Comments on Society, Technology, and Life

Well, I've gotten back into my Blendtec because my oven is broken, so no baking for now. But there's SO much I can do in a Blendtec (blender) that doesn't involve grinding up iPhones ... And I decided to start with Fondue. This required some water, some dry white wine and some cheese, corn starch and nutmeg. The recipes are easy to find, but I used the one in the Blender book. Liquid in first, then the rest, and use (oddly enough) the soups setting. Amazing. Worked right off, though ended up doing it one more time to heat it up more. Quite easy to do, though the cheese isn't cheap that the recipe calls for.

I think next I may have to try either a "green smoothie" - something that's supposed to be good for you, but I shudder about the taste - or (and I'm far more excited about this), Ice Cream!

So I've had the Bosch for about 7 months and have obtained and used some of the attachments. The one I'm most excited about is the Slicer Shredder. It has a ~12 cup capacity and comes with 3 blades, there are 3 additional blades you can buy. I ordered them all. So far I've had the chance to use one, the french fry blade. I used it to make potato salad.

That's right, you don't usually use the french fry blade to make french fries. It's misnamed in my opinion. It's actually a dicing / chopping blade. And to do up celery, pickles, and onions for the potato salad it's amazing. It is BY FAR the best powered chopper I've ever used. Most food processor style devices I've used have a simple problem - they spin too fast, so the slices or chopping is way too fine. In fact, I often found little difference between a food processor S chopping blade and my blenders chopping when pulsed to chop stuff.

This Slicer Shredder moves at the speed of the mixer, so spins much slower - and therefore makes much better sized pieces for chopping or slicing. Now, you can of course turn the speed up if you want to go faster or make strips or actually use it for the named purpose of making french fries. Plus there is the actual food processor attachment which, while small, will spin very fast for the more traditional food processing tasks.

I also got the Meat Grinder and Berry Press. I haven't had time to use them yet as I plan on using them to process tomatoes at the end of the summer. So more to come.

I've also had some time to make something other than bread in the Bosch Mixer. I made a yellow cake, frosting and an angelfood cake. The yellow cake and frosting came our quite well. The batter whisks seemed to be the right attachments, and creamed butter and mixed the cake as well as our old Sunbeam Mixmaster. I'm not sure why some people are claiming you can only do bread in the Bosch - it was very competent with the cake (from scratch, though I didn't grind the wheat for the cake flour, don't have a mill and the Blendtech doesn't give me really the fineness of the flour I would need).

The Angelfood cake went well with the french whisks - they do whip really really well. In fact, they can overwhip which is why I use the batter whisks for standard cakes. The only problem was folding in the flour at the end. The Bosch does not have a slow / fold speed for folding in flour, and it is difficult working around the center post to fold stuff in. The cake ended up falling a bit - I think because I had to fiddle around too much to fold in the flour. The Angelfood cake tasted great, but was heavier than I would have liked. The simple fix I think is to pour the mix into another bowl for the folding by hand. This is the one task where the Sunbeam style regular glass bowl is absolutely better - you can just take it off the mixer and do the hand folding. (Also, the Sunbeam bowls are really really nice heavy glass - I still use them all the time, just not for mixing. So if you want a cheaper mixer, look at the Sunbeam mixmaster - just be aware it's a mid powered mixer and doesn't do bread or attachments.)

All in all, I am still very happy with the Bosch, I recommend it to anyone who wants a step up from a basic mixer. It still excels at pretty much all of the tasks I've set it so far.

My mother had an old hand mixer for forever and while it worked OK, it wasn't great for anything. When it finally began to die about 10 years ago, my father and I decided she should get an upgrade, and went looking at stand mixers. While I was somewhat awed by the KitchenAid, $370 for a mixer was well out of our budget at the time and we weren't sure it would really be that great.

We ended up purchasing a nice Sunbeam mixer for about $70 with two glass bowls (one small and one large). The bowls spin by friction from a plastic piece on the end of one of the beaters which then sits against the bottom/wall of the bowl. The head tilts back to get the bowls on and off. The Mixer has 10 speeds.

