It's my information.

It's my account.

It's my freaking password. 

"Must contain at least eight and no more than 16 characters and include at least one letter one number and one special symbol." Bullpuckey. Says who?

Sometimes the rules make it impossible for me to create a passsword I can remember. So what do I have to do? Write it down. How's THAT for secure, you lame-os?

If I want to be stupid enough to use 1234 as my password or my name or whatever else, what the heck business is that of yours?

Keep your grimy mitts off my passwords!

There. Now I feel better.

:-)

Knowledge, which when reflected upon creates

Wisdom, which can then be applied to improve

Experience and

Or:

There's an art to this and Google gets it.

So I changed the password, disabled a bunch of app connections and researched what other steps I might take.

Finally, I tried to send Tweets to the folks who had reported their concerns. No can do. Twitter tells me I've sent too many Tweets now and advises that I try again in a few hours!

On top of that, I went to get help with the problem and Twitter informs me, after I submit my report, that, "We are usually able to respond within a few days, but some issues may take longer." A few days? In an era of instant communication that they are capitalizing on? Really? Ridiculous.

If this doesn't clear up today it will be the final reason to kill my Twitter account and never use the service again. Frankly, its value has been pretty limited anyway but as long as it remained low-maintenance, I was OK using it. But this hassle has already cost me over an hour and there's no telling how much longer it will keep up.

And don't get me started on the filthy, corrupt, greedy idiots who engage in this vandalism and cyberviolence. They all but destroyed email and they clearly have their sights set on social media next. Their behavior is despicable and cowardly.

The President, quoting from Luke 12:48, said his view of social policy coincides with the statement, "for unto whom much is given, much shall be required." That was an accurate paraphrase of the actual quotation from the King James Version but I prefer the NIV on this: "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded;"  The passage goes on to say, "and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked."

That the largest portion of Jesus' teachings -- insofar as we have them recorded reliably -- is about neighborly love and caring for the downtrodden. So, too, were the teachings of virtually every Hebrew Scripture (Old Testament) prophet,'

But Reed, of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said that for the president to tie his tax policy to Jesus’s teachings “is theologically threadbare and straining credulity.”

It's a classic clash between the Social Gospel and Socially Conservative Fundamentalist Christians. This clash, in turn, is a product of late 20th Century America. Jesus talks not once about abortion or gay rights or any of the other social issues on which the Christian Right is focused like a laser beam while ignoring most or all of his teachings about love, relationship, charity, compassion and forgiveness.

It's sad, really. This time, at least, the President got it right and the guy with a Ph.D. in history who leads a large faith-based movement got it, if not wrong, at least sideways.

But tonight I spent an hour longer than I needed to spend editing a document that required substantial modifications. Word on Mac OS X just seems to lose its mind from time to time. I lost substantial work three different times when all of the menus in Word -- dropdowns and ribbon-based -- just started showing blank contents. All other apps running at the time were fine. I'd try Command-S to save a document and get an absolutely blank dialog box in the middle of the screen. It was just plain weird.

On other occasions, text entry slowed to an absolute crawl. I'd be typing 5-10 words ahead of what was displaying on the screen while the disk thrashed. 

I've been avoiding using MS Office products as much as possible for the past several years and now I understand why. They just don't work reliably.

(Is it any wonder that the country is so politically fractured when a bunch of guys can't agree to just get together and talk sports?)

Speculation is that it will take two more years for this new standard to reach deployment to the consumer. It's likely to happen much faster because one of the cell phone providers will jump on this with both feet and start implementing and deploying it, forcing its competitors to accelerate their plans as well.

Supporters say that this speed is so high that there will be literally no visible delay from the time of requesting a Web page and having it show up on the 4G-enabled device.

Sometimes I look at a user interface decision someone's made and scratch my head, wondering what in the world they were thinking. On rare occasions, that "they" is Apple.

My case in point today is Apple's TextEdit, the free generic text processor Apple includes with every Macintosh they sell. It's a far-above-average text editor and processor with some pretty nifty features packed into its small, free space.

But with one of the recent upgrades -- I think it came with Lion but I'm not 100% sure -- Apple removed the "Save As…" file option. It used to be that I could save a copy of an existing text document by selecting "Save As…" from the File menu and giving the file a new name and optionally a new location.

