A Lot of Fs

fit of ill temper

It has been brought to my attention, and after some introspection I am forced to confess, that I have a stubborn temper. I just do not like to be proven wrong. But when I do admit to being wrong, I have the good sense to apologize for any offense that I have given.

This is when I am wrong about matters of fact. I have learned, despite a firm belief to the contrary, that the host name of a printer's network card can be changed. I had thought it was static. It is not.

failure

At this point, I will also admit that the new print server has proven to be a failure, and that my workplace has returned to the old one. Two printers were changed back on Thursday, and the rest the next day. I am relieved that the changeover is done and out of the way. I had intended to start another project (involving the Macs) this week.

futility

In all this talk in the popular media (print and electronic), only an article in my monthly AARP newspaper and this week's edition of Marketplace Money just barely touches on the real reason why the unemployment rate is so high: American businesses do not want to hire American proles, nor do American banks want to lend to businesses that hire American proles. This is a now common attitude among American suits, reflected in an attempt by the Bank of America to patent a "business method" that IBM no doubt already had in its portfolio: How to ditch American workers (how expensive!) and relocate to lands of cheap labor. As long as American banking and business maintains such an attitude, there will be no return of prosperity and no letup of high unemployment of those whom they deem unemployable.

fraud

I will have to keep an eye on my own telephone account. So far, this month's phone bill looks normal. But I am vigilant now because the local telephone company pulled a fast one on my sister the editor, who got crammed by a third-party service whose machinations doubled her phone bill. The phone company is saying, It's not our fault, and making the foolish assumption that people would know what cramming is. I also learned that the phone company also does home-page hijacking, making its own home page that of its subscribers (who use the company's DNS servers rather than, say, OpenDNS).

The phone company does this to make up money from the loss of landline subscribers. It never occurs to its suits that such behavior drive subscribers away.