On my return from the AGU conference, I rented a car to get home from the airport. It was late and I took what the clerk gave me without noticing. I got to the car and noticed it was a Ford Fusion. It was significantly more roomy than the Suzuki I had driven less than a week ago. There was room for my legs as well as for someone to sit behind me. The style was very nice. The dashboard was sleek and all the buttons well placed.

As for power, I had enough power that even with another person in the vehicle with me, and our carryon luggage, I was able to glide up big hills.

The seat was confortable with good lumbar support. The radio even had satelite radio. I did not use the radio but for a second or two to see how well I could work it.

If I had a need for a medium sized sedan I would strongly consider the Fusion.

I just drove to the airport in a rental car. I was given a Suzuki SX4 sedan. I am tall and did not expect to fit very well. I complained to the rental clerk that I have never fit well into Suzukis perviously. He was kind and asked that I try it first. To my surprise, I had ample leg room as the driver but no one would have been able to sit behind me, not even a child. However, the drivers seat was rather narrow and my hips hurt from driving the 90 miles to the airport.

The controls: shifter, wipers, cruise, radio and air/heater seemed ok to me. Nothing special but good enough to not be noticed. I did have a little bit of slow down going up a big pass. I was in the car alone with a large carry on bag and a backpack so not a lot of extra weight. Certainly not as much as say three adults would be.

For myself, I would probably not buy it. For someone that is not considered tall this would be a decent car for commuting (not up big hills), to run around with a couple little kids, or for an older couple.

I have been stalled for some time in my progress in upgrading my wife's HP laptop to MS Windows 7. I received an error during the upgrade and MS Windows Vista shut it down.

I figured I would just have to re-install Vista and perform the upgrade on a fresh install. I didnt have time and thus procrastinated the day.

Today my wife was trying to install a game onto the laptop and it would not allow the game to install, even with entering the admin password. It needed, for some reason, the user to actually be an admin. I tried to log in as the admin and it failed. the password was accepted and it proceeded about 15 seconds. Then it simply failed saying "the user profile can not be loaded" and returned to the login screen. This was not acceptable. I spent a bit of time with google trying to find a solution to the problem. I found the solution here. In order to boot into safe mode I had to pull up the msconfig dialog and tell it to always boot into safe mode. It then auto-logged in and assumed I had admin privileges. Once I changed the registry key I changed the msconfig back to a normal boot process.

As soon as I logged in as the admin I was prompted to put in the upgrade disk to finish the upgrade. Apparently you need to be logged in as the actual admin (or a user with admin privileges) not just as a user with access to the admin password. It finished in less than an hour.

Thus total time I spent trying to get the upgrade to work was less than about 5 hours. This includes time spent with google and trying to log in as the admin. Also includes trying three times to get the data to copy to the system.

After a reboot I was running MS Windows 7. I must say the hidden backgrounds are beautiful! but I will leave that for another day. As for now, I actually like the feel of MS Windows 7 including the menu. I know, for someone that prefers GNU/Linux this is heresy.

The first ammendmentHave anyone in the White House actually ever read the first amendment to our Constitution? I mean more than just accept that it says "free speech"? Sometimes I wonder what they were taught in school, then I remember that our schools are utter failures despite the tons of money we as a country have been throwing at them for decades. I guess it really is no surprise.


Let me quote the first amendment:


Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.



To paraphrase, Congress shouldn't abridge the freedom of speech or of the press. Many people came to this country to escape government sponsored religion and government sponsored forced adherence to that religion. Take the Pilgrims for example, they were mistreated in England so they set sail for Holland. After some peaceful time there, they realized that it was not ideal for their kids and set sail again but this time heading west to the new world. They had been restricted in what they said, how they dressed, how they prayed and even in their own printed words.


