Is this particular phenomenon called Lemon Populism or Astroturf?

This whole John Rich / Glenn Beck thing is quite amazing, really, in a morbid sense. Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s finally thrown off the veil of bipartisanship and not a moment too soon.

The state government is deadlocked because suburbanites don’t like taxes (but certainly like their road and utility subsidies, don’t they?), the MTA is cutting service and raising fares to ridiculous lengths (and the comments on that article hurt my faith in humanity), and people are again antsy about violent crime.

For my part, the mood is prevailing on spring student aggression and teacher dispair. Fights have been breaking out on a daily basis in high traffic hallways, two computers were stolen today by students who managed to get their hands on a master key which, along with other petty thefts, foments a possible crime wave a la about this time last year, where teacher laptops and school equipment were being snatched left and right for two weeks of insanity.

I was in a hardware store picking up padlocks so I could secure my equipment now that the door locks were compromised, and when giving the rundown to answer the cashier’s inquiries, the lady next to me broke out in laughter.

“I’m glad I’m not sending my kid to your school!” said this Asian yuppie in high heels.

That’s okay. No other white or Asian mother does. Not one. There’s a reason they call it a ghetto: Nobody who has a choice stays. It’s beginning to feel like the 70s or the 90s in sense that yuppies are having misgivings about the city again and locals are hunkering down.

The thing I hope for at least in the NYCDoE, given the frustrating nature of the current crop and the limited prospects they’re looking at is the promise that we’re only holding the fort until the Bloomberg generation – ie, the generation of students that grew up entirely within the agency that is known as Dead On Education as compared to Bored Of Education – is old enough for high school. Big hope.

“Over the last few years, we have all witnessed the decline of the music business,” starts a Huffington Post article*, and already warning klaxons are blazing in my head.

• First, is the death of the music industry inherently destructive of music itself?
• Second, since when is the recording industry the sum total of the music industry?
• Third, why are physical copies of recordings the sum total of the recording industry?

Record companies never saw themselves as “conduits for music,” because they are companies, not public utilities. CDs were born out of greed, yes, but so were every other form. Hell, CDs as a medium were less horrendous than the two previous – cassettes and 8-tracks – to speak of cynical greed creating consumer branded music.

Hell, the writer of this Huffington Post article basically defined his music as better quality than Spears not by talking about the creative process, but about how grassroots his marketing was, as if anti-establishment is in any way inherently better than establishment by mere dint of title.

This whole article smacks of a limited purview; pretentious sour grapes, and even while I agree with its precepts – don’t mourn the big labels – I can’t help but wince at its application of them as they make him sound like a bigger dinosaur than the one he’s burying.

*Not that I would readily admit to reading the Huffington Post.

From the Metro section,

“I think it’s unfair to tax drivers to pay for those using public transportation,” Serena Burch, 37, said as she waited on a recent afternoon for a bus near Brooklyn College, where she is a full-time student. “Why should the bridge commuters pay for the subway commuters in Brooklyn?”

Because each train full of passengers is a thousand fewer cars between you and Manhattan, dipshit.

Decided that 3.2 gb of RAM on a 32x OS wasn’t enough, so I got 4x2gb RAM and an upgrade copy of Vista Ultimate 64x so I could use it.

Things I learned since updating to Vista in the 22 hours between coming home with the DVD and being able to install programs on a relatively stable machine:

1. Vista does not like my Plextor PX-760A DVD-RW, and won’t run either of its install DVDs from it. It does, however, like the LG budget DVD-RW in my other computer, despite it being an older model.
2. Vista does not like my Linksys LNE100TX NIC, and will not support it. It will use a Netgear GA311 NIC, but lists it as a Realtek NIC for some undefined reason.
3. You can’t upgrade XP Pro to Vista 64x; only to Vista 32x. Which begs the question why an upgrade copy comes with a 64x DVD.
4. 4x2gb DDR2 RAM does not work on the default 5-5-5-15 BIOS settings and 1.8 DIMM voltage of an nForce board, despite being required to; instead preferring 6-6-6-18 2.2v. Anything less results in crashes due to underpowering. Of course, this leads to the next point:
5. Vista computers crash more often than XP computers, most often due to overheating from constant CPU usage and RAM caching.
6. Ironically, most programs do not utilize the extra 4.8gb of RAM I upgraded Vista for.

So between researching I/O errors, SATA controller errors, CMOS settings, BIOS settings, DIMM settings, formatting the hard drive, replacing multiple peripherals, running extensive diagnostics, updating firmware and drivers, and spending $600, I have a machine that crashes every half an hour or so. I’ve gotten it so it doesn’t just randomly blackout and restart; now it thankfully gives me a BSOD so I can tell it to restart in the middle of whatever I was doing.

I suppose I could have waited for Windows 7, but who wants a brand new OS from Microsoft? Hell, their only worthwhile OSs thus far are heavily-patched ones: 98SE and XP SP2. I feel duped.

Also, the room here is very dusty. (cough)

Cramer changed!

Now that’s some atonement.