Hoskins

I have two thoughts about this, aside from the really horrible way this whole situation developed for the boy, the family, and the schools. First, it may be a public BUILDING with no expectation of privacy in its public SPACES, but the expectation of privacy In a RESTROOM should be sacrosanct no matter if the restroom is on public or private property. I mean, come on. Second, I'm an old crank who wants nothing but a lawn kept clear. I work with different companies in a consulting role. In several of them, it's a given that you can't enter the building with a device that can take a picture or a video without clear authorization and rules about where those devices can be used. You leave it at the desk when you enter, you pick it up when you leave. I think this should be a solid rule at schools.

It wasn't my intention to be offensive. I don't even know what my intention was, in fact, other than I got my panties in a twist about something Chris said, and griped about it. Addym, I had not intended to offend you. I apologize. And to anyone else too. And I'll just take away from all of this that I probably should just let Chris be Chris and I'll just hang back.

Chris, you don't ruffle my feathers with every statement you make - far from it. It's only the broad-stroke judgments against institutions, where you disregard the people within them - that I get riled about. I agree with you about Monroe, and the overly politically correct environment (which is decidedly NOT "redneck" - it's overly progressive, in my opinion) where talking about blackface nearly leads to criminal charges. It's over the top and it's wrong. We do agree about that. What's odd is that Monroe, as a downriver city, is seen by Michiganders as redneck and yet this school board is taking what I'd say are actions that are totally in opposite to that. I've never seen your definition of redneck. It's not my definition, which is of uneducated white people living in trailer parks, drinking all the time, sleeping with their cousins and driving around in pickup trucks with gun racks in the back. They've got American flags pasted everywhere and an IMPEACH OBAMA bumper sticker on the back of the fifth wheel. To me, your definition just covers the spectrum of " very right wing Christian Conservative". You can be a gay Tea Party member. You can be a gay man in a Christian church that's against gay marriage, and still enjoy your time at church. People aren't made up of one thing. Watch this clip of the Newsroom, if you have the time: What riled me up about your blanket statements about Michigan is that you've decided the entire state is a shitshow, and it's not. It's a beautiful state with a lot of really positive attributes that happen to be overshadowed by it's crappy government. But the people that live here elected that government as a reaction to some really crappy economic conditions, more than anything. The people I talk to (and I talk a lot) roll their eyes at the morons in Lansing just as much as we do the morons in Washington. And the terrible actions of a rural school district outside Lansing do not mean that all school districts in Michigan beat up on gay kids. I understand your anger about it, and I'm right there with you in seeing the injustices that kid and family have faced. But they don't define the state or the people that live in it. No more than the actions of the Phelps gang define Christianity, no more than Monroe defines Michigan. I think it's a reflection of rural living everywhere, where these anti-gay attitudes are far more prevalent than in non-rural areas. And you'll find those attitudes across the country, not just in Michigan. They're everywhere. And Addym: Yeah, I got up in Chris' grill. I respect the guy, a lot. You may think I'm a redneck - do with that what you will. And I'm done with my rant now. Please enjoy your Sunday.

Rednecks. Nice word. Can you define it for me? Please do. I'd like to hear an educated, erudite definition of that word as it applies to Michigan specifically. Because it really sounds like you know what the hell YOU'RE talking about. I had a nice long rant here before, but I'l just sum it up: What you know about Michigan would fit in a condom. A small one. Still in the package. Monroe is not Michigan any more than Detroit is, and not any more than Atlanta is Georgia or Salt Lake City is Utah. There are bad people everywhere, and judging Michgan by what some idiot school board in Monroe does is just, well, baffling to me. While I really like your writing and your characters and your stories, your broad-stroke judgments about religion/politics/social issues are tiring and insulting. It's clear you like to read the paper and get mad. Good for you. I guess everyone needs a hobby. I just think you really ought to listen to yourself sometimes. Read what you wrote about Michigan out loud to yourself, and then sit and think about whether or not you'd talk to that person at a party.

