A new program, a new project

I constructed my website, what, 5 years ago? I used Rapidweaver to make it. I was happy enough with it, it did what I thought I needed to. To be frank, it was also the extent of what I could make without a much greater investment in time.

Well, wouldn't you know it, Rapidweaver is now in the Mac App store. They are on version 5 these days. I made my website with version 3, and later upgraded to 4 but didn't really take advantage of it. I went ahead and downloaded the newest version while it was on sale (30 bucks!) and then took a look around at what could be done with it.

Holy smokes! There has been a ton of added functionality added to it, and it looks as though it's easier to use than ever. Looking at some of the themes available these days makes me painfully aware of how tired my site looks. It also looks like some of the things I wanted to do before but didn't have the patience to learn how to code are now really easy to do. This along with my recent purchase of Pixelmator has made me think that I should tackle a redesign of my site this year.

I don' t plan on doing crazy stuff to it, but now that no one is on dial up any more, I am freer to add some eye candy and make the site more interesting and dynamic. With all of the plug-ins available for Rapidweaver, the sky is the limit. I hope to add more content as well as cleaning up some of the old stuff. I'm afraid that some of the links to my more popular pages (Profit is important is the #1 page on my site) are going to get changed and my RSS feeds will change as well but I'll worry about that when the time comes. This should keep me busy for a while, it'll be good to flex some creative muscles after all this time.

Foreign policy chickens coming home to roost.

So Tunisia started it, who knows when it will end. Egypt is rioting, Yemen is demonstrating, and Jordan is tense. Pop quiz, what do Saddam Hussain, Mubarak, Ben-Ali, Salah, and the Shah of Iran all have in common? That's right, they are, or were wildly unpopular rulers that were supported by the US government. So far, Iran has been the worst case scenario as far as how they have responded to the US after the leader was deposed. Our befriending of Saddam was mostly due to the ongoing strife that supporting the Shah and the shenanigans that brought him into power brought on.

If Egypt does wrest control from Mubarak, some interesting things are going to be put into motion. Here's another question, what are Egyptians supposed to think of a US government that just told them that they shouldn't want to be out from under Mubarak? For the record, Biden really is an ass and should not be allowed to speak in public. Would it really surprise anyone if the general populace in Egypt does not trust the US after having propped up the instrument of their repression for 30 years?

The reasons why people don't like the US are many and varied, but it can't be denied that "A friend of my enemy is my enemy" enters into people's thinking. I don't know how many times people in Yemen asked me why my government, supposedly in the land of the free, continued to support some of the worst autocratic rulers in the world. I couldn't really tell them the truth, that US politicians and policy wonks considered those rulers adequate for keeping the rabble under control. It would just confirm their suspicions. I heard a joke over there, it went like this:

 

George Bush convenes a press conference and announces that as part of the war on terror, 100,000 Arabs will be killed, and 1 doctor. A member of the press asks the president, "Mr. President, why are you going to kill one doctor?" Bush then leans over to Rice and says, "See, I told you that no one cares about Arabs..."

I have heard several variations on that joke. Sometimes it is one Israeli, sometimes it is one American. In all cases, it is clear that people are interested in the single person over the 100,000 arabs.

I'm glad to see that the Obama administration is following a more nuanced treatment of Mubarak, Biden notwithstanding. With any luck, good old Hosni will be convinced to depart and let Egypt get on with the political evolution that has been stunted for these 30 years. Will things get ugly and complicated in the middle east? Undoubtedly. Will the folks at State and the leaders in this government learn any lessons about planting time bombs in foreign governments? I'm sure they won't. SIgh....

Morning song...

Woke up the other day to the White Stripes' "Death Letter." This wasn't all that surprising actually, I had watched a documentary involving jack White before I went to bed. It's a cover of an old Son House song, old school blues. Like most White Stripes songs, the best thing about it is the hook that jack is able to create with his guitar. It wasn't so much the song that was running through my head as the guitar lick. Check it out...

