Teddy “The Swimmer” Kennedy finally passed away yesterday.

He was a symbol of all that is wrong in modern American politics. He was one of the more successful Machiavellian liberals. Kennedy often treated the US Constitution as a suicide pact. He never met a terrorist or a communist that didn’t occupy a warm place in his heart. He perverted the values of America to expand the welfare state and erode the rights to own private property. He worked to thwart a parents’ ability to pass their values to their children. He spent his whole career trying to destroy the values the made our country great. He was always a defender of murdering the unborn and in his later years he worked to establish a national framework for euthanizing the infirm and aged. Kennedy hated Truth and Justice and anyone that stood for those values. He made a mockery of his faith and his family. He was at least guilty of manslaughter and to many he was a murder that got away with it.

His legacy is one of moral failure both personally and in his legislation record. Any success touted by Kennedy was a diminishment of the American people. His gains were our losses. How a man who so totally embraced wickedness could be called a role model for anyone is a commentary for just how corrupt we have become as a people. The only sad part in all this is that I am sure the people of Massachusetts will give the rest of the country another Senator just as worthless as Kennedy.

I have a mental picture of Kennedy experiencing his eternal reward and begging Father Abraham to let Mary Jo give him one cup of water to ease his suffering. Enjoy reaping what you sewed Uncle Teddy ‘cause you worked hard for it!

I agreed to upgrade a laptop for my wife’s friend last week. I have Acronis True Image Software and a USB connected external hard drive so I figure this is easy money right? NOT!

I took the laptop home and went to work. The laptop is a Dell that is about three or four years old. I made a full backup of the drive, inserted to 160 GB drive that replaced to 36GB drive. My first indication that all was not well was when the system was booted via the Acronis disk and the software could not see my removable drive. I had to copy the image file from my removal drive to my desktop computer. Only in one of the Public folders in my Vista machine could the backup file be seen via the Network option on the Acronis software. After the backup was completed, I booted up the computer and was greeted by a 36 GB hard drive that should have been 160 GB!

After much research I found that I was the victim of proprietary and hidden software that Dell stuck on their hard drive! I was not a happy camper. Acronis has an article on their support website called “HPA Makes the Cloned Drive Display Wrong Capacity.” While this is great information, it does nothing to fix my problem.

Most of the solutions that I found on the Internet were dangerous and/or dubious. One family of solutions involved using the Windows Repair Console. The owner of the laptop could not provide the master Administrative password so I was stuck and could not use most solutions. For those not yet familiar with this problem, when Windows is first installed it prompts you for a password. Whatever you type will be the only password that you can use three years from now to access the utilities on your Windows installation CD. Otherwise you get to wipe your hard drive and reinstall everything in your computer. Refer to http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/hpa-issues.htm

So what I knew at this point is that any solution involves fixing the Master Boot Record (MBR) on the laptop. The other part of the solution involved killing the HPA software that made my new hard drive exactly the same capacity as the old drive. Once this size change is made on the drive, both the BIOS and the Windows installation program see the drive capacity as being the same as the old drive. You can even delete the partition and reformat and the new disk will still be the same size as the old drive!

Some Internet solutions say you must find a hexadecimal editor and edit the MBR on original disk. If you do this and screw-up you just lost all the data and you know that the owner of the laptop has never made a backup CD of all her vacation photos from her trip to Europe last year. After editing the MBR then they say make your backup and restore on the new disk. Yeah, Sure!

So the Master Boot Record must be killed, fixed, replaced or otherwise deal with to fix the computer. Then the drive size must be repaired. To repair the drive the only option that seemed to work was from Hitachi. Download the Feature Tool from this page. Get the ISO image file and make a CD. The program is bootable and simple to run. I will tell you when to use the disk in a moment.

The Hitachi tool will let the computer see the whole drive but what then? I found the answer on this discussion thread. http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?s=984536e28c3c7ee064a0e7d6e054dc57&t=167401&page=2 The solutions proposed on this page mostly don’t work but there is a nugget in their that rang a loud bell in my mind. To get the space back on the drive one of the postings references Acronis Secure Zone. They said create a Secure Zone of any size and then delete it and pick the option to allocate any unused space to the partition that you select.

What I’m telling you now took me five nights staying up past one in the morning to figure out. Yeah much of the time was waiting for my Vista computer to send restore files via my home network to the laptop. I did 12 to 18 restorations during the period to find a fix.