I just open the search box and type "shutdown.exe" (without the quotes). Note that you'll get a 30 second warning before the machine shuts off. Laptops DO have on/off buttons. WHat happens when you press yours? On my laptop, I have it set so that when I close the lid, the laptop sleeps, thereby saving my work. Pressing the power button orders a shutdown, which closes all apps (asking to save where necessary) and then powers the machine off. Also, a bit of defense for Microsoft: They do a lot of user studies. One big issue that has been persistent in Windows on a laptop from day one is the ability for a computer to sleep, and sleep well. It's been a huge issue - either the laptop gets shut and the power goes out: the user loses their work, or the laptop gets shut and the laptop stays on: the machine overheats, the battery runs down, and the user loses their work. Bad outcomes. Windows XP was terrible at handling sleep states. So was Vista. Both got better with service packs (i.e. MS learned about user behavior over time), but there were very annoying differences between "suspend", "hibernate" and "sleep" for a while there (for the record: "suspend" means freeze. Stop processing anything and kill the video, then wait for user input, but don't power anything off. "Hibernate" means write anything in RAM to a temporary file and power way down, including spinning down the hard drive and the video. "Sleep" means power down the hard drive and video and anything else that's not needed, but leave everything in RAM (some electricity is still used to keep RAM alive). Suspend is awful. Hibernate means the laptop is slow to wake up.. Sleep lets the laptop come up fast but preserves user states and is a good mix between suspend and hibernate). Windows 7 handled this well: Close the lid, the laptop hibernates, saving the user's work and restoring the session when the lid opens up again. But it took a long time for laptop makers, user studies, and Microsoft to come up with that, even though it should be common sense. After Windows 7 got it right, MS saw the user behavior change: Nobody shut the machines off anymore, they just closed the things. So they just made it a default behavior. But it is behavior that can be changed. Go into power settings in the control panel. Look for advanced options. Somewhere in there, and not far away, are options for what to do when the power button is pressed, along with options for what to do when the lid closes. Choose your preferences and feel good about pressing the button to power off. Happy to help find the right settings if you need any help. And Start8 ROCKS. It's the first thing I install after setting up a Windows 8 box.

THAT is a cool story, and your granddad sounds like a good guy to know. Here's a bit of trivia for you: The attempt by Digital Research to get into the PC market is the subject of a book by Tracy Kidder, called "The Soul of a New Machine". I've read it a few times. It's a very well told story, and it hinges around the guy that headed up the project, Tom West. It's a great read, and your grandfather may know of it or may be interested in reading it. Then again, you might be too.

Ha! Zork. You can download it here, if you like. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue, however. Zork is a rewrite of the original Adventure game, written by MIT in 1976. You can play Adventure here: http://www.web-adventures.org/cgi-bin/webfrotz?s=Adventure I just played it on the site for a quick minute, and got a dose of the snarky humor found in the game: (The "In Forest" bit is telling you where you are, and telling you how many moves you've made). I've played Zork 1 and 2, and never finished 3 (something about needing to finish high school). I drew the maps (and was pretty accurate) and played it with friends (back when "multiplayer" meant you remembered to hand the keyboard to your buddy, who was yelling "GIMME THE KEYBOARD DAMMIT" Ok, gonna play a little Zork now.

...and: You can now get emulators for these systems. They run on a PC or Mac, and can run anything the old machines can. I wanted to transfer some Atari programs to an emulator, and spent an inordinate amount of time finding a diagram for a cable that would allow an Atari disk drive to be connected to a PC's parallel port. It worked fine, and I saved some stuff that, due to the age of the floppy disks (getting on about 30 years now) was going to be lost forever. So Colin: take a picture of that camera connector and let's see what it looks like. Your goal of using it with a PC may not be that tough to reach.

