I remember well the first time I heard the word “attitude” used to mean “negative attitude.” It was shortly after John Lennon had been killed. I was in a mall and the poster shop was selling some crappy Lennon memorial posters at jacked up prices. I was devoted to Lennon, and muttered something about it being opportunism. “You got an attitude,” the clerk said, sneering. “I don’t need your attitude.”

I was tempted to say, “Yes, I have an attitude. We all have attitudes.” But I knew what he meant.

Likewise, nowadays I hear weather forecasters predicting that there will be “some weather moving in.” No, there’s always weather. They mean “severe weather” or maybe just “noticeable weather.” I do sometimes correct them, but since they’re on tv, it hasn’t yet had an effect. Except on my wife who finds it charming every time I do it, or so I choose to believe.

This is far from the first time a quality has been taken as denoting a particular value when used unadorned. “He has a temperature.” “You’ve got a reputation.”"He’s in a mood.” I suppose you could even put “a person of color” into that category. So, it happens.

But that won’t stop me from whining about it.

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In my continuing series “How to Be an Idiot,” here’s what not to do when installing a new hard drive into your MacBook Pro.

I started off right. I had everything prepared: a new 500gB hybrid drive, a fresh Time Machine backup, and an 8gB USB stick with the Mac Mountain Lion installer on it. I still managed to fail maybe 20 times over the course of two days booting from everything I could find, re-installing Lion onto the stick, backing up from Time Machine, etc. The closest I came was when I installed off the repair partition over a backup drive. The Mac started up its install process, but got stopped with a message that said that Apple was unable to confirm that my computer is authorized for an OS install. At least, that’s what I think it meant; it’s not a very clear message, and, no I didn’t write it down :(

This made me think that the problem was that I was trying to install the wrong version, although I was pretty durn sure that I had upgraded to Mountain Lion a few weeks earlier, having resisted the blandishments of Lion. Maybe Apple was confused, although I couldn’t see why. I installed the prior version of the OS on my USB drive. Nope.

And now for the answer. And it’s not going to make me look smart, that I promise you.

You see, kids, for Apple to verify my machine, it has to get onto the Internet. It turns out that if during the install process you give your Mac a choice of wifi hotspots to connect to, it picks an open one without asking for your say-so. As a result, it happened to pick a hotspot that requires a login on a web site, but there’s no browser available during the install process. Once I pointed the Mac to another hotspot, it was able to connect and authorize my machine, enabling the installation to proceed.

Sure it was dumb of me. But it’s also dumb of Apple to give us an error message that says that it’s unable to authorize, rather than that it was unable connect. (I also didn’t see a relevant message in the Installer log, but I may have missed it.)

Fortunately, each of the things I tried took a relatively long time to fail, so I was able to get a lot done while trying. Still, the moment of victory was definitely a forehead-slapper for me.

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I’ve just spent almost two weeks without a mobile phone as mine was being repaired. I’m glad to have it back.

But why? What did I actually miss? Obviously, the following list is quite idiosyncratic â?? e.g., I don’t do a lot of texting â?? but here goes:

• Making outbound utility phone calls. I don’t do a lot of socializing on the phone, but it’s nice to be able to check in on plans for the evening, etc.

• Emergency call availability. I travelled for three days during my Mobile Hiatus, and asked a friend at a conference if I could give my wife her number in case of an emergency.

• Google Maps for navigating. I was back to printing out a map and, mainly, annoying any competent adult near me.

• Interstitial amusement. Waiting for the bus, I can read on my mobile, whereas reading a paper book or magazine while wearing gloves only works if you don’t ever have to change the page.

• Bus location-finder. Given the way Boston buses cluster, getting to a stop 30 seconds late can make a 20 minute difference.

Things I did not miss:

• Any of the dumb games. I like games. But other than my obligatory time with Angry Birds back when they were still angry and not just mildly pissed off, none have stuck with me.

• Interstitial email. It’ll wait until I’m off the bus.

