Life as Me

10 Questions a Pro-Choice Candidate Is Never Asked by the Media

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 12:56:48 -0400

10 Questions a Pro-Choice Candidate Is Never Asked by the Media:

Very thought provoking.

SpecFlow

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:30:48 -0500

After spending some time looking at MSpec, I couldn’t bring myself to write tests like that. Yuck. Now Gherkin+SpecFlow+MSTest is a whole other ball game! It makes you think about what you need to test, write it out in English, and then fill out the stub. The actual tests are a cake walk, but the real meat is in documenting your intent and getting a test framework stubbed out for your effort. Nice. Happy Developer.

Siri

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 11:20:34 -0400

So I’m going to dictate this entire message using Siri to see if I can post just using my voice. In between sentences though I’m stopping to take a look and see how it does. Other than missing a comma or period here or there where I might have put one myself everything seems to be really good I’m pretty impressed. My wife and I have been asking Siri some funny questions and sometimes she has some funny responses as well. I think the best so far is when I tried to quote the Princess bride and said millage is what brings us to give him today. And what will love. have you doing? You can probably figure out what I said even though Siri never gets it right she pretty much forces you to use regular speech and not accents. Not Star Trek but as close as I’ve ever seen.

Luke 15:7

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 22:08:30 -0400

Who knew?

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 17:33:05 -0400

Wow! Having experience as a community organizer and using Twitter doesn’t actually translate into being a good president? Even after 3 years of doing it… Who knew?

Spin

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 21:57:00 -0400

Spin:

Not Catholic myself, but happened to run across the link from a blogger which is a great rebuttal to a completely jarring AP story entitled “One Child Policy a Surprising Boon To Chinese Girls”.

Choice quote from the original article:

“I do think the (one-child) policy has improved female well-being to a great extent, but most people want two children so their children can have somebody to play with while they’re growing up”

And a dose of reality from the rebuttal

So if you don’t count the women who are slaughtered in the womb, and the women who are subjected to involuntary sterilization, and the women who have their unborn children torn from their wombs by the government-backed butchers who drive around the country in vans equipped as slap-dash abortion clinics, and the women who live in fear, trying to dodge the family-planning officials who will punish them for pregnancy, and those who live with regrets, having sacrificed their children—if you exclude all those women—well then the one-child policy is a “boon” to the others.

43 million girls are “missing” in China today, due primarily to sex-selection abortions, but hey - some are doin’ alright. It might be considered a boon even. Yeah, nice spin AP. Stay classy.

NULL

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 21:19:13 -0400

My controversial opinion for the day - the default of allowing NULLs in database columns was probably the worst universally accepted design decision in all of RDBMs land. Every vendor does it, and it’s wrong. NULLs are fine in certain specific instances, but the idea that you have to explicitly disallow NULLs for every column makes negligent nullability way more common than it should be.

Buy Low, Sell High

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 08:16:26 -0400

So, I think the real news from all this S&P downgrade and debt debacle mess is that it’s time to invest. Buy when everyone sells, sell when everyone buys. Unemployment and housing make that hard for risk-averse people to accept, but that simple formula is the key to keep in mind for long term success as things continue to tank in the short term.

S&P

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 23:04:17 -0400

Well - I wish vindication didn’t come at such a price, but folks like those in the Tea Party have been warning about this for awhile. And the response is mockery and jeers. I still don’t think people realize the true scope of the consequences of our debt+entitlement culture.

"your[sic] an idiot"

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 22:39:00 -0400

““your[sic] an idiot””

- Comment I saw on a web forum. Methinks those who live in grammatically-incorrect houses, should not throw stones.

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with..."

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 22:28:00 -0400

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

- Generally misattributed to Alexis de Tocqueville for lack of anyone better

"We in the Tea Party understand a basic concept that Washington has forgotten: When you are in a..."

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 08:41:05 -0400

“

We in the Tea Party understand a basic concept that Washington has forgotten: When you are in a hole, quit digging. Every time we have approached the debt ceiling, we have been told the same thing: If we do not raise the debt limit, it will be the end of the world as we know it. A couple of years later, when we find ourselves facing the same crisis, we’re told the same thing.

At some point, this will end. America cannot keep borrowing money it does not have. There is a common fate for those who spend too much money. If you doubt that, visit a bankruptcy court sometime.

We can see Greece’s economy in its death spiral. That is our future if we do not stop out-of-control government spending and the borrowing to cover it.

Americans want Washington to do one simple thing: Stop spending money we do not have.

”

- http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-the-tea-party-is-unyielding-on-the-debt-ceiling/2011/07/27/gIQAGvEVdI_story.html

http://www.doctorsonfetalpain.com/

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:49:00 -0400

http://www.doctorsonfetalpain.com/

2% of Americans? 98% out of touch.

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:27:27 -0400

2% of Americans? 98% out of touch.

The word is "expelliarmus"!

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 16:02:28 -0400

Saw HP in 3D. I was totally into it until the end battle, and then they botched it. Even the epilogue which I hated in the book was tastefully done. Snape’s memories were also fantastic. Why did they have to botch the most pivotal part?

An open letter to Congress

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 10:03:00 -0400

Dear Congress,

If you raise the debt ceiling again, you need to do two things:
1.) Have a credible plan to pay it back, implemented immediately.
2.) Cut up the credit cards and ensure that it’s nearly impossible to raise it “just one more time” after this.

I accept that you will have to raise taxes to do this, but you have a habit of continuing to spend other people’s money when you have it (and lately even when you don’t). So forgive me if Americans ask you first to cut, and cut more, and once you say you’re done we ask you to cut deeper again. Then, and only then, raise our taxes. Of course you’ll have to. We’re in too big of a hole for that to be off the table.

