I bought this Toshiba Satellite back in 2001 for the princely sum of $889, marked down from the kingly sum of $1299 because there was a small dent in the plastic case and the floppy door tended to stick. It’s accompanied me on all the subsequent World Tours plus various and sundry other activities, and it’s probably getting near the end of its lifespan, but that doesn’t give me any excuse to let it just die. So I’ve spent much of this weekend giving it the once-over, or, given the number of reboots involved, perhaps the thrice-over.

The box came with Norton’s brand of antivirus, which I dutifully upgraded as needed up through 2006 or so, at which point Symantec demanded not only its annual vig but also the installation of newer and bloatier bloatware, whereupon I yanked their plug and went for something that wouldn’t cost me anything: AVG’s Free package, then in 7.x.

It worked well enough at first, but the mandatory upgrade to version 8 was convoluted, and scan time (for a mere 8 GB of files) grew from an hour and a half (Norton had taken about 2:10) to an appalling 6:20. Worse yet, some of its behind-the-scenes machinations were sucking the very life out of the poor little box:

I’ve still got an old Compaq Presario 1200 notebook that refuses to die. I use it for basic stuff like the surfing the Internet and word processing when I’m on the road. It’s got 320MB of RAM (which is the maximum) and has been running just fine under Windows XP Pro.

After installing AVG 8 all that changed. The notebook acted like I had reinstalled Windows 2000 on it. Anything I did from the desktop, like launching Windows Explorer, or from the Start button, like launching the Control Panel applet, suddenly took 10-15 times longer.

Unfortunately, disabling some of AVG 8′s new modules did nothing to improve the performance problem.

My Toshiba has 512MB (that’s all I can cram in there; it came with 256), but the symptoms were identical.

So I pulled AVG and am embarking on a 30-day trial of ESET’s NOD32. Its footprint is way less than the Sasquatchian AVG’s, and it wound up its first complete scan in a fairly average-sounding 1:47, though this figure may have been affected by the fact that between its installation and the commencement of that scan, I installed Service Pack 3 to Windows XP. (No guts, no glory.)

For the curious: 20 GB disk space, one optical drive (reads DVD, writes CD-R/CD-RW), two USB 1.1 ports (no 2.0, alas). Processor is Intel’s Celeron at 1.1 GHz.

Earlier I threw in something about the practice of short-selling. While I have dabbled in securities from time to time, I don’t have any personal experience with shorting stocks, but there are people who have and will say so:

I shorted for clients without the stock to back it up at least a thousand times and naked shorting has been illegal for at least twenty years. I was able to do this because I had a great reputation on the floor as being “good for it” so I never had to show anyone the goods. I always knew this was a part of organized efforts to bust a stock, sometimes a perfectly good company stock. What you don’t seem to understand is that massive shorts are almost always “covered” by buy stops and/or similar positions on other stock on other exchanges. Writing puts with a stop is also done. The real true short risks next to nothing … unless the stock is thinly traded (too few shares outstanding) and I’ve never seen any big spec ever play a stock or commodity like that. Shorts have been a speculation vehicle for at least twenty years but rationalized (falsely) as a hedge. Hell, if you want to hedge there are a hundred ways you can do it without going short, but rarely does an investor go short, he just bails out and lives to buy another day. Bear Raids, in which large groups of short sellers with massive capital, get together by phone and plot to short a stock to near zero for no reason other than that they can. [George] Soros? The pig of all time. He singlehandedly broke several South East Asian countries until big bad China stopped him cold when he tried that stunt there. Massive shorting needs to be controlled by position limits, period.

None of this makes me feel any better about things, but if I had had any notion that the current Wall Street bollixment was purely a matter of negative feedback loops correcting excesses — well, I think I’m over that.

And every once in a while they come up with a gem like this:

“I was supposed to meet my parents here for dinner but they didn’t show up. This place is terrible. I spent four years in Okinawa, so I know good Chinese food.”

After which, I presume, they sent him to Germany, where he learned the fine points of Italian cuisine.

And few packages in the videogame world were as instantly recognizable as the box for an Atari 2600 game cartridge, as noted here:

Before the over the top, logo heavy madness of today’s next-gen masterpieces became the visual norm for video game cover art, there was the basic beauty of the Atari 2600′s approach to package design. Clean composition and vague descriptive text came together to create something that was just so … intangibly fresh and mesmerizing.

The style, alas, is every bit as obsolete as the 2600 itself — or is it?

Now how could you turn down something like that?

(From Boing Boing via Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

Poor Dana Orwig. Last time she dropped by the palatial estate at Surlywood, she caught me in my bathrobe, in which I look rather like a badly-bleached version of Barry White.

