A picture is worth $200 billion dollars. Borrowing by banks to cover demand deposits because their assets have less value than their liabilities. Graphic from the St. Louis Fed.
I’d be curious what it would be in relation to the value of money over the years. ie. I know that central banks where not as strong before the Great Depression, but still there is a wiggle there. How much was lent and what would of been its worth?
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Tags: Banks, Economy, Finance, government, Math
Welcome to Living in the Whine Country. New design going on, so please be patient and let me know on any issues.
Another reason to ditch Windows…
After a year and a half of fighting Vista on my Toshiba A135-S2276 I gave up. Quite simply I got sick of the problems, errors, lock ups, “security” pop-ups and general sluggishness. So to sort of future proof me, also since I figured it was easier, I bought a new hard drive cheap (seriously gigs are pennies each wtf?) and swapped it in and decided to go dual boot. I had tried Ubuntu Live-CD before on this and it had worked decently well 6.04. Hardy Heron 8.04 is so nice on my main desktop that I knew I had to install that and then XP for my work programs.
Now XP was a bear. I just want to say ahead of time that if you want to install XP… prepare for some painful moments. But the fact I was able to find a compresed folder of “tweaked” drivers for XP finally saved my sanity. The long and short is that Toshiba did not make or provide XP Drivers, and then for hardware they used in XP machines also, they changed hardware IDs in cases, breaking XP drivers for the same hardware on other laptops. So simple things like Video, Sound, Wireless Network Card, and ACPI did not have drivers. What made it even more painful was how simple and easy Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 installed on it in a dual boot setup.
Now after all the fighting to get Windows working I decided to give WINE a shot and try installing Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator* and a few other programs I still keep Windows around for. And they installed rediculously easy. I opened up the config, answered couple questions and clicked my way through every tab, and then stuck the install CD in. Now it wasn’t perfect. The menus and everything was setup for a Windows machine and seems mouse-type at the resolution I originally had it at. Also I tried installing itunes… That doesn’t work at all. (So Apple please get a linux client or perhaps send one engineer to talk to the WINE group about fixing compatibility.) So I’ve had to squint a little or change the resolution a little, otherwise I’m golden. And my XP license I bought a long time ago gets put to use on only an occasional basis.
* Since the CS Suites are so integrated I didn’t bother trying either my CS2 or CS3 licenses on this. My pre-CS versions would work fine for everyday work… and I’ll install the Suite under Windows without stressing about it.
Tags: Adobe, Design, Interesting, Linux, OSes, Review, Software, Ubuntu, Windows, Wine
If you thought Red Bull Racing was crazy, you won’t believe the Rocket Racing League. Think NASCAR, but in the air, using planes powered by solid-state rockets flying simultaneously. The racers take off in pairs, separated by minutes, competing against the clock at the same time. That means that they will have to maneuver around the competition, following a 3D track projected in their head-up displays. You know it would be spectacular just with the description, and watching this video of one the $1 million racers in action at the 2008 Air Venture in Oshkosh.
The Rocket Racing League® is an aerospace sports and entertainment organization that combines the competition of racing with the excitement of rocketry. The RRL was established by X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis and two-time Indianapolis 500 champion team partner Granger Whitelaw to advance the technology and increase public awareness of space travel. The NASCAR-style racing league features rocket-powered aircraft that will be flown by top pilots through a ‘three-dimensional track way’ at venues throughout the world. With millions of fans who enjoy racing and air shows, and an even wider audience enthralled with humanity’s next step into space, rocket racing is destined to become the future of racing!
I love the Red Bull Air Races… Like you may know. But this does look interesting. I just think that the Red Bull Air Races are more entertaining. They do a very good job or putting the whole thing together, and its more like NASCAR then these races.
I had posted on The Wordcamp Report, but I figured I’d let you all know that WordCamp San Fransisco is coming up and looking good. They’ve gone ahead and picked a new larger (more comfortable) location… I’m assuming modeled off of the very successful WordCamp Dallas. And they also lowered the cost a little and cut it too one (1) day.
So I’m challenging you. Who is going? Who is going to come up and make me stammer while I pretend to remember who you are? Also, what do you think the sessions are going to be about? Will this be as big, bigger then previous years? Will I stop asking questions and instead think up some intense commentary that actually adds more meat to this article? (That last one I’ll say no for one reason. I don’t compare.)
Tags: Conference, Interesting, San Franscico, wordcamp, Wordpress
Earlier this week I saw Kiss playing Rock Band on “Gene Simmons Family Jewels” and the band members got trounced by Nick Simmons and his college friends. Well in a similar twist of fate here we have Rush backstage at The Colbert Report last week, they played “Tom Sawyer” on Rock Band and now there’s video of it. [via Comedy Central Insider]
OK, in case you didn’t know I’ve been paying for a virtual server through dreamhost, and generally been happy except for now worrying I make enough to pay the MONTHLY hosting bill (yes it was nice to forget about it till yearly). So I started looking around to see who is offering what, and truthfully. I DID NOT REALIZE… how many hosting companies there are out there. I swear it used to be fewer. Ane even taking and doing teh service vs. money spent it seems a lot of hosters are either matching prices or it really does all cost pretty much the same.