This was a nice purchase and it works well enough for doing cake batters and other light mixes. However, it's not a heavy duty mixer like I imagined the KitchenAid to be, and as a basic stand mixer, no attachments. This really wasn't a problem until my mother recently started gardening much more heavily and doing heavier mixes like zucchini bread, or wanting an attachment or device to strain skins and seeds from tomatoes. Recently the bowls started sticking and that proved interesting to track down. After ~ 10 years, it seemed like it was an opportune time for an upgrade.

I started looking online for a KitchenAid that I thought we'd always wanted. I picked out the KitchenAid Pro 500 at $450 on Amazon. Then I started reading the reviews. These pretty much scared me off. It seemed that while it did well at the same things the Sunbeam did (small to mid size cake batters etc), it tended to overheat or burn out or strip gears on heavier tasks like bread. This made me wonder how much it could run the strainer attachment or any others. Plus, if the reviews were right, why would I pay $370+ more than another Sunbeam to do the same tasks?

I did some more research in case there was some anti-kitchenaid targeted negative campaign on Amazon (not likely, but possible I guess). I found the Yahoo group Mixer-Owners which discussed extensively the (according to them) three main types/brands (and each is apparently quite different to use):

• KitchenAid
• Bosch Universal Plus
• Electrolux DLX

The list confirmed what the Amazon reviews said, if you made heavy breads or used taxing attachments, KitchenAid would only cover using it for 2 Minutes or so at a time, and you were likely to burn it out. Well, that was a letdown to say the least. They also said that the KitchenAids were quite heavy. We put the Sunbeam away after each use, and don't really want to struggle with a mixer. No KitchenAid for me then, I wanted something stronger than the Sunbeam!

So, per the suggestions of the Yahoo list, I started researching the Electrolux DLX and Bosch Universal Plus. Both were generally loved by their owners, and each could handle heavy loads. However, the DLX had a reputation (and there were several very frustrated threads on the list) of being quite a bit of a learning curve to use. It is very different from the Sunbeam or Kitchenaid with a bowl scraper and roller you're supposed to set or configure depending on what and how much you're mixing. It's also reported to be somewhat heavy. So, because I didn't want a complicated mixer you could take years trying to understand, I decided to go with the Bosch.

I've had the Bosch Universal Plus 800w (vs KitchenAid 525W in the Pro) for a few weeks now. It's nice and light, with suction cup feet to hold it to the counter instead of dead weight. It seems well designed, and in the mixing tasks we've set it, it's done amazing. I got the Cookie Paddles as an extra on special. I paid $420 for the mixer, the food processor attachment, the Cookie Paddles and the Batter Whisks. This was cheaper than just the KitchenAid mixer I was looking at, so it seemed like a good deal to me.

If you look at the Bosch Universal Plus online, you'll see it has a stationary bowl, with a cover with the drive coming up from the bottom of the bowl. There are two whisks that rotate around the center shaft and spin as they rotate. This may seem like it requires a lot of "getting used to", but I really haven't seen that. You can run it with the cover off, just the splash guard or fully covered. The metal drive shaft connects to a metal receptacle, the bowl locks on the drive, and you sort of plonk on the top of the shaft what sort of beater you want. The Dough Hook is all metal and one piece. The whisks have a plastic drive and hook on to that. The Cookie Paddles have a metal drive which you can use for the whisks too if you want - but you don't get that without the add on of the Cookie Paddles.

The food processor attachment is quite small, and fits on the high speed drive instead of the high torque drive that runs the mixer bowl. It seems to work OK, but it is so fast that you can't really chop with it, and I'm not sure I'll end up using it much. I might just get the "slicer/shredder" attachment that goes on the high torque drive and spins slower for the much larger capacity - only it doesn't have the S blade that you might want in a food processor. I was hoping the Universal Plus might (with appropriate attachments) replace our old food processor, but this small attachment isn't going to. May have to consider a Cuisinart or some such. We'll see and I'll post updates.

