Sage tech advice

Some sage technical advice for people with computer issues,
How to find a good computer repair person.

1) Don't flatter them and tell them how smart they are, or how lucky their wife/family/dog is to have a computer guy in the family.
2) Don't laughingly demean yourself in front of them and shyly admit that you know absolutely nothing about how a computer works. I mean, would you tell a plumber you don't know how a tap works? A mechanic that you don't know what makes it go vroom?
3) See #2. Every call I have been on, I feel like telling the person to stop demoralizing themselves in front of me. It's like hearing someone tell you how fat and ugly they are and that this is why they will always be single. Just say what the problem is. Period.
4) Seriously. If your machine is ten years old, don't pay me $90 an hour to open it up and look at it. You have already broken most records for hard drive life and power supply life. Live it up and buy yourself a new computer. Pay me for an hour to help you set it up and be happy that you probably won't need me for a few years.
5) Google. Google your problem. Your question has been asked a million times and answered a million times. If you can fix it, great, if not, at least you will know what you are talking about when the tech arrives.

I can definitely agree with all of those items. Especially the last one. Google it. Phrase your problem in different ways. Even us geeks use this solution when WE don't know the answer. Most people that know the answer probably do some writing about it on the internet, we are geeks after all.

And on #4. When you get a computer, find that trustworthy geek and ask him to spend an hour setting up the computer with anti-virus, firewall and anti-spyware software. An ounce of prevention... will keep the computer healthy for a lot longer in the hyper connected world of today.

Oh yeah

I love G.K. Chesterton. And this is vintage.The Ironic Catholic: Friday's Chesterton QOTD

When such a critic says, for instance, that faith kept the world in darkness until doubt led to enlightenment, he is himself taking things on faith, things that he has never been sufficiently enlightened to doubt. That exceedingly crude simplification of human history is what he has been taught, and he believes it because he has been taught. I do not blame him for that; I merely remark that he is an unconscious example of everything that he reviles.

--G.K. Chesterton

Kinda reminds me of the "scientists" saying the global warming debate is closed because they have "consensus." As if that would pass the scientific test. Isn't science about forming a theory and then doing everything you can think of to break the theory? Or is it now to form a theory and get grants to perpetuate the theory and publish your theory so you get more grants?

At the center of it all

A friend referred me to this wonderful piece on the state of the Church. Fr. Martin Fox lets us know What's Going on in the Church? It is rather long but worth it. For the teaser I will give you the Chesterton quote he gave.

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.

The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob.

To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom -- that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect. —G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter 6.

Wisdom with words

I have always admired Chesterton's wisdom and way with words, even when I can't fully grasp them. But I fully grasp this bit of eloquence.Alive and Young: Chesterton on Drinking

A new morality has burst upon us with some violence in connection with the problem of strong drink; and enthusiasts in the matter range from the man who is violently thrown out at 12:30, to the lady who smashes American bars with an axe. In these discussions it is almost always felt that one very wise and moderate position is to say that wine or such stuff should only be drunk as a medicine. With this I should venture to disagree with a peculiar ferocity. The one genuinely dangerous and immoral way of drinking wine is to drink it as a medicine. And for this reason, If a man drinks wine in order to obtain pleasure, he is trying to obtain something exceptional, something he does not expect every hour of the day, something which, unless he is a little insane, he will not try to get every hour of the day. But if a man drinks wine in order to obtain health, he is trying to get something natural; something, that is, that he ought not to be without; something that he may find it difficult to reconcile himself to being without. The man may not be seduced who has seen the ecstasy of being ecstatic; it is more dazzling to catch a glimpse of the ecstasy of being ordinary. If there were a magic ointment, and we took it to a strong man, and said, "This will enable you to jump off the Monument," doubtless he would jump off the Monument, but he would not jump off the Monument all day long to the delight of the City. But if we took it to a blind man, saying, "This will enable you to see," he would be under a heavier temptation. It would be hard for him not to rub it on his eyes whenever he heard the hoof of a noble horse or the birds singing at daybreak. It is easy to deny one's self festivity; it is difficult to deny one's self normality. Hence comes the fact which every doctor knows, that it is often perilous to give alcohol to the sick even when they need it. I need hardly say that I do not mean that I think the giving of alcohol to the sick for stimulus is necessarily unjustifiable. But I do mean that giving it to the healthy for fun is the proper use of it, and a great deal more consistent with health.

The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other sound rules--a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.

Drink not because you need it, but precisely because you don't. Wine is a gift of God, but one that is easily abused. But in the context here, adding to revelry is quite normal. And very refreshing after a hard day of labor.

On this day

On this day, back in the summer of '68, a legend was born. Or more to the point, Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae. And as the legend went, this was the day the Catholic Church would officially be left in the past. It turns out Pope Paul VI was prophetic rather than stuck in a dark closet.

See John's wonderful post over at Catholic Dads for a breakdown of the prophetic encyclical, Still Right After All These Years

One item he highlights is how G. K. Chesteron could dispense of the Overpopulation Myth with a simple sentence.

G. K. Chesterton wrote, "The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him whether he is the surplus population, or if he is not, how he knows he is not."

Obsessed with Sovereignty

Shellie brings out a marvelous point from Chesterton's The Catholic Church and Conversion.

Satan tend to attack us in our blind spot. We have many traits that we tend to think of as strong points, but often they are our biggest weakness.

Me, I am pretty laid back. I don't let things bug me or get too upset. But if I wasn't married to my better half, that trait would probably become dominant and I would be lazy and care about nothing. I don't lack faith, I lack zeal. So I could easily become a one day a week church guy. If I even would make that effort.

So it maybe the Devil's greatest triumph to have church shoppers looking to find their "niche". Considering our fallen nature, if you find a church that agrees with you on most things, perhaps that is the worst place for you to be.