A Short Note to 2012 Doomsday Worriers

The world is not going to end. Life will continues, so get on with it.

Oh and please take my late mother’s advice to “dread only one day at a time.”

Winter Weather, Last Minute Shopping and Al

Here in the Southeastern tip of Minnesota we got more than the one inch of snow that was supposed to dust the area yesterday. Tramping out to the car it varied from three to four inches deep and made cleaning the Subaru off a bit of a chore. But my father and I had good reason to go out despite the snow. It had suddenly dawned on me that he hadn’t done any of his Christmas gift shopping – not even online. I checked and sure enough that was the case, so something needed to be done about that.

Heading for La Crosse, the situation reminded me of my late friend Al Ulven. Al was the proprietor of a drug store and a variety store in the small town of Spring Grove. Many believed he made a great deal more money than he actually did, so it was always amusing to watch him around Christmas time.

Though thought of as a miser, Al really didn’t have extravagant sums to throw around. His adult children were often in need of help and the profit margins of his businesses were pretty slim. Did all this make him a Scrooge?

No, he was a giving person, if frugal. But it was the nature of his Christmas gifts that made me shake my head in wry amusement. You see, Al would always wait to the last possible minute to get Christmas presents. Usually this was on Christmas Eve and he wasn’t willing to travel to the nearest city of La Crosse to shop.

Instead, he would put out the least amount of effort possible. Once he claimed that he wanted to keep it local to help the community, but I called him on that since he almost always bought the gifts from his own store. The truth was he was too lazy and would put the shopping off until he was backed into a corner.

So some of the oddest presents would be given with little tailoring to the individual. Knick knacks aimed at elderly women were presented to bachelors, office supplies to kids, and so forth. The thing is he would give the gifts with a twinkle in his eye and you couldn’t get offended even if you wanted to.

Another Christmas time memory of Al was triggered by noticing the lights festooned by the City of La Crescent on some of their trees along the highway. He was always involved in the city council in Spring Grove, plus the Ballard House and other town institutions. Sometimes he would shanghai me into assisting in some of the tasks involved and one time it involved replacing light bulbs.

How hard could replacing a few light bulbs be?

Said light bulbs turned out to be on decorative strings meant to festoon the trees in the town’s biggest park. Many long strings of lights that had been subjected to the worst that Minnesota winters could throw at them were stored away waiting for winter to come again. This was before LED bulbs and so many feet of had to be checked for bad bulbs.

Untangling Christmas lights is tough enough for decorating trees in the house, now imagine industrial sized lines determinedly knotting together. It was tempting to use Alexander the Great’s solution to the Gordian knot, but these were expensive items. The size of the them meant it would be difficult to work on them, but fortunately the Fest Building was available to do so if a little chilly.

There Al, his friend Ted, and I worked on untangling and laying out lights, then plugging them in. Searches for broken and burnt out bulbs followed with many a light needing replacing. Al would be in and out running errands during the work which took hours. Eventually all the strings that were fully functional were carefully wound into bundles for others to put up on the trees. That entailed bucket crane work and I’m glad it wasn’t my job.

I miss those misadventures with Al.

Windows 8 First Impressions

Oy, where did everything go? The Start screen is a pain in the rear. Getting to settings for hardware and software takes even more digging than in Vista and Windows 7. This was a particular pain since I had to hack drivers for my audio card to work properly. That little endeavor was painful, but ultimately successful in granting me full optical out.

I don’t like that I was forced into 32 bit Win8 due to the downloadable cheap upgrade locking you into whatever was on the system before. Be warned you will need the much more expensive disc version to move to 64 bit. Me, I’m cheap or I would never have upgraded.

Flash player is being temperamental in Firefox 17, yet works just dandy in Internet Explorer 10.

I do not like how difficult it is to get to programs now. Everything is aimed at the Start page, which is a garish mess. I feel like I’ve been thrown back to Windows 3.1 it is such a step backwards. This interface will not be put on my main PC unless I’m forced to by Microsoft.

If I hadn’t gotten an Android based tablet earlier this year, I’d have no clue where things were hidden. The interface is completely smartphone and tablet centric, which is pretty useless when using a mouse.

At least Win8 is running fast on the old hardware which has an AMD Opteron 180 Dual Core 2.4 ghz processor with 2 gigs of RAM.

A Curious Decline and Other Things

Since last Thursday, the traffic to the blog has dropped to a fraction of what it normally is. I don’t know if it was my tweaking the robots.txt earlier in the month knocking me down in the search rankings or what. That has since been returned to the Blogger default since the tweak served its purpose in getting Bing to actually index the whole blog. Arcane stuff, but interesting to learn.

It’s a good thing I don’t earn any money off of this site!

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey In-Theater Review

Having survived the long trek to see the midnight showing, I will attempt to give a brief (and spoiler free) review of Peter Jackson’s return to Middle Earth. It was the Digital 3D version at 24 FPS, not 48 FPS that I saw, so no comment can be made on the controversy surrounding the new technology. Fears of odd coloring that had been raised after early footage was released can be put to rest for the movie looks and sounds like the previous Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The best way to sum up my feelings about the film is that it was a nostalgic return home, for I felt that peculiar emotion during the scenes that were set in very familiar places from The Fellowship of the Ring. It didn’t hurt that there were familiar faces from that film and that the beginning of this movie dovetails into the beginning of that one. For my final thoughts you can skip to the end of the review, since I’ll be going into technical details about now.

Pacific Rim Trailer Does Giant Robots Right!

This looks spectacular and should appeal to giant robot fans and kaiju fans equally. It looks like more fun than should legally be allowed.

That Was a Lost Day

Shortly after writing my last post on health, I fell completely apart. It is probably a virus of some kind, but I ended up sleeping most of the afternoon into early evening. So not much got accomplished. By the way, have I ever written how much I hate sneezing? It makes my teeth, back, and elbows hurt. No clue on how the last can be affected by it.

I did watch the second half of The Return of the King Extended Edition in preparation for The Hobbit coming out this week. Something that struck me while watching the Blu-ray versions of the trilogy was how well the CGI effects blended in with the rest of the footage. It may be my imagination, but it seemed like it was more seamless in 1080p than when I watched it on DVD on the old television. Specifically, there was little of the “popping” where outlines of composited effects stood out. Gollum looked particularly good.

Since I don’t feel well and writing was not happening, the work I planned on The Last Starfighter review did not progress. So I took notes while watching The Dark Knight Rises on Blu-ray instead. It is a fantastic transfer of a brilliant film, but it will be awhile before it is reviewed thanks to all of the extras included.

Meanwhile, I’m downloading some games that I only played as shareware back in the ‘90s. GOG.com is having a winter sale, check it out for DRM free games from yesteryear. Given how slow my reflexes are now, I’ll be playing them on easy mode.

Well, my thoughts are moving about as fast as cold molasses, so I’ll quit writing while I’m ahead.