That's it, Global Sanding! :laugh:

Mine has a port replicator at home, so I connect to dual monitors (portrait and landscape) and proper keyboard and mouse. Even last week when I 'took my show on the road' I brought along the keyboard and mouse.

What kristiancua said.

I have seen a similar quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson. I think it is less about government per se, but more about the scale of government.

So, Mauna Kea is taller while Everest is higher.

I loved the VAX/VMS system. I used Pascal, some C, DCL, FMS, and others. I had a 2 shelf set of manuals from DEC, which if you followed the rules everything would just work. I even developed a primitive pre-object system where I would pass a structure for specific data entry forms to several routines; saved a lot of coding.

Yeah, he drew nice pictures of buildings. He just couldn't draw people. Makes you wonder how many 'failed Arts students' are marching in the streets today. Kind of disconcerting.

Sounds excellent, but you probably would like to see *something* go into production. Draw up a plan for the Kitchen Project. Anticipate changes. Break the plan up into phases. Phase 1- Awesome Blender. If management and/or priorities change in time, the result might not be the Kitchen, but likely the Blender, Refrigerator, and Microwave. :)

I raised 3 daughters, now in their 30s. None were interested in programming, but all 3 married IT guys. :)

The worst car I ever owned was a gently used 1968 Toyota Corona I bought in the mid 70s. Styling-wise think Soviet era Lada, but because it was a Japanese car it always ran. That is until I made the mistake of letting one of my brother-in-laws borrow it. At some point in the evening he was driving back home on the freeway when the engine light came on, and the temperature gauge max'd out. Of course, he was bound and determined to get home. It finally gave out about 15 or so miles later. He left it on the side of the road, angry that I let him borrow such a clunker! My other (good) brother-in-law helped me rebuild it. It lasted another 3 months. Turns out knuckle-head managed to warp the crank shaft (and we hadn't thought to check that before our rebuild). :laugh: Now a-days I carefully vet anyone who wants to drive any vehicle I own, and usually decline.

In my case I flooded the help desk with (genuine) tickets for installs, and blamed delays on their backlog. I got LocalAdmin.

It's funny how we pick up these habits along the way, going from one language to the next. I immediately knew you had programmed in Fortran at some point.

Regarding Liptons, yes we do have actual English tea available at least where I live in the US. Regarding coffee, you should really expand your perspective. Coffee favors (OK, favours) differ by variety and growing region. I prefer Guatemala, Colombia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Sumatra depending on my preference at the time; and only the Arabica not the Robusta variety. I only add sugar to low grade coffee. And similar to tea, none of this fruity, favored c***; though sometimes I will add a Star Anise pod to the grounds.

Speaking of memory usage and Chrome, and maybe it is just me. Open several of your favorite websites in separate tabs in Firefox. Then open Chrome (you shouldn't have to do much, maybe go to Google with one tab). Sit back and watch the fun in Task Manager. MOST times on my PC BOTH Firefox and Chrome go off into Not Responding and eating up CPU cycles. Looking at the processes tab, Chrome has a bunch running even though it only has one tab open. Kind of like Chrome has knocked Firefox over in some alley and is rifling through the pockets. Now close Chrome and Firefox is happy again.

I have found excellent success by calling the president of a company after a couple rounds of the old 'run around'. Take notes as to who said what, etc. Then call and complain; amazing how quickly problems can be resolved. My all time best was in the mid '80s. I had ordered a large Oldsmobile car (3 small children required car seats in the rear bench). After 4 months the dealer was pressuring me to skip the options I ordered and just accept a vehicle in their stock. I did a little research (pre-Internet), and called the president of General Motors early the next morning (8am his time, 6am my time). Spoke to his secretary, explained my predicament and noting that American car companies were complaining about poor sales while I was trying to buy one. Two hours later when I arrived at my office I had a message to call the regional vice president of Oldsmobile. He apologized for the delay, had found my order and moved it up at the factory, that it would be built on Wednesday the following week, and be delivered the week after!

And for years the marketing morons' guiding principles for UI design as been to hide or remove access to all the detailed information I need.

Side note: Comic Sans reminds me of the script we were taught to use in High School drafting class. This was back in the Stone Age, when drafting was done by hand not computers.

That's not too bad ... if you're 80 years old or so. :)

I agree with this approach. You might try to: 1) make sure the Desktop is not read-only, and 2) make sure the prior version Windows Desktop path exists (thru Documents and Settings, or whatever).

Regarding "seriously considering installing Linux on it and converting the current win7 install to a virtual machine", I am thinking along the same lines. If you do this, please let us know how that works out.