Remember back in the late 1700s, when the United States was still just a puppy with really big paws? Back then, Adam Smith was a guy who wrote some of the very first books about the economy and the way we think about it now. You may even know that he described something called the “Invisible hand” of market forces, which essentially describes how people acting in their own self-interest actually do a lot of good for the society as a whole for a variety of complex reasons. We call this counter-intuitive stuff capitalism, generally. And we mostly like it these days, inside of our fairly orderly, modern society.

Thus I ask… what if you were a Pirate?
And no, not in the bit torrent sense of the word (good heavens!) What if you had not an invisible “hand” of the market, but instead an invisible “hook” where the hand used to be.

And so, what if you were a part of a floating society of up to 150 democratic citizens (sure to be put to death if ever caught) commanded by only a handful of leaders? What would your economy be like if you were a pirate? Would Alan Greenspan lower your interest rates? :)

If you ever wondered how democracy worked aboard a pirate ship, or how barely literate people of every race worked together smoothly under on-board written contractual law, or how money and incentives worked… then check it out.

If you have an extra hour and a few extra brain cells (sadly I’m not entirely sure how I met both of these requirements, but I did listen anyhow)… you might want to check out http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/05/leeson_on_pirat.html for an interesting free internet audio discussion with an author that explores just such questions in just the right amount of detail.

He even gets into a bit how the old pirate culture and economics mesh with the current (2009) style of sea piracy. Int-ARRR-esting stuff!

Here’s more on the author: http://www.peterleeson.com/TheInvisibleHook.html

I rode on a plane and stuff about a week ago. Locations: London, UK; Copenhagen, Denmark, Chicago, IL, USA

This post is a test of a possible new photo-galleries-in-blog tool I’m trying:

The local environmental non-profit group I’m involved with had a significant event happen in its history today.  Due to a variety of factors (primarily budget shortfall issues), the board today voted to become an all-volunteer organization effective at the end of June 2009.  This is a huge change: the original founder had been a full-time, paid contractor prior to this point.  No longer will this be the case, and the process of creating this change is a major one that has big consequences for the founder.  No one likes to change jobs, even if their paycheck was sporadic at best.  No one likes to release the reins of their own creation.

Our board has bitten off a huge responsibility to ensure that the organization continues to fulfill its mission, and to properly honor the contributions, vision, and work of our founder.

Let’s just say that it all made for a pretty heavy board meeting.

For this project, I picked an area up my upstairs office that was nestled between some built in shelves and cabinets on one wall.  It measured 48 inches wide by 33 inchess tall.

Next I went to my favorite free high resolution desktop wallpaper sites, and looked for something that I wanted to see on my wall.  I wanted to find something that included obvious perspective cues to give the illusion of depth, and seemed to have a light source in the middle of the picture where my lamp was going to be shining from.  I picked this one without over-thinking it too much for the purposes of the experiment.  Many others would have worked, and been much more interesting.  I downloaded it at the highest resolution offered (2,560 x 1,600 pixels).

In order to know how my photo would look, I divided the number of pixels I had wide by inches wide (2,560 pixels/48 inches) = 53 DPI (dots per inch).  For a section of wall that people will be at least 1-3 feet away from, 50 DPI is fine.  100 DPI is good if people will get less than a foot away at eye level to your wall.  This requires less DPI than other printing applications in order  to look good from the distance a viewer sees it.

Next I went to an online printing place to have it printed large.  I went to BargainBanners.com, (my employer), here.   My wallpaper printout arrived well within a week.

When it arrived, I thumb-tacked it to the wall under where the trim was attached.

Since there is a lamp that goes on that part of the shelf, I set it up without its shade to preview how the room’s real lighting would work with the image.  Looks like the bulb is practically part of the sky.  Exactly the effect I was hoping for.

Wood trim, lampshade, and various office junk put back into place.  I’m pretty happy with how it turned out for a first try.  What does everyone else think?  I have more complicated wood paneling elsewhere in the house.  I was thinking of trying something more complex, with a more meaningful image, in the future.

Regarding the copyright of the image, that part is sticky.  I believe it would be a better practice to surf on over to iStockPhoto.com to buy the proper rights to an image they have for $5-$12.  Better yet, if you have a camera with a lot of megapixels, you can print directly from your photographs, which you already own.  My employer sees a lot of this for beautiful engagement photos on huge display at the wedding reception.

