Musings

Hank the Siamese cat is slowing down. He is nine years old - 63 cat years. Hey, I'm 64 - but he hasn't the availability of a cat-gym or the desire to chase ladies running around in their underwear.

(Running, guys, running... As in road races...)

So he is spending more and more time snoozing.

I'd hate to lose him. He had a physical last week, seems to be just fine for his age, no complaints, but just not the kitten he once was.

Regarding a book I am reading - Passionate Marriage, it is an interesting book, about 25 pages compressed into 500 pages. So very slow going. But the bottom line is that you have to become differentiated, i.e., dependent on your own commitments and perceptions and principles.

Well, duh.

But it also talks about "normal neurosis", in that we are all slightly crazy, so should just understand and accept that.

To which I add, we are all slightly in emotional pain, with some undercurrent of disappointment or betrayal or hopelessness, but also hopefully embued with an enduring sense of hopefulness.

The most healthy among us may still not be deliriously happy, but we know there is a pony out there somewhere and expect to find it.

So you just have to keep looking. And not give up, or settle for second best.

Surrender is not an option.

It just won't work.

We can run, but we can't hide.

We can run, but we can't hide. We need to face up to reality.

It would be really nice if we didn't have to face all the problems that exist.

Just take the kids sailing or go to a soccer game.

Unfortunately, it is not going to happen that way. "Thinking about it tomorrow" won't work.

So let's get a grip. Please read this:

Was Obama Right?

Everybody counts, everybody wins

Pleasant enough day.

Went to church. Had asked the rector what happened to the birthday blessings, they seem to have disappeared.

The signup sheet had places for Sick (to which I added a friend in pain) and then Thanksgivings. So I added "Andy Birthday"

The reader was Lil. She sort of did a double-take but then moved on in perfect stride: "And we give thanks for Andy's birthday."

>:-) So there is more than one way to skin a cat.

Birthday's are special. It is your one opportunity in the entire year to be appreciated for no other reason than that simply because you exist.

Other recognitions require a host of work and accomplishment aforehand.

But God loves each and every one of us for no more reason that
that simply we exist. Birthday recognitions are a recognition of this
fact.

We need to recognise birthdays.

End Spiralling Taxes??

I see I tend to post about once a month. Maybe that is a natural cycle. Are we getting close to a full moon? Oops. Yes, 2 May.

:-)

Anyhow, a recent correspondent inspired the following idea: What if we established escrow accounts for departmental managers to retain unexpended funds and rewarded them for the growth of those escrow funds, while reducing the budget to the level of the actually expended funds.

Here is the thought in detail:

> More taxes for Newport , at this point is akin to believing that pouring
> ever more amounts of water into a sieve is an effective way increase its
> ability to transport water.

What is absolutely amazing to me is that people will sign up to the concept that more taxes are inevitable.

I've stated before, with examples, that all forms of government that I've ever seen are totally bloated. (Duh, I'm not the first to notice this...)

Let me loose on the local budget and I'll bet you a bundle I could slash it in half, without raising a stink from anyone, because they'd say, "well, yes, he's right." And because there would be far and away still enough perks in the budget to satisfy all comers.

(Budget users are usually not overly greedy people, they just don't want to see their personal ox gored, at least not unless everyone else's ox is being obviously and equally gored, and as long as they still have a reasonable amount of an ox left over...)

I dare anyone who has had any proximity to a government budget of any kind, be it federal, state, or local, to deny the existence of the end-of-period frantic "Use it or lose it" mentality:

"We need to obligate this money or we won't get the same amount next year."

Well, duh. If you don't need it this year, you prolly won't need it next year, so how about saving it?

Well, because then "Your budget, Mr. Manager, won't be so big, and people will think you are not good at feeding at the public trough for 'our children' (or whatever other expediently politically correct slogan is available) so you might get fired."

:-( Hence spiralling budgets and taxes.

How about a change in mentality to protect and promote those who reduce their budgets?

For example: how about establishing departmental escrow accounts? Whatever is not spent remains under the control of the manager, but is transferred from operating funds to an escrow account, which can be invested under a ruleset to accrue interest and be available for future emergency expenditures, but at the same time be removed from the "budget".

(There are already methods for establishing multiyear funds, but these still do not provide an incentive for saving. They just defer the end-of-cycle panic to the out-years...)

