Posts from — January 2006

Thanks to Michael Yon for introducing me to Operation Iraqi Children.

This is an awesome cause that helps Americans send School Supply Kits to Iraqi children. I can’t think of something better to show the true spirit of America while planting seeds that will last a lifetime.

Look at these kids – so happy with so little… God bless them! Its this kind of spirit that is the true hope for Iraq’s future.

And God bless OiC founders Gary Sinise and Laura Hillenbrand! What a great idea…

Give today for tomorrow’s sake…

For cameras at least…

Digital Photography Review reports that Konica Minolta is getting out of the camera business! I am totally shocked and a bit sad as well.

My first SLR camera was a 35mm Minolta Maxxum 7000i as seen to the left. My Dad bought it for me when I was 16, and I spent almost every dollar I made in High School on lenses, accessories, film and photo processing. In fact, often I had no money to develop the film, but that didn’t stop me from buying and shooting more of it.

The 7000i had an expansion port built into it that would accept little cards about the size of modern day SD Cards. These cards would hold various programs that would make shooting certain kinds of photography easier – like a portrait card and an automatic exposure bracketing card, etc. Today most cameras have these programs built in, but this was a major breakthrough in consumer cameras for the time.

Oddly enough, I used to dream of being able to stick some kind of memory module into that slot so that I could take a picture and have it saved to the module instead of exposing it onto the film. Why? So that I could somehow load it up into my Apple IIgs and print it out on my 8 color Imagewriter II dot-matrix printer! We’re talking back in 1988 – way before I had ever heard of a digital camera. See the crap I invented before it was even invented?? Don’t even get me started on noise cancelling technology…

Anyway – I had actually wanted a different camera to begin with – the Konica FT-1. My mother was working at Konica in the parts department for their copier division at the time, and I begged her to find out what cameras she could get at an employee discount. At first, I didn’t even know that Konica made cameras but a friend told me that his dad had a Konica and that their product was first rate.

My mom brought me back a price list and a bunch of brochures about their equipment and I fell in love with the top of the line, as I usually do. The FT-1 was the badest thing I had ever laid eyes on (this was before I saw the 7000i) – and despite the fact that I had NO clue how to use a manual 35mm, I was convinced that I would die if I didn’t get one.

It was about $800 at the time, if I remember correctly, but I could get it for around $600 with the discount. Then came lenses, etc. Basically I needed a big ‘G’ to cover the bill. With about a tenth of that to my name, I asked my mom to check into the availability – how soon I’d get it, etc and she gave me the horrible news. They had stopped making it the year before, and they had no stock left for sale to employees. They didn’t really have a new model in its class as a replacement, so I was pretty much out of luck.

About 6 months afterwards, I found out that my uncle knew a guy that could get Minolta equipment at the employee price. They had just come out with the 7000i at the time and I was enthralled. It was WAY more than I could afford, but boy could I dream. Then, somehow, my Dad and my Nana decided that they were going to buy it for me for Christmas that year. I was in heaven! It was an awesome camera.

My Maxxum took all the pictures for my High School yearbook, gave me an excuse to study through a lens the woman who would become my wife, took over 1500 pictures of our trip to the holy land and captured thousands of memories over a decade of use. It was my main camera until I finally gave in to the digital bug and bought a Casio 3000EX point and shoot camera in early 2000.

I always missed that 7000i though – the flexibility and creativity of an SLR is far superior to a point and shoot camera and my photographic style was cramped for years. When consumer priced digital SLRs started coming out, I waited patiently for Minolta (then merged with Konica, the very company who started my photo jones) to release a version that would use all the Maxxum lenses that I had acquired over the years, but it just didn’t happen in time.

When we found out that we were expecting a daughter, I bit the bullet and bought a Canon 10D with several lenses, thinking that Minolta would never make the jump. They did about a year later, much to my chagrin. Their foray into the D-SLR field was fairly successful, but I guess it was not successful enough. Sony is acquiring the photo assets of Konica Minolta and will continue to develop for their lens mount, but it just won’t be the same.

I’m a bit sad at loosing, at the same time, both of the companies that turned me on to photography.

So long old buddies, and thanks for the memories…

Apparently, the Disney board is going to officially consider the purchase of Pixar, according to the LA Times (reg req).

Wow, what a change since the Jobs-Eisner wars of 2004… This makes me nervous for a few reasons the largest of which are 1) I’d hate to see Pixar screwed up by Disney and 2) I’d hate to see Pixar screwed up by Disney.

