blogging sporadically since…what? 1998?
Jul 10th, 2008 by brianschettler
Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a resource quite like this. I can’t vouge for the accuracy of it, but it seems to be pretty interesting reading. Although I dislike it when sites like this preface facts with “FACT:”.
Jul 9th, 2008 by brianschettler
Jun 27th, 2008 by brianschettler
I saw this story about a man torching his BMW to protest high gas prices.
The Bavarian man, whose name was being withheld because he has not been charged with a crime, told police that gas prices were so high he could no longer afford to drive the vehicle.
As in many countries, gasoline prices have risen steadily in Germany; a liter of regular gasoline now costs about euro 1.55, or $9.40 per gallon.
Let’s take note of two things here:
Jun 25th, 2008 by brianschettler
I just finished Financial Peace Revisited by Dave Ramsey. A pretty good read with sound financial advice. I especially thought that the chapter about compounding interest was very good, although you have to remind yourself that after 40 years of saving, inflation has wiped out a good portion of your gains. It’s easy to look at saving $2000/year and after 40 years you have $2,000,000. But that’s two million 2058 dollars, not two million 2008 dollars. Also, he was basing his calculations off of 12% interest rates which are quite high for right now.
It reminded me of two different schools of thought when it comes to spending money. One side says, “Who am I to deny myself? I only live once! It’s just money and I can’t take it with me when I die, and as long as I work I can always get more. I should spend money and enjoy myself.” The other side says, “Woa woa, now. We should save for a rainy day. It’s a security blanket, because unexpected events wipe out a lot of people, financially speaking. And often if we wait a while, we’ll see that buying xyz wasn’t really a good decision.” Right now I definitely fall in the latter camp. But I think happiness, like most things, is somewhere in the middle.
Also: I wonder if it’s possible for someone starting out to stay completely out of debt in today’s world?
Jun 21st, 2008 by brianschettler
One of my favorite extensions for Firefox, Tab Mix Plus, is available for Firefox 3. This add-on lets you change the behavior of tabs. My most wanted feature: when I type a URL in the location bar, I want it to open a new tab automatically.
Jun 20th, 2008 by brianschettler
It’s kind of sad that it takes a private entity to do a good job at recovery efforts:
When his company, Disaster Recovery Solutions, was hired to clean up after storms like Hurricane Katrina, he noted that days — even weeks — routinely passed before authorities began establishing recovery operations.
Local response officials were often debilitated by a loss of resources, and aid organizations arriving early on the scene with water, medical care and food were unable to reach those in need because of road-blocking debris or flooding.
“I got this crazy idea to use one of my cranes to respond immediately to a disaster and just open up roads,” Agoglia recalls. “So I deployed equipment immediately. And sure enough, there was a need.”
Jun 17th, 2008 by brianschettler
Jun 17th, 2008 by brianschettler
Just a reminder that Firefox 3 is out today. I haven’t tried it yet and honestly I didn’t care too much for the Release Candidates (mainly because it broke my add-ons), but I thought I’d contribute to the Firefox 3 Download Day, which seems like a neat endeavor.
Jun 6th, 2008 by brianschettler
From CNN on rising oil today:
Recent data show high prices have led consumers to cut their gasoline consumption. Meanwhile, many Asian nations are cutting fuel subsidies, effectively raising prices, which is expected to further dampen demand.
Artificially lower prices means people will use more of a commodity, driving up demand. And when there’s not enough supply, it means higher prices for everyone else not receiving government subsidies. See this list of global gas prices from 2005:
Saudi Arabia Riyadh $0.91 Kuwait Kuwait City $0.78 Egypt Cairo $0.65 Nigeria Lagos $0.38 Venezuela Caracas $0.12
Jun 5th, 2008 by brianschettler
Although I’ve known about their existence before, I’ve always shied away from installing some add-on to manage my del.icio.us bookmarks. Why do I need something extra? The website and “post to del.icio.us” bookmark works just fine. I can go to the website and click the tags I want, save it, and I’m done. But here is something interesting. The addon saves me a trivial amount of time…maybe three or four seconds because it’s much more instantaneous than loading delicious, saving the bookmark, then returning to the page. There’s a button right on the toolbar, one click, a small window opens, click the tags, save, done. The old way was two clicks (for me, I don’t like the bookmarks toolbar…I feel it makes it cluttered. I would click Bookmarks > post to delicious). Wait for the delicious to load, same process, then wait for the original site to come back (and also find your place in the site again if it was a long site and you were somewhere in the middle of the page). I find the math interesting: if I bookmark just two sites per day, at an extra 3 seconds it adds up to 36.5 minutes each year wasted.
I also think it’s interesting that when everything is moving online (Google Docs, etc), there are still large speed advantages to have a local application. And extensible browsers such as Firefox that allow these extensions that can speed up online applications will be very important in the future. You just have to make sure that your browser won’t slow down with many add-ons installed.
brian schettler
blogging sporadically since…what? 1998?
There are 97 Posts and 12 Comments so far.
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