stoutfellow

Google Grudge

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 00:31:20 GMT

I cannot fathom the following sequence of events.

a) I begin typing in the Google search box.
b) Google offers several possible completions, and I select one.
c) Google objects to my selection: "Did you mean :something else:?"

(I have many objections to the "Did you mean" message, but this one is especially annoying.)

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Wacom Woes

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 23:01:46 GMT

I cannot begin to describe my frustration with Wacom. After a whole series of roadblocks to getting the tablet up and running, I asked to reset my password. I received an e-mail with a link to the password-reset page. I entered a password, repeated to confirm, and pressed "Submit". Nothing visible happened; when I went over to the login page, it rejected the password I had entered.

The e-mails suggest going to the Wacom support. All it has are links to a bunch of FAQs, none of which are relevant to my problem. There is no place to chat or state a specific problem.

Swelp me, if I have to fall back on PowerPoint with voice-over, I will be well and truly pissed. (Well, actually, I'm there already...)

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It's a Wonderful Time

Fri, 06 Dec 2019 10:36:19 GMT

I'm sitting here listening to Dan Fogelberg's "Only the Heart May Know". The song is a duet, but his partner is not identified on the album. It took me only a few seconds of googling to identify her as Emmylou Harris.

It is, in many ways, a wonderful age to live in.

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GeekAid Needed

Tue, 23 Jul 2019 23:16:55 GMT

My home desktop computer is apparently unable to access Dark Sky. ("Server Not Found".) I checked isitdown, and they report no problems; I am able to access it from my laptop and from my office computer. I suppose there's some "clear XXX" command in Options that might fix this, but I don't know which one. Help?

ETA: Problem fixed!

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Add-Offs

Sun, 05 May 2019 10:01:42 GMT

I am well and truly pissed at Firefox this morning. I don't have many add-ons, but the ones I have are either important or very useful. The add-on glitch they're dealing with has disabled both of my ad blockers, two of my security add-ons, and my feed reader. The "studies" link says it's already run on my computer, but the add-ons are still hors de combat.

Six hours, they say. OK, I'll give them until 10:30 before I start screaming.

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Nuts!

Sun, 14 Apr 2019 19:37:25 GMT

Learn something new every day... Apparently crushed walnut shells used to be used to clean jet engines (and are still used for smaller engines). They're tossed into the running engine, where they have the right abrasiveness to scrape off gunk, and they wind up being incinerated without causing further problems.

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DB Help

Sun, 17 Feb 2019 20:10:40 GMT

I'm rather annoyed by Microsoft's plans as regards Office (or, more specifically, Access), so I've downloaded OpenOffice, in hopes of building my library and finances databases on that platform. However, I'm finding the documentation difficult to work with. Just setting up the first form is giving me fits; for my Finances database, I start with a dashboard form, not tied to any table or query, which provides me with some immediately-needed data and allows me to shift to other, table-tied forms. OO Base seems reluctant to let me do that. (There are hints that I need to create that form with the OO word processor, which, whatthehell?

Does anyone a) know how to get decent docs for OO, or b) know of a decent, user-friendly, not-too-complicated DB environment, preferable as easy to work with as Access?

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Pictures

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 02:24:26 GMT

I may have mentioned that I have a large collection of backgrounds, and my monitors cycle through them at six-hour intervals. I have a lot of Astronomy Picture of the Day screens, a bunch of screens from one or another webcomic, a few TV-oriented screens (mostly from Buffy or Angel), and most recently a variety of famous paintings.

A few days ago my computer had another episode of catatonia. When I rebooted, Windows Media Player had once again forgotten all of my music - it had somehow recovered a while ago, but it's gone again - and my monitors were stuck on two backgrounds, randomly choosing one or the other every six hours. (One was a picture of the recent solar eclipse, in the background of a pagoda; the other was a closeup of Jupiter.)

I finally did... something, I don't know what, that kicked the display out of that loop, and I've got "The Blue Guitar" and an Angel screen up now. We'll see if this is back to normal, or just another tight loop.

:is hopeful:

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The Nose Knows

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 20:07:40 GMT

A little bit ago, I received a message from my department's chairman. Subject line: "Hello!" Text: "Are you on campus?" I started to reply (of course I'm not on campus; the university is closed today), then paused, and looked again. The "From" line read :LastName FirstName:, rather than :LastName, FirstName:. The "From" address was not his university account; though it was a plausible one, it was not one I remembered seeing. The "Subject" was nondescript; the text contained neither a salutation nor a signature. "Is this really from him?"

