Okay, so you may have noticed that I haven’t been writing any posts for a while.  Sorry about that.  Believe it or not, I have actually written some, I just haven’t uploaded them.  Why not?  Oh goodness is that a long story…

But basically it comes down to incompetence at The Landmark at Hatchery Hill apartments in Fitchburg.  Do you remember when they were in hot water?  Well, more of the same.

Though, admittedly, it wasn’t all their fault.  But they certainly didn’t help the situation any.

So here’s the story, as short as I can make it:

When my wife and I moved in, one of the many (36) items clearly wrong with the apartment in our initial inspection was that the living room phone jack was clearly broken.  It was bashed in and still contained half of a phone wire jammed/stuck into the jack where someone had obviously just yanked out a phone cord while it was still plugged in.  Yes, it was that obvious to see something was seriously wrong from a simple visual inspection.  One that clearly had never been done by management before we moved in, even though the manager handed us an inspection sheet with everything marked as “okay”.

Anyway, so our living room phone jack was DOA from our move-in date.

So when the AT&T U-Verse technician hooked up our internet and cable, he had to use a bedroom phone jack, even though the main TV, two computers, and network printer were all in the living room.  But he was just a cable guy, not a wiring technician.  So he couldn’t fix the living room phone jack.  That was the responsibility of the apartment complex to fix.

This also meant that we had to have a wireless AT&T U-Verse TV box in the living room.  Which just wasn’t working.  I suspect that perhaps in many homes it would work just fine, but in an apartment complex where the wireless channels are all highly jam-packed, the airwaves are just too muddled.  The result was that the TV signal in our living room, our primary TV, was quite often dropping out.  If we were lucky in maybe a minute or two the box would eventually realize it had an issue and reset itself.  (And then in another minute it’d finally finish rebooting.)  If we weren’t lucky, it wouldn’t realize and we’d have to get up and unplug the bugger to reboot it, because the box would get so FUBARed that you couldn’t even use the menu to reboot it.  And worse, because though not officially supported, you can easily run a network jack from the wireless box and run all of your other network devices (like two computers and a network printer) off of that line, that also meant that our internet was frequently going down as well.

Clearly, that wasn’t working.

So after repeated attempts to get the apartment complex to fix our living room phone jack, so that we could make the living room the primary line in for AT&T’s U-Verse modem/router, theyfinally sent someone over to look at the phone jack.  And that wasafter we had to convince them that it was their responsibility and that we did not want to assume liability by fixing it ourselves, as management first suggested.

And then, when they finally got a technician involved, believe it or not, in no uncertain terms we were told to send them pictures of it.  Because they clearly had no idea what a phone jack that hooks up to a DSL modem for ethernet was?  That was already a Big Red Flag.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, the technician comes over, plays with the jack, and leaves.  And I don’t mean fixes everything, tells my wife (who was the one there for his first visit) that it’s fixed, and then proves it to her or anything.  No, I mean he monkeyed with the jack and then just disappeared during one of his many trips to the main junction box and back and simply never came back.

And when I got home from work, what did I find?  That everything was fixed?  Nope!  Quite the opposite.  Instead now not a single phone jack in the whole of our apartment was working.  So not only could we not finally hook up the AT&T U-Verse modem/router in the living room like we were supposed to be able to do by this point, but now not even the bedroom jack workaround was working.  Nothing was working.  It was a Friday night and we were now officially without TV or internet.  And all attempts to contact the technician or the apartment management to resolve this fell on deaf ears.  It wasn’t until Monday morning, when anyone bothered to check their messages, that we finally got anyone even willing to listen.

Late Monday afternoon the same idiot technician is sent back out to our apartment.  This time my wife calls me from work so that I could come home to talk to him as he works to make sure things get fixed correctly this time.  (Since I’m the techy one, so I know how to speak geek.)  I even had my PC hooked straight up to the router so that I could reboot the modem on command as soon as he tried anything.  Still no resolution.  Very uncommunicative and extremely unprofessional, the electrician insisted that everything was in working order and that the problem had to be outside the apartment.  And that we had to contact AT&T to have them re-activate our cable service because this was all their fault.  Since nothing was wrong in the wiring.  According to him.