This time — well, it’s probably a good thing I was extremely slow getting to the door, or she’d have had to see it again, and there’s a practical limit to how much people will put up with that sort of thing.

There has to be a twist, and of course there is:

Created by a group of UC Berkeley students, the Bubblegum Sequencer is basically a step sequencer that uses gumballs to generate MIDI events. A multi-row grid, with each consisting of 16 holes — representing the 16th-notes in a measure — are color-mapped to a specific sample.

Sound and video at the link.

(And, because it’s the weekend, a title reference.)

Sandra Day O’Connor did 24 years as one of the Supremes. Lee Hamilton represented an Indiana district in the House for 34 years. Reading this, I have to count myself grateful both of them are retired and no longer in much of a position to influence policy:

With young people voting at higher rates than ever before, it might seem that the founders would be pleased with our progress. Yet civic engagement requires more than voting in presidential elections every four years. A healthy democracy demands sustained citizen participation, and our schools must give students the knowledge and tools to participate.

Sadly, civic education has been in steady decline over the past generation, as high-stakes testing and an emphasis on literacy and math dominate school reforms. Too many young people today do not understand how our political system works. They lack the tools to shape their communities through their own participation.

Yeah. How dare those “school reformers” emphasize “literacy and math”? We’re trying to do some nation-building here!

Roberta X observes:

I suppose I should expect no less from a pair who approvingly quote the fatheaded Dewey, one of the architects of the ruin of American education. Still, it’s the sort of damnably huge hole in logic that makes me wonder how some people get through law school, let alone ascend to rarefied heights within the Federal government. Are they hauled, kicking and screaming, by main force, do you think, or do they just save up enough boxtops and send away for a sheepskin and a bar card?

If law and logic were one and inseparable, there’d be a minimum of forty suicides a year in Congress alone, just from the overwhelming cognitive dissonance.

You do know what a leading question is, right?

Are 95% of the men in America impotent or what? I mean, I don’t mean to be crude, but why not, I can’t watch 30 minutes of television without being inundated with numerous ads for erectile dysfunction pills.

Be grateful you’re not watching Spike, where “numerous” gives way to “innumerable,” even for products known to be bogus.

I don’t have any, you should pardon the expression, hard information on how many guys suffer from this sort of thing, but in terms of sheer fear, it ranks somewhere beyond finding dead pixels on an LCD screen or losing an arm-wrestling match to a girl. I’ve never sampled any of these wares, partially because I have too damn many prescriptions to fill already and I suspect that one or two more will run my poor bedraggled sack of flesh to the point where it starts to liquidate itself and I’ll run down the wall and across the floor and soak into the carpeting, except that I don’t have any carpeting.

More to the point, performance-enhancing drugs are largely irrelevant if there’s not going to be any actual performance, but that’s a different issue entirely.

The Los Angeles Lakers have announced that seven home games against likely playoff contenders will carry a higher single-ticket price tag than the other 34.

The first such game will be on the 25th of December (!) against the Celtics. The increase is substantial: seats usually $35 will go for $45, while $260 seats will run $315. The handful of $10 seats in the upper bowl will remain at $10, and season-ticket holders, who’ve already faced a price increase this year, won’t be affected. Tim Harris, Lakers senior VP for business operations, says that “roughly 900 to 1,000 tickets” will be repriced for those seven games.

Incidentally, Lakers tickets, not surprisingly, cost more than Thunder tickets, though it’s not always that much more: the price range in the upper bowl at Staples Center is $10 to $45 ($10 to $55 for the premium games). Up in the Thunderdome, it’s $10 to $30, though seats marked as Premium Balcony run $50.

I ordered a box of checks yesterday, and in the process of so doing, I thumbed back through the register to see the last time I’d done so.

Summer of ’06.

Which means that I’ve used up a mere 150 checks in 27 months. Used to be, I could go through that in three months.

The only significant recurring bill I pay with an actual check, other than the mortgage and the car payment, is the city utility bill, and that’s because Oklahoma City utility billing isn’t set up to take online payments from my bank: the bank has to cut them a check and mail it to the same place, and I can do it quite a bit faster. (Five days, they say.) Both electric and gas companies used to have the same issue, but now they’re wired: two days max. My check usage has declined commensurately.

And I suspect the check-printing business has declined somewhat itself: the design I ordered throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s was discontinued in 2004, and the replacement design is no longer available in 2008. Maybe they’re trying to tell me something.

Luke McKinney at Daily Galaxy asks: “Will the Internet evolve into a lifeform?”

While the movies teach us that evil cybernetic intelligences are created in military research labs, with the occasional time-traveling component mixed in, the most likely environment is wherever has the greatest connectivity, diversity and sheer quantity of data flow. That’s right, the internet.

