“No Great Economic Sacrifice;” Are You Kidding Me?

Tooling around trying to find something on the radio to listen to, I fall upon a daytime talk show. The guest on at the time was talking about the War on Terror. He made a point that there has been no call for economic sacrifice. He meant stuff like Victory Gardens, scrap metal recycling, buy war bonds, and bring back the Steel Penny. While true, the guest hadn't thought it through and I was ticked that the host hadn't challenged that statement.

I'll pick up the slack.

There has been great economic sacrifice. One way is the call to duty by the military. The military is essentially divided into two main parts: Active and Guard/Reserve. The Active Duty's impact on the economy is that when a unit deploys that's anywhere from 100 to 1000 people no longer participating in the local economy for at least a year. That number of people not buying food, gas, clothes, music, books, movies, manga, going to baseball games, dry cleaning, military surplus, and going to strip clubs. That can really hurt a small community that is completely dependent on the military customers for its business. And businesses can go away for good leaving employees without jobs.

I will put myself into a potentially hazardous situation and say the when a Guard or Reserve unit deploys, that can even be more detrimental. Why? Who makes up one of these units? Unlike an Active unit that is made up of people from all over America, and in some cases all over the world. A Guard unit is made up of people from the local towns, cities, counties, and states. These people are not soldiers 24/7. When not doing the two weekends a month and two weeks out of the summer; they are going to their day jobs. People like plumbers, carpenters, truckers, managers, telemarketers, cops, firefighters, lawyers, judges, politicians, and strippers.

These citizen soldiers are activated and become full time soldiers for at least two years. A year to train up and deploy then redeploy. And a year on the actual deployment. That's two years of not participating in the local economy. Especially if you are making less as a soldier than a garbage collector. On top of that businesses have just lost several employees and now must scramble to fill those positions. It costs a business a lot of money to hire someone, even just temporarily to fill a slot. These businesses are losing customers because they can't fulfill the customer orders. Those customers are losing business because they are scrambling to fill slots left open by deploying Guard/Reserve employees.

Two years later the citizen soldier comes home gets their job back (hopefully, I've heard stories) and one year later does it all again.

So even though you are not seeing a flood of ads to join the Army in the national interest, doesn't mean that there hasn't been a call for great economic sacrifice.

Browsing for a Better Browser.

When I first got on the net way back when. I used what came with Windows: MSN Explorer. I always found it rather slow and unwieldy. A friend pointed me to Internet Explorer. (I got him back, I hooked him up with his now third ex-wife.)

IE was great.

However.

I kept hearing about this foxy little upstart browser. All the magazines and online reviews said it was fast, safe, and easy to use. When I saw that one of my favorite webcomics was saying "Best viewed in Firefox." I decided it was time to take a peak. At first I thought that it was really no different than IE. Until that fateful day that when I went to paste in a password. Instead of hitting Ctrl/V, I hit Ctrl/B. My bookmarks came up. I no longer had to click twice to get them. It's a keeper.

However.

Since then Firefox has become bloated, slow, and unwieldy. I figured it was time for a change. To get me to change browsers, one had to pass two tests. The first is what brought me permanently to Firefox: bookmarks. Could you just import your bookmarks from another browser or a backup file and go forward? Like with Firefox? The one that stuck out like a sore thumb was Safari. For the life of me I couldn't figure out to import my bookmarks and make it look like it does everywhere else. I can drag and drop the backup HTML file onto the Bookmarks Bar then I would have to click twice to get anywhere. Or I can set the bookmarks as my homepage and center click to open the link as a new tab and then click on the tab to see the page.

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

So how do the others I tested do? Internet Explorer did okay. It alphabetized my bookmarks. Now I get to spend all day reorganizing them back into the order I want. Plus I still have to click once to get to see them. But they stay open during the entire session.

Chrome: They are on a toolbar that autohides. So I have to click twice to get to any page. They imported in the same order as I had them in Firefox.

Opera keeps the bookmarks pane opens and stay open for each session. Alphabetized again and you can't reorganize them. Wait? What's that? I have to check "Sort by My Order." Why doesn't it sort by my order to begin with?

On to test two: my site. I have to admit that one of the things I have failed to do over many years is to see how my site looks on other browsers. Does it function the way I intend? The answer is yes. The CSS, Flash, and links work the way they are supposed to in every browser. For the looks, I get that my site looks basic. I care more about being able to access the comic than spending time designing some super flashy interface that can't be seen because it turns into a mush of CSS and Java-scripting and doesn't work on an iPad. (That is one thing I need to fix: Change the Flash content to YouTube or simple HTML. No big rush since most of that is buried in the archive that isn't visited anyway.)

Firefox, Chrome, and Safari display just fine. I really can't see a difference. Internet Explorer and Opera really stand out. For opposite reasons. IE makes my site look bad.(Who can I blame beside me? I know! Micro$oft!) The links on the darker background are almost impossible to see. There is a setting buried in Internet Options that you can uncheck to make things look the way they are supposed to. But will the average user go that far? No. I've talked to many people. All they really care about is just being able to click around and have a good time. Not dig around in the bowels (literally) of some program to fix what some guy that gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars should have fixed in the first place.

