Computer Tips

[Rob]

MS Internet Explorer, version 7

Just downloaded and installed MSIE v7.0.5700.6. I think it's pretty cool. Different look and feel. New options. Check it out.

[Websman]

Heck...I had my share of duties when I was young...However, as far as being Bad...You can be as bad as you want...The Key is to not get caught...Heck...I was Captain of the Varsity Ditching Team in High School and I got a scholarship to college...Although I figure if I'd actually done any academic work in High School I'd probably have gotten a scholarship from a Private College....Doug(IIC)

I grew a few plants when I was a kid... Was that bad???

[Websman]

Just downloaded and installed MSIE v7.0.5700.6. I think it's pretty cool. Different look and feel. New options. Check it out.

I just downloaded it... It'll take a little getting used to, but I think I'm going to like it.

[Rob]

I just downloaded it... It'll take a little getting used to, but I think I'm going to like it.

The thing I like best so far is the ability to open numerous Web pages simultaneously and switch back and forth between them easily by using the tabs. That is very cool indeed!

[ParkTwain]

Try Firefox browser also

I have used nothing but Firefox for a long time. Also has the tabs feature. I find Firefox's bookmarks list much easier to work with.

A key convenience issue with Firefox is that it can't run some pages (like video found on CNN's pages) that have an embedded Windows Media Player applet. (Sometimes this is due to intentional IE-only interoperability in a Windows HTTP server.) But the YouTube-type player on any page runs great.

Can't stand IE. Would always use Netscape over IE in the past. I have never understood how IE determines a sort order for my bookmarks, and it pushes an edited bookmark title to the bottom the list. Bad move, IE!

[Rob]

Firefox is OK as an alternative. But a couple years ago I was writing HTML pages that had certain elements aligned with inline style commands. In IE and Netscape these elements lined up perfectly, but Firefox just couldn't seem to get it right.

For example, if you place a 100-pixel-wide element 50 pixels from the left side of the window, and then place another element 150 pixels from the left side of the window, there shouldn't be any gap between the two elements. Netscape and IE got it right; Firefox did not. My thought at the time was that if the Firefox programmers couldn't even get something that simple right, what else have they screwed up? I therefore rarely use it.

I tried Netscape a few times and for some reason was never comfortable with it; it always seemed overly complex and counter-intuitive to me. I always went back to IE.

From your statement, "Can't stand IE," it sounds to me, Park, like you are one of those who just dislikes Microsoft. There really isn't that much to dislike about IE. The bookmarks list thing is pretty minor in the overall picture. I mean, you can put them in any order you want and they will stay that way, or else you can right click and sort them alphabetically.

I guess my philosophy about such things, in a nutshell, is: stay open-minded and follow the path of least resistance.

[skiracer]

I grew a few plants when I was a kid... Was that bad???

