Your President

Let's look at headlines from 2000 to 2004 leading up to the point that we, the people re-elected this leader.

You should probably just read this.

My favorite part:

"More Americans, including more minority families, own their own homes than ever before. In June 2002, President Bush challenged the nation to increase the number of minority homeowners by 5.5 million by the end of this decade. Since the President issued his challenge, 2.4 million minority families have joined the ranks of homeowners. The 2007 budget includes increases to several programs that advance the President's goal of creating an ownership society"

I've never much liked Bush the leader.  He was governor of Texas for a bit and implemented some crazy educational reforms.  Today, the DISD is in financial trouble.

Most of the time, it's probably better for the government to leave things alone.  When it does decide to meddle, it helps to have an intelligent meddler.

Another good post from someone who thought this all through.

This was an ad from the 2004 election:

How to Fix the Mortgage Industry with 700,000,000,000 dollars

If you write it all out, it's more impressive. Like carrying cash instead of using credit.

You can look around in 5 minutes and find all sorts of people trying to stop the 700B giveaway. I'm all for that. Unfortunately, someone needs to fix the industry and you don't see solutions, only complaints.

I went here to do some research on the population of USA. To make the math easy let's say there are 300,000,000 people in the USA. If you divide 700,000,000,000 by 300,000,000 you get about $2333 for every person living in the USA. Unfortunately, that won't fix the mortgage industry and why do those kids need 2 thousand dollars.

The population of everyone paying taxes is a little harder to come by. It says that the population from 0 to 14 is about 60,000,000. That's about 4,000,000 per year. To make things easy we'll say that the population from 0 to 16 (16 year old's can work) is 70,000,000. I think we can safely say that there are 30,000,000 in the population above 16 that don't work or don't pay taxes. So the number of taxpaying Americans is at 200,000,000. That's $3500 per tax payer.

Back in April, the government gave all the low income tax payers a stimulus check. We can see how well that stimulated the economy. And that was mostly $600 per tax payer. The government meddles and he giveth $600 and then he meddles and he taketh away $3500.

You can see the logic there. Last year there were 1.3 million foreclosures. Let's say there are going to be 1.5 million this year. At some point, they should stop. But, for the sake of argument, let's say there are 3 million foreclosures that are wrecking things. 700 billion allows the government to pay about 233 thousand to each family that lost their house to foreclosure. Maybe they are lending money to the wrong people?

For $233 thousand I could buy 2 or 3 pretty nice houses near Fort Worth, TX! Not mansions by any stretch of the imagination, but definitely some place to call home.

This is all assuming that 700 billion is the lucky number. There are probably a million ways that the government could cut back and save a million dollars. That's $1,000,000,000,000! I've changed my mind. They can give away $700,000,000,000 as long as they make the necessary cutbacks to do so.

PGO and the Startling Wake up

I like it when I'm listening to the radio and I learn something interesting that, I never really intended to learn, but wondered why I didn't.

Have you ever had one of those episodes where you are dozing off at church and suddenly your whole body shutters and you are violently rattled into 100% awake mode for the next 2 minutes? Sometimes, it even happens in the comfort of your bed. You are sleeping although maybe it feels like you just started sleeping and suddenly you spasm into wakefulness.

They said on the radio this morning that there is a name for this. So, when you suddenly twitch in all directions and your significant other says, "What happened? Bad dream?" You can say, "No dear, bad PGO". Or if you are feeling really crazy you can say, "No dear, bad Ponto-geniculo-occipital".

If you do research on the Internet, wikipedia calls this twitching the "Hypnic jerk", but goes on to say they don't really know what causes it. Are they related or are they two completely different things (albeit both related to sleep)? Maybe you have to say, "No dear, I'm just a hypnic jerk".

Vista, XP, Vista 64 update

I think in my last update, I mentioned that the XP hard drive I put in the machine that was running Vista was a smashing success. XP is now up and running with no problems. I ended up having to install Vista from scratch on the machine that was running XP. It was an old nForce 2 motherboard so the hardware was too old to allow an existing Vista installation to recognize all the hardware (for some reason). I guess you can't really expect Microsoft to account for all the insane combinations someone might try in using their software.

When I installed Vista from scratch it came up to the installation menu and said it couldn't find any hard drives on my computer. This was becuase the SATA controller was an older one and during the initial release of Vista, there was no support. In fact, nForce 2 hardware was largely unsupported. I had to manually download the Vista SATA driver and tell the installation where it was (I put it on a USB stick). Vista loaded it and began installing. Vista puts all of your old stuff in a directory called windows.old which is very handy for this kind of thing.