I don't get paid that much. I'll never get paid that much. Maybe that's why I recognize the fact that I will eventually change up the color scheme so it doesn't A: Blind anybody visiting; and B: Doesn't cause any unnecessary squinting to see the links.

Opera is the lone standout. My site looks great (to me. I don't trust my eyes. I've been up all night typing this out.) Turned out better than intended. Everything is nice clean, clear, and crisp.

Final verdict: I'm sticking with Firefox. None off the others have that perfect combination to make me switch. Firefox has all the great add-ons I like and have spent years figuring how to make work. I don't want to start from scratch.


bonus: spelling suggestions:
online-leonine
webcomics-economics
Ctrl-Carl, Curl
toolbar-barstool
autohides-autodidacts
CSS-CUSS, ASS (boy is that spot on)
iPad-paid, IPA
YouTube-Buyout
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!-(No Spelling Suggestions)

Ravy 2011 Pg. 36.

 Click

A long time ago I used to be about two years ahead of schedule. That has since withered down to about six months. Mostly because I spent a year trying to get a date with Yuffie on Final Fantasy 7.

Six months ago there was this huge controversy over Michelle McCool using A.J. Styles finishing maneuver. Then there was Wrestlemania 27 with several wrestlers using Kurt Angle's five moves of doom.

Of course there's me trying to poke fun at all this six months later.

Here.

More Inukami.

Just kidding. I'm done with it. I swear. Figuratively, and literally.

Win Great with Win 8. Part Deux.

I have been hearing that there might be a major overhaul to the interface. My initial reaction is don't. The start menu and My Computer has been working fine since 1995. Then again, the way iOS works is to just put an icon on the “desktop.” (I don't have an iPad or iPhone, so I'm not familiar with the terminology.) That's exactly what I do. For the common stuff I use all day it's right on the desktop. I just don't want to be locked out of my harddrive. I also don't want to be forced into sticking all of my music in My Music. I don't want to use a Libraries system which is nothing more than an overly complicated version of what I do anyway.

This is something from Win 7 that I love: the Favorites Menu in Explorer. It's easy to add location to it. What’s so great is say I'm in my comic folder and need to go to C drive. I just click on it without having to click on the back button, going to the Start menu, or minimizing a dozen windows to see the hard drive shortcut on the Desktop. I would really like to see that feature kept in Win 8.

Compatibility Mode has been garbage since day one. With Vista and 7 it does have its one good point. If a program won't install, set Compatibility Mode to “Run this program as an administrator” and it may install. However that doesn't mean that program will actually run as it did in XP and 9x. Or at all. Is there a way to get it to work as it was promised to do?

XP Mode made that promise as well, but it was a disappointment. From the overly lengthy startup times to programs not working because the detect that they are on a network. It's one great feature is that I can install an app in XP Mode to test it out. If it is no good, or if it was dangerous to begin with, then it is contained in an easily deletable folder that is not connected to my Win 7 Registry.

Just like a sandbox. What that is just simply an app that is contained in its own folder. Like Rosenkreuzstilette (haven't said a word about that game in a while.) You don't have to install it. It doesn't hook itself into the Registry and a hundred hidden folders. If you get a new computer, just transfer the file and keep going.

Sandboxing is quite the step up from that. The app is locked from being able to access anything else like the Registry. So if you get a virus laden deathtrap, just delete the app. In addition, it tones down DLL hell and won't delete DLLs needed by other programs when it is uninstalled.

The big disadvantage to this system is that it makes it easier to pirate software. But hey, let's be realistic. Hackers and pirates don't care. If you put some protection program in your app, they will find a way to break it. In some cases, upstanding citizens will look for hacks. Especially if they have to go through the twenty page registration process each and every time they click on the app. They will immediately go to Google and look up how to hack a way around such an annoyance. (Or so I hear.)

I think the best way around all that is an app store. I have Intel AppUp. I used it to get Angry Birds up and running. I just registered once and that was it. I can download what I want and uninstall at will. If someone tries to pirate the app by uploading the file folder to a file sharing site, it won't work.

However (didn't see that coming, now did you?) that is an app store's biggest weakness as well. If you can't get the app to work after transferring the file folder, how do you back it up? And no, you can't depend on being able to re-download it. After having installed Win 7, I tried to install Bejeweled 2 that I had downloaded from Popcap. I couldn't play the game because Popcap had lost all my registration information. What if that happens to your copy of Photoshop?

Windows has always had some basic free apps, but some improvement are needed. How about spell check in Word Pad? Or a better GIF filter in MS Paint? Layers, fades, and gradient fills? Just fix the damn transparency bugs.

The one thing that Microsoft should do that they are talking about not doing is an extended public beta testing. With Win 7 MS did what they hadn't done before: get feedback from the everyday user. Granted, up until a few years ago, MS would have had to mail out beta version of software. Only those that had the Technet subscription service could get betas. Just too expensive to mail out to a million people at once. Now that most have high speed internet, it can now be cost effective. Now MS can hear about and fix that MP3 bug before thousands of copies are sold in stores and installed on OEM computers.

If Microsoft had done a public beta test on Vista, there probably never would have been Windows 7.