The internet, over the past several years, has become a mecca of the mind; a meetingplace of thought and passion, art and criticsm. When it comes to the latter, there is definitely no lack of those who think they know better than everyone else. These are the people of whom I speak of this evening.

After reading articles I tend to enjoy reading the "comments" sections when available. They're usually chalk full of unintentional humor, anger, and vitriol the likes of which most civilized humans would be embarrassed to spew face-to-face with someone. Let me share some fun ones from this article on Oliver Stone's "W." with you so you can see why:

"...Why does uneducated movie stars think the rest of educated America gives a straw about what Hollywood thinks. Please believe nothing Oliver Stone shows in his movies is true..."

"How care what Hollywood thinks!"

"Wow, what a bunch of idoits! HOW DARE THEY, THEY ARE ACTORS! MORONS"

"...when anything happens everyone blames bush the democrats in congress and the senate have just as much blame they are the one's that have sit by and done nothing to help this country and even delibratley kept the prices at the pump high by not allowing america to drill..."

"I'm glad to see that they are also premiering the re-release of the Hanoi Hilton, oh, that's right. They are waiting until after the electtion as to not effect the outcome. Noycott Hollywood I say, and especially Springstink."

"I dont think you need to be a havard graduate to know Bush was/is a disaster."

"I pray that I live long enough to be alive when the Muslims take over this country.This group of people will be the first group be-headed..." (Wow, really, you're literally praying for Muslims to take over the U.S. and be-head actors? -ZP)

"This is a disgrace, I dont care who is the sitting president is democrat or repbublican this should not be done at all and the hollywood team have hit an all time low which really was not to far t go. And im a strong republican and would not tolerate this if president was a democrat either."

"Hollywood SCUM!!!!"

"you mean to tell me You mean to tell me Hollywood doesn't like President Bush? Shocking!!!" (This comment was posted twice, too. -ZP)

"So sick of these people... Communists."

"Movies like this one has made me decide to STAY HOME, rather than support this kind of pathetic bias..."

"So-caalled superior minds playing with themselves again."

"Who cares what an actor's opinion is? Their work is to play act people and events." (Triple-posted. -ZP)

"Well James Cromwell is a political expert and yes the Bush administration did sack the office as if it was imperial Rome..."

"say...doesen't dreyfuss have aids"

There are literally hundreds of these, so I can't read them all. These are just the ones that stick out. And there are millions more like this all over the internet, on sites all over the place.

People amuse and disturb me.

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Well, I haven't posted in a while. The primary reason is that my laptop has taken to crashing minutes after being booted up, which I have all but concluded is due to some issue with the CPU. ZombieHill is taking it to 'Mr. Notebook' tomorrow for them to take a look. If it were my desktop I'd have the thing taken apart in minutes, but with my laptop I'm a bit more...cautious about tearing it up. Taking them apart is easy; putting them back together in working order is not.

It's hard not having a laptop. I love my desktop system, don't get me wrong. But the convenience of my laptop can't be beat. I can use it anywhere, and when it comes to mine, I do. It's not a bad laptops either; it's an HP Pavilion, which I bought because I've never had any issues with the HP/Compaq brand systems. My desktop PC is an HP and it's been great over the years. I've had HP/Compaq laptops and a Compaq desktop in the past (in fact, the first PC I ever bought was a Compaq) and never had any issues. I know that Compaq has had a bad rap for the past several years, but I don't share in that sentiment.

So I was surprised that this system had any problems. It happened suddenly and inexplicably, as far as I can tell. I am usually pretty careful with my computer systems, so I don't think it's anything I did. I'd love to blame Hill for it, as she was using it for the last few months while we put off buying a replacement AC adapter for her MacBook which was chewed up by one of her pet rats. But she never did anything to it that I didn't, and she's pretty good about taking care of her stuff too (mostly).

So anyway, hopefully in the next few days I'll get my laptop back and things can go back to normal. I've never heard anything about Mr. Notebook before, but if worse comes to worst, I'll just buy a new one anyway. Eventually.

