Spending Your Way Out of Trouble

The world’s financial problems came about by having a government push financial institutions into providing home mortgages to people who would not be allowed to hold a credit card in a third world country. These mortgages were invested in by a wide range of outside companies without anything approaching due diligence. These companies include insurance firms and private pension funds who should have known better.

Long after it was obvious that there were looming problems with the so-called “sub-prime” mortgages investors (generally using other peoples money) continued to buy in. When the penny finally dropped there was such enormous exposure from financial institutions that many of them needed to be bailed out with government money. It sort of makes you wonder why these firms payed big salaries to their financial people if they couldn’t see this one coming.

After throwing money around like drunken sailors to “stimulate” the economy the world’s leaders including Obama, Brown, Rudd and many others are still wondering what to do next as they have to keep the money printing presses working full time just to pay for what they have already spent.

Perhaps they should take a look at history, particularly the quote below.

“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced,
the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign
lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt.
People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” ~ Cicero – 55 BC

Great Service From Amazon.com

A recent experience with Amazon’s service people has left me smiling. Generally I have rather low expectations for service from online sellers but this was one occasion when the service was genuinely excellent.

I had ordered some books and had them sent to my address in Indonesia using the cheapest method, which has worked okay many times before (though slowly) and the first shipment (out of two) arrived in about the normal time frame of about five to six weeks while the second shipment, which had been shipped the same day but probably from a different location, was nowhere to be found three weeks later than the first shipments arrival.

I notified Amazon about this and they apologized profusely and immediately reshipped all of the books again and also upgraded the shipping method for free. As luck would have it the original shipment arrived a few days later, thus setting a new low standard for Indonesia’s customs and excise people.

When I informed Amazon about the arrival of the original shipment they thanked me for being honest and asked me to ship the newer shipments back to them by the cheapest air method and let them know the cost so that they could reimburse me.

Amazon obviously has no control over delivery of their shipments once they go out the door. Their gracious apology and their wonderful service in reshipping the books was a very nice customer experience. The way that they handled things when the original shipment turned up several weeks later than even the usual long period is nothing short of amazing.

I highly recommend shopping at Amazon for this reason. The helpful attitude does not stop after the product is sold and they have your money, unlike many others.

Sudan Pictures

WNPOC Sudan (18 photos)
13 June 2007, Juba

Global Warming Scam

I think that it is high time that the public started calling the media on the garbage they are spewing about global warming, sea level rises and all of the associated ills which they are making up as they go along. Take a look at the old pictures and quotes below and make up your own mind.

Call me a climate sceptic but when I see a program on CNN saying that Bangladesh is being inundated because of climate change I start to get annoyed at the crap that the media spews. Every report regarding a flood, drought, tornado, heavy rain etc. etc. is blamed on climate change.

This is patently ridiculous and contradicts the media’s own articles. Consider some of the following quotes.

“Bangladesh is already facing consequences of a sea level rise, including salinity and unusual height of tidal water,” said Mizanur Rahman, a research fellow with the London-based International Institute for Environmental Development.

Link

ADVERTISEMENTS for beachfront properties should include warnings that they may end up worthless because of rising sea levels, a planning expert says.

Link

Now compare them with the quotes below.

Venice has also suffered serious flooding for the second time in two weeks, with the waters reaching 1.05m on Thursday morning.

Last week, the “acqua alta” (high water) reached 1.56m, the highest level since 1986, before falling back again.

Link

The USA sweated this year through its hottest summer in 70 years, with temperatures not seen since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, according to a government report.

Link

You will notice that the last one was from 2006, not 2007 as you would predict if you believe what the climate change people would have you believe.

Now don’t you think that this could be classed as evidence that the climate change people are talking through their hats?

Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
- Michael Crichton

Nokia E71

My all-time favourite mobile phone was my old Sony Ericsson P910i but SE’s later phones just don’t match up in features or ease of use. I replaced the P910i with a Nokia E61i after the scroll wheel got wrecked by an idiot in airport security in Jakarta knocked the phone off the scanner in his haste to look at the duty free booze I was carrying.

