| Posted in: Ideas by Michael on 11/19/08. | In order to help survive poor business decisions made over the last 40 years, the big auto makers are seeking a federal bailout to the tune of $25 billion. I simply don't believe that it is the place of government to bail out failing companies. If a failing company is to survive, it is the job of that company to adapt to their market, or simply die.
I understand the implications of allowing these companies to fail.
The parts makers would have to tighten up their operations, or file for protection themselves. The workers would be forced to see what the UAW and their strong arm tactics have led to. The already terrible economy in Detroit would likely collapse, and the resulting unrest could lead to some nasty, unforeseen chaos.
There are lots of reasons these companies are failing of course. From the terrible decision by all three to allow the UAW to enslave them, to the ever changing needs of their customers. The skyrocketing price of fuel and the continued uncertainty in that market (the price is perfectly reasonable now, but I'll leave that for another post) have led consumers to conserve, and to buy cars that have better fuel efficiency. Some even argue that Detroit has made great cars over the last 20 years and their customers don't feel the need to upgrade. Ok, whatever.
Now for the solution. If you follow the path, the failure of Detroit can really be linked to the escalating costs of fuel and the public's general distain and contempt for big oil. Therefore, I think the big oil companies should step up to the plate and take responsibility for their mess.
Last quarter, Exxon-Mobile had a net profit of $14.83 billion. Royal Dutch Shell had a net profit of $8.44 billion, and BP's was $8.04 billion. Combined, those three alone had profits of $31.31 billion - in ONE QUARTER.
What are the market caps of GM and Ford? GM's market cap was $1.89 billion, and Ford's was $4.01 billion, as of this post. That means that any one of those companies could outright buy an auto maker (or both for that matter) with a single quarter's profits. Think about that for a second.
In summary, those three oil companies, just a few of those responsible for the chaos in Detroit, could bail out the US auto industry with a single quarter's profits.
Thanks to Mike Malloy for planting the seed for this post. | | |
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| | | | I believe the days of operating system dependence have finally come to an end, and I'm ready to test it. I know, this is a little strange coming from me, but I think everyone should hear it (and Digg it!).
A new era of technological independence is upon us - either of the two major operating systems will do the job just fine. I left Linux out of of the equation for one reason, and one reason only. iPod/iPhone integration just isn't simple enough for *most* users. It just doesn't get better than iTunes for that, so blame Apple.
Some things may work better with one or the other. And I'm not talking about obvious specialty markets (gaming, platform specific application development, etc.), but the things that matter to the average user. The web, email, office applications, chat, media applications, etc.
Admittedly, I'm a power user, and have been primarily a Mac user since 1987. I've been using computers since 1983 beginning with the RadioShack MC10. I've seen a lot of changes in the computer industry (I actually learned a bit of Cobol, I have used punch cards LOL, and I'm only 40 years old ;-) and I think now is by far the coolest time in the history of technology.
So how am I going to test this theory? I'm prepared to switch full time to Windows Vista Home Premium - for at least 30 days.
I really want to help the average user figure out how to live with either operating system, equally. So if you're on the fence, in either direction, subscribe to the RSS feed
I'm using IntenseDebate for comments, so by all means sign up for an account and comment away. The comments are threaded. :) | | |
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| | | | I've been a Zend Studio user for a long, long time. Being a Mac user has made it interesting at times (we're still a server release behind, for example), but the productivity gains that using an IDE with a debugger gives me makes the occasional "suck" well worth it. There are others out there, but this is the best one I've found for PHP.
A while ago, Zend turned to the Eclipse project for their IDE. Eclipse is an open source cross-platform Integrated Development Environment that supports many programming languages. It provides syntax highlighting and lots of other goodness way beyond the scope of this post. If that stuff geeks out out, look here: Eclipse.
I'm thinking that Zend made this move to allow them to focus on the core Zend Platform instead of working on a custom IDE for the whole thing. It makes perfect sense really, and it makes sense that there would be a few bumps in the road as the product matures.
