There's a distinct line between challenging a system because of real or perceived inequities that affect the people participating and challenging a system because it doesn't benefit you personally the way you would prefer. This situation seems to be listing heavily toward one of those categories. Granted, contrary to the common (mis)perception, we don't live in a democracy (as attractive as the concept is in patriotic ads and fiery speeches), but rather a constitutional republic (a form of government in which a core of established rights trumps the majority will of the people), and thus voting, as important as it is, is subject to limitations and interpretations; despite that, the candidates for any office should be sensitive to what the people want, not what benefits them most. Honesty, people. Please.
It's a good thing the liberal portion of the country tends to eschew violence, because Ralph Nader is the sort of misguided-yet-destructive personality that engenders very strong negative emotions among the people he thinks he's trying to help. Don't get me wrong; I strongly dislike the established two-party system and I've toyed with various third parties in the past, but one of the facets of third parties is that they draw votes *only* from the main party they most resemble. In the case of the 2000 election, it's arguably likely that Nader handed W. the presidency by refusing to drop out of the race and earning enough votes from people who otherwise would have voted for Gore to send the election spiraling into the recount mess that followed.
Posted at 11:23:00 AM. |
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Thursday, February 21
This and That
-The lunar eclipse last night was pretty spectacular. Too bad it coincided with a typical Nebraska night in February. I tried taking some pictures out a window in my house, but I'm afraid the warm air escaping into the freezing dark may not have been the best photographic situation (they're still on the camera; no need to look for the missing link in this paragraph).
-This week's Tales of the Twins(tm): *Scott takes away Kylie's water cup* Kylie: "Why the hell did you do that? I not making a mess." There's something about two-year-olds swearing that's inherently wrong and yet engenders laughter all the same.
-"Dexter" is a fabulous show. I might have more to say about it later. If I can come up with a passable way of drawing parallels between my psyche and the main character's without giving off the creepy "wow, he might be a serial killer" vibe.
Or Anti-Valentine's Day. Or Zombie Pigeon Day. However you like to celebrate it.
Apologies to all my (hopefully still) friends for being absent lately. I'm finally caught up on the house renovations (except for some tiling, anyway) and I should be online more . . . starting next week. My family is in town for the state wrestling tournament, so I have hosting duties until Sunday.
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Wednesday, February 13
Mac Update
I'm adjusting to the iMac fairly well. The close buttons on the opposite side, check. Dock and Dashboard, check. Menus in the top bar instead of the window, check. Programs running even when closed until actually quit, check.
The minor annoyances that still require acclimation: keyboard map, command keys, equivalent programs. I haven't found an HTML program I like yet (iWeb is useless and RapidWeaver *says* it will do what I want but the documentation and trial-and-error hasn't produced it yet).
Most of my actual complaints have been hardware. I really didn't like the Mighty Mouse. Even with right-click enabled, the mouse would routinely interpret my right-clicks as left-clicks (even when I was almost on the right edge), and the short cable really isn't compatible with a large screen. So I bought an MX Revolution wireless mouse, which had some early kinks (less-than-stellar OS X drivers that kept switching the scroll wheel mode on its own and a charging station that took some fiddling to make work) but that seems to be working pretty well now. And the built-in speakers, despite the reviews, sound awful (or more accurately, they sound like a stereo without any bass). Soundsticks seem to have solved that problem. All I think I'm really missing at this point is my Adobe Suite (you don't want to see Jay in Photoshop withdrawal . . .).
My daily drive to and from work (save on snow days, when an alternate, less inclined path is employed) traverses Saddle Creek, a street that borders several less-than-upscale neighborhoods. It saddens me, then, but failed to surprise me when I noticed three new businesses (two side-by-side in a strip mall and the other directly across the street) providing services in check cashing and tax refund loans.
For those unfamiliar with the practice, for a fee a check cashing business will provide a customer with cash in exchange for a post-dated check to be cashed at a specific time in the future (usually the next payday). If the customer does not have the money available to cash the check at the appointed time, he or she can conveniently "extend" the loan by paying an additional fee. In this way, these businesses bypass the traditional interest rates (and their state law caps). The net effect, however, is the same; within a short amount of time, a person paying $40 a month in "fees" on a $200 loan has paid far more than the original loan was worth. The equivalent interest rate is hard to calculate because it depends on how long it takes the customer to finally pay off the loan, but the number can easily go into the triple digits ($1,200 in fees on a $200 loan, for example).
On a comparable basis, tax anticipation loans involve the tax preparer giving the expected amount of the refund to the customer on the spot, with an expectation of paying it back when the refund arrives. The average interest rate on a $2,000 tax refund is just over 220%.
If all of this was upfront and aboveboard, I'd have no (or less, anyway) problem with it. Adults can do with their money as they please, after all. But as the location of the new stores shows, these loans are targeted at low-income families living paycheck to paycheck, often those with poor English, the very people who can't afford 200% interest rates and the people least likely to understand the language or math involved (who would say yes to a person offering them $200 now in exchange for $1,200 a year later?). Obfuscated language and unspoken drawbacks lead to families struggling to pay off an additional, extremely high-interest-rate loan in addition to whatever struggles led them to need the money in the first place (usually bills, which never go away), and the businesses capitalizing on this know that's what their services are doing. It's essentially exploitation of the poor and ignorant, and that's a loathsome thing to do.
