Back Soon

Chasing Ghosts.  And Ghosts I don't want to catch.

Damn Ghosts. 

@#$%! Google

There are a lot of blogs on the blogroll here that Google won't display.  Sure, it let's you add them to the blogroll but it only displays ten.  When the heck did they start that?

Apologies to those of you who mysteriously dropped off - it looks like I'm going to have to do major surgery to get everyone back.

Laissez les bons temps rouler*

Happy Fat Tuesday to all our readers.

* Offer void in Democratic controlled locations, like New Orleans.

Politics sucks

Damn

It was a silly movie, but she was really good in it.  She was only 20.  That was 64 years ago.  Debbie Reynolds, mother of Carrie Fisher, dead at 84.

Monday

Yeah.

Any Macintosh experts out there?

I just got a printer for Castle Borepatch.  The Queen Of The World started a new job and will be doing some working from home, and our old printers were, well, old, slow, and drank lots of expensive ink.  And so we got a nifty new color laser printer.

Alas, that's where my problems started.  When I changed jobs last fall I chose - no doubt in a fit of curiosity or whimsey - a Mac instead of a Windows laptop.  And while the Mac sees the printer over the WiFi, and while the print queue says that everything is happy happy, it won't actually print.

It appears that the print jobs are being sent to the queue as PDF, and from there are going to /dev/null (they sure as heck aren't going to the printer).  The little pull down that says "PDF" below has all sorts of PDF options, but nothing else - and there doesn't seem to be any option along the lines of "Screw PDF, just print the dang thing".

Any thoughts, Oh Mac gurus?  I did have to pull down the newest driver from support.brother.com, but the laptop found the printer just fine via bonjour.

Of course, the Queen Of The World is printing up a storm from her Windows laptop.  And reminding me that technology choices maybe shouldn't be made from whimsey.  Oh bother.

UPDATE 10 June 2016 15:15: Success!  It turns out that configuring the WiFi from the printer's front panel doesn't enable AirPrint, which is what the Mac was looking for. When I downloaded Brother's WiFi setup utility and ran it to set up the WiFi on the printer, it suddenly showed up in the Add Printer selections.  It supposedly will let me print from the phones, too.

So the lesson is that Apple has "Insanely great" but pretty obscure ways of doing basic stuff (like wireless printing).

Note to self

Be more careful when introducing different food to Wolfgang.  Explosive diarrhea every 2 hours for a day makes for an exciting day (and night).

Dear self: don't do that again.

Off to the vet.

Grumpy

That would be me.

Bah.

Bill Withers - Ain't No Sunshine

The Queen Of The World has been traveling - this is the fifth week out of the last six that she's been gone.  Damnitall, we've only been married for three months.



Sure, she's worth the wait (duh!), but this house just ain't no home anytime she's been away.

Abbey Normal

At my annual physical, my PSA was elevated. The doc wanted to redo the test: no biggie, things are sometimes goofy with False Positives.

It was elevated the second time, too, so they sent me to a specialist for a specific test. The office called yesterday.

The Doctor would like you to come in to discuss the results. They were abnormal. How does next Tuesday work?

Well there's some good news. Especially the "We can't see you on Monday so come Tuesday" bit. Not in four weeks, but four days.

I'm getting behind in the kilt pictures. Sorry. I'm a bit distracted.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Damn

The doctor called, and my PSA is (still) elevated.  Getting referred to a specialist.  Gentlemen, this is why you get screened.

Or get kilted to kick cancer.  Or donate.  Please click through to donate to this cause.  It's fully tax deductible, as a 501(c)3 charity.  The Donate link is here, and please select Team Borepatch.

And if you click through to read Brigid's post you'll see why she is also invested in this - her Dad is fighting that same fight right now.  She is so invested that she's made an enormously generous offer: the first twenty donations of $50 or more via Team Borepatch will receive an autographed copy of her amazing The Book Of Barkley.

Now hear this

Go, read. The Internet Expects everyone to do their duty.

Take a moment to look at this

I don't know what's going on, but Jennifer knows more than I do.  It doesn't sound like there's any part of that which isn't filled to overflowing with teh suck.

Well May sure stank

Didn't even get 100 posts - a new record low for me (you know how chatty I am).  Quite a difference from May 2010 which is probably the best month I ever had, at least as far as quality posts are concerned.