The E61 was okay for text messaging and such but I had a hard time setting it up to send and receive email no matter how many times I rechecked the settings. The other problem was the sheer width of the phone making it difficult to find a belt pouch for it. It fit into the pocket of a work shirt but I had it drop out when I bent over, luckily without breakage, just a couple of scratches and a dent on one corner. The E61 was solid with a steel battery cover and a large battery, making it good for those long conversations with clients when things go wrong.

I had a brief interlude with the Sony Ericsson G900 but a drop of sweat on the screen managed to find its way into the screens inner layers and stopped the touch screen interface from working at all. Just as well, I had been trying to find an excuse to junk the phone as signal dropping (in places where cheap mobiles had no problem) poor screen visibility in sunlight conditions and the tiny virtual keyboard along with a fairly opaque menu system compared to the old P series were getting on my nerves.

 

 

Time for a new phone. Previously I had a hankering after the Nokia E90 but after seeing it in real life I didn’t really like the bigger size compared to most of the current crop of mobiles. My bad experience with the SE G900 and the tiny virtual keyboard made me look for something with a full keyboard. The HTC TyTN II and the HTC Touch Pro were contenders with their slide out keyboards but the size, price and the fact that Windows mobile was driving the things counted heavily against them. Blackberries had the full keyboard but were pretty large as well.

Then I saw the Nokia E71. All of the functionality of the E61i was there in a a slimmer package. Even though this phone’s trim size fits in most cell phone pockets (those built in to many cargo/BDU type pants) the battery was the same size as the larger E61 giving excellent battery life of up to ten hours of talk time as well.

Signal strength is up there with the best of them and the phone is a quad band unit making it useful almost anywhere in the world. The connectivity is rounded off with HSPDA 900/2100, WiFi, Bluetooth (A2DP) and infra-red for those whose laptop no longer has an infra-red transceiver. Mine came with a 2GB MicroSD card for extra storage for email and such.

The newer phone has a couple of features that I found lacking on the E61i. The first is automatic key locking. I don’t know why Nokia left that out of the E61 but I always had to remember to lock the keys manually. The second is a real alarm clock function which can use multiple alarms. Finally Nokia built in the GPS in the E71. As there is nothing missing you have to wonder how they fit everything in there with a maximum thickness of 10 mm.

Thinks I like:

• Small size fits in pants pockets without making you look like you have a cancerous growth.
• Great signal strength and clear calls.
• Has fairly good office file viewing software.
• Solid feel.
• Sunlight viewable screen.
• Built in GPS.
• Full keyboard which I can use one handed.

Things I don’t like:

• Screen a touch small, I know it goes with the trim profile but my eyes are getting older.
• Keyboard a little cramped for my large hands, see above for why I can learn to live with that.
• Limp white colour, I prefer the grey version but there were none in stock anywhere.
• The shiny back cover in polished stainless steel with etched lines is a magnet for fingerprints.
• People asking how I like my Blackberry.

Vibroseis versus Dynamite

I’m currently on a 2D job which is mainly flat but it does have one portion in the middle which has some hills requiring bulldozer cutting. The client emailed me the other day asking about using vibes in the hills as somebody at the office had asked if it wouldn’t be better to use dynamite. On this job dynamite is not a realistic option as importing the stuff is difficult and drills are just not available to get it down to a decent depth so I needed to answer in such a way that he would be able to convince the doubters.

The first thing that I normally do in these cases is look for an expert opinion that has been published in a respected journal but as I looked around the Internet for any sort of scientific comparison between vibroseis and dynamite on flat terrain I came up empty, far less a comparison on steeper grades.

