Jack Manassas and Company

Blind Login and Blind Shutdown of Windows 7 My laptop has dual operating systems: Linux and Windows 7. Maybe it was a recent update to Windows. Maybe it was the aftermath of an unsuccessful viral attack. Whatever the reason, I found that it suddenly became very difficult to log into Windows 7. Linux puts up a purple screen while booting. Windows would boot behind the purple screen, but the purple screen would not go away. For a while, I could only get into Windows by starting the Windows login and then inducing a power failure by pulling the battery while the laptop was unplugged. When I restarted the laptop, it would often (but not always!) bring up the option to start in Safe Mode. For some reason, selecting “Start Normally” would usually get me into Windows. That said, it was an unhappy Windows 7. It was no longer possible to Hibernate, Sleep, or Sign Off of the login ID. The only option to stop Windows was “Shut Down.” And even then, it w

Manually Reinstalling The Lenovo Solution Center – A Back Door for Malware The Lenovo Solution Center is an application that comes installed on most Lenovo Laptops, including my Lenovo E440 Thinkpad. Its functions include Hardware Scan, Driver Updates, and System Info. I didn't use it very much. One day, after a Critical Windows 7 Update, I clicked the Lenovo Solution Center icon only to find a red box warning-- Something like, “The Lenovo Solution Center Hardware Scan has been corrupted-- Please Reinstall Lenovo Solution Center by clicking here.” When I “Clicked Here,” I got another message telling me that the Lenovo Solution Center would have to be manually reinstalled. Search for Support With some difficulty, I found the Lenovo support website at https://support.lenovo.com/us/en The site wants you to search for support by entering your product number, serial number and other information. If you had a working Lenovo Solution Center, you cou

We have been getting our eggs up here from Suzie, who works in the office next door.  They are enormous, delicious eggs with rich, creamy whites and deep yellow yolks.  At CDN $4/dozen, a super deal!  I was running low on eggs and went over to put in an order for another dozen. Suzie was annoyed. "Something is up with my hens, and I don't know what!  They have stopped laying eggs in the hen house, and seem skittish.  It looks like they are hiding their eggs." "Does this happen often?" I asked. "Once in a while, and usually only with one hen," she replied, "but never all of them at once.  I'm going to see if I can coax our old dog into sniffing out the nests, and then we'll see what's doing." Regretfully, I went to the supermarket and bought a dozen organic eggs.  They were CDN$5.00 a dozen, and not nearly as good. The following week, Suzie had figured it out.  Or rather, her dog did. "My old dog found the new nests

About That Place In France... When I was about 8, my older brother taught me a song about France, Pants, and Dancing.  You may have heard it.  The song is widely parodied, to the extent that the parodies may be better known than the original song.  Here is a typical link to the song on You Tube; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eL3VAORMYOE The words go like this; There’s a place in France Where the Alligators dance. One couldn’t dance So they kicked him in the pants, And the pants he wore Cost a dollar ninety-four, And the tag on the pants Said his pants were made in France. It is high time someone did a literary exposition on this mysterious song-- The scenes called to mind by the song start at the macro level (a picture of France), then focus down to a particular place in France with dancing alligators.  The focus continues further to a particular alligator who—alas!--cannot dance.  The next level of detail examines the pants of the alligator, and then the tag

While looking for something else entirely, I found a box of  'Appleford's Cooking Parchment' that appears to have been made in 1935.  It is a real eye-opener!  The directions all over the box (and in the brochure that miraculously stayed inside the box for the past 82 years) are completely different from anything you read about parchment paper today-- You probably think it just prevents cookies from sticking to a cookie sheet. In fact, Parchment Paper was never meant to be used with cookie sheets.  I'll bet you didn't know that you must wet the sheet before you use it.  You can wrap several types of veggies in parchment paper bundles and boil them in the same water without transferring flavours between them.  You can-- and should-- wash your parchment sheet after use, and use it over and over again. Of course, maybe the sheets inside the box are made of different stuff than today's parchment paper.  The box originally contained ten sheets, neatly folded in