 

 

Say what you want about jack White, but he can certainly play a mean slide guitar...

A morning song two-fer

I awoke from a rather bizarre cleaning at work dream to Janet Jackson's "What Have You Done for Me Lately?" It had nothing at all to do with the dream. I fell back asleep and woke up to the Star Wars main theme running through my head.

The Janet Jackson song is a classic example of a song that I don't really know getting stuck. I had the chorus looping through again and again. On the flip side, it's kind of cool to have a stirring John Williams number as a theme for waking up...

Songs in my head

Every morning, I wake up with a song in my head. Sometimes it's a carryover from a dream, other times, it's totally random with no apparent reason. Think I'm going to keep track of these as I remember them.

 

Keep in mind that these aren't favorite songs. They are usually catchy, but how much I like them has little to do with what sticks. This morning is a good example. I had a dream I was at a White Stripes concert. Did I have any of their songs stuck in my head when I woke up? Of course not. I had "Let's Twist Again" by Chubby Checker.

The story behind that is that I started the audience singing that song when I saw Jack White twisting for some reason as he was heading off the stage. I shouted out "Let's twist again Jack!" and some people picked up on it and joined it "Like we did last summer..." A woman near me ended up leading the audience. One of the crew actually gave her a mic towards the end.

Sigh. Chubby Checker to start my day. I wonder why my brain does this to me....

Apptivate!

My latest purchase from the Mac App Store is a little dandy called Apptivate. It's $2.99 and worth every penny. Essentially, it is a hot key activator. What's that? It allows me to assign a key combination to launch applications, folders, etc. For example, I have "cntrl m" set up to activate the blogging program I use called Marsedit. So I just hit that key combo and BAM! the program is launched. If it is already running, that key combo brings it to the front of all of the windows I have active.

It doesn't sound like much, but I now have these combos for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox browsers (cntrl 1,2,3), iTunes, iCal, Graphic convertor, Pixelmator, Address book, Join Together, and the Mac App Store. I also have my downloads folder at my fingertips. I've made heavy use of the control button cause it doesn't seem to have a lot of things assigned to it yet. Apptivate also allows you to do sequential key commands. So while I have "cntrl j" to activate Join Together, what do I do with all of the "i" apps" Easy, I hit "cntrl i" first and then touch the letter for the next part of the app. So for iCal, I hit "cntrl i" and then the letter "c". It makes it easy to keep track of where everything is.

Where this can get pretty interesting is that I can also use Automator to create custom actions on my computer. Automator creates Applescript programs to automate actions on your computer. So I could create a program to open a folder, rename the pictures in it, and then upload them to whatever site i want them to. Then every time I want to do that, I can just run the applescript. Now, with Apptivate, I can run that with a quick key combo. The possibilities are almost endless....

 

Another great, cheap app from the App store!

Wow

"In the last two quarters, Apple sold 30 million iPhones — half of what it sold in the previous three years (60 million units)."

 

And it looks like Apple is just getting started, what with Verizon coming on board soon.

 

There are some analysts that expect Apple to sell 100 million phones in the coming year.

 

Wow.

Some other apps in the app store

I noticed a bunch of other apps in the app store that either I already had, or that had significant discounts on them. First off is the iWork and iLife suits of programs from Apple. It used to be that if you wanted to upgrade these programs you had to buy all of them over again even if you only wanted one of them. Now you can buy iPhoto, iMovie, Garageband, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote individually. If you just want a word processor, 20 bucks for Pages is a lot better than $79 for all of iLife or $100 for MS Office.

Apple has also priced its advanced photography program Aperture at $80. That's an amazing discount. Not only is that much less than the usual $200 price of the program, it's even less than the usual $100 for the upgrade! That means that when the new version comes out, you'll be able to buy it through the app store for less than you used to be able to! Apple has also slashed its price on remote desktop software to $80! Granted, that's a lot more specialized piece of software aimed mostly at system administrators, but wow, what a price!

