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Well, the DOW is up 393 points so things are looking up. Even if the economy is down, there’s so much to be happy about. There’s been legislation that’s gone through these past couple of weeks that have been huge, but pale in comparison to the media onslaught of the economy.

Physician Payments Sunshine Act:

To me this is one of the greatest pieces of legislation to ever be introduced in healthcare. The bill was introduced in March, and so far there hasn’t been word of it. Here’s a summary of the PPSA, “H.R. 5605 would amend title XI of the Social Security Act to provide for transparency in the relationship between physicians and manufacturers of drugs, devices, or medical supplies for which payment is made under Medicare, Medicaid, or SCHIP.”

Solar Tax Credit Is Renewed:

For those who are trying to implement solar power into your homes, this is great news.

The Senate has proven atleast once that it can get over itself to pass useful litigation. It’s staggering to see how many bills or proposals are axed because of disagreement on the Senate floor. With so many interest groups, pushing and pulling different senators, it’s amazing that anything is able to get passed.

The solar tax credit was expiring at the end of they year, and for awhile it was looking like it wasn’t going to be renewed. The old tax credit gave residential solar users a cap of $2,000 for tax breaks; while commercial endeavours saw no cap but were compensated back for a percentage of their expenses. With the new tax credit, residential projects no longer have a cap.

Tags: Ramblings by JohnnyV - No Comments »

You always know the songs that transcend time, class, and ethnicity; they’re generally the ones on the radio. One of those songs is Loverboy’s ‘Working For The Weekend’. Yes, it’s rather overplayed and contrived in the sense that it’s trying to reach everyone. The song does speak truths though, because during the week it is essentially what we’re doing.

The idea of ‘Working For The Weekend’ isn’t as readily apparent as when Friday peaks its head up at the end of the week. The clock seems to move slower, there’s always that one person that needs help when you’re running for the door. Once your out; ahhhhh, it’s the weekend. I figured I would share with you some plans I have for this weekend, and I’d like to hear back.

University of Kentucky vs. Western Kentucky

There’s very few things quite as American as football, except perhaps baseball. Of course the NFL has become a juggernaut, over how much money the MLB rakes in. My college team will always be the UK Wildcats. I’ve been a fan since the early 90’s when winning 5 games was considered a decent season. Now there’s so much pressure put on them, it’s hard to imagine being a UK football player. That’s UK fans though, they can smell greatness, and then they demand perfection.

I know that most who are reading this could care less about the Wildcats, so let me hear about some of your fav teams.

Miracle at St. Anna

I love War epics, especially when there’s an interesting story and hopefully twist. The moment I saw the trailer for Miracle At St. Anna I was intrigued. In the past I haven’t been a huge Spike Lee fan, but I really liked his last movie Inside Man.

Here’s a synopsis for the movie from RottenTomatoes: “Miracle at St. Anna chronicles the story of four black American soldiers who are members of the US Army as part of the all-black 92nd “Buffalo Soldier” Division stationed in Tuscany, Italy during World War II. “

So far the movie has been received as ‘mixed’ and that’s being generous. The RT meter is hanging at 32%, with most critics saying that the movie is too long, and drawn out. I’ve liked movies that score low on the RT meter, so who knows it might be what I’m looking for.

I want to hear back from you all. What are your plans for the weekend. Or will you be the unlucky ones who don’t work for the weekend, because you’ll be working anyway?

Tags: Life by JohnnyV - 1 Comment »

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as pulling off a prank on someone. When the plan goes through without a hitch, the satisfaction of successfully pranking someone always brings a smile to the face. If there’s one place that a smile is needed, it’s at the office. Sometime the hum drum atmosphere of the office needs to be broken; and a prank is a perfect way to accomplish that.

When pranking someone at the office, there are a few guidelines to follow. First, make sure you aren’t offending anyone with your prank. The objective is to alleviate tension in an office, and offending someone isn’t going to help. Also, be sure to keep it simple. More than likely, you’ll be under time constraints for executing a prank. The more simple you keep it, the more likely you are to see it pull through successfully.