Had an atari 800 with two disk drives, a cassette player, an acoustic coupler modem, 48k of RAM and a color monitor. We had an epson dot-matrix printer that we reburned the eprom on to get it to print wider than an 80 column display could (and I do mean reburn - pulled the printer apart, pulled a chip out of a socket, put the chip in an eprom burner, and wiped/reloaded it). I was 15 at the time, I think. There were magazines, like Compute! and Byte, that would print out the code for cool games, and I would laboriously retype them into my Atari. If I got the things to compile at all I was lucky - it was a pretty silly way to learn to program. And of course if you didn't save your work - which wasn't possible until it could compile - the only thing you could do was reset the machine and start over. Not a good workflow. One of the more fun parts of the atari was it's graphics handling - different than an Apple, and in some ways far superior. But intricate. I think my dad sunk a good five grand into that computer by the time we moved and it got packed away. I later took it to Alaska with me - in a huge wooden box - where I sold it for pennies to buy my first Mac (a 512K version, it was HOT). My dad's first PC was an original IBM 8086, it had two monitors- one green, and one amber. The amber monitor was used to see how the system was running, and the green one for actual work. It had a 20 megabyte hard drive that was mounted on an ISA card. ISA is the predecessor to PCI, which is the predecessor to PCI-E. I still want that old IBM keyboard back. Louder than hell and it felt like you were typing on little metal sticks, but you were typing, not faffing about with these mamby pamby plastic things. Cool things I remember: - Early floppy disks had a notch on one side. They could only read one side of the disk. Using a hole punch to put another notch on the other side made it double sided. - There were times when you wanted to copy protect a disk so that it could only be read by your computer (or your friends - heh). You did that by opening the floppy drive and using a screwdriver to slow the disk down a little bit, then recording your program on it, and then putting the speed back to normal. In order to read the disk again, you needed to know exactly how much you slowed it down. We had codes for this. Also, ASCII porn sucks. - You'd use the acoustic modem by picking up the phone, dialing into the network, and listening for the answering tones. When you heard them, you had to tell the computer to look at the modem for a signal (by pressing a key - you couldn't do it early because the computer froze while it looked), then smush the phone handset into the cups and then the network would basically take over, if the dial tone was good and solid. We had a party line, so I could only use this late at night. I dialed into a mainframe somewhere in GM's headquarters in Detroit (long distance even!) and would play Adventure for hours "It is dark. You are in a clearing. There is a path to the west". "Go West" "It is dark. You are on a path that goes east and west. There is a lamp here." "Light Lamp". "You are not holding the lamp." "Pick up the lamp". "You are holding a lamp. It is dark. There is a path..."...etc. Fun times.

Yep, that fixed it! Much obliged, sir.

I can, and do, copy and paste the stories into a text reader that only has a sans serif font, so it's workable. The problem seems to be that Comic Sans doesn't seem to fit a font "family" like sans serif or serif. It's apparently seen as a "decorative" or cursive font, so the iPad substitutes another decorative/cursive font (that wonderful cursive one in the screenshot), rather than a serious one. I'm just glad it doesn't pick some gothic Olde English monstrosity :) And I haven't found any way to force a substitution on an iPad, you just don't have that kind of granular control over the screen display. It's certainly not a deal breaker, I'd find a way to read the stories here if they were in eleven different fonts, all with different colors. Just something y'all should be aware of as more and more people read on tablets. That PDF of 'Pieces of Destiny' looks spectacular on an iPad. If only more e-book authors would take that kind of care with their books...

So, when formatting stories for tablets, one thing to keep in mind is that iPads are missing windows fonts, and when that happens, it substitutes, usually badly. I think Cole used Comic Sans in his 2 x Ten story. Here it is on an iPad 3: http://imgur.com/RZ2OcXi.jpg It's not horrible, but it definitely can strain the eyes a bit. Just something to know.

Ha! http://www.theonion.com/articles/fred-phelps-man-who-forever-stopped-march-of-gay-r,35582/

Who?

I think the best picketing to be done would be to stand outside the church/funeral pyre/whatever, backs turned. Either that, or nothing at all. Not even an obituary. No attention to them pisses them off more than any protest does.

Any version of word after '97 should work fine. There's no reason to be concerned if you're using anything later than that, because the encoding issue only exists if your file is very old. Also, what Cole said. If you think there might be an issue, Mike can certainly tell you if there's a problem.

