In my role as a system manager, I have the enviable job of picking out new systems for people. Obviously, I work with the person who is going to use the system to come up with a good system for them, and balance it against the directives for IT from the greater University.

In the past couple of years, we have seen a shift in our area towards the touch interface. We have one Notebook/Tablet convertible, and everyone loves it. Since our primary application is ESRI's ArcGIS, we actually can make good use of the tablet interface. The users here have used touch based PDA's in the past for ArcPad, with great success. We have also used the one tablet we have for data collection, and it worked out great.

Now, as anyone who has used Arc may have realized by now, trying to shoehorn ArcInfo Desktop onto a notebook is a fun exercise in and of itself. When we look to buy a notebook, we expect that we'll start off around $3k, and go from there. That's fine, that's the cost of doing business for us. But the tablet makers seem dead set on telling us to go fuck ourselves.

For those who don't deal with Arc, as a basic idea of what it is and requires, it's essentially a CAD type application with georeferenced data. All of the lines on a map, all of the polygons, and points will have a latitude and longitude, to as high of level of accuracy as the equipment will allow. From there you can perform all kinds of analysis and manipulation on that data, and the intersection of data and so on. It's pretty damn cool. If you've used some of the advanced features of Google Maps, you've actually seen the smallest tip of the iceberg.

Like AutoCAD, the graphics cards we go for are the workstation level graphics cards (usually NVidia Quadro). Fortunately, we can get those in notebook systems. We also eat memory like a database application. We start at 4GB of memory, and a 64-bit OS, and go from there. Again, this isn't a problem with notebooks. On the CPU side, we usually get a good, multi-core, CPU with the best clock speed possible, without going nuts. Sure, we could get a 3GHz quad core processor, but the performance gains don't quite justify the cost. Also, one of the joys of ArcDesktop is that it is a single threaded application, so the multi-core CPU is mostly about allowing the user to start a process, and then do other stuff.

So, I can get a notebook with all of this, no problem. So, the next question I ask is, can I get a notebook/tablet convertible like this? And for some reason, the answer keeps coming up negative. All of the offerings I seem to find are small screen, integrated shit graphics cards, tiny and slow hard drives, memory starved, low voltage CPU, crap.

WTF, over? Would it really be all that hard to take one of those higher end notebooks and slap the touch interface on it? Yes, it's going to be a brick. Yes, it's going to eat batteries like starving cannibal in a nursery. So what? I'll deal with that, just give me a convertible with enough power to actually boot into Windows Vista.

This is a place holder, it is only a place holder. If this had been a real post, it would have been filled with profanity and controversy.

This post has been created because I was tired of looking at the out of date title of my last post. We now return you to your regularly scheduled slashdot, thank you.

Beep, Beep, Beep

It's just about time to vote again, which means trying to figure out which way to throw away my vote. I have figured out my presidential vote: Cthulu (why vote for a lesser evil?); but, given that I live in California, I know that my electors will be voting for Obama; so, that is a wash.

I haven't sorted out my congressional choices yet, but that will probably also be a choice between a giant douche and a turd sandwich; though, I imagine that I will just hold my nose and pick one of them. So that is close enough to sorted.

Where I'm still working through things in on the ballot initiatives, which I expect to have the greater impact on my life. Let's face it, the Federal Government will continue to do what it's corporate owners tell it to do, the state level is small enough that I can have an effect as an individual citizen. So, I was reading through the summaries for the various initiatives over breakfast this morning and have managed to sort a few but not all. And figured my /. journal was a good place to elicit some criticism, and maybe even some constructive criticism. ;)

1A: California High Speed Rail Bond. S.B. 1856
I like the idea of more rail in CA, but I just can't see spending $10 million on the state credit card for it, end cost of the credit tab will be about double that over 30 years. Tax revenues are down, our state budget process was a bad joke this year, and we're looking to run up more debt? erm, no. Maybe once state revenues are actually covering state costs, without the need to borrow money every year, but until then we need to cut up the credit card.

2: Treatment of Farm Animals. Statute.
Leaning yes on this one. I know it will raise the price of my meat, but I think that will be acceptable. Having seen the pictures of how some animals are treated, I would rather we try a little harder to make their lives better before we kill and eat them. They're getting the shit end of the stick no matter what, the least we can do is not swirl in shit gravy as well.
Of course, I haven't read the initiative yet, so this could change if there is some screwball riders in there; hopefully, this one is really what it claims to be.

