Entries from January 2007 ↓

I just installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my home rig and work laptop.

So far, I see no compelling reason to upgrade. Not only is Microsoft confusing everyone with six different versions of their newest OS incarnation, but the price is still too high, and the product is still not going to think for you.

Wikipedia has detailed information on the new "advances" in Vista here. Some of them, like the new graphical interface, are pleasant, if your system is less than two years old and began as a high-end machine. Otherwise, you’re really not getting anything great. In fact, in some areas, like user control, you’ll actually be stepping backward. Windows Vista forces you to answer many irritating prompts authorizing actions to take place that you most likely already initiated. Vista approaches security much like airports do by relentlessly asking you if you’re sure that no one else has handled your "bags" - in this case the bags are installer packages. Then there is the improved DRM (digital rights management) - Vista attempts to completely control your ability to make copies of various media. If you like being babysat, then Vista is an improvement. If you don’t, then Vista is a big kick in the rear end.

My initial installation attempt (upgrade) failed at home due to my use of a simple RAID mirroring configuration. The installation finished, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that the computer wouldn’t boot after it was done. Vista didn’t like either the on-board RAID on my two year old Intel motherboard or the add on PCI RAID card by Adaptec. Needless to say, I ended up getting rid of the RAID configurtation, and doing a clean install on the home machine. Now I’m slowly restoring applications by manually reinstalling, and I am carefully guarding my backup. A lot of older CD burning apps won’t work in Vista. Neither will my PGP Desktop software. And I’m sure there are other problems I haven’t yet discovered.
At work, things went a little smoother with my upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Windows warned me prior to installation that my scanner wouldn’t work. It did anyhow, when the process was over. What stopped working? Our corporate anti-virus product by Trend Micro. And there were other irritating quirks. My applications all stayed alive through the upgrade process, but almost all of them act as if I’ve never used them before. My preferences have all but disappeared across the system.

The bottom line - Windows is still too hard for the average user to upgrade successfully without any blood pressure raising events. You’re better off buying a pre-configured Vista box and then paying a professional to migrate your important data over.

There are very few compelling reasons to rush out and implement Vista. In the long-term, it will change the way some users work, especially with the new sidebar. But if you don’t have a lot of free time on your hands, wait at least a year before you make the switch. By then, Microsoft will have worked out many of the irksome little things that are going to break if you install your fresh new copy of Vista today.

UPDATE: Microsoft tech support has become less and less coherent and competent with every passing year. My work PC, which seemed to handle the upgrade to Vista Ultimate fine on first glance, has decided it needs to create me a new profile every single time I log into the company domain. This results in a complete inability to retain any personalized settings, browser favorites, document history and so on. Many of the highly touted new features, such as feed lists and custom widgets don’t work when the user profile aspect of Windows breaks. So far, I’ve been either on hold or arguing with customer "service" representatives for about two hours. Microsoft won’t acknowledge that I am a customer entitled to free support incidents and keep trying to get me to pay for the call, although we already have an agreement with them for "free" support. The automatons on the other end of the phone tell me they cannot find a record of my existence in their database, and that’s pretty much where we end all progress. I can log on and see my existence in Microsoft’s system on-line but its own employees cannot.

Reiterate - if your Windows XX version works now, DO NOT UPGRADE if you a) have little free time or b) get easily frustrated or c) don’t want to pay for extra support or d) any of the above.

Update II: I got the issue with my profiles in Vista fixed by using the networking wizard. In the meantime, I wasted about three hours on the phone with Microsoft trying to get them to assist me. They finally acknowledged that I was entitled to free support but I fixed the problem myself by experimenting while I was waiting to get that support.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame writes in the New York Times of new, albeit very localized, efforts to promote a culture where individuals rather than the nanny state take ultimate responsibility for their own physical safety.

Last month, Greenleaf, Idaho, adopted Ordinance 208, calling for its citizens to own guns and keep them ready in their homes in case of emergency. It’s not a response to high crime rates. As The Associated Press reported, “Greenleaf doesn’t really have crime … the most violent offense reported in the past two years was a fist fight.” Rather, it’s a statement about preparedness in the event of an emergency, and an effort to promote a culture of self-reliance.

