Jokes of the Day
On the lighter side of things, I came across two jokes in today’s morning news. The first joke came from Bill Clinton, who was out yesterday promoting his wife’s presidential campaign. As reported by Newsbusters, he said the following:
This is not your rally. I heard you. That’s another thing you need is a president, somebody who will stick up for individual rights, and not be pushed around, and [Hillary] won’t. The policies she spearheaded saved a heck of a lot more lives than all the TV ads that were bought and all the hot air that was spread. And we ought to talk about that.
Get it? Funny stuff! But not to be outdone, Fidel Castro decided to leave power with a zinger of his own. As reported by NPR:
When the Cuban parliament meets Sunday, Castro said, he will neither seek nor accept a new term as president.
