While stopping for lunch today I shared some sailing highlights from the MedCup in September 2010 with my son who loves extreme ‘go-fast’ sailing. Although my interest in ‘racing’ wind powered machines has dimmed as technology plays a significantly larger role in decisionmaking aboard very today’s sophisticated boats, I’m still intrigued with those who do race at this level. For me, I’ll think I’ll stick with heavy, slow and a bit more laid back sailboat cruising.
Thanks to a season long team effort and last night’s ninth inning homerun from Jay Bruce, the Cincinnati Reds clinched a playoff berth for 2010 post season baseball … next goal, home field advantage.
The excitement happened late on Tuesday night in a dramatic fashion, when Bruce blasted a walk-off home run for a 3-2 in their game against the Astros. The celebration was great for baseball lovers in Cincinnati (truly a “baseball” town) and long overdue – the last time the Reds won the National League Central was in 1995.
With 5 games to go, the Cincinnati Reds currently sit with an 88 –69 win – lost record. The next few games are crucial in determining who and where they will play … winning continues to be important.
The Phillies have already clinched home-field advantage throughout the playoffs, so the playoff team with the worst record will be faced with the unfortunate task of opening the postseason in Philadelphia. If the Braves hold on to their lead in the NL Wild Card race, the Reds could host Atlanta … IF they finish ahead of the NL West champion.
There are two opposing mindsets when dealing America’s deficit and correcting America’s struggling economy; it is pretty black and white when it comes to opinions. There’s the liberal Democrats position, expressed by the Nobel Prize winning New York Times columnistPaul Krugman, who recommends dealing with our deficit by raising taxes and continuing to increase in public spending in order to re-kindle the sputtering economy. The opposing position expressed by conservatives like Republican congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) believes raising taxes will slow the economy further while public spending digs a deeper hole. His answer is to lower taxes (proposing a two tier flat tax), cut spending and reduce the size of the federal government while reforming Social Security for those under 54 years of age. I suspect that if we are serious about saving the economy and preventing an economic collapse, we’ll need to meet somewhere in the middle … I only hope it will not be too late.
CNBC’s Becky Quick shared some numbers about a week ago which should concern all of us: “From 1948 to 2008, the federal government spent about 19.6% of our gross domestic product, while taking in tax revenues of about 17.9%. But now we are spending 25% of GDP and taking in closer to 15% in revenue. That gap has to be narrowed.” David Walker, comptroller for the United States under President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush, has been expressing deep concern that we’re not moving fast enough to correct this growing deficit and that our real debt is already worst than Spain, Britain and Ireland. He says the numbers we’ve all seen, $13 trillion and growing debt is not telling the truth and that the numbers are too low. That should frightened both liberal progressives and fiscal conservatives considering that we don’t even include the extra $4 trillion we owe to Social Security and the deficits facing states, municipalities and some public pension funds.
So how long do we have to get our house in order? What would you say to Walker’s warning … “we are within three years of becoming the next Greece.”
So far I’m not convinced drivers are big fans of the new complex intersections being constructed on many of today roads and highways – referred to as Superstreets. The handful of completed projects that I’ve traveled on recently seem overly complex and tailored to create accidents. A couple of examples that come to mind would be the new intersection at Monroe Ohio’s I-75/Route 63 and new junction at Austin Pike and Route 741 near Dayton-Wright Brothers Airport (MGY) in Springboro. If you’ve driven on them, imagine navigating for the first time on a dark, rainy night with headlights glaring in every direction – and an out of date GPS to mix things up even more.
Today while in Fairfield Ohio the Route 4 Bypass was under full construction. The clearing for all phase of the widening project have added significant width to the highway. When checking as to why so large, the comment I heard was that it was going to be a ‘Superstreet’ project requiring added width. Is it really going to make traffic better?
How do you keep all of your online passwords safe and secure? I’ll admit, I wasn’t all that smart about managing mine.
About a month or so ago, a technology friend of mine shared his method of using the stand alone KeyPass Password Safe on his PC and explained how he then plop the encrypted file into his Dropbox account so he could access across multiple PCs. Hmm, this looked interesting, but required me to manually enter all my passwords or create new ones then enter them into the KeyPass software application on my PC … but the real glitch was that there wasn’t a version for the Mac.
Thankfully there is LastPass: I gave the free version of LastPass a try and have been using it for a couple of weeks now and been pretty satisfied. I liked the random strong password generation, encrypted form fill and ability to add secure and encrypted notes often required for person to person customer service phone conversations. It was easy to set up and because the files are encrypted before saving them off-site, it offers a doubly good way to archive all of your web passwords. LastPass now remembers passwords each time I visit a site no matter how complex and it can create even more random strong passwords for me. It can even import all of my existing browser based passwords that may have been saved in Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome browsers and works great on the MacOS too.
Give it a try if you are still looking for a better way to incorporate more secure passwords and then remember them without the risk of leaving them in an unencrypted database or address book.
After digging into the dry rot that has plagued our garage utility door for a number of years, it was determined that although the steel door was still good (as was much of the surrounding frame), that repairing the frame was out of the question. So I as my demolition ergs took over … I spent Saturday removing the door and founda a new replacement. Unfortunately that left Sunday afternoon to close things up before the predicted Monday rain. Along with replacing the door and frame, I added a couple better pressure treated boards to the cement foundation in hopes to curtail rot IF water finds a way to blow into the caulking next to the brick. Next weekend … priming, painting and caulking.
Here a photo of the ‘roughed in’ door. I tweaked it with something just for fun… can you tell what I did? (click for larger image)
We live in a changing area, not as much in 2009 or 2010 as a few years ago, pre-recession, but growth is still happening. I’ve been pondering the idea of including an occasional archived photo or two from the West Chester/Liberty Township Ohio area. The thinking is that it might be nice to have a before demolition and after construction photo posted to the blog as the area changes. Above is another new Walgreens going up in Liberty Township (Jericho) at corner of Princeton Road and Cincinnati-Dayton Road.
Although I may offend some of my hardcore conservative Tea Party friends, I’m in agreement with Charles Krauthammer and enjoy his his columns and commentary (“offend” – in reference to his comments regarding Tea Party favorite Christine O’Donnell)
I appreciate his bright and intelligent arguments … from a conservative point of view … and was in complete agreement with his thoughts pertaining to congress and how they are, or are not, handling the expiration of the 10 year tax cuts. The comments he makes only reinforced my post a couple weeks ago.
I was somewhat irritated to hear that comedian Steven Colbert was invited to speak to a congressional subcommittee… in character… about illegal aliens living, working, committing crimes and and basically leeching off US citizens. It did sound like a ridiculous way to spend taxpayer dollars (estimated at $125,000/hr), but in retrospect might be an effective way to get congress to focus on their job of securing our borders? If Washington makes progress in this area and deals with the over 10 million who have illegally immigrated to the United States, it may not have been the worst idea they have wasted time on this year.
Nothing like a union lunch break – see video below.
Let me get this straight — American automakers were bailed out by taxpayers and President Obama endorsed the workers at this Chrysler plant … yet the still overpaid union American workers aren’t appreciative enough to put in a decent day’s work?
Instead according to this undercover video some workers day after day they head to a park for some drinking and smoking toking … over lunch! I don’t know about you, but I’m not these guys inspire me to buy a “proudly built in America” UAW union built car. (if it were up to me, they would be fired without unemployment eligibility or any benefits)
If you see/hear a follow up on what Chrysler management and the UAW says and does about this … comment below.
EDIT: Original video was removed from YouTube, but an updated story link with Chrysler and UAW response along with video is at Detroit’s Channel 2 News.
