https://buy-zithromax.online buy kamagra usa https://antibiotics.top buy stromectol online https://deutschland-doxycycline.com https://ivermectin-apotheke.com kaufen cialis https://2-pharmaceuticals.com buy antibiotics online Online Pharmacy vermectin apotheke buy stromectol europe buy zithromax online https://kaufen-cialis.com levitra usa https://stromectol-apotheke.com buy doxycycline online https://buy-ivermectin.online https://stromectol-europe.com stromectol apotheke https://buyamoxil24x7.online deutschland doxycycline https://buy-stromectol.online https://doxycycline365.online https://levitra-usa.com buy ivermectin online buy amoxil online https://buykamagrausa.net

Category: My Computer

Odd start to a Monday morning

First off, it’s cold in the office. If I say I’m wearing my (light) jacket sitting at my desk, and you know how my internal thermostat works, you’ll understand. Second,…

First off, it’s cold in the office. If I say I’m wearing my (light) jacket sitting at my desk, and you know how my internal thermostat works, you’ll understand.

Second, I’m having Google problems. I can’t call up google.com for searches, and Google Reader, Google Calendar, and the Google Talk client all fail to connect. Google Mail works, though, as does Google Chat within that client.

Snow — not a lot, but not just showers — forecast for today. Plus a business call I have to do 5-6p — and I’m likely (unless the snow gets worse) to go to karate tonight, since tomorrow evening I’ll be doing the caucus thang (and I’m already expecting to miss too many classes this month).

Some irksome blog problems.

About six major demands for Lots of Info from Important Management Types, none of which are trivial to respond to, or delegate, or even get my arms around. Busy day, it looks like.

 

Potpourri

A couple of inches of snow on the ground at home this morning, including on the streets.  Highway was okay, but basically tire tracks down to the pavement only…

  1. A couple of inches of snow on the ground at home this morning, including on the streets.  Highway was okay, but basically tire tracks down to the pavement only … until I got to Wadsworth on 470, and suddenly the pavement was clear and dry all the rest of the way to work.  Weird — snow usually gets worse the closer to the foothills.
  2. My Outlook/Exchange is sometimes losing file-read flags on mail.  I.e., I came in this morning to find 93 unread messages in my inbox.  I determined quickly that there were only about ten that were truly new, unread mail; the rest were old, already-read mail that had regained unread status in some way.  Strange, and annoying.  Not the first time that’s happened recently.
  3. After waxing lyrical over the Stash Lemon-Ginger tea I had last weekend, I bought a small case of it via Amazon — a container of six boxes of the stuff. Which shows how much I liked it.  Except I misread the fine print (well, not so fine, but overlooked), and it actually turned out to be four cases, each with six boxes with each box having 20 bags.  That’s … a lot of tea.  Guess I don’t have to reuse bags for a while.
  4. I can’t believe it’s already Thursday.
  5. Katherine has her “biography night” tonight, where we’ll get to see her Beethoven puppet, hear her Beethoven report, etc.  Should be fun.

 

 

Thunderbird notes

Though I’m firmly entrenched in Gmail, Margie still uses the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client.  Here are the announced plans for Thunderbird 3 — which, no surprise, will finally incorporate a…

Though I’m firmly entrenched in Gmail, Margie still uses the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client.  Here are the announced plans for Thunderbird 3 — which, no surprise, will finally incorporate a calendar, better searching, and better add-in support.  Good to hear.

Worlds past

I’ve been doing some sifting and sorting of my old Thunderbird folders, preparatory to dumping them to disk and uninstalling the program (since I’m now well and truly embedded in…

I’ve been doing some sifting and sorting of my old Thunderbird folders, preparatory to dumping them to disk and uninstalling the program (since I’m now well and truly embedded in Gmail).  And it’s been quite the trip down memory lane, since I’ve been sifting through old gaming  folders, including:

  • The Justice Squad PBEM I ran in ’95
  • All the old messages for Doyce’s Nobilis game.
  • Scott Nolan’s “Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth” Amber PBEM in ’99.

So many ideas, so many tales.  Definitely don’t want to lose those.

Malfunctions

My technological world seems to be having problems. My computer is occasionally throwing errors where it oughtn’t.  E.g., I was trying to fire up LotRO last evening, and it would…

My technological world seems to be having problems.

