"Liberate Minnesota"

No, not a war protest. A tax protest at the state capitol yesterday. There were signs that read "Liberate Minnesota" and "Cut spending now" there. This was in support of Governor Pawlenty and his stand of not raising taxes.

The interesting thing is that this event, organized by the Minnesota Taxpayers League, was on a weekday, unlike all previous MTL events. This was done so that legislators would actually see them for once. Why wasn't this done before? Because, unlike so many other demonstrators, these folks actually work and had to take time off from their jobs.

Despite the complete (and hardly unexpected) absence of DFLers, this does show that their view is not the sole view of the public. And the DFL budget proposal? Oh, that's right. There still isn't one. I find that rather telling.

The new machine...

The memory arrived yesterday and was installed last night. Pulled pasofino from the office and put it back in the machine room (still need to reconnect it there). Put belgian where pasofino had been in the office. Found I need a couple PS/2 cables but can run without them for now - I just have two trackballs on the desk instead of one.

A quick look through the BIOS settings (did I mention this machine is fast? I have to hold the DELETE key in almost as I press the power button or it goes right into booting) showed all to be well. The CPU (Athlon XP +2100 - ~1.7GHz) ran just over +90F as I first looked.

Mandrake 9.0 installed quickly. A bit of a wait for drive formatting but not all that long. I've waited longer for DOS formats of smaller drives. The only glitch was not selecting the right video driver the first time, but a check of the motherboard manual showed what to select and all is well. Okkay, almost all. The splash screen before thing really start is... well, distorted hardly begins to describe it, but once that's past the video is fine.

I expect I'll spend much time (likely Saturday) installing the software I want. One snag was xchat. The latest and allegedly greatest is very bleeding edge (wants gtk2 or later..) so snagged an earlier version. Still need to get stuff to make it happy, and that stuff wants yet other stuff. Not exactly desktop ready, it seems. ("It's dependencies all the way down!")

Everything, as far I could tell, works. And after running belgian for a few hours I checked the temperatures again. The system temperature was a bit higher, but not out of line, and the CPU temperature was still hovering just over 90F, so I set the BIOS to do the thermal shutdown at the lowest setting (something around 170F as I recall) it had that wasn't "OFF."

Saturday should be... interesting. But my only difficulties seem not to be with the hardware. It just works. I like that.