w00t for the power of the citizenry.

But that’s not the reason I’m posting this entry.

I’m posting the entry because of the apparently slack standards of news services. This — and many other reports I’ve seen lately — appears to have been either:

(a) written by several different people and not copy-edited

(b) cobbled-together from several reports around the world and not copy-edited

(c) not copy-edited

Notice the common-denominator in the above points.

Seeing the same piece of information repeated several times in the same report smacks to me of apparent laziness.

And in the award for Shameless repetition, we have:

“…Qian Xun was nicknamed Pumpkin, after the Pumpkin Patch-brand clothing she was wearing when she was found in Melbourne…”

“…She was nicknamed Pumpkin, after the Pumpkin Patch-brand clothing she was wearing when she was found in Melbourne…”

The award for the most gratuitous use of the same fundamental points goes to:

“…Murder suspect Nai Yin Xue was found by police with his pants around his ankles and his hands tied with his own belt after being captured by a group of angry Chinese Americans…”

“…”They had basically taken his pants and tied his legs up and taken his belt off and tied his hands up, so he was very much in custody by the time our officers got to the scene,” he said…”

“…”Local authorities got wind of the incident and arrived on the scene only to find the suspected murderer hogtied and detained by a number of men.”…”

The award for emotive geography goes to:

“…The abandonment of Xue’s daughter caused outrage in Australia and New Zealand, and led to the establishment of the Little Pumpkin Trust in both countries…”

“..Qian’s half sister helped establish the Little Pumpkin Trust in Australia and New Zealand…”

The award for television over-exposure is for:

“…Authorities in America had recently said they were closing in on the fugitive, and his image had appeared on America’s Most Wanted…”

“…The website for the America’s Most Wanted television program says Xue was caught after Chinese-American locals recognised him…”

“…”The arrest was based on the news reports and the internet and America’s Most Wanted,” Hession said…”

The Where’s Wally award goes to:

“…Xue had now been transferred to the Dekalb County Jail where he will be held until US Marshalls take him into custody…”

“…Xue is now in custody while it is determined what legal jurisdiction he faces….”

The Stating-the-bleedingly-obvious award goes to:

“…Murder suspect Nai Yin Xue was found by police..”

“…He is accused of Liu’s murder…”

“..Xue, who is suspected of killing his wife, has been charged with being a fugitive and for being wanted in New Zealand…”

I’m sure there’s more, but the point is well and truly made: it’s an abominable news report and the “with Staff Reporters, stuff.co.nz and Agencies” is little more than a disclaimer rather than giving proper credit to the sources of the report.

This is really sloppy journalism, but I’m up for alternative interpretations (other than a 5-minute deadline, which is just tommyrot on an online newspaper).

Okay, bored now.

I found a link for a Fake Steve Jobs round-up of the Macworld conference, and thought it might be worth a look. Cool, I thought; I quite like the blog — even though some of the readers are obviously sexist pigs (take a look at some of the Photocrank pictures if you doubt my appraisal) — and thought this might be an amusing diversion to what I was doing: translating incomprehensible tech-speak into something that people other than the author could read without a fairly high inhalation of peyote and camel-dung.

First I got a crappy and incomprehensible IBM advert, but hey, you expect that sorta thing on some online news reports; I lived with it.

Then there was a lady news reporter — no, not FSJ — saying how there’d be a report on Macworld. Cool, I thought.

Then there was a second ad.

And that was the point I killed the page. Arse-factor Zero; you lost me within the first 30 seconds. And that’s what happens these days guys. Don’t inundate people with crapervising, we’re Not Interested Anymore! And it wasn’t like I could just click the progress indicator because each of these babies was a self-contained presentation.

Morons.

Froot-loops.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUrCF7fpViw&rel=1]

Choice quotes:

“…If we can just save one person’s soul…”

“…I don’t know if you’ve seen Kirk Cameron’s ‘Left Behind’…”

“…Noah’s Ark is real, and the Millenium Falcon is fake…”

“…When they die, and they’re judged, then they’ll go to hell… according to my beliefs they’re going to go to hell…”

So today I looked at the blogs I usually look at.

Fake Steve Jobs hadn’t added anything since yesterday.

Vista Sucks isn’t adding much regularly (maybe once a week; come on! I’m a bloggict, I need my fix once a day at the very least!)

Rory Neopoleon had some new content and some additional links.

This one looked interesting — Laura Foy — except, What The Hell is “Microsoft Silverlight“? Surely they’re not creating a “competitor” to flash? Or even to Youtube. Please don’t tell me they’re doing this because I hate the pain caused by broken ribs, and that’s exactly what will happen when I LMAO and fall onto the floor.

Well, you can see from the link, that I’ve found some information. Talk about missing the bloody boat.

Oh my aching sides.

Okay, thanks to this article, the treo might just be syncing properly…

I deleted all the windows sync settings from the treo, and have paired the computer and the treo once again.

If this works, I might just call it a night. It’s only been 4 hours. All right, 3 and a half at this point (I arrived here at about 6.30pm).

Well, it kind-of works. There’s still more contacts on the Palm than on the PC.

The addressbook seems to have synced properly though, so that’s nice.

Screw it. It’s after 10pm. I’m going home.

Okay. Success: it installed.

Now for the hard bit: getting the thing to (a) recognise there’s a treo connected, and (b) getting it to perform a full sync without crapping-out halfway through with some incomprehensible error message that not even the programmers in Redmond understand.

Restart time: here we go again…

I just had a heart-stopping moment there: straight after the PC manufacturer rubbish (Press F8 to do unspeakable acts to the BIOS), there was a black screen and a blinking cursor.