The "budget" would then be based on the actual expenditures, but the incentives and promotions would be based on the growth of the escrow fund: the less he spends, the more he saves in his escrow account, the more he is rewarded.

Don't take the savings from him, since that will demotivate him, rather reward him for saving it.

Then the central government can reduce his budget according to the size of the escrow and collect the interest on the escrow, but still reward him for fiduciary stewardship AND save money.

Then set some maximum threshold and special controls for the consumption of the escrow, perhaps using the CPI or some other device so that responsible use can be made of the escrow, but still allow punishing budget expansions (or growth in expenditures beyond some reasonable threshold) and continue to reward frugality...

The end effect would be the following:

+ The actual expenditures would be reduced
+ The escrow accounts would grow
+ The actual budgets would shrink, and with them the taxes.

And there would be a huge sigh of relief from the 99.9% of managers who hate the current system but don't have any other way of dealing with it:

Hey, managers are people too. They need to get ahead and feed their families. So why not let's figure out a way to let this happen and protect the public?

And, most importantly, the true public needs would be met, without bloat.


Too bad the founding fathers were not clever accountants. They got almost everything right, except budgets. I'm not an accountant, but I recognize bloat, and bloat is no friend of mine.

RSS Feeds

I am really getting geeky. Figured out how to add this blog page to RSS feeds.

It took me a couple of hours of Googling. Surprised that blogspot doesn't point it out up front.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (and various other interpretations). RSS is a text-based format, a type of XML.

RSS files (which are also called RSS feeds or channels) simply contain a list of items. Usually, each item contains a title, summary, and a link to a URL (e.g. a web page). Other information, such as the date, creator’s name, etc., may also be available.

An item’s description may contain all of a news article, blog post, etc., or just an extract or summary. The item’s link will usually point to the full content (although it may also point to what the content itself links to).

Well, I spent several hours figuring out how to build the RSS file, tried adding it to this page, it didn't work. And then I found that:

Blogspot provides an Atom feed. Append /atom.xml to the end of your Blogspot URL to get your Atom feed. For example my blog (this page)

http://genietvanhetleven.blogspot.com/

has an Atom feed at

http://genietvanhetleven.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

It's that simple. Then add the latter URL to your RSS reader and it immediately lists the six postings so far.

Cool.

There are numerous RSS readers out there. Mozilla's Thunderbird email client has a section for newsgroups and blogs incorporated directly into the client. That is where you enter this URL.

Illegal "Diplomacy"

http://feeds.opinionjournal.com/~r/wsj/opinion_journal/~3/107122423/

Very interesting. This is available at my WSJ OpinionJournal feed in the upper right hand corner.

Representative Pelosi has run afoul of a two-hundred-year-old law, and indeed, a millenium-old (or older) tenet of common sense:

Something about not blind-siding the boss.

Recommended.

My Status with Linux

I recently read an article discussing Vista. It displayed considerable angst at the new offering.

I have learned better.

Successive versions of MSWin have added little if any functionality since WinME AFAICT. Conversely, they seem to have added hosts of maddening little idiocies that drive me nuts, for which there are no solutions.

When I loaded XP in 2002 and it started phoning home without my permission that was the end of the line; the straw that broke the camel's back.

By contrast, with Linux it is such a pleasure to have a machine that does exactly what I tell it to do or that at least asks permission, instead of executing a host of condescendingly stupid alternatives.

I have now bought two very expensive new machines in the past four years.

I do not turn them on even once before putting a Linux setup disk in the DVD drive.

Blowing off an investment? No. All that overhead is nothing more than the cost of doing business. Add it to your tax deduction at fair market value. (Disclaimer: Suggestion, I am not a tax advisor... :-)

Rather, doing so is recognizing a fundamental law of nature: There is no such thing as a free lunch.

All that suckerware is just that. And my crawling through it to delete it is a waste of time. So just nuke it all to start and then begin afresh with a new Linux distro setup disk.

Let me suggest that you investigate Linux Format, a UK magazine that each month publishes a "live DVD" with a different Linux distribution:

http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/

My favorite distribution at present is the SuSE series, currently at 10.2 (I have 10.1 installed), but have used Mandrake / Mandriva and Fedora Core. All surpass any version of the mainstream OSs in flexibility, usability, availability, reliability, and obedience, IMHO. SuSE issues a point update every six months, not every six years.

