Just another day of lies

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The Powers That Be that run this country (into the ground, apparently) don’t seem to be physically or psychologically capable of telling the truth anymore. The Nation’s David Corn takes a look at “The Latest Bush Gang Whoppers” today, including this from our Dear Leader…

September is back-to-school time, and Bush hit the road to promote his education policies. During a speech at a Nashville elementary school, he hailed his education record by noting that “the budget for next year boosts funding for elementary and secondary education to \$53.1 billion. That’s a 26-percent increase since I took office. In other words, we understand that resources need to flow to help solve the problems.” A few things were untrue in these remarks. Bush’s proposed elementary and secondary education budget for next year is \$34.9 billion, not \$53.1 billion, according to his own Department of Education. It’s his total proposed education budget that is \$53.1 billion. More importantly, there is no next-year “boost” in this budget. Elementary and secondary education received \$35.8 billion in 2003. Bush’s 2004 budget cuts that back nearly a billion dollars, and the overall education spending in his budget is the same as the 2003 level. Instead of a “boost,” there is the opposite–a decrease. Perhaps like Rumsfeld–and Cheney and Wolfowitz–the president merely was overstating.

(via Tom Tomorrow)

A question for Windows experts

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Or at least, people who are more familiar with the intricacies of Windows 2000 than I am.

Here’s the short version: Why can’t I delete a partition from within the Windows 2000 setup utility?

Here’s the long version:

I’m in the midst of nuking and paving (wiping and reinstalling) my Windows box, running Windows 2000. The machine has two physical hard drives in it — a 2GB drive and a 6GB drive. Under my previous setup, I had the 2GB drive mapped to C:, and the 6GB drive partitioned into 4GB for D: (for documents and downloads), 1.5GB for E: (for applications), and 500MB for F: (for a scratch/temp disk). The thinking at the time (since I’m far more used to the Mac) was that I’d be able to reinstall Windows on the C: partition if it had issues, and I wouldn’t risk either losing my documents or having to reinstall my applications, as they were on seperate partitions. Of course, on Windows, it’s not that easy, as so many applications tie into the registry, so over time, I decided to ditch that scheme.

So now I’m working on the reinstall. While in the Windows 2000 setup utility, I’m given the option of deleting and recreating partitions on my drives. My plan was to essentially flip-flop things around — use the 6GB drive as my Windows 2000 system and application partition, and the 2GB drive for documents and downloads. So, I happily nuked all the partitions on the 6GB drive and created one single large partition across the entire drive. However, for some reason, the 2GB drive seems to be locked down — I can’t delete that partition at all.

Okay, so I figured maybe that was because I’d started the reinstall process by booting off that drive, and since the installer copied a few files onto the drive for the install before restarting and dumping me into the DOS-based setup utility, it couldn’t wipe that drive as it would end up wiping those files. So, once Windows was installed and I rebooted from the new installation, I tried reformatting the 2GB drive from within Windows, and it still won’t do it. The 2GB drive (still C:, but not booting from it) has the designation ‘System’ visible in the Drive Manager (or whatever that window is called — I’m going from memory on that right now), and the 6GB drive (D:, booting Windows 2000) is designated ‘Startup’. Obviously, the Startup drive shouldn’t be nukeable, but I’m not too sure why the 2GB drive has the ‘System’ label, or why it’s still locked down.

In one final guess, I went back into the Windows 2000 setup utility, this time starting the process after booting from the new install on the 6GB (D:) drive. I wasn’t sure this would work, but I figured it was worth a shot, guessing that the lower-level system hooks of the setup utility would be better able to muck with the drives, and this time it wouldn’t be copying any setup files onto the drive I intended to nuke. Unfortunately, that didn’t make a difference — the setup utility still stubbornly refuses to let me reformat the 2GB drive. And, once I’d started the setup process, I couldn’t get out of it, so now I’m starting over from scratch (which is why I was going from memory in the previous paragraph).

So, now I’ve got a 2GB drive which is essentially useless to me, as I can’t remove the installation of Windows 2000 from the drive to either just put the new install of Windows 2000 on that drive (which I’d rather avoid, as these days 2GB is fairly limiting for both the system and applications) or to use it for my documents and downloads.

Anybody out there know how I can reclaim those 2GB of space?

Updates, updates, updates

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As it’s been having issues for a while, I started the process of nuking and rebuilding my PC last night. I just managed to get it online (after having to search out the drivers for the motherboard’s on-board ethernet port, since it wasn’t auto-detected), and Windows Update has just notified me that I have 33 “critical updates” to install to my copy of Windows 2000 SP 2.

Oh, joy. I’m so glad I have broadband — but even so, there are enough of them that have to be installed on their own so that they can trigger restarts that this is still likely to take all night.

Update:

After the first update was installed and the computer restarted, the next trip to Windows Update actually increased the count to 34. If this keeps up, I’ll have the computer up to date round about the time Longhorn is released to the public in…oh, 2007 or so.

