"Shut up, Abe! I won!"

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The bill now heads for committee where it the House and Senate versions must be reconciled. The Nelson deal just made that impossible. Everybody will want their own gravy train added to the bill and for once the greed of the ruling class will bring them down by their own hands.

I don't think Pelosi has the strength to play whack-a-mole with all the new requests for "special" treatment from the rank-and-file members. The Nelson deal may have saved us all.

You just can't make this stuff up. From the original CIA report:

"There are three basic schools or philosophies of climatology. The first is centered around Professor H. H. Lamb who is currently the Director of Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom."

So it appears that the CRU jumped from ice-age panic to toaster-oven panic in the course of a few years. Also, if you review the original report, the exact same disasters are predicted then for the looming ice age that are now presented as inevitable outcomes of The Warming. Oh, and the same weather indicators are used: flood, drought, etc. Of course, now they leave out the unprecedented high levels of snow.

The report does offer one telling question: "Can the Agency depend on climatology as a science to accurately project the future?"

Evidently not.

The first was my home-built video editing computer running 32-bit Vista Ultimate. The process went flawlessly in about two hours. Really, a few clicks, no difficult choices and boom: Windows 7 Ultimate. I tried a few apps, like Adobe After Effects and one or two games with no hiccups.

OK, one hiccup. Sleep and hibernate no longer work but since even Vista was unable to restore my Creative EMU 8020 audio break-out box (although XP never had trouble) I'm used to doing a full power down.

My one-year-old HP Pavilion Dv7 laptop, running Vista Home Premium x64 turned out to be a different beast. Repeatedly the installation would hang at "Expanding Windows Files (18%)". I found a few references to this problem on the web but none of those solutions have made an impact.

Five (now six) retries have all failed at the exact same point in the upgrade. Repeated rollbacks have not been too kind to my laptop, either, as the last one required a run of chkdsk. I'm going to let this run for a few hours to see if it makes any progress at all.

UPDATE: Disabling the floppy drive from the boot options has solved the problem. Installation is continuing!

Two computers, one running Vista Ultimate and another Vista Home Premium. Two copies of Windows 7 Professional. Upgrades: zero.

Neither version of Vista will upgrade to W7 Pro. Why not? What the hell does it matter? Especially for Home Premium as W7 Pro is an upgrade (kind of, really it just installs additional features).

So my fault for not reading the fine print and going only on the hype of "Vista can be upgraded."

Here I was expecting to provide a glowing report on my upgrade experience but I never got out of the batter's box.

UPDATE: The chart on this page shows what I'm talking about. Vista Home Premium can be upgraded to anything but W7 Premium. Of course!

All you have to do to excel at a subject is to work hard (in the right way). Deliberate practice is hard and not inherently enjoyable but anybody can do it.

I'm working on my own essay summarizing the concepts in the book and other research papers. More to follow!

So get this. Seven of the top ten states are west of the Mississippi. Nine of the bottom ten are east of the great river.

After the Fed's creation, from 1913 to 2008 (95 years), the value of the dollar, relative to the Consumer Price Index, decreased by 95%. A dollar could buy 95% fewer goods in 2008 than in 1913. Thus, if in 1913, you sat on your savings pile of $1,000,000 for 95 years, it would then be worth only $50,000 in purchasing power (it will have depreciated in value by 95%). One would now need to pay about 20X more than J.P. Morgan for one's bread. Ask my mother how much the price of milk has increased just in the last ten years alone.

Referring to the belief that God decides during the Jewish New Year “who shall live and who shall die,” Obama told the rebs, “We are God’s partners in matters of life and death.”

Now there's a job Obama is already hard a work doing via socialized medicine and cap-n-tax, etc. etc. etc.

For me, having lived my entire life around beautiful women might have skewed my perspective, a consequence I'll happily admit to.

Mr. Narayen,

I’m sure whoever had the brilliant ideas for destroying, excuse me, enhancing Adobe’s product registration and activation system has, by now, fully paid the price for their epic short-sightedness. The CS4 registration/activation process is a disaster of legendary proportions and you approved it. I can only guess at the monstrous impact on the balance sheet.

I’m just an individual who’s been happily using Adobe video products for nine years but moving to Creative Studio Premium CS4 may well be my final upgrade. Let me give you two reasons.

First of all, I upgraded from an older suite. The inability to perform this upgrade without customer support intervention was and is unforgivable on its own. I suspect the marketing department laid a heavy hand on the technical team to initially deny upgrades to older suite owners like myself and that perhaps there was an uproar late in the game which forced them to rethink that position. Regardless, having to call support (and wait, and wait) just to activate using a special one-time code is surely meant only to punish smaller customers. I mean, you have worked hard to make it as painful as possible to remain a customer, after all.

Secondly, the process of activation after a reinstall from, say, a hard drive failure also requires a call to customer service. Perhaps this would be a simple, quick event if it weren’t for the already overwhelmed support system. In my case, I sat on hold for one hour and twenty-three minutes (reported wait time: 20 minutes) without getting through to a person. Perhaps you can help me understand how many times I should expect to endure this type of wait before speaking to an individual?

It would be tremendously helpful if I could manage my activations through my online adobe account, so that I would not have to trouble your overworked support staff.

With a mere 17 days remaining before my software becomes unusable I have serious doubts about making a support breakthrough. It’s not like I can spend ninety minutes every day on the phone hoping for a miracle. When I can no longer use the software I worked very, very hard to acquire, I promise I will never purchase another Adobe product in this lifetime.

Most Sincerely,

Director