My computer is occasionally throwing errors where it oughtn’t.  E.g., I was trying to fire up LotRO last evening, and it would throw out a DirectX error.  Sometimes.  If I rebeooted, the lotroclient would just crash.  If I rebooted again, the DirectX error was back.  Testing of DirectX showed it was okay, and I’d had the problem come up previously and get solved with a reboot, but not this time.  So I reinstalled DirectX 9.0c (the version I already had), rebooted, and, hey-presto, all’s right with the world.

I’ve also had problems crop up with Java on the new MT pages, and .NET with a beta version of ecto.

File scans and diagnostics on the machine continue to come up clean.

Meanwhile, my Blackberry got hung up on Friday and wouldn’t open the mail app.  I had to do a hard start to fix it (which it did).

And my wireless headset for my office phone isn’t working, either.

Going to be one of those weeks, I can just tell.

The timer is running on Faerie

Yesterday was Tech Support Day at the Hills.  I went over to my folks’ house around 9 and spent the day optimizing and scanning and tweaking and prodding their PC…

Yesterday was Tech Support Day at the Hills.  I went over to my folks’ house around 9 and spent the day optimizing and scanning and tweaking and prodding their PC to get it up to full fitness.

I upgraded their iTunes with an eye toward documenting how to rip CDs onto it (EVIL!!) and then syncing to the iPod Nano my dad got last birthday, which then would let them use the iPod car adapter we got them last Christmas.

Got iTunes all snazzed up, got the iPod all working, got the instructions all typed.  Last step was the car adapter which looked really easy and …

… and …

… furshlugginer iPod doesn’t fit in it, even in the adapter marked for it.  Gah.

Went to the site.  Aha.  Seems the ‘rents have an iPod Nano Second Generation, which requires a different bracketty widget than what came stock with the car adapter.  The manufacturer of which will send the new part over for free, of course, but not while I’m there. 

Ordered it anyway — I’ll be back some day, I suspect — and gave Mom and Dad the iTunes / iPod tutorial, so they can at least start ripping stuff.  (Their job isn’t made easier by having a collection that is mostly classical music, which fits into MP3 libraries like iTunes poorly and which is often has pretty sketchy support in the Gracenotes database).

Around that time, the Ks and Margie and Katherine arrived, and we had cocktails and I opened a couple of very nice birthday presents (that being the ostensible occasion). 

We then went off to a very nice dinner at Tulipano, the best little Italian restaurant in the worst strip mall in SoCal.

Then back to the Ks and to bed.

Today was taken up with getting Jim & Ginger’s new monster AIO printer (a Brother MFC-9840CDW) installed — which it now is, and humming along nicely.

Tonight, Margie and I go off to a date (Sweeney Todd and Catal). 

Tomorrow we pack.

And head home.  🙂

Out and about in Faerie

Another day lost in the mists of Faerie … Up just after 7 a.m., and wandered downstairs, helping with prep for the one event a year the Ks watch their…

Another day lost in the mists of Faerie …

Up just after 7 a.m., and wandered downstairs, helping with prep for the one event a year the Ks watch their TV set: the Rose Parade.

Kids were all up in time, so kicked it off at 8 a.m.  Standard fare to nibble on — coffee cake, juice, coffee — and a pretty standard Rose Parade (with standard “Get the car, Virgil, we gotta move us to California and away from these here snow storms!” weather). 

We usually watch KTLA, and Bob Eubanks (of Newlywed Game fame) is still one of the parade announcers, having drunk of the same Dorian Gray potion as Dick Clark once did.  His previous cohort, Stephanie Edwards, though, was nowhere to be seen — after many years of (unintended) buffoonery and petty sniping, last year she was banished from the booth down to the street, and this year was vanished entirely.  It was a good riddance (though not everyone agrees), but it did make things a bit duller.

After that, it was time to venture out to the wilds of Office Depot.  Ginger (with our guidance and actual purchasing services) got Jim a Brother AIO Printer/Scanner/Fax for Christmas — the same model, basically, as what we have.  After further discussion, they decided to upgrade to a color unit (that also does Legal-size).