Not any more. In the latest revs of TextEdit, the old "Save As…" option has been foolishly replaced by a "Save a Version" choice. Selecting this option saves the current document with its current name in the folder where the original is stored. But despite its tantalizing promise of version control, this option simply overwrites the older version. In other words, it's identical to "Save". 

Meanwhile, if I really want to save a copy of the file under a different name, I can't use "Save As…" (not available) or "Save a Version" (overwrites the current copy). Rather I have to take the non-intuitive step of choosing "Duplicate" from the File menu. This creates an identical copy of the present document in a new window. At that point, TextEdit will allow you to "Save…" the new document but it's at the expense of extra mouse-clicks and/or keyboard presses. Not at all intuitive.

Apple? I want my "Save As…" back.

This could be a very important development. I have at least two clients who will be taking a very close look in the next few days.

If that's true -- and I don't put anything past NFL owners and managers -- then Manning will be debilitated and either missing practice or working an abbreviated program for two or three days. This is Wednesday. If he doesn't recover much of his strength before Friday, this could really hurt him coming into Candlestick Park for Sunday's NFC Championship game.

I never wish ill or injury on anyone and this is no exception but a tiny corner of my mind licks its lips in anticipation of any reason the Niners can get to support optimism before the big game Sunday.

Today comes this gem;

No, Mr. Feehery, the problem is that your cause is one nobody is going to mobilize around unless they are content providers interested in maintaining archaic ideas about how to do business in an Internet-dominated 21st Century. It wouldn't matter if your clients were the most savvy social networkers on the planet; those who are fans of their products are not going to support things like the two ridiculous bills pending in the U.S. Congress these days to protect their intellectual property. And that audience will never be a fraction as large as the number of Internet users who see their freedom as of overriding importance.

The answer isn't to try to figure out how to mobilize millions of supporters. The answer is to figure out how to publish and price your content on the Net with a win-win model. You're the creative ones. Figure it out.

 

I am in complete agreement and sympathy with Wikipedia's position but I think they could and should have found a smarter way to demonstrate their opposition. By blacking out the site, they inconvenience millions of users, a minuscule number of whom are government employees of any stripe. What makes them think the firmly ensconced, well-trained corporate cronies who occupy legislative seats in D.C. will notice or care?

Instead, they could have:

• rerouted all incoming traffic to a page explaining the pending rules and why they oppose them, thus educating without interference;
• replaced the top half of all pages with an explanatory black banner (larger than the one they have on their site today to warn of the blackout) so users would get the same message but still be able to scroll to their content;
• selectively blocked only DC-area IP addresses (I know that's not 100% feasible or effective, but I bet they could figure out how to have a big impact that way on folks who are actually the idiots making the decision).

I'm sure there are many other ways they could have found to make their feelings known without cutting out millions of school kids, college students, researchers and journalists who rely on Wikipedia to do their work. (Oh, and I'm not one of those, so this has no real impact on me personally.)

Adobe behaves inexcusably in what they jokingly call "support" and should call "interference and obfuscation."

This afternoon for the first time in some time, I tried to run Photoshop Elements 6. On launch, it gave me an error message that said my licensing had stopped working for this product and I needed to restart my machine. That made no sense but I did it anyway. Re-launch. Same issue. So I go to my Adobe account, find that app, redownload it, uninstall the original and re-install fro the new DMG file.

Launch. Same issue. 

At 3:45 p.m., after an hour of fiddling, I finally called their support line. After going through all the ACD steps, I was asked to request a callback which would stake place between an hour and three  minutes and an hour and 22 minutes.. I waited until 5:40 and tried again. This time I was told the wait time would be 31-42 minutes and was placed on hold with no option of a callback (which is just as well, obviously).

While I was on hold, I did some rummaging around their support forums and found that this kind of issue can be fixed with an app they have called something like LicenseRepari. I downloaded the app and followed the instructions (which included -- are you ready for this user-friendly idea? -- launching Terminal and running a Python program!). No matter what I tried, the Python app refused to run or give me any feedback.

At 6:30 I didn't have a response so I hung up and went home, thinking this is the worst support for an overpriced (i.e., Adobe) product I've EVER experienced.

