Parks are closed and that's (sort of) OKAY!

All metaphors have their weaknesses, but let me give this a shot.

YOU own a museum. It has lots of interesting things in it, some of them valuable to the point of being irreplaceable. Many, perhaps most, of the things in the museum are fragile.

You hire people to manage the museum because you don't want to sit there 24/7 and watch it (and who would blanme you?).

You tell the people who manage the museum when you want it to be open, when you want it to be closed, and the security provisions you expect them to maintain.

One night a friend of yours - someone who has visited the museum several times and is known to most of the people who manage the museum - comes around after the museum is closed and asks to be admitted. Your friend has brought a group of people, some of them elderly. Your friend has not called you to arrange this visit.

Do you want your managers to let your friend in, just because?

The nonsense resulting from the government shutdown includes video evidence of a Congressman - one who supported the shutdown - berating a uniformed member of the Federal Park Service, berating her with the ugly words, "You should be ashamed."

I don't think so. She should not be ashamed to be following the policies of the National Park Service directing when the staff who maintain the park are not on duty, the parks should be closed.

Americans can own rifles and hunt. Americans own public parks. Yet, Americans are not allowed to hunt in public parks, for many reasons. Policies exist for a reason. Right now, the policy says, "The parks are closed." People moving barriers and walking around in them are engaged in civil disobedience. I do not recommend you doing this, even with a congressional representative in your party.

Leave the discussion of how well we federal employees do our jobs aside for a moment. The issue is, do you want us doing our jobs according the procedures and policies of our employers (you), or do you want us to just do whatever we think is okay under the immediate circumstances?

The parks are closed because the government is closed. This is not usurpation of public lands, this is STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE for the maintenance and protection of public lands entrusted to the government and the National Park Service. "Essential" personnel maintaining barriers are operating according to standard operating procedure.

Personally, I'm glad the parks are closed, because the last time the government was closed, the national parks were the first bellwether that the government being closed is INCONVENIENT FOR CITIZENS. Or, as then-Speaker Gingrich said, in an admirably honest moment, "We throught if we closed the government, no one would notice. We were wrong."

Many of your friends and neighbors - one out of every five people in the country - work for a local, county, state or federal government. However well or poor we work, my experience in both camps tells me that government workers are no less proud, no less professional, no less skilled at the work they do than people in private sector employment. Some of the work being done right now is being done less effectively because we are not at full staff. Many of the people equipped and trained to do work on specific activities are not coming back when the budget issues are resolved, because they will have moved on to other jobs in order to feed their families. And many other people are being harmed by the interruption of government services in the process.

We are not ashamed to be federal employees. We are not ashamed to be doing our jobs. We hope that the amateur theatrics will stop and that agreement can be reached. In the meantime, if you can't get into a federal park, please understand that the uniformed person preventing your entry is doing their job. The parks will be open again; the public land will not disappear in the interim.

So far, how good?

Having started at 6, at 7:40 I was ready to execute the "5-minute install" WordPress so famously claims.

Well, it may be installed but there are still some configuration issues that shall have to wait until tomorrow. MySQL has a database and there's even a user configured. Which I presume means that both PHP and Apache are running fine below MySQL. Tomorrow night, we'll see whether we can get WordPress to notice.

I am starting to realize a) my friend was truly dedicated to WordPress to install a complete server environment onto a laptop just to run a couple of demo sessions and b) he was even more "dedicated" (or perhaps another word is more appropriate) to do it on his wife's laptop.

Happy Easter, 2013, from an old dog not so much learning new things as devotedly following the wonderful instructions of the anonymous, amazing people at WebDevelopersNotes.Com - thanks, folks, for startlingly clear and easy instructions.

Tomorrow never knows, but the future is unwritten. Rest in peace, George and Joe and Phil Ramone.

Fear and Trepidation, 2013

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," as the title slide says in the infamous '60s film, "Lord Love a Duck." "Go to school - get a little knowledge, live dangerously" is the way that advice goes on.

A well-meaning friend gave me an introduction to WebPress last weekend, and so here I am on an Easter evening with a brand new Apache server sitting on my antique-but-beloved Windows 7 beast. Several steps to go in my pursuit of dangerous living (or at least, further knowledge), but this is my progress report for the moment.

Hail, Hail Androidia - Current state of the tablet market

Shortly after I heard someone make the point, I put a poster in my office that said, "A computer will help you do what you want to do. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO?"