Now, I knew that couldn’t possibly be true because before he touched anything, we at least had a working bedroom jack.  Where as now we didn’t.  The only factor between those two points was him.  He must have screwed something up somewhere.  But just like the first time with my wife, on one of his many trips to the main box, he just vanished and never returned.

The problem was most assuredly not resolved.

But clearly he thought it was.

And once again, attempts to contact both the technician’s manager and apartment management got nowhere.  We were still without working TV or internet.  And clearly at this rate, would never get any.  Not even back to the way things weren’t really workout out before with the wireless signal coming from the bedroom.

So I was forced to take things into my own hands.  I cracked open the living room jack.

Cat5 used as phone wiring.  Interior wiring was clearly blue and orange pairs as every jack in the apartment used that scheme.  Exterior line … unknown.  In fact I wasn’t even sure which wire was the outside line.  But one thing was clear, that the living room phone jack was apparently where outside met inside.  Strange.  Most apartments have that in a separate junction box in a bedroom closet.  But not The Landmark at Hatchery Hill.  Oh no.  All done in the living room jack, clearly.  Well no wonder the idiot screwed up the whole apartment.  All it’d take was incorrectly connecting the outside to the inside line there.  Which obviously is what he did.

And I say obviously because when I opened up the living room jack, it was immediate and undeniable proof that the technician had no idea whatsoever what he was doing.  Well, that or he was intentionally trying to break things.  But more likely the former.

He used those B Connectors, beanies, those long blue sheaths with the little teeth inside that you clamp over the wires, to make his splices.  But he had stripped and twisted the wires together first, as if he was using caps.  The result meant that the teeth in the B Connectors meant to cut through the insulation and lightly into the wire – with no insulation in play anymore – had just cut deeply into the wires.  And because the wires were twisted, the beanies didn’t have many places to grab.  So as a result two of the four splices that he’d made had broken apart, the wires so damaged that they just snapped and fell free, no more connection.  A 50% splicing failures.  And as it just so happened, of the two lines through the apartment, it was one from each pair that was broken.  So not a single pair from the outside line to the inside wiring had both a positive and negative connection.  There’s no way in the world that either line had ever worked after he had left.  So there’s no possible way that he could have even checked either connection.

So he used his tools incorrectly.  He used B Connectors instead of UR connectors (like were used all through the apartment).  He replaced the living room two-jack box with a single-jack box.  And half of his splices had been broken by the time he left so that not a single positive/negative pair was left intact.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, four, count them four lines of the inside wiring were stripped of their insulation so that they could ground on each other or on the metal of the box and short circuit … if any of them had been working.  I’m not sure if that’s a fire hazard, but it certainly can’t be to code, let alone safe or right.

Oh, he also removed the short lead from the wall wiring to the jack panel that allows you to pull the jack panel away from the wall a bit without disturbing the wiring in the wall.  Because I guess that was one set of wires too many for him to work with?

Thank goodness they’d made me take pictures to send them before they started work, because it was those pictures that helped me to figure out how to fix things at least a little.  I could easily identify the outside line from the inside line because the outside line was using the green pair as the main line.  (Where as inside the apartment, blue and orange pairs were used for the main and secondary lines.)  So that made it stand out which one was supposed to be the outside line.

What had the genius done?  I guess he didn’t like mismatched colors.  Even though he had access to the outside box, so he knows which color pairs are coming into the apartment.  So he spliced the outside green pair to the outside brown pair.  And then the outside blue to the inside blue, and outside orange to the inside orange.  (Or, as I said, tried to, because both of his blue and orange pair splices had one line broken, so neither worked.)  So not only had he not spliced wires together, but he had tried to splice the wrong wires from the outside to the inside.  So even if he hadn’t been completely incompetent at splicing, he still had the wrong lines.

