I don’t know if I can even stand to listen to another minute of talk radio or talking head news punditry. At what point, in America, did the population stop thinking? Look at McCain and his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Look at the boon of support it gave to his rotting campaign? Just take in for a minute the mountains of bullshit the media unloaded in to the cars and living rooms of the American People.

Suddenly, pundits who were saying that if Hillary couldn’t take the blows from the men candidates she should drop out of the race, are saying that the cruel media make it hard for women politicians to get a fair shot. Those who dismissed Senator Clinton as a candidate that pandered to the lesbians and the feminists were quick to point out that in 2008, it’s unfair to make such stereotypical claims about someone just because of their sex.

I know it sounds cliched, but in just watching the gears of our new system turn, I feel like the exchange of ideas is becoming the consumption of ideas. People have completely given up on forming their own opinions. They opt, instead, to adopt someone else’s philosophy, for the sole reason that they are on TV, and that they claim that they’re right.

Long, Long ago, the idea was that in order to get on TV and lecture about how right you were, that somebody has checked to see if the things you say apply to the same reality that we all live in. This is no longer the case. Out of the hundreds of people that CNN, FOX, NBC, CBS, Ad Nauseum, would call experts in some way or another, are only experts at looking in to a camera and talking for two minutes straight. They have about as much business talking about politics and policies than Clayton Bigsby has talking about white supremacy.

Take FOX News. They have a show called Hannity and Colmes, a ‘fair and balanced’ debate show featuring the greatest manipulative mastermind in the known universe, Sean Hannity, and some idiot who couldn’t argue his way out of a french bathroom.

I guess the Competitive Media look at it like this. They have 24 hours in a day, the entire time they are expected to be on the air talking about the news. Since you couldn’t possibly objectively report the days events for that long without losing market share to the weather channel and that one channel that plays a local radio station and a PowerPoint presentation promoting local events, they are forced to make the news interesting by making the discussions adversarial in nature.

I can sort of understand the logic behind that. Ideally, Discussions equal discourse, discourse is the cornerstone of democracy, and your news station is no longer bland and neutral, it’s exciting and patriotic.

So, they come up with the two archetypes of American politics; the Neo-con and the Flaming Liberal. They put them in a room together, they turn on a camera, and they throw some money in the middle and film the bloodbath.

So, you get extremists on both sides, both of which have to make legions of yes-men want to watch them. Neither of the two are capable of understanding the first thing that happens in our government. Nevertheless, pick your issue. One of them is fanatically in favor of the topic, the other is fanatically against it.

I used the term Competitive Media, and I think it works in the purview of this topic. The American People asked the Corporate News Media to inform us. The Corporations decided that they would take on this stupendous responsibility, and then - after a track record of doing a decent job with it - finally decided that it’s duty to our society just wasn’t making them enough  money. So, they decided to dedicate more time to the news throughout the day, and exponentially piss all over the quality of the journalism to make it entertaining.

The result? Nancy Grace, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and every author and bobble head that makes it in one of those little camera output squares. You know, the ones that are being interviewed by the CNN anchor you’ve never heard of who was hired because he could read a teleprompter and banter during the segways.

It’s been a glacieral process. It started when the American People decided that TV news was good enough and felt secure that religiously watching 24 hour news channels was a sound method of staying informed. It’s inevitable result? A population that will accept any answer you give it. A castrated America that couldn’t make an informed decision if civilization as we knew it hung in the balance.

That’s the real irony here, isn’t it? Even the atheists are starting to worry about the apocalypse. Yet, we have one political campaign telling us that we need bumper sticker quotes and lackluster legislation, and we have another who’s telling us that we do, in fact, need bumper sticker quotes and lackluster legislation, just from a different tent.

We have hour and a half debates where candidates are encouraged to keep their responses to short blurbs, and even then, all they do is call each other liars and cheats. The issues are swept under the rug, if you were reading a transcript, you wouldn’t even be able to tell the two apart.

Yet, when people step up with opinions which go against the two usual talking points, those people tend to be censured.

These people, who arbitrarily make up the sides to the opinions of the day, poll the population on which of the sides they came up with they agree with. Then, they use that polling information to justify what they’ve been saying all along.

This is what passes for news in my country. This is the main reason my country will be in a recession for the next decade, and probably taken over by the British in the decade following.

Yeah, screw you for laughing at me. Justin Timberlake is the shit. Straight up. I know he was in *NSync and popular consensus is that he’s gay. It doesn’t matter. Judge me all you want.

But, luckily for humanity, there’s this dinky little importer tool that made it happen. It’s called O2M or Outlook2Mac, and it did a mighty fine job. Even got his distribution lists. Well worth the $10 they are asking for it.

To recap: I tried to import my fathers Outlook 2003 contacts in to Apple’s Address Book.app. After trying everything I could think of, and a few things that the folks on the web figured might work, I was left with being able to do it via Mozilla’s Thunderbird, albiet very sloppilly.

But, as I said, Luckilly for humanity, the guys at littlemachines.com figured it out for us. You see, that’s the difference between folks who make software for Windows and those who make it for the Mac. Even if it’s coded for Windows, you can safely expect that the program will do its job.

Windows Developers make terrible software. Mac developers don’t. Anyways, Thanks for making the right tool for the job. I was able to install the windows app on my dad’s virtualized xp desktop, make a single vCard (.vcf) file that imported in to Mac’s Address Book without any fuss. 340 some-odd contacts, a dozen distribution lists… all in order like I knew what the hell I was doing.