Any of these Linux distros offer at least two "desktops" - eye candy environments: KDE "looks like" MSWin, Gnome "looks like" Macintosh, but their applets can all be installed on the same machine. And of course, all other Linux software can be installed on either desktop framework.

However, beneath the eye candy is a raft of higher functionality.

Have you tried Firefox? Thunderbird? KHotKeys? Kwrite? Kate?

Konqueror blows away the legacy file and internet managers. It offers both file and Internet functions in one app, plus tabbed windows, multiple panes, direct internet connectivity, and a host of connection protocols far beyond ftp and http, e.g., smb, buetooth OBEX...

OpenOffice is fully compatible with MSOffice for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. It even now executes VBA macros. It has a DB function that I have not yet investigated. But then there is MySQL, cited below.

GIMP is a Photoshop clone. I use GnuCash in lieu of Quicken. Stellarium is brilliant. Rosegarden MIDI and score editing, XMMS audio player and equalizer, Audacity sound ripper and editor, K3b cd/dvd burning, Codeine/Kaffeine video players, Ekiga videoconferencing, GAIM instant messaging, the list is endless of highly useful, easy to use, reliable, robust, and powerful applications, all free as in speech and beer.

Stability? I honestly can't remember the last time I rebooted this machine. It's been weeks for sure, prolly the last time I had to shut it down to go on business travel. But since it is almost Easter, I guess I may do so tonight, just for old times sake.

File system? A raft to choose from. You can use FAT if you must, but then there are ext-2, xfs, and a host of others. I've used ext-3 and Reiser. All of these keep "journals" so that if you do have a crash before the data are saved you can recover. And they back themselves up, AND they error check and defrag themselves. So gone are the days of having to endlessly error check and defrag your disk. It just happens, in the dark of night while you are alone with your dreams.

Viruses? Generally fuggedaboutit. First, a well disciplined permissions protocol prevents access to critical files. Secondly, executables are all in one kind of a sandbox or another. Nevertheless the ClamAV virus search, cleaning, and protection system seems robust, although to date all it has found are old macro virii in old Windows DOC files and its own test files.

Development? Mono mimics .net. Then there is BASH, Perl, PHP, TC/TCL and a raft of other languages designed to do things simply. The flagship of web servers worldwide is LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. All open source and highly flexible, extensible, and usable. Not to mention the W3C standards for CSS and HTML. I have to write special CSS routines to accommodate MSIE, while the Rest Of The World read the authorized CSS styles just fine. XML seems to be an emerging standard for database formats, embraced by the LAMP community. A 'way cool app is Notebook:

http://notebook.wjduquette.com

This is an XML personal Wiki and database where you can easily store all your stuff. You can easily create a functional decomposition of your life and store away all those little snippets of information that you hate to lose and keep them a click away. I vaguely remember a proprietary Win app, InfoSelect I think, that sort of did this, but this is open and you can edit the DB with a text editor, which you could not do with InfoSelect.

The alleged "driver" issues are mostly solved except for perhaps the most arcane hardware. My Nvidia display, WiFi, printers, and USB peripherals work out of the box. Some folks, notably Nvidia, and others are now providing Linux drivers for full functionality, and the ndiswrapper protocol is doing a wonderful job of taking care of the rest.

There is still a problem with fringe proprietary software, mostly synchronization with PDAs and such hardware, e.g., Timex geek watch synchronization, Garmin GPS jock gear synchronization, Rosetta Stone language software, etc., but for those very arcane and limited applications there is VMWare as a full x86 hardware emulator into which you can install up to Vista, or CrossOver Office, which provides an enhancement of the Wine API to run Windows apps directly. Then there is Win4Lin, Wine itself, and others. I can transfer files between my Linux file system and my Nokia 9300i using Bluetooth OBEX but still haven't cracked the calendar, todo list, and contacts synchronization yet. Funambol and multisync promise this Real Soon Now (RSN)...

And on and on and on.

So you *can switch.

And most importantly, IT DOES WHAT I TELL IT TO DO AND NOTHING ELSE WITHOUT ASKING PERMISSION!

Obedience is good. I paid for this machine, it belongs to me, not some faceless corporation in the far far west.

So do yourself a favor by taking a look at Linux, especially the SuSE and Ubuunto distributions. And, importantly, Linux Format and SourceForge.net as excellent sources of up-to-date information on the latest developments.

Linux has not only arrived, it is clearing the brush and weeds of obfuscation and frustration from the Desktop forest.