*Transcendental *Logic

Tech Notes from your friendly online blatherer:

1.  I used to really like ScribeFire (a Firefox extension) — it’s easy to call up & get rid of, and great for managing multiple blogs — but after a recent update, it became really slow on all my computers, so I can’t recommend it as completely as I would have.  Ah well.  Keep an eye on it if you’re a blogger; maybe it’ll get fast again, and in the meantime it’s still not bad.

2.  Ubiquity (also a Firefox extension) IS TEH FUTURE; I highly suggest you try it out.  It’s the closest thing you’ll find now to a StarTrekesqe “Computer?  Please do x, y, and z for me…” …I’m always amazed when I see natural language processing working at all in the real world, and this little app is one impressive example, seriously.

3.  After years of being stuck with Quickbooks and other Intuit products (all while hating the company because gods they suck), I’m finally free to try GnuCash as the main accounting software for the impending business.  I’ve got it all set up — which was deceptively easy, as long as you RTFM — but the next few weeks will tell how usable it is.  Wish it (and me) luck!

4.  My Wii is something I probably shouldn’t have spent the money on (but to be fair, it wasn’t my money — I bought it with the first $350 in royalties I got from the Ubersleep book; how effing cool is that??!  THANK YOU GUYS!!), but I’m consistently really impressed with both its design and the intentions that it portrays.  It’s beautifully designed inside and out, and you can really tell that it’s high-quality equipment made of good parts — and it came with all the cables and everything it needed.  But even more than that, little things, like, it can play GameCube games, which is purely lagniappe on the company’s part.  And this is a good example of why it’s a good idea for a company to throw such bones to their customers:  I’ve never had any interest in Game Cube, but I went out and snagged a game for it just because my Wii lets me play them…a friend of ours recommended Tales of Symphonia, and yeah, if you like anime-styled RPGs, this is the BEST one I’ve ever played (and I say that having played it for a total of 20 minutes so far)!  So, see, even ignoring the smackdown the Wii gave to other next-gen consoles thanks to the work they put into it, Nintendo also adds a neat feature they don’t need to include, and as a result they’re boosting an outdated revenue stream by interesting me and people like me in Game Cube games.  I only hope I can run my company that well!

5.  Lastly, kick me for not mentioning this sooner, because my EPIC search for good syncing software is over now, and that deserved a bit of trumpeting and flag-waving which I didn’t get around to.  However, since it’s been about a month since I found Dropbox, I can at least say without guessing or stretching the truth at all that IT’S A FREAKING MIRACLE.  My problem was a deceptively tricky one:  I use several computers daily, and I keep a pretty sizeable chunk of files that cannot, cannot get mixed up or mis-versioned….as a writer, just about nothing is more painful than accidentally losing a page, a paragraph or even a few words that you changed in one of your pieces.  Such a mishap often destroys my motivation to continue with a piece, so I avoid it at all costs.  But how to sync almost a gig of files between three computers running three different operating systems, and preferably a secondary backup too, without losing track of versions?  Believe me, I’ve tried nearly everything, and all of it has risks I just hate (like, using a disk or thumbdrive, there’s always some time somewhere when the only up-to-date versions are on that little thing…::shudder::)  Enter Dropbox.  This software (Windows AND Linux compatible, woot!) is everything I’ve ever wanted:  It’s small, FREE, runs in the background, and simply keeps the latest version of everything (in the folder I tell it) updated.  It retains folder structures and metadata, and moreover keeps an online backup that I can access at any time.  If there’s a conflict, it just saves both.  So literally, when I change a file, it’s changed online and on all my other computers that happen to be on, within minutes.  And I can pay a reasonable price if I want a lot more space, too.  I’M IN LOVE.

This ends our very dry and stuffy technology report for today. 

Congratulations to America and everyone affected by America for avoiding a disastrous election outcome, and may you always trust yourself first whenever possible.

Peak Oil News >> Forums >> Economics & Finance >> What an economic collapse looks like WILL SCARE YOU SILLY, but may also provide what you consider useful advice.  My family and I have been arguing about his gun recommendations for a week now.  ;)

Sweden did something similar to what the U.S. is attempting, after a housing bubble burst and threatened their economy.  It worked.  Then again, there are significant differences:  Sweden is a lot smaller, and their problem was actual mortgages, not tricky, poorly-documented “mortgage securities”.  Plus, probably most significantly, the Swedish “bailout” included a hefty smackdown on banks themselves; it was far from “no strings attached” like our government wants it. 

So from where I sit, nothing is certain (other than that the little guys who had nothing to do with it will end up taking the burn for this mess — that, you can pretty much count on).  Oh, and that Weird Al’s new song is awesome.  That’s totally a given.  ;)

For today’s amusement, you’ll be filling out a short mad lib. A Yankovician madlib.

I heard this song this morning and thought, "My gods, that would make a fantastic mad lib." So, what the heck, right? I’m only doing the main verse, because that way if the idea sucks, I haven’t wasted much time. But I really like the idea of mad-libbing songs. ;)

Get into a nicely 80’s mood and pick…

1) body part, plural
2) adjective
3) adjective
4) adjective
5) adjective that rhymes with 4
6) adjective that rhymes with 3
7) noun, something awesome
8) place
9) state of being

…There, that was easy enough! Now, go behind the cut and see what you’ve wrought, and don’t forget to tell me about it if it’s near the extremes of the awesome/horrid scale. ;)

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I want to hang this on my forehead, facing inwards.

What a world lately, eh? Sometimes it feels like there’s so much Truth crowded up on the front porch that it’s temporarily blocking up the door, unable to get inside and actually cause any change (or damage).

Four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, health-care in crisis, damn near the whole world involved in fighting in the Middle East over shit that nobody who’s paying for it understands, creationism refusing to die (thanks, Louisiana), America drowning under the weight of its obligations to large corporate powers (and starting to spread them; watch out for that “treaty” that’s going to push America’s gods-awful copyright crap onto the rest of the world, and tighten things up even more in the US in the meantime)…and yet, I don’t know about everyone else, but things continue to chug along for me, personally, for all the world as if all this stuff is only theoretically real. I feel like my cat, laying on the floor washing my tail while the world boils by.

I pay for gas, and my iffily-funded nonprofit job hangs in there week after week and I’m somehow mostly just excited about getting a haircut today.

People are having sex in confessionals, married couples are doing it 100 days straight for science, and I’m enjoying watching Torchwood in the evenings way too much for someone with a college education.

The good ol’ Church of Reality wants Atheists to give up on their obsession with “God”, which is just as wishful as a size-12 woman winning a major beauty pageant…but hey, one of them happened, why not two? For me, I give up — I’ve decided that I believe in kungfu, hail the White Crane, a-men-Iiich!

All this…stuff…and yet it’s the little things that make us happy, in the end. Haircuts, and the new alarm working perfectly this morning, and an impending weekend truly, actually “off”.

Hubble? Great. Economy? Yup. Presidents? Sure, why not, I’ll have one. And a small Frosty.

I want to learn to snog like they do on British TV.

I want to prove the pure rationalists wrong in a way they can’t logically deny.

Something big and cool and important could happen tomorrow…

…Or maybe not. A nice plain Saturday would be perfectly fine too, I think.

ALSO! I got the Ubersleep books yesterday, and they look quite fantastic — once again, I’m really happy with Lulu’s job on the production end, and their quite reasonable prices. The First Edition of the book has my thumbs-up. Yay!