Why bother?

In a galaxy far, far away, I started this blog with the hope of earning a few dollars every so often.

At first, most readers were from the U.S. and Canada.  Now I get dozens of visits from Russia or Italy.  These are probably trolls who are hoping I will click on their URLs which they hope will trap me into some nefarious scheme.

The few dollars never got to the level at which Google would send me a check.  With only a few dollars to go to that level, the meter stopped.  Then Google sent me an email that I hadn’t made certain changes or something or other.  I’ve long forgotten how to edit the site and really don’t want to figure out how to do it again.

If you’ve been a long time reader, I thank you.

Maybe I’ll post something else here now and then; maybe I won’t.  Che séra, séra!

A newspaper’s takeover of subscribers’ computers

Given the increasing complexity of software and its decreasing user-friendliness, I think 1984 has arrived.  We are supposed to follow robotically through the latest commands of the software designer, aka Big Brother.  And like in 1984, we have no idea what we are doing or should be doing.

I have almost 59 years of computer experience.  I started with a summer job in which I used a textbook to learn to program an IBM 650.  That was a set of large refrigerator size boxes with punched cards in and punched cards out.

Over the next twenty-plus years I went on to program and debug larger and larger computers.  I was often an advocate of newer techniques, like using compilers instead of machine code or using email instead of typed memos.

Then personal computers appeared on the scene.  Some of them easy to use, some of them opaque to use.  In 1984, the Macintosh appeared.  It was a real break-through in ease of use.  Many laughed at WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pictures).  They preferred the complex set of coding that had to be done for the simplest tasks.

I was hooked and became a Certified Macintosh Developer.  I was eager to get the latest Mac with many great features: color, faster and smaller storage devices, and more.

Then OS-X (operating system 10) appeared.  It had many nifty features except ease of transferring older programs to it.  I never got around to rewriting my genealogy program and have lost all that data (except that which I had printed out).  On the other hand, there were many new features that were a delight to use.

But as one OS X after another followed, the Mac started being persnickety.  Printers that were easy to use became a nightmare.  Where is the setting to print an envelope.  Why does the scanner work well with an old OS but gives dark blobs on a newer OS?

Then sin of sins, without asking me, Apple decided I should install the latest operating system just because I was using wi-fi at a coffee shop.  Not only did Apple decide that I should upgrade, it decided that all my files in the Document folder should go to iCloud.  But that was more data than my free 5GB.  It asked me to upgrade my account to 50GB.  The extra $0.99 a month was no big deal, but I still haven’t completely reorganized my Document file so that I don’t need be hooked up to the web to use those files.

The same increasing difficulty has struck many web-sites.  I now subscribe to four newspapers.  Most of them generally work well with only a few quirks that take awhile to figure out.  Just like the print versions, the newspapers are filled with ads.  Generally you can just scroll past them.

But sometime last year, the Star Tribune began to have intrusive ads.  They would take over the computer with no obvious way out.  Not only would the ad page take over the tab slot on a browser, there was no way to get out of it except close the tab or follow it on to other pages in the ad chain.

A similar annoyance is a side-bar ad with a misleading message: “Log In”.  It is not a log in to the newspaper, but an ad for using a Google product for signing in to web sites.

A friendly guy at Star Tribune’s support department helped me try to clear things up.  But it was drastic, including resetting my iPad.  Guess what that did?  It wiped out all my cookies so that I had to enter saved passwords all over again.  Good thing I have the passwords stored in an obscure place.

Rather than making my life simple by easily accessing my bank accounts, reading the latest news, and sending email to friends, I seem to have gone into standby debug mode.

Unfortunately, one of those pop-ups appeared again this morning.  That’s it.  I asked the Star Tribune to cancel my subscription.  Bye to “The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee” and many other comics that are not in the Duluth News Tribune.  Good-bye to many in-depth state stories and editorials.

I do have relatives who spend a small fortune calling Geek Squad every time time they need to make some software change.  Do you think the Star Tribune would pay me for all my efforts?  Do you think your phone will run forever without re-charging?

P.S.  Well, maybe I'll keep the Star Tribune subscription for a few more days.  It worked fine this morning.

Awful Motors has introduced “new, improved” wheel design

Awful Motors has introduced square wheels, a cool new feature on all of its models.  Awful Motors stated in its introduction that round wheels were boring, they just went around and around.

This just in, after thousands of complaints of Awful Motors’ square wheels, the company has announced that by popular demand it will replace the square wheels with octagonal wheels, providing a significantly smoother ride.

