Religion, Politics, and Culture: Explained and Defined
Hope everyone has a good holiday.
Here is a quick item to put a smile on your face.
A few days ago, I asked my son if he knew what “Black Friday” was?
He answered, “Isn’t that the day Jesus died?”
You can’t really say he is wrong. I think it puts the Christmas season in a better context and helps remind me that this time of the year is not about “retail therapy”. Please remember that Jesus is the reason for the season. Stryper has a song by that name and I think I’ll give it a listen.
This just in from the National Republican Senatorial Committee
Does this sound sincere when Senate Republicans make claims like these?
“President Obama and Senate Democrats lied to the American people to force ObamaCare into law.”
“We won’t fooled by the Democrats’ political ploy.”
Wow, I thought maybe Lindsey Graham and John McCain resigned. After three years as the law of the land, the Republicans awaken?
Didn’t we shutdown fifteen percent of the federal government last month and then capitulate for no reason except we were winning?
Any Republican appeal for money should include the disclaimer:
“Warning any semblance of us displaying a spine is purely coincidental and not intended to offend any independents and democrats in the electorate.”
Was there any doubt the Republicans would unilaterally cave on the debt and budget? Then Speaker Boehner gets a standing ovation from his caucus??? The Speaker declares victory and everyone goes home!!!! WTF? No wonder the Democrats bumped-off my squishy Republican Congressman last election.
Victory gets turned into defeat again.
Some Republicans then ran to the media and said this really strengthens Boehner as Speaker. “I think his stock has risen tremendously. He has great security as our leader and our speaker.”
Last Cconference-Jonathan Strong
Governor Moonbeam strikes again.
Gov. Jerry Brown has signed into law a bill that will make California the first state to ban lead bullets for all types of hunting… The Democratic governor says in a signing message Friday that lead ammunition poses a threat to wildlife.
YEAH it’s called hunting!!!!!!!!!!
Read more: California is first state to ban lead ammo for hunting
A few months after stripping the concept of being “morally straight “ from their core beliefs, the Boy Scouts are now willing to remove God from their pledge. Granted, this action is “across the pond” but can it be far away from the United States? Scouts pledge welcomes non-believers In England—where church attendance is less than three percent and the top boy’s name is Mohammed—is it any wonder that The West is falling?
I have a Windows Surface with Windows 8.1 Preview. I learned that if I installed Windows 8.1 RTM that I would not be able to keep my programs and setting without reinstalling everything. This was not acceptable so I began to find an alternative. After three days of trial and error here is what I learned.
• You need ISO image of Windows 8.1 RTM
• 1 USB Thumb Drive 4 GB or larger
• Rufus http://rufus.akeo.ie/
All the web nonsense about editing ISO images is just unnecessary and a waste of time.
Create bootable drive per instructions at this website ( http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/15458-uefi-bootable-usb-flash-drive-create-windows.html ) but here are additional things that I encountered trying the procedure. (Remember Surface is UEFI computer select your computer type on line for Partition Scheme.)
The first time I tried this it did not work. My drive did not format correctly and Windows Explorer could no longer see the drive. Don’t panic. Go to Disk Manager in Windows and you will see the drive. Just format it with FAT32 and then you can try again.
My second attempt in creating a bootable USB device was successful. Since the USB image is just files and not an ISO Image then it was easy to edit the cversion.ini file as instructed here. http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Upgrade-from-Windows-8-1-Preview-to-RTM-Guide-379950.shtml Ignore rest of this post as it is unnecessary.
Once the USB drive was ready, boot Surface or whatever computer that you have and insert drive into USB port. Use Explorer and double click on Setup.exe. It is not necessary to boot from UBS drive to run Upgrade. Enter product key. Eventually—if you edited cversion.ini correctly—you will be offered three upgrade options on Choose what to keep screen:
• Windows settings, personal files, and apps
• Just personal files
• Nothing
Of course the whole purpose of this blog is to get the option to keep Windows settings, personal files, and apps. Just follow any remaining prompts and you will have a happy computer upgraded from Windows 8.1 Preview to 8.1 RTM without reinstalling a single thing.
Enjoy.
Yesterday it was announced that Fresh and Easy Stores had been sold. While not clearly stated in local media reports, all northern California stores will be closed by the end of September. The fire sale begins today. My family will miss them. They have been a source of new and different items for many meals served in our home.
We also enjoyed supporting them because local unions had harassed the crap out of them when they first opened. My wife and I both have unions stealing part of our paychecks each month due to our places of employment. It was nice to support free enterprise and innovation. I will miss them.
Last year my daughter hijacked my Acer laptop to take to college after she broke the hinge on her HP. (HP laptops don’t like going past 90 degrees when opening the screen.) Recently, I decided that I needed a replacement for my laptop so I could take a few college classes necessary to get promoted at work. After much debating and searching I decided to purchase a Surface Pro from Microsoft.