I kept refining my attempts and this is what finally worked:

1. I restored everything from the old drive to the new one: C:\, the MBR and the two hidden partitions that Acronis found on the Dell laptop. Elapse time for this step about three hours.

2. Then I got my old DOS 6.22 bootable CD with Windows 3.11 and Norton Desktop on it and booted up the computer. Any bootable DOS disk that you can get will work as long as FDISK is on the disk. At the DOS prompt type A:\ FDISK /MBR and press enter.
(Even though it says A Drive, this command knows to run on the C Drive.) Remove the disk.
Insert the Hitachi disk, reboot computer and start via this CD and then follow instructions to resize the new hard disk.
To restore the drive to its full capacity you need to remove HPA on the target drive:

5. Click on the “Features” menu or press Alt-F keys and select “Change Capacity”;
6. You should see “Manufacturing values” and “Current values” on the appeared window;
7. Click “Options” and choose “Maximum Capacity” from the list. The appropriate value will be automatically entered in the “New Capacity” field;
8. Click OK.
http://www.acronis.com/r/support/en/kb/907/Removing_HPA.txt

At this point if you want to start Windows and look in Disk Management you will see the balance of the drive as unallocated space.
Warning: Don’t delete the other two partitions that you see via Disk Management Console. If you do the computer will not boot because your boot.ini file will then not match your computer configuration.
Elapse time for these steps is about ten minutes.

3. Lastly, get your Acronis CD again and boot the computer. Create a Secure Zone on the unallocated space on the drive. As you go through the process DO NOT SELECT ANY DRIVE OR PARTION. Leave all check boxes empty. Keep going Next. The program will automatically select space on the unallocated portion of the disk. The partition can be any size.

4. After the Secure Zone partition is created restart the wizard for Secure Zone again. This time delete the partition you just made. As you go through the screens you will see one with your disk partitions. Select the one that is labeled as C Drive. On my computer the other two partitions had no drive label. This selection allocates all unused space on the entire drive (not just the Secure Zone you are deleting) to your C drive. This is what you want. Click on Proceed. In fifteen more minutes you are done.

That’s it, enjoy your upgraded machine.

KOVR TV is reporting that

Yesterday, SEIU 1000 President Yvonne Walker told members that the union’s council voted “voted unanimously authorizing the union’s officers to seek member support for concerted actions up to and including a strike to protect our members’ pay, benefits and job security."

What a gift to Governor Schwarzenegger. Now all he has to do is fire the Union when they strike and start over. The Governor could do to SEIU what President Reagan did to the air traffic controllers. This way the Democrats get to whine about the evil Republicans and the Governor gets the most sweeping civil service reform in my lifetime. The Republicans can finally fix the system.

Hey MS Walker, go ahead make my day.

While their buddies at the state capitol are dragging their feet on getting something resembling a balanced budget for California taxpayers, state workers are fretting about the economic hardship that three furlough days a month is inflicting on their lives.

Please note that despite any publicity to the contrary, not one state worker has lost their job! Local and county governments have been lightening their load but the state has yet to do anything meaningful to cut spending. As anyone in the private sector knows, payroll is the largest part of any large organization. Compared to the punishment inflicted on the private sector, the state still thinks it is fun and games as usual. In fact the state is still hiring new employees in July despite the fact that any solution will have to involve reducing payroll.

Now that a third furlough day is added, state workers are being offered courses during working hours on “Coping with the Stress of Economic Uncertainty.” This three hour seminar will “explore healthy strategies for managing stress and increasing resilience during tough economic times.”

What do state workers with cushy jobs and great retirement know about stress?
Try running a business in an environment designed by the state employee’s union and still make a profit; now that IS stress!

Meanwhile Karen Bass is whining like a little baby. Hey Karen, if you don’t like your job quit and give it someone who can get it done.

I realize that California is experiencing a fiscal meltdown. Layoff notices are flying all around the ranks of government workers. In the midst of all this drama would you believe that I got a job with the State of California? No I didn’t land a cushy appointment from the Governor. I started as a lowly paper pusher for the Department of Corrections. Yes the same department that just sent out over 1,500 layoff notices!

I interviewed and was hired a week before the notices were sent out in May. I did part of my pre-employment paperwork in May; most notably the Form I-9. I had to speak with four different people before I could convince them that a passport was the only document required, (I only spent 15 years doing HR and payroll and I know what documents you need to check to hire someone.) The third week after I reported to work, I finally got fingerprinted and filled out the IRS Form W-4.