Far-fetched?  This is not far from the abrupt changes that so many software designers put into their products.  A feature was working fine for millions of users, and then some designer has a “better idea”.

Some bothersome changes I’ve found recently are Yahoo! Finance’ rework of its pages and the Star Tribune’s changing relatively simple software to move between the print edition and an expanded article to cluttered software that never seems to work as one would wish.  I have no idea how other readers perceive the changes to the Star Tribune, but Yahoo had a page for comments.  These comments were almost all negative.

Google once had a simple way of moving from blog authoring to statistics without signing in again.  Now one has to log in over and over again and there are several clutter pages between authoring, feed analysis, and income review.

Apple, once the computer for the rest of us, has morphed into guess how this cool new feature works.  In the first few years of the Macintosh I was eager for a new version when real advances were made - hard drives, color, drag and drop, and on and on.  Now, I update to a major new release only when I buy a new device.

Often I think these changes are not for the benefit of the uses but the employment prospects of the designers.

Thanks to my most eager and vigilant user

If I post two entries within fifteen minutes of each other (sometimes less), it seems that somebody has viewed the first before I post the second.

Thank you so much for your interest.  I hope you can tell many others.

I need as many readers as possible to counter the increasing number of Russian reverse spammers.  I can’t believe that there are five times more people in Russia who are interested in this blog than there are in the United States who read this blog.

Shameless self-promotion

I’ve spent way too much time documenting a problem with Apple software.  I phrased my description in a manner that it was moved from the support people to the programmers.  The latter asked for a bit more information.

To add to my “bona fides” I suggested they do a search for

“melvyn” “magree” computers

The quotes are important.  Without them Google would also search for melvin and magee.  The “melvyn” is also important because there are many Magrees who are better-known than I am, especially in Australia.

Wow! Over 20,000 hits going way back.  Gosh, if I could have gotten $100 for each of those items…

Word play

I am taking a University for Seniors at UMD called “Words Just Want to Have Fun”.

The instructor passed out cards with a word or a phrase.  We were supposed to make a poem using that word.  Mine was “buffalo” and I thought of a haiku and a pair of rhymes.

Buffalo, the town,
Gets lots and lots of deep snow.
It’s the lake effect.

Where the buffalo roam
Is the subject of a poem.
But there are no buffalo on the range
And the bison are penned to cook on your range.

We were also supposed to work in pairs on a cryptogram.  It is from the Oct-Dec. SPELL/Binder.  No pair finished it in class.  I kept making copying errors, putting the letter of the clue in the grid rather than the letter in the clue.  I also had to look three clues, one online (author of “The Razor’s Edge”,  one in the dictionary that began with “syn”, and one in “Hamlet” about what the ghost had to say about Gertrude.

This last was misleading because the clue included “Hamlet’s ghost”, not the ghost in “Hamlet”.

Google does no evil?

After learning that Google had joined ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, I sent the following letter (paper) to Larry Page, CEO and a founder of Google.  I forgot to include that Google got its start with a federal grant.

By the way, I think that paper letters have far more influence than petitions, online or otherwise.  It's easy to add your name to a petition; it takes time and thought to write a letter.

I didn't take the time to fit into my letter a reminder that Google's start was made possible by a government grant.  See the very interesting "On the Origins of Google".

Larry Page
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View CA 94043

Dear Mr. Page:

I was surprised and disappointed to learn that Google had joined ALEC, an organization that is opposed to much of what Google stands for:

From “Ten things we know to be true” on your company philosophy:

“You can make money without doing evil.”

ALEC is an anti-democratic organization if there was ever one.

Consider the words of Adam Smith:

"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [those who live by profit], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776

For more tidbits from Adam Smith, see “The Invisible Adam Smith” at http://magree.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-invisible-adam-smith.html

I wonder if I want to keep using Google products.  But maybe I should use Google products to fight whatever “evil” Google may do.

Why snail research is important

On a Bill Maher show, "Stephen Moore, libertarian economist and Wall Street Journal columnist" kept pounding away that we must reduce the debt and one way to do that is to cut funding for science grants, like $2 million for snail mating research.  "19-year-old Zack Kopplin, science advocate and history student" retorted that government-sponsored science often gives far better returns than many investments.  He gave as an example that the government investment in genome research paid back 140 times the investment.  See "College Kid Forced To Remind Know-It-All Economist That He's Actually Not A Scientist".

