BootSkin is a free program that lets you change your boot screens in Windows XP and WIndows 2000. It does it without affecting any system files making it safe to use.
Version 1.02 adds the feature to have randomly selected boot screen come up every time you boot.
Bootskin's homepage is www.bootskin.com
I'm a snob. I admit it. I've always been a snob to a certain level. My snobbery, however, is specific. I enjoy debating with people. To debate with people, you have to have people who don't agree with your positions. So I definitely like people who disagree with me feeling free to disagree with me. But like I said, I'm also a snob. And that means I don't have much toleration for noise.
Being a snob means I tend to be rude when confronted with people who waste my time. If, having written a lengthy article I'm confronted with a response from someone nit-picking some grammar issue or some other triviality or someone hijacking the conversation to go over to their pet cause I will tend to either tell them to knock it off or just black list them from my blog depending on how much respect I have for the original poster.
For instance, today, one guy responded to a couple page blog I wrote about Europe with an insulting 1 line response. In my blog, I had written "France hasn't actively helped the United States in nearly 300 years." Technically it's only been around 225 years. But this person responded to my article trying to insult my intelligence because I chose to round to 300 years instead of say 200 years. As if we have to round to the nearest century. Or maybe I should have said "going on 300 years" instead of "nearly". In either case, it wasn't germane to the discussion. It was one of those things that gets on my nerves.
I don't have that much free time. I do write a lot because I write at around 120wpm. So I'm particularly impatient with people who split hairs about irrelevant issues. I don't want my time wasted reading their stuff and I don't want my readers time wasted.
The reason I don't just make it impossible for anyone to respond to my articles is because there are plenty of intelligent people out there who not only disagree with my views but are able and willing to put together a coherent argument. Those people may not always convince me of their perspective (though sometimes they do) but they add value to the overall discussion and make us all think. But I don't want the discussion watered down with mindless trolling so I tend to try to weed out the trolls. If someone I've black listed shows themselves to have grown beyond trolling, I can always let them post on my articles again after all.
Someone asked me if people's articles who I initially disagree with ever change my views. I said they have. Let me give you a few examples where convincingly written articles have changed my views:
My point is that I can be convinced of the merit of an opposing argument. But everyone who's debated enough knows that the mind tends to shut itself closed when attacked by zealots. And that's bad because the post right after the zealot may be coming from someone whose reasonable and persuasive. But if you're still irritated after having read some zealot's half-witted regurgitation of some partisan's talking point sheet, you may not be open to listening to the well reasoned points of the next person. And when that happens we all lose.
So I tend to have a short list of things that irritate me. Those who do it enough end up not being able to respond on my blog. My blog as in draginol.joeuser.com. Not the whole website. I don't ban people because they irritate me. Only two people have ever been banned from JoeUser.com which I think says a lot for our tolerance.
Here's that list of "Craptastic" argument styles:
Those are 5 things that I know annoy the heck out of me when people do. And I suspect if you talk to other seasoned bloggers they'll have a similar list. Those of us who don't have a ton of free time on our hands tend to want a good signal to noise ratio. Steven Den Beste's website used to have commenting/forums. But he eventually tired of the idiocy that ended up coming up as topics slowly morphed into crap. So he took down his forums. Luckily for us, we have lots of tools to eliminate the wasters (black listing works not just by account but by IP as well so they can't just log off and respond anonymously).
So there you have it, I'm a snob. I admit it. I'm not just a snob. I'm an arrogant snob. The difference though is that I admit it. As you read the blogs, you'll find that there are lots of arrogant snobs out there. But they don't tend to admit it. We all have foibles. I'm not perfect by any means -- arrogance and snobbery are not things I'm bragging about, they're admissions of guilt. All I can do is do the best I can and write what I can with the limited time at my disposal.
David Warren: http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/Comment/Mar04/index205.shtml has an interesting article making the case that continental Europe really hasn't changed very much since World War II.
That weakness and appeasement that led to its near destruction in World War II runs as strong as ever. This article http://www.coldfury.com/Sasha/archives/004682.html#004682 is even more explicit on the matter.
