To Jocelyn Rowley, for her Amazon contribution, and to David Tweeten, for the DVD of Merchant and Ivory’s trippy Savages. Very much appreciated!
A few site notes:
1. We’re working on the PW Pub, which will be a satellite site for guest posters and those who want to carry on conversations outside of PW proper. Posts from that site will occasionally be plucked and placed on the PW main site, at my whim. We’ll probably just use Expression Engine to power the site (Word Press takes far longer to build, and has to be done from scratch), though that’s not definite yet. A while back we put together a working prototype using Drupal, but I’m not sure where it is. May have gotten lost during one of my hardware failures.
At any rate, I expect the Pub will be ready in the next couple of weeks, if not sooner. And you have to admit — it sure beats the hell out of all these “cafes,” which are the kinds of places that insist on “civil” behavior.
Whereas pubs can get a bit raucous — up until the bouncer comes and asks you to make your exit by way of gathering you up by the collar and throwing you into a stack of empty Guinness kegs.
2. Does anyone know how to change a laptop’s hard drive? I’m hoping that should I be able to change out the fried hard drive (at least, I hope that’s the problem) on my old HP laptop, I’ll be able to use Photoshop — which I have available for PC but not for Mac. Is it difficult? Something I can do myself without sending a lot of unwanted electricity through my body?
Would I have to update system Bios or anything like that?
3. We’re still tweaking the software, so if you find something wrong, please drop a note in the Father’s Day thread. Include what browser you are using (with version) so we can correct as many errors as we can.
4. Evidently, someone over at Firedoglake [update: and Sadly, No! — who predictably notes, once again, that I’m a “failed academic” and “horrible writer” who isn’t at all funny] has called me a “meta-concern troll” or some such in response to a post I wrote expressing a bit of sadness over Scott Kaufman’s having clung to the notion that the attacks he’d been receiving from (many) progressives for taking to task Jesus General (for an obviously flawed misreading of a Brittney Gilbert post), was an isolated incident that had little to do with political ideology.
I didn’t bother to read the FGL post taking me to task — I suspect it came from TRex, a guy who has proven to be such a bitchy fop that other bitchy fops are considering handing in their wine-tasting credentials — but I’m guessing that the charge forgot to mention the inconvenient fact that Scott has actually guest posted here, and that we share much in common in terms of our academic proclivities. Which should suggest, to the careful reader, that my concern for what I take to be Scott’s ideological blindness was (and continues to be) genuine.
Scott is a bright guy whose politics diverge from mine just as we reach a common (and crucial) point of linguistic understanding. He is a progressive idealist, I think — and while I find the strategies he (and Walter Benn Michaels, for that matter) adopt in their push for social justice wrongheaded and potentially self-deconstructing in practice, I nevertheless remain convinced that he at least arrives at his prescriptions from a point of intellectual honesty and rhetorical rigor.
— Not so much the lynchmob that hangs out at sites like Firedoglake — whose sole purpose, it seems to me, is to try to marginalize anyone who dares challenge their New Progressive world view, a world view based around a cynical will to power whose mechanisms and machinations I’ve examined numerous times, and whose vicious, enforced orthodoxy has convinced actual progressives like Chris Clarke to distance himself from them.
Which is really just a long-winded way of saying that perhaps the New Progressive community should stop worrying about me so much, and start paying attention to the way that policing their own has turned “manufacturing consent” into “fidelity to the established narrative of the state.”
Because there’s something very eastern bloc about that.
5. And in the eastern bloc, of course, the only pie is made from potatoes. And sweat.
****
update: If you happen to have a blog, try tracking back to this post. I want to see if trackbacks are working, given that they’ve been virtually inoperable for me for 2 years now.
Thanks.
Hmmm. I used to push reprobates out of the Emerald Isle right into the street light outside the door. At least they wouldn’t end up sprawled on the road.
I prefer the term "overly jolly" to "reprobate", MJ.
And thanks for you concern on a tengentially related matter vis-a-vis General Order #1 a couple of nights ago. However, GO #1 does not apply to me.
On topic, I often wonder if those practicing/developing/espousing what Jeff calls "the New Pregressive world view" could boil it down to ten or so essential elements. That’s not a rhetorical request on my part, because lately, it sure is a confused and contradictory bunch over there.
At a certain message board that I frequent, there is a bitter and long-standing feud over the relative merits of pie and cake. Persons expressing deliberately provocative or contrarian views are liable to be denounced as cakists and slotted for re-education.
And I need to use the spell check.
Hi Jeff,
Different makers hide the hard drives in differnt spots. If you’re lucky, (with HP you might be) it is a single screw on the bottom that removes a cover and the hard drive can be slid 1/2 inch (to disconnect it from the pin assembly) then simply drop out. If you are unlucky you will have to remove the keyboard. I recently did a sony that the drive was in the center of the system accessable theu the kb. too much brain damage. Pulling the battery is always a good idea, not for your safety but to protect the computer.
email if you have othr questions.
Scott
Re: I doubt you’ll need to update BIOS (though that wouldn’t hurt).
