God Bless America .... Pretty Please?

Ok, so I get home from work and (somehow) end up in front of the TV. Except this time I'm not watching some pointless sitcom or something. I watched C-SPAN for two hours. They're talking about the national budget. At the moment I turned it on, there were a few Republican representatives griping about how the Democrats were going to raise taxes. We are to believe that this would be bad, because the money the nation gets from taxes actually goes up when you lower taxes, because people have more money to invest, and to start new companies with, and as a result everyone is better off and can pay more taxes anyway. They proposed instead that taxes should be lowered further, toward the end of prompting more of this same effect.

So the Republicans are done. Now it's the Democrats' turn. It took all of about 5 seconds after the representative set up his little easel and big cardboard diagrams for him to start whining about how President Bush has increased the national debt by a few trillion dollars. He argues, then, that the President has borrowed money from other nations in order to help fund a tax cut for Americans making more than $400,000 every year. That is a nearly exact quotation. So now I'm to believe that, if this representative is speaking accurately, America borrowed $3 trillion and handed it to a bunch of rich Americans. But the fun doesn't stop there! We're not planning to raise taxes, but we are going to lower taxes, says the Democrat. And while we're lowering taxes, we will increase spending on education, veterans, and healthcare. Gee, doesn't this sound familiar? Oh yeah, that's the same promise that President Bush campaigned on in 2004. So it sounds to me like the Democrats are saying that President Bush's budget plan has put the country in a ridiculous and insurmountable amount of debt, and yet they are proposing the very thing he did.

Where can our country go? This is not politics, this is some sad kind of schoolchild playground war. The Elephant gang and the Donkey gang are so blinded by their own superiority that they refuse to see past the shortsightedness of their own team and accept that the other side might have anything valuable to contribute. Ok, so there were several Republicans who got involved in scandals of some sort. Therefore, all Republicans are bad. So there are some Democrats who think taxes and spending should both be increased. Therefore, all Democrats think taxes and spending should be increased. HELLO! It's not rocket sceince! It's BASIC LOGIC! What if our congresspeople would, for once, forget what "side of the aisle" they're on and just look at an issue as no more than it is. A Republican proposition to lower taxes should be treated no differently than a Democrat proposition to lower taxes. And yet, if the Democrats have the majority, the Republican bill will lose simply because it was a Republican who created it. Does no one else see it? Surely, you'd think that if enough regular citizens would speak up on an issue, politicians would have to actually read the Constitution for once and realize that they are supposed to be representing their districts, not representing their party. What I'm seeing is top-down government, not the bottom-up government that was intended. Authority is supposed to come from the people, through the congress, into the laws. But instead it comes from the majority in Congress, into the laws, down to the people. Never mind who started the war, never mind what party that last scandal involved - why can't politicians vote based on the merits of the propositions rather than their affiliations?

Vote for Nader!

Journey to Vista: Part II

So, Vista did actually install that time. (Finally...)

I spent most of the first 2 days after that working, and/or installing WoW and various other games. Throughout all of that, aside from several dozen (Yes, I mean at least 25) messages asking me if I was REALLY sure about installing that game, or if I thought it might rip out Vista's internal organs, I couldn't tell that I wasn't using XP with prettier windows. I wasted no time at all getting rid of the "Windows Sidebar" (a.k.a. Mac Widgets for Windows) and shutting off various other resource-draining things that Windows assumed I'd need. I was relieved, however, to see that there was no Windows Messenger bugging me every time I started up.

If you asked me what I thought of Internet Explorer 7, I could only tell you as much as I saw when I was downloading Mozilla Firefox.

And then I tried to reorganize the Start Menu. EVERY TIME I tried to rename something or move something, it asked me if I really wanted to do that. After all, if I renamed it, that would just be bringing out a welcome mat for all sorts of terrible viruses. (?) At that point, I got sick of closing those windows and shut the User Access Control off. Who cares if some little piece of spyware figures out what websites I go to - it's a lot less trouble than closing 50 pop-up windows every day.

