June 2004 Archives

From Mike James, a moving and sober (but a sobriety mixed with much emotion, faith, and hope) look at 9/11 Farenheit

This end note stands out :
It’s not the whole Church that’s complicit, I know; it’s not all of us Christians. Large swaths of the Church Universal in the world oppose this war and oppose this administration’s policies, as well it should as it seeks to be true to its Lord and its mission. But enough of my (former) church community supports Bush come hell or high water that it feels to me like the Church herself is complicit.

If I struggle to make this distinction after decades in the faith, I know there are many people — whose only exposure to Christianity is that of the Christian Right in the media — who are being repelled from the Church in undifferentiated disgust.

Amen, Mike, and thanks.

After reaching their pinnacle of 12 games over 500 back on Jun 7, The Reds have descended in an up and down manner, but clearly downward, toward the Pirates in the cellar, and are in the process of losing 2 of 3 to the Pirates at home (and if it weren't for a heroic grandslam Friday night by Pena, they would have been swept.)
After June 7th, the Reds lost 7 in a row, took 3 straight from Texas (bouncing back, right? ) then lost 3 of the next 4, then won 3 in a row again, before dropping the last two games 1-0 (wasting a rare good pitching perfomance by the bullpen) and now are getting rocked 13-3, the seond straight bad outing for Paul Wilson, who was 7-0 with at least three other wins blown by the bullpen.....is now 7-2. Phil Norton and Mike Matthews, the Reds lefties in the bullpen (now they have Gabe white, who is a legitimate pitcher), need to be let go. They have been pounded time in and time out, and Norton has wildness to go with his inability to make key stops for an already worn out Reds bullpen. When you can't take at least 2 of 3 from the cellar teams AT HOME, where they had played well all year, it looks like a downward trend. And add to that Sean Casey leaving the game with a tight hamstring. Those are always scary, especially when you consider the Red's MVP this getting slowed down. Not looking good at all.

My MT blog is reverted back to 2.66 ( I think) This is the first time I've seen the Edit Entry page since trying to upgrade to 3.0 .

I TRIED to install my HP dj3650 under the 64-bit XP......no go. Driver install fails......printer detected, but "Problems" prevent the driver from installing. What's the deal here? How is it that Hp Printer drivers won't work? A search on 64-bit HP printer drivers yielded zip...nothing

NOw that I've installed 64-bit XP as a dula boot with my XP Pro, I notice that when I'm in 64-bit Windows, the Flash player won't install into the 64-bit IE. I've seen people say "load the 32-bit IE", but won't that overwrite the 64-bit version, which I want to keep?

the previous post ended with this observation:

There seems to be something in this that leads to another "theological" observation about Churches. That is, how often do churches resort to a "package deal" to appeal to a larger audience, and end up "dumbing down" the gospel (or worse, selling out for a more "palatable" Christianity.

The Religious Right has probably done the "best job" at this (but that casts the strategy in too positive a light, as this is a result of "appealing to a wider audience"). They have succeeded, in the most part, in "packaging" an "easy to use" faith which people can flash (like an ID badge) at any number of a range of issues and life choices (and also manages to ignore many issues in life , like, what to do about all these "other cultures" --- they're evil, backward, or something that allows us to dismiss them; not care about their status in the eyes of God who values all of humanity and EVERY human culture for the sake of those humans who live in them.

The previous post leaves me with a disgust toward the state of "PC-Support" today by the major manufacturers. The "solution" of running a completely unnecessary wipe clean and start over is overkill and just plain wrong, since it ignores the fact that most don't want or need to re-configure everything from scratch again, in the absence of "config backup and restore" programs for all the major apps (like Outlook, Office, Macromedia Studio, and who knows what else).

This "mass market" approach, while understandable, leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. HP won't take the small step of producing a recovery CD (that could also easily include a "Drivers and Setup" directory to quickly and painlessly reconfigure the major system drivers back to the "intended" state, as well as provide CD keys for the various software packages, for cases where customers have to resort to clean wipes. It is recommended by most computer literate people that one installs Windows afresh periodically anyway, and for this, it would be nice to have a backup opgtion for installed apps and configurations, so a Windows install could be floowed by an "Application Restore". This would be a welcome additonal utility to supplement a "Wipe and Restore" that ignores the fact that most people needing to use it would want to keep the configurations and appliactions they were previously running.

