To set the background: I live in a rural, nay, a very rural location. Many of the homes are 1/2 mile or more apart, set in farming and ranching country in Central Texas (there are certainly more cattle than residents nearby). A lot of these properties have been in the same family several generations, and property owners generally know pretty much everything about their land, going back for years.

One of the residents in the area, long after mailing in their Census form, got a follow-up call asking about the trailer in the back of their house. Resident responds “there is no trailer behind the house”. Later on, a field person shows up at the house, asking again about the trailer behind their house. Resident insists there is no trailer behind the house. They point out the few mobile homes in the nearby area. Field agent insists that there is a “yellow trailer right in back of the home”.

It turns out that, from an aerial view, someone had identified several long rows of large, round hay bales sitting in a fenced off area (a hay lot, fenced to keep the cattle from getting in) as a mobile home with a fence around it. And the tractor tracks leading to it as a driveway. And therefore there needed to be a determination of why this “residence” with the “yellow trailer” did not show up on their address list.

I leave it to readers to use their own judgment about efficiency and thoroughness, but the person who related this to me was certainly not grateful for the attentiveness.

While there are technical flaws in the production, I learned a lot making it, including how much more I need to learn. I created the whole cartoon, right down to the sound effects and music. I put it up on YouTube, in case anyone wants to see it.

A substantial number of people do not want bad medicine shoved down their throat. The entire process reeked of backroom deals and a condescending attitude of lawmakers who explained away their insistence on moving against public opinion through a belief that they knew better what was needed than the electorate. Let them eat cake. So yes, people are upset.

Now it seems that some have come to the realization that there are more than enough guns, high-capacity magazines and ammunition in this country to make a war against the citizenry a difficult proposition. Yes, that is why the second amendment is there. Any dispassionate reading of the plain text reveals that the intention is that the citizenry is to be allowed to prepare themselves to resist tyranny, which can be defined as oppressive power exerted by government.

Those who recognize that the reason history repeats itself is that certain human behavior triggers reactionary human behavior should pause to remember the last time the government undertook major initiatives to squash dissension, they only triggered more. [Here I am referring to the series of events that ended in the Oklahoma City bombing].

While we haven’t seen the bullets flying like they did in Waco, or tanks being deployed against civilian structures, calmer heads should remember that specific, repressive actions undertaken by the government contribute to the growth of anti-governmental sentiment as surely as the rain contributes to the growth of flowers.

One has to wonder if the cycle of governmental attempts at repression is once again on a upswing. The suspicion that politics was behind the arrests of the “Hutaree” group is there, and any continuance of efforts to make more high-profile arrests will surely be followed by a greater level of resistance. A lack of parity in weaponry has never hindered resistance to oppression, for some examples look to the United States, France, Mexico, Cuba and most recently Kyrgyzstan to see how well received tyranny is.

The raw exercise of power in contravention of popular opinion runs counter to the spirit of our representative system, as described by Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, as a “…government of the people, by the people, for the people…“. Being a duly elected representative is no license to substitute personal opinions for public opinions.

While I do not hope for a resurgence in violence (or the repression which feeds it), I think there will be a revolution of sorts this Fall, at the polls. Some people just never seem to remember history, even when it was less that twenty years ago.

After examining the event viewer I began to suspect indexing. I changed the option for my drives to uncheck the box labeled “Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties”. So far, I have not had any freezing on wakeup. Of course, this is just a workaround… Windows 7 should not freeze if indexing is happening. Doing more than one thing at a time is called multitasking, and Windows is purportedly a multitasking operating system.

Microsoft, get a clue.

While Windows 7 does not perform particularly poorly when running programs, it is full of niggling little issues that irritate particular people like myself. The issue that has me about ready to close the book on it for a while (and let other people beta test for Microsoft) is the freezeup issue. I have turned every power management setting off, but when I have left the machine idle for a while, when I go back to use it, the screen comes back right away, and the mouse will move a few times, but if you click on anything the whole system freezes solid.