Recently I helped prepare a Passport application for an upcoming trip.  This form can first prepared on the computer, and then taken in to an actual goverment office to file.  The process was wonderfully well explained and made easy, and actually works.  But I found myself wondering why an insignificant mistake in the online form hadn’t been fixed yet.

On the form, where it asks for your phone number, it formats your phone number as if it were a social security number instead.  The number is still readable, but just looks a little strange.  No big deal at all.

All the same, at first I was a little shocked.  The U.S. Department of State is a big time operation.  Was this ignored mistake a sign of our “outdated and crumbling infrastructure?”  How many millions of people have encountered this tiny mistake in the online application since they first provided it?  Does no one take pride in the details of this most auspicious task?

About two seconds later, I realized one (of many) obvious answers.  They have much bigger problems to fix.  And this experience brought a new awareness rapidly to the surface.  Had I temporarily applied a bizarre expectation for my buraucracy to provide a flawless consumer experience to every single person that interacts with it?

What an embarassingly childish thought to have had.

Dang it!  And I thought Santa was at the bottom of the map. :)

Yes, I’m working on a technology upgrade for this blog.  Basically, I’m trying to integrate my Google Reader (RSS feeds galore) with the blog.  The way it will ideally work is that I will read something interesting, comment on it, and embed my comment as well as the original post (media intact) along with a link to the full item.

Unfortunately, the built-in self-installed WordPress “post by email” functionality doesn’t support “fancy HTML” emails.  So every time I’ve tried to send something to this blog via the post-by-email function, it strips out everything but the title of the post because it’s HTML.

But that won’t be a problem for long.  You see, WordPress is written in PHP.  That PHP.   MY OWN PERSONAL EDITABLE (bwaaah haaah haaaah) kind of PHP.  (Did you know I was a computer science major before a business major?)

So I’ll get this working soon, and then the blog post count will explode.

At first it will be like a tribble population.

      Later, it will be like tribbles eating alkaseltzer.

            Picture the carnage of posts:  fuzz…. munch…. fizzz….. boom!

So if you ever wanted to know what kinds of things I think about, these are things that are possibly interesting even without my commentary (which is easily scrolled past to the good stuff)…

So quit reading my blog before it’s too late, before you get any of it on you.

Otherwise it is all coming soon. :)

Ever has this happen to you?  You’re happily typing away several paragraphs into something.  Suddenly, your application closes and your computer reboots.  What happened?  A crash?  A virus?  Spyware?  Nope.

Think more in terms of a subliminal dialog box.  Appearing for only a second, it becomes visible and steals your keystrokes from whatever you were happily doing.  Maybe you were about to hit the space bar between words in your document.  Since the subliminal popup window has buttons in it, and the space bar will click one of them, you’ve chosen to do something.  Probably this is something windows related, such as rebooting to install updates.

I’m so glad that our computers are protected by automatic updates from multiple software vendors.  I’d hate to think of what kind of loss of data or productivity might occur if all of this loss of data and productivity didn’t happen to prevent it.

Grumble grumble grumble.

Update:  Don’t know how I forgot to cite this sooner!  The headline of this post is a quote that I found from someone else experiencing this issue here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001011.html

Today I’ve alienated hundreds of my most active readers on this blog.  Please accept my apologies if you are among them.

This site was never expected to draw much interest, outside of what a few friends chose to give.  From the beginning, I’ve been clear it is presented by me for others to take from it whatever they will.  The recent scaling up of participation and broadening of readership was quite unexpected.

I know the importance of being open minded when you take in the reactions of your audience.  Yet I suddenly found these very personal values being tested daily by many of my new readers.  Maybe I can’t even explain it in a way that leads anyone to agree with my decision.  Perhaps I *have* acted hastily, and I will see that in time.

After all, it really wasn’t so bad.  Xigidib’s comment on the “Amazon Customer Service”  post about male enlargement pills made it’s own logical points.  Although I didn’t apply the strategy in own my life, perhaps following their advice *would* help somebody to get better phone support.  But Haojipisippuz’s tersely written contribution on pharmaceuticals seemed to have missed the original spirit of my “blue screen of death” post on the US economy entirely.  In short, these new arrivals didn’t fit in with the existing community very well at all.

