20070620

Just made the roll, and it doesn't look very different

. . . between Mac OS X 10.2.8 and 10.4.6. The key applications seem to work: Nutscrape, PGP and Quicken. Though I'll upgrade or replace all of them as I get to them. The very same applications that, a few weeks ago, ceased to appear in the Dock and seem not to want to be put back there.

Thunderbird for Netscape 7, BTW.

It was an Upgrade install. Normally I whack the HD drive and do a Clean install upon it, but I wimped out and didn't want to backup and restore 20GB of my sh17.

20070619

Teach your children well

It's another of those mornings where I am restless, pacing around the house while the family sleeps, but I cannot. If you don't believe me, look at the timestamp.

After running multiple over-analytical scenarios of house-modding, I notice that two layers of paper are taped to the picture window facing Lincolnway. One layer is a photocopy of a page from a How-to-draw-manga book I found at a bargain table years ago in the Mall of the Americas; the layer above it shows my daughter's attempts to trace manga upon the photocopy.

I carefully peeled the two layers from the window. They belong to one of my daughters, not sure which, but they do not belong on the window.

The trace looks very close to the original. In one way, that is good; daughter-unit sees and copies what she sees. In another way, not as good, in that she has copied what another creative mind has given to her, rather than creating her own vision.

In one way, good because she saw and was inspired; in another way, she did not complete the assignment. Some lines end before the idea behind them.

This is the torture and promise of rearing children. Finish what you start, or you pass the torture and promise together to them.

20070618

Oh I do so want a pair

. . . of Bionic Boots.

Wondering: if one gets reasonably stable standing in a pair of these, could one deliver a half-decent off-hand rifle shot from them? Imagine a platoon of riflemen running through a MOUT course with these things. Gives a new spin to "shoot. scoot and salute."

Today's burning Green question

A good friend of mine, formerly in the office supply business but nowadays a Dragon Soldier, tells me that when I replace an exhausted inkjet cartridge from my HP Photosmart 2500-series all-in-one printer and ship it back to HP Planet Partners in Tennessee, they do not refill it and ship it out to another grateful HP user.

Triangular contorted RECYCLED arrows to the contrary. He says they just throw 'em out. The postage-paid return envelope gives them Green cred and reduces the likelihood of customers refilling the little bastards and denying HP the repeat business.

I will probably never attempt refilling inkjet cartridges. It looks like something best left to companies that know how to manufacture them in the first place, or at least companies that can offer warranties on the performance of the refilled product.

Now, "throw them out" can also include offering the plastic package to the recycling gods, to be washed of all traces of ink, harvested of the little printed-circuit ribbon, and ground up, prior to reincarnation as Old Navy Performance Fleece. That qualifies as recycling in my book, but to many other Boomers it means an empty Rolling Rock bottle will be refilled with more Rolling Rock. Shame on us for unrealistic expectations.

But if my friend is right, I'm paying for the spent cartridge to be shipped to a distant place for proper disposal, not just in bucks but in the ethereal new coinage, marginal carbon footprint. I'd rather pay less and have it shlepped to the other side of town (versus other side of the Continent) for hashing back into its component molecules.

What's the business case here? Spending $.90 (postage and envelope) to gather up a plastic cartridge that cost $.10 to make and will be worth $.0005 as cullet polymer? Meanwhile releasing about a quarter of its mass as CO2 in the process to move it, strip it, and grind it? Raw deal, I think. What say you?