A New Year

Hey....

     Life hasn't changed much.  Nor working, but never bored.  Too much to do, too little time, and too much time on the computer.  Video games are a curse and a blessing.   I can go to Middle Earth and destroy evil, help save the world, get away from this real space and time.  Forget the reality which is sucking my soul dry.  (No, not all bad - reality does have it's better moments...)

     I read about big pharma going to trial for allowing the mass distribution of opiates without adequate over-site.  Big news - corporations are corrupt...  Our government allows this to happen, and only the huge outcry of families devastated by this crisis have forced our government into some sort of action.  Unfortunately, there are legitimate uses for these drugs, and people in real pain are denied relief.  Maybe there are other ways to manage it, and yes, their use needs to be tightly monitored.

     But, this will not solve the crisis now.  I don't understand how simple incarceration is the go to answer for the addict or alcoholic.  Very limited resources, if any, for them to begin or continue to work on recovery.  Doesn't make sense to me. I suspect it would be cheaper to house these people is some sort of sober recovery house, where they could maintain their jobs, schooling, what have you.  Instead their lives are torn apart with nothing given to improve it, at great expense financially to the taxpayer, and to the detriment of society of a whole.

     Also, why does our country not go to the root of the problems.  And I do mean root.  Is it so hard to stop the heroin at it's source?  The poppies  We kill people, how about the fields of poppies instead?  We put restrictions on countries when they are corrupt, or undercutting trade, or providing help to terrorists.  Let's put sanctions on countries that allow the production of opiates.

     I've looked back at my old posts, and realize very little has changed in this world.  Government spews out words.  They do nothing to jeopardize their status quo - or sources of income and power.

     Anyway.  For now.  It's a lovely rainy day.  The servers are down.  Maybe I'll break out my watercolors...

     Safe Travels.

     LadyKyote.

 

Random thoughts.

It occurred to me that substance abusers are told to accept that their lives are a result of their choices, and blaming others for their issues only serves to keep them from recovery.  Their problems are never their fault - that is a trademark of an addict, that is how they define their lives.

And while I believer there was a time when sexism and racism existed to a much greater extent than it does now, these groups are still fine with pushing blame for any failures or shortcomings onto the "sexist" or "racist " cultures that they perceive still exists.

As a "victim" they can refuse responsibility for their lives.  How can they ever achieve if every failure is blamed on society's bias.

In fact, society encourages this mind set.  Often allowing women and minorities special privileges to help them advance.  In fact I believer this just causes most of us to question the qualifications of blacks and women, since they may not have been held to the same standards as other applicants.

As a women, I find this demeaning.  There was a time, maybe, in the beginning of the rights issue when a step up was possibly in order.  That time has passed.  I think now such hand holding and affirmative action only serves to put minorities and women who ARE qualified in position to have to doubly prove themselves.

Soo... Lord of the Rings Online, my main game these days, is consolidating servers. The decision must be made of where to transfer. Today I was exploring the Great River, and the question was answered.  Meet Landroval.

Progression (?)

I was taken in by the progression server frenzy of EQ and EQ2. Started, played for a bit. Loved the old zones - and the old starting point for EQ2. But - reality set in, and I realize I do not want to do the grind again. Nostalgia is great, but it is moving backwards, not forward.

A pit with sides that crumble as you try to climb out. You find each morning that you have fallen a little deeper, and realize that only a miracle will get you out, and that really, there are no miracles.... Sorry for the downer - now move on....

EQ Emu

Was it really this hard? And this ugly??? Nonetheless, this is the game that hooked me years ago, reborn, and free to play. Actually, I liked the struggle to survive, and the challenge to get your gear back after death. And, as a barbarian, I really liked those bearskin caps! Tradeskills mean something again, and the starting zones are no longer ghost towns.

It was easy enough to set up using my copy of Shadows of Faydwer.

I'll be back.

http://www.eqemulator.org/

Safe Journeys.

