Obama Bungles the Economy

Let there be no doubt that Obama stepped into a financial mess. He had an opportunity to demonstrate his skills at managing the economy for the good of all but he did just the opposite. Finger pointing has never solved a problem especially when that finger points to you and your party.

No matter how the Obama administration wants to spin the cause of this financial mess, the Democrats are liable for the lion’s share of it. It is the Democrats who have been in charge of the nation’s purse strings since 2006 – not the Republicans. Since 2006 the Democrats have been in charge of the Congress, and it is the Congress who spends the money. But I want to put blame aside for this article.

Obama and his willing accomplices in the Congress have sought to use the Government to shore up the sagging economy. Their anti-business approach has only deepened the size and scope of the problem.

Using the Government for such direct involvement in business is fundamentally flawed. The national treasury’s only source for money is the taxpayer. Period, end of story. All government jobs are a drain on the national treasury and contribute nothing back to the treasury.

However, there are proper places for Government spending. Government spending can create a good environment for businesses by providing the necessary infrastructures for businesses to thrive. Highways for commerce, a military to protect and defend the nation, maintenance of national parks and monuments that provide destinations for travelers, basic education that provides a first step towards pursuing happiness, and basic services for the poor and infirm all contribute to our well being as a nation. I am sure that I missed some, but the whole idea is for Government to provide the framework for opportunity and freedom for its citizens.

It is not the responsibility of the Government to provide the happiness to any group. The personal well-being of an individual is up to the individual. Obama has taken the opposite route by providing for certain groups at the expense of others. This is known as the redistribution of wealth. Saving large corporations suffering from mismanagement is not a function of the Government. Enriching banking institutions with taxpayer money after the banking management has over-leveraged and let greed consume them is not a function of the Government.

The Government does have a duty in preserving freedom. Failure is also a freedom. There is no better teacher than failure. But having the Government making the decisions of who fails and who does not is not equal opportunity. The bankers who squandered billions of dollars of their client’s money and got bailed out were no different than Bernie Madoff. Bernie Madoff was perceived to be a winner and a lot of people put their trust and their money in the way he did business. If Madoff would have been as well connected as the Wall Street Bankers, he probably would have been bailed out. But instead, he became the poster boy for what was wrong on Wall Street. In comparison to the Wall Street gang though, Bernie Madoff was a minnow. The wealth lost due to the incompetence and greed of Wall Street was in the trillions – but you don’t see any of the bankers or politicians that enabled them going to jail.

I think Madoff got what he deserved, but he should have company. Everybody with a 401K account lost money – some, a lot of money due to the avarice and greed on Wall Street.

Obama has set a course that will impoverish this nation. His spending is an attack on all of us. The inflation that is sure to come because of monetizing his expanding debt is sinking our ship. First our 401Ks, and now the double whammy of runaway inflation is an assault upon all of us. On a personal note, I have shed my dollars for the more stable environment of commodities like oil, gold, food, and necessary industrial products. The dollar is a declining product because of Obama’s bungling. Dollars are no longer worth holding. The shame of such foolish Governmental policies that are destroying this wonderful nation.

It is the businesses of our nation that need relief from Obama. The actions that he and the Congress are taking against them will only exacerbate employment and drive us deeper into debt. For reasons unknown or unfathomable, Obama thinks he can spend his way out of this mess. God help us!

Cheers, (I think)

-Robert-

Email Comment to Robert

Installing Windows 7

My last article was about the upgrade I made to my computer. This is the follow-up to that article about my experiences installing Microsoft’s new operating system – Windows 7.

By the way, before I get to the actual installation of Windows 7, I want to comment on the box or container that the system comes in. I don’t believe there was ever a box designed that is more aggravating than the one chosen by Microsoft to ship and display their products. It took some tinkering to get at the enclosed system without resorting to an axe to open it. But being a klutz, it could have just been me.

Your first looks at the disks that came in the box gives you the impression that this was indeed a fancy iteration of the venerable operating system. They are laser inscribed with a wavy pattern around the outside edge. One of the disks is for a 64 bit installation, and the other is for a 32 bit installation. You have your choice of the system you want to employ.