Personally, I don't know what to think. During the early days of World War II (1940 specifically) many people referred to the war as "Churchill's war" as if somehow Britain had started it. Today you hear about "Bush's war" as if Bush had something to do with 9/11. Al Qaeda has been attacking countries, especially the US, since 1992 when Bill "unilateralist" Clinton was President.
Appeasement doesn't work. You'd think the deaths of 40 million people in World War II would have made that clear. Apparently not. The argument shouldn't be whether we use the current strategy or no strategy at all. The argument should be which of several potentially effective strategies will work. Closing ones eyes and putting hands over ones ears and saying "I see and hear no evil!" is not a strategy. It's capitulation.
I am, frankly, shocked by continental Europe's political reaction and in particular the electoral choices of the Spanish.
As one Spanish person who changed his vote at the last second put it, "Maybe the Socialists will get our troops out of Iraq, and Al Qaeda will forget about Spain, so we will be less frightened."
What more can be added to that?
The anti-war people are just anti-action.I have no respect for the position of the "anti-war" people. They just want to make it tougher for the people who are stuck having to make real decisions.
The Bush-bashing is usually the most amusing though becaue it demonstrates the lack of rational thought by some people. Bill "multilaterialsm" Clinton suffered more terror attacks on the United States than Bush has. After 9/11 there have been zero attacks on the United States. By contrast, under Clinton we had the USS Cole, the embassy bombings and the first WTC attack. In those cases, Clinton tried to work with "the international community" and treat the whole thing almost purely as a law enforcement excercise.
And what did such restraint do for us? 9/11 was planned during Clinton's watch. In other words, we tried the "multilateral" approach (multilateral in this case meaning having France and Germany's support since the US has had the support of dozens of nations in Iraq and Afghanistan under Bush). We tried the diplomatic approach and the result was 9/11. And since we changed our strategy under Bush our successes have been quite strong.
After all, it wasn't the US Al Qaeda bombed on 3/11, it was Spain because they predicted, correctly, that the Spanish people would cave in and elect someone who was more willing to move back towards inaction. Al Qaeda has suffered grievous losses since 9/11 and is trying to get the pressure taken off of them.
Some people seem to make an artificial distinction between domestic murders and international murderers. If someone native to your country goes on a senseless killing spree, the reaction is to go after them aggressively and put them behind bars. Yet, if that same homicidal lunatic is foreign, you'll instantly have the protester class argue that we need to negotize with them. Understand where they're coming from. Consider what we may have done to upset them. Work with lots of other countries, particularly ones that have no real common interest with us in solving the problem to deal with these lunatics.
Look people, we're dealing with killers here. People who do things specifically to murder as many innocent people as possible. The US strategy, like it or not, has worked pretty well. Go after them directly. Eliminate their allies or potential allies. Dry up their funding. It's no coincidence that Al Qaeda went after Spain first and not say the USA or UK. Maybe thanks to the appeasement from Spain that Al Qaeda will believe (incorrectly) that the voters in the US and UK can be cowed into submission by a terrorst attack before their next election.
And yet when faced with a difficult decision we always hear about "other options" from those who are against the proposed actions by leaders. But those other options are rarely specified. For intance the inspectors had been kicked out in 1998 and no one seemed to care about inspections until the US made them an issue again.
Leadership requires coming up with a plan and carrying it out. Curling up into the fetal position under your desk may seem like a "position" but it's not. It's simply the absence of a position. Being against something without being for something instead is not a position. It's the absence of a position.
I'm all for other options. If those other options are actions are convincingly likely to have the desired affect. NOT doing something is not an option. It's simply a lack of action. If someone is murdering my neighbors, I'm not likely to consider "doing nothing" an option. I want the murders stopped. Somehow. Most people are open to hearing various ideas on how the murderer can be stopped. The anti-action people need to step up and provide realistic alternatives.
War, after all, wasn't our first option. Treating the war on terrorism as a law enforcement issue was the strategy pursued from 1992 to 2001. It results in 9/11. Treating this as a military matter from 2001 to 2004 has thus far eliminated direct attacks on the United States and forced the terrorists into going after seemingly arbitrary targets to kill civilians (I mean, heck, if you have a half dozen guys with access to explosives you could kill lots of people too, not exactly the same impact as crashing hijacks airliners into the largest buildings in the world).