Drug Trade in Afghanistan

I know it isn't the complete answer, but with our troops in Afghanistan I hope we can do something to stem the flow of drugs from that country. If nothing else, drive up prices so that the drug is no longer a cheap alternative to just about any other drug (including alcohol and marijuana). They say that targeting the farmer is not the answer, but moving up the ladder to stopping the Taliban and al Qaeda traffickers.

Just maybe our military involvement may do some good...

Let's See

Obama Says He Intends to 'Finish the Job' in Afghanistan

I voted for him. I hoped for a change in the direction our country was heading. Yes, change is what I got.

More support than ever for big business in the form of bail-outs and hand-outs. More money yet thrown to the masses only to appease them, not to really accomplish any sort of real improvement in jobs or the economy.

An of course, the change in the war focus. We are now nation building in Afghanistan. Fighting a war with no real 'win'. Finish the job indeed. How exactly do we know when that job has been accomplished?

I guess we did such a great job in Iraq. that he wanted more. So what if Russia tried and failed miserably. We are America! We obviously have nothing going at home that needs our attention and resources so we can spare the billions of dollars. We all know war is good for business. And heck, the military will provide jobs.

I'm sad. I worry for our children's future. I was misled. (And no, I do not hold Bush to blame for being 'mislead' any more than all the politicians who fell in line behind him.) I will however not be supporting this paper president we have now any longer, and only hope we have someone who is honest, logical and unafraid to really speak and act for America in the next election.

Update to Previous PC Problems

Just thought I would add what the fixes were for the 2 PCs mentioned in the previous post.

The Dell XPS had some bad RAM causing the errors.

The laptop that could not open programs had a stuck key (I think it was the alt key).
This one took quite a while to fix as it was not at all obvious. Even after taking the keyboard off, it took a good look to find a tiny spot of something gooey causing the key to stick.

Still on the Job / Dell support

Nearly two months at my new job, and I haven't quit or been fired. I"m still learning, and getting comfortable, and still making mistakes now and then. But I am moving into the tech area more and more now.

Today I spoke with two customers with Dell computers still under warranty. One was a laptop that had some strange random problems with icons and programs, another was a brand new state-of-the-art Dell XPS that had yet to boot up cleanly into Windows.

Both pc's were under warranty, and both customers had given up on Dell support, citing language barriers, the fact that the tech support people did not seem to listen to them, and did not go beyond a set of canned suggestions for them to try, all to no avail...

The Dell support was free, but they were ready to pay us up front to diagnose the computers for them.

I had at first thought the problem with the laptop was a virus, but as I looked into it, I am beginning to think it is hardware related: hard drive or ram being faulty. I have not finished with this yet.

The XPS starts up in Safe Mode. I suggested he go into msconfig and see what turning off some or all of the startup programs might do for him, or maybe checking for faulty RAM (he has 24G!) I am just a newbie, and off hand don't know of any issues Windows or hardware may be running into with the DDR3 ram, or the 3 hard drives, etc. the customer may be seeing, but I would hope that Dell knew what they were doing in configuring this pc and making it stable. He is going to try a few more things, and then again, may bring it in for us to test.

A coworker also had a call today from a Dell customer who needed help with his computer still under warranty...

I have heard some good things about Dell computers lately as far as price and performance. But the chance it seems you take, is that if there is a problem, there is very little help from Dell for you....

A Wedding!

Congratulations Tim and Margaret!

Another Stab at Semi -Random Employment

I have a loose list of jobs that I would like to try out one day.

I got my frappacino, coffee and tea fix and enlightenment at Starbucks, and saw their corporate management in action and got paid for it. When hours there got too hectic, and home life too demanding, I left. Since then, home life has become a less demanding, and I have more free time again.

Late last year, I saw a help wanted sign in a local computer shop window. It was for Milwaukee PC, a local chain in SE Wisconsin. Another challenge! I turned in an application. Today was called for the interview, and lo! A new job!

This time I hope to learn more about computer hardware and software, and hope I know enough initially to not to look like a complete goof. I was honest in describing my background and experience, so I guess they think I am qualified anyway.

This could be fun.

