I send out a lot of Plaxo Birthday greetings. I don’t know if it makes a lot of difference, but it “feels” like a meaningful connecting type activity. As always YMMV!
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JOBSEARCH: Networking by “birthday greetings”
Sunday, July 22, 2007
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WRITING: MV Project Chapter #1 done
Sunday, July 22, 2007
http://glcavalier.wordpress.com/2007/07/20/
the-true-penalty-of-procrastination/
GLanC’s post on procrastination made me realize that my BLOG2BOOK project went much better when I blogged about my progress or lack there of. So here goes. (P.S.: Thanks GLaneC for a need butt kick).
(Not prog-ress, but drag-ass!)
Announcing Writing Project #2 MV!!!
Chapter One is done and thru first revision.
I’ll be doing a roadmap shortly. Probably Tuesday.
I have a really lame cover art piece done with the MV map. Just have to superimpose the title on it.
I’m going to envision Lulu-ing it. But, I’m not planning to make a big deal out of maybe a copy for me and Mom. Frau can read my copy.
:-)
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JOBSEARCH: Don’t waste the top half of the first page
Saturday, July 21, 2007From a email with a fellow turkey
***Begin Quote***
Here’s my feedback. A picture is worth a thousand words. Most of my turkeys don’t get the idea of a compacting the header. It’s the most important space on the resume. Your resume is two pages. I think you should either “fill up” two or make it one. I don’t have a ruler handy but I bet more that than 50% is wasted. It’s critical that the first half page be the most well used. It might be all that gets read before it gets tossed. It could save the game. I always say if your the right person, the reader will get out a magnifying glass to read your name. Name, phone, and email on one small header line in 8 point font is all that needed. Do that an I bet you get back 2″x7″ or fourteen square inches of prime resume landscape.
***End Quote***
He made what I call the “classic letter” mistake. You know when you were in grammar school and you wrote a letter, it looked like:
dd mmmmm, yyyy
xxxxxxx
xxxxxxx
xxxxxxx
Dear xxxxx,
So to, he put his name, address, phone, and email in that left column sort of format. 6 lines that took a quarter of the width and made a huge barren area. So I used MS-Paint to color some stuff in there.
:-)
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INTERESTING: all we have to show for it are 3,600 graves
Saturday, July 21, 2007http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese379.html
The Republican War
by Charley Reese
***Begin Quote***
The Iraqis are killing us on the cheap with secondhand AK-47s, rifle grenades and homemade bombs created out of old artillery shells. We are using the most expensive weapons in the world, wielded by the most expensive army in the world, to kill them by the small handful. I don’t know what the insurgency has cost, but the Republican War has cost us half a trillion dollars, and all we have to show for it are 3,600 graves, several thousand wounded, a civil war and a corrupt, ineffective civilian government. The Iraqi supply line stretches around the corner; ours stretches 7,000 miles. The Iraqis know what their mission is; our soldiers don’t have the foggiest notion of why they are still there.
***End Quote***
Leave it to an old tank driver to put it bluntly.
I can’t think of a better way to say it.
Get the troops home. Now!
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MONEY: When does the dollar cease to be the world’s reserve currency?
Saturday, July 21, 2007http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north550.html
The Five Stages of Counterfeiting
by Gary North
***Begin Quote***
The FED does whatever it can to figure out what the public will expect next. Most important, it keeps its activities and plans secret. But, step by step, word is getting out. The dollar is falling. The government’s debt is rising.
***End Quote***
While North is focusing on how the fiat currency “burrows” into the civilization’s thinking (i.e.paradigm shift), I was focusing on the meme of money. There’s no doubt that the debasement of the currency has caused the downfall of several empires, civilizations, and nations. The French Kings, the Byzantine, and Zimbabwe to cite just three quick examples.
The 64k$ question is “when?“.
When does the SHTF?
When is the Gadswell “tipping point”?
When does the money fail to support the division of labor?
