ShopVac Assembly - Be Careful!

I bought a new ShopVac Wet/Dry Vacuum from Amazon.com for spring cleanup and set out to assemble it Saturday.  The User manual has fourteen pages of instructions and cautions in multiple languages.

The English Safety Instructions include 23 items.


I put off reading that paragraph until I finished the assembly.  Step 5 of those instructions says,"Insert casters into feet by placing stem of caster into holes provided.  Apply pressure and twisting motion until casters snap into place ..."


Perhaps those instructions should be modified to include,"if no snap is heard, it's probably because the damned caster has just pinched your finger.  In that case, remove blood from finger with a clean rag."

A New Low in Website Creation Has Been Reached! (ScoreCard dot com)

"Here, run this program on your PC!"

Remember when people would say that and you'd actually do it?  Probably not, unless you were using PCs back in 1981/82 or thereabouts.  People have gotten a lot more savvy since then.  Thirty years of experience tells us that this is a bad idea.  No one would just accept a program from a stranger and run it on their computer in 2013.

Or would they?  Most web-surfers don't realize that this is what they might be doing when they visit a site on the web with "scripting" enabled on their browsers.

I normally surf the web with scripting disabled.  Scripts are just programs downloaded from websites onto your computer.  I presume they are all evil - not a bad position to start from in spite of their widespread use.  I will enable scripting at a site like my bank so I can log on to my account, since I assume they take reasonable security precautions in the code on their site.

Today, Instapundit had a link to the website RightWisconsin.  I followed the link and briefly saw the page flash up followed by this message:

Well, that is interesting.  And if I don't enable scripting, I keep getting bounced back to the message.  I can't visit RightWisconsin with scripting disabled.  Now who thought that was a good idea?

Well let's just check the code on the site to see what they are doing that makes it so damned important to be able to run javascript.  Besides setting up lots of tracking cookies, they include this piece of code to count the folks that drop by without scripting enabled

<noscript>
       <img src=" ... scorecardresearch.com ... c1=2&c ... =1" />
</noscript>

 

 ScoreCardResearch?  Who's that?  Why do they want to know who came by without scripting enabled?

I'll leave you to research ScoreCardResearch for yourself.   See if you can turn up this quote:

Going crazy with the Scorecardresearch virus infection on your computer? Don't know what exactly it is and where does it come from? It seems ...

There used to be a widely accepted belief that swearing was the sign of weak vocabulary.   I don't necessarily agree since I learned my serious swearing in the army back in 1969 from some quite articulate NCOs.  But I do believe that the use of scripting is generally a sign of either weak CSS skills or evil intentions.

Wait! Don't Hangup on This Call.

206-397-1823 Health Care

That's the number left on Caller ID when this computerized robot-caller contacted me.

I suppose some ex-Microsoft programmer in Seattle got the idea of calling people at random after careful data analysis to solicit them for Health Insurance.  Then he could get really rich since his MS stock options were all underwater. Maybe he didn't qualify for the buyback program.

Well, the reason he didn't qualify was because he's incompetent as a businessman.  After telling me to press 1 to talk to a representative, I went into a holding queue for over three minutes since "all agents are busy helping other clients."  And so I was treated to three minutes of pleasant guitar music until an agent picked up the line.  Well, at least the phone company was making money!

I began my conversation with, "Wait!  Don't hangup on this call.  You are a ...." but, I'll be darned if the agent didn't hang up anyway.

Whom, do you suppose, buys health insurance from an unsolicited robo-call that dumps you into a three-minute wait?

Never hang up on these kind of calls.  Wait 'em out and make them pay for the call.  Then waste as much time as you can to maximize the loss on their call to you.  Hanging up just plays into their business model.

 

I Lost My Internet Access - Thanks, McAfee

Yesterday, I lost my access to the Internet on my main computer running Windows 7.

The tiny network logo in the bottom of the screen had an even tinier yellow warning triangle on it.  A little fiddling with Windows'  "Network and Sharing Center" and the Microsoft diagnostic tools concluded that my computer Cannot Access DNS Server.

OK.  Reboot.  Boot the router.  Boot the DSL modem.  No go.

Upstairs to the kitchen computer.  Everything is cool.  Try the iPad - cool there too!  Only the hardwired computer has a problem.  Blew an hour or more looking for a wiring problem.