The thing that struck me first about Joyce was the laugh. We had an open house for our small group at church—I don’t remember the exact details—but Joyce was there, and at one point she let loose with an enormous belly laugh. It was a laugh that someone laughs when they haven’t laughed for years. A hungry laugh, a laugh of desperate starvation. A laugh that told the world, “Maybe I don’t have to be alone anymore.” She started coming to our small group each week. All the adults in Joyce’s family tended to die of heart attacks when they hit 50, so Joyce worked out at the gym. She was one of the fittest people I knew. Her husband had run off with the secretary and left her to raise their children alone. She did a good job, and by the time I got to know her, they were grown, had moved out of the house, and were living on their own. Joyce was witty as well as very smart, a good friend, and a marvelous cook. She was also lonely. Small group

In 1969, it probably seemed like a good logo for Cream Soda-- But with the advent of a certain emoji, maybe not such a good choice.  At least they didn't color the soda brown... On the other hand, I bought a bottle just to take this photo.  Maybe not such a bad marketing move after all, eh?

And Now for Something Completely The Same... Against my better judgement, I watched Dawn of the Planet of the Apes on Netflix.  Halfway through, I got a great idea! What this world really needs is a NEW movie– “Planet of the Apes King Kong!” It starts in Planet-of-the-Apes 1936.  A group of ape explorers finds a mysterious island with ape natives that try to convince the ape explorers to turn back from the enormous bamboo gate.  Naturally they go through the gate anyway–and they find a Giant Human! One thing leads to another, and the Giant Human finds his way to the top of the Ape-Empire State Building, carrying a lady-ape. Apes in biplanes attack, and the giant human falls to the pavement. “T’was Beauty killed the Beast.” That’s the basic outline.  Remember–You read about it here first...

July 28-31, 2017 - Mini Vacation in Revelstoke Anne noticed that I had 4 days off in a row over the weekend, culminating in her birthday (she is 29, of course!). She has completed the six-month ordeal of the CP3, that was the final hurdle to getting her pharmacist license here in BC. She will soon be heading down to Maryland to visit with family and help take care of her mother. Our Honored Son (HS) will soon be heading to California to seek his fortune in Silicon Valley. Really, it is our last likely time for a family vacation. So naturally we headed for Revelstoke. We stopped at the Dutchmen Dairy for ice cream. The camel and llama are both gone now, but many farm animals are still on display.  I was working in Sicamous a couple of weeks ago, and got two one-liter tubs of their ice cream after work. It was actually a bit disappointing. We remember how rich it tasted in previous years, but these two tubs were not much better than

A lot of people are very upset about global financial conditions these days.   Almost everyone I know is struggling to make ends meet, and failing at it.  Debt levels are high, wages are not keeping up with inflation, our standards of living are going down year by year.  The most likely endpoint of this process, for most of us, seems to be bankruptcy--But bankruptcy is increasingly being prohibited by law.  The only people who seem to be prospering in the current environment are the Very Rich, Government Employees, and Organized Criminals. In the banking crisis in 2008, we bailed out the banks.  It has gotten us nowhere.  The banking industry has continued the same bad practices that got it into trouble in the first place.  We are heading for another crisis of the same kind, but orders of magnitude larger.   The usual endpoint for all this is a giant financial crisis, mass bankruptcy, hyperinflation, chaos, war, bankers and politicians hanging from lampposts, possibly a new Dark Ag

July 2017-- British Columbia is on fire. Well a lot of it is, anyway. We went driving around to see what we could see-- and what we couldn’t see. Smoke from the wildfires hundreds of kilometres away have obscured the sun for days on end. Here are some pictures:  This is Blind Bay Road, heading towards the lake.  The trees are not really covered with ashes-- That's an artifact of the dirty windshield, which IS covered with ashes...  Here's one of the giant mini-mansions near the waterfront.  The reddish ball in the sky is the Sun.  It looked a lot redder in real life...  Here's the Marina, mountains in the background barely visible through the smoke.  The sign in the middle says "Thank you." By contrast, only a couple of days later, the wind shifted and we had blue skies again.  This is what watering the flower baskets is SUPPOSED to be like!