3: Children's Hospital Bond Act. Grant Program. Statute.
Back to the same problem with 1A, it's a good idea, but let's put the credit card down. No more debt until the state shows it can handle a budget responsibly. Yes, I realize that this is For the Children!!1!one! What else ya got?

4: Waiting Period and Parental Notification Before Termination of Minor's Pregnancy. Constitutional Amendment.
I'll agree with this, as long as we can attach a rider that all the fundamentalist asshats who are fighting for this type of force our morals on others shit are aborted, no matter how late of term they are in. In other words, not only no, fuck no!

5: Nonviolent Offenders. Sentencing, Parole and Rehabilitation. Statute.
Up in the air on this one. The summary from the voter guide seems to indicate that it's about sending non-violent drug offenders to rehab as opposed to prison, which I really like. Drug use is a public health problem, not a crime problem. But the anti's argument that this would also affect sentencing on other crimes as well has me waiting until I can read this one through. Granted, this will probably cost money, which will create more budget problems, but ultimately I see this as a good investment. Killing the War on Drugs and reducing our prison populations are good, long term, goals.

6: Criminal Penalties and Laws. Public Safety Funding. Statute.
Our prisons are full, build more prisons! How about no? Is no good for you? As stated above, let's kill the War on our Rights...er, Drugs; put the drug users into rehab; legalize, tax and regulate drugs like we do alcohol and tobacco, and see what our prison populations look like then. Yup drug use, all drug use including alcohol and tobacco, is bad for you. So what, it's your body, if you really want to destroy it, have at; just don't come crying to me when you do.

7: Renewable Energy. Statute.
Leaning yes on this, but I need to read it in full first. That Southern California uses coal/oil to produce electricity is just plain dumb. We have a lot of sunshine and wind and a lot of open spaces. We also have the technology from Solar Two sitting here, why aren't we using it? Hell, start at about Cabazon on the I-10 and just cover everything East of it, to the state border, in solar collectors. Might be a bit inefficient, but we have enough land and sun to deal with it. As for storing the extra for off hours, stick a hose in Pacific and dig a big damn hole in the top and bottom of a mountain, we've got plenty of them. Water gets desalinated, and pumped to the big hole at the top. When extra electricity is needed, the water is let to flow over turbines into the big hole at the bottom. And the big hole at the bottom is used to feed the water needs of Southern California. Electricity, storage and fresh water all in one.
On the North end of California, don't you guys have a huge reservoir of geothermal sitting right under your feet? Mammoth lake used to be a big mountain until it literally blew it's top off. Start drilling.

8: Eliminates Right of Same-sex Couples to Marry. Initiative Constitutional Amendment.
Again, I'll vote for this one, assuming we attach the same rider as in prop. 4.

9: Criminal Justice System. Victims' Rights. Parole. Constitutional Amendment and Statute.
This is a tough one. I like the idea that the victim will be able to be more involved in the parole and sentencing of a criminal. The problem is that, in the summary, it was stated that the criminal may also lose the right to legal representation during parole hearings. I just can't vote for that. Sure, I do think that some criminals should just be taken and shot; but it needs to be done with every consideration for due process along the way. Depending on how the actual text reads, this is probably a no.

10: Bonds. Alternative Fuel Vehicles and Renewable Energy. Statute.
Ok, so, the state government is going to borrow a bunch of money on it's credit card and then it's going to take that money and give more than half of it out to people who buy the right cars. The remaining money will go to research on making more of those better cars. How about instead we just take the $325 million a year, which we would be spending to pay off this charge on the credit card, and just put that towards research? That way, all of it is going to research instead of half of it going to pay off interest on the credit card? Ok, so people who buy the right cars don't get a discount, which might make such cars less attractive. Let's use a different tool in the government toolbox, taxes. Want to get rid of polluting cars, start changing a carbon tax when the vehicle is sold to cover the costs of cleaning up the pollution it will create in it's lifetime. More tax money, though it should diminish with time, and a good incentive to buy the better alternative.
As with the common theme of thinking: put the credit card down!