One route is the evolution of electronic intelligences in situations like the internet-arms race between spammers and shielders. It might sound silly, the idea that new life could be created in an attempt to offer you a great deal on C1@Lis!!, but have you tried registering for a forum recently? Even gaining access to the lowest level of interaction online now requires elementary Turing tests to tell the humans from the robots.

Another option is the idea of the net itself becoming sentient, a vast self-modifying array of connections and information storage with limited connections to the outside world (kind of like that glob of grey goo you carry around in your skull). If that happens then Gibson help us all — remember that the net is made of about 90% spam, 9% porn, and quite a lot of whining blogs. If that mixture ever becomes self-aware we’re not quite sure what it’ll do, but the odds are against it being anything good.

(Seen at Violins and Starships.)

“Vista,” from the Latin visorum, “of those things already seen not to work”:

The whole downgrade-to-XP was a little bit tougher than anticipated, though and ended up taking several hours and ultimately cost me my copy of Vista. I goofed up and zapped the Vista operating system without having a backup. ThinkPads don’t have restore CDs. What they do have is just as good … except in special cases like this. Then I had to figure out which of the three CDs did what to get XP on there. I eventually got there. It would have been sooooo much easier if I’d simply installed a pirated copy of XP on there, though.

That’s really one of the biggest problems with Microsoft’s copy protection … they make going illegit not only cheaper, but easier.

I wonder if we have any of these left:

(Explained here.)

You’d expect that sort of phraseology from a delivery service or a utility. But a drug dealer?

Spiraling gas prices led an Indiana drug dealer to levy a fuel oil surcharge on customers purchasing cocaine, according to investigators. Anthony Salinas, 18, tacked on the gasoline surcharge when he sold a confidential police source coke on two occasions in June. While arranging one buy, Salinas told the source that a quarter-ounce of cocaine would cost $240 — $215 for the drug itself and “$25.00 for gas money to deliver the cocaine,” according to the court affidavit.

Things are tough all over, Tony.

(Via Daily Pundit.)

The practice of selling a stock short is somewhat counterintuitive, since you’re basically selling something you don’t own, but it’s long since been accepted as a component of the investor’s tool kit.

In recent years, investors, without SEC interference, have refined a stripped-down version of short sales:

In short-selling, a trader borrows shares and then sells them, hoping to profit by buying them at a lower price later to close out the loan. Under existing rules, traders have to confirm that the shares are at least available for a broker or dealer to borrow (the locate rule), and they are supposed to conform to the conventional three-day window to deliver shares to the trader on the other side of the transaction.

In naked short-selling, the locate rule and the delivery rule go out the window, since the trader doesn’t borrow the shares to begin with. That, and the absence of a rule requiring short sales to be done on a stock’s uptick, gives plenty of ammunition to a trader intent on driving a stock into the ground.

Suspecting that this sort of thing has contributed to the tumult on Wall Street this month, the SEC, starting today, will impose penalties on investors who run afoul of the locate rule or the delivery window. Some people are wondering why they weren’t doing this all along:

[Overstock.com CEO Patrick] Byrne has waged a three-year campaign to get the SEC to tighten borrowing and trade settlement rules and, perhaps more urgently, actually enforce them.

But there’s this:

Until very recently, the whole issue was dismissed by some as the fantasy of small-company chief executives who were trying to pin the blame for their management failures on mythical market forces.

Now that big companies are failing — but never mind, you can see where this is going.

And let’s say goodbye with something we haven’t had around here lately: a shoe that Sarah Palin hasn’t been seen in.

You’re looking at the Matisse Chantal sandal, a just-slightly-wacky Brazilian-made wedge with a metallic animal print — whatever happened to all the metallic animals, anyway? — and about an inch of heel. (This is the gold color; silver can also be had.) It’s very summery, if you ask me, and, says Kim of Shoeaholics Anonymous, well-suited to the “boho look.” At $102.95 (Endless.com), these are probably too inexpensive for boho exponents like Mary-Kate Olsen, but they’ll get plenty of takers, especially among women like Kim who hate things between their toes. Sorry, no insane psychosexual analysis available.

From December 2004:

I haven’t heard that [Bradford] Commons are going to be Cabrini-Greened out of existence, but at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to see bulldozers heading down 8th Street.

A year and a half later, the bulldozers had been there, and yes, they’d done that. Now there’s a new use for the land:

The Oklahoma City Urban Renewal Authority today approved conceptual plans for an eight-story, 196-room Embassy Suites to be built in the Oklahoma Health Center.