I looked at the RT version but I wanted to run PC programs as well as apps. My general opinion of apps is that they are buggy and tend to be unstable. This is true of Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8. (Apple burned their bridges with me a long time ago so they aren’t even part of my world.) PC programs are just more robust than apps. Also, PC programs don’t require Internet access and many apps are just front-ends for cloud data. Without Internet access most apps are useless.
Since Microsoft sets the sales price for Surface, it didn’t matter where I purchased it. Generally, I like shopping at Fry’s but their credit card is terrible. You can only make payments via snail mail. You used to be able to make payments on the Internet but they discontinued that many years ago. Their website claims that they now take payments again but I have yet to verify if this is so. Worst of all, they will not accept payments are their brick and mortar stores for their credit card. As a result, I purchased Surface at Best Buy. Best Buy has a multitude of payment options. I got my Surface for 18 months interest free. Best Buy tried to sell me an extended warranty but their prices were extremely high. I registered my Surface on Microsoft’s website and they offer a two year warranty for $149. It sounds much like what Best Buy offered for about half the price.
Anyway, here are my thoughts on Surface.
microSD Card
When I purchase the Surface I bought a 64GB micro SD card to use with the computer. I planned to keep photos and music on it so I wouldn’t fill up the internal hard drive. However, I was unable to use the SD card for this purpose because the Library function in Windows 8 will not allow a removable card to be added to my music library. The Surface has about 85 GB of storage available and my complete music collection is over 35 GB. Windows Media Player will see the audio tracks but will not play them from the SD card. The Music app will play the audio files on the SD card but you must manually navigate to the SD card each time you want to play something from it.
Mouse
Best Buy only had one Blue Tooth Mouse in their otherwise huge store. The mouse was not even on display. It does work fine with the Surface but it creates a huge bulge in the storage case. The mouse is almost as big as my fist; it’s not a typical laptop size. I wanted my only USB port to be free if I needed it.
Start-up & Configuration
I logged into the Surface with my Windows Live account. I was going thru my initiation of Windows 8 when I was asked if I wanted to Trust this computer. I said YES and an email was sent to my phone. I typed in the code from the email and all my settings were copied from the Internet to the Surface. The desktop background on the Surface was the same photo as on my desktop. Additionally, all my Favorites from Internet Explorer and passwords were copied. The email app was also configured to match my desktop computer. While I thought this was cool, it did make me wonder how much the NSA is really watching us.
I like the touch ability in Windows 8 but there is one thing I cannot do successfully without the keyboard or mouse, I can’t get the right click menu to come up for a tile on the Start Screen. You can touch, hold, pinch or do any gesture that you can imagine but it won’t work. Nothing beats a mouse for customizing the Start Screen.
Mount ISO & MS Office
I did install Microsoft Office on the Surface but when doing it I did encounter a bug/glitch in the software. Every time I tried to mount the ISO image of Office that I downloaded from Microsoft I got an error. The error was that the ISO image could not be mounted. After some research on the Internet I found that the best thing I could do was ignore the error since the ISO image was really mounted even when the error said otherwise. I followed this advice and was able to load Office without any further issues.
Old PC Games
As an experiment, I downloaded Diablo 2 from the Internet to see how it would run. The download from Blizzard’s Battlenet website was painfully slow. Wi-Fi speeds are significantly slower than wired speeds. The program installed OK but when it came to running Diablo 2 I hit another snag. The only native resolutions for Diablo were 640 x 480 and 800 x 600. Running Diablo in a window the size of a large label is not my idea of gaming. I tried the fix for bigger resolutions suggested on the internet—this is a third party program that allows more resolution choices—but it would not work. By adding –w to the end of the target line of the desktop shortcut I was able to get a larger windows but still not the correct height. In the midst of learning this, I accidently changed the resolution for the Surface to 640 x 480 more than once. Correcting that problem was another challenge. Even rebooting the Surface would not restore full screen operation once the resolution was changed. This was another time when touch was not precise enough to change settings.
After much trial and error, I did get the Blizzard games to run at full screen. As usual, you had to blend parts of different procedures found on the Internet because none of them was correct.
The first part was posted at Surface Pro brightness bug
It was to download the full video driver from Intel. Use this one unless this is fixed in the Windows 8.1 update. downloadcenter.intel.com
The second part was a completely undocumented key combination that I found. Here is the full post. I FOUND A FIX FOR OLD GAMES ON SURFACE PRO WITH SMALL SCREEN After loading the video driver mentioned above, start game then simultaneously press CTRL+ALT+FN +F11. When this works, the game will go to full screen. Then you must exit game in the normal way. When you do screen resolution will be wrong. Then set screen resolution using Control Panel or Right Click. After that the games will be full screen when started again and desktop will be correct size.