11: Redistricting. Constitutional Amendment and Statute.
No clue on this one, need to read it. On the surface, it looks like an attempt to stop gerrymandering, but one thing politicians are good at is making a shit sandwich look like a good meal.

12: Veterans' Bond Act of 2008. S.B. 1572.
Again, having problems with the idea of whipping out the state credit card. Though, the one thing this has on it's side (if it's supporters are being truthful) is that this program has a history of carrying its own costs ultimately. Still, why are we looking to do this on credit? Is the situation really so bad that simply allocating the money, which would be spent to pay the bonds back, for use by the program wouldn't cover it? I just don't like the idea that we will ultimately be paying the same amount in interest as in principal, where a slower approach to the problem could result in twice as much money spent on the problem itself.

Well, that's where I am at the moment. I welcome comments, feedback, arguments and flames.

Originally posted Friday, September 19, 2008. Slightly edited (just a few small fixes) 9/21/2012.

Wow. I've had my iPhone just over a year. And to think that when it came out I wasn't even planning to get one. (Long story short: neat, but had nothing I needed. Then I got a raise at work at the same time th price dropped so I got one after all.) Let's see how a year of use matched my predictions:

I have a video iPod, but I don't watch movies on it, so a widescreen iPod is not something I need.

I don't have any media on my iPhone. At all. I have plenty on my 60 GB iPod. I had some music on my iPhone just so I could see how coverflow looked, then I ran out of room for taking pictures, so I just tossed it all the next chance I got. I have almost every pic I've ever taken on this thing. The only video I've seen on this is a handful of YouTube clips, which I usually watch when I want to run down the battery to zero before recharging. I've never come close to watching a 22-minute TV show, let alone a whole movie, on this.

I do a decent amount of text messaging but the fact that it saves my conversations in an iChat-like interface is not something I need--most of my messages are read once and tossed.

And this sucks. MOST of my messages get quickly tossed but SOME I like to keep. No middle ground. So I have EVERY MESSAGE my wife and I have sent each other since 9/26/07. Grr...

Speaking of texting, I have a Nokia 6820 with a QWERTY keyboard. I'm sure the touchscreen will be nice, but it'll be hard to beat a physical keyboard. I'll reserve judgment until I try one out, but regardless, I already have a real keyboard, so even if it's decent, the iPhone's full keyboard won't be a huge step up--it's not like I'm coming from the world of texting with 12 buttons.

The virtual keyboard works great... AS GOOD AS a physical one. A bit better in some ways, a bit worse in others. The great spellchecker is what makes it work. (Never having used a 12-button phone for texting, I don't miss T9.) And I miss physical buttons for some other reasons. Like, to press # to skip a voicemail greeting, I used to be able to do that without taking the phone away from my ear. Now I have to pull the phone away from my ear so the screen will light up (PLUS press the 'keypad' button) and then press pound.

visual voicemail looks great--and it's about damn time!--but I don't get that many messages. When I miss a call and get a message, my Nokia offers to show me the number I missed before it offers me the option to listen to the message, so before I call in, I generally know who it is that called. I don't stack up a lot of messages since I don't get that many calls and am usually available when people want me. So it's another cool feature that I don't really need.

Yup. I'm not kidding--I've gotten maybe a dozen voicemails in the last year.

the Internet stuff looks great. Despite the fact that my Axim X50v has twice the screen resolution (640x480 vs. 480x320) I don't doubt that Apple will make browsing better, especially since web browsers on handhelds mostly suck. But again, I'm rarely someplace that I don't have Internet access and an actual computer. Would it occasionally be useful to check the weather while I'm sitting in a movie theater, or look up the price of something online for comparison purposes when I'm in a store? Sure. Would this really be life-altering stuff? No. I doubt (I hope, but I doubt) Apple will make Cingular offer a decent data plan to go along with this. You'll probably be looking at $100/month to really use the Internet over a cellular network--and I don't think the speed via anything but 802.11 will be that great. (Plus, using Google with a regular phone is pretty great.*)

The Web works great. A bit slow but generally acceptable over EDGE for those times when you just really need it. And it's handy and fun to have the rest of the time.

email. This is the one thing I would kinda really like to have... But again, I don't live and die by email, so this isn't a huge deal for me.