However, this freezeup is only temporary. The disk activity light indicates that something is being read from the disk, and while that is underway, all other activity ceases. A properly designed multi-tasking system should never lock up like that, especially for several minutes. Initially I thought the only escape from the freezeup was a shut-down, but the problem seems to go away on its own accord when it is good and ready, when whatever it was working on finishes.

I have no idea whether there are some options I am using that are causing this, but I have ruled out antivirus software because none of the two packages I have tried, or bareback, has made any difference. Something is being done during long idle times that does not readily cease. However, a freezeup is inexcusable, and indicative of the typical shallowness of testing that is put into Microsoft’s premier product.

I have been amazed at the vast difference of popular opinion between other (particularly European) countries and those in the U.S. The street view here is that it is a con job, designed to part more working people from their money and pass it to entities favored by powerful political interests.

The evidence is not very definitive, even if you avoid looking outside. The last winter in the U.S. with this much snow was probably 1978. Who needs climate-gate emails when the weather does not cooperate. Climate is merely a scientific endeavor to assess the longer term patterns for weather. Some of that is very important for me, such as the prediction of El Nino conditions starting this past fall. I have to spend real money to buy enough forage for my animals for the winter… higher moisture will increase the growth of cool-season grasses, reducing the amount of hay my animals consume over the winter (anything fresh is preferred to dried hay). If I buy too little and run low before winter is over, I will be paying more for lower quality hay.

But even the climatologists don’t get it right over two years, but we have a ‘consensus’ of scientists that can tell us what will happen 100 years from now, and have laid it on thick. Sadly, much of the case was made using the worst case scenarios, and all that has done is create more skepticism.

I know first had that over the five hundred or so years between when Europeans traveled to the Americas and today, sea levels have risen feet. You don’t need expensive research equipment, just head out into the Gulf of Mexico on a diving trip and find  submerged tree stumps 30 miles from shore.

Or do what I did… I built a dock out 200 ft. from shore. One significant obstacle to the effort was the remains for pine tree stumps under the sand where I was trying to set the vertical piers to support the walkway. Under a foot of sand were the remains of stumps, at a level below where oxygen penetrated, which slowed their decomposition greatly. When the Spanish sailed through, those were trees along the banks of the bay. Today, the beach is hundreds of feet further inland.

If this happened across 500 years without a mass acceleration over the last 50, then we certainly have time to determine what parts of the science is real (yes, there is some usable data there) and separate out the hype and politics. Once the scientists started hyping some of the results, making hockey-sticks out of thin facts, they attracted a political element that thought they could use this raised awareness to justify increased regulation of larger segments of human industry.

After all, additional regulation brings not only increased revenue from taxes, permit fees and licenses, but it requires a larger cadre of dedicated workers to enforce these new rules. And it will be no secret to these new bureaucrats which part is responsible for creating these new jobs, and thus why they need to vote a certain way to keep their jobs. I would call it politics 101, but I am sure the process preceded written history.

Finally, there is no feeling of emergency. Talk of tipping points generates yawns, and this winter is a fine example of why no one not already starry-eyed believes such blather. If the sea rose a foot, people would build larger seawalls and truck in more sand from the main land. We already cited what happened with a half-foot rise per-century of 500 years…. during that time Florida went from colony of Spain populated with a few missions to the fourth-largest state.

Credibility is what is lacking here. Scientific (and some not-so-scientific ones)  ideas were sensationalized into science-fiction movies with huge waves crashing and gargantuan storms ruining large, populous portions of the country. We all saw Star Wars, and The Terminator… they had great graphics too, and a fun plot you could get into by suspending disbelief. Not so with this stuff, it is unbelievable to the vast majority.

