eReader was doing e-books long before Amazon or iTunes, so I own a number of eReader e-books. One of them is Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. If you tell eReader to download this book, it will warn you that it will probably time out on the download. It is right. It will. Here's how to get a large book onto your iPhone.

If you haven't done so already, go to the eReader site (www.ereader.com) and download every one of your books to your Mac/PC. Disk space is cheap, and eReader could go out of business. They could be in business for another 100 years, but why take chances?

I have Chrome Portable 4.1.249.1036 (41514).  I'm having trouble with extensions crashing.  One of the extension vendors suggested upgrading to a newer version.  Google has 5.0.375.55 at chrome.google.com, so here's how I (tried to) upgrade.

Chrome 4 is installed in S:\Chrome-Portable.  I'm going to (try to) put Chrome 5 in S:\Chrome-Portable-5.

I had trouble with Google Calendar Sync (GCS) deleting some of my Outlook calendar items when I set it up for 2-way synch between Outlook and Google. Then I dialed it back to 1-way sync, and found that some Outlook items weren't getting copied to Google. Bummer.

I looked in "C:\Documents and Settings\kk4056\local settings\application data\google\Google Calendar Sync\logs" and found the error message:

Participant is neither attendee nor organizer

Issue: You receive an error message resembling Cannot delete xyz: Error while deleting key." when you try to delete an entry in the Windows registry.

Solution: Right-click on the item, select Permissions, and grant yourself permission to update the item!

First, I'll describe what I did; then why; then how.

What:

• I've got a Windows XP computer (host).
• I've got Portable VirtualBox (PVB).
• I've got a physical partition on the computer that is encrypted with TrueCrypt (TC).
• I've got Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid Lynx) installed as a guest in PVB.
• I made the TC partition available in the guest as a physical partition.
• I mounted the TC partition with TC in Lucid.
• I shared the mounted TC file system from Lucid.
• I accessed the shared file system from the host.

Why:

• To see if I could!
  

Evernote is one of those products that I simultaneously love and hate. With their 3.5 version for Windows, it started taking 90 seconds to start -- sometimes. Evernote's forums and their blog comments indicate that this is at least somewhat common.

After some investigation, I realized that it was slow to start only when my laptop was connected to a company LAN; elsewhere it took about 5 seconds. The problem does not occur with version 3.1.

Hate Government and Taxes? Move to Somalia.

I wish I'd thought of this. Paraphrased from http://www.marriedtothesea.com/041410/hate-government-and-taxes.gif

Another place where the right wing and I agree is that we think that subsidizing someone else's healthcare is unfair.

• The right wing thinks it is unfair for someone with lots of money to subsidize the healthcare of someone without lots of money.
• I think it is unfair for someone with little money to be charged MORE for the same healthcare than someone with lots of money.

I have yet to meet someone who declares, "Obama is a socialist," and can give the classic definition of socialism and give an example of an Obama policy which meets that definition.

Socialism: A system which advocates public ownership and control of the means of production and allocation of resources.

What is it that they think Obama wants the public (i.e. the citizens of the USA) to own?
What would be wrong with the citizens of the USA owning it?

One place where the conservatives and I agree is that we'd both like to see a 'flat tax' replace the current federal tax scheme. It turns out there is a way to gradually implement a flat tax, beginning with the highest income taxpayers, and all Congress has to do is... nothing.

If Congress simply leaves the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) where it is today, gradually, as inflation takes its toll, we will all become covered by the AMT. In effect, we could all file an AMT short form. No more schedules A and B, or the long form 1040.