Bush beats Lame Duck Challenge. We get cool, free software to show for our empty retirement funds.

I've been having a really lousy day at work, what with the ceaseless calls from people who misdirect all their hatred of technology at me. It can be surprisingly exhausting working tech support. You're there to provide solutions, but many people see you as the embodiment of the Impenetrable Mystery of the Malfunctioning Box, and find it difficult to resist lashing out. I am apparently also there to hear complaints about software bugs and issues that really should be best communicated to, you know, their developers, but because I am the nearest representative of the nebulous realm of technology I end up receiving the anal fissures that belong to Steve Ballmer. After hearing and emotionally metabolizing their venomous complaints, these users then want me to fix their problem and be gone, for the sooner they dismiss me the sooner they can start feeling secure in their relationship with their PC.

With each call, slowly life force drains from me. My eyes lose their sparkle, become milky. For awhile I feared the cataracts would blind me completely.

But my day has brightened significantly, now that I've heard about CodeWeavers giving away their Windows-API enabler & WINE GUI, CrossOver, for free. BAM! If you've got Linux or MacOS and feel like running Windows programs and games in it, now you can, bubba.

What's even more amusing is why this is all happening. Snipped from Star Tribune:

In July, St. Paul software developer CodeWeavers came up with the gimmick to make its products available free for a day if any one of five positive (but seemingly unlikely at the time) things happened during Bush's last six months in office: gas drops to $2.79 a gallon, milk drops to $3.50 a gallon, U.S. jobs exceed 138 million, the Twin Cities median home price returns to $233,000 or Osama bin Laden is captured.

Bingo on No. 1.

When CodeWeavers CEO Jeremy White saw that gas was $2.79 a gallon during a recent fill-up, "I screamed, 'Woohoo!' Then I yelled, 'Oh, crap!' as I realized every American can now have my software for free -- kind of upsets my fourth-quarter revenue projections," he said.

You can't write satire like this. The president just succeeded in beating a Lame Duck Challenge by letting the economy gutter. George Bush is finishing his presidency not as a lame duck, but as a monkey's paw.