The mixing bowl is quite large, ~6.5 quarts is claimed. I've done frosting with the whisks, mashed potatoes with the Cookie Paddles (amazing really, much easier than by hand) and bread with the dough hook. The whisks work as expected, with a warning from the Yahoo list that if you do cake mix (I haven't yet), you want to beat less time than the recipe calls for to not over beat (whatever that means). The bread hook is pretty amazing, it seems to knead the dough and aerate it such that you only have to let it rise once and don't have to punch it down - at least this is true with White Bread. The small Bosch recipe I found on the website:
http://www.mykitchencenter.com/recipes.cfm
makes ~ 5 loves of white bread. This is a lot of bread at once, but it's actually quite quick and easy to do. We put in the warm water, yeast and sugar, mixed a bit and waited 10 minutes to proof the yeast. It was foaming, so good! We put in the rest of the ingredients and the stated 5 cups of flour, and set the speed to 1. While that was all mixing together we kept adding flour about a cup at a time till we got to 5.5 cups and it looked like it was pulling the dough away from the bowl (Here we probably should have done the full 6-7 more cups of flour - as opposed to stopping with the 5.5 cups - as the dough turned out a bit sticky still). Then we let it run at speed 1 for 10 minutes kneading the dough.

Then we let it rise near the oven vent to keep it warm for ~ 40 minutes. The recipe said we only needed 20 minutes, but we were having lunch so let it sit longer. This didn't seem to hurt anything. Then we put it in 5 bread pans, and stuck it in the oven for 35 minutes. The bread was done and came out pretty good. I would add a bit more flour next time and maybe cut back the sugar, it seemed somewhat sweet to me.

Clean up for everything has been simple. I put the bowl cover and whisks in the Dish Washer with no problem. I can quickly soak the dough hook (only part not dishwasher safe) and the plastic bowl in hot water and wipe it out with some soapy water. The bowl could go in the dishwasher too, but it's easier to wash in the sink as it's so big. No scrubbing needed yet.

Anyway, so far so good - the Bosch Universal Plus has no problem with mashed potatoes or bread dough, and worked easily for lighter stuff like frosting. The Food Processor isn't amazing, but if you only occasionally need a small amount of stuff chopped, it's fine for that, and you can get the Slicer/Shredder instead if you want bigger amounts sliced etc. The other attachments look good and I plan on getting the Meat Grinder + Berry Press for processing tomatoes next summer.

If you have a cat, you know about litter boxes. The worst part of dealing with a litter box in my opinion is cleaning it out regularly, or dealing with the smell when you don't. Sometimes you want to clean it out after nearly every use. Of course, if you have several cats, this compounds the problem.

I'd tried various odor eating litters with little effect when I came across a LitterMaid at Wal-Mart one day. I went off and did some research and found them getting 3.5-4.5 stars in most online reviews, and the price was $89, so I bought one. I figured the way it cleaned our the litter after every use would be good and make the odor much less with the smelly parts sealed away in a box.

The good parts of the LitterMaid were that it was effective in doing what it advertised. It usually could clean itself and put the "stuff" in the little box. This significantly reduced odor. Cleanup if done appropriately often was just un-clicking the box and throwing it out, and clicking in a new box.

However, there were a bunch of negatives. The first was that you had to use their boxes, and even though some users online said they could re-use the box, I don't see how. That would negate the "easy cleanup". The reason I put that in quotes is that if you have one cat using it, you need to change out the box about every 3 days at most. If you have multiple cats, every day is a must, and sometimes that's not enough. When you wait too long, all the advantages of the LitterMaid go away - you have a mess of it trying to overfill the box and spilling all over, the smell isn't trapped in the box, and it can jam the machine.

Of course, you have to buy the boxes, and with one going every day, that was at best a $1 / day cost in bulk, more if you purchase the boxes retail. There was no point in buying 12 box containers unless you liked going to the store a LOT. Of course, if you buy the 60 box bulk order, you have to have a bunch of room to store it. Not great.

The LitterMaid would also jam or get stuck where it could not get back to the home position (usually due to a little too much litter in the box), and then go into a cycle of just running back and forth forever. This required you unplug the LitterMaid and scoop out some litter, smooth it over and hope it would then be happy.

