Day: February 11, 2010

Captain America steeping in the tea baggers

Marvel Comics is taking some heat for what’s being taken as a swipe against the Tea Baggers, in the latest issue of Captain America.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100211/ts_ynews/ynews_ts1129

I heard about this while watching Keith Olbermann. Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada issued a statement that seemed to implicate… the letterer?? Then, in the middle of the piece, Bill Clinton’s doctors held a press conference about his heart stent operation. I just checked the MSNBC site and this part of Olbermann’s show isn’t there, so I grabbed it myself from the re-broadcast at 10. I sure can make good video transfers off of Verizon FiOS TV, huh?

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2010/FEB/Olbermann.flv 512 384]

Clinton’s doctors refused to say what brand of stent was used but if it’s a Kamen stent there’s still a comics connection, because it was invented by Dean Kamen, son of the late comic book artist Jack Kamen.

XP BSOD

Microsoft may now have a worse public relations problem than Toyota has:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9155419/Windows_patch_cripples_XP_with_blue_screen_users_claim?source=CTWNLE_nlt_dailyam_2010-02-11

I don’t automatically take Windows updates. I set XP to notify me and then I click “Advanced” to review them. That way I can ignore Office-related changes that don’t apply to my home computers. But yesterday all of the updates looked like necessary security fixes, so I took them on my desktop and netbook computers. If I have to deal with this BSOD problem I will be very, very unhappy.

Follow-up: It seems that if the first restart of Windows is OK after the update for KB977165, you won’t go BSOD. I updated my Dell Inspiron 530 desktop and Acer Aspire One netbook, and both were OK after restarting. I have not yet updated Carol’s laptop and Eric’s tower PC, and for now I think I’ll leave them that way.

I don’t know how widespread these crashes are. The update was released two days ago, and news of the XP failures doesn’t seem to be in the non-technical media.

Follow-up: Microsoft has pulled the patch.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9156118/Microsoft_stops_serving_Windows_patch_blamed_for_blue_screens

Follow-up: Appears as though the affected machines might have already been infected.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1764&tag=nl.e589