OK, I know I’m not supposed to eat Chilean Sea Bass, or use plastic grocery bags, or leave the water running while I brush my teeth. I buy a lot of organic, drive a Prius, and even use sink and laundry water in the garden. But how could I possibly have known that buying seedless mandarins, the ones that are grown locally and organically, the ones the kids love so much and are easy to peel and go by the genius brand name “Cuties,” are threatening the livelihood of beekeepers? And why hasn’t someone told me that my favorite soft toilet tissue is destroying old growth forests? Next you’ll tell me that my laptop is made by indentured labor in China, or my compost pile is attracting West Nile Virus mosquitoes. Sigh. I guess I need to subscribe to more blogs.
While it’s pretty simple (it sort of had to be) I think this is nice piece of work and does an admirable job of taking the worst economic situation most of us have faced in our lifetimes and presenting in just over eleven minutes.
Here’s a list of the open source and otherwise free software that I download immediately whenever I set up a new computer. It is a Windows-centric list, though most of these packages will work on Linux and probably some on Mac OS as well.
For everyone
CutePDF: Install this and you can “print” to create a PDF file just like you print to a printer.
Fastone Image Viewer: This is by far my favorite photo viewer. It is super fast; it loads the whole folder into memory when you click on a photo, and then you can page through them, full-screen, using the arrow keys. Moving the mouse to the edges of the screen gets you different menus, including a gallery slider (on top) and quick-resize and crop (on the left). Lots of hot-keys if you want to get really efficient.
Fastone Image Resizer: Need to make a quick set of thumbnails from photos of various sizes and orientations, and rename them all with a “T-” prefix at the same time, while changing the .JPG suffix to lower case? This will do it in one step.
GIMP: An open source Photoshop, full featured and powerful.
Google Chrome: Google’s recent entry into the web browser wars. I like Firefox and its extensions, but Chrome simplifies everything (for example, there is only one text box for web address AND search, and it always knows which you are trying to do). Plus, it is FAST.
Google Earth: Fly around the planet. I’m sure this has practical applications, but I don’t care. You can spend hours just looking for that secret swimming hole you found in Kauai, or trying to guess when the satellite image of your house was taken.
Google Sketchup: Draw 3D models of things. Used this to re-design our kitchen recently. It helps to go through their online video tutorial.
Open Office: The de facto Microsoft Office replacement. It is compatible with MS Office most of the time. I have also been using Google Docs extensively, but for different purposes; in short, Google Docs is good for sharing docs between computers and people, but it is far from full featured.
Skype: Make free calls through the internet to other Skype users in your circle of family and friends. I got my parents up and running using Skype to video conference in no time.
TVAnts: I’m pretty sure this is on the edge of legality if not well over. TVAnts is a video player with an associated directory that allows you to basically watch someone else’s TV. It seems to be geared primarily to sporting events. We don’t have a TV at home, so we used this to watch the Superbowl this year. We still get the ads, but I’m pretty sure we weren’t counted in the Nielsen ratings.
Video Editing: I haven’t really played too much with open source video editors, but I’ll provide this link to a list of packages in case it is useful. We have been using the Flip video camera which comes with its own built-in editing software – very nice, if not professional level.
For the more geek-oriented
Cygwin: Creates a unix-like command prompt on your PC. You can use this to download and compile source code or perform shell scripts on text files, which sometimes is the only way to go.
FileZilla: A simple, straight-forward ftp client (and server).
HTML-Kit: A nice HTML editor. I wish it wouldn’t keep bugging me to upgrade, but I find the interface otherwise very easy to use.
XAMPP: Apache, MySQL, php and perl. Install this and you have a database-driven web server up and running in a matter of minutes. Use it as a “sandbox” before publishing web pages to the internet, or drive an internal server for a home or business.
The CNN feed cut out so I ended up watching on MSNBC, which had real-time focus group reaction lines for McCain and Obama voters. Both of these stayed firmly in positive territory, often so high up on the graph they could barely be seen–and I was watching on a 46 inch TV. More interesting was that the McCain voter line was often higher. Even more interesting than that–for much of the speech the two lines occupied the same space, almost exactly. Both groups liked what they were hearing and liked it a lot. I hope the White House was watching and remembers next time they consider the need for broad-based bipartisanship.