Now, I’m not sure what the outside line colors were supposed to be.  I know green was the AT&T U-Verse line.  But there’s two lines and I couldn’t tell what the secondary line was for certain.  I thought I had it, but now I’m not so sure.  But in that we don’t use the secondary line for anything, that doesn’t really matter for us.  The important thing was, I was able to fix the correct green U-Verse outside line to our primary blue inside line.  So now our TV and internet work again!

But I didn’t have the right tools.  I don’t do this for a living after all.  All I have are some old-school caps and some electrical tape.  I also used the electrical tape to fix the insulation stripped from various inside wires to prevent the potential short circuiting problems.  I doubt either fix is to code.  And at some point I’ll probably have to fix things properly.

Because, again, this isn’t supposed to be my responsibility.  But I can’t live without TV and internet indefinitely while management pulls their head out of their behind.  Allegedly, we’re supposed to have a proper technician come in to clean up the mess.  One day.  In theory.  That’s what we were promised the last time my wife contacted the apartment manager.  So I’m not supposed to be the one fixing these wires permanently.  What I did is just supposed to be a kludge to get us to the point where a professional fixes things The Right Way.

But now it’s been a week and a half and still no pro, nor word on one.  I’m pretty sure that once again, for the umpteenth time, the apartment manager has promised something and then just either neglected it or forgotten all about it.  So we’ll have to nag him for another week or two until he finally schedules someone.

If he ever does.

I may be making a trip to RadioShack shortly for a couple of UR connectors and be fixing this on my dime if I ever want it fixed right.  Because the management at The Landmark At Hatchery Hill is apparently just as incompetent as the electrician they hired.  And at this rate, even if they bring in another “pro”, will they even do the job right?  How can I possibly trust them?

And no, this isn’t the only story of such incompetence here.  There are plenty more.  This is just the reason why I haven’t been updating InsanIT.net lately, because I haven’t had TV or internet!

And keep in mind, I’m a computer programmer.  I don’t fix phone lines for a living.  And yet I’ve already shown far more competence and skill than the jerk they hired to fix my phone jack.  All I wanted was a phone jack fixed.  There was no need whatsoever to mess with the connection from the outside line to the inside lines, even if they just happened to be in the same box.  Just replace the phone jack.  That’s all he had to do!  Instead he takes out every single line in the apartment and then declares it’s all working inside, so it must be a problem on the outside, with AT&T.

Moron!

So anywhen, yeah, I’m finally back.  And some of the articles I wrote and cached locally, maybe I’ll even get around to publishing.  Sorry for the downtime.

And keep in mind, if I hadn’t kludged together a fix myself, things would still be down.  All for gross incompetence followed by patent negligence in replacing a single phone jack that should have been fixed before we even moved into the apartment, because it was very clearly broken by a former tenant.

Whatever you do, don’t move in to The Landmark At Hatchery Hill unless you enjoy this level of mismanagement.

I know, I know, I haven’t been keeping up with my blog.  Getting settled in has been more of a challenge than I expected.  And it may be a bumpy road for a while yet.

One such unexpected bump was this:

Landmark At Hatchery Hill – In Hot Water

Sunday my wife went to take a bath, only to come back into the room to find the above.  That’s a real photo of the muck that was coming out of our hot water tap.  When we called maintenance they were less than expedient in looking into the matter.  They kept trying to downplay it like there wasn’t actually any problem, that everything was okay.  No, it was not okay.  I have never seen water that bad.  They tried to blame it on construction, but I’m sorry, if it had been construction we’d have seen it in the cold water at some point.  I drink a lot of water.  The taps run pretty regularly.  But there was no sign of that in the cold water.  Even after my wife convinced then to send someone to look into it, she was told “first thing Monday morning”, but they didn’t show up to investigate until after 1pm.