After 9/11, most Americans had enough common sense to recognize that we couldn't go on indefinitely letting Saddam violate his agreements and be an open enemy of the United States. We didn't have that luxury. We knew this because 9/11 showed us that the Islamofascists would use any weapon they could get ahold of, including civilian airliners, to murder Americans. And since Saddam was an open enemy of the United States, we knew that he had every incentive to provide weapons to Al Qaeda. Maybe not imminently but at some point. So after Afghanistan it made sense to deal with Saddam before Al Qaeda could effectively regroup. And so we did.
The arguments, if they can be called that, to remove Saddam were always incredibly weak in my opinion. And the results already justified the action. Saddam is captured. By Boulbushead's argument the legitimate government of Iraq is controlled by the United States. And it was all done with only a few hundred casualties total. Simply amazing. But the anti-war people are so lame that they fixate that we didn't find stockpiles of chemical weapons. Big deal. I for one never considered stockpiles of chemcial weapons to be a significant threat. It was the future threat that Iraq posed -- i.e. a POST-sanctions Iraq posed that I was worried about. Better to deal with Saddam now while we had a reasonably good excuse to do so than later when it would be politically more difficult.
I'm particularly disappointed with the Spanish because they have, effectively, forced the heavy lifting of this war to be more on the shoulders of the British, Americans, Australians, and Poles. As if we somehow want to have to send our soldiers into battle. I think if you asked any American, Brit, Aussie, or Pole they'd tell you that they'd prefer it if we could just go home and live peacefully together. After all, it's the terrorists murdering our civilians in cold blood and making demands that we must convert to their religion or die.
To the terrorists, this has been a war for a long time. Only in 2001 did we start to treat it as a war. Whether we treat it as a war or not, the terrorists will be murdering civilians as long as they have the power to do so. The problem isn't going to go away simply by wishing it. Remember, these guys were attacking us when Bill Clinton was President. You're not going to get a more diplomatic President (beloved by Europe's elites) than Clinton. So those who hate Bush need to get a grip and realize the problem isn't Bush. The problem is that there are murderous Islamic zealots who will stop at nothing to murder as many non-Muslims (or even Muslims if they get in the way) as they possibly can as part of their worldwide campaign to bring the world to Allah.
The political season brings out the worst in both sides. Too many people treat real world politics as a game. Not as a computer game, but a game of intellectual exercise. What they forget is that there are monsters out there. And once in a great while, a monster gets loose.
In the 20th century, Hitler and his ilk were allowed to run amok across Europe and besides the 30 million or so who died in actual in the war, another 12 million were executed simply because they weren't the correct race or creed. In Rwanda, nearly a million people were slaughtered for not being of the right tribe. That was only a few years ago.
You would think given these examples and others that people would recognize the obvious - there are monsters out there, and once in awhile, a monster gets a hold of the means to do great harm. Al Qaeda is one such monster. But you wouldn't know that based on some of the things you hear. The bombing in Spain seems to have woken up some people in Europe finally. Which is ironic because what happened in Spain was trivial compared to 9/11.
Luckily, adults are in charge. The kids can go hang out on-line or protest somewhere but the adults are the ones making the real decisions. And for them, they understand what Al Qaeda and its ilk really is. So let me share with you what the goal of Bin Laden is: The complete and total transformation of all the world to Islam. Those who are willing to be subjugated to their laws (Islam's not just a religion, it's a form of government) will be spared. Those who resist will be killed. It's that simple. The United States was attacked because it represents the largest obstacle to that goal.
Some people will say "Well, the US had that base in Saudi Arabia and if we hadn't had that, maybe he wouldn't have attacked." And why were we in Saudi Arabia? Because we were asked to by the government of Saudi Arabia. Why? Because Iraq had recently invaded Kuwait and wanted US presence in the area "just in case". We weren't there as part of some sort of imperialistic crusade. We were there to help protect others. Just like we did in Korea (and South Korea was a rural society in 1949, so don't delude yourself into thinking that was about some natural resource). And it's irrelevant anyway. Sooner or later we would have been targeted. Lucky they had to strike sooner, before they had nuclear weapons, rather than later so that we can begin actively resisting them now.