I set up a special email account that is used only on this phone so I can send pics to Flickr. That's it. Otherwise I use the yahoo mail and gmail through the browser, mainly just for the occasional "I wonder if anyone has written" when I'm out, about, and bored. I've composed a dozen, maybe 20 emails on this thing? I have two jobs and am otherwise usually home so I'm never far from real email.

2 MP camera. Nice. I actually find myself using the incredibly crappy camera built into my phone surprisingly often--mostly for odd-but-useful things, like taking a picture of a store's door to capture the hours it's open. And I wish it were a lot better than it is (352x240) and I wish I would remember to carry my real camera with me for when I see cool stuff. But that alone is not worth shelling out the money for. I really should just keep my PowerShot in the car.

I love the camera to death. Sure, it's not great, but its quality is very good, and I've almost ALWAYS got my phone on me. And even if I did keep my PowerShot in the car (it died this summer, btw.) there are plenty of times when my car is not nearby.

All the other stuff, like the fancy address book, is nice, but again, just not something I need. Sure, it looks great, but I can use my current phone pretty easily. 90% of my calls are to 10% of my contacts, so I usually just use my 'recently dialed numbers' list, which is 1 button away on my Nokia. Maps looks nice, and I'm sure it's great for finding "nearby' businesses, but I'd rather have real GPS capabilities.

Maps has been useful. Since I mainly call a handful of people, I use favorites instead of recents. (Which is good, because iPhone's "recents" suck--either "missed" or "all"--no way to only show "recently dialed" or "recently received.")

So it does lots and lots and lots of cool stuff, but it doesn't do a single thing I really need. I'll probably get one in late 2008 or early 2009, when my Nokia is dead and the iPhones are $249.

I bought one of the very first refurbished 4 GB phones--$399 is just so much more reasonable than $499. Then came the infamous price drop a week later--soon enough that Apple credited me the $150 difference in price. So I got it for $249. :-)

But for right now, my Nokia will do. Plus there is one mark in favor of my Nokia that the iPhone will never reach--since it isn't also a widescreen iPod, it's quite small. If you haven't seen one, it's about the size of a candy bar. Bigger than the smallest of phones, but much smaller than the iPhone. Maybe not thinner, but probably shorter and about half the width.

Wow, are looks deveiving. The iPhone is just a bit wider and taller than my 6820 and quite a bit thinner. Even with the protective case it slides into and out of my pocket easily. I liked the way my Nokia fit into my pocket a little more but the iPhone is fine. Mainly I miss having clear tactile cues about which way is up, and indentations and texture to really get a grip on it.

* Google's text messaging features are pretty great. Just put together a short query and text it to GOOGL (46645) and get a text message response back with your query results. It's not a text portal to the full Google site--it's geared towards local stuff and stores and it gives short answers, but it's handy. I've used it to... - get the number and address of businesses - get weather info--send 'weather' and your zip code and you'll get the current temp, wind, etc., plus a week's forecast - check prices--I was in a Best Buy and they had an amp on sale, but they were out of stock. I sent the brand and model to Google and found out that not only was it available at bestbuy.com (just so happened to be the match that they sent back) but that it was $40 less online! (I did the actual purchase at home.) - and I'm sure there's tons of other stuff it can do, like movie showtimes and whatnot.

... but having a real browser is just so much better. I do all these same things on the real Web and it's just so much better. :-)

So, long story short: the little things (maps, etc.) are nice to have, a great mobile browser is great to have, and having a decent camera with me is my favorite thing about it. The main thing missing is GPS, but it looks like I can sell this one for enough to buy a new one.

So, I beat up Microsoft a bit in the comments of my last post about mmc and Office (the latter being started by tqft, but I was right there with him). So, I thought I would turn it around for a bit and give MS some props for something they did very right: Powershell.

