So, tell me, what do you use for an Internet Home Page? I’m looking for a new Internet Home Page now that Yahoo has cut a deal with the Evil Empire. I want to bail on them now, not wait for the infection to take root. All I’m looking for in a home page is one that shows me the world news and local weather on the first page and has a finance link with a quote/portfolio tracker that works like the Yahoo one. What I mean is it shows me the quotes with up to 4 digits, last trade info, and a quick news heading summary at the bottom.

Doesn’t sound like a big order, does it? Well, I spent about an hour this morning looking at various portals, and it seems my simple requirements cannot be met by most of the famous sites.

So, do you know of a site which meets these requirements?

How can you possibly turn on the news or surf the news sites on the Web without hearing about Professor Gates and his run in with a slow news week? Don’t I mean “the law” you ask? No. I mean a slow news week. Corporate owned news media has become all about the advertising. If there isn’t a juicy story out there to tell, they’ll manufacture one, and that is just what they did here.

I couldn’t sleep last night, so I turned on the new Jerry Springer show…errr…I mean CNN. Here we had three talking heads all manufacturing a story. Well, not all of them. Two were trying to make the story go away, one because she was a lawyer and paid to do that, another because he was a fame whore with the unfortunate quality of having been a personal friend/co-worker of Professor Gates, but another, whose fame and income is sadly tied to keeping race anger alive was out there trying to tie the incident to Rodney King and a host of other police brutality. (Oddly enough, people from Chicago old enough to have been around when the current mayor wasn’t the mayor, just over the police department, didn’t find that video so shocking. It was one of the common interrogation techniques used on anyone who found themselves in police custody and deemed “uncooperative”, but that is a different subject.)

Ah yes, they spent a good deal of time yacking needlessly about how the police report said the witness stated “two black men were trying to break into a house” and calling it an abuse of police power. It wasn’t, but once again, continued air time and income mandate it had to be, at least for one more round of commercial breaks.

Do you want to hear what I’ve pieced together on this, being someone who has seen very similar situations many times over? Too bad, you’re going to.

Professor Gates was having a bad day. One of those days where most everything he touched turned to shit. He came home early with his friend/driver only to find that (&_)*ing sticky door was even worse now and it took both of them to shoulder the damned thing open. Why can’t the weather dry out so this thing will start working again?

A few minutes later, while Professor Gates is still complaining/venting to his friend/driver, our, now famous, police officer shows up. He keeps the witness out away from the scene and goes to the door. When he asks to see Professor Gate’s ID, the Professor loses it. He really starts venting then.

“Oh, you get a phone call stating two black men are breaking into a house so we must be criminals! Get the (&)_)*( out of my house you (&()*()_(* racist. I’m Professor Gates and I own this house!” (or something very similar. The vent would have went on quite a bit longer)

Then you get the follow up call requesting backup. We all got to hear that yesterday. The now famous police officer didn’t sound excited, pissed, or anything else.

What nobody in the talking head crowd bothered to pipe up over is the fact Professor Gates was already going to get to wear the handcuffs at this point. He was pissed off, uncooperative, and initially refused to show identification. Anybody who has ever known a police officer with professional training knows that the fastest way to contain the situation is to put that person in cuffs. 99.99% of all the bad things which happen during a police response are taken out of the equation when you put that person in cuffs. The shootings, the stabbings, and the unnecessary police chases get taken out of the question when the irate individual(s) doesn’t(don’t) have use of their hands.

Once they are in cuffs, what happens to a person is really up to them. Keep handing out the mouth and attitude, and you are going to the station. Get really mouthy and you will most likely hit your head getting into the back of the squad.

I’ve seen this go down many many times. Okay, not with police responding to a home invasion call, but with police responding to calls from bars and restaurants where someone had a rough day, came in looking to vent, then after a few decided to make someone feel worse than they felt. Doesn’t even have to be a rough bar. There are some guys who simply haven’t had a good time until they’ve been thrown out of the bar.