• Weather reports. It’s a once-a-day thing for me, and my various work computers are fully weather report capable.

• The time. I have a watch. And an alarm clock that actually wakes me up.

• Typing on a tiny keyboard, although the slidy virtual keyboard built in to the Samsung Galaxy S III is pretty good, and Google’s speech-to-text is kind of awesome.

• Misplacing my phone four times a day, although others might claim that that is not strictly the phone’s fault.

And you?

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Yesterday Disk Utility told me to restart my Mac from a boot disk and run the disk repair function (= Disk Utility). Fine. Except I was unable to boot from any of my three Mac boot disks (including the original) whether they were in my laptop’s SuperDrive (= Apple’s plain old DVD drive) or in a USB-connected DVD drive. The system would notice the DVD when asked to look for boot devices (= hold down the Option key when starting up), but froze after I clicked on the DVD (= no change in the screen after 30 mins).

So, what the hell, I installed Lion, which I had been hoping to avoid (= my pathetic resistance to Apple’s creeping Big Brotherism). Thanks to the generosity of Guillaume Gète, I downloaded Lion DiskMaker, followed the simple instructions (= re-downloaded Lion, all part of Apple’s makings things hard by making them easy program), and now have a Lion boot disk. I was able to boot from it and fix my hard drive.

The whole episode was so reminiscent of why I left Windows (= Windows 7 looks pretty good these days).

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It used to be that on my birthday I’d get untouched-by-humans birthday wishes from my dentist’s firm and perhaps a local car company and real estate agent. Now I get them from sites I once age-verified for (gaming sites, not porn, fellas), a Prius forum, a diabetes forum, and — one level of abstraction up — from Xing itself.

If these groups are going to issue pro forma birthday wishes, I think they ought to be required to hire someone who has to sit there and actually think warmly about each person before pressing the “send” button.

And then, as a special birthday present, keep your stupid marketing messages to yourself.

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I’m staying at a “boutique” hotel in NYC that is so trendy that it has not only dressed its beautiful young staff in black, it has removed as much metadata as it can. There’s no sign outside. There are no pointers to the elevators on the room floors. The hotel floors in the elevator are poorly designated, so that two in our party ended up on a service floor, wandering looking for a way back into the public space of the hotel. The common areas are so underlit that I had to find a precious lamp to stand next to so that the person I was waiting for could find me. The room keycards are white and unmarked, without any indication therefore of which end goes in the lock.

Skipping metadata has always been a sign of mastery or in-ness. It’s like playing a fretless guitar. But hotels are for strangers and first-timers. I need me my metadata!

BTW, I think the hotel’s name is the Hudson, but it’s really not easy to tell.

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Here’s what’s happening with Microsoft Word 2008 on Mac. Note that I am not looking for help. I am merely venting.

1. Redefined heading2 so that it begins with an auto number.

2. Now when I select Normal paragraphs and apply the “number me” button to them, they all turn into heading2′s.

3. Create a new element called Normal-List, defined as beginning with an auto-number.

4. After the fourth instance of heading2, begin my fourth set of Normal-List items.

5. That fourth set continues the numbering from the third set. Select the first item and choose “Restart numbering.” It is a no-op.

6. Try every thing you can think of. Nothing works.

7. Re-open it in LibreOffice (nee Open Office) and fix the goddamn autonumbers.

Q: How many years will it take for Microsoft to get auto-numbering right?
A: How many years are there?

This is especially frustrating since the software company I worked at from 1986-1994, Interleaf, got this right about twenty years ago. AAAaaarrrrrgggggghhhhh.

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4. [NOTE: (These notes are in reverse chronological order. I have numbered them for your reading convenience.)I unlocked my Blackberry by calling Verizon support. I bought an Orange SIM card in a cigarette store in the Old City of Jerusalem for $10, plus $9 of calling time that times out in a week. So, I now have a working phone. It does not come with a data plan, however.]