 

There are several other apps that I already own in the app store as well. I use Rapidweaver for my website, and the 5.0 version is up in the store. They have the purchase price the same as the upgrade price in their website. that's rankling some folks, but I think it makes sense to transition everyone over to the app store. Socialite is a handy program for keeping track of your Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds, and Google Reader. It's only 10 bucks, a great price.

 

If you can't tell, I'm mighty psyched about this. It's one more way that Apple has managed to make things easier for us.

The Mac App Store

I talked a bit about some of the things I bought from the App Store, but some of you may not be real familiar with it. Apple has taken the lessons it learned from the app store for the iPhone and iPad and brought it to the Mac. Unlike the iPhone and iPad stores, you are still free to get your apps for the Mac elsewhere, but the Mac app store adds a lot of convenience and makes it easy to find things. I wasn't so sure about this approach, but after having used it, I think this will be absolutely huge.

The app store makes it super easy to find apps, but it also makes it really easy to buy them, install them, and update them. It's essentially all done for you, and it's all done through the same account you use for iTunes and the other app stores. Another nice thing is that since all of these are vetted by Apple, there's no worry about spyware or trojans.

Initial reports seem to be very favorable from both the consumers and developers. The only issues revolve around apps that you already have installed on your Mac and then they appear in the App store. Unless they were actually bought from the app store, they will not qualify for the easy updates that you can get through the app store. So for now, you will still have to update like you always have. The good news is that a lot of software companies are selling their apps at their usual upgrade prices. That means that when it's time to upgrade to the newest version you can convert over to the app store version I did that with Graphic Convertor. I'm a little jealous of the people starting from scratch, they will be able to use the app store for almost all of their app purchases without the messiness of us legacy users.

So if you have 10.6.6 (and if you don't, why don't you?), you should definitely check out the app store and see how Apple is changing how we buy programs. God, I love this company...

Oh my Wallet! (Mac app store edition)

The app store for the Mac launched back on the 6th. I took a look at it that day and the next and wondered if it was going to do much. Several days later I did something I probably shouldn't have done, I went through the app store again, category by category. Ouch! Here's what I got...

 

Clippy. We'll start out with an inexpensive app, this one is only 99 cents but it's brilliant. I don't know how many times I've wanted to copy and paste multiple things, but since the clipboard can only store one item at a time I had to constantly go back and forth between the sources and the destination. Clippy to the rescue!

 

 

 

Now I can copy as much as I want and have all of the snippets at my disposel at once. Like I said, simple, but awesome. Well worth the 99 cents. It would be perfect if it could do pictures as well, but the text only mode is still a Godsend.

 

This next one is probably at the other end of the value scale. It's 5 bucks and it's called insight. What is it? Ummm, I guess you could call it a visualizer. What does it visualize? The workings of your computer. It takes readings of your CPU activity, free memory, memory wired (whatever that is), and memory active and turns them into a moving shape.

 

You can't see it in that screenshot, but those colors are constantly moving. It sort of reminds me of the "Bit" character from the original Tron. Yes, this is about as geeky as I hope to ever get, but I like it.

 

IP Scanner is a a free app and it's a simple one. It essentially shows me who is on my network. Since I'm the gatekeeper to the internet and the other folks in the house are supposed to pay me for it, I want to see who is using it. This is a quick way of checking. And you can't beat the price.

 

Sketchbook Express is a free app I downloaded on a whim since I don't have any other drawing apps. This is the baby brother to the Sketchbook pro app and it will most likely do what I need it to do.

 

Now we get to the ouch portion of the post... Years ago, a program called Graphic Convertor was bundled with the mac OS. Maybe 10.2, 10.3? I don't remember. I do remember that it was useful and easy to use, so I bought a full license. It is a lot cheaper than photoshop, and it could do the stuff I needed it to do. I saw it on the app store and noticed it was version 7.03. I had 4.1 installed, so I went ahead and bought the current version for $35 or so.

