Coffee Klatch

Yesterday the Circle City Ringers performed at a church in Peru, Indiana. We played the prelude, offertory, special music, and postlude for their service. Last summer we played up there as well, and the people enjoyed it so much they got their handbells out of a dusty old closet and decided to start a group again. Pretty cool! And they were very appreciative of us being there for the service. After the service I saw some of them picking the brains of some of our ringers, asking questions that had arisen during the last year. About 4-in-handing, playing chimes, etc.

We went out to lunch at a cool restaurant that is where they used to have a train station. They have a couple actual railroad cars connected to the building, so you can eat your Sunday Buffet in a railroad car. Pretty cool. And the Bourbon Chicken was out of this world!!

But the big thing of the day came afterwards, when we had a recording session in the church. An old friend of our director’s had the equipment and expertise to record us. We worked our way through five songs in under 3 hours. It took a lot of “takes,” and all that, but we got some really good stuff done.

This was for a demo CD, not a commercial CD. The purpose is for us to have something to give potential clients when they’re considering booking our group and want to know what we sound like.

Another cool thing was that two of the songs were MINE! Appalachian Sunrise is for 3-5 octaves and was performed on all chimes. There were quite a few people who talked to me after the service about how much they loved it, which was cool. The other was a 2-3 octave version of the William Tell Overture (just the Lone Ranger part, not the ENTIRE thing) that we played on 3 octaves and UP TO TEMPO! It ROCKED!! What a blast that was! And I’ll have you know that it’s NOT a scaled-down version of the piece, but the full orchestral type with all the chords and notes you’d hear if an orchestra played it.

So for our demo CD we had five songs, including:

• William Bell’s Overture
• Fantasy on Hyfrodol
• Grazioso
• Appalachian Sunrise and
• Hymn to Joy

A nice variety of sacred/secular, slow/fast, serious/fun, so people will have a good idea of the types of things we play. And another step in the Circle City Ringers moving forward in a positive direction!

There is something to be said for drying your laundry on a line outside. The clothes tend to smell fresher and you save money by not running the clothes dryer as much.

But at the same time, if there’s no breeze, the fabric tends to get a little stiff, as evidenced by my crunchy towel this morning. It’s folded like normal, but it looks a little ragged, like a dog that’s been out in the rain a bit, or like Hammy the Squirrel in Over the Hedge when he’s trying to look rabid. The giveaway is when you grab it. It’s all… crunchy.

A few months ago I talked about how I was uninstalling Symantec AntiVirus and was having difficulties. It wouldn’t uninstall normally and I had to go through a manual uninstall, which meant editing the registry.

Four months later I’m still having issues with Symantec. Apparently I didn’t get rid of ALL of it. When I’m in My Computer and I right-click on a folder, I get Symantec popping up and trying to install itself again. I searched the web a bit and found another website that had different instructions on getting rid of it all. I found a few more traces and have now eliminated ALL of it (I hope).

For those of you having similar issues, here’s the website: complete list.

The Minimum Wage is going to be a hot-button issue during the elections this fall. I blogged about it over a year ago, but since it’s becoming an issue (radio ads by the Democratic Party started this week and focus on this issue), I feel like it’s worth another look.

The Federal Minimum Wage is currently $5.15/hour and has been that since 1 September 1997. Eighteen states have passed laws setting their own minimum wage higher than that; the rest are the same or lower (so the higher federal rate applies). The purpose of the Minimum Wage law is nominally to guarantee a “liveable wage” for the American workforce. Of course, the law as written does not state the purpose of the law, only what the requirements are. The purpose is something argued about by Congress.

The U.S. Department of Labor says:

The minimum wage law (the FLSA) applies to employees of enterprises that do at least $500,000 in business a year. It also applies to employees of smaller firms if the employees are engaged in interstate commerce or in the production of goods for commerce, such as employees who work in transportation or communications or who regularly use the mails or telephones for interstate communications. It also applies to employees of federal, state or local government agencies, hospitals and schools, and it generally applies to domestic workers.

In other words, it applies to almost all businesses in the U.S. Even tiny little “mom-and-pop” places use the mails or telephones for interstate communications, if only to communicate with their suppliers.

