The Binary Circumstance

Both the Seattle Times and the Seattle-PI reported today that Ric Weiland, who was one of the first five employees at Microsoft, left millions to nonprofit organizations focused on gay rights and HIV/AIDS. For many of the organizations, the donations he gave them were the largest donations they have ever received.

Weiland committed suicide last year at the age of 53 after a long battle with depression.

I had never heard of him before today but have certainly used products he wrote or developed. I found his story fascinating. He was obviously a brilliant, remarkable gay man who lived a full, rich life.

I find it interesting that he was unable to find happiness even though he was in a long-term relationship, had strong family connections and was active and respected in his community. We are constantly being told that those things are protective against unhappiness. But in his case those things and the fact that he was in great physical shape and very wealth were not enough. Depression is a puzzling problem.

I’d certainly like to know a lot more about his important life. It sounds like his depression was being managed until he suffered so many deaths in his family. Personally I find it depressing that a gay man of such enormous accomplishments felt he had leave much of his fortune to support the battle for basic human rights for gays and lesbians in our culture. I wonder if that got to him as well. If he had been straight his life would have been different just because of the political climate in our country.

I had a very frustrating technical problem with my laptop today. My search of the Internet revealed that many other people are having the same problem. I finally figured it out and so I’ll describe the problem and then what the solution was.

I’ve been using Yahoo! e-mail for years but when I clicked on an e-mail link to send an e-mail, Outlook Express came up. I went into the control panel and chose Internet Options/Programs and then looked at the drop-down list of programs and Yahoo! Mail was not one of the choices. What happened to it? It’s been my default for a long time.

I checked the Yahoo! Mail help question: How can I make Yahoo! Mail my default email application? It said that if Yahoo! Mail didn’t appear on the list of default e-mail programs, you should download Yahoo! Messenger. I checked my Yahoo! Messenger and I already had the latest version installed.

Then I chatted with a tech support person who basically walked me through all the steps that I’d already performed. Finally she suggested that I uninstall Yahoo! Messenger and then download it again and re-install it.

I did that and Yahoo! Mail still didn’t show up on the list of default e-mail programs.

I then checked my desktop and noticed that the Yahoo! Mail program worked fine. It appeared on the list of possible default e-mail programs. I also had a desktop icon named Yahoo! Mail. When I clicked the Start button, then choose “all programs,” there was a program called Yahoo! Mail on the list along with Yahoo! Messenger. My laptop only had the Yahoo! Messenger program and no Yahoo! Mail program and no desktop icon.

I finally realized that I had installed Yahoo! Messenger differently on the two computers.

The solution to the problem is to install the entire Yahoo! Messenger which includes Yahoo Browser Services. I had been eliminating that part and the Yahoo! Toolbar on my laptop because I don’t use the Toolbar and the Browser Services didn’t say anything about being necessary for the default mail function. You don’t have to check the buttons to make Yahoo! your home page or make Yahoo! your default search engine.

I still don’t use the Toolbar but after downloading and installing with the Browser Services I checked the Start/All Programs> list and there was an entry for Yahoo! Mail as well as Yahoo! Messenger. Going to Control Panel/Internet Options/Programs revealed that Yahoo! Mail was now on the list of options for default e-mail.

Now when I click on an e-mail link, I get Yahoo!

Dreamhost, which has been pretty stable in recent months, had some serious network problems the past couple of days. My site has been down most of the past 18 hours.

But it’s back up for now!

When DreamHost crashes, it’s always a BIG event.

Speedmatters.org has a great tool for testing the speed of your broadband connection. Once it has figured out your download and upload speeds, it presents a chart comparing you to your state and other countries around the world.

You can then use this tool to see what the average speeds are by state and county. Their statistics are based on actual speed tests done by users of their speed testing tool. (That’s why they ask for zip codes.)

My speed is so slow that you would think I was living in the third world, except that a lot of third world countries probably have faster broadband than I do. My ISP (Qwest) and I will be having a little chat in the very near future.

Timothy Karr of the Huffington Post writes about the problem and why the U.S. is falling so far behind the rest of the world.

The Bush administration, which has pledged to make broadband cheap and affordable to everyone by 2007, is instead painting the same pretty picture of broadband success.

“I think our policies are a success,” FCC chairman Kevin Martin told phone company executives last week.

“We have the most effective multiplatform broadband in the world,” the administration’s top technologist, John Kneuer, told Web experts in San Francisco last week (to protests from his audience).

Kneuer says the real problem is not bad broadband services or market failure in America, but faulty data — blaming those who compiled the recent OECD broadband report for getting the facts wrong.

[…]

Phone and cable’s complete market dominance has translated to anti-competitive, anti-consumer practices that stifle innovation and push our speeds and services generations behind those available in other nations.

“It’s not just a matter of national pride,” SavetheInternet.com’s Ben Scott told Newsweek. “A country that’s fully connected has access to tools that let citizens do jobs that we can’t do. The cost of falling behind can be hundreds of billions of dollars every year.”

A few network giants like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have staked out the market for themselves. They use aggressive lobbying, phony research and campaign contributions to maintain this control at our expense.

Sadly, many of those now in power have bought in. By their words and decisions, people like Kneuer and Martin now help phone and cable cement their dominance — implementing rules that help them further exploit consumers, stifle new innovation and insulate their status quo.

With the Fourth of July less than a week away, I think it’s time for Americans to commit themselves to understanding just how much damage both Republicans and Democrats have done to freedom in this country by whoring to special interests for the sole purpose of increasing their own power and personal profit.