I shot him a line at his university account, asking whether he'd sent it and, just in case, answering the question. He responded quickly; that isn't one of his e-mail addresses.

I deleted the message. I'm a suspicious type, and I'll do this kind of check if a message seems off to me. It pleases me, in a grim sort of way, when my instincts are right, and when they aren't, well, safety first!

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Where's My Warning?

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 19:36:47 GMT

The university requires us to change our passwords at least once every sixty days. We get a warning at two weeks out, and then daily reminders from one week out on.

My last change of password occurred on November 5; the next deadline, therefore, should be the 4th of this month. I should have started being noodged before Christmas.

Nada. I think I'll make the change on Friday, just in case; but I'm curious what's going on.

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Copy-Os

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 02:40:03 GMT

Among the e-books I'm currently reading are a collection of Chinese fairy tales and a biography of Theodore Roosevelt. I'm pretty sure both were digitized using OCR, because both are plagued by recurrent errors. The Roosevelt book makes frequent reference to GOP pol James G. Blaine as "Elaine". (They get it right a couple of times, but more often than not it's wrong.) The last couple of fairy tales have referred to "the Euler of Heaven", and while my mathematician's heart feels the phrase is accurate, I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be "Ruler".

(Neither is as bad as the collection of Navajo stories I read a couple of years ago; the author, to represent sounds that are present in Navajo but not in English, used a set of nonstandard symbols, which the OCR reader couldn't handle. There were numerous cases where what was obviously the same name was transcribed differently in successive paragraphs.)

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Oops

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 09:47:32 GMT

I may have made a mistake.

Last Wednesday, I posted the geometry take-home final. I just received the first submission, in .pdf form, from one of my best students.

I have not looked at it yet, and probably won't until the rest come in.

It's 14.3 MB. (Lots of images, and he wanted them to be clear...)

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Music?

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 15:45:37 GMT

This morning, when I sat down for my morning websurf, my computer was... unresponsive. Moving the mouse woke up the monitors, but clicking yielded no results. I finally went for a manual reboot. When it came back up, mouse and keyboard were fine, but I found that Windows Media Player couldn't find most of my music. (It displayed the first twenty-four, alphabetically by artist.) I verified that the music was still there, and I could play it by clicking on individual songs, but... this was unsatisfactory. I've shifted over to Groove, which recognizes all of my music, but I have been reminded of the reasons I prefer WMP.

Anyone know of a fix?

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Face Me!

Tue, 20 Nov 2018 15:14:25 GMT

Something odd is going on with my Facebook account. When I log in, my timeline shows no posts, nor the field for entering a new post. When I shift to "Home", I get a shimmery I'm-trying-to-load image, but nothing comes clear.

Has anyone experienced this? I realize many people don't have FB accounts (and I don't need to be asked why I do), but I can't post this there, given the nature of the problem! Any thoughts or helpful (see previous sentence) suggestions?

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Semiliterate

Sat, 10 Nov 2018 21:14:19 GMT

When I get a phone call, my Caller ID tells me who it is. Of course, a lot of the time it says "Unavailable", but that means "Don't bother", as far as I'm concerned. I liked the identification "Illegal Scam" that it gave me a couple of times. But lately there've been a number of calls audibly IDed as "Not Eye En Service". I don't always hear the first iteration very well, but the second one has been clear; it took me a time or two to figure out what it was actually saying.

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Say What?

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 02:15:50 GMT

TFW... you point the remote at the TV and press a button, only to be told "Not available".

"Not available? *Not available*? It's the freaking *off switch*, you bastard!"

(It took another couple of tries, but the TV did, eventually, submit.)

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Superfluity

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 00:40:35 GMT

A few days ago, I decided that it was time to use my long-dormant online banking account. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten not just the password but the username. Checking the FAQ, I saw that this problem could be dealt with by phoning :number: or e-mailing :address:. Being rather averse to telephoning strangers, I chose the latter option.

Today, I received an e-mailed response. It advised me to call :number:.

I'm feeling rather peeved by this.

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Serendipity

Sat, 08 Sep 2018 16:28:45 GMT

I just ripped my three new CDs - Sweet, Katy Perry, and Lou Rawls - to my hard drive, and have begun listening to them.

