And now, for tonight's sunset...

Fire in the sky. Wasn't that a movie title many years ago? If I last long enough, almost anything will be. Enjoy another lovely evening, everyone!

And the sequel looks like this. Just lovely.

 

Computers? Maybe you'd like an update on mine....

I'm writing this on an Acer Aspire AM5100 quad-core using Windows 7 Ultimate, and it's just fine, thanks. But after I started testing Windows 7 back at the beginning of the year, I got thinking about what to do in case something went terribly wrong, so after months of trying to decide, I bought another Acer this August for a back-up, running Vista Home Premium (ugh!) and therein lies a tale. A rather long, sad tale, as it is developing.

The new one, an Acer dual-core, 64-bit desktop, running Vista Home Premium was bought new on August 12th. Everything went along as nicely as anything ever does with a Vista operating system, until September 13th. When I tried to start it up that morning, it did not boot, and it did not try to show any recovery information. The Acer 19-inch LCD flatscreen monitor wouldn't do anything but barely flicker faintly and too briefly to make sense of it. The three Acer Recovery DVDs that they encourage us to make during first use were then tried, but nothing happened with any of that either - because it wasn't booting into anything which could use those. Thirty days out of its box, and dead.

I took it back to the shop where it came from, and the man who runs that, and who has done other excellent work for me on other computers had a look at it, and tested the monitor as well, and the results were not good. He says the monitor is shot, and so is the hard-drive of the computer. After almost a month there, I am now told that not only is the hard-drive of the computer shot, but so is the motherboard of it. Evidently, it was the motherboard's problem(s) which killed the hard-drive. Nobody knows what killed the monitor that was attached to all that at the time. It has a three-year warranty, with one year still to go. The computer itself has most of its own one-year warranty still valid.

The computer is now packed up again in its original box, and waiting for the courier to come for it tomorrow, and return it to Acer's ace repairmen. I'm not being asked to pay for its trip. So why am I not happy?  Is that what you may be wondering? May I tell you?

I'm not happy because: This Acer Aspire X3200 cost me $695.00 plus $195.00 for pre-delivery servicing including initializing, updating security patches, etc., etc., etc., and then there's $106.80 for federal and provincial taxes, for a total of $996.80 for 31 days use. Needless to say, $32.15 per day is just a little too much to pay for a computer with a newly designed and seemingly unproven hard-drive, and a motherboard that evidently wasn't up to the task of connecting and operating all that other hardware. My point is that Acer seems to be woefully lacking in Quality Control - to the point where you'd have trouble convincing me that they can even spell those words.

But your other Acer, the one you are using now, works OK, doesn't it?  Yes, it does, but that's no thanks to Acer. When this one was about five months old, its main CPU fan began making ugly growling noises. I shut it down, opened it up, and checked it myself during a short test run with the cover open. It was vibrating excessively, and acting as if it was running with dry bearings - which it was. I removed it, soaked it with the only clean oil I had here - number 10-40 motor oil meant for the car - then dried off the excess, and put it back together again. Its label said it had a new kind of magnetic suspension bearing that did not require lubrication. Hah! like hell it didn't need lubrication. Once thoroughly lubricated with good quality heavy-duty oil, it has been running properly ever since. But again I have to stress that this wasn't Acer's doing - I fixed their problem for them myself.

So out of two Acer computers, both new within the past year, two out of two of them have had problems. One relatively minor, the other about as major as it could ever get, requiring essentially a new computer. So keep all this in mind when you go shopping for a new computer. Sure, stuff happens. But it doesn't usually happen this often and to the same guy. This has to be more than just blind coincidence, or 'bad luck'. And you know what I'm thinking, don't you?
 

I like writing Letters To The Editor - any Editor....

It's my way of keeping my writing skills honed - in case I do have some.

