Watch out when business people recommend their clients

When a friend recommends someone to sell your house, tile your bathroom or pull the engine out of your antique VW, stop up your ears and run for cover. Pause, steep some tea, pour yourself a glass of sherry or amaretto. Have a beer or a latte. Sit and contemplate alternatives. Or at least ask a few questions and do some research. Sure your friend means well, but good intentions and good advice are not the same thing.

Especially beware when friends, relatives and others recommend people who are clients in their businesses. Just because the client successfully buys services or goods doesn't mean they are good at providing goods or services themselves. Many businessmen espouse the motto, "One hand washes the other." So, they try to throw a little business to their clients by recommending them. They don't necessarily know anything about their clients practices or reputation as a service provider, and are not aware of complaints or legal actions pending against them either. All they know, is they guy pays his bill or they hope he will soon...

The unmerited assumption that a business person is trustworthy can play out badly for the one doing the trusting. I know this from painful experience.

A friend recommended a real estate agent to me several years ago, quite a few years ago, THough th ending was eventually a good one with a different realtor it cost me a year of time to right it. The lesson I learned was this - don't fail to investigate and read the fine print because you think this person your friend recommended has your best interests at heart 

I recently heard another sad tale right in the family. My cousin-in-law who is a nice fellow and a very good businessman, recommended a mortgage banker to my Uncle, told the guy, the Uncle needed a fixed rate mortgage.

When the Uncle, after also asking for a fixed rate mortgage himself, reads the mortgage contract he sees that his interest rate is guaranteed for two years only. BUT INCREDIBLY HE SIGNS IT ANYWAY. After all his daughter's husband who is very smart, recommended the guy and he must know..... NOT NOT NOT! Next year his interest rate will sky-rocket because he assumed this was the best he could do since his daughter's hubby recommended him. Or in his case,  it likely has more to do with his irrational belief that the world would end before the two year initial interest rate expired....

ALWAYS investigate. May I take my own advice.....

Will the morning paper become an afternoon paper?

The News Times, which cut a bunch of staffers last summer, and which is under new ownership, seems to have a rotating deadline for its home delivery.

Once upon a time, the weekday paper was supposed to be delivered by 6 a.m. so people on their way to work could have it before they left for the day. No more. The new deadline is 8a.m. When a friend called at 8:20 this morning, the News Times answering machine bleated that if the paper hadn't be delivered by 11 p.m. to call back. 11 PM??? Perhaps the News Times is planning to return to its roots as an AFTERNOON PAPER. Or even an EVENING PAPER?

I doubt that. What is happening though, is a bit of difficulty staffing the home delivery roster. Home carriers are poorly compensated independent contractors on whom is foisted much of the true long term costs of delivery. They use their own vehicles, on which they are raking up milage, which lowers resale value. They pay for their own gas, oil, maintenance, and have higher insurance costs as well, and shovel out extra early in the snow. By contract, they must deliver the paper seven days a week, every week, every month of the year. If they want to go out of town, or have a day off, they have to pay someone else to make the deliveries while they are gone. The also have to keep books, and must "buy" their allotment of papers from the company.

Now that gas is over three bucks a gallon, I am wondering if the News Times is having difficulty finding people foolhardy enough to take the job. Enterprising boys and girls on bicycles are apparently in short supply as well. Moms think it's way too dangerous for them to be wheeling about unsupervised, at so early an hour when who knows who is lurking about.... Besides - they have to be in class before 8 a.m.!!! Wow. It's a different world.

Adults who do take the contracts soon realize after their first independent contractor's check - that they will net a pittance after their costs, to get up at 3 am. to make all their deliveries before six. These folks are getting wise to it all. As a small concession, apparently the company is hoping to make home delivery contracts more attractive by making the delivery deadline later.

Among the other staff cuts the paper has made - is the real human being who used to answer the phone when people called to say their paper hadn't arrived. All in all, some old-time subscribers are not happy. I know one who is planning go switch to the Daily News which is always in the neighbors driveway when she passes by on her 5:30 am walk. I suggested she could take a peak a Ct news online. She's considering the idea.