Somewhere, on some IRC server that only folks who are hardcore in some Usenet Group would know about, there are a group of people plotting the take down of Microsoft. Sure, there’s probably several groups that fit this description, but only one of them have a chance at succeeding. These people work for a company called Canonical, and they are the makers of Ubuntu Linux.

Ubuntu really isn’t much different than the bazillions of distros of linux that tens of hundreds of people use religiously. It runs the solid Debian kernel, it comes with the familiar and pretty ordinary Gnome Desktop Environment, and it’s standard bundle gives you all the usual open-source suspects like Open Office, Pidgin and Firefox.

No, there isn’t hardly anything unusual about Ubuntu Linux at all. You pop in the disk, install it, and you’re up and running. All your drivers work, everything is just as you’d expect.

This, my friends, is hardly usual in a Linux Distro. Ubuntu’s Device Compatibility trumps Windows XP’s, and I would be willing to bet that it rivals Vista.

I’ve been an avid fan of Ubuntu since those Dapper Drake days, and I have to say, inspite of a few glaring flaws in their blue tooth implementation, namely having to drop to the terminal to pair my Bluetooth Mouse, it’s finally getting to the point where Microsoft should start worrying.

Even before Compiz forked in to Beryl and Desktop Compositing was new, Ubuntu was far better than Vista as far as graphical features were. It’s not as pretty as Windows Vista, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a billion times more usable, freer, and just as impressive looking when you show it off to your friends.

It makes me wonder, though. My father, who just discovered Expose and Dashboard earlier today, might decide that such features aren’t really necessary for being productive in front of a computer.

I figure, though, that once he realizes how useful visual aides are in turning a shit computing experience in to the best one he’ll ever have, he might just realize why Mac OSX and Ubuntu beat the hell out of Micosoft’s Windows.

You know, I always suspected - but the PST database, however the hell it works, must not be very reliable. Look, I don’t know exactly how Microsoft Office Works, I didn’t write it. I wasn’t even in the same state at the time.

No, I’m a lowly computer guy. I want to get contacts from Microsoft Outlook into Apple’s Contact Book. It shouldn’t be hard. In theory, you go in to Outlook, and follow the Import/Export Wizard in the File Menu and dump you out a CSV or a Tab Delimited Text File, and go import that motherfucker on your Mac.

Kid, in his ongoing endeavor to switch from Windows XP to the exponentially more awesome Mac Platform sorta needs to get his shit from Outlook to Address Book.app.

You’d reckon, since Outlook can export text files, and Address Book can read text files, this would be perhaps one octive above trivial. No, it doesn’t work that way at all. First off, even Microsoft Excel can’t figure out what the hell Outook’s trying to portray in the bloody file, and even when you can screw with the contents of the file so that maybe you could import it, No. There’s no telling why it won’t work, just that it doesn’t.

So, you start scratching your head wondering what in the world you’re going to do. Then, it hits you - vCards! I know! I’ll go to my contacts list in Outlook 03, Select All, and go to the Actions menu and forward every damn one of those to Kid’s e-mail.

No, that won’t work either. Kid uses AOL’s IMAP service for his e-mail in Outlook (which, BTW he has used probably once… their IMAP implementation is exactly as advertised though - kudos AOL… I still hate you, though) and AOL auto responds with the e-mail being to complex to send. I guess that’s what happens when you have like 300 Contacts.

In an attempt to seem witty and cool, I try to bulk save the 300+ Attachments to a folder so I can get them on the Mac and import them. Outlook 2003 doesn’t have that feature. So, I try to save the message, complete with the attachments, so I can extract them on the Mac. Couldn’t find a way to do that.

So, I head off to Google to find an answer to my woes. Somewhere, I found a blog post claiming you can install Thunderbird on the PC, Import the files, then export them to an LDAP file and finally import that in to Address Book.app.

I can’t really say that it didn’t work - but it mangled his Distribution Lists, so by the time you got it imported you’d have to spend the next six years fixing all of the problems.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is exactly the way Microsoft intended it. These are those switching pangs people bitch about as a reason not to learn a new platform. Shit like this. It doesn’t even make sense, either. Why would you reward Microsoft for their total, utter, inexplicable ineptitude? I say, when Micosoft makes an application that is totally uncooperative when your trying to accomplish some task, you don’t reward them by still using it.

You say ‘You know what, Microsoft? Fuck you’, you start from scratch - if for any other reason than to finally have something that doesn’t reak of suckitude, and you punish Microsoft by taking away from their market share.

Remember, it doesn’t hurt Microsoft if you quit using Windows. It hurts them when you switch to their competitors.

I know what you’re thinking. But Doug! Starting from scratch is hard! Do you know what I did when I switched to Linux just to find out that Media Player 11 took it upon itself to override all 7000 MP3’s on my hard drive with it’s incompatible bullshit ID3 Tag implementation? First, I sought a program that would salvage it. When that didn’t work, I started over. In the process, I discovered Amarok; it’s like iTunes, but better and for Linux.

Sorry Apple, Amarok is king of the MP3 Database. Having said that, when I imported my Amarok library in to iTunes when I switched, I even had album art. When I copied my iTunes Library to my Ubuntu laptop this weekend? It worked fine. Literally, I copied the file over, opened amarok and intel took it from there. Pretty much, if you want some shit to work, it will - just so long as your not dealing with Microsoft.