The melt-down of our economy that started in the fall of 2008 wasn’t just fueled by corporate greed. Corporate greed might be born in a vacuum, but it takes its life from our gluttony.

There will be a lot of people, even those who see ads like this, who will choose to spend themselves into deep debt … and deep doo-doo … again this fall. They do it every year and then hold their breaths until they get their income tax returns. It’s called “keeping up with the Joneses” Well, here’s some bad news … “the Joneses” are broke. They’ve been living on plastic so long they’ve got recipes for it.

It will do no damage to the economy if you don’t buy anything you don’t actually need for a while. In fact, it will help all concerned if you simply focus on paying down your debt and maybe putting a reserve fund away before you start buying ‘shiny’ things again.

The guy in Pakistan who makes these things might feel a pinch for a while, but he’ll get over it.

I may have gone to the Red Ruby restaurant for the last time ever tonight.

My wife and I are accustomed to going out to eat after the meeting Sunday. Sometimes we go here, sometimes we go there. Basically, we keep going someplace we like until we begin to tire of it. While our side of town is not known for its ‘haute cuisine’, there are a fair number of places one can go to eat that will not kill either the diner or his wallet. They range from White Castle at the low end to Olive Garden at the upper end.

Now, I’m not saying that White Castle is the lowest place that one could eat; I’ve certainly eaten worse. But it IS the worst place I am willing to go to deliberately. Nor am I saying that Olive Garden is the top ranked ristorante anywhere on earth … but the food is reliably good at prices I don’t have to save more than a month to enjoy.

My personal top-ranked dinery is a little pub in Limerick, Ireland about a 5 minute walk from the Jury’s Inn. Don’t eat at the Inn, eat at the deli across the street during the day and at the pub come evening. Really, it’s better this way.

In between, our neighborhood is blessed with a wide variety of greasy spoon establishments, including a fair assortment of Coney Island restaurants. None of the local Coney Island joints are famous, but most are passable imitations of the real thing.

Duressis, a Macedonian joint on Telegraph, makes decent french fries and spinach pie, but there is nothing in their dogs to set them apart from anybody else. They make the same gut chili from the same thawed blocks of grease that everyone else makes. It’s probably the only time most people eat tripe.

For some time now, my wife and I have been on a Chinese restaurant kick. There is a local Chinese joint with threadbare carpet that serves absolutely the best hot & sour soup on the planet. It’s spiciness and viscosity are spot on. Like I mentioned earlier, its name is “Red Ruby” and it is also on Telegraph, just south of Joy road.

By the third or fourth spoonful of this wonderful elixir of a soup, the floodgates of our sinus cavities have been opened wide and long before the bottom of the bowl (about a quart of honest to goodness soup) all systems are ‘go’ and I am breathing as though through a wind tunnel.

And that’s why I am writing you. You see, I am troubled no end about having to bid adieu to this beloved cookery, yet, wander I must.

Tonight my wife ordered two egg rolls and a large bowl of soup. I ordered a side of pot-stickers, an egg roll and an equally large bowl of soup.

Fine, so far.

Then, as dinner came to its inevitable close (can you believe that she finished that huge bowl of soup before I was half-way through mine? WOW!), our hostess brought us a complimentary set of fortune cookies. I looked at my wife and said something to the effect of “My, you WERE hungry!” She just grinned back at me with a mischievous look that I doubt if many other people get to see, quite pleased with herself.

Mind you, those cookies only come free with a full-on meal … we weren’t supposed to get them.

Avis opened hers and read it aloud and we both had a bit of a laugh at the good fortune that is supposedly headed her way.

Most of the time, fortune cookie fortunes make for entertaining reading … like scanning the National Enquirer headlines in the grocery store checkout lanes. So we usually read them and end the meal with a good chuckle.

But mine said:

“Shut Up”

(the actual text after the break)

Click here to read on, my friend.

