Playing Ostrich

I’ve been emulating the phony meme, “Ostrich Hiding Head in Sand,” this week, mostly avoiding news (it’s all bad) and just getting on with life. It occurred to me that one of the biggest problems in our society today is that we’ve placed far, far too much power in the hands of folks who are far, far removed from our lives, power to directly affect our lives that the “feddle gimmint” (“feddle” rhymes with “meddle” you notice) ought not have and was never meant–at least by the Founders–to have.

WE, the People, have ceded our rights to liberty–freedom from governmental meddling–to people who do not have our best interests at heart. Let me repeat that: anyone who says, “I’m from the government; I’m here to help,” is lying–to you at the very least, and, if they’re stupid enough to be sincere, to themselves as well. Our political masters do NOT sincerely want to solve the problems they’ve created (with our help–we elected these bastards, didn’t we?), because any problem genuinely solved equals less power for the politicians *spit* and bureaucraps *puke* to exercise over us.

So, I’ve been hiding out this week. But that hasn’t stopped the little wheels from turning (be they ever so slowly turning). What if… what if just 10% of taxpayers said, “Enough! No more!” and simply… opted out. What if… just 100 people in every major city banded together and (after first purchasing body armor *heh*) simply drove V E R Y S L O W L Y on their city’s major arteries during rush hour. Every day for as long as they still had a car, in protest against civil governments doing everything possible to screw us blue. (Yeh, pay the tickets, but keep up the Good Work.) What if… people of good conscience (and at least half a brain–100% more than the average Mass Media Podperson) simply banded together and said, “No!” loudly, consistently, without fail, every time politicians lied to us, stole from us, lined their own pockets at our expense?

What if?

I suspect it’d look something like this.

*d’oh!* Moments from America’s Third World County

So, for the past several days, the “nag bar” insisting that I upgrade WordPress to 2.7.1 has been a big yellow distraction. “Been busy,” I told myself. Truth? Been lazy. Spoiled by the “Automagic” Upgrade plugin I’ve used for the past year or so, and so, when automatic upgrade failed drmatically on the first two tries, I thought to myself, “Self, just upgrade whenever ya have the time and mental spizzerinktum (plenty of good, fresh COFFEE!) to do it,” knowing full well that what I meant was, “When is someone gonna fix the plugin?!?!” *heh*

This ayem, with plenty of coffee in me, I started the lil trek to backup twc and manually install the upgrade when… “Hey! Why not search on the error message?” *d’oh*

Oh. The plugin I’d used for the past year is incompatible with the built in WP Automatic Upgrade function in 2.7!

Disable plugin. Upgrade automagically. Done. Actually fewer clicks than with the plugin. Got an error message, but blog appears to be working fine, I see no weird anomalies. Go with it.


*sheesh!* Found another thing I Do Not Like about Win7. GREATLY disliked same thing in Vista. It’s a little thing, but one of those little things that make life easier for lil ole me. ALL toolbars seem to be ONLY “sprouted” from the taskbar. Now, from Win98 through WinXP it was easy-peasy to create a SEPARATE custom toolbar on ANY side of ones desktop, just by dragging content there and dropping it. In Ubuntu, it’s easy to move the placement of the two built-in toolbars (not as easy as in Win98-XP, but easy. Easy to specify a new toolbar on any (unused) side of the desktop, too.

Not so with Win7 or Vista. *d’oh* (I’d seen this already with Vista but hoped against hope for a different behavior in Win7) Want a separate toolbar completely unlinked to the taskbar? Go fish. For some add-on app to enable that.

*feh* Me$$y$oft ‘s not even channeling Apple well with this one.

Another negative check mark.

*sigh* And I so wanted to like this OS. Really. OK, so I still mostly like it. But it still has too much Vista in its bones n blood. Oh. *duh*


I don’t have full access to my Ubuntu drive from Win7. Funny. NTFS drives aren’t a problem to access from Ubuntu…

Another negative check mark, I suppose. Oh. Well.


Have I mentioned enough times how much I hate, hate, hate Windows’ DRM crap? No, I have not. Not enough times at all, at all.

Oh. Well. There are ways around it.


*d’oh!* Need some OS relief! VMs to the rescue?

Later today (or this evening), off to VMWare to pick up a copy of VMWare Server so I can install a few more OSes on this drive and see just how well Win7 works with VMWare Server hosting other OSes. Should be interesting. Let’s see… what do I want to install? WinXP-64, Win2K, Win98, Suse Linux, Ubuntu, PCBSD and maybe an on-disk Puppy Linux? Sounds about right. 10-15 GiB disk space (with room to grow if needed) each should make ’em happy enough. See how VMWare Tools work here.


Oh! Another *d’oh” moment: why haven’t I installed some “Will only work in Win98/95” apps in compatibility mode, already? Needed to be fully caffeinated, I guess.

Here comes the last version of Encore I was really happy with… sometime after the VMs are installed. One in the Win98 VM and another in compatibility mode in Win7. Let’s see which one really works, eh? (Now, where did I put my midi controller/keyboard when I was cleaning off my desk… )


[Addendum] Habañero peppers are pretty hot, my lunch is telling me… *d’oh* (But *yum* too.)


About time I got back outa here. Almost time for my Wonder Woman to drop in for her lunch (long weekend for her starts today). Booyin’ now. Buh-bye!