Interestingly, I signed the form with the oath required by state employees to uphold the constitution twice but neither time did anyone actually administer the oath to me. The second time, the person helping me with the paperwork even signed the portion saying they were a witness to the oath being administered—even though they never administered the oath. Go figure!

The conditions in the office were surprisingly Spartan. There are virtually no office supplies in the supply room. Employees are cannibalizing empty cubicles for supplies. The supply cabinets consist of odd sized Post-it Notes, red pens, typewriter ribbons and tractor feed labels. After trying two calculators that were both broken, I ended-up bringing my calculator from home.

My four year old has a better computer than I was given at the government office. The HP that I run at work is a real dinosaur. It is slow. I’m sure the video memory is shared with RAM which makes it even slower. The user rights are fairly locked-down and I can’t install any programs or run Windows Update. My son’s computer is dual core with 640 MB of video memory. It is very fast running XP Professional.

Every copy machine in the office is either dead or on its last legs. I have difficulty getting my work done when I can’t make copies. I thought about bring in my flatbed scanner just to run copies but I don’t have rights to install any programs.

Contrary to what you would expect in government service, there are no procedure manuals for the work I am currently doing. I am processing paper forms that are then entered on a mainframe program that was probably new in the 1980s. It takes days to process the forms for payment. Partially this is because the people filling out the forms don’t follow directions. All the places they leave blank or incomplete I have to fix. I then have to check all math on the forms. I must then hand-code all entries and write them on the form. I have to check vendor setup in the mainframe and then check for advance payments prior to authorizing A/P entries into the system. After several more tedious steps, I have to do some more antiquated procedures. The copy of the paperwork that is sent to the State Controller for payment is literally held together with string. I had to salvage a three-hole punch and rig it as a two-hole punch to get holes in the paper for the string to go thru!

There is a system that employees can use to do this online and deliver folks like me from as much paperwork but the computerized system is only optional. This system is also obsolete but the new accounting program used by the rest of the state is not yet compatible with what I’m doing.

“And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” Barack Hussein Obama

Just for the record, I ran the numbers and the United States ranks 56th in the world and has a population of 0.78 percent Muslims. Yeah, less than ONE percent. Hey Barry WTF? Obama is not only lying, it’s a whopper that is reminiscent of Bill Clinton in his heyday.

Niccolò Machiavelli would be proud of Barry’s brazenness. Does this guy really believe this stuff or just think people with towels on their head will believe any BS that is said for their consumption. Obama probably thinks he is giving an olive branch to the Middle East but he is actually double-dog daring them to call his bluff. We will regret his stupidity and arrogance.

Sorry, but can we really afford four years of this fascist buffoon?

I finally was able to hear Steve Poizner speak at our much delayed Reagan-Lincoln Dinner here in Sacramento County. I was most impressed by his presentation and understanding that “it’s the spending stupid” to lift a phrase from another political campaign.

He fielded a number of questions on a variety of issues. The person next to me was anxious to ask Poizner about his position on abortion—a subject that many folks are passionate about. I suggested instead of asking him which label—prolife or prochoice--he wished to apply to himself that this person ask him specifics about issues that Poizner would likely face as governor. I suggested that he ask about taxpayer funding of abortion and conscientious objections by pharmacists and other healthcare providers to being forced to provide “morning after” pills and other such methods of abortion.

The person seated at my table got up after Poizner had completed his Q & A period and went looking for his. This person had stated previously that he would only vote for prolife candidates. He must have been successful with what he was told by Poizner because when he returned to the table, he was filling out an endorsement card.

The voters have spoken. California’s legislature and our Governor were sent back to the drawing board to try again to fix the budget. Meanwhile, we have the highest and oppressive taxes this side of New York.

It’s time for voters to take the next step in the tax revolt. It’s time for a series of ballot initiatives to implement a part-time legislature; probably with a unicameral one with about 180 members. If we had one representative for every 200,000 people, we could have more responsive representation with such a variety of interests that no party would be able to firmly run the state. Budgets would be on a two year cycle and lawmakers would meet for three months every other year. Lastly, we need to reign in the power of state employee unions. They need to comply with the rules that every other business in the state must adhere to.

