The Millennium Shrimp

Here’s a curious “irony” - a few weeks after publishing an editorial opining:

By retiring, Streit has done the only thing he could do to uphold the school’s broader commitment to personal integrity.

and also that:

That is what this comes down to, of course— intellectual dishonesty

the Repository’s editor Jeff Gauger finds himself being called on the carpet over the Rep’s “adaptation” of an iphone parody ad that the Sun tabloid in England had put out earlier last year.

Below is the Rep’s new ad that Gauger was pleased to unveil as “the must have mobile device of 2010″ on March 4th:

Here is the original Sun video:

The back and forth on it can be found in these posts:

Fitz & Jen: Canton Repository’s Sincerest form of flattery
Editor’s Extra: Version 2.0:The must-have mobile device of 2010
Fitz & Jenn: ‘Canton Repository’: It’s not copying without credit, it’s irony!

We live in a society where copying the written word has become so easy that it’s hard to see what is really wrong with it. And yet, copying a video is not as simple as a few mouse clicks. You have to shoot the footage, edit it, get a voice over. You’re recreating the content, not creating a digital copy of the content. So why slavishly copy the original script? It could have been a clever extension of the original concept instead of a lackluster imitation.

heh

The secret to a happy marriage for men is choosing a wife who is smarter and at least five years younger than you, say UK experts.

‘Younger wife’ for marital bliss

Another case of life immitating XKCD?

Little Bobby Tables

http://imgur.com/QHKXu.png

Heard an interview with the President of a local Union chapter up in Michigan on WKSU this morning. I can’t find a link to it, but it was in the story on the Pontiac stamping plant being closed. Obviously, this is a sad situation for a lot of GM employees, but one of his comments struck me. He blamed GM’s bankruptcy on corporate management (of course), but also laid the blame on his neighbors (I’m assuming he means the whole town here), many of whom were GM pensioners. He said that it was their fault for buying foreign cars instead of GM.

To me, his comment reflected how deep the problems at GM actually run. Buying a car still is a significant purchase for most Americans. Real wages in this country have largely stagnated since the 1970s, and cars certainly haven’t gotten cheaper. (On the other hand, they do last longer.) GM’s labor contracts with the Unions added $1,500 in production costs to every GM vehicle. The only cars the GM could build and still turn a profit were the huge gas-guzzling SUVs. His neighbors were quite willing to buy them when gas was $1.50 a gallon, but not now. The simple fact is that the labor unions have been a boat anchor waiting to rip the bottom out of the boat as soon as the company hit shallow waters. GM’s problems are not so much the result of upper management making bad decisions as it is the result of the economic realities of running a corporate dinosaur where bad decisions were the only economically viable ones.

The Unions were the product of the conflict between management and labor in the early twentieth century, a conflict that was often quite bloody. Larry Page gave the commencement speech at the University of Michigan this year, his alma mater and the school where his father earned his PhD, and one of the artifacts he brought on stage with him was the “Alley Oop” hammer that his grandfather had carried on strikes back in the 1930s. It was a home-made hammer, a lump of lead welded onto an iron pipe, that the auto workers carried to protect themselves on strike.

The unions fought for something important back in the day - basic rights and economic stability for the working class. But the president of this local seemed to think that the point of the Union was to preserve privileged economic sinecures to pass on to their children.

from Wired.com

The world’s oldest automaker hitched its electric wagon to Tesla on Tuesday when it bought nearly 10 percent of the company and a seat on its board. Neither side is discussing specifics of the deal, reportedly worth $50 million, but both sides walk away winners.

Awesome! I was scared that Tesla would be a victim of the recession, but it looks like Daimler is coming to the rescue. Is Telsa proof that Americans can still build innovative new automobiles even if Detroit can’t? As the Wired article says, having the company that invented the automobile investing in you certainly doesn’t hurt when you’re looking for investors. Also, having Daimler’s parts bin makes the 2011 time frame for producing the S Sedan more realistic. It might be easy to read this as the collapse of the fordist economic model

From /.
Google Tricycles To Map Footpaths For Street View

heh:

I shall be twittering this with a sigh
On someone’s blogs and blogs hence:
Two paths diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less googled by,
And that has made all the difference.

–RFrostie1977

Maybe they can use these in Pinecraft!

