27 August 2009

A little too Web 2.0 for my own good.

It occurs to me that in the course of stumbling around my creative outer fringes I've accumulated a fair number of places to post/publish my work. A blog's great for long-form stuff, but too many short posts and it comes off looking like I've got nothing to say.

You can see where this is going, so I'll just spare you the gory details and point you at twitter.com/monsterdog5 and tell you to go follow it. I may decide Twitter's not worth the time and effort, but I've seen some really good ones (and a LOT of really bad ones...) and seen that no site epitomizes "brevity is the soul of wit" quite like Twitter, so if you're looking for the tl;dr version of my thoughts, you'll find them there.

26 August 2009

Schedule Creep BEGONE!

Regular readers of this item (all one of you) will notice that I'd more or less abandoned this during August---there is a simple reason for this. Playing Oblivion and Hearts of Iron 3 does not lend itself well to a blog about an aspiring accountant---I had a Gamespot blog once upon a time and probably should set about updating that.

Interestingly, one of the requirements for IS101 (Information Systems, or "Computers for Complete Fracking Idiots") is a "Web 2.0 Assignment". The assignment involves keeping and posting either a Facebook, a Myspace, or a blog. It will be a cold day in Hell before I'm on Facebook or Myspace, so that's as good a motive as any to get this damn thing up and running again.

It's not that I have anything inherently against technology (quite the opposite), it's that I wish I could just test out of a class that's about as challenging as a maze on a Happy Meal box to a guy who's been using PCs at home and in the workplace since 1993 and knows them inside and out.

Fortunately, the class rule is "do the assignments and whenever you're done, you're done with the class." Jeez, twist my arm! My goal is to have a celebratory rack of ribs at the Sparks Rib Cookoff come Labor Day Weekend (that's next week) to celebrate my first A of fall semester. Ballsy, ain't I?

Truly, however, with me updating this once a day during college weeks it's more likely going to take me three weeks to complete assignment four. I hope my IS101 professor likes musings about economics, accounting, and statistics, because I'm going to do a LOT of thinking out loud about those subjects. Still, this IS101 will be the easiest A I ever get in education at any level anywhere (and that includes the class I took in summer that basically amounted to "listen to classical music for two hours every day.")

Just a thought, but these 75 minutes can't go by fast enough.

05 August 2009

Economic collapse, American style

Sometimes I wonder about this country. It seems that once our national debt bill comes due---and it will, sooner rather than later---taxes will have to go up while government services go down just to keep the Chinese from invading to take a pound of flesh for all of our bad debt (worth about as much as General Motors corporate bonds at this point) that they've bought over the years as a sort of land claim policy. Meanwhile, I'm getting ever closer to affluence in the form of the high-paying jobs my college education will land me by the time I'm forty.

My wife brought up an interesting idea---using Canada as a springboard to EU citizenship (via the UK). I'm not keen on living in Britain, but the broader subject of emigration so I'll at least get something worthwhile for my tax dollars (er, tax euros) looks more and more like an attractive option. If the Obama administration keeps it up, they'll add more to the national debt in four years than George W. Bush added in eight and we'll start to see either a massive shift toward income inequality (more so than our worse-than-the-world-average inequality we've got now) or an exodus as the wealthy hightail it out of the country and run their American corporate businesses from tax havens like Monaco or the Cayman Islands.

Not that I'm ever going to be that rich, but life in the Netherlands or Germany (or the Czech Republic or even Hungary, two of the wealthier former Soviet-bloc countries) looks more and more attractive the more I realize that it's my generation that's going to get killed by the last nine years of American political profligacy.