Colin: The website is forcing UTF-8 on the document...which hadn't been converted to it prior to the conversion that dude does. You can see this if you change the character encoding in your web browser to Western European (Windows) instead of UTF-8, which puts the quotes back by reapplying the original charset. The two fixes (that don't involve editing the document - your method of replacing the bad characters works too, of course) are to convert the document to UTF-8 before dude gets it, or for dude to change the encoding in the document by changing the meta charset tag to iso-8859-1, which may play hell for users on a Mac or Linux. Pecman's method works best (that's how I'd submit a story anyway) because cutting and pasting clears out all the weird Word HTML and sets the proper charset tag. /nerd

Chris: Here's a technical answer, but there's a fix in it. The technical explanation is that this happens when the encoding in the document and the encoding on the web page don't match. The encoding determines the character set (not font - that's different) that's used when web page is displayed. When characters in the original encoding don't exist in the destination encoding, they're swapped for something else. On my ipad, I see squares (so will most Mac users). On Windows machines you see the diamond with the question mark. The web page is saying "I don't know what this character is". I looked at the HTML source for your latest chapter, and the encoding in the web page is "UTF-8", which is a Unicode character set and the most common one used on the Internet and it accommodates many different character sets. Later versions of Word encode in the "Western European (Windows") encoding. "Western European (Windows)" is more commonly called "Western (Windows-1252") and in browsers, is usually called a "Western" character set. All of these encodings are very very similar to UTF-8, so should be fine for everyone to use. I don't know what character set was used by old versions of Word, but I'm guessing that it's not the same and that the single quote character in it was not included in the newer encodings. So. What to do? First, in your document most of the missing characters are Word's "smart quotes", in this case, the single quote. What I'd suggest is to change the encoding in the document and send that to dude. To do that: - Open the story in Word. Doesn't matter which version as long as it's later than 2003. - In the File menu, choose Save As... - the Save As... dialog will open. Choose the "Word-97-2003" option as you have in the past. Don't click save yet. - Look in the dialog for the Tools menu. It's a little drop down that should be next to the Save button. - From the Tools menu, click Web Options. The Web Options dialog will open. - Click the Encoding tab. Change the encoding in the drop down from "Western European (Windows)" to "Unicode (UTF-8)". - Save the file (whether you choose to overwrite the original or make a copy is up to you, but use the copy for any web publishing tasks if you go that route). Send a chunk of this file to dude and have him test it on the site - convert/format it as he would, then publish it up and see if the encoding issue is solved. For USERS: If you come across a story that has these issues, you can change your browser encoding to match the original (in this case "Western (Windows-1252)" and the original single quotes will be restored. - In Chrome, click the Customize button in the upper right, select Tools, and then Encoding. Change the encoding to Western (Windows-1252). - In Firefox, open Options by clicking Firefox in the upper left. Hover on Web Developer in the menu and it will fly out. Select Character Encoding. Look at the bottom of the menu and you'll probably see UTF-8 and Western (ISO 8859-1). Select that. If that doesn't work, go back to the Character Encoding menu and select More Encodings, and select Western European, and then Western (Windows 1252). - In Internet Explorer, right-click the page and select Encoding, and then click More. Select the Western European encoding. Sorry this was so long and technical - but the short answer is: Change the encoding in the original document, and users can change the encoding of the pages they are viewing to match that of the original document fairly simply.

He had me right up to the point where he said he wants to form a van halen tribute band. That's just tragic...

Dabeagle - it sounds like, from the very little information you've provided (and probably this is because it's all you have), Camy is probably correct - the data is there, but when the install ran it created a new instance because it didn't use the settings from the old board. This should be reversible, or at least recoverable. The hint here is that it asked for a host name. After that, it probably created a new database table WITHIN the existing database. So the old data is probably there but you need some assistance with: - access to the root directory of the new and old PHPBB3 directories - access to a PHP Admin dashboard (a popular one is phpmyadmin) - possibly a copy of the old database tables, which can be extracted from the database using phpmyadmin. If you can't get in contact with your support person, contact a local web hosting/design company or a local college that might have a qualified student you can borrow, explain the issue in detail, and ask them what they'd require - it's probably an hour to determine the problem and maybe 2 hours to fix it - and see if they can take a look. They will need some kind of credentials to look the server over, so get that information together beforehand. Good luck, I've seen this happen before and hopefully it's not as bad as it looks from your perspective.