Warning: this segment deteriorates into a shouting match!

I might add, would we be reading these stories if the government hadn't invested in the Internet decades ago?  Would we have had Google if the government hadn't given a California university a grant to study search algorithms?

About the snail mating research, "it's to prevent children in developing countries from getting parasitic worms…"  Why should we protect these children from parasitic worms?  Parasites increase poverty.  Poverty leads to corruption.  Corruption leads to terrorism.  Two million dollars is a much better investment to prevent terrorism than two hundred million dollars and rising per F-35, a plane that still has many problems.

The people know best how to spend their own money! Really?

Yes, we know how to spend our money on food, shelter, and entertainment, but do we know how to spend our money on infra-structure, police and fire, military, regulatory agencies, foreign policy, and basic research?

"Know best how to spend our own money" has been a mantra of the anti-tax, anti-government crowd as if government is just a sinkhole giving money away for no purpose.  They completely ignore that taxes pay for our roads, our sewers, and many other physical features of a civil society.  They ignore that without regulatory agencies a power company could change its rates willy-nilly without warning.  They ignore that without a military, there would be nobody to fight the wars that they claim we should get into.  They ignore that without the basic research into atomic energy that we would not have the nuclear energy that taxes have heavily subsidized.  And if they found this page with Google, they should thank the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and NASA for the grant to Stanford University in 1994 that made Google possible.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation and many other pages.

Protesting is great, but voting is better

Google, Wikipedia, and others did a great job of mobilizing people to protest SOPA and PIPA.

It would be even better if they mobilize people to vote in November. Not support any candidate, but just get people to show up and vote.

I sent feedback to Google and Wikimedia about this. I hope you will do the same and encourage your friends to do the same. We have to stop "landslides" of less than half the eligible voters.

Be the demōs in democracy!

Vote!

Please pass this entry to your friends. It's URL is http://magree.blogspot.com/2012/01/protesting-is-great-but-voting-is.html

One better ranking of this blog

This morning when I was looking at the statistics for this blog, I was intrigued by the access through the search term "how to argue with a tea partier". I did a google search and my blog entry came up number 12 of about 6.78 million!! The entry is "You can't argue with Tea Party supporters" and is about an off-the-wall, missed the point response to my Local View about the Tea Party in the Duluth News Tribune last June.

If you want to grow, you have to spend money for seeds

After I wrote the blog entry "We have met the enemy, and he is us", I reread a bit of David Weidner's article.  One thing that struck me was that Google was founded with the help of a federal grant!

I thought I would check a bit further, and found "National Science Foundation (NSF) Discoveries - On the Origins of Google".  The article was written long after the fact and I didn't try to dig out the original grant.  I do wonder if Page and Brin would have even been in graduate school without the grant.

I don't know the size of the grant, but think of the huge amount of income taxes paid each year by the 16,000 employees of Google.  Think of the productivity increases of many researchers in companies large and small thanks to Google.  I wouldn't be surprised if that one grant paid many times over for all the similar grants made at the same time.

Quote of the day - Ease of use

"Everything syncs without us having to think about it." - Apple CEO Steve Jobs, 2011-06-06, on introducing iCloud

Hey Steve!  How about coming to my house and think about syncing my iPod and MacBook Pro?  I have spent I don't know how many hours trying to restore dropped calendars and contacts or remove duplicate entries in either.

Maybe it's Microsoft's fault.  These problems seem to have started when I switched from Office 2008 to Office 2011.  Microsoft replaced Entourage in the former with Outlook in the latter.  Similar software, but as usual, the new improved version can be several steps backward.

I don't know how many times I've searched in Apple's and Microsoft's support pages.  Lots and lots of people report the problem, but few people, if any, answer with a solid long term solution.  I've tried some, and some have worked for a while.  But like the infamous cat, it always comes back.

I've called AppleCare and got some advice that sort of helped. But the cat came back.

I looked in Apple's support pages and did find a more detailed solution.  It sort of seems to have worked, but I had duplicates going back to 2002, like 20 Christmas days on the same day and six voice lessons on the same day.  I've spent well over an hour eliminating the duplicates in 2002.  At least for the holidays I won't have to delete duplicates in later years, but all those other activities, it remains to be seen.

Also, I don't know what the side effects of deleting ALL the files in the cache folder.  There was stuff for TurboTax, Google Earth, Adobe, and I've forgotten what else.  At least they are backed up on my Time Machine.

