Finance is Fun

Lakers win, Spurs go home and we are going to LA.  Yes, now that that is over until next Thursday, I don’t have to worry about missing a game while we are in West Hollywood for a book reading.  We have gotten to the point where driving somewhere has to entail a lot of different tasks.  So since summer is on the cusp and the fair season starts in June we have to stop at our storage lot in El Toro to check out the equipment. Then it’s on to West LA for a cruise of the Santa Monica Blvd. shops before we get to the book reading by Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge. 

It’s weird but the more I wrote the above the more it felt like a Twitter post.  Weird because I normally don’t do much on the social networking side of blogging.  It has taken me three years just to add an avatar to this site.  My main reason for that is that I am mostly scornful of the cell phone, text-message crowd.  I really do see most of their constant chatter back and forth as meaningless.  Of course, that isn’t true.  Amidst all the chatter, is a hard core of real work getting done.  People who use the net, and their cell connections, to actually save time and save on energy use by not having to travel physically.  That I applaud.  But people are strange to me in the way they over-indulge in talking.

There is a new movie out I want to see that deals with this issue.  Tim Robbins is in it and it’s called Noise.  Maybe we can find it on our LA trip. 

Speaking of noise, and back to that Lakers game, am I the only one who feels that the announcers have gone crazy?  They are covering a televised game.  We can see it, too.  But the play by and the color, just keep on talking.  Can you imagine watching a game in person and the fellow sitting next to you keeping up a constant chatter?  On top of that, it feels like most of the time they aren’t talking about the game, they are talking about their own experiences.  What are they afraid of, that we will switch channels because they aren’t telling us what to see?  Talk about noise.

I started reading a new author yesterday, Nicola Griffith’s, Always, a tale told in classic noir style, the hero viewing the world for my eyes.  At one point, she has a need to quote Andrea Dworkin:

“We are taught systematically to be afraid.  We are taught to be afraid so that we will not be able to act, so that we will be passive, so that we will be women…”

Don’t worry men you are taught the same thing and for the same purpose.

“the information we get, every day, from TV and newspapers and online, is all about the rapes that are completed, the lives lost, the pain suffered — preferably with blood and body parts and panicky eyewitness accounts.  Why? Because that’s what get an audience, and the bigger the audience, the more media can charge for their commercials.  More than eighty percent of us spend our lives afraid because that helps soap makers and computer manufacturers sell product.”

One of the most popularized strategies of the 80’s “War on Drugs” is the scared straight method.  Take a group of potential users to a hospital or a jail to see the end result of drug usage, and, so the story goes, they see what there is to be afraid of and thus change their evil ways.  Last year, over 870,000 people were sent to jail in America for drug related crimes.  Adding their lives to the 70% of the prison population that were already there for the same type of crime.  But I bet a lot of commercial time accompanied the TV showing of this strategy.  Today, you can see its progeny in the spate of Cops, Jail, Coroner, and Law and Order shows that clog the cable system networks. 

These days, though, the fear and purchasing power of these show may be on the wane.  Too much of a good thing?  Maybe.  But I think fear of something else may be pushing its way to the surface.  Right now what is selling TV and newspapers, and even here online, is the fear of a Recession or even worse a long term economic Depression.

The imagination is a powerful thing.  Feeding it with the news that sells is the purpose of our advertising.  But, and this is a big But, being scared straight into supporting an increasing and ongoing trillion dollar debt-laced budget, that’s just foolish.  We need to take a deep breath and remind ourselves to use our fears to Think Straight about what the true nature of our economy and our part in it is.

Here are some questions that might help frame our answers:

• Where do we live and how close are we to the work we do?
• How often do we use alternative forms of transportation?
• What active part do we play in deciding what is happening in our own neighborhood?
• What is happening in our neighborhood that contributes to a sustainable life?
• How often do we participate in local government?
• What are the political forces at work in our local economy?
• What are the long range plans for our local economy?
• What are the real problems that face our local economy:  job loss, business failures, not enough affordable housing, air pollution, increased utility costs, education system breakdowns ?

If we think straight about the answers to these questions, I believe we will see that there is much we can do and much to be worried about, but if being afraid is the result, it is the wrong one.

In my continuing pursuit of blogging expertise, I recently checked out The Everything Blogging book from my local library.  I am always hoping that I’ll find something new to add to what I’ve learned since I became a blogger.  Keywords, search strategies, trackbacks, pings, and plug-ins are phrases that now trip across my tongue as easily as babies batting balloons. But something from the past is what brought this book’s scope into focus today.  Each of the 23 chapters has something unique and valuable to say.  A fact I’ll cover later this week in my review.  For now I just want to point out one thing.

In Chapter 20, on Maintaining Your Blog, the author reminds us that backing up your blog is a necessarily sensible thing to do.  You forgot didn’t you?  Just like I have.  But last week’s dust up over changes in the format here at wordpress should have reminded us:

Web servers everywhere can be vulnerable to a  whole host of problems, including, but not limited to, crashes, where all or parts of the data on the server is lost or damaged; hacking, when someone infiltrates the server and wreaks havoc; failure, when a server simply dies and the data cannot be retrieved; or human error, when one false programming  move wipes everything out.

She goes on to explain several methods one can use, starting with Blogger’s back up the whole blog into a separate site method, and Typepad’s ability to let you back up your whole blog as a file.  Some people go so far as to back up each post on paper which can be time consuming if you have to reenter the whole thing.  Some folks short cut the process by writing posts in a word processing format and then pasting them into the blog.  (I’ve used this method but sometimes the blog might not like or accept the formatting of the WP)  Backing up to your computer is also mentioned but if it can happen to your host it can also happen to your computer, so saving to disk is the final, safest, and most efficient method. 

1. Name a folder by your blog name and save it to a disk.
2. Copy each post, or each page of your blog (highlight and hit control c) then save it to wordpad or a WP under a distinctive name.
3. Paste your copy into the folder on the disk.
4. Set yourself up a reminder to do this once a week, a day, a month, or after every post, whatever you feel an amount you would mind losing is, and so that backing up becomes a habit.

It may be time consuming but once you get the habit, it will get easier.  It definitely is worth it since losing everything you have written can make you want to give blogging forever, almost.