The other game franchise that I tried without any success on Surface was Command and Conquer. I went on Amazon and despite the bad reviews I bought the C&C Ultimate Collection. This is a downloadable only collection of all 17 Command and Conquer games. They don’t require a CD or DVD to run them. Total downloads are over 60 GB. Before I gave Amazon my money, I actually installed the disk version of Command and Conquer Generals on the Surface through my external DVD. It worked without and patches, or tweaks necessary on Windows 7. After I proved it would work, I gave Amazon my money and downloaded Generals. It would not work. As a form of troubleshooting, I downloaded it on my Windows 8 desktop and it worked great. What I learned was that the Origin software (cheap knock-off of Steam) would not bring up the menu to let me start the game. I uninstalled it on both machines and tried it again with the same results. The biggest difference that I noticed in hardware was that I have an NVIDIA video card on the desktop and an Intel one in the Surface.
Weight and Usage
The Surface weights two pounds. It is heavier and larger than my Kindle Fire. I have not tried Netflix on it yet but holding it above my head to watch streaming video or surf the Internet the way I do with Kindle is more of a challenge. I think I will have to park it on the table next to my bed to use it for longer periods of time. The jury is still out on this aspect of the Surface.
They type keyboard is wonderful. It is thin and reliable. Having it cover the screen when not in use is an added bonus. The click in place feature is clever.
So far I like the Surface. If you get one, get a small Blue Tooth mouse and seriously consider the optional touch keyboard. The on screen keyboard is ok but sometimes covers the part of the screen that you are trying to type in.
And now from the people that brought you Global Warming, Climate Change, and Green Energy in their never ending quest for a socialist utopia, we proudly present Earth Overshoot Day. What is this; enquiring minds might ask? Warning: Read this and you may see your lunch again.
An environmentally focused think tank has announced that Earth will be living in what they referred to as an ecological deficit for the remainder of the year.
As of Tuesday, humans officially exhausted the planet’s resources to a point where the Earth is not able to regenerate them fully for the rest of 2013, the Global Footprint Network reports. The group referred to the official date of transition from one side of the ecological preservation coin to the other as “Earth Overshoot Day.”
study earth forced to operate on ecological deficit for rest of 2013
For me to know that God is in control is mythology but this idiocy is science? Mother Earth (a.k.a. the goddess Gaia) is failing to undo the damage inflicted on her by mankind! It’s shocking that this was even put into print. Walter Cronkite’s network has really fallen on hard times to call this newsworthy.
Whatever happened to the law which states “matter can neither be created nor destroyed; only changed in form”? So what are we loosing? This planet can support billions more people than live here now.
Ok, so if this were true what would these environmental extremists want us to do? I would venture to guess they want more government control of our lives.
• Socialism-Abolish personally owned vehicles and other private property ownership.
• Eugenics-Population control coupled with government healthcare.
• Freedom from Religion-Outlaw guns, God, and grillin’.
• Community Planning-all housing would be assigned by the government based upon your contribution to society. This would eliminate suburban sprawl by eliminating privately owned housing and replacing it with more efficient multistory housing and allow for establishment of more green spaces and community gardens. Millions of jobs would be created by building the new multistory housing units and environmental restoration of formerly inhabited spaces that would be returned to the state of nature which existed prior to humans inhabiting the area.
Only in Berkeley could something like this originate.
World Net Daily today published an atricle on the lastest fundraising drill run by Capital Resource Institue. This one is supposed to overturn the transgender bathroom billed signed by Jerry Brown.
race on to overturn transgender bathrooms
Since CRI’s effort was presented as a serious one by the author of the story, I felt I needed to respond to him. Below is the letter I sent to him:
Mr. Unruh,
I just read your story “Race to Overturn Transgender Bathrooms”
I do wish CRI—Karen England and Tim LeFever—and others would mount a serious effort to overturn this law but that has not been their track record. The last few ballot efforts run by CRI have been fundraising gimicks to prop up CRI. Virtually none of the funds they took in actually went to getting anything on the ballot. In fact, England doesn’t even live in California, I have it on good authority that she actually lives in Reno Nevada and commutes to Sacramento where she works for CRI a few days per week. I know CRI has reduced much of it’s staff over the last few years.
It typically takes about three million dollars just to get enough signatures to qualify a ballot measure in this state and several times that to run the campaign to get it approved. England & LeFever don’t have access to that type of funding. When they start a campaign like this and fail, they give the other side confidence that they are the majority and CRI’s failure emboldens the Leftists and anti-christian people in this state. If you wish you can research how CRI pretended to be part of the Prop 8 campaign and used the money just to keep their current operation running or their failed Harvy Milk Day, or SB 48 initiatives. capitol resource institute
CRI fleeces the flock to keep running their organization but has little to show for it.
Then there was the time in 2011 that CRI and friends tried a hostile takeover of the California Republican Assembly.
CRI has no track record of success on any ballot initiative they have attempted. They have yet to qualify anything for the ballot in California let alone get it approved. This is the same kind of fundraising drill that some political consultants do in the name of the Tea Party.
“For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it”— Luke 14: 28