We also had the LitterMaid die in the first year of ownership. I don't know if 3 cats were too much, or if it wasn't built well. Wal-Mart replaced it under warranty though.

It also was a bit noisy when running.

After the second LitterMaid died in another year and out of warranty, I decided to try something else. I certainly did not want to go back to hand cleaning the litter, but the LitterMaid was only slightly helpful.

I ran into the Litter Robot. At $320 for the device, a bit pricey, but it got got great reviews online, and had a 60 day satisfaction guarantee. While not perfect, it is much better than the LitterMaid.

The first thing is the design is better for most cats, unless you have a very large cat that cannot fit in it. The LitterRobot takes more litter so you're much less likely to overfill, though it can happen.

It doesn't have a belt driven blade that goes across the litter, but instead is a globe device that the whole thing rotates via a gear (much stronger) and then dumps the "stuff" below the device instead of trying to lift it up and out and dump like the LitterMaid. Much less to go wrong here, and working with gravity. This thing jams far less often, about 5 times a year vs 5 times a month with the LitterMaid.

It doesn't use special boxes you have to buy, just a 13 gallon kitchen garbage bag. This is great as they are much cheaper, and you can buy them anywhere from multiple competing manufacturers. It also holds a LOT more stuff than the little boxes in the LitterMaid. You only need to empty it every week even with multiple cats. Emptying it is generally pretty easy. The bag is held up with some rubber grommets, you grab it and pull it free, tie it up and throw it out. Push in new bag.

The Litter Robot is really the best automatic cleaning litter box I've seen. The only negatives I've found is that it makes a lot of noise when running, and that some cats are too large to use it. If they offered a bigger one, I'd probably give it 5 stars, but due to the issue with large cats, I have to give it 4 stars. If your cat can fit in it (up to about a 15lb cat), it will make litter box duty a lot easier.

I've used many washing machines in my life, as I'm sure just about everyone has. From a 30 year old (at the time) Maytag from the 60's to laundromat ones to new GE and Kenmore Elite ones. I'll tell you one thing up front. They all are competent. I don't think you can buy a bad washing machine today in terms of performance. You might only have it last 6 years, but while it works, it works as well for washing clothes as any you could buy.

I've found that the detergent makes far more difference than the machine, though there isn't a lot of range in detergent either. I've preferred liquid detergent, the powered stuff always seems to make a mess for me on the way to the detergent slot or washing chamber in the washing machine. Maybe I'm just clumsy.

In Liquid detergent, there are definitely bad performing ones - generally the very very cheap, no name brand ones and the "eco-friendly" ones. "Eco-friendly" is great, but doesn't seem to get out the stains. Beyond that, any general name brand seems to work fine for me, from All to Purex to Tide to Wisk. I generally get the cheaper ones, and I much prefer the non-scented ones. Recently I've gotten All as I can get the Free and Clear version for $12 / 110 load container at Sams Club. YMMV on how many loads you really get, but it's a lot more detergent than I can get from anyone else at that price. It works as well as Purex and the Consumer Reports "Best" Tide 2x Cold Water - which I did NOT see any benefit to paying more than double what Purex or All costs to use. The clothes came out the same, except they smelled with the Tide perfume.

So, what differences are there in Washing Machines? The main ones I've noticed is durability (the cheap, entry level ones only last about 5-6 years with multiple weekly loads) and features (automatic cycles, detergent holders, automatic stain treat). If you're getting a new one, I recommend at least considering the detergent dispenser, it's a great convenience over waiting for the water to fill up and then manually adding detergent. The auto cycles are nice as well for convenience.

I personally like the Kenmore Elite ones, and that's what I've currently got. The center column has one drawback though, the model I have has some plastic paddles that stick out at the bottom, and if you've got sweat pants or pajamas with string ties, they can get well wrapped around that so it can be difficult to get them out. Also, the washing tub is VERY large, so if you're under about 5' 6" you may strain to reach the bottom, or even need a stool to get clothes from the very bottom. Of course, the large size is also a benefit if you can use it, less loads are necessary.