Two hours after my original call, I got a callback but by then I was no longer in my office. Still, I tried to see if the support person could help. After arguing with me about what should work, he asked me what OS I was running. I told him Mac OS X 10.7.2. He says, "Photoshop Elements 6 doesn't work with Lion."

So Adobe gives me an absolutely bogus error message, sends me down a two-hour rabbit hole chasing a solution that wouldn't have worked in the first place, and then provide garbage support as an added bonus.

I'm done. I will never buy another Adobe product and I'm going to start now searching for replacements for the crap I already own from them. They've bilked me out of thousands of dollars over the years but this ends it.

The present line has the Saints favored by an astonishingly small 3.5 point margin. The over-under is also low at 47.5.

I'm predicting the Niners will lose, but by between 6 and 10 points, making the game closer than expected.

If -- big If -- the Niners are ahead by 10+ at the half, they could pull out a win. Otherwise, I don't see how the Niners stop the potent Saints' offense and Drew Brees in a second half they've dominated all year.

I have no idea whether the article is correct in drawing the conclusion it drew. But I am sure of one thing: it is highly doubtful that every member of Congress who takes a position does so as a direct result of campaign contributions. I think we sometimes carry the notion of quid pro quo too far and paint everyone with the same brush unfairly.

It is at least plausible that someone like Rep. Foxx had independently reached the position that she takes with respect to the superiority of for-profit colleges over not-for-profit government-run colleges. She may have had some personal experience with the subject. Or one of her staffers might have come to her with some research she found on the Internet or elsewhere. Then, noticing that there are indeed folks out there whose views on the subject are sympatico with her own and who have funds available for campaigns, Rep. Foxx might have approached them -- rather than the other way around -- and suggested that since she was going to advocate for them anyway, it might behoove them to help her say in Washington.

I'm sure that there is a lot of quid pro quo going on in Washington on both sides of the aisles of both houses. But I refuse to believe that all of our elected representatives base their policies on who pays the tab. The media from both extremes ballyhoo perceived corrupt connections as if they were proven fact when it is almost never the case that there is any proven connection between a contribution and a policy. Just because A happens and then B happens doesn't mean A caused B. Sometimes it does. Other times, it doesn't. A bit more discrimination and careful investigation is needed if the media are to stop playing the crucial role they now play in causing Congress to be so widely disrespected.

Ask.com is still around and still doing the English-language (perhaps "natural-language" would be more accurate since it probably works in non-English languages) searches. But not many people know about it or use it.

I figured Google could probably handle searches phrased as questions as well so I gave it a try. Sure enough, answers are as easy to get with a question as with a search phrase. Interestingly, neither Ask nor Google turned out to be particularly good at parsing or answering compound questions.

For example, I could get both search engines to give me good results for the question, "How many pieces of music did Mozart compose?" In fact, the results were nearly identical.

But when I asked, "Who composed more musical pieces, Mozart or Schubert?", both engines fell down. Google corrected my "or" to an "and", rendering the question pointless and the answer unusable. But when I corrected it, the results it returned weren't comparative, so they weren't really direct answers. Ask.com accepted my question without a hassle (score one point) but its results were quite similar to those provided by Google. (BTW, the answer to the question is Schubert, by quite a margin.)

Search remains the most used and least understood means of navigating the Web. You'd think by now someone would have found a more reliable and accessible way to do that.

But what I saw in the game leads me to believe it's going to be all but impossible for the Niners to beat the Saints. As good as the SF defense is, I don't think it can bottle up Drew Brees. The guy is a machine. He's having an awesome year. I don't see any way the Niners can slow him down, let alone stop him. In what I suspect will be a run-and-gun  offensive battle, I expect some league records to fall (they've been doing that a lot already in this remarkable post-season) and for the Saints to come out on top by 10 or more points.

Would I love to be wrong about this! But honestly I just don't see a chance for an SF victory Saturday afternoon at Candlestick. The only real hope would be for the Niners to force two or three early turnovers, score off of them and knock the Saints back on their heels early enough in the game that they have trouble coming back. That could happen, of course; the Niners lead the NFL in takeaway ratio. But I'm not feeling it.