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http://wcbstv.com/seenon/four.seasons.pricey.2.835862.html
http://www.dailynews.com/ci_10663875?source=rv
http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/localnews/ci_10664741?source=rss

Does anyone else feel like they are in a surreal 70's SciFi plot? I am almost obliged to attempt to bridge the gap between the current economic black hole with the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) with the latest behavior of mankind. The thing is, if you click one of the above links you will come to the same conclusion as if you clicked all three. These well to-do folks all calculated and executed the equation we've been conditioned to believe yields the answer of stability and happiness. And yet they find or found themselves with their Ego, Id and Super Ego as blurred and as hard to discern as the latest Dow Jones graph tracker. What do I make of it? A better question is what do you make of it? We are collectively faced with not only the challenge of losing everything we find essential but with the loss of everything we take for granted. It's easy to walk around in a cloud of affluence where self worth equals net worth. The challenge is to transcend with the nads that are as bad ass'd as eternal TRUTH. Truth prevails, stock markets fall as fast as Roman Empires and not with big parades and fanfare but with with light speed and smoke.

I'm reminded of what happened during the great depression. God forbid that's where we are headed, I have two sons I'd like to see either quaterback the Dallas Cowboys or create a longer lasting light bulb... However, back during the 1930's I seem to remember reading such well to-do and successfull folks jumping off of large buildings to escape the despair of facing the fact that their allusions were illusions. Another thought hit me, I was laying in my California King sized bed surfing 900 channels of 46" big screen, high definition imagery in a very intricately controlled climate when I realized.. of all the kings who occupied history in it's entirety, not one ever enjoyed such comfort and extravance as I do. I am at best middle class.

-STK

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So, the big thing going around the internet today is that instead of buying up bad debt and investing in these failing banks, the government should pass out that $700 billion to the American people. The email I got today put it this way:

Conservatively estimating that there are about 200 million taxpayers, if you were to split the initial $45 billion proposed amongst all of these hard-working taxpayers, that would be $425,000 per taxpayer to pay off debts and invest back into the economy and fix all of ills.

No wonder we're in a financial crisis right now, people! 45 billion divided by 200 million isn't 425,000; it's 425! That's $425 dollars per taxpayer. Even if you took the entire 700 billion and divided amongst 200 million taxpayers, it's still only $3500.

Look, you financial geniuses out there. Stop looking for your own personal quick-fix. I know it seems ingenius finding a way to personally grab a couple hundred g's from Uncle Sam, but it just doesn't work that way. Geeze, imagine the hyper-inflation that would take place if every taxpayer were given $425,000. The value of the dollar would fall so hard that gas would probably cost $100 a gallon. Interest rates would fly through the roof. You want to see an economy crash? That would do it.

We have to be smarter than this. It's our responsibility to keep this economy afloat and the corporations in check. I know a lot of people were forwarding this around as a joke; but you can't believe how many people were thinking this is a good idea today. The CNN forums are full of people talking about how this is the course the government should take.

Boy oh boy. This is going to be an interesting week.

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Well, it looks like those Washington economic whiz kids have come to an agreement on a bail-out deal for those hard-hit financial giants dying away thanks to their bad banking, loan, and debt management systems.

I'm no economy expert. I'll admit that up front. But it seems to me that throwing money at the problem now is only delaying the inevitable. Everytime the government creates money to pump without any real thought into the economy, it creates more and more inflation which hurts the value of the dollar in the long run. Maybe a recession, as painful as it would be here and now, is what the economy needs for the future. Not every problem needs a quick band-aid fix.

The real problem is that Washington is now expected to kiss every boo-boo and fix every problem that crops up. I can just see Congress buying stocks in every company that starts to sink to prop them back up, until the government is a major stakeholder in every major U.S. corporation. Good-bye, free market economy. Good-bye, freedom in general. Forget Republican platitudes, forget all that B.S. about wanting smaller government and less government spending. This is a major shift into a new, socialist era in the United States. We're all a part of the ride, and as we stand idly by and watch these idiots sign their names to a check tied to an account with our money in it...

Jane, get me off this crazy thing.

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Nothing like a Boeing 747 full of change, is there?

Alright, I don't really know what kind of plane it is. What I can tell you, based on this and other photos, that Obama has a big plane to carry him and his crew around. This is aside from the "change bus" or whatever the vehicular parade he rides around in is.

