Unity Of Purpose

I’m going to deviate from my standard post topics tonight and I hope you’ll bear with me for a few moments, because I feel what I have to say is important.

Tomorrow is Election Day, and there are only two things that you absolutely have to do; the first is to vote, you have to vote. People have sacrificed a great deal, including their lives, so that you and I can live in a free society and exercise our right to vote for the candidate of our choice.

The second thing you have to do is to make the choice to stand behind whoever gets elected.

Why? You ask. I can hear you now; “Over my dead body, I can’t stand that other guy. I can’t stand his policies or his personal beliefs, and I’ll never acknowledge him as my President.”

The answer is simple, we’re in a dark place right now, and no politician or party can pull us out of that dark place without our help. Unity of purpose is the only way we’ll ever get this country back on track again. One nation, indivisible, that’s how we bill ourselves, and it’s what allows us to be great. Many hands working for a single purpose, that’s how things get done.

Right now, we’re a nation divided, but we shouldn’t be. The people on the other side of the political fence from you are not your enemy. They’re not crazy, and they’re not deranged, they’re just your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, good Americans all, they’re just not all on the same wavelength as you, and you know what? That’s how it’s supposed to be.

If everyone was the same, thought the same, acted the same, there’d be no progress. It’s only through our exposure to others who think differently that we learn, and that helps us to make informed, intelligent decisions. Freedom of thought and speech form the bedrock of this great country. My opinion, or yours, or our party’s, is never the be all and end all. There’s always room to build and grow, none of us are perfect, and it’s how our forefathers intended it to be.

If you’re afraid that we’re going down the wrong path if one party or the other comes to power, fear not. The checks and balances that are built into our political system ensure that no one person, or party, can take us too far off track. You can start to work immediately after this election cycle to make sure the person or party of your choice makes it into office in the next cycle, but you are undeniably obligated to try to make things work in the meantime.

I look at it like this; say you work for a company that has profit sharing, and you get a new boss who you disagree with. Do you stop performing because you’re unhappy, or because you don’t like the direction the company is headed in? Of course not, because you’d be cutting off your nose to spite your face. You wouldn’t stop working, and you wouldn’t publicly talk smack about your boss, or your company, because it would hurt the company’s public image, and that would hurt your earnings.

That’s what’s going on right now, people are intractable in their beliefs and refuse to see the higher ground. They refuse to see the benefits, no, the absolute necessity, of cooperation, of unity of purpose.

Yes, there are a plethora of things wrong, and yes, change is slow and painful, but change can only be achieved if each and every one of us rolls up our sleeves and contributes, so tomorrow I ask you to vote, and to promise you’ll work with those crazies on the other side so we can get things back on track. It’s your solemn obligation as an American, and the only way you can ensure that this great nation carries on.

That is all.

Windows Autorun/Autoplay Problems

I recently did some major scrubbing and upgrading of my system, and as is often the case, broke something in the process.

My PC had gotten sluggish; it needed a good cleaning and more memory. Norton had flagged a couple of downloaders and a Trojan Webkit that it couldn’t remove, or quarantine, so I decided just to nuke it and start over.

Confident that I had a good backup, I popped the hood and added another 2 gig of RAM, then reloaded Windows. Next I spent about 2 hours researching and removing all of the useless crap that comes bundled on the reload disks. Once I was happy with it, I plugged in the network cable and began downloading and applying all of the security patches and updates that had come out for service pack 2, culminating in the application of service pack 3. Done, or so I thought…

The computer was running great. It was clean as a whistle and fast as lightning, and I was a happy man. That is, until the first time I popped a CD into one of the drives.., and nothing happened.

Normally the Autoplay wizard fires up when you insert or connect any media or media devices into your PC. It’s the little wizard that pops up and asks you what you’d like to do with said media. Insert a CD, DVD, USB drive or connect a camera or MP3 player, and it asks you to choose a program to open, play or import data with. It’s not a necessity to have, but it sure makes life easy.

If I opened up My Computer, I could see the media mounted in the drive, so I could use it, but something was blocking Autoplay from starting. I checked all of my settings, and found the process was enabled on all of the drives, so I began searching the Interwebs for an answer.

First I found this document on the Microsoft Help and Support site. It described the problem to a T, and came to the conclusion that the problem was caused by having certain versions of Easy CD Creator loaded on the machine. The fix was to remove the software, and then make some registry changes to re-enable Autoplay. Not having this program, I continued to search for an answer more appropriate for my situation.

Then I found this link to an Autoplay Repair Wizard available from the Microsoft Download Center. After verifying the authenticity of my copy of Windows, Microsoft allowed me to download and run the wizard, which indeed found a problem, fixed it, and wrote the changes and results to a log file. The wizard requires you to log out and then log back in to complete the fix, and once I did, the system immediately recognized the CD I had in one of the drives and fired up the Autoplay feature. Sweet.

Just to be certain I had the problem licked, I switched the CD to the secondary drive. I’m glad I did, because I found that I wasn’t done. I ended up having to run the wizard on all of my drives and ports, one at a time, with a logout in between each. For the USB drives, I had to insert a thumb drive to get them to show up in the wizard’s device repair list, but once I fixed the first one, they all began to work again. It was a bit tedious, but it looks like my system is finally back to normal.

This must be a fairly common problem, as Microsoft has come up with a repair wizard for it. The last puzzler I had like this was the Media Center black screen problem, which they also had a wizard to fix. My post on that problem, and repair, has been the top visited post via keyword search on my blog for over 6 months now, so I hope this one proves to be just as helpful.