Pinocchio

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Something else to add to my ever-growing reading list, thanks to Cory Doctorow: a beautiful new edition of the original Pinocchio fairy tale. Here’s what Cory had to say about it…

Pinnochio is one of my favorite children’s books. Like many of the great children’s stories that have survived history, it is a lot darker than most people realize. In fact, it’s a vicious little bastard of a book, and screamingly funny in places. […] Now, Tor Books has brought out a beautiful new edition of the public-domain text of the novel, deisgned by Chesley-Award-winning art director Irene Gallo (who is astonishingly good at her job, and who has a special fondness for this book, I’m told), and lavishly (and I do mean lavishly) illustrated by Gris Grimly, in sepia-toned macabre ink drawings that are as angular and jocularly grim as the text itself.

Dean Seattle flashmob

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Last week I mentioned the Doonesbury-inspired flashmob at the Space Needle. I didn’t go (to be honest, I remembered it exactly when it was scheduled to happen), but pictures and a quick account have been posted by Harvey Wallbanger. If I’d remembered earlier, I’d have been there — but failing that, I can at least live vicariously through the power of the Web.

Namedropper ;)

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Some people. I mean, come on…

My first exposure to the Pixies was when i was in Europe with the also now reuinited Skinny Puppy on their Mind TPI tour. Must have been 1987….

The Skinny Puppy guys were driving me crazy. Cevin was fight with the tour manager on a daily basis. It was just not an environment that i was particularly enjoying. I was helping to set up the stage and sell merchandise for Puppy. It meant i had a fair amount of down time during the day. So i wrote long notes to the Throwing Muses and the Pixies begging them to get me off the Skinny Puppy tour. I would write them on the back of the posters for our shows and then leave them a kind soul from the club to hand off to someone from the Pixies and the Throwing Muses the next night.

And if that weren’t enough…

Did i mention that i once had dinner with Michael Stipe? But by now, who hasn’t? He liked my shirt. I was tour managing the left wing of the socialist wing of the Democratic Party, Consolidated, when we were playing in Athens. The drummer for Consolidated (Phil) was putting together a compilation album for In Defense of Animals and Michael was contributing a song. He came and joined us for dinner.

As someone who, having listened to the Pixies, the Throwing Muses, Skinny Puppy, R.E.M., and Consolidated for more years than I can think of, but because of living in Anchorage — who nobody cool goes to when they’re touring — never having had even the chance of seeing these artists in concert, let alone having dinner with them, I want you to know that I say this from the deepest, darkest depths of my heart:

You lucky bastard.

;)

Sorry. Just had to get that out of my system.

(And yeah, R.E.M. does still rock — their Bumbershoot show was excellent.)

Twenty Questions

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Why don’t we have answers to these 9/11 questions?

  1. What did National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice tell President Bush about al Qaeda threats against the United States in a still-secret briefing on Aug. 6, 2001?
  2. Why did Attorney General John Ashcroft and some Pentagon officials cancel commercial-airline trips before Sept. 11?
  3. Who made a small fortune “shorting” airline and insurance stocks before Sept. 11?
  4. Are all 19 people identified by the government as participants in the Sept. 11 attacks really the hijackers?
  5. Did any of the hijackers smuggle guns on board as reported in calls from both Flight 11 and Flight 93?
  6. Why did the NORAD air defense network fail to intercept the four hijacked jets?
  7. Why did President Bush continue reading a story to Florida grade-schoolers for nearly a half-hour during the worst attack on America in its history?
  8. How did Flight 93 crash in western Pennsylvania?
  9. Was Zacarias Moussaoui really “the 20th hijacker”?
  10. Where are the planes’ “black boxes”?
  11. Why were Donald Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials so quick to link Saddam Hussein to the attacks?
  12. Why did 7 World Trade Center collapse?
  13. Why did the Bush administration lie about dangerously high levels of toxins and hazardous particles after the WTC collapse?
  14. Where is Dick Cheney’s undisclosed location?
  15. What happened to the more than \$1 billion that Americans donated after the attack?
  16. What was the role of Pakistan’s spy agency in the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent murder of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl?
  17. Who killed five Americans with anthrax?
  18. What happened to the probe into C-4 explosives found in a Philadelphia bus terminal in fall 2001?
  19. What is in the 28 blacked-out pages of the congressional Sept. 11 report?
  20. Where is Osama bin Laden?

(via MeFi)

Persistance of Mouse

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Dalí, whose previous film experience included two short films with the Spanish master Luis Buñuel, approached Disney at a dinner party at the house of Warner Brothers head Jack Warner. Dalí, then working on Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, believed he and Disney could create what he called “the first motion picture of the Never Seen Before.”

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Disney agreed, and assigned director John Hench to help Dalí turn the Mexican ballad “Destino,” by Armando Dominguez, into a kind of prototypical music video. (Hench, now 95, continues to come to work every day at the Disney lot, and consulted on the new Destino.)

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Dalí spent his time at the Disney studio painting, drawing and discussing with Hench the challenges of adding motion to what he described as his “hand-colored photographs.” The project continued for eight months, and was abandoned in 1947 when the Disney studio ran into financial problems. Dalí died in 1989.

Thanks to some of today’s Disney animators, Destino has been completed, and will likely be shown in theaters next year before a Disney film, and eventually end up on DVD. I’m really looking forward to seeing this.