Perhaps the best person to ever explain it was a DOT (Department of Transportation) inspector who came to visit a group of new truck drivers. He took a pen out of his pocket, held it up to the group and said “My pen isn’t filled with ink like yours, it is filled with attitude. The more attitude it receives, the more it responds with.”

“The two black men” thing in the police report was an honest point of confusion, it wasn’t the witness who said it, but the person in cuffs…okay…they screamed it. This wasn’t an abuse of power, it was a case of “so much was said in a short span of time it was hard to keep it all straight.” Until someone ran to the media and tried to play the race card, the police report didn’t matter. As long as the guy really was the home owner, he was only going to be held until he cooled down. This wasn’t a case of police brutality or racial profiling, it was a case of a cop being a Peace Officer. “Let them cool their heels in a cell for a while, then kick ‘em loose.” That’s a practice which saves a lot of lives. If you want a great example of a worst case situation when that practice doesn’t happen, rent “Falling Down”. It’s a great movie about a guy having a bad day that just keeps getting worse.

The only sad part of this entire thing is that the President got sucked into it. The press set him up for a Jesse Jackson Moment, and he wasn’t focused enough to step aside. They had to set him up, it’s been a slow news week, and it’s all about the ratings you know! Hopefully that won’t happen to him again. Oh, I’m sure the press and others will try it again, but I hope both he and those around him are smart enough to never walk into it again. What is a Jesse Jackson Moment? You have to be old enough to understand that Jesse Jackson is a moth, whenever there is a camera out he flys to it like a moth to a flame, the rhetoric spews, and usually the situation implodes. Probably one of the more spectacular Jesse Jackson Moments where when those high school students got expelled for getting into a fight at a football game. That story wasn’t hours old before he was in front of the news cameras marshalling the troops and denouncing the administration…then the high school released the security camera video and we saw the fight in all its brutality with what looked like little old ladies falling through the plank spacings of the bleachers, some seemed quite hurt, or at least looked as if they should have been given what happened to them. Then we got to watch the back peddling, the stammering, the stuttering, and all other crash recovery attempts. Most everyone who saw the video found themselves saying “if they got so much fight in them let a dozen cops take them into a room with billy clubs and kick the shit out of them while their still young enough to both heal and learn something from it. You don’t go starting a fight in the middle of a crowd of little old ladies, I don’t care who you think you are.”

At the close of Jerry Springer…errr…I mean this segment of the CNN show, the one who wanted to keep it burning said “it is all very well that they are going to have a beer, but that is not how we solve this issue in the country”. He just doesn’t get it. Are their police who are racist and hand out abuse, probably. Was that involved in the current situation? Nope. What happened here is someone had a bad day, they vented at the wrong person and got to spend some time in cuffs cooling off. Now they are going to have a beer and laugh about it.

Anyone who doesn’t understand that never read their copy of The Guy Rules.

I was checking the business news on Yahoo today (before it joins forces with Microsoft and becomes just as worthless as all Microsoft sites) and came across the following story.

http://finance.yahoo.com/college-education/article/107402/most-lucrative-college-degrees.html?mod=edu-collegeprep

Of course they were simply trying to encourage college bound students and those with enough time left before graduation to take additional math classes, but they have unwittingly provided the basis for criminal prosecution by the Department of Labor. These numbers are the national average starting salaries for recent college graduates having the corresponding degree. The DOL is free to use these numbers as opposed to their own internal numbers when issuing fines and criminal prosecution.

Admittedly, they have been unforgivably lax in their duties when it comes to criminal prosecution as of late. Companies have been completely ignoring tax rules, flying $10/day workers over on tourist visas, slapping them 8 deep in an Extended Stay America “suite” and billing them out at companies with DOD and other government contracts. Companies have been demanding H1-B workers by committing perjury on the forms, claiming there are no qualified IT workers to fill their positions. The truth is there are hundreds, if not thousands of completely qualified IT workers, the only qualification they lack is they aren’t willing to work for less than $30K/yr.