• Governments nationalizing their banking and largest industries.
• Government regulating salaries of the businesses that they control.
• Government hiring and firing executives and members of governing boards.
• Government confiscating or depleting the assets of its wealthiest citizens.
• Government trying to spend its way into economic prosperity.

The Cold War Soviet Union? Cuba? China? Venezuela?
NO! It’s the United States of America under Barack Obama.

Reports are surfacing today that the newly elected President will be give the head of General Motors President, Rick Wagoner, as the price of any more federal funds to keep GM afloat. Wagoner has reportedly agreed to step down. Wagoner’s sin according to Obama was that “He is considered responsible for increasing GM’s focus on trucks and SUVs—at the expense of the hybrids and fuel efficient cars that have become more popular in the last couple of years.” – Politico
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/20625.html

Translation, GM made the types of vehicles that Americans wanted to buy instead of forcing American consumers into “green” vehicles that the environmentalists said were good for the planet. He has sinned against the planet and assisted in the violation of “Mother Earth” and for this he must be sacrificed.

Obama furthers his fascist aims of controlling the means of production and also furthers the erosion of individual liberty and freedom of choice.

Allegedly this new show is a modern day telling of the lives of Kings Saul and David. After watching it last night I was disappointed. The King’s son is a spoiled party animal that pretends to like girls but saves the really intimate stuff for the boys. There is no son named Jonathan even though he and David are best of friends in the biblical account. David reveals that his slaying of the Goliath tank was an accident not the result of his faith in God. I could go on but I think you get the point.

The story premise could actually work if the writers were just more attentive to the original material. It looks like NBC has chosen to give the biblical account the same treatment that they gave to Battlestar Galactica. Keep the names, flush the story line and “reboot the franchise”. Hey guys, God doesn’t need your help to rebrand the Bible.

There are a lot of reasons that Saul might want to kill David, but it was the people chanting “Saul killed his thousands, David his tens of thousands” that really pushed Saul into a homicidal quest. In the first episode David surrendered twice and blew-up a tank. With a kill ratio like that how is he ever going to get the King a few hundred foreskins for his daughter’s hand in marriage? I Samuel 18:24-29

I have my DVR set to record the show but I have little confidence that it will improve. Too bad. If the show lived up to the hype I would make my children watch every episode.

Over the weekend I snuck out of the house and went to see the movie Watchmen. I had read much of the publicity about the movie. I also was familiar with the legal disputes that almost stopped the film from being released.

Unlike some ignorant idiots, I did know that this was an “R” rated movie and not intended for children. The violence in the film was not as disturbing to me as The Dark Knight Batman movie from last summer. Most of the rape scene in the movie ended up on the cutting room floor but has been promised in the director’s cut of the DVD. You did get the idea of what happened and at least a few other guys stopped it once they figured out what was going on. Dr. Manhattan manages to spend half the movie buck naked and the full frontal shots of his “purple pickle” at parade rest is a new addition to the “R” film genre.

The movie soundtrack has many old songs that we have heard before. Bob Dylan singing “the times they are a changin’” was the first I remember. The most irreverent moment related to the soundtrack in the film was the song used for the big love scene between Night Owl and Silk Spectre. If you listen to the lyrics, the song is about King David composing a song of praise to God with the refrain of Hallelujah. So what you get in the movie is a song that keeps repeating Hallelujah while the passionate couple is going “oh yeah baby”. This song choice tells us about the director’s view of God and contributes nothing of substance to the scene.

The film features some bit parts of characters that you might remember from the 1980s.One scene includes characters doing an episode of The McLaughlin Group. It features: Eleanor Clift, Pat Buchanan and John McLaughlin. In another scene we meeting several captains of industry including Lee Iacocca right before Mr. Iacocca and several others are murdered by an attack on the group and their host. The infamous Apple computer ad from the 1984 Super Bowl makes an appearance in the film also.

The portrayal of Richard Nixon as a blood thirsty President that decides on a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union is not in character. Neither is the depiction of Nixon using of Dr. Manhattan as the weapon that ends the Vietnam War. Nixon was the one that started nuclear disarmament talks with the Soviets and Henry Kissinger was close to a settlement in Vietnam before Nixon resigned. Had Nixon remained in office, the timeline in Watchmen would never occur.

At this point stop reading unless you want to know some more details of the film including my take on the ending.

You know who the bad guy is in this film the first time you see him. He is not revealed to the characters in the movie until the end of the film. Frankly this spoiled the film for me.