If not for the limitation of memory I was experiencing because of a bad memory module, I would have installed the 64 bit system, but with only 4 gigabytes of memory, it made sense to install the 32 bit system. 4 gigabytes is the limit that is addressable by the 32 bit system, but the 64 bit system can address a lot more than that. In my case, I will do with the 32 bit system until the other half of my memory gets here from Corsair. They say it has been shipped, but I still have not seen hide or hair of it. When it arrives and posts properly, I will make the decision about whether or not to reinstall Windows using the 64 bit system.

Getting started: I allowed the new DVD with the system on it to boot up the computer. It was a surprise to read that I could install the system and retain my applications or do a clean install and then reinstall my applications. But printed clearly on the box, the new Windows has to be a clean install if you are replacing Windows XP. If you are replacing Vista, then you can install and retain your applications. Since I was replacing XP, I made the necessary preparations for a clean install. (I had to save those files that I wanted to keep that were on my System drive.)

When Windows 7 does a clean install, you will lose the old system, but some files are preserved and moved to a folder named windows.old. This new folder will contain your old Documents and Settings folder with all of your personal info including your music, photographs and videos. Just about everything else disappears so if you go the new or clean install route, be sure to back up any data files you have that are not in the Documents and Settings folder.

The new system is not a quick install. Be forewarned that in the process of Windows 7building its nest on your hard drive, it is moving a lot of information around and in a out of your computer. It is also very helpful to have your internet connection available to the new system.

Once the installation starts, Windows is pretty much on its own. Eventually you will get to the part where you have to type in your key code but other than telling the system your time-zone and language preference, that’s about it. The real adventure starts after the system is successfully installed.

Reinstalling all of your applications is a pain and time consuming. If you have downloaded programs from the internet, you will have to find the codes sent to you before they can be activated. I hope all of you either wrote down those codes or preserved your emails that contained them. Those codes are among the first problems I encountered.

For the applications I had downloaded like Winzip, Paretologic’s Driver Cure, Spider Sol and a lot of others, the key codes were in emails saved into a folder I named ‘Confirmations’. I use Mozilla’s Thunderbird for a mail client program and after installing the latest and greatest version from the internet, I tried to restore my saved email folders. Thunderbird would have none of it. Compounding the problem were the emails I received and sent during the few days between my having saved the folders and the present. The only up-to-date folders that contained all of my email addresses and saved emails resided within the new folder of windows.old that Windows 7 had created. I had to figure out how to retrieve those files, but they were hidden and I had no access to them.

So my predicament was twofold. Thunderbird would not restore the saved files that I had saved and I could not locate the files that Windows 7 had saved. It was getting close to panic time. If you experience the need to see the hidden files, do this --:

• Click on the Windows Icon(You’ll find it on the left bottom most of the screen)

• Click on ‘Control Panel’

• With control panel open, Click on ‘Appearance and Personalization’

• From the list of options that appear, Click on ‘Folder Options Show hidden files and folders’

After you set your system to show you the hidden folders, then you will be able to access the ‘Application Data’ folder within the old ‘Documents and Settings’ folder. For Thunderbird users, this is where you will find your address book and mail files.

My email program is my link to the outside world. I have literally over 2000 email addresses, all of the comments from my blog and the other web sites that I write for. Not to mention all of the thousands of emails saved from friends and family. Yep, all of the factual, funny, and ridiculously outrageous emails along with their accompanying attachments are to be found in my email archives. If you sent me a joke in the last 7 years, I still have it. My library also contains the videos, photographs, Power Point files and cartoons that have come my way. So reestablishing those files to an active status and making them once again accessible was vitally important to me.

Once I had located those files and pointed Thunderbird to them – it still would not recognize them. What to do ---?

I started the laborious chore of manually transferring the data to the new Thunderbird directories. It took nearly two weeks but at the same time I separated the data into categories and files that were not only accessible to Thunderbird but also to my file management system. I should have been doing that all along, but being the slug that I am, I didn’t.

As a side note, I also tried to get MS. Outlook to read those files and it would not. For a lot of reasons, I do not use Outlook. Outlook is the only program in the MS. Office Professional suite that I do not use.

Media player also gave me some concerns. I had to reauthorize all of my protected music. The process wasn’t too bad, just an annoyance. But once Media Player found my saved music files I was in business.

Windows 7 is a winner. It operates smooth as butter and once the UAC (User Account Control) settings are quieted down so that you aren’t pestered to death with those nagging popup windows – it only gets better. You can get to the UAC settings several ways, but I use the access through MSConfig. To get to MSConfig, do the following:

• Click on the Windows Control Button at the bottom left of your screen.