We had just one problem — in all the Christmas wrapping and cleaning and shuffling about, we couldn’t find the receipt.  Still, I had the credit card transaction number (from the credit card site), it was registered on the Office Depot membership card, etc.  No sweat, right?

Well, sweat.  Without the receipt, the store would only refund us the lowest price the printer had been in the previous 90 days.  And, alas, it had been in a $100 discount somewhere relatively recently, because that was the delta.

Kudos to Margie and Jim (who are the customer service wranglers supreme), for some polite arm twisting, and to Roxanne, the assistant manager (I assume) at the Orange Office Depot, who got the date of the transaction, and managed to pull the records from the register.  I got my full discount, and after a visit to another OD (since Roxanne’s didn’t have the printer we wanted in stock), we got the significantly larger-and-heavier box home.

Then a quick change, and off to Eric and Janine’s house, to drop off the boys and to have some tempura for dinner.

Then back home to … well, blog about it (etc.).

Good way to start the new year

Meanwhile, in EMail Spam Land …

Google Mail has one of the most faboo spam filters out there — but it seems flummoxed by the “Hello, I am bored / tired / spammy tonight /…

spam

Google Mail has one of the most faboo spam filters out there — but it seems flummoxed by the “Hello, I am bored / tired / spammy tonight / today / this morning” spam messages I’ve been getting for the number of weeks.  Weird.

Earning my technical chops

One of the challenges of our trips to Faerie is that I get to put on my Technical Wizard hat — a bit faded, crumpled, and moth-eaten — and show…

One of the challenges of our trips to Faerie is that I get to put on my Technical Wizard hat — a bit faded, crumpled, and moth-eaten — and show off how much I don’t still remember about working on PCs.

I have a laundry list of things to do at the Ks this year, but the first was reestablishing the wireless network here.  I had a setup all working the past few years with the DSL modem from AT&T (SBC) Yahoo and a Netgear wireless router, but sometime midyear their DSL stopped working, and the AT&T technies had gotten them back working by undoing everything and getting their PC hooked directly to the modem.

Which would never do as I moved in with my PC, and Margie’s too, with rumblings about their getting another additional machine here, to boot (so to speak).

So first step Friday was trying to get the wireless hookup back working.  And … no joy.  For whatever reason, the Netgear router wouldn’t dial the DSL successfully. Now, I’m not a DSL guru by any means, so I wasn’t sure if there was just something I needed to tweak, if there was an actual failure in the DSL modem, if AT&T had changed something to not allow it, or if the particular older router was somehow no longer compatible.  I did a bit of poking at the AT&T/Yahoo pages, but didn’t come back with anything clever besides the fact that they flog their own home networking kit and didn’t have any support info beyond that. 

In fact, the last thing I wanted to do was call AT&T Tech Support for help.  After dealing with explaining why I wasn’t Jim, having all the identity validation stuff at hand, and knowing to a moral certainty that they would simply offer to sell me an AT&T solution for eleventy zillion dollars a month,

*sigh*

So on our shopping peregrinations, yesterday, we swung by Best Buy and I resolved to pick up a newer router for the Ks, which would cover at least a couple of the above cases.  I mean, I’ve had a couple of Netgear routers go out on me, so I thought I’d replace it with a Linksys one like at home and see if that worked.  When in doubt, swap out the hardware …

“Hey, look, here’s an AT&T one,” Margie noted.  And, by cracky, Best Buy was selling the same AT&T integrated DSL modem/router gateways that were discussed up on their pages.  Which would (for a few dollars extra, natch) give me a full solution that AT&T tech support would accept.  Huzzah!

So we picked that up, and this morning …

… with some help on the tech support line trying to puzzle out Jim & Ginger’s password …

… we’re up and running.  Easy-peasy (relatively speaking), and now blogging this wirelessly from the card table (and my notebook).

One issue dealt with … dozens more to go …

GTalk as a pocket translater

Cool beans.  Google has created some automated translation bots that work through Google Talk / Chat.  Send them a message, and they’ll send back the appropriate translation (subject to normal…

Cool beans.  Google has created some automated translation bots that work through Google Talk / Chat.  Send them a message, and they’ll send back the appropriate translation (subject to normal automated translation limitations).  Since it also works (as noted) on GTalk for the Blackberry, that makes an opportunity to turn my BB into a pocket translator for free.  Spiffy!