Rorschach is the character that actually moves that plot along in the film as he tries to discover why someone would kill a 67 year old retired crime fighter called the Comedian. In flashbacks we get to meet the Comedian. How he got the name is never explained. The Comedian is never funny or likeable. He is a selfish, murdering S.O.B. that gets his kicks hurting others.

Rorschach reminds me of Charles Bronson in Death Wish or Eastwood in Dirty Harry. He is a vigilante that sees the world in black and white. His search for the truth is compelling. He operates outside the law and delivers the justice that “the system” is too weak to administer.

The villain in the movie reminds me of someone that you would find in a James Bond flick with one major difference. Bond always stops the bad guy at the last minute. Good eventually triumphs over evil. However, in this movie not only does the bad guy get to nuke several major cities and frame Dr. Manhattan for doing it, he gets away with it! Rorschach protests and Dr. Manhattan kills him! Then Dr. Manhattan leaves earth for greener (or redder) pastures. In the final scenes of the movie, we then see that the villain’s corporation gets the contracts to rebuild the cities that he just nuked five minutes before.

Watchmen is yet another film that does not deliver a comic book ending for “Truth, Justice and the American Way”; instead it embraces relativity, moral ambiguity and materialism. I really wanted to like this movie but it left me empty and unsatisfied. If you want to see it, save some money and wait for the rental.

In the course of getting through my MBA program I have run across some really good teachers and some that are so removed from reality that I can’t seem to find much common ground to even communicate with them.

I rarely listen to Michael Savage but I know that he contends that liberalism is a mental illness. I am now not only willing to concede the point but wholeheartedly agree with his assessment. At its root however, I think that liberalism is the result of spiritual death that comes from rejecting God and his Word. Put another way, Christ is the cure to liberalism.

A case in point is my current instructor. He has multiple degrees—including economics—and a doctorate. He looks at the spending spree of the federal government and his only gripe is that President Obama is not spending enough money to effectively rescue the economy. He claims that Obama is beholden to the right wing of the Republicans because he allowed a few token tax cuts amongst all the pork. Let me get this straight, every Republican in the House of Representatives voted against this bill and the three most liberal Republicans in the Senate voted for it and Obama caved to the Republican right?

The effective debt of the US government exceeds 65 trillion dollars-- which is greater than the gross national product of the entire world—and he has the stones to say Obama is not spending enough money? In adjusted dollars, Obama has spent more than FDR in the New Deal in less than two months!

Furthermore, my instructor thinks Obama should nationalize every financial institution in the US and then after a few years the government should divest then (make then private again) and create one thousand small banks. These banks would not be allowed to merge to form larger banks by aggressive use of anti-trust legislation.

My instructor feels that all our problems can be solved by government central planning of production and aggressive use of wealth redistribution. He wants the outright confiscation of all wealth from the top five percent of all income earners. He asserts that we need to be more like France and Germany. We need more days off, nationalized healthcare and more government control of the economy. This conveniently negates fact that France and Germany are demographically on the verge of extinction due to legalized abortion and other social factors that resulted in low birth rates. For many decades the birth rate has been below replacement levels for all European countries. In addition the large Moslem populations in these countries are pressing for recognition of Sharia Law in these formerly Christian nations.

Of course my instructor is also a believer in “green” energy. He seems to want the personal use of automobiles banned and replaced with mass transit. To facilitate this, he wants housing to be changed to cram as many people as possible into the smallest amount of space. Gaia forbid that we should have yards around our houses and waste water keeping them green.

These are just some of the issues that I can recall my teacher advocating. So why you may ask do I contend that these beliefs are symptoms of a spiritual illness? Let me briefly try to explain.
God has created three institutions to govern man: government, church and family. For a healthy society, each of these must be in balance. Each has an exclusive area of responsibility but there are areas where each intersects.

All law is religious.

"…in any society, any change of law is an explicit or implicit change of religion. Nothing more clearly reveals, in fact, the religious change in a society than a legal revolution. When the legal foundations shift from Biblical law to humanism, it means that the society now draws its vitality and power from humanism, not Christian theism.” RJ Rushdoony

Any change in law is a change from one god to another. In the same book, Rushdoony states, “…it must be recognized that in any culture the source of law is the god of that society”.
The basis of Western civilization is rooted in biblical values.