• In the space provided type ‘msconfig’. (without the quotation marks.)

• From the menu that pops up click on the tab labeled ‘Tools’.

• In the tools menu, you will find a lot of useful, helpful applets, including the UAC control panel.

• Click on the tool of your choice and then click ‘Launch’ at the lower right side of the window.

Whether you want the device manager, event viewer, or registry editor, this is a great place to find those programs. Mind you, it is not the only place to find the various tools, but it is a good place to find most of the tools you will need all in one place.

The MSConfig program also has other tabs that give you control over which services and programs start automatically, and the boot sequence. I rate it high as a versatile tool to keep windows running efficiently. A word of caution though – if you are not familiar with some of the services and programs that start automatically, I suggest you research it on the internet before you disable it. But there is a saving grace, all you have to do is recheck the box if you find you have made a mistake.

Cheers,

-Robert-

Email Comment to Robert

Computer Upgrade

This article is for those of you wondering where my articles have been for the past 2 – 3 weeks. Life with our gadgets, if nothing else, is an adventure.

First I want to say up front that Windows 7 is a smooth operating system that addresses most of the irritations of XP, and now that I have it installed and all updates working, I very much like what Microsoft has done.

The glitches that I encountered during the new system installation were for the most part, self inflicted - even though I have been involved with computers since 1980.

I probably would not have installed or bought Windows 7 if not for a freak lightening strike that took out my satellite modem, hard disk drive, and messed up my motherboard so that it would not boot up without the system disk in the CD-Rom drive. When I realized that I was going to have to replace major components of my computer, saving and preserving my data was suddenly very important to me.

It was during this process that I received a notice from the folks at Newegg.com that I could pre-order Windows 7 for half-price. I had already read the good reviews about Windows 7 so I jumped at the chance to upgrade to the new system at a significant savings. A timeline would put this in August of 2009. The biggest problem I had now was to make do with what I had until the October 22nd release of the new operating system. I bought two new hard drives, one for archiving my data and the other one for a clean install of XP.

A clean install meant that all of my programs would have to be reinstalled. It took XP about two hours to install itself and another two to three hours to download all the latest updates. (My original system disk was at least 2 years old.) Altogether, it took me the better part of two days to get up and running again. In the process, I found out the hard drive that I thought was damaged was not damaged and that it was the motherboard causing the strange boot up problems. Even on a new hard drive with a clean install, I still had to have the system disk in the CD/DVD drive to boot.

The chipset on my ASUS motherboard turned out to be the problem and I could not find a software update for my AMD 590 chipset. This meant that I would have to go the hardware upgrade route.

You can buy a new motherboard in lots of flavors with numerous chipset and CPU configurations. Each combination of motherboard and chipset has its place concerning speed, economics, and features. I chose to buy one of the latest and greatest with the hope that time would not eclipse it so fast. The new motherboard meant that I also had to upgrade my memory and CPU; the other components would not be affected. (Power supply, computer case, hard drives, CD/DVD drives, video card, and monitor.)

For the record, a clean rebuild is easier than replacing just a few of the major components. Wiring harnesses and other installed components manage to get in the way and make upgrading a real pain. So after laboriously installing the new parts, I turned the computer on for the first time - it would not post. Posting is the process a computer goes through when you turn on your computer. When power is applied, the computer checks for hardware errors. Whenever a component does not respond properly an error is generated and the error checking process stops. At that point, the offending component has to be fixed or the computer will not work.

Fortunately for me, my new motherboard came equipped with an LED readout that shows a code of the post operations. When the post stopped, it gave me a code that I could look up to find out what was wrong. In this case it was one of the memory modules that I had installed. Removing the memory modules one at a time quickly located the one that was causing the errors. The memory sticks were a part of the upgrade because my previous system used the DDR2 memory and the new motherboard had to have the DDR3 memory. Long story short, I got the computer running with only one-half of the new memory.

I want to say a word about the company that made my memory. They were very nice and issued a RMA for the bad memory stick’s return, and have shipped me a new memory module. I expect it any day now. So if any of you buy memory for your computer, you might want to consider the Corsair brand of memory. For no other reason than they offer you service if you should ever need it.

When I do install my new memory module, my computer will be complete. But there was another adventure I want to relate to you and that is the Windows 7 installation. I will write about that in the next article. I was going to include it in this writing, but it made the article longer than I wanted.

Cheers,

-Robert-