Short and to the point...well, short, anyway...

That's what television shows are. Commercial television is now running about 8 minutes of ads per half hour of air time. That means your favorite sitcom is now all of 22 minutes long, if you're lucky. That hour long drama is actually only 45 minutes of show, the rest of the time is spent with screamingly painful commercials. Just another bit of evidence showing the decline of our quality of life.

Too much of a good thing?

I now have three "cloud" accounts where a couple months ago I had zero. Cloud accounts are places you can place files and then share them with others. Places like Dropbox, Google Docs and, now, Ubuntu One.


My problem right now is that I don't have people in place to use these resources. But, if I start to get my act together, I should have all three in use by the beginning of 2010. These are the perfect tools to use to build a virtual organization. All work is placed in secure locations out on the web while they are active. Once we build the company, we move everything to our servers and zero out what is in the third party hosted accounts. This is cool stuff. Now let's see if I can make use of it.

My first order of business is to take all my bits and pieces of a business plan, and to put them into a coherent order. Once they are lined up, I need somebody to help (even if the help is just text editing--although I would like actual collaborative help as well) turn them into a presentable business plan. While that is in progress, though, we can start working on building a website and working on the structure of this idea. More to come on this...

How things have changed.

So, for the past week or so, my wife and I have been getting letters from banks. Now, these are not just any banks, they are banks that issue credit cards. More to the point, they are banks that issue branded store and gasoline company cards. The interest rates on these cards are approaching (within tenths of a percent) 30% interest. Now, when I was a kid, loan sharks charged that kind of interest. In fact, we had laws against charging exorbitant interest. Those laws were called usury laws, and those who broke them were considered the lowest of the low.

I think it is time we begin to recapture that particular bit of our heritage. So, the next time you see your neighbor who works for Citibank (I use them because at least four of the letters we have received came from them: J. Jill and Mobil are two of the name branded cards that come to mind), or any of the other big card issuers, spit at their feet and move away. Grab your kids and tell them what horrible people work for the banks. And cut up those cards. I plan to cut up my Mobil card and send it back to the company with a note saying that my never darkening the entrance to one of their service stations is all I can do (other than start writing online at any and all opportunities) to protest their greed.

No, think about it. How much do the banks pay you for the use of  your money? Savings accounts pay...what?...3 or 4 percent? CD's brag about a 5% return, and you only get that if you lock in for two or three years. And yet the banks are then turning around and charging you 30% to use their credit cards (which actually use your money to make those "revolving" loans. Fucking incredible. And we are supposed to respect and even admire these people. Hell, my family once were Wall Street stock brokers and bankers. When my uncles presided over the fall of the family business, I was pissed. But now I thank my lucky stars that I am not engaged in this slimey, evil business anymore.

'Nuff said, at least for the time being...

Scrutiny rises over NJ kids singing Obama song - Yahoo! News

Scrutiny rises over NJ kids singing Obama song - Yahoo! News There are people in this country who want to destroy our democracy. These people include Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin, amongst others, who are working tirelessly to weaken our democratic form of government. They are, in fact, a greater danger to us than all the crazies in Al-Qaeda. This latest tempest in a teapot is a perfect example. If you asked any of these kids to sing any of these songs to you today, odds are they wouldn't be able to. Now, ask them to sing a Hanna Montana song, and the odds for success go up dramatically. And, even if one or two of them do remember the song, I don't think that it will have much effect on them as they go through life. I remember a song I was taught (more by my peer group, I think) when I was very young. It was sung to the tune of "Whistle while you work" and had to do with praising Dwight Eisenhower while, at the same time, labeling Adlai Stevenson a "jerk". I did not grow up to be a conservative republican demagogue or camp follower because of this. In fact, I shed my parent's political views as soon as I hit high school. This pernicious attack on the fabric of our society by the right continues day in and day out. Their sole goal is the destruction of our struggle to create a truly egalitarian society, and substitute in its place a society where they call the shots and the rest of us do as they tell us. In essence, they want the U.S. to become an oligarchy with them in the driver's seat. This outcome is not in the best interest of 95% of the population.

Beautiful music

I've got a new favorite song...only I've liked it for almost 40 years. Can't Find My Way Home was a Blind Faith song, and that means I first heard it circa 1969. Well, as anybody who is anybody knows, Clapton and Winwood got back together for first one concert last November and then a 14 date tour this past June. One of the songs in their two hour show was the afore mentioned tune. Only the 2009 version is truly brilliant. The lead in with the organ and guitar building to the actual song is sublime. And then all through the song the music behind the lyrics is worth the price of the CD in an of itself. I just can't get enough; I keep hitting repeat on my MP3 player. (Sure I ripped the CD; I'm not lugging around a great big CD-player...)