I generally buy large appliances from Sears, and that's why we always compare the Kenmore's. The reason I buy from Sears? The best customer service from among the chains (Best Buy, Lowes, Home Depot), the cheapest delivery, competent repair centers with reasonable extended warranties (if you like those - I usually don't), and generally competitive prices overall. When I compared for washing machines, we may have saved $80 on the same machine at Lowes over Sears, but the delivery charge as more than double with additional charges because we were "out of area". They were going to nickle and dime us to more than the Sears price. Sears has in our experience just had one flat fee for delivery, setup, and haul away. Lowes and Home Depot charge individually.

I like the Kenmores because in my research, you can often wait for a sale (or a sale was always on when I went to buy, so maybe the sale price is actually the real price - it's hard to tell with retail stores now adays) to get the price very competitive with others in the class, and they have better features or design compared to, say, Frigidaire or Whirlpool for the same price. However, in the case of washers, there's no performance reason I've seen to prefer any manufacturer, it's just aesthetics and convenience features.

I've used many vacuums in my life, and had more or less decent luck with them till about 6 years ago. The inexpensive Hoover my family had when I was a child worked well for basically 10 years. My grandmother had a Kirby she got on sale that runs to this day, over 20 years.

The problem began when we started needing to replace the Hoover. We tried several vacuums in the $100-$200 dollar range and found that they all wore out in 2 years or failed to work well at all. The final Bissell had a great idea in a removable canister that plugged into the upright, but this had a major issue for my father at the time, basically it was quite heavy. He had trouble moving around 20lb machines. So I started researching a replacement.

I looked at commonly available Bissel, Hoover, Dyson, Kirby, and all were 20 - 30lbs. It seemed that heavier was considered better in the upright vacuum market. Then I checked out Oreck. Their products were at the upper range price wise(except for Kirby), so I was a bit skeptical. Their use of infomercials also worried me.

However, they did have one thing that let me compare them, local stores where I could actually use one before buying. This allowed me to compare to the various brands at Sears where I could also use them before buying. As an aside, this is one reason I wouldn't just go to Wal-mart to buy unless I'd checked out the vacuum beforehand somewhere else.

The Oreck XL 21 seemed to live up to the advertising - very light at ~8 lbs, easy for my father to maneuver and in their demos well able to pick up dust. The different thing about the Oreck was that it didn't have onboard tools, instead they sold a combo with a cannister vacuum. This was actually fine with me as that was why we had the Bissel before - we also wanted a cannister vac.

I ended up purchasing the Oreck XL 21 and the Ironman vacuum. I can honestly say it's the best vacuum purchase I've ever made and the best overall compared to the ones I've used extensively. The only one that compared was the Kirby which lost out due to being over 2x the price, having a much shorter warranty, and being 4-5x heavier.

The Oreck local service is great where I live, and they fix any issues in the store. Their yearly service (that came with the product - no additional charge) restores the vacuum to like new each time. I fully expect the upright to last the full 21 years of the warranty, if only because they will fix it if anything goes wrong. Oreck no longer offers the 21 year warranty unfortunately, but they do still offer a 10 year one, and that is fully equivalent in included service, and is longer than other comparable vacuums at the price point.

The Ironman is amazing. I've never had a vacuum hose have such airflow and power. I've used it to clean cars as it's almost as powerful as the stand alone pay vacs at car washes. I've used it to super compress SpaceBags. I've used it to pick up small pine branches after removing a Christmas tree, and seen it pick one up to the end of the tube, and snap it in half and then suck the pieces into the bag. The only downside I see is that it only had a 3 year warranty.

You might worry about getting the Oreck "lock in" for the bags, but it's not a big deal. They ship them, and you can pick them up at local stores. The upright bags are significantly larger than competitors we had used, and are far more convenient than the previous bagless vacs we had. We don't have to empty them (and deal with the dust flying out of the container when we dumpted it in the trash) every time we want to vacuum. We went from emptying every time we vacuumed to changing the bag once a quarter on average. They last so long that the price is actually quite inexpensive. Obviously YMMV here, but we vacuum twice a week and have LOTS of pet hair.