On of our products uses a feature of the Apache server that allows you to process specific files with a particular plugin. In our case, we wanted the "page" script to be processed as a PHP file. The "page" script has no file extension... it works well, and has for a long time. Zend Studio 5 has always allowed us to edit the "page" script, including PHP syntax highlighting and debugging, with no problems. It turns out that Eclipse doesn't pay attention to the content of the file, but instead uses the extension to decide how to treat the file. Bummer.
Again, Zend Studio 5 is a proprietary IDE made by Zend, and Eclipse is an open-source application, with a whole new architecture to support. Things happen, right? Well no, this was too much of a problem for us, so we've put off moving to Zend Studio for Eclipse until support for no extensions is added.
Kind of.
I sent a tweet: "Zend Studio 6.1 still doesn't let me associate a file with no extension to PHP. Guess we're sticking with 5.5.1 for now." and a little bit later was replied to by royganor from Zend. He mentioned a trick to make it work.
What a trick, indeed. Do this at your own risk. If you bork your install, I'll try to help, but ultimately you're on your own.
1. Go to your Zend > Zend Studio for Exclipse 6.x > Plugins folder and look for org.eclipse.php.core. Mine was actually a .jar file. If it is a jar file, simply rename the .jar to .zip and decompress. The resulting directory will work the same as the .jar file. (keep the .zip as a backup)
2. Search for the string: file-extensions
3. Add a comma inside the extension list. Mine looks like this: file-extensions="php,php3,php4,php5,,phtml,inc"
4. Save the file and start Zend Studio for Eclipse
It turns out that the double comma is interpreted as an empty string, as it should be. But this is dirty, yep. Expect it to be overwritten by your next install, etc. But all files that don't have an extension will now be handled as PHP by Eclipse. | | |
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| | | | Tonight Microsoft released three new ads meant to answer Apple's "I'm a Mac" ads. The ads start with a John Hodgman look alike, but finish with a a number of real people doing real work with PCs. Business, creative, education, etc... they're all represented.
Nice job Microsoft. I'm a PC could be a hit. | | |
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| | | Posted in: iPhone by Michael on 09/04/08. | I've been using Twitteriffic on the iPhone since it was released. Sure, I've tried the others - Twittelator Pro and Twinkle - but neither of them were as comfortable as Twitteriffic to me.
A couple of days ago I was looking at the new apps in the iTunes App Store and stumbled across TwitterFon. It is simple, fast, and useful. It doesn't do pictures, it doesn't update your location, but it does what it does well.
You can see the tweets of your friends of course, your replies, and your messages. Your friend's stream is two shades of blue - darker blue is unseen, and lighter blue is previously seen.
TwitterFon keeps lots and lots of history too which is something Twitteriffic doesn't do. There's even a "Load all stored Tweets" option at the bottom of the list if you need more.
I like it a lot. You should give it a shot. Simple, fast, and cheap.
Download it here: TwitterFon - Version 1.1, Free | | |
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| | | | Several years ago I signed up for a service called .Mac (dot Mac). My intention with .Mac was to have an @mac email address for life, have a place to back up important files, and to have a way to sync bookmark/address book/calendar data with several computers. You know what? It did all of those things really, really well. Sure there were outages, but they never really affected me since none of my uses were mission critical.
The day the iPhone was announced (Macworld, January 2007) I was extremely excited at the prospect of over the air (OTA) syncing with my iPhone. Push email on the iPhone wasn't really of interest to me, mostly because I never understood the advantages (I still don't get it). Regardless, OTA syncing with .Mac was never to be.
Then the world brightened. MobileMe, the renamed an much improved .Mac offers everything .Mac did, but so, so much more. Now when I add a date to iCal, it shows up on my iPhone automatically. Am I bothered fact that it isn't instant? Not in the slightest. What it means is that the next time I add an event on my phone, it will automatically show up in my iCal on my Mac, and at MobileMe.com. I don't have to plug my iPhone into my computer. Neat.
My address book is also in sync, as are my bookmarks across my iPhone, my laptop (MacBook Pro), and my desktop (a pc running Windows XP).
Remember just three years ago how horrible the land of data syncing was? I don't have to think about this syncing stuff anymore.
