Donate Through The Official Movember Website!: TylerOnEverything.com/Movember/

Don’t forget to donate: www.TylerOnEverything.com/Movember

BUT: There is catch!

They state very specifically that you have to:

Start With A Clean Shave

Gah?

Shave my beard? My safety net? NO! Well I have been talking about participating in Movember for quite a while. So I had to do it.

Sigh.

Doesn’t my beard look scared?

Well now its gone! I feel so naked and alone!

Well the real Movember starts tomorrow. Hopefully I will have a healthy bushy Mustache by then! If not check back everyday for a Mupdate!

If you wanna donate, you can do so, but I’m seems kinda pointless When I don’t have a wicked thick mustache yet: TylerOnEverything.com/Movemember

It would cost $1400-1800 (CDN - which I need to specify since the Canuckian dollar is falling again).

It would have this case:

And it would be speced like this! 

Actually I prefer to see one of the new Intel Core2Quads, around 2.6-2.8 GHz and a 4gigs of ram and 750MB hard drive.

What are the chances that Apple delivers on my wishes? About as much chance as the iPhone having push GMail before 2009! Damn near none.

I really hope that Apple does choose to somewhat close my perceived gap in their Mac line. Of course it still does not guarantee that I will be willing to pay the ‘Apple Tax’. Still they should try!

Having said that, I now have 2 machines, and I am looking at adding a 3rd. 

My machines are:

• Work laptop, running XP. Quite powerful, but I don’t have free reign to install all the software I would like on it.
• Home desktop. About 4-5 years old now. P4 3.2 gHz, 2 gigs of ram, also running XP. 

My home has had some hard ware issues as of late, and needs to be replaced as my primary machine. I am planning on keeping it and would like to install a linux distro on it, I am leaning towards ubuntu. 

Now as more and more computing gets done at work, my home machine gets used for a good deal less. Programs that I run on it, and would like to continue running on it are pretty limited:

• AMP - Apache, MySQl, PHP
• Eclipse
• iTunes
• Firefox or Chrome
• Photoshop
• Premiere Pro (or Final Cut Pro, etc…)

When I look at that list, and see that my machine is mainly used for web surfing, listening to music, some web dev, and photo/video editing, I start to consider getting a Mac. It would be better for the photo/video editing, about the same for web browsing -maybe a little safer, and a little worse for web development. Although I could install the AMP on linux machine, it is not out of the question on a Mac. It would also be nice to have 3 different OSes for testing purposes.

Now having said all this, I stared looking at the Apple store and was somewhat shocked. It didn’t look like there was anything that fit the bill for me. Basically I was looking for a pretty powerful desktop machine for around $1,500 or less, as I could easily spec a Windows box for that. It looks like the only option is an iMac. I was hoping to not buy a monitor in the same purchase, and I don’t really like having my entire machine in one sleak case. I already have 20″, and 22″ Samsung monitors. I also have bad luck, and my stuff tends to break. The easier it is to replace components the better. So I’m feeling very iffy on an iMac. 

The Mac Pro is right out of what I am willing to spend on a box. So is a Mac Book Pro, and I don’t really want another laptop, but that seems like it may be a (very expensive) solution.

Now it has been suggested that I build myself a Hackintosh, but that kinda defeats the purpose. I want to get a Mac to have less hassel, and frankly a project like that is not the cards for me (and my lazy ass) at the moment.

So is it just the way things seem? Is there nothing in the Mac line that suits my needs? Is a Mac that much improved over a Windows box for photo/video editing? What would you Mac Afficeanados suggest in my case?

Preliminary tests show that it fixes the video bug where YouTube and other Flash based videos stop after 2 secs.

This is a huge deal for me, as  I hate having to use IE. 

My problems with the Flash 10 Beta also seem to be gone. This is a great day. Chrome/Firefox users I would recommend grabbing it now.

The biggest winner in this election was the Liberal party. I had predicted this outcome when the election was called, and I was bang on. The Liberals took a huge hit, in the popular vote, and seat totals. Why is this a huge win? Because they can now cut loose the dead weight that is Stephan Dion. 

The NDP picked up some extra votes, by taking a naïve, but rosy looking view of increasing taxes of employers and reducing those of employees. Which I firmly believe would weaken our job market, and hurt the employees. Nice thought, just wouldn’t work.

Couple that with the fear mongering of comparing Harper to Bennett and thus comparing the current credit crisis to the great depression and the NDP picked up a decent share of the vote. The problem with the potential leader of the country taking this sort of action is that its a self fulfilling prophecy; the prime-minister (as Layton wanted to be) saying the economy was going in the crapper rocks investor confidence, they start pulling their money from the markets… and it goes in the crapper! 

