Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   a beer for drinking while driving
Wednesday, June 13 2012
Jessika and Aaron had left me a 12 pack of Tecate beer when they came through, and today I enjoyed one as I was driving out to Home Depot to get supplies for the greenhouse's new second floor (two more sheets of 3/8 inch plywood and rust-resistant screws). As I enjoyed that beer, I realized that it might be a popular brand for people (like me) who like to drink while driving. (Having been an occasional hitchhiker, I can tell you that it's more common than you probably think.) The thing about Tecate is that it comes in a red can, an unusual color for a beer. From a distance it looks like a benign can of Coca Cola, making it possible to drink Tecate flagrantly while operating a motor vehicle. Over the years I've become increasingly aware of product design decisions that seem targeted for off-label uses. There are those people, for example, who like to shove razor handles up their assholes as they masturbate in a shower, and this probably accounts for the fact that most razor handles have been designed seemingly more for that purpose than for providing a secure grip for someone who is shaving his face.

Today, leveraging my recent experience migrating a Windows operating system, I used AOMEI Partition Assistant to replace the conventional hard drive in Flyingfish (my netbook) with the 120 gigabyte solid state drive that had been in Woodchuck. Like most netbooks, Flyingfish is an underpowered machine. I have it running Windows XP, and it mostly works, though there can be annoying delays. With the new SSD, though, nearly all of those delays are eliminated. It comes out of sleep instantly and can boot up in 28 seconds (most of which time is taken up by the initial bios stuff). The only glitch in the migration came when I realized the shares I'd set up on Woodchuck were not working, and I really needed access to my fucking filez. I kept banging my head against the wall trying to liberalize policies in hopes of accessing those shares until I finally realized what the problem was: the "Permissions" button in the "Advanced Sharing" window doesn't actually assign any permissions. It's useless. Instead you have to go to the "Security" tab in a directory's properties and add users (for example, "Everyone") there. Actually, I think the uselessness of "Permissions" is also a problem with Windows XP as well, but I'd simply forgotten. It's amazing how little of what I hate about Windows XP has been fixed in Windows 7. Here's another example: during a Windows 7 file copy, though the copy mechanism appears to have been changed a great deal, there's still the risk of a copy failing part-way through and hanging up an hours-long operation sometimes only seconds after it has started. Maybe that doesn't sound fury-inducing to you, but then I'm guessing you've never started a copy and then gone off to bed.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?120613

feedback
previous | next