I know from several recent projects that vibes can be used pretty effectively in some steep areas but I am also perfectly aware that the laws of physics even apply to seismic crews and vibrators. The simple fact of the matter is that as we get to steeper angles the force that the vibe exerts is working at an ever increasing angle to the force exerted by the vibes weight which normally holds the machine down so the output power can never be equal to that on level ground so there must be a limit to what can be done with a vibe. The problem is to demonstrate that this limit will not be reached in the hills that we have.

As mentioned earlier my recent projects include two jobs in mountainous country. One of the jobs was a 3D done completely with vibes and the other was a 2D where there was dynamite available and some pattern holes could be drilled in the hard rock areas that were completely inaccessible to the vibes.

On the latter job the dynamite shots were not as good as the vibe records for adjacent shots. Penetration was poorer and the noise was far more noticeable due to the lack of stacking and correlation which favours the vibes. The terrain in that area was far worse than anything that we are up against here and the data was acceptable. I know that it isn’t really a fair dynamite versus vibes comparison using pattern holes but then again the vibroseis were being used in places that they were never designed to go.

Here on this project the same vibes are being used  and the data we have been getting is very good but the question remains, would it be better to drill and use dynamite. Cost is a big part of the consideration when it comes to seismic, especially with the oil prices at current levels.

Maybe somebody out there has been involved in some sort of comparison testing that could be of help. Let me know in the comments below.

New Server Home for Seismic Talk

I have not made any posts for some time as I tried different software to run Seismic Talk and a couple of different hosting accounts. I tried using another gallery style as well with the images hosted on another service but could not get things set up to make it easy for other people to add albums to the gallery. After some time it was apparent that the other systems could not come close to the user friendliness of Wordpress and Gallery2 with the WPG2 bridge making them work together harmoniously so I just updated the old site with a bit of a facelift and got all of the other bits up to date.

Seismic Talk is now hosted on a new account with its own IP address. I had tried to set it up on a Virtual Private Server but kept running into issues with file permissions causing automatic updating of plug-ins and the system itself to behave badly. This was not the fault of the hosting company, their equipment ran very well and served the site up faster than ever before, but one of the quirks of virtualization software in conjunction with the site software which even the best service in the world could not fix.

I could have gone back to updating things manually but laziness is a factor. The automatic updates work well on this new server and the speed should be okay even on a shared server as the system information always shows a low load factor for all of the different services and hardware.

The hosting company that I am using now did a fantastic job of moving the site with only a few small tweaks needed to get everything functional in its new home.

Hopefully now that things are set up I will be able to spend more time adding more posts for you to read.

Airport Security

I thought airport security was over the top when I couldn’t get into an airport because I was carrying a windproof lighter as “It could be used as a weapon” but this is just plain downright ridiculous.

Brad Jayakody, from Bayswater, central London, was stopped from boarding because his Transformers T-shirt depicted a robot with a gun. Now I know that the Brits have become all new age sensitive and namby-pamby about guns but this was a picture for crying out loud. A picture of a cartoon show robot that kids all over the world watch.

Mr Jayakody said he had to change before boarding as security officers objected to the gun, held by the cartoon character.

Airport operator BAA said it was investigating the incident.

Mr Jayakody said the incident happened a few weeks ago, when he was challenged by an official during a pre-flight security check.

“He says, ‘we won’t be able to let you through because your T-shirt has got a gun on it’,” Mr Jayakody said.

“I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’.

“[The official's] supervisor comes over and goes ’sorry we can’t let you through and you’ve a gun on your T-shirt’,” he said.

Mr Jayakody said he had to strip and change his T-shirt there before he was allowed to board his flight.

“I was just looking for someone with a bit of common sense,” he said.

It’s a cartoon robot what threat is it to security or offensive to anyone at all.”

It’s bad enough that they took away our liquids and gels. This has been stretched to the extreme of lipsticks which are so far removed from gels that there is no comparison.

Looks like common sense is completely missing from airport security.

A BAA spokesman said there was no record of the incident and no “formal complaint” had been made.