Ironically, readers who get home delivery are paying subscribers. Online readers, (the up and coming, thing for newspapers hoping to compete with Internet news) are supported by an expensive infrastructure, but they read between the gaudy, flashing animated ads for free.

Lessons & Carols tomorrow

• Tomorrow is Lessons and Carols. (a job not a belief). The concert is by the combined choirs of St Mary’s and the local Congregational church. Their choir has a LOT of men and they sing like vikings. TEN bases in the combined choir. I will be recording it all on my Olympus mini thing. I recorded the entire dress rehearsal which sounds pretty good. This time I placed the recorder on the shelf behind the organ with mics facing away from the singers and out towards the congregation. That resulted in a nice natural “reverb” from the vaulted ceiling!

We also have the benefit of two folks up front. The music director from the congregational church is tickling the organ keys for this one. Our director is conducting. They make a nice team! Finally, after all this churchy stuff I am heading to a solstice bonfire at a friend’s house.

Remembering the heat in the cold - my brush with heat stroke

Last night, in obscure moments of semi-sleep - I could hear what I thought was rain. This morning it was clear the sound was actually little frozen sleet-pellets hitting the roof. The walk and driveway were full of them and it was a peculiar walking experience - almost like walking on deep sand, rather than snow. Driving was tricky but by going slow, and with some skidding and sliding, things progressed. Out by the airport it was almost all white like driving in a cold cloud with hills and sky merging into white. I made it into work and back without a hitch.

Since it's 24 degrees outside my window, naturally I am thinking of hot weather.

During the one of the hottest summers on record, I made the incredible mistake of moving to burbs of Atlanta GA. Shortly after arriving, I went for a walk one day in a long lazy southern subdivision. I got lost and wondered for hours in the terrible afternoon heat. Later I learned it was 105 degrees that afternoon. I knew it was hot, as I was soaked in sweat and my mouth was parched. After an hour and half of passing houses that looked alike, my forehead was cold, and my hands were clammy. I stopped sweating altogether and imagined I would never be heard from again. About that time, I came to a school and I spied a water spigot on the foundation. First thing I stuck my whole head under the water, so it ran down my back and shoulders. Then once I was soaked, I felt a little better and I drank, thanking the fates no one had turned off the water during the summer recess. I stuck each foot and arm under the spigot too, so I was really soaked and cooled. Then I collapsed in the shade for almost an hour, getting up several times for more water. I was lucky I didn't die that day.

When I was rested, I started to walk very slowly, to float along really on my rubbery legs. Getting overheated takes a lot out of you. Finally I came to a commercial area. The first store I saw was an air-conditioned fast food joint where I ordered a large ice tea... New to the south, I had no idea how large a large drink was down there. It came in a bucket the size of bucket of fried chicken. I could have bathed in it..... But right at that moment, I just marveled and drank as much as I could for the trip home. I really had no idea where exactly I was. On a payphone, I called a friend who came in a lovely beatup air conditioned cougar to pick me up.

In praise of the Harper's Index

No, it's not a stock index, nor a fund index, nor related to maps, encyclopedias nor to a government census. Harper's Index is a page of offbeat statistics published each month in Harper's Magazine. We are talking odd and outlandish statistics that seem to flow into each other in some sort of semi-poetic stream-of-consciousness progression. A quasi organic tumble of cultural quirks - evidence from which (perhaps) deductions can be made. Need to know the percentage of Americans who claim they'd like to have a plug to the internet surgically hooked into their brains? The amount of CO2 released from opened champagne on New Year's Eve? The chances your daughter's bright red lipstick has an unsafe level of lead? You need this month's INDEX to find out...
(Note: Harper's Magazine is NOT to be confused with Harper's Bazaar which is NOT NOT NOT on my reading list.)

