Web Blah Garza

We’ve come to Flagstaff AZ for my daughters graduation, staying at the Du Beau Hostel in town, owned by an old friend who was once a local musician turned city councilman, now buisness owner. I went to Macy’s Coffee shop for a low fat mocha and low and behold as I walked out I saw several familiar faces. Since it’s been over 10 years I had no clue who they were but familiar just the same. It’s odd how we (the human) are truely a creature of habit and some habits are quite predictable. Here’s a shot of the Du Beau courtesy car and the door to the commons.

The back wall with the mural is the outside wall of Macy’s Coffee Shop and where I conceived my song One Armed Girl. It seems like light years away when I was in the recycle truck working that day, so much has happened and so much is different. Which brings me back to the creature of habit thing, although I like to think I’m not caught up in that whole thing, sometimes I fear I am following the crowd no differently than anyone else. Then I take a look around myself and see that isn’t possible because of the fact so much has changed and is different for me. This deserves comtemplation. More to come from our journey to Flagstaff before it’s over.

I have a Toshiba Satellite with Vista on it. Of course over the course of owning my laptop I, like so many, decided that Vista sucked. I got this idea that I would uninstall Vista and downgrade to Windows XP Pro. As I researched the internet for information on this process I began to find that over and over again anyone who had done this with the same model laptop I have had a night mare on their hands. The biggest problem was drivers, among some other minor ones. At one point I came upon an entry in a particular forum, this one fellow had done what was called a clean install of vista and found that it was actually an excellent OS. The more I looked in to this the more I decided that this would be the thing I would attempt to do.

Fortunately I found a handy little tool called the ABR (Activation Backup and Restore), this handy little app was a life saver and mad this all the easier. The thing about Vista and computer sold to day is a thing called by geeks BLOATWARE!  Bloatware are all the little things that a manufacturer will put on their computers that is absolutely worthless resource hog items. When you do a clean install of any OS you end up with the bare essentials that are the main part of the OS and nothing more. That means that you can add what ever apps you want on your system and only that. This is what I did.

A clean install in a sense gives your computer back to you in a stripped down streamlined manner that allows your computer to actually behave in the manner it should. You will suddenly see just how fast your system should move. It is strongly recommended that you backup anything you want to keep before doing a clean install.

Once I did this I found that Vista is actually a very nice OS and it has gotten a bad rap because of all the bloatware that comes along with it. Here are a few links with instructions on doing a clean install, If you have a copy of the Anytime Upgrade Disc that came with your system then your good to go with this process. first a link to the ABR tool

ABR (Activation Backup and Restore)

Notebook Review.com Vista Clean Install

DirectEdge.US- Installing Vista Clean with No Crapware 

If you don’t find these informative enough them you can simply do a Google on Vista Clean Install. Good luck and I think you will find that once you do this you will never complain about Vista outside of it’s annoying quirks. The truth about Vista is simply this it is just another OS with as many problems as any other and the thing that makes it such a pain is all the Crap that computer manufacturers shove down our throats along with it. Do your self a favor and clean your system.

Last night I drove to Flagstaff from Durango I got to Flag at 3:30 am. I came to pay my respects to my Friends David and Barry Milgram. They lost the youngest of their two sons yesterday. Daniel Milgram was and is one of the most alive young people I have ever known, a perspective and attitude rare in a 17 year old young man. Mostly because of his wonderful parents who have lost one of their most precious gifts. Being a parent I have an Idea what it must be like to be going through what they are going through, but only an Idea. I remember Daniel from his earliest of ages since I have know David and Barry at least that long and watching their two sons become men has been wonderful. Now Joshua is alone with only the memory of his brotgher and I do not envy or know how he must feel. He is a great young man and his brother was a huge part of his life. I spent the morning with my Friends in their grief and remembered good things about Daniel and we laughed and cried. As people began to show up I felt the need to leave as I only came for them and Daniel and not others. I gave them my feelings and shared time with my friends and now I will drive home, back to the land of Hesperus/Dibé Ntsaa the sacred mountain where the Spirits Jump off of this place from. Perhaps Daniel is up there, dancing at the top and preparing to jump off to the next place, perhaps he has already jumped. Regardless he was a jumper, a dancer a soul filled with life and ideas rare for a young person of his age. My Cosmic Little Brother, we shared a rare connection beyond words and with a knowing look we understood together. You will be missed!

Well let’s see, first the demise of Salvador Allende in 1973 at the hands of a military coup assisted by the CIA was a blow to democracy in the western world. It doesn’t matter if he was the leader of a socialist party, he was democraticly elected. The death of Bhutto some years later is another blow to true democracy and now Kenya has had a run in with problems with democracy. It seems that the gerimandering of the CIA and the United States has brought about the demise of true Democracy. There is a joke among my Hopi friends the word Democracy is very similar to Dima-Quasi, in Hopi Dima-Quasi means “white washed penis”. I rest my case.