In today's on-line Toronto Star, which I used to deliver every morning back home, during the Second World War,  some 65 years ago now, there's a toot-your-own-horn article all about the Google Street View now including Toronto. A balloon calls for a pin, so here's mine:-

Dear Editor:

So's Beautiful B.C.'s Vancouver,
and Montreal, potholes and all.

So quit bragging.

Toronto is still the nation's greatest
waste of reinforced concrete. Too bad
you hadn't shown Montrealers how to do that.

Regards,

Ray in North Van.

An example of 24X optical zoom with the Pentax X70

My neighbours across the street have some fresh flowers, and she knows that I like flowers, but I live on the shady side of the building where growing them is not easy. So these are usually placed where they can be seen from up here in this high-rise condo development. It's really nice to have such thoughtful neighbours. I sent them this picture so they can see it too, and I'd just like to say "Thank You" to my friends the Zhangs.

 

Finishing off the concrete walks and driveway

Finally, the end seems to be approaching on this long, drawn-out construction project in the next block, over in West Vancouver, on 3rd Street just north of Keith Road. This was started over a year ago, by demolishing a one-storey rancher near the back of this large and mostly wooded lot. They then removed most of the trees, butchered a couple of the big ones left standing, and then brought in a big backhoe to dig up most of the lot and create the hole for the basement. That machine, incidentally, was operated by a gal with long dark hair, and a cute posterior, who made that thing practically dance. Since then, the rest of the job has been relatively slow going. Sometimes they've only worked on it about three days a week. Other times, people seemed to be swarming all over it. I just don't understand the construction business, I guess. But I'll be absolutely delighted when all the noises have subsided, and somebody actually starts living in this almost-hotel.

And this is the finished driveway and landing on the stairway beside it. Hopefully, it will all dry before any of our ever-radiant West Van matrons come along walking their pampered pooches in search of pooping places and peeing poles.  And before some semi-conscious driver decides to use it to turn around in.... If it were me in charge of that job, I'd post one of my turbaned employees at the roadway with a well-oiled shotgun loaded with rock salt, or maybe buckshot.

'Oldest Living Blogger' asks....Do you watch CNN ?

I sometimes try to watch it, but I always fail. I only last for a few minutes, until those strident loudmouths succeed in irritating the hell out of me, and then I have to switch channels before I throw something heavy at my TV.

I tried again this evening, and before I knew it, there they were again - a bunch of those smug, self-important know-it-alls doing their damnedest to drown out their two or three fellow arguers and their moderator. Everybody talking at once, everybody repeating half a sentence, everybody getting frustrated, and the viewers, if at all like myself, wondering what the hell these idiots think they're trying to get across to the public - other than the fact that CNN is the home of strident and obnoxious Ugly Americanism at its worst. And what can we expect from an outfit begun by Ted Turner, the acknowledged "Mouth of the South" and himself a well-known shit-disturber who seems to thrive on controversial comments?  When I want news, I don't want some smart-assed bigot's opinions - I just want the facts. Not manipulation or conjecture, just straightforward honest reporting. I can bend it all out of shape myself after I get it, thanks. Just give me the raw material without the window-dressing or the applesauce. I've got an I.Q. more than twice my shoe size - I'll figure it out. And CNN? If bullshit really baffled brains, the country wouldn't be in such an unprecedented mess. Would I lie to you? 

How fast is your Internet service?

Using the little Speakeasy logo in the right-hand margin on here, I've just tested mine, and this Acer AM5100 using Windows 7 Ultimate as its operating system is performing as follows:-

Downloads at 365.1 Kb/sec.
Uploads at 86.1 Kb/sec.

This is on a service that provides 3 Gb ADSL, and it's much faster than just a few years ago.

Heading for the rookery...

Some of our local crows heading home for the evening after another very nice day. (Click to enlarge.)

My little Canon Ixus-30 is still alive & well...

