@ my wits’ end

Just one year ago hope spread around the world like wildfire. Barack Hussein Obama’s inspired oratory gave us a glimpse of a better way. Here in New Zealand we had a double dose of optimism; new Prime Minister and all-round nice guy John Key promised change for the better, albeit without the soaring rhetoric.

For me and for many who’ve heard it all before the hope was tempered by doubt and cynicism. Nevertheless, the possibility of a sea-change was real and exciting.

Maybe this time…

The hope proved fleeting

There was a sea-change alright, yet another tsunami of missed opportunities to douse the flames of hope.

“Yes, we can” morphed into “maybe”, promises became aspirations. We’re almost back to business as usual. The dreams are on hold, the disappointment is acute.

What next? Sarah Palin?

Democracy doesn’t seem to work anymore. We need a system which punishes politicians who blatantly disregard their election manifestos. We need less adversarial politics-as-usual and more lets-all-pull-together consensus. We need less Old Testament Hell and Damnation and more New Testament Golden Rule.

To put one more nail in the coffin of hope we have the sad reality of President Obama using his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize to extol the virtues of a just war. I’m an ex-serviceman, and I’m not a pacifist. Nevertheless, I don’t accept the “just war” justification in the case of Afghanistan. There were many ways to fan the flames of freedom in that region without sending in fighting forces.

A few weeks ago the New York Times website ran a “Word Train” asking readers to describe their feelings about President Obama in just one word. The results were depressing but sadly predictable.

I chose disappointment and that seemed to be one of the big four, along with hopeful and proud for the optimists and disgusted for the realists and the “We told you so” brigade. Nowhere could I find pleased, delighted, or even a mild satisfied.

My disappointment was less acute for being not unexpected. I knew all along that there was a strong probability that Mr Obama would be subsumed by the pressures and realities of the beltway, so now that it’s happened I just feel sad.

1. I don’t believe that his dreams were impossible to realize. If President Obama had chosen to fight the Washington system he could have prevailed. He would have had two years of struggle against the House and the Senate, but he could have kept the people on his side and transformed Congress in the mid-term elections – just as FDR did when he went directly to the voters to expose the people who stood in the way of true reform.
2. I don’t believe that peace in the Middle East is not achievable. It’s just not achievable while continuing to provoke all Islam by backing Israel at all costs, by funding Israel’s abuse of power or by sacrificing young Americans to perpetuate to perpetuate factional Islamic squabbles.
3. I don’t believe that the war in Afghanistan is a necessity. Fix point 2 then the Taliban and Al Qaeda lose their raison d’etre.
4. I’m astounded that his administration has allowed the money manipulators to go back to business as usual bleeding the productive sector and that there hasn’t been rioting on the streets by those who’ve lost their jobs and their homes. Scrooge MacDuck is alive and well and bathing in your money again.
5. I do believe that climate change is a challenge we can meet and with sensible policies could be economically beneficial to any country which grasps the opportunities, to the planet, and to all mankind. A uniting cause. To find out how to do it read Thomas L. Friedman’s excellent “Hot, Flat and Crowded“.

Too late now.

Unless he has a cunning plan.

A companion for Evernote

Although I’ve used web-based email off and on for a few years, I didn’t appreciate the value of cloud computing until I discovered Evernote. That gem led me to investigate other cloud options: among them the excellent DropBox.

The concept is simple: imagine a folder on your computer into which you can stuff files that can be accessed from any computer in the galactic neighbourhood. As soon as any change is detected in that folder or its sub-folders, the updated file is duplicated in your account on DropBox’s website. Then it’s automatically updated on your office desk machine, your notebook computer and your home computer.

I can acomplish the same thing with Evernote, but some files—notably Word, OpenOffice, and Excel files—aren’t compatible with Evernote’s free version. Even with the Evernote Premium, Office files can’t be read in Evernote’s local client. You must locate the file in Evernote and then open it in the relevant application before you can read it, search its text or edit it. Because your files are stored in Evernote’s rather cryptic database there’s an issue with finding the file’s actual location on your hard drive if, for instance, you wish to back it up locally.

