Basement Rewiring

I earned some more home improvement snaps today. My brother-in-law Horacio helped me do some rewiring in the basement. Basically, I thought this would be easy. We were just going to take lighting fixtures that were currently on pull-chains and convert them to be controlled by two three-way wall switches.

Well, my 100year old house had some different ideas. Apparently every friggin outlet on the north side of my house is powered by the same breaker that feeds these three light bulbs. A day and a half later, I crack the code of the wires.

Now my basement is totally dark most of the time and then gloriously bright whenever I want. We used to have to leave a small flourescent light on because the basement was un-navigable without it, but now everything is controlled by the same switch. I'm proud of this, but only until the house burns down. I'm only half joking.

How Many Indictments Until You're Voted Out

I guess Ted Stevens found out. I don't know much, except that he solld his vote and got busted for it. He's finally gone and Palin-land has a Democratic Senator for the next six years. You betcha. http://mobile.nytimes.com/

Another Roadside Attraction

We were driving through middle america a few weeks ago and we saw this. A 40 foot white cross in the middle of a cornfield. I suppose it was some sort of war memorial or something. But something about it struck me as really wrong.

I'm sure it cost this small town a decent amount to build it. They chose to build this huge monument instead of building schools or hospitals or library books. So I thought what's so important about this monument that this town would decide to donate private or public money at the expense of other things?

It occurred to me that this was a picture of everything that was wrong about the last 8 years in America. We have been living in a charade of public displays of patriotism and religiosity. Hypocrisy festers when the only standard is how devoted you appear to be to God and country.

A huge aluminum cross in a cornfield does nothing to make America better. Instead it glorifies the patriotism and religiosity of the builders. What we need is authentic love of God and country and our fellow man, and not shallow gestures.

Definition of Insanity

Business, it seems is the art of doing something over and over again and expecting different results. We are all insane. Right now, everyone is cutting costs - layoffs and staff adjustments abound. Unfortunately, unless there is a fundamental change in process, productivity will drop. Fewer people will do less work than more people, presumably, unless they go about it in a fundamentally different way.

One thing we know about process change is that it is expensive. No one wants to buy new tools, or revamp old ways of doing things, because there is time expense or capital expense, and besides the old way was successful once, right? Only a fool would lay out cash to re-engineer a process in the middle of a weak market, right? Wrong.

Here's the insanity. If you trim staff and resources during a downturn, to adjust for low order volume, you will greatly hinder your chances of ever coming back. You will be out the cost of the turnover (severance, unemployment, recruiting, training), before you can take one step beyond your low order level. By trimming staff, you effectively say, "we are at this low level until further notice." Inertia inevitably sets in and you become accustomed to the lower volume of business and the smaller staff size.

The BEST thing to do at times like this is take the staff you would lay off, and put them on a task force and require them to revamp and retool processes, and then train the rest of the team. Give them solid benchmarks and goals, constantly measure KPIs and use metrics that actually matter. That way, you are not out the cost of the turnover, you can accomodate growth, and when the growth eventually does happen, you can handle it even more efficiently than before the downturn.

Instead, as we see all over America, companies are not making themselves better, they are just making themselves weaker.

Two dollar gas

Isn't it funny how we freak out about gas prices? I was in Mattoon, IL and saw this gas station. Being from the city - land of the 60 dollar fill up - I was shocked and immediately snapped a picture. Then I began to think about it.

We use about 13 gallons of gas a week. I'm no expert, but that probably puts us at about average. At $2 per gallon, that's about $26. At $4 per gallon it's $52. Over 52 weeks, I'm paying $1352 more when gas is at $4 per gallon than when it's at $2. Seems like a lot.

Actually that comes to 3.70 per day. Or, alternatively, the cost of a frothy cappucino. So the difference between unreasonably high gas prices and super-cheap gas is about a cappucino per day. For a lot of us, that's pretty insignificant.

Makes me wonder why the election made such a big deal about "pain at the pump." Fox News wouldn't shut up about how offshore drilling would "solve" gas prices. Obama and Biden spent a lot of stump time going on about alterrnative energy, which although good for the environment was also intended to ease people's fears about gas prices.

You know why I think that everyone panics? Because gas prices change every day. And we all have to buy it every week. It's just so visible. We have so many other problems, I think we are just spending too much time haggling over so little.

Road to Greenville

Beck and I are on the road to Greenville, IL for our friend Joel's wedding. We left our kids with my mom & dad and hit the road. So far the most exciting thing is that the check engine light went on in Matoon. More from the wedding later.

Alfie's, home of the Loinburger

Andrew and Liz managing the greatest cheeseburgers in the world.

Yes we did

I'm pretty proud of America today.

I'm proud that more people voted than ever before, and that the highest percentage voted since 1908.

I'm proud that we elected the son of an African to be president. And finally silenced all those who continually defamed America as only benefitting rich white men.

I'm proud that America mandated that the funneling of wealth from the middle class to the wealthiest Americans has got to stop.

I'm proud that we expressed our demand for and end to the wars and bullheaded diplomacy.

I'm proud that we finally recognized that the lack of affordable quality healthcare is the biggest domestic problem we face.

I'm proud that I voted.

Most of all, I'm proud that we got it right.

(My friend, Karen took this picture from her balcony)

Bush Still Making Hay

Did anyone else see what GWB is doing with his last month or so of power? Seriously. He's single handedly dismantling as much as he can. The economy is in shambles, the wars are out of control, and here he is destroying everything from civil liberties to the tax code. He's not even closing Guantanamo - a promise he made to avoid looking like a blatant war criminal. We're all caught up in the next administration while this one is SERIOUSLY out of control.

Posting a Contact form Using Ajax

Here's the challenge - to make a form that appears by ajax, post to a page, and then have it return the response text. My friend digitalbart pointed out the futility of server side validation on a form that is only visible by javascript, but hey, that's just how I roll.

I would have posted the actual code here, but syntax highlighter doesn't seem to like me very much. I'll try to get the code posted in a bit.

Ah here we go - As you can see, the primaryAction button drives the post. There are five arguments to the $.ajax function... and they are type, url, data, success and dataType.

<script>
$(function(){

$(".primaryAction").click(
function(){
var name = $("input#name").val();
var email = $("input#email").val();
var subject = $("input#subject").val();
var message = $("textarea#message").val();
var office_email = $("input#office_email").val();
var urlt = $("input#urlt").val();
dataString = "name="+name+"&email="+email+"&subject="+subject+"&message="+message+"&office_email="+office_email+"&urlt="+urlt;


$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: "/includes/emailform.php",
ata: dataString,
success: function(data) {
alert (dataString);
$("#ajaxresults_"+urlt).html(data);
},
dataType: "html"
});

return false;
});
});
</script>

Halloween-election joke

Q: What did John McCain say to the trick-or-treaters?
A: Get out of here you redistributionists! I worked hard for this candy and I'm not going to give it away to you just because you're too lazy to get your own!

Batting Practice

She's only five, but she can hit. After I made this video she hit one over our fence.

Mmmm... bacon

What is it about bacon? I love it, my kids love it. Everything's better with bacon.