Not to be confused with ending foreign dependence on oil, or reducing all dependence on oil. People already believe this. Here in Texas, there are vast amounts of Wind Power currently undeveloped only because they are waiting for completion of a larger mainline to move the electricity from the sparsely populated areas in West Texas where it is being made to the more populous Eastern and Northern parts of the state where it is needed. No one needs to wake up on that one, it just need to run to completion.

Biofuels are becoming a large force. Whether the climate goes up or down, or does nether, we are well served by broadening our inventories of energy sources, for many reasons, including security.

I suspect this winter has killed all chance of a massive cap’n trade or carbon tax solution being implemented here. Hey, they haven’t got past arguing about health care. Nothing will happen next year, it is an election year, and unless things change a lot, the chances of progressive solutions winning more congressional seats are pretty diminished. You can hear that in the shrillness of arguments like one from Nancy Pelosi “A bill can be bipartisan without bipartisan votes.” A Who What?

For further thought, read my post from before the election (Oct. 10, 2008) where I predicted Barack O’Bama would be as successful as Jiminy Carter at his presidency.

Today, we are going to single out one company, McAfee, for being tone deaf to customer needs. I wanted to just fill out a form and report a bug. The bug is that every time I restart, McAfee Total Protection insists on creating a desktop icon. I have a perfectly useful icon in the system tray, so I don’t need another one on the desktop. If you delete it, don’t worry, it will come back at the next restart.

So I went to their website, there the only email service option is “customer service”. However, it is mislabelled, as you don’t get any service there. I just got instructions on how to get a live chat with a technician. The message is clear. “Can’t you read, you must not bother me”, although the words are polite.

So I took the time to use the technical chat. This process starts with downloading and running their virtual technician program. That did not go so well, it was unable to scan my computer. I would wonder if my anti-virus program interfered, but either way they look like fools, because they wrote my anti-virus program. The lack of technical ability so far is quite evident, and could hardly inspire one to an increase in confidence.

So I had to type my report into the system, and open a “GoTo Assist” window, which was another download and installation. That worked, and a proud technician named “Divya” proceeded to say hello and ask me what I needed. Obviously, what I typed at the start of the session is either not passed along or was ignored. So I explain again (now, this is the third explanation). After a short bit he proceeded to tell me that it was a known issue they were addressing.

I asked to open a ticket, he would not do that, just repeated that the engineers would fix it and it would be in an update. So here is my summary of the process:

• You,  the customer, are a useless entity except when you are paying additional sums of money.
• You, the computer user, cannot be relied on to make an observation, you must use our virtual technician that does not even work.
• Customer Service does not mean you are entitled to any real service; if you want to report a problem, don’t talk to us, chat with a technician.

Does no one care about what the customers think? Or are they just a time wasting entity that have nothing better to do than call in and complain about problems. I guess they expect that eventually they will get the customers trained so that they expect the little they are going to get.

In the State of the Union speech last night, political rhetoric would be expected. The President, as winner-in-chief, is the nominal head of his party, although the dogs are always nipping at his heels. But his public excoriation of a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States (on political funding) during a joint session is nothing but a scrap of raw meat to try to rally the more determined left half of his party.

This was no different politically than Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro blaming social problems on the United States. In this case, he is an elected, term-limited leader who rhetorically is challenging the judgment of a group of unelected, life-tenured judges, who we depend on to referee the important issues for us. Not everybody likes a call that goes against your team, but it is unsportsmanlike to try to dump on the referee, and that  is exactly what he is doing.

This country managed to support two vastly different political parties, with peaceful transitions of power for two centuries without the limits the McCain-Feingold act imposed. But you would think the sky is falling to listen to some of the people that disagree with the ruling, including Mr. Obama.

At the heart of this is the recognition that after the loss in Massachusetts, something has to be done to retain the interest of (and contributions from) the party faithful, by creating a caricature of a new enemy lurking amongst us. The tactic is not new, and not left-wing, other examples include the Roe v. Wade decision (which has raised countless funds for both sides of the argument).

Well, so much for post-partisan politics. It’s like 1977 all over again.