What’s more, DropBox, unlike Evernote, is fully Linux compatible. I’m hoping that will change with Evernote’s recent raising of $10,000,000 for development but we’re not there yet.

Evernote is outstanding for information which I need to be fully and instantly searchable, but DropBox is more suited for the files I wish to edit regularly.

In a nutshell

Evernote is a full fledged application which allows you to view and edit text files and to view pdf files and images from within the application. Dropbox doesn’t do any of that, it’s just an icon in your notification area which accesses your DropBox folder. That folder can be in your Documents folder or any other location your heart desires.

DropBox has a tiny footprint and its simplicity is its biggest asset.

I use Evernote to squirrel away all the random information I may need to reference later and which needs to be easily and quickly searchable. Some examples:

• image files,
• scanned magazine and newspaper articles,
• web clips,
• pdf files,
• scanned statements, bills, receipts, library slips and business cards.
• scanned copies of wills, marriage certificates and the like.

I use DropBox for working files:

• my website local files,
• my blog notes,
• my Microsoft Office files: to-do lists and inventories,
• my financial spreadsheets,
• downloaded program files,
• data files for utilities like Stickies for Windows and PhraseExpress.
• and anything else which I need to keep synchronised between my main computer, my virtual computers, my Linux test box, and my laptop.

I only use a small fraction of the 2GB of free storage available with the free DropBox account. Because it’s such a simple concept I find it very useful for my everyday files—if I need to backup large files to the cloud I can use Microsoft’s free and generous 25GB Sky Drive but that doesn’t have DropBox’s synchronisation ability.

Bang for buck, which is the best operating system for you?

Over recent months, apart from trying to paint the house, battle my backyard wilderness, sort out my junk overload and save the planet, I’ve been trying to become moderately expert in Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard and Ubuntu Linux 9.04. I’ve not been impressed with Windows lately so I decided to evaluate the opposition with a view to deciding which OS to throw my lot in with for the foreseeable future.

I’ve written more in-depth about my findings here on mistywindow.com

What’s the conclusion?

A plague on the houses of both Apple and Microsoft. Ubuntu Linux wins by a narrow margin.

Apple have an excellent operating system and easily the best hardware, but that beautiful hardware is just too outrageously expensive for me. Yeah, I know you pay for quality, but the extortionate Apple hardware tax will cost you far more than Microsoft’s operating system tax.

With Windows 7, Microsoft have improved their act by a degree of magnitude. It’s too early to be sure but my feeling is that, security aside, Windows 7 is as good as Snow Leopard. They’d become divorced from reality and from the people paying their bills – maybe they’re seeing the light at last.

Windows 7 is far better than Vista, smoother, less bloated. and with a lot of incremental usability improvements. They’ve kicked we long-suffering Vista users in the teeth with their Windows 7 upgrade pricing but at least they’re on the right track. If you’re thinking of upgrading and budget concious, consider buying an OEM copy – it’s the cheapest option.

I’m sticking with Windows for the time being: I’m ready to give up Photoshop and Dreamweaver which I can’t easily run in Linux, but I won’t give up Evernote. Nevertheless, if present trends continue, within a few years I’ll be going full open-source, probably with Ubuntu Linux.

Any discussion over the relative merits of Windows, Mac and Linux usually invokes fanaticism worthy of the Third Reich and degenerates into personal abuse on a scale usually reserved for South American football referees.

If you’ve read my full investgation I’d like to hear your views. I’ve given my biased opinions based upon my own trials, my own software requirements, my own limited budget and my own past experience. Your requirements may be very different so your conclusions may be just as different.

If your mileage varies that’s fine with me, just leave the flamethrower at home.

I wish to cancel my subscription.

1. I don’t wish to add unnecessarily six plastic bags a week, biodegradable though they may be, to my already excessive consumption of planetary resources.

2. I’m even less anxious to continue the regular morning search of my front yard, the street over the front fence, and my neighbour’s garden, for the paper – which appears to be dropped from a passing Lockheed Orion from about 5,000 feet.
I can’t find it at all this morning. Either it’s late, it landed in Spriggins Park, a passer-by had a wind-fall (literally), my neighbour’s reading it, or it’s better hidden than usual in my renga renga lilies.

