people, places and things that have piqued my interest
Remarkable: all front pages news stories on the printed edition of our local newspaper today are good news. Possible HIV cure in a baby, brewpub opening revitalizes downtown Springfield, and, the U.S. and Russia are cooperating in an effort to protect polar bears.
So much better to start the morning read this way. No blaring headlines of murder, no mayhem, no political bickering. Thanks Register-Guard!
My hope and my wish is that 2013 will be a great year, bringing health, happiness, peace and love to all. Let us all work toward those ends!
Today’s snailmail, once again, includes a thick envelope from the Sierra Club urging me to renew my membership. It’s hard for me to understand how an organization that is supposed to be all about the environment keeps sending out the same tired packet of paper: four page letter about all the good things they do, special offer (hurry, limited supply) for a backpack, poorly reproduced flyer on John Muir, a “petition” to sign with membership renewal (printed on heavy cardstock), another flyer telling me I must respond immediately to get this special renewal offer (same one I’ve been getting for years), and a very large, totally useless map of the USA.
I have been a strong supporter, and sometimes member, of the Sierra Club for many years. It’s a great organization and it’s members have done a lot for conservation and trail maintenance. But these repeated, wasteful mailings really irk me.
Yes, I recycle the whole thing. I doubt that most people who receive it do. And even if the vast majority of recipients recycle all that paper, it’s a giant waste of resources to print it, ship it, have it delivered, haul away the recycling and process the pulp all over again.
I have asked Sierra Club to stop sending me snailmail, told them I’m fine getting email from them, but I still get the fat packet. I think maybe I’ll start mailing all the papers back to them in the postage-paid envelope they provide.
Why is it that Intuit continues to ignore the many thousands of Mac computer users and not come out with an updated version of Quicken for Mac? They produce an update every year for Windows users, but haven’t updated the tired, crippled “Quicken Essentials for Mac” in years.
Stranger still is that Quicken 2013 for Windows users can use a new iPhone app, but Mac users can’t!
What’s up with that Intuit?
The Amazon Kindle is now selling for about $70 bucks. This wonderful piece of high tech gear is full of complicated hardware and runs on some amazing software. It is an amazing little gizmo.
It is also amazing that a simple leather and plastic protective cover for the Kindle runs $40. The cover has no electronics, has no moving parts. It is just a piece of plain black leather glued onto a piece of molded plastic. How can it be that the cover costs more than half the price of the Kindle itself?
I just read that, if things continue the way they have been, the web hosting industry will be a bigger polluter than the entire airline industry by the year 2020. If you have a blog or website, I hope you’re using a green host like GreenGeeks.com or Hostgator.com, and not supporting that Daddy guy just because he’s cheap.
Here’s a New York Times story about the problem: http://nyti.ms/Rgujuu . And here is Hostgator’s statement on what they’re doing: http://www.hostgator.com/
My wife/partner/bestfriend has just spent the past three+ hours on the phone with a friend who has recently gone through a difficult divorce that involves a longtime partner and two teen kids. She burned through the battery on her cell phone, then switched to the land line (thank goodness for plenty of minutes on the cell plan and Unlimited Long Distance on the land line).
Everyone should have a friend like this, someone they can talk to for hours at a time, someone they can just spill it all to, someone who can offer advice and opinion but at the same time not be judgemental.
Our friend is lucky, and so am I.
Do you have someone like this you can count on in times of need?
One of the reasons I love the Pacific Northwest: summer, midweek, sunset, sitting on the shore of a Cascade Lake. Osprey cruising, chee-ewping, suddenly diving. The last diehard fishermen quietly dipping their oars, hoping for that last strike of the day but not really giving a damn if it doesn’t happen because it’s so darn beautiful just being here. Peace, serenity, lots of soft noises but at the same time a calming quietness. Billowing thunderhead clouds on the west horizon, wispy, golden clouds to the south. Water smoothing to a glassy mirror as the breeze dies, reflecting sky above and dense green forest of pines and firs all around. It doesn’t get much better than this.
Waiting at the stoplight, the pickup truck in front of me had a decal in the back window that said:
I’ll keep my MONEY, my GUNS
and my FREEDOM.
You can keep the “Change”.
It’s pretty obvious that this is the truck owner’s thoughts about the change promised by Barack Obama during his first presidential campaign. It’s also obvious that there are huge numbers of Americans that agree with the sentiment expressed on that decal, and who feel threatened by Obama’s leadership.
But let’s look at the facts.
People like the truck owner are adamantly opposed to paying taxes, but the tax cuts, de-regulation and lack of oversight during eight years of Republican rule resulted in a worldwide financial meltdown. The pickup owner more than likely saw his retirement plan suddenly lost more than half of its value, the equity in his house dropped tremendously, and there’s a good chance that if he had a company pension plan, the benefits were cut.
How many of those who don’t want to pay taxes scrambled to get their share of the Cash for Clunkers program? How many had their money invested in financial institutions and automakers that had to be bailed out? How many are now reaping the benefits of economic stimulus programs? How many have jobs that rely on government contracts? How many went to public schools? Quite a few. Wake up folks, it’s tax dollars that fund these programs.
Gun owners in the U.S. seem to be under the impression that Obama is avidly anti-gun. Why is this? Since his election, Obama has not only done nothing to curb the rights of gun owners, he signed a law allowing firearms in National Parks, much to the chagrin of millions of parks users and against the wishes of the National Park Service personnel.
A while back I was in the sporting goods section of a department store and overheard one of the employees tell a customer that they didn’t have the ammunition he wanted for his gun because of Obama’s regulations. I bit my tongue, but have regretted it ever since. The Obama administration has passed no laws limiting the manufacture or sale of guns or ammunition, but the NRA-led faction of gun owners is so convinced that Obama is anti-gun that they have been buying ammunition and firearms faster than the manufacturers can produce them. Shortages on store shelves are due to gun owner stockpiling, not new laws prohibiting their sale or use.
And what about the decal-bearing truck owner’s fear of losing his freedom? Where was his outrage during the years of the Bush-Cheney administration that saw some of our most basic personal freedoms taken away?
Yes, I’ll keep the Change, thank you.
Good, clean, uncluttered design always catches my eye. Simple lines, gentle curves, harmonic colors. One of the reasons that Apple is so successful is their incredible attention to design, right down to the smallest detail. Not only is the product itself stylish, but the packaging is also remarkably well designed and usually with minimal text, logos and other clutter.
Look at a Mac notebook computer. One very distinctive logo (recognized the world over) on the lid, and a discreet “MacBook Pro” on the screen frame. That’s it. Open up the box for almost any other brand of notebook computer and you’ll see logos and stickers plastered all over the lid and keyboard area. Many of them can’t be removed without damaging the finish of the computer. It is not necessary to have a permanent sticker on a computer to show that it has 811wi-fi, USB, Intel, Windows, etc., etc.
Why don’t other manufacturers take a cue from Apple and emulate the clean, uncluttered design and sense of style?