Classmates.com

I got sucked in to the classmates.com gold. After years of the teasing emails who-who-who, I paid my $20 dollars. (The first price I saw offered when I responded was $40 - are they nuts? I am nuts enough to pay $20... but I have my limits. An older email gave me the lower price)

So, for your upgraded membership you get a very confusing interface to their site, archaic editing tools, and you STILL get blasted by ridiculous ads!

I was already aware that their massive emails were grossly misleading. But some people are more than just annoyed, they are angry!

I am not going to renew. No reason to support this ill laid out web business any more than I have.

More on Hard Drive Upgrade - 1 Question Answered.

I read that if I attempted to use the old, or cloned hard drive in another system, it wouldn't work. The cloned image is specific to the computer hardware system it originated on. Still, it would be interesting to try.

Amazon One-Click Order Gotcha - Got me...

If you see an item on Amazon.com that requires you to put the item in your cart to see the price, DO NOT out of curiosity click on one-click ordering, and assume that just because they didn't give a verification of your order that nothing happened...... And if you DO click on it, you had better check your account and email quickly, because you don't have much time to cancel the order.

My $220 order will be going back out to Amazon via UPS pretty soon......

Hard Drive Upgrade and Cloning

Time had come to retire my secondhand hdd. It was filling up quickly, with precious little room to spare. I chose a cheap Seagate 7200.10 w/ 250G of space to replace the little fella. I also wanted to clone my old disk to the new one. The whole pc is aging, but I want to get a little more use out of it before I try my hand at another build.....

I had never replaced a hard drive with a cloned new one before, so I began the adventure.

First, my new $55 (w/ free shipping from NewEgg) hd was OEM - just the drive. That was okay, I knew I had a SATA cable somewhere, and a baggie of screws. I had heard about Norton Ghost and some other cloning utilities. Well, as you may already have noticed, I am rather a cheapskate (thank my german heritage). I was not about to pay more than a couple of dollars for software, and didn't want to wait. But - AHA! Seagate has a utility on its website called DiskWizard, a free hdd utility that also does cloning, based on Acronis, a respected software program.

Here goes.

1. Downloaded DiskWizard to old hard drive.

2. Installed SATA hard drive. Stupid screw holes did not line up, and a little bending was in order. Found the power connector for the SATA drive, and connected it, and connected the SATA cable to the disk and the m/b. Too bad m/b only supports SATA 1. (mk8-939 Mach Speed Viper)

3. Case closed, boot up. Hmm- where is my new drive??

4. I found that I had to go to rt click on My Computer >Manage >Disk Management. There it is!
Right click on the box for the new hd and initialize.

5. Another right click, this time in the box showing the new drive space, and select new partition, primary, and use others as default (tho I did change volume name to something more descriptive). Aaand.. it worked! I made the drive active here.

6. A quick check shows my new drive, (as 'E') and I can write and read to it!

Rebooted here just for the heck of it.

7. Clonage begins! Running DiskWizard. At this point I see I could probably have used DiscWizard to install the new hd. Either way, we are good here. I continue on to cloning tool, and follow the steps.

8. Another reboot :) DiskWizard does its magic. Be patient.

9. Success! And the screen requests to press any button to close down.

10. On my next reboot I del into the bios, and make the new, bigger, better hard drive the one I want to boot from (after the CD drive), and bravely go on...

11. Woohoo! Magic happened! I am now working on the new Seagate drive, and the change so far, seems to be ah... seamless.... It is now the C drive, and my old drive has become the E drive.
This was much easier than I had anticpated. I love when that happens :)

12. It remains to be seen how I would use the other drive. I guess I will save it as backup for a while... Will windows question my upgrade? Would I be able to just put the old hd in another pc and access my programs as well as my files? These questions will be answered in time I suppose. For now, my time has to be spent elsewhere.

Time to Ditch Time-Warner Cable

Yahoozers!

U-verse is coming next week! The big package, with all premium and DVR. We are also stepping up our internet speed.

Family Time

Nothing brings the family together in the home like the smell of bacon frying...

Arrests! At last!

