Another near-derelict sign from Badlands (and I mean the BIG BADLANDS) National Park.
(WARNING: Long. Seriously, eye-glazingly, geekly. Caveat lector)
We are a computer-centric household; probably 90-plus percent of our interaction with the outside world is via our various machines, or "boxes" in studly geek-speak (or "boxen", for the truly annoying geekly touch). However, all of our machines but one speak some flavor or other of Linux or FreeBSD, and there are times when a Windows box is necessary – sad but true. So we have one ancient HP Vectra sitting in the basement, its twin SCSI drives whining away like little circular saws, running Windows 2000 for those times when we must call on the dark powers of Microsoft.
Recently I picked up a slightly less ancient Compaq machine at a garage sale (thirty five bucks!) as a potential replacement for the 7- or 8-year-old Vectra. It had twice the memory (but still not enough!) and four times the processor speed, a DVD-RW drive, a CD drive, a hard drive which purred rather than whined, a monitor whose red electron gun wasn't shot, and spiffy speakers (Age of Empires! In stereo! Finally!). The box came with Windows ME installed; I rolled my eyes – I scoff at your pathetic consumer-oriented operating system! Hah! – reformatted the drive and put on Win2K (as we studly geeks call it).
Reboot, and up comes the familiar desktop, but really grainy because it's in 640x480 pixel resolution. Hmmm, tweak the video settings – wait, the graphics card isn't recognized at all. What's up with that? This machine isn't that new. I have no idea what kind of graphics card it has. Pop in the Kubuntu disc (thank God for live discs!), reboot off that, and read off what Kubuntu thinks the card is – an S3 Savage4 – then pop the CD out, reboot into Windows, and go searching for S3 drivers for Win2K – web surfing at 640x480 resolution is not a pleasant experience, btw.
Find the drivers, download them, try to install – the machine doesn't recognize them as drivers at all. A dialog box blandly informs me, "No drivers for this device found." But I downloaded them direct from S3's site! Step away from the computer. Go outside. Hack at unruly yard vegetation.
I think, let's try this again, methodically. Slowly. Re-install the whole bleeding OS, then realize maybe it needs to be patched and upgraded first, before it will accept the Offering of the Drivers. Install Win2K. Reboot. Install Win2K Service Pack 4. Reboot. Install Windows Update. Reboot. Install many, many patches. Reboot. Re-visit S3's website, discover tool that detects graphics card version. Neat! Download. Install. Reboot. It's not a "Savage4", it's a "SavagePro". Download the SavagePro drivers. Install. Reboot. Hold breath, and – 1280x768 pixels! Obstacle overcome!
Now, install all the necessary software: Internet Explorer (or, as us geekly types call it, "Internet Exploder". Get it? "Exploder"!! Ha ha! We kill us, sometimes). Reboot. Acrobat PDF reader (reboot). The VPN client (reboot). Finally, just because of those spiffy stereo speakers and the DVD writer, I installed the iTunes client, and of course I then (all together now) rebooted.
Or at least I tried. The first half, the shutdown part, went ok. But the second half, where the disks spin and the lights blink and you end up with a working computer? Not so much. The Win2K splash screen came up, and the little blue progress bar made it about 2/3rds of the way across the screen – then silence. For a long, long time. After 10 minutes, I pushed the button, and tried again, hoping that we could just ignore that little faux pas, just pretend it never happened. But no, the computer stopped and sat there, sphinx-like, at the same point.
Now I remembered the other main thing I hated about Windows; its smug, superior attitude vis-a-vis the person sitting at the keyboard. With a UNIXy box, there would have probably been a screenful of text, some last dying cries for help sent out by the kernel as it vainly attempted to cope with some hardware or software malfunction, cries that would at least lend a bit of diagnostic help – but here, in Windowsland, nothing. It is not for you to know why I cannot boot, stupid little end-user! It is enough for you to know that I shall not.
Yes, yes, I tried 'safe mode', 'debugging mode', even 'command-line' mode. Sometimes it froze before the splash screen, sometimes during it. Other than that, no difference. I'm guessing it may have been a hard drive error – this household seems to be prone to them – so I broke out the diagnostic utilities disk and am now running the painstaking, many-hours-to-finish tests on the hard drive, then I'll run the painstaking, many-hours-to-finish tests on the memory chips, more for something to do than anything else. If it's not the hard drive, or maybe the memory, I don't really know what else to check – I guess there's the "jiggle all the cables" technique. But there's a limit on how much effort I want to put into a $35 machine. A $35 Windows machine.
Naturally this arouses envy among certain hominids, disguised as aesthetic displeasure: "People tend not to like crows, because they have this fiendish look to them and they're black and they like dead prey."
Crows are the family totem animal of Fleck y Breen.
(Original link via Alan Sullivan.)
I use the equivocating "I'll bet" above because a quick google for my quick snark did not quickly turn up a link to a neat table of adult literacy rates by state. It's quite remarkable how buried and obfuscated that information is on all the governmental and non-gov sites I turned up. There are all sorts of "assessments" for this and that grade level but I haven't yet found what I'd think would be an important and simple stat - the percentage of adults who possess an easily defined attribute of "functional literacy", by state. There is, however, all sorts of gobbledy-gook in brain-desiccating educationese - sites that tell you all about "what they do" re literacy research without any apparent posting of any results of all the research they've optimized, empowered, and missionized themselves to do. One even had impactful links to webcasts about their research! Well, I didn't actually follow those links, but I'm sure they impacted stuff like nobody's business.