...and so is the Mail-girl and her venerable old truck. She's still wearing her shorts, even though it isn't all that warm here this morning. It's 14 C on the balcony right now, and part of that is heat escaping from the 15 floors below me. Down where they frequently create those fumes evoking visions of goats, camels, and other roadkill roasting on a spit over an open fire, surrounded by gibberish-speaking natives with bones in their noses.
 

Just looking...

...for any donated snacks to fend off starvation. Actually, these little guys are probably the best-fed crows in town. They not only get their natural diet, but people ignore the house rules here, and treat them to cookies, cereal, and bread. They thrive on 75% whole wheat, and they enjoy a few slices of Chunky Cheese Bread periodically. They can airlift that stuff all over the neighborhood in mere minutes, and they like to fly over to a neighbor's roof, so they can dunk the munchies in some water in the eavestrough so they'll slide down easier. These guys are not stupid - they know all the tricks. One even caught a slice of bread in midair one morning, and I wish I could've got that on film.

One more time....

The thin clouds in front of it make it difficult to get a sharp image. This one has been filtered with a noise-reduction program, with so-so results. For a program that brags it is the best available for removing jpeg artifacts from images, I'm not impressed - that's why I haven't sprung for their paid-for version yet.
 

Full moon setting this morning

A picture is worth a thousand words, and Canon gets the picture.

Comparing Canon G9 and Pentax X70 taking full moon

It's Canon all the way, Folks. The Pentax zoom, extended fully, and even at maximum digital zoom, shows absolutely no detail on the moon at all. All it does is enlarge the big ball of light, larger and larger. The Canon G9, with its additional 2X doubler lens mounted on top of the regular zoom lens, shows the above image with details. Now, we know.

'Oldest Living Blogger' looks at the news....

In the on-line edition of The Globe and Mail, in a section called 'The Week In Quotes' :-

“Don’t like him at all. ... President Obama is following Marxist theory. He’s taken over the banks and the car industry. He wants the country to fail.” Singer Andy Williams

Andy Williams, for all you kids who don't know and shouldn't care, is a has-been lounge lizard and vocalist who got his start on the old Tonight Show in the early 1950s. He had some modest success, but was never a threat to Old Blue Eyes or The Rat Pack.  He was born in 1927, making him five years older than I am, and he ought to stick to singing and leave politics to somebody who knows their ass from their elbow.  It's OK for him not to like Barack Obama, but being in the public eye himself, he ought to know better than mouth off about the man that way. God Knows, Barack Obama, like the rest of us, isn't perfect, but he beats the living hell out of that shithead 'Dubya' who had the job before.

In that same section, the ever-radiant Courtney Love is quoted on the subject of the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, saying:- "He's a sexy dog. He invited me to visit his country, and I'd like to go. I'll rock Caracas." 

Dear Courtney, you sexy thing, you - You should go, Darling! Both you and Hugo would likely thoroughly enjoy another conquest. If you need any help arranging it, let me know, and I'll get in touch with my friend Lourdes Lopez at Radio Havana Cuba, and she will speak to the right people for you.

 

The Bluejays are back from the hills

These are really cute birds to have around, and they'll pack away puffed cereal or other stuff as long as you can put it out there. We can't do that here, but I wish. These make some really loud squawking noises, but they also use other softer calls when they don't want to attract attention. The bad weather must be on the way, because these usually don't come down from the high country where they spend summers until it gets hard to find food up there. 

 

Tonight's sunset....

No, this wasn't another of my many mistakes - I did this one on purpose, just to see how it would turn out. That crossbar of the sliding door to the balcony is hiding most of my little Canon Starwriter 30 on the table, beside that lamp and the stand holding paperwork for typing. The tabletop itself doesn't show, because it is also glass. This sure isn't great art, but it's a fun look at tonight's sunset through the window.
 

Another Pentax test....