MobileMe is everything I need, and it works flawlessly. | | |
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| | | | Ok, so maybe I didn't create this super simple exercise program, but I can tell you that while doing this I lost over 40lbs. I went from around 215 to 170 doing this, combined with a pretty big change in my diet of course. Today, nearly 3 years later, I'm still at or less than 175.
The desire for change came one day when my very good friend Bracken mused (paraphrasing): "It is really hard to watch what I eat when I'm with you all day. All you eat is cheeseburgers and fries." Ouch. My wife and I had also just welcomed my son to the world. I thought about the example I would set for him, and I really, really didn't like it. Indeed, time for a change.
One thing I really dislike about exercise is pain. Are you with me? Maybe it is just my personality, but pain is bad, and I find no joy in it. I have friends that run marathons with 7,000 feet of vertical gain. Not for me.
When you hear how simple this is, you're going to laugh, and you might even laugh out loud. My goal when starting this experiment was to find something that I could never make an excuse to avoid. I would never take the time to go to a gym. I would never run. I needed something though.
It takes twenty-one days to form a habit. It takes easy to make it twenty-one days.
THE EASY PLAN. One plus.
I created a plan I could manage. I did three exercises one time, twice a day for two days. The third day, I moved up to two, twice a day for two days. The fifth day, I moved up to three. You get the picture... I kept going until I hit five a day. I did these right when I woke up, and just before bed - no excuses - even if I went to bed at 2 AM.
Then things changed; I'd been doing this for 10 days, and I was half way to a new habit. I started to increment one a day. The 12th day I did 6 twice a day, then 7 and so on. Before I knew it, my body felt different and I had more energy. In less than fourteen days, I was seeing the change I'd hoped for.
This is so easy, even I can do it.
The morning I started this plan, I was a little unsure of where it would go since it was so easy to start. By the time I was ready to try something else, I was at 262 - twice a day - 524 reps a day of these three exercises. I didn't do 262 in a row mind you. When I started out, I'd take a few seconds break between every 10. Then it was every 30, then every 50. By the time I got to 262, I was doing 100 at a time - so 100 twice, then 62.
I felt so good by then, I was also doing a bit of running. I was riding my bike for about 50 minutes at 16 to 17 miles per hour (a converted mountain bike, mind you) on Saturday mornings. Exercise was something I could do.
I can only speak from my experience, so if you decide to tweak the plan, you're on your own. It is so easy though, I really encourage you to do it just like I explained.
Want to give it a try? Here are some links to Expert Village videos. I chose these videos in particular because they're the exercises I did, I just didn't have these videos as a reference when I did it. On a side note, I do my sit ups and leg stretches with my arms crossed on my chest, but these methods are just fine.
Push Ups, Sit Ups, Double Straight Leg Stretch
If you try this, let me know how it works for you. Remove the thoughts "I can't" and replace them with "I'll try" and you'll succeed. | | |
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| | | | This is an entry I made on the thefives blog. It summarizes everything succinctly.
I wanted to give you all an update on the status of thefives.tv. The support for this project has been nothing short of amazing. We have 5 confirmed hosts, and three referrals that I've yet to hear from. Based on the number of hosts we have, I'd think the audience for thefives.tv is definitely there.
THE GOAL
I've been asked a few times what the goal of the project is. I think it is important that everyone understand what my motivations were for wanting to get this thing off of the ground. I like people, and I like to hear their stories. I like the idea of seeing someone covered in tattoos and learning that they're a brain surgeon. I want other people to know that people aren't what we see, they're people - with different backgrounds, and problems, and families, and ideas - no matter what lives we make up for them. Understanding this may help others to be more respectful of their peers, and may encourage more thought and conversation. That is my goal - thought and conversation. What about you? Why are you involved?
LET'S GET STARTED, NOW!
Let's pick five questions from the list below, then make this thing happen. I envision three or four minutes of interviews, but if they're longer or shorter, they certainly won't be turned away. The idea is to give you the opportunity to talk to as many people as you want, while keeping the length of the production manageable and something fun. Remember, this is all about fun.
I'll take the videos and add pre and post roll branding for thefives.tv. I'll handle the credits, blog translation, and the encoding/uploads of the video to YouTube. If this gets too time consuming I may need some help. I'll arrange storage for these videos and give you instructions for where to upload them when you're ready.
