Greenwood High School Bowling Team of 2012
This is a photograph taken Monday, March 5th, 2012 of the Greenwood High School “Alleygators”. Every team member is in this picture, except for those who have recently left the team. Greenwood started off with a bang and quickly took the lead in the newly formed bowling matches between area schools. I have attended every match except one and did not attend the District match in Elizabethtown. This Saturday they will be attending the Regionals at Crescent Lanes. Seven high schools will be represented and the students can expect to be there from 10 am until approximately 7 pm. Students will bowl individually, in groups and in teams to determine who will qualify for State. These young men and young women have done an admirable job and hopefully have had a lot of fun also. Many of these team members are Seniors and will definitely be missed next year.
Losing Your Medical Benefits and Life Insurance
In another month or two my husband will be going into short-term and long-term disability. During that time he will be applying for regular Social Security disability as well. He has many medical problems that cause severe pain, which the medical professionals can not do anything about. And his arthritis has become worse as well. This morning he was unable to close one of his hands. Any head motion seems to cause the most severe pain of all and it’s difficult to work without doing that. But what worries me most is what will happen to his medical benefits and life insurance. Will his work allow him to keep it all or will we need to find other life insurance. I need to find a life insurance quote or two so that I can make a decision as to which one we can afford. Many life insurances stop at a certain age, seems like it is 80. There are some that continue on for a lifetime yet the benefits are lowered at certain ages. I definitely have got to do some investigating. Not many people can afford not to have life insurance. When one spouse dies the other one is often left in a very hard situation.
Irate Taxpayer Burns House, Crashes Plane Into IRS Building
This is a sad albeit understandable action by a taxpayer. About 10 am this morning, an Austin, Texas resident, Joseph A. Stack, a 53 year old man having problems with the IRS, set his house on fire and after that crashed a small plane into the IRS building that housed nearly 200 IRS employees. Two people were injured and one person was missing, although no deaths were reported. The man apparently wrote a suicide note on his website, and although it is supposedly on facebook, there are too many Joe Stacks to find out which one he is. Regardless, he left a very long letter explaining his actions which really sounds like he left a lot of explanations out. The best I could understand is that he had lost several retirements and pensions due to tax matters which were done within the law but which laws were ignored by the IRS, and the final blow that had something to do with his income, for which he felt that he was being treated unjustly by the IRS and the American Government.
He ended his ‘suicide’ note with these words:
I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, lets try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.
No doubt this man will be discounted as a nutcase instead of a man who had become desperately frustrated over his dealings with the IRS.
This story was reported by CNN.com.
Win32 Viruses
There are a great many viruses out in the world today and it is actually impossible to prevent all of them from infecting your computer system. Why? Take a look at how anti-virus programs work. First, a virus threat must be identified. In many cases, this is completed by computer owners who send a suspected compromised file to their anti-virus company to be checked out. It could also be determined by visiting an online antivirus company, while even though their system won’t actually ‘know’ which virus it is, but will recognize that it is a virus dependent on several factors. The everyday computer user will not be able to determine what is infected and not all virus infection programs work the way they should. Some viruses act as a proxy server.
A proxy server is a server (a computer system or an application program) which services the requests of its clients by forwarding requests to other servers. So in simple terms, the Trojan-Proxy virus uses your computer as a host to sell to spammers. Ever wondered where all your internet bandwidth has gone?
The Trojan itself is a Windows PE EXE file written in Visual C++, packed using UPX. The file can be between 39KB – 53KB in size.
An example of a Trojan horse virus would be that a program you may have downloaded which you think is something simple like a screensaver program named “exotic-cars.scr” which seems to be a car desktop screensaver. When you install it, it instead unloads hidden programs, commands, scripts, or any number of commands with or without you knowing it is doing it in the background. Trojan Horse programs can often be used to bypass security protection you have on your system which causes you system to be left without any protect and gives the hacker full access to your machine. And where else can you get a virus? Simply by visiting a certain web page which has been set up expressly for that purpose, or even just looking at an email. This is why you must have a good antivirus program.
