Needed a powerful laptop to take to Africa for photo storage and presentation. I settled on ASUS G1sn. It was loaded with Vista64 but I figured I could wipe it clean and upgrade to XP. No Drivers! I wanted to list some of the neat features about Vista that make it tempting to keep:
1.
After heavy research and in some cases hacking drivers to make them fit, I have XP running! It is more than twice as fast for some things, and all games run FPS better.
A friend needed a laptop and insisted on XP. I found that Newegg sells XP laptops, but no retail stores do! Walmart has a nice basic Toshiba for a great price, so I figured that they would have drivers out there. No such banana. Same hammering procedure will be needed to get XP running.
Update: The business model is now to charge extra for the option to be “XP compatible.” Toshibas L series actually got off their butts long enough to write XP drivers. No such luck for my Psycho ASUS gaming laptop or any of the Vista Toshibas I have the pleasure of tech supporting constantly. How much would computers cost without operating systems being forced down their throats?
Popsy Pointless
I just casually glanced at the cost of this bailout socialist attack. Adjusted for inflation it is more expensive than WWII!
This is from some news site: “The bailouts cost more than the total combined costs in today’s dollars of the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the entire historical budget of NASA, including the moon landing.”
I want a list of what I get for my tax dollars!
- WWII I would pay for to have freedom from communism and to deter aggressive nations.
- Moon landings and spaceships? Oh yeah! Sign me up.
- Bad mortgage debt and companies that build bloated unoriginally designed gashogs?
- Elitist parties in Scottsdale and corporate jets?
I wish I could pass.
Update: It turns out that financial evils and bad debt really can cause an airplane bailout! The sad part is that this sap will go to jail, and our greedy senators and leaders of state will be praised for the same actions.
Popsy Pointless
Ok, something is up with our local elections. There are nothing but Ron Paul ads everywhere. You cannot look in any direction without seeing them Kryloned on peoples trucks, sides of barns, holding them with hand painted signs on street corners and such.
Now after elections they claim that he got something like 400 votes in Cochise County. This is just impossible. I have seen that many people with signs in Sierra Vista alone! Also the traditional rural voting stations were closed and people were being sent to other cities farther away to vote. The voting stations had large queues when they closed.
Last night the news reported wrong numbers and errors I think the Ron Paulians are neither Democrat nor Republican so somehow their votes don’t matter. I cry foul! The media is only presenting two choices: a woman and a pro-abortion liberal. Our country has gone mad. The internet wins this election.
Popsy Pointless
I thought for once in a long while I would give another TV show a chance. Every time I peek at the filthy thing I leave disappointed. Last time was Bionic Woman, as a kid I remember she was all about virtue, strength and goodness. So I give the series a tiny peek and sure enough she is sleeping around with the main doctor, then in a toilet, and so is her little sis in some car. Sigh.
Tonight I was entrapped by an interview where they claimed the fun and light hearted nature of the Night Rider show would be carried into the new one. There was a large part of the original show that was about being good and doing good deeds for the world.
Within the first fifteen minutes we have the new “knight” sleeping with several women at once, and the female lead FBI agent having a one night stand with a girl on some beach. Shame on you, Hollywood! And shame on me, too.
Update: Fortunately the series backed away from most of the foulness. Still has a high flirtly factor, but does not make ick and eww.
Popsy Pointless
We did the annual free credit reports today. Transunion was arranged badly. Difficult to tell which accounts were open or closed. No useful other information. Confirmation of my identity was clunky. Forced to create an account at the site. The score fee (7.95) and skip fee were equal buttons.
Equifax grouped open and closed in sections, had info about what might be good practices, and told what total credit available was. Very nice. Bar graphs and a pie chart even! Confirmation was simple multiple choice, and no account was required. (As long as you got and printed the report in the same session). Skipping the score fee (7.95) was a small text link under two pay buttons. They said they were the cheapest score fee out there.
Experian had a quick confirm of social, then four multiple choice answers, some of which could be found on any map. Include score fee (5.95) was a grayed out but functional skip button. After confirming my information the site says “unable to give information at this time”. The options for snail mailing it were a broken form. 
Do this:
You may limit “prescreened” offers of credit and insurance you get based on information in your credit report.
Unsolicited “prescreened” offers for credit and insurance must include a toll-free phone number you can call if you choose to remove your name and address from the lists these offers are based on. You may opt-out with the nationwide credit bureaus at:
1-888-567-8688 (888-5OPTOUT).
(Update: one year later and the spam is almost gone! We get maybe one snail-mail from credit people a week! Now was this change because of our effort or because of the failing debt industry?)
January 18, 2010 Did Transunion again
28th December, 2010 did equifax.
Popsy Pointless
The model for staying in people’s homes as opposed to paying for a motel is improving. Even locally some sites are offering this service. Our family can’t stay in a motel for under 100 bucks a night, but we could easily camp in one of these: http://www.tdyrents.com Some of these houses are posh impressive. Now I would love to find that house swapping service and exchange for a few weeks with some lucky family in Japan!
Popsy Pointless
I have moved from the “quit being silly” about spiders category into the “shake every piece of clothing and look in the sheets” category in one bite (actually, two bites). There are some evil spiders out here such as recluses. I used to let them live, but now all spiders have moved into the cricket category. (Kill on sight). Notice the uneven spread of poison and the red soon to be black color?
What I wanna know is how did he get in my briefs? One bite was on the right cheek, and this one up front at the leg joint. I did the correct procedures, using a sharpie around the perimeter to measure growth. I am very blessed that it didn’t get as bad as those internet pics and stories of bad recluse bites.
Popsy Pointless
I am building to split the information in several sites and move them back to America from my horrible Indian host (avoid powweb.com unless you are fluent in Parsi or Hindi.)
Soon to be brought into existence: whatacustomer.com, mudstick.com, and cdnerd.com. Fun! (Actually it feels too much like work at this point.)
This is a shameless cross-link so that spiders will quickly find the following sites:
The Sons of the Rio Grande Official Western swing music group page. Apart from the music player, it is straight up plain php.
Check out The evangelism tool has been updated with a better navigation structure. Made image maps without using image maps, flash or javascript. Do they work in other browsers? Did I nail the Indiana Jones feel to it? It is time for content providers to help.
It seems time that this popsynth tired site gets a facelift as well. Now all that remains is to choose a method, brand it, and repost everything. While updating the Where to eat pages, I happened to consider that URLS should also not be changed during the upgrade process. I should have chosen a more stable blogger, no?
Popsy Pointless
Installed a cheap pellet stove off of ebay, but listen to the noise! T__T (10mb)
Popsy Pointless
Normally I’m not very politically motivated, but the gas-price leeches are really sapping me. Plus the ditty “We need a war” by Fischerspooner is really fun. The following approach looks very accurate:
Fact-based costs of the war in Iraq.
Even getting a third of all our gas money does not make a dent in funding the war. We will be paying for this one for many generations. Is debt how Vietnam and other conflicts were funded? As a country have we ever actually paid for any of it?
The whole Saddam hanging thing bothered me. It felt wrong. If Osama really has family with millions and his goal in 9-11 was to hurt our economy by attacking the iconic financial institutions, he clearly won.
Popsy Pointless