Well, here we go. Published out there for all to see by the National Association of Colleges and Employers is the Rosetta Stone for criminal prosecution. We aren’t talking about simple things like the $45,000 fine levied against iGate Mastek for running ads stating candidates had to be H1-B to apply, no. We are talking full blown INS raids looking just like the raids they run on farms and sweat shops. This time they aren’t looking for people who are taking a low paying job nobody wants, they are looking for people doing employee work while here on a tourist visa, and companies who willingly are violating their DOD/government contracts by allowing non-U.S. Non-clearance background checked individuals access to the source code running in production.

I don’t know about your state, but here in IL, where we toss a governor in prison every so often, this criminal practice has been happening with wanton abandonment. I know it has been happening in NJ as well. I’ve posted on this blog before about “contract” postings there looking to pay $35/hr - $45/hr for on-site work that required 10-15 years experience. These contracts are all for one company really, and they are looking to pay far below the average wage for that level of skill and experience. How do they get those positions filled? Take a guess.

Perhaps I can blame this all on “Royal Pains”, “ In Plain Sight”, or “Torchwood: Children of Earth”, but I’ve been seeing this “Hand Me Downs” Subaru commercial a lot lately. What a great concept from a marketing firm. Scavenge eBay and garage sales for a few “almost working” iconic things from the late 70s and early 80s, then show a kid being handed down all of them. What better way to hook the “long in the tooth crowd” into watching.

Shortly after the “Space Invaders” game, you see the kid lugging a huge monitor and keyboard of brownish color down a hallway. What struck me was the fact the keyboard on the top had its function keys on the right. The geek in me remembers that particular trait was iconic of a few brands/models, prior to IBM moving them to the left, then deciding the left really sucked and moving them to the top. Their only saving grace was that they put the numeric keypad on the right which is used a lot more often by OpenVMS developers editing in a terminal emulator.

Was that computer really a VIC-20? The only pictures I can find show them in white. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=252 It would make sense if they chose that particular computer. It was the first “personal” computer to sell 1 million units. It is even funnier if you think about the story of how it came to be. Jack Tramiel mandated the company build a new computer which could be sold through retail outlets for $300 to use up the surplus 1Kbitx4 SRAM modules and this 22 column VIC chip which had no other market. (Full story here: http://en.allexperts.com/e/c/co/commodore_vic-20.htm)

Admittedly, the VIC-20 had every design flaw known to the industry, at least in retrospect, but they also had a killer ad campaign. Knowing that a very high percentage of computer geeks were Star Trek fans, they got none other than William Shatner to ask kids and parents alike “Why buy just a video game?” Another major marketing catch phrase around the product was “The one to grow with.” The real problem was, you couldn’t grow at all…at least you couldn’t grow the computer…you couldn’t get it to have both an 80 column screen and 64K of RAM..at least not at the same time. Everything kept re-using $A000 so nothing worked together.

What is even more astounding about the VIC-20 than its success, was the fact it knew the price point. Even in the 1980s when computer programming graduates started at just under $20K per year the target was a $300 computer. I ran across a snippet in an article found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/958307/Sunset-Days-VIC-20-TPUG-Feb-1985 that I want to share with you:

All that is needed to revive the VIC-20 is ideas. Maybe they will be your ideas. Give it some thought. In the meantime, remember: it’s now how much you get, it’s how little it costs. Caveat emptor.

Time has proven that author correct. Today, we have a new VIC-20. Like the VIC-20, they have what passes for a real keyboard in the current market and the successful ones sell for that magic $300 price point. We don’t call them a VIC-20 though, we call them Netbooks. I read a lot of disparaging remarks from “industry analysts” and others whose personal wealth is directly or indirectly related to the profitability of the companies producing chips/computers. None of them can see a user wanting a $300 computer. None of them probably know anyone who still has a computer running Windows 98, but there are a lot of people still using those old PS/2 Model 50 computers major corporations tossed from their desktops nearly two decades ago.

