Bob’s Father Was An Ape

WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR?

This article might pique your interest in this movie.

HURRICANES FOR DUMMIES

A nice review of our friend Bryan’s Hurricane Almanac – and a plug for his web site. Tell me this isn’t a great way to get your 12-year-old interested in science.

JUST ANOTHER FALSE ALARM?

William McLeese: ‘In the final chapter of his superb book Collapse, Jared Diamond points out that a huge percentage of fire alarms turn out to be false. If we considered false alarms an excuse for inaction, we would have abolished fire departments long ago.’

Ted Gault: ‘Thanks so much for mentioning that Y2K was AVERTED due to much effort; it wasn’t a hoax. Few beyond those of us that worked to prevent the problem, and our accountants who funded the effort, seem to remember that today.’

TREMENDOUS IMMEDIATE

Joel Margolis: ‘If, as you say, Bush, Cheney and Rice were told by the CIA at Blair House on January 7, 2001, that Osama Bin Laden posed a ‘tremendous’ and ‘immediate’ threat to the United States, could you tell me exactly what your heroes – Clinton, Gore, Cohen, Reno, et. al. – did about it? Or did the threat only occur on January 7, 2001?’

☞ You can read about it in Bob Woodward’s largely pro-Bush Bush at War. Go to Amazon and ‘Search Inside the Book’ on ‘Blair House.’ You’ll find it at page 18. You will see that ‘President Clinton had approved five separate intelligence orders authorizing covert action to attempt to destroy bin Laden and his network.’ The CIA was urging Bush to continue or step up those efforts; instead, he shut them down and (we know from Bush’s first Treasury Secretary’s book) turned his attention to Iraq.

APES

Bob Neinast: ‘Regarding the so-called ‘global cooling’ crisis in the 1970s, that was media hype. Very few scientists were pushing that. Click here. And regarding whoever got mad at you for saying we descended from apes, they are wrong, too. The common ancestor of us and the other apes would almost certainly also be called an ape, by any reasonable definition of the word. Indeed, by any reasonable scientific definition of the word, we are apes. I am an ape. My father was an ape. I am descended from my father.’

Kathy Flake: ‘I was also going to send you a (not-so-angry) message saying that we did not descend from apes but rather a common ancestor, but I asked my daughter, who is studying anthropology, and she informed me that although humans and apes descended from a common ancestor, that common ancestor was an ape.’

If they made a movie about YOUR HOUSE, would you go see it?
Well, they have.

Monday (which through the miracle of relativity, traveling at the speed of light, you can experience today): Real Estate

For MYM owners ONLY:

YOU CAN STILL PRINT CHECKS — MYM LIVES!

Charlie Engelke: ‘Bill Strong reported that he couldn’t print from MYM to the USB printers on his laptop. Your solution of printing to disk works, but there’s another way. MYM wants to print to LPT1:, which was always the printer connected to the parallel port (which few PCs have any more). But Windows networking will let you assign the name LPT1: to any network printer, and MYM works with such printers. Say your network printer name is MYPRINTER, on a PC named MYPC. Then run the following command (from a DOS window, or using the Start/Run menu choice):

net use LPT1: \\MYPC\MYPRINTER /persistent:yes

‘Now when you try to print from MYM, it works. I’ve been using this for years, under every version of Windows through XP (I haven’t tried Vista yet). But Bill wants to print to a local USB printer, not a network printer. The solution is emotionally dissatisfying, but it works: share the USB printer. You can do this with the Control Panel’s Printers and Faxes applet (see below). Once you share it, you can run the ‘net use’ command. I’ve done this for laptops, and it works with MYM.

‘Here’s how you do the ‘share’ thing:

‘Open the Control Panel and select Printers and Faxes. You should see a list or box of printers (or maybe only one). Right click on the printer you want to use, and select Properties from the pop-up menu that appears. The Properties window that opens has a lot of tabs, one of which is labeled ‘Sharing.’ Select that tab, and then click the radio button ‘Share this printer.’ It will fill in the blank for ‘Share name’ for you, but the name it fills in may be long and have spaces, which would make the ‘net use’ command harder to run later, so enter a short, easy to type name instead – perhaps ‘MYMPrint.’ Click the Okay button to close the Properties window. If you are running security software, it may pop up and ask if you intended to do what you just did, and you’ll have to say it’s okay.

‘Next, you need to know your PC’s name. (If you don’t know it, use the Control Panel and select System, which will open a Properties window. Click on the tab labeled ‘Computer Name.’ The ‘Full computer name:’ will be displayed (always followed by a period that is NOT part of the name). Take note of it and cancel to close the window.

‘Suppose your computer name is called mypc. Finally, use Start/Run and type the command

net use lpt1: \\mypc\MYMPrint /persistent:yes

‘And now MYM should print. I’ve been using the “net use” trick for years and years successfully, but with real network printers. The second level of the trick, of sharing a local printer and then “net use” it from the same PC, worked for me in the past but I haven’t actually had a local printer on a laptop and used it lately.’

☞ Oh, Charlie. Would you consider living in my office closet? I think everyone needs a Charlie Engelke. Thank you!