Take data from several sources and combine it into one screen, in this case politicians, their money, and where it comes from. Is a mashup of data in one picture worth a million words?
Check out this little toy about what influences your legislator and who gives them money.
According to the WOKV Facebook page, “an idea being floated by Jacksonville City Councilman Don Redman” is moving the local trick or treating to Saturday in the Jacksonville, Florida area.
Whatever the reasons given, the biggest reason NOT to is pure confusion; half the kids wouldn’t get the message and may try to trick or treat on either night. The advantage of Halloween on Sunday this year is that adult parties and kid special events ARE on Saturday, freeing Halloween Sunday just for treating and home celebrations.
It’s no secret that I enjoy setting up a cool little graveyard with special effects and such, and I have time set aside on Sunday afternoon to set it up. I have no desire to do it twice, nor can I leave it set up over night for fear of idiots destroying or stealing parts of it. And, yes, I’ll have pictures up here very soon.
The ramp up to cool decorations and costumes has been slow this year, but now things are getting up and running. The last Spirit Halloween store is set to open today in Jacksonville, Florida (over a month after the all the ones in Houston were already open), while a costume-only Halloween Express opened on Southside last week. Spencer’s gifts is finally transitioning into Halloween mode, about a two weeks after Hot Topic started setting our creepier-than-usual clothing.
I haven’t seen or found any particular cool new thing or must-have decoration this year, but for those of you into fog machines and special effects, Target’s brand of foggers, low lying fog machines, and bubble fog machines are 25%-40% cheaper than everyone else, including $10 remote timer controllers (and many include a bottle of fog liquid or whatever they need to work.)
If you find something new, cool, and Halloween spooky, lemme know!
Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen, Ray Charles, Julio Iglesias, Mickey Rooney, Jason “George” Alexander and myself all share a single somewhat important existential commonality: we were all born on September the 23rd.
The Dalai Lama endorses extroverted pessimism, and I have his tweet to prove it.
DalaiLama: If we change inside and disarm ourselves by dealing constructively with negative thoughts and emotions, we can literally change the world.
Can the man make it any clearer? When your glass is half empty, find another half-empty glass to fill the first one back up with. I shall change the world!
Have you ever done something and thought, “There’s gotta be a better way to do this,” or decided to remake something to work better?
I do this constantly; ask anyone who’s seen my computer desk. I have my high speed modem and separate router (with WiFi) mounted vertically on the side (for easy access without taking up desk space) along with a dedicated analog telephone that runs off the phone line (no batteries or plug ins.) The underside of the desk has a protected screen over the power center (my cat loves chewing wires when you aren’t paying her proper attention) with a UPS/surge suppressor and “power off” outlets that secure against phantom power feeds when the computer is off. The desk hutch lights are all low-power super-bright LED and also power down with the computer.
I’m also all for gradual change to improve things, like moving away from leaded gasoline, replacing paper bags with plastic, or using green technologies, but only when it makes sense to do so. Have you heard how loud wind farm windmills roar to make electricity (60-70 decibels?) Have you priced how many solar panels it would cost to run your home or business (285 square feet for 600 MW a day?) As technology improves to become more efficient, green technologies will also improve until it makes sense replace old technology. If you can get your 600 MW of power consumption down to 100, you’d only need 1/6 as many solar panels, or just 48 square feet.
If world leaders mandate that the world must stop using oil by 2015, maybe that will happen and maybe it won’t, but making it a crime to use oil thereafter even if the problem hasn’t been solved is just foolish. Need a better commercial space orbiter? A car that drives itself to a destination while avoiding obstacles? Fifty miles per gallon? DARPA and the X Prize Foundation has had the better answer for years: offer a prize to create the competition for solving a technological problem. This is why free market business competition works.
So, if you’re done inside a room, turn off the light as you leave. If you can replace an appliance with a more efficient one that can do more with less, buy it and properly dispose of the old one (or better yet, recycle it.) I cannot wait for my own electric car that goes a thousand miles on a single fuel cell that plants wildflowers as it roars down the highway at 120 mph steering with only the power of my mind, but please don’t ask me to park my car in a land fill and walk around in the dark eating tree bark just because the future hasn’t been invented yet.
And speaking of the future, where are my cheap, solid-state, everlasting LED replacement light bulbs so we can quit making these florescent bulbs that need a Level 5 HAZMAT team to properly dispose of?
Normally, I post something like this on August 1st, but support on this has been down this year (I’m talking to YOU, retailers.) With the so-called summer blockbuster season of films spent and kiddies back in school, it’s time to get spooky.
As hobby stores go, Garden Ridge used to be first out of the gate with new decorations and such, but due to being restructured in bankruptcy, it’s hard to roll out new stuff with only a quarter of the staff remaining. Your local Hobby Lobby and other craft stores should be caught up by now while Walmart and Target will start setting up as those local Spirit Halloween shops start to appear.