Once I got it all installed and got it hooked up to the Internet, Vista went out and found all of the drivers and several updates (72 in all). About 2 hours later it was running fine with no '!'s in the device manager.

After this success, I decided to go upgrade my Vista 32 box to Vista 64. You can't upgrade. I'm kind of disappointed by this, but from a logical level I have to assume that the upgrade option is turned off because all of the software would have to change. When you installed Tetras, there could have been a 64 bit version of Tetras so you would have to re-install it anyway. There are 64 bit versions of all the drivers. Long story short: I backed out. I'll go from Vista 32 to Vista 64 on another day and let you know how it goes.

Oktoberfest, the Tent and Wineries

Once again, I present to you, with great anticipation and unadulterated excitement: My Weekend!

Friday night I met some folks that are distant relatives through marriage and we went to the Texas Roadhouse. It was crowded. The conversation was good. I don't remember the food that much and the beer selection was horrid. Really good conversation though. It's fun talking to people that do stuff on a daily basis that I'll never get to do in my life. He is a pilot for the air force.

On Saturday, we went to the Oktoberfest in Addison. I discovered the "tent". I've been to this event for about the last 3 years and I've never been in the tent. It's the only part of the Addison Oktoberfest that even begins to approach the ones in Munich. The picture doesn't do it justice. It's lots of people sitting together at common tables with huge lines in the back heading for the food and beer. My wife and I went in and stood in line, got our food, then walked out amongst the tables trying to find two chairs to sit in. I finally found a man who was wearing the most insane shirt I had seen so far and asked if I could sit with them. He said, "Only if you can party." I sat.

One of the vendors was selling the big liter mugs this year and the booths selling beer were refilling them. This added to the flavor. They really, really need the beer girls from Munich though so you don't have to get up and stand in line for your beer. They also need to learn how to pour beer. Notice the girl on the right and the thick stuff at the top of the glass. This is called the head. It's a good thing. Also, the liter mugs. It's a liter before the head starts (not up to the rim). Not that I saw too many people complaining about the extra beer.

Sunday we went to the Lightcatcher Winery and watched Rhett Butler play some guitar for about 3 hours. It was good relaxing fun. If you've never been, you should go. They have lots of events. Check the website for schedules. And the wine is always good.

Vista and nForce

There is a chipset by nVidia called nForce. If you this post and this post, you'll get a preface.

nForce 1 & 2 don't like Vista or perhaps Vista doesn't like them. I switched hard drives in two computers. One hard drive had Vista, the other had XP. The XP hard drive came from a box running on an nForce 2 chipset. The Vista hard drive came from a box running nForce 7.

The XP hard drive is now back up and running fine on the nForce 7 box. The Vista machine is now dead. I don't know that I can recover it. I may have to install another copy of XP on the nForce 2 machine as it seems there are no Vista drivers for the nForce 2 chipset.

This weekend, I will experiment with downloading individual drivers from each mainboard component and see if I can overcome this flaw. I've already found sound drivers, network drivers and SATA drivers. The memory controllers may be a bit of a challenge. Regardless, I'll have to install the OS from scratch.

Bob Barr and those Wacky Libertarians

Libertarians, the party that nominated Bob Barr as their presidential candidate, are trying to keep McCain and Obama off the ballot in Texas.

I don't care how stupid you think the Libertarians are or how frivolous or stupid you think this lawsuit is, you have to look at it objectively. I'm going to help.

Imagine that you make $100k per year. You have to pay annual membership dues to a club so you can remain a member. Let's say that every year, on January 15th, you have to fork over $5k to continue your membership. If you don't pay, then your membership is canceled and you have to wait until the next January to re-apply.

Now, most people that are members of this club make well over 7 figures annually. Let's say $10 million just to keep it simple. They have no trouble paying the $5k dues. It's pocket change to them, but you have to work really hard to make your $5k. But, membership has it's privileges, so you always work really hard and you always have your payment there on time.

One year the people with all the money and the majority of memberships decide to raise the cost to $7k and make it where you have to fill out some forms indicating why you deserve to be a member. They've now made it harder to get into their club. It still has to be done by January 15th or you are banished.

So, January 12th rolls around and you are fighting to get all of your forms filled out because you still work for a living. You have to convince your spouse why you need the extra $2k this year to be a member of this club. So, after blood, sweat and tears, you finally come up with the $7k and get all the forms properly filed.

January 16th rolls around and you find out that all the club members with the big money who make the rules have not filed their forms on time, but there is no indication that their membership will be revoked. You find out because they are so popular and have so much money that they don't have to follow the rules that they created.