The add-on optional parts and value ads are of varying use. We liked the beater brush add on to the ironman, but it's jammed up on us twice in 3 years. The carpet powder is good if you use it often and it's basically maintenance of the carpet, but it's not going to replace steam cleaning, and it's a bit expensive. You may want to check out other brands of similar power cleaner or just rent / hire a steam cleaner. Their pet stain cleaner is also a bit pricy, works well enough, but is somewhat more dangerous than competitors. I need good ventilation and rubber gloves to use it. I suggest comparing other products.

I have heard poor reviews of the entry level Orecks and I cannot personally speak to them. If you are considering one, I'd consider the top of the line for a similar warranty, service plan and experiance. It's not likely worth the $200 for a 1 year warranty Oreck.

I think everyone knows in their gut that American Cell Phone plans from the major vendors are a rip off. But due to psychology, they end up paying far more than is necessary much of the time. Of course, the comparison between various companies and plans is extremely complex. It's actually intentionally almost impossible to do, so the companies make more money. See Priceless for explanation, on this and so many other ways psychology sets prices rather arbitrarily - and often not in your best interest.

Now, depending on your use pattern and amount of money you want to spend, many people are finding pre-paid phones to be a much greater value than the major players offer. So much so that major vendors like Verizon and Sprint are running their own pre-paid offerings, but generally at rip-off rates though.

Now, I can only comment on a few services I've used personally, but let me say this. If you're in the market for pre-paid, there's usually a downside right? If you live in the eastern US, Verizon often has, by far, the best network and coverage, but Verizon's prepaid plan is really expensive. I had settled on Virgin Mobile, but they use Sprint's network, so often have spotty coverage and bad call quality.

Enter the little known, but growing PagePlus. These guys so far are amazing. You can use any unactivated Verizon phone, and can get most CDMA phones flashed to their service. They use the Verizon Pre-Paid network, which is pretty much the entire Verizon network that I can see from the maps.

You can do the entire setup on-line - generally check on e-bay (oddly enough).

For voice/text use they are quite reasonable. Calls run you $0.10 - $0.06 a minute depending on bulk purchase and amount of talking done (this is the only shady thing, they only advertise $0.10 a minute, but I've seen them charge less on a somewhat random schedule). You only have to add $10 every 119 days - basically every 4 months. There is a $0.50 a month charge, but this basically means you can pay ~$2.50 a month if you have this as your emergency only phone for calling AAA or such - much better than the AARP deals for your senior family and friends.

Texting is a cheap $0.08 a text. They also offer bulk deals for $29.99 a month for 1200/1200 minutes/texts and $39.99 a month for Unlimited Talk/Text. The only place they lose out if if you want to have unlimited Data, you would be better with StraightTalk, but I can't speak to their service as I haven't used them.

So if you talk / text, this is a way to save a bunch of money.

So what's the downside? There's no customer service - it's all pretty much online website stuff and e-bay. Theres no support for unlimited data, though I do understand you can hook up a blackberry and surf at the per KB/MB data prices which are decent. You pretty much have to get a used phone for reasonable, or e-bay a non subsidized unlocked phone.

So far (2 months in) I give them 4 out of 5 stars. They're not Verizon with all the glitz, but they are the Verizon network at really cheap prices. I'm not paid for this, just a satisfied customer.

So now ISPs in the US want to cap data transfers after years of unlimited use. And charge overages. It seems they want to kill the internet to me... Now I know all the arguments, I've read DSLR for years. ISPs are oversubscribed etc...

I understand that ISPs can't provide dedicated bandwidth to every user at anything like costs that home users will pay. What I don't understand is how caping is going to help. Caping doesn't alleviate conjestion - network management/QoS/throttling does. Personally I'm ok with QoS during heavy use times. I understand that if everyone is on at once, the net will slow down for everyone. Caps don't propose to try and slow down access during heavy use, they will just front load the slowdowns at the beginning of the month before everyone has used up their caps.

The worst part of course is some ISPs claiming to cap at 5GB. This is insane - I'll go back to dial up and get more data, and pay less every month. Most of my bandwidth use is in background moving of files / e-mail. Much of my other use is forums - mainly text. Oh, and I use Opera so I can of course deal with slow internet. $10/month is going to drop my bill, and back to lowest phone plan... just for the net. So they go from $100 a month to $30 a month... real way to make money or deal with internet use.