Given the above, what my teacher is advocating is removing the last vestiges of biblical Christianity from our society and replacing them with the power religion of the secular state.

For many, it may be a distant memory but the Ten Commandments are still one of the pillars of Western Civilization. What my teacher is embracing is inverting the edict “Thou shall not steal” and making it the basis of implementing social change. His whole vision of utopia is built by wealth redistribution at the point of the sword wielded by the State. This is the formula for tyranny not liberty.

My teacher thinks by abolishing much private property and nationalizing businesses and thus investing the government with the power to plan our lives he can solve society’s ills.
One can’t help but recall that the Scripture proclaims, “Professing themselves to be wise they became fools “. 

At its root, my teacher seems fixated on jealousy and envy that others have more material possessions than he does This whole scheme that my teacher has dreamed-up is the result of years of sin eating away at his insides. Clearly the focus of his worldview is based on a violation of the Commandment “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.” Clearly my teacher covets his neighbor’s house and he covets his neighbor’s employees and he covets his neighbor’s job (ox) and he covets his neighbor’s mode of transportation (donkey) and everything else his neighbor has.

My teacher’s utopia can only end in a tyrannical society based either on fascism or socialism. You would think after the hundreds of millions that died in the last century for these two belief systems men would reject such evil. Unfortunately, my teacher thinks he can get it right where Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the rest got it wrong.

In the wee hours of the morning, Republican state senator Abel Maldonado finally caved to pressure from Democrats and cast the deciding vote in favor of the pathetic budget deal hammered out by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democrat leaders. Maldonado traded his vote for one change to the budget and a pyrrhic dream of political reform. Maldonado swapped a twelve cents a gallon gasoline tax for an increase in personal income taxes and some hoped for federal money courtesy of the Obama bailout. He also got Democrats to reluctantly allow a ballot measure for open primaries to appear at a future election.

In reality, all Maldonado did was kick the budget can down the road a year or two. No structural reforms were implemented. All he did was allow taxes to be raised in the midst of a recession that is much deeper in California than in the rest of the country. This will make any hope of recovery in California much more difficult due to an even more hostile business climate than any of our neighboring states. The reality is that not one dime of taxes had to be raised to fix this budget. It is a spending problem. Period!

California is sitting on billions of dollars of oil and natural gas that the government won’t allow anyone to go after. We waste millions on firefighting every summer when proper timber management would prevent these fires from being severe and generate jobs and revenue to state coffers. Water is horribly mismanaged in this state and the list goes on. There is no need for any tax increases.

If we conformed to President Clinton’s welfare reform bill and quit treating illegals as citizens we could realize billions more in savings but as the Good Book says, “The compassion of the wicked is cruelty”. Education is a black hole of money that eats up over 75 percent of all its funding in top heavy bureaucracies that favor San Francisco and Los Angeles at the expense of the rest of the state. We are in the bottom of the nation in our quality of education but we have the strongest teacher’s union in the country.

There is one other factor which the media was too lazy to investigate as to why this deal had to be made this week and that is that we are one day away from the state convention of the California Republican Party. The main focus of many grassroots Republicans was a series of competing measures that would deny any funding from the State Party for any Republican that supported increasing taxes. Some ideas that went along with these resolutions included the State Party being required to fund primary challengers to any Republican politician that voted for tax increases and an automatic censure of any office holder supporting tax increases. Whether Maldonado and company will get this treatment remains to be seen.

I can assure you that rank and file Republicans are mad as hell and some heads in the Party are in serious danger of getting chopped. California is on the verge of becoming a one party state and gutless men like Schwarzenegger and Maldonado are to blame. If current trends hold, Decline to State—California’s version of “None of the Above”—will soon be the second largest political block in the State with Republicans a distant third.

In the course of reloading my Windows Vista drive, I needed to install some components of Windows Live programs. The Photo Gallery and the Toolbar for Internet Explorer are the main ones I was after. The Photo Gallery program is better than the one that came with Vista. The toolbar has been the keeper of all my passwords for many years. When I went to the website and hit Download I ended-up with the entire suite of Windows Live programs in one shot. The toolbar had been completely redone. Gone were all the icons that I was used to seeing. Most were now just large rectangles of text that I could click on. OK, different doesn’t necessarily mean good or bad.

