{"id":460,"date":"2008-03-24T14:59:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-24T18:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=460"},"modified":"2009-01-14T22:56:25","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T02:56:25","slug":"odd-lots-43","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=460","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>I&apos;ve had a difficult week here; new dental problems have arisen,                 culminating in an unplanned root canal this past Thursday, followed                 almost immediately by a much-delayed flight from Denver to Chicago                 for an Easter visit, where they happened to be having a blizzard.                 (The earliest Easter since 1913 corresponded with a lingering                 winter across the Midwest.) Tooth troubles continue, so if my                 posts have been (and continue to be) a little sparse, that&apos;s most                 of the reason.<\/li>\n<li>Our early Easter this year caused some people to ask how the                 date of Easter is calculated. Well, <a href=\"http:\/\/godplaysdice.blogspot.com\/2008\/03\/easters-early-this-year-deal-with-it.html\">it&apos;s                 not pretty<\/a>. At least next year it happens in April, whew.<\/li>\n<li>Here&apos;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.americancatholic.org\/Messenger\/Jul1997\/feature2.asp\">a                 nice article<\/a> describing a problem that is by no means recent:                 The split between people in the Catholic Church who can worship                 with a light heart, and people who invariably equate reverence                 with grimness . This has been an issue at least since Pope Pius                 IX lost <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Papal_States\">the                 Papal States<\/a> in the mid-1800s, after which the Papacy became                 obsessed with its authority and lost any ability to laugh at itself                 or anything else. (Pope John XXIII bucked the trend, but we didn&apos;t                 have him anywhere near long enough to make a permanent difference.)                 Roman Catholicism needs a sense of humor far more than it needs                 a Pope, but this may be one of those things that won&apos;t be solved                 within my own lifetime.<\/li>\n<li>In keeping with its long history of contempt for the consumer                 (which, in all fairness, is rife in Japan) Sony attempted to charge                 purchasers of its laptops $49 <i>not<\/i> to install a crippling                 load of crapware on the machines. Apparently they&apos;ve taken so                 much flak for it that <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.zdnet.com\/Bott\/?p=404\">they                 recently dropped the fee<\/a>. What I find boggling is that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.davidlouisedelman.com\/technology\/vaio-bloatware\/\">they                 willingly cripple their own machines by selling huge numbers of                 crapware slots<\/a>, which makes you wonder how much money they                 make in the crapware business. We may be heading down the same                 path here for laptops that printers have followed, in which the                 printer is a thin, shabby thing sold for very little that makes                 money for its parent company by consuming artificially expensive                 ink\/toner cartridges.<\/li>\n<li>It seems that I&apos;ve been hearing a great deal within my own circle                 of contacts about people who try to help nontechnical folks (often                 parents) make Vista work with existing peripherals and software.                 The script goes like this: Nontechnical person brings home a new                 Vista PC or laptop from Best Buy and tries to install older software                 or connect it to various external hardware devices. Install fails;                 system aborts in various weird ways; technical person tries to                 fix (or simply understand) the failure, to no avail. Moral here:                 <i>Do not use Vista<\/i>. Everything that isn&apos;t needless window                 dressing is there for Microsoft&apos;s or Big Media&apos;s benefit, not                 yours. (Reread the venerable <a href=\"http:\/\/slashdot.org\/%7Etwitter\/journal\/177855\">Vista                 Failure Log<\/a> if you haven&apos;t read it for awhile.) You can still                 order PCs from vendors like Dell with XP preinstalled. Do it while                 you still can. And failing that, start researching Ubuntu\/Kubuntu.<\/li>\n<li>Speaking of failure, WiMax (which we have seemingly been waiting                 for since the last ice sheets retreated) may be a failure <a href=\"http:\/\/www.commsday.com\/node\/228\">because                 it&apos;s lousy technology<\/a>. The wireless DOCSIS technology mentioned                 in the linked article as a solution has been around for some years                 and doesn&apos;t have a much better reputation. We may in fact be asking                 too much of low-power microwave broadband systems\u2014fixed point-to-point                 broadband is totally at the mercy of topography and even vegetation\u2014and                 I keep coming back to the conviction that some sort of &#8220;roof-hopper&#8221;                 mesh network may be the best path to follow. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.airinet.com\/\">People                 are doing this<\/a> in some areas; why it isn&apos;t seen as a more                 general solution puzzles me.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&apos;ve had a difficult week here; new dental problems have arisen, culminating in an unplanned root canal this past Thursday, followed almost immediately by a much-delayed flight from Denver to Chicago for an Easter visit, where they happened to be having a blizzard. (The earliest Easter since 1913 corresponded with a lingering winter across the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[15,39,64,42,14],"class_list":["post-460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-hardware","tag-health","tag-mathematics","tag-religion","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=460"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":476,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460\/revisions\/476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}