I'm also ok with the arguments that users who use more should pay more, but if we're going to do that, what's good for the goose is good for the gander - i.e. lets bill by the GB. No $45 a month to start, lets have an equivelent line fee (maybe up to $10 to keep DSL going) and some real cost of GB / month. Maybe up to $1.50 / GB though that sounds like highway robbery, it's what we pay at work, so probably reasonable to get the bandwidth out to the rural area. However, I will need a couple things - one a official billing bandwidth meter, like I get with the electric company, and a way to block stuff I don't want, like port scans, from spending my money. Maybe something like the telephone where you don't pay for incoming calls or the like...

Anyway, 5GB is absolutely useless for the internet now adays, and I think will lead to more unpatched computers etc... Bad all around.

I was listening to a Talk of the Nation podcast from NPR today, and they were talking about an interesting idea. As we all know, Politics often seems to end up with the inexplicable occuring on the national stage. Partially it's the system, I think there have been many discussions pointing out the problems with our Electoral system. But there's another problem, and it's not "the system".

The big problem is identified in "The Big Sort" and elsewhere online as well. It's simply that people like hanging out with like minded people. We like other people like us. And it's not really an amazing insight at all - why wouldn't you want to hang out with people who like the same hobbies, books, games, TV shows et cetera... More obviously, what would you do with a group who was into something that you cannot stand or at best find terminally booring?

The problem of course is slightly more subtle. I can offer an anectadote. I don't listen to the radio. I can't stand the ads or the runs of music I hate. So I listen to podcasts or CDs. This leaves me with an interesting problem though. When I've gotten tired of a band, or there's a dry spell in podcast topics I care about, how do I find out about a new band?

To take this back around to politics, if you're hanging out with people who agree with you politically, and are going online to the sites that you agree with, you end up in a similar echo chamber. So, first, you don't know alternate points of view (and I'm not talking the two major parties. Many people have never heard of Ron Paul, or only know Ralf Nader as the person who lost Gore the election). So you have two or poentially only one worldview you can see issues through. You never get to critically evaulate your positions, and you never even know some positions exist.

Then you end up being forced to pick one of the two parties, and take the bad with the good. You may end up taking a position on Abortion that you don't like for a position on the economy you think is the most important. You end up picking a "Team".

The final endgame is you end up not understanding why people might pick another team. And then how can you ever find political common ground when you can't comprehend why people are following a different team.

Well, after not being on except at work for 2 months, I'm back, with a new, better PC. And as part of that, I've evaulated my necessary software. Some suprising things have changed in the 2 years since I built my last PC. Some of my old "must-have" software is gone, much remains. Security has changed quite a bit in recent years, as has my experiance working in a "real" IT job doing real Systems Administration.

So, what's new? New hardware - Gone SATA finally. XP installs fine. New ASUS mobo - Striker II formula. I'm also back in the Intel camp after what, 8 years? Core 2 Quad 6600 - nice chip, cheap, overclockable. Still nVidia though, 9800GTX 512MB - screaming video card. Great for my 24" widescreen, once I get that installed (have to clean my desk...). I'm also moving to a RAID-Z2 storage array I've built, so 2 of my HDs are out of my PC, with more to follow if all goes well. Looking at 5TB storage once done. On OpenSolaris! Hopefully is SOLID!

Software:
NOD32 - never thought I'd say it, but gone. Lost in the AV-Comparitives, costs $$.
Antivir - IN! Free, rates as good in everything I've seen (and in personal use) as NOD32, so why pay? Plus still just an AV, not trying to be a web proxy (NOD32 v3 sucks for using a third party firewall).
Outpost - Gone. v3 was OLD and newer versions DID NOT get good reviews. After months of testing, Comodo Firewall Pro 3 is solid currently, has HIPS (something I was sad to see go with the death of Process Guard) and really fills in for blocking trojans and just controlling your PC well.

Those are the big changes. Oh, and Opera 9.51 is out and I'm lovin it!