The next time you call 911, assuming you ever have to do so, remember that you could have pulled out your weapon and controlled the situation yourself in the same amount of time it took to pick up the phone and start waiting for events to take their course without any control on your part.

Just before I left Iraq, I wanted to check my credit score for free on-line. And that’s when I made a mistake. I was dumb enough to use freecreditreport.com to check my credit score. The site is owned by Experian, one of the big three credit reporting agencies, so I figured it was safe to give them a credit card number to “verify” my identity. Boy, was I wrong.

Three months after my mistake, I noticed a charge on my credit card that looked like this -

I didn’t remember signing up for a monthly subscription to anything, so I called the number and was surprised to learn that by trying to get my one free yearly credit report as authorized by federal legislation, I had inadvertently “signed up” for a $13 a month service that would keep me apprised of my credit score moment by moment. That is a service I simply don’t need.

I immediately told the representative, who sounded like she was at the bottom of the ocean somewhere off the coast of the Philippines that I wanted to cancel the account and that I wasn’t even aware I had signed up for a monthly fee based service. All she wanted to do was argue about how valuable the service is to me. I find it highly insulting that a large company like Experian, a company that keeps track of millions of people’s financial data without their consent, is also in the business of trying to rip those people off. Experian trains their customer service representatives to treat callers like cowardly idiots who aren’t intelligent enough to make their own decisions about how much money they want to spend on a “free” monthly-fee based service.

Experian has earned my ire for life. Any opportunity I have to steer people away from doing business with Experian or any of its subsidiaries will be my pleasure. I am warning anyone who reads this blog entry to stay away from any services provided by Experian. They are unscrupulous rip-off artists who practice misleading advertising techniques and purposefully make it painful to cancel their completely useless service once they have tricked you into “signing up.” I’m sure that eventually, Experian will face a class-action lawsuit because of their unsavory business practices, but for now, make sure you steer clear of freecreditreport.com. Instead, use annualcreditreport.com. And boycott Experian whenever possible.

Another 200,000 troops might make a difference. 20,000 additional sets of boots on the ground is not going to help Iraq any corners that lead to the promised land.

The real question in my mind is: how can we expect to win politically when we don’t have the willpower to win militarily? Iraqis may have been ready to vote, but their leaders are not ready to lead. The President would have done better if he had announced that we were going to deal with militias once and for all, starting with the elimination of Moqtada al-Sadr. But we Americans are growing increasingly spineless when it comes to following through with any painful, messy decisions. I’ve suggested that al-Sadr must be dealt with before in a post entitled Muqtada al-Sadr: enemy of a free Iraq. When Saddam was deposed, he was replaced with 1,000 little Saddams due to poor planning and ignorance of the realities of life in Iraq on the part of the invaders.

One of the most powerful of these little Saddams is Moqtada. We put out an arrest warrant for the man years ago, but we haven’t had the willpower to follow through on it. We need a full scale attack on his followers, instead of constant little clashes. Moqtada must most likely be killed. It’s easy for fat, comfortable Americans back home to complain about how brutal and harsh this approach is, but Iraqis would understand it. They lived with it under Saddam, and under many of his predecessors.

Killing Moqtada would send a message - that we mean business, and that we are not going away. If Iraq is to be pacified, if it is to be given a chance to develop and grow out of its savage state, we will probably have to continue killing every harbinger of violent and torture that steps forward until there are so few left that they run and cower. Instead, we’ve emboldened these crackpot fundamentalists by threatening them with a spanking instead of giving it to them. We have the military capability to put Iraq back in the Stone Age overnight, but we’re hesitant to use it because we’re compassionate.

Iraq’s politicians are not going to bring the bubbling cauldron back under control. We need to put aside our compassion and face the facts - daily life in Baghdad is a living hell for most of its residents. Now all we have to do is decide whether we want to set the conditions under which the militants there are going to die, or whether we want to continue allowing them to set the conditions.