I thought these guys were all about the environment and stuff? Does Obama really need a plane that big? Same thing for McCain really since he's bitten into the global warming apple too. What a bunch of hypocrites man. It really is irritating, and frankly somewhat distressing. Either these people genuinely believe that global warming is man-made and is going to be the death of us all and don't care enough to curb their jet-setting and bus riding, or they don't believe it and are lying to us and trying to get us to change our lifestyles...for what? To look good to Europe?

What a load. These guys aren't worth my time in November. I'm penciling in Steel_Toed_Kodiak. He may immediately push the button and unleash armageddon, but at least I'll be expecting it.

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No, just kidding. Let's see how long it takes for this to start really generating some Google traffic. Honestly, who wants to see that anyway? She's really only hot by proximity; in other words, compared to McCain and Clinton, she's gorgeous. I've seen pics of her as a teenager (all fully-clothed) and while not bad looking, she's no supermodel.

Anywho, I'm here watching the Cowboys take on the Packers on NBC. Usually I don't think about it much, but for some reason on Dish Network we don't get NBC in high-definition. I really need to call them and ask why. We get so many other HD channels, I can't see why we wouldn't get one of the top broadcast networks' HD feed.

I was concerned about moving to satellite when we were moving out to the country, but so far most of those fears have been unfounded. In the year we've lived out here, I think we've had a cumulative 30 minutes of outage time. We had that much outage time with cable too. As a matter of fact, Time Warner had to install a repeater to strengthen our cable signal when we were at our old house, and if that thing wasn't plugged in, forget it. Another cool thing with Dish is that all of our TVs have DVR, not just one. So our guests can...pause and rewind, I guess. Whatever, it's cool.

Man I love me some Cowboys. 10-6 Cowboys right now as I'm typing at Green Bay's 15 yard line.

Whoops, nasty sack. Almost lost it to Green Bay with a fumble. I think Hill gets concerned by the sounds I make when I'm watching football sometimes. Just now it sounded like my spleen ruptured.

Better get back to the game and our email stream, or this'll sit in my notepad window forever.

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So for the longest time I've been running Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop and as a dual-booted partition on my desktop PC. Over time, though, I've slowly migrated back to Windows. I can come up with a lot of different excuses as to why, but the honest and truest answer is because it's easier to work with. I am pretty familiar with the Linux community, and while a good chunk of them aren't necessarily computer saavy, most of them have had the patience to take the time to familiarize themselves with Unix and gotten to know their operating system. They know all the hacks to get stuff working, and they enjoy messing with something to make it work right. I know this feeling, because I do it to.

But there are somethings that I want that just don't run correctly in Linux. Orb, for example, which sits on my PC at home and can stream my satellite signal over the internet to any PC with an internet connection. (Though in truth because my internet connection at home is fairly unreliable, I don't use it like I used to.) Any random game or piece of software that I want to download. The game here or there that I have to go through hell and high water to get running correctly in Linux that just installs and plays in Windows.

Well, so I thought.

Last weekend I reloaded my laptop with Vista Home Premium edition, the operating system that it had come with (my laptop is an HP Pavilion). I have played with Vista in the past, and frankly had always had mixed feelings about it. It was a huge departure from what I was used to, and there were certain things that had irritated me about it. But I had heard some positive comments about the latest service pack, and I thought "what the hell" and loaded it to give it a spin.

First of all, it is a dog-slow operating system. My laptop isn't exactly a gaming rig, but it gets the job done. Unless I'm running Vista. Before I got my video drivers loaded (that prior-to mentioned internet was down most of last weekend) I decided to kill some time one night and play some solitaire. Wouldn't you know it, without a competent graphics card giving the game an edge, it ran in some kind of "low performance" mode and was nearly unusable.

Solitaire. Needed a graphics card.

Deciding not to take a risk on getting rejected by a graphically-enhanced session of minesweeper, I put my laptop away until I could get a hold of those drivers. Sunday night our internet connectivity returned and I was able to download the needed files from the HP support page. After installation, I was finally able to run solitaire. The 2D graphics blew my mind in their sheer mediocrity.

Tired of a game that I could have played in real life with a deck of cards and a coffee table, I decided to really test my portable "GeForce Go" video card and installed Spore, which really is an awesome game. After the (twenty minute!) installation was complete, I went to Start > Programs and...nothing. The game had installed (apparently), but there were no game files.

