Book Reviews and Money Saving Tips

After having ie8 upgrade trashing my wife’s XP, I decided to get two new computers. I got Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit on mine. So far the only programs that have gone on seamlessly are my MS Office programs and not all of those went on well. My first issue that has not been resolved yet was that if I put my printer on the Win7 machine, my Vista machine could see it and print but none of my XP machines could access the printer. I moved the printer to one of my XP machines and my Vista machine and my XP machines can print but my Win 7 machine will not address the printer. It sees it, it just won’t use it. I thought I found a fix with Windows Virtual PC that will you allow you to run XP compatible programs on Windows 7.(supposedly) However Microsoft has decided that Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit can not run Virtual PC. My assumption is that they could give a rat’s ass if it works for home computers but that their bread and butter corporate clients would go bananas if th...

I am aware that emailing and posting while angry is most likely not a good idea. However I am afraid that means I will never be able to post on this since I have exceeded ballistic and volcanic and am well on my way to super nova disgust. It is astounding to me how a “simple” Microsoft upgrade can cause me so many hours of labor. BTW might I suggest that you don’t walk, run to your computer and change your browser to FireFox before MS bites you in the butt. After reading an article about the latest vulnerability of ie7 I decided to finally upgrade my spouse’s computer to ie8. I’ve been using it for awhile and it finally seemed a little less buggy. It hadn’t occurred to me that I don’t use ie8 on my XP machines, I use FireFox. The only machine I use ie8 on is a Vista laptop. I blithely downloaded ie8 and when it rebooted my XP was corrupted. I had no explorer that worked, no screen icons, even task manager locked up when I tried to access programs through it. I tried mu...

Technorati Tags: ideas , easier ways , new things Shellie who is a regular at my other blog, Pick of the Literate ,  told me to try Windows Live Writer for writing my blogs.    The world is so frequently cumbersome that it was intriguing to think there might be an easier way of doing things.   Surprise, surprise, there is.   This may have been one of the easier things to learn.  If you have a blog, you may want to try it.  

I recently had a Microsoft inspired computer debacle. There will be a detailed post regarding those zany pranksters at Microsoft and how they sucked 7 hours out of my life, never to be regained when there innocuous ie8 upgrade blew up my, up until then, stable XP. As usual I digress, this post is about the computers I looked at when I decided I was going to buy a new computer due to my frustration with the ones I have. If you are new to my world, I had a computer business for 25 years. When I sold the business 4 years ago I had several computers I was using there were not part of the sale. I have since used those computers with reasonable satisfaction. When the ie debacle occurred, I realized that I was fighting with a computer and OS that was well over four years old. None of my desktops were new when I sold the business so they are at best 4-5 years old. Now being an economical soul (cheap) I have a whole bunch of used parts that I have been cobbling together for repa...

Here is another post best categorized under philosophic musings rather than tech tips. I’ve had a epiphany! Shopping while buzzed is more like partying than shopping. A recent cruise I took stopped at Cozumel. If you have no interest in Mayan ruins or uninsured adventuring (snorkeling, parasailing, motorcycles, dune buggies), you are left with drinking or shopping or in the Cozumel market place shopping while drinking. I have never, ever walked into a jewelry store and been asked, “Water, beer or tequila?” I suspect that the last time I had a beer at 10 in the morning, Nixon was President! Cozumel is a long stretch of store after store with alcoholic beverages available gratis with great frequency. If you accept all offers, you will be buzzed in two blocks and bombed in four. It provides a totally different view of shopping and explains why several of the stores have multiple outlets along the street. If they don’t get your money in the first store, they give you a drink and you p...

