Marc’s Musings Reality from Marc’s point of view!

The last time we saw legislation so ill-fitted to the ideals this amazing Constitutional Republic was when that most heinous piece of trash legislation called (ironically) “The Patriot Act” was cobbled together and dumped in representatives laps with no time for them to review the outrage contained therein. Nobody could not vote for something with that name.

It seems that capitalism is now without risk for those with the right “leverage”…

Posted under Opinions

Forwarded to me by my brother. This tongue in cheek interview goes a long way toward explaining the subprime crisis, notably the terrible excess of greed, lack of judgment and twisted incentives that lead to this issue.

Posted under Amusing, Opinions

I just checked my 401(k) statement and it tells me that my yearly rate of return for the year to date is…

-22%  (!)

It almost makes me wish I’d blown it all on household electronics.

All those forecasts - “We’ll use the conservative model of 7% growth per year” - aren’t looking all that promising at this point.

I’m taking the advice being sent to me by all those incredibly wealthy folks who run the various brokerages and I’m “staying the course”.

Am I just being foolish? Should I just stop investing in my future and join the majority?

Sometimes I wonder…

Posted under Affluenza, Opinions

I’m running Vista Enterprise on a T60 laptop and connect to my office using Cisco’s VPN client version 5.x .

Lately I’ve been having problems with my DSL where it drops for about 15 seconds and then springs back to life (they’re sending me yet another modem to address the issue…). This is, of course, enough of an outage to cause the VPN client to drop its connection like a hot potato.

Trying to reconnect yields the dreaded

Secure VPN Connection terminated locally by the Client.
Reason 413: User authentication failed.

 error. And it seems you’ll never reconnect again without rebooting your computer.

Do this instead:

• Close the VPN Client GUI
• Open “Services” (Click “Start” button, type “Services” and hit enter)
• Find the “Cisco Systems, Inc. VPN Service” and STOP it.
• Now single left-click on your connection icon in your system tray and select “Network and Sharing Center” OR Click “Start” button and type “Network”, you should see “Network and Sharing Center”
• Look at your current connection and click on “View Status”
• At the bottom of the “Connection Status” dialog click on the “Diagnose” button
• Click the “Reset the network adapter “Your Network Connection”" option.
• Wait for the “The problem has been resolved” dialog to be displayed and click the “Close” button
• Close the “Network and Sharing Center”
• Go back to the services dialog and START the “Cisco Systems, Inc. VPN Service”
• Wait for about 15 seconds and you can now click on your Cisco VPN Client icon or start menu item.

Now the tough part. Depending on how poorly the system is configured on your company’s side you have to wait a few minutes until it times out your connection. Otherwise you will need to go through the above steps all over again.

I hope this helps!

Posted under Tech Stuff

I had the computer set up and it was showing fairly steady power consumption of around 220 watts. Again a little less than I expected. Turning off my smaller monitor drops the consumption by 19 Watts (s/b 34 Watts), the larger monitor by about 26 Watts (s/b 55 Watts).

I’m going to disengage the power meter now since I want to reconfigure things a bit as I swap in my new modem/router combo from AT&T. I’m going to hook it up to some known consumer (a light bulb) to verify if the consumption readings are accurate.

Assuming accuracy, my main computer’s consumption after 273 hours (a little over 11 days) is 51 kilowatts or $5.42. The average cost is about 47 cents per day or $3.33 per week. The predicted annual cost is about $173 per year. A bit of an eye opener really. Little things have so much power to add up when paired with the inexorable march of time.

Posted under On the Home Front, Tech Stuff

This is a pretty good idea. The stars just bring up the issues and aren’t pushing their personal agendas beyond actually getting you off your sorry behind and getting you out to vote.

I don’t usually put much stock in what actors have to say on the issues as they’re often not terribly broadly educated and the ones with the clout to get heard seem to be rather cloistered and somewhat detached from the world that most of us live in. But this campaign hits the nail on the head.

Be sure to educate yourself on the issues that are important to you. Your individual vote may seem meaningless. But if you throw away this opportunity to express yourself, then you are just one more drone in a sea of drones who are willing to accept whatever government is thrust upon them. And there is simply too much of that going on.

Check out this video:

Then head over to this site here and register yourself to vote if you are not already registered.

For my county the deadline is by October 6 so there are still 2 more days left. Hopefully it’s not too late for you.

Posted under Opinions

In case you’re wondering what all those little silhouette icons are about, they are placeholders for folks with no avatar.

An avatar is a graphical representation you provide to give others some kind of insight into who you are. In this largely anonymous “interworld” it can provide a way to let folks know that you’re not (or maybe you are) overly serious. Or maybe you’re a cat lover… whatever you want to express.

This site supports a particular type of avatar called a gravatar. A gravatar is a globally recognized avatar. You can go to their site and register one or a few of your email addresses (they don’t have to be your primary address, just one that you’d provide to blogs and forums you frequent) and then put up your avatar image there.

Any blog or forum that supports gravatars, once you’ve provided one of your email addresses, will then show the relevant avatar sourced from the gravatar site.

You can even specify “G” through “X” so that you can have different images on differently oriented sites. My site supports up to an “R” rating.

Posted under Utils / Tools, WordPress