I recently have downloaded a 30-day trial version of a program called VIPRE. So far it has detected several trojan’s on my system and it prevents my computer from viewing them. For instance, I was using the Widows explorer program to look at the suspected file that Vipre had told me was infected and it quarantined the file. It also found a file trying to run itself today which looked like a perfectly good Windows file. There is no way for the everyday user to protect their system as they are simply too complicated. Protect yourself with a really good program, and don’t let a high price fool you into thinking one is better than another. None of them are as good as their virus updates, without the updates any new virus can attack your system and your antiviral program won’t do anything but sit there and wave at it. Back up your computer, before it’s too late.
CRCDISK.SYS – Fixing It Can Be Very Hard
For the second time on the second computer, I’ve discovered a problem with crcdisk.sys. The first one was actively crashing and I could not find any fixes for it other than wiping and redoing the entire computer. On the second computer I was starting to do a backup when the computer notified me that it could not do this because of a crc error and it advised me to run chkdsk. I started in safe mode with command prompt and ran chkdsk and was told that this was impossible because the disk drive was write protected. Hello? I’ve been doing research into this problem and apparently it is quite commonplace. However, a quick fix or any fix at all, is not really forthcoming. Best suggestion so far is using a Vista Repair disk and then trying to do a chkdsk. According to one sufferer this is the only way he could find of fixing the crc error his computer said that he had. He got the same write protected error message as well. Be sure to do a lot of investigation before you decide that your only recourse is to wipe your system. Usually this also means wiping out your recovery section, and that is a bad thing. I will report back with any success that I may have. I’m simply copying my c drive to a back up drive first, just to be on the safe side.
Snow Days – You Gotta Love Them
Oh boy, it’s snowing again today, if you can call intermittent flurries snowing. Some of the snow from a couple of weeks ago still had not melted when this snow started. So underneath some short snowfall is a hard, crunchy layer of icy snow. Frozen crunchy snow might be fun to walk on, but it sure doesn’t make it better. Today the schools closed, for although the snow hasn’t really stuck that much, it made the roads icy. Yep, the snow was intermingled with some rain. But when I woke up this morning, the snow was melting and dripping, even while more snow was coming down. But what the heck. Old man winter is still paying us some attention.
Who Wants to Fly When Pilots Fall Asleep or Have Fistfights?
I’ve never flown in a commercial aircraft. My ears give me problems. Years ago we drove up to Colorado from Florida and in New Mexico I thought I was going to die from pain. One ear did not pop. A few years after that I was told that the eardrum of that ear was inverted. So I have been afraid to get on an airplane. I recently started thinking about an airplane trip and have been trying to get an appointment with an ENT. Not too hard of course, they never returned my call and I haven’t tried again. Anyway, yesterday I read on CNN that a Delta Airlines sub-company plane overshot it’s destination by one hundred and sixty miles. Apparently the two pilots were too busy having a physical fight to pay attention to where the airplane was going. Then the article talks about another airplane whose pilots fell asleep, overshot their destination and were awakened when the flight controller radioed and woke them up. And yet again, it talked about another pilot who landed his commercial airplane not on the runway, which is where they land, but on the strip where all of the planes take off. Now I’m wondering, should I bother to go ahead and get my ears fixed, or am I just lucky they have kept me from flying all of these years?
Repair Your Hoover Carpet Cleaner Yourself
My carpet cleaner has been with me for about three months. In other words, it’s still new. But twice now I have had a problem with it and have not only gone to the Hoover website looking for answers, but as with most people, I also googled. My machine is a Hoover SteamVac Carpet Cleaner, model FH50020. The first problem occurred between water changes. When I put the new cleaner tank on and started it up, I found that I had no suction. Therefore I went to the Hoover site because who knew where I’d put the manual (such as it is). Their ideas on what would cause no suction was good but they only showed one reason. It wasn’t mine. I kept reading and reading, and did find some interesting information which I kept until problem #2, but I figured out the problem on my own. The dirty water tank has this little piece that comes up out of it. I don’t know why that is even there. But mine was in backwards. Therefore I had no suction. They could have put that in the list of how come’s though.
