Memory Machine

Regarding whether Bristol's pregnancy ought to be outside the political fight, Daniel Radosh nails it for me:

Finally, let's dispose of this nonsense that Bristol's "condition" is out of bounds.

I believe the exact formulation of the rule is, if there's grass on the field, let's play. I know what Barack Obama said: "How a family deals with issues and you know teenage children, that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics." Um, in Europe, maybe.

Obama himself has made (other people's) parental responsibility a centerpiece of his campaign. And it's not just him. Is there a politician around today who hasn't mouthed off on the proper way for families to deal with issues regarding teenage children? Hillary Clinton wanted to ban Grand Theft Auto. Talk about something that shouldn't be the topic of our politics. McCain cited the example of his own daughter when he opposed Bill Clinton's sex-ed and contraception policies. But suddenly, our politics isn't supposed to touch on how families deal with teenage children? Or is the idea that it's OK to talk about "families" and "children" in the abstract, as long as we let actual families with children alone. Sorry, but every child impacted by lousy Republican policy is someone's actual child.

And as numerous people have noted, Palin has ensured that her daughter's pregnancy should be a political issue by repeatedly referring to her decision to keep the child. That opens up an entirely legitimate, and extremely important, question Palin should answer if and when she gets around to answering questions: "In praising your daughter's decision, aren't you implying that she has the right to make a decision? If this decision is a private family matter, why do you want to take that decision away from families and give it to the government?" Palin has also stressed that Bristol will marry her hottie boyfriend, and will have the full love and support of her family. But lots of teenage girls who aren't so fortunate in either respect. With the matter of "decision making," or "choice," as it's sometimes called, having been put squarely on the table by Palin herself, shouldn't she be obliged to discuss why it's right to take away the right to make that decision from less fortunate girls? Not abstract ones, but actual ones. Children who are every bit as human as her own daughter.

To this I'll add that if it were a Democrat's daughter, would it be off-limits? Of course not; it would be evidence of the moral perfidy of liberalism. Since the choice of Palin for the ticket was based in large part on her appeal to Christian conservatives, of course the unwed pregnancy of her teenage daughter is an issue. If this is unfair to her poor daughter, it is Palin who exposed her to it, accepting the nomination for Vice President knowing that it would shine a bright light on her family.

I can hardly believe it, but I fixed the machine.

Cattitude, you were right, a connection had come loose. Hiding under the modem at the very bottom, a cable labled "HDI audio" was loose. I had to unseat the modem to get to it (which involved several metal empty-slot-covers falling off the back and having to be reset). Machine now humming happily.

This is a much better day.

New machine won't start. No signal to monitor. Optical drive won't open.

How did this happen? Damned if I know. What I did: I wanted to install a second cd/dvd drive, to make copying easier, and to not have to open and close the other drive so much (I worry about wear and tear on moving parts). I had scavenged the perfectly good optical drive from my dead machine. Carefully following Gateway's instructions, I opened my machine. Looking inside, it was quickly evident that my old drive would not fit in there, and that it didn't have the right kind of connector. I didn't try to install it. I didn't move anything. I didn't unplug or jostle or look sideways at anything. I put the front cover back on, and the side plate back on. When I plugged the machine back in and turned it on, it didn't work. The hard drive spins up, but doesn't start the clicking that tells you the system is loading. The optical drive emits a slow, regular, small thunking noise, and won't open when the button is pressed. And the monitor says "no signal". It doesn't even give a bad startup message; it's not receiving anything from the computer at all.

I just. can't. believe this.

Okay. It's taken me just a few days of trying to set up basic things to decide that I hate Vista intensely. I'm not going to go into a long list of the ways it's pissing me off -- among the trivial things are rearranging my desktop every time I restart, and not letting me set Firefox as my default browser (it asks me every time I start Firefox, I say Yes every time, and I'm not using any other browser).

Just now I tried to uninstall Real Player (properly, using the control panel), and it said I didn't have permission because I didn't have administrator privileges. WTF? This is my computer, I am the only user.

I'm going to learn Ubuntu as soon as I have the time, which will be this coming week. In the meantime, I didn't know my hatred for Microsoft could deepen, but it has.

After wrestling with new machine most of the night, I finally got it running more or less properly.

But the old hard drive: still apparently hosed. I thought it was just failing to boot Windows. But no, when I connect it to the new machine, it does the same click-click-click whiiiiiiiiine, and the new machine can't find it. (It finds other new hard drives just fine.)

I still have hope I can get the data off the old drive, because after it started doing the click-whine thing, I did get it to start properly twice, and it worked for some days each time, with all the data still there. The day after I was finally able to order the big hard drive to back everything up on the old one, the old one crashed and hasn't come back.

I don't really have a clue how to get a hard drive to spin up properly that's doing this click-whine-fail thing. I haven't found anything helpful on the net.

Sigh.

If I buy a new machine with a Vista OS, is that going to make it more difficult for me to get the data off the hard drive from my dead XP machine?

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