| The Essence of Hutt |
[Dec. 30th, 2009|02:10 am] |
|
http://mises.org/daily/3915 
Hutt presented a theory of unemployment and depression that is consistent with a rehabilitated Say's Law of markets and is fully capable of explaining observed fluctuations. |
|
|
| Tyranny and Finance |
[Dec. 30th, 2009|01:06 am] |
|
http://mises.org/daily/3936 
Dionysius, the storied tyrant of Syracuse, was a consummate financier. His gift stood him in good stead on the day he found himself in bankrupt condition, having borrowed from the citizenry more than he could repay. |
|
|
| Mac OS X 10.6 and Intego VirusBarrier incompatible |
[Dec. 30th, 2009|08:51 am] |
Since switching to Mac OS 10.6 on my Almost-64-bit iMac (64 bit processor, but 4GB memory cap), I've had terrible problems with crashing. The machine would lock up several times a day. It was more likely to be triggered by iTunes and big file moves, so I was assuming that it was an I/O problem, possibly hardware related (the hard drive failed on this machine a few weeks after I bought it).
I've been swapping regularly-used programs in and out looking for the source of the problem, and I think I've found it: Intego VirusBarrier X5.
Being a good little paranoid computer user, I run AV with all of the "scan on mount" and "scan on open" options enabled. I'd rather catch a virus BEFORE it runs. Well, it seems that when I turn those options off, the crashing goes away. As iTunes mounts my iPod when it starts, in hindsight, it's easy to see why this would cause problems, too.
I went with VirusBarrier because the reviews that I read said that while it had an ugly UI, it didn't tie up resources or cause as many system problems as it's competitors. I'm hoping that those reviews pre-date 10.6, because the alternative is that everything else on the market renders my computer unusable even more quickly.
I don't know whether this is an issue with 10.6 or with my hardware -- I went to 10.6 and started using VirusBarrier at around the same time. Either way, I think it's time to drop back to nightly scans and no realtime scanning. Maybe Intego will get this worked out before something hits that requires realtime scanning. If not, I guess I'll have to look at Norton or one of the other Mac AV products. |
|
|
| Loot |
[Dec. 29th, 2009|10:24 pm] |
M-audio AV40 studio monitors
Shirt my girlfriend made
Book: The Mythical Creatures Bible
Book: John Grisham - A Time to Kill
Wooden Puzzle Thing
Dangly clicky balls thing
Book: John Fahey - American Primitive Guitar
Book: Mickey Cochran - Guitar Crosspicking Technique
CD: Jars of Clay - The Long Fall Back to Earth
Beard slotted dobro nut (this is a guitar part)
Nintendo DSi
Nintendo DS games: Chrono Trigger, The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass
Nintendo DS accessories
Candy
Candy
Candy
Candy
Candy
Cookies
What did you get for Christmas?
Powered by ScribeFire. |
|
|
| Inside the blacksmith's shop at Colonial Williamsburg |
[Dec. 29th, 2009|08:47 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  tired | ] |
This morning, we went to the blacksmith's shop at Williamsburg, where I took this picture. I'm not altogether happy with it. I was using the stubby little 25mm "pancake" lens with the aperture set to f/5.6 (since it was dim in the shop, and taking pictures of people going about their business ruled out really long exposure times -- I settled on 1/50th of a second at ISO 400), which made depth of field a problem, particularly since I was trying to focus manually on a moving target. Sadly, the blacksmith himself wasn't quite in focus at the moment I took the picture -- the rough wooden surface of the workbench in the foreground was (this is a bit more obvious in the full-size original image).
Apart from rotating the picture a couple of degrees (so the square wooden pillar in the foreground was perfectly vertical), cropping it just a tiny bit, and scaling it down to a sensible size for displaying online, I didn't touch it at all with Photoshop. |
|
|
| New GnuPG key |
[Dec. 29th, 2009|10:08 am] |
Due to user error, I've had to move to a new PGP/GnuPG key. For those who care, it's
( behind the cut )
The Key fingerprint is
22F2 5B94 B26C 38BF BD85 3C08 39A7 7F14 072C E512
Feel free to verify the key with me via other channels. |
|
|
| The Right to Work |
[Dec. 29th, 2009|03:18 am] |
|
http://mises.org/daily/3942 
Mussolini is dead, but his fascist idea lives — the idea that the individual is the creature of the state, that he exists for the state, that he has no rights except what the state gives him and can take away. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Dec. 29th, 2009|01:00 am] |
|
I just wanted to recommend Orbit Unlimited by Poul Anderson as a good libertarian novel. It brings up a couple points about what might be required for a society to actually stay libertarian once you managed to get one going, among other things. I know we had a post about libertarian novels a while ago, but I don't have time to try and dig it up right now. I would probably recommend any of Poul Anderson's novels for at least liberty-minded themes even if they aren't all completely libertarian. |
|
|
| I love cars |
[Dec. 28th, 2009|10:13 pm] |
|
Took Laura's monster truck in for an oil change and asked them to look into some vibration at highway speed and while braking. Figured it might need new brake rotors and tire balancing. It did. Plus a new brake caliper, new ball joints, new spring bracket, and alignment. Oh, and the tires are slightly damaged because of the other problems, so we might need to replace those, too. |
|
|
| A few pictures from Colonial Williamsburg |
[Dec. 27th, 2009|10:30 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  okay | ] |
I'm at Colonial Williamsburg right now with my wife and her family. I took a few pictures earlier today. Apart from cropping them (not particularly aggressively) and scaling them down to a reasonable size for displaying online, I haven't touched them with Photoshop. This first picture was taken at the front window of the apothecary's shop, facing Duke of Gloucester Street.
( click here for two more images ) |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
benkilpatrick's Friends Page
scared