Much to my chagrin, I uninstalled what was there and decided to try again. Same thing. So now that I had wasted about an hour of my life, I decided to research the problem. Turns out that in Vista you can't install the game directly from the disc. EA suggested copying the files from the disc to a folder on the desktop and installing it from there.

What!?

What kind of weird bug is this? Can't install software from a disc? Had anyone tested this out before shipping? I have a hard time blaming EA; this disc installs Spore in XP just fine (I had installed it on my desktop running XP just fine).

Tired of my Vista experiment, I got an old XP disc I have and reloaded my little machine again. Of course, thanks to Microsoft's stranglehold on the PC manufacturing community, HP no longer supports XP on this model laptop, so I had to go to great lengths to get the drivers I needed to run it in XP. But after about a day's worth of work, I am sitting here on my XP-loaded laptop. And Spore runs great.

I think that I'm skipping Vista at home. We've got another few months until the government adopts Vista at work, so I feel no real compunction to get it running. As for Ubuntu, I still have a partition loaded on my desktop running it. I don't think I've been in it in two weeks.

Windows may not be the best operating system around, but the support base for it can't be beat. Sorry, Linux; I'm just not ready to invest the time in you yet.

P.S.: I'd like to give a shout-out to JoDee and her family; she sent me a nice email telling me about how she reads the site and enjoys it. Hope you all have a great weekend!

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Well, I'm kind of disappointed in the amount we got to participate in Hurricane Ike. Look, I feel for the people from the coast whose homes were destroyed and lives rocked by this devastating storm. I'm not at all saying that I wish it had happened to me. But was a little rain too much to ask for? Throughout the partly-cloudy-at-most weekend, we didn't get even a drop of rain out here in the country. Some of my friends got rain at least where they live (north of San Antonio). We got none.

Anyway, I'm watching the Cowboys game right now so this is going to be short. Started out with the Cowboys just destroying, but they have fallen apart within the last ten minutes giving the Eagles the lead by six. Oh it makes me sick. This is our last start in the old stadium, fellas. GET YOUR S*#%T TOGETHER AND LET'S SEE SOME FOOTBALL!!!

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Well, Hurricane Ike is churning its way through the Gulf of Mexico towards Texas like an old woman driving slowly across several lanes on the freeway, oblivious to everything around her and either unaware or unconcerned about the damage done and the lives lost in horrible, horrible carnage.

I'm trying to decide how much effort I'm going to have to put into protecting my home and property before the storm hits. Apparently the eye of whatever's left of the hurricane is going to pass right over us, so we're going to have to do something. Hill is going to Home Depot tomorrow since she gets off work early on Thursdays to get some wood so that I can put together the semblance of a shelter for the goats. The horses are probably going to have to cower along the side of the trailer, which they do anyway to stand by the AC compressor which blows the flys off their faces. I'm really not too concerned about them; as dumb as they are I think even they'll know enough to run away from a tree if it starts to fall.

I'm pretty sure that we'll be without power for a considerable portion of the weekend; at least for Saturday. Sometimes it seems like if I fart the wrong way we lose power. I was considering looking for some kind of generator but am not really sure it's worth it. Besides, everyone in San Antonio is going to be out buying generators, water, and batteries over the next few days. You'd think that we were in Houston.

I am definitely writing off going anywhere this weekend. I-37 is going one-way here in a day or so to get as many people out of the coast area as possible, and I-37 is our way home, going the wrong way. We can take one of the loops also, but it's a long way around and I don't think it's worth it. Besides, I don't want to miss it when our roof blows off.

I think the biggest concern for us is tornadoes. Living in a tornado magnet, we do run the risk of our mobile home vortex sucking a tornado onto us. At work they sent out a bunch of government crap about the dangers of extreme weather, and one of the dangers was living in a mobile home. I guess the danger is that when your home is sucked into the air it becomes a hideous projectile of cheap cardboard doors and storm windows. And in our case cats.

Hill was talking about going to Waco for the weekend, which I needed to talk her out of. Afterall, when the power is out and there's no TV or internet to bide the time, that leaves one thing for a young couple to do.

Monopoly.

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