Posted at 12:22:00 PM. |
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Thursday, February 7
Automatons
Spell check, in general, is a good thing, helping to sand off the rough corners of written language. As a basic standard, however, one should at least look at the suggested replacement word before approving it:
"As of today, more than 4 million people have given me their vote for president, that's of course, less than Senator moccasin's 4.7 million, but quite a statement nonetheless. Eleven states have given me their nod, compared to his 13. Of course, because size does matter, he's doing quite a bit better with the number of delegates he's got," Romney said. [Italics mine.]
My new Soundsticks are here and attached to the iMac, adding yet another diffuse blue LED glow to the collection of lights in the corner of my room (the USB hub and the Lightscribe drive being the other two, along with the green lights on the cable modem). That freed up my old Altec Lansing 251 speakers (a 5.1 speaker system won't fit on the new desk, hence the "downgrade" to 2.1 speakers). Given their likely (low) value, I "converted" them into television speakers (they're certainly not true surround sound, especially given the wires are too short to place them anywhere but on the entertainment center itself, but they sound better than the television's built-in speakers). One interesting quirk is that the "static" that the bass unit has been experiencing for the last several months, when I actually put my ear down by it while hooking it back up in the living room, revealed itself to be the faint murmurings of at least three different radio stations. So much for shielding.
In other news, despite the possible contribution crystalline water may have made to the emergence of life (and hence me) on this planet, I remain completely unimpressed with its insistence on returning on a seasonal basis. Read, shoveling snow (a task completed last night, only to be resumed tonight), while not on par with, say, invasive surgery or financial bankruptcy, remains an unenjoyable task. Lisa has openly scoffed at my plans for a superheated compressed nitrogen "gun" capable of flash-steaming snow off the sidewalks (and has suggested I just buy a small snowblower instead).
The bedroom project is nearing completion. The paint is long since dry, resplendent now with its shimmering highlights and metallic copper accents, reflecting a hybrid Frank Lloyd Wright/Stargate Atlantis/Myst theme seen only in the surroundings of bachelors with some degree of creativity and spending money, certainly nothing ever seen in a room requiring the input of two people. Most of the furniture is moved back in (including, thankfully, my bed, sparing me from the discomfort of my spare beds that in most situations I reserve only for visiting guests). The old computer desk is still partially assembled and the Dell is still running, mostly because I haven't finished migrating files but partially because I still need it for a handful of applications (mostly Photoshop-related) that the iMac is not yet capable of handling. Once it's gone I should be able to move the dresser into its place and be done (sans wall decorations, which may require some re-evaluation given the new color scheme).
The iMac itself has been a mixed blessing. The culmination of a year-and-a-half of saving and a good dose of longing, it sits in blissful pretentiousness, ignoring the sullen glares of the Dell. At the same time, it has frustrated me just a little bit. I don't like the Mighty Mouse (the lack of context for the right-click has annoyed the hell out of me) and the smaller keyboard will take some adjusting after using the same (very big) ergonomic keyboard for (and I'm not joking here) 12 years (it's a hell of a keyboard, even if it's a faint yellow instead of white now and some of the keys have been worn blank). I haven't yet figured out why Apple (the industry standard for incorporating design and convenience into their products) doesn't make an ergonomic keyboard, or why the grand march forward toward larger screen space (this is a 24" monitor, after all, which dwarfs even the 20" screens at work) is mirrored by a gradual shrinking of the keyboard to laptop size. The keyboard layout is similarly unfamiliar for the time being (in particular, I'm used to the backspace key being at the upper right edge, and frequently use the edge as context to find it, which on the Mac keyboard lands me on the DVD eject button, not to mention the additional "modifier" keys that Tim advises me will become lifeblood in the near future). The other major frustration, unforeseen in my switch plans, is that the "easiness" of the Mac (one of its selling points) comes at the expense of tool sets I take for granted; iWeb, for example, a program for making Web pages, has no option to actually edit HTML (and won't open my old HTML pages), instead supplying a series of pre-made templates awaiting text, a fabulous program for people with no HTML experience but a worthless one for those of us who just want to open our previous recipe pages and update the text and pictures. Firefox also has some odd limitations (the bookmarks, for example, while fully draggable and editable as-is in Windows, are locked on the Mac version until you actually open the bookmark editor). It's as though the programs were made "idiot proof," at the expense of convenience.
I have no doubt that a month from now I'll have either adjusted to the new settings or found alternate Mac programs that do what I want them to do. And I'll probably have a new Logitech Revolution mouse (especially if any of my readers are feeling generous . . .).
Granted, such grandiose phrasing is meant to apply to the cosmic beings beyond time and space in the Lovecraft universe and not a fairly insignificant carbon-based primate occupying a mere blip on the universal time line, but it still seems somewhat apropos, given my scarcity-to-the-point-of-nonexistence in recent weeks.
In what qualifies as my meager defense, I've been displaced from my bedroom for a remodeling project and my computer has been in various states of disassembly. Thus, I apologize to those who think I have vanished into the ether (or worse put them on my ignore lists); rest assured, I have merely been preoccupied with painting and furniture assembly. I'm nearing the end of the task, and my shiny new aluminum iMac is waiting patiently on a new desk in the corner of the room for instructions on how to take over from the sullen Dell sitting near it. Pictures will follow eventually, but for now, yes, I'm still alive.