Garaphernalia 7.5

I, like most people now days, have a USB drive that I carry with me. I got mine a few years ago and like all cutting edge users, paid a lot for what is now a piece of crap. I’ve been using a 128mb UBS drive, and while its fine for storing simple things, was leaving me feel inadequate and wasn’t able to do the cool stuff I wanted to do.

I went to Micro Center (best computer store in the Twin Cities) and got me a 2gb USB drive from Corsair. Its got rubber armor and its water resistant, and acording to Maximum PC, is the best USB drive available.

What do you do with 2gb of memory that you can carry with you all the time? You install portable versions of the applications you use all the time.

I am writing this post off of a portable version of Firefox that is on my USB drive. I also have versions of Thunderbird, Abiword, and OpenOffice running. Basically, all the core applications I use can now run off of my USB drive so they are always with me and my settings never change. All of the applications I have installed, plus all the stuff from my other USB drive, are only taking up about 17% of the 2gb drive. Nice.

If I was really adventureous, I could even run an OS off of the USB drive.

If you want to play around with some portable apps, go to PortableApps.com.

Note: you can only install open source applications as of now.

Having this ability is really, really nice. This is one of those things that really changes how you use a computer. Its that big of a deal.

I just walked past a poster on campus that said banks loan 17x more to cars than they do to students.

I rolled my eyes.

I’m not even sure where to start on this one:

1) Banks don’t lend money to cars. They lend money to people to buy cars.

2) Implict in the poster is the claim that people are morally superior to cars. People are more important. See comment #1.

3) The real thing to compare isn’t people and cars, but cars and education. Or better yet, transportation and education.

There are a lot of things about education, higher education in particular, which people accept as fact which are not. The primary one is that getting an education will increase the amount of money you make in your life.

There is indeed a strong correlation between getting an education and the amount of money you make in your lifetime. However, and if you are indeed educated and have had stats 101 you should know this, correlation isn’t causation. There is good reason to believe that people who go to college are the ones who probably would have been more successful, regardless of college. Especially if they are in a line of work which has nothing to do with what they studies (which is damn near everyone) I know some very bright people who never graduated college and do quite well. I also know some idiots with degrees.

More over all educations are not created equal. We are currently churning out loads of people with useless degress. I can’t tell you the number of political science, sociology, and psychology majors are running around the UofM campus. The number of these kids who actually end up working in this field is very small. The college you attend, and your field of study are enormous variables that are completely absent in any generic discussion of education.

Most discussions of higher education almost universally center around getting more people a college education. In reality, we probably have too many people in college. One of the primary reasons why the costs of education is going up so fast is that the supply is pretty much constant, where as the demand keeps going up. College takes people out of the workforce for 4 years. That is the primary reason for college.

When I have this discussion with people, they usually resort to things like meeting new people, hanging out and other non-academic things. These have nothing to do with college, but leaving home for the first time.

Back to the original point of banks and lending. Cars, quite frankly, are a better investment. You at least can sell them. If I were to loan someone money for an education, which is not a bad idea, I’d tie the loan to things which no one ties education loans to today: what will your field of study be, grades, what college you will be attending, etc. I’m not going to waste money on someone who muddles through an american studies degree. I’m going to give it to the kid going into engineering.

And also, there are a lot more cars than students.

I’m horrible at photo editing. I know nothing about it. It is what has prevented me from chaning the default image for my website.

I’ve created a few test images. If I’m really ambitious, I might do some sort of random image thing.

The current image up top I ripped off from other guy’s website that uses the same wordpress theme as me.

Here is what I got so far:

Here is one I made from my summer in Colorado.

Here is one from Buenos Aries.

The Louvre in Paris. What makes this one great is the couple on the bench.

Again with the Louvre.

The UN

Paddington Station, London

Crater Lake, Oregon

I’m going to try a few more. Unfortunately, all I have is the default photo editor that comes with windows, and that sucks.

Here is where I’m spending most of my time now days. I’d say its like a cell, but cells have windows. The nice part is the walls are thick and my music doesn’t travel very far. On sundays it doesn’t really matter because I’m the only person here.

I’ve just discovered Visqueen. As usual with music, I’m always a day late to the party.

Anyhow….

I heard “Crush on Radio” driving home on 89.3 The Current (The MPR alternative station for those of you not in the Twin Cities) I immediately went home and purchased it on iTunes.

89.3 has a huge variety of music, which is a good thing. Its a way to hear stuff you’d otherwise never hear. They also keep a log of all the songs which have played going back at least a month. I think they are going to begin archiving their playlists.

What I don’t understand is that they only have links to their own public radio music store, and no links to something like iTunes. I’d guess there is a lot of money they are leaving on the table from people who don’t want to buy and entire CD right away, they just want the song they heard on the radio. I’ve probably purchased a half a dozen songs from iTunes based on what I’ve heard on their station, and for every one I had to go to their website to get the name of the song, and they never got a penny of my purchase from Apple. I don’t think I’m alone.

If they are going to annoy me to give them money, the least they can do is take advantage of the money making opportunities they have.