27 charged in heroin network that authorities say led to 5 deaths

By JOHN DIEDRICHjdiedrich@journalsentinel.comPosted: July 15, 2008

Twenty-seven people from Milwaukee, Chicago and Waukesha County have been charged with being part of a heroin ring that authorities say led to 11 overdoses, five of them fatal, according to federal court documents unsealed Tuesday.

The ring is similar to one charged in 2006 and 2007 that reached from Chicago through Milwaukee and into Ozaukee County, where at least four people died from overdoses. In that case, 16 people were charged and most have pleaded guilty.

In the current case, many of the suspects and victims came from Waukesha County, specifically the Village of Pewaukee. Because people died, the defendants face between 20 years and life in prison if convicted. All but one of the suspects is in custody and that person is being sought.
Village Police Chief Ed Baumann said he was shocked by how prevalent heroin was in his community.

"The questions are unanswerable," Baumann said. "They are the same questions Ozaukee County had. How did this group of kids get hooked on this poison? I don't know."

While five people died, the total might have been higher if not for life-saving medical procedures, authorities said. In four of the other six overdoses, a drug called Narcan was used to revive the users, several of whom were not breathing.

Dubbed "Operation Lake Effect," the investigation started in early 2007 when Milwaukee police pulled over Lonnie L. "G-money" Johnson, 31, who is identified as the Chicago-based supplier of the ring, according to a 70-count criminal complaint. Authorities already were working with informants on the ring, which was already being traced into Waukesha County, it said.
Last August, Valerie Luszak came to a house at N. 18th and W. Nash streets in Milwaukee to use heroin and died when she injected the drugs, the complaint indicates. Louis Brown told police he wrapped Luszak's body in a sheet and dumped it in a garbage cart where it was later found. Luszak's age was not listed in the complaint.

In December, law enforcement found Joshua Carroll, 26, dead from an overdose in a Town of Waukesha home. Friends said the heroin had come from Milwaukee.

In April, Luke J. Bandkowski, 28, of Genesee, was charged in Waukesha County Circuit Court with first-degree reckless homicide in Carroll's death. According to a criminal complaint, Bandkowski is accused of supplying heroin to Carroll in December. An autopsy showed that Carroll died of "opiate intoxication." Bandkowski is also charged in federal court.

Investigators learned that heroin was brought into Milwaukee every couple weeks and distributed through a network operated by Jermaine J. "Main" Stewart, 24, the complaint indicates. The drug was distributed to certain areas of Milwaukee, sometimes by couriers on bicycle, and users from Waukesha County would come into the city to buy, it said. Some of those buyers would then turn around and sell the drug to support their own addiction, according to the complaint.

Because the case has been charged as a conspiracy, all members would be culpable for the overdose deaths and face the stiff penalties if convicted.

On Feb. 21, Jeffrey Topczewski was found dead in a Muskego home by police, the complaint says. His age was not listed. Then on June 6, Andrew Goetzke, 19, was found dead at a Pewaukee home.

Finally, on July 3, David Knuth, 25, was taken by friends to the Aurora Healthcare parking lot in Pewaukee where he was found by police, the complaint said. He later died.

Earlier this month, Waukesha County Deputy Medical Examiner Kris Klenz said there had been four overdoses there as of June 30. Previously, the most heroin deaths recorded in the county came in 2006, when there were three.

James F. Bohn, assistant special agent at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said the purity of heroin sold on the streets has increased over the past 10 years, making it possible for users to snort the drug instead of injecting it. That has eliminated some of the stigma formerly associated with heroin, but it remains highly addictive, regardless of how it is used.

"Heroin is not a recreational drug," Bohn said. "Once you use the drug, you are on that path."
U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic said the investigation is ongoing, noting that in both the Waukesha and Ozaukee cases, the source of the heroin was traced back to Chicago.

"The source of the supply remains under investigation," he said.
Biskupic added that both cases show that heroin is not a Milwaukee problem, but a regional one.
"Law enforcement knows drug dealers aren't concerned about city borders," he said.

My God... They knew it was deadly, yet they continued using and letting their friends use. This drug is evil...