Here are a few ideas to get you started…

1. The Phantom Keystroker is such an amazing device, and is one of the most simple pranks. It does cost money, but the outcome is so worth it. The device slides into an extra USB port on a computer. It’s unassuming, and can cause much frustration. The Phantom Keystroker will input random keystrokes at various times throughout the day. If you sit near the person you’re pranking, watch as they aimlessly try to fix the problem.

2. This next prank is credited to the show; The Office. I’ve seen this pulled off and it’s nothing short of amazing. You take your victim’s office supplies, and put them in the snack machine. It’s again a simple gag, with the hardest part finding a way inside the machine. You can befriend the person that stocks the machines, and have him let you put the supplies in. Or if you have a key to the machines, that works as well. Be sure to leave him a roll of quarters, or nickels as he shouldn’t have to pay his own money to get his stuff back.

Do you all have pranks that you’ve successfully pulled off in the past? If so please share them.

Tags: Fun by JohnnyV - No Comments »

It’s funny to think back on the early days of the internet. I remember first getting our 56k connection at home; getting so excited that my internet speed was going to double. When Napster first came along, I thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread. I remember downloading a Snoop Dogg song, and it taking around a hour and a half to finish. I was in heaven.

Now in 2008, if someone told me I would have to revert back to 56k, I’d laugh. Or punch them in the face, depending on the validity of the statement. I bring up this topic, because due to bandwidth issues with our ISP, the office I work in is running at about 56k speeds. It’s enough to make you want to throw a chair out the window.

Now that I’ve had to deal with the problem all day, I’ve had time to reflect. Thinking about it; it’s scary to imagine how much we truly rely on the stability of the internet. I would be out of a job, if the internet just one day didn’t work anymore. I’d be in an unemployment line, or working construction.

Today, I’ve truly felt like the man in this video:

Tags: Internet by JohnnyV - 1 Comment »

The immediate response is one where skepticism plays anchor to hope: Could crowd-funding of real journalism work to actually, you know, save journalism?

Good ideas are always ruined by realities of humanity and this human reality involves not just money but bidding. It’s not just bidding, but it pulls from the masses instead of the elite. The only thing more corrupt than the elite is the masses.

At least the elite can be thrown over a cliff (or beneath a guillotine in one century) for misdeeds against the masses. But what happens when the masses are guilty? Does everybody just go home dodging accusatory fingers? Is a sacrificial lamb appointed?

Yikes, talk about a catch 22. But it will be fun to watch the experiment Spot.us is currently perpetrating in Northern California—David Cohn was able to talk the Knight Foundation out of $340,000 to give it a shot.

Before we get into how this crowd-funded journalism works, let’s address the present crisis. Media conglomerates own your news and with the help of the Internet and cable TV have created a 24-hour news cycle. While that’s been happening, traditional newspapers have been losing subscribers, money, and firing journalists. Bottom line: the watchdogs are employed by those they used to watch, and the formerly watched have pushed for more news in shorter time spans, which means less time and funding to investigate the flood of press releases in the inbox, often from PR/lobbying organizations hired by the formerly watched.

And then there’s blogging, good for the proletariat, bad for anybody actually looking for (expensive) truths. Investigative journalism, it is feared, is on the outs because nobody can afford it any more except those who’d rather nobody investigated at all.

Spot.us, then, thinks the answer is some good old-fashioned grassroots ingenuity, the kind that raised all that money for Barack Obama. Think the mayor is on the take from local contractors? Propose an investigation and donate $5 toward funding a report. If enough other people want that story investigated and are willing to fork over some cash to accomplish it, then you’ve got yourself an investigative reporter on the case.

Nobody guarantees he or she is a good reporter, but at least there’s somebody looking into it, right? And there’s that thing with the bidding: seems ripe for abuse, seems subject to similar problems we have today, as suddenly large sums of cash flow in toward particular stories in order to distract from certain other pesky stories.

