I am the sys admin for my wife’s PC. She’s a non-techie scholar who uses her computer for email, occasional browsing, and just about nothing else. So, it’s a straightforward job keeping it up and running. But yesterday I was on the verge of switching her to Linux. All because of Norton Antivirus.

What an arrogant piece of sw NAV is.

Yesterday my wife started getting error messages I haven’t seen in my twenty years of owning Windows machines. The desktop would only barely load and no apps would run. Guessing that it was Norton, I tried to use the Windows Add/Remove facility. It refused to uninstall Norton. So, I booted into Safe Mode as an administrator, but Norton will not uninstall itself in Safe mode.

So, I went through Norton’s instructions for manually uninstalling and removed the 2,035 places Norton writes itself into the Registry and the 367,222 directories Norton strews about your desktop.

But Norton Antivirus is like sand on a beach: Days later you’re still finding it in crevices you didn’t know you had.

As of last night my wife is using Grisoft AVG, the antivirus software I’ve been using on my computer for years. It’s simple. It works. It doesn’t think that it owns your machine. And there’s even a fully functional free version. But at $40 for two years, it’s worth every penny.

I should probably switch my wife to Linux anyway. [Tags: norton grisoft avg antivirus virus whines]

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Our son is on the verge of switching his email from AOL to Gmail. The one sticking point: moving his AOL address book into Gmail. Thanks to an article in the Washington Post and Gmail’s import help page, I did it. Sort of. Here’s how.

1. Sign in to AOL and use the keyword “Communicator” to find AOL’s free email client. Download it and install it.
2. Run it. Go to the addressbook. Select “All contacts” from the categories on the left. Go to File > Export and save it. You now have an LDIF file.
3. If you don’t already have a copy of Thunderbird, go get yourself one. It’s free. (It’s also a damn good mail client.)
4. Go to Tools > Address book in Thunderbird. In the address book do Tools > Import, and import the LDIF file you created. Thunderbird will make a new address book in the list in the left pane, so you don’t have to worry that your AOL addresses will get sprinkled among your others.
5. In Thunderbird’s address book, select the address book you just imported, do Tools > Export and export it as a CSV (comma separated) file. You now have a file that Gmail can import. Sort of.
6. Log into Gmail. Click on the Contacts link to the left. In the Contacts window, click on the Import link in the upper right. Browse to the CSV file and click “Import.” It’ll probably fail.
7. Open the CSV file with a spreadsheet program. Delete empty columns an. Add a first row that provides a label for each column. Try using the labels “First Name,” “Last Name,” “Email Address,” “Street Address” and “Phone.” (I couldn’t get anything to import except the names and email addresses, but I gave up because it was going to be easier to manually type in the few phone numbers, etc. If you have a more complex address book, you should experiment more than I did.)
8. Save the spreadsheet as a CSV file.
9. Repeat step #6
10. Call up AOL and tell them to bite you. They may not deserve it, but you’ve earned it.

It’s just that simple!

[Tags: aol gmail thunderbird]

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I met Craig in the mid-1980s when I worked at Interleaf and the Seybold Seminars was our major industry event. Craig was knowledgeable, helpful, honest and friendly. He died way too young, leaving a wife and six children.

Tim Bray shares some good memories of Craig.

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Everything Is Miscellaneous is in some ways — but not ways that we’ll talk about publicly because we want to sell some copies — about the thorough death of Essentialism, the ancient (and continuing) idea that some special (and possibly eternal) property of a thing defines it. Essentialism has the advantage that it enables taxonomies: If the essence of a screw is that it’s threaded with a slot at the top (but the exact width of the threads is not essential), then it’s clear what property you’re going to use to place screws in your Taxonomy of Things. Essentialism captures something important about how we understand our world, since we want to call a mouth a mouth even if it has no teeth but don’t really want to call it a mouth if it has no opening. But, there are ways to account for that without having to say that there is a natural Essence of Mouth. Our world is more miscellaneous than classical Essentialism admits.

But, Michael Ruhlman makes a good point in The Soul of a Chef. While rhapsodizing about Thomas Keller, the chef at The French Laundry, Ruhlman says that when you eat his food, you have the sense that for the first time you know what the ingredients taste like: His carrot soup shows you what carrots taste like. It shows you the essence of carrots.

Taste is one of the places where we naturally (?) fall into talk about essences. In fact, we even create concentrated versions of some foods and call them the “essence of ____.” We don’t need a full-blown Platonic theory of essences to accommodate this proclivity. Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory works just fine: The sweet, tart and juicy taste of this apple is a prototype of what an apple should taste like. But we’ll still use talk of an essence to pare down the flavors and hues that are not prototypical. That’s not what an essentialist has in mind, but it is a “natural” and perhaps inevitable use of essences. [Tags: essentialism everything_is_miscellaneous prototypes cooking taxonomy]

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Jonathan Mahler, in a NY Times review of Joel Meyerowitz’s book of photos of the World Trade Center clean-up, joins the congregants at the church of the WTC, saying of the workers: “…they are reclaiming this hallowed ground, making it possible once again to imagine a future there.”

The attack on the World Trade Center was a despicable act of mass murder. As is true for too many of us, people I know lost loved ones there. But those deaths did not make the ground sacred. There’s something dangerous and unseemly about referring to it as such: Unseemly because it implies that the lives that were stolen need a special nimbus of grace to be valued; dangerous because imbuing a horrible crime with religious significance puts it within the realm where the murderers want it. They want a jihad. It’s real important that we not give them one.

IMO.

I have not seen the movie WTC, and I will not. In fact, I would pay an annual subscription never to see another Oliver Stone movie.

[Tags: wtc terrorism 911 oliver_stone]

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A work day = a day of work

Labor Day != a day of labor

Just in case you were wondering.

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In September, the students return and Boston’s life begins again. Fall is spring in Boston.

[Later that same day:] From a lovely post on Aug. 24 by Liz Lawley: “For me, fall is like spring–new beginnings, fresh faces, a sense of promise and potential.”

If I’m only a week behind Liz in ideas, I’m doing really well!

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