Without benefit of any special requirements, a very bright friend complimented me by asking for some of my thoughts about "the non-Apple" tablet market. Not wishing to disappoint, I tried to do my homework, and here for the general benefit of anyone else who cares is the result.

“non-Apple” limits things usefully and I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment. To focus further:

• HP bought Palm for $3B solely to get their hands on WebOS, which they proceeded to murder and then mutilate. Recent news that over 200 Palm staff were laid off surprised the media only in that it was hard to believe there were still over 200 Palm staff in HP. There are Palm tablets available but there is no point in buying something already at a dead end. As Gertrude Stein said about her Oakland childhood home, “there’s no there there.” 
• The RIM death watch is continuing, and while the BlackBerry tablet also exists, there seems little point to discussing it. No there much longer.

I'm not saying Android is everything we have ever wanted in computing, but it is the most popular platform, has the most applications and can pretty much do anything any other tablet can do (except load data from iTunes). This is where the action is, even if you don’t want to get into flashing your OS with mods.

7-inch Tablets

There are several good reasons why you might consider spending $249 for a nook tablet rather than $199 for an Amazon Kindle Fire (I will leave for another day the question of whether the $80 Amazon Plus membership is a hidden cost of the Fire).

Any Android product will be communicating through Google servers. The Fire, however, also communicates through Amazon’s servers on a dogmeat browser of their own design that is already notoriously slow and won’t be getting faster – this in the interest of “offloading” processing into “the cloud,” which as Michael Hammer would put it, adds hand-offs and thus delays results. Two clouds for the price of one, with delays for free.

One reporter, at the grand Amazon announcement, asked Jeff Bezos if someone using the Fire to shop for shoes was likely to get an instant message from Zappo’s (which Amazon owns) offering a better deal, Bezos’ reply was a terse, “We won’t do that.” Reassuring? Not so much. I was quite impressed that the reporter had internalized the architecture so quickly; many people weren’t yet even sure whether the Fire would support Google’s Market (now known, sadly, as “Google Play Apps,” but for the record, yes, it CAN).

Yes, the Barnes and Noble product will offer you access to Barnes and Noble products, but remember the concept of tablet-as-reader is 180 degrees from the concept of the ereader. eInk does not have backlighting, and many people prefer it to reading books on a computer screen. Barnes and Noble has music products but they aren’t as adept at marketing them as Amazon; they are much less adept at marketing their “cloud” services, although for the nook it serves quite well – books do not have to be stored on the device and do not disappear from the account. The nook Tablet does not REQUIRE B&N connectivity; the Fire doesn’t communicate with the Web without Amazon connectivity.

This is to say, I think Barnes and Noble will be much less of an annoyance on their Tablet than Amazon is for Fire users. Any tablet can download music from emusic, Amazon, Google Play Music and a host of others; the only vendor I know that absolutely doesn’t support Android is…yes…Apple iTunes. I am pretty comfortable with the idea that you can even watch Amazon streaming movies on the nook tablet (and Netflix, and Hulu, etc.). I know for a fact that Barnes and Noble has fewer grand schemes for the use of private data than does Amazon; since a very generous friend gifted me with a nook, B&N has had lots of time to do bad things to me and, so far, the worst they've done is sent me emails for business partners (I remember where my delete key is, so it wasn't too difficult to deal with). The Fire, on the other hand, is an identity theft waiting to happen.

More and perhaps better thoughts about the nook tablet are here: http://reviews.cnet.com/tablets/barnes-noble-nook-tablet/4505-3126_7-35059751.html

The Large-Form Tablet

“The sky” right now is the asus Transformer Prime (yes, Hasbro is very cranky about that name, which has nothing to do with Optimus Prime or Bumblebee). A to-die-for tablet, thinner than the iPad 2 (the new high-def iPad is thicker than the 2) that attaches to a delightfully-designed keyboard, this was immediately identified by c|net's Molly Wood as more than just the "Gadget of the Week.". Maximum PC says “KickASS.” BlueTooth, WiFi, HDMI video-out port, micro- AND FULL-SIZE SD ports, a USB port and an earphone jack (the single speaker is okay but not boom-box loud). Worst thing anyone has to say about aTP is, “How soon can you deliver it, please?” I think the combination of touch screen with keyboard is near perfection; it is HARD to type on a tablet. If and when I get back to building Frankenstein, I'm going to look HARD at

The other main competitors for the notPad market include the Sony, which is about the same $500 price as the older Samsung Galaxy.

