Ron Helwig

A good friend of mine noticed that I support Ron Paul for President. He asked me what I thought of Fred Thompson. Now for most people I'd either ignore them or give them a quick answer. However, this guy is intelligent, thoughtful, and worth giving a more complete answer. So I did some research on Fred Thompson. Here's why I won't be supporting him.

My roommate Anthony and I went up to Grafton to help Kat and Russell work on their new home. We hadn't seen it before, and all we knew was that they are building it using the 'rammed earth' technique. When we showed up, Lloyd, Mike(?), and the family had just started working on digging the trenches for the foundation and using the dirt to level off the area. Anthony and I started helping just about the time they all went off for lunch.

Well, I'm sitting here at Murphy's Taproom in Manchester, working and blogging. The waitresses provide for nice "eye strain prevention" breaks.

Anthony just got a job, at the factory across the street from the bar. Let's hope that works out.

Recently my laptop's hard drives failed. They had been set up as mirrored (both having the same data in case one fails) and I was able to limp along for a week while new hard drives were on their way. Thankfully I had been moving more and more stuff onto the web. When the laptop finally croaked, I did lose all the data on the hard drives, but it wasn't much of a loss.

So others can benefit from my example, I'm putting together this page that explains how I'm "Living on the web".

Today the Concord Monitor reported the "results" of the Iowa straw poll. They were very careful to not make the article worth reading. The Union Leader didn't do any better.

After taking Otis for a walk this morning, the people that I bought the land from dropped by for a surprise visit. I gave them a tour of the place, and we talked a bit. I had been meaning to invite them to visit, but never got around to it.

The hard drives on the laptop finally failed, but luckily I had already ordered replacements and copied all my valuable data.

I tried out a Linux variant, but apparently the drivers for my RAID controller are insufficient. Thus I had to re-install MS Windows. If I could have gotten it working with Linux, I would have also had to install something called cedega - that supposedly would allow it to run the Windows version of Civilization 4.

I do have Civilization 4 installed and operational, which is key. It didn't work until I applied the 1.61 patch.

The laptop has been flaking out the last week or so. This afternoon it crashed and on reboot I got an error message. The system just wouldn't reboot.

Thankfully, I got it with a RAID setup. After removing one of the hard drives, I'm back to work.