As long as we continue allowing our enemies to choose their battlefields, we will continue suffering and fighting amongst ourselves about whether or not we’re accomplishing anything. It’s time to decide whether we’re willing to win. If we are, it could get very, very ugly in the short term, but in the long run, Iraqis and their neighbors will be better off. Let’s get serious about controlling Baghdad by any means necessary. That means destroying anyone that gets in the way.

20,000 more policemen won’t accomplish that. No, 20,000 more American uniforms in Baghdad will create what we in the U.S. military call a target-rich environment. Unless, of course, we send those 20,000 new fighters in with the discretionary authority to do whatever they need to do to subdue their enemy. But I don’t think we will do that. We’ve become weak-willed due to our own Sunni-Shia type split. Maybe we’re headed towards our own next civil war.

I listened to the excerpts from Nancy Pelosi talking about how the Democrats will turn America into a nirvana for everyone. Yeah, right.

She seemed particularly excited about her own importance as a woman and kept referring to how historic it was that SHE is now the third most powerful person in government here in the United States. True to form, the fawning mainstream media poltroons are eating this drivel up:

A new chapter of American history was written Thursday when California’s Nancy Pelosi was formally chosen as the first female speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s taken more than 200 years for “the marble ceiling,” as Pelosi and others described, to be shattered by a woman. But it happened as the 110th Congress convened, making the San Francisco Democrat next in the presidential line of succession after the vice president.

But wait, there’s more:

“Becoming the first woman speaker will send a message to young girls and women across the country that anything is possible for them,” Pelosi said before being sworn into office.

The only signal I get from this “momentous” event is that women are just as eager to control my life with every means possible via the mechanism of big government as men are. We’re supposed to celebrate that, but I cannot figure out why. Women have been making strides for decades now. I’ve had women bosses in the private sector, the military, and of course, in married life. I don’t need Nancy Pelosi helping out while crowing about how historically significant she is. No one in their 30’s who has been a professional in any venue has a hard time understanding the women in the United States have a pretty equal playing field with men both in business and legally speaking. So please shut up, Nancy. You’re a two-bit politician and you haven’t done anything to improve my life that I am aware of.

If you must insist on continuing to speak, try and talk in terms that resonate with standard issue run of the mill Americans. Otherwise, you’re just going to end up being as hated as every other politician running around the arrogant ant hill called Washington, D.C. Thanks for not listening to what I have to say, you self-congratulatory idiot.

Happy New Year everyone who followed my journey through Iraq! Especially my secret readers from back home who watched and didn’t comment. I’m glad you were paying attention, even if you didn’t say anything till I got home.

Saddam is dead. I didn’t really have any feelings about that. People have been asking. I just cannot bring myself to care. Saddam had a major impact on the region that will outlast him. Saddam being dead is irrelevant to me because what he did while he was alive is still affecting us all, to one degree or another, and will for decades to come. Saddam was just a little piece in a 12-century jigsaw puzzle filled with hate, ignorance and power struggles.

It is interesting to me that the top search phrase bringing people to my blog right now is “Saddam hanging joke.” I really don’t want to joke about the man. He was an evil human being. I’ve been reading lots of pseudo-journalism about how Saddam spent his last years feeding the birds and talking to his nurse. I’ve read how his family loved him and wanted to say goodbye. And on and on. I have very little sympathy. All I can think is that I wish he’d died sooner. Not because I personally hated the man. I didn’t. I viewed him the same way a cancer patient feels about their disease. They want the mutant cells to be expunged from their bodies.

Iraq continues to be what it has been for so long - a horribly insecure place to be born, a place where life is cheap. Saddam reinforced that lesson over and over during his rule - he made it a part of the culture, and it should be no surprise that in the end, his own life was just as easy to snuff as that of the victims of his regime. If you want to make jokes about Saddam, please, be my guest. Just don’t be surprised if I don’t laugh.

Saddam is gone but his works live on. I won’t laugh about him until Iraqis can. That time is far away.