Sony http://reviews.cnet.com/tablets/sony-tablet-s-32gb/4505-3126_7-35003724.html and 

Samsung http://reviews.cnet.com/tablets/samsung-galaxy-tab-10/4505-3126_7-34505338.html

Everything else is so many shelves below the two tiers identified above that you just DON'T WANT TO LOOK. 

You will discover that you want the MOST on-board memory and storage capacity you can get. If they don’t offer Ice Cream Sandwich, ask why. Firmly.

Android Apps - a few recommendations

You can download a free application daily from the Amazon App Store, even without a Fire [be careful, though - once you have Amazon in your machine, they will try and take ownership of ALL of your apps, and you might not want that]. But absolute minimum requirements include:

• avast or Lookout security
• Cracked Light
• Dictionary.com
• GasBuddy
• Netflix
• Overdrive Media Console (allows you to borrow books from your library)
• SpeedTest and 
• WiFi Analyzer

Don't panic yet - all of the above are well within your price range, and so far we haven't spent a dime.

I like the highly-customizable GO keyboard(s) and, should you be into such nonsense, I find Super Sudoku to be the best presentation of that particular puzzle, just as I find AI Factory’s Checkers and Reversi not only challenging but attractive. These and many, many other pleasant opportunities are free, too.

If you have $10 left after your tablet purchase, that will pay for both PocketCast (which I find the most effective podcast manager) AND MobileKnox, a secure database for user names and passwords that allows you to back up the data to your desktop (all for one low price).Being more than slightly compulsive, Folder Organizer was well worth the price to me. My work desk may be a mess, but my 'droid walls are tidy!  And your correspondent is not being compensated for these recommendations.

Be aware that many games have in-game purchases, preferably BEFORE your kids start playing. Corby is one of the worst offenders, and news that someone's children spent over $100 buying hats and clothing for the charming main character of the game was unsettling but unsurprising. Google is paying attention, though, and later 'droid operating systems have governors for in-game purchasing in the Setup menus.

C'mon Jellybean! Let's keep building Android Planet!

RodM

Happy St. David's Day - Where is YOUR money?

Another screed about Web design and process flow.

http://irs.gov has a relatively clean and bright home page with lots of topics readily apparent to the casual observer. A pleasant-looking man says, "I'm waiting for my refund" as are many of us, so I click there.

A three-step process appears. How nice, straightforward, clear. Except...warning...

"Please DO NOT CALL our toll-free number unless 'Where's My Refund?' specifically indicates that you should." And above that warning, another curious item - "Keep in mind that IRS telephone assistors will not be able to provide additional information." Good thing I found that, given that I have to keep it in mind.

Look around...aha. Step 3 is "Where's My Refund?" Got it.

Below that...hmm..."IRS toll free hours are 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. local time." Awkward phrasing, and worse, there is no number provided. No phone number anywhere on the page. Well, let's try working through the process.

• Check 72 hours after you e-file - no problem. It's been a week and a half.


• You need: SSN, filing status and EXACT refund amount - no problem.


• Get your REFUND STATUS [a link] at "Where's My Refund?" [A graphic link]

Wonderful news. My refund hit the bank two days ago. Except, not so much...the bank knows nothing about it. "Please wait until that date to contact us again because we cannot take any action until then. Thank you for your patience." Someone is thanking ME for patience? That's a nice thought...and again, no phone number nor evidence of a link to same. The "Refund Help" gives me much, much more information than I could imagine needing about how to deal with the form I've already finished. Okay, let's back up.

Back at the home page, there's a menu at the top with "Contact IRS." This sounds promising. One of the options on the resulting page is "Contact Us for Status of Your Refund," which likewise sounds promising. Click...

ARRGH, we're back at the 3-step process page. Back to the home page, and back to "Contact IRS." Oh, there's a note BELOW "Contact Us for Status of Your Refund" stating "Want to check on the status of your refund? You can check online with the Where's My Refund application, or call 1-800-829-4477. (Please wait at least four weeks before calling.)" This is the first time that "Where's My Refund" has not had a question mark.

