The WKRP of Journals: Nobody's Reading It!

Over on my LJ, on an entry dated a few weeks back, called Feed the Rich, Starve the Worker: That's Bullshit... from Madison, neuralclone commented:

What bamboozles me is the way ordinary people are supporting the corporatists. Economics 101 - can't they understand that by reducing people to a subsistence level they're going to destroy the consumer economy that sustains them? It will eventually rebound upon themselves.

And my rant got kinda long, so I made it an entry:

Corporatists have been working on this for thirty to fifty years (or more, kinda hard to tell when it really started), just chipping away, and they do it by taking advantage of this annoying thing called Human Nature, the desire for short-term gains pitted against long-term gains that require patience and, more importantly, thought. It's what con men rely on. Like all scams, they need the cooperation of the person they're scamming for this shit to work. Despite what the old saying says, you *can* cheat an honest man, but it's a lot more difficult than cheating some idiot who's helping you do it, usually with a smile, because they think they're in on the con with you.

( Case in point: )

/rant! I feel better! Especially since Fox just announced they're dumping Glenn Beck! Let's hope this is a the beginning of a down-turn for all corporate shills everywhere!

In other news, LJ is messed up again. I wanted to Import my LJ to Dreamwidth, which I didn't even realize I could do until several friends mentioned it on their journals, but don't think it's a good idea to attempt it until LJ is working again. Besides, I can't get in and change my LJ password, which is suggested on the handy-dandy Import Journal page on Dreamwidth.

This morning I woke to find that someone quite evil grabbed my hotmail account's address list and sent out spam (or possibly worse) to the people on it. The email looks like it's from Telzey Amberdon, which is my hotmail name. It bounced to a lot of defunct addresses I still had in there. I can still get into my hotmail account, I wasn't locked out, but I changed the password because, what the hell, why not.

How did these guys get hold of my email address book? Did they actually hack my email account with my password, or did they do it by using the new Facebook-like connectivity Hotmail and Gmail seem to be trying to constantly force on us in new and clever ways? Any suggestions, other than "change your password", which I've done? I went into my account info and zeroed out all the "Isn't it neat how we're sharing all your personal info with your friends!" crap they build in, with friends being able to access all sorts of things on your account. This should not be the default, privacy should be the default!

EDITED TO ADD UPDATE: I got nothin' in my Hotmail "sent emails" folder, so this happened off-Hotmail! The spammers took info and ran and did not use my hotmail account itself to send their spam.

I recently tried to set up an Outlook account on my computer so that Hotmail would drop into it when I hit "send/receive" on my home computer, but was unsuccessful -- and my Hotmail address and password being input into Outlook were part of that attempt. Maybe the bad guys got the info that way? NOT A KLEW.


EDITED AGAINDeleted the second half of my post because I figured out how to get rid of a defunct alternate email address... man, they don't make it easy.

From demandprogress.org:

Just the other day, President Obama urged other countries to stop censoring the Internet. But now the United States Congress is trying to censor the Internet here at home. A new bill being debated this week would have the Attorney General create an Internet blacklist of sites that US Internet providers would be required to block.

This is the kind of heavy-handed censorship you'd expect from a dictatorship, where one man can decide what web sites you're not allowed to visit. But the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to pass the bill this week -- and Senators say they haven't heard much in the way of objections! That's why we need you to sign our urgent petition to Congress demanding they oppose the Internet blacklist.

http://demandprogress.org/blacklist/

Read more about the bill:

http://demandprogress.org/blacklist/coica

This article explains how the government is proposing it censors the internet, the way it would work:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-segal/stop-the-internet-blackli_b_739836.html

WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA?

Via nycdeb, I just got the bad news that Susan Garrett, aka susanmgarrett, had passed on.

We lost a good one this morning. The thing about Susan was that she was an amazingly powerful influence for good, just by the sheer force of her sweet and smart personality. I really only knew her through Forever Knight fandom, on the ForKni lists, though I did get to meet her at parties at a friend's house once or twice -- yet all these years later, I remember her and the work she did vividly. She pulled FK fandom up to a whole new level just by participating in it. She made people want to be better and do better.

Terrific writer and all around great human being: you'll be missed, Susan.

Edited for the solution: WOOT!

I tried a few things, but this seems to have fixed my problem: when I got my computer back on Monday, I had originally changed the DPI setting to Large (120 DPI) and slid the slider on the Display Properties: Setting box one over to the left. That made my screen images nice & big & viewable.

To fix the problem, I reset the DPI setting back to 96 DPI (normal, which is the default.) Then I pushed the slider on the Display Properties: Setting box over to the left once more to embiggen everything on the screen to make up for losing the Large DPI. Currently, my screen resolution is 1024 by 768 pixels. I've rebooted a few times and let the computer/monitor go to screensaver a few times and it hasn't gone to "Input Not Supported" even once!

Can anyone in the hivemind of LJ or DW help me with a computer problem? (Also, apologies for not replying to the lovely commenters on my previous posts -- I've been playing computer catch-up and will make time to do that tonight.)

