http://www.cafepress.com/dd/36347865

At a time when the economy is truly suffering and people everywhere are looking for leaders to do the right things, many see things such as ballooning costs in government programs as being full of fat and needing to be purged.  Thus was the case with the VH-71 Presidential Helicopter.  From what I understand this was a bid by Lockheed Martin for a 2 phase project.  The original cost was $6 Billion for 28 helicopters.  Now that is probably the seed of the overall problem.  I will admit that there is a spending problem in Washington and that seems like a huge amount of money for a helicopter.  As a tech person myself though, I must also admit that we as civilians also don’t know what technology they were trying to put into those helicopters to justify such a huge cost.  The biggest news we have heard is that the project cost has ballooned to $13 Billion.  Truth be told most of the “soaring cost overruns” and “government procurement process ‘run amok’” were probably scope creep in phase 2 where the military was trying to push the already bleeding edge technology even further which would also lead to delays and extensions of the deadlines (which was also cited as a reason for the cancelation.)

After spending $3 Billion already on phase 1 (and having 4 prototypes built – 3 of which are the final product scheduled for delivery in 2010) they decided to cut funding to the program completely and put additional money toward repairing the already failing helicopters.  It seems that the money (and jobs?) would have been put to better use finishing phase 1 and having new (albeit not so technologically advanced) helicopters so they don’t fall out of the sky.  Why punish the citizens and local economies because the military and government have a spending problem.  Lets curtail costs where we can and reign in spending but lets not throw jobs and money away and pretend that we are doing the right thing for the economy.  But hey, its all a political game right?

The President was quoted as having said “The helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me,” but isn’t that kinda like someone in a building when the fire alarms are going off saying “I don’t see any smoke… must not be a real fire…” – What does he know about a helicopter?!

Further Disclaimer: I have some bias toward wanting the right decision for this program to be made as I am from the Binghamton, NY area where these possible job losses would cause a devastating problem to the local economy.

The solution was used again for a different purpose when one day I had a friend who had installed windows and something went wrong.  A drive other than his main windows partition was set as “C” and his windows partition was created as “F”.  What made this a problem was that when he would install some programs (flash for example) it would attempt to install certain things to the registry on the “C” drive which it couldn’t find and there seemed to be no way to correct this.  So I showed him my little trick.  I didn’t think much of it until the other day he asked me for the script again because when he just installed his new computer the USB drive was “C” and he messed it up again.  He said he searched for a fix on Google and couldn’t find one.  You can’t just rename the partition because you are using it.  I imagine there is some kind of a fix if you put in a live cd and you can change it but we didn’t really look into it.  I just gave him the script and off he went.

So its a very simple batch script and you can modify it to do either of the things that I just mentioned.  Just save the following as virtualDrive.bat (or whateverYouWant.bat)

This first one shows my setting up the W drive:

@ECHO OFF
ECHO.

subst W: /d
subst W: D:\htdocs
CLS
EXIT

This one shows the fix if your windows partition is not set to C and it is causing you a problem:

@ECHO OFF
ECHO.

subst C: /d
subst C: F:

CLS
EXIT

The first “subst” line deletes the “C” drive in case your script has already ran previously (this stops an error from popping up if it already exists) – The second creates the “C” drive pointing to the “F” drive.

The last hint is that if you want to have it created every time you start your computer, just put a link to the virtualDrive.bat file in your startup folder in the start menu.

Isn’t it funny how things kinda tend to go full circle?  It reminds me of this quote I found:

Historical footnote: Way back in the mists of time, people not only didn’t have cell phones, they didn’t even have telephones. (It’s true; you can look it up.) To communicate over any sort of distance, people relied on the telegraph. Due to the limitations of the technology and to the costs involved, people also had to resort to using cryptic messages like this: C U 2MAR O. Talk about primitive, huh? Today, of course, you can use your fancy, high-tech digital cell phone to send really cool text messages like this: C U 2MAR O. We’ve come a long way, baby.