I’m an ingineer, not an ekkynonymist. I’m not even sure that those three whens are in the correct order. In the history of the USA, and before that in the United States of America, we have never seen such an event. There have been several close calls. The Carter 21% inflation, the Nixon Wage Price Controls, and the Long Term Capital Finance derivative mess.
The tipping point on when the American dollar can no longer be inflated imho is when the Chinese accept something else as a reserve currency. The recent “news” that they were diversifying out of dollars was telling. It’s a toe in the water. When OPEC wants payment in other than dollars, when the Chinese make WalMArt pay in other than dollars, when the Mexican “illegals” start sending home something other than dollars, htt will be the tipping point. Look out below.
The SHTF when the legal marketplace begins to fail and the black market begins to boom in other than drugs. Ebay starts auctioning food. Amazon sells move books on Victory Gardens. And, the politicians start “jawboning”.
Money is a unique meme. The store of value function is what is being messed with by gooferment. Money allows capitalism and the division of labor. On Crusoe’s island, Robinson has to save five days of fish to make a the fishing net to allow him to catch twice as much. Tool building is the hostage of savings. If there were ten castaways on the island, they could each “invest” a ½ fish in making a net. (Dumb analogy. But you get the idea.) So to substitute money in for those saved fish, money saved allows small sacrifices to be “collected” more easily into one big “investment”. Note that money isn’t the saved fish. But printing more money doesn’t make more fish. When money devalues so quickly that there is a paradigm shift by the population, that’s when the division of labor breaks down. When people are growing “victory gardens” instead of working for money, the division of labor is a “toasty critter”. Stick a fork in it we are done. We only support the number of living souls based on the division of labor. If we begin to regress to subsistence farming, then there will be a lot of dead people around.
When the big question is not if, but when?
So what does one do?
* Become Amish? Or a Mormon. No debt, frugal life style, seek valuable skills.
* Orient savings and investments away from fiat currencies. Stick to defensive investing regardless of what your politicians and bureaucrats tell you.
* Minimize your exposure to taxes. Call the shots as you see them. Save and plan for what does one do when the transition occurs.
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INTERESTING: I get an insertion in Risks Digest again
Friday, July 20, 2007***Begin Quote***
RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Thursday 19 July 2007 Volume 24 : Issue 74
ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks)
Peter G. Neumann, moderator, chmn ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc. *****
This issue is archived at <http://www.risks.org> as
<http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/24.74.html>
The current issue can be found at
<http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt>
{Extraneous Deleted}
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2007 14:32:42 -0400
From: Fred Reinke <reinkefj@reinke.cc>
Subject: “Microsoft Copy Protection Cracked Again” and who’s surprised?
{Begin Quoting an AP story}
Jessica Mintz, AP, 17 Jul 2007
Microsoft Copy Protection Cracked Again
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=2007-07-17_D8QEFI3O1
<http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=2007-07-17_D8QEFI3O1&show_article=1&cat=breaking> &show_article=1&cat=breaking
Microsoft Corp. is once again on the defensive against hackers after the
launch of a new program that gives average PC users tools to unlock
copy-protected digital music and movies.
The latest version of the FairUse4M program, which can crack Microsoft’s
digital rights management system for Windows Media audio and video files,
was published online late Friday. In the past year, Microsoft plugged
holes exploited by two earlier versions of the program and filed a federal
lawsuit against its anonymous authors. Microsoft dropped the lawsuit after
failing to identify them.
The third version of FairUse4M has a simple drag-and-drop interface. PC
users can turn the protected music files they bought online-either a la
carte or as part of a subscription service like Napster-and turn them into
DRM-free tunes that can be copied and shared at will, or turned into MP3
files that can play on any type of digital music player.
{End Quoting an AP story}
Like an arms race, the DRM folks are spending a lot of cycles on a failing
paradigm.
Like putting lipstick on the proverbial pig, it annoys their paying
customers and is pretty ugly! Some of my biggest irritations, in my
computing career, have been at the hands of “copy protection”. Couple that
with bad, or non-existent, support and you have the seeds of a revolt.