Fortunately sometime during the night the taps cleared up so that by Monday we could use hot water again.  But clearly, something went wrong with a hot water heater.

Just one of the many lovely things about living at the Landmark at Hatchery Hill.

So it was news the world over, Steve Jobs (of Apple … as opposed to some other Steve Jobs I guess) shed off his mortal coil. Or something like that. Dude died. Kicked the bucket. Bought the farm. You get the idea.

To anyone who was surprised … WTF?! He’s been sick as a dog for so many years now it was getting ridiculous. How could you not see it coming? Time and again he was failing to do his job because of his ill health, but he still wouldn’t step down. When he finally did step down, read between the lines man! He must have been darn near comatose to do that. He should have done it years ago. So the surprise was sorely lacking. There was no astonishment to be found there. Steve Jobs had been dying forever. Sooner or later the bastard had to win.

So it was no surprise. It shouldn’t have been to anyone. Or at least anyone who even remotely cared enough to learn even a smidgeon about who Steve Jobs even was.

Shame on anyone pretentious enough to lament upon it being any kind of unexpected happening.

And speaking of shame on folks, shame on pretty much the rest of you too. It wasn’t just days (a day?) before on G4’s Attack of the Show that I was chuckling at the robust honesty of an interviewee who was going on and on about how Apple doesn’t innovate, and has never innovated. To listen to the Cuperatti, you sure wouldn’t know it. But it’s incredibly grossly true. You can even look at Apple’s new iPhone 4S. Look at what features it doesn’t have. Near Field Communication? Nah. No NFC there. Heck, simple 4G? Nope. Even if 4G isn’t even really 4G, let alone something as almost close to 4G as 4G LTE, Apple won’t have any of that advanced technology in their latest phones.

Why not? Because that’s just not what Apple does.

Apple does not innovate. Apple will only work with a tried and true technology. And only when it is absolutely ready for prime time, with no hitches left to trip over, will they finally get around to speccing it to go into their next product.

And I have no problems with this! There is absolutely nothing wrong with not innovating. To make a solid, stable, rock-solid product is something that more companies should be working so hard at doing. Apple should not be the shining example of dependability.

But the simple fact is, new is not dependable, and Apple does not do new.

If you live in a sad little technology-deprived world you might not realize that someone else did it first, but that doesn’t change the fact that Apple has always been and will always be behind the technology curve, on purpose. It’s their business model. And clearly it is working well for them.

So did Steve Jobs do anything that would actually change our world then?

Well … not much, no.

I’m sorry to say, but the one and only one thing that Steve Jobs really did do, that Apple is good for, is taking a technology that geeks can take a chance on and shoring it up to make it safe and easy to use for the lay(wo)man. The average Joe/Josephine can take an Apple product and use it, maybe even be productive on it and use it well, whereas the same device made months (years?) before by someone cutting edge could only ever be useful/usable in the hands of the nerdiest of nerds. Give or take. More or less. All things being relative.

What Apple, under the direction of Steve Jobs, did, was make old(er) technology usable. They made it possible for everyone and anyone to use Thing A.

They did not invent Thing A.

And they were always way behind the release of the Apple’s version of Thing A from when Thing A actually first hit the world.

But they made Thing A a real pleasure to own instead of a constant point of frustration.

Now, that’s not to say that Apple always made the best version of something either. Others have managed to do a job as good as (and rarely but sometimes even better than Apple did. But what Apple and Steve Jobs did do, was set the bar.  It’s good to set bars.  It takes a lot of talent to constantly be setting bars that the rest of the industry has to try to match or beat.

A perfect example? People rarely even bothered writing books about how to design a GUI for Windows. Why? Because every good Windows GUI designer/programmer looked at how Apple did it, and bought books aimed at Apple GUI design.

So to sum up, Apple and Steve Jobs do not and have never innovated. They have refined. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with that at all! But let’s at least get it right, shall we?

