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Monday, February 27, 2012

Road Apples, #121

Hartford Bound...I'm working out of our Hartford office Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.  I do keep telling myself that "one of these days" I am going to put the 3.5 hour (each way) drive to good use by renting an audio book or learning to speak Italian via Rosetta Stone.  Hell, if I didn't have lunch plans today I would run up to the bookstore and get something.  Oh well.  God willing there will be plenty of next times for this one.

Rain...Ms Rivers and I went to see the Rain show Saturday night at the Scranton Cultural Center.  If you are not familiar with the show, it is a Beatles tribute, complete with all live music.  It was, without doubt, a great show.  The vocals and instrumentation was very good.  It was also pretty impressive that the musicians used what appeared to be period instruments, from the Hofner fiddle bass to the Rickenbacker guitars.  A splendid time was had by all.

Tuesday...I will be in Hartford, but Republican voters will be selecting the candidate of their choice in Michigan.  I have no love for Michigan by the way.  Never liked the University all that much (yeah, good football team & world class business school, but all that brainpower and they still have a non-diversified economy?).  Anyway, feelings about the state of Michigan aside, this is a big one for Mittens Romney...

(with a nod to Gort, who is pretty good at finding these sorts of things)

...as in theory this is his home state.  No, it's not Utah (he just saved the Olympics there and is a Mormon), no it's not Massachusetts (he was governor there & signed a alll that required employers to provide health insurance...^5), no it's not the Cayman Islands (he just has off-shore bank accounts there) it is Michigan, where a long time ago his father was governor.  His dad was also the president of American Motors Corporation, aka AMC.  These were the folks that gave you one of my favorite all time cars, the Pacer, which looked like a squatter version of the VW Beetle.  Anyway, I don't know that losing Michigan to Ricky Santorum will break Mitten's campaign, but man is it going to smart something fierce.  My personal opinion is that Santorum is, as I type this, costing the Republicans the general election by focusing so much energy at social issues.  This is, in my estimation, the Achilles Heel of the GOP:  the far right social conservatives are so out-o-step with mainstream American on many issues that catering to them in the primary only gives the Democrats cannon balls to fire in the general election.  Oh, and let's not forget that every time Ricky has to defend himself for some nonsense he spewed about states being able to ban contraception (reference HERE) is a missed opportunity to talk about something that actually matters, namely the economy.

Boring General Election...Consider this:  can you imagine just how boring the general election might be if it is Mittens vs. Obama?  Both have the vocal energy of a tree sloth.  Hell, I think  that Rick Santorum is a blithering idiot but at least he is interesting (in a "does this guy really think that?" kind of way).

New Gear...Well I finally broke down and purchased a desktop computer.  I've been using laptops and netbooks for something like 8 years now, but my vision isn't getting any better so having a large screen to view stuff on is a real plus.  I didn't go for anything fancy, but rather picked up an Acer for a decent price.  A few key attributes:

  • A pokey but adequate AMD processor
  • 4GB of RAM, which is fine for the stuff I do
  • A beefy 1TB hard drive
  • A 23" LED monitor
I wanted something with a large hard drive so that I could have my primary storage for music and pictures in a place where transfer rates would be pretty quick.  Anyone who has ever transferred files from one removable device to another will tell you that it can be tedious in terms of time.  I still have some software to install, but all things considered I am happy with my decision.  What I really like though is that I can sync Evernote and Wunderlist now between my tablet, smartphone and desktop computer.  Pretty good stuff indeed.

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