Going To Be Out Of Pocket For A While

 I am going to be pretty much away from the Internet soon, over the next few days. I got this fancy (and expensive) new dish to pull the magical Internet from the sky. Well, somehow I've lost the ability to view any You tube or any clips from news sites or even www.nakedchubbygirls.net.

 and the clips and such are why I got the fancy new dish. So the guy from the company came out and said it's not the dish, it's something in my software. He said  it's like maybe I have too many choices to run them on and the poor computer can't figure out which one. So I've been taking programs out, so far no joy. I got it as far as taking Adobe out. So then I looked a a post at Pamibe's spot and it told me I had to Have Adobe so I clicked to download it and lo and behold it still says I have to download Adobe. Poo.

 So, anyhow I'm going to be fighting with this 'til I somehow get it right. Worse, the laptop won't start so I don't even have that during the fight.Foo.

 The good news is that Mitt won tonight. Can't wait to see how the MSM tries to spin this.

My Computer Has The Fantods

I can't get online much because the old computer that I plugged in when my new computer got bit with a bad virus of some sort now has a bad case of the screaming fantods. We are, for the next few months, stuck with dialup. And, out here, that means aol. Every other Internet provider with dialup is long distance from here. Now I wasn't exactly a big fan of aol even before Huffington took over the place, it's worse now. Still, a few months and we'll have something else.

My problem is that my computer starts just computing away at something no one is telling it to do. Further, I sign on to Firefox and the firefox window won't stay on Firefox. Even on this, Linda Lou's computer. Sigh.

Anyhow, I do not know what waol is. Whatever it is, it takes over and won't turn loose. I fight with it and then it comes up "program not responding" on me and when I hit the end now button, it won't end. Even pushing the big button on the front of the computer won't work, I have to unplug it.

What I have to do is figure out why Firefox won't give me a Firefox screen. Oddly, on this, Linda Lou's computer, which she guards jealously when she's awake, Firefox gives me an "Inbox" screen and I keep asking for Firefox.

Meanwhile we seem to have picked up something awful, a while back my sister called, out of the blue, because she got an E-mail from our aol account, swearing up and down that I needed everyone to send money because I'd been robbed at gunpoint in London. Now we haven't been able to buy enough gas to go to that little six stool lunch counter in Hugo, Oklahoma but we're supposed to have driven to Great Britain?

This on top of the person or persons who bought a plane ticket to Cairo, Egypt. Now folks, I don't fly. And if I did fly, there isn't enough in our bank account to fly to Cairo, Illinois.

So, anyhow, I won't be around much until we get this all sorted out. Oddly we were still paying for a three year contract with Norton Antivirus. The folks in India and I were getting to be quite the friends as I kept trying to explain to them that my antivirus didn't work and they kept telling me that they couldn't help it because of my slow Internet connection. So, I asked for my money back, they said that THAT was not a tech support issue. So, here I am with a very expensive computer, on which payments are still due, a three year antivirus contract, on which payments are still due, and the computer won't work because of a virus infection which I cannot afford to make go away. Sigh.

Meanwhile I had much to say about Weinergate. and much to say about the anniversary of the Battle of Midway and D-Day. The anniversary of the battle of the Valley of the Greasy Grass, aka Little Big Horn is coming up, too.

In other news the Physical Terrorists are taking a lot out of me. They are adding weight to the weight machines, adding more exercises and, generally workin' me like an old Missouri mule. I told the little girl Physical Terrorist who has more muscles than I do that if she kept workin' me like a rented mule I was gonna forget I'm housebroke.. Poor girl didn't understand. So I asked her if she'd ever seen a housebroke mule. Heck, the poor girl didn't know exactly what a mule is. This in Greenville, Texas where folks were still using mules right up til Ike was President.

I'm gettin' old. Oh well, when I was a kid people not much older than I am now were talking about how it was during Teddy Roosevelt's Presidency.

The good news? They might build a muscle on me. I have been resisting putting our new laptop online here at home but, I might as well. We got it so Linda Lou could get online at the hospitals, not that she did, very much. Might as well use it, by the time we're able to go anywhere it will be obsolete.