The Harper's Index that arrived today (on Page 15) has 39 tidy snippets of intrigue and outrage. Some of their stats hit like a sucker punch with a quick one-two rhythm. Here's an example of the one-two style. Tidbit number 29 - in the state of California 19,300 credit card disputes have been resolved since 2003. While that one fills readers with a satisfying sense of justice, it's a short-lived delusion. It's just the setup line. The punch is the next line which reveals that 94 percent were resolved in favor of the credit card company. On page 82 in a neat source box, you can discover that both these statistics were provided the Public Citizen, an organization founded by Ralph Nader

For the 37 other bits this month, including the three odd questions posed in the first paragraph - subscribe! Or go to the library! You can also wait two months and get the index online. Or if you know me, I can lend you the issue. And yes I realize I am plugging a bit of traditional media. I like it. If you are bored or in need of small talk stunners I urge you visit the Harper's Index Archive which runs all the way back to March of 1984. - regards and happy reading!

Books: Amitai Etzioni: The Spirit of Community

Etzioni’s Communitarianism Cookbook
(add morality to taste then stir until social movement rises)
by Mar Walker
an essay in response to the book The Spirit of Community by Amitai Etzioni
this was originally written for a grad class in 1997, has been posted on my website for years
and I also posted it to Amazon.com as a book review

A Morality “Play”

Picture the scene. On the lawn, beneath your bedroom window a crowd is gathering in the dark. They know your spouse’s car and that red coupe that pulled in at 2 a.m. isn’t it. Mrs. Abernathy, a strict communitarian who lives across the street was up taking an aspirin when she spotted this car and saw the shadowy form of some home-wreaker sneaking through the side door. Duty bound, she called out a few neighbors to help you keep your morals in line. Your spouse, who had just fallen asleep, makes an appearance in the window to disperse them. (It was inconvenient enough when the car broke down on the way home from a seminar. The red coupe is a loaner.) You’re mad, so you open the window muttering and fling tennis shoes into the retreating crowd of busybodies. In the morning, this ungrateful behavior will get its own round of censure by telephone.

Communitarianism - as proposed in Amitai Etzioni’s “The Spirit of Community” assumes the moral legitimacy and truth of your community’s assumptions about your life. It offers an external morality without epistemology, theology or logic, without any messy philosophic notions of essence or virtue, without judge or jury. It offers a slap-dash recipe for suffocating Stepford communities where neighbors are encouraged to interfere in each others lives. And this call to action is not grounded firmly in a basis of friendship, common humanity or agape caring as in Scott Peck’s work on community building.

Mr. Etzioni himself should not be pointing any fingers. His communitarian morality represents either an ineptly presented or a cleverly muddled patchwork of positions with a little something for everyone. His occasionally tempting construct was designed to attract supporters for an underlying agenda of campaign reform in Washington, which he openly states must be leveraged from a position outside of politics through the political energy of a new social movement tied to morality.

As I began reading this book, I wanted to like it. But I kept getting an uneasy feeling - that same odd feeling one gets when reading certain literature. For instance, Vladimir Nabakov’s Pale Fire - where the narrator’s voice is unreliable in ways that are not obvious at first. Although Etzioni’s awkwardly worded tome is not a novel, I believe it contains some fictions.

The self-declared “single core thesis” on which Etzioni states Communitarianism is based is that “Americans .... can now act without fear. We can act with out fear that attempts to shore up our values... will cause us to charge into a dark tunnel of moralist and authoritarianism that leads to a church-dominated state or a right-wing world.”

Besides the obvious difficulty in the notion of “shoring up” values, this statement is not a premise. "Trust me you liberals and libertarians, there is nothing to fear in supporting my as yet unstated proposals to curtail your self-centered freedoms," Etzioni seems to coo with the butterfly net carefully hidden behind his back. His self-declared premise does not undergird any of the recommendations he subsequently proposes - but it is the basis on which he selected them. He throws enough bones to both extremes so the unwary and the battle-weary might buy in hoping for consensus at last.