So, if you haven't already, get this CD (Winwood/Clapton Live) or just buy the track from Amazon or iTunes or whoever and see if I'm not right.

The Kindle

So, the original Kindle ebook reader is now selling below $200. The newest version, the Kindle 2, is selling for $299 which is down from $359 a month or so ago. I think when the original Kindle can be had, easily, for about $100, the age of the ebook will truly be upon us. FYI, Fictionwise, a Barnes & Noble company, now sells ebooks in a format readable by the Kindle. The time is getting closer for the true rise of the ebook as a major distribution channel. And, when that time truly arrives, the publishing industry had best have re-invented its business model.

Furniture update

So, as I noted in the previous post, yesterday we did some shopping. The place we got the sectional from specializes in clearance items. One of their terms is that all purchases must be picked up within 48 hours. Well, I wasn't planning to try to stuff the sectional into the Outback, even at one piece at a time, so we went with the delivery option which added another $95 to the price. Knowing that the piece would be arriving within a day or two, we stopped off at city hall to get "bulk item" stickers so the old pieces could be hauled away.

Shortly after we arrived home, the store called to tell us that our purchase would be delivered some time between 8:30am and 11:30am the following morning. This moved Judy to insist that the old set be removed from the living room so she could clean and make ready for the new. So, at about 5:30pm we hauled the old sofa and love seat out to the curb. Now, virtually all the cushions had splits in the fabric covering. The springs on the couch were so shot that, when one sat on it one's knees were at about one's eye level. And yet, within 1 1/2 hours, they were gone. History. Not destined for the landfill quite yet.

I was a little nervous wondering what would happen if the delivery truck was in an accident or something else weird happened. But nothing did. Our new centerpiece for the living room arrived and was set up without problem. And here is the lovely Judy showing off her new baby...

Thirty years and counting

Yesterday, my life partner and I celebrated 30 years of wedded...mostly bliss...some rough spots, but mostly good days, weeks, months and years. So, today, to honor those thirty years, we went out and spent about $100 per year. We are doing our part to keep the American economy recovering by purchasing durable goods. We bought 2 refrigerators, a washer/dryer set and a sectional for the living room. The refrigerators replace two that are vintage 1980's. The washer/dryer replaces the pair we purchased when we moved into this house 10 years ago, and the sectional replaces the sofa/loveseat we bought from a discount furniture place in 1996. As you can see, we believe in squeezing every last minute of life out of our purchases. We still have the sunroom addition in the line queue, and after that we need to reconfigure the sleeping arrangements in this house. (That means we get a king and our queen goes to the guestroom. My kids and their husbands/significant others will appreciate that.)

All of the above is our anniversary present to each other. We are going to have to decorate and furnish the new 4-season sunroom when that gets added (which I hope will actually begin in the next week or so) And then we have our one-room-per-year renovation which we have been trying to adhere to over the past couple of years. If we are able to do that, I am pushing to do the living room this fall. New wall treatment (paper or paint...decisions, decisions, decisions) and a new carpet on the floor. The goal for 2010 will be to do the dining room--same work plus lighting (chandelier and wall sconces). My goal is to have the entire house redone (with an added basement entertainment center) by the time we seriously think about selling it (call it 8 to 10 years). Actually, our son will get first dibs and, depending upon how things work, that could happen sooner rather than later. I'd give my daughters a shot at the homestead, but neither of them would be caught dead living in Joisey.

And with this spurt of spending, there are only two things that I really need now: I need a stereo which can run speakers in either/and the basement workshop or out on the new sunroom, and I need a new desktop computer. The primary Dell machine is now 5 years old, and the backup Quantex is like 12 years old. It makes grinding noises when it is running. The hard drive is about to die...Oh, and I need a new wireless router...one that provides a little more coverage than the Netgear 805.11g model I have now...If I can add those three things to my immediate spending priority list, I'll be good for the next couple of months. (OK, sooner or later we need to replace our cell phones, and new MP3 players are always in my "gotta have" list.)

PS.

Oops, I forgot one more thing that needs to be done this summer. The new sunroom is going where our current patio is. When they come in to put the sunroom up, the first thing they are going to do is move all my lovely flagstones from the patio to over by the pool machinery. So, when that happens, I need to have somebody come in and remove 8-10 inches of dirt and replace that with 6-8 inches of gravel and sand. Then, upon that base using my existing flagstone, build a new patio next to the pool. I figure that is going to cost me about $1500 for labor plus the cost of gravel and sand. *sigh* It is not easy supporting the economy all by myself...