Questionable NDP platform appeals to younger Canadians. NDP wins.

Conservatives lose. They didn’t get the majority government they wanted, and they blew a few opportunities. Some missteps alienated Quebec voters, and Harper completely failed to jump on some blatant lies from other parties.

I could not understand why he would not call Dion on some tax comments he made during the debate. At one point Dion said that a family with two children making less than 30k a year (27k I think, but certainly less than 30k), would receive a $2400 tax cut in the liberal plan. This is a blatant lie. A family making less than 30k a year with two children pay exactly $0 in income tax. The only tax that a family with income that low pays is sales tax, which the Liberals wanted to raise.

There were issues to debate and Harper let them slide. There were votes that could have been had there.

I won’t go into the Green Party or the Bloc Quebecois as they are not legitimate parties.

——————————————–

On another note, the credit crisis in the US is pretty scary. I have heard some murmuring that Harper isn’t the person to handle the crisis. I have heard people say that Harper wants to implement the same Bush style deregulation that caused the crisis in the states.

I find this hard to beleive, since the sub-prime Canadian market is roughly equivalent to the US prime lending. The other thing is that a few months ago new regulations were put in place to prevent exactly this kind of problem.

Mortgage changes followed concerns about housing crunch in Canada

Basically 100% financing is gone, and so is 40 year terms. Doesn’t seem like de-regulation does it.

The other way more interesting tid bit, is that the US credit crisis wasn’t a 100% Bush error. Today a found a New York Times article that really marks the start of the credit crisis. It is about the relaxation of the lending policies by Fanny Mae (who along with Freddie Mac are the leaders of the credit crisis), in order to premote home ownership among visible minorities and low-income consumers. This was done at the urging of the Clinton Administration!

A quote from the article:

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

Here is the full article: Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending

This is very interesting as I thought that the deregulation and economic crisis was square on Bush’s shoulders. Now the Bush Administration is not guilt free right now, but certainly the start of the crisis lies with the preceding Clinton Administration.

It was a perfect storm of sorts. The Clinton admin wanted to get people to own their own homes, so they relaxed the lending laws. The Bush admin, tries to stay out of private sector affairs, so they didn’t step in to stop the Buy Now/Pay Later style of mortgages. Banks got greedy, and things fall apart. 

Very interesting stuff. Regardless it doesn’t look like Canada is heading down the same path.

The flash player is so bad, the flash player is a monkey that shits in a bucket, and then throws shit at you, and then mocks you for being covered in shit. It is a system hog, any page that uses flash runs my system (dual core 4 gigs of ram) up to processing limits while it loads. But that isn’t where the suck comes in…

The suck comes in that it is a buggy piece of crap!

The current version of flash for Firefox (if you are using IE well that is just another different shit throwing monkey ball of suck) won’t work with Youtube videos. Great eh?

The video stops after 2 seconds (perhaps a keyframe issue since you can skip forward).

It is actually a bug in flash itself. This is not limited to windows either.

Mozilla Support Forum

Ubuntu Forums

This is a problem in Flash versions after 9.0r47.

There are several solutions posted from copying a file to the plugins directory of Firefox, this does not work for me, or downgrading (no dice security concerns), or upgrading to the version 10 beta of flash. There are lots of bugs that I have found with this.

This is an old problem, it is time for Adobe to get their shit together and come up with a real fix for this problem. As for developers, think twice before using flash, because if I have to use IE to view your page, I will probably just skip your page.

Personally I don’t like the idea of a dog going in/out on their own. I personally don’t like tons of mud everything, so unless the system could be disabled in the rain…

Now a better idea? Put one of those RFID chips on your key chain, you walk to your front door, it automatically unlocks, shut the door and walk away, it automatically locks. Now there is a good idea! Your door is always locked, except for you, in which case its always unlocked!

WASP Knife does just that. From their website:

As divers, we all know what the effects of compressed gas are underwater. Our training teaches us that our lungs would burst from over-inflation if we held our breath and rose to the surface. This principle is key to the effectiveness of the WASP Injection System.

This weapon injects a freezing cold ball of compressed gas, approximately the size of a basketball, at 800psi nearly instantly. The effects of this injection will drop many of the world’s largest land predators. The effects of the compressed gas not only cause over-inflation during ascent when used underwater, but also freezes all tissues and organs surrounding the point of injection on land or at sea. When used underwater, the injected gas carries the predator to the surface BEFORE blood is released into the water. Thus giving the diver added protection by diverting other potential predators to the surface.

Bayonets were made illegal for their brutal actions, but they didn’t explode you… but I guess… they could now!

This just seems like a bad idea, watch what it does to a watermelon!