The Pixar and Disney relationship worked because each company was exactly what the other was not. In my opinion, a purchase of Pixar, while probably good for Steve Jobs, is bad news for everyone else. Why?

• Pixar will loose because it will be stifled and constricted to conform with the souless mantra of today’s Disney
• Disney will loose because it will kill the very thing it currently values so much
• The animation industry will loose because the primary example of critical and monetary success will be gone, once again bringing in to question its value as an entertainment medium
• The public will loose because we won’t be dazzled by movies like Finding Nemo anymore.

Now, I’m no fan-boy of Jobs, but I’ve got to hand it to the man. His turn around of Apple and the success of Pixar are an amazing testament to his abilities. Abilities despite his faults, I might add. In this case, I’m hoping that his reportedly massive ego will keep him from selling Pixar and that the whole thing will simply result in a lucrative distribution agreement that will keep the movies flowing for benefit and enjoyment of all.

802.11n Proposal For Next-Gen Wi-Fi Approved

I can’t say it better than these folks, so I won’t try.

Wow, that’s a mouthful! And what the heck does it mean?

Basically, we are talking about computing systems that are smart enough to 1) know what’s wrong with themselves when a problem happens, and 2) actually take action to fix the problem on the fly. Results are coming in that say this type of technology reduces the time required to fix a problem by 90%! Now, that’s smart! And IBM is at the forefront of the push…

Read all about it on their Autonomic Computing Blog. Neat stuff.

This goes hand in hand with On Demand initiatives – a buzzword for the last few years in the IT management industry. IBM calls it On Demand Business, Computer Associates calls it their On Demand Computing Initiative. A main part of on demand business comes down to faster response to high demand for certain IT resources. If application A is suffering from performance problems, On Demand calls for automatic redistribution of resources to compensate, either from a reserve of capacity or ideally from unused resources that are currently “mis-allocated” to application B that isn’t being using at the moment. Think of it as resource allocation based on dynamic need, rather than static allocation based on a peak usage analysis.

For years, IT architecture has been designed to handle peak instantaneous arrival rates rather than building for average usage. The result is usually large scale “over building” to compensate for peak usage, which means that a lot of resources lay dormant during non-peak periods. As an easy example, think of a classic billing system (which runs all night) and a corporate intranet site (which is accessed all day). With On Demand computing, these two applications share IT resources (CPU’s, bandwidth, etc) resulting in a dramatic reduction of overall cost by driving up the average utilization of each resource across the board. Don’t double build – build it with On Demand technology. Self-Managing Autonomic Computing takes this one step further by bringing automatic problem resolution to an on demand computing environment.

Hmm… Sounds like Harry Reid (Democrat of Nevada and the Senate minority leader) is suffering from “pre-judge-itis”.

He is quoted in the Boston Globe (registration required) as saying:

“I’m not a fan of Alito. I haven’t been a fan since his name was mentioned. I don’t need more information to say that this was a very poor choice.” 

Boy, sounds like he went to the hearings with an open mind… *smirk* Who did he expect, Stephen Reinhardt from the Ninth Circuit?

I typically like to keep common ground with people who have opposing political views to mine – how else are we supposed to understand each other? But recently, the left has been boiling over with stupidity and indignation. Just read some of the comments at the bottom of the linked post on ThinkProgress above – these people are insane!

They say that Bush is dividing America – no, liberals are dividing America. Clinton had Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993 and Stephen Breyer in 1994 and they were confirmed easily – not because they were more conservative than Alito is liberal, but because Republicans are more about compromise than their leftist counterparts. Oh, but they confirmed Roberts someone will surely say. OK, lets look at that. Look at the numbers.

• The Breyer vote: Yay 87, nays 9
• The Bader Ginsburg vote: Yay 96, Nays 3
• The Roberts vote: Yay 78 yay, Nay 22

While many may argue this point, Roberts was nearly irreproachable in his qualifications and experience and widely seen as an even swap for Rehnquist. Still, the liberals put up anywhere from 2 to 7 times the “fight” that conservatives did on Clinton’s nominations.

In my experience, conservatives are more likely to accept common ground solutions than liberals – with them, its often their way or no way. Obviously that isn’t true of all liberals, OR all conservatives. But in general, my experience is that most liberals don’t even want conservatives to be part of the process. That is what really creates division – a complete lack of respect for those who disagree with you.

For example, do you believe that the comment writers from ThinkProgress ever bothered to look at things from the perspective of their fellow conservative citizens? Why is their ideology the CORRECT ideology, but the conservative one is divisive? What makes them right and us wrong?

