The Lottery Conspiracy

Well, it happened. The very, highly, extremely, humongously improbable happened. Who are they fooling? We all know the odds of the same combination of numbers coming on two consecutive lottery draws. Anybody, even schoolkids know they are so incredibly high that it's actually impossible for it to happen.

But it happened! And now they just want us to close our eyes and say "well, it is amazing, but it was bound to happen sometime". Yeah, right! Like we'd be around for zillions of years. We're not blind! Not even colour blind! Here's a test. What number do you see in the image below? (Hint: It's one of the numbers in the lucky combination)


It's a conspiracy. We knew the lottery was a big conspiracy, but now we have proof. PROOF!

Well, some of you may actually think a bit and say "Wait, what kind of a conspiracy is this? Why would the lottery forge the results so that 18 idiots, who probably have less than 4 classes of school, can win less than 6000 euros?" I mean, usually we're talking about big money. Millions. Many millions. Why would the lottery do this? It's just not worth it.

Well, you're not seeing it from the right perspective. But you have an excuse. They're trying to put you off the track. Lucky you have me to guide you. The really incredible thing in this whole story is the 18 'people' that actually played the same numbers. Just think about that for a minute. Nobody can be so stupid. Would you have played the same combination? Never! You see? Now that's strange.

In fact, they aren't that stupid. Quite the opposite. They are of superior intelligence. Aliens, most probably. Not the ET type. More like the Monolith or Brainspawn type. You see, something has ripped through our Universe. This shouldn't have happened. Because it can't normally happen! There was a glitch in the frigging Matrix! And they know it. Or maybe they provoked it. I don't know that much.

Of course, the police are in it, too. They act like they're 'investigating' it. But that's another throw off, too, cause they're not investigating the right thing. They should be looking for telepathic brainwaves, and modifications in the flux of positive bosons. But they're not, are they?

I don't know how or why.... But something big happened. Something very important. Something wonderful. Even Dan Brown missed the story. We have to keep our eyes open. All seven of them. I already have all my money put on 1-2-3-4-5-6 at the Faroese Lottery. If I win, I'm buying a rocket-ride to Jupiter for 2010.

Câteva gânduri

"Ce absurd e omul! El pretinde că a înaintat, a propăşit, s-a civilizat, născocind nouăle mijloace de comunicaţiune!"

Dacă limbajul nu l-ar da de gol, aţi putea crede că e un citat recent, doar suntem în era comunicaţiei, când marile progrese tehnologice şi toate privirile sunt îndreptate în acest sens. Dar să citim în continuare.

"Dar care e oare scopul progresului, al civilizaţiunii, dacă nu este de a lăsa omului independenţa cea mai largă în faptele, în gusturile şi în cugetările sale? a răspândi peste toată lumea libertatea cea mai întinsă?"

"Nu este oare mai liber omul când, cu organele ce i-a dat Dumnezeu la naşterea sa, pentru umblare, el străbate întinderea, dupe cum îi trece prin minte, oprindu-se unde vrea, cotind unde-i place, alergând când îi abate, odihnindu-se când se simte obosit?"

"A trebuit însă mai întâi ca el să renunţe în parte la această neatârnare spre a se da în sarcina unui dobitoc, spre a se pune la dispoziţiunea lui, încălecându-l sau cărându-se dupe un bou ori dupe un cal."

Alexandru Odobescu - Câteva ore la Snagov

"[....] conchidem că, pre cât dobitocul e un tovarăş plin de compătimire, un prietin intim şi simţitor al celui ce, din simplă îngâmfare, i se zice stăpân, omul, încrezându-i sarcina trupului său, nu i se robeşte cu totul, ci mai mult se învoieşte cu dânsul ca cu o fiinţă căria-i place a jertfi chiar şi parte din nepreţuitul dar al neatârnării sale."

"Până aci toate merg destul de bine; dar când omul, regele naturei, ajunge a-şi încrede soarta unei simple puteri brutale, care nu judică, nu cugetă, nu simte, ci merge mereu nainte, zdrobind toate în preajmă, fără socoteală, fără conştiinţă; când el se face sluga unei căldări cu apă clocotită care târaşte orbeşte dupe sine sufletele omeneşti, şi nu cunoaşte altă lege mai naltă, altă strună mai puternică decât două şine de fier aşternute pe căpătâie de lemnş când omul, într-un cuvânt, clădeşte cu cheltuieli şi sudori colosale drumuri-de-fier, spre a se transporta pe sine, ca o scurcea fără preţ, lepădată în voia nesocotită a elementelor;"

"atunci, eu unul, declar că omul şi-a pierdut cel mai scump odor al inteligenţei sale, raza luminoasă ce-l aseamănă cu dumnezeirea, simţul valoarii şi libertăţii sale; el s-a înjosit până într-atât, încât s-a făcut chiar unealta, jucăria, robul, materiei brutale şi, în loc de a păşi în calea progresului, în loc de a înainta spre civilizare, cum pretind cei mai mulţi, mie mi se pare curat că el s-a cufundat de sineşi în cea mai umilitoare netrebnicie, şi s-a degradat, nesocotitul, la cea mai tristă barbarie!"

Ce absurd e omul....

10 Steps to the Holy Grail of Free Space

Here are the 10 steps you need to free up a lot of space on your Windows installation drive:

1. Go to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301
2. Scroll down and click the download link.
3. Run the executable you've just donwloaded (msicuu2.exe).
4. Next, I accept, Next, Next.
5. Wait a bit. Don't click Cancel!
6. Click Finish
7. Start -> Run...
8. Type in "cmd". Hit Enter.
9. "C:\Program Files\Windows Installer Clean Up\MsiZap.exe" G! (type in the quotes too)
10. Check how much space you freed.