I now don’t buy content online — music or other kinds — if it has copy
protection. I have a lot of expensive 8 tracks, cassettes, and cds of
“content” that are unusable. Add to that “software”, which has stopped
working, stopped being supported, or otherwise orphaned.
My most recent experience was with MusicMatch JukeBox being acquired by
Yahoo and forced to “upgrade”. This was one of my last purchases, excuse me
“licensing” — what “barbara streisand”!! — before my new policy of “no
more”.
“No more” locked content. “No more” buying software, excuse me licensing it,
from vendors who are one step below used car salesmen. “No more” operating
systems that require “activation” and have “self-help” provisions.
I look to the open source software makers and happily “donate” to their
projects.
I’m calling out the content makers, “software” licensors, and the entire
Microsoft empire as the hucksters they are. At least the snake oil sales men
of yesteryear didn’t try and make you “license” the bottle! A plague on all
their houses.
Imagine how I’ll be when I get old and crotchety!
Ferdinand J. Reinke, Kendall Park, NJ 08824 http://www.reinke.cc/
blog http://www.reinkefaceslife.com/ http://www.reinkefaceslife.com/
——————————
{Extraneous Deleted}
***End Quote***
Twice in one year! Maybe I’m getting older and wiser. :-) Either that or PGN is getting lax?
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INTERESTING: A visit from the “state-ist” relatives
Friday, July 20, 2007What a joy, relatives, in-laws actually have come to visit. They’re big gooferment proponents. They work for the gooferment. So how can the gooferment be bad? They listen to me rant and rave. But, at dinner, with a slew of in-laws, it was amusing to hear them all talk about property taxes. One of the local in-laws pulled out her property tax “statement”, and reported that 63% of the property taxes went to “education”. And, from there the fun began. I got my digs in often about taxes being theft. It was great to see all the statists squabble about high taxes being whose fault. I, of course, mentioned that they should imagine what they could buy if they could keep their own money. People can’t believe that we ever had no taxes. Wow! What fun.
I have to remember the lipstick on the pig. It doesn’t make the pig any prettier and annoys the pig.
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TECH SERVICE: What is ITtoolbox?
Thursday, July 19, 2007***Begin Quote***
What is ITtoolbox?
A community where peers share knowledge about information technology.
***End Quote***
With some LinkedIn type features.
Hum?
As exclusive as rain, if they’ll have me as a member.
Sigh!
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LIBERTY: Ordained by whom to enforce their wisdom?
Thursday, July 19, 2007http://www.townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2007/07/18/economists_on_the_loose
Economists on the Loose
By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
***Begin Quote***
Free markets are simply millions upon millions of individual decision-makers, engaged in peaceable, voluntary exchange pursuing what they see in their best interests. People who denounce the free market and voluntary exchange, and are for control and coercion, believe they have more intelligence and superior wisdom to the masses. What’s more, they believe they’ve been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Of course, they have what they consider good reasons for doing so, but every tyrant that has ever existed has had what he believed were good reasons for restricting the liberty of others.
***End Quote***
Professor Williams really nails this one single point. Ordained by whom to enforce their wisdom? Love it. You might be right that I “should” do X, Y, or Z. But under what system of morality do you get the right to force me? Ahh yes, you have to love them elites.
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INTERESTING: exception to an amendment to strike money in a spending bill
Thursday, July 19, 2007http://www.politico.com/blogs/thecrypt/0707/North_to_Alaska.html
July 18, 2007
North to Alaska
***Begin Quote***
Rep. Don Young attacked his fellow Republicans on the House floor Wednesday, as he defended education funds allocated to his home-state of Alaska.
“You want my money, my money,” Young stridently declared before warning conservatives that, “Those who bite me will be bitten back.”
Young took extreme exception to an amendment by Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) to strike money in a spending bill for native Alaskan and Hawaiian educational programs.
***End Quote***
I think this sums it all up. It’s the politician’s money; not yours!
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