CDC definition : “Noroviruses (genus Norovirus, family Caliciviridae) are a group of related, single-stranded RNA, nonenveloped viruses that cause acute gastroenteritis in humans. Norovirus was recently approved as the official genus name for the group of viruses provisionally described as “Norwalk-like viruses” Succinctly, get a norovirus and barf your guts out. I’m not a fan of ralphing. I do not worship at the temple of the porcelain god. The idea of taking a vacation and spending 24-48 hours with my arms wrapped around a toilet just seems horribly, horribly wrong. Consequently I have great sympathy for the poor folks who did just that on several recent cruises. Mercury as an example.   The record-holder for bad trips in 2009 was Holland America . Its fleet delivered seven different outbreaks on five different boats. According to an article in the AARP magazine, (Yeah, embarrassingly enough I read it but just for the pictures.), Holland America spent a whoppin...

Zoom, zoom is no longer just the Mazda slogan, Cisco is putting Zoooom into it’s new infrastructure routers. ” Translation: Well in Cisco terms, the router will be able to provide download speeds of 1 Gigabit per second for everyone in San Francisco, download the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress in 1 second and stream every movie ever created in less than 4 minutes.” Some folks are questioning the need for that kind of speed. Obviously they are the folks who send one email a week and have never downloaded a program, let alone streamed a movie. We ALWAYS need more speed. We have a NEED for speed. When my cell phone is billed by the minute, I don’t want to wait for a download. Of course the inability of Verizon to get a reliable signal in my area has been the subject of previous posts and is still one of the more annoying aspects of my technical life. What is the point of getting a smart phone if you don’t have a stinking signal! But as usual, I digress...

This sounds pretty cool. “Teen Tech Week 2010 is March 7-13! Teen Tech Week is a national initiative aimed at teens, librarians, educators, parents, and other concerned adults meant to encourage teens to take advantage of libraries' nonprint resources. The 2010 theme — Learn Create Share @ your library — fosters teen creativity and positions the library as a physical and virtual place for safe exploration of the many types of technology available at libraries, including DVDs, music, gaming, video production, online homework help, social networking, tech workshops, audiobooks and more.” (Direct from the YALSA Site) Sourcebooks, one of the companies that provide me with books to review has jumped on Teen Tech Week to also promote teens reading. Their site has a bunch of very cool things going on to coincide with Teen Tech Week. TeenFire is a social networking site that promotes the titles that Sourcebooks represents but it also promotes reading in general...

This isn’t my Big Bad Green 69 Javelin cruising down the street, radio blaring, long hair (LOL) shaking, low riding but a 916 foot truly, easy rider; the Royal Caribbean Grandeur of the Seas. I took a cruise recently this post has no tech. Money saving does fit the appropriateness of this post due to the fact that cruises are offering deals that are just impossible to beat. The nightly rate for the cruise I just took was less than if I stayed in a decent (not 4 star, just decent) hotel. Disregarding the ubiquitous free breakfast on the 95 corridor hotels, most hotels do not ply you with “free” food 20 hours per day. Nor do any hotels I stay in, provide multiple venues of entertainment nightly at no additional charge. If you aren’t interested in very professional singing, dancing or variety acts; you can always gamble. Again, outside of AC or Vegas, I don’t know where you would have that variety of entertainment and last I checked, Vegas and AC hotels don’t provide any of that at ...

On this International Woman’s Day, I would like to celebrate the strength of women. Sadly there still are too many of my gender, who feels deep down in their heart of hearts, grossly threatened by accomplished women. That is a mystery to me. If a person is accomplished, how can their gender diminish that accomplishment? I’m 6’2’’ and 220 pounds. The love of my life is a foot shorter and well over 100 pounds lighter than I am. Yet this diminutive dynamo kicks my butt on the golf course. She is more skilled, has greater consistency and is just better. I’m not keen on being beaten in anything by anyone. I am sadly aware that size and strength pale in comparison to skill in golf. So what if it is a tiny terror of feminine pulchritude, she beats me, gender has nothing to do with it. Strength is not just measured by breadth of bicep or endurance; it is measured in character, dedication and perseverance. My personal life has been enormously enhanced by the strength of ma...