*WEDDING.BLOG.LINK*

I just thought some folks out there might have run into the same "click-wheel doesn't work" problem with their iPod. Holy geez am I glad it's such a simple fix! My iPod's been acting pretty flaky for the past few months and I was sure it was ready to die.

I predicted this a few months ago.

The BIS (Bank for International Settlements, the world's most prestigious financial body) is suggesting that there are some serious problems with the economies of the various developed and developing countries in the world, where debt (both consumer and governmental) reigns supreme at the expense of any financial securities - much like just before the Depression in the '30s in North America, and much like the giant cluster-f@#k that the '90s turned out to be in Asia.

Everything about the world right now depends on low borrowing rates - i.e. cheap funding - and that isn't going to last forever. As for what to do about it - I personally have no idea. I'm much more interested in politics and economics than I am in financial issues such as personal management and [stock]market trends.

Just don't say I didn't warn you.

I seem to be thinking a lot about money lately (buying a house, paying for wedding, car repairs, insurance, raises, plus the everyday stuff...) and I've been following some finance related blogs.

GetRichSlowly (great site, btw) had a good piece the other day about joint finances (how-to, how-not-to, why, why not, etc) and I just thought I'd link to it here. It's definitely good reading for those of us interested in couple-ly financial integration (am I the only one?)

• Original article on GetRichSlowly

Links (from the original article):

• Should Couples Keep Separate Finances?
• Avoiding The 'i' In Joint Finances
• 3 Keys To Making Your Personal Finances Work As A Couple

And for good measure:

• How To Orgainze Your Finances In 4 Easy Steps
  

Although perhaps not strictly 'wedding' related, I thought I'd post this here as it pertains to the life Morgan and I will lead together as a result of the marriage.

I just found this great blog post introducing "Square-Foot Gardening" and absolutely love the idea. Expect to hear of adventures building boxes and perhaps even mini-harvesting in a few years!

What American accent do you have? (Best version so far) Canadian People from outside North America probably think you're from the States, but over here we wouldn't make such a mistake.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

Oh what a crazy world it is...

I was listening to a tune by Mogwai this morning called Punk Rock, in which a man's voice can be heard speaking in the background about punk rock. I did some digging, and it turns out the voice (and the words he's speaking) belongs to a man named Iggy Pop. And he spoke these words on the CBC in 1977 in an interview with the one and only Peter Gzowski.
Here's the video clip. Inspiring.

In case anyone was thinking of scoffing at my Apple-fanboyism (fanboyism is a word, isn't it?) when they fired up the new Safari 3 Beta for Windows and saw the strange font-smoothing going on, here's a great piece by the one-and-only Joel Spolsky, explaining what's really going on.


For what it's worth, many XP users might be pleasantly surprised by Safari's strange font-smoothing, as it seems that font-smoothing is set to 'Standard' by default (which is pure shit) and so they're not used to any decent anti-aliasing at all, let alone the truly beautiful (on a computer screen) ClearType font smoothing Windows provides.

I hate seeing a modern computer with anti-aliasing turned off and I incessantly go around enabling ClearType on every Windows computer I get my hands on.

Here's a great article about the arduous task of 'hiring'. One aspect seemed particularly relevant to this blog, as I posted about it here on another Advice From The Internet column on presentations. This is a great explanation of why you shouldn't bullshit through a question you truly do not know the answer to :

"One way to test for an aspect of ethics -- honesty -- is to test for how someone reacts when they don't know something.

Pick a topic you know intimately and ask the candidate increasingly esoteric questions until they don't know the answer.

They'll either say they don't know, or they'll try to bullshit you.

Guess what. If they bullshit you during the hiring process, they'll bullshit you once they're onboard.

A candidate who is confident in his own capabilities and ethical -- the kind you want -- will say "I don't know" because they know that the rest of the interview will demonstrate their knowledge, and they know that you won't react well to being bullshitted -- because they wouldn't react well either."

Here's a (surprisingly, for the NYT) good piece about class wage inequality in America. (For the record, I think the same thing is happening in Canada, though the article specifically points out that it's not as big a problem in the UK or Scandanavia).