The laptop likely has replacement instructions online at HP in a PDF. There are no lethal voltages in a laptop. Turn it off, touch a coldwater pipe for a minute to reduce static discharge danger. Take out the old drive and tote it to the local, friendly Best Buy/Circuit City/Microcenter and tell them the model laptop you had. That will ensure you get a suitable replacement.
How much memory is in it? If it is less than a gig and it has the capacity for it, you might increase it to at least that amount.
The system will detect a new hard drive at power-on self test and ask to save the new configuration. You should boot off the CD/DVD with an operating system recovery disk you received when you bought the laptop., which may require restting the boot order. Then cross your fingers and hope that XP (is it XP or Win 2000?) discovers everything OK. You should have on hand all the driver CDs you received when you bought the system, as well, in case XP asks for anything it does not already contain.
Good luck!
testing
testing testing testing testing, is this long enough.
Dance, Monkey!
Jeff Goldstein, who has just changed blogging platforms from EE to WordPress, requests,
If you happen to have a blog, try tracking back to this post. I want to see if trackbacks are working, given that they’ve been virtually inoperable for me fo…
On the old Compaq (pre-merger) laptop that was our first, the damn thing had to practically disassembled to get the hard drive out so I could copy the contents (the motherboard had keeled over so except for the drives it was a giant paperweight).Again though, that was an older model and I haven’t tried to get at the HDD in our second laptop yet. It’s already lasted several times longer than the first, but then the first was being used at the time as my wife’s sole home computer and was running a home weather station, which meant it had to be left on all the time. That was a bad idea, apparently…
In the realm of the uber-picky, I note that the "Next page" tag at the bottom of the home page reads "ext page." Could be an IE6 issue, though.
Take that potato pie, add hamburger and onions, and you’ve got pasties.
Not the kind you’d wear over your nipples, although you could if you wanted.
Also, I can’t help noticing that, despite the changeover, McGehee’s comments are still showing up.
HAHAHAHAHA! I slay me!
(*duck*) (built in spell check is way cool for this word idiot.)
Swapping out your laptop hard drive is a fairly simple and inexpensive process. The swap only takes a couple of minutes, it’s the easy part. It’s the reinstallation of the OS and all your apps that takes the most time. Even so, I highly recommend it. If your laptop is a fairly basic model and is at least a year or 2 old, then you’ll need an ATA notebook hard drive and you can pick up an 80GB model for around $60 at NewEgg.I’d be happy to help you out so feel free to touch base if you decide to take on the task yourself.
I think that’s a browser problem — you keep clicking to posts I’ve commented on.
Jeff,
Depending o the size of the replacement drive, you may indeed have to update the BIOS first. Some HP laptops had drive limitations inadvertantly built into them & cannot recognize the faster, larger drives. On HP’s websote, read the initial configuration page which should list the total amount of RAM & hard-drive size acceptible. In addition to sometimes allowing for larger drives, most of the HP updates also address power use issues, interaction w/ the embedded USB ports, etc, etc.
In Soviet Russia, sweat potato pie eats you!
Must be tough when the topic turns to cheesecake.
Seems people can trackback to me, but I still can’t trackback to other sites.
What in the hell IS it about this site that doesn’t allow me to leave trackbacks?
<blockquote>What in the hell IS it about this site that doesn’t allow me to leave trackbacks?</blockquote>I blame the trolls. And George Bush, of course.
Okay, you cannot embed html. I’ll remember that.
And in the eastern bloc, of course, the only pie is made from potatoes. And sweat.
And beets, many’s the time I’ve enjoyed some nice, beet pie.
Sweat potato? Sounds nasty.
Cranky-D, actually you can embed HTML.
What you have to do is stop the page loading before the editor script loads. You then get a plain text box without all the neatsykeen buttons, and it acts almost like the one on the old site.
Of course, if you are on high speed you may have to have very quick reflexes. But for us dialup dinosaurs it works quite well.
Regards,
Ric
Were my reflexes fast enough?
Chris Clarke is one hell of a writer. And I disagree with most of what he writes. I think Marcus Aurellius’s adage applies: The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Personally, I take comfort in Kennth Clarke’s thoughts at the close of his BBC tour de force, Civilisation:
A concept against which TBogg, TRex, Jane Hamsher, Jesus’ General, Atrios, Kos, et al come up very, very small.
Jeff, here’s another handy little thing to have, on the cheap. This thing will allow you to explore that drive you pull out of the laptop via USB, if there’s any life in it, and retrieve anything you need from it, Gaia willing and the wadi don’t rise.
Jeff, I’ve sent an email offering to help with the HP laptop. I’m hoping the protein at celluloid address is still valid. Enjoy your week.Rick
Not much I can add to the computer advice besides stressing that you do your research at the HP website. The most difficult part about laptops is getting the darn things open without a hammer.
Love the new look! I see there’s still some problems with the WYSIWYG comments editor, but this has got to be the way to go. Inbedding formatting commands manually and flipping back and forth with a preview window went out with WordStar in word processing and I’m amazed it’s still so common in the internet world. Oddly enough, this is the first time I’ve seen a WYSIWYG comments editor in a blog, but then I don’t get out much.
Mmmm, cheesecake. I’d recommend more cheesecake, but not with this crowd. The world’s not ready..