I’m not trying to be a tyrant and censor real discourse here.  Sometimes you have to make hard choices.  You learn to get past your initial fear of loss of readership.  It’s not something you had ever planned to do, but sometimes it’s best for everyone just to part ways as amicably as possible.  You have to foster the belief within yourself to know you’ll gain back much more in the future than was lost today.  Yet I wonder if I can really be so sure that the ultimate project goals can be realized without their many contributions.

So as I say goodbye to my hundreds of Spam-bot commenters on this blog, hopefully we all can one day see this parting of ways as having been for the best.  I’ve installed the WP-SpamFree plugin and there’s no looking back now.

1,057 comments pending moderation:

You probably won’t be thrilled if you buy these things either.  I think that my Amazon Review (and I consider Amazon to be innocent in all of this) says it all:

I want my 6 hours over this last week back. Buying this was the one of most frustrating wastes of time I could possibly have orchestrated for myself. 

Yes, these things did pair easily with my wireless phone. Too bad they are completely fugly (sagging around the ears and generally not flattering the human face), and add a constant bright flashing light to the side of your head. Great I suppose for attracting insects or directing aircraft, not great as a stylish accessory. I knew in advance that I wasn’t willing to wear these things in public, so they were basically useless for my cell phone. 

So the real reason I bought them was to have wireless stereo headphones on my Vista computer. Naturally there would be some installation process, but I had no idea that it would be so long and so very fruitless. 

Pairing the device with my Vista PC’s bluetooth adapter was the easy part. Then came the fact that Vista didn’t have any underlying driver support for the Bluetooth protocols needed to do things like, um, pipe stereo audio to these stereo headphones. No driver disc came with the headphones, and no drivers were available on IOGEAR’s website for this product. So although I was being prompted for drivers, none were available. 

I contacted IOGEAR’s support department via their website chat. BIG MISTAKE. The poorly trained moron I got obviously had never even touched a pair of these headphones (and possibly not a Vista PC either) and proceeded to walk me through the exact steps I had already completed in the manual to pair the headphones with the computer. I completed these dutifully through a 30 minute chat, and at the end, it once again prompted for drivers. The moron tech support person mistook my “it didn’t work what else can we try” for an invitation to end the chat while telling me that they were “glad to have been able to resolve the problem”. So IOGEAR obviously spends the big bucks on hiring competent support companies that are worth talking to. (not!)

Moving on, and trying not to give up too early (elapsed install time over two hours now), I went to the web to search for options. It turns out that Vista doesn’t have a very full featured Bluetooth “stack”, and you need to upgrade/install a new one to resolve the missing Vista Bluetooth protocol issue. By the way, this Vista Microsoft Bluetooth issue seems like the kind of thing the IOGEAR tech support moron might have known about, right? Well they didn’t. So I followed the advice of a tutorial, paid $5 extra for an updated Bluetooth protocol set from a software vendor that Microsoft seemed to endorse, and the saga continued. 

Of course the damn things still did not work. Even in the ‘test audio’ area of the Sound Hardware control panel app the sample sound effect would only play for about .5 seconds in the headphones before cutting out. This was consistent with what happened when I tried to play audio from any source on the computer: iTunes, windows media player, etc. 

So I dug deeper into the tutorials, and many suggestions abounded. Perhaps these headphones did not support encrypted bluetooth audio. So I followed detailed instructions to disable encryption in the driver settings in about 12 registry entries. Reboot, try again, of course it doesn’t work. So then the tutorial suggests that the headphones may not be compatible with the built-in Vista Bluetooth stack at all (even with the paid for protocol upgrades). Maybe I would need to disable & uninstall the Microsoft Bluetooth stack entirely, and completely replace it. Of course, there didn’t seem to be any clear options that worked well with 64bit Vista. 

So I’m done with these things. A normal product I would return with a bit of a sigh. These things will be burned. 

Do not buy unless: 

A) You don’t care how you look in public using them with your mobile phone

-or-

B) You’re willing and able to spend even more time researching the very technical process of getting these things to work properly with your computer than I was.