Potpourri for a Lazy December Afternoon

It is way past time I cleared off some tabs from my Firefox … Harrumph.  I purchased a copy of Contacts Plus as a way to use my Outlook…

It is way past time I cleared off some tabs from my Firefox …

  1. Harrumph.  I purchased a copy of Contacts Plus as a way to use my Outlook address book without loading Outlook.  Now I find out that (a) it’s no longer being supported (though that does mean it’s available for free), (b) it actually loads a portion of Outlook to access the data file (probably less overall footprint, but it does mean it takes a while to load it up), and (c) it doesn’t support Cateogories, which rendered it a lot less useful when it came time to print Christmas Card labels (though it does have good label support).
  2. Speaking of Outlook, here’s an interesting service I’ve seen recommended for syncing Outlook and Google Calendars.   Marking as a reference for later review.
  3. And speaking of Outlook, SimplyFile is about 80% of what I want from a mail system — an add-on to Outlook that looks at how you move mail into folders and develops its own rules about it to do it for you.  Except it doesn’t — it simply suggests a folder and lets you do the click to do it.  Not good enough …
  4. How to attach this to that.  “Because people have a need to glue things to other things.”
  5. As we were sitting through Nona’s funeral (etc.) this week, my thoughts turned to my own — not in a morbid fashion, but in a planning fashion.  I’ve already started scribbling down hymns I particularly like (Margie knows where the list is), but I’ve not done any thinking about readings or anything.  Bookmarking this to go back and look.  Being Episcopalian, there’s all sorts of interesting (to me) liturgical bits available for such things.  Not that I expect I’ll be terribly interested in what’s going on after I shuffle off this mortal coil — but I have an interest in it now, y’know?  Oh, and I want a huge marble tomb marker, with lots of weeping angels and everything, okay?  And a huge party …
  6. The readings will probably not include the Nine Most Bad-Ass Bible Verses, however (via DOF).
  7. Yes, this is one of Margie’s Swedish cousins.  Had an inquiry about the domain name recently from a rep.
  8. Linguistic coincidences.  Didn’t I already post that?
  9. Monopoly with Real Money — in World War II.
  10. Cool — a new hardcover edition of the Aspirin/Foglio MythAdventures graphic novels.
  11. What it means to be a Christian after George W. Bush.  It’s ironic that the Religious Right have probably done more harm to the cause of Christianity world-wide (not to mention in the US) than any other recent historical person, group, or movement.  Arguably, the rise of so-called “militant atheism” (Dawkins and the like) are almost directly a result of the actions of Bush et al. in the last several years.
  12. If you’re suing your employer, using a company computer to discuss things with your attorney means you lose the presumption of privacy of such communciations.  Duh.
  13. Sex in space?  “Twenty positions were tested by computer simulation to obtain the best 10, he says. ‘Two guinea pigs then tested them in real zero-gravity conditions. The results were videotaped but are considered so sensitive that even Nasa was only given a censored version.’  Only four positions were found possible without ‘mechanical assistance’. The other six needed a special elastic belt and inflatable tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag.”
  14. How do you raise smart kids?  Don’t tell them they’re smart.  Oops …
  15. More super-duper-accurate atomic clocks are on the way.  Spiffy.
  16. Anaesthesia awareness — being awake but paralyzed during surgery — is a lot more rare than popularly thought.  But it’s still pretty damned creepy.
  17. On the other hand, it’s less daunting that the prospect of the male equivalent of a Brazilian wax, as described in personally-experienced detail by Christopher Hitchens.  “The combined effect was like being tortured for information that you do not possess, with intervals for a (incidentally very costly) sandpaper handjob.”
  18. Trailer for the next Narnia flick, Prince Caspian.
  19. Unique Visitors vs Time Spent vs Page Views — fight!

Colorful mail

Couple of slipstreamed changes in GMail — including making labels different colors and integrating AIM chat.  The former, at least, looks to be pretty handy….

Couple of slipstreamed changes in GMail — including making labels different colors and integrating AIM chat.  The former, at least, looks to be pretty handy.