Ah!  Time Machine, that marvelous hourly backup in the background.  Background? Hah!  When the backup is busy for over an hour, lots of other things slow down and certainly make me think about it.

No, I'm not going to go over to the dark side.  Microsoft Office is enough.

But I certainly wish you would run a company that is more efficient than the IRS, which contrary to Republican doctrine, does a nice job of co-operating with private companies to make reporting and refunds quick.

P.S. Thanks to the messed up composing page in Google's Blogger, I couldn't post this right away.  Or maybe it was because Apple's instructions to delete the cache.  I fixed the problem by quitting and restarting Firefox.

Little box vs. BIG BOX (Videos)

Several weeks ago we went to our favorite video rental store, Video Vision in the Mt. Royal complex of shops in Duluth.  We don't rent movies often, maybe twice a month on average.  Even then, we weren't big spenders, as seniors we paid $1.08 for videos not considered New Release.

As we entered, we noticed a sign that the store would be closing in about two weeks.  The sign referred customers to its other two stores that our outside our normal errands.  I should mention that the now closed store was in walking distance for us.

This store was tucked behind a coffee shop and not easily seen from the street.  It had a reasonable selection but was becoming eclipsed by two other competitors.  One of course is Netflix, which many people find very convenient.  The other is Red Box, which has a limited selection but is in high traffic areas.  The nearest Red Box is at Mt. Royal Fine Foods, a supermarket that probably has more traffic in an hour than the video store had all week.  Of course, not every supermarket customer is looking for a video, but I've seen many people standing in line with one.

The nearest video store to us now is a small shop that is for sale.  We haven't visited it in years because of its small selection and at that time, nearly no DVDs.  The next is Mr. Movies in the Plaza shopping center.  It does have a large selection, including many foreign movies.  But it is out of our normal shopping routes.

I couldn't tell you where the big video chains are without checking the phone book.  We may be skipping the big boxes for videos completely and going "out of the box".

With a nominal 7Mbps internet speed, we can access movies online.  It has some drawbacks, but we don't have to leave home to access a movie.  Both Google's YouTube and Apple offer recent releases at $3.99.  The customer has 30 days to access the movie and once viewed, 24 hours to complete viewing.  Viewing includes backing up to see parts again.

We gave "The King's Speech" from YouTube a try.  I ordered if from my laptop for delayed viewing and then we watched it several days later by streaming it on my wife's iMac.  Even with the supposed high-speed internet, we had little, minor, annoying discontinuities.

If I remember correctly, YouTube only offers streaming.  We could never watch a movie this way at our cabin with dial-up at 24kbps.  At this speed, it takes five minutes to load the main page of many online newspapers.  It would probably take most of the evening to get through the initial credits.

I checked Apple's iTunes store and they have the same deal for recent movies, but one can choose between streaming and downloading.  Since I already "blew" my movie "budget" for the month with "The King's Speech", I chose "All the Pretty Horses" at 99 cents.  I downloaded it for later viewing, but it took over two hours.  I have yet to watch it but plan to do so later in the week.  We'll see if it offers smoother viewing.

Wow, how movie viewing has changed in my lifetime!  Neighborhood theaters at 10 cents for kids with a newsreel, a short, a cartoon, and one or two features.  Were they ever crowded on Saturday afternoons.  Downtown theaters with first-run movies.  Drive-ins.  The suburban multiplexes, making money with many of the seats empty.  Then VHS for home viewing.  Then DVD for home viewing.  (Oops, I forgot cable because we never had it.)  Stores cropped up in malls and neighborhoods to rent them.  Each type of the movie theater has all but disappeared.  The video stores are disappearing.

I wonder if anyone has done an analysis at the number of jobs "lost" as the tastes and technology changed.

Now we'll have less than a dozen companies offering movies for on-demand viewing, each with its huge banks of servers holding thousands and thousands of movies.  It wouldn't surprise me if many movie producers had no hard copy of their work.  From camera to computer to editors to computer to the online retailers computers.  What meaning will "roll", "cut", and "in the can" have anymore?

Blogger was down

I tried posting the Carly Fiorina update on Sunday night, but when I signed on to Google's Blogger I was given a notice that "Blogger is unavailable".  I tried again this morning and afternoon with the same result.  This afternoon there was a status report:

"We're aware of isolated access issues in certain regions within the US. We're investigating this now and will follow-up as soon as we have more information to share

Thanks for your patience in the meantime."