Bill Canaday, hisself

Outside of the sex drive of a 17 year old, the money drive of a man in his 30’s seems to be one of the strongest forces for shaping lives.

And I’ve got to wonder if we aren’t missing something here, something important.

Have you any tips for living an unhurried life in these frenetic times?

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In order to take any appreciable value out of life, we have to put a commensurate amount into it.

There is no shortcut. If paperwork is a part of the process, we must attend to the paperwork. We can work smart. We can work hard. Or, in a best of both worlds scenario, we can work both smart and hard. But life is only going to let us keep what we have completely earned. That also includes our arrangements for investing what we have earned and for tax avoidance. (Not evasion; avoidance. Evasion is illegal. Avoidance is written into the statutes and is approved behavior.)

In other words, we must see the thing through. Then, and only then, can we sit atop our ’stash of cash’ and boldly declare “Mine”.

John Cruzat, USA Swimming’s diversity specialist, said these inequalities were compounded by a widespread misperception fueled by flawed academic studies that blacks’ swimming ability was compromised by an innate deficit of buoyancy.

“There are people who still give credence to these stereotypes, even in the black and Hispanic community,” said Cruzat, who wants to break the cycle that passes negative attitudes about swimming from one black generation to another.

When I was younger, I DID have ‘an innate deficit’ of buoyancy … I was too skinny to float automatically and had no exposure to pools to learn in. Just your average skinny white kid living in the ‘burbs.

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The problems we bloggers face pale in contrast to those faced by that kid on the left. He’s going to be waiting a long time for his next push.

So, keeping that in perspective, let’s take a look at a comparatively minor problem that seems to consume an awful lot of electronic “ink”.

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Patience is the unseen lever that moves the world. Few situations, presently intractable, will not change if we are patient. Then, under the new circumstances, we may find ourselves better able to proceed with our goals.

Lot’s of ‘rah-rah’ at the school board lately, but little traction on the things that would seem to be important? There might be a reason.

“With the relative opulence of today, it would be simple to fill teaching slots with accomplished men and women if that were a goal. A little adjustment in what are rationally indefensible licensing requirements would make talented people, many performance-tested adults in their fifties and sixties, available to teach. That there is not such fluid access is a good sign the purpose of schooling is more than it appears. The year-in, year-out consistency of mediocre teacher candidates demonstrates clearly that the school institution actively seeks, nurtures, hires, and promotes the caliber of personnel it needs.”

The Fresco At Herculaneum - John Taylor Gatto

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The best teacher I ever had was tenured … and that gave her the freedom to teach her final year as she wanted to. On the very first day of our “Seminar in Ideas” class — taught, most likely, as a ‘200′ class in college might be, she noted that we were in a ‘Level 5′ English class — hand-picked, literally, by her — and earning college credit for her class. We thought we had lucked out by applying in time. She noted that almost the entire senior class had applied. There were three hundred applications for 60 seats. She also noted that we were Seniors in high school, most of us bound for college next fall, who had never been taught the art and science of taking notes. So she dispensed with the printed curriculum and taught us how to take lecture notes for 6 weeks. Nearing the end of that detour, we could take notes as fast as she could lecture … and we finished the full, 18 week, curriculum in the remaining 12 weeks.

That is, we read the major work and defended the ideas of two major philosophers every week: twelve weeks, twenty-four philosophers and the high points of nearly thirty centuries of thought.

Every Friday at 2:15 pm, the inquisition convened anew.

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As of last week, I would have responded that ‘predatory lending’ had been met with ‘predatory borrowing’ and, to a lesser extent, I still might today. But the following statistics have me questioning just how much (of what) went on. This is beginning to look like a sophisticated variation of ‘redlining’.

Some community banks believe there’s a racial component to the sub prime mortgage crisis, an idea supported by a Federal Reserve Study that found 55 percent of African Americans, compared to 17 percent of whites, were steered to subprime mortgages, even when they were qualified for lower interest rates. —

cbs13.com - The Role Of Race In The United States Mortgage Mess

Numbers CAN lie, so I am not entirely sold on that quote. For instance, is it saying that 55% of all African American loan applicants were steered toward the sub-prime loans or is it saying that 55% of those who were wrongly steered toward sub-prime loans were African Americans? That is a much smaller number. Moreover, 55% + 17% = 72% and that leaves 28% hanging … who are they? Considering the rise in home ownership among Latinos and Middle-Easterners, I can guess.

Moreover, there are a number of other factors not weighed in that number, such as the location of the real-estate. While the borrower may be qualified for a better loan, the property itself might not justify that. I don’t know that this was the case, but I am pointing out that the numbers can’t be read quite so simply.

I’d like to see some of the raw numbers. Does anyone have a link they would care to share on this?

cbs13.com - The Role Of Race In The United States Mortgage Mess

Bill Gates might have to turn this down, but the rest of us would probably jump at the chance.

Mason, over on "SmallFuel Marketing Blog" offers up useful marketing information for small business owners.  Since I do accounting for small businesses and operate my own as well, I thought you might be interested in what he has to say. Don’t stop with this article … he offers up insight on gaining new customers and retaining existing ones, too. The information is not earth-shaking … think of it more as a series of gentle reminders to keep doing what you already know to do and to add to them as you go.

How I Gave Away 15 Minutes and Made $5700 | SmallFuel Marketing Blog

I normally wouldn’t make any sort of mention of porn … not even in jest … but this site uses it as just one example of the sort of information that might reside on your computer that you probably want to keep out of the hands of others. All of the techniques have a number of other uses.

For instance, I use TrueCrypt to securely store client accounting files in an encrypted directory and Eraser to delete other files existing outside the encrypted directory. This muddies the waters about the boundaries of the encrypted directory(ies). I do this so that I won’t get in legal hot water from my clients if the computer itself should be stolen. As long as I have physical custody of the (separately encrypted) USB drive and access to a fresh copy of TrueCrypt, the client data is safe and recoverable. If the USB drive is also stolen, I can still assure the client that no one can read the files. Not in this life, anyways … and maybe not in the next, either.

You can use any sort of file as the source of the encryption seed … even those .jpg files from the darker corners of the internet or those torrent download audio files that you’d just as soon no one knew you had. You might also take the output from a random number generator to use as a keyfile. Just copy and paste from the website to a text file. Save the text file using any name and any extension (Jillian_in_black.png, for instance or “TheWall_trk01.wav” or “2008q3.xls”) and tell TrueCrypt to use the file as a keyfile when encrypting or decrypting. Or, make a file like this as ‘bait’ and use a REAL photo, audio or ‘whatever’ file for the encryption seed.

Then, too, there is the issue of personal privacy. For several years now, technology has outstripped legislation so that there really IS no reasonable assurance of privacy anywhere. It is up to the citizen / end user to enforce their claim on privacy or lose it to ‘un-named others’. Just because I have ‘nothing to hide’ doesn’t mean that others get to gawk at it.

So, if you are interested in preserving your (US) constitutional rights to privacy, get on over to http://virtualhosting.com/blog and give them a thorough read. Just don’t tell ‘em that I sent ya, okay?