The psychology of poverty. The psychology of loneliness.

This interview really got me thinking about myself. Not simply in terms of scarcity, but also loneliness and enrichment. I have friends and associates that I consider successful (speaking both fiscally and in overall fulfillment) and I’ve always envied what I perceived to be some innate tendency towards success that many of them appear to have. I never thought much, however, about the psychology of failure – especially not pertaining to myself. Hell, why would I want to? But taking it into account while considering many of of the important decisions and actions I’ve taken in my life… well, it’s eye opening.
Being Poor Changes Your Thinking About Everything

Battling XP

I was given an old (old!) laptop to rebuild – Dell Latitude D630 – and short of putting Linux on it XP was the only way to go.  I dusted off an ancient XP Pro SP 3 disc and got to work.  Lo and behold after install I could not get it to run updates (“the website has encountered a problem”).  Hitting the site produced an error every time.  I downloaded and installed IE 8 to no avail.  I downloaded what one site claimed was the latest Windows Update package and it also produced an error.  I ran a variety of Microsoft’s “Fix-its,” none of which found any problems.

What I wound up doing is turning on Automatic Updates and then forcing a detection via a command prompt with:

wuauclt  /detectnow

This allowed it to pull enough to update the, er, Updater and get me over the hump.  It still wouldn’t pull updates from the site (rather than erroring it spun forever), so I headed to the MS fixit site:

http://support.microsoft.com/fixit/

And chose Windows, Install or Upgrade Software or Hardware, and Windows Update and then downloaded and ran the first Fix-it in the list (“Fix the problem with Microsoft Windows Update that is not working”).  This repaired 2 problems and allowed updates to begin working.

Kind of ridiculous, no?

On Privacy

Online privacy’s been a thing for me for years now.  Not because I’m doing anything “wrong,” but simply because I feel it’s my right – and your right – not to be snooped on.

I don’t pretend to be an expert at this (or at anything, for that matter), but here are a few things I use and recommend to try to keep prying eyes away:

Use Firefox.  I used to be a Chrome fan, but Google’s a big part of the problem.  No organization is perfect, but Mozilla – thus far – seems much more interested in our individual well being than that of any other browser offering.  And the very first step in locking down Firefox is to navigate to Tools > Options > Privacy and choose “Tell sites that I do not want to be tracked.”  

Next, a slew of Firefox add-ons:

  1. HTTPS Everywhere – An EFF offering (and are you a member of EFF? You should be.) that forces a secure connection to your surfing destination whenever possible.
  2. DoNotTrackMe – a tracking blocker.
  3. disconnect – another tracking blocker, this one specifically tailored towards social media.
  4. Ghostery – a configurable tracker/cookie blocker.
  5. AdBlock Plus – perhaps not so much so for privacy, but for sanity.  Surfing the web without ABP freaks me out.
  6. DuckDuckGo – Make DuckDuckGo your search engine of choice.  Simply go to the site, and then click the icon next to the search field (to the right of the URL field in Firefox) and add it.

Other security/privacy conscious items I use include:

  • TrueCrypt – I use TC for create encrypted containers to store all my sensitive data, personal and client related.  It adds a much needed layer of comfort to using sync services such as Dropbox or Windows Live.  Granted, it makes it a pain in the ass to sync (the whole container must be resynced rather than just the changed files within it), but with a decent connection and some common sense container sizing it’s worth it.  I also use TC whole disk encryption on all my family’s laptops.  If someone swipes your ‘top, at least they’re not getting your data!
  • VPN – Securitykiss is but one of many VPN services.  I can’t speak to their effectiveness specifically – I include them only as an example.  A Google search will pull up a wealth of free and paid VPN options, along with plenty of reviews.  VPN is essentially a tunnel between your computer and a remote gateway, through which your online requests are routed.  The theory is that your traffic is effectively anonymized by way of emanating from a shared point of entry to the ‘net (the gateway), meaning it’s undifferentiated from the traffic of everyone else utilizing the gateway.  The tunnel between you and the gateway is also secured via encryption.  Ultimately the effectiveness of VPN relies on the provider, as they have the ability to log your activity in their tunnel.  In other words, do your research and choose wisely.

There are lots of other privacy options out there, like TOR, but the few things I’ve listed above are the simplest ways to start securing your privacy.

Windows 7 “Black Screen of Death”

Upon logging into a friends Windows 7 laptop I was given to get working again I was presented with a solid black background and a navigation window opened to Computer.  No taskbar.  No desktop icons.  I figured explorer.exe wasn’t running, but a check in task manager proved me wrong.  I Googled around and discovered that though I hadn’t seen this problem before, it was not uncommon.  The fix turned out to be easy:

  1. Get into the registry via regedit.exe. You can launch regedit via task manager (which you can launch via ctrl+alt+esc or ctrl+alt+del and  then choosing it) by doing a File > Run.
  2. Head to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon.
  3. Delete the Shell key.
  4. Reboot.

 

Tooth Fairy Box

My son’s first loose tooth was *that close* to coming out, and we wanted something special to give him for it.  We’re not the type to start introducing money just yet.  We’re still fostering his creativity and imagination.   He has the rest of his life to covet the almighty dollar – why not give him as much time as possible without that soul sucking force?

So I bought a nice piece of walnut from a woodworking store, borrowed the neighbors band saw, and made this Tooth Fairy box.

Tooth Box 1

I hand sanded it and rubbed the whole thing down with a beeswax finish to give it that deep color.  Within there’s a slot to place the tooth:

Tooth Box 2

…which the Fairy replaces with a magic bead to be used in crafting.  That circle you see is the remains of my attempt to fuse the top and bottom on a swivel dowel.  I was unhappy with the results, so I lopped it apart, sanded it all down, and bought the hinge and clasp at the local hardware store.  I like the result much better than the dowel idea.

I’m pleased with it as a first attempt.  I really want my next house to have a proper workshop so I can begin to slowly amass all the fun tools I’d like to have for projects like this.

White VS Sewing Machine / Treadle

Some wonderful people gave us this ancient, indestructible White sewing machine/treadle.

IMG_0555[1]

We got it tuned up and it’s ready to roll.  We found the crumbling manual in one of its drawers.  After searching in vain for a digital copy of it, I scanned what we have.  I love the art in these old manuals:

07

 

The entire manual, such as it is, can be downloaded here in PDF format.

Sending an email with Task Scheduler using Powershell

Today at work I had a need to query a bunch of databases for a particular, er, thing, and then send that thing, if found, to myself via email.  I needed this to happen every morning. I decided, since we’re talking about a MS SQL and Windows 2003/2008 environment, that Powershell was the way to go.  And it was – until I popped it into scheduler.

When executed as a scheduled task, the email didn’t send.  Things before and after the email routine worked – the arrays populated, the log file filled – but the email didn’t go.  Firing it from a Powershell manually, everything went fine.

Being the stubborn arse I am, rather than get to Googling I started ripping things apart.  I had the query dump its results into a temp file that a separately scheduled script would open, parse, email and then clear.  Same result: run manually everything worked peachy. Scheduled, no email.

In the end the problem was irritatingly simple.  For some reason, when run as a scheduled task the script didn’t keep the socket open to the SMTP server long enough for a successful transmission.  I added a Start-Sleep -s 5 right after the SMTP command to give it a 5 second breather before continuing on.  Voila – email success.  How silly.

I think I’m going to like Powershell just fine.  Other than quirks like this, and getting used to the syntax, it’s easy enough – and it seems a lot of Windows specific stuff is streamlined, at least in comparison to my old go-to admin scripting languages.