Well, I’m on Vista 64, working on getting things up and running again. I was afraid I was going to have to go find a new wireless card, but Vista64 at least had a basic driver built-in which made up for the lack of one provided by the manufacturer. There have been a couple other little glitches I noticed, but for the most part everything seems to be working pretty well.

The sad part is, with a clean OS installed and nothing else running, Vista 64 takes up 1.12GB of memory. Good thing I added that pair of 1GB sticks.

One thing about Lich King, though (or more specifically, WoW 3.0) is that it takes up a ton more memory, assumably due to the new graphics extras, and more precaching. 1.25GB, to be exact.

This really hurts on my Vista 32 machine with 2GB of RAM.

So, I just ordered a 64-bit media from Microsoft and another couple of 1GB sticks… hopefully that will speed things up a bit. It sounds like driver and application support for Vista 64 is close to parity with Vista 32, so hopefully I won’t have any issues with that.

Well, I decided I needed a vacation, and since Maggie really wasn’t able to take one also, just decided to coincide it with my other favorite pastime.

Blizzard really did a good job with this one. The environments and storylines are very well put together, and they seem to have been much more prepared for this than they were for the last expansion; realm stability is very good and bugs seem to be few and far between.

Although at the moment I am taking the time to write this post as I am unable to get connected to my realm. Oh well.

I’m getting really close to re-enabling registered-only comments or at least a captcha; I’ve had an issue lately with some spam comments getting through that aren’t easily caught by Akismet.

We’ll see how it goes the next couple of days.

Well, it looks like the battle over Proposition 8 is going to go back to the courts. And so it should.

We starting seeing it when Bush took office (at least in our political lifetime… I’m sure the term came up before then). “Activist judges.” Our current administration tries to make us believe that these so-called activist judges are evil, and they are to the detriment of society, because they go against the will of the electorate.

I’ll admit, I used to share that opinion, but now I realize that the role of an independent judiciary is to protect the minority from the majority rule. I find this especially important in California, where the supreme state legal document can be amended by simple majority vote. 50.1% of people in California get to make the final decision about how 100% of people should live their lives? Seriously?

Just look back at the past. How would the African-American civil rights battle have turned out without the intervention of the courts? Can you imagine what society would have been like if Brown v. Board of Education had never happened? We certainly would not have just elected the first African-American president. One might argue that shifting public opinion would have caused change in the legislative branch, but I hold that, especially on such a hot-button issue, legislators would have only taken it just far enough to get re-elected, and would never have made the all-encompassing statement that the Supreme Court did.

Thankfully the framers of the US constitution saw the possibility of abuse such as what is occuring in California right now, and not only made the judiciary as independent of politics as possible (life terms, non-elected), but designed the constitution to be changeable only in the most dire of circumstances, requiring a two-thirds vote of both houses and the approval of the legislatures of 38 states. I would not be opposed to federal ballot initiatives, but at the constitutional level? That’s just calling for a crisis, which is exactly what is about to happen in California.

I just hope those “activist” judges remember their purpose. Protect the minority.

And I thought California Prop 8 was bad. Arkansas voters approved this piece of drivel last night:

BE IT ENACTED BY THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF ARKANSAS:

Section 1: Adoption and foster care of minors.
(a) A minor may not be adopted or placed in a foster home if the individual seeking
to adopt or to serve as a foster parent is cohabiting with a sexual partner outside of
a marriage which is valid under the constitution and laws of this state.
(b) The prohibition of this section applies equally to cohabiting opposite-sex and
same-sex individuals.

Section 2: Guardianship of minors.
This act will not affect the guardianship of minors.

Section 3: Definition.
As used in this act, “minor” means an individual under the age of eighteen (18) years.

Section 4: Public policy.
The public policy of the state is to favor marriage, as defined by the constitution and laws
of this state, over unmarried cohabitation with regard to adoption and foster care.

Section 5: Finding and declaration.
The people of Arkansas find and declare that it is in the best interest of children in need
of adoption or foster care to be reared in homes in which adoptive or foster parents are
not cohabiting outside of marriage.

Section 6: Regulations:
The Director of the Department of Human Services, or the successor agency or agencies
responsible for adoption and foster care, shall promulgate regulations consistent with this
act.

Section 7: Prospective application and effective date.
This act applies prospectively beginning on January 1, 2009.

Not only is this a thinly-veiled attack against the rights of LGBT families to raise children, it’s an attack on the quality of life of children as well. How can anybody honestly believe that growing up with two (or more) loving, caring people who happen to be in a non-traditional relationship is worse for a child than growing up in a broken home or an orphanage? It’s completely ludicrous.

I cannot believe California passed Proposition 8. Beyond my stance on marriage which I’m sure most of you know (if not, the gist of it is that in my opinion, the word “marriage” is one of overwhelmingly religious connotation, and as such should be stricken from the word of law. Marriages should be left to the church; let lawmakers worry about households and civil unions), the fact that five million people in an overwhelmingly liberal place like California can vote to restrict the fundamental rights of others just boggles my mind. It’s like Jim Crow all over again.

There is absolutely no reason on this earth any two people who choose to cannot set up a household and receive the same benefits by law that any other two people receive. If you don’t want to call it marriage, that’s fine, but denying the financial and legal benefits is a slap in the face to people in this country who work hard to build a family and make a life for themselves, and is something needs to be rectified immediately.

I saw a comment earlier today on Facebook that I find entirely appropriate for this situation: “A closed mind is a wonderful thing to lose.”

So, our landline hasn’t been working in about two weeks because maintenance screwed up the wiring on the intercom box (which stupidly links in with the phones).

They said it was going to be fixed last week, but wasn’t (surprise surprise). I’ve decided I’m not really going to get mad about it until after tomorrow though. There is one benefit to not having the landline the past few weeks…