What Steve Jobs did for the world was impressive. His motivation and achievement in making technology usable to anyone no matter how un-geek is very laudable. And out of respect for that great ambition I won’t even go on and on about just how closed and locked Apple is, how much Apple went out of their way to anti-geek their products by locking them down and keeping us nerds from tinkering with them, on them, or for them.  Writing and installing their own software.

Really, I won’t.

Though I will take a moment to ponder just how much of Steve Job’s vision came from that other Steve at Apple. You know, Steve Wozniak.

Still, Steve Jobs had direction, and went with it, and made Apple what it is today. It’s not an Apple that I personally buy products of. Because I don’t like overpaying for last year’s technology no matter how improved the usability of it is.  Especially when it’s so closed. But it is an Apple that is very successful and reached the hearts of many, and that’s A Good Thing.

It’s a direction that I hope Apple can continue to keep without Steve Jobs to guide them.

And I agree with Steve Jobs that technology should be made usable for everyone. That belief is why I specialize in GUI development. Because it is my firm belief that the best algorithm in the world is absolutely meaningless if no one can use the software it is in. And further, that is why I even specialize in technologies like Qt that make good cross-platform software possible. To reach everyone. Not just Windows users. Not just Mac users. Not just Linux users. Everyone. I firmly believe in it. So as much as I may rag on Apple for everything that they do wrong, I still respect them for doing some things right.  You don’t have to agree with every last thing that someone does to respect them.  I even respect their business model.  I can understand it.  I don’t agree with it, but again, adults can do this thing called “agree to disagree”.  After all, what would the world be like if we were all the same?

So kudos and a half to Steve Jobs for wanting to bring technology to all the world, not just to those of us who can program our VCRs. (Well … if we still used VCRs anyway. DVRs have rather made things ridiculously easy to program. One of the few areas where someone else, in this case TiVo, did an Apple.)

But putting water in a trough for any old horse to find is not the same thing as inventing water or innovating animal husbandry. Streams existed first, and smart horses were finding them for years all on their own. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it innovative.

Apple and Steve Jobs didn’t change the world, they just made it easier to live in … for those of you who found it difficult in the first place. And for the rest of us, well, not so much new there.

And let’s face some simple truth here too. Steve Jobs might have been visionary, but he wasn’t always right either. He’s had his share of failures too. As has Apple. I mean MobileMe? Come on! iCloud you not! Again, out of respect, I won’t go into gory details of each and every failure, but we all know they’re there. No one is perfect. He’s only Steve Jobs, not God.

So while I am sorry to see Steve Jobs go, the world is still going to go on just fine. He was an awesome man, but he was just a man, and just one man. And frankly, I rather think there are a lot of even more brilliant people who have done even more for the world. From the use of penicillin in medicine to the observation of gravity, there are far more important people with world-changing lives that have lived, and in many cases are still with us and are still changing the world. Stem cell research will one day become the common cure for so very many things.

So maybe a little perspective is in order, eh? It’s sad. I get it. I even mourn with you. But enough is enough with the overdoing it already. Write about the man that was, not Fantasy Land.

The more I use Windows 7 at work and at home, the less I hate it. I have to give Microsoft credit, after royally flirking up Windows Vista, they came back strong with a real alternative that works out well for most people. Of course due to resource usage issues, Windows 7 still isn’t a suitable replacement for Windows XP in all cases, but for new PCs there’s no reason why you shouldn’t give Windows 7 a shot.

But if there’s one thing that really sets Microsoft Windows apart from Linux, it’s that they get the little things right. It’s not just about making an OS that works (because that should go without saying), but about making an OS that’s smooth. It’s something that while Linux has gotten better at, is still very much in the win column for Microsoft. (Since this is about PCs, I’m not going to bring up the Apple Macintosh, even if these days it is a PC itself, and running a beautified Unix OS no less.)