 

 

They have really cleaned up the interface and have put in a ton more functionality, it's well worth the $35. In particular, I love the smart trim feature. They have also put in a browser and organizer. I haven't gotten a chance to use it yet, but it looks good.

 

Pixelmator is another graphics program that I had heard of, and had heard good things about. Once again, it has a lot of the functionality that mere mortals need out of photoshop like curves adjustments, layers, etc., but at a fraction of the price. I took a look at the screenshots and the home page and went ahead and bought it even though I had just bought Graphic Convertor.

 

 

 

I think the UI is more polished in Pixelmator, but what really won me over was the support pages for the program. They have tons of video and text tutorials as well as a thriving forum. I think Graphic Convertor is a little hampered by the fact that they are a German company. There may be more help available in German, but that doesn't help me much. So which one is better? Well, I did buy both, so I think they're both pretty good. I may not have bought Graphic Convertor if I already had Pixelmator, but I am glad I have both, even if Pixelmator is in the $35-$40 ranger as well. I've used Graphic Convertor for so long that I'm pretty comfortable with it. If you're a graphics newbie like me, you would probably be better served picking up Pixelmator first and then see if you need the conversion features or the organization features of Graphic Convertor.

 

The last app I downloaded was the current Stuffit Expander. it's a handy app for expanding compressed files, and it's free, so it was a no brainer. I downloaded a few more free program to see if i liked them, but I didn't so I deleted them. No harm, no foul. I'm sure there will be plenty more new apps in the app store as time goes along. I hope I can afford this...

 

Why do you carry that around?

We were talking about rolling  coin across out knuckles at work (don't ask, I have no idea why we were talking about that),

so I pulled out my $5 Canadian Maple Leaf coin to try it. My manager immediately asked, "What's that?" I showed her and explained that it is one ounce of silver. Sure, it has a value of 5 Canadian dollars printed on it, but the value of the silver at that point was a hair below 30 bucks. I had bought it 5 months earlier for around 18 bucks.

Her next question was, "Why do you carry that around?" The most basic answer is that I like it. There is something solid and reassuring about the size and weight. With a little more thought, I also like it as a conversation starter, and it had worked this time too. It gave me the opportunity to mention the difference between fiat currency and hard money. Don't worry, I never go into too much detail, unless they are interested of course...

I also carry it around to remind myself of the difference between how the currency maker and the market value money. Everything varies in price over time, but paper money's and regular coins' values are changed by that country's central bank primarily. The government can print whatever value it wants on silver, but they have zero control over the actual value. In an ideal world, no single group could hold sway over the value of our money, our store of value. This is as close as we can come to that right now. It's good to be constantly reminded of that.

Best Buy

While I was waiting for my stereo to be installed, I wandered around Best Buy. I hadn't done a full store tour in a while, and it was illuminating. After hearing about all of the tablets released at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (I think it was 40!) I wanted to see what a non-Apple one looked like. I could only find one tablet computer, the iPad. I think the competitors are going to have a difficult time, the iPad has a significant lead right now and it doesn't sound like a lot of them will be out before the middle of the year. There was a lady getting some information about the iPad there. I was pleasantly surprised to hear the Best Buy guy not talking nonsense. I deliberated a little, but decided not to be the jerk that cost him a sale by mentioning the free set-up at the Apple store:-)

Best Buy might as well be called the TV store. TVs were easily the biggest part of their sales floor. Once again, I was blown away at how good some of them looked. I had to keep repeating the mantra "You don't watch TV, you don't watch TV" in order to avoid buying one. I caught myself thinking that $2000 really wasn't too bad a price for that TV... Yes, Hockey would be amazing on one of those, but really, I can spend my money on better things. If I were a bigger movie kind of guy I probably would already own one... I checked out the 3d TVs too. Some of them, especially from Panasonic, were impressive. I really can't see wearing glasses all the time though. The LED backlit displays really do seem to be worth saving up for, there does seem to be a real difference.

