Hasta la Vista RTM

Today was it for (all three or four of) you Windows Vista lovers who can’t bear to update your original RTM (release to manufacturer) installation with the broken Control Panel. After today support ends you’ll get no more security updates unless you update to Service Pack 1 or 2. And you XP SP2 diehards (you know who you are — or maybe you don’t!) have until July 13 to embrace SP3.

Welcome to Pair-o-dice

The push to allow casino gambling is a hot topic here in Massachusetts. Gambling is economically regressive. Much of the money comes from those who can least afford to spend it — day laborers, people on Social Security, etc. The only valid argument that I see favoring Massachusetts casinos is keeping the state’s gamblers from spending their money at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun in Connecticut. WGBH radio in Boston, which recently retooled to compete with FM news leader WBUR, has been doing a series on casino gambling.

http://www.wgbh.org/news/lastresort.cfm

I was surprised to hear that Mohegan Sun wants to develop a casino in Massachusetts.Their chosen site is Palmer, which is one of the many failed mill towns in the region. Apparently Mohegan Sun executives feel Palmer is far enough away from Uncasville, Connecticut that they won’t be competing with themselves.

The decline of communities like Palmer has been going on for a very long time. Over 30 years ago, I spent a day with Nixon-Watergate attorney John Dean, who was speaking at my college, and while we were driving through Western Massachusetts we talked about how many of the once-thriving textile mill towns were in trouble. Is casino gambling a way out of financial desperation? I don’t think so. I think it causes more desperation than it prevents, but if it happens my feeling is very simple: NIMBY.

Netbook year two

My Acer Aspire One netbook, a now-defunct 9″ screen model, is already a year old. It’s been trouble-free, and I’m glad I bought it. I’m using it now.

The Chumby One that I bought Carol for Christmas was working fine, but then it suffered a failure of some sort when I unintentionally powered it off while checking the Netflix widget. I returned it, and a replacement is on the way. When it gets here I’ll put a pair of Dell AX210 speakers on it that I picked up for next to nothing. For now they’re on the netbook. They sound pretty good!

The mono speaker in the Chumby One is actually pretty good, but Carol wanted something more for listening to Pandora in the kitchen. I was going to buy a multi-outlet power adapter for a pair of computer speakers to plug into the headphone jack; but then, for only a few dollars more, I found the AX210, which doesn’t need an AC adapter because it’s USB-powered, and the Chumby One has a USB port in the back.

Follow-up: The AX210 speakers are not a good match for the Chumby. The USB port is a very noisy power source, resulting in hum and whistling sounds.

78s4FR’s on YouTube

One of my favorite YouTube genres is of turntables playing records. It must be the ex-DJ in me. One of the best examples is from a woman in England named Liz, whose channel is called 78s4FR.

http://www.youtube.com/user/78s4FR

Here’s a sample. Stan Freberg’s superb parody of Harry Belafonte’s ‘Banana Boat Song’, followed by the equally great ‘Tele-Vee-Shun’.

Note for younger readers: Because a shellac 78 could hold only a few minutes of sound, record albums used to be exactly that — multiple discs in an album book. Later, vinyl LP’s could hold up to 30 minutes in mono, yet there were still albums. In a 2-disc LP set, side 1 was backed with side 4, and sides 2 and 3 were on the same disc, so they could be played in sequence on a changer. The arm on the changer held the stack steady. When playing a single record, with the arm in the position shown in the video above, most changers repeated the record.