Please Say Obama is Smarter Than That...

It's been speculated for a while. Between Hillary's dwindling odds at getting the Dem nomination to her more recent conciliatory tones, it does appear she is trying to muscle her way into the VP spot. The linked article seems to be pro-Hillary, discussing how good of an idea it is, while paying little attention to the myriad of reasons that it is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.

Aside from the attacks Obama has taken during the primary campaign, there's the obvious cloud of distrust and skepticism that hangs over Hillary. Then there's Bill. Does Obama really want them standing over his shoulder? Bill's already sabotaged Hillary's campaign (ok, so it wasn't obviously all him since she did much of it herself, but he did not help)...would Obama allow him the chance of doing it in the general election?

Another reason for Obama's success in the light of Hillary announced as the presumptive Dem nominee so many months ago is the underlying current that we've had enough of the Bush-Clinton control of the country. The two families have been in power for TWO DECADES.

It is time for a change--but putting Hillary on the ticket is certainly not the change we are looking for...

American Idol Thoughts

So here we are at the finale, with Davids Archuleta and Cook. For the past few weeks I've wondered why the judges had seemed to push Archuleta when his performances were not all that good. And after tonight, I'm not so sure that it wasn't an overt attempt to sway votes.

Sure, he's a good singer. Maybe even really good. But in past seasons they talked about the performance aspect and stage presence--of which he has neither. David Cook, on the other hand, is not only a really good singer, but has an amazing stage presence--and seems so at ease there--and makes his songs into performances rather than just songs. I simply cannot understand how they judged the way they did...it certainly was not the knockout Simon said it was.

Perhaps, Fox, this is why ratings have fallen...

My Inital Lenovo R61 Review

I've mentioned it a few times between the blog and twitter, but my new laptop finally arrived today...albeit more than 2 weeks early. Not a bad thing at all.

I opted for an R61, custom-configured, in part because of special pricing (ironically enough, you'll soon see) as a Microsoft partner. Basic specs are:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 (2x2.2GHz, 800FSB, 4MB cache...and 64-bit, of course)
• 2GB DDR2 RAM
• 100GB 7200rpm SATA hard drive
• 14.1" WXGA+ LCD screen (stunning)
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop for operating system

Yes, Linux...thus the ironic part. As for SUSE, I hadn't played with it since about 2005, so was interested in seeing how it had changed--plus it also came with Xen virtualization, which I was really interested in.

As it turned out, I was both disappointed and extremely happy. Happiness was in the performance--the system rocks. Disappointment came somewhat from SUSE--it was snappy and looked decent, but its implementation of Xen was very, very disappointing. After installing it and rebooting, it was obvious the boot process itself as having issues, and then once it got to loading SUSE, it suddenly didn't have the correct configuration for X.

So...I'd already had enough....I downloaded the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 8.04. Loaded up without issues, then got to work on the initial configuration, because I just cannot stand the brown/orange thing standard with Ubuntu. I go blue.