Finally got out to Chicago and spent a mad few days visiting family and running errands, after presenting two sessions at the annual conference of the American Society for Indexing in Denver last Friday. I gave the keynote talk and it was well-received\u2014my position that pages are essential and reflowability is a fetish that carries a lot of subtle dangers\u2014but the other talk, which was basically a how-to on getting Windows to work tolerably well, was SRO. People are still struggling with Windows, and when I asked, their reaction to Vista was basically unprintable. I got the impression from their questions after the session that something like Degunking Windows<\/i> needs to be done again, but covering both hardware and software in the same volume. We did a separate book a couple of years ago called Degunking Your PC<\/i>, and if I do something again, it will draw on both books. I'm taking notes. We'll see if and where it wanders.<\/p>\n
Computer crankiness always seems to erupt as soon as I kick my shoes off and get to work at my Chicago-area satellite office. When I tried to answer some email here, I found to my supreme annoyance that ATT\/Yahoo had changed the game again: Simply blocking port 25 and requiring that all outbound mail pass through their SMTP servers was not enough. Now they require that every From: address has to be explicitly registered on their Web site or the SMTP connection to their servers will be blocked.<\/p>\n
Screw that. I did a little research based on a fleeting memory that some hosting services listen on ports other than 25 for outbound email, and voila!<\/i> My hoster listens on port 2525, and after 90 seconds' worth of tweaking Thunderbird's settings, I was able to answer mail again.<\/p>\n
Ructions didn't end there. About ten minutes after booting up, my video signal started going crazy. I took the SX270 apart, determined that the insides were squeaky clean and not especially hot, and was scratching my head after seeing the problem persist after a couple of reboots. In frustration I gave the Samsung 204B a hard whack on one side, and the video signal fell immediately back into line. Because the cables were quite tight, I can only assume that the damned thing has a loose connection somewhere internally.<\/p>\n
Anger sometimes works, heh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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