On November 12, 1938, Adolf Hitler ordered the given name of God (Jehovah / Yahweh) removed from the Bible.

This name appears at least 6,200 times in the original Hebrew texts. (Counting, apparently, all variants, some sources range as high as 6,828.) When my wife and I attended an exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was our great good privilege to see this name on the ancient texts with our own eyes. It was, for us, a profoundly moving moment.

Up until the most recent revision, the KJV carried it at Ps 83:18. With the most recent incantation of that version, it is my understanding that Hitler finally got his way.

As the name would have appeared in ancient texts.

Got your imagination fired up?

Down, Skippy, down … these are two VERY talented German girls (if I understood the introduction, they are sisters) at a competition of some sort.

Although marred (IMHO) by a last-second gratuitous blurb, these gals are also incredible. WAAAY high energy and super coordination.

I’m sorry, but it just isn’t going to work out between us and, at the risk of being blunt, the sooner we both acknowledge this, the better.

I had hoped for better and more and I really worked hard to make it happen between us, but my Home Media Center, with its allure of a full terabyte of data storage addressable from anywhere on my home network is, alas, not to be.

I’ve tried everything I know how to do to keep things from coming to this point. I’ve booted, reset, re-booted, plugged and un-plugged, installed, uninstalled and re-installed in as many combinations as I can think of and, while I’ve come tantalizingly close to consummating our tryst, you keep throwing the same roadblock in my face.

A few days ago you tempted me with a lovely graphic of the folder structure and, truth be told, when you were directly connected to my laptop, I was able to sneak a file aboard your glistening metallic disks … I hope you don’t mind but the only way a man can be certain what his limits are sometimes is to press and stretch them. But, even though you somehow allowed that momentary intrusion, in a moment it was gone and you never did reveal any administrative interface that would allow me to make the relationship permanent. It was like a first timid kiss … with none ever to follow.

Today, you show up as a workgroup computer and still, o’ tease of mine, still you keep me at arms length, telling me to speak with my system administrator about permission to mount you.

I AM the system administrator and I haven’t a clue as to what you might be talking about. You should have shipped willing to take on all comers. Instead, you arrived locked down in an electronic chastity belt that lets your suitors look, but not touch.

You have played too hard to get, m’dear; there is a Western Digital 1 TB NAS sitting in a box at my feet quietly whispering to me “use me, use me”.

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Update : From the time I made the decision to open the box, the Maxtor Central Axis network storage server took all of 15 minutes to get set up, including setting up users and getting the initial backup started. I estimate (by eyeball, basically) that it transferred files over my 10/100 network at roughly 5 Mb/s. I note, too, that there is a USB port where I might attach additional storage … which I have in the shape of 1TB Duo-Pro desktop external drive.

This might get interesting … I now have roughly 2 TB of external storage. According to the outside of the box, that amounts to roughly 33,000 hours of audio OR 2,000 hours of video (that’s a normal US work year of 50 wks of 40 hrs. each) OR well north of a half-million photographs. Hmmm … looks like a challenge to me!

Update #2 (11/04/09): After roughly 18 seconds of sober reflection, I modded the DuoPro down to 500 GB and set it to run in raid 0  mode, that is, mirrored. While that cuts the capacity in half, it is an aid to the reliability of the device in that data is written to both hard drives simultaneously and, in the event of the failure of one drive, the other has a complete copy available for transfer to another storage device.

n.b. Since I ended up re-arranging my network topology, I tried installing the Iomega ‘one more time’. It just isn’t meant to be. It’s boxed up and waiting for UPS to pick it up for return. Kudus to Amazon.com for a no-hassle return policy. Everybody else seems to take a “you opened it, it’s yours” attitude toward computer stuff. (How on earth am I to know if something is junk without opening the box?)

Not Amazon … they give the purchaser up to 30 days to try to get the flea-bitten thing working before closing out all chance of returning it. Even then, they will offer to sell it for you.