The third parties keep on chugging along.....

Even though the media have been focusing on the Big Two, there are still planty of other political choices out there, even though they have a snowball's chance in hell of winning.

The Libertarians had their convention already. And for their candidate, they picked......Bob Barr. Yes, that Bob Barr. Former conservative congressman from Georgia.

My take on this: It appears that people who are currently disgusted and/or disenfranchised by the Republican Party will vote Libertarian. This includes the card-carrying members of the Religious Reich. That doesn't sit well with me. While libertarians are for personal liberty, I believe that that liberty should extend to areas that conservatives won't tread: a woman's right to choose, the right for gays and lesbians to marry, the freedom to practice *any* religion (even no religion). Yes, I'm a social liberal, but at the same time, I'm a fiscal conservative.

I don't think I'll be voting Libertarian this year. Thanks but no thanks.

Meanwhile, the Natural Law Party has packed up its tent and folded national operations. Statewide opeations stil continue. Their last candidate, Dr. John Hagelin, has been promoting a US Peace Government. Others have worked on forming a Department of Peace.

The Green Party has their national convention next month.

Oh yeah. And Ralph Nader is still in the running as an independent....I think.

The Linux notebook experiment is over.....

After being unable to use the modem and network cards with my "new" laptop (a Dell Latitude CPx), I thought I wouldn't be able to successfully run Linux on a notebook or laptop computer. (To recap the problems I was having, I couldn't connect to the internet using either a PCMCIA modem card or wireless network card.)

This past weekend, during some housecleaning, I found the copy of Windows XP Professional I bought last year. (This was bought with a deep student discount, as I was taking a class at Sinclair at the time. I refuse to pay full price for average software for the average user.) Tonight, I installed it and it appears to be working fine. And as evidenced by this post, I can connect with my modem card.

In the next few days, I will be installing some more hardware and software, getting the latest patches, and migrating software and files from the old laptop ("tardis Mk II", a Dell Latitude XPi CD). I intend to install OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird on the new laptop ("tardis Mk III", the Dell Latitude CPx J).

I'm not completely giving up on Linux, though. My last employer scrapped a Gateway 4000-E desktop because the hard drive went bad. So I put dibs on it, took it home, put in a new hard drive, and installed Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). It appears to work great. I still need to install the network and video drivers. Maybe I can install MySQL and Samba on there.

To the Linux geeks out there, thank you for all the help you've given me over the last couple of months.

Shout-outs: Happy birthday uk_kay_kay!