Al Qaeda makes it clear that it will do anything, and I mean anything to bring about its goals. It will kill innocents wholesale. We should take them very seriously. Seriously enough to consider how 9/11 might have been with chemical or biological or nuclear weapons. And then perhaps the kids who treat this all as some far off intellectual game might come to understand maybe why Saddam had to be removed from power rather than fixating on whether he had actual stockpiles on hand at the end.
I wasn't willing to gamble the life of my wife and children to placate some college student or some European intellectual in Belgium. I know, and continue to know, that Al Qaeda will use whatever it has to murder people in large numbers to reach its publicly stated goals. And if Iraq didn't have WMD on hand, I don't care, because I do know what his intent was and what it was in the long term. I have always known that which is why I supported the war regardless of whether stockpiles were found. I understood and continue to understand that Iraq was part of the war on terror.
But not everyone understands because to them, it's still just a game. But it's not a game to Al Qaeda. To them, it's serious. Deadly serious.
Consider Bin Laden's own statement to the American people:
The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.
The religion of the Unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Islam is the religion of all the prophets, and makes no distinction between them - peace be upon them all.
It is to this religion that we call you; the seal of all the previous religions....
call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest...
You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator...
You are the nation that permits Usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions. Yet you build your economy and investments on Usury. As a result of this, in all its different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense; precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against...
The full text can be found here.
The first thing Al Qaeda wants is the full conversion to Islam. He makes that clear. This isn't US propaganda. This isn't George Bush trying to scare you. This is what Al Qaeda specifically wants. This is what all the killing has been about.
You can tell it's a game to some people because the same people who argue against US resistance to Al Qaeda are the people who would suffer the most under the rule of Islam. The same people who can jump from one discussion supporting gay marriage or telling everyone that was unhappy about Janet Jackson's breast exposure should "get a life" are the ones who will then go on and say that he has a lot of good points. Huh? They'll post how capital punishment is a "human rights violation" while pretending to understand that to be gay under Islam is to be executed? That usury (that's borrowing with interest) would be banned? You have a mortgage? A car payment? A credit card bill? Forget it. In Iran, for instance, Janet Jackson would have been executed by the government, if she were lucky. Stoned to death if she were not. But some people will put Al Qaeda and the US on morally equal grounds? Clearly, these are unserious people arguing about serious things.
And don't forget that paranoid Jew hating thrown in there, just to make sure that there's no mistake about the would-be Fuhrer's intentions are.
But some people see all this is just another playing card in their game of philosophical objection to the United States or its leaders. So soft and so naive that they write from their places of luxury as if there really are no monsters out there. To them, George Bush is "the monster" even though they have no understanding of what real monsters would do to them. They think it's all part of some quest for oil or <insert natural resource X here>. Or imperialism or whatever. It's not. It's about our way of life. Our existence outrages them.
These people want to eliminate our way of life. They find our way of life appalling. They find it immoral and dishonorable. And they plan to make us change it either by voluntarily converting ourselves to their way or by killing every man, woman, or child that resists or may resist them. We're not just fighting some ideology or some far away concept. We're fighting for our lives.
You can't negotiate with a side whose primary demand is that you cease to exist. You can't ignore people who are working towards gaining the means to kill increasing numbers of people. You can't wait until it's a mushroom cloud over your city to act. Al Qaeda and its ilk were not created by the CIA or some American group as some smug yet ignorant people seem to think. I say smug because it demonstrates an arrogance -- that other peoples are incapable of putting together such a movement and such an organization on their own. They believe in what they're doing. They believe they're doing God's work and the only way they'll be stopped is if someone stops them.
Thankfully, the adults are in charge. Regardless of who wins in November, don't kid yourself that the US will change its course. Both candidates, luckily, know that there are monsters out there that have to be dealt with.
The terrorist attack in Spain may or may not be the work of Al Qaeda or some other Islamofascist terrorist network. But based on what's coming out of Europe, one thing is clear: The Europeans are starting to "get it".