The content will be released under the following license:
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States .
The tone should most definitely be as playful and fun as the subject being interviewed allows. Take a few still photos of the subject if you can. This will add additional interest to the subject.
EQUIPMENT
I've had feedback that some of you may not have the "proper" equipment to get started. I'm not worried about production quality, but more about the message that the interview sends. So, if you're like Jon Sullivan, you'll use a Macbook Pro's iSight focused on two people or a digital camera's movie mode to shoot. You may have a tripod and a DV camera (they're under $200 at Amazon). Jon and I even talked about doing Skype video interviews with a complete stranger and recording that as content for the project.
Ultimately, as long as we can hear the interview and get some idea of who you're interviewing, make it happen and don't worry about quality right now. The deployment target for this early content is Youtube, not a 100" HDTV.
THE HOSTS
I'm excited to say that participants are 50/50 on the sexes. The experience of the team varies from professional actors and people that make a living behind a camera to people that just really like to talk to other people. This variety will really add to the feel of the project.
COMMUNICATION
The last thing I want to say is that it is time that we all start the process of meeting each other and working together. I set the domain http://thefives.tv to forward to the Ning site. Each of you need to create a profiles there so we can move these emails to that site. That way things can happen without me.
THANKS!
Without you this thing would still be an idea. Your participation is really appreciated. Thank you.
See the original post here: Project update: thefives.tv | | |
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| | | | It all started one summer, passing through New Mexico while driving from Colorado back to Texas. This whacked out but curiously logical guy was on the radio telling listeners how to get out of debt. I made a mental note that I'd like to be debt free, and intended to find him again. He was crazy, a crazy I liked, and besides - who doesn't want to be debt free?
A year and a half later (October, 2006) a friend of mine asked if I'd heard of a guy named Dave Ramsey. My "debt free" mental note was nowhere in the archives, so of course I said "No." He suggested that I download the Dave Ramsey podcast and give him a listen. That I did, then it hit me like a ton of bricks, "This is *that* guy!" We bought his book The Total Money Makeover along the way - the advice was simple and worked well in our minds.
Here are the numbers we were dealing with: a $23k personal loan, $24k in two cars, and a few thousand on credit cards ($50k for for the math deficient). We hated opening Quicken to see the red "net worth" number, but at least we knew where we were - good or bad.
Before I get too far in to this, I want to just stop for a second and get something off of my chest. There will be a number people that think that budgeting is something poor people do to squeeze every penny out of the bank account. That if you budget, you must not make enough money to survive, or that if you budget you're somehow telling "the universe" that you're poor. That is a load of crap. You budget so that you know exactly where your money is going, no matter how much money you have. If you don't know where every penny is going, you don't know how much you have to invest. Or how much to use to pay off debt. There, I said it, budgets rock!
The plan? Live on less than you make (a lot less if you can), and use the rest to pay off debt. Once you're out of debt, build wealth. Duh. Living on less than you make is pretty easy if you make a budget every pay period. Not every month, because there is no magical month that a budget will always apply to. Expenses change, and your budget needs to reflect that.
Make a written budget every pay period. Make sure you know where every single penny goes from that check, so you don't wonder where all of those pennies went. It may take a couple of months to get this right.
We weren't exactly living paycheck to paycheck back then, but at the end of the month we had practically nothing left. We had no real savings, and no backup plan other than credit cards in case something big happened.
I made a vow to myself to eat lunch on $10 or less every day, eating decent food too, not just fast food crap. Surprisingly this is a really easy thing to do. I have friends that try to eat lunch on $5 per day now. I dropped my coffee expenditures to around $100/mo too. I work in coffee shops every day, not for the coffee shops, but because I'm a cafe warrior. I run a small software company and use coffee shops as my office (that is another story all together).
Those two things alone reduced the budget by couple of hundred dollars. Eat at home for breakfast and dinner. Buying groceries is alway cheaper than eating out, and you can actually eat better. If you're in a relationship, cooking for your partner is always a grand slam. Make an event out of it and use it to expand your palette.
So we formulated a plan based on Dave Ramsey's "Baby Steps."
