Archive for August 14th, 2006
I received the following email from Team Spitzer at 8:36 pm this evening, Monday, August 14, 2006.
Dear Friend,
This is just a quick reminder that the registration deadline to vote in the Democratic Primary on September 12th is this Friday, August 11th.
One of the major themes of this campaign and Eliot’s career has been about empowering all New Yorkers to Be Heard for A Change, so if you haven’t yet registered to vote and want more information click www.spitzer2006.com/registertovote. Please forward this email on to your friends, neighbors and colleagues to remind them to register and Join Eliot.
-Team Spitzer
Perhaps this was a calculated screw-up. A larger turnout favors Tom Suozzi. This just further illustrates the lack of management experience by Spitzer compared to Suozzi.
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Global warming is a hot topic (no pun intended) these days. Alarmists, like Al Gore, are running around predicting doom based on predictions, not fact, from scientists who told us we were going to enter another ice age during the 70’s. The simple fact is that the computer models that exist are not capable of making this type of prediction accurately. The danger is that this is just another case of socialist Utopians trying to legislate our lifestyle.
The trouble with today’s political rhetoric? People get stuck in their own paradigms, unable to reach others who think differently. Take “An Inconvenient Truth,” the current documentary about Al Gore’s PowerPoint presentation on global warming.
Gore appears unable to understand his detractors.
He sees “global warming” as an “inconvenient truth” . . . for them.
What he can’t see is that his opponents regard global warming as a convenient half-truth . . . for people like Al Gore.
A certain breed of person simply wants to disrupt other people’s lives. Control them. Tell them to “stop doing that”! Such folk used to be socialists, promising utopia after we “stopped doing” things like trading goods, running businesses for profit, and freely engaging in wage contracts. This theory, however, had problems: Do what socialists told us and we all become impoverished slaves.
The new theory — environmentalist catastrophism — promises us only that we MAY survive IF we undergo hardships and increased regulations and taxes and nannyings-about. Socialistic, but no utopia.
It’s harder to falsify than socialism. If Gore has his way and the oceans don’t rise, then he says we’ve won. If catastrophe happens anyway, he merely say we didn’t do enough.
A trap! Who likes traps except the trappers?
“An Inconvenient Truth” did not allay many fears that some of us have over the political agenda of environmentalist Cassandras.
Too bad. Because if Gore’s right, there’s precious little time for shillyshallying.
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What am I talking about? ME! I didn’t abide by the advice I always give others. Never, never, never try beta versions of software unless it is on a 2nd PC and you don’t care if there are problems. Stupid me put windows vista beta2, referred to by Microsoft as an advanced beta, on my computer.
The experience with this advanced beta was horrible. Following are some of the problems are had:
- * randomly lost my internet connection at least once per day, requiring a reboot
- * my HP laser printer wasn’t compatible
- * windows vista is a memory hog causing overall slow performance
- * intensive applications such as photoshop took forever to complete tasks
- * I had to reset my custom color profile for my monitor every time I rebooted, this was a major pain because the color accuracy of my photo printing depends on the monitor settings
I could go on, but it is pointless. The simple fact is that windows vista sucked. I did plan for this problem by making an image backup of my hard drive using Norton Ghost. That didn’t work either, Norton Ghost would not run under vista, making my backup image worthless. I also did not have a restore disc. Dell, in their ultimate cost-cutting wisdom, ships computers with a backup image on a separate partition. This was also garbage. Dell’s restore program that utilizes the image would not work either.
I was left with two choices. Order a restore disc from Dell or reformat my hard drive and install a clean installation of windows xp pro. I opted for the latter which was uneventful until I booted to xp and found I had no drivers installed for the ethernet card, sound and many other things. I did save the drivers folder before the reformat. It took me an hour and a half to manually find the correct driver for the ethernet card. Once I had internet I was able to quickly install the other drivers via windows update and Dell’s support site. Of course, the major task of reinstalling software was still looming ahead.
This experience did have a good ending. After hours and days of getting my computer back into a useful state it actually runs faster and better than it did when it was brand new in April. I attribute that to all the crap that comes preinstalled when you purchase a new PC from a major manufacturer.
Two lessons were learned. One, listen to my own advice and don’t use beta versions of software. Two, whenever possible, even with a brand new PC, format the hard drive and start with a clean installation of your operating system. That will eliminate a lot of useless garbage that does nothing but slow down your PC.