“If a T-shirt had a rude word or a bomb on it, for example, a passenger may be asked to remove it,” he said.

“We are investigating what happened to see if it came under this category.

“If it’s offensive, we don’t want other passengers upset.”

Are we eventually going to have to be naked and sedated to even think about boarding an aircraft?

Gun T-shirt ‘was a security risk’ BBC

Microsoft Office 2007

I have been using Microsoft’s 2007 version of their office suite for a little over six months now and while i have managed to become accustomed to some parts of the “ribbon” there are other parts where it is sheer torture to use for anybody with a good working knowledge of the older version.

One example of this is inserting a table of contents. After clicking on the “Insert” tab and looking over the available options I discovered that it is not on the insert bar. You need to go to the reference bar to find it. Once there it is easy enough to add a table of contents using the appropriate button but how do we then format the table? I have not yet found out as I have not delved too deeply into the system.

I tend to take the path of least resistance and just accept the defaults. The only clue that I have found so far is to toggle the fields but that seems to be a lot of work for little return. It would be nice if the user could change the table of contents so that the main headings were not split from the sub headings for that chapter. It is probably possible but it should be easier.

Headings are easier and one thing which I have found better is that Microsoft have finally woken up to the fact that many documents use appendices and made it simpler to implement them in your document. This makes my life a lot easier when I am writing reports as I use appendices a lot.

Headers and footers are a different story. What happened to the old style of page numbering where you could put in the page number followed by the total number of pages? If it is still there I can’t find it. With the old version it was simple but the wizards in the new version left it out completely.

Another problem is with images in the header. I have a documents which have logos in the headers and for some reason after placing the logo I cannot now select it to move it at all. What is happening with that?

Mail merge is fairly easy though formatting the results of the merge as currency or dates and times requires that the fields be changed by hand. Why can’t we just have an option to keep the formatting of the original data? Most of my merges are from Excel in any case so it should be easy enough.

One of the problems that I had with the old versions has still not been fixed in the new suite. Captions can be placed above or below figures and tables from the right-click menu. The only problem is that they are not stable. Make some major changes to your document and the captions can become divorced from the images and show up a couple of paragraphs away. I wish they would fix this.

Outlook is slow to load and creaky when loaded. It is also a mathematical imbecile with different percentage numbers showing up in the status bar and the send receive details. Often both are wrong. With four email accounts set up when 5 send/receive actions are completed I have seen the status bar showing 25% complete and the send receive details showing 75%. It makes you wonder if we can really trust Excel to work out our formulas.

The status bar is particularly stupid. Sending one email can show sending message 4 of 4! Where did the other three come from? One of my pet bugs in all versions of Outlook that I have used to date is the send receive details dialogue. Why does Outlook always show sending from every account even when you have absolutely no email being sent? Can’t one of their developers fix this?

I am also heartily sick and tired of seeing the popup in the task tray telling me that an Outlook file did not close correctly and is being checked. Microsoft admit to problems for .pst files around 2GB in size. Mine is less than 500 MB but I still get this more than half the time. I sincerely hope that SP1 for Office 2007 fixes this.

Excel 2007 adds some nicer chart formatting options, particularly on 3D charts. The blends and rounded corners can look really nice but getting the chart in the first place seems much more fiddly. My biggest problem came with the changes to pivot tables but I have managed to get over that. The other changes don’t seem all that difficult to get used to compared to Word.

There are some office addins available to bring back the traditional menu systems. This is fine but I used to customize the menus in Office 2003 so that many functions which I regularly used were only a click away. I know it is possible to customize the ribbons, if you are an XML guru. The little bar that is left for us to customize is not enough for me. In a CAD program that I own you can add fly-outs to the menus. What is wrong with Microsoft that they cannot seem to implement this, even if they had to release a suite for power users to do so?