Choice quote:

"Americans care about “fairness” more than about “equalness.” We boo athletes suspected of taking steroids, but we admire billionaires."

This is going to become a huge issue if we (North Americans) continue to do nothing about it.

And that's exactly what we're doing BTW. Check out your tax return form for a good example:

2006	$0 - $8,839	$8,839 - $36,378	$36,378 - $72,756	$72,756 - $118,285	over $118,285
	0%	15.25%	22%	26%	29%

[ table c/o wikipedia ]

Notice how our tax brackets stop mysteriously at 118k? Admittedly, 29% is a pretty hefty tax rate, but there are a LOT of people in Canada making annual incomes in excess of 118k! [I can't find any stats one way or another in a quick search. Maybe some of you readers will know where I could find a stat about how many Canadians make more than 118k/year and what the distribution is after that as well - like how many people make in excess of 150k, and 200k and 300k, etc ]

It seems to me on first glance that we could easily shave a few percentage points off the two lowest-but-not-zero brackets and create a new bracket for those who make 200k+.

Also you'll notice the difference from the first bracket to the second is quite large at 15.25%, and then grows at an increasingly slower rate after that. This leaves effectively means that if you're in bracket 2 at 15.25% and you find a way to somehow make enough money to fit into the next tax bracket your 'penalty' is greater than if you make the same move from the 4th to the 5th bracket. Does this seem backwards to anyone else? Shouldn't the brackets be at least an even distance apart? It's like there's an incentive for staying in a lower bracket!

I know I'm not an economist and there's probably really good reasons for setting things up this way but it seems completely counterintuitive to me. Another choice quote to put this into perspective a bit:

"Kevin Hassett, of the American Enterprise Institute, estimates that a family of four earning $50,000 pays exactly the same share of its income (30 percent) on taxes as one earning $150,000."

But, as the article points out, although tax policy is important, the issue shouldn't be about punishing the rich (which is one way this could be seen) but more about "raising" the folks who are at the bottom. And it just hasn't been happening the way everyone predicted in the '80s when Regan cut taxes and Mulrooney signed NAFTA (which TOTALLY F-ed the lower class), both being good little conservatives and predicting confidently that all the wealth they were creating 'at the top' would mean good things for poor folks too. Someday. It didn't happen.

And now we really need to do something about it. As the article says:

"Hamburger flippers simply don’t command a high wage. We can pass laws to change that — a minimum price for cheeseburgers, maybe — or we can, finally, invest in teaching the flippers to do something else."

Anyways, read the article, it's great.

Please PLEASE read this interview with African (Kenyan) economist James Shikwati on the issue of aid from developed countries being sent to poor countries (everywhere, but in Africa and Kenya specifically).

A lot of the stuff in this article is stuff I've been suspicious of for a long time but never had the data to support it. Granted he doesn't supply any 'data' in this interview either, other than making a ton of sense.

It's quite possible I've selected information due to some confirmation or disconfirmation bias, but I'm willing to live with that in hopes that you'll read this an consider the opinion. I have a ton to say about this but I don't have time right now. Hopefully this will generate some food for thought for you. It certainly did for me.

My favourite quotes:

"A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unscrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN's World Food Program. And because the farmers go under in the face of this pressure, Kenya would have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year. It's a simple but fatal cycle."

"Why do we get these mountains of clothes? No one is freezing here. Instead, our tailors lose their livlihoods. They're in the same position as our farmers. No one in the low-wage world of Africa can be cost-efficient enough to keep pace with donated products. In 1997, 137,000 workers were employed in Nigeria's textile industry. By 2003, the figure had dropped to 57,000. The results are the same in all other areas where overwhelming helpfulness and fragile African markets collide."

"When an aid organization needs a driver, dozens apply for the job. And because it's unacceptable that the aid worker's chauffeur only speaks his own tribal language, an applicant is needed who also speaks English fluently -- and, ideally, one who is also well mannered. So you end up with some African biochemist driving an aid worker around, distributing European food, and forcing local farmers out of their jobs. That's just crazy!"

A number of folks around me have been complaining about Safari lately. There are a number of things wrong with Safari, and I think even Apple would happily admit them.