If I may deviate from that for a moment and take a longer look at history, with especial focus on that of the 20th century. Every socialist, communist, marxist, fascist, mao-ist, dictator, or tyrannical government (in history) has tightly controlled or made its first movement in controlling what people read and write. Hitler burned books that he deemed seditious. He also held an iron fist over what news the people received. Lenin and Mao held that same iron grip. Anyone who said or printed anything, even just asking questions of the leaders, was killed, sent to the gulags or worse.


The question really should be why do regimes want to control news, books, etc. I think that in some cases followers of these leaders are so caught up in emotion and in the flattering words that they have convinced themselves that they must "for the greater good" burn a book, ban someones words or ostracize someone for even daring to ask a question.



Back to the Pilgrims. They ingrained into their children and so forth the need to be able to peaceably express their ideas and thoughts to each other even if they disagreed. Leaders such as King George also reinforced this belief in freedom by trying to severely restrict it. Our ancestors, of a literal sense or of a national sense, fought a war to provide freedom from government burdens. Among the things they demanded was the right to dissent from the government in thought, word and in the written article.


Why then does our government abandon the founding principles of our great nation and attempt to restrict what people say and write about them? Why do those in our White House spout things that the tyrannical, mass murderer Mao Tse Tung said? Why do they act as if they would burn books as was done in Germany?


Let Freedom Ring!

I stopped tonight to fill my gas tank. I had not filled up for three weeks and failed to notice the up tick in gas prices over that time.

As the gas flowed into my tank, I made mention of the change in price to the gentleman across from me. He looked at the price and said he had not noticed. I stated my recollection and he then agreed that prices had gone up. Nearly under his breath, he said something like "those gas companies sure know how to rake us over for a profit." I topped off my tank, grabbed my receipt and left.

As I drove away, I thought about his comment. I remembered how the summer of last year gas prices went over $4 per gallon of gas and reached astronomically high prices per barrel. I could not think of one good reason that gas companies would want prices to go up. If prices go up, we buy less gas and conserve more. That doesn't do them any good. I then started to think about why the prices went up.

I realized that there could be two or three things competing against us and causing prices to go up.

First, the US dollar is weaker because the last president borrowed a load of money. The dollar continues to get even weaker because our current president has borrowed more than 1.4 trillion dollars this year alone. So a weak dollar means our money does not buy as much from other countries. Since we get a lot of our oil from other countries we are going to pay more. This, however, does not explain the sharp increase last summer. It does explain why we are paying more now than two, three or ten years ago, especially when you consider we import an ever increasing percentage of our oil.

Second, we and other countries are using more oil. India uses more oil now than it did last year and will continue to demand more oil. So does China, Mexico, Brazil, etc. That means there is more demand with about the same amount of production. This causes prices to go up. As an example, I wonder how many people recall what happened at Christmas time some years ago with Cabbage Patch dolls. There was a Huge demand and a short supply. They were selling for ridiculous sums and people were literally duking it out to get them. I bet Coleco made a huge windfall profit that year. Anyone mad about that?

As investors see the increasing demand for oil in the world they bet demand would continue to go up and they bought more oil. This caused prices to go up, way up. As the price went high enough investors sought to sell, cashing in on the stock market tune of "Buy low and sell high". This then caused prices to go down as there was more oil on the market.

Third, this comes from the conspiratorial side of me, OPEC, Venezuela, and other oil rich nations could deny us the oil we need. Because we do not have enough domestic production of oil, their choice could cause our prices to sky rocket even higher than we saw last summer. If such an embargo lasted long enough, you may not even be able to buy a gallon of gas for any price.

If oil companies made a hefty profit last summer or are making it now, it is not because they were controlling gas prices. Also, why should they not get to keep it and pay out nice dividends to retirement portfolios?

Who gets to cast a ballot? How do we determine if it is legit?

Polling stations and ballot laws were designed to be in local communities where people knew each other. there was no need for showing IDs. They knew what you did and who you were. Now, if you havent moved in the last 5 years you are an oddity. If you know all your neighbors and many eve in your own neighborhood you are considered a kook.

