A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… I attended AA for several years. Mostly Narcotics Anonymous, but AA as well. After about nine or ten years, I decided that I needed to get involved in service, to give something back. I ended up being the Policy Chair for my area. Sitting in meetings, reading Robert’s Rules of Order back to front and front to back, and…making policy. First thing I did was retype the damn thing, which was mostly hand-written. After awhile I decided that it need fleshing out. MORE rules. MORE clarification of the rules and regulations about how we did shit. It took a few months and I finally realized that what I was doing was ridiculous. Who gives a shit anyway. Policies and procedures, like the US Constitution, begin as simple things. They are NOT living documents, evolving to meet our needs. They are simple guidelines to follow, and don’t need to be fucked with.
That’s the damn problem wth congress now. They are so busy making new rules and regulations when we already have most of the ground rules that we need in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It’s easy. Don’t kill your neighbor unless he is trying to kill you, in which case we can dispense with all the niceties and get it over with. Don’t steal from other people. Don’t fight (or spy) for the other side. Mind your own damn business about what I do in my own home and I will do the same. Vote for the people that DON’T want to be in congress. See. Simple. Would solve 90% of our problems, end the war on drugs, and actually get the shit done that needs doing. Tell you what. If we were to make government service unattractive enough that they wouldn’t want to serve more than a term or two, they would only worry about the really important stuff and get the fuck out.
The solution would be to take away the ability to give themselves pay increases. Pay them an average wage based on other local government employees, such as Police, Firefighters, and Teachers and see what happens. Most people would want to server about as little as they want to serve jury duty. Hell, there’s another solution, government by lottery (limited to people who either own property, or have had a job for at least ten years). If you sit on the government dole making your living through welfare checks, you don’t get to serve OR vote. In my world anyway.
June 22, 2006
Computer people
There are several different types of what I call computer people.
First, there are those folks that want nothing whatsoever to do with computers or any technology at all. Rotary phone types. Not really part of the discussion at hand, but I have to put them in here.
Next on the food chain are people like my daughter and grandmother. They don’t particularly give a shit HOW it work, they just need it to. They are willing to learn simple tasks (like creating fire) such as opening the web browser, etc. The are the end users that create havoc. Download garbage, spyware, generally fuck up their computers within a couple of months. The only reason I have my daughter in this list is because she is eight. I am pretty sure that she will progress as time goes by. This group of people, although I end up making money off of them, is a big pain in the ass. I have driven the 60 miles to College Park more than once to fix the sound on my Grandmother’s computer because the fucking speaker wire was unplugged.
Third on my list are the sterotypical Mac users. Secretly all serious computer geeks want to be Mac users. Just have the shit work right, but not be afraid to ask questions and try and fix it. They can also be pretty dangerous, viruses, spyware, but overall, they are the perfect end users. If it don’t work right, pop in the fucking restore CD and be done with it. Most of the people that I do small jobs for fall into this range. My wife is one of them. Over the last couple of years, I have stopped building PCs for people, and just recommend buying compaq or macintosh. Easy to use, comes with a restore CD. Just make sure you get one with a burner and backup your important docs and pictures.
I am going to leave the Professionals out of this. Most of the full time pros are very good at what they do, but when they leave work, either they are the previous group that just wants the shit to work right, or they hate computers completely.
I belong in the last group. Semi-professionals who think they know everything and have to tweak shit all of the time, usually to their detriment. Recently I had a hard drive crash and had to rebuild everything. I finally got everything right, running under Windows XP, everything was moving along smoothly. Microsoft has released their Windows Vista beta 2, so I downloaded both the 32 bit version as well as the 64. I tried to upgrade to the 32 bit version and something went wrong with the install. Damn. I booted to the 64-bit DVD that I had burned and proceeded to install. Can’t do an upgrade this way (it is disabled) and I don’t think that I would be able to upgrade from 32 to 64 anyway. I installed the 64 bit version and found that it didn’t support the 64 bit Abit drivers from XP for my damn NIC. I formatted it again, and loaded the 32-bit Windows Vista. Everything seemed ok for a couple of days, then it started freezing up on me. Then I lost sound. Dammit. Reloaded the drivers and that didn’t work. I figured that I had screwed something up messing around with the Vista settings, so I tried a repair. No good. So I formatted the drive and have now loaded the 64-bit evaluation of Windows XP. Sound STILL didn’t work, and after a bit of troubleshooting (which I should have done a week ago) I found that it was mainly locking up when accessing the sound hardware. Goddam onboard sound. I disabled it in the BIOS and found an old SB Live card in my basement, popped that in, and everything is hunky dory.
Now I am just waiting for compatible 64-bit drivers for my NIC and I will upgrade back to Windows Vista beta 2, haha. I am a damn glutton for punishment sometimes.
Whether it be screwing around with my operating system, or skinning my desktop, or seeing if I can run some bad-ass AS400 fans in my desktop, I am always tweaking. Sometimes it can be a real pain in the ass and at those times, I wish I were just an end user. I just want the shit to work right.
In jail
Finally was able to get my scanner to work, maybe I will start scanning all of our old photo albums again. Thanks again to those of you who supported MDA.
Going to jail!!
…Actually I have allowed myself to be sucked into the annual MDA lock-up stuff. I am supposed to come up with a crap-load of money prior to June 22nd, so if you have a couple of extra bucks and nothing better to waste it on, click on the link below. It’s actually for a pretty good cause and the less time that I have to sit there on my first day of vacation, the better. If you are a corporate sponsor, I think that you get a mention on the local MDA telethon as well. I will probably post date this to keep it on top and will update as donations are received. Thanks all.
Welcome to MDA’s Official On-Line Application
Updates
5-28
So far, MDA has received $25 in donations from my page. Thanks guys, and by the way, if you want to be listed as having donated on this page, just let me know and I will be happy to put your name here.
6-7
I received a couple of donations from some folks that I used to work with at our corporate office. Up to $60 now. Woo hoo. Only $2440 to go 🙁
6-19
I got a check in the mail for $25 from one of the guys I used to work with at our corporate office. Damn, come on ya cheap bastids, send me $2 or something. It’s a frigging tax deduction.
6-22
Well, all done now, except for a couple of checks that I picked up after the thing today. I ended up raising around $450 total, which isn’t too bad considering that most of the donations were in the vicinity of $25 and that I suck doing this kind of stuff. It was held at one of the local restaurants, they supplied food and drink for the couple of hours that I was there. One of the local cops picked me up from my store this morning, and then I got to ride back in a stretch limo, which is something that I have never done. I have a pic that I will post if I can ever get the scanner going. Had to hook it to my wife’s pc since I have rebuilt mine four times in the last two weeks, but that is a whole nuther story.