I love me some Powershell, in that hot monkey, using the I/O ports for what god never intended, kind of way. I'm a keyboard junkie, always have been. And I still have a habit of using the command line to do tasks which MS put in a GUI long ago(net use beats the piss out of Tools - Map Network Drive). That's not to say that I hate GUI's, I just find the command line to work better in most cases. Though, the funny thing on this is that I hate config files, I like GUI's for program configuration. My typing skills are actually crap, and I hate having to hunt through a few hundred lines of:
hFetchSomethingWhichIGaveAReallyLongNameToButStillMeansNothingToSomeoneWhoIsNotACSMajor = 5

Because I typed a 'r' instead of an 'e'.
Ok, it's not that bad, but configuring Apache feels like a puzzle in the Tomb of Horrors some days. Granted, MS has a bad habit of jamming everything in the registry and having no easy way to look at it. stsadm.exe is useful for all sorts of things; like actually making Sharepoint not take a shit on you. However, unless you read MSDN compulsively, you may not know that, in order to configure the "no shitting on me" setting of sharepoint you need to run:
stsadm -o please -NotShitOnMe -url http://www.diaf.666

Unless, of course, you installed Project Server first, in which case the command changes into three different commands having to do with sand, Vaseline and a barrel.

But, Powershell...Yes, now this is a small slice of sanity on Windows. Honestly, they just ripped off a good idea from the *nix world, but what the hell, I'll take it. Powershell, for those who haven't tried it, is essentially a DOS command interpreter with direct access to the .Net API, with a bunch of pre-made applications on top. It's the command interpreter on steroids. Just what the IT guy with not enough to do and too much time needs. (And if I ever meet that bastard I am going to kill him and take his job.)

One of my habits is scripting. Pretty much, if it takes more than three steps and I am going to have to do it more than three times, you can expect me to turn out a script for it. Powershell makes this far, far easier. Most of what can be done in PS can be done in VBS. Actually, I imagine it all can. But, if I have to futz around with one more callback function, I am going to shoot someone. I'm not a programmer. If I was a programmer I would be spending my days attending meetings, creating design docs and reading use cases; might actually write some code in there too. No, I chose IT. I spend my days attending meetings, creating system reports and posting on Slashdot. Every once in a while I do actually work on systems, but ideally, that should only happen in a planned fashion. Also, I have a tech working with me, so I can foist most of the real work on him anyway.

Amazingly enough, my most recent use of Powershell actually was for writing reports. There is something kind of sad about writing a report with a script, but hey, it's what ya gotta do. We're doing an audit at my work and we needed to profile all of our servers. Name, IP, OS, Service Tag (We use Dell almost exclusively) and all installed software and versions. I did this all by hand last year and it was three levels of suck. So, this year I set out to automate the process. The way I figure it, the computers already have all of that information, and the profile doc is a known format; why not just make the computer do it. That is what they are good at, storing data and performing repetitive tasks. So, having been playing with PS for a while (we run Exchange 2007, which means I've played with PS) I decided that it would be perfect for the task.

Sure, VBS would have gotten there, but it would have been a mess. I know, I've done some VBS in the past, and it wasn't pretty. Well, a few hours later, I had a nice chunk of powershell script churning out beautifully formatted (actually, the format is crap, but it's THE format) server profiles. Just point the script at an OU in the Active Directory tree, and it profiles all of the servers in there.

The other recent use was in setting up students. The program I support gets a new raft of students every six months. Each student needs an account, a mailbox, a user folder, a web folder and an ftp folder, and all the various permissions which go along with those, plus email and security groups, and don't forget to sort the students and their computers into the appropriate OU in AD. It's such loads of fun, and after the 10th student or so, I usually miss something somewhere. So, I figured this time around, why in the hell am I doing this by hand? I know I'm going to screw something up, script it! Fire up trusty Crimson Editor (there is a powershell language file for it), and get typing. The end result is a script which, when pointed at a .csv file with first and last names, and given a group number creates all of the AD objects, folders, groups, etc. Basically, it does an hour or two of work for me, which has lots of potential for mistakes, into 30 seconds of watching the script spit out feedback.

One of these days, I'm probably going to try using Visual Studio to write this stuff too. Having played with VB enough, and C# a bit, I know how useful intelli-crack can be. I just hate having to wait for a few minutes for it to come up to change one line of a script. Much the same reason I bitch about the Management Studio in MSSQL 2005, I've actually had to wait longer for the damn thing to come up than it took me to type and run the command I wanted to do. I miss isqlw.exe.