Personally, I thought the speech was pitch perfect and his delivery was the best I’ve seen from him since the primaries. He’s been on the job 35 days and already he has delivered one of the very few speeches in my lifetime that can be deemed truly presidential. That was FDR-level work. He could have mumbled nonsense and it still would have made the history books–our current national straits assure it. But he rose to the challenge tonight and asked the country to do the same. I know that’s been said before in this nation, but not in a long time.
I am waiting for my son’s bus to arrive so we can pick up his sister and go shoe shopping. I just watched a man drive his Audi 75 ft to pick up his mail then drive back into his garage. He does this everyday and is not disabled, and it’s 50 degrees and sunny so weather is not a concern.
Went by a Circuit City earlier for a little vulturing. Alas they are not serious about selling TVs or external hard drives yet. The place is about a week away from feeling like Beirut in the 80’s–desperation in the air, everything up for grabs. The store PA was playing the complete GnR Appetite for Destruction album and quite loudly.
I have tasted evil and it is named Slim Fast Capuccino Delight. I had one for breakfast today and it is the distilled shit of a chemo patient. Even worse is the aftertaste, which can only be described as having the half-life and metallic weight of depleted uranium. I could not face a future with 5 more cans of this stuff in it so I sealed it in concrete and threw it away.
Damn. I liked this service. But if it turns out that Last.fm actually did hand out data then I’m out of there like shit through a goose. Not because I listened to an illegal copy of U2’s latest piece. Actually, I haven’t thought about U2 since Auchtung Baby. I didn’t even realize Bono was still alive.
I’d bag on Last.fm on principal. The principal being that the RIAA needs to find a business model that isn’t based on the same business model they started with in 1952.
Okay, I think it is pretty safe to say that I have never agreed with anything that any of the aforementioned nitwit CNBC analysts have ever said. While we are a pack of tempermental bastards, they are a collection of immature, short-sighted, opportunistic, conservative, well, nitwits pretty well names them perfectly.
However, I guess that like monkeys with typewriters and infinite time, one of them gets it right once in a blue moon. Today, CNBC’s Rick Santelli had a brilliant take
This subject has been boiling in my brain for a few weeks. My wife and I are lucky to have a very nice upper income. Hoever, we choose to live beneath our means. If you go to one of those sites that helps you calculate how much house you can afford, we can afford about 3 times the value of our current home. Why should those who live within their means bail out those who don’t? Further, what about the renters? Why should they bail out (through taxpaying) those who shouldn’t be homeowners but somehow are? Now, some of those homeowners who are in trouble got in trouble through no fault of their own. But I don’t see a realistic way of sorting out the wheat from the chaff. And, unlike Mr. Santelli, I do see the danger to the 92% of homeowners who pay their mortgages on time that the collapsing housing market presents.
All that said, the bottom line is the Obama administration’s first stab at this is completely wrong. Santelli (and sadly, Rush) get this one right. It is the government rewarding bad behavior. Here is how to solve this. A bailout now with a built in pay back later. The current plan would reduce the mortgage payments of homeowners in trouble to no more than 31% of their monthly income. My plan is as follows. Suppose this means that the mortgage has to be reduced from $200,000 to $150,000. The federal government would take a lien on the house for $50,000. Eventually, the housing markets across the country will recover and begin appreciating again. When the property was eventually sold, the government would receive 1/2 of any appreciation from the $150,000 figure. In about 5 or 6 years, I would also start charging a 1% annual interest rate to preserve some of the value of the government’s lien. Each time the house was sold, 1/2 the equity of any amount of the previous lien would go to the government until the lien was fully paid off.
In my example, the lien would be $50,000. The family lives there another 5 years and then sells the house for $170,000. Normally, they would realize a profit of $20,000 over the the $150,000 value of the home at its government-backed refinancing. Instead, the homeowner would keep $10,000 and $10,000 would go to the government. The new property owner would have a house worth $170,000 that had an additional $40,000 lien on it. When that homeowner eventually sold, half of that homeowner’s profit would go towards the lien. The lien could be paid off early with no penalty.
I am aware that this is rather simplistic solution and that I don’t know enough of the mechanics of the real estate market to get all the details right. You have to figure out how to get the second and third buyer to be will to by a house at the value of the home and accept the continued lien. Still, I think you could create a reasonable fair system along this basis that wouldn’t leave the responsible folks feeling like they’ve been suckers.