My laptop has Win 7 Pro on it, and also Ubuntu Linux 16.04.  Windows is a grumpy little OS that feels that it is the only OS in the universe.  Ubuntu Linux realizes that it is not the only OS, just the most trouble-free and flexible-- But Ubuntu does not really care about the issues of other OS's. To get them both on the same laptop, I usually have to install Windows first, then nudge it aside with Ubuntu.  If all goes well, the two systems mostly get along, but it is not elegant. On start up, there is a menu of OS's that allows you to select Ubuntu or Windows.  If I choose Windows, I used to see a purple screen with white dashes for a while, then the Win boot menu would come up and all would be well. After the laptop crashed, I got the purple screen with white dashes, but the Win boot screen did not appear.  I could hear the Win 7 start up tune, but could not see the screen. It turns out that the purple screen with white dashes is an Ubuntu splash screen that does not

For the second time in 3 months, my laptop has been attacked by Trojan viruses.  For the second time, the viruses have gotten past Norton Antivirus (R) and done some damage. -Sigh- I usually put in a blog entry so I'll remember how I fixed it when it happens again in a couple of years.  But between Win 7 and Norton, looks like I will be doing this every few months. :-) 1.  Prevention -- Put Ubuntu or other Linux-based OS on your laptop. Even though the Windows side of my laptop is trashed, the Ubuntu Linux side works fine, and can even read files from the corrupted hard drive.  It is a life-saver!  I was able to back up all my Windows files to a backup drive. Add Clam-Av, the free Linux-based antivirus package, to your Linux installation.  Also the Graphical User Interface (GUI) that goes along with it. I used ClamAv to detect and quarantine the viruses from the Windows side of my hard disk.  ClamAv over-identifies viruses on your machine, but you have the option to selec

How to transfer folders and subdirectories (20170210) The Dolphin file manager in Kubuntu can be used to transfer files.  However, if you try to transfer whole directories with subdirectories and the files in them, it does not always work.  When I tried this, after the computer crash, Dolphin transferred the directories, but not the files! Better to use CLI, the Command Line Interface.  Issuing one cryptic, gargantuan command will do exactly what you want with no muss, and no fuss. rsync is the command you want-- A quick google search brought up rsync, a CLI command for synchronizing directories. The general format of the command is; rsync -avr /miscellaneous/source/directory /miscellaneous/destination/directory Of course, you have to figure out what exactly goes into the directory pathways. Choose your options -avr is the options part of the command, where  “a” means file attributes will transfer, including permissions, comments, etc. “v” means verbose = show what’s being done “r”

Hello again, At a friend's request, I read an essay by theologian Jack Crabtree about building the Christian Church.  Here's a link.       http://msc.gutenberg.edu/ audiofiles/Crisis_Paper-1_ Only-One-Truth.pdf   Wrote more than I thought on this one, so into the blog it goes! I clicked on paper #1 and read it.  I have a few comments; How to build the Church.  It's a big problem these days.  I remember a sincere young black man, a Jehovah's Witness, who came knocking at my door.  I noticed that this clean cut young man in a suit had some scars and some tattoos on his neck that indicated he had been involved in some sort of street gang for a while.  He made his sales pitch.  I told him, "You have to start with a hard look inside yourself.  It doesn't matter what you say to me, It doesn't matter what people think about JW's.  The most important thing to find out is what you _know_ is really, really true in the depths

Updating the Kubuntu Desktop Note to Self- Read this first before the next time you update the Kubuntu Desktop Intro; Perennial as the winter, I got a system message that “Kubuntu 14.04 is no longer supported.  Click this button for a fast ‘n easy upgrade to Kubuntu 16.04.” “Kubuntu hasn’t been working that well lately,” I says to meself. “No more support is a bad thing.  Okay...” I shouldn’t have, but I clicked it. Six hours later, I had Kubuntu 16.04, but it tended to freeze up and I could only use the Command Line Interface (CLI) if I was quick enough to hit [Ctrl][Alt][F1] or [Ctrl][Alt][T]. First Note To Self–Read the Release Notes First Using another computer, I went to the website and read the 16.04 Release Notes; The release notes say not to click the automatic upgrade, because it does not work.  Hmmm. Second Note to Self–Fix Kernel Panic The first known bug that affects my system is “Kernel Panic,” brilliantly solved by Zanna at this web location; http://a