Now Dreamhost starts at $5.95 a month.. and that does sound freaking cheap. But I ran across a lot of “cheap web hosting” which has hosting at almost half the cost. And what they provide for that little is more then what I used to pay 5, 6 or almost 10 times as much for years before, For example one hoster I had never heard before Hosting Metro is offering for $3.95:
• 10 GB TRANSFER
• 500 MB STORAGE
• 50 Email
• 10 MYSQL DB
• PHP, MYSQL
That seriously is is all one needs to host most basic sites. Does that mean I’ll be moving? No, not to them. There are SO many other issues my current hoster offers (number of doamins needing hosting, packages available, support). Plus, the amount of wear I was taxing the stock Dreamhost account. (which is why this is now running on a private server with a private IP… Oh and now with SSL). But seriously… my brother in law with the single low traffic site?…
Oh and to go back to the point, am I smoking something, or are a lot of hosters reselling… or somehow hitting the exact same price points in their costs/markup/prices.
One positive side effects of all the fires in California, are all the beautiful sunsets. I was wishing I had a better camera on me. The timing was a little off, originally the sun was an orangish-red globe over the scoreboard.
Mind these shell commands are more for those who have shell access to their domains and are having to deal with upgrading many WordPress installs or are just wanting to be lazy. If you look at it, you’ll see its very simplistic, and I didn’t do “garbage collection.” In otherwords I left the install files there until the next time (in which they get deleted first thing). The reason for that was that I might be playing with my install and need to swap back a replacement file or what-not from a default install. But enough going on, here is the simple script.
I wrote this as a cshell, tshell or zshell script, technically it wouldn’t take much to make it a straight bourne shell script but I was lazy.
rm latest.zip
rm -rf wordpress
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
unzip latest.zip
cp -R wordpress/* BLOG_INSTALL/.
date
A couple of options you can add:
At the beginning
pwd
sleep 3
That will tell you where its starting and give you enough time to CTRL-C if all of the sudden you realized you started it in the wrong place.
At the End
rm latest.zip
rm -rf wordpress
If you want to clean up and are running on a host that has a tight amount of space.
Now the steps to use this script.
- Edit the script in your text editor (I suggest EditPad)
- Bring up your shell and cd ~/ to your home folder
- Confirm to yourself that the install directory/path is correct
- Type: emacs upgrade-example (or the name of the blog your are upgrading)
- Paste in your finished script and make sure its all right
- CTRL-X CTRL-S and save it
- chmod 755 upgrade-wp
- Your done, to run type ./upgrade-example and a minute later your almost done
- Visit http://example.com/wp-admin/ and run the upgrade script if prompted
Hint: Tab can be used to auto complete and I’m sure you probably won’t have any files labels up___
if you don’t have shell access (Another reason I love Dreamhost) then you can give the automatic WordPress Upgrader a chance.
Tags: Hosting, Plug-in, Programming, Site Update, Upgrade, Wordpress
When one hears about an impeachment of a President a person thinks about the last two memorable situations. Richard Nixon who stepped down and waved “I’m not a crook.” And the media circus that was Clinton’s impeachment for infedelity (yes I know there was a “real” reason but it was stupid). Yet through all of it, this is the first time I can think of president who badly needed it, but was because the Vice-President was worse.
As a side, I originally supported Kucinich vote wise because he seemed like an upfront good man. As he dropped I looked over who was left and I agreed that Obama is a charasmatic canidate who, provided it wasn’t a facade, could be a great President. That said, I stopped following Kunicinich until he popped up on the radar noting that he was going to investigate Bush’s cabinet and conduct. And that facty that this Friday he’s going to be filing Impeachment Charges against Bush makes me wish that someone had done it earlier. Below is Kucinish’s announcement. And FYI for those apposed to piolitics altogether, I’ve tried to keep it toned down here.
Tags: Flail, Impeachment, Kucinich, Politics, President Bush
Okay Gizmodo had a link to a new “feature” at the LA Museum of Natural History. This is a video of a dinosaur on the loose in the exhibit halls. No computer effects used here, folks: it’s all real. Well, I mean, it’s not a real dinosaur of course or those kids would be totally devoured, but you know what I mean. If you look closely at the dinosaur you can see what’s going on here.
I love this idea, and at the same time I’m sure there were more then 1 freaked kid and some nervous adults. I couldn’t see the persons legs at first to catch that they’re in a costume, but they did an amazing job. I can’t wait to take my son to a museum to have a dinosaur wander up to him.
Tags: cool, Interesting, Museum, Natural History, Video