Since I got my baby back on Monday, I have had a small problem. When the computer went to screensaver, the screensaver would be on for a few minutes, but after those minutes, the screen would go entirely black. If I then moved the mouse to bring the desktop back into focus and pop out of screensaver mode, instead I would get a box bouncing around that said "Input Not Supported" -- the box around those words had "HP" for Hewlett Packard (the make of my computer) on it. The only way to get the desktop (or whatever I had on the screen) back on the monitor would be to unscrew and then reseat and re-screw-in the DPI cable that attaches the monitor to the computer. Then, the monitor would work perfectly, like nothing had happened. But this happened over a dozen times over the next few days.

I did a google check and found there were a few others who had this problem, but none of their suggests were overly helpful. Some of the queries people made on tech sites went unanswered, others had people telling them to go into "safe" mode to do lines of type, which is something I don't feel comfortable doing.

I called the Staples repair guy and he had me do a right-click on the desktop to get into "Display Properties" on the Screensaver tab, then click the "Power" button. You get another box for Power Options, and he had me pick "NEVER" for all four of the choices you get there. Basically, he felt that after a few minutes of being in "screensaver" mode, the computer was slipping into "sleep" mode and that was... I don't know, doing something to cause the monitor to not understand and give me the Input Not Supported box. Now, when my computer screen rests, the computer itself never goes into sleep mode. Which begs the question, is it okay for a computer to never go into sleep mode?

SO, this actually did fix the problem -- I can walk away and go take a shower or go out to a store and when I come back, the screensaver image is on, not the "Input Not Supported" image.

Except that now when I turn on and boot up or restart the computer, it doesn't go to my desktop, it goes directly from loading Windows into "Input Not Suported". So every time I turn on the computer, I have to pull it out, unscrew the cable, reseat said cable and rescrew it in. Then the computer is fine and I can see my desktop.

I got the Input Not Supported box bopping about on my monitor when I turned on the computer for the first time after I got home on Monday night and put the system together -- I assumed that I simply hadn't screwed in the monitor cable properly and reseated it as a matter of course, so I didn't think anything of it at the time. For the next couple of days, I had to reboot the computer quite often (due to downloading over a dozen software packages and executing them), and I never had this problem once. But now that I've told the computer NOT to go to sleep mode when at rest, it's doing this when it starts instead.

Any ideas? Have any of you heard of this? No fear, I'm gonna called that guy at Staples in a bit, but I thought maybe one of you might have an idea first. This is the guy who assured me that my computer not going into sleep mode, ever, would not be a problem, so I'd love some feedback on whether or not I can trust him on this even if you don't know how to fix the DPI cable/monitor problem.

I donated blood last Friday -- the Red Cross is in such dire need of O negative blood that they called me up to beg me to come in! They've never done that before. If you live in the USA, you can find someplace to donate close to you -- just go to their site and enter your zip code:

http://www.redcrossblood.org

Busy day: Yoga class in the morning, then blood donation at the American Red Cross Donation Center in Chinatown, then a quick trip to buy cute and very comfy yoga pants at the Eddie Bauer Outlet at Downtown Crossing at 70% off. God, I love that Outlet store! Then a walk over to Haymarket for blueberries and strawberries, and home.

Hey guys! Have any of youse ever seen a chiropractor? I've seen one on and off for many years for various problems, and was lucky enough to have one of the world's most famous and talented chiropractors work on my knee back in Brooklyn (thus saving me from a very painful knee operation). I recently started seeing a new chiropractor here in the Boston area because I stepped funny and threw my leg into a downward spiral of OUCH, and he's doing a pretty good job, but he did something weird and I wondered if it was common in chiropractic circles to do this.

After doing a neck, spinal and leg manipulation, he took a long, smooth bar that resembled a knife (to my myopic eyes, as I wasn't wearing glasses), and he put lube on my leg on and above the knee where I've got a pulled and stiff front-of-thigh muscle. He then used the bar to smoosh out all the nasty little lumps and kinks in my stiff and painful muscle and knee. The action was as if he was trying to scrape something off of the skin, very hard, but the lube made the leg slippery. It really hurt like hell, too! But it did feel better afterward -- the area felt hot, as all the blood rushed where he'd been smooshing. My leg is a mass of tiny clumped bruises where he worked the muscle (he warned me that I'd be badly bruised.) He said he was breaking up the kinks and working them out.

I've never seen this before and can't find it online as something chiropractors do. What is this action called? Anyone else have any experience with this?

I'm all-over painful today, but then I went to a very tough yoga class before my chiropractor visit, so it's to be expected. He is seeing me again next week after my yoga class -- he likes that I've worked out before I show up, as it helps loosen my muscles up.

I'm going to take a nice, hot bath now. I may not be in Gregory House levels of pain, but it still hurts enough for me to be chugging motrin.

OY, it's been busy since last I posted. Here's a (rather long-winded) recap:

( Cut for tl;dnr family drama... )