Some interesting bits from the media

I was browsing through National Geographic Magazine today, and, while there were some fascinating articles, on the whole it was a depressing experience. What NGM is telling us is that we are using up this planet's resources at a prodigious rate. I think or my well loved granddaughter and I worry for her future. What all of this is telling me is that, as a species, we have to get off this planet in big (and I mean in the billions) way within the next one hundred years, or we are going doom both ourselves and our planet.

Then I was skimming through Newsweek, and found this on page 4, "...from an American perspective, the revolutions transforming the Middle East are also deeply sad. They're sad because they underscore what a terrible waste the last decade of American foreign policy has been." We have poured over a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives wasted for no real reason. Once again we are presented with clear evidence that George Bush (the younger) was arguably the worst president of all time. As a result of his presidency, we are left with a crushing debt load, a weak economy and an increasingly isolationist, selfish and fearful national psyche. 

Slow morning at the bookstore

Yeah, it’s raining out, and, besides, Sunday morning is usually slow for the first two hours or so. Knowing that it was most likely going to be not busy, I snuck a couple magazines behind the counter to fill in the empty minutes. The first one I opened was March's copy of National Geographic Magazine.

Now, I love National Geographic. It has been a staple in my life since I first learned how to read. But, this issue depressed me. One of the center-piece articles as about the “Age of Man”, and how we are shaping the planet in ways similar to major geologic events such as asteroid strikes. The gist of the story is that we are burning through the planet’s resources at a prodigious rate. There is a three page foldout picture of one of the California oil fields which produces about 32 million barrels of oil per year. The story notes that this is about 9 hours of the world’s consumption of oil.

I think of my well-loved granddaughter, and I seriously worry for her future. I’ll be dead and gone when the oil wells dry up in fifty years (mol), but she, and her children, will have to deal with this reality. So, what all this is telling me is that we, as a species, have to get off this planet in the near future (next 25-30 years) and in a very big way (in the tens…hundreds of millions.) We have to bring the population of the planet back down to a sustainable level and we have only a little time to do ourselves. Otherwise, dear old Mother Nature will do the culling, and, dear and sweet as she is, Mother Nature’s methods tend to be very…painful for both those culled and  those left standing. If we don’t get off this planet, we are dooming both our species and our planet to a very dark future.

Leaving National Geographic, I picked up the current copy of Newsweek and began to read. I Didn’t have to get very far into it before I came across the following, “…from an American perspective, the revolutions transforming the Middle East are also deeply sad. They’re sad because they underscore what a terrible waste the last decade of American foreign policy has been.” We have poured over a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives wasted for no good reason. Once again we are presented with clear evidence that George Bush (the younger) was arguably the worst president of all time. As a result of his presidency we are left with a crushing debt load, a weak economy and an increasingly isolationist, selfish and fearful national psyche.

Re: Aaack…(aka. computer problems)

Well, that post was about 3 months ago. Let me relate how things progressed. First, it seems that Roger didn’t know what he was talking about. The problem was not the drives, the problem was the SATA controller on the motherboard. Now, seeing as how the SATA controller is integral to the motherboard, the way to fix it is simply to buy a new MB. Which I did. However, it was not the exact same model as the one originally in the ASUS case.
While I was waiting for that to arrive, I started poking around with the Dell to see what it's problem was. Turns out, it wasn’t the Dell at all. I have a Belkin port sharing switch which allows me to share keyboard/mouse/monitor between up to four computers. Well, I have a real old computer (still running Win98) and the Dell hooked up to that. I had some idea once about converting the really old Quantex into a Linux box, but that never quite happened. Anyhow, when the power went out, the Belkin box reset to default configuration. The really old Quantex is on port 1, the Dell is on port 2. When I switched ports on the switch from one to two, voila!, the Dell was right there. Oops, operator error.
So, back to the ASUS. I finally got the new MB in towards the end of January. Had it installed and ready to go the first week of February. I got the board pretty much naked. I cannibalized the CPU, memory, fan, video card, original hard drive and the new 500gb drive I had purchased to replace the supposedly bad 2TB drive I had originally got to fix my problem from the old setup. Once I had everything in place, I powered it up and (again) Voila! the ASUS was back. OK, it was not the same computer: it was a new computer in the old box. Still, I now had/have a working computer again.
Except that it glitches a little bit. Sometimes things are very slow and sometimes it freezes up entirely. Now, the slowdown could be because I have installed the full ZoneAlarm package, and  it, in its unswerving pursuit of perfect safety, sometimes does slow things down. The good news is that I am back to having everything working. And it only has taken me three months to reach this point.
Now that I think of it, I’m not sure this is all good. I’ll get back with a conclusion about that after I have had time to think about it.

2 am and I can’t sleep….

So, here I am at 2am with eyes wide open. I have to get up in about 5 hours, and the harder I try to fall asleep, the more it eludes me. Last night was inventory at the store, so I didn’t get to bed until 4am-ish yesterday morning. my circadian rhythms are all screwed up. I have jet lag without having gone anywhere. That and the fact that my granddaughter’s weird mother (they’re divorced so all she is to me now is my granddaughter’s mother) wants to take her out of the Montessori school she is currently going to, courtesy of my wife who is a teacher there, and put her into public school. This is not a good thing. The woman is certifiable. If I were even moderately rich, I would spend huge sums of money on lawyers to bury her in the system. By the time she got her head above water again, the granddaughter would be in college and living her own life.

Alright, maybe the 3 ibuprofen tabs I just took will kick in and I can get a couple hours sleep before facing another day in retail. Some aspects of my life really do suck…