But does the Minimum Wage law accomplish its purpose? My answer is “No.”

First let’s look at the business process when the minimum wage is increased. We’ll use a hypothetical burger joint for an example. Businesses are required to pay more for their “low-end” workers. This won’t affect management because they make quite a bit more. It more typically involves high school and college students and the poorer people of society. So the basic workers coming in to flip burgers have to get paid more. This produces a higher cost for the employer, obviously, because they’re spending more money on employees. This causes profits to be reduced. For every burger sold, the company makes less money. If they were already struggling financially, this could kill them. No exaggeration.

This also means that the suppliers of beef, hamburger buns, paper goods, cleaning supplies, etc., are ALSO making less of a profit, thus increasing the costs for the mom-and-pop place even more.

If profits are to be kept where they are, then, there has to be either a decrease in costs elsewhere in the company or else an increase in sales. Often, this means hiring fewer low-end (lower-productivity) workers. This has been documented here and elsewhere. If fewer poor people are hired, how is this helping society? It’s a guarantee for higher unemployment. Many of these people would be willing to work for LESS than minimum wage if they could have a place near where they live and not have to take a bus to get there. Instead, more of them are out of work.

The other way to offset the cost of an increased minimum wage is to increase sales. Most profit-driven companies are in a continual process of trying to increase sales so they can make money. That’s their business. So if that’s not really an option, the only other thing is to increase the price of their products. Mom-and-pop’s hamburgers go from $1.99 a burger to $2.25 a burger.

Figure that this process is going on in ALL businesses that have minimum-wage workers. The end result is that costs for EVERYTHING go up. So we’ve increased the pay of the low-end workers and then raised the prices of the entire retail market. That results in NO CHANGE for the minimum-wage workers and LOWER PURCHASING POWER for everyone else, since they’re not getting raises to balance the low-end pay rates.

How is this a good idea?

This is an area that should NOT be regulated by the government. Let the markets drive the wages. Businesses that hire many low-end workers will hire more people and will experience decreased costs, allowing them more retail flexibility for competing with their rivals. Sure there will be some that will try to exploit their workers, but that happens anyway. The market will eventually even it out and allow more people to be hired, help reduce unemployment, and increase the power of the dollar. For many poor or out-of-work people, $4.25 an hour would still be tons better than $0.00 an hour.

So if you get a choice this November to voice your opinions on the Minimum Wage, just say NO! It’s a foolish idea that offers a pretense of helping people while in reality it hurts both businesses and employees.

One of my favorite movie moments is in The 13th Warrior. The movie itself is interesting and fun, a retelling of Beowulf from the point of view of an accompanying Arab. Some great Viking action and some really excellent insight into warfare and the Viking perspective on it.

Anyway, there’s a point in the movie where the Arab is travelling with these Northmen and every night he’s sitting around the campfire with them, eating and resting. They’re all loud and talking and laughing (stereotypical Norsemen), while he’s sitting there quietly. You see him start to pay attention to what they’re saying. They’re speaking Old Norse (for real) and he doesn’t understand it, of course. Yet, over repeated nights you see him watching their mouths and listening to what they’re saying. You hear them from his perspective, so they’re talking in Old Norse and you’ll hear an English word or two right in the middle of a sentence, showing that he’s understanding a word or two. (Obviously it’s English because the movie was made for a Western, English-speaking audience.) Then there are occasional phrases thrown in, right in the middle of the Norse sentences, as he is able to pick out the phrases. Eventually you’re understanding everything they’re saying, because it’s all in English.

When one of them insults the Arab’s mother, he speaks up, defending his mother and in turn insulting the other guy. Someone grabs him and asks where he learned their language. His response: “I *listened!*”

Isn’t that awesome? I’ve never seen such a great depiction in a movie of someone learning the language being spoken around them. That’s one of my favorite “movie moments.” I’ll probably post more of these down the road.

Current music: Direct, by Vangelis

This morning I came across a posting written by someone who is fed up (literally and figuratively) by the moral superiority that many vegetarians manifest. Especially when being taken out to eat by a friend who likes a good steak. He’s being funny and making a point at the same time.