Well, this has gone on long enough. So, for all the other Windows Admins out there, let me give a positive recommendation for Windows PowerShell. MS actually got this one right. (blind squirrels, broken clocks and all)

I admin systems for a living. The vast majority of them are Windows servers due to a number of various constraints. As such, I work with the Windows GUI a lot. I'm also a compulsive right-clicker, I tend to rely on context menus to get through quite a few things.
So, my pet peeve, which I just hit again, twice in a row, and decided to complain about while I am waiting for a move-mailbox to finish:
When you right-click a program in the taskbar the bottom item of the context menu which comes up should be Close. Yet, some developers get the bright idea to change that. Don't fucking do that.

I have a bad habit of getting involved in discussions over on Fark, and one thing that I have seen there and in our culture is a habit of calling things murder when, really, they aren't. Let me pull from Merriam-Webster:
Murder - the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought

Yet for all the lack of laws backing the claims up we get: Meat is murder, abortion is murder, the Death Penalty is murder. All wonderful sayings meant to, and usually getting, some type of emotional response. And all completely wrong.

Now, certainly one can believe that any of these is morally equivalent to murder. That's OK, I'm not arguing the morality of any of them, just the actual statement itself. But this is rarely, if ever, made clear. And, I would argue, that the point of the sayings is that they are trying to elevate the action which they disagree with to the level of murder.

So what? Well really, not much to be honest, my mind is just wandering about. But it occurred to me that, we overuse the "is murder" meme quite a bit in the US, and I wonder if in doing so we have cheapened the impact of the title "murder". Murder is perhaps the worst of crimes, as it absolutley destroys all of an individual's rights in one fell swoop. A dead person has no life. Without thought, there is no real liberty. And a dead person has no use for and no real way to exercise ownership over property.

I can't really come up with any other crime which so thoroughly destroys a person's rights. A captive is alive and can be freed; thus, he retains the possibility of having his rights restored. A stolen item can be returned or compensated for. Certainly, emotional damage can last a long time and affect a person well after the crime, but possibility exists. With murder, all possibility is gone. Unless we figure out some sort of resurrection device, the dead will always stay dead.

Now for the fun ramification of this claim: The Nazi death camps were not murder. Pol Pot's actions were not murder. And the list goes on.
No, I've not taken leave of my senses. No, I'm not smoking anything, though I would share if I was. Just stop and look at it logically.
1. Murder is the unlawful killing of a person
2. Laws are created by governments
3. The Nazis were in control of the German government
4. The laws of the Nazi German government created and condoned the death camps
ergo, it wasn't murder.
Substitute most oppressive, horrible regimes for the Nazis and the logic still follows. The only real weakness seems to be in number 2. One could claim that laws which violate basic human rights are not legitimate and therefore void. Or that most of those governments were dictatorial coups and therefore not legitimate. In either case any action they engaged in was, by default, illegal and you could come to murder. But either way, it's going to come down to defending a definition of basic human rights or legitimate government.

Now, anyone who's paid any attention to my ramblings will know that I tend to believe in Natural Rights (Life, Liberty, Property). To be honest, any time I have tracked out that belief I have found that it's based on an appeal to consensus, which is a fallacy and not logically defensible. Still, if people can base their morals on 2000 year old writings about an invisible sky wizard, I'm keeping mine until I find something better.

So, this isn't about trying to justify anything. It's just about the use of a word, and what it would mean to try and stick with a strict definition of it. As if often the case when we try to "stick to our guns", it often sets us up with strange bedfellows. If someone wants to have a go at it, and try to defend the idea that certain rights are basic and any law in contravention to them is invalid and therefore void, I'm all ears. Word of warning on it though, unless your rights are based on a logical foundation I'm going to drag it down to relativism, and no one wants that.

Original entry: Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Long story short: WDs "Caviar Black" drives are advertised as having five-year warranties but may only show 3 years. If you buy one, visit WD's warranty check page and let them know if your drive shows up as only being covered for 3 years.

One of my 19-month old, 500 GB Western Digital hard drives recently died. Well, not totally dead. It got flakey and OS X's Disk Utility said that S.M.A.R.T. reported that the drive is dying. It's pretty much dead--OS X usually won't mount it, and if it does, it doesn't stay up for long. (Side note--anyone know of a way that I can keep using this drive? Or is it totally dead once SMART says so?)

