With UL tags

• Terrorists Hate Lemonade, Y'All


• Cheney


• made this entry 28 June 342pm


• elizabeth is testing padding issues


• this is ereed at Nobu

With para's
This spring I bought a new laptop, as I end up doing every two years or so. By that time, the older one is showing its road wear, after being hammered on and toted around all day, every day. Defective pixels start to pock the screen. Half the keys on the keyboard have had their lettering worn off, the N always first to go

With UL tags

• Terrorists Hate Lemonade, Y'All


• Cheney


• made this entry 28 June 342pm


• elizabeth is testing padding issues


• this is ereed at Nobu

This spring I bought a new laptop, as I end up doing every two years or so. By that time, the older one is showing its road wear, after being hammered on and toted around all day, every day. Defective pixels start to pock the screen. Half the keys on the keyboard have had their lettering worn off, the N always first to go

No UL tags

This spring I bought a new laptop, as I end up doing every two years or so. By that time, the older one is showing its road wear, after being hammered on and toted around all day, every day. Defective pixels start to pock the screen. Half the keys on the keyboard have had their lettering worn off, the N always first to go

update: so does NBC4 yet the server thinks its 516pm. this is a problem

kansas is great

This time I got a ThinkPad T60, maybe the dozenth ThinkPad I've bought over the decades and the first with a Lenovo label. I am loyal to ThinkPads despite what I learned early this year while reporting my article on Shenzhen -- that virtually all the laptop computers in the world, whether they are sold as Dells or Sonys or HPs or ThinkPads, come from the same handful of no-name Taiwanese factories based in southern China. (Details at end of this post, after the jump.) I like the ThinkPad keyboard, even when the lettering is gone; ThinkPads have rarely done me wrong; I illustrate brand loyalty.

And -- practicing what I preached in the Atlantic last year -- I waited to buy this ThinkPad until I could get it pre-installed with Windows Vista, Microsoft's latest operating system. Why not just stick with WinXP, by now a tried, true, and stable platform? With the other laptops scattered around the house, that's what I've done. But within the lifetime of this newest machine, I expect that I'll be forced or tempted to move to Vista, for compatibility reasons. So I'd rather start out with it installed, despite the inevitable bugs in early release, than later have to install Vista myself.

(Why don't I just use a Mac? I do. I've always had one around, currently an iBook.)

But really, there seems to be something basically wrong with Vista.

Minute by minute, Vista seems no slower, but also no faster, than XP. Startup and shutdown are another matter. It takes what seems a lifetime, and in reality is two or three minutes, to boot the system up and, much worse, to shut it down or even "hibernate" it. Twenty-five years into the personal computer age, this is crazy. Actually, it's unacceptable.

And disk use!!!! This latest ThinkPad came with a 110-gigabyte hard drive installed. We take that for granted, but it's astonishing. The first PC-XT I got, also 25 years ago, came with a 10 megabyte hard drive -- or 1/11,000th as much as this new machine.

Here is what is more amazing: the new disk is almost full!!

Let's do the math. We start with 110 gigabytes. Apparently a vast recovery-and-repair partition is built in, which takes about 10 gigabytes. Then I have all my junk -- programs; installation files; gigantic CAB files for installing the likes of Microsoft Office (whose new version I like very much); every digital photo I've ever taken; music and audio files; twenty years' worth of email; bloated PDFs; vast index files for the X1 search program and Microsoft's built-in indexer; backups and versions of all kinds of things.

As best I can calculate, ALL of that together - every single file on the disk, as shown by Windows Explorer or utilities like ExplorerPlus -- takes up at most 32 gigabytes. That should leave at least 65 gigs free on my disk.

So why does my new computer show only 4 gigs free on the hard disk? Yesterday it had 10 -- bad enough in itself. But where did 6 gigs go in one day? (OK, I used Windows Update overnight. But if that devours 6 gigs per time, no one will use it for very long.) The computer is now exhibiting all the symptoms of being short on disk space -- mainly, a whole lot of churning disk activity and general slowdown as it has to swap material in and out of a small amount of available storage.

How can this be? Backup and un-install files? Snapshots of the configuration at a certain point, so you can go back to a previous system-state if new programs cause new problems? I couldn't say. But one way or another, the problem would have to involve the operating system. Can Vista really be this profligate and sloppy?

Bonus point: Here is a passage from the Shenzhen article talking about the miracle of notebook-computer brands:

Inventec [is] one of five companies based in Taiwan that together produce the vast majority of laptop and notebook computers sold under any brand anywhere in the world. Everyone in America has heard of Dell, Sony, Compaq, HP, Lenovo-IBM ThinkPad, Apple, NEC, Gateway, Toshiba. Almost no one has heard of Quanta, Compal, Inventec, Wistron, Asustek. Yet nearly 90 percent of laptops and notebooks sold under the famous brand names are actually made by one of these five companies in their factories in mainland China. I have seen a factory with three “competing” brand names coming off the same line.

Slifka was the midwest regional political director on the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign and was close to McCain's former campaign manager, Terry Nelson. Failor, Jr. is the executive vice president of Iowans for Tax Relief. In '04, Failor headed the RNC's Victory '04 operation in Iowa. Both are native Iowans.

In an e-mail to reporters, Failor said that his "fondness for McCain" aside, he decided to resign because "the leadership team I trust and agreed to serve is no longer in place."

He continues:

Karen and I both orally agreed to continue with the campaign in our positions in a voluntary capacity for a few months beginning July 1. I agreed to do this because I believe in the leadership of Terry Nelson and the candidacy of Sen. McCain. These are the same reasons I agreed to serve the campaign in the beginning.

Sitting on the table next to me is a copy of the imminently forthcoming masterwork, Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President by . . . Steven Hayes (yes, that Steven Hayes).

The jacket copy is priceless: "With exhaustive reporting, Hayes shines a light into the shadows of the Bush administration and finds a very different Dick Cheney from the one America thinks it knows." In short, Hayes was able to penetrate the legendary veil of secrecy surrounding the Vice President and uncover the shocking truth that -- Dick Cheney is awesome! Why, one wonders, has the administration been covering this up?

But then again, one also wonders why the administration was covering up this convincing evidence of an al-Qaeda/Iraq connection that Hayes claims to have discovered. For example, it turns out that Joe Wilson sucks! Also -- Cheney's wartime leadership is vital!

Q Mr. President, do you agree with the National Intelligence Estimate that we are now in a civil war in Iraq? And, also, you talk about victory, that you have to have victory in Iraq; it would be catastrophic if we didn't. You said again today that the enemy would come here, and yet you say it's not an open-ended commitment. How do you square those things?

The press conference marked a turning point for me. For the first time, I actually felt sorry for the President. Every time he returned to his mantra about the Iranian Quds force -- "What we do know is that the Quds force was instrumental in providing these deadly IEDs to networks inside of Iraq" -- and then refused to elaborate or engage further issues, he sounded the way I would if I were forced to appear on live television and deal with hostile questions from a well-informed crowd about something they knew about and I didn't, like opera. I would cling to one sentence -- "What we do know is that La Boheme was one of Puccini's greatest works" -- and refuse to be budged. You could see him seizing opportunities to be "affable," with his painful banter with Mike Allen, ex of the Washington Post, about Allen's new website, and his leaden drollery when asked about the Libby trial and the possibilty of his offering a pardon:

THE PRESIDENT: Not going to talk about it, Peter. (Laughter.) Would you like to think of another question? Being the kind man that I am, I will recycle you. (Laughter.) John.

Q Thank you --

THE PRESIDENT: You like that one? "Recycling" him. (Laughter.)