Thursday, May 25, 2006

Bob and Kathy Rhubart - 1972


Bob and Kathy Rhubart 1972
Originally uploaded by Bob Rhubart.
This photo was taken about a year before Kathy and I were married -- three apartments, two houses, four mortgages, two kids, two grandchildren, eight or more cars, three dogs, several gerbils, one bird, one rabbit, several jobs, seven presidents, three wars, and thirty-three amazing, humbling, absolutely priceless years ago.

And the adventure continues...

Zoho Writer

I've been playing around with Zoho Planner, trying to figure out how to use it, when I discovered Zoho Writer, the companion word processor. Very impressive, kind of a combination of a full-feature word processor and a wiki.

I can use Zoho to compose blog posts and then publish them directly to any of my Blogger blogs, as I have done with this post.

Cool!


Friday, May 12, 2006

It's the Public Opinion Limbo!

Bush job approval falls to 29 pct in new poll - Yahoo! News: "The poll of 1,003 U.S. adults said 71 percent of Americans said Bush was doing an 'only fair or poor job,' up from 63 percent in April. It said the survey was conducted May 5-8 and had a 3 percent margin of error."

How low can he go?

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

InternetWeek | News | Piracy Cost Movie Industry $6.1 Billion

InternetWeek | News | Piracy Cost Movie Industry $6.1 Billion: "The study, conducted by LEK Consulting, estimates losses from Internet piracy at $2.3 billion, about $2.4 billion to bootlegging, and $1.4 to illegal copying. The MPAA commissioned the study 18 months ago to quantify the scope of the movie theft in the digital age and to provide ammunition to nudge governments in the United States and internationally to take action."

It's not that I don't think piracy happens, and it's not that I don't think that the practice costs the industry a lot of money. But do these numbers assume that every pirated copy of a movie represents a lost sale? If so, I suspect that these numbers are way off. I think very few people who snag a bootleg copy of a movie do so in lieu of buying a legal one.

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Election disaster was not 1st time

Election disaster was not 1st time: "Election Day glitches and even meltdowns are nothing new to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections."

In a brief discussion of the primary during my Tri-C political science class last night, the gentleman who teaches the course mentioned that he worked at one of the polling stations, where problems with the machines delayed the start of voting at that location. He added that for quite a while only a couple of the machines were working properly.

A woman in the class mentioned that she was supposed to be on the ballot for a precicnt captain seat, but through some snafu, the poll workers were given the wrong cards to activate the machines (someone had inadvertently swapped card with another district), so her name didn't appear on the ballot until the mistake was corrected -- after 5:00pm.

On another note, the class intstructor mentioned that he had to explain to far too many voters that in a primary election asking a voter to identify a party selection is part of the process. He said several people refused, while others seemed embarrassed to request a ballot for either party, whispering the party name, and looking around to see if anyone was within earshot.

Democracy in action, baby!