Just a few minutes ago I was using the machine and had just changed the water and started it back up only to see streaks of wetness on the carpet. I thought it was shadows to start with so I kept trying different areas and verified that my cleaning liquid wasn’t coming out right. This is where the interesting information I had read last time came in handy. There is a little white rubber hose that you can see when you take off your dirty water tank. That goes up under the plastic to the “spout” coming from the cleaning liquid. Mine came off. I know that does not sound so bad but the thing is that this plastic piece is not screwed on but tabbed on and it really doesn’t lend itself well to being disturbed. I used a small screwdriver and popped out three areas of plastic tabbing so I could look up there with a flashlight. I put the tube back on via feel only and then the machine worked again.
These machines have so few parts that most of us can fix our own. But Hoover puts these parts in inaccessible places. Had the tube been placed differently it might not have come off at all. Plus, that tube is not secured to the “spout” in any way, so it can and will fall off again. I think Hoover is like Maytag; it isn’t that their items don’t break down, but that the public gets so pissed off by substandard manufacturing that they just give up. This carpet cleaner of mine didn’t cost me that much, just over $100 (it doesn’t have the special attachments), but I expect it to do it’s job and if it doesn’t, then my money has just been tossed out the window.
Kentucky and Williwigs?
Yesterday I was checking out at Wal-mart when my cashier started talking about our weather. It’s just suddenly turned cold here, right after a lot of rain, and the skies resemble those that you’d see on a snow day. Seemed like half the town was at Wal-mart buyingi up items. I realized that these people were getting ready for one of the worst winters they have had here for quite some time. My family has lived here since October 2007 and can’t really say that we’ve had that much snow, although we have had some very low temperatures. Anyway, my cashier is telling me that when the williwigs are black, it means a very cold winter. I don’t even know what a williwig is or if she said williworm. She said it was a caterpillar though. She couldn’t tell me though, what the little black bugs with hard shells are which are crawling through my apartment. Oh well.
Get to KNOW Your Medicines
Years ago I had a nine day stay in a hospital, and while I was there the nurses demanded that I learn the names, dosages and shapes of my medication. Ever since then I am sure to check out all of my medications to be sure they are the right ones. A few days ago my husband picks up my generic Ambien medication. I always put the old medications left (if any), into the new bottle and change the lids. They always give me child resistant and I have trouble opening those. While pulling out my meds for the night, I got the last round one of the Ambien and then noticed the new pills were not the same. I looked up pictures of the pill online and it kept going back to Ambien, although it never showed me a picture of the new pill. I figured the pharmacy gave me the wrong medicine. The next morning I called my pharmacy and spoke to a pharmacist about it and was told that Wal-mart had started using a new manufacturer. Good to know that I wasn’t given the wrong drug. However, I took this pill last night and two hours later I still wasn’t sleepy. I suppose I’ll have to call them again to discuss the lack of efficacy or else check with other pharmacies to see if they have my old ones. Naturally my insurance company doesn’t want me to take anything but generic, less money for them to pay out. This coming year they are once again raising the price of the co-pay that we have to put out. It’s never ending, these increases.
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Composite of a Series of Images Taken From Space Aboard the Station
This is a composite of a series of images photographed from a mounted camera on the Earth-orbiting International Space Station, from approximately 240 miles above Earth. Space station hardware in the foreground includes the Mini-Research Module (MRM1, center) and a Russian Progress vehicle docked to the Pirs Docking Compartment (right). Expedition 31 Flight Engineer Don Pettit said of the photographic techniques used to achieve the images: "My star trail images are made by taking a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic detector noise effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many amateur astronomers do. I take multiple 30-second exposures, then 'stack' them using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure." A total of 47 images photographed by the astronaut-monitored stationary camera were combined to create this composite. Image Credit: NASA
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