MacValley's post-Christmas message to all of you

Now that the chocolate buzz has started to recede and the guests have started to go home, now it’s time for a post-Christmas message of peace, joy and hard looks at each other. 

To begin with, if you feel your Christmas spirit has drained out of you like anti-freeze out of the engine at Jiffy-Lube, go to Britain’s Spectator magazine to read this article. You won’t agreed with half of them, you won’t know what he’s talking about for some of them; but I’m sure you can come up with a list of twenty things of your own. Have at it. You need a good laugh and probably a decent gin and tonic. 

With regard to the election, just about every candidate now leading in the polls will fizzle out by Labor Day 2016. This is because only idiots who can’t work an answering machine respond to unsolicited telephone polls. 

If you get an unsolicited call from someone who says they’re from the IRS, ignore it. The IRS will mail you the bad news in an official Treasury Department envelope. You have to phone them. The scammer will want you to pay them through a PayPal account. Uncle Sam is not that advanced.

For Heaven’s Sakes, call the IRS about this or talk to your tax preparer. Don’t hand over money to a scary voice on the phone.

Now for some good news. If you have an official Microsoft license for Windows 7 or 8 in your possession, you can upgrade to Windows 10. 

I had wiped out my Windows 7 installation and substituted Linux, but Microsoft let me download the Windows 10 .iso, burn a disk through the Finder, and do a clean installation of Windows 10. More on this topic to follow.

Now for some bad news. Keep OS X 10.10 Yosemite on at least one of your drives or partitions until after tax season. I speak from experience of last year, when Turbo Tax 2014 failed to install on Yosemite. Fortunately, I kept an installation of 10.9.5 on an external drive. Here are Apple’s own instructions for installing OS X onto an external drive of some sort. 

So good night to all. I’ve got Jim Svejda on KUSC.org turned up for holiday music.  Time for the decent booze. 

Tom Briant

Editor, MacValley Voice