3. [NOTE added minutes after the note right below this one: I'm on the phone with Verizon. It is indeed $20.48 per MEGABYTE. But wait...I am now talking with a tech support person who assures me that attachments don't count unless you actually download them. Well, that's something. She, however, is also telling me that the first two reps I talked with are wrong; in fact (says the tech support person), Verizon's international plan gives you 70MB per month for $100, and every megabyte after that is $20.48. That's still piracy, but the broadsword goes into you slightly more slowly.]

2. [Note added minutes later: Some other knowledgeable people tell me that Verizon must mean $20/gigabyte, not per megabyte. So, this may have been a mistake by the the service rep. I would happily take the blame for any misunderstanding, except that I confirmed that the rep said "megabyte" by inquiring, "PER MEGABYTE? PER MEGABYTE? ARE YOU FREAKING CRAZY!!!!!!!!!!," to which he replied in the affirmative to the first two of the three questions.]

1. I’m going overseas tonight for a week. In the past, I’d call Verizon and have them switch service from my Droid to my previous phone, which was a Blackberry with “world phone” service. For $2/day, I’d get unlimited data access, so I could check my email and perhaps check the news on the Web now and then. (Believe me, on a Blackberry you don’t want to do a lot of heavy Web browsing.)

Today when I tried to make the switch, Verizon informed me that they have changed the plan, entirely for the benefit of their customers of course. So, now it’s $20 per megabyte. Holy crap! What kind of unearthly profit margin is that?

My knowledgeable friends tell me that that I should figure 50-100 emails per megabyte (although that number is conservative). So, no email for me. That’s what happens when the “free” market is so pwned that it laughs in the face of competition.

And these are the folks we’ve handed our Internet to? Great. Freaking great.

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On paper, Verizon’s Friends & Family program is sweet. We can list up to 10 telephone numbers we can call as much as we want without those minutes subtracting from the 2,100 minutes we pay for. (We have five lines.) Verizon also doesn’t count against those 2,100 minutes calls made to other Verizon wireless subscribers.

So, what one piece of information do you need in order to figure out which ten F&F to choose? You need to know which ten numbers outside the Verizon network you have spent the most minutes on. And what information can you not get from the Verizon site, from the person you chat with on the site, or the customer support person on the telephone? Yay!

The site lets you see calls ranked by minutes or expense within each telephone line, but not across all lines. Worse, you can’t tell if the calls are within the Verizon network. The telephone person I spoke with actually was quite kind and spent many minutes looking through our 40-page bill, pulling out useful information. But even she didn’t have the magic query that would answer the question. And it’s really not that hard a question for a computer to answer.

I’m sorry to say that the most plausible explanation is that Verizon simply does not want its customers to make effective use of the Friends & Family program it promotes so heavily.

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Alert reader George Janczyn points out the truth I’ve been avoiding: Joho the Blog isn’t sizing correctly. It seems to be of fixed width, with the right-hand column shoved out of the frame. Resizing your window doesn’t resize Joho. That’s true in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.

It didn’t used to be so. And I haven’t changed anything in my Word Press template. I also can’t find any particular elements of content that are sized too large. I’m stumped.

The body of Joho consists of a table with three columns. The overall table is sized at 95%. The left and right columns are at a fixed 150px because if I made them a percentage, they’d wrap funny. This has not been a problem until a couple of weeks ago. (Yes, I tried laying it out “properly” using floating divs and CSS. After losing a couple of days at it, I figured I was struggling to do with divs exactly what tables were designed to do easily.)

I have tried setting the columns to percentage widths. I have tried setting the middle column to a fixed size. Nothing seems to affect the bad layout. I have inspected the elements on the page using Chrome’s inspector, and have found that the computed width of the table is 1432px, while the style widths I’ve set are not that wide. I’ve also looked at the two inserted graphic elements that happen to be in the blog posts currently displayed, and neither is sized very wide. The problem persists using all of the styles offered at the top of the page next to the “Hard to read?” text.

So, I’m stumped. Any suggestions?

LATER that day: See the comments for the solution. Thanks!

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