The Unpaid Dell Software Mechanic

I'm still fighting with the new computer. Internet Explorer has decided to go on strike. Half the news and fun sites I visit would come up, then a few seconds later a box would pop up saying Internet Explorer can not open the site. Meanwhile I'm looking at the site but can not scroll down to read it.

Meanwhile the McAfee had disappeared again. Back to the Dell help desk. Naturally typing only worked for a few minutes and it was back to the cell phone in one hand and the mouse and keyboard in the other. It's bad enough that I'm half (or more) deaf, the help desk people are all in India. It's as bad as talking to a bunch of yankees. Hey! I'm a Texican. We talk slower down here. And we have no accent. Y'all have accents and you talk too fast. Everybody isn't from New Jersey and Boston.

So now everything is slowed to a crawl while everything we paid for is downloading, again. I did not realize that I was signing up to a new career, I thought I was just buying a computer.

So today I don't know much about what is going on in the world. I'll try to catch up when everything is finally downloaded. What happened to Algore's promise of fast internet service everywhere? Oh yeah, he's busy saving the polar bears. He's getting enough blubber to feed a polar bear family for a week, he ought to go up there.

I assume Michael Jackson is still dead. He managed to wipe Iran out of the news. And now Honduras. It sure is crowded under Obama's bus. Seems that just once, maybe by accident, he'd side with freedom. He did have the gall to claim victory in Iraq, after years of trying to achieve defeat. And he's put slow Joe in charge of getting reconciliation in Iraq. Yep, Biden. The new Sheriff in town. One would think that he had enough to do, overseeing well over three quarters of a trillion dollars in pork, er stimulus money.

I noticed that I had no picture of Linda Lou in the Karson birthday pics so here is one in her new natural habitat. She and Ming the Merciless out on the deck. Call this pic "the girls". Okay, call it the reason I'm living.

Saint Peter, Don't You Call Me...

'Cause I can't go...My Father's Day present arrived a bit early, a new Dell
studio XPS 435T. The thing has so many bells and whistles attached that the packing list is two pages long. I feel somewhat churlish that I'm plugging in the same old speakers and not the new ones with the humongous woofer. But then I already have a humongous woofer, her name is Cochise' Apache Princess. And two emergency backup woofers, Ming and Bingo.

Anyway, this is the biggest computer I've seen since they stopped using punch cards. I like to herniated myself getting it in the house and thence into my little gun room/study. I mean the thing is nineteen inches tall, about seven and a half inches wide (my tape measure is kind of rusted there and I can't tell persactly, and twenty inches deep. This is the only thing keeping Linda Lou from taking this one over and giving me her new one, it's way to big to fit into her computer cubbyhole. Most computers come with one or two little discs to restore things in case of having to wipe the memory, this one came with seven. Linda Lou tells me that the size of this computer is because it's used by gamers. She chose it because she could have a phone line modem put in, still no DSL or cable out here. Anyway, it's quite a machine, it's not only full of features I don't know how to use, it's full of features that I don't know what they are.

So far it loads things much slower than my old one, I think that's because McAfee Virusscan is trying to download and, because I'm on a phone modem out three miles past Resume Speed, Texas, it keeps having to go back to the beginning. It would get up to fifteen percent complete and then, the next time I had to get back online it's get to seven percent and then...(It's up to fifty-two percent, please pray for the wind and rain to hold off until it's finished.) So anyhow I don't really know how well it works, yet. Anyhow, although the computer is for gamers, I'm not a gamer. In the Cowboy Action Shooting world, we have gamers. they shoot virtually recoiless loads and sound like a semiauto rifle at full speed. Thing is, they go "pop-tink" when they hit the steel targets. I'm sometimes a warthog with my 250 grain bullets and my near original velocities. But then I mostly shoot real black powder, that makes me a soot Lord, or I prefer Soot Hog as I stick with the heavy bullets and more powder than the old Cavalry load of twenty-eight grains of Black and a 230 grain bullet. This is the load that the Indian fighters used from about 1875 until they replace the Single Action Army with that anemic .38 Long Cold, only to go back to it when the Moros got pesky. That is the load Saint John of Browning duplicated in smokeless powder for a semiauto pistol, the immortal 1911. But I digress...Meanwhile it's back down to twenty-five percent downloaded. Note to self, tell the kids that if the interwebz are important to them, don't move to the country unless they've got over a hundred a month for satellite intertubes service.