What we don’t have, yet, is a Netbook manufacturer smart enough to only use the hard drive for booting and forced user storage, but use a flash or thumb drive for all /tmp and swap storage. I know we don’t have this, although there is rumor that the Netbook specific version of Ubuntu is heading in that very direction. Why? Because the market wants a $300 Netbook with a real keyboard and 7 day battery. Perhaps we will even let them cheat and put a solar panel on the cover which can bleed some power back into the battery whenever it sees light.

People who say Netbooks aren’t game changing don’t understand the power of cheap computers. They don’t understand the thinking behind “One Laptop Per Child” and they don’t know computer history at all. A young Linus Tovalds was given a VIC-20 as his first computer. Torvalds later upgraded to a Sinclair QL, then to a 386 PC. For those of you who don’t know, Torvalds later went on to write the Linux operating system kernel.

I’m still not going to buy a Subaru, but their marketing company does know how to put together a very memorable commercial. Now if Subaru only knew enough about building cars to make one that could get out of its own way when you are trying to do ordinary life threatening things like merge on a Chicago tollway.

I have been someone occupied by vehicle offers and such things these days. Part of it has to do with some equipment locating firms interested in my Failing 1250 water well drilling rig. Another part of it is all of the news articles about the government vehicle credit of up to $4500 if you dump a sufficiently old enough vehicle for a sufficiently new enough vehicle. The main catch is the dumped vehicle cannot be resold, it must be scrapped.

I haven’t found many articles explaining how the government was actually going to get the vehicles from dealer lots to shredders. Perhaps they are going to higher the same group of people the Chinese buyers did several years ago. You haven’t heard that story? Shame on you.

Back when China started building the world’s largest hydro-electric damn some engineer did the math and found out they needed something like twelve years worth of the nation’s steel production during the four year, or whatever it was, construction cycle of the damn. This sent Chinese steel buyers all over trying to find rebar quality steel at an affordable delivered price. They got shut off in quite a few places because they tried to buy it all at once. Eventually, some enterprising businessmen obtained a “ portable” car shredder and a fleet of dump trailers.

The businessmen found or bought a nationwide listing of auto wrecking yards. They focussed on the yards along west coast and worked their way east doing something of a north south sweep. Their primary target was family owned wrecking yards which had been in the family for generations. They waved a briefcase full of cash in front of the owners and got them to cart every vehicle older than 1980 forward for shredding. The scrap metal was hauled to and/or loaded into shipping containers, where it found its way to into a plant in China which was simply cranking out rebar as fast as the scrap arrived.

Given the “buy American” clause tied to most of the construction packages funded by the Stimulus Package, it makes sense for the government to try helping out the environment by basically sweeping every commuter/work vehicle more than 10 years old off the road and into a steel recycling plant that is cranking out rebar. I don’t fault them for making the attempt, I only fault them for not putting out a story of how they (or should I say “we the taxpayer”? ) are going to get the vehicles purchased under this program from the dealer lot to the plant cranking out rebar.

Of course this program is supposed to help bail out the world wide auto industry as well as stimulate the economy and help reduce green house gas emissions. It does beg the question though…do they really expect taxpayers to buy GM vehicles?

We’ve been bent over the kitchen table quite profusely by GM.

You will recall that GM and EDS were at the very tip of the “IT offshoring” trend which basically kicked two legs out from under the three legged stool the world wide economy was sitting on. The current generation’s great-great-great-great grandchildren are STILL going to be paying off the financial industry bail out when they reach retirement age, thanks in large part to GM.

Now we have a “new GM” and are supposed to forget all of the sins of the past. The “old GM” is now a worthless smoldering hulk which screwed each and every investor it ever had, along with shareholders and its employees. Granted, the UAW is almost as much to blame for the catastrophe as GM management, but a lot of the previous management is still in place at the “new GM”, not so much of the UAW.

