5. February 2012 by admin.

One of the Web sites I follow regularly is the Barbara Ehrenreich forum from her book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.  The book describes her unsuccessful efforts to secure a ‘middle-class’ job in corporate America, and the people she meets along the way.  The book came out before the financial crisis of 2008, and it was already clear that the corporate job that we once took as a mainstay of American life was going the way of the dodo.  When it came out, I had recently started my own business, and it was comforting to find out that I was not the only one who had been stomped on by my last employer.

There are about a half-dozen people on the forum who post regularly about the sorry state of employment in the US, and up until a month ago, that was OK.  But for the last few weeks, the forum has been taken over by ‘HicyacixGar,’ who generates useless posts about 50 times a day.  We’re down to one thread, as everything else is flooded by Hicaycix.

But I’m compelled to wonder: who or what is HicyacixGar?

OK, a spammer, but to what end?  The posts appear to be illicit ads for prescription drugs, but the Bait and Switch forum seems a thoroughly pointless target for a marketing effort.

Looking at the other fora on the Barbara Ehrenreich Web site, there is some spamming going on, but nowhere near as bad.  The Bait and Switch forum had been the most active, with the most interesting discussions.

So I wonder: is Hicyacix just a spammer, or does it represent a person or agency bent on suppressing discussion about the crappy state of the economy and employment?

Posted in Computers, Networking (computer) | 5 Comments »

22. January 2011 by admin.

My wife is a member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and as a result, we get advance DVD copies of movies so that my wife can watch the movies and vote in the SAG awards.  I had wanted to see The Social Network, but missed it in the theatre, so now was my chance.

I’m glad I saved the $25 that two movie tickets would have cost.

It’s not that The Social Network is a bad movie: it has a compelling script, is well-photographed, and has excellent performances.  The cast and crew have more than done their job in bringing the story of Facebook to life.  But I very quickly came to the realization: I don’t like these people.

I remember old movies about how great enterprises came to be.  Their founders struggled with practical problems, overcame them, and proudly succeeded.  But we see nothing about the practical problems of creating Facebook: instead we see how its founder promptly got embroiled in lawsuits.

In fairness, perhaps I’m biased.  Facebook, we’re told, is the social experience of college wrapped up in a Web site.  Alas, I had no social life to speak of in college: we were all engineering nerds, and what few girls there were in class quickly got snapped up by the guys who were better at that sort of thing than me.

But if Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg is supposed to be what a modern captain of industry looks like, we’re all in deep, deep trouble.

Posted in Computers, Media, Things Falling Apart, Movies | No Comments »

25. March 2010 by admin.

From time to time, I get a message that someone has registered with this Web site to post comments.  Most of the e-mail addresses seem genuinely strange, as if not actually belonging to a person, and I’ve never received any actual comments.

The other day I tried to register and post a comment, and found that I couldn’t, or at least I couldn’t find the magic link that enabled one to post a comment.  I could register, and sign in, but then I couldn’t actually do anything.

So we’ll have to use an old-school fix.  Long ago, before magic blogging software, I kept what was known at the time as a ‘Web journal,’   and I posted an e-mail address for comments.

And indeed, I got comments; I also got vast quantities of spam.  To avoid the spam, I now have to play a stupid little game:

Please write me at some_guy _at_ harderworld.com.

If I include the actual @ in the address, the robots of the world conclude, ‘Aha! An e-mail address!’  and proceed to send me dubious ads for Canadian drugs.

And I’ll see about getting the magic blog software kicked in the pants so that you can send real comments.

Posted in Computers, Networking (computer) | No Comments »

28. February 2009 by admin.

About a year and a half ago, I bought a shiny new laptop with the Vista operating system.  I had heard that Vista had gotten mixed reviews, and looked forward to experiencing it for myself.  I found that the oh-so-sexy windowing system, with translucent windows, was an annoyance when I was trying to be productive, so I shut it off.  I set up the machine to look like Windows 2000, and I was happy.

People made fun of Vista for User Access Control: the function of asking for confirmation when you were about to do something that could potentially reconfigure the system.  I lived with that function under Linux for a few years before getting the laptop, so I was glad to see it in a Windows system.  (As much as I like Linux as an OS, it’s a Microsoft world out there, so running Linux for business is not a practical option.)

So for a year and a half, I lived with Vista, and it seemed to work OK.  I had a couple of minor problems, but nothing too terrible:

• The Windows XP driver for the printer at the office would work, and then toss its cookies after finishing the print job.  I could tell Vista to restart it automatically, but that didn’t help my CADD application, which ran each page in a batch as a separate print job.
• Vista insisted on trying to figure out what sort of files were in each directory, and showing them to me in an appropriate format.  The result was that running Windows Explorer was somewhat of an adventure, as one directory would list details of the file, while another would show thumbnails.  I tried to force Vista to show me everything as a detailed listing, and it sort of helped.

Other than that, Vista was OK.  It ran my software and pretty much took everything I threw at it.  I had maybe two Blue Screens of Death in the eighteen months I had the machine, and they had fairly obvious causes.

And then, about a month ago for travelling, I bought a ‘netbook’ computer.  The newer machine has a pipsqueak processor and half the memory of my Vista box, but it runs perceptibly faster.  But the netbook runs Windows XP.

Anyhow, last Tuesday at 4:29 pm, my Vista box all of a sudden dropped dead.  I was writing a document when the screen went black.  Restarting didn’t help: it wouldn’t even access the disk, wouldn’t display an error message, wouldn’t even beep.  In a word, dead.  Fortunately, the disk was still OK, so I didn’t lose any data.  (But it’s much cooler to sigh, ‘Thank God for backups,’ when someone asks.)

So for a couple of days, I used my netbook as my work computer.  Everyone who saw it thought it was cool.  But I know I can’t go on that way forever: I couldn’t possibly do CADD on the netbook.

So yesterday, I bought a new Lenovo laptop.

It runs, and will continue to run, Windows XP, although it included a set of disks for installing Vista.

A machine cycle is a terrible thing to waste.

Posted in Computers | No Comments »