1. The $1,000 Emergency Fund - we put ours in a savings account that was tied to the checking account as overdraft protection. That helped us get over using the credit cards as a buffer. We found that we never had an expense so large that we needed more than $1,000.
2. Pay off all debt using the Debt Snowball - pay off the debts, smallest to largest, using the payment from the last one on the next. Eventually, everything is paid off and the fun starts. Interest isn't relevant in the conversation because the excitement and the feeling of progress by paying off debts is extremely valuable. Don't get out the calculator, it doesn't matter. Pay them off, smallest to largest, and you'll see how fun getting out of debt can be.
We started with the smallest card, then the other. Closing credit cards is fun. In the meantime I made the incredibly difficult decision to rid myself of my car and the $800/mo it was costing us. Man I loved that car, but $580 for the payment, another $100 for insurance, and $120 or so in gas per month? Didn't love that. My car took two months to sell, but once it did we were able to apply that money to the other car (it was next in line).
With the second car paid off ($300/mo), my car sold ($800/mo), and the credit cards gone ($180/mo), the personal loan was up next. The friend that loaned us the money was getting a little impatient with us given how much debt we were paying off, but he was pretty excited to see the progress come so quickly when it was his turn. We were paying that debt off quickly. Very quickly.
It is said that once you start doing smart things with money, money finds you. Whether or not I believe that in a metaphysical sense is a matter of debate, we did see a nice tax return (the largest in years) and had an investment pay decently that spring. We didn't get raises during that period, and still haven't, but the investment keeps making returns and by getting out of debt, we've found a lot more money in our salaries.
We wrote the last check on September 18, 2007 - we were debt free in less than a year.
3. 3 to 6 months of expenses in savings - we chose a high interest savings account... and decided on 3 months of expenses because two of us were working. By extension, that means 6 months as long as we don't both lose our jobs. We've completed this step. Reaching this goal while debt free was relatively painless - we were already trained by the budget.
4. Invest 15% of household income into Roth IRAs and pre-tax retirement. In 2007 - for the first time ever - we fully funded our IRAs. We snuck it in just under the wire, but we did it.
So now we're working on 5 through 7:
5. College funding for children - We plan on having Z go to a state university and will have set the ball in motion closer to that time. He already understands the concept of being paid (we give him a quarter to clean up before bed) and will understand how to manage money from a very, very early age.
6. Pay off your house early - we don't own yet, but we're saving for it. Every now and then we wonder if buying is even for us given that we've moved ever few years since we've been together. We'll see how this goes. If nothing else, we can always do the 100% down thing later if we wait long enough.
7. Build wealth and GIVE! - This excites me the most. I already have a desire to give back to the world, but I think that is more about maturity and growth. Once I have the funds to help with it, all will be well.
The advice is very simple if you follow it and I hope you've had enough of debt to make it so. Imagine waking up one day to find that interest is paying you instead because you have no debt.
One last thing. Get rid of the expensive car debt and buy a beater. I bought a 1989 Montero for $1,700 cash. If you can let go of what people think of you, getting out of debt will be easy. | | |
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| | | | After our successful modding of the Creative Fatal1ty Gaming Headset for use with the iPhone, I realized that there may be others interested in the pinouts for the iPhone headphone plug. I've seen other places that mention the external iPhone plug functions, but to do anything productive you need to know which colors go to the plug itself.
What are the iPhone headphone plug pinouts?
Green is 1st contact/left headphone
Red is 2nd contact/right headphone
Red/Green Combo and both coppers are 3rd contact/ground
White is 4th contact/microphone - the white wire is inside the red/green combo wire
If you would like for us to mod a headset for you, leave a note in the comments and I'll get back to you. The process should work with any headset that uses the 3.5mm plugs for input and output. It is just a matter of determining what the wires do in the headset itself.
I also found that the Verizon stores carry a 3.5mm to 2.5mm adaptor for US $3.99 - it has the same pins in the same positions, though I haven't tested it. The Verizon adaptor option is way cheaper than destroying a US $29.99 pair of Apple iPhone buds. If you try it and it works let me know and I'll update this post. | | |
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