I didn't like the panorama that originally filled this space, so I've substituted this more recent shot (Saturday morning, October 3rd) of that same scene, but an all-in-one. As I am getting more familiar with the Pentax X70 and its 24X optical zoom, I'm discovering that when it is set at 24X, like it was for this shot, there are dark patches in the four corners of uncropped images. This appears to be the faint peripheral image from the inside of the tube holding the telephoto lens elements. I can duplicate that same effect with the Canon G9 by not extending the zoom fully while its add-on doubler lens is in place on top of that. That's the clue that tipped me off to what's happening on this Pentax. The Pentax has a comparatively long set of extending tubes holding the lens system, and it is evidently taking a picture of part of one of those outer ones, at least in the corners of the frame, when the lens is set for maximum optical zoom. It can easily be cropped to eliminate that, but unless it is, there will be a darker 'shadow' effect in the corners. That's the price you pay for a whopping 24X optical zoom on a relatively small digital camera. 

More musings from 'Oldest Living Blogger'.....

The blog-site where I had that first blog and used this nickname is now virtually abandoned, and my 'Oldest Living Blogger' handle hasn't been used for a long time. I never was the real 'oldest living blogger' of course. I simply chose that handle to grab a few more eyeballs, and it worked out very well, too. 

Mr. Google today tells us that this is Mahatma Gandhi's birthday. And who is Mahatma Gandhi you ask....he's what every woman wants in a husband: thin, tan and moral. Aren't you sorry you asked?

The other day, over at the First Memorial, while waiting for my advisor to show up, the receptionist and I got chatting about the differences between life today and life when I was a kid away back in the 1930s and '40s. She said that kids today are probably being overprotected compared to back then. I remarked that when I was ten, I had a paper route for the Toronto Daily Star, and I knew almost everybody in our little town, and all of their dogs. Nothing happened around there that I didn't hear about, and sometimes, I helped to make the news myself.

There was one section of the downtown core where my route and my buddy's route were on opposite sides of the main drag, and we often got together along there to help each other out with a difficult customer, or just to enjoy a coffee at the one and only all-night 'greasy spoon' in town. It was a Chinese place, and we sometimes got bones for our dogs from the cook in there.

My buddy had one customer in an apartment block on the main corner of town, in the only building in town with an elevator in those days. This guy had a good job with General Electric, which had its local office on the ground floor of that same building. He lived on the top floor, and he was always about six weeks behind on paying for his papers. So we had to resort to our own special collection procedures to keep the bastard honest and reasonably up-to-date.

He slept with his bedroom window open about three inches, and at 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. you could hear a pin drop on the street outside. So one morning, while my buddy is taking the paper upstairs to his top floor door, I removed the valve-cap from one of the front tires on this guy's car, and let some air out of the tire. It made a hell of a whistling noise, and then his window is thrown open, and he sticks his head out and yells at me: "Hey! You little bastard! What the hell are you doing to my car?" I thought it was fairly obvious, but just in case he wasn't wide awake yet, I yelled back, "I'm letting the air out of your tire, you cheapskate. Maybe you should pay for your goddamned papers and then this wouldn't happen." He yelled back, "I'm going to call the cop!" I was absolutely fearless in those days, so I yelled back, "Go ahead - he's on my paper route too!" He paid up the overdue money and all was well for about two more months.

Then, the same old same old once more. So this time, we had another cure. We went to that all-night restaurant, got some bones from the cook, and then each of us rode our bikes around downtown for a while, holding up the bones, until we'd collected every stray dog in town. With these dogs following along, we went to our guy's building, and used our paper bags to block open the outer and inner doors of the lobby, and then we opened the door on the elevator, and held it as we threw in those bones, and all those dogs ran inside trying to get them. Then, we punched our guy's floor, and let it go. We promptly grabbed our bags and headed into the mouth of the alley across the street, to watch the show.

