Wayne D's Blog

The media has me a bit peeved because they seem to be quite happy that the economy is in the toilet. They can't wait to tell us how terrible things are today and the negative feedback this obsession with how bad things are can only result in lower consumer confidence and a deepening of the financial doom and gloom.The U.S. governments bailout of the financial institutions that helped cause the mess in the first place seems completely misguided. It may have added liquidity to the system but it hasn't done anything to reduce the excess inventory of housing that will continue to be a drain on the U.S. economy for years. The problem with the mortgage backed securities that prompted the collapse of the financial house of cards is that there risk level either weren't well understood by those buying them or misrepresented by those selling them. The compulsion to deregulate that occurred resulted in greed winning out over good judgment. The U.S. government abdicated it's responsibility to mind the financial store and now it's adversely affected the whole world. Now they need to start knocking down some of those houses they will end up owning when the mortgages are defaulted on to help salvage the rest of the portfolio and return some of the value to the houses of the people who still are paying their mortgages. Yikes what a mess.

I have decided to put together a chart showing what flash based video capture websites I have successfully used with my EEEPC 701 webcam. Please feel free to add comments with your experiences. I'd especially like to hear from some EEEPC 900 owners.

Notes:
NR - works with Flash 10 so not tested, should work OK with flashcam too
1 - sometimes requires you to use the command echo 1 > /proc/acpi/asus/camera in a terminal window to enable the camera before it will be detected
TBD - data not available

Here are some links to articles I have written on setting up Flash 10 on the EEEPC and installing Flashcam on the EEEPC. Flashcam is a utility that converts the V4L2 camera interface on the EEEPC to the dumber V4L interface that some flash based websites work better with.

It looks like ping.fm has been screwed by their DNS provider GoDaddy.com. Instead of seeing the ping.fm site visitors to thee URL are getting a GoDaddy parking page. A response from ping.fm suggests they are at the mercy of GoDaddy to fix this, poor ping.fm, maybe GoDaddy wasn't the best choice for domain registration. GoDaddy has received some bad press in the past for suspending domains cutting off ping.fm for coming up on 24 hours isn't going to help their reputation.

Come on GoDaddy, fix the problem, I miss my ping.fm.

I write this as slowly crawl down the ramp at the parking garage from the fourth level after todays Argos game so it will be a short article. I am resigned to the fact thay I will never be an A list blogger. Merlin Mann says so. The reason? My blog doesn't have a theme. Merlin says I should pick something I am passionate about and make it the subject of my blog. My problem? Too much passion. I see something, or hear something, do something or an idea will pop into my head and I just have to blog about it. Some might suggest that I just can't focus on one thing. This hypothesis I reject.wholeheartedly.

One quick clarification, Merlin didn't actually speak to me, he was speaking about what makes a successful blog on the CBC radio show Spark.

Another quick clarification. Only the first half of this post was written on the parking lot ramp, the second half was completed in my tent on the Bruce Trail where my Explorer troop is spending the night after completing a 22 kilometre hike today. I didn't do the whole hike because the last time we did it the strain on my middle aged knees was so much that they hurt way to much at the end of the day.

I finish this posting content in the knowledge that though I'll never make the A list it doesn't matter. I write for myself, if somone stumbles upon my blog and enjoys it all the better.

For those interested here is a map of my hiking route from Caledon East out and back.

View Larger Map

On the drive back from Thanksgiving in Cornwall I had the chance to listen to the three part Ideas program The Suspect Society. The program discusses how governments are using our fear against us and creating a society where we are suspicious of everyone and everything. I recommend you at least listen to the first part. It talks about how the United States is subtly militarizing their schools and breeding fear through lock down drills. I viewed the emphasis on law and order by the Conservatives in tour recent election campaign through a different lens after listening to the first episode of the Suspect Society. We in Canada are not immune to fear of things that go bump in the night.

Part 2 focuses on how academic freedom is being attacked in this new age of patriotic correctness. Part 3 talks about how illegal immigrants in the United States are being treated very differently in this new age. Though you may not agree with everything you hear in this documentary it will certainly make you think.

The real audio for Part 1 is here, part 2 is here. If you prefer mp3's CBC only makes podcasts available for one month after the broadcast so the mp3 for part 1 is no longer available. The mp3's for part 2 and the part 3 will still be available for a short time. The real adio for part 3 is not currently available on the show website, I expect it may appear soon.