How can any U.S. citizen, or for that matter, any global banker who bought those government bonds backing the money given to GM while they went through bankruptcy, ever forgive or forget? The next four generations are going to be paying off the GM debt alone. Oh, it isn’t just the money we loaned them. Just how do you think the “new GM” managed to “get solvent”? They jettisoned the pension plan! Just where do you think that pension plan landed? On the back of the U.S. taxpayer! Oh, don’t expect any Union backed or operated pension program for its members to ever be able to actually take care of its membership during their retirement years. There are too many hands from Union’s upper management reaching in that till, it will never be flush with cash.

Even if we magically got the Union’s upper management to stop funding their personal lives via “investments” the pension/retirement fund made and forced them to use regular investment channels, just where would it be able to park its money? It really looks like it is going to take us 60 years to financially recover from eight years of Bill Clinton. Teacher’s retirement funds and 401-Ks got clobbered by the DOT-BOMB scam he unleashed upon the world. Then we got bent over once again by the Worldcom/Enron/Adelphia/et. al. scams brought on by Clinton era policies. Oh, some didn’t self destruct until W. was at the helm of the Titanic, but the iceberg was waiting and all of the lifeboats had been sold in order to pay for hookers at the Democratic convention. We no sooner start to recover from these debacles, then we get to see just what the Clinton era mortgage industry deregulation coupled with its policy of pushing sub-prime mortgages out there did for us.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve watched my retirement account lose multiple digits of value thanks to the Clinton era and GM. There is no way for me to thank former President Clinton for focusing on his cigar bobbing fetish instead of what was good for the country. I can, however, thank GM. So can you.

Buy something else.

Pay attention children, you are about to witness yet another self proclaimed industry standard whither into obscurity. This time, it will be the Microsoft Empire. After decades of rape-pillage-and-plunder business practices, the payback has finally started, all it took was a global recession.

Oh, yea of gullible character, it isn’t just a sales slump due to the economy, it is a sales slump because Federal and State governments around the world are now standardizing on the Open Document format. Thus, the once lucrative cash cow of MS Office is being put out to pasture by any company doing business with either. In the current business climate, many who have never done business with either are even making the conversion hoping to grab several handfuls of stimulus dollars while cutting support costs.

Even IBM has seen the drawings on the wall. They have released a pretty serious free word processor based upon some of the OpenOffice project. The IBM release is known as Lotus Symphony. They ship it on various 32-bit Linux platforms, MAC, and even the outgoing Windows platform.

Speaking of outgoing platforms, isn’t it interesting that Microsoft announces a complete dropping of XP in a fraudulent attempt to force Worsta…errr…I mean Vista migration, only to do a complete about face and allow XP to be released on Netbooks? Google, of course, has had a Netbook OS out there for a while, but it hasn’t been viewed as complete as Ubuntu’s Netbook specific version. OpenSuSE has yet to release a Netbook specific version, but I wouldn’t put it past the community. Why the focus on Ubuntu and OpenSuSE? Those are the leaders as far as IBM is concerned. We know this because those are the two Linux platforms with specific Symphony releases.

One of the offshore consulting firms I’ve worked with in the past has even ripped out MS Exchange in favor of GMail. It isn’t just for their own use, they are doing this for clients as well.

I read a lot of people who sound a lot like IBM mainframers at the dawn of the PC age. They couldn’t see a purpose for a computer on a desktop back then. You will read a lot of authors stating they don’t see a future for the Netbook. They would be sadly mistaken. Corporations are looking to cut costs in any way they can. Most of their employees want notebooks. Many are splitting time between home and office. The simple reality is that $300 Netbooks running either OpenSuSE or Ubuntu with Symphony provide what the vast majority of end users need. Mutltiple Web browsers. Xterm provides VT terminal emulation for OpenVMS access. There are also Open Source 3270 terminal emulators included in most bundles. If your email is hosted and works with Mozilla or Opera, the majority of your employees need nothing else.