3. I’m also worried that the rather heavy Saturday morning missile, in addition to demolishing new plantings and threatening my window panes, will deal a serious blow to an unwary grandchild.

Love the paper, can’t cope with the stress.

)

Please invoice me for my outstanding balance.

Kind wishes,

Alan Henderson.

I seem to be in the minority again.

That poll just reveals once more that just because you’re in the majority doesn’t mean you’re correct. No wonder two thirds of the world aren’t interested in democracy.

Listen to me Michael Laws

Banning gang patches will accomplish nothing. You’ve wasted a lot of time, money, and energy. Black Power and the Mongrel Mob will tattoo patches on their backs and saunter down Victoria Avenue starkers if they wish.

I have lived less than a kilometre from Wanganui’s main street for nearly six years. Most days I walk, cycle or plod through and around the city centre. Most days I visit Indigo, Rapido, the Rutland Arms or the Big Orange for a coffee or lunch. I see no gang activity.

I live 50 metres from the Springfield Park rugby field and greyhound track. 90% of the Whanganui tangata whenua walk past my gate when there’s a rugby match on. I see no gang patches.

I have never seen a gang member wearing a patch in Wanganui. In all that time I have seen no evidence of gang activity in Wanganui. I have never felt threatened by anyone. The most antagonistic, obnoxious, aggressive and offensive behaviour I encounter is from you Michael.  From reports of your dealings with your fellow Councillors and long-suffering Hospital Board members, from your ubiquitous columns in the press, from your radio show—which I sometimes flick to momentarily on the rare occasions that National Radio has nothing to inspire and the not-so-rare occasions that Leighton Smith becomes smugly unbearable.

I read the semi-literate Wanganui Chronicle every day and I understand that we have our share of crime and gang activity, but if we consider the relatively high unemployment rate in our town (your rhetoric and grandiose schemes have done nothing to redress that—I live in hope) the problem is no greater than anywhere else in New Zealand.

We need real action, not gestures

The visible manifestation of gangs is not the problem. It’s their criminal activities—especially the zillion dollar drug business—that need addressing.

We need pro-active and draconian measures from government to give police the power and the motivation to smash the gangs. To tear down their fortifications. To confiscate their drug financed assets. To put a stop to their criminal and anti-social activities. To rehabilitate the best and to incarcerate the rest.

We need jobs for the young before they become mired in the gang sub-culture.

A good start would be to de-criminalise hard drugs and to legalise cannabis. Sell the stuff just as we do tobacco and use the taxes raised to educate the young about the danger and futility of drug use and to rehabilitate those already hooked.

In one fell swoop you remove the gangs’ main source of funding. Then maybe the long-suffering and under-resourced police can get on with battling real crime instead of wasting scarce resources chasing harmless hippies harvesting happy baccy in the Ureweras.

As far as His Worship the Mayor is concerned it’s hard to accept that he believes this ban-the-patch rubbish. But it does create a stir.

And all publicity is good publicity. Right Michael?

OK, I confess. I voted for him.

Twice!

At least for once I was in the majority.

Remember 20% interest rates?

No?

Well I do. It was rather unpleasant. The Muldoon economic miracle that wrought the 20+% interest rates also ushered in punitive taxes. After 20 years as grossly underpaid serviceman (30 years later that situation hasn’t changed!) I entered the real world — I finally started earning a good salary.

I walked from $12,000 a year as an Engineer Officer in the RNZN straight into a job as a steel mill engineer where I was soon on $20,000 with a company car.

Luxury

Except for the 66% tax rates — even on my miserly naval pension.

It could happen again.

Economics 101

George Bernard Shaw said that “If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.”

Harry Truman plagiarised refined Mr Shaw’s observation by reminding us that the economists would all still point in different directions.

I’m more inclined to the oft-quoted view that if you laid all the world’s economists end to end that would be a very good thing.