Lightning for Thunderbird

Steve points out a new add-on for Thunderbird, Lightning, which adds calendaring capabilities. If you’re looking for a local client-based calendar, and are using Thunderbird as a local e-mail client,…

Steve points out a new add-on for Thunderbird, Lightning, which adds calendaring capabilities.

If you’re looking for a local client-based calendar, and are using Thunderbird as a local e-mail client, it might be something worth looking at.

You may prefer Lightning if…

  • you send or receive meeting invitations via email
  • you already use Mozilla Thunderbird for email
  • you customize your applications with add-ons (such as extensions or themes)

Mozilla also has a separate calendar client, Sunbird, but I’d think something integrated into a single app would be keen.  (“People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like,” as Lincoln said)

(For myself, I make use of Google Calendar, and Google Mail, which are also joined at the hip.  I have pretty much persistent online capability, between my notebook and my Blackberry, so having something client-based isn’t as important, but if I didn’t, I would certainly consider this.)

A different firewall story

So  the previous firewall note had to do with the office Internet gateway firewall.  This one’s about my PC. I started running a firewall on my laptop about a year…

So  the previous firewall note had to do with the office Internet gateway firewall.  This one’s about my PC.

I started running a firewall on my laptop about a year ago.  Between the office and home and various hotels and the like, my PC’s exposed more than I like to the Bad Guys.  XP has a default firewall which operates at kindergarten level, better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick but not quite robust enough for my paranoia.  So I installed Comodo Personal Firewall.  It’s done a good job for me since then, and I recommend it to anyone who wants a personal firewall.

I mentioned this to one of our Security guys at a meeting a few months back, and he mentioned that we actually license (and, upon request, recommend) Symantec Client Firewall, to go with our corporate Anti-Virus standard (as part of the Symantec Client Security package).

So I just got that done today.  It seems a bit more fiddly than Comodo, though it does have the capability of recognizing different locations (and so allowing different rules).  But I’ve found one thing that makes me seriously love it:

It can block the ads in Yahoo Instant Messenger. 

Huzzah.  That’s worth the inconvenience right there.

I’m sure I’ll find things about it to hate or at least be annoyed by, but that one feature is soooooo nice.

Don’t firewall me in

While we have corporate Internet gateways, the local office has its own (to assist in communication with a major client).  Sometime in the last couple of days, they’ve turned on…

While we have corporate Internet gateways, the local office has its own (to assist in communication with a major client).  Sometime in the last couple of days, they’ve turned on some port blocking and content filtering on that gateway, which is causing me problems.

So, okay, I can’t exactly ask to have YouTube access reinstated, and blocking some gaming sites is difficult to argue against with a straight face (at least not without putting a big target on said face).  But one of the things apparently blocked is Yahoo Instant Messenger.

Now, we don’t have a formal IM standard in the around.  There’s a nascent pilot project going on using internal Exchange servers, but that never got a lot of traction.  There are a variety of concerns, but, surprisingly, the biggest is not that people will fritter away their time chatting with their SOs and buds, but that company-sponsored and -sanctioned IM tools could be considered subpoenable business records.  So folks do it, but without any sort of formal approval or standard setup from IT or anything like that.

My department — including my boss and his — tend to use YIM as the IM client of choice (I prefer GTalk, but they didn’t consult me first).  But now that I’m cut off, I can’t make use of it.

But that’s the lever I have — I’ve put in an inquiry about whether YIM is blocked, citing it as a legitimate (if not official) business purpose.  That at least gives me the appearance of asking about such things without sounding like I’m grumpy because I can’t look at YouTube or stream audio from Amazon or stuff like that.  And, in fact, it is a legitimate inquiry, and the thing causing me the most fits right now..

Stay tuned.

End of an Era

My Treo 650 has been sitting on the charger on the floor, reminding me of recurring meetings and other alarm-worthy processes for several weeks, waiting for me to confirm…

My Treo 650 has been sitting on the charger on the floor, reminding me of recurring meetings and other alarm-worthy processes for several weeks, waiting for me to confirm that I’ve gotten everything off of it that I need.

Which, I figure by this point, not having needed to go back to it to look for something for several weeks, I have.  So last night I did a hard reset on it, to wipe out all my various installed settings, content, and software, and I yanked the SD card, and now it’s back to being a baby again.