To you Democrats - enough with the class warfare and the inability to see that the government is too big already and that Americans have lost their tolerance for it. To you Republicans - enough with defending your rich donors and the tax loop holes and pretending you’re the model of fiscal conservatism. That ship sailed with the unfunded wars and the huge deficits in the last decade. The rise of groups like the Tea Party has shown you we just aren’t buying it anymore.

And once you’ve finally done what we all know you’ll have to do - your patriotic duty to the defense of this great nation - I have two words for you. “Term Limits”.

Sincerely,
A concerned American taxpayer and patriot

feel free to republish, unchanged.

Netflix is raising rates

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 19:05:38 -0400

Netflix is raising rates:

My Netflix subscription, of which 90% of my usage is streaming, will be jumping up quite a bit. This might be too expensive for my taste. Maybe I’ll go streaming-only and Redbox for the rest. I’m also an Amazon Prime subscriber, but their selection is pretty limited.

The Golden Rule of Finance

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 18:26:00 -0400

There is one Golden Rule to successful personal finance. Spend less than you earn. When struggling financially, there are two sides to that equation you can work with. Either you attempt to modify your earnings (aka: sell things, get another job, get a new job, or just plain get a job). Or you can modify your expenses (consolidate debt for lower interest, cut unnecessary bills, reduce discretionary spending, move someplace cheaper, cut coupons, etc). You can earn less than you spend and survive, but not for very long. Debt will bury you.

Of course we violate this rule all the time, and sometimes it works out okay. But only for a little while. Maybe you take out student loans to go to school. Assuming you get a job that increases the earning side of the equation, you can pay that back and eventually come out ahead. Maybe what you earn in the month of December is less than what you spend for Christmas. Assuming you saved a little during the other 11 months, you can usually afford to do this. Maybe you buy a house that you could afford at the time, but then lose your job or change jobs and suddenly earn less. Assuming you have enough savings cushion, you might still be able to make your payments. But maybe you’ll have to move someplace cheaper.

There’s one other piece of this puzzle I’ve not touched on fully. It bears mentioning that the Golden Rule of Finance has a Silver Sidekick. As much as you can, plan for the future. This means you need your earnings to exceed your spending enough that you can save the excess. Incurring debt by borrowing makes certain assumptions about the future. Namely that what you want to have now is important enough that you’ll commit to future repayment. But the future is often unpredictable, and debt repayment has a way of highlighting that like nothing else.

Now, you can occasionally find yourself out of balance with the Golden Rule of Finance and still be okay. The road of life is full of bumps and twists and unexpected turns. But when trouble comes, it’s how we react to it that matters. Do we recognize the road we’re on? Do we see the imbalance when it’s there or predict a future imbalance? Are we willing to make sacrifices to modify the equation? That last question is key, because if you find that you spend more than you earn, you cannot modify the equation without sacrifice. Sometimes difficult. Usually painful. Often realized late.

That’s where our nation finds itself with this debate on the debt ceiling. The same simple equation for personal finance applies here, just on a much grander scale. The trouble is, the federal government’s earning side of the equation is not normal. They don’t earn money as much as take it or make it. They take it via taxes. They make it either literally via a printing press, or artificially via methods like quantitative easing. Taking money via taxes stymies growth in the private sector by reducing consumer spending, or by affecting unemployment. Which is a bigger problem as many taxes are tied intimately to employment. As unemployment rises the earning side of the equation suffers further. Making money contributes heavily to inflation. Interestingly, inflation is somewhat good for debt because the money we borrowed in the past was more valuable than the future money we use to pay the debt back. Of course, in every other way inflation comes at a heavy price quite literally, as future buying power is reduced.

The US has committed to spending more than it earns on all the things the government spends money on. And borrowing to do it. And that course is not sustainable, and that’s what the current debate in congress is about. It’s not politically viable to make the sacrifices necessary to balance the equation. Raising taxes is not popular and is potentially job killing during a time when ‘economic recovery’ is tenuous at best. Cutting spending is not politically viable either as there is always some advocate on the receiving end of those benefits that will make a fuss. Of course, the worst thing we could do is just borrow again and not change either side of the equation. Raising the debt ceiling means that we’ll just continue the borrowing cycle, which only ends one of two ways - eventual repayment (sacrifice) or eventual default (greater sacrifice).

Nancy Pelosi recently asked why the vote on raising the debt ceiling couldn’t be decoupled from the vote on spending. The question is so alarming because it shows how ignorant those at the helm are to the situation we’re facing. I recently read somewhere where someone posted that this is like a fat man gearing up to eat a trillion more donuts before promising to finally diet. Politics are going to have to be put aside, and possibly political careers as well, and both sides of the equation are going to have to be modified if calamity is to be avoided.

Ultimately though, the sacrifice will happen. If not in this generation, then I fear the next will be forced to pay it. And by then the sacrifice will have accrued interest.

Surface

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 23:53:22 -0400

Surface

Matlock Lied

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 20:16:00 -0400

In every formulaic episode, Andy Griffith’s twilight years lawyer character Ben Matlock would take on the case of someone wrongly accused, and by slick detective work and tough cross examination, he’d get the real murderer on the stand and expose them. Never would an episode end without knowing the truth of “whodunnit?”. I even remember one episode where the person he was defending was actually guilty, which was a shock because of course the whole premise of the show was about the wrongly accused. But even in that episode, the guilty are found out and the innocent go free. Though the show was cheesy and predictable and not targeted at my demographic, there was a certain appeal to its idealistic view of the law and justice as a search for truth. Whatever happened today, the truth is still unknown, and the real innocent was buried. All that’s left are the guilty.