Common Sense: an oxymoron

Yep, oxymoron...at least as far as Glenn Beck is concerned. I was at work today (another rant entirely) and, as it was painfully slow, I picked up Beck's book Common Sense to see why it was selling so well. Unfortunately, I have to report that I was appalled at what I read. If my fellow citizens think this man has any answers, we are in more trouble than I thought we were in. I have to report that I only read about 25 pages, scattered around the book, and they were all uniformly egregiously bad.

However, I think a paragraph on Page 5 pretty much sums up the basic, underlying rot that infects Beck and his writing. On Page 5 he states,

"You don't hate people who are different than you, but you've stopped expressing opinions on sensitive issues a long time ago because you don't want to be called a racist, bigot or homophobe if you stand by your values and principles."

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but the only way you could be called those things is if you made derogatory comments about blacks, Jews/Ethnics or Gays. If your "values and principles" leave you open to the epithets listed above, then I would submit that your "values and principles" leave a great deal to be desired. Even more to the point, the fact that Beck obviously does not see a problem with this leaves pretty much his whole book without a firm moral foundation.

I need to find a way to access this book without contributing to Beck's fiscal wellbeing. If I could come up with a copy which was not paid for, I'd do a page by page rebuttal a la Fred Clark and his demolition of the Left Behind books. I do have a library card (which I haven't used in years) so I could go get myself put on the waiting list for the book down at our local library, but that would mean that I would have to scan it into my computer so I would be able to quote accurately. Oh well, maybe I will think of something less labor intensive as the writing part is going to be labor enough. Until I do find a freebie copy that did not contribute monetarily to Beck, let me urge you not to buy this book.

Rock 'n Roll will never die...

Went to see Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood at the Meadowlands last night. Both of these guys were making music in the '60s. Hell, I saw Winwood and Traffic at the Filmore East back in the day. The thing is that these guys are still playing great music. From high decibel rock and roll to acoustic blues and back again, this concert rocked. They didn't jump around the stage or posture and strut. They simply played great music, and they played it for two and one-half hours straight. Sure, when Winwood did a solo turn, Clapton left the stage, and Winwood did the same when Clapton played solo. But each of them only did one song alone. By the end of the show, the audience was up and dancing. Hell, I was bouncing in my seat from the second song.

It was a great concert. I'm really glad I went. And, when the live CD of this tour comes out, I highly recommend adding it to your library; I know I will.

Two Short Thoughts

I was looking at Levine's book (not actually reading it, you understand, because I don't have time to waste on that kind of drivel), when I had two thoughts about government.

Thought #1: If you desire a society based based upon the rule of law, then you have to have a government to erect the legal framework and then enforce the laws hanging off that framework.

Thought #2: Those who rail longest and loudest against any form of government tend to be those same predators who the laws are supposed to control. In other words, when you hear someone bitching and moaning about "government", mark that person as someone you would not want taking your back in a fight...

Hmmm....

it's been months, so let us talk about books and records

Damn, I find that I have about 6 drafts in my Blogger file which I have never gotten around to posting. The problem here is that most of those posts are like newspapers. More than a couple days old and they're not good for much more than wrapping fish...except that blog posts don't even have that last little bit of utility. So, with a certain amount of regret, I checked off most of 'em and hit the "delete" button."

I am making this a mission...instead of giving up something this Lent, I am doing something intentional and positive: I am going to write 20 minutes a day. I am going to write 20 minutes a day and post it here. I am already 12 days behind, but that is because I really didn't decide to make this my Lenten discipline until today. OK, better late then never, eh?

Now, having gotten that off my plate, I have a request for any and all who happen upon this note. In the future, whenever you feel the need to buy a book, first go to Amazon and check to see if there is a Kindle version. If there is, no other action is required. However, if there is not a Kindle edition, please click on the link that requests a Kindle version. The more clicks Amazon gets, the more pressure publishers will feel to put out digital versions. I ask this because I am finding that I like reading the digital versions better than I like reading them in their traditional printed-on-a-paper-page format. I truly believe that books in digital format will be the next form of mass-market distribution.