Today we read about Dell trying to put a brave face on things saying the PC market seems to have found a bottom. You will notice from the way their stock moved, most analysts disagree. The biggest badest notebook one can purchase for under $300 retail is going to define the bottom of the market. While there will be a token few who need more power on their desktop, the days of multi-billion dollar R&D into chips is over. Yes, we’ve got quad core CPUs, but they draw too much power and we don’t have much software which can actually use all four CPUs in any meaningful way. Netbooks appear to have retrenched to nearly the 486 days, but updated the components of that 486 so they are all shiny, new, low power, and tiny.

The testosterone days of “I’ve got more computer than you” are over for everyone that isn’t a gaming addict. You can’t spend money on an OS license or office suite when you are trying to make money in the sub $300 Netbook market.

In less than two years, Microsoft will be reduced in size to that of Corel. In less than five years it will be nothing but a game vendor. Ordinarily this would have taken longer, but a world wide recession has sped it up.

President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors issued a report on the future of the U.S. job market which stated: “Well-trained and highly-skilled workers will be best positioned to secure high-wage jobs, thereby fueling American prosperity.” What they failed to state was that as long as the criminal enterprise of offshoring is allowed to continue unchecked, there will be no high paying jobs left on the American continent. Oh, there will be a handful of those jobs handed down to family members of the Aristocracy, but none that could be had by education and gumption alone.

The policies of the Clinton administration, which went unchecked during the W. Administration have put in motion a two class society or America. The “Have Mores” and the “ Have Nots”. Until there is a $45,000 per head tax placed on companies who either create or maintain a job offshore, either directly as an employee or indirectly via service contract or partnership, there will never be high paying jobs created in this country again. Right now the plug has been pulled out of the drain and we are watching the whirl water gets just before the last of it goes down the drain.

Even after all of the historical evidence, they still keep leaving the same policies in place. The bankruptcy of GM because they and EDS lead the charge in offshoring. The collapse of the housing market, due in large part to the removal of IT workers from the “Flip this House” group. Those of you who need further reminding need to read a previous blog here title “Welcome to the Age of Corruption”.

What is disheartening to see and hear is the fact nobody involved in the economic planning and advising has taken it upon themselves to fix the one thing which will fix most everything else, stopping the whirl down the drain. Perhaps one could cut the administration some slack with the old adage “when you’re up to your ass in alligators it is hard to remember your objective was to drain the swamp.” Well, you need to pay for all of your programs President Obama. One of the best ways to pay for that is to charge the $45,000 per head tax on offshore jobs created or maintained either directly or indirectly. The fastes way to bring those jobs back is to remove the economic viability. There is no reason to fund college education when the very jobs the graduate will be qualified to hold have all left the country.

Now that we have finished planting and are about caught up with the crop spraying, I’ve had more time to catch up on my reading. It may shock many of you, but I don’t subscribe to any geek magazines anymore. I think there is a DB2 magazine that keep showing up, but that is only because I haven’t figured out how to get myself off it. Hell, I’m not even certain why I started receiving it, but I believe it had something to do with my days of subscribing to DevCon for my OS/2 development.

Much of the reading I’ve been catching up on has to do with the writing magazines I receive. I actually pay for these magazines, unlike the vast majority of geek magazines I used to receive. When you take the time to pay for a magazine in this day and age, it means that you actually read it…or that you are in that financial world which spends $20 million per year on “entertainment and living” expenses and simply can’t keep track of all the $20 magazine subscriptions you have floating around the world.

I have noticed one thing which strikes me as quite odd in all of this reading. The bulk of the “successful author” interviews I’ve been reading talk about how they force themselves to write 1500 words per day when they are writing. What struck me as odd is that so many seem to be tossing out this exact number. It is almost as if the magazines themselves agreed on that number and stick it into every interview article. Perhaps these writers don’t partake of nicotine, caffeine and booze? Mayhap the publishing industry won’t exist if they raise taxes on any of these. Okay, they can raise taxes on coffee all they want since that is the beverage of the damned, but not the other sources of caffeine. We’ve all read the statements and seen the television commercials which talk about how Hemingway was “at his best in the morning”. If you actually read up about Hemingway you will find that he was thought/known to be an alcoholic and that he smoked various forms of tobacco. The TV commercials simply didn’t finish out the sentence: “Hemingway was at his best in the morning when he was imbibing caffeine and nicotine to get rid of the hang over.”

