Category: Uncategorized

The original text: A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. My reading: There are two sets of citizens discussed in the Second Amendment. One group is the set of ALL citizens, named “the People.” The…

Like most people I leave my browsers download folder to the default “Downloads” on Windows 10. I have on occasion had an issue where I download something and then want to upload it somewhere else right away, but when I browse to my Downloads folder Windows Explorer does not show me the contents of the…

The President has declared October as Cybersecurity month.  It’s not a bad idea — just like you change the batteries in your smoke detectors once a year, maybe you should review your electronic vulbnerabilities? My top ten security tips: 1) Change your passwords.  You’ve had them too long, you use the same password in too…

The other day I was opening a packet of ketchup and on one side it said “open here.”  I said aloud “You’re not the boss of me!” and opened the packet from the other end, which worked just fine. It is not in me to submit to authority.  I will HAPPILY put my shoulder to…

Today is Juneteenth, and on the heels of a racially motivated massacre, we are forced to ask ourselves once again — when can we end this violence?  When shall we know peace with our brothers?  When will we achieve the dream that we all judge each other by the content of our character?  How can…

My friend Chuck Hobbs, a frequent and eloquent writer to places like The Hill posted a photo on facebook which included a naked breast to make a point.  Facebook responded by suspending his account and silencing an eloquent voice. In particular Mr Hobbs is a voice of reason regarding the state of race relations in our…

When something is free, it has no value and people treat it as such. When I worked at a great hospital in Boston, we used to offer free printing to everyone in our small division — 1000 people were generating printing costs of $100,000 per year.So we put a program in place so that when…

I attended the Massachusetts Libertarian Party state committee meeting last Saturday, and as always I left thinking:  “I know I’m being paranoid, but am I being paranoid enough?” To that end, I have generated a new 4096 bit public key.  Scroll down further for my 2048 key. If you want to know how to use…

Regarding deflate-gate Amounton’s Law says “The pressure of a gas of fixed mass and fixed volume is directly proportional to the gas’s absolute temperature.” So P/T = Constant For comparing the same substance under two different sets of conditions, the law can be written as: P1/T1 = P2/T2 I’m also going to do this in…

When people talk about having standards, it’s with the shared assumption that standards are a “good thing.”  When we talk about minimum standard for something, we’re talking about a baseline, below which is considered unacceptable.  When we use the phrase  “a standard of excellence” we associate the word standard with an ideal that we should…

In the 6th Essex race the Salem News editorialized: “… Parisella has certainly earned another two-year term…”  Apparently the editors have not been reading the excellent reporting of Paul Leighton who detailed the conflict of interest complaint filed against Parisella and his subsequent quitting of his job. And though that weighs on my mind, I’m…

This is a public request for Charlie Baker or Martha Coakley to show real leadership by stepping up and demanding that

I’m proud of Massachusetts today. Last night on the debate on WBZ all 5 candidates for governor were featured, including 3 in depende

I’ve used the login name “fishdan” since 1996 — I own it about everywhere it’s worth having.  Because I’m old, my primary usage is via yahoo, but I’m also fishdan@gmail, It’s my primary interface to all things google, including my google+ account and the account I sync my android phone with. Because I’m a good…

Just upgraded to windows 8, and I’m not happy about a lot of it, but I kept digging to see if the answers I wanted are perhaps in there somewhere. Most particularly I was very frustrated that I could not see the progress of windows update as it ran from the app.  It took me…

We’ve all encountered the diehards on the web.  They’re never wrong, they will post link upon upon link

We have changed ourselves as a country and as a people when we think that the social safety net MUST come from government. When my grandparents came to Lynn in 1904 they came to a community that took them in and shared responsibility for them. If a kid was misbehaving, the first adult in the…

After the Command-S startup, type the following on the command prompts, allowing time for each to do its thing:  /sbin/fsck -y<return> /sbin/mount -uw /<return> /sbin/autodiskmount -va<return>  launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.diskarbitrationd.plist /usr/sbin/diskutil repairPermissions / 

I have a series of 6 machines that I need to occasionally deploy the same file to in exactly the same place.  I got tired of it being such a pain so I wrote this little script I call mcp.sh  It’s certainly easy enough for a shell script master to do this, but for me?…

So we got a new Mac Book Pro in the house, and it came without an installation disk.  That’s weird, but so be it.  So then I wanted to install bootcamp on the mac.  When you run through Bootcamp Assistant it gives you a chance to download the drivers you’ll need for windows if your…