Presidents born on a Friday

These U.S. presidents were born on a Friday:

George Washington
James Monroe
Franklin Pierce
Rutherford B. Hayes
Barack Obama

See also:
Presidents born on a Sunday
Presidents born on a Monday
Presidents born on a Tuesday
Presidents born on a Wednesday
Presidents born on a Thursday

Presidents born on a Saturday


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Presidents born on a Thursday

These U.S. presidents were born on a Thursday:

Martin Van Buren
Andrew Johnson
Warren Harding
Calvin Coolidge
Harry Truman
Lyndon Johnson
Richard Nixon
George H.W. Bush

See also:
Presidents born on a Sunday
Presidents born on a Monday
Presidents born on a Tuesday
Presidents born on a Wednesday

Presidents born on a Friday
Presidents born on a Saturday


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Presidents born on a Wednesday

These U.S. presidents were born on a Wednesday:

Zachary Taylor
Theodore Roosevelt
Jimmy Carter

See also:
Presidents born on a Sunday
Presidents born on a Monday
Presidents born on a Tuesday

Presidents born on a Thursday
Presidents born on a Friday
Presidents born on a Saturday


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Presidents born on a Tuesday

These U.S. presidents were born on a Tuesday:

James Madison: Tuesday
William Henry Harrison: Tuesday
Millard Fillmore: Tuesday
Benjamin Harrison: Tuesday
William Howard Taft: Tuesday
Dwight Eisenhower: TuesdayJohn F. Kennedy: Tuesday


See also:
Presidents born on a Sunday
Presidents born on a Monday

Presidents born on a Wednesday
Presidents born on a Thursday
Presidents born on a Friday
Presidents born on a Saturday


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Presidents born on a Monday

These U.S. presidents were born on a Monday

John Tyler James Polk
Chester Arthur
Herbert Hoover
Franklin Roosevelt
Gerald Ford
Bill Clinton

See also:
Presidents born on a Sunday

Presidents born on a Tuesday
Presidents born on a Wednesday
Presidents born on a Thursday
Presidents born on a Friday
Presidents born on a Saturday


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Presidents born on a Sunday

These U.S. presidents were born on Sunday:

John Adams
Andrew Jackson
Abraham Lincoln
William McKinley
Woodrow Wilson

See also:

Presidents born on a Monday
Presidents born on a Tuesday
Presidents born on a Wednesday
Presidents born on a Thursday
Presidents born on a Friday
Presidents born on a Saturday



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Presidents born on a Saturday

These U.S. presidents were born on a Saturday:

Thomas Jefferson
John Quincy Adams
James Buchanan
Ulysses S. Grant
James Garfield
Grover Cleveland
Ronald Reagan
George W. Bush

See also:
Presidents born on a Sunday
Presidents born on a Monday
Presidents born on a Tuesday
Presidents born on a Wednesday
Presidents born on a Thursday
Presidents born on a Friday


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Glossary for "Lighting Out for the Territory"

"Lighting Out for the Territory" by the Roy Morris, Jr., is a good book (see my review) but it may test your vocabulary. So as a public service, here are the definitions of some words you'll find in this book about Mark Twain:

• Frangible: Brittle
• Tosspot: a habitual drinker
• Transgressive: involving a violation of accepted or imposed boundaries,
• Penurious: extremely poor
• Choleric: bad-tempered or irritable
• Impecunious: Having little or no money

It's funny that Morris uses "impecunious" early in the book to describe Twain's brother Orion, because later on he quotes Twain mocking a writer for such an obscure word.

Then there's "abjurious," which Morris uses in this sentence: "For once in her life with the abjurious Orion, Molly could live in high style, and she made the most of her position as the wife of the acting governor of Nevada."

Unfortunately, though I've looked and looked, but I can't find a definition of "abjurious."


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Book review: "Lighting Out for the Territory"

Without the Civil War, we would never have had Mark Twain.

As the year 1861 began, 25-year-old Samuel Clemens was a happy and well-paid Mississippi riverboat pilot. But when war broke out, Clemens, fearing conscription into the army, fled his Missouri home and headed west. It was there that he had the experiences that made him into the writer known as Mark Twain.

"Lighting Out for the Territory" by Roy Morris Jr. is an enjoyable look at this early part of Twain's life.

What I liked most about this 2010 book is how it offers, through Twain's experiences, an up-close look at a unique period in American history.

Morris shows us the life of a 19th century riverboat pilot. He describes the mixture of adventure and discomfort in traveling by stagecoach across the continent. He brings us along with Clemens to the silver mining boomtowns of Nevada, the gold mining camps of California, the booming city of San Francisco and the exotic Hawaiian islands of 1866.  These were all part of Clemens' life, before he was over 30.

Morris does a good job of adding extra details along the way. We learn, for example, that many more people died due to disease while traveling west than to Indian attacks. We see how newspapers of the period had no problem "enhancing" – and sometimes, inventing – facts to make a story better.

If the book has a weak point, it's that it doesn't build any suspense or drama. Twain's meandering life is interesting, but it would be easy to hit "pause," put the book down and pick it up sometime later.

Morris' writing has a tendency to exceed my vocabulary – and maybe yours, too – so check out my glossary.

If you like this sort of book, here are three others you might consider

"Narrative of a Journey across the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River" by John Kirk Townsend. The diary of a naturalist exploring the west in 1834-1837.