Of course, places like that have always played games with TVs in order to mover certain ones. It was fairly obvious as I walked down the aisles that some TVs had their saturation turned down, brightness lowered, etc. There were several others that had the video equivalent of "boom and tizz." In the audio world, speakers that have impressive bass and sizzling highs really stand out. Of course if you listen to them for a while, you get tired of them. The most natural speakers sound boring when you first hear them. People tend to buy the speakers that get their attention, subtle loudness adjustments are all it takes to steer people towards certain speakers. The same goes with TVs. The classic ploy was to bias the pictures towards blue, guys seem to be attracted to that. Nowadays, excessive brightness, garish colors, and lousy comparisons are the things used to get people to pick one TV over another. The TV section was the only place where people made eye contact with me, let alone offer any help.

What else... I saw several audio bits that were interesting. They sell Martin Logan and B&W speakers, both brands have long been high end audio staples. While I know that the models they sell at Best Buy aren't their best models, it's good to know that you can get decent speakers there. I also saw a pair of active speakers I had briefly considered getting called Rokit. They have gotten pretty good reviews... They are also carrying electronics that have always been considered solid mid-fi brands like Denon, Marantz, and Yamaha. Pioneer is still there, but I no longer see any Onkyo, or Kenwood. It looks like you can get a nice sounding system there. When I used to sell this kind of equipment, you really couldn't.

 

I was shocked at how many of their electronic displays simply weren't working. All of the cameras I picked up were dead, and all of the smart phones were static displays only. You couldn't try any of them out, they just had a sticker showing you what it could look like. Pretty lousy way to show stuff. Honestly, after walking through there, I'm saddened at how low the bar is set in electronics retail. No wonder Apple is kicking tail. I don't think I'd go there for anything but a TV. Even then, I'd have to have my guard up so that I'm not unduly influenced by their display antics. Are there any other big electronic stores around anymore?

New car stereo!

I have been enjoying playing my iPod in my car ever since I got it. The factory CD player had an auxilery port in it and it allowed me to listen to whatever I wanted. After some early issues, I got the sound quality to as good as it was going to get. It was miles ahead of using an FM transmitter, but there were still a few problems. Factory systems are never any good. Even if you get a decent sounding one, you pay way too much for it. The amplifiers in those things are anemic and lead to irritating and headache inducing distortion when you turn them up. I was also using the headphone output from the iPod which while it worked, was hardly ideal from a sound quality perspective. Going though the iPod's amp before the main one just added to the noise. The biggest issue was a control one. The only way to really change stuff was to pick up the iPod and fiddle with it while I drove. Hardly a safe situation. Well, all of that has changed...

 

This thing is awesome. There is no CD player in it. Along with plugging in my iPod, I could use the analog input, or pop in an SD card. It sounds like I could potentially plug a flash drive or portable hard drive into it as well, I'll have to explore that a little bit more. The sound quality has gone up a ton, tighter bass, louder, cleaner, and more understandable. I can control the iPod with it, so no more fiddling with touch controls while driving. It also has some sound shaping controls, their "sound retriever" really does smooth out some of the rough edges that you get with compressed audio. I'm also looking into getting a microphone they make. Using it, the deck can create a custom EQ for your car. For $20 or so, it is probably worth it.

 

I had considered installing this, along with a pair of speakers, myself... for about 10 seconds. Crutchfield has assured me that it was no problem, but after looking at the instructions I decided that discretion was the better part of valor. I had Best Buy install it instead. Good thing too, they had to do a few things to make stuff fit, I wouldn't have had the ability to do it. it's funny, in these days of $300 headphones for iPods, installing a stereo that can control it in your car would seem like a no brainer. All told, the deck, a pair of new speakers, the hardware for installing it, and the install came to a total of $350 or so. If you didn't get new speakers, it would probably only run a little over $200. Very, very excited about this. Oh, and thanks mom for the great Christmas present!

