Ian Royle

OK.  I definately didn’t see that coming!  Republicans voting against the bailout!  Wow, I think that was my last prediction.  At this point the entire system appears headed for collapse.  I guess we’ll just have to climb out from under the collapse in the future.  On the bright the Chinese have now put men in space.  So here is a big congratulation to such an accomplishment.  I’m going to learn something new today by using different buttons in this writing function. (more…)

Today for my post I offer up this prediction.  Given that the U.S. congress has agreed on the wording of the law, the vote is only a formality that is my opinion.  Why would it go so high and not more or less.  Well the situation is that the U.S. worst situation is the losses being incured by the financial institutions that are propping up the fabled US consumer.  The consumer isn’t so much fable as reality.  Most people, everywhere, not just the US but in France, Botswana, India, Quebec, anywhere, when given more resources, will consume them.  Financial institutions distribute the most liquid form of resource, currency.  So these two are intertwined.  The economy falters if consumers stop buying, consumers will only stop buying when the source of their currency dries up.  Ergo, the necessary bailout of the financials.  Is this long term, absolutely not, never is.  People are incredibly forgetful.  We did this in the eighties.  Had a credit crisis and two years, later we were basking in the wealth that was Reaganomics.  And soon we will put this whole fiasco behind us and tighten up lending practices for another twenty years or so until Obamanomics or McCainonomics makes the top half of the population wealthy enough that they believe the lucky runs are the result of their inherent skill.  As for the TSX, todays moderated bounce up will be as a result of priming for the expected run on resources coming as the US economy restarts and the world economy which has been chugging along oblivious to the US stall roars.  As well financials will get a boost, but that will be moderated since Canadian financial institutions while smarting from exposure to the US turmoil, are primarily serving Canadians, in Canada, where the economy never took a beating like in the US, sure it slowed, but you’d have a hard time finding sympathy in the states.  Foreclosures never took off and jobs and income stayed steady while everyone watched the carnage in the states all the while muttering, “None of our business.”  And it wasn’t, demand for resources continued but shifted from a US centric world economy to those emerging markets which aren’t so much emerging anymore as established, and that is where we are folks.  But 500 pts?  Seriously I’d bet on up, but I haven’t got a crystal ball.  If I did I wouldn’t be writing this stuff, I’d be shorting what was going to be down by the end of the day!

That’s right, a 15 year old Cutlass Sierra.  By putting in new plugs and filters and getting a few more years out of it my carbon print is staying much lower than if I bought a new hybrid.  You see the car is already made, no further steel, plastic or other textiles need to be mined, refined, shipped, shaped and assembled to produce my car.  It’s already here, already made and any further output it may have by moving my sorry ass from home to work and back is minimal compared to the massive amount of energy that needs to be expended to produce one hybrid.  I’m gonna say it.  The current environmental debate is the exact same debate we had years ago when AIDS popped up.  Hysterical fear made people make irrational decisions.  Everyone was afraid that AIDS would wipe the swathes of humanity off the planet…but it didn’t.  Everyone, looked to the government and politicians for salvation, celebrities lined up on stages, benefit concerts were organized and we forgot about it a few years later.  And that is what is coming for this current hysteria and the hucksters Like Dr. S and Al G. are going to fade into obscurity.  These events pop up every decade, and no one can predict what it will be.  But it’s like a haunted house, people like being scared.  They pay their money go in the door, play along, get frightened, safely and emerge out the side door into the lights of the midway and carry on living life as they always have.  But for a few moments they weren’t bored and that is what AIDS hysteria was and what environmental hysteria is now, the people clamour to hear the pundits today like they wanted to hear the shills speaking about AIDS for the same reason.  They are bored.  As it was then and now, AIDS wasn’t a threat to most people since it was confined for the most part to a specific subset of lifestyles in society, gay males and intravenous drug users.  So if a person wasn’t promiscuous and didn’t mainline hard drugs the threat to safety was negligable.  And today, most people know that the threat to our future posed by greenhouse gasses is a phantom, it isn’t real but the hysteria is, and we aren’t bored.  And the proof is in behavior and not words.  Everyone says they are concerned about the environment but very few have undertaken the sacrifices required to reduce greenhouse gases.  Even Dr. S and AL G haven’t done anything to reduce their carbon footprint.  If people were really scared they would change their behavior, but they aren’t.  They’re just going along with this newest fad and it is starting to get stale.  I can hardly wait for the next big scare.