Luckily, I have a 1 TB WD Caviar 'Green' drive and my backups were pretty current. Sadly, the 500 only had a 12-month warranty so I started looking for a new drive. I generally buy whichever drive is on sale that week (I bought my 500 in 12/2006 when it was suddenly on sale for $149 instead of $249--wow!) though I've become more sensitive to the warranty situation. (I started buying Seagates a few years ago (when economical to do so) when my friend pointed out that they have five-year coverage; the 'Green' drive (purchased a month ago for $169, down from $239) has a 3-year warranty.) Nothing was on sale last week but this week presented me with two options: a $169 Maxtor at Office Depot (or Office Max, I forget which) with a 3-year warranty and a $199 WD Caviar "Black" from Best Buy with a 5-year warranty. (I generally prefer to buy from a physical store--you get it quicker, you don't have to pay for shipping, and returns are easier. It's bad enough when a product is bad and you've got spend time to return it; it's even worse when you've got to PAY to send it back and wait 2 weeks for the whole process to be done and your credit settled, etc.)

I went ahead and bought the Black but when I got home, a moment after I tore the plastic off (d'oh!) I saw that the bottom of the box states that the drive has a 3-year warranty. WTF? I went to WD's warranty check page and plugged in my serial number and, sure enough, I'm only covered until 2011--three years hence. I sent them an email on Sunday but hadn't heard back (except for their instant automated response) by Wednesday so I called them. The helpful Indian gentleman stepped me through their site and directed me to this page which also states that Caviar Black's are covered for five years, whether purchased in bulk or at retail. Thanks, buddy, for helping me make my case!

He put me on hold for a bit and then returned and asked me to fax in my receipt and they'll get it straightened out. I'll do that tomorrow (drive is at home, I just brought the serial number with me to make a call--note that WD won't even talk to you if you don't have a serial number) and will update this page with the result.

I'm now totally religious about keeping receipt and warranty info complete and accessible. For the drives that are in my Mac Pro, I keep the original receipt, a photocopy of the receipt (in case the original receipt, typically printed on thermal paper, fades) and a printed-out copy of the warranty info (don't trust that the site will be current, available, or correct when needed) taped to the case itself. If I've ever got to get inside the machine again to replace a drive, everything I need is right there. A warranty is no substitute for backups but at least the manufacturer will give me a new drive if the old one dies. (Though I've heard other horror stories, like a friend who wanted to return his dead drive--the manufacturer told him they wouldn't RMA it unless he ran their utility to verify it. The drive was SO dead the utility wouldn't run, so they wouldn't take it back. Not sure how that wound up working out for him but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.)

Also: after having had some things stolen and recovered recently, I am also totally a believer in registering things with the manufacturer. Just like no one ever kicked themselves for having too many backups, it's never a bad thing to have multiple places showing what you bought, including a serial number, and when.

Update: I came into work Thursday ready to get all my paperwork together. In addition to faxing them the receipt, I was going to put together a few pages showing the bottom of the box where it says '3 years' and the pages on the site that say '5 years' and the warranty check page showing that my drive has 3 years. Upon arriving at the warranty check page, I saw that my drive has been upgraded to 5 years. So without my fax, they went ahead and fixed things, though if it was due to the phone call or the original email I don't know. Since it has been fixed I'm not going to bother to send in all my stuff.

About a year and a half back, I wrote this entry in my journal. Essentially saying that we should find a way to mount a camera on every police officer. Today, I saw this on Popular Mechanics. The long and the short of it is that Taser Inc. has been reading my journal. That, or they just have someone who thinks like I do. Either way, they are trying to make the idea of a cop "head-cam" a reality. This just seems full of Win to me. Evidence collection will be better; an officer taking a statement will have a good record to work with; if an officer goes too far, there will be a record; if some dumbass screams abuse, the officer will have a record of the encounter to exonerate himself.

The only piece of the puzzle which I expect to be lacking at inception, is going to be public access to the stored video. Excepting where it would compromise an on-going investigation, or violate the privacy of a citizen or the officer, I would want the video to be publicly accessible. After all, if there is nothing for them to worry about, then there is nothing to hide, right?

I think I have finally figured out why Nancy Pelosi is working so hard to screw democrats. Her last statement about the FISA bill finally cleared up my confusion. One of her aids said, "For any Republican-leaning district this would have been a huge issue" and goes on to estimate that "as many as 10 competitive races could have been affected by it..."