One feature of Windows 7 that I am wishing I could enjoy more is “pinning”. The concept itself could be a handy time saver. The stupid Start Menu for example, the one that theoretically holds all of your commonly-used applications so that you don’t have to keep hitting “All Programs” to find what you want to run, I could see where in theory that just might work for someone. If it could be populated with shortcuts to the applications that you actually want to use regularly. I don’t know what “logic” fills it, but I use the term “logic” loosely there, as it never seems to grasp what I actually use frequently.

Same for the Windows Explorer shortcut pinned to the taskbar. You can right-click on the shortcut to access a list of frequently used directories. In theory. But, again, the “logic” that fills it somehow completely fails to find what I actually use regularly.  Even though I always browse straight to it!

I don’t know how Microsoft can fail to not recognize what I’m doing, but somehow Windows is oblivious to my actual intent.

Silly Windows.

Which turns an otherwise potentially useful feature into a nuisance instead.

Now, theoretically, there’s a fix for this. In theory you can “pin” the shortcuts that you want into permanent residence at the top of the heap.

In theory.

In practice however, to my knowledge, this can only be done by right-clicking on an item already where you want it to be, and then choosing to pin it there permanently. So in other words, if the bad logic that propagates the lists doesn’t comprehend what you want to shortcut in the first place (and for me it almost never does) then you have no mechanism to use to pin it there to overcome its bad logic.  Which is something like circular logic down the drain.

And it’s really annoying, because nowhere else in the Windows user interface is the option to pin.  Nowhere can you tell it what you want.

You can’t just find the shortcut that you want in the “All Programs” Start Menu and pin that. You can’t just browse to the folder you use all the time in Windows Explorer and pin that. Because that would be easy (for the user) and make sense.

You can’t even manually find some “favorites” list of shortcuts somewhere in your user data and force what you want in there like an advanced user would try to do. Or hack the registry to add your folders to the permanent “pinned” list in Windows Explorer like an extremely advanced user would try to do. For better or worse, that’s not even a way to go about getting around Microsoft’s bad logic.

Frankly, I’m not sure what the solution is to pinning what you want when Windows is too stupid to find it. I don’t know how you can manually open a folder in Windows Explorer on a nearly daily basis and yet not have it show up in your Frequent list, but there you have it.

If you know of a solution though, please, by all means share it with us!

You’ll hopefully have noticed that here on InsanIT.net, I try not to get political. It’s not that I don’t care about politics. I could wax political until cows fly and the pigs come home. I just choose not to because, frankly, there’s just not much that can be said that can do anyone else in the country (world?) any real amount of good. And besides, this blog is dedicated to Information Technology. Short of electronic voting machines, there’s not much that should be said about politics in IT.

But for this Independence Day I thought I might try, just for a moment, to talk about the governance of our country. I thought I’d step back and let loose a rant that’s been struggling to be contained for many a year.

Yes, it’s the run-up to the presidential race already. The politicians are already playing up to the cameras, and to each other, and maybe accidentally to us. They’re preparing for the next presidential election. We’ve already had three years of being stuck between a Barack and a hard place, and before we know it next year will be here and we’ll be deciding if we want more of the same or not. And don’t get me wrong, it’s no judgment of mine upon him. As a person I have nothing against him. I’m even sure that in a time of prosperity, he could have made a great president. But let’s face it, in the time of hardship that he was elected to, for all of his campaign talks of change, he’s been walking loudly and carrying a small stick. He’s spent too much time trying to make everyone happy. (An impossible enough task at the best of times!) And not enough time getting the right things done to make anything better for any of us. The economy is still swirling down the toilet for all his talk.

Yes, the Democrats have failed us.

But, before we go back to the Old Republic, let us take a moment to remember just exactly how we got here in the first place. Did the global economy take down America, or did the failing of the economy of a global superpower (AKA America) destabilize the global economy? I think anyone with even a half-pence has to admit that the village idiot we elected for two terms (well, okay, technically we only elected him for the second term, his first “election” itself a harbinger of Bad Things) did far more harm than good during his stay in the White House. We wouldn’t be in this Epic Fail if it weren’t for him and his.