The proposed site at NE 8 and Phillips Avenue was home to a Section 8 complex until a few years ago.

A little more detail:

It will boast multiple water features throughout its four-story indoor atrium. The facility will also include a 16,000-square-foot multi-function banquet area, an on-site restaurant to seat 133 patrons, a market deli restaurant, a business center, a 627-square-foot exercise facility and a concierge lounge on its 8th floor. Temporary parking will be available to the south of the project until future development of a 316-space parking garage is developed.

And suites make sense for a hotel near a hospital complex, right?

No start date has been announced.

Legendary Motown producer/songwriter Norman Whitfield, who presided over some of the greatest hits from Hitsville, USA, died Tuesday in Los Angeles from complications of diabetes. He was 67 (some sources say 65).

Whitfield was born in Harlem; his family moved to Detroit in the early 1960s, and young Norman began hanging around Motown. Berry Gordy put him to work in the quality-control department, and eventually he started writing. (“He Was Really Sayin’ Somethin’,” a 1964 hit for the Velvelettes, a bigger one in the 80s for Bananarama, was written by Whitfield, Eddie Holland and Mickey Stevenson.) Whitfield also got some feel for production, and when “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” another Whitfield-Holland collaboration, outsold “Get Ready,” the previous Temptations hit, Whitfield became the Temptations’ producer. (When you beat out Smokey Robinson, you’ve accomplished something.)

Whitfield’s production was radically different from Smokey’s: more dance beats, more individual vocal parts, less in the way of old-fashioned harmony. Lead singer David Ruffin found himself singing above his range, which made him both more gravelly and more distinctive. Whitfield’s new songwriting partner was Barrett Strong, who’d cut one of the very first Motown hits: “Money (That’s What I Want)” way back in 1960. After Ruffin dropped out for a solo career, Whitfield moved the Tempts, now fronted by Dennis Edwards, into a psychedelic sort of funk that produced even bigger hits.

Perhaps his finest moment, though, was “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” which was recorded by Smokey’s Miracles, the Isley Brothers and Marvin Gaye without ever getting approved for release. Finally a version by Gladys Knight and the Pips passed muster, and sold well as a single; the Marvin Gaye version was dropped onto an album (In the Groove), where DJs discovered it and started riding it. Motown was forced to put out a single, and as Tamla 54176, Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” became Motown’s biggest-selling single of the entire decade.

By 1973, Whitfield had split from Motown; Warner Bros. had given him his own label. It was not successful, though his 1976 production of “Car Wash” by Rose Royce, issued on MCA, was a smash. For most of the next two decades, he lived primarily off his songwriting royalties; failure to report some of them to the Feds got him six months of house arrest and a $25,000 fine in 2005. His health was already failing, so he drew no jail time.

The record I was listening to while writing this was “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” Whitfield’s last big hit for the Temptations, a twelve-minute wash of strings and bass and wah-wah guitar and agonized vocals and one chord — B-flat minor — cut down to a mere seven minutes for the 45. I find more in this record every time I play it.

Last week’s link to the Carnival of the Vanities said something to this effect:

[I]f I’ve counted correctly, this week’s Carnival of the Vanities, tagged “Sober,” is the 300th in the series.

There is precedent for my not having counted correctly, and inasmuch as Andrew Ian Dodge has affixed “300+” as the title to this week’s edition, I’m more inclined to accept his numbers than my own.

So: 300. I note that it’s grown a bit since moving to Dodgeblogium, which augurs well for its future.

The “most inappropriate,” anyway, says Craig Burrell:

This is a 2002 release (I think) on the French Opus 111 label.

In terms of sheer impropriety, though, it comes second, maybe third, to this early-1970s number:

(With thanks to WestminsterGold.com.)

The ride home certainly started out amusing enough: I watched two guys on horseback pull up at a tag agency, which is not exactly an everyday occurrence. (Do horses require licenses?)

The fun, though, began at the westbound Classen exit from I-44, which in its present form is not long for this world. (I knew a redesign was coming, but I didn’t expect it quite so quickly.) This is a particularly heinous example of the breed: you’re barely around the curve (it’s posted 40 mph) and you hit an actual intersection at 51st. And there almost certainly will be oncoming traffic; in fact, there’s a hotel just on the corner. (The old Guest House Inn was razed; this is a modern Sleep Inn.) They’ve got the stop sign, and sometimes they even obey it.

For now, you can’t proceed down the curve: you’re detoured to eastbound 51st, which will put you right on Classen — if you’re heading north. If not, you’re screwed. Eventually, I understand, 51st will be rerouted along the side roads to what used to be the Classen Circle. Getting into Edna’s, always a thrill, is about to become more so.