Let's see, in other news...David Letterman is a chump. Six years ago he made a baby with his girlfriend. Only now did they get married. Yet he has the gall to call Sarah Palin slutty looking? He then talks of the fourteen yeat old daughter getting knocked up? And then explains it all by saying he was talking about the 18 year old? But it's okay because the 18 year old got pregnant, just like Dave's girlfriend. But Dave's girlfriend isn't a slut while all the Palin women are. And the left is where the majority of women vote. Because we, on the right don't value women. Uh-huh. Now, buy that bridge quick, I have other buyers lined up.

I'm a dad, although the kids are grown and married, and producing grandkids at an alarming rate, there is no parent of teenagers that didn't worry about unexpected grandkids. Some lefties worry a little less because they believe in abortion. Still, what happened to Bristol could have happened to any teenager, and happens all too often. It was certainly not a moral failure of the Palins. Instead it's a simple matter of human evolution. It was only a hundred years ago that kids of Bristol's age were married. It wasn't that long ago that a young woman of Bristol's age was, if unmarried, an oddity. So, now it's the style to marry later, if at all. Too bad we don't know how to tell the hormones that. The reality is, kids are horny. Women are gullible. Thank God for that or most men would be bitter old single men, with neither pot nor window.

Progress, Not Perfection

I managed to get my computer to restart and ran the Restore Disc. Unlike some folks I still had it, I have a pile for everything and keep everything in it's pile. The only danger is that I sometimes forget which pile is which.

Anyhow I got the computer to restart, put aol back on and that works fine. The only problem is that the thing won't let me install Firefox, the file is corrupted, whatever that means. And when I tried to put the sixty thousand megabyte avg virus scan in, it got over fifty-five megabytes in (at dialup speeds, mind you), the thing bounced offline. I shall change phone cords and try again. ARRGH! I did not cry, though I felt like it. By that time it was five in the morning. I gave up and went to bed.

I got up this afternoon (I love retirement I can sleep like a teenager would like to) and the first thing I saw online is how some UN guy says we must prosecute the CIA guys for torture. I have an idea. Lets us prosecute our guys right after the Castro brothers, Robert Mugabe, the chinless wonder in Syria, Imadinnerjacket of Iran, that bunch in China with their forced abortions, Putin, and all those other murdering creeps that populate the UN. Lord, I miss John Bolton. And Ronnie.

I am also furious with the political class in Washington. I'm old enough to remember what those idiots, Jimmeh Carter and Frank Church did to our military and intelligence services. I'm also old enough to remember how difficult it was to rebuild. Especially the cost in lives.

I do not know exactly what would have happened if Carter hadn't been such a Casper Milquetoast. Would Khomeini have taken over Iran? Would the Russians have invaded Afghanistan? I doubt it. What would the world look like today, absent those events? I dunno but I suspect there would still be a couple of tall, rather ugly buildings standing in New York City.

I notice that some sixty (so far) people in Mexico are dead from swine flu. I'm not overly worried about me, I never go anywhere but the supermarket anymore, I'll just have to remember to wash up carefully afterwards. This is something I'm used to, the people I dealt with while working I had to wash my hands before going to the bathroom.

I gotta run, I have to get gas for the mower and deliver the cookies and fifteen dollars for getting pulled out of the mud.

Update in the middle of the night... I'm trying to download all the updates in the Kasperky Virus Scan, I started off needing to download 58,000+ kilobytes, I'm one third of the way through and now it's up to 77,000+. I was up until five thirty AM trying to get some kind of virus protection, now it looks like I'm going to be up that long again. Al Gore promised everyone would have high speed internet. He lied but now too many people are believing him about global warming. Yeah, right.

Help!

As most folks know I'm on aol out here, it's the only Internet service that isn't long distance from here. The only high speed Internet is satellite and that cost a fortune out here. We've lived here since '98 and each year the phone company has told us "soon".