Adios, Treo.  I enjoyed the ride.  And to you, too, PalmOS … you’ll always have a special place in my heart.

Not so Elementary

Rrg.  Upgraded yesterday from Adobe PhotoShop Elements 4.0 to 5.0.  Various and sundry features made it look like the cat’s meow, etc. Alas, the system no longer generates HTML/JPG-based web…

Rrg.  Upgraded yesterday from Adobe PhotoShop Elements 4.0 to 5.0.  Various and sundry features made it look like the cat’s meow, etc.

Alas, the system no longer generates HTML/JPG-based web galleries, but Shockwave-Flash-style galleries.  Worse, the number of gallery options has been sharply reduced — there are some spiffy-flashy-fancy galleries, but a simple, straightforward thumbnails-and-photo option is still done in Flash and the design options are significantly reduced.  Plus the pictures published are quite a bit smaller.

Oddly enough, “HTML Photo Gallery” still shows up in the help files, but the option doesn’t seem to be there by that name.

Poking around for templates online runs into a few problems.

  1. PSE 5 is relatively new.  A lot of stuff for PSE 4 and 3, which seems no longer valid, is out there.
  2. A lot of what I’m looking for, and a lot of the Googleable content, is hidden within eleventy-gazillion scrapbookers.
  3. A lot of template stuff (probably because of the scrapbooking aspect) (a) is actually deathly ugly, and (b) costs money for the privilege.

Continuing to pound at it, though.  I’m sure there are ways to do what I want.

Laptop Dance

I like havling a laptop computer for the ability to take it places I couldn’t access a normal computer from. I like it for the convenience of not having to…

I like havling a laptop computer for the ability to take it places I couldn’t access a normal computer from.

I like it for the convenience of not having to maintain parallel systems at work and at home.

But most of all I like it for those three second power blips in the office during the hot days of the summer when all the desktop machines reboot but my laptop doesn’t.  Yah.

Mobile Blogging

I continue to search for a decently reliable way to blog via my cell phone. Now, I can actually call up the Movable Type edit screen on my Blackberry.  It’s…

I continue to search for a decently reliable way to blog via my cell phone.

Now, I can actually call up the Movable Type edit screen on my Blackberry.  It’s slow and awkward and the BB browser sucks mightily.  (Going to another browser might help that — I am researching that possiblity — but the normal MT edit screen is a big, fat monster, not optimized for a small screen.)

There is no “native app” blog client I can find for the BB that goes to MT.  (I had a similar problem on the Treo, by the bye.)  Which seems just bloody stupid, but there it is.

I can photos by e-mail — sometimes.  The MMS-to-Flickr is spotty sometimes, and the Flickr-to-MT thing seems to be a bit flaky, too.

For non-photo e-mail messages, I appear to be SOL.  There are no trivial email-to-MT systems out there, either — bits and fragments of ones past, but nothing that I can just plug in.  I had very high hopes over the last year that MT4, combined with 6A’s acquisition of SplashBlog from SplashData, would provide native posting of photos and/or text from mobiles to MT blogs … but I just read that 6A is shutting SplashBlog down, suggesting that folks move over to Vox or another canned blogging solution from them.  Bleah.  And I haven’t heard of any MT4 features to do what I’m looking for.

My ideal solutions:

  1. A blogging app for the BB that supports XML-RPC.
  2. A mechanism for e-mailing to MT.

Am I missing something obvious here?  I don’t want to move off of MT, and I’m not giving up my BB, so if that means I can only do it through the browser, that’s tolerable but suboptimal.

Four Things Meme

You know how it works … Four Jobs I Have Had in My Life: Cooking/cleaning/sales at the local Burger King Line runner at Harwood Dining Hall at Pomona College Elementary…

You know how it works …

Four Jobs I Have Had in My Life:

  1. Cooking/cleaning/sales at the local Burger King
  2. Line runner at Harwood Dining Hall at Pomona College
  3. Elementary school teacher (Farmdale Elementary, LAUSD)
  4. Systems Programming, PC Tech Support, Xbase Programming, Oracle DBA, Site IT Management, Documentation Management, Enterprise Systems Management at my current employer.

