The Rabid Quill

Andrew Sullivan at TheAtlantic.com — along with Obama’s zombie army on Digg.com — is giving Mr. Obama credit for having the “prescient judgment” to predict the housing crisis … in 2007. For perspective, economists at HSBC saw a problem in December 2004. Anyone with more than two neurons between their ears saw that not everybody is going to get to buy more house than they can afford and get away with it.

To be fair, Sullivan is only crediting Barack with being smarter than Hillary Clinton and John McCain, which should be an insulting comparison for normal people, but since this is a politician we’re talking about, maybe he does deserve credit for noticing the obvious. What’s most interesting to me is that Sullivan did not mention the fourth candidate still in the race when lauding Barack’s prescience: Ron Paul. He either omitted the Texas Congressman because he knows Paul was even more “prescient,” or the good doctor is not even on the blogger’s radar. Either way, it takes some willful ignorance to praise Obama when Ron Paul and people like him, beat the Illinois Senator’s analysis by 2 or more years.

The wealth of articles you can find by Googling “housing bubble” with “2004″ or “2005″ makes citing particular ones redundant. Anyone who was paying attention knew trouble was brewing. Nobody was right about what exactly would happen or when, but the fundamentals were obvious to those with even a rudimentary understanding of economics. The axiom held true that markets always do what they’re supposed to do, just not when you expect it.

What we should really be noting about all this was that back in 2004-5, you had to go to the Internet to get anything more than a whisper that something might be wrong. Mainstream TV, radio and newsprint media apparently had little concern over the growing malinvestment in the housing market. The Fed was telling us in October 2005 that everything would be fine. The only ones pointing out any stormclouds this far back were people like gloomy old Ron Paul. Since the housing bubble couldn’t have been easier to spot if it ran up and slapped you, the very compelling question is: Why did the Fed lie to us? If your answer is that this is part of the Fed’s job, in order to help “control” the market, you’d be right. And it’s exactly as fishy as it sounds.

Back then, when all the pundits with the biggest megaphones were telling you everything was just great, the “doomsayers” who saw this coming were dismissed as being out of touch and unfairly down on the economy. Well, they turned out to be right.

What would you rather be? “In touch” and “optimistic”, or correct? The kind of economic prescience that saw the housing bubble a mile away is not difficult to apprehend. In fact, you can get a college-grade education in economics just by reading the recommendations at Mises.org. The Austrian school of economics makes the “dismal science” surprisingly simple and exciting, in part because it makes rational sense; it is rooted in pure logic.

So would you like to be able to beat Saint Obama’s next great economic prediction? Study the Austrian school. I recommend starting with Economics in One Lesson.

When I upgraded the hard drive on my Thinkpad T61p from the stock 80GB to a Western Digital Scorpio 320GB, I was presented with a problem: I had to be able to change the partition sizes on the new hard drive, which can’t be done if you’re using the drive to run your OS. I had installed a copy of Windows XP Professional on the new drive, which at first could only see the first ~130GB. The majority of the disk was still unallocated. After running all the Windows Updates and installing SP2, it could finally see the full drive, but the C:\ partition was still 127GB. I wanted to expand the partition without destroying my new XP install. In order to do that, I had to be able to run Windows on a different HDD, while still being able to read the new WD Scorpio and edit its partition table. I had another hard drive with Vista on it (the one the laptop came with), so that wasn’t a problem. The problem was reading the new drive without it being inside the Thinkpad.

Fortunately, I already had a Western Digital Passport external hard drive, which meant I already had an appropriate adapter. And it was easier to get at than you might think.

Open the casing

Western Digital’s Passport external drives are slick little devices and might look like you can’t get them open, but it’s surprisingly easy. Just start along one of the bottom, edges where the seam is easiest to crack open. Take your time; the casing is made of only two parts, and they will unlatch given enough time, so there’s no need to rush and risk breaking anything. You’ll want to use the case later. Just keep working along the edge you’ve opened farther and farther until you’ve gotten all the way around, and soon enough the top part will pop right off and you’ll see a 2.5″ SATA hard drive just like the one you’re trying to read.

Remove the Passport’s original HDD

The drive that comes in the Passport will have a sort of aluminum foil adhered to it, which is folded around the circuitry we want to remove. Carefully peel the upper side off. What you will find plugged into the SATA interface of the 2.5″ hard drive is a small circuit board with the USB connector on the other side. The drive is not attached to the casing so you will be able to lift the whole thing right out.

Now, carefully pull off the connector and now you have a device that will turn any 2.5″ SATA hard drive into an external USB drive. I bet you could even solder on a different LED light if you wanted. That little blue thing is brighter than all get-out.

Once I had my SATA to USB converter in hand, I put my old 80GB HDD back into the Thinkpad and booted Vista. From there, I used the connector on the WD Scorpio and connected it to a USB port. Once Vista recognized it I fired up the command prompt and ran DISKPART. It will take a little fumbling around at first, but once you SELECT the disk and partition from within DISKPART, you can use the EXTEND command to extend that partition to encompass all the remaining unallocated space on the disk. I did that to the XP partition (the only partition on the drive), reinstalled the Scorpio in the Thinkpad, booted up, and viola!

Windows XP had the entire drive at its command. You’ll notice it only reads about 298GB total, but that’s because the marketers for the HDD manufacturers like to use a little fuzzy math when they tell you how big the drive is. This is still the biggest laptop hard drive on the market alongside Seagate and Toshiba’s.