Book Reviews and Money Saving Tips

In spite of spending hours on end at the keyboard I still periodically find a site or search engine that I am unaware of. Google Patents is a search engine especially for patents. If you are bored at the office or anywhere else you can search for patents. You can see if someone you know has a patent. You can also discover some of the strange things that are patented. The baby diaper that announces the child is wet by changes in conductivity of a charge running though the diaper and sets off an alarm. I am sure that the people who make Huggies are going to jump right on that. Just one more way that the Internet is enhancing our lives.

May you have a wonderful, fun filled, happy day!

Those two words are supposed to illustrate a firm conviction against propagation of societal ills. Zero tolerance on weapons in school. Zero tolerance against sexual harassment ad nauseam. What have those two noble sounding words led to in our society and our schools? Those two words have led to two more powerful words, Astounding Intolerance! A six year old who is threatened with 45 days of reform school for his cub scout eating utensils is the height of absurdity. A kindergartener who kisses another kindergartener is expelled for sexual harassment. It would be hysterical for its ludicrousness if it wasn’t so sad. Political correctness has run amuck and our children and grandchildren are paying the price. If one looks at the salaries we are paying our teachers and educational administrators, one would think we could depend on them to make rational decisions in regards to flexibility and zero tolerance. Except zero tolerance means no flexibility and consequently a th...

Read on, there really are some money saving tips and some are even technical in the following post.   I am a self published author. I have self published for a variety of reasons. My primary reason is time. I have no interest in spending my days trying to find an agent, who will then try and find a publisher. I have been told this can take years. Although I have a resilient ego, I have no interest in facing a wealth of rejection. Again, I have been told by published authors and read author interviews that document myriad rejections. Some successful manuscripts were rejected for years before finding a publisher who saw the value of the work. I’m a retired guy who always wanted to write something and have it published. If what I wrote actually appealed to anyone and it sold, then all for the better. Since that is currently occurring I have created a self fulfilling prophecy regarding how brilliant I am for seeing that self publishing would work for me.LOL Now...

I am in no way, shape or form recommending you jump right into Windows 7 regardless of the Microsoft commercials. My 25 years of microcomputer experience has clearly demonstrated that you never want to be the initial installed base of a new operating system. Frankly Windows ME was discontinued before I ever installed it. I don’t think we sold one copy of it and were thankful that we didn’t. However if you are bound and determined to be on the sharp point of implementation, you really don’t have to pay full retail. I found a great article on ZDnet.com that details multiple, legitimate ways to move to Windows 7. Rather than repeating the article, here is the LINK .

Every year, 20 million babies are born too soon, too small and very sick ― half a million of them in the United States. November 17 is when we fight. Do you know a baby that was born too soon, too small, unable to suck, unable to breathe on his own? Premature birth is a health crisis that jeopardizes the lives and health of nearly half-million babies each year. It is the #1 killer of newborns and can lead to lifelong disabilities. Worse: the number has increased 31 percent since 1981. It can happen without warning and for no known reason. Until we have more answers, anyone’s baby, could be born too soon. Medical advances give even the tiniest babies a chance of survival, yet for many babies premature birth is still a life or death condition. It’s the #1 cause of death during the first month of life. And babies who survive face serious health challenges and risk lifelong disabilities. The rate of premature birth has never been higher. In half the cases, we simply don’t understand...

One of the ZDnet bloggers posed a question as to why so many people are still using “obsolete” Windows software. This may be another case of standing in the trees and not seeing the forest. Most of the people in the computer industry make rash assumptions as to the level of expertise and fervor the average user has. The bulk of the studies or surveys are done by contacting corporate users. This makes sense, you can get a great number of responses easily but you are dipping your toe into a limited pool. Seldom is there any attempt to find out what the small business or home user wants, let alone needs. I’m retired, I just want my computers to run. Admittedly after spending 25 years in the industry I have a little more expertise than the average user. I also have a network. I have no interest in upgrading the OS of my machines. In 25 years I have seen nothing but incremental increases in ease of use or reliability in operating systems. I have seen MS automatic updates t...

My experiences with the paid anti-virus community have not been positive. I have had issues with Norton and McAfee conflicting with software I normally run. I currently use Avast Anti-Virus and both Ad-Aware and Spy-Bot Search and Destroy. I suspect they are not top notch but by using them all, I have had pretty good protection. My innate cynicism kicks in when ever I read glowing reviews about different software packages. ZDnet.com has a good article rating the behavior of different anti-virus and malware solutions. Don’t be deluded into thinking that the ones marked free are really free. You will find them to be either trial versions or a version that tells you, “yes I have found much nasty stuff and if you will slip $50.00 in small unmarked bills underneath the un-welcome mat, I will then remove them for you”. Here is a LINK to go to the chart that rates the software, look at it with a jaundice eye and read the accompanying text. I didn’t find the chart all that use...

I read an article on Zdnet the other day on how a Dutch teenager sent out an unknown number of messages to iPhones explaining that they were hackable and for a small fee paid to his paypal account he would explain how to block people from doing what he was doing. He exploited a known security vulnerability and claimed he, himself, would do no harm but if he could hack their phone so could others. Regardless of his intent, his hacking resulted in a tsunami of outrage. He then apologized, posted a fix of the vulnerability and then my guess is he headed for the hills. The article did not detail what happened, if anything, to him. Once again truth is so much stranger than fiction.

I know another “be careful on the Internet” article. The Internet is somewhat like Las Vegas, it has beauty, glitz, shiny lights, fabulous shows and as long as you stay on the main drag in the well known places you are safe. If you wander off onto side streets, just like in any major city, you may find things you really didn’t want to see. You can caution older kids and revoke Internet privileges if they ignore your cautions. Pre-school and primary grade children are an entirely different situation. Older kids may wander into nefarious activity intentionally; the younger ones generally get into questionable areas quite unintentionally. This isn’t a new problem, an article in the NY Times six years ago pointed out that kids searching for something like Disney and misspelling it, ended up in places they shouldn’t have been. I point this out because these very young children seem quite adept on the computer. There are a wealth of sites that have mentally challenging g...