Back in mid-April I gave up on the nicotine, not because it was ruining my life or health, but because they jacked the tax on it yet again. (See blog about Holier Than Thou Tax.) I have noticed that my writing, when I have time to write, doesn’t come as easily without it. Oh, I have things to say, but I simply can’t “chase a roll”. When I was writing “The Minimum You Need to Know to Be An Application Developer” it was nothing for me to write 18-26 hours at a stretch. I’m working on four books right now and haven’t managed to put more than a four hour stretch into any of them. I have to jump to a different project rather than chase a roll.

What really strikes me about 1500 word comment is how unrealistic it sounds. Just a little while ago I completed the blog entry “Book Publishing and the Porn Industry”. According to OpenOffice the article weighed in around 1300 words. I didn’t spend 45 minutes on the thing. (Yes, I have to use OpenOffice for blog entries because Lotus Symphony doesn’t have a plug-in to publish directly to my Blog.) This article will weigh in at more than a few hundred. The question which keeps haunting my mind is “Do they hate what they are writing or is it simply because they cannot type?”

This blog entry will expand a little bit more on why you don’t buy books, and you owe it all to the lady who cut my hair today. I didn’t even ask her name, so I cannot tell you exactly who to blame. No, we didn’t talk about porn while she cut my hair. Like far too many people in the world, she’s a closet writer. We talked a little bit about writing while she was lowering my ears.

She claimed her problem with writing wasn’t the writing itself, but the fact she had to outline and stick to it rigidly, otherwise when she started writing one story it branched out to three or more stories that had nothing to do with the first one. I told her a good writer would simply add one more chapter before the ending and tie them all together. She wasn’t big on that idea, but admitted she hadn’t tried it.

Hours later, after I was home and catching up on email, I began to think about the easiest way to blend her stories together. I could actually hear her shock when I thought about….”simply set the story in Wisconsin and have a fuel truck fall off an overpass into a brewery parking lot.” Oh, don’t call that story contrived. It wasn’t all that long ago when that exact thing actually happened. I remember watching it on the Channel 7 news. All of the reporters were saying just how lucky the place had been. Had the truck went off the overpass half an hour later, people would have been lined up waiting to be let into work. It wasn’t too much later in the day when we got all of the follow up stories about everyone on the planning commission who was opposed to building an overpass with that sharp of a curve for just this reason, and the documents stating all of the buildings had to be moved out from under the overpass in the name of public safety.

I went searching the Web for this story so I could post a link, but that story must have been from back when I was in college. There did seem to be quite a few “truck fell from overpass” stories though. During the month I was driving an 18 wheeler around the country, I often wondered just how many went off overpasses. Have you ever driven south to north on the overpasses in St. Louis where they seem to go up forever, but limit truck speed to 45MPH?

At any rate, that got me thinking a little more about background and back story. It also got me thinking about the TV series Crash. I watched some of the episodes of Crash, and liked the concept, but I missed some, and kind of got out of the groove on it. Crash is/was a STARZ series that actually came out stating all of the different story lines were going to collied like a traffic accident and you wouldn’t be able to look away. I must admit, while some of the story lines were kind of “Soap Opera” in nature, others were quite good. It was somewhat difficult to see how they were going to bring it all together. It might have actually been a better sell if they hadn’t told people they were going to do it. While it pulled me in to watch it initially, it did take some of the magic away from the show.

In today’s publishing world, a person would have to self publish a story which culminated with a tanker truck falling off an overpass into a brewery parking lot tying all/most of your story lines together. We’ve heard the old maxim “If your story doesn’t really get going until page 56, throw out the first 50 pages!” It wasn’t until today that I realized this is exactly what happened to the porn industry.