I haven’t seen anything new or must have for the $100 and below set this year. And (credit goes to Brett for this observation) why does EVERY fake tombstone have to say “R.I.P” on it? Halloween is on a Sunday this year, and a weekend day is always nice for setup. I’ve got four flame projectors to play with this year (acquired during the after holiday sales last year), so I intend to light the entire yard on fire!
What are you playing to do to get a few screams this year?
There’s been a lot of political talk as of late: who believes what, who wants what, and who’s doing what to whom. I’ve had some college, traveled the world on the US Navy’s dime, and have made my name in the work force through the development of the Internet. I believe my point of view in both US and world politics is as important as anyone else, and also I feel that something is very wrong. Here’s why:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Every American should know this, the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence. Everyone should be allowed to live; everyone should be free. And to me, “the pursuit of Happiness” implies that the United States government in no way should prevent any citizen from reaching to better themselves. I also feel it does not, however, imply that everyone should get the same as what everyone else has, that there is a minimum requirement.
Write a book, start a company, fulfill a need, earn a profit, and buy stuff. What’s more American than that? But there seems to be a movement to demonize “the American Dream” (own your house and retire debt free to live out your life as you wish.) How dare you succeed where I fail? Because there is no “fairness” clause in the declaration, only the right to pursue a better share. Failure is knowledge; try again or try something else.
I believe in a strong military to protect these rights. Failure to show the strength to protect something is an invitation to having it taken from you; ask any bully on the playground where he got all that lunch money from. As a world superpower, the fact that America is not bent on conquering the globe (as the British Empire once did) should speak volumes, although we probably should police the world only when called in or directly threatened.
On a side note, guess what the first thing to go is when you cut military spending? Soldiers raises and their families benefits. If there are less bombs and bullets, that means military families are already suffering. I’ve worked military supply; I’ve seen how this works.
In polls, I’ve read that other countries declare that America is the country they hate the most, but it is also the country they wish they could have been born in. It seems intuitive that others want what Americans already have, and it is now becoming evident that it can be lost at the stroke of a pen fair easier than at gunpoint.
Whether you believe in the invisible creator in the sky or not, the idea of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness is worth fighting for. I wasn’t an economics major, but I know the difference between an income and an expense. A call center (providing customer support) is always an expense because it produces no income, just like a government. It needs to be as small and efficient as possible to do its job cost effectively, allowing more revenue to be freed for expansion and sales.
Some things being done and suggested right now in the name of “boosting” the economy won’t work, and it’s simple to see why at this level. Taxing only the most successful companies actually taxes EVERYONE… because any price increase or tax obligation will be passed on to the consumer. If a company can’t afford to raise the price and meet a government imposed obligation, they can go out of business and take all of those jobs with them. To boost the economy, lock in the current tax base so smart companies and entrepreneurs can make actual business plans today that will still work tomorrow.
But what about everyone who CAN’T strive for more, that CAN’T better themselves? When others needs help, charity is when you have extra and CHOOSE to help those less fortunate. Sadly, there are people who think YOU should help whether you want to or can afford to. When the government decides to take your money only to give it to others who don’t produce anything, its called tyranny (even for a very admirable cause) and people have died all over the world to stop it, even declaring their independence from such a government… and that’s where we came in, folks.
Please discuss.
The movie Thank You for Smoking had a clever epilogue ending. After a career putting a positive spin on the negatives of tobacco, the main character is shown training board members how to spin cell phone radiation. The truth, of course, is mixed: it isn’t whether or not there IS any radiation, only how much. Additionally, it’s also a fact that the harder a cell phone has to work to hold a signal, the more it has to boost the signal (ie increase the radiation) to serve the whim of its master.
Now with Apple’s so-called “antenna-gate” crisis, Steve Job’s said that all smart phones were subject to this. In other words, if the user holding the phone covers enough of it using a “death grip,” the smart phone has to fight by boosting the signal (and in the case of the iPhone, drop it if it can’t boost it enough.) An independent company, Tawkon, has created an app to demonstrate the effect and predict the radiation output based on the clarity of the signal, whether caused by being in a bad location or holding the phone like a kung fu master. This video demonstrates the effect… interesting stuff, eh?
“There is a great disturbance in the Jacksonville Alternative radio scene… like a hundred thousand listeners cried out at once before their radio station was silenced.”
All kidding aside, I was one of the first people I know of in Jacksonville, Florida who noticed when X102.9 went on the air and who they were targeting. Later I documented how far they’d gotten when ratings were posted, but the competition (since there’s no college radio around these parts to speak of.)
But as of this morning, the once mighty Planet Radio had become “magic” something-or-another, a ho-hum light station. The morning show X made fun of, Lex & Terry, won’t be allowed back on Jax airwaves until October 1st due to contractual obligations. The question is, with X102.9 not only the dominating alt radio in the area, will it continue to get better or start to coast the way Planet Radio did… into oblivion?
Kevin A. Ranson 