Why all this nonsense?

I'm tweeting, I'm blogging all over the place, I'm on facebook. I guess I'm just trying to assemble content. Like now I'm on the train, why not continue to communicate? I've decided that people who try to be mysterious are usually very boring.

Query to get earnings

Stupid software. Here’s a nice query to get earnings by year by customer. The billing history table is historysummary.

SELECT customers.customername, SUM(historysummary.total), year(historysummary.invoicedate) from customers INNER JOIN historysummary ON historysummary.customer = customers.customer GROUP BY customers.customername, year(historysummary.invoicedate) ORDER BY year(historysummary.invoicedate), customers.customername

New beginning

This is what I saw from the el platform this morning. I was late for work and grumpy and bleary-eyed from too little sleep.

I hope my camera phone caught it. I'll have to look at it later. Sometimes, it seems that as hard as we try, we'll never do anything as cool as a sunrise.

From the PHONE

Just seeing if I can do this from my phone... Late in my kitchen - who needs twitter? Open the floodgates!

Broke people get dumber. Dumb people ruin nations.

I'm broke, like everyone else I know. All my money goes to mortgage, food, education, health insurance, transportation to my job, Gas bills, Electric bills. I don't have cable, and I drive a 10 year old car.

People get all fired up about wealth redistribution. You know what wealth redistribution looks like? When it's done right, it looks like Social Security; elderly and sick people getting what they need to live. When it's done wrong it looks like AIG spending margin and fee money on $500k executive retreats. Taking their profit (which came from investors like us) and using it to pad their lifestyles.

Don't give me any crap about hard work. I just read this:

Although sociological research on the subject wealth is relatively new, economists have long been studying wealth. Economic research has shown that family wealth has grown considerably over the past several decades as housing and stock markets have soared (Wolff 2002). Wealth inequality has also increased substantially over the same time period. Inequality in wealth far surpasses inequality in income. The top 1% of U.S. families control over 38% of the country’s wealth, and the top 5% own almost 60% of all wealth. One of the potential consequences of this rising inequality is that families with wealth will use it to create more opportunities for themselves and, particularly, for their offspring.

from this site: http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/0/3/9/0/p... It's a good paper. I know that we don't read 20-page papers any more, but it's a good read.

My point is, we have been living in essentially the most free market of all economies since the eighties. Bill Clinton, though a democrat, still geared the nation's finances toward the free market. As a result, the rich are REALLY rich and the middle class are poor, and the poor are broke.

Broke people get dumber as a whole. Dumb people ruin nations. You cannot save America by creating an environment which allows the super-rich to sustain itself and actively exclude anyone else. You can save America by funneling it's resources back to the people where they belong.

Without Reason You Are Blind, Without Faith, You Are Dead

So at work today, we had this chat about creationism and spontaneous generation of life. We were all pretty much agreed about a few points. But I think I made the guys think a little.

• Don't confuse "evolution" with "spontaneous life origination". They are very different. Evolution is what happens when genetically stronger lions are better hunters so weak lions die before they can breed. Eventually every lion is genetically predisposed to be strong. Spontaneous life origination is when source elements somehow get together and form a protein. Then that protein meets other proteins and then DNA happens and then somehow a cell happens. Only morons don't think that life evolves. Every year, flu season makes that rock solid case. Spontaneous generation, however, is conceivable, but ridiculously improbable, and so far, completely un-doable in a laboratory.
• One possibility for the origin of life is that God created everything. It is conceivable, no less probable than any other idea, and completely un-debatable in a scientific context.
• Another possibility is that since life could not have originated on such a young planet as earth (I mean come on! a few trillion years for all that Amino MAGIC), it must have originated somewhere else (in an elecro-chemical environment that is unknown to us) over a few quadrillion years, and then hitched a ride on an asteroid and then landed on earth to begin the slow evolutionary process. Seems about as likely as any other idea, and that adds a few years to that time window in which life was supposed to have originated.
• So we have all of these ideas that are pretty much equally plausible (unless you have a closed mind). I guess then it comes down to what you feel most comfortable believing. Maybe another way to put it is: if you are basing your argument for the non-existence (or existence) of God on the origin of life, then you make a very bad argument. The fact that life and the evolutionary process exist neither prove nor disprove the existence of God as anything more than a semantic necessity. I.e. God fills the semantic hole of "first" or "best" or "forever" and all that stuff. Don't get me wrong - I am not arguing that God doesn't exist. Far from it. I'm just saying here that mixing up all the good science that's going on with any theological argument doesn't do service to either side of the debate.

Expression Engine Over Drupal

So, I've started to mess around with EE. Sorry all you Drupal-ers, but it is definitely worth knowing. However, having worked a little bit with both, I see some definite personality traits...

First of all, Drupal is WAAAAY more flexible. But you have to really know Drupal to get it to fly. Making your own module is a labor of love. When it works, then it is awesome, but it is really tricky.

EE is more of a way to shortcut around all of the annoying parts of PHP programming - you know, writing while{} loops and for{} loops, and having to figure out SQL syntax, and all that. Also, the URL structure is pretty sweet. I mean it is cool when mysite/offices/city/chicago takes me to my chicago office homepage. There are a few annoying things about it, but overall, it works pretty well for what it is - a framework for CMS.