This is a funny story. Your post brought it back to my mind. There were two brothers who were very good friends of mine. I'll call them Lou and Jim. Lou was the older and touch as nails as they were dirt poor growing up. Jimmy grew up very street smart and cunning. Early on they were always doing anything to make money. Lou had the paper route and Jimmy was on the hustle. It didn't take them long before Jimmy was realizing the profit in marijuana and the sale of it. These two brothers were about 8/9 years younger than me so weren't in my inner circle but I knew them from being in the same larger cirlce of associates. Over the years any number of us would interact in all kinds of deals and levels and Lou and Jimmy prospered and did real well. Lou and Jimmy were brothers but not partners and Jimmy, although the younger, was always correcting Lou or disregarding Lou's ideas. But Jimmy always included Lou in his action and Lou always accepted because he knew it would be a money maker. Jimmy was the first one of us to go to down to Colombia, on the cold, just to see what was going on and how he could profit. To make a long story much shorter we all ended up prospering in Colombia and had a nice villa on the north coast that several of us lived in on an off. In those days, 1972 to around 1977, it was basically wide open down there and all you needed was a green card to go down.
Several years passed by and me and a couple of friends were living on a black woman's hog farm in the summer of 1976. She had 106 acres and about 12/13 of them were farmable and the rest was wooded. We were going to try to do an organic farming adventure and market the produce at a couple of locations around the area. We all had plenty of cash and real jobs weren't even considered so we had plenty of time on our hands. We had bought several pieces of antiquated farm equipment and were in the process of levelling the farmable land. Lou and Jimmy were regular visitors, as were about a hundred of other long haired psyedellic stoned knomes we knew and didn't know that wanted to hang out and help with the farm work for pot and food and a place to crash occassionally. We accomadated all of them. We had set up a large old army tent, 20 x 30, that were were calling home at the time. Liza's house, if you wanted to call it that, had no heat or running water or bathroom facilities. She had about 10 dogs that would run in an out of the house at their leisure as they were no closing door either.
But I stray from my original story. Lou and Jimmy were always around and they thought for sure that I was growing pot for profit somewhere in the woods or on that farm somewhere. The truth was that there were so many police around thinking the same thing that it would have been insane to even try to do anything illegal. Besides the farm work was the hardest thing I ever did and turned out to be a whole lot more than I considered initially.
Lou and Jim couldn't get the idea of my growing pot out of their head and this is what they went and did. They found themselves a small isolated farm somewhere in Monmouth county NJ and out in the back somewhere they cleared off a considerable area, put in a simple irrigation system and grew about two acres of pot. For the entire summer they disappeared. Like smoke in the wind they were out of touch for the entire summer without a word. No one knew where they went or what they were doing and it was on everyone's mind as to what was going on.
The farm was a success as far as the produce growning. I had more than I could handle and ended up growning 25 hogs of my own because of all the rotted vegetables that we couldn't get off the vines or plants and to our markets. It took a ton of work and time so I really didn't miss Lou or Jim to much. In the meantime their crop was doing great and a long time later I saw photos of the farm and the crop. The plants were 7/8 ft. tall and very bushy.
After our season was done my buddies stayed on at Liza's place for quite awhile into October when Jimmy stops by out of the clear blue sky and tells me what he has been doing all summer and that he is sitting on quite a bit of product himself. Like the movie makers he was looking for distribution help and was just talking to people he knew and trusted. Anyway he offers me the chance to look at the farm but I don't need to do that but was open to doing business whenever he was. I don't hear from Jimmy or Lou for a couple of weeks when I'm reading a clip in the Asbury Park Press about two brothers who got caught growing pot out in Manalapan, NJ in Monmouth county. It seems that as they were pulling out of their driveway with a pickup loaded full with marijuana, they happenned to pull out in front of an normal looking unmarked car that was a NJ State police officer. He stopped them and was quoted as saying that as soon as he got out of his car the stench of something recognizable as marijuana was overwhelming. Lou was driving with Jimmy in the passenger seat. The rest is history.
This is part of a much larger story that I have been working on over the last year or so. It's in a rough draft stage so please forgive the spelling and some of the sentence structure. This is still in a rough stage.

[billyjoe]

Ski,
I would have no knowledge of that , but now I'm told just a hand full of plants can be spotted from the air by infrared sensors or some such thing and there's nowhere to hide.

-------------billyjoe

[peanuts]

Ski,
I would have no knowledge of that , but now I'm told just a hand full of plants can be spotted from the air by infrared sensors or some such thing and there's nowhere to hide.

-------------billyjoe

cops have too much time on their hands. Aren't there real criminals running amok somewhere? sheesh

[eliaskane]

I tried Netscape a few times and for some reason was never comfortable with it; it always seemed overly complex and counter-intuitive to me. I always went back to IE.

From your statement, "Can't stand IE," it sounds to me, Park, like you are one of those who just dislikes Microsoft. There really isn't that much to dislike about IE. [...]

I guess my philosophy about such things, in a nutshell, is: stay open-minded and follow the path of least resistance.