As France's Le Monde put it:
"If she did not know it yet, she knows it now: Europe is part of the battlefield of hyper-terrorism ... Nothing, evidently, no cause, no context, no supposedly political objective, justifies this kind of [large scale] terrorism ... If the trail back to Al-Qaeda is confirmed, Europeans should rethink the war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, as did the United States after the attacks of September 11, 2001."
Many Europeans before this incident quietly believed that while 9/11 was a tragedy, that really, America deserved what it got. That various unspecified "American policies" directly led to 9/11. They were wrong, of course, for no one has ever been able to articulate a specific set of US policies that could possibly justify the carnage of 9/11. But one can almost forgive Europeans who felt this way for their views. After all, America is far away to them and the two towers, seen on TV, just look like a couple of buildings, not the city sized structures they actually were in reality.
Terrorists, generally speaking, are not the brightest bulbs. They may have a few intelligent people in their ranks but by definition terrorists tend to be zealots of a lost cause. And there is usually a reason why they're losing so badly that they have to resort to attacking civilians with bombs. But the real indication of the idiocy of terrorists is that they never seen capable of learning. 9/11 was not a triumph for terrorists, it has spelled their doom. Afghanistan is no longer a save haven. Iraq will be relatively westernized, secular, and democratized. And the US now has a long term permanent presence in the region that the likes of Osama Bin Laden could only have imagined in his nightmares.
And the result? The terrorists then went after Australia over in Indonesia cementing the public's support behind the war on terror. And now Spain. One of the major newspapers there has boldly claimed that they are "99%" sure that this was the work of Islamic based terrorists in retaliation for the government's support of the US. The newspaper, aligned with the opposition socialists, apparently thinks that this will somehow harm the government in the upcoming elections. Perhaps I'll be proven wrong but I suspect the opposite will happen. The Spanish are not cowards. They will not be cowed by terrorists. They will want to strike back with fury. Democracies, historically, are quite predictable in how they react to sucker punches. Perhaps history courses should be required for journalism majors?
When even Le Monde is recognizing the reality of terrorism you know things have changed. Perhaps they have realized what Americans realized on 9/12/2001 -- imagine if we let this go on in the long term? Imagine these same terrorists with nuclear weapons? Weapons supplied by say someone like Saddam Hussein either today or in the future when sanctions get lifted? We can't wait for that day. We must act now lest we suffer far greater carnage in the future. That path led us to Afghanistan and later Iraq. So to the Europeans who have suddenly woken up to this new reality I say, "Welcome to the party, pal!"
I've gotten emails from people suggesting that with the GUI Olympics, that we've become snobby. That is, because WinCustomize, Neowin, and deviantART now are so popular that we somehow just "blew off" the rest of the skinning community.
But it's not true. I actually did try contacting the owners of every skinning site. In every case, however, I received no response. On Deskmod, for instance, I even responded to the featured GUI Olympics news item there saying how I've been trying to contact Gorman for weeks.
Customize.org, I have no idea who is running the show these days. We have to talk to someone who can actually change the website (i.e. not just a moderator) to put the GUI Olympics banner up.
Even Skinbase, I talked to Snowman and Scarebar but they can't change the page. I guess "Grave" is but I can't seem to get ahold of him.
I sent email before the contest to Chaz at ArtUproar and never heard back. I didn't know what to make of things until i started looking closer. In the old days, the owners of the site regularly participated on them. But looking at news items and such, I haven't seen Chaz or Grave or Gorman or the others making news items or anything in a long time.
It's as if the sites have been turned over to the moderators to run on auto pilot. So it's not that we're ignoring the other skin sites, it's that there doesn't seem to be any owners actively participating on a regular basis anymore.
Based on popular request from the skinning community, the GUI Olympics has pushed the beginning of event judging to May 4th!
The GUI Olympics is an inter-website contest in which people can create visual styles (WindowBlinds), icon packages (IconPackager), and Winamp 5 skins. Anyone can enter. Nearly $20,000 in cash and prizes are being given out. There are approximately 20 events total spread amongst the three.
Participants can enter as many skins and themes as they choose and could potentially win it all. You can also update your entries as many times as you like. Judging begins May 4th on the first events and ends May 31st. So you have 6 to 10 weeks to put together you entries.
Good luck to all!