Enough Already! He's gone!

I think I've been fairly tolerant of the great media meltdown regarding Michael Jackson. I have not complained at all about the incessant coverage of his life, death, family, kids, house, estate, neverranch, cars, garage doors, front sidewalk, who he knew, what he knew, who knew him, how long his pinky finger was, etc... etc...

But Enough Already! You can't seem to flip through the TV channels without getting at least a few channels STILL talking about this stuff. I believe that Michael Jackson was an extraordinary artist and performer. I believe his works will be known forever and by generation after generation.

But come on! We survived the onslaught when he went to the hospital. We survived the 24/7 coverage of his memorial. We are now having to survive unending coverage of things that I don't really care about - at all!

Enough Already! He's gone! The King of Pop has died. Let's, please, let the coverage die as well. I'll be more than happy to simply listen to Michael on my media player today at work.

100 Million Dollars

Here you go - a fantastic representation of big financial numbers.

Computer Fail

My computer failed me. Not even 6 months old and it failed me. Working great until about 2 weeks ago - and fail it did. What frustrations.

I have a Dell Precision M6400 Mobile Workstation Laptop. It is big. It is heavy. 'Portable' is a pretty loose term here. The battery lasts less than 3 hours - if I'm lucky. If in hard use, and planned for more than 1.5 hours, I have to carry my power brick. And by 'brick' I mean 'BRICK'. The power supply alone weighs as much as my youngest daughter, or at least it feels that way. This is a Fantastic machine. It does everything I need. I do 3D mechanical modeling in Solidworks, 3D Architectural modeling in ArchiCAD, and it plays music. I have a port replicator / docking station that I have everything connected to, including my two monitors. They don't call it a 'Desktop Replacement' for nothing.

For the past 2 months or so, it hasn't left it's docking station more than a mere handful of times. During the school year, it's off and on - back and forth to school. When school starts up again, I'll haul the back-breaking monster and it's companion life-brick to and from school, every day - either walking or riding a bike.

But it failed me.

About two weeks ago, around 9pm, I noticed the machine was running really slowly. I check my task manager to find that the CPU usage is pegged-out at 100%. As I watch, it bounces between 80+ and 100% CPU Usage while the memory pull is sitting around 2gig (I have 4 gig). Assuming something was doing an update, I let it be and by 10pm, it was back to normal - just in time for me to head to bed. The next night, the slowdown started around 10pm - I didn't wait for it to finish. I went to bed. 2 days later, I notice the problem around 6pm, so I call Dell Support. He assists me in using msconfig to turn on and off services and after about 20 minutes on the phone, the computer is back to normal. He gives me additional advice for testing purposes. I make note that, with a thermometer, the temperature on the back of the machine, between it and the port replicator, it is 122 degrees F.

Jump past a number of other very frustrating slow-downs to 3 days ago. I called Dell support again, the slow-downs are becoming more frequent and lasting longer. Always pegging the CPU Usage up to 100%, thus inhbiting me from doing practically anything else. The support agent tells me this isn't too uncommon. Idiot. The thermometer is reading in the high 120's F now.

I called yesterday again - I had been working on it since 5:30pm when I got home from work - CPU usage always screaming at 80+, regularly hitting 100% and holding. From an IT standpoint, make note: I had Notepad open for taking notes on the call, I had the Task manager open to monitor the CPU's. While sitting doing nothing, talking to the support agent, the CPU usage drops to about 40% and bounces around between there and about 60%. BUT - when I move my mouse over the icons on my desktop (you know how they highlight as you mouse over them), the CPU peaks at 100% and holds for 20 seconds. Just for moving my mouse around - no clicking - just moving.

The agents response? Could be hardware, could be software. We reboot into safe mode and the CPU seems under control - down bouncing around 1% & 10% usage. Reboot in normal and the CPU goes nuts. The agent says I need to reformat. There is a software issue and tracking it would be a nightmare so I need to reformat, reload windows, and start from scratch. I note the temperature at 144F.

Oh goody.

So, I make a note of everything that needs to be backed up and start moving it all to my secondary drive, in preparations for formatting my C: Drive. I think I have it all and get everything copied over. Insert the Vista DVD and reboot to the CD. Follow the steps and half way through a non-stoppable process realize I'm only installing a second copy of windows - I didn't get it formatted. 1 hour later, I reboot again to the DVD, go through the format option and get it done. I got Windows back on and started installing software.

By now it was just before midnight (I got started at 5:30pm), I had Windows, security software and Internet. My wonderful, wonderful loving and caring and giving wife had been reading Deep Six by Clive Cussler to me the entire time and was clearly showing signs of wanting to go to bed. I decided to call it a night.

This morning I got another dozen or so programs installed before I had to leave for work. Tonight - I'll install another dozen or so progams that I need. When did I become so dependant on computers?

So - my wonderful laptop - my mean machine, my heavy, heavy wanna-be-portable laptop, my do anything I need workstation - it failed me. And now I'm working on getting it back up and running, less than 6 months since creation. Bummer.

Reverse Racism / Descrimination / Bias

If you follow the news, particularly msn, then you have seen the headlines on the latest ruling of the surpeme court on the firefighters in New Haven. Click here for the latest article.

On my family board, We are discussing this as well. My brother states: "This is racism directly caused by anti racism policy and law." How can it be that anti-racism policy/law is actually causing racism? Simple. When one is required to hire/promotte/accept/etc... any particular race, it is racism. When New Haven failed to promote those with the best test scores because they were worried about a lawsuit from another race - that is reverse racism.

My sister-in-law also mentioned that schools and colleges are required to accept a certain number of non-white applications. This is Reverse Racism.

The laws that were put in place, many years ago, to ensure equal rights to all races were essential in the development of our country and the breaking down of racist barriers. But now those laws work more towards ensuring racism then what new Haven wanted in the first place. I side with the white firefighters in this case because they were unjustly denied promotions when they 'earned' it by doing the best on the tests. However, I also side with New Haven out of pity. They were clearly in a no-win situation and it got ugly. Truth-be-told, I believe they would have promoted those that did well if it werent for the anti-racism laws that scared them with the prospect of facing a racism lawsuit.

Clearly, America (and the world) needs to become 'race-free'. We are all one people all working towards similar goals. It is no longer essential to enforce racism laws as it was so many years ago. Today, we need to see people for who they are, what they are, what they can do - not for what color or race they are.

With the death of Michael Jackson, his #1 hit Black and White comes to mind (watch it here on youtube.). Clearly - it doesn't matter if we are black or white or asian or russion, we just need to be all together one.