Americans today have an attitude of entitlement, Mr. Etzioni says. They demand rights without responsibilities. Large numbers don’t even bother to vote. Yes, I thought, it’s true. So let’s call a moratorium on new rights. Sure, I said I can buy that. The ones we have constitutionally are pretty substantial. While pointing to “rights” that have no legal foundation, Etzioni claims quite a few of our constitutional rights need to be “notched” just a tad. Like Ayn Rand, he dismisses “rights” to housing and heath care saying, “who will pay for them?” But when it comes to children of nice middle class families - never mind the bill, we are too money-centered. After all, children with two normal parents are important, unless they need housing or health care.

Individual conscience is not enough to inspire virtue, Etzioni states. Communities should marshal focused social pressure to force people to do right. Of course he admits that he personally didn’t have the backbone to say what he really thought about Japan’s “dirty tricks.” I guess it’s easier to wag a finger at a neighbor than risk censure from your intellectual peers at work. He later expresses dismay that the public pays so much attention to the private scandals of politicians. Hey - attack Washington about something that really matters and save the moral nit-picking for the neighbors.

The family should be strengthened, he says. Somebody should be home with the children. Etzioni repeatedly says it doesn’t have to be the wife. The wife can work at home or the husband can - a suggestion designed to resonate with liberals and still not offended the conservatives. It is a suggestion already among the compromises couples routinely work out without this communitarian guidance. And when he talks about the farm boys raised in moral homes and working for other farmers in moral family-like settings, it’s interesting to note how ineffective his externally imposed morality really is. The minute these farm boys head to the city they turn into reprobates according to Etzioni.

Just as an aside, he notes we are all born half a human and must find wholeness in marriage. He declares flatly that thousands of productive single and divorced people are “damaged” goods, “in every sense of the word.” This is common knowledge according to Etzioni, as he sees no need for argument or supporting evidence for this outrageous dehumanization of significant portion of the population. (Does this attitude foster community?) Let’s just turn up the social pressure to marry and make divorce more difficult at the same time, as he proposes. That way those who really didn’t want to marry in the first place can suffer long-term damage if they cave in to social pressure and tie the knot! Perhaps we can resurrect Joe McCarthy and get those damaged singles off the streets and free up their jobs for married folk who really count.

Where’s the beef?

With no real premise stated, the first two sections of the book set the communitarian table with a smorgasbord of many flexible cheerleading-type phrases and many contradictory statements. Even the books opening bit - the pathetic flag-waving “We hold these truths” says very little in specific terms. Yes - -”We can do “A” (fill in some appealing but vague proposal) without offending you by causing “B” (fill in some authoritarian horror.) Still, he suggests people get the word out, talk up what ever you think communitarianism means with your neighbors over the back fence.

No where in this patchwork of moralizing and reassurance do we find Etzioni’s motivations for stitching this crazy quilt together. It’s not until the third section “The Public Interest.” that we come to a clear sequence of cogent reasoning - which I propose is the underlying motive for the entire unwieldy structure in first two chapters. In this section he targets big-monied special interests in Washington. “What is missing is a wide recognition that special interests are at the core of our systemic problems, a consensus powerful enough to unlock their grip on our legislature,” (Page 221). Again “The ultimate goal is to replace a government by and for deep pockets with a political system that is based on the principle of one person one vote, one that is responsive to all members of the community.” (Except the damaged ones who are obviously only half human.)

What does Etzioni really want? What he calls a “neoprogressive, communitarian,” legislative solution:

Finance congressional elections with public funds.” (Starting on page 234)
“Curb the flow of private money into the coffers of members of congress.
Impose a ban on PACS.”
Reduce the cost of running for office by offering free TV and radio ads.
Promote disclosure of the political process by lobbyists sign into a registration book each time they visit a congressional office. (Then the power lunch might become even more powerful)
Enhance the enforcement of all rules, old and new
Enhance the role of political parties - Channel campaign contributions through political parties rather than directly to individual candidates. (Isn’t that the so-called “soft money” that is so hard to track.? I guess it might increase public confidence if we didn’t know our who was bought or who did the buying.)
To get these reforms Etzioni has a plan: “There must be a new source of political energy sufficiently powerful to over come strong opposition and to propel far reaching changes...” (Page 226) “For reform to succeed, reformers, like Archimedes, must find a point of leverage outside the political world in order to be able to change it...... the challenge is to find ways to mobilize the great underrepresented majorities.” (Page 227) “Historical experience suggest that social movements are the source of the needed political energy... They command cadres that mobilize the rank and file to what ever social action is called for...” (Page 230)