So lets keep in mind that before the Democrats failed us, the Republicans failed us even worse.

And that, dear readers, is where my point comes in. What this rant is really all about.

This Independence Day, I ask you to take a moment to stop thinking in terms of left and right, blue and red, Democrat or Republican, winged, super-absorbent core, or otherwise. Because let’s face it, both parties, as extremes, have failed us.

And this, dear readers, should really come as no surprise to anyone. Any Zen master could tell you that the universe needs balance and harmony to thrive. Or as your grandma would have said, “Everything in moderation.”

And yet when it comes to the ballot box, we – as a nation – just can’t seem to think “outside the box”. Sadly, most of us don’t even bother to learn about any candidates other than the presidential duos. When most of us vote, IF we vote, we vote simply R or D, not bothering to choose individual people for their actual qualities.

I would say that, collectively, we should be ashamed of ourselves for this laziness… but frankly, I can’t. Because political thinkers have always known that people are sheep. Why should we be ashamed for simply being who we are? Our founding fathers knew it. That’s exactly why we have an Electoral College that creates and abstracted layer instead of always flowing with the simplicity of a popular vote, because those who created our government knew from the beginning that in a “democracy” the unwashed masses simply couldn’t be trusted with something as important as choosing the destiny of a nation. It’s a sad truth, but one we might as well accept already. Even Joseph Stalin saw it when he mocked our Democracy by pointing out the very linchpin that the Electoral College was in saying, “Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” Yet we the sheeple can have the flaws laid right out for us and still continue to support the same broken system year after year.

Unless, of course, we don’t.

At this point we can hopefully start to admit to ourselves that the two-party system is itself synonymous with failure. Not only has each party shown itself quite clearly of late to be incapable of representing the needs of an entire nation, but frankly… how could it be otherwise? How could any polarizing agent such as a two-party system represent a whole instead of the approximate halves that it by definition divides us into? In such a diversion of interests, how can all of our needs as a country ever be met?

It is a system designed for failure.

And in such a system, established in such a way that only two parties receive the vast majority of campaign funding, not to mention the massive bulk of our lazy voting, how can anyone who stands apart from this polarity in order to represent all of the needs of our nation ever be elected?

Let me say it again: It is a system designed for failure.

Even if you don’t want to join in with the conspiracy theorist nutjobs holding hands and singing Kumbaya around this blog rant right now who are chanting, “Control the masses,” under their breath… Even if you want to take a completely rational standpoint… You still have to admit, things just aren’t working lately.

At all.

Not even a little.

Three terms, twelve years, for more than a decade now, things haven’t been working. We could argue if they ever truly did, but regardless of the past, the present is telling us that if we want to survive we need to change.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

And so, this Independence Day, I invite you to take the politics out of … politics!

Free your mind.

The system is a jalopy, a broken down old car that is no longer getting us where we need to go. It’s time to retire this lemon.

Aren’t you tired of the sour taste in your mouth?

Aren’t you tired of working so hard only to get nowhere?

Aren’t you tired of doing the right thing only to be paying for someone else’s mistakes instead of getting something for it?

Aren’t you tired of watching our country go around and around the same circles over and over instead of moving forward into the new millennium?

Aren’t you tired of living in an era where so much is possible and yet so little is achieved?

Stop perpetuating the same broken system. This election season, as politicians begin to jockey for their positions, keep a mind for who they are, not just what party they belong to. Make a list of the people that you want to see set this nation’s future. Let’s throw away the menagerie of stubborn mules and plodding pachyderms. Let’s choose people, not politics. Let’s choose leaders and doers, not empty mouthpieces. Let’s remind them that they work for us. Let us declare our independence from the system that has been bringing us all down! And let us bring true democracy back to our fair nation!

Let us take back the power from the politicians and give it back into the hands of us, WE THE PEOPLE!