There need to be a class action lawsuit by consumers to demand this as a minimum. Of course, this would initially drive prices up, but all would be forced to compete and level this out.

There seems to be something in this that leads to another "theological" observation about Churches. That is, how often do churches resort to a "package deal" to appeal to a larger audience, and end up "dumbing down" the gospel (or worse, selling out for a more "palatable" Christianity.

More on the aforementioned HP (and other computer manufacturer's) resorting to ELCHEAPO customer support. It came about as a attempted to install the 64-bit XP on the HP Pavilion a530n, which sports an AMD Athlon 64 processor.

I am uploading this article in pieces since I just wrote about 5 opr 6 paragraphs that evaporated as MT-Blacklist (which was running in the background , deleting the glut of spam comments I have received, finished and refreshed my browser window which contained all my MT entry window....so I begin again)

Click the "Continue Reading" link below to read on

I started loading the XP 64 bit OS on an available partition on my new machine. XP Pro was installed and working. When the machine rebooted after the file copy phase, I got :
NTLDR is missing.
When I load Recovery console, I have no "fixboot" command. A "map" command shows that I have
C: fat32 (the HP recovery partition (4570mb)
E: ntfs my xp p ro install
J: the partition where my 64 bit install was going
D: my second hard drive

A: floppy
K: cdrom0 (m dvdr-cdr)
L: cdrom1 (my cdrom)

My XP Pro install had gone onto the partition available next to the HP recovery partition. That install worked fine. When I tried to add the XP 64 bit install to a partition on the remaining space, the above goofup happened. Any ideas out there?

I stayed up way past my usual bedtime, and I'm tired now.

The windows mySQL setup will not work on my XP Pro machine.
I ran setup from the Windows mySQL (mysql-4.0.20a-win) and it ran, installed files in C:\mysql, but running C:\mysql\bin\winmysqladmin.exe gives me this error: the application has failed to start because LIBMYSQL.dll was not found. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

This is in a Windows error box with the title bar displaying: "winmysqladmin.exe - Unable to loacte component"
Reinstalled it. Nope. Same deal. What's missing here? Why doesn't a "Windows" install correctly install the component?

This is one of those times when I say to myself: "How in the world does the open source community expect to make much of a dent in the windows world if they can't get their wonderfuyl features in front of windows developers? Doesn't it seem reasonable to expect a WINDOWS install to at least install a copy that will RUN? Why is the component "missing"? What is the install for?

I am a ready and willing convert. Actually, I don't even need to be converted. I just need a little "meeting half way". Not even half way. Just part of the way, like.....the install so I can see and run the thing.

OK, so I MANUALLY copy the missing dll to the windows\system 32 directory. Boom, the mysqladmin tool pops up. Now would it have been that hard to have the install program do that for me? I mean , its not hard to do that, but why make me do that? It irritates me to no end to see such "neglect". There is not going to be a toppliing of Windows client usage anytime soon. That includes developers like me who are reasonably capable. Get it RUNNING for me, show me the features, and I will be MOTIVATED to get geeky on it as I learn it, but don't throw obstacles in my way.

In this month of birthdays and anniversaries, I just realized that tomorrow will mark 2 years of Theoblogical. I began on June 2, 2002 (I have a blank entry on June 1....don't remember what happened there). My birthday was on the 22nd of May, Janet's is on June 3 (this Thursday), and our 21st anniversary is the 11th.

The blogging has been light over the past couple of months, with the new job and all. I am getting a lot of interest and questions about blogging and RSS, and its use here, so I am diving into the latest news and details about it, having been away from my normal attention to those details for these past couple months. It's exciting to see the interest and vision of those around me, asking what seems to me to be the right kinds of questions about how to foster conversation. There's also some interest in Flash as a tool for generating data-driven graphics, so I picked up the latest Macromedia "Training From The Source" Book, Flash MX Professional 2004 Application Development.