President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has done a decent job of suppressing the media, but hasn’t been able to quiet everyone. There is still Internet access there and people are still able to get images and video out of the country.

While I consider myself an optimist, I am not very optimistic about the situation in Iran. I don’t see a new election in the future. I see Mahmoud Ahmadinejad snuffing out all those who stand in his way. The bloodshed is only going to get worse in the upcoming days. This isn’t going to end well.

For a delivery which was supposed to get here on the 19th, two days after leaving Ohio, I can’t expect it until January 2nd, two full weeks after it should have been here.  Nice going, UPS.

The other night, NBC Nightly News had Tim Russert on and he brought out his little white-board and showed how there is no mathematical way for her to get enough delegates and superdelegates to beat Obama. She’s just hoping to prove that Barack isn’t as strong as people think he is by winning a state here and there.

At some point, I had hoped reason would sink in, but I just heard this week that she loaned her campaign another $5 million or so. All I could do is shake my head when I heard that. There’s nothing for her to win at this point.

It’s time to admit defeat, pack it up, and move out of the state of denial.

Anyway, I’ve been transferring files from one to the other all night. I was doing that for three or four hours last night and am finishing up what’s left. It wasn’t too difficult. Outlook Express was surprisingly easy to transfer over. Microsoft had terrific instructions on their support site. In the past, I used instructions made by an Outlook Express guru, but his site doesn’t seem to be that easy to find or navigate through anymore.

The biggest hurdle I’ve faced had to deal with IP addresses. When I plugged the new machine into the network, I got an error message. Two PCs were fighting over the same IP. I forgot that I don’t have them using DHCP because I needed to give the machines static IPs for port forwarding on my router. So I had to check out what IPs the others were using and give the new PC an IP of its own. It wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t a problem I was expecting.

After getting all of that sorted out, I updated Windows. 38 Critical Updates were found on Microsoft’s Windows Update site. Wow. I think Dell needs to get these updates into their installation discs because that’s a lot of updates. And I passed on getting Service Pack 3 (SP3). I’ve heard a lot of complaints, so I’m staying away from it. Every time there’s a service pack released, Windows users complain of problems.

One other problem I didn’t think I was going to run into was Windows Messenger. It pops up when you open Outlook Express. I couldn’t get Messenger to stop popping up when I open OE. I unchecked every logical option within OE and Messenger and still couldn’t get it to stop popping up. So I did the natural thing: I edited the registry. This isn’t something I enjoy doing because I know bad things can happen if you screw up. But I followed instructions found on PC Hell and Microsoft’s support site to create a DWORD value that would stop Messenger. It worked like a charm. I no longer have to worry about that annoying little program anymore.

Right now, I’m just installing a few programs that I need… 7Zip, FileZilla, Winamp, Notepad++, etc. I should be done with that pretty soon and will be able to put the old Dell away in a box. It’ll be nice to get this old CRT monitor off my desk. That bowing in my desk is annoying as hell.

Right now it has a letter from Jeff Bezos blathering on about their electronic book reader, which from what I’ve heard is a piece of ****, but I can’t find a way to get rid of the damn letter and replace it with the more sales pitches.

If only Amazon would put a little link at the bottom of the letter which would enable normal front-page activity…

About a year or two ago, I began using SmartFTP, but I sometimes have connection problems with it. And when you are always uploading files due to WordPress updates (yeah, 2.5.1 was just released), you want the program to work properly. But with failed connection after failed connection warning in the program tonight, I went on the search for a new FTP client.

Well, meet FileZilla.

I’ve had one or two connection drops already, but I’m wondering if it’s my host and not necessarily my FTP client. But the file transfers are easy to re-queue under FileZilla. It’s going to take a while until I know whether or not this is going to be a favorite FTP client, but at least it’s free.

When I was younger, I collected baseball cards with a frenzy. I still have some of the cards, but one of the cards I was most interested in obtaining was Ken Griffey Jr.’s rookie card, specifically the 1989 Upper Deck card.

Way back then, this card had a book value of over $100. This is a very good reason to want to collect it, of course. But I never did manage to obtain one. Today, they can be had for a lot less on sites like eBay. Highly valued cards like the Griffey ’89 Upper Deck Rookie aren’t worth much unless they’re graded by a reputable grading company like PSA, which looks at the surface, edges, etc for imperfections. If you manage to get a perfect 10 from PSA, you can get over $200 for it from most buyers.

Anyway, back to Griffey, himself. Right from the start of his career, Griffey proved himself to be an excellent baseball player. Not only did he have speed on the bases and in the outfield, but he had one of the sweetest swings of anyone. He hit for a good average and belted a lot of home runs, so much so, it was Griffey who was said to be the next home run king, not Barry Bonds.

But injuries nearly ended the outfielder’s career. Once he would heal up, he’s get hurt again. I remember watching SportsCenter on ESPN and seeing disappointing news after disappointing news. But here in the last few years, Griffey is playing more often. He’s not injured nearly as often and is about to hit his six hundredth home run.

The lack of media coverage is rather surprising though. Here we have the one guy who is clean [no steroids], and he’s about to surpass a huge milestone. Griffey is currently in sixth place all-time, and the media doesn’t care.

I realize the media is tired of covering baseball because of steroids, but they should be championing the one guy who didn’t use.