So many of these things come down to matters of taste. I went the Netscape - Mozilla - Firefox route and never looked back. Firefox does great for 99% of everything out there on the Web. IE is behind the times when it comes to things like tabbed browsing and popup blockers. Firefox is much better at standards compliance.

The only times I need Internet Explorer are a) to run the screener on MSN Money Central and b) at work, to run a handful of web-based applications that are Microsoft-only. Other than that I follow my preference, and it's okay if yours is different, no Microsoft loving or hating necessary.

[skiracer]

Ski,
I would have no knowledge of that , but now I'm told just a hand full of plants can be spotted from the air by infrared sensors or some such thing and there's nowhere to hide.

-------------billyjoe

Billyjoe,

This story happened a long time ago. I just thought it ironic and funny that after all that work they pulled out in front of a cop at the last minute. It's certainly not a condemnation of the police or anything like that. They both went to prison for that escapade. Non-violent crime but still a crime. The technology has certainly advanced since that time. I guess it wasn't that funny after all.

[diogenes]

[B]This is a funny story.
This is part of a much larger story that I have been working on over the last year or so. It's in a rough draft stage so please forgive the spelling and some of the sentence structure. This is still in a rough stage.

Wow, sounds like a very interesting time and was a fun read.
Thanks.

[ParkTwain]

Re: disliking Microsoft

What I dislike is the smothering of innovation that has occurred for the last 10+ years in the computing world due to the Microsoft monopoly. All the innovation has come from the WWW, open source community, and similar user-driven movements. Microsoft "earned" its monopoly status, so that's not subject to debate. But look at the consequences. I have worked in the high tech field since 1980. I have programmed everything from mainframes, several kinds of minicomputers, and PCs, etc. etc. Microsoft's dominance has drastically slowed the rate of innovation in the industry. Standardization (whether formal or de facto) is also important to disseminating the results of technological innovation. Microsoft's products have provided de facto standards in several areas of computing, but today they function as the "floor" of functionality in most IT sectors. Microsoft does gradually raise that floor, but not due to competitive pressures in most cases.

Did you guys see the news about the EU threatening to sue Microsoft due to the poor quality of their API documentation? Poor documentation of the means for other software systems to interoperate with Windows puts another area of drag on the growth (other than Microsoft's own) of the industry.

http://thecontentwrangler.com/article/microsoft_api_manual_so_disorganized_its_deemed_useless/

//
May 25, 2006
In 2004, European Union (EU) regulators ordered Microsoft to produce a “workable” programming manual that would allow companies that use other operating systems (like Linux) to utilize the “grammar rules” needed to build software programs that could communicate with Microsoft products. Microsoft complied with the request, which was part of the an EU anti-trust lawsuit against the softare giant, but not to the satisfaction of regulators. The EU asked Microsoft to rewrite the manual because they were “dismayed with its length and its disorganization”
//

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/06/979&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

[skiracer]

Wow, sounds like a very interesting time and was a fun read.
Thanks.

It was an interesting time and will be a great read if I ever get it all down. Almost Damon Runyonesque in it's similarity to a bunch of "Guys and Dolls" characters. Webs post just reminded me of this story so I had to tell it. I condensed this one alot because of the time and space element but the whole story of that period, and this particular story is just a tiny part of that summer, is a much better and funnier read in the context of the whole story. I started trying to put it all together at the beginning of this year an intend on posting some of the parts as I finish them just to get some feedback. This one wasn't finished and would be much better in a finished state with the spelling and sentence structure fine tuned.
I should have posted it on my own thread though. I think I may have posted another earlier story regarding Liza, the black lady with the hog farm, and my how my relationship started and developed with her. It's somewhere in my thread. She was in her 90's when this took place.

[billyjoe]

ski,
An interesting story , parts of it Cheech and Chongish. Entrepeneurs have to start somewhere. I remember selling used "rare" United States commemorative postage stamps during recess in 5th grade for 1 to 8 cents each.

------------billyjoe