I somehow don't think waiting for four weeks is going to help with whether or not the bank should have my refund, so I dial the number. I go through one minute of information including the cryptic "We will update our systems with the new information very soon." Then I go through an automated process almost exactly the same as "Where's My Refund?" and learn...yes...that processing of my return is complete, it was delayed (for which they apologize) and the refund should be in the bank...two days ago. I am also advised not to contact them before that date, which doesn't seem like it will be a problem.

I finally, after three calls, locate a mechanism by which I can wait for an operator to assist me. The current hold time is 10 to 15 minutes. Unfortunately, I discovered that while I had not been invited to a meeting, my attendance was required in two minutes, so I had to break out of the queue and attend to business.

The phone tree one must traverse to actually speak to a human being is quite challenging, and to avoid any further annoyance to the IRS than this faithful report already provides, I will not go through the procedure. Suffice it to say that one must score correctly on five different levels of automated responses, enter nothing for the sixth and then resist the temptation to press 1 to indicate that you owe the IRS money. This is when you are told how long the current hold time is; my time to this point was 4 minutes and 37 seconds. Once on hold, you are provided with suggestions that you take your question to the IRS Web site, and of course that their representatives are helping other customers.

Please believe me when I say that the attendant who answered my phone call (at 33 minutes, 12 seconds after the connection began) was extremely pleasant, gracious to a fault and very patient with me having violated several procedural steps to make my inquiry.

The problem - this year's program is malfunctioning. The automated systems are giving out incorrect information and the IRS is experiencing processing delays with bank deposits. She suggested that I wait until the week of March 12th to call back and see whether or not further information was available about when the deposit would be made; she also complimented me on submitting a tax return with no errors.

Remembering - in case you "missed all that"

Let's start with a simple association. The 1960 musical, "Bye Bye Birdie," was a comedy about a rock and roll star being drafted, as well as a shout-out to one of the best friends Broadway ever had, newspaper columnist and TV host Ed Sullivan. The film included a break-out performance for Ann-Marget, co-starred Bobby Rydell who himself already had four Top 10 hits, provided Dick Van Dyke his film debut, and continued the fascination Hollywood had with parent/teenager relationships, albeit in a much funnier vein than, for example, "Rebel Without a Cause."

It also - however inadvertently - taught American kids what they were supposed to do when the Beatles arrived. The song chanted by fans of Conrad Birdie, "We Love You Conrad," both formally and informally was transformed into "We Love You Beatles" in January 0f 1964 when Sullivan provided the Beatles for three weeks in a row on his Sunday night variety show.

Elvis was the real rock and roller who had gotten drafted, and in his absence a number of pop stars became part of the popular consciousness. Bobby Rydell, just as dozens like him, sang songs written by other people while musicians behind him played arrangements written by different people. The teen-idol phase of his career was intended to be the star of a longer career, perhaps in Vegas, and that's what happened. Philadelphia gave the world Bobby, Frankie Avalon and Fabian. Detroit gave us Mary Wells and Martha Reeves.

But also in Detroit, Smokey Robinson was writing songs for himself and others. Chicago had the haunting falsetto and socially-conscious voice of Curtis Mayfield. Texas gave us Buddy Holly for four short, prolific years. Dozens of blues musicians recorded whatever they got paid for. At Sun studios after Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash were recording country songs for pop audiences. And with "Maybelline," Chuck Berry appeared to have married country and blues and created rock and roll.

A bunch of lower-middle-class kids in England were eating it all up and spitting it back out with a verve, an intensity and a life all its own. Even now, "Please Please Me" (the Beatles' second single) and "She Loves You" (their fourth) leap out of a set of speakers with startling vitality. In the months to come, a dozen other British music groups arrived to grab whatever scraps were falling off the tables. Some of them had been listening to American blues for years. Some were art school drop outs. A few were kids who'd been stuck taking piano lessons for classical music recitals.

In Greenwich Village, a Columbia Records producer introduced Woody Guthrie acolyte Bob Dylan to the music of Robert Johnson. Not much later, a couple of L.A. kids came out of the theater having seen "A Hard Day's Night" and, deciding they wanted to be rock and roll stars, set Bob Dylan lyrics to electric guitar music and called themselves "The Byrds."

