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The house is mine
The closing went as planned. Ormewood Park here I come!
It recently made Creative Loafing’s Best of Atlanta as the up and coming neighborhood. More details and pictures to come.
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Throw your dreadles in the air
Somebody warm up the defibrillator, this is going to kill several of you. It’s reasonably safe for work (due to language)
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Quick link roundup
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Of particular annoyance
So I call T-Mobile to see how to use my Blackberry as an internet connection since I’ll be without the cable for a couple days. The first tech I talk to was nice. She calls me on my land line so we can continue setting everything up.
All is good so far. She then transfers me to their special Vista tech support department. While I’m waiting for Vista support to pick up, I hear a horribly loud screeching sound on the other end and I’m disconnected. T-Mobile is a phone company mind you.
I call back, speak to a tech, who tells me I have to add a $19.99 package to my plan. The first tech made no mention of such a thing.
I’m calling back and hopefully I can bypass this nonsense.
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A weird story
Combining characters from The Departed, Mississippi Burning and Donnie Brasco. In real life no less.
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Tuesday night rapid fire
- Robert Kaplan on private military contractors
- John Robb on private military contractors – one thing he doesn’t mention (and I don’t think he has mentioned it before) is that there could be many, many problems with highly trained combat forces under no particular command, they would make quiet a crime crew. It’s unlikely with the current stock of PMCs, but it might be with the next generation.
- Solar Power is becoming a vested interest
- For some reason validator callout extenders won’t work with a custom validator with the standard Visual Studio code, but it works with this code.
- Nazi War Criminal was found in Metro Atlanta. Why must events like these be the only time Atlanta makes national news?
- Building a tree fort as an exercise in project management
- DNI on leaving Iraq
- A client of mine was in the AJC today, I did the Atlanta Arrangements site late last year.
- Secret Geek has a nice post on the Principles of Scale
- Tyler Cowen on income inequality. I wonder if anyone is actually worried about this. No one seems to be, but everyone thinks everyone else is scared stiff. One thing to bear in mind is that the bottom is fixed at zero
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Great minds thinking alike
I check my rss reader, and lo and behold, one of the tech blogs I read has a review of The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, which formed my world view greatly.
Convergence is nice.
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Saudi Israelia
In response to, You’re right. Both Tel Aviv and Riyadh play us like violins by Tom Barnett, Dan TDaxp responds with this post, where he points out that Israel and Saudi Arabia are our two closest allies in the region.
What a depressing thought. Our two closest allies anywhere are a tyrannical monarchy which breeds terrorists at an alarming clip, and an ethnically based democracy with socialist leanings who doesn’t even have the common decency not to spy on us, even though we give them billions outright every year, and far more in support.
It’s sad.
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Economics for five year olds
Arnold Kling has a great post on explaining economic development to five year olds, with the hope that journalists understand it. The version he came up with was this
There are lots of people in the world who will give us things that we want, as long as we give them something they want in return. This is called trading. Some of the things we trade are hard to see–they are like nice thoughts. Other people keep thinking up nicer things to trade with us, and we keep thinking up nicer things to trade with them. We keep trading nicer and nicer things. Many years ago, people had not thought up all of these nice things, so they did not have as much to trade as we do. That is why people who lived back then were poor, and we are not.
Now if he’ll only do one for deadweight loss.
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Recommended Friday viewing
Check out this speech by Michael Sheurer.