a letter to my constituents

Funny how in my last post I mentioned Live search. A month and a half or so has passed since then and Live is done, stick a fork in it. 

Now, if you go to www.live.com you get bounced to Bing. WTF is Bing? It's Microsoft's latest attempt at contesting Google's dominance of web search. I've used Bing a couple times. I can't say anything bad about it, but I also can't say that there's anything special about it that gives me reason to use it over Google. Millions of people are in the habit of googling. How will Microsoft convince them to stop googling and start binging (not to be confused with bingeing).  Maybe some of them wonder if you can google on Bing. Is Bing a better googler than Google? Will Bing become a verb? How will Bing conquer the internet?

As I type this, I'm watching the national soccer teams of Spain and the USA in the first period (or half or however soccer's split up) of their match in the FIFA Confederations Cup, somewhere in South Africa. Neither team has scored yet, at 11:45 into the match. I'm not a big soccer fan but I like watching it sometimes. I'd rather watch soccer than hockey, that's for sure. It's hard not to be drawn into the crowd's enthusiasm for the game. Soccer fans are maniacs, and I mean that as a compliment. I love the intensity. It reminds me a lot of college football.

The last 3 days I had jury duty. I was grumpy at first that I'd be taking a pay cut for a couple days (I don't get paid if I'm at jury duty) but I soon got over it and started to enjoy my civic duty. I figure it'll be one of the few times in my life where I'm directly involved in a government function. Or maybe it's blown my mind and I'll go on a quest to be the next John Adams.

I will say this, I feel a little more patriotic than I did before serving in that jury. It also gave me a little more faith in my fellow Americans. And I'd say I feel a little more compassionate towards human beings in general. I'm a better person for having served in that jury. I'm glad the founders of our country laid out such an excellent system. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I think it's pretty bad-ass. My fellow jurors and I were the center of the universe there for a few. Everything hinged on what we decided. I had moments with dim recollections of Kafka and Dostoevsky. Sometimes I thought I might go insane with boredom and break out of the courthouse screaming with several sheriff's deputies sprinting after me. But mostly it was an awesome experience that improved me as a man and as a person. I'm glad I didn't labor over ways out. I'm sure I could've imagined up something to get out of jury duty, but why? WTF is wrong with people that they want to get out of it? Those people should be sent to countries that don't have trial by jury.

Storms moved through the Pensacola area yesterday. They were a welcome relief from over a week's worth of heat indexes over a hundred a couple record-setting days...

USA SCORES!!!!!!!!!!! (around 26 minutes in)

...there's nothing like waiting tables outside in over a hundred degree temps and worrying that the sweat which has built up all over your face just in the brief time since you wiped it off before walking to the table will drip off your nose and disgust the guests. That sucks. Mostly I don't mind the heat (sometimes it annoys me) but I did welcome yesterday's rain. It'd been too long and we needed a break from the heat. I'm pretty sure most of the plants liked it, too...well, except for one of my fellow juror's tomatoes. He said he was going to be having a bunch of fried green tomatoes because the rainstorms damaged a bunch of his plants. Oops. Collateral damage.

Cheers,

mitchell

Lazy Man's XP Optimization

I recently did a Live search for the terms "optimizing xp in older machines". The first link Live gave me was Optimizing Windows XP on an older machine. The link led to a useful page. That's all I ask for from a search engine.

From there I chose Eric's first link, A faster Windows XP? Here's how. I followed the instructions to disable indexing services. Cool. I just learned a little about how Windows XP works, and I sped up my computer a little.

Afterword
The more I learn about how computers and operating systems work, the more I realize that they use a significant amount of resources doing things that most people don't care about or need. I'm also surprised by how much is required of a computer's processor(s) to just deal with the increasingly graphics/video-centric Web. I wonder how many computer crashes are caused each day simply by going to MySpace.

Web browsing showdown: old Toshiba versus not as old Apple

If you read gadget and tech blogs you'd think that you can't even open Google's home page without a brand new quad core laptop with 4 gigs of RAM. Thing is, most people who use computers on a regular basis aren't using the latest equipment.

In preparation for the A+ exam, I've switched to using my old Toshiba laptop as my primary computer instead of my iBook. When it comes to browsing the Web I've noticed that there's almost no performance difference using this Toshiba Satellite (1.8 GHz Celeron, 256 MB RAM, Windows XP Home SP3, Chrome) versus my iBook G4 (1.42GHz PowerPC, 1 GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.4, Safari). It surprises me that a 7+ years old Windows laptop plays just as nicely with the Web as a 3 years old Apple. Using Chrome helps a lot. Also, I'm not running anything other than Chrome. Whenever I'm using the iBook I almost always have iTunes open and running and maybe Adium.

For browsing the Web and checking email, an old PC works as well as a not-so-old Apple. When it comes to start-up and waking up the computers, the iBook smokes the Toshiba. When it comes to opening up applications, the iBook is faster. If I'm viewing an animation laden web page, the old PC starts to bog down and the iBook is markedly superior. But as a general Web machine, both computers operate at pretty much the same speed and have the same functionality.

Apollo Group Profiting from Bankruptcy

In an article in Yahoo! Finance I noticed that the Apollo Group is behind 3 of the significant bankruptcies mentioned.

Are they bad at business or do they know what they're doing? I don't know enough about business to say how one might go about sinking a business and profiting from it, but I'm sure it can be done.

tracing Israel controls stupid Americans article

My normally pleasant morning cruise through the intertubes was disrupted by a disturbing feature on Truthed. I don't know much about the site. I'd never been there before. I'd only happened upon it because a Twitter friend posted a link from Truthed to a video of a woman who was beaten by a police officer. I clicked to the home page and was immediately irked by the first image of their feature marquee (or whatever it's called). It showed an Israeli flag and said, "Israeli Spokesman Says We Control Stupid Americans".

The image linked to a forum post by one of the forum moderators. The post was a quote of an article from a site called Pakistan Daily. As it appeared this morning, Thursday, February 5, at around 6:30 AM Central time, the article's byline says "WRITTEN BY WWW.DAILY.PK". It's dated Sunday, 01 February 2009. In the article, it says:

You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can't criticize Israel.

There's no context for the quote. Was it from a press conference? An interview? The source is someone named Tzipora Menache, allegedly an "Israeli spokeswoman". We'll see what we can find out about her later.

My first thought, after being disgusted, was wondering what the Twitterverse had to say about the article. I did a Twitter search and found that the article was older than claimed on Pakistan Daily. The Twitter search led me to a post on Uruknet.info, which is subtitled "information from occupied iraq". That article was very similar to the one on Pakistan Daily. In fact, the only difference is that some of the paragraphs were shuffled. The article on Uruknet.info clearly links to the original at thepeoplesvoice.org. The original article is titled "How to Kill a Palestinian" and is written by Dr. Elias Akleh.

My point here isn't about whether Israel's Gaza attacks are right and wrong. My main beef is with Truthed.com. Their post is followed by a post from the Truthed administrator which attempts to disclaims the anti-Israel, the Jews control stupid Americans article by stating:

Pakistan Daily, so take it with a grain of salt. Everyone has an agenda.

Apparently Truthed.com has an agenda, too. A forum moderator posted a dubious anti-Israel article and the SITE ADMIN said to ignore it...BUT THEY FEATURED IT ON THEIR FRONT PAGE.

WTF?

A site apparently dedicated to truth FEATURED an article which apparently has little to do with truth and everything to do with inciting people with vaporous claims meant to slant Americans and the world in general against Israel and the Jews.