Rebuilding Eden

As I write this tonight, the stock market has taken another plunge, the government is debating a bailout of the auto makers and gloom and doom seems to be coming at us from every direction. The dire financial news of today is likely to become the dire financial news of tomorrow and quite frankly for the forseeable future. The problem is that we cannot allow it to control our lives. Too many of us have connected out financial success to happiness. My thought for today is this. Celebrate life.

November 1st marks the beginning of the Holiday Season for me, from this point out the year is focused on celebration. Thanksgiving is just around the corner, holiday sales, football games, parties and other events seem to get endlessly strung together from now thru the end of the year. While the constant taunting of “buy me, buy me” coming from the stores comes earlier each year, I will make a point this year of turning my criticism of this into celebration of it. No, I won’t shop any earlier or buy any more than I usually do, but I may have friends over for dinner this November, or have a pre-holiday party. Click here to read more.. »

I had the opportunity this weekend to travel to Washington, D.C. to return my son to school where he will be a Junior this fall. We took a similar trip just a few weeks ago to move my daughter into her first apartment. She is attending graduate school and thankfully they are only seperated by a few miles (more importantly 2 metro stops). I have never been in an area that has been gripped by the need for Change than the greater D.C. area is right now.

During this brief 2 day whirlwind tour we were approached no less than 2 dozen times for people looking for change. On the way to the metro, “Excuse me, do you have any change?”. Walking by the ballpark, “Got any change?”. People playing instruments hoping for change, people selling flowers hoping for change, people peddling local papers, hoping for change. More than anything else though, people doing nothing at all, just asking for change.

Presidents Clinton and Bush, with the help of Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have managed to get the printing presses of this country operating at full speed. It will be the job of the next president to get the Mints up to maximum capacity however, because if Washington D.C. is at all representative of this country, we are definitely in need of some change.

(recovered from Google cache, thanks Google!) I have received a few emails this week regarding my weekly TalkCast, Rebuilding Eden, from some of my listeners on TalkShoe.com. Two of them stood out as they shared nearly identical opinions on the topics that we have been discussing recently, Peak Oil and Global Warming. Each of the listeners stated that they enjoyed the TalkCast, but had some reservations as to the relevancy of the information with regards to their own situations. The first argued that “We may not see any serious effects from Global Warming for years or even decades”. The second that “By the time we reach Peak Oil, the new technology will be there to relieve our needs”. In both cases I hope they are correct, but as we all know, hope is not a strategy. Click here to read more.. »

This is what happens when you are smart enough to run your own webserver, but not smart enough to backup the sql database that contains all of your historical writings…you start over. This time you start over on a hosted machine though so that you have someone else to blame when a machine failure eats your homework. Back up soon…