Quick Roundup 391

Vote Early, Vote Often!

These days, I barely have time to follow my own blog, much less meander about the blogosphere, so I have been really slow on the uptake....

Bubblehead's blog, The Stupid Shall Be Punished, has been nominated for "Best up and Coming Blog" in the 2008 Weblog Awards. As of this writing, he leads in his category by about twenty votes. Remember: You can vote once per day per computer, and, counting Monday, when the polls end, that means we can help put him over the top with 4 votes apiece per computer.

It was thanks to Bubblehead's nomination last year that Gus Van Horn was able to compete for and win last year's award in its size category.

Daddy's New Car

Mrs. Van Horn and I had already decided it was high time to buy a new main computer, but we'd decided to wait until after I moved to Boston, just to avoid having to worry about moving a brand new computer cross-country. But the need to have Windows to run some proprietary data analysis software for my paper, and the spotty availability of the workstation I normally use for that at work conspired to make my purchase earlier.

Love the machine, hated the OS until last night when I installed Linux.

Linux?

Yes. The plan all along was to buy a good machine, run Linux on it, and Windows when necessary on virtual machines. I had wanted to wait to do that until Boston, but along with the 2.4 GHz processor, 6 GB RAM, and 640 GB hard drive was a serious deficiency. It is euphemistically known as Windows Vista.

The program I needed to use -- the very reason I decided I could not wait to buy -- calls on a proprietary Microsoft database that the newer version packaged with Vista can't read properly! I hate vendor lock-in to begin with, but shouldn't you at least be able to access your own data if you buy future versions of a vendor's product? This show-stopper instantly transformed my purchase into a $700.00 brick. I can't touch a new version of Windows without being reminded why I switched to Linux over a decade ago.

So I have Linux installed now, and plan to run my application on XP in a virtual machine on top of that so I can do what I bought the computer for. With 6 GB RAM, I don't think virtualization is going to slow me down! Thanks for wasting my time -- again -- Mr. Gates!

On a positive note, I love having twelve times as much RAM as the computer I'd assembled from the smoldering remains of two others that had died around the same time! And Firefox 3 seems much more stable than Firefox 2.

[Update: For once, a problem turns out not to be due to Windows! I thank Darren Cauthon for asking about the database and causing me to learn that the problem was with the software itself.]

Objectivist Roundup

The weekly Objectivist blog carnival is going strong, and you can see it over at Rational Jenn's this week.

Two New Blogs

I have finally gotten around to adding Caroline Glick's blog and Heroes of Capitalism to the sidebar. Happy reading!

The Picture of Mindlessness

The fact that we haven't already defeated an enemy like this says a lot more about us than it does about them. (HT: Scott Powell)

The sign says, "Death to all juice." And we need a Department of Homeland Security because of these guys? No. We are told we need one because we aren't using the Department of Defense properly.

Wrong Title

This video is hilarious, but FAIL Blog got the title wrong. They should have called it, "Darwin Award Fail"....

-- CAV

Updates

1-12-08: Added update in computer section. HT: Darren Cauthon.