Why is it that, by law, you are registered to vote when you get a driver's license and many states allow immigrants (legal or not) to get driver's licenses without proof of citizenship?

How do we then assure that those who vote are legitimate voters? how do we know they are not going all over town voting?

As I proceeded in the process of upgrading my MS Vista to MS 7, the upgrade disk said it would copy nearly 4 GB of data to my system. After having copied more than 2.3 GB of the data an error message popped up and said something to the effect that the program (meaning the upgrade program) has caused an error and that windows needed to close it. What?

so I pulled the disk out, rebooted and tried again. It took about 10 minutes to get through the compatibility report, copy over the 2.3GB of data, and throw an error again. The same error. I tried it once more.

Not working.

Maybe it is one of the programs I have installed on the laptop. I compiled a list of programs I have installed. I can not see why one of them would cause the failure but here is the list (in no particular order):

• Open Office
• SpeedCrunch
• Quicktime
• ClamWin
• Mplayer-MPUI
• Acroread
• Unison
• Zenmap
• Firefox
• Blackberry desktop
• Cygwin
• TexMakerX
• MikTex
• GIMP
• Putty
• Notepad2
• Muvee
• WikidPad
• SlingMedia
• LightScribe
• various HP software (the HP compatibility disk checked these without raising any flags).

I will continue this entry later.

As I mentioned previously, I bought an HP laptop for wife. It came with MS Windows Vista Home Premium Edition and an option to mail in and request a free upgrade to MS Windows 7. I was not excited about the Microsoft operating system nor the upgrade but my wife was. Originally I thought we could cimply wipe the hard drive and install something like Open SuSe as the sole operating system. This is how our desktop computer runs and I thought that would be sufficient. She uses Open SuSe daily and seems to like it. She navigates through many programs, folder/files, word processing (Open Office), picture editing (Gimp) and many other task just fine. I made a small partition on the drive and install ArchLinux. However, this time, she said no to GNU/Linux as the default operating system. This is mostly because she wants games on there for the kids. We ahve a few that operate in MS windows only. We will see how it works.

I read several reviews about performing the upgrade. So when the upgrade disks finally came, I was excited to try my hand at the upgrade.

Since the laptop in question is an HP and the upgrade option is through HP, there are two disks that came. The first disk is from HP and is intended to validate the system; ensuring all drivers are updated. I started at 9:27 PM. There were several dialogue boxes and it did its thing. At 9:30 PM it requested that I reboot the machine. I noticed that the boot menu was not overwritten. 

-- Previously everytime I have installed a GNU/Linux operating system first on a sytem and then installed an MS operating system the MBR, where I put Grub, has been overwritten. Meaning I had to rewrite the MBR and re-setup Grub to enable dual booting. This is a pain at best. Often the easiest solution is to intall MS first and then a flavor of GNU/Linux.

After the reboot, I logged into a user account, not an administrative account, and I put in the MS Windows 7 upgrade disk. After asking for the admin password, it asked a question regarding language and then attempted to install the latest updates.

I will continue writing more about the upgrade process later.

A lie is a lie, right? When a politician has an affair it is his business? When anyone makes a racial slure, that is a very bad thing, right?? It is a jail-able offense to not pay your taxes, right? It is worth life in prison to promote or have sexual contact with minors, right? Well, at least you ought to loose your job for that, right?

I find it frustrating and even infuriating that some people, like Oscar winners or those in the pocket of whoever is currently in power, to not receive justice. Is Justice blind to race, religion, money, status, fame and even friends?

Lady Justice is no longer played out in the court room. She is unblindfolded and played like a fool in newspapers, TV shows and online in forums, blogs, etc.

When I think of a sleezy, used car salesman I think of someone who will tell me anything to make a sell and then give me something very different than what I was promised.

The bolshivek revolution was supported by the masses because of the promise that a "workers paradise" would be created in which no one would have to work and everyone would be able to eat; everyone having and being the same. To someone toiling long hours of the day for little reward it sounds great. It is pure flattery. It is a ponzi scheme