Measuring the money supply

Mike Hewitt today made an educational post about how the Federal Reserve measures the US money supply with a nice little graph. It's interesting to note that since discontinuing M3, a couple of third parties have "reconstructed" M3 (and the other). Anyway, the coming years don't look good for the dollar.

Badass first comment

Check the first comment on this digg post. Oh man that's great. I really do hope he gets imprisoned for treason after being impeached. He's such a piece of shit. I wouldn't want it any other way, if it could work out that way. He may not be the magical dude behind the curtain on 9/11, but he certainly knows a thing or two, and he's just a fucking liar to the American people. Anyway, that was just a cool comment.

Partition Magic sucks

So today I had a big scare.
I recently unplugged the second drive in a raid 1 array. The raid array carried on fine, degraded, with only one drive. A few weeks later when I was able to get around to it, I re-plugged the drive. Well, not knowing that this particular bios (or do they all?) required that the newly inserted drive be completely lacking any filesystems or formatting, I stuck it in and booted up, selecting the correct one I wanted to keep. Windows XP boots. The RAID bios said I now had two degraded raid arrays. Oops. "Obviously, I have to clear the drive", I thought to myself. Well, windows disk management didn't allow me to do that, for some reason, so I whip out Partition Magic, old school, 8.0. Now, I've been burnt by PowerQuest's shit before, specifically their version that came out right after XP that STILL DIDN'T SUPPORT XP, but because I'd used 8.0 since, I thought I'd be cool. I went in, deleted the disk. The action was added. I exited the program and it said I had to reboot, so I did.

When it came back up, it wouldn't log in. Rather, it would, but then it immediately said "Logging off" and took me back to the login screen. Fuck. Something in the userinit process is fucked. Microsoft is also fucked -- I have no way of getting to the registry to see wtf is going on, and wtf partition magic did, because I can't login to windows. Last known good config did nothing, just took me to the same fucked install. Luckily, I remembered a couple things. I can boot XP, log in (even though it automatically logs off), and it will get an IP, and it already started services, like ... whatever the service that lets you connect remotely to registries is, and windows shares (if those aren't the same).


I used a different box on the same network. Start -> Run -> regedit -> Connect Network Registry...
Put the box IP in, connected, found that userinit under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ WindowsNT \ CurrentVersion \ Winlogon was set to the right thing (C:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.exe)
So... that makes no sense... why isn't it booting? Just then I remembered PSexec. Thank god someone had the good sense to make this app, and then Microsoft had the good sense to keep the utils around after they bought that company.
I also had pstools installed on the fucked up computer, so I was able to run psinfo remotely with psexec:

psexec \\ol.db.ox.ip -u Administrator -p password psinfo

It came back with output that told me the systemroot was E:\WINDOWS
Apparently, when I put both hard drives in, the second, older one took over as C: and that fucked everything up. So through the remote registry, thanks to this guide, I was able to set the root drive from E: back to C: and I rebooted. Everything rebooted normally and I was able to log in.
Day saved. Partition Magic sucks.