The legendary advice about Hollywood from screenwriter William Goldman applies double to the record industry, "Nobody knows anything." A group of blues players went into a London studio at the direction of their record company to record "a rock New World Symphony." The album they recorded with symphonic instruments and electronic keyboards, songs chronicling a single day, "Days of Future Passed," was not that but, having paid for an album, the company released it anyway and "art rock" began. Even funnier - one band took a section of New World Symphony and grafted it onto Bernstein's Broadway show-stopper, "America" - and almost no one noticed (as I write this, the song is still widely available on collections of the The Nice and still incorrectly credited only to Bernstein; the keyboardist involved soon became friends with Aaron Copland but never quite paid back Dvorak).

This is not an absolute principle but it's close - take any music group working in 1966 and look at the album(s) they released that year in comparison to what they recorded in the five following years and you will notice they have one thing in common - extraordinary growth.

• For the Rolling Stones, the curve starts with "Under My Thumb," goes past "Sympathy for the Devil" and lands at "Gimme Shelter."



• For the Kinks, a British-patter "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" led to the shimmering "Waterloo Sunset" and to "Arthur," a song cycle about the end of the British Empire.



• The Impressions went from "You've Been Cheatin'" to the civil rights anthems "We're a Winner" and "Choice of Colors" to arrive at "Check Out Your Mind."



• Even Elvis had to get on board. His own arc started with yet another movie song, "Frankie and Johnnie," then "U. S. Male," then "In the Ghetto." Along the way his first black-leather suit and his first solo TV special reintroduced him as an idol and gave him his gold ticket to Vegas.



• In 1966, the Who created a generation gap anthem, "My Generation" with a hopped-up singer stuttering "Why can't they all f-f-f-f-fade away?" By 1970, they'd already served as the world's smallest touring opera company with "Tommy" and were looking back to American rockabilly with their loud remake of "Summertime Blues."

In 1970, the film "Woodstock" fed the festival to millions who hadn't been there while allowing thousands who had their first chance to actually hear the music. Rock was firmly established as a canvas on which anything was possible on any instrument one could grab. Flute with a blues band? French horn with shatteringly loud drums? Screaming guitars playing Latin salsa? Tape loops and multiple rhythms and theremin against vocal choir and clarinet? Ho hum; it's been done. What else ya got?

Because the performers were creating their own music, because the industry never understood the music well enough to participate (Motown and Columbia came closest, and both made crucial mistakes, and even Fillmore producer Bill Graham couldn't handle a record company) and because the whole world was engaged in struggles for equality and against the Vietnam war, the music managed to go in all directions at once.

A return to "three-chord" rock by Southern groups only added additional texture, it did not stop the 20-minute science-fictional jams. Disco did not kill rock, but gave some of the older and straighter musicians new jobs while setting the stage for the rebirth of Michael Jackson and rap. Katy Perry may call herself the new millennial Bettie Boop, but the Beatles were cartoons twice, once on TV and then in the visually-anarchic "Yellow Submarine."

We have all been here before, and some of us feel like we owe it to someone to sleep with both eyes open, lest we miss something.

The music of the period endures, despite the expectations of many who, like the unhappy Time magazine reporter renamed "Mr. Jones," simply didn't know what it was that was happening. Solid performers, many who were not born before the day the music died, are available on a new tribute album, singing Buddy Holly songs. All you need, according to the savant who produced the Beatles, is ears. Love helps, of course; it always does.

Starting with 7 Starter - painless tricks for survival

So, you just got a great deal on a NetBook, a reconditioned machine or some other too-good-to-be-true deal? And it comes with a little label that says "Windows 7 Starter"?

The good news is that you have several options. And not all of them cost money.

You could get a copy of Home Professional, or go in with a couple of friends and get a 3-pack (and it's funny, but as I write this, one vendor is selling each of these products for the same price).

But it is likely that there are two key things that are making you ache from the limitations of Windows 7 Starter

• you can't get rid of the Windows logo on the desktop, and
• you really, really want a screen saver, if not more than one.

Would you believe...both problems are easily solvable?

Solution number one involves a freeware called Oceanis Change Background W7. It allows you to pick a background, two backgrounds or more and then either leave one in place or cycle through them all. There's even an option to avoid cycling while you're on your battery.

Solution two...and you're going to hate this one...is even easier.

Hit your Windows button and look in the bottom left hand corner for a small text entry block to appear (the screenshot seems to have disappeared from Blogger). Now for the really painful part - start typing the words "screen saver"...

...and now look at the top of the window.

That's right - they left the function in, they just removed the Control Panel hooks to it.

And you just saved yourself an upgrade.

Best from

RodM