Hurray! After a 2 1/2 hour drive trying to avoid delays due to accidents, I finally arrived home where my beautiful wife had burgers ready for grilling and beers ready for drinking. Refreshed after my long drive, I tackled her laptop with a vengeance. After a brief battle, it yielded--it is ours! It is with this machine that I write this.

The only hitch in the giddy up, as my Dad would say, was Microsoft's product activation process for Microsoft Office. I have 5 copies of Office for 4 computers. There should be no issue as to my having a proper license for the copy I installed on her laptop. I was not able to activate the copy of Office Professional on this machine until I called Microsoft. A very nice young woman helped me finish the procedure, whereupon Office's activation wizard has hopefully been laid to its final resting place.

My wife asks all too often, "What do people do if they don’t have you to help them" when speaking of computer problems. I am sure that it is frustrating. I understand Microsoft's position in this case, however. A few years ago during a meeting at Microsoft, a speaker said that Microsoft's revenues would have been one billion dollars greater if not for software piracy. I am sure that crime and the losses it generates have only increased over time.

Do not steal. Pay for the things you use. But for goodness sake, companies who make products should make them work so that you don’t feel like a crook just for using them.

I have been working on my wife’s laptop. I spent much of last night--until England lost to Brazil somewhere close to 2 AM--and part of the morning essentially rebuilding the laptop. I am close to having it back where it was. The hoped-for improvement is the addition of access to my wife's company's VPN network. The VPN client is installed; my wife will have to attempt to log on this weekend to verify my success or failure.

All of this due to the Cisco VPN client’s peculiar insistence that it live on a disk partition labeled C. Virtually all of the other software on the machine worked fine on the D partition. Now that my wife's company has given warning that her present company-owned laptop must be returned soon, I sacrificed sleep so that she could work from home using our wireless LAN from anywhere in our home, including the couch.

Now I ask you, is that love or what? ;-)

I don't know if I am sad or not about the end of the US run in soccer. I managed to miss the soccer craze that has afflicted so many American parents and their children. Still, I think that some overseas pundits were worried by the prospect of US domination of the world in their cherished sport--fun stuff for an unabashed American like me. So many countries--large and small--seem to see the success or failure of their soccer teams as an expression of national prowess. What would they think if the US began kicking their butts in their beloved sport during every World Cup? Would they retreat to Cricket? Take up Caber Tossing?

Imagine all the anti-American screeds that would be written and protests that would occur if we took the World Cup home someday? I say to all the Soccer Moms and Dads out there, "Press on! Damn the traffic! Ask not what your country can do about the roads, ask how many kids can you get into your local Soccer program for your country's future. Our nation cries out for its Manifest Destiny! All other fields have been conquered; it is the Soccer pitch or nothing!"