  The implication is simple. Pelosi is pursuing the Republican agenda in order to gain Republican votes. By gaining Republican votes and likely some Republican leaning politicians with a 'D' on their titles, she can turn the Democratic party into the NEW Republican party!

  Personally, if I wanted my elected officials to vote Republican, I would have voted Republican.

  Nancy Pelosi has put political ambition above the will of the people, and above the will of her own constituents who elected and supported her.

-Rick

This is a copy of a post I made in the discussion on the most recent attempt to get the new FISA bill, with Telco immunity, pushed through congress:

Okay, I like Obama's stance on a lot of the issues, but this is just retarded.

So Bush's wire taps were illegal, meaning they were/are in violation of existing laws. So we're going to make a NEW law that makes it illegal for Bush to break the existing law?

He already broke the law, why would he care about breaking the law that would prevent him from breaking the law?!!?

Laws are designed to govern people that follow them. People who place themselves beyond the law will not be effected no matter how many laws are created. More laws will not make them change their behavior.

Punishment is the answer. Even if the punishment can not change their behavior it can limit their ability to affect others.

We've already determined that Bush's wiretaps were illegal. He broke the law. The answer isn't to create more laws, the answer is to enforce the laws that we already have!

The whole situation reminds me of a .sig a friend of mine uses. It's not cited, so I don't know if it's his work, or something he gleamed elsewhere:

-Rick

I have been loosely keeping an eye on the developing case over the children of the FLDS sect in Texas. In case you missed it, Child Protective Services in the State of Texas removed approximately 400 children from the YFZ Ranch in Texas, which is a private community for members of the FLDS church. The reason for the seizure is related to the FLDS's practice of polygamy and marriage of underage girls to older men. Tied to the seizure is the implicit claim that the children were in immediate danger of harm.

The Texas Supreme Court has ruled that the State has failed to demonstrate that the children are in immediate danger of harm (Source) and that the children must be returned to their parents. The parents are being required to sign an agreement which requires them to stay in state and notify the state of any trips greater than 100 miles.

While I don't agree with the FLDS teachings, I can't help but agree with this ruling. From the get-go it has bothered me that a community's children were seized by the state. Yes, the FLDS sect's belief system encourages and teaches underage marriage. But to seize every child in a community based on a belief system smacks of a First Amendment violation. Also, looking at the requirements placed on the parents, they seem reasonable enough, based on the assumption that there is an ongoing investigation into possible abuse.

In all, I think I feel much more comfortable with the way this has worked out now. However, I am still bothered by the fact that the state was able to engage in such a seizure and that no one will face any repercussions for the decision. I'd just be happy with some sort of official censure of those involved in the seizure, just so that there is a permanent legal record that this was wrong.

I would like to suggest this article for your reading pleasure. It's a nice commentary on the War on Drugs. The guy being interviewed is a veteran police officer and a writer, and he makes some damn good points about the failure of modern prohibition and the police in general.

If you missed it, the California Supreme Court recently stuck down the ban on same sex marriage in California.

This, of course, has been greeted by howls from the right as a case of "judicial activism". This has brought me back around to a problem I have. What the fuck is "judicial activism"? So far, the best definition I come up with for it is: a ruling I don't agree with.

Now, I would agree with complaints if judges were inventing laws out of whole cloth and tossing people in jail with them; that isn't happening. At most, they have been interpreting the rights of the people in a very open way. Which is what this country was supposed to do. Ideally, the legitimate role of government is to protect the rights of the people. When those rights are threatened, the government is supposed to step in and restore those rights. If the judicial system invalidating laws which violate the rights of the people is Judicial Activism, I'm all for it.

I'm going to Wasington, D.C. next month for the DC PHP conference. I've been there once before with family and enjoyed it a lot but this time I'm going alone and I'm wondering what there is to do in the evening. Seems like all the museums close around 7 or 7:30 and I don't remember there being much else to do at night but walk around looking at the monuments. (Which is fun, but I've got 3 or 4 nights to fill) Any thoughts? Any unique geeky things I shouldn't miss while I'm in town? (I've already been to the Air & Space museum.) Is there an SR-71 parked anywhere nearby? That would be worth a rental car. :-)