Phew, Windows hasn’t suddenly turned into a turgid pile of horse droppings infested with the worms of a thousand parasites. Well, no more than usual.

(By the way, before anyone complains how much I’m bagging windows tonight, consider, I’m well into my fourth hour on this sodding thing. I’m entitled to feel a little annoyed).

Okay, sync-time!Well, we’re back to what we had before the uninstall/reinstall loop.

Activesync refuses to accept there’s a Treo connected, while Windows syas there is.

Found New hardware it keeps saying, like a small dog with a sudden unabiding love for your leg.

Okay, I’ve waited a bit, and restarted the treo. Activesync seems to think it can deal with it now. And we’re Synchronising……with another sodding status bar that does NOTHING!

Let’s see what happens next…

Come to the UAE, get arrested for having poppy seeds on your clothing!

As a good friend pointed out “…It’s stupidly ironic, given that they’re trying to promote themselves as a business hub…”

I think this gets ten points for Moronic abuse of power and is in top-spot at this time.

If I can keep the attention-span up, there’ll be an award at the end of the year for The Dumbest Thing on the Planet.

For the love of…

What’s all this sudden panic and worry about oil and the cost thereof? For crying-out-loud, Peak oil has been and gone. Why the hell aren’t we — in this Great Southern Land of high temperatures and lots of sun– putting stacks of money into solar and alternative fuel research.

All this will do is expend millions on what’s a band-aid solution at best, and a total waste of money at worst. Why not stick some serious money into something we can supply in abundance: sunshine? If they spent all the money they’re going to spend on searching for gas and petroleum into a solar panel for every rooftop in the country, we won’t need anywhere near as much fuel as we’re consuming now and into the future.

Well, I’ve had some luck finding people with the same sort of HP printer problems as I’ve experienced. Glad to see I’m not the only one losing time and energy attempting to do something as simple as installing a printer.

It just goes to show what I was saying earlier: HP isn’t a company I’d like to deal with on an ongoing basis.

Honestly, if they made any other items in the world with this degree of difficulty to get them working, they’d be out of business in three minutes flat. What is it with the computer industry churning out stuff that becomes incredibly difficult to use?

Dear Hewlett Packard,

I have a friend who owns both a Windows XP PC and a HP Officejet 9110 multifunction print,fax,scan,copy machine.

I’ve recently been asked by her to clean-up and reinstall her system for her, a task which took a little time due to the computer being the aforementioned Windows machine.

However, I have achieved this task admirably.

That is, until it came to reinstalling your printer.

Initially I thought that the Windows drivers might handle the printer; the system certainly popped up saying the system had found the printer with monotonous regularity. But alas, this did not work once I shifted the printer to the Apple wireless network. It didn’t even work when the printer was connected to the computer!

So, I reconnected the printer to the computer and started again, with your purpose-built HP Officejet 9110 CDs which came with the unit.

This took a little time to install, but it wasn’t an issue, I felt like a latte anyway. When I arrived back from the shop, I found the software had installed. A quickish restart, and there appeared to be no more complaints.

Being the arse-covering tech that I am, I tried to print. This worked. Good; just what I was hoping for.

So I tried to scan something.

The printer initially came up with an error stating there was no software installed.

Funny, I thought, I could have sworn I just had a latte while waiting for the software to install. A quick check revealed my empty cup and there, in the Start Menu, was HP printer software.

Odd, I thought.

So I tried the process in reverse by firing up your image management software. Another latte later and it was up and running.

I clicked the scan button in the UI and was greeted with a message saying there was an error connecting to the scanner.

I checked the cable. Yes, connected. But of course it was connected; it just printed something.

Right, third try; Let’s try someone else’s software: Apple’s Bonjour in this case.

This solved the printing, but not the scanning.

Back to the drawing board, or more accurately, the Control Panel and the Add Remove Programmes folder, where I attempted to uninstall the HP printer programmes.

But to no avail; An error message told me I would have to attempt uninstallation again once I’d restarted the machine.

I resisted the urge to go out and get another latte; the caffeine was beginning to make me twitchy (or perhaps it was the ongoing frustrating failures of your software to speak with your hardware?). No matter; I was made of sterner stuff, so restarted the machine once more.

Then I tried the same process: Start>Control Panel>Add Remove Programmes.

And I got the same error message.

I wondered briefly if I had offended some heathen god, but persevered, finding an unistallation programme in the Start>Programs>HP printer folder. This uninstallation worked, and required only one more restart of the system.

Like the dutiful hardware user that I am, I performed said restart, located the HP CD once more and commenced the software reinstallation process. I went for lunch, knowing that it would finish some time before I arrived back.

And I was right, it had finished, and required another restart to make things work.

So I restarted the system and tried printing again. This worked. Good.

I tried scanning again. This did not.

I’m at a loss why your hardware won’t talk to your software and vice-versa on a clean installation of Windows XP SP2. There’s a direct connection, there’s nothing wrong with the cable (as evidenced by the fact the printer can receive a print message and that XP goes freaking bananas and beeps repeatedly at me when it’s connected); so what’s the issue?

Perhaps it thinks I should be running Vista. Think again bozo.

Perhaps it misses the old installation of XP? So sorry, it’s dead; move on.

Perhaps even, it just doesn’t like the muttering and cursing I have allowed to be uttered in its presence while trying to get it to work? Well, to quote The Master: tough, I’m like that when I’m frustrated at inane plastic objects refusing to work.

Whatever the reason, one thing is certain: as long as there is breath in my lungs, as long as I have conscious thought processes going through my head, I will Never Ever purchase an HP product.

Yours with much love and kisses,

Lisa 4.0