bt’s Weblog

It is sad that today we honor those who have died because of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld’s ignorance and arrogance. It is difficult to look at photos of the dead and realize that it didn’t have to be this way. It is tragic that their loved ones must suffer their loss and face the possibility that it was in vain.

Darksyde has a Memorial Day piece posted in the DailyKOS and there you can see that the creators of this war had better things to do than join the military. In today’s New York Times there is an uplifting story of the Patriot Guard Riders who honor the dead by shielding the grieving families from the despicable vermin led by Fred Phelps, may he writhe in hell. Marie Cocco’s column in the New Haven Register is about returning veterans and the shock they experience when they encounter the disinterested and superficial citizens they were supposedly defending.

A million Americans have served in Afghanistan and Iraq so far. Over 20,000 of them have been killed or wounded. At Arlington National Cemetery and West Point this week the Deserter in Chief, Shrub, continued to conflate the war on terror and Iraq. It is a lie he retells often. It is proof that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld have no remorse for their monumental mistake which has brought death, suffering, grief and loss to millions.

All animals are equal, But some animals are more equal than others.” George Orwell, “Animal Farm,” 1945

The more I read about the current GOP Congress the more it reminds me of Orwell’s allegory on Communism, “Animal Farm.”

The great Contract With America masterminded by Newt Gingrich was billed as the beginning of a new age, a return to honest lawmaking and a revival of American values in the conduct of the U.S. Congress.

It was a marketing strategy rather than a political movement and quickly degenerated into partisanship which culminated in the concerted effort by Republicans to unseat the President of the United States. The Impeachment was an exercise in lies, propaganda, innuendo and deforming of the Federal Government and was pursued with abandon by GOPigs like Gingrich, Hyde and Sensenbrenner whose jowls quivered as they proclaimed that no one was above the law.

We now know that these hypocrites cared little for law and certainly considered themselves exempt from its moral and ethical implications. Gingrich along with rat boy Bob Barr lost their seats and Hyde is retiring this year. Sensenbrenner is now the chair of the Judiciary Committee and proponent of “the law” against illegal immigrants and the need to build a wall manned by U.S. troops to keep them out of the country. Hastert has taken Gingrich’s place and is an even porkier Republican whose job it is to coordinate the looting of American assets for the clients of the GOPigs.

It isn’t difficult for me to add Dick Cheney and Karl Rove to the list of GOPigs because that is what they look and act like. They are poster pigs for what the Republican Party has become - a revisionist, lying, greedy,vengeful and arrogant clique who along with jackass Shrub decide what laws they will enforce, which they will redefine, which they will ignore and which they will hide behind.

The GOPigs have distorted our system of government to fit their desire to wallow in power and money. They are corrupt and have looted our treasury for their own benefit and to curry favor with those who keep them in power with a small portion of the money the pigs have showered on them through legislation and earmarks.

The damage can not be undone. The money is gone and the debt is waiting to be paid. The suffering of the uninsured, the unemployed and other needy citizens is happening now and will never be erased. In Iraq tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians are dead and gone forever. The GOPigs have turned America into a nation that wages unprovoked war, tortures prisoners, denies all rights to those it deems unworthy, consumes a quarter of the world’s energy to satisfy than one twentieth of its inhabitants, pollutes the atmosphere and endangers everyone on the planet. This is what the GOPigs have made of their Contract With America. They have made it a slop pit from which they occasionally lift their porcine snouts and snort “God Bless America.”

The argument is because Mr. Pilkington and Napoleon have both played an Ace of Spades at the same time. But as the animals look from Napoleon to Pilkington, from man to pig and from pig back to man, they find that they are unable to tell the difference. “Animal Farm”

This is not a drill. It is really happening. You have five older computers each with Windows XP SP2 installed as the operating system. The processors are Pentium III or IV and run at 500MHz to 1.6GHz. The hard drives range from 9.3 to 40GB. However, the drive sizes do not match the speeds. That is, a slow processor has a large drive and so forth. You want to switch hard drives to put the largest drive in the fastest machine and the smallest in the slowest. You get the idea.