I’m in a ranting kind of mood.  I’m angry, upset, mad, and I’m sure it is from an lack of vitamin B complex.  What I like to refer to as my Not-Angry-Pills.  Today, I went to work for the Canadian Militia.  And it sucked, well most of it sucked, but not the SAT range with Sgt Dulooey.  He’s a real nice fellow, good disposition, friendly personality, not much like me.  No my problem with the militia commonly called the Mo is its unrealistic expectations for attendance.  By unrealistic, I mean pay for time worked, and the desperate belief that other factors might overshadow the fact that the pay and benefits are better at any fast food establishment here in Alberta.  You see the upcoming weekends events are scheduled to begin at 06:15 Saturday morning with the first day finishing up at 01:00 Sunday.  We are then expected to go home which for me is a half-hour drive sleep, get up, shower, SHAVE, eat breakfast and return in time to start again Sunday at 06:15 and be dismissed at the earliest 16:00 Sunday afternoon.  That is 29 hours of work for which I will recieve the princely sum of two-hundred-fifty dollars less mess dues, taxes and other deductions.  If you figure anything after 8 hours a day would be paid in the civilian world at a minimum time and a half, there are 16 Regular hours and 13 OT hours.  When considering the hours against the earnings the wage we are earning that weekend is $7.04/hr!  For this, we recieve such benefits as, sitting on the dead grass on a windswept prairie, stale sandwiches and preservative laced snack products in a cardboard box, terrible coffee and the contempt of university students promoted to superior positions simply because, with no responsibilies such as children, mortgages and real jobs they were able to attend 6 week camping trips with the Mo during which excessive drinking would have occurred and at least one instructor and one candidate would have been removed from course for fraternizing.  Any wonder why I won’t be attending next weeks exercise?

The simplest economic law to understand and perhaps the only law in economics is the law of supply and demand.  It states simply that if demand is high and supply is low prices will rise and the opposite is also true.  If demand dwindles or supply exceeds demand then prices fall.  And now we come to opinions.  In our current think-less-buy-more society opinions are in high demand.  Everyone wants opinions on real-estate markets, stock markets, auto-insurance, private schools, presidential candidates and Brittney Spears’ parenting abilities.  Oprah’s empire is built on shilling the opinions of her weekly experts.  Dr. Phil comes to mind.  Opinions though are also in over-abundance.  The number of talk shows, blogs and op-ed pieces in local newspapers is proof of that.  So there it is.  Oversupply for existing demand.  And now for what I am up to here.  What I have noticed stems from a series of video op-eds done on video games by a fellow who goes by the name Ben Yahtzee.  Well not so much a fellow since he hates Christians but I guess fellow human?  His opinions come bundled up with a gimmick or three.  His gimmicks are, he talks really fast, he’s intentionally offensive and he doles out sarcasm like, well like opinions-in copious amounts.  I’m not sure if his opinions are good, I don’t play video games, but his delivery is extremely entertaining, at least at first and interesting enough that I visit back once a week to see his update.  So what the point I guess is is that if you have a good opinion in the internet age, your going to have to have a creative way to get it across otherwise, you may as well not waste your breath.

Today I thought I woud try to post a picture to the blog seeing as the internet is visual and without pictures this blog will always be boring!  Now I have to figure out how to optimize the appearance.  This pic is from Mexico, and that is brads arm.  We were feeding the fish.  And apparently many other people do as well since the fish saw us before we saw them and swarmed us.  It was pretty neat.  I took a lot of photos with my Optio W30 a great camera for underwater photography but the video function isn’t so good.  The audio is always terrible from a mic problem.

Currently, saving is unpopular.  Credit is the rage.  There isn’t anything wrong with credit as long as those being given credit are reliable.  It used to be credit was given to those who could be expected to return the borrowed funds with interest.  For the most part credit was available to those who had means.  Now though credit is available most often to those least in a position to accept it.  The point for the companies offering doesn’t seem to be a return of borrowed funds with interest, it seems to be interest into perpetuity.  In the instant generation we live in now you don’t have to wait very long for anything.  If you can’t afford it now simply fill out the credit application and wait for the plastic to arrive in the mail.  Eventually, following this pattern though entire incomes go to make payments for money borrowed for devices no longer used and events now forgotten.  It would be a good time to return to the previous reason for credit: the purchase only of necessities that are very expensive such as shelter, or assets, both durable and perishable necessary to earn a living, such as investments and in some cases vehicles.  Our current practice (which isn’t so current especially if you have ever read Charles Dickens) must cease if we are to establish a firm future for ourselves.  Save when others are not so that comfort can be had when you need it.