 

Grace in tragedy

"This shouldn't happen in this country, or anywhere else, but in a free society, we're going to be subject to people like this. I prefer this to the alternative."

 

That was said by John Green, father of the slain Christina Green. She was the 9 year old that got gunned down when that nutjob tried to kill a congresswoman. I love liberty, but this wouldn't be what i was thinking if I were in his shoes... It's sad that none of the pundits or politicians speaking about this incident sound nearly as measured and clear as John Green.

Highs and Lows

Well, the excitement of my new medicine has quickly been quashed by me being laid up for 3 days in a row. I had been bragging to my nurse during my infusion that I rarely get ill. well, wouldn't you know it, I got a cold the next day. A cold, big deal, right?

 

Here's the thing. My immune system hates my nervous system. When I get sick or get an infection, etc. my immune system can go on the attack and cause an MS flare-up. I get the brain fog and have difficulty walking, along with my old friend exhaustion. This has happened to me once before and it totally freaked me out. I'm a little calmer this time, I'm expecting the MS to die down along with the cold, like last time. It seems to be happening, I'm feeling better all around today and hoping to go back to work tomorrow.

 

So I shouldn't brag... I'm also going to keep in mind that things can change quickly, feeling good one moment, feeling bad the next is always a possibility. This should help me appreciate the times I feel good, right?

Dream issues

One of the more nefarious effects of MS is how it affects your brain. There are the periods of brain fog where it is just difficult to think. I've also recently been having some rather vivid dreams. So far, they have just been standard dream fare, nothing too good or bad, but they are really life like. This morning, I dreamt that I had been visited by some friends of mine from back home and they brought some tube amps with them! The trouble was that they had woken me up and I needed to get ready for work. I spent the entire dream coughing (I had a cold) and trying to stave off sleep because they had woken me up early.

Here's the problem, when I woke up, I took those feelings with me. I felt exhausted, and it took me a while to appreciate that I wasn't coughing. I do have a runny nose, so maybe that made me cough in my dream. The big issue was that my dream felt quite a bit more "real" than my waking hours. This happened to me last week too. I drove to work, and I remember thinking that at any time i was going to wake up. I only lasted a couple of hours at work before I gave up.

So I called in today to tell them that I will at the very least be late. We'll see how long this feeling will last today, the last time I was OK by 5 or so. I wonder if this is a side effect of my new medicine? In any case, it's unnerving.

The best way to think about macroeconomics

Russ Roberts, the host of the Econtalk podcast, just put up a really good post about the limits of knowledge. Here's an excerpt:

 

Suppose the economy does well this year–growth is robust and unemployment falls. What is the reason for the improvement? Will it be because of the natural rebound of an economy after a downturn that has lasted longer than people thought? The impact of the stimulus finally kicking in? The psychological or real impact of extending the Bush tax cuts? The psychological or real impact of the November election results? The steady hand of Obama at the tiller? All of the above? Can any model of the economy pass the test and answer these questions?

The reason macroeconomics is not a science and not even scientific is that the question I pose above is not answerable. If the economy improves, there will be much talk about the reason. Data and evidence will be trotted out in support of the speaker’s viewpoint. But that is not science. We don’t have a way of distinguishing between those different theories or of giving them weights to measure their independent contribution.

 

The macro economy is just too complex for us to be able to suss out the reasons that things happen with any sort of exactness. When we look at an end result like employment, GDP, or the stock market we naturally try to figure out "the reason" for that thing to be the way it is. There is no single reason, there is no single vector that can explain an aggregate result. It's like seeing shapes in clouds. A pattern emerges, but there isn't any one thing controlling it.

Macroeconomics is inevitably apologetics for a particular policy track. Anyone spouting it inevitably feels as though the government can in fact steer the economy. They never seem to ask themselves the question that if the government can control stuff like that, why didn't they stop the bad stuff from happening? The fact that government officials can't see things coming and then promise to fix things later should make people wonder.

 

 

 

You can read The Test: "" from Russ at that link.