And so from there, I moved on to hardware issues. All my CDs that came with my hardware had drivers for XP, but not for Vista. Vista already installed drivers for my graphics card, so that was fairly convenient. However, finding and downloading the drivers for both of my audio devices proved to be a little bit more irritating. Not just because Windows goes crazy whenever you have more than one hardware option for sound stuff, but because the websites of the companies I had to get the drivers from were complete junk. Just, eww. But I eventually found and installed those, and got everything (even my microphone) working again.

So, overall, what do I think of Vista? Well, I'll sum it up in one sentence:
Vista is XP + (Pretty Graphics) + (Mild Foolproofing) + (Copied Features from OS X)
And, this is pretty much what I figured it would be.


Moving on... my spring break was way busier than I wanted it to be. Somehow, I ended up working a bunch for the first 3 days of the week. Oh, except on Tuesday I went to dinner with Sarah and the Tatums at Chipotle. I now know that it is NOT smart to get the sauce they call "hot". And we were going to see Amazing Grace, but Andy was in a random mood so we say Night at the Museum instead. Then I had to work more on the same old volunteer project on Thursday, but had a little lazy time later on in the day. On Friday I had the morning to do nothing, but then I went to help my mom do a big mass mailing thing. After that I had a LAN party, but it didn't last all that long... everyone had left or fallen asleep by 5:00 AM. Today I slept until 11:00, and then spent most of the day being lazy and/or doing nothing of significance.

Woo hoo. One more day of break until school. Gee, I can't wait to get up at 7:00 AM on Monday. *groans*

Journey to Vista: Part I of ?

Aside from working for 9.5 hours, all I did on my birthday was... hmm. Install Windows Vista!

My 120-day trial of XP was running out... days counting down to 0 more quickly than I could keep track of. And so, last week, I ordered Vista (Home Premium version, but who's counting). Well, it came today. I was going to give a little presentation at work about building computers (remind me to think about who my audience is next time I do that) and so I had my mom run by and drop off the package, but it was too late for me to install it first to show it to the people. Unfortuate. Or so I thought at the time.

Then I left work. The family (minus dad, who is in Europe this week on some kind of fancy business trip) was going to go to Steak and Shake or something, but it was already closed. Go figure... at 8:45 PM on a Monday. Oh well. So after that little detour, I returned home to try to get Vista to work.

I backed up my files to one of my other hard drives. Or, well, technically, to a small piece of all three of my hard drives in this computer. But anyway... that's roughly $250 of game CD keys, music from iTunes, and things of that nature. But the money aside, I did not really want to have to mess with setting everything up again. I copy all my game install CDs to the hard drive - much faster to install them that way. At any rate, I ran the Vista installer from within my current version of Windows. It got kinda far along, and then it asked to restart. So I comply.

BOOM! Blue screen of death!
(restart again...)
BOOM! Blue screen of death!
(mess around with the motherboard settings for a bit)
BOOM! Blue screen of death!

Ahh... a glimmer of hope? Vista didn't die when my computer restarted at this moment. Yeah, I'm writing this as it tries to install Vista again. But anyway, back to my story.

At this point, I had given up on that installation. So I tried to somehow get back at the old files to make sure they were still intact. That wasn't working. Ohh, back to realtime: here loads Vista. Ok, I'd better cut to the chase...

So after much tinkering with components, I "borrowed" the hard drive from my previous computer and booted Windows off of there. I was able to salvage all of my data. Then I tried many more things to get Vista to work, with little success. On a hunch, I eventually got back on and set up the hard drives more simply (converted them to basic partitions, did away with the software RAID) and isolated all my important stuff onto one hard drive, leaving the other 2 completely blank. So then I installed Vista again, and it seems to be working this time. And that's where this story ends for now.

And here's my desk, after all of this:


To be continued...