"Undaunted Courage" by Stephen Ambrose. A engaging look at the Lewis and Clark expedition.

"Innocents Abroad."  Twain's book about his 1867 trip to Europe and the Middle East.



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How to get Mozy to back up your videos

If you use Mozy to back up you computer files, you should be aware that the service does not automatically back up video files.

In a computer crash, you could lose all your videos – permanently.
 
There's two ways to get Mozy to back up your videos. One is to open MozyHome and manually select the files you want backed up. But that's a tedious process, and you'll have to keep doing it each time you add new videos to your computer.

Here's how to have Mozy automatically save your videos:

1. Open MozyHome and click on settings

2. Click on "Backup sets."

3. In the left hand pane, you will see a list of your current backup sets. It might say, for example, "documents" and "photos."  Move the cursor to white space below those items, and right click.

4. You will see "Add backup set." Click on it.

5. Click on "add a rule."

6. Choose "include" and "file type." Then enter in the box the file extensions you want to back up, putting a space between multiple types.  For example: AVI MOV

7. Be sure to check a box to designate where Mozy should look for these files – the C drive, for instance.

8. Give the set a name and click OK. You're done.

Keep in mind that videos tend to be large files, so they'll take up a large share of you Mozy storage space.

See also: "Are your videos safely backed up with Mozy?"



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Is "Are You the One?" the one to watch? No.

The new MTV show, "Are You the One?" is rated TV-14.  Having viewed the first episode, I can only conclude that it means "inappropriate for anyone with an IQ over 14."

The F-bomb is dropped about 10 times in the first 2 minutes of the show, and then repeatedly throughout, include one deep-thinking young man who says "I want to f*** all the women here." Sure, each one is beeped, but miraculously you can figure it out.

Barely 5 minutes into the show, two of the women are so delighted at the sight of a bed – never seen one of those before? – that one lies down and spreads her legs in the air, while the other immediately gets on all fours and wags her tail end at the camera (both are clothed). The guys play a stimulating game where they're shown a picture of cleavage and try to guess which of the women it belongs to.

The show features 10 young men and 10 young women stuck together in a large house, and each one is supposed to figure out which person of the opposite sex is his or her "ideal match." The drama is intense: Will the self-infatuated guy find the self-infatuated girl? Will the stupid people pair up? How about the obnoxious drunks?  It won't be easy, since those descriptions apply to multiple cast members.

Early on, the whole group erupts in an excitement when they learn they can win a collective "One million dollars!" on the show.  I wouldn't expect any in this group to do the math, so I'll help them out. This amounts to $50,000 a piece, and really more like $35,000 after taxes (another foreign concept).

Now I wouldn't turn up my nose at $35,000 if it fell in my lap, but for this group to earn that they not only have to match up everyone perfectly, they have endure at least six weeks or so in this house and be exposed as buffoons on national television. Is it worth it? I didn't see anyone walking out.

The real question is why anyone would find someone from this house an "ideal match" in any sense.  After all, there is a technical term for someone who can afford to spend six weeks doing nothing but drinking, bickering, whining and game playing: Unemployed.


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Are your videos safely backed up with Mozy?

When our home computer crashed, I took some comfort in knowing that my family's documents, photos and videos had been backed up with Mozy.com.

I've been paying Mozy for years to automatically back up and remotely store the files from our computer, but it wasn't until this episode that I truly had to use it.

When I went to restore my files, I got an unpleasant surprise. Yes, my documents and photos were backed up. But the videos were not. They never were.

I was crestfallen – the missing videos including many important family moments, like our kids singing in concerts, birthday parties and Christmas morning gift opening.

The videos were stored in the same folders as my photos and I assumed everything in those folders were backed up. But it turns out that – by default – Mozy skips video file formats (mine were .AVI and .MOV).

To avoid a fate such as mine, there are two ways you can get Mozy to save your videos. One is to open MozyHome and manually select the files you want backed up. But that's a tedious process, and you'll have to keep doing it each time you add new videos to your computer.

Here's how to have Mozy automatically save your videos:

1. Open MozyHome and click on settings

2. Click on "Backup sets."

3. In the left hand pane, you will see a list of your current backup sets. It might say, for example, "documents" and "photos."  Move the cursor to white space below those items, and right click.

4. You will see "Add backup set." Click on it.

5. Click on "add a rule."

6. Choose "include" and "file type." Then enter in the box the file extensions you want to back up, putting a space between multiple types.  For example: AVI MOV

7. Be sure to check a box to designate where Mozy should look for these files – the C drive, for instance.

8. Give the set a name and click OK. You're done.

As you can see, this is not at all intuitive. I'm surprised Mozy doesn't have an easier way of doing this.

Keep in mind that videos tend to be large files, so they'll take up a lot of your Mozy backup space. 

As for my lost videos, things turned out OK. First, Mozy wasn't my only backup method. I had copied most of my pictures and videos to flash drives, so I was able to recover almost all the missing files from there.

That still left, however, videos from the most recent two months, which were stored only on the hard drive of my now-dead computer.

In a last-ditch effort, I tried to turn on the old computer again. It started, balked, and then turned itself off – exactly as it had been doing the last 20 times I tried. I tried again and it did it again. But then, on the third reboot, it miraculously came all the way on.  I hurriedly attached a flash drive and copied all the files I needed.  Whew!



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