an old-fashioned guy who still uses "voice" to communicate) and despite his Internet 1.0 habits the man remains a genius! As I begged him to reconsider joining the borg of us on Facebook, and he refused for about the fourth time, he single-handedly coined the phrase "Friend Management System."

A proper FMS will allow one not only to keep instant tabs on the status of all friends, but to manage those friends as the Friend Owner deems appropriate. It's obvious that we'll each need to define classes of friends, so that we can provide differing levels of access and security. Rodger.bestfriend would be infinitely more powerful and all-seeing than Rodger.casualAcquaintance. Facebook is already doing some of this, but we'll need more...a lot more. I can see an entire hierarchy of relationships, with rankings awarded for witty comments or subtracted for watching and then commenting on, say, cooking reality shows. Instead of silly Facebook Snowball Fights, we can have Virtual Friend Warfare Systems in which all of us will compete to become and to retain the highest quality of friendship. Friend Recognition Systems will assembly entire armies to fight on our behalf, until our Avatars turn on the humans who created them and our rag-team fleet of Facebookers is forced out into the vastness of Internet 2.0 to seek a new home....

Well, you get the idea. And just remember: we all have ElTorro.bestfriend to thank, and we could all do it, too, if he would only join Facebook.

Adding Video to My Life

Woke up at 3:00 AM with a sore throat and a general feeling of malaise, so it's probable I have definitely quite possibly caught strep. Either that or I am such a hypochondriac that the moment my daughter was diagnosed, I caught it, too.

Can't make it to a couple of important meetings today (I feel well enough to go, but in the interest of public health--I do work for a School of Nursing--I will stay home) but this got me thinking about how it might be possible to use Skype to attend those meetings from here at home. Naturally I would want a video feed. I have a laptop at the office with a webcam that would work at that end, but what for here? The only cameras we have connect via Firewire, not the USB port that Skype expects. A little Googling put me on the download page for Splitcam, a free app that does indeed solve the problem...except that there is about a one second time lag in my video--and that's on my end, before it ever goes across the wires! So it would work, but the whole thing would look clunky, and that's the opposite of what I was trying to demonstrate.

So now it's either back to bed or back to struggling to make CSS do what I command (or rather, make myself do what CSS demands). Life as a would-be Internet hipster, at the moment, is more of a should-be than an is-be.