I’m suffering from a little from the “don’t have a cool laptop blues.” I own 3 laptops. One is a Compaq, circa late 2007, which is my best performing laptop. The problem with it is that it’s just a little too heavy to be comfortable to carry around. It mostly stays in one place.
I have a Sony laptop that’s much lighter and easier to carry, but it was new in 2003 — and at this point isn’t powerful enough to even keep up with my typing when I’m trying to write a post like this one.
And then I have a 700 Mhz G3 Apple iBook, which belonged to my dad. I’m writing this post on it now. It was new in mid-2002, about as old as the Sony. It’s interesting that it performs better than the Sony for the simple task of writing to a blog like this.
I like the Sony and the iBook as far as physical characteristics. I like the Compaq for performance. So what do I do? I’d like to reduce the number of unused computers sitting around. I could put some things on eBay and probably get a couple of hundred bucks towards a laptop fund. Maybe sell the Compaq and use the proceeds to buy memory for the iBook?
This is what happens when a person doesn’t have to make any serious effort to feed himself. He comes up with petty problems like this to grapple with. Woe is me.
It boggles the mind what some individuals are paid for doing their jobs, especially considering they seem to have been doing them very poorly.
This post at Talking Points Memo ponders the situation with AIG and the Obama Administration’s difficulty handling it.
I guess if I were Geithner (assuming he’s the one who could do this), and I held an 80% stake in a company, and the CEO gave as blithe a response as this, my words would be: “You’re fired.”
Seriously, why are we letting these people keep their jobs? I’m sure we’d be able to find plenty of qualified people willing to do the work at half the pay!
And it should not be 0 degrees outside.
I am ready for warmer weather.
So says Tim Pawlenty. I think he’s right — the point he makes is that it’s not “as if Barack Obama was going around and constantly talking about Truman or LBJ.”
The funny thing — for the way my ears are tuned at least, Obama goes around talking more about Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt than any other past president. If that’s not a sign today’s Republicans are far from being a majority party right now, I don’t know what is.
Heard a little bit of Richard Florida on Midmorning this morning, on “How the financial crisis will change cities.” He’s the author of The Rise of the Creative Class. This guy is always interesting. They should have an audio archive of the show at some point in the near future.
A few weeks ago I bought a used Eltron Zebra label printer to experiment with for work. I’d like the power to print labels directly from our customer database without using a proprietary application.
I’ve taken a small step — by sending simple commands from the programmer’s guide I was able to print a bunch of bar codes which I was able to read successfully using my bar code scanner.
Next step is to test some actual formatting on appropriate sized labels…
If I have everything set up correctly, this post should show up on my Twitter account, with a link back, as well as my Facebook page.
I’m looking forward to checking my Google Analytics account tomorrow to see how much traffic this generates… 
Hello faithful readers. I’ve moved the site back to the wordpress platform. I’ll be importing old posts shortly so hopefully I’ll have my complete history available soon.
I’m also hoping that with a blog handy again I’ll be posting more frequently. We’ll see!
[Update] Just added a post to twitter plugin… This update should cause a status update on Twitter.
An interesting fact:
The “Big 3″ are asking the US Government to loan them $25 Billion. Let’s do some math…
- Market Cap of GM: 1.76B
- Market Cap of Ford: 3.32B
- Value of Chrysler: unknown (privately held). Let’s be generous and say $5B
So I’m not going to advocate that the government take these companies over. I don’t think the government should own business enterprises. I also realize that if a takeover bid were to go forward the stock prices of these companies would rise. But still, their combined market value is roughly $10 billion, and they want a bridge loan for $25 billion? That’s insane.
I was disappointed last night, trying the sample ballot tools from MPR, Star Tribune, and League of Woman Voters, I found errors in the results provided by all three.
MPR gave me the wrong slate of school board candidates, and also the wrong judges. The Star Tribune list wasn’t complete, and the League of Woman Voters didn’t highlight contests in the Judicial races, so there were a couple of contested seats that I didn’t look into before going to the polls, and I was caught unprepared.
Disappointing.
