A post from the ipad. I don't know how to apply formatting, but I can attach a photo. Looks like a pretty lame app.
May the coming year bring to
you and your loved ones
all the blessings of
peace, good health and joy
Hilda and Clive
I bought a Kindle Fire to replace my aging Kindle (1st Model). For me it will make a fine book reader, (especially for reading in the dark) with some enhanced functions. Overall, it feels like a prototype - everything works, almost, but not very smoothly. It is based on a fork of Google's Android, but oddly enough, does not have a native Google Maps app - it has Mapquest instead.
Screen scrolling is jerky. I like the size - great for books, not so great for magazines.
It feels heavy - but I expect my muscles will develop with use :-)
For a full review - read any of the reviews popping up all over the web.
My latest watercolor painting. I was struck by this staircase in Havana, Cuba, on my visit in 2009.
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| Havana Staircase 2009 |
Tweeting is like standing in a large square packed with people, all shouting loudly and hoping that someone will reply to them, or at least hear their message and pass it on. Some of the shouting is advertising.
Technology has moved on. Thus, so have I. From now on, you can find what I would have blogged here on Google+, at
this address: gplus.to/chmoss
If this does not work for me, I will be back here soon :-)
Is it not time we stopped electing demagogues?
From The New York Times....The leading opponent to my appointment, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the committee, has questioned the relevance of my expertise. “Does Dr. Diamond have any experience in conducting monetary policy? No,” he said in March. “His academic work has been on pensions and labor market theory.”...To the public, the Washington debate is often about more versus less — in both spending and regulation. There is too little public awareness of the real consequences of some of these decisions. In reality, we need more spending on some programs and less spending on others, and we need more good regulations and fewer bad ones.Analytical expertise is needed to accomplish this, to make government more effective and efficient. Skilled analytical thinking should not be drowned out by mistaken, ideologically driven views that more is always better or less is always better. I had hoped to bring some of my own expertise and experience to the Fed. Now I hope someone else can.Peter A. Diamond is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
New social media seem to be making personal blogs and websites obsolete. For quick thought that one wants to share with the world, Twitter feels more appropriate. It gets pushed to friends, and broadcast to the world for anyone following a specific subject to see. For more private thoughts for friends only, Facebook is the place. For photographs - Flickr, Smugmug, Facebook, or any of dozens of photo sharing sites are more convenient.
Fragmentation across media is a problem - but it is being addressed by platforms like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and the like.
So - why would anyone (including me) other than business or organizations continue to maintain a blog and a website?
Was this the first Spaghetti Western? We saw it Wednesday afternoon. Not Puccini's best, but entertaining.
Green = no health care unless you don't need it! Red = help those who need help. The insurance companies win this round of posturing - but thankfully it will go nowhere.
Beware Bipartisan School Reform
If everybody on the Hill is happy, Americans probably shouldn't be.
Katherine Mangu-Ward | January 7, 2011
As an example of what happens when Democrats and Republicans agree, consider the Reagan-era dismantling of the mental-health system. The conservatives wanted smaller government, the liberals did not want anyone locked up against their will -- and now we have lunatics like Jared Lee Loughner with no ability to stop them until they have wreaked their havoc. He was identified as mentally ill ( http://tinyurl.com/2acg968 ) but nothing could be done until it was too late!
When you think about it, camping is an odd little ritual. You exert energy pitching a tent and setting up camp, then subsist for the duration on food that is tasty, but hardly gourmet. Real camping enthusiasts drive miles into the woods and do without the conveniences of store bought wood, and indoor plumbing, but even amateur dabblers like me deliberately put ourselves into a situation that, on the face of it, seems uncomfortable. What's the appeal of uncomfortable sleeping arrangements, the pervasive smell of smoke, and limited access to modern conveniences like air conditioning and WiFi?
Also applies to Conservative Judaism - or any other ritualistic observance.
http://clivemoss.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/chmoss
http://www.facebook.com/clive.moss
http://chmoss.tumblr.com/
http://chmoss.posterous.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chmoss/
There seems to be a certain temperamental difference between conservatives and Republicans on the one hand and liberals and the Democrats on the other. In broad strokes, Republicans, especially of the tea-party stripe, are typically proud, at least unapologetic, and sometimes belligerent about their beliefs. Democrats, in contrast, seem to adopt the defensive position by default. ...
Why are Democrats more anemic? One thought comes from the liberal journalist Thomas Frank. Writing in Harper's, Mr Frank argues that while Republicans respond to their base, Democrats have a misbegotten faith in a "Magic Middle" of centrist ideas that are tolerable, at least, to most Americans:
Democrats, for their part, tend to do the opposite, dreaming of bipartisanship and states neither red nor blue and of some reasonably-arrived-at consensus future in which the culture wars cease and everyone plays nicely forevermore under the smiling, benificent sun of free trade and the knowledge industries.
The Economist often has an interesting take on American politics.
Should auld acquaintance be forgotAnd never brought to mind?
I am switching to Posterous for all posts to social apps. This post is a test to see what happens. It may result in dual posts somewhere. Sorry. A picture of nothing in particular is attached to see what happens. A boring video for the same reason.