And now here's the back story. At work, my hard disk has a crappy 80GB and is split in two partitions. Windows XP is installed on drive C: which is only 25GB. I didn't notice how the used space just grew and grew, until the first bubble popped up in the System Tray, warning me drive C: is low on space. I clicked it and it started the Clean Up program - compressing old files, removing temps, whatever. I was OK. For the moment.... Pretty soon another bubble popped up. And this repeated quite a few times.

For some time now, I've been lounging around 1GB of free space. Then I noticed the Windows Updater couldn't finish the current one, and it just tried installing over and over again, always when I left work and hit "Shut down and install updates". Of course, it was trying to install Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005. Which means it downloaded (in the background) the half-a-giga installer. When I shut down Windows, it would execute it an try to install the Service Pack. Of course, it would fail because it didn't have enough space. And so, the next day, the process happened again. And the next, and the next, and next week and so on. First thing I thought of was to kill the updater forever, but the IT guys didn't allow this and I didn't know the Admin password.

I didn't want to repartition the disk, so I just deleted some programs I didn't use. Moved documents to drive D: and stuff like that. The updater wasn't really annoying, since it did all the work when I wasn't there. But, from time to time, I would see that blasted bubble pop up, my free space jumbling between zero and 1GB and that was starting to bug me. I searched the net for articles about cleaning up your Windows folders, but nothing really useful. So I started a hunt of my own.

I looked for areas to free up. The target was big folders. Of course, I ignored important stuff like the Windows dir and other important-looking areas. I found "C:\Documents and Settings\ANDI\Local Settings\Temp" ("ANDI" is my username). Pay notice that "Local Settings" is hidden. In this folder I saw big (meaning 4-5 hundred megs; in my search I ignored anything that had less then 100) VMware stuff, and some exe or msi files that sometimes I couldn't delete because they were in use. Guessing they were updater files and thus didn't need them, I erased them. Of course, they just reappeared after a few days so I was back to that annoying repeating task.

And, if you see the pattern emmerging, after a few of that, I got angry again. This gave the courage to look into the Windows dir. Dusting away the spider webs, my sight fell on "C:\Windows\Temp". Cool! Another one to empty. It contained something called "VS80SP1fsdgfSDFGSDFGSFSGFGdfs...". Ah, the stupid Service Pack installer. Delete! Of course, if it wasn't yet installing. Otherwise, that meant waiting for it to fill up all the space and stop, or do a restart.

I hope by this point you're not surprised that this didn't solve my problem either. My situation was this. Do my work, and when that bubble popped up let the cleanup do it's work, and delete any big stuff in the two directories I mentioned. And this went on and on, until today when I looked some more in my Windows dir and noticed "C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download", 900MB. I searched the net to see if it was ok to delete it. It looked like some uninstall, or installer remnant crap, so I wiped it. I think it's a good point to list the dirs that are subject for deletion when you're low on space. They are:

• C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\Local Settings\Temp
• C:\Windows\Temp
• C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download

There are others, but these are the main ones I found. I was looking at about 2GB and I had an idea. That stupid updater always downloaded the installer to drive C:. So I downloaded it manualy from Microsoft and saved it to D. I ran it from there. For one hour it was just gathering requirements, then it filled up 1GB, and after some more configuration stuff, I could see the free space just going down, and down, right down to zero! Now that was cool. Seeing that the partition was completely full. It took another half-hour for the installer to clean-up. Also note that I previously tried the installer with just below 1GB and it complained it didn't have enough space. It didn't complain when I had 2GB, but still it went to fill it all up. It was close to finishing, though.

So back I was, looking for stuff to delete. I looked in Program Files, but everything there seemed to be useful. That was the second largest folder on the drive. The first was, of course, Windows. It was a whopping 15GB, but I said it's ok. I had a preconception that initially the Windows dir is 10GB so I guessed it just grew with updates over the years. Anyway, I entered it and started tapping space over every directory. System32 was big, assembly was big. Of course. That's where Windows actually is. But they weren't that big. A lot of space was missing. Like the dark matter missing from the Universe.

That's when I saw the Black Hole! A folder named Installer. 10GB! WTF?! A quite plausible explanation rushed through my mind that it was Windows's weird way of keeping its stuff, just installing stuff when it was needed, but nah! It couldn't be. Even for Windows. So I searched the net again. It seems that after you install a program, the installer is copied there, for when you would want to uninstall the application. I also found a link to a blog post that explains the tool I showed you and explains how it works. It removes any of those installers that are not needed anymore for your current installed apps. Meaning it's safer for you to use it, rahter than just deleting manually from the Installer folder.

So I ran it. You can imagine after so many failed attempts, my hopes were really low. It finished in an instant and it also reported some errors. Then, I looked at the free space. My eyes dropped! 10GB of free space! I was astounded. After all that! This was really much more than I hoped for. It all really felt like I completed the Quest for the Holy Grail.

I hope you enjoyed my story, beacuse now I have to put up a disclaimer:

I don't know how safe it is. I'll have to wait some time to see that I don't have any problems and report back. I've only done this on Windows XP and right now I'm going to run it on my home 4-year old laptop with a lousy 40GB hard disk. I don't know if it works for other versions of Windows. If you don't care about what I've just warned you, then just do the 10 steps. If you are unsure, search for other opinions. Google for "MsiZap", "Windows\Installer" or anything else you find here. You could add "safe to use/delete".

Hope this was useful....