After bemoaning the failure of groups like Common Cause to create widespread change he says “....as I see it, what is missing is a broader agenda, one that goes beyond legislative reform and encompasses the deep moral issues at stake.... (Page 244) “Without a major social movement, the reforms required to render public policy responsive to the public at large will not take place.” (Page 245)

From the text of “The Spirit of Community” it’s hard to avoid concluding that entire moral construct of Etzioni’s communitarianism has been built to sign people up so later they can be called out to vote for his legislative reforms.

“It is sociologically naive to sit back and wait for new communities to spring up,” Etzioni says. Or social movements for that matter - why not build your own? ”It is often necessary, and there is nothing artificial or otherwise improper, in recruiting or training organizers and facilitators of we-ness,” he says. (Page 125)

However, as Etzioni’s brand of communitarianism attempts to cut a swath through the middle to pick up as much support as possible - it gets attacked from both edges. In a 1995 newsgroup post on the Progressive Sociology Network, Morton G. Wenger a professor of Sociology at the University of Louisville called Etzioni's ideas “a form of fascist ideology for the squeamish petit bourgeois.” Etzioni apparently responded by implied there were “reds under the bed” at the progressive network. On the other hand the libertarians cast glances across the middle from the other shoulder of the road: In a Sept. 1996 article published on the web by the libertarian Cato Institute, Tom G. Palmer calls Karl Marx, “an early and especially brilliant and biting communitarian critic of libertarianism.”

Greg Smith, Research Officer writing for Aston Charities’ Community Involvement Unit in London cited Etzioni's background. “Etzioni is a keen publicist writing in popular as well as academic journals, speaking in public and on the mass media....”

Could it be that the ideologic patchwork found in the first two chapters of The Spirit of Community and in the far less specific Communitarian Manifesto is not accidental and represents an attempt to lure as many people as possible into the fold?

In Chapter 1 of Smith’s on-line book “Community-arianism” Smith wondered how marginal groups or groups with divergent value systems could find a place in an America run by Communitarians.

“Although Etzioni denies that he is majoritarian and claims to accept pluralism there is an obvious problem in a diverse and plural society..... With a normative view of mainstream values and harmonious and homogenous local communities it is hard to see how groups with marginal or divergent values systems can be given space to participate in the community of communities which is national life. Can "fundamentalist" Islamic or Christian groups or other religious sectarian groups, New Age travelers or homeless street dwellers be give equal human dignity let alone equal economic, political and social rights?”

Despite his misgivings Smith's book undertakes a detailed consideration of communitarianism and community. By Chapter 9, he concludes that in a pluralistic society, the hope for a common core of shared values maybe untenable. He offers an alternative communitarianism with a more tolerant framework, after questioning the movement's moral tone.

"This is not so much because it expresses a preference for marriage and stable two parent families over libertarian sexual attitudes, but because it opens the way to stereotyping, blaming and stigmatising..."

As an American citizen who prizes my constitutional rights, I see no need to pursue any worthwhile ideas about community under some nebulous umbrella of communitarianism. (Not unless you're trying to drum up a social movement as Etzioni obviously is.) Frankly I’m not satisfied with the “extensively edited, rewritten and modified” and far-more palatable Communitarian Manifesto sanitized by Mary Ann Geldon and William Glaston (who no doubt removed the offensive specifics in Etzioni’s original draft.)

As a member of an about-to-be-oppressed minority, I’m taking my damaged goods over the to American Civil Liberties Union. My wallet suddenly seems one ID card too light.

Copyright 1997 Marjorie M. Walker

Sending unwanted treasure on consignment

Maisy wanted to take some slacks (that were too long), to a consignment store today, so we visited "Such-A-Deal" on Old Mill Plain Road. We wobbled up the stairs into a well-stocked, nicely arranged shop. She consigned her slacks and found a purple sweater to take home. I consigned three jackets and a sequined top - pink, lavender and silver on black. I don't even know anyone who can envision me in a sequined top these days. I don't think I ever wore it. I have no idea when I wore any of them, if ever. However I know were I got all of them ... in one of three second hand stores I frequent.

While it felt good to shed a few items, the pile that still lives here is a problem. I could easily disappear under unopened mail and half-read books. My world sits low in the water, like a sinking dingy, overburdened with past collections both physical and psychological. That's an idea. A mental junk sale. What kind of buyers would that attract? Probably writers of all genre, looking for quirky character traits, freshly spoiled relationships, tipsy metaphor and other such debris.

After we got home Maisy also wanted to walk around the block (It's a pretty steeply draped slap of pavement I must say.) We did. It was good for us both. She did well but was happy to get inside and put on slippers. Now I have to get ready for work tonight. Afterwards I get to walk the dog around the block.

latest install of Leopard was purring, we'll see how it goes..

This is the first post I have made from the macbook post Leopard Install#2.

With all the trouble I had last time, I am being very cautious with this new setup. So far I have installed absolutely nothing. I have run software update and gotten the latest code. I have arranged the dock, synced for my address book and bookmarks and imported my purchased tunes from the iPod as well as a bunch of CDs. (iTunes would only let me import items purchased from the iTunes store, not stuff loaded via CD) Recordings I made myself I had backup on the G5. Another bit of good news, after repeated tries, the external hard drive I had acidently dropped is suddenly mounting again. And strange to say - its "on-off" button which NEVER worked, is suddenly functional. Go figure. Today I am planning to add iLife. Am keeping my fingers crossed.

Immediately after typing that last line, my network connection just dropped out just as it was doing last time. Cut and paste in this blogger window is acting weird too. I used photo both and took a good morning shot. Maybe I will hold off on iLife.

Post script - I have added firefox now, as some of the problems with blogger were Safari errors, according to the consol log.. hmmm. I also added taco html edit. so far so good.

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The dog's lumps, the world's bumps

The dog has a growth on the back of her paw. I noticed this a few weeks ago when I trimmed her toe nails. This week she started licking it, and limping just slightly. So this morning, off we go to the vets.

Dogs love a car ride. And getting out at the vets is Okay too -- so many interesting smells in the yard! But from a dog's eye view, the exam room is ominous. The PEOPLE are great, but that aluminum table is for cats. Poor dog gets tricked into standing on it and suddenly something emits a growl-like hum and the table starts to shudder and Lo! The dog Ascendeth! Acsendeth to the vet, that is. And the table is slippery too, like life, a little dance, a little prance and a leg can hang precariously over the side. Then as blood gets drawn, poor dog's behind begins to slip out from under her and soon she is laying down on this cold aluminum precipice. No stairs, no place to land, too slippery even to try. I imagine Oggi leaping. Imagine clouds instead of tiles. Wonder if I too can fly, then they hand me an estimated bill. The landing is a shock!

Leopard, a clean install this time

Often when things run amok on a computer there are two software programs having an unresolved argument over system resources, or one going into some endless loop for some inexplicable cosmic reason..

After the clean install that I HAD to make of Tiger, I had nothing more on the hard drive to lose. So I thought I would give the spotted cat one more try with nice clean reformated installation on my Intel macbook.

I did that this morning. Have not installed anything else. Got my wireless network right away, have been loading CDs into itunes. SO FAR SO GOOD (hold breath tightly...) I think I will add my programs one at a time and see how it goes. Perhaps the OS was not at fault, but the programs adapted to run on it.... On the other had there was a large Leopard update which I installed immediately after the wireless was connected....

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The kicker: a realization on iWeb files

Ah the final kicker on my intel macbook troubles. I was hoping against hope (Irrationally I must say) that there would be some way to import the websites I'd made and published in iWeb. I had carefully saved a published-to-a-folder representation of my websites, never once realizing the obvious fact that this would not help at all. Oddly, when the OS finally started having some sort of loop where it could not fully load, I was still able to hook it up in Target disk mode via firewire to the G5 and drag things off of the hard drive... I thought I had everything haha... SO in addition to total software snafu - I am also suffering from operator stupid (in not recovering enough stuff and in dropping the backup hard drive where previous backups were located.) ****** IMPORTANT ADDED POSTSCRIPT 2/27/08 ---> the file to back up is: domain.sites2 --- which is located in your homefolder: /Library/ApplicationSupport/iWeb/Domain.sites2 ***** This file has all the info on your sites and all their pages.....

So I spent most of Monday night and Tuesday morning building a new main page for the Wednesday Night Poetry Series on a blogspot site. (Which is now live at http://wedpoetry.net ) I moved the sub pages that could be moved out of the iDisk web folder to the old sites folder. I moved the WNPS features archive and blog but it doesn't seem to be functional outside its origional spot. ( I will recreate them and the founder's page slide show at a later time.

The problem for me is this -- in order to recreate and upload wedpoetry.net - I would obliterate the current issue of Bent Pin Quarterly because the program would over-write the web folder. After the upload only the files from the current IWeb publishing event would be left in that folder. NOTE: It didn't work this way it added to what was on the iDisk when I finally uploaded it in Jan -- though I am not sure what would happen if the site names were exactly the same.

I also ran mac Hardware test from the Tiger disk which found nothing. I have almost nothing on that machine, and I may reinstall Leopard sans additional programs to see if it will work alone..

Leopard is out temporarily

Well, it' s not over, but Leopard is off the macbook. But that means no Bonjour scan support. Even With Tiger back Soho Notes was unable to open the database backup. Never liked its group feeling anyway. it's open base heart always wanted to go out somewhere and contact some distant database. Maybe it was Soho notes all along. FOR THE RECORD I LOVED STICKY BRAIN. GREAT PRODUCT. I RUE THE DAY CHRONOS DITCHED IT FOR SOHO Luckily while the thing was still operational I exported my files so I have the rtf and text files of my writings at least up to a month or so ago.

I have have lost my itunes library, except for the files I created by recording or garageband. lost all my project files. I had backups but accidently knocked the External HD off the shelf when switching between machines. Now it won't work.

Not sure how to get iWeb to import what's on the idisk instead of replacing it.

This might be my worst fake-geek day ever. I should have stayed in bed. At the time it the external HD fell, I had already made a 28 gig timemachine backup for the G5.

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Will be removing Leopard from the Intel Mac

Yes, I will be removing Leopard. Now my ethernet connection keeps dropping just like the wireless connection. I am posting this from my old G5 which seems to be running Leopard like a champ. Go figure...  Soho Notes will no longer export either . I will be restoring OS X 1.4

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Leopard OS on my Intel mac has some aggravating problems

NOW THAT I HAVE IMPROVED MY INTEL MAC by installing the Leopard OS I have begun having all sorts of problems - with the key board and with the wireless connection.  Slow boot, a blackedout menu bar, a stuck shift key then a stuck num lock, and the airport connection in out in ou in out the finally no connection at all.

 I am really angry and frustrated that this expensive piece of equipment which worked very well for six months now is an aggravating piece of crap after I spent money to UPGRADE it.  Guess you can't guild the lily.... Ironically Leopard works just fine on my G5 which I almost got rid of....  

On the upside -  with my apple airport network I could plug a spare ethernet cable into my macbook and be instantly connected to the internet -   I have tried quick switches between wireless and ethernet on a PC with Windows XP -  the OS doesn't seem to find the connection - so I guess to be fair Apple is still ahead despite the snafus.

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