They have a new version coming out with Leopard in the fall and I imagine they're quite happy to make you wait until then to get any relief. They just don't decouple Safari from the OS it ships with. (As in, you probably won't be able to use the new version of Safari with Tiger, just as you can't use Tiger's version with Panther)

There are a pile of things you can do to help Safari run a little faster, and I'll try to detail a few of them below in the hopes that you'll get some mileage from them and be happier using your computer. Also, there are some really great alternatives to using Safari (which may or may not have your favourite Safari features) which I'll try to detail as well. Finding a browser that really and truly suits your personal needs is hard and painful and I want it to be as easy as it can be.

First of all, there are some easy things you can and should try:

• Restart Safari
  Many people, especially laptop users (me too), leave Safari running for days or weeks on end. Because Mac OS X is so robust and can stay up for weeks or months without restarting, and because we sleep our computers so much (closing the lid) I think Safari often runs long enough to start having problems keeping everything straight.
  Typical use case:
  
  • open computer
  • do something with Safari
  • close computer
  • repeat a zillion times a day for six weeks
  • notice Safari is slow
    
    
  Restarting the application will help mitigate this.
  
  
• Run Maintenance And Restart Your Machine
  Get a maintenance program like Cocktail and run the maintenance scripts (which don't get run because your machine is never on when they try to run), clean out your font and internet caches, and restart the machine. There's a lot of housekeeping that Mac OS X knows how to do for itself, and a good chunk of it is 'internet' related.
  
  
• Use Safari's Maintenance Tasks
  Safari knows how to do some stuff to keep it running quickly as well.
  
  • In the History menu, you can select "Clear History" - dragging around months of browsing history can be slightly taxing.
    
    
  • In the Preferences window you can clear the Autofill history using the button on the Autofill tab. Again, dragging around months of form data can really slow things down. (FWIW I have my autofill turned right off, though you can do some finer tuning if that's what you're into as well. For me having it turned off completely means I don't have to go in and clean it out or maintain which things I want on 'the list', etc)
    
    OR
    
    
  • In the File menu select "Reset Safari" - this will do some basic cleanup in Safari. It will also kill your browsing history and clear any sessions and cookies, and flush out your forms Autofill, so be prepared for that. It's just a quick shortcut for doing all the things mentioned above in one step.
    
    
• Get Your Hands Dirty
  If you're still seeing the spinning-beachball-of-death or just unhappy with Safari's speed, there are still some things you can do. (though some of them might not be much help)
  
  • Delete your icon cache: (~/Library/Safari/Icons)
    Safari remembers sites' favicons for the bookmarks list, and it can really chew up a pile of time sorting through them. Delete the cache to see an increase in speed, but lose your favicons. This is something that will need to be done periodically.
    
    
  • Disable localization:
    If you're only using Safari in one language you might get some small increase in performance by turning off the localization features in Safari. In the Finder, find the Safari app in the Applications folder, and do a Get Info on it. Select the Languages pane and deselect all languages you don't plan on using. (I'm skeptical that this will really do much for you)
    
    
  • Make room on your drive:
    Make sure you have at least 20% of your hard drive free, so your computer has lots of room to put temporary, swap, and cache files out to disk whenever it needs to.
    
    
  • Extreme measures:
    
    • If you're really into getting super performance out of your browser you can set up a RAM disk and put the computer's swap files on it. It's a bit risky and it's not for me to explain here. You can do your own research if you think you're into this approach. There's pros and cons.
    • You could try turning off your widgets - they suck up a lot more resources than most people realize, though then you'd have to go without the widgets. It's a trade off.
    • If you're on a laptop and you find Safari is slower when you're running on the battery, go to your energy settings System Preferences panel and turn off the processor cycling option, which will run your computer's processor a little slower when you're on the battery to conserve power. Of course, you battery won't last as long... again, it's a trade off.
      
    
    
• More Hardware
  The only thing left is to buy more RAM, a bigger hard drive or a better machine. Those shiny new LED/SantaRosa MBPros look pretty sweet!
  
  
• Other Options
  Wait! There is one thing left to try: other browsers! Maybe I'll put this into a separate post....