Bah.

Looking for sugar and water.  Or vodka.  That'd work, too.

Giving up your dreams is easy

The only difference between the Saint and the sinner is that every Saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

- Oscar Wilde

Dreams are a future that hasn't happened yet.  Because it hasn't happened, it's easy to give it up.  "Easy".

Giving up your past is not as easy.  It's as easy as a sinner becoming a Saint.

Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings.

- George Orwell

A request for help

No, it's not for the Borepatch clan, but for a friend.  She describes the situation:

My son is dying. He’s just 33 years young and father to two beautiful children. His doctors, who claim they exhausted all options, give him only a few weeks to live. But there is an option that remains--a possible miracle—hidden behind red tape. Bryan’s a fighter, courageously battling metastatic melanoma for over a year. He’s been prescribed multiple medications and received whole brain radiation twice. Yet despite the recent news he, and I, refuse to give up.  Merck Pharmaceutical Company is presently trialing a possibly life-saving cancer drug, Anti PD-1.  My son’s participation was rejected because of his advanced stage. Our last option is to appeal for “compassionate use,” which, much to my dismay, requires sensational efforts and a social media blitz. Why? What other use could there be for this drug but compassion? How can one be “too far advanced” to trial a potentially life-saving drug?  It is senseless. Bryan is ready and willing. If it works, Merck helped save one of the most precious lives I know, and if not, it’s outside the scope of their study and caused no harm. We can’t, as a society, let this happen. We can’t sit back and watch families try, and fail, to exhaust all options.

Help us make a difference, for Bryan and all cancer victims. Sign our petition to Merck:http://chn.ge/1h479Ej 

Debbie is good folks.  I'd be very grateful if you click on over and sign the petition.

Update

Thanks for everyone who has left a comment.  It wasn't me, and it didn't involve the motorcycle.  It was one of the kids, and it was a near thing.  Don't even want to think about that.  He'll be in the hospital for some days, I expect.

Damn, I'm worn out.

The best laid plans of mice and men

Oft gang aglee.  I was supposed to be test riding one of these today:

That's not happening, with Wolfgang in the Cone of Shame and not eating yet.  I'll be watching him like a hawk today.  Damnitall.

UPDATE 1 March 2014 11:06: The patient has a considerably reduced energy level.

We are now run by Big Business, Big Banks, and Big Bureaucrats

Nigel Farage, leader of the surging UK Independence Party, telling the Prime Minister of Greece that he doesn't run his country:



Alas, this is not isolated to the fringes of Europe.  Bob finds an eloquent description of the same thing happening here on these shores, from Pat Buchanan of all people:

To understand why and how the Republican Party lost Middle America, and faces demographic death, we need to go back to Bush I.

At the Cold War’s end, the GOP reached a fork in the road. The determination of Middle Americans to preserve the country they grew up in, suddenly collided with the profit motive of Corporate America.

The Fortune 500 wanted to close factories in the USA and ship production abroad — where unions did not exist, regulations were light, taxes were low, and wages were a fraction of what they were here in America.

Corporate America was going global and wanted to be rid of its American work force, the best paid on earth, and replace it with cheap foreign labor.

While manufacturing sought to move production abroad, hotels, motels, bars, restaurants, farms and construction companies that could not move abroad also wanted to replace their expensive American workers.

Thanks to the Republican Party, Corporate America got it all.

I studied economics back at State U, and so I understand the arguments that maximizing trade maximizes economic output, and by implication economic output per capita goes up.  But there's a Jedi hand wave that occurs at that point: ceteris parabis, "all other things remaining the same".  They don't.  Even the Libertarians over at Reason make this hand wave.

And so we've seen the hollowing out of the American manufacturing work force, and now 12 Million immigrants will start taking barista jobs from new college graduates.  Ceteris parabus, we're net better off.  National Income per capita increases, corporate bottom lines swell, all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

But the ceteris is never parabus.  There are winners and there are losers.  The losers are our neighbors.



Both political parties are co-conspirators against the middle class.  Both of them. 

But it probably doesn't matter: like the Prime Minister of Greece, someone else is calling the shots.  The title of this post shows my thoughts on who that might be.  On good days, I can run to optimistic.  But there are days where it sure looks like we've completed the transition from democracy to oligarchy. 

VOTE, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary