Duchess of Evil

 For my European friends. My husband had a conversation while he was in Japan this year with some fellow travelers who originated in Europe. The talk turned to high speed internet, and it seems in at least some places in Europe, average high speed downloads are as fast as 100mb per second, with average cost somewhere in the $15-20 per month range.

While here in the us, 1mb per second is "high speed" for anywhere from $40-60 per month. Our European friends were marveling at this, and wondered how the US high speed providers could get away with this highway robbery (it's simple, really - we have no choice. There are no other/better options.)

Once home, Mark was uncertain if his fellow travelers were referring to business internet, or home internet. So I offered to pose the question to my f-list. So, if you're inclined to share, how fast is your internet, and how much do you pay for it?

Okay. I'm making a new header for my LJ, and I NEED something to make that heavy fog look, like the fog machine makes on the show. A brush, or something. Help a girl out, LJ!

So. Say, on a ship (in this case a space ship) when the elevator or lift from one deck to another doesn't work, what is that ladder thing you can climb instead called? You see it in all sorts of SF movies/TV shows. I don't think "ladder" is right, but damn if the words to call it by don't completely escape me at the moment.

So, say you're in a civil war in the far future, and both sides are fighting over a mining colony, because the depostis are too rich to give up to "the other side". And the current government wins the day, but the colony decides to fire on any ships they send down.

This would be called what, in technical terms? An act of sedition? Of treason? Of what? Militarily speaking. It feels right on the tip of my brain, but it's just not there.

Hmmm. Maybe someone out there will have some good suggestions.

A friend of mine has, in partnership with another woman, sponsored a local event this Halloween, the Albany Masquerade, a Masquerade Ball at a local venue that will include live music, etc, with proceeds to benefit SMART - a literacy program here in Oregon designed to help kids better learn reading in schools.

The problem is, if they don't start selling some tickets, they won't even be able to cover the cost of the event, much less actually donate something to SMART. They are on an extremely tight budget, but they have done some things for promotion, including dressing up and handing out flyers to local businesses, putting an ad on Craigslist, the website, the local radio station is chatting about it and giving away a couple of tickets - but so far, only ten people have actually purchased tickets. And of those ten - me, my sister, our husbands, my friend L's sister and her boyfriend, her Mom - that leaves, what, three tickets that are not in some way directly linked to L? She is starting to panic and think that she's going to lose a lot of money on this, not to mention have no one show up. Any ideas on how to better get the word out? Tickets are $20, and this doesn't seem like too much when people can write it off on their taxes. They need to sell something like 140 more. Surely there are 140 adults in the area willing to dress up on Halloween and go out and have fun with a bunch of other adults. We just need to find them.

The husband's MacBook is suddenly experiencing super slow load times on internet pages.  All pages, like 30 seconds and up.  This via the exact same wireless connection, in the exact same room as my MacBook, which has the usual lightning fast speeds. 

Our first thought is some kind of spyware bogging things down, but that doesn't usually attack Macs.  Any ideas, f-list??  We are at a serious loss here.  He's using Firefox, FYI, same as me.

Okay, so Mark was extremely excited about using Numbers from iWork as his new gradebook software...until he tried to use Vlookup to look up a particular student and get that one student's grades and history...apparently it's not as easy to do as typing that sounds. And the "help" feature is full of unintelligible jargon like "...enter the search value of the cell range of the column..." that makes it nearly impossible to decipher.

Anyone got an Idtiots Guide to using the Vlookup feature? I know Excel also has 'vlookup' but whether it functions exactly the same as Numbers or not, I don't know.

Help me, oh F-list, you're my only hope!

Mighty f-list of all-knowing power, you can help me with this, I know.

The husband is eyeing an iBook as his next laptop. I've been putting him off, saying our laptops are only two years old, and we don't need new ones - that is only partially true. We use them so much and write so much, we both have keys on our keyboards that are starting to lose functionality. He's traveled enough with his that even the sturdy Thinkpad is showing wear and tear. (Japan and back can do that, I suppose.) I'm thinking about possibly maybe getting him an iBook sometime in the next year. Maybe.

I'm starting to research them now. Our current laptops have 15" screens, so that's the size I'm thinking of for the iBook - but that kicks it up to twice the cost of the 13" iBook. So...those of you who have one, what size do you have? What do you love about your iBook? What would you change if you bought another?