Let’s indulge this fallacy for a second though and say that this is correct. The truth of the matter would STILL be that if feelings on these issues WERE indeed strong enough to divide America, than their ideology would be just as much at fault as ours, because it wouldn’t be satisfying the other half of the country!

While I try to keep an open mind for other opinions, this squawking is starting to sound more like the whining of a three year old sore looser than honest political debate. Decisions for “the other side” are inevitable in life regardless of the team you are on. Saying that conservatives are dividing and ruining America by voting for Alito is like saying that the Boston Redsox are ruining baseball when they beat the NY Yankee’s. One has nothing to do with the other…

The AP today covered a study from a researcher at the Ohio State University who finds that:

“a person who marries – and stays married – accumulates nearly twice
as much personal wealth as a person who is single or divorced.

And for those who divorce, it’s a bit more expensive than giving up
half of everything they own. They lose, on average, three-fourths of their
personal net worth.”

The article mentions a number of reasons why this might be the case, but the most interesting is that married people are more economically productive because they are working for something that is bigger than themselves – they are working for the welfare of their family.

I fully agree with that – I work much harder for my wife and daughter than I would ever work for myself. Left to my own devices, I’d live in a small shack with my Tivo and a PC, but that just won’t fly with a family. But is this the full story? Does what you learn by being married motivate and teach you to be more financially responsible, or is it that people who tend to have the skills for financial responsibility also have what it takes to make a relationship work and last? I don’t know that we’ll ever find out…

A few other things stuck out as noteworthy to me.

First, is the size and length of the study – 9,055 people from 1985 to 2000. WOW! That’s amazingly comprehensive – crap, the media quotes statistics from polls of 300 people as reflective of the almost 300 million people in the population. While this study may be a bit skewed for age it is probably the most accurate picture we’ll ever see on the matter, and is likely a lot more accurate many the statistics we are quoted on any number of topics.

Secondly, as a fairly new father, I found it interesting that this seems to fly in the face of the “kids are SO expensive” urban legend. That made me do some research – it seems that on average, a US family will spend a median of just over $200,000 to raise a 17 year old, or about $12,000 a year. Sounds like a lot of money, huh?

Consider that this cost includes things like housing and it starts to make more sense. To put it into some perspective, the average person will own about 3.5 cars over that same 17 year period. Given the average new car price of around $28,000 and they are spending $98,000 in cars. Oh, and those cars are financed, so that $98,000 over the 4-5 year loans that paid for them will actually cost you around $115,000. Now figure the gas, wear and tear, etc… You see where I’m going. It isn’t that expensive relative to other things in our lives.

What is amazing is that married people have more wealth and STILL spend over 200K raising each child. And what if you have a child out of wedlock? Hmm… Maybe it isn’t just a bad parenting idea, maybe its a bad financial decision as well. Given that children usually go to the mother in a divorce, these costs may explain why divorced women will have 2.5 times less wealth than divorced men.

The third thing that I found noteworthy, is the amount of wealth that these same people have accumulated. The study says that the participants had a median of $1,500 at the start of the study and finished up with $10,900 in the 15th year. Amazingly enough, this was 93% more than single or divorced people over the life of the study. Keep in mind that the study “defines wealth as the total value of a person’s assets, such as real estate, stocks and bank accounts, minus liabilities, such as mortgages.”

OK, I have to say that it scares the crap out of me that these participants, who are now 41 to 49 years old, have a median of only $10,900 in net worth. Oh, and the single and divorced people have 93% less! This doesn’t bode well for the future of our country – not when, as I mentioned before, the average car is over $28,000! After more than half a lifetime, a large majority of the people in America won’t even be able to pay cash for the average new car. They won’t even be able to buy half a car.

Something is seriously wrong with our spending habits. The 2002 Census says that the median household income is $42,614. Lets assume a household is 2 married people. So the 41 year old married person from the study had $639,210 come through their household in the 15 years of the study. Adjust down for inflation, etc and lets say (generously) that they had only $525,000 come through their household. Over half a million dollars, and all they have to show for it is $10,900.

This person’s individual savings rate is only 2.07%! In fact, its worse than that – the national savings rate is really only about 1.6%. This is horrible! In 1985, when this study began, the average savings rate was right under 11%. That’s a 687% drop! If we had continued with those numbers, the married person in question would have $57,750 in wealth, rather than just $10,900. A significant difference to be sure.

Anyway, I digress…

Its clear from this study that getting married, and staying married is a good financial decision. Hmm, go figure – traditional family values having a positive effect on both the individual and on society. Amazing how that works.