His plan: find some vegetarian who really irritates people every time you all want to go out to eat. Then “sponsor” them by eating THREE TIMES as much meat as you normally would. In their name.
If you want to read more, click on the image below. (Note: The site has a bit of vulgar language, so if you’re bothered by that, please don’t go read it.)

This is a classic Physics question that shows up in many forms on high school physics exams. The question goes as follows: A gun is aimed at a monkey sitting in a tree. Exactly as the trigger is pulled, the monkey drops from the tree. Ignoring air resistance, where should you aim the gun so as to hit the monkey?

Know the answer? It’s “right where he was sitting.”

The reason is that gravity is working on both the bullet and monkey equally. If there were no gravity, then the bullet would travel in a straight line and the monkey would not fall anywhere. Add gravity, which causes downward acceleration at a rate of 32 ft/sec/sec, both the bullet and the monkey fall at the same rate.

Sounds illogical, but that’s the way the world works. Of course, if the monkey shaped his body differently as he fell, he would increase or decrease his wind resistance, thus changing the answer. Visit Everything2.com for more discussion of why this is so.

When I was in Physics class in high school, my teacher had a little metal contraption that was mostly a spring and a rod. There were two balls that both had holes drilled through the center. When you pulled the rod back against the spring and latched it, thus “cocking” the machine like a gun, one ball was put onto the back end of the rod and the other was placed in front of the rod. When you “unlatched” it, the rod shot forward, knocking the front ball straight forward while pulling out of the back ball, allowing it to drop. On a classroom countertop over a hard floor, it was easy to hear that both balls hit the ground at exactly the same time.

Go figure!

Current music: Zen Breakfast, by Karunesh

For the last year or so I’ve been using Crimson Editor for doing my basic text editing and html coding. But just this week I’ve been turned on to something new, better, and open source. It’s called Notepad++.

Notepad++ is an open source program that serves both as a source code editor and as a replacement for Notepad. All the things you hated about Notepad are gone! And Notepad++ is extremely simple to use. If you want to work on html or some other source code, you can click on Language and change it from “Normal Text” to one of almost 40 different programming languages. You can even create your own custom “language!”

The language affects how your text is displayed. For example, in basic HTML, all the HTML tags are colored blue, while the tag parameters are red and the values are purple. Comments are green and are in a smaller and different font. There’s even an italic display of ASCII codes, so if you add a   or something like that, it looks different from the regular text.

I’m quickly becoming a fan of Notepad++. Some other features that I like are the tabbed windows, so you can have multiple files open at the same time, tab between them, and EASILY copy and paste material from one to the other (Crimson Editor still hasn’t got that worked out). Also, (and what originally drew me to this program) they’ve got a search/replace feature, which Notepad doesn’t. You can also insert bookmarks into the documents, so you can find your place quickly. If you’re working on code, the indenting function works great. And if you have a lot of text or code, you can even zoom out to see more (or all) of the document and create a screenshot if you like.

Visit http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm to download the program, to read more feature details, and to see screenshots of its various features in action.

FYI, here are the features of Notepad++ :

Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding

WYSIWYG

User Defined Syntax Highlighting

Auto-completion

Multi-Document

Multi-View

Regular Expression Search/Replace supported

Full Drag ‘N’ Drop supported

Dynamic position of Views

File Status Auto-detection

Zoom in and zoom out

Multi-Language environment supported

Bookmark

Brace and Indent guideline Highlighting

Macro recording and playback

Here’s a little humor from Jason Jones, a correspondent on the Daily Show:

“A whole lot of turmoil this week, so let’s get right to it. Starting as always with… the Middle East. This week, the area’s usual subconscious depression collided with storms of violent anger moving on from Israel on up to Gaza and straight on up through to Lebanon. By the way, if you’re in the Mid-East, this is your 6,021 straight week of seething rage, and guess what guys? That’s a new record, breaking the old mark of 6,020 weeks set by you last week. Moving on over to the East, a severe crazy front [on screen: picture of North Korean Dictator Kim Jong-Il] could move into nearby Japan as a cloud of crippling fear.”

Here’s another comic strip that you might like to subscribe to. You can either visit their site (ReverendFun.com) or subscribe to their RSS feed.

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