Category: FYI

So, after two–regularly scheduled–days off, Son&Heir drove in to work on (state) roads that are clear of ice. That our street, and the streets connecting to the first state road here around America’s Third World County Central, are still sheet ice covered with packed snow is immaterial: he can drive on three day old stuff like that. It’s a 30-minute drive, but traffic’s usually only bumper-to-bumper for about 2.5-3.0 miles of it, so it’s not too bad.

Of course, fellow “workers” who live right down the street from his place of employment “couldn’t make it in” and so he’s alone at work today.

He says he now knows why that town’s motto is, “Come to visit; come to stay”. Because the roads are so bad you can’t get out. I’m thinking it may be another reason: because staying too long makes folks too stupid and lazy to find a route out.

Interesting motto. Lots of ways it could be read…

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No, not “2009 ResolutionS per day.” That’d just be silly. Although I do engage in goal setting, I just think that since I’ve not made any “New Year’s Resolutions” in some time, perhaps a little taking stock and goal setting of the “New Year’s resolutions” type might be in order. So, herewith my first “New Year’s Resolution” of 2009.

It occurred to me that stuff temds to multiply to fill whatever space is available, and not just in the “nature abhors a vaccuum” kind of way. For example, I had a new 400GB hard drive about six or so months ago. It’s now about half full. Of what? Just–mostly–stuff. Heck, I regularly scissor out and toss several gigs of stuff, and yet still stuff proliferates.

Take my desk. Please. *heh* I try to clean it off every now and then. The last time was about a month ago. But does that help? Nope. It’s crammed, piled high, stuffed with stuff.

Storage shed. Garage. Store rooms. Stuffed with stuff.

A goal for 2009? For every new piece of stuff brought into twc central, TWO pieces of stuff must go–preferably of like stuff. I’m not talking about increasing twc central’s use of the landfill, necessarily (although it may come to that from time to time). Most of the stuff we are plagued with is useful stuff, but might well find a more useful home elsewhere.

So. Yard sales. Donations. Want ads. Friends, neighbors and relatives: all potential new homes for stuff over the course of 2009. For example, how many CD/Radio/cassette tape “boom boxes” do we really need? The kids have stopped using them. I no longer use them (as I once did for ed purposes–amazing the usefulness of those lil items). Sure, some no longer have full functionality, but…

And then there’s my closet. How many boxes of “five-to-seven ‘gold stripe'” silk ties do I need, anyway?

And my techie hoard. Yes, I can and do use all the teeny lil bits and pieces I’ve stripped off of innumerable discarded computers, but how many of those old cases (still left after discarding more than a dozen computers last summer) and power supplies and CDROM drives and etc., do I really need to hang on to? How many can be made into perfectly serviceable hardware firewalls to give away? Well, it pretty much depends on how many spare 100mbit network cards I find I still have and how many people might find they really need a hardware firewall.

And the sheet music, books, magazines, manuscripts, records (both paper and LP), tapes, tools, materials of all kinds that is gathered in both organized and topsy-turvy, ramshackle disorganization–all still in need of digging into, even after the major cleanup of the BIG store room last summer.

Tons (possibly literally tons) of stuff that has simply bred and multiplied in the dank, dark storage places where it’s been consigned must go.

And the same goes for my digital stuff. Boxes and boxes of old floppies, CDRs, old hard drives: sorted, cleaned, recatalogued and either re-stored (this time with a digital library catalog and perhaps even bar coding) and that which is to be discarded either run through a degausser (for the floppies and other magnetic media) or shredded (for the CDRs) or melted (NOT burned). Some of the old hard drives, suitably and securely erased, could well find new homes in file servers, but this stuff must either be used or it must go.

So, that’s “Resolution Number One”–no more wildly proliferating stuff. LESS.

So, a week ago today, my Wonder Woman explained the mystery of why she’s stayed with me so long. Inertia. Seems, according to her, that once we got going together, it was just easier to stay on the wagon and keep moving along together.

Maybe that’s because it’s been all downhill for her… *heh*

Whatever; as long as she’s comfortable with it, I’m staying on the wagon too.

Here it is, 9:00 on a Wednesday morning. I’m looking at a full plate of “work” to do (why the scare quotes? Because it’s all “work” I can approach as play… when I finally get off my fat… fundament and do it), and yet here I sit with four browsers open in three machines (one “real” and a couple of VMs hosted in it), with something over 100 tabs open among the four browsers…

Now, that’s a problem. I’m not doing real multi-tasking but semi-background serial semi-multitasking in a major ADHD/schizo fashion. Sure, things from nearly all the tabs are perking in the background while the foreground is being dealt with (as I write this, things from John Ringo’s rants page and thoughts from Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor Musings are mixing it up with Thomas Sowell and John Agresto over at NRO, while some XBox geek is whispering in my third ear about XBox modding and my gripping hand is grappling with the weird pre-emptive sound problem that’s cropped up in Linux again and my first and other hands are juggling a Mercedes Lackey book and a Dean Koontz book and an Ann Coulter book–offline/online, mix n match).

