Roxio Revisited

It has been almost a month - October 2nd – since I reported an annoying glitch on my laptop.

I suppose that I made some progress in rectifying the situation, since back then it was trying to install Roxio Media Suite (which was already installed and working) but could not find a necessary install (.msi) file.  Now, each morning at start-up, it tries to install Roxio Media Experience.  And it tries, and tries, and tries…and tries. 

I can either sit and click cancel over and over – a dozen times or more – or I can go have a cigarette and a cup of coffee, in which case I may only have to click cancel a couple of times.

As I mentioned before,  I went on-line and tried every solution offered there with limited result.

I tried again today and this time I found an article on the Roxio user forum that I had not seen before.  It confirmed my suspicion that the problem was the result of a Windows update, suggested running something it called the Microsoft Installer Cleanup Utility and gave a link to the Microsoft Support web page where it could be found.

I went there, and found that the Installer Cleanup Utility has been replaced by something called MS Fixit. 

Running Fixit seems to have worked.  I rebooted the laptop and those annoying Roxio pop-ups did not appear!

While on the Microsoft website, I confirmed a rumor that I had heard – Microsoft will stop supporting XP on April 8, 2014.  That’s not great news, but at least I won’t be getting any more automatic upgrades that screw something else up.

109 What?

That’s Google Maps satellite view of the Boggy Thicket.  That bright white spot just to the right of center is the 5th wheel parked next to the garage.  You can see parts of the house and the pool if you know what you’re looking for, but they are almost hidden by the trees.

As I’ve mentioned before, we are located in the northeast corner of Harris County at the intersection of Conners Road and Bearden Lane.

When we first moved here, thirty-something years ago, I went to the post office to get an address.  They told me that the post office did not assign addresses, that I should pick a number I liked and they would deliver my mail to whatever address I chose.  I asked how I was supposed to do that, the lady at the counter didn’t know, but she suggested contacting the light company to see if they had a suggestion.  They did not.

I finally settled on the 109 – the tract number on our survey.  I later learned that most of my neighbors chose their street addresses the same way.

109 Conners Road has served us pretty well  as an address.  It does put an odd numbered address on what would normally be the even numbered side of the street.  Over the years, that has occasionally caused FedEx and UPS to deliver our packages to neighbors across the street.  Otherwise, it has worked just fine.

Recently, Google Maps has decided that we moved.  Type in a search for 109 Conners, Huffman, TX and the site automatically switches your entry to 109 Bearden.

My first thought was that when we built our garage and moved our driveway to the Bearden Lane side of our property, they assumed that was now our primary address. But - a close look at the area on Google Maps shows that they have Conners Road labeled as both Conners and Bearden – and Bearden Lane labeled as both Bearden and Conners.  The roads used to be labeled correctly, but they're not anymore.

The other on-line map programs aren’t much better.  Type in our address on MapQuest, and they can’t find us at all; Yahoo Maps put us on the wrong side of the road and Bing finds us but puts their little locator arrow down at our next-door neighbor’s.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, nothing has changed.  We are still right where we’ve been for almost forty years.

Looking Up

I recently encountered a couple of pictures on the internet that really caught my fancy. 

They were well framed, in focus, all the things that make for a good photograph, but what really grabbed my attention was the point of view.

The first was shot in a forest of tall pine trees

and the other is an unusual shot from one of America’s most photographed National Parks – Bryce Canyon.  Thousands of pictures have been shot there, most of them looking something like this:

According to the Bryce Canyon Visitor Guide, the park, open since 1928, now sees an estimated 1.75 million visitors per year, very few of whom leave without taking pictures of the impressive landscape.

Almost all of those photos have been shot from locations along the canyon rim, which makes this photograph – one of the most impressive I’ve ever seen - truly unique:

 

Over Early

Today is only the 28th, but I’m pretty sure that Halloween has come and gone here at the Boggy Thicket.  All the local ghosts and goblins (and pirates and princesses, fairies and gangsters) came by on Saturday evening.

