IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Microsoft Problem - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I recently purchased a copy of Microsoft's "Office Home & Business". I made an error in trying to install it on my laptop and could not find a way to recover from that error. While trying to achieve remedy, I got some baffling screen messages like "You are not the owner of this case." and "We can't find your subscription."

I requested assistance from Microsoft's support but all I got as a result was to become utterly bewildered. Shortly afterward, in came the Microsoft message below to which I made the shown e-mail reply. Results thus far:  Nothing. No answer. Silence. The product remains useless.

Having gotten nowhere with all of that, I tried to reinstall my Office 2007 suite to get back to where I had been before the onset of this debacle and guess what: My Office 2007 suite doesn't work properly anymore either. Via Outlook, I can send out e-mails but I cannot receive them.

Within the bounds of polite language, can anyone offer any suggestions?

Antiques and Fossils - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

What is the difference between an antique and a fossil? If an antique gets to be old enough, does it qualify for fossilhood?

It has been suggested to me that an antique, however old it might be, forever remains an antique because it was created by human hands. Some measure of artisanship was required to have created an antique while a fossil comes into being through natural processes that do not involve human intervention.

Still, the Cro Magnon cave paintings are sometimes referred to as fossil art even though someone had to do something by hand to bring those images into being. Prehistoric spear tips are also the results of creative activity but they too are sometimes called fossil artifacts.

So then, what's the threshold? When and by what criteria did those and/or other entities make the transition?

Vanity Plates, Part 3 - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Still more folks expressing their personal philosophies in eight letters or less:

Plate Street Obstruction - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

There is a nearby street intersection where some new signs were installed in such a way as to block a driver's view of oncoming traffic. I e-mailed this picture of the problem to the town's Highway Department.

This is what happened:

By simply raising the plates, street viewability was restored. Of course, those plates should never have been installed wrongly in the first place.

Still, if you see some municipal infrastructure issue in your neighborhood, don't hesitate to say something because, all cynicism aside, doing so can work.

False Attributions - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I have heard of, been told about and actually met various persons who having become ill in some way, they then TOLD their doctor what they wanted that doctor to prescribe as treatment for their ailment. Often included in the recitations presented to me were phrases such as "Doctors don't know anything."

One example was a child care professional who should have known better but who asserted that "All antibiotics work in three days." Some doctors have been known to capitulate to sufficiently strident patient demands based on "reasons", however misguided, but perhaps did so supposing that their giving in would not lead to harm.

When someone who becomes ill and then for "reasons" insists on receiving treatments known to be ineffective but who actually recovers, they will then insist that their recovery was in consequence of the treatment they had insisted upon receiving.

I am more inclined to think that those fortunate recoveries were achieved more in spite of having shunned valid medical care rather than because of that avoidance.

The nonsensical "reasons" why many people have shunned vaccination, the nonsensical "reasons" for touting Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquin as Covid remedies and the nonsensical "reasons" for non-compliance with basic rules of hygiene are why Covid deaths in the US have arrived in the one-million range. By dint of much improper oratory, the tragic effects of all of those "reasons" were made all the worse.

There are two responses I have observed from having this matter spelled out. One is quietude in the seemingly firm persuasion that doctors really are wrong and that the truth stands known only to those outside of credentialed medical information sources.

The other response is an eruption of profanity, invective, accusations of ignorance, epithets such as (fill-in-the-blank)-tards and sometimes orders to shut up or else. Sadly, I have seen and/or heard each and all of these at one time or another.

I remember a TV repair article I once read when television repair was one of my big interests many years ago. The article's author wrote of being told that "every time" a television picture's vertical height went bad, it was the vertical output tube. That had once been true in one customer's set so obviously it had to always be true. The writer's admonition to his readers was to not fall victim to any such fallacy.

Ditto in the third paragraph above.

Thirty Millennia - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

From the following URL:

https://www.universetoday.com/155169/nasas-upcoming-spherex-mission-will-map-the-entire-universe-in-infrared-every-6-months/

We read:

"NASA's Upcoming SPHEREx Mission Will map the Entire Universe in Infrared Every 6 Months"

If I understand the article, the plan is to compare successive sky surveys which I imagine means using image subtraction techniques. When they find differences, high resolution observational attention will then be devoted to those differences using the Webb telescope.

We also read:

"....  the Hubble Space Telescope has given us amazing views of the heavens, but in its 30-year mission, it has only captured about 0.1% of the total sky."

That means that only 0.1% of the sky, only one one-thousandth of the sky, has been imaged by Hubble in its thirty years of service. By extrapolation, at that same rate of observations, imaging the entire sky would take Hubble thirty-thousand years or thirty millennia.

That's a sobering thought, isn't it.

Actually, the "Enitre" adjective is a bit overstated. The survery will capture 99% of the sky, but hey, who's counting?