I think I need to take a break from the computer. Except part of the “work” I need to do is right here sitting on my fat fundamental.

I blame it all on the fact that this is the most comfortable chair in the house. Riiiiiight. *heh* (Well, maybe some of it is due to the fact that I seem to have developed the attention span of a gnat with ADHD. NEED MORE COFFEE!!!)

Maybe it’s time once again to look to Wordsworth (open another tab… ;-))

THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

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Trackposted to Rosemary’s Thoughts, Political Byline, Faultline USA, Right Truth, The World According to Carl, DragonLady’s World, Rosemary’s News and Ideas, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, CORSARI D’ITALIA, Democrat=Socialist, Dumb Ox Daily News, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Probably. (As Napoleon is said to have opined, “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.)

In the last few weeks, Congress has once again validated two aphorisms:

The eight most dreaded words in the English language are, “I’m from the government; I’m here to help.”

and

“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”- Mark Twain

(Perhaps I should add another Twainism to the list of aphorisms Congress has recently validated: “There is no native criminal class except Congress.”)

Anywho…

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 that was signed into Law by Dhimmi Kahtah had ostensibly good intentions: allow folks who were being redlined (supposedly because of race but actually because they were BAD RISKS) to obtain mortgages for homes. Eventually, this led to

Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992, passed during a lame duck Repugnican’t presidency by a Dhimmicrappic Congress, ” …required the Federal National Mortgage Association, commonly known as Fannie Mae, and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, commonly known as Freddie Mac, to devote a percentage of their lending to support affordable housing. This in part, contributed to increased Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pooling and selling of such loans as securities , (i.e. securitization), and expanded the secondary market for those loans.”*

In part. The 1992 act required “a percentage” of Freddie/Fannie lending to support so-called “affordable housing” but it was in the hands of the Clintoon Administration that the practices accelerating the downfall of mortgage lenders reeally took off. Contra Bubba’s recent disclaimers, “In early 1993 President Clinton proposed new regulations for the CRA which would increase access to mortgage credit for inner city and distressed rural communities.[7] The new rules went into effect on January 31, 1995… “*

And so it goes.

More recently,

“In 2002 there was an inter-agency review of the effectiveness of the 1995 regulatory changes to the Community Reinvestment Act and new proposals were considered. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and the Office of the Controller of the Currency put new regulations into effect September of 2005. The regulations were opposed by a contingent of Democrats because the action ‘undercuts the statutory purpose of the Act for institutions to meet the needs of low and moderate-income persons and communities by OTS.'”*

So, Dhimmis conspired to leave the CRA free to wreak havoc on our financial system by appealing to two base traits shared by many humans: risk avoidance (after all, don’t make those loans to people who might default and you KNOW the Feds are gonna squeeze your privates for “discrimination” or some such bullshit) and greed (“If I have to make these crappy loans, I might as well get as much as I can out of ’em before they go toxic”).

Let me leave you with this video. Watch the whole thing. Yes, the whole thing. Get a cuppa joe or two to help you sit still that long if you’re AADHD or whatever, but WATCH IT!

Now, go watch this one, too.

Do note, America’s Third World County isn’t participating in the CRA-Freddie-Fannie-Wall Street kerfuffle. Sure folks elsewhere are losing their shirts, but around here, the banks are solid (don’t ask about St Louis or KC, though–those places on on another planet far, far removed from America’s Third World County), business and life goes on.

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NOTE: I did use Wikipedia for the citations, despite its notoriously uneven content. The key to using Wikipedia wisely is filtering. One must learn a great deal from elsewhere about a subject so that filtering out the B.S. and outright stupidity that frequently creeps into Wikipedia articles–Jerry Pournelle has given up on correcting misstatements of verifiable fact in the biographical Wikipedia article on himself, for example–becomes simply an exercise in doing ones own homework. When, as here, I find a Wikipedia article worth citing because of accuracy and concise treatment, I’ll use it. But that doesn’t happen all that often.

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Trackposted to Diary of the Mad Pigeon, , Faultline USA, Woman Honor Thyself, McCain Blogs, The World According to Carl, Shadowscope, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, Cao’s Blog, and Conservative Cat, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.