When VCRs first came onto the market (and standardized on a format) the porn industry was a license to print money. Movies had good budgets and people really liked them. Okay, some people watched them only for the sex, but others watched a real movie which didn’t have to be coy about the sex. In the case of my brother, I think he was simply going alphabetically through all of the titles in the back room.

I was in some form of college when he brought home “Corporate Assets”. I think I can say in all honesty that this is the last porn movie I ever watched. Yes, I’ve seen 3 minute snippets here and there, but I haven’t actually watched a porn movie since then. Here is some information on it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0196472/

Had they wanted to get into regular theaters, they could have simply cut about 15 minutes of hard core and done well. This was a well written story, and for porn, incredibly well acted. Most people do not see that massive left hook coming at the end, I know I didn’t. Some reviewers call this “the last movie of Adult’s Golden Era”, and I have to agree. It has been more than 20 years since I’ve seen it and I still remember it.

What is striking about this tale is that immediately after the release of that movie, porn adapted the maxim “If your characters don’t start having sex until page 56 of your script, throw out the first 50 pages.” Porn basically devolved into videos where characters didn’t even start with their clothes on. It went from being something most women liked to watch to something which disgusted them, and rightly so. Hell, I wouldn’t even rent it, and I was in my 20’s then. Occasionally someone would tell me about some incredible moment in some otherwise worthless flick and I would rent it, fast forward as far as they told me, watch the scene, then rewind and return the video. Usually I wouldn’t even bother to do that. Porn simply became a bunch of “collections from the cutting room floor” in my mind.

Of all of those scenes I was told to watch, there is exactly ONE that I remember. I even kept the movie a while and showed the scene to some female friends. A guy had built this round table with a whole in the center which was just high enough off the ground for him to lie down under. A girl got on top and well…yeah…but the cool part was the table had ball bearings so it could be spun while they were doing that. It was totally unexpected. Nearly every 20-something girl I showed that scene to said they were game to try it if I could build the table…I just never got around to building the table. I still remember that table though. I don’t remember anything else about any of the other things. Eventually, as I got older and my friends got married, I stopped getting recommendations about porn to rent. Everybody says that free amateur Internet porn is killing the porn industry. Well, no. What is killing the porn industry is the fact that the stuff being passed out for free on the Internet is just as bad as the stuff being pressed onto DVD, but we will tolerate it for free. You haven’t put out a movie like “ Corporate Assets” since 1985 and everybody knows it.

Perhaps “Corporate Assets” needed the porn scenes to keep the lesser minds involved in a story which wasn’t going to really get going until the last 15 minutes. Shakespeare had to sprinkle jokes and humor in his plays to quiet the rabble in the pit. Two things are certain. Shakespeare wouldn’t get published and “Corporate Assets” wouldn’t get filmed today.

I’ve spent the last couple of days ripping my hair out trying to identify why a FreeDOS partition I installed prior to an OpenSuSE installation would not boot from Grub. Oh, it would try to boot, but then it couldn’t find the C drive once it finished loading or mostly finished. This was most infuriating.

At first I suspected it was because I had placed the SWAP partition on a different drive since the SWAP drive was appearing out of order in the device list. I did some backing up, some reformatting, and some restoring but still no love.

I started testing things like System Rescue CD 1.2.0, Partition Commander 10, Image for Linux, and most other things where I had a bootable CD. All of them use some form of Linux kernel load. I even found the instructions for listing the device order in Grub and did that. That piece of shared code between Grub and the Linux base which identifies drive hardware at system boot is broken. It identifies SATA drives in the reverse order they are seen by the BIOS.

You can test this yourself. Hook up 3 SATA drives of different sizes. Boot to your BIOS and see the way the BIOS orders the drives (write down the order). Use a bootable CD like System Rescue CD 1.2.0 or your OpenSuSE installation media which will let you open a partitioning tool. Take a look at the drive order. You will see the SATA drives are backwards.

There is no amount of parameters tweaking you can do in Grub to get FreeDOS to boot when the BIOS and the loader don’t see the drives in the same order.