Writing

I have started writing for The Examiner and many of the political musings I'm having should be found there. You can find my latest article here.

I'm still talking to people about making their websites. I've made a little headway but I am certain I need to get out more. Funny thing is I may have an actual video job coming up. With a little luck may make a little money off that. The person I've quoted is Gia Khalsa. She has a website and is currently teaching group classes on Sundays, which my wife attends.

We will see if she can front the money for a professional-looking set of DVDs. She has an issue with music for belly dancing, as she is afraid that the cost of the music would be prohibitive. She doesn't yet understand that everyone who writes music is interested in any kind of collaboration they can get. I think she'd find the licensing fees really minor -- though the costs of a lawsuit would be high.

I swear, the RIAA's actions recently have created a pattern of fear that is killing all art.

So it's the 10th of February. It would appear that Congress will pass a stimulus package. And that gives me some hope because people who are afraid to spend money might actually start spending. But I'm sure it doesn't spend enough and I'm also sure that lots of people think the same way. After all, if you didn't see a pretty massive check from the federal government coming right your way, you'd not really see the stimulus, either.

And that is the view most people have. 

I came across this chart that pretty much says it all. It was presented to Speaker Pelosi by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

It shows a really dire recession in terms of job losses if this keeps up. On the basis of this, I see a hug indictment of the past administration and the past majority in Congress.

The green line in the chart is our current state of job loss. The blue line was Bush I in 1990 that Clinton got us out of and the red line is the 2001 recession that GW Bush got us into when he took office for his first term.

I spoke with someone today in the building trades. He told me people are absolutely not doing anything. Someone asked him to do a patch job of a leaky roof. He looked at the roof to offer an estimate and found that this roof had needed to be replaced for the last several years.

People are holding on to what cash they have. And that is a real change. But because we have been such a consumer-driven society for so long, that will cause deflation of our economy. So it's time for the government to get spending because the people cannot.

I hope everyone who has a job stays in it or is hired for something better. The reality may be different than my hopes.

Musings

Well, it's been a twisted road.

I used to work in television and now I make websites. Perhaps that is the way it ought to be because television is headed to online as television audiences become massively more fragmented and as more and more people find easier ways to connect to the Internet at something approaching decent speeds.

Decent. That means you're not doing 56k dialup. It means websites load all at once. It means you're able to get content from the Internet that includes video and audio that does not stutter, drop frames and look overly cartoonish due to compression. 

Frankly, as someone who worked for 25 years in television, everything on the internet makes really crummy VHS look good. And I have a fair amount of experience in high-definition as well as our previous US television standard.

I now have three websites under my belt—four if you count my own. I am still working on learning php and, if anyone knows how to reliably set up a testing server on a Macintosh running a Power PC chip, I'd surely love to know how to set up a mySQL database with php without making my computer unsafe to run. 

I did buy a good book on Dreamweaver. It goes through the steps but the MAMP software has changed so much that the book is now incorrect. Anyone want to help?

I do like Dreamweaver. You can work in code or you can just put the page together using the Design view and it won't create bad code. It also checks for compatibility with browsers that won't run on a Mac, like Microsoft's Internet Exploder. And that is a great feature.

I can't buy Dreamweaver CS4. It won't run on my venerable G4-400 that I purchased in 1999. I did upgrade the processor and put 1.5G of system RAM into it. My Venerable G4 is proving the concept that, if you buy a Macintosh and you buy one that is not trailing-edge, you will pay less over the years of service for your Apple computer than you will anyone else's. Today's Intel-based Apple computers run Microsoft's operating system faster than anything comparable made by anyone else. There's so much innovation at Apple that I still recommend their stock.

My clients are really happy with the websites I made them. One of them has a "contact" form that took me three days of noodling and internet searching to build. Now, I can make a contact form in a snap by simply copying and pasting code with Dreamweaver. That's hot.

I sure hope this political situation sorts out. In Washington, DC you have these Republicans posturing that they'll stop any government spending aimed at helping the main mass of people out. Seems Republicans only want to help out the rich guy. Frankly, if I were a rich guy, I'd be happy to be helped out. But it would bother me if government help was impoverishing others. I've seen too much poverty in my life to want to see the United States play host to that kind of lifestyle for most of the wage earners.

Republicans are telling everyone that this stimulus bill "spends too much." Gee, they must think we're pretty dumb because they were all-too happy to pass non-budgeted bills to make war in Iraq and waste millions and trillions of taxpayer dollars fixing up Iraq. They seem to think we have forgotten how happy they were to spend back when Bush was running things.

I suppose it's always the Party in Opposition that wants to be "fiscally-conservative." But that's not true, either. The Hoover administration wanted to be fiscally-conservative during the Great Depression. And his party backed him while they were in power. Problem is, that didn't work out so well for most Americans.

My mother, who was born in 1930, wanted me to learn how to do hard work. She had me working in restaurants when I was in high school. It built character and was always something I could fall back on. Well, I understand restaurants these days. And if this business of making websites doesn't pan out, I suppose I could always wait on tables or wash dishes.