Schedule meetings in a flash with Doodle
meetings | web 2.0 | time savers
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Need to schedule a lunch meeting? How about a winter-camping weekend with your buddies? Doodle promises to tackle these and other scheduling challenges by creating simple polls: Everyone “votes” on…
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It’s simple. It works. It’s a neat use of technology. I like it.
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Productivity | 
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Posted by reinkefj
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/adams8.html
‘Down, Down to Hell! and Say I Sent Thee!!’
by Charles Adams
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Nero in one of his fits of madness, said that he wanted to abolish all taxes and make a beautiful gift to the human race.” Not a bad idea, unless you want civilized life. For taxes are the fuel that makes civilization run. But if you have bad fuel with impediments, or not properly designed for the engine, then civilization will run badly, and that has happened too many times in history to need explaining
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I am not sure that’s true.
Back in the “golden age”, post-Civil War to pre-WW1, there was negligible taxes and liberty abounded. It wasn’t Nirvana, but it certainly was better than now. I’d like to see it.
If a service is desired, or needed, then the market place will supply it.
Now that’s not a naive wish, but just look at the real world. The market place supplies “stuff”. Greedy people in search of profit anticipate what people will want.
If one thinks of a government service, then see what the “overhead” of that service is. So, let’s take schools. Just compare what the gubamint gives away free and it’s private market alternative. Back during the NJ Florio tax revolt, I showed that total taxation divided by total student (including parochial and private schools) was about 10.5k per student and the most elite Pton school only charges 10.2! There is a cost of using the gubamint as a market intermediary. It’s at least half to two thirds. Parochial grammar schools currently charge about 3k versus the gubamint ~10k in the 90s. Arghh!
Take any government service and you can see the inefficiency in not paying directly.
If you can buy it for a dollar, it will definitely cost two if the gubamint does it and they will have collect four in taxes to have that two.
Obviously, I’m just making up numbers but I know in my gut it’s true.
In 1975, I bought my house and had private garbage. I paid 62.50 a YEAR and they took the cans from the side of the house and put them back. Two years later, the township went into the garbage business. My taxes were raised $285 a year just to pay for the new “service”. Argh! And, the I have to put the cans at the curb and take back up! The funny thing is that it was the SAME company! I just got to pay more for worse service.
So, clearly, if we said no taxes, then I’d STILL have to have my garbage picked up. And, I’d probably have choices like I used to. The incumbent could probably give me a good deal based on signing up lots of my neighbors. And, after a while, there’d be lots of choices.
Only with a gubamint “service”, do I get the “opportunity” to overpay, for a service I may not want, delivered badly, with no one to complain to!
Leave a Comment » | LIBERTY | Permalink
Posted by reinkefj
Another one of the fellows I went to high school and college with just “obitted”.
He didn’t die. I wasn’t there. I just read his obit. Makes it a little less unbearable.
He and I were always in different “sections”.
In my small Catholic high school, the sections were sorted by “smart” and “dumb”. It didn’t take us too long to figure that out! Might as well have put stickers on our foreheads. That established an unhealthy tension between the sections. With testy laden guys! But, he was one of the people I liked. From what I remember. I hated high school. All I can say is I survived it!
In college, it was alphabetic by last name. Equally dumb! But, not as demeaning.
He and I interacted mostly around the computer lab. Even in those days, I was a nerd’s nerd. I took to the computer as duck to water, … or a pig to s….!!! He used to joke that he had special influence with the College data center operators, cause he knew me, and always dropped my name to get of the front of the next input tray of keypunched cards going into the computer room. Sometimes, especially at crunch time, there’d be up to 40 trays waiting. After 40 the good Brother would “close” the window. That was fun! But, getting into the next tray in, meant he’d get his results quicker. And, in those days, I had “stature”, I was the Number TWO student systems programmer. AND, I had a real job in industry; even #1 didn’t have that. Would you believe that in those days, I was “somebody”. Any way, he and I used to laugh about that. I had the power to make operators miserable since I had input, or made all sorts of decisions. That was in the day when people !decided! things, not held a meeting to form a consensus about what to have for lunch. Any way, he’d drop my name — put fear into the heart of the input clerk (the lowest job in the computer center, short of the janitor and he was a real College employee!) — and get fast turn around. In those days, fast turn around meant leaving a reasonable hour, or not getting your class work done. It was a giant game! And, we laughed about it.
I didn’t even know he was in my geography.
I notified anyone in those circles of interest. Updated my high school alumni page and “his” page on the site. Messaged our college’s alumni office.
I am saddened by this.
Bummed out!
Leave a Comment » | ALUMNI | Permalink
Posted by reinkefj
I’m defining a new word to describe this problem / opportunity. SNARF for the word SNAG and F for you know what.
A message gets SNARFed, when for no apparent reason,
LookOut, (OutLook’s evil Sybil side), takes:
a perfectly good outbound message that was sitting read to go, as denoted by that BOLD ITALIC font that it has in the outbox with a date of today
AND
changes the date to NONE, removes the BOLD ITALIC font, and it just sits there.
No amount of cajoling will get it out of that state!
One can see other messages whizzing out bypass the “stalled cars”.
Stopping Outlook doesn’t help, though it gripes about unsent messages, so it knows that they are there.
The only solution is to create a brand new message, send that, and nuke the old ones.
Argh! I hate OutLook.
And, yes, the data stores are big, but that would only bear if all messaging stoped.
Argh!!
Leave a Comment » | Technology | Permalink
Posted by reinkefj
WIth the popularization of RSS, it has become apparent to me that the amount of content generated by the internet wildly exceeds one’s ability to keep up.
(Hey, I’m a quick learner. It only took a year of trying to keep up to grok that fact. It was slammed home when I missed reading my RSS feeds when “stuff” got crazy. it’s overwhelming.)
SO, it’s time to “adjust” the strategy:
(1) Ruthlessly prune what one attempts to keep up with.
(2) Look for sources of “distilled” DIKW.
(3) Compartmentalize. (For example, my alumni feeds have been moved to Google reader tied off the alumni Google throw away id.)
(4) Seek “editorial” blogs that have high value content (i.e., Opton’s Six Figure Learnings http://execunet.blogspot.com)
(5) Develop ruthless methodology to prune feeds with in a category. Like creating a category of feeds called “Productivity” with subcategories of Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Lead. Add Platinum at the top if you want five. Periodically promote or demote feeds.
(6) Focus on the meme discovery sites or the peer-voting sites.
Start asap. The tide is rising.
Leave a Comment » | Productivity | Permalink
Posted by reinkefj
You are currently browsing the Reinke Faces Life blog archives for the day Saturday, October 21st, 2006.
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FJohn Reinke
Consultant at Technology Legacies LLC
Advisor, Computer Governance Committee at Manhattan College
Editor / Publisher at Jasper Jottings
Greater New York City Area
JJ Positraction JJ Endnotes Downsize DC
Philosophy of Liberty
I have NOT received any gagged governmental information requests
Reinke Faces Life 