Mass market paperbacks were once seen as anathema to "legitimate" publishing. Paperbacks were the province of genre hacks. They were good for potboiler science fiction, murder mysteries and romance novels. Serious authors of serious books didn't publish in paperback format. At least not until publishers saw how well paperbacks sold and finally figured out that paperbacks made them more money in the end. Well, I think that digital format books will do the same. All it will take is for the publishers to devise a form of digital security that makes it about as hard to steal content as it is now to scan and then digitize the pages of a book. It simply takes too much effort to scan and then digitize a book to make it seem attractive to jerks who get their kicks that way.

Look, the same thing is beginning to happen in the world of mp3 music files. I was a big Napster user when it first came out. When it was origninally shut down, I puttered around out in Gnutella space, mostly on Limewire, but it wasn't the same. On Limewire, I mostly downloaded mp3 versions of music I already owned on old vinyl records. I don't have an iPod, so I don't use iTunes, but I do use Amazon. For $0.99 per track I can buy individual tracks which I like without having to buy a whole cd. So now I budget myself for about $5.00 per week for new music. I get to pick and choose; I am assuming that the creative artist gets some of this--that the parasitic leeches in suits don't usurp all my money--which makes me feel like I'm doing the right thing. And, $5.00 a week is not an exorbitant amount to pay for music I like. Also, I support a listener sponsored online radio station (RadioParadise.com) which also means I send something on to the creative people who create my music. I still go down to the boxes holding all my old records every now and then to see if there is anything that rings a bell...that I would like in digital format. If there is, and I have it on vinyl, then I'll go out to Limewire to see if somebody has a digital copy. I would make my own except I don't have a turntable anymore. And, besides, its too much work.

I would actually really like to be able to buy tracks directly from the artist, bypassing the suits who suck off the talents of the truly creative completely. I would think that 50-cents a track would be a sufficient price which would probably give the artist 3 or 4 times as much income as they get from the record industry which exists only to exploit their talent. Today musicians don't need the hugely expensive recording studios of old. Some cheap foam soundproofing, a PC, a couple microphones and one of the music-studio software packages and a garage band can put together tracks that are as good as those coming out of most record label studios--at least in digital quality. Now, a good sound engineer and a good producer can make a huge difference, but they are not completely necessary. Besides, let's face it, most producers aren't all that good.

What I'm getting at is that it is cost-effective for me to pay for individual tracks, because, again let's face it, on most albums/cds there are only a couple tracks, at best, that I really like. The others, for the most part, are just fillers. In fact, I can only think of a couple albums/cds that had more than a couple songs, and those were either "greatest hits" or concept albums like "Tommy".

*sigh* I have digressed. My point was that when digital books can be had for a couple bucks apiece, there is no real incentive to copy them illegally or to seek copies of books that were made illegally. There are a lot of books which are free for the taking out there because they are in the public domain. A person could build a huge digital library for relative little cash outlay. Sure, there will always be a market for physical books. There are probably as many good reasons for physical books as there are readers. However, like the paperback, digital publishing is a new technology whose time has come...or, at least, is about to take off. There are some books I want in physical form, but there are even more which I would be just as happy owning as electronic ones and zeros. So, urge publishers to make digital copies available. And, if they could make them available in an open source format so they could be read on any one oa the e-readers out there, that would be better yet.

I have made up about 4 days of my Lenten discipline with this post. More tomorrow.

Facebook

I joined MySpace a couple years ago, but never really did much with it. For the most part, I only used it to keep up with a couple of the young people I work with and some of my younger relatives. However, over the past year, I have hardly ever logged in to my Myspace account. And I certainly didn't have a Facebook account (mostly because it started as a college thing and I wasn't anywhere close to being a college student), but that has changed. So, Christmas day I opened a Facebook account for myself. And who are my friends? Well, my sister is one (but she is a Facebook member because she has a large family on her husband's side who she has to keep track of), and my friend Ted is another. And then there are my daughter and a number of nieces and nephews. I have looked for other people I know, and they aren't there. People of my generation, or at least those who I know, are not computer people. They don't see the computer as their friend; as their window onto the world.

So, I have a Facebook page and, as soon as I can find a picture that does not make me look like a pedophile, I'll post it...maybe I should scan one of those old pictures the kids were looking at over Christmas...my son (who does have a Facebook page although I don't think he uses it very much) said I look like Tom Sellick (sp?) so one of them might be usable. But that is not what I wanted to really talk about. I would love to use Facebook or one of the other social networking sites to keep up with both new and old friends...except that, as I said earlier, most of my generation doesn't do this. I get to play with the "kids" or I don't get to play at all. The latter is unacceptable (I love to play), so I will have to be satisfied with the former. And my children, nieces and nephews (and the odd cousin) will have to deal...