Stan Taylor

Rafe Colburn makes an excellent analogy about the government takeover of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae:

Letting these two quasi-governmental companies fail would crater an already failing housing market, destroying an awful lot of wealth. That’s not something any politician is going to let happen if they can stop it (nor should they). The US is sort of like the family where the single income earner takes month’s wages and blows them at the casino. You may hate them for what they did, but you still have to take them back in because they’re the only one with a job in the first place.

I’ve probably assembled and installed well over a dozen ceiling fans in my adult life. Over the years, the manufacturers have improved the designs so that the fans work better and, more importantly, are easier to install. This past weekend, I installed a new Hampton Bay ceiling fan in the kids’ bathroom. Two features presumably keep it from rattling: rubber washers where the blades attach to their brackets and rubber bands around the light globes where they are held in place by screws.
But this fan had a feature that made a big alleviated probably the biggest installation headache: holding the blades in place while you screw the blade brackets into the body of the fan. Due to the light kit, the screw holes are awkward to access, plus you have to hold the blade in place, the fan in place and screw in the screws upside down. Inevitably for me, the first screw for each blade falls to the floor once or twice before I get it in (the second screw is much easier, since I no longer have to hold the blade in place).
The helpful feature of this fan: the screws that attach the blade brackets to the fan were already inserted into the blade brackets and held in place so that they would not come out. That meant I just had to hold the blade and screw them in. Very nice.

A talk about obsession (and long Q&A with the audience) by Mythbuster Adam Savage at The last Hope hacker convention in July, 2008. It’s an hour long, but if you like Mythbusters, it’s well worth watching.

John McCain’s claims that Barak Obama is ‘elite’ are old news now. As we’ve heard, his credibility for making these claims is brought into question by his marriage to a multimillionaire, not knowing exactly how many houses he owns, and saying that earning $5M per year constitutes his definition of being rich.
However, I just read an article that contained some McCain biography, and I learned that his claim to being ‘elite’ goes well beyond a fortunate marriage. Some excerpts:

He was a privileged, but rebellious scion of one of America’s most distinguished military dynasties – his father and grandfather were both admirals.
…
Through Ross Perot, [McCain] met Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California.
…
Meanwhile McCain moved to Arizona with his new bride immediately after their 1980 marriage. There, his new father-in-law gave him a job and introduced him to local businessmen and political powerbrokers who would smooth his passage to Washington via the House of Representatives and Senate.

You learn something new every day.

A New York Times article discusses software for altering cash register data to cook the books in order to pay fewer taxes. Interesting.
Locally owned businesses seem to have a long history of reducing their recorded income. When I was a teenager, I worked in a family owned restaurant in the Texas hill country. I remember that the owners would pay me from the cash register usually. When I receive my Social Security summary, I see that the owners did report some of my income, but the numbers are in the report are much lower than my actual income those years. So, it appears that a certain percentage of the owners’ business (income and expenses) just never got recorded.
A small family-owned restaurant that I frequent here in Austin is pretty brazen with their cash siphoning. You pay for your meal at the register, and I’ve noticed that about half the time I pay, they simply open the register and make change, not recording the transaction at all. Until recently, they only accepted cash, so it was pretty easy to do that. Now that they take credit cards, I don’t think they can manipulate the portion of their payments made by credit card–at least not as easily.
(Via BoingBoing)

I’ve written before about the high cost of veterinary care. A pair of opinion artciles in the Wall Street Journal discuss how much people are willing to spend on pet health care. The author ponders:

[These days] [v]ets do aggressive cancer surgery and hip replacements. They pump dogs full of expensive drugs for various maladies. In short, dogs get many of the same procedures we humans get. But it’s not cheap, and if it’s anything like human medicine, it’s going to get more expensive as vets take increasingly sophisticated and heroic measures to keep dogs alive.
I’m not here to say this is good or bad. We live in a very rich country, and if people want to spend thousands of dollars on their dogs, so be it.
But should the willingness to pay for expensive procedures be a prerequisite for getting a dog, as some of the emails to me seemed to suggest? I question that. That would pretty much mean that poor people, or their children, couldn’t own dogs. That doesn’t seem right.
Even people with the wherewithal to pay for expensive dog care are going to draw the line differently

In principle, I don’t believe in paying thousands of dollars on pet health care. Due to my country upbringing, I see a distinct line between pets and people.
In practice, however, things are not always so clear cut. A few months ago, Penny tore her ACL and meniscus (there are other veterinary terms for the injuries, but those are the human equivalents). The vet told us that if we did not do surgery she would be in pain for the rest of her life. The surgery, of course, would cost about $1500.
After doing due diligence to determine that there were no other alternatives to surgery, I suggested that we should ask the vet if there were cheaper procedures that would relieve the pain but not necessarily return her knee joint to its original function, such as fusing the joint or even amputation. Boy, did that cause an uproar in our household.
In the end, we didn’t ask about other alternatives, and we proceeded with the surgery. Penny seems to have made a full recovery.

On the other hand, we’ve made different choices with Tippie, our 14-year-old Shepsky. We recently stopped giving her heartworm medication ($18/month). There’s very little chance she’ll get heart worms, and even if she did, she’s still likely to die of old age before the heart worms could harm her. And we’ve been giving her Ibuprofen for her aching joints, even though this runs the risk of harming her liver. Our goal is to make her comfortable for her remaining time with us, not to extend that time as long as possible.

We lived in an 1880s house in the country in New Jersey for several years in the 1990s. The house was on a hill rising from the street. It had a short driveway and a long sidewalk up to the house (which was good in terms of snow shoveling).
The remnants of a hurricane blew through one night (it must have been hurricane Opal), bringing rain and relatively high winds. The storm woke me in the middle of the night, and I could see the dome light on in the car down the hill. Shit, I told Katie, I must have left the door ajar in the Camry, and it’s raining.
So, I put on my raincoat and ran down to the driveway to fix the situation. When I came back to the bedroom, I told Katie: the good news is, I didn’t leave the door ajar; the bad news, the car has been crushed by a tree branch.
Man, we loved that car.

Every time I drive past downtown Austin and look out over the many new luxury condo towers, I comment that the developers of those condos must be ‘shitting bricks’ with the economic downturn.
Well, the Austin Business Journal reports today that “At least 700 condominiums — almost a dozen buildings — slated to be built in Central Austin are either on hold indefinitely or scrapped altogether.” Gee, who’d have thought?!
At least those developers can get out while the getting is good. The developers of projects that are already in development or completed aren’t so lucky.

I spent most of last week at the Agile 2008 conference, which was held at the Sheraton Centre Hotel in Toronto.
In my opinion, this hotel was an epic fail in regard to internet access.
The rooms offered only wired internet access with per-day charges (which is pretty standard for business hotels), but the jack in my room didn’t work. When I informed the desk of the problem, they sent someone up to give me a new network cable, which, of course, didn’t help. After that, I just didn’t bother with internet access in my room. I didn’t feel like trying to get it fixed and then having to pay for the access.
The hotel offered two wireless access networks in all the public areas of the hotel and conference center. Both networks were unsecured, which didn’t thrill me considering I was among 1500 geeks. But that was a secondary concern: the networks were both unreliable; sometimes I just couldn’t get an IP address from them, and other times, I could connect but not get any internet access.
Because of the situation in the rooms, every evening, the lobby was completely full of geeks using their laptops, including me (when the wireless worked).
You would think that business hotels and conference centers would be getting these things right by now.