But perhaps there’ll be a mechanism in place to control for rigs—and you know there’ll be attempts at rigging if this gets off the ground. But hey, it’s better than sitting on our citizen journalistic heels, right?

Tags: News by JasonLeeMiller - 1 Comment »

But only when on a deadline…

It’s hard to know how to react to psychological research saying procrastination is now an official mental illness affecting about 20 percent of the population. The cynic notes immediately this telling tidbit: psychologists warn these people need therapy.

Therapy, in case you didn’t know, is how psychologists stay in business. With all these psych majors pumping out of the liberal arts pipeline, there seems an obvious need to create more loonies—even if the loonies are generally functional, generally sane most of the time. There’s a lot of money in just slightly crazy. More drugs to dispense, more hours logged.

But that could be another sign of mental illness: denial. It could be humans have wires crossed in their brains all the time. Just add it to the list of human conditions. Human: man or woman existing in the throes of Kant’s constants of birth, death, and sexuality, but whose pandemic denial of evolutionary-societal conflicts makes them generally a little bit nuts.

Wouldn’t be hard to prove there are a lot of crazy humans, would it? It may be we only notice crazy when it’s really crazy, like-a-violent-monkey crazy or eat-your-liver-with-some-fava-beans-and-a-nice-chianti crazy. Maybe more subtle types of crazy we just tolerate and label as the character flaws that make a person human.

Maybe immediate manic skepticism or depressive acceptance of either theory is a bit too, well, bipolar. Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle. Maybe that’s a lie too. Doesn’t matter, the research shows what it shows: procrastination is a mental illness and the digital age isn’t helping things one bit.

I remember thinking ten years ago about how many kids I knew were on Ritalin and I wondered if too much stimulation—TV, radio, the Internet, cell phones, movies, music, games, well, you name it—wasn’t contributing to everybody having so much trouble paying attention. We know now that multitasking isn’t what it’s cracked up to be—it actually makes one slower—and I may not have been far from the mark according to the procrastination research.

So here’s what’s up: Chronic procrastination is more common than depression or phobias, and doesn’t affect any particular demographic. Rather, it affects people across racial, gender, and socio-economic lines:

“[I]t encourages depression, lowers self-esteem, causes insomnia, and indirectly affects health by discouraging visits to the dentist or doctor. Sufferers are also more likely to have accidents at home involving unmended appliances.”

They think procrastination is on the rise because of email, web-surfing, social networking, texting, YouTube, blogging, et cetera, et cetera.

But it’s not a new thing, not by a long shot. Time-wasters (”sufferers” of procrastination), they think, are hard-wired to be that way by evolution, by survival instinct. Back when we lived in caves, we only turned on the go-getter attitude when absolutely necessary, like when a saber-toothed tiger was staring us down, and hurrying the hell up suddenly mattered. So then, add this to list of human conditions as well: generally lazy until given a good reason to do something.

Take a good look at orangutans, how they lay about (you can see them on one of the Discovery channels), and then walk by a backyard with a hammock some time. Do you think there’s a difference?

It wasn’t really clear from the article about the study what was meant by “therapy.” When my grandmother was growing up, “therapy” entailed her parents taking switch to her backside. They didn’t know that causes other problems perhaps worse than laziness, which is why we (as a society) don’t do that anymore.

Today we use deadlines, and chronic procrastinators push the limits of those deadlines. Researchers say it’s not true when they tell themselves they work better under pressure; they just have selective memories and put those times they succeed in their mental pockets while conveniently forgetting the times they crashed and burned. One more human condition: We kid ourselves a lot.

How about a different, more radical proposal than trying to rewire a brain hardwired for energy conservation (i.e., chronic procrastinator)? How about we slow down and enjoy life from time to time? Maybe it’s the workaholic who’s crazy, instead?

Yeah, I know. Not gonna happen. I suppose brains are easier to rewire than entire achievement-driven societies.

Tags: Blogging, Business, Computers, Fun, Internet, News, Productivity, Ramblings, Technology by JasonLeeMiller - No Comments »