News Flash: Solid State Drives Rock, Dan the Last to Experience

I'm honestly not sure how old my laptop is off hand but it's at least five years. It's a System76 Serval Pro 5 that I originally ordered with 8 gig of RAM, Two Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU P9700 @ 2.80GHz processors, an NVidea GeForce GTX with 1G of RAM, and a 7200rpm 500G hard drive. It was a higher end workstation replacement class machine back then and cost a few thousand dollars. It has been a great machine but the old hard drive was finally giving up the ghost. The occasional random file would go corrupt and the various disk utilities couldn't fix the bad sectors.

I finally made the jump to a Solid State Drive and highly recommend it. Without the moving parts of an old fashioned platter and spindle it's blazing fast. While I had it open I removed the years of built up gunk from cooling system that was apparently making the poor cooling fan run non-stop. Between the cleaning and the new hard drive this machine is now nearly silent. What a difference! Here's hoping this investment will make extend usefulness another five years.

I know that I'm coming late to the SSD game... I was always interested but, between price and a lack of need, I just never bothered. So far, it's absolutely worth every penny.

Double Standard?

Many have already heard that Mayor Schmitt has formally invited Pope Francis to Green Bay.

I wonder if the FFRC would object so strenuously to an invitation to an atheist leader or even the Dalai Lama?

My view? Bring on the Pope! The Catholic church is heavily woven in to the fabric of this community and many-- probably the majority?-- in our community would love to see it happen. While no organization or individual is perfect, I believe Catholics do way, way more good than harm. I also believe that will become more true given the less individually judgemental and more organizationally critical approaches that Pope Francis seems to be taking.

Besides, the economic infusion for our area from a papal visit would probably be at least that of an NFC Championship game and that is a good thing for everyone. If the pope came on a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help, so would others and that would result in a never ending bump in tourism spending.

This whole papal visit thing is a long shot but what does it hurt to ask? I don't know if Mayor Schmitt thought this up or not but kudos to the person who did and to the mayor for giving it a shot.