This all started back when our kids were small.  We and our next-door neighbors hosted a bonfire and wiener roast for all the kids in the area, complete with games, etc.  When our kids got older, the tradition died out for a while, but once those kids grew up and had kids of their own, it started up again – bigger and better than ever.

Their celebration starts with a Halloween hayride.  Local residents wait at the ends of their driveways in lawn chairs and pickup trucks as the trick-or-treaters circle the block.  Once the candy run is over, they all gather back at the starting point for a party that lasts well into the night.

This year there were two tractors pulling 30-foot hay wagons full of costumed kids, escorted by a half dozen Gators, Rangers and other  four-wheel off-road vehicles.

We always save a little bit of candy just in case, but two years ago we only had four visitors on Halloween, and last year there were none at all.

-0-

Speaking of early celebrations – Yesterday, Honey and I went to Texas Land and Cattle Company for a surprise 80th birthday party for her Aunt Jean.

The party was a great success.

Honey had always been told that she was born on her aunt’s 12th birthday, and they have enjoyed a special bond because of that with lots of jokes and teasing over the years.  Yesterday, Jean revealed that although her mother always said that she was born on November 4th, she recently discovered that her birth certificate lists her date of birth as the 3rd.  There are some other discrepancies – it identifies her only by her middle name, for example – but now she isn't sure what to think.

An 8 by Any Other Name

Back on the 14th of this month, my post used words like Lakh and Crore – terms from the Indian numbering system

The Indian Numbering System is used throughout India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. It is based on the Vedic numbering system in which numbers over 9,999 are written in two-digit groups rather than the three-digit groups used in most other parts of the world.  For example, one lakh - written 1,00,000 – corresponds to 100,000 in the Arabic decimal system we normally use in the USA.

Of course, the decimal notation is not the only system in use here.  That same 100,000 could be expressed as 11000011010100000 in binary, or 186A0 in hexadecimal , or 303240 using octal (Base 8).

Speaking of Base 8, it was once used in programming early computers, but now its only purpose seems to be the confounding of young math students. 

I have a nephew who is an actuary and a bit of a computer/math geek.  I was not surprised when his daughter posted on Facebook that Base 8 was no fun.  She claimed that when converting from decimal to octal, math lost its sense of humor, and as evidence she offered the old elementary-school joke

Question - “Why is 6 afraid of 7 ?

Answer - “Because 7 10 11 !”

 

Rub-A-Dub

Despite Lord Wolfenden’s best efforts, what you choose to do in the privacy of your own home may still be subject to scrutiny by the state.  Okay, granted that his committee was dealing with “consenting adults” in the UK, but still…

In an era when Cialis is urging you to install a pair of bath tubs on your patio, what you do in your own tub can get you in trouble.

I was recently looking a a website dedicated to strange and/or ridiculous laws, and learned that

it is against the law in Los Angeles to bathe two babies simultaneously in the same tub.

And in Oklahoma,

it is illegal to have a donkey in your bath tub after 7:00 p.m.

Genie Transplant

Well, the garage door opener transplant is complete and the operation was a success.

As I mentioned yesterday, although the two openers looked alike from the outside, they were not identical. They were more like fraternal twins that only shared about 90% of the same DNA.

They were bought within a month of each other at two different Home Depot stores, one in Porter and the other in the Austin area.  The model numbers were almost identical, with one ending in 350AG and the other in 350 AGM. 

I’m assuming that M stands for magnetic, since the carriage (the plastic piece on the end of the chain that connects to the door bracket) on that one has a small magnet imbedded in it which is used to activate proximity switches at the up and down limits of travel.  The non-M model uses mechanical switches with levers that hang down where they can be hit by the moving bracket.  Luckily, I noticed the difference and swapped carriages before I got it installed.

The difference in the wiring patterns turned out to be pretty simple.  I did end up with one extra pair of wires I didn’t know what to do with, but once I determined that they were no longer needed – they went to the other side of the garage to control the opener I was removing - everything was smooth sailing.

Two days of going up and down stepladders did manage to locate  some muscles that I didn’t know I had.  My upper thighs just below my buttocks are really sore today.