Wait - here's a table (p,8) with rates of Level I literacy by state as of 1998. (According to the text (p.9), "Level 1 Literacy refers to the lowest level of literacy and is defined as the adult population that can perform many tasks involving simple texts and documents but display difficulty using certain reading, writing, and computational skills considered necessary for functioning in everyday life.".) Utahns, Alaskans, and Wyomingans have the lowest level of lowest-level literacy at 11%. The deplorably white and unrepresentative New Hampshire is second with Vermont at 12%, and Iowa ties for 3rd place at 13% with Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, and Nebraska. Californians, alas, at 24%, have only slightly less trouble with cereal box decipherment than my fellow Floridians (25%). (I would guess that those percentages have increased in most of these states since '98.) Now, I am sure you are muttering to yourself, "But, Moira, those numbers are pushed up by the large number of non-English speaking immigrants in those places!" To which I say, "Nonetheless." Call me nativist scum, but I don't feel that my destiny would be any more wisely decided by persons illiterate in English than by honest hog farmers, despite their high-falutin' tradition of widespread literacy.
But I must admit I disagree with the gravamen of Bainbridge's post only to the degree that "incredibly annoying" hardly begins to describe the profound suckitude of our political process. And that's my ethanol-burnin', high-fructose corn-syrup swillin' opinion, live from the heart of Ames.
*I do not, as a matter of fact, know if the folks who run the ITBS, developed at the University of Iowa, are still Iowa-based.
Mostly it was just yard signs – a Romney here, a Tancredo there – but the signs of politics in the air have increased to where even I cannot avoid them. First it was the Romney hanging door tags on the front door in the morning. "Please join Mitt and Ann Romney outside Hilton Coliseum for food, fun, and entertainment..." Then the Ron Paul DVDs began appearing. (Hmm, I think Paul ought to lay off that 'no income tax and abolish the Federal Reserve' stuff, because (IMHO) it makes him sound like a kook.) Then letters, addressed to me – personally! by hand! – by random people from out-of-state urging me to vote for this person or that person. (Ok, I lie. I only got one of those, and it was some woman in Arizona urging me to vote for Rep. Paul.) Then yesterday, as some co-workers and I headed for the lunch buffet at the local Old Chicago, we found our progress blocked by the Brownbackmobile, a huge silver-gray Winnebago with Brownback's kindly-yet-Republican visage staring down from all sides. (We looked in vain for the Senator himself within.)
According to one of my colleagues, you don't have to be a registered Republican to show up for the straw poll, and seeing how it's being done about three miles from our house, I'm tempted to drag the offspring there just so she can witness "the largest political event in America" (hey, that's what Romney's door tags call it). On the other hand, it's going to be nastily hot and humid today, and I doubt it would maintain either of our interests for long.
*Though if you seek them out, they're pretty easy to find.
UPDATE. Skimming through the Ron Paul DVD – hey, we have to do something to keep ourselves amused in this heat – I notice that there are several clips of enthusiastic Ron Paul supporters, carrying signs, some of which say 'Ron Paul REVOLUTION' ... but wait, the E, V, O, and L of REVOLUTION are a different color and the letters are ... reversed, spelling "LOVE" backwards. WTF? Some kind of secret message? This tends not to dispel the 'kook' vibe. "Ron Paul and the Love Revolution", or "Ron Paul and the Lovolution", a good name for a sixties psychedelic band out of 'frisco, no? Of course, when you're talking Lovolution, it's best to go to the source.
UPDATE II. Thirty-five bucks? Not bloody likely.
UPDATE III. Best comment on straw poll strategy, from a Ron Paul supporter commenting on the Des Moines Register website: "...the plan is to get all of Mitt's supporters drunk as they get off the bus and then steal their [tickets] and vote for our candidate. Okay, I'm just kidding. We can't afford the beer."
UPDATE IV. There ought to be a name for this phenomenon: Somebody writes blog post entitled, "Is Ron Paul Being Sabotaged By His Own Supporters ?" positing that the average Paul supporter is a bit of an angry nutjob, and his comments section immediately fills up with comments from – you guessed it – enraged Ron Paul-supporting nutjobs!
Badlands was different. It was the smallest Park we visited, and by far the least crowded – in fact, it felt largely abandoned, both by visitors and the NPS. The visitor facilities are small and relatively undeveloped, the trails are few, and even the park's signage looks like it was put up in 1950 and promptly forgotten.
We had intended to stay in a cabin, one of a cluster of cabins that form the only accomodations in the park aside from a small motel and a campground; but our changing arrival dates meant that we ended up in the motel instead. It was passable. (Not that we had any choice.) The motel was actually just outside the park entrance, and another mile or so was the small town of Interior, S.D., and another mile or so beyond that, the Pine Ridge Reservation. The NPS has a unique arrangement with the Reservation; park entrance fees are split 50/50 between them.
After touring what we could before the light failed, we headed to the restaurant at the Cedar Pass Lodge, the only place to eat in the Park, and ate standard fat-laden stodgy mid-American fare served to us by chunky Sioux youths. Chewing my greasy hamburger, I contemplated the sixties-era decor of the restaurant while the radio blared unintelligible thrash metal at the mostly middle-aged white patrons, and thought this is indeed a land of strange contrasts.
