Aaron has been on a Toy Story watching spree.

Yesterday he decided a really fun thing to do would be to stand on the arm of the couch and yell "Neeee naaaaaah!" ("To infinity and beyond!" foranyone who missed it earlier) and crash face first into the couch pillows with his arms out like he's trying to fly.

There is a great case to be made for civility. Kids are still taught what my teachers called citizenship early in school whether it's still called that or not. Adults still aren't always following through.

But when I look back on history... it makes me a little hopeful. Yeah, we've had years where politics didn't seem so dirty and where our media was more civilized. But we've also had generations where the recent politically or "ethically" motivated killings, etc. (Tiller, the UU Church in Tennessee, the mosque that had gas or smoke bombs thrown through the nursery window...) have been massively dwarfed by lynchings and massacres.

On the whole we're more civilized than we used to be.

We do still have a ways to go, I think.

I used to wonder how anyone could go out of business from not paying sales taxes. I mean, I understand a slip up now and then (I've made one) but just not to pay them at all until you owe so much you can't pay them didn't make sense. And how could you not know you're supposed to pay them? I don't know, maybe some people expect a bill or something, maybe they get their math wrong, maybe it's different in different states and you don't pay them monthly. I know I shouldn't judge. But hearing about a store that went out of business due to not passing along the sales tax they charged always bewildered me a bit.

I think I've figured out how it might happen, though. I missed a payment once and didn't notice until the next month. No one said anything. No one mailed me anything. I didn't get any angry phone calls. Just a fine the next month when I filed. And it wasn't even a huge fine or anything. I mean, percentage wise it was a good chunk of interest, but it wasn't that bad for one month. I've realized that in slow years like this when the bank account starts to droop... it might be pretty easy to look at that sales tax as a line of credit. So you pay it all off next month when sales are better? So what's the problem? Everyone wins! Unless, of course, next month isn't better. And so on. And then you've taken out a pretty good sized high interest loan and you're sunk.

Glad we have a lower interest line of credit to keep me from ever being tempted if we need it.

New pattern!

Update on the computer update. I finally figured out how to get the Windows 7 disk to format the drive. It's very simple. You just have to actually click on the word "Advanced" or something like that.

I figured that out after figuring out that I hadn't actually done a clean install the first time. Which was weird because all the info from Windows said XP wouldn't install without a clean install. Go figure. Maybe I misunderstood. Maybe they exaggerated. Either way, I wanted a clean install so I started over and formatted the drive and reinstalled 7. That way I didn't have all those leftover files and programs from old hardware I didn't even have any more.

Anyway. If you're going to format your harddrive before installing from a Win 7 update disk, the only thing you have to remember is that you don't want to enter the product key during the install when it asks you to. If you try to enter it, it'll tell you it's an invalid key. Just click "next" with the spaces blank and it'll keep on installing. Once you're done, you can go in and activate your copy of Windows and enter the key then. I've heard if it won't activate then, you can try reinstalling on top of the new install. That way it sees you've already got a version of Windows installed and it's happy. If *that* doesn't work, there's some registry stuff you can do. But from what I've heard so far, it works to just wait 'til after you've installed it to enter the product key.

From an Austin Chronicle article on the foundation of the Texas Tribune:

Some believe the nonprofits are more susceptible to bias than commercial organizations. "No matter how good the nonprofit operation is, it always ends up sustaining itself with handouts, and handouts come with conditions," Shafer wrote.

I'd say the same thing about for-profit businesses... only they tend to need bigger handouts.

It all started about a week and a half ago when I figured out I could order a new motherboard/cpu combo and a new harddrive and pay for it after Christmas... So I did. You know, to go with the copy of Windows 7 I'd ordered last summer because the upgrades were only $50 at the time. Randy says they're still $50... I'm ignoring that.

The hardware got here last Wednesday so I figured I'd go ahead and get my new motherboard, cpu and extra harddrive installed and get XP working on them since I had to have it running in order to upgrade easily to Win 7, anyway.

Somehow hardware upgrades never go the way they're supposed to. After fighting with connections, realizing I was dealing with a whole new power supply and type of drive, multiple trips to Fry's and Altex buying a new cd/dvd drive and connectors and extenders and adapters I found out that the XP disk wouldn't install on the new disk. Then I decided to try starting up my old disk to see if XP would boot (once I got it adapted and connected) and it did boot! But for some reason my USB keyboard and mouse weren't recognized by the BIOS so instead of installing new drivers amid the flurry of windows popping up to tell me about all my new hardware XP had found, I was focused on shutting it all down and finding my old keyboard so I could get into the BIOS to change some settings I probably didn't need to mess with, anyway.

That was the last time XP booted on my computer. After that the install disk still refused to install and the harddrive gave me a message that a file was corrupted whenever I tried to boot from the harddrive. I did get Ubuntu installed on the new disk during all this (which messed up my install of Win 7 later... but not in a bad way as it turned out) but couldn't find a driver for the wireless connection. So, no internet.

I ended up spending nearly a week getting Katy's old laptop up and running XP. It's set up pretty well, now. I had to use Randy's laptop for the bookkeeping program, though. Katy's wasn't fast enough.

Then today, just as Aaron's late nap time rolled around, UPS dropped off my new operating system. So I've spent the rest of the day getting it installed on my computer. At first I tried to install it on the new drive so I could keep my data on my old one. It was formated wrong, though, and the Win 7 disk wouldn't format it. Instead of spending another day looking for a way to format it on my own (like I'd spent a day trying to find a bootdisk for XP last week) I gave in and installed it on my old drive like I'd first planned. It ended up saving all my data in a separate folder, which was nice. Now I only have to move my documents and pictures and music from the C drive to the D drive instead of moving them across the wireless network from our network backup. It's still taking more than an hour to move it all, though.

Now all I have to do is get my applications and settings back the way I like them and I'll be set. I'm liking Win 7 so far. It's pretty easy to use even though I've had a little trouble finding things in the new places.