It was beautiful! When that elevator full of barking and fighting dogs got to the top floor and the door opened, dogs took off in both directions down the hallway, and the building began to light up like a pinball machine, from the central elevator shaft outwards. Windows were thown open all over it, heads came out, and people began calling out all sorts of things. One little old lady said, "We're all going to die!" Another guy said, "I'm going to kill the son of a bitch that did this!"  And then our guy stuck his head out the window, and called out, "I know who did this! It's the goddamned paper-boy and his pal." Then he realized that maybe that was too much information because everybody knew he was always weeks behind paying up.

The old janitor appeared at the main entry, holding a dog by the scruff of the neck in each hand, and off in the distance we heard the town's lone cop car approaching, so we got the hell out of there and hid in an empty warehouse until things cooled off about 45 minutes later. The next Saturday, when I went to the cop's house to collect, and knocked on the door, he called from inside "Come in here, you little bugger - I want to talk to you!" He was sitting at the kitchen table in his underwear and uniform pants, and holding his service revolver in one hand, aimed straight at me. He said, "I've a good mind to shoot you right now, you little son of a bitch! Now tell me all about that thing the other morning with the elevator and the dogs!" 

His wife came up behind him about then, and gave him a swat on the head with one of my newspapers, and said to him, "Put away that gun, you idiot - you're not The Lone Ranger, and you're scaring this poor little kid out of ten years growth." He put down the gun, and again asked me "What was that all about anyway?" I told him about that cheapskate with the company car who worked for General Electric but almost never paid for his papers unless we did something to encourage him. He tried not to smile, and said "Next time, and I'm sure there will be a next time, try to pick something that doesn't involve getting me into the act at five in the morning, OK?" I said, "OK - It's a deal, Chief! - and I'll even leave your car alone on Halloween."  - Ah, the good old days..... 
 

"Liberals fail to topple Tories "

This is one of the latest website headlines on the Globe and Mail's on-line edition tonight.

Maybe some of those people in Ottawa are getting the message that we're fed-up with all this electioneering. Ignatieff's got such a bad case of the 'hots' for the Prime Minister's Office that he can't get that giant brain around the idea that if he triggers another election right away, we the overtaxed voters may very well kick his scrawny ass right up to his shoulder-blades, or further. 

Granted that our 'democracy' is basically a benevolent dictatorship except for that one day every few years when we actually get to vote on it, that doesn't mean that just any old pompous ass with the urge to crack the whip can simply decide for himself about when he may or may not get that chance. Iggy's sudden conversion from expatriate to returned prodigal son here doesn't alter the facts, and the facts are that he's been outside this country for most of the past three decades, doing his level best to become a 'somebody' in the U.S.A., and not really achieving the levels of success he apparently desired. So he then allowed himself to be persuaded to return to our country, for the intended purpose of leading the scandal-plagued Liberals back to glory and becoming our Prime Minister in the process. 

He only overlooked one thing: the other 33,592,699 of us just might have other ideas about that, and perhaps don't want some wannabe-American leading our Great White North down the road to American colonialism. Our American cousins own and control entirely enough of this proud nation already. So to 'Iggy' I would say "Yankee, Go Home!".  I might even let myself be talked into putting on my old steel-toed safety boots one more time, and giving him the kind of send-off I think he deserves. He's a self-serving, conceited ass and we don't need another of those in Ottawa or anywhere else around here. We already have a surplus.
 

I like to answer questions....

Lawrence Martin in a column in today's Globe and Mail from Toronto titled "How 'Iffy' and the Liberals dropped the ball" asks the question "How did it come to this?" Here's my answer:-

Dear Editor:

Lawrence Martin asks, "How did it come to this?"

It came to this because the average voter these days
isn't as clueless as those professional politicians
believe us to be. We've already made it clear that
we're all electioned-out, and we're tired of having
these consummate two-faced lyin' bastards repeatedly
pissing away $300-plus millions on indecisive games
of 'Silly Buggers' at the expense of getting on with
the nation's business and doing what we thought we
were paying them to do.

That's how it came to this.

Enjoy your day,

Ray Sutton in North Vancouver, B.C.