I use NotePad++ for text editing and HTML quite a lot. This is a freeware program but one thing which I like is that the save button is grayed out until there are changes in the document. It would be nice to see this feature on all software, particularly software that costs a considerable sum of money as Office does.

I did change back to Office 2003 for a while. The one thing that made me reinstall Office 2007 is an add-on. The save as PDF works brilliantly with tables of contents becoming clickable bookmarks and all links working well, albeit that they open in a web browser by default, even links to other PDF files and images. The images I don’t mind so much but PDF in a browser can bring your computer to its knees.

That said I still like love the way that the save as PDF works. I had always used Adobe Acrobat Pro before but with Office 2007 the output has been repaginated compared to the original Word document if you convert to PDF rather than just printing to Distiller. I don’t know if that is Adobe or Microsoft but it shouldn’t happen. There is also the time factor. A 200 page document being converted to PDF using Adobe Acrobat gives you time to make and drink a cup of coffee. The save as PDF is much quicker.

I have heard Microsoft Office 2007 being referred to by colleagues as “Office for Idiots” and they are not too far wrong. The bells and whistles are more accessible to newcomers and people who are barely computer literate but power users generally complain about it, especially those who have used the older versions for a long time.

One thing which the ribbon bar has done is to make things easier for people who format documents like a fifth grader, with different fonts and colours for all of the styles. The styles being on the ribbon are not a big help for those of us who used to keep all of the styles open in the right sidebar. How many documents have you received with more than 100 styles used? I have lost count as most people just change the fonts and colours etc using the left side of the “Home” tab on the ribbon.

One thing that Microsoft could do is to change the home ribbon and leave out the font changing stuff from that side. Instead just leave it where it should be, in the customize styles section. This would at least save me from having to see documents with really wild formatting.

Another thing that should be done is to have a wizard that pops up whenever somebody uses more than one carriage return and explains to people how to use the paragraph spacing options. This could also be done for tabs or indents when multiple spaces are used.

The menu changes after the old menu was used in three prior versions are a big step. Microsoft should seriously consider adding the option of using the newer ribbon style or going back to the traditional menus, even if the option must be selected at install time.

While I am not an Office guru, I do use quite a lot of functions that most people never see. The simpler ribbon bar may be fine for them but I still have issues with it, even after regular use for more than six months. I am sure that I cannot be the only one. Are you listening Microsoft?

Oil price "may hit $200 a barrel"

A Goldman Sachs energy strategist warns that this may happen in as little as six months. This is because of the demand driven price of oil.

Goldman Sachs energy strategist Argun Murti made the warning as benchmark US light crude passed the $123 mark for the first time.

Surging demand was increasingly likely to create a “super-spike” past $200 in six months-to-two years’ time, he said.

Oil prices have now risen by 25% in the

last four months and 400% since 2001.

US sweet, light crude hit an all-time peak of $123.53 (£63.25) on Wednesday, while London Brent crude jumped to $122.32.

Mr Murti correctly predicted three years ago – when oil was about $55 a barrel – that it would pass $100, which it reached for the first time in January of this year.

The article goes on to mention some of the factors driving the price up.

Soaring global demand for oil is being led by China’s continuing economic boom and, to a lesser extent, by India’s rapid economic expansion.

Both are now increasingly competing with the US, the European Union and Japan for the lion’s share of global oil production.

This additional demand comes at a time of continuing production problems in a number of oil-producing nations.

Production is down in Nigeria after the latest attacks on pipelines this week by anti-government militants, while Iraqi exports through the north of the country have been hit by renewed cross-border raids by Turkish forces against Kurdish insurgents.

Oil prices are also rising as the key US summer driving season approaches.

You have to wonder how big a factor the US driving season will be with people already feeling the pinch with higher pump prices and food also on the rise.

If the oil price does hit $200 we can expect another wave of food price increases as the increased costs hit the farmers.

You have to wonder how much this will affect the global economy.

BBC NEWS | Business | Oil price ‘may hit $200 a barrel