It is very cold today.  It was nice, yesterdays weather meant I got an unexpected and welcome day off from work.  Rain and clay means mud here in Alberta and trying to walk around a construction site with Alberta snowshoes on isn’t conducive to productivity.  So today I’m back to the site.  But this past Sunday I managed to install a medicine cabinet into a wall in one of our rental properties and took a good amount of video of it.  What I expected to be quick and straight forward wasn’t but I’m hoping edit the video and post it.  I enjoyed the work and hope to talk more about this sort of thing.

It’s that really cool special one off logo that replaces the blue e at the top of a browser next to the address bar.  It sets a site apart especially in the favourites section, at least for me.  I can spot each of my favourites and identify them by favicon.  So I set out to get one.  The instructions seemed simple, straight forward, with a plethora of sites to help a fellow out.  I followed the instructions and now it is all murky.  One site even said I had one…but I couldn’t see it.  So this is what I did, using numerous sites; feefavicon.com, faviconprime.com and html-kit.com.  I took a nice photo of me this morning and began following an article specific to self-hosted WordPress sites (WordPress.org). 

The graphic will need to be saved as “favicon.ico” before it will work.  There are many tools on the internet that makes this easy so you don’t have to worry about converting your graphic yourself.  The result will be two tiny images.  One at 16×16 pixels and the other at 32×32 pixels. But the only one that is listed as faviconico is the 32×32 one

A tool for converting your image can be found anywhere on the net by searching for favicon creator.  Go there and upload your image for conversion.

Now that you have your “favicon.ico” file.  Upload the “favicon.ico” file to your root directory for your WordPress blog.  If you don’t know what this is, look for the name of your site folder on your web host’s control panel file manager (like cPanel) or via your FTP client.  It should be the same folder that contains your “cgi-bin, wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes” folders.  Along with those folders you’ll see many other single files including “.htaccess”   If you see these you are in your root directory for your blog site.  Please note that if you have multiple domains (not sub-domains) hosted under one master domain you’ll mostly likely find your root folder in the main domain’s “public-html” folder.

If you’re confused, just locate the folder where you installed WordPress which should be the folder the domain you’re using for your blog.  Interestingly enough there is a zero kb file prepackaged into the wordpress root folder that will be replaced when you add your icon.

Now, upload your “favicon.ico” file in the root directory/folder.  After uploading you should see your new file along with the other folders and single files mentioned above.

Next, you’ll need to insert a small piece of code into your header page.  To do this, log into your WordPress admin and navigate to Presentation/Theme Editor.  Alternatively you can use your FTP client.  Locate your header.php file.  Then locate the </head> tag.  Place the the following code just above the </head> tag.

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico” >

After you’ve inserted the code it should look something like this:

<?php wp_head(); ?>
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico” >
</head>
<body>
<div id=”page”>
<div id=”wrapper”>

As long as you insert the line of code just above </head> tag it should work without problems.

The reason you are placing the code in your header.php file is because by default WordPress displays your header on every page.  This means your favicon will also be displayed in the browser with all your pages that the header is called upon.

If your WordPress blog is configured differently where you’re header is not displayed on all pages then you will need to also place this code within the <head> and </head> tags on those pages.

Once you’ve finished it’s time to refresh your browser.  Do this by hitting the “F5″ key or  “Ctrl + F5″ to achieve a hard refresh.  You should now see your new favicon in your browswer’s address bar.  If your browsers uses tabs (like Firefox) you will also see there as well as in your favorites list if you save your site to your favorites.

If you have problems, the site I mentioned above also has a validation tool so that you can verify everything is working properly.  If not, it should give a hint as to what may be wrong such as not finding the proper html tags.  The validation tool is located here.

And yes well I still don’t have a favicon.

NOTE: This only works for self-hosted WordPress blogs (WordPress.org) and not blogs hosted by WordPress.com

I haven’t found a theme I liked but I figured I may as well find one I could live with until I could do something better.  And change what I have for no other reason than to see how it can be done.  so I picked this 3 column plain one and added it.