I went to the Illinois Secretary of State office today to get new a license plate sticker. In and out in five minutes! The office has put in place a fast track for seniors (65 and older). Age has its benefits. However, this approach is a reflection of the general view that equates elderly with poor and infirm. Whereas I enjoy the benefits of the elderly I recognize the unfairness of institutionalized preferential treatment for people who have no real right to preference or deference. The negative side of the silly equation is workplace discrimination and chronic underemployment of the aging.
My generation had the good fortune of being born slightly ahead of the baby-boomer wave. The boom provided a steady supply of workers for the pre-boomers to manage who could fund retirement of the pre-boom generation. When the boomer wave breaks as the generation begins to turn 65 this year, the retirement system breaks with it - and the world economy is grappling with how to support the elderly with health and dignity. Preferential treatment in government offices is a symptom of government trying to address the problem with no observable impact on budgets. It lets the legislators and bureaucrats feel they are addressing the problem without really doing anything. I may as well enjoy it while it lasts.
For folk who do not live in the USA - Secretary of State sounds like an impressive title. It is not. It is the administration department of State Government.
Just add a Compact Flash card and I will not need to carry a camera any more.
Image Sensor Implant Restores Partial Sight:
"Electronics Weekly, BBC News: German firm Retina Implant reported testing results of the chip that has restored limited sight for people blinded by retinitis pigmentosa and similar diseases, destroying only the eye's photoreceptors, and leave its layers of image processing neurons intact."
We arrived at SOFA, checked our coats, bought tickets, and had our tickets checked by the ticket checker at the door. I noticed that he scanned preprinted tickets, tore bought tickets in half, but just looked at my tickets taking no action.
When we left I pulled out the coat check tags and noticed that they looked remarkably like tickets to SOFA and not at all like coat check tags.
Turns out we had entered the show by displaying our coat check tag, and we now have two unused tickets for SOFA. They would be worth $24 - if the show did not end in 55 minutes.
We have been in London for three weeks. We have been here long enough to feel that we do not have to run around and "tour" every moment. Instead, we can live almost normally, not like locals, but almost like expats.
We are in Hampstead. This suburb has been an intellectual center of London for many years. All around us houses display the little blue plaques that mark the home of a prominent person or family. Gracie Fields home is a little way up the hill. The Huxleys lived around the corner. Sigmund Freud lived a few blocks away.
Shopping malls are few and far between. High Streets are lined with interesting little shops with much more diversity than can be found in malls. The restaurants are reasonably priced (generally) and serve fresher and tastier food than similarly priced US restaurants.
Last weekend we visited our family in The Netherlands, with a brief stopover in Brussels, courtesy of Eurostar, the train under the tunnel. We missed a strike of Belgian rail workers by two hours. Yesterday we took a train to Oxford to spend the day with Hilda's cousin. Last night Julia and Abigail slept at our apartment. Tomorrow we are off to a coastal resort in Devon for the weekend. And so it goes.
Life is good.
Hilda's old G5 iMac was misbehaving -- badly. It often died when sleeping. (We can only do it once, but computers can be re-booted after death.) It could not connect to the web over a wired Ethernet connection, but worked (sometimes) over WiFi.
So, I decided to start from scratch. Easy decision, given enough time.
I updated the SuperDuper back-up. All of our data files are also up on Dropbox (somewhere in the cloud) so we have at least three copies of everything. I ran an install from the DVD that was shipped with the system, which wiped the internal hard drive. No problem ...
...until it tried to use the 2nd disk. It was unreadable. Install stopped after 30 minutes, with a high-falutin version of "OOPS" as its message. I tried some later versions of OS X - no go - the machine is the last of the G5s - not an Intel processor. So, being of unsound mind, I decided that I could make a copy of Disk 2 on my other iMac. I have an external DVD drive in addition to the one that is built in.
First try -- not enough space on target drive. OK -- what's on the source? Almost nothing except OS 9, says Finder. Do this magic using Terminal :
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder
Find all the stuff that is not OS 9 (9 is X-1) and copy it to a new DVD disc. Worked! Used the new DVD to complete the install on the iMac. Worked.
Tried to get on the 'Net. No go. Putzed around with the settings on the 2Wire modem supplied by my ISP - ATT U-verse. No way to get on the 'Net - neither Ethernet not WiFi.
Reset some stuff on the 2Wire modem that was designated as "Don't do this unless you are asked to by tech support." I spoke to myself (what I tend to do at this stage) and asked myself to do it (I am my own tech support). Got online. Went through several update cycles to get current versions of everything. Installed the stuff we really need - Dropbox, Skype, NeoOffice. etc.
Fired up iTunes.
Here is the miracle:
Jacob (my grandchild) is approaching his bar mitzvah. iTunes had his barmitzvah portion and Rabbi Frankel's rendition of the related brachas already set up. Where the @##$$% did it find it? Easy answer - on Dropbox - but who told iTunes it was there? Not me!
More miracles may be reported here.
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