Well, taxes at least…Finally did my taxes this past weekend.

How I would describe the experience:
About as much fun as giving yourself a root canal with dull drill bit and an underpowered cordless drill. I actually spent a day cleaning my living room and dining room just to put it off for another few hours. And that’s after avoiding it for the past month and a half. Okay, that’s probably melodramatic. I just hate having to sit down and try to do basic math on overly complicated forms.

TurboTax
I’ve used the Free edition for the past several years and always found it an excellent tool. It takes a little over three hours to run through everything with my itemized deductions. And the state taxes are usually $39.99. Which you really can’t beat with a dead horse. It really is an insanely good deal on tax prep. Much better than actually sitting down and do it out on paper in long hand. They give you excellent guidance for running through the itemized deductions. This year, I decided to spring for the Deluxe edition since I now am a homeowner.

Overall rating for the deluxe edition:
Meh

Honestly, for my tax situation, the biggest benefit in using the Deluxe edition was importing the data from last years return. But honestly, I didn’t like this all that well, especially when it came to the itemized deductions. I probably did something wrong, but I never saw a screen where it went through the 1026 A worksheet to itemize my deductions. Instead I ended up having to input all of that data during the “error checking” portion of the session, and the error checking screens were ambiguous. It was difficult to know which questions I was filling out and there wasn’t any way to go back in and edit the worksheet data after I had gone through the error checking process. So, I feel like importing the data from the previous year is basically more of a hinderance than a good feature. But then again, my tax situation is fairly simple. My only income is wages, and from one company. I haven’t moved (and probably won’t be for a while) and I don’t need to file for multiple states and/or municipalities.

Things to avoid
They charge you $29.95 to deduct the charges for the tax filing from your return. Definitely not worth it. And the thing I don’t like is that it doesn’t really advertise that extra cost on there.

Final thoughts
On the local tax front, my taxes were much simpler this year than previous years. Only had to file for Ohio and not multiple states, and I only needed to file for the city of Canton (and not Akron as well). Thanks to the helpful auditors in both city tax departments for clarifications on how it works when you work in Akron and live in Canton.

And a shout out to Kathy for Personal Mortgage Insurance Premium deduction advice on a Sunday evening! Thank you!

So, I guess it was inevitable, given my twin interests in archaeology and science fiction, but the whole “steampunk” design aesthetic sort of ran me over, stopped, and tossed me on the back of the wagon. But, I have to admit, I’m not so much fascinated by trying to make modern technology look old as I am just playing around with old technology. The stuff people in the past actually did make is far more fascinating to me than the might have beens.

So, for the past year or so, I’ve been slowly buying “old” stuff, and I’m going to start blogging about some of the pieces here. The first one I thought I’d break out is the Underwood.

As some of you know, about a month after I bought my house, my parents bought the house across the street. They attended the auction because my mom was going to buy me a book shelf. They ended up buying the house. Which is a story for a different occasion. But in the basement of the house was an old Underwood typewriter. Now in this day and age using a term like “old typewriter” is a bit redundant. But this wasn’t some cross-breed “word processor” like what I remember from high school and college. (Yes, when I went to college young ‘ens they still had “computer labs” and only the ultra-geeky kids brought computers to school with them).

This was cast iron, steel with nickel-plated accents, the high tech of my grandparent’s generation. It was beautiful. It was covered in dust and starting to rust. No one picked it up as the auctioneer moved through the house selling off the contents. After the auction ended, I grabbed it and asked the auctioneer if I could have it. He didn’t care. He’d just sold the house to my parents.

Since then, it has been sitting in my basement, waiting patiently. I thought it would make a lovely winter project. But Winter has come and gone and there it sat.

I broke it out this evening and googled “underwood typewriters.”[1] This page[2] showed me where to look for the model number and when that serial number was made. The model number is “M5098122.” According to the website, the M stands for “Master” which was a successor to the #6 model, and it was manufactured sometime in the last half of 1939…

the repair guide is here[3]

Another interesting web site [4] that sells typewriters.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

image001, originally uploaded by millermichael76.

Mike Sine was walking through the office area when he looked out the window and shouted, “oh my god!” A truck at the International Dealer behind our office rolled down the hill and into the creek that separates our office from their lot. That’s probably the most excitment we’ve had at the office in years.