Periodically aol goes weird on me and I have to uninstall it and put a disc in to reinstall. This has always been no problem, right up until last time. The last time I was uninstalling awy, minding my own business, not bothering anyone when I accidentally uninstalled one thing to many, something called photo album.

Now I have never in my life used photo album. It has nothing to do with the pictures I have on the computer, they're still there. What it seems to be is something very important, though. Although I've never used it, the computer won't start without it. So I am using this circa 1999 laptop again because Linda Lou won't let me use her computer. Actually she won't let me sit in her chair, she decided that the recliner, which she chose, hurts her back.

Anyway, the silly computer pops up this little screen, right in the middle saying that it's installing photo gallery. Then another little screen pops up from Microsoft.NET Framework There is a big X in a sorta stop sign shped red field and the following text: An unhandled exception has occured in a component in your application. Click continue and application will ignore this error and attempt to continue. (then it skips a line or two and says)

Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Then there is a box over here and over here

Details continue

Now the box that says details is full of unintelligible computer gobbledygook and continue does nothing. No disc I have, not the restore disc, not the disc with WindowsXP, nothing will make this go away.

I do not wish to spend hours a day on an old laptop. All I want is to get online, read the blogs and news sites and write a little.

I only wish I knew this E-Machine was junk when I bought it. Does anyone have a suggestion?

Writing On The New Confuser

So Linda Lou and Ming the Merciless are lying on the couch for a Sunday afternoon nap and I am trying to blog on the new infernal machine. I forgot how easy it is to type on a brand new keyboard. There are a couple of downsides, though. I can barely point an' click with the new mouse, or maybe it's just the new mousepad is so smooth. Another minor downside is the new monitor screen has about a two-two and a half inch strip down the right side that has the clock, some headlines and a bunch of our pictures scrolling through, one at a time, over and over. Including lots of pictures of Eddie. I wish I knew where he is and how he's doing.

In other news I durned near burned up the neighborhood yesterday. We had a bunch of boxes so I took them out to burn them. Well, as soon as the fire was going good, the wind came up, hard and dry. The grass and weeds were also very dry. Ooops! We managed to get it out before the house burned down, though. Still, had all the neighbors investigating the fire, kind of embarrassing. Especially since I was doing this in the front yard where our hose doesn't reach, I wanted to burn a stubborn patch of bushes that are too thick to mow.

Note to self: Never again try to burn stuff outside while wearing flip flops. Yes, it was that warm, thing is, the wind picked up as the cold front blew in, by the time I got the fire out I had icicles hanging off my toes. I blame Algore.

Update: I'm still reading about why the Secret Service let that bozo throw two shoes at Dubya. The answer is simple, it's very bad publicity when the good guys cut loose with gunfire on someone armed with two shoes. Even worse publicity when the bozo has already thrown them. Can anyone imagine what the lefties would be saying if the bodyguards had cut loose a burst each with those little subguns? Now I wouldn't complain too much if overpenetrating rounds, plus misses and ricochets had knocked down a half dozen media types. Far as I'm concerned there ought to be a bounty on 'em, but the same people that are complaining about how he managed to fling both shoes would be having a cow. Each.

What An Ordeal

So we set the new computer up and (of course) nothing worked the first time. We never did make the program that was supposed to transfer what we wanted from the old computer to the new. After trying to load it from the disc for an hour, with no end in sight, we just blew it off. Linda Lou will just enter stuff over the next few weeks.

Then I put Linda's computer in my room and got it half set up. Enough to use, for now. Meanwhile my old monitor wouldn't come on so I had to drag the ancient cathode ray monitor in here and put it on my desk, the thing is huge. Doesn't look as if I'll be eating many meals in here until I get my new flat screen monitor.

Meanwhile I'll have to few items at a time to my Firefox bookmarks. This is a pain as I have to put the laptop on line, write the urls down, move the phone line to the desktop, add those in, etc. Plus the thing won't let me register my printer because it's already registered. Ah well, at least I have a keyboard, as well as a new monitor coming.