Random Links to Interesting Stuff
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Friday, December 26, 2003 |
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New Homes and Durable Goods On the one hand, one month doesn't make a trend.On the other, every trend has to start somewhere.
Orders for core capital investment goods fell 5.9 percent, the biggest drop since March 2002. Core capital orders have risen 6.6 percent in the past year as businesses abandoned their caution and began investing again. And, from a separate story:
Sales of new homes sank about 2.4 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.08 million, the Commerce Department estimated Wednesday. As these articles point out, these numbers conflict with other--good-- economic news. But, consider the lackluster holiday sales, the stagnant labor market, slow wage growth, increasing state and local taxes and rising health insurance premiums. A paycheck can only take so many hits before it starts to give.
Northwestern Ohio will have more than 10,000 bankruptcies this year--a record pace (2002, also a record year had 8,500 bankruptcy filings). As part of my job, I see every bankruptcy filed in our Federal court district. December usually sees a slow down in filings, but the pace stayed the same from October through December, averaging about 30 a day. |
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Sometimes, blogging feels like living in a big, old house with no foundation: things keep shifting and sliding, and you are constantly making adjustments to keep things functioning. After a year and a half, I found that I enjoy compiling The Hellenophile a lot more than I enjoy writing stuff here at The Agora. Keeping even a poor-to-to-mediocre political blog going takes a lot of work. I am a news junkie, but this stuff requires a near-obsessive yearning for information. An encyclopedic knowledge of everything from economics to 20th century history to the federal budget process doesn't hurt either--especially if you don't want to look like a moron. That does leave the question of just what to do with The Agora. It's here, and there are a number of incoming links, it would be silly just to abandon it and only post to The Hellenophile. Having a place to rant is good; having a place to mention undeservedly over-looked web content is also good. I had thought about posting snippets of good posts from low-traffic leftish blogs. With Radio's aggregator, that would be easy, but it feels a bit like cheating. A food blog is out, since I only cook frozen pizzas ("To Hell with what the box says--12 minutes will give you a great, crunchy crust.), and my profession is mind-numbingly boring, so a blog about that is out too (I'm a commercial real estate abstractor, so unless you really care about subspace agreements, how the U.S. uses a range, town and section system to describe property, and how to convert links, chains and rods into feet, that's a blog you won't want to read either).
So, until I'm struck with inspiration, expect posting to be light, and of low quality. Apologies in advance. |
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Last week I bought Rogers Cadenhead's Radio Userland Kickstart. I know that a lot of Salon bloggers have been frustrated by Radio; God knows I've had a host of problems with the software too. One reason is that Radio does a lot more than just blogging, so the program is more complex than a new user would expect. Combine that with the lack of documentation that ships with the product, and the differences between desktop-based blogging and the more common model of server-based blogging (as with Moveable Type and Blogger), and it is no surprise that newcomers to blogging quickly find themselves at sea. Over the last year and half of blogging, I've often been frustrated--and once or twice, downright furious--with Radio. Radio Userland Kick Start has turned me into an unabashed fan of the software. Like the author of the book, I am stunned at the capabilities of this $40.00 piece of software. The worst I can say about the book is that it wasn't written a year ago. Posting is simple and Radio is a deep program, so the book has a quick tour of the mechanics of adding entries to your blog, and then moves on. Following sections deal with using the aggregator, the nature of upstraming, designing themes, using scripts in a weblog and the outliner. Learning how the www folder works sheds a lot of light on how the whole program works, and understanding this will solve many problems. Here the book also shows you how Radio can be used for managing websites other than your weblog. The book moves onto more advanced topics--using the object database, and writing scripts--and presents them simply and with good examples. When I bought the book, I assumed I would never have cause to use the scripting language built into Radio, but the book has given me some ideas that I want to try and some confidence that I won't screw up too badly. It's these later sections where the book shines. Radio Userland Kick Start delves into all of the possibilities of the software, including developing web services and creating enhancements for Radio.
The volume is slim for a computer book--less than 300 pages--but it avoids the bulk of most other computer books (whose inflated page counts exist mostly to justify a higher price), mostly by not covering the most basic functions in exhausting detail. If you haven't a clue about starting with Radio, this book will definitely help, but it moves quickly onto topics more useful to readers beyond the stage of rank beginner. The book is a good value for users at many levels of familiarity with the software. If you hope to use Radio for more than the basic weblog functions, Kick Start will prove to be invaluable. |