It takes only a few minutes to remove and replace a hard drive except of course, if the mounting hardware is different. This was the case in one machine which used a carrier tray instead of allowing you to attach the drive directly to the frame. So that takes ten or fifteen minutes. That should be the end of the story but it is merely the beginning of an odyssey.

The usual result of inserting an XP drive in a different machine is a message consisting of a paragraph or so that stays on the screen for a second before the machine restarts. This speed reading challenge repeats itself, perhaps indefinitely. I have not had the patience to let it go more than three times. This comedy also occurs during cloning processes (using Symantec’s Ghost) if there are more than slight differences in hardware.

A second scenario is that the drive boots the operating system and you are informed that the hardware varies too much from the image on the disk so you will have to reauthenticate your copy of XP. That isn’t so bad except when you get the notice that the key you typed in has been used (up) and so you need another one. I have another key but will not waste a license so we go to the “repair” XP option.

I’ve installed and reinstalled XP more times than I care to count and have learned some things not to do in the process. Don’t opt for “Repair” on the first screen. You don’t have the correct backup disk since the drive isn’t in its original machine. Don’t select the “Repair” option the second time it’s presented because no amount of time you spend in the console mode will fix the mismatched hardware problem.

After the three or four minutes required to get to the “discovery” phase you may then opt to repair the Windows directory the installer discovered. This is actually a complete installation which saves applications and registry information. It’s better than nothing, I guess. You now get the 39 minute countdown to end of install. It will take that long only if you do NOT let the installer try to connect to a network. If you do that the machine will hang and you’ll have to push the reset button (a rare item these days) or hold the power button in until the machine shuts down. After restarting you are told the installation is resuming and are back to the 39 minute countdown. So on the network question tell the “Wizard” to connect you to a workgroup instead. It will tell you in a minute or so that it can’t do that but at least it will then go on to the 29 minute countdown and from there to the end of the “repair that is really an install” process. Somewhere along the line you have to type in a software key. I tried to use the one that was used up but the Wiz rejected it. Fortunately, I have a multiple license whose key worked.

You are now close to an hour into the mission and can boot to XP as the machine administrator. That ID along with the applications you installed are as you had them on the previous machine. BUT, you are now running the original XP and have to install Service Pack 2 for starters. On older (slower) machines this takes up to 45 minutes. I start the update from a CD and go on to other business.

Once you have the system up to SP2 you now are ready to begin the Windows Update phase of the mission. First you have to install the “new” loader version which you had on the previous incarnation of the disk but which got wiped during the “repair.” Once that’s installed you suffer the “Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Tool” which is marketing bullshit for “We want to make sure you haven’t stolen this copy of XP.” Once you have been acquitted of piracy you can now download the 23 or so security updates that followed the release of SP2.

This security shit is a total joke. During the installation you’re informed that XP is the “most secure Windows ever.” That may be true but it was followed by two service packs of security updates and then more security updates monthly and sometimes more frequently for really, really, really necessary “critical” updates. Face it folks, these are not updates. They are patches to correct mistakes or omissions in the original code. I wonder how often you can patch a tire and still have a tire.

Finally, after an hour or two you can add the machine to the network. Of course, you can’t use the original name unless you’ve wiped it from the Active Directory but that’s a minor issue. And just think, you only have to repeat this idiocy four more times. Nearly an 8 hour working day to switch drives on 5 older computers. Can’t even outsource the job to Bangladesh.

XP is a disposable operating system. Microsoft will not have to announce its end of life because it is tied to the life of the system disk it was installed on. Once that needs replacement XP is toast. And do not doubt that Vista will be more of the same (or worse?).
If somehow the license key I used for “repair” is recorded as the machine’s official XP identity I will write another entry under “Dear Microsoft, I am not a thief, you bloodsucking sack of shit.”

To those who say Shrub merely spins things to get his point across -

George W. Bush Is A Liar

To those who blame liberals for misinterpreting Shrub’s remarks -

Bush Is A Liar

To those who say Shrub dissembles -

W Is A Liar

To the self-styled Christians on the right who adore the burning bush -

“You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” John 8:43-45