It is a nice coincidence that the process of ripping a standard-sized CD takes about as much time - a little less, I think - as a single track, so I get to listen to the first song while ripping.

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Weekend

Fri, 31 Aug 2018 20:51:37 GMT

I don't have any classes on Friday, so, with Monday being Labor Day, I'm effectively on a four-day weekend. I'm tinkering with the latest iteration of my library database; I've figured out how to greatly simplify some rather kludgy code from the previous version. It'll take me a while - probably into December - before I have the new version up and running, but I'm feeling good about it so far.

I plan to make my first Amazon trip of the year this weekend also. (Long and boring explanation omitted.) I've got quite a bit to catch up with, most notably the latest Vorkosiverse novella. (There are fifty-two messages in my Bujold folder that I haven't read, since they contain spoilers.) I also want some more music.

Of course, the weekend won't be all fun and games. There are some financial items that need attending to as well. But mostly I intend to enjoy myself.

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Unrequested Services

Fri, 31 Aug 2018 15:19:53 GMT

Feh.

I use Thunderbird for my e-mail on my home computer. The mail passes through the university server, however, which uses MS Outlook. Somehow, the Notifications flag on the latter got turned on, giving Outlook permission to read my mail and notify me of upcoming events. "You're flying to Seattle tomorrow!" was not too bad; I just deleted it. But today, I received a message: "Your bill with :company: is due in a couple of days!" But a) I paid that bill a week ago, and b) if I had not paid it, :company: would have given me a noodge by now.

This service, I do not need. It took me a while to find the appropriate settings page, but I have turned it off. I think. I hope. I still don't know how it got turned on.

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Getting Ready to Roll

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 20:08:16 GMT

Fall semester begins next Monday. I didn't get as much done this summer as I'd hoped, but I did take care of a few things.

My new state ID card arrived last week. Unfortunately, Illinois IDs don't meet TSA's RealID standards; they'll still be accepted till October, but not after that, so I'm OK for Meg's celebration of life meetup next week, but I'll need to get a passport before my December trip to California.

My laptop began malfunctioning a few months ago. I didn't find time to take it in for a checkup until today; the people at Best Buy fiddled with it for a bit and voila, the malfunction went away. They gave me some suggestions on how to keep it from happening again, which should be easy enough to carry out.

My Master's student was away on family business for a couple of weeks, but she's back now and we've resumed meeting. We'll have to work out our fall schedule soon.

I absolutely must get some new clothes this week. I'm down to 2.5 passable pairs of pants, which means laundry every three days. Not good.

Where'd I leave that harness?

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Wildmoka

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 21:41:08 GMT

This is interesting, I think.

I have the Maddow Blog RSS feed bookmarked. Currently, the topmost item listed is "Demo of Wildmoka", which is apparently a video editing program. Actually going to the Maddow Blog site reveals, as its topmost item, "Tuesday's Mini-Report", as I would expect. I see no sign there of a link to Wildmoka - not that I have any need for video editing, but I'm curious what's going on. Has Wildmoka, with or without MSNBC's permission, inserted something into the RSS feed? Do I have to watch out for this in future?

:purses lips:

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Check, Please!

Sat, 16 Jun 2018 12:33:57 GMT

I can understand websites whose income is ad-generated, blocking people who are using ad blockers.

I can understand websites which ask people with ad blockers to whitelist them, or take other compensatory steps.

I cannot understand a website which asks you to whitelist them *without checking whether you've already done so*. (The button reads "already whitelisted or declining to do so".)

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Icon't Stand It

Mon, 14 May 2018 09:12:28 GMT

Every so often - it's rare, but not nonexistent - my WiFi flakes for a bit, and I can't access anything. It usually resolves in a matter of minutes, but it leaves one trace: any websites in my Bookmark list that I try to access during the flake have their icons in the Bookmark menu replaced by the AT&T (my ISP) logo.

This irritates me. They've got *perfectly good icons of their own*. Give. Them. Back!

Does anyone know a way to correct this?

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Truth in Advertising

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 23:02:39 GMT

I just got one of those malicious phone calls, where they tell you that your computer has been compromised and you need to call them about it Right. Now. I did not pick up, but let the answering machine take it, as per usual.

What is interesting is how Caller ID handled it: "Call from illegal scam."

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