It took me a while to find this post on the Tech Support Guy site.  And this post at A Technical Journey.  Yes indeed, McAfee caused this problem with a an update back in mid-August.

I, of course, don't install software updates until they have been out for a while so that the vendors can fix this kind of bug.  I made the mistake of letting McAfee update itself two days ago, then rebooted yesterday to sever my Internet link!  Wouldn't you think they might just delete updates that cause this?

As I have stated many times, I have had to fix far more problems caused by Antivirus software than by virus and malware.

Oprah and I

We really are two nations, divided!  I realized it this week when I noted all the praise for Oprah Winfrey's remarks in her commencement speech at Spelman College in Atlanta on May 20.  Her remarks included this:

"Always be excellent. People notice. You go to Taco Bell and someone gives you extra napkins and sauce. That’s right, even at Taco Bell, excellence is noticed."

Of course, that just happens to be one of my pet peeves when visiting a Taco Bell.  I usually make a very specific order of "... and one hot sauce."  I then look at those extra sauce packets and napkins that I don't want and think, "what a waste - giving away the store's profits."  Funny how Oprah and I notice the same thing but think quite differently about it.

My Sears Craftsman Self-propelled Mower Won't Propel Itself!

My Sears Craftsman lawnmower had been losing its "oomph" as a self-propelled device during the past year.  One round with it this spring and I knew it was time for some repairs.  I started by looking into the drive mechanism located under the large plastic cover on the front of the mower.


I had expected to find a slipping belt, worn pinch-roller or other item possibly needing adjustment.  Instead, everything under the hood looked OK.  It was just that the wheels seemed to not engage with the drive mechanism.  I pulled off a front "driving wheel" and took a look.  This picture shows a new wheel on the left and my worn one on the right

 

And here is a closer look at the worn teeth: 


The gear teeth on the plastic wheel were worn down in some places on one side and totally worn off on the other.  Here is the driving gear that chops up the plastic:


O.K.  whose bright idea was it to make the driven wheels out of plastic?  I can just imagine the discussion between some mechanical engineer and a cost accountant, "Sure it will work for a while, but then ..."

Obviously the engineer lost that argument.

I drove over to the local Sears Repair and Parts location.  (Eden Prairie Center if you live in the Twin Cities area.)  With a wheel in-hand, I told the clerk that I needed two replacements.  Here's the best part:  I didn't even have to show them the part number!  "It's one of our most common replacement parts," said the other clerk as she rang them up.

Well, duh!

I Just Installed a Software Upgrade on my iPad and Now the Apps Won't Run

I've never been a fan of Apple.

This probably goes back to the Macintosh with the 9-inch black and white monitor with its 512 pixel-wide screen.  Good idea, poorly implemented.  This probably is the real Apple Corporate Motto, pasted on a back wall in Cupertino in Sanskrit.

But, the iPad has become the place where really creative people put forth their best efforts creating application programs for computers.  Once again, Microsoft missed the boat.  They didn't invent a store to sell cheap application programs and didn't think up a clever name for them, like "Apps!"  So while the whole world is buying and selling sophisticated programs for between one dollar and five dollars, Microsoft is still out there trying to sell a word processing program for $120.  Good luck on that.

So, the iPad is the place to be to use this stuff.  The screen is still only nine inches, just like that 1984 Mac, but at least you can pick it up and hold it so you can see it.  I caved.  Santa brought us an iPad Saturday night.

I loaded up a few Apps.  Angry Birds, of course!  Netflix and the Kindle reader, then a nifty photographer's guide to where the sun will be on any day of the year at any place.  Throw in a few restaurant guides and we were ready to hit the road!  My Travel Blog is here.

But, why not also make sure the iPad operating system is current too?  So I upgraded to the current version of iOS.  I then clicked on one of my application programs (Okay, an "App") and nothing happened.  Well, it briefly started to expand, then contracted back to icon size.  What the heck?

The restaurant guide, the Kindle reader, LightTrac - nothing!  But Safari, e-mail?  Yeah, those work.

Searched the web.  Found this marvelous website, where people have been complaining about this problem from April 15 through December 22 of 2011.

Lots of interesting solutions are mentioned but non quite as good as the one I found on another thread which was "Just download another free application from the App Store.  This fixes it.  Then remove the newly installed App."

Worked like a charm.




It was also educational to find that there are people who recommend a "hard reset" for the iPad just like the people who inhabit Windows forums and suggest, "wipe the disk and reinstall the operating system."