Consider me a purveyor of doom for a moment. I fix computers and networks for a living. So: CD-Rs and DVD-Rs degrade over time. The plastic layer pulls away from the metal, and they become unreadable. It's a natural process and not stoppable. I trust them for a life of about two years before they get untrustable. If this is your method of backing up files, get in the habit of copying your old CDs to new media once in a while. Flash drives also degrade. There is a property in the silicon used to make them that limits the number of reads and writes they can do, and I get regular calls about flash drives that suddenly think they need to be formatted. External hard drives can and do fail. Especially when they are in constant use. Western Digital has a bad rep with me for this, their "mybook" drives might as well be called "nobook". Hive had good luck with Seagate drives - look for the ones with the 5 year warranty. But my main point - it sounds like y'all are backing up your data, and not the complete PC or Mac. How many of you have or know where to find your windows product key? Or your Office product key? Do you have the original install discs? did you go through the process of creating them when you got the PC? I bet you burned them to those flaky CDs... External hard drives are cheap. One simple process of setting up Windows Backup or Apple's Time Machine can give you the ability to fully backup and restore the entire machine. Both run on a schedule and are very fast. Out of the box, Time Machine runs a backup every hour. Windows can be set up to do the same thing. These are "bit" level backups and take about two minutes to run. One of the big advantages: you can restore to any hour you want. Wreck a file at four pm, restore it to the 2 pm version, or yesterday's, or whatever. Or the worst case: your hard drive dies completely - the dreaded INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE error and that awful clicking sound of a bad drive. What now? Get a replacement drive of the same or bigger size, restore the system image from backup, and you're up and running in an hour or two. The biggest time sink in the world, to me, is attempting to get recovery disks for a PC with a bad hard drive, then reinstalling Windows, then all the updates, then installing all the apps, and then restoring the data. It takes hours, and for (literally) about a hundred bucks and an hour of setup, it can be completely avoided. If you're not inclined to set up backups to run, then consider using a cloud service like Carbonite that does the backups for you. Oh, and yeah, all you writers: PRINT A COPY.

UPS and fedex delivery failures also affected non-Christmas deliveries. I'm an it guy and I need two computers from a supplier...won't be seeing those until after the new year, they show as in transit but haven't moved from Tennessee in a week and a half. A family friend was going to fly to see her mother in Costa Rica. Her passport - in transit for a week - never showed up - no trip to see mom this year. At least this year, there's less whining about what kids didn't get - "I HATE MY LIFE MY DAD GOT ME MONEY INSTEAD OF AN IPHONE I HATE MY PARENTS" than I saw last year. Or maybe I'm just not noticing it... Christmas is what you make it.

I'm not having a great Christmas. That's okay, things happen. But this story really, really has made my day much better. Thank you, Cole.

This is a very simplified explanation, but: An email server is assigned an IP address. They look like 198.345.234.123 or somesuch. You can have many email domain names assigned to the same server (which is a physical machine, with a network cable attached to a network). So the server itself has one IP address. When spammers (using their own domain names) send emails out, they all come from the same IP address. If many servers are run by the same hosting provider - which is very common - the hosting provider will buy a block of IP addresses, so 198.345.234.123 may be part of a block of 200 addresses, all assigned to servers in the same physical location as the IOMFATS server. That's what's been blocked by Spamhaus - the address of the server, regardless of what domains are on it, because it's in one of these blocks. When Timmy sends emails to the iomfats list, he's sending them FROM his computer, THROUGH the server, and out to the people on the list. The actual email addresses that make up the email list are not stored on the server, they're stored on Timmy's PC. The only way the spammers could get the email addresses would be to sniff out the traffic going through the server, which is Not Allowed by many service providers, and would be a major security breach. That has not happened here, according to the forum posts. I won't go into how IOMFATS gets their server whitelisted, since it sounds like Spamhaus will be doing some of the whitelisting for the affected servers. Just know that your email address has most likely not been compromised. Your account information at IOMFATS has not been compromised. I work with Spamhaus a fair bit when I configure email servers for my customers. They're a decent organization doing a good thing by blocking spammers. They do that when someone reports an IP address as a spam source, by adding the IP address to a blacklist. They don't go any further than that, until they investigate the source to see if they really are spammers, and they do that through watching, and aren't intrusive at all. They don't have any access to the emails that are being sent out, and they don't have any access to account data. So yeah, it's a pain for Timmy and the gang but it's not a security issue. Just annoying.

Well there ARE a lot of congresscritters there...might skew the demographic a bit :p