Four Places I Have Lived:

  1. Mountain View, Calif.
  2. Diamond Bar, Calif.
  3. Fort Collins, Calif.
  4. Centennial, Colo.

Four of My Favorite Foods:

  1. Snickerdoodles (most cookies, in fact)
  2. Rum Raisin ice cream (most ice cream, in fact)
  3. Cottage Fried Potatoes (esp as cooked by Margie or her dad)
  4. Anything with my mom’s meat sauce on it.

Four Places I’d Rather be Right Now:

  1. At home in bed.
  2. At home in front of the computer.
  3. At home in front of the TV.
  4. With Margie, most anywhere.

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over:

  1. Undercover Blues
  2. The Princess Bride
  3. Madagascar
  4. The Incredibles

Note: I always have huge problems with these sorts of questions if I’m not standing in front of my video library.  I always end up leaving off something I’ll regret later.

Note 2:  Having a kid is a great way to learn what movies you are willing to watch over and over (and over and over).

Four TV Shows I Like to Watch:

  1. Doctor Who
  2. Painkiller Jane
  3. Law & Order
  4. Dinner: Impossible

Note: I limited this to current/non-canceled shows only.

Four Websites I Visit Daily:

  1. Stupid Evil Bastard
  2. Blogula Rasa
  3. Father Jake
  4. Decrepit Old Fool

Note: I’m excluding my own pages, as well as GMail and the like.  I do most of my browsing via Google Reader (but I won’t count that), which means I most often hit pages that are most often updated.  There are some other sites that, when they post, I’ll go to immediately (e.g., good friends).  There are many others that I tend to fall behind on then plow through several dozen posts at a time, e.g., BoingBoing.

Four Early Musical Influences:

  1. Beethoven, Mozart, Hayden, Bach, and anyone else that my parents played chamber music by.
  2. John Denver
  3. Simon & Garfunkel
  4. The Monkees

Four Computers I’ve Owned:

  1. Commodore 64
  2. Mac SE/30
  3. A long array of desktops and laptops, past and present, none of which I have any inutterable fondness for and so cannot remember the particular model names.  They have included Compaq, Sony, HP, Everex, and IBM.
  4. Katherine’s first work-surplus Compaq notebook, on which she learned to play a variety of toddler games.  (Now looking for a good home.)

Note: I’m excluding company-owned computers I’ve used.

Four people I tag:

  1. Nobody!  I tag nobody!  If you want to do this, do it.  If you don’t, I don’t want anyone to feel obliged.  So there!

(via Terry)

UPDATE:

Evidently this meme has metastasized around the blogosphere, with new questions being plugged in.  Some that BD had that I didn’t:

Four places you’ve been on vacation:

  1. Walt Disney World
  2. Dry Creek Valley, Calif.
  3. Wales
  4. Santa Fe, NM

Four albums you can’t live without:

  1. Bangles, Greatest Hits
  2. Eurhytmics, Greatest Hits
  3. Hogwood & AAM, Handel’s Messiah
  4. Edwards & Sherman, 1776

Note: Okay, none of these I couldn’t live without — of the 7,918 songs I have loaded into iTunes — 20+ Gb, or 17.7 days of  listening — these are the albums with the most 5-star songs on them that I think I would most regret not ever being able to listen to again.

Four magazines you read:

  1. Smithsonian
  2. Comic Buyer’s Guide
  3. um … do comic books count?  Otherwise, I’m stuck.

Four cars you’ve owned:

  1. 1971 VW Super Beetle
  2. 1987 VW Jetta
  3. 1990 Honda Civic hatchback
  4. 1995 Saturn coupe

Four colors you like (not necessarily together):

  1. Cobalt Blue
  2. Fire Engine Red
  3. Lavender Purple
  4. Teal

Four Hollywood stars you want to have a drink with:

  1. Steve Martin
  2. Judi Densch
  3. Jon Stewart
  4. Joe Straczynski

Note: I’m using “Hollywood stars” to mean “Show Business Notables.” Also, I tend to draw sharp lines between actors and their roles, and I’m seriously not into the Entertainment Biz world, so a list like this is tough.  That said, I’m sure there are a dozen stars I’ve long said seem like they’d be fun to have a drink with — I just can’t think of any of them offhand.