I looked for my friend that kept all passwords and it was not there. After much searching I finally found the Form Fill Add-On button by our friends at Windows Live. I downloaded the button and it went through the installation process but was never added to the toolbar. After much searching I discovered that the Form Fill button does not work on the new toolbar! There is not one made. If I want it, I have to download something from some third party programmer with no affiliation with either Windows Live or Microsoft. Sorry, I will not trust all my passwords to some unknown programmer in Eastern Europe.

Disappointed, I decided to remove the toolbar and install the old one. However, using Add and Remove Programs in the Control Panel will not let you uninstall any Windows Live component. Not even if I booted into Safe Mode! Both Windows Live and Microsoft searches were no help. Finally, I turned to Google and found the answer.

http://messengergeek.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E3785B1281BBDA1!1271.entry

Find Windows Live application on this page. Follow these instructions.
To uninstall Windows Live Toolbar, click Start, then type/paste the following in the Start Search box and press Enter:
msiexec /x {2B4C7E1E-E446-4740-ADB5-9842E742EE8A}

This will uninstall only the new version of Windows Live Toolbar so you can keep the other Windows Live applications. Then you can install the good ole Toolbar that supports saving passwords.

Old Windows Live Toolbar
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6AD4D337-C3B9-42E4-B8A3-35A0BD9DB2BB&displaylang=en

Form Fill Tool Button
http://gallery.live.com/liveitemdetail.aspx?bt=2&li=4dab8a8c-3f1e-41c6-ba8c-44b500149134

Being the first kid on my block to have new technology, I just had to download and install the beta of Windows 7. I chose to install the update instead of a clean install. My 64-bit Vista Home Premium was running just fine and was fully patched prior to running the upgrade. I wanted to keep all my installed programs and data. However, being an admirer of the boy scouts and their motto to be prepared, I did a backup of my data prior to this installation.

The upgrade did a scan of my computer and gave me a warning that my printer might be incompatible with Windows 7 but I chose to go ahead with the install. The upgrade took well over two hours but required no user intervention until it was almost done. Then I was prompted for the Product Key. It’s good that I printed the number before running the program.  My digital copy was saved to my desktop and therefore not accessible when I was finally prompted for it.

During the install, my primary monitor was on the right with my second monitor on the left. Partway through the install everything switched from the right monitor to the left. I’m running dual screens and the mouse seemed to be in the opposite monitor from the install screen. After Windows completed the initial startup, I found that my primary monitor was on the left and the extra was on the right. To get the mouse from the right monitor to the left, I had to move it completely right and then it would appear on the left monitor. I had to go in display settings to put everything back like I had it in the Vista installation.

At first glance, all my Microsoft programs functioned just fine. All the office programs still had recently used documents populated. Internet Explorer still had my saved passwords, probably via Windows Live toolbar. My computer seems to be running faster while running Windows 7. The XPS viewer is much faster than in Vista. So far I’m impressed with the potential of Windows 7.

Control Panel
The show Network Map option in the Control Panel renders an accurate representation of all hubs and computers on my home network. This function even displays my DirecTV DVR. The Devices and Printers show my all in one printer and can even scan via a right click on the printer icon. The Windows Mobile Device Center can’t recognize my HP 910 Pocket PC but I’m sure that a driver will be written for it sometime.

However…I’ve had some issues with the program.
• My first issue is with the desktop wallpaper. Many pictures that I tried resulted in a completely black screen being rendered instead of a full color photograph. When I would switch to another photo on the wallpaper, the old one would briefly flash on the screen correctly before switching to the new one. (I found that the show desktop button would show the correct desktop photo but when any program was running it would revert to black.)
• Another issue is that upon startup, the toolbar on the bottom loses it’s the icons. I could get the icons back if I stretch the toolbar upward until they reappeared and then put the toolbar back to its original position.
• Whenever the computer entered the dreaded sleep mode it failed to wake-up. I had to shut off this pesky setting. Occasionally I even got the BSOD (blue screen of death).
• As it turned out, Word 2007 would not work correctly when saving documents. The save animation would freeze the program at zero percent complete. In order to get back into Word it was necessary to reboot the computer. As someone trying to get my MBA, this was the deal breaker for me. I was forced to go back to Vista to get the Word issue fixed.

I think that Microsoft has gotten a bum rap with much of the Vista criticism. Apple has more security issues and problems than Vista during the same time period. Why Apple’s sh*t doesn’t stick is a mystery to me. Apple is overpriced and much more limited than Windows. I like Vista and Windows 7 looks to be even better.