There’s no shortage of jokes about economists, but like all humour, there’s an element of truth lurking in the cynicism. One of my favourites:

For those of you who don’t understand Reaganomics, it’s based on the principle that the rich and the poor will get the same amount of ice. In Reaganomics, however, the poor get all of theirs in winter.
Morris Udall

Here in Godzone, guided by these experts in economics, for years we’ve slaughtered the economic goose by making borrowing much more expensive than it is for our competitors. As a means of controlling spending and inflation it has not worked. As a means of throttling our economy, discouraging investment and keeping a damper on our pitiful productivity level it’s been spectacularly successful.

Allan Greenspan, a highly lauded and respected economist confirmed as Federal Reserve Chairman by a succession of US administrations had a big hand in starting the current economic mess and so ruining the lives of millions. Mr Greenspan was the genius who persuaded the US administration to allow the relaxation of financial regulation that enabled the grossly greedy bankers to lend on zero—even negative—equity.

Our own economic geniuses were forced, screaming and kicking, into slashing our ludicrous interest rate levels but they’ve already started muttering about jacking them up again as soon as signs of recovery are glimpsed over the horizon.

It’s madness. Instead of cranking up interest rates to stop consumers borrowing, why not just make borrowing more difficult?

When our notoriously short-sighted consumers again show signs of getting back on the borrow-and-spend bandwagon here’s a few things we should do:

• Keep interest rates down to encourage business and to keep the pressure off home mortgages.
  If oldies like myself with money in the bank don’t like the deposit rates then they’d best get acquainted with the stock market.
  Now’s good.
• Stop retailers from coercing customers into going into hock for consumer junk.
  No interest holidays.
  No repayment holidays.
  A minimum cash deposit of 25% for hire purchases.
• Only allow hire purchase for durable neccessities.
  Refrigerators are in.
  72″ LCD TVs are out.
• Impose some tough conditions on the issue and use of credit cards.
  For starters: at least 30% of the outstanding balance to be paid off each month, otherwise credit is suspended.
• No home mortgage (or other borrowing on assets) to amount to more than 80% of the cost of the house at the time of purchase.
  Exceptions only for those wishing to use the capital in their house for new business investment.
• No second mortgages.
• Capital gains tax to be applied to all real estate except owner-occupied dwellings, farms, and business premises.
• Real estate to be sold only to New Zealand residents. Believe it or not our currency is under-valued and has been for decades.
  Allowing holders of US dollars, Euros, Sterling etc. to buy our under-valued (to them) property forces up prices beyond our reach.

Don’t believe our currency is over-valued? Google the Big Mac index. It’s not a high exchange rate that’s our problem, it’s exchange rate volatility. Do you really think that if your Kiwi dollars became worth US$10.00 each overnight that it would be a bad thing?

Think about it. There would be problems for some, but oil at NZ$7 a barrel has its merits.

On the other hand, if devaluing by 20% is such a good thing why don’t we devalue by 200%? Nah, bugger it. let’s not muck around. 2000%!

Yeah, right.

Then again you could listen to Allan Bollard. Our very own economic genius who understood the system so well that he proclaimed the recession over in 2008.

God help us.

Old Man Gaia speaks

We should listen. In the video below Dr Jim Lovelock talks about space flight, and his pessimistic view on the likelihood of medium-term survival for a few billion of us.

James Ephraim Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS, postulated the Gaia hypothesis long before the dangers of climate change were acknowledged, or even suspected. At the age of 90, when most of us have our feet up (if we’re still above ground) he’s released a new book – The Vanishing Face of Gaia: a Final Warning – and Richard Branson has invited him to become an astronaut, possibly to stop him opening a brothel called Virgin.

He’s someone worth listening to. It’s easy enough for those with an  anti-anthropogenic-climate-change agenda to dismiss Al Gore as just another politician with a barrow to push and a high carbon lifestyle to maintain but Dr Lovelock is not so easy to write off.

However!

I have a couple of relatively minor bones to pick with him.

First bone

He maintains that anyone who thinks that expending vast quantities of fuel to toss a few people 100km above the earth on a jolly in Richard Branson’s space adventure is either “gravely mistaken or a damned hypocrite.”

I disagree. In the unlikely event that I were given the same offer I can think of very little I’d rather do but I hope I’d have the moral fortitude to say “Thanks Sir Richard, but no thanks.”

Bone two

He views trees in plantations as a waste of time. You can’t recreate an ecosystem he says.

1. OK, you can’t recreate an ecosystem, but plantations are still invaluable carbon sinks and they provide renewable carbon based material to partially satisfy our profligate habits.
2. Although you can’t recreate an ecosystem you can extend an existing one by planting adjacent to it or by creating corridors between islands of forest and you can create a new forest and let nature take its course over time via the birds. the bees, and the wind. The more diverse the plantings the quicker the development of a sustainable ecosystem will be. It may not be as diverse or as pristine as the original but it will be an ecosystem and given time, invaluable.

Creating special characters in your Linux documents

Inserting special characters can be tedious. In Linux you must open and search the Character Map or set up a Panel Widget and search through it. The least irksome way for often used characters is to memorise the Unicode.

1. While holding down Shift+Ctrl
2. click the U key,
3. then type the 4 character code – e.g. type 00B1 to produce the character ±

The list on the left comprises those symbols which I find useful and which display correctly on web pages (HTML). The more complete list in the image on the right includes those symbols and further characters which work in normal usage (such as text editors, spreadsheets and most other programs) but may not display on the web. I made the image by taking a screenshot with Gimp of an OpenOffice spreadsheet – so you can be sure they work!

To display the fussy characters on web pages you need to use the (X)HTML Character Codes, the most common of which I’ve listed here on mistywindow.com.

There are thousands of these symbols. Links to the .pdf documents which show them are at the end of this post.

For Windows users see my mistywindow.com page about ASCII symbols right here.

00ab  «  left guillemet
00bb  »  right guillemet
2039  ‹
203a  ›
00d7  × multiplication sign
00b1  ± plus or minus
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Currency
00a2  ¢
00a3  £
00a5  ¥
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fractions:
00bc  ¼
00bd  ½
00be  ¾
~~~~~~~~~~~~
00b5  µ
00b6  ¶
00c6  Æ
00e6  æ
00d8  Ø
00f8  ø
00e8  è
00e9  é
00a9  ©
2022  •
2013  –   en dash
2014  —   em dash
201c  “   curly quote left
201d  ”   curly quote right
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Superscripts
00b0  °
00b2  ²
00b3  ³
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Get them all here—thousands of them—at unicode.org and more here:

This method didn’t work for me in OpenOffice.org v 2.0, but it’s OK in the current version 3.0.

Annie Leonard’s been thinking …

Annie’s video is a must see for everyone who’d like to keep our planet viable.

It’s a must see if you don’t give a stuff about the planet but you need an excuse to get off the madcap consumer roller coaster.

How did big business create a system that puts consumer products on the shelf for a fraction of their actual cost? We’ve all wondered about it. Annie went to find out and it changed her life. She will tell you how this obscene system started, how it functions and why—one way or another—it can’t last.

She’ll tell you the real cost of our addiction to stuff and why your grandchildren will pay for it tomorrow just as the world’s poor are paying for it right now.

From Annie’s website »

The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

Click on the play movie button to see Annie’s movie »

Visit Annie and The Story of Stuff: click right here

Evernote for Mac keyboard shortcut cheat sheet

If Evernote is unknown territory for you, you’re missing out on the best free software on the planet. Find out about it here.

After migrating from Windows to Mac, one hassle has been getting to grips with a totally different Evernote local client. There doesn’t seem to be a published list of keyboard shortcuts, so I’m in the process of tracking down all the shortcuts I can find with a view to publishing them on my website as a printable pdf Cheat Sheet.

My Evernote for Windows Cheat Sheet is right here.

If you know of any extra shortcuts which are not on the list, and any corrections or suggestions please tell the world in a Comment below. If you prefer, email me: alan@mywitsend.co.nz

Where there’s a question mark in the Notes column it means that I haven’t confirmed that it works and/or that I don’t yet know enough about OS X to understand it.