iPods lock up Windows Vista

Talk about PANIC! Yesterday I turned off my PC that I am testing Windows Vista on, and when I came back to it hours later, it would not boot up. This particular PC has an Intel motherboard, Intel Pentium 4, 2 gigs of RAM, an ATI video board with 128M of RAM and the other usual suspect hardware.

When I would turn on the PC, it would show the Intel screen from the Intel BIOS, but it would not start up the hard drive. I figured that my hard drive had finally been killed by the poorly programmed Windows Vista. Odd things you can observe on your Windows Vista PC are watching the CPU peg at 100% utilization when you have no programs running, having your monitors turn off and turn on randomly, having to wait 15 minutes after booting up for Windows Vista to “stabilize”; if you attempt to do anything during this stabilization phase of booting up, Windows Explorer will crash and you will have to reboot your PC for it to function.

Anyway, I had foolishly plugged my iPod into a USB port to recharge it. Windows Vista not only now supports booting from a USB port, it looks to the USB ports FIRST for booting up! Doh!

Well, once I unplugged my iPod and rebooted my PC, all was well. By the way besides the fact the having an iPod plugged in prevents Windows Vista from booting up your PC, the iTunes software doesn’t work under Windows Vista either, even in “compatibility” mode!

Sadly I still have Windows Vista on my PC. Windows Vista is just a dog of an operating system that smells as rank as a pile of skunk droppings.

30 Seconds to Mars uses DRM

Yep. My daughter attempted to download the songs off of her 30 Seconds to Mars CD, to her iPod, only to be stymied by the EVIL DRM (Digital Rights Management). The iTunes software simply would not recognize that she had a legitimate copy of the music! To add insult to injury 30 Seconds to Mars put a survey on their CD asking if users were unhappy that they couldn't download their songs to an iPod!

So, after attending 2 of their concerts and buying their CDs, my daughter is no longer going to be a consumer of 30 Seconds to Mars.

She just wanted to listen to their music while she worked out. The combined corporate greed of 30 Seconds to Mars and their publisher Virgin Records just cost them another customer.

An Inconvenient Truth

Go see the movie and read the book.

This is very real and quite scary. Things need to change or we will all die in an unexpectedly short amount of time.

Although their website is still a work in progress, Nature's Future is probably the best environmental group in the world for contributing your time and money to in an effort to fight global warming and to support and repair bio-diversity.

They do real work and they don't screw around with your donations.

Dell XPS 2010 FINALLY ships!

Woo hoo! Yes at $3500 and 18 pounds (well from earlier reports; Dell NEVER DOES say how much this thing actually weights) the Dell 2010 is the Godzilla of both notebooks and uber geek status.

Just go to Dell's web site and check it out. While I might have techno lust for such a beast I lack the money. A more practical solution for my impoverished tastes would be the new G35-AV650 model of Toshiba's Qosimo which has HDTV built into it.

Allen Ginsberg's Howl turns 50

The 50th Anniversary of the publication of Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg took place on June 4th. I always found Howl to be inspirational. For more details, visit the City Lights site.

The 25th Anniversary of the first reported cases of AIDS

June 5, 2006, marked the 25th anniversary of the publication of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of June 5, 1981, describing the first reported cases of an “unexplained illness among five previously healthy homosexual men in Los Angeles.” The report signified the beginning of what would later become known as the AIDS pandemic.

Through the California Department of Health Services, Office of AIDS (CDHS/OA), the State provides funding and resources for HIV and AIDS prevention, care, and treatment, including HIV rapid tests, (now available in over 30 local health departments), and services to 29,000 HIV-positive citizens of California who benefit from the largest and most comprehensive AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) in the United States.

For additional information about AIDS or to locate HIV testing services, contact your local health department or the California AIDS Hotline at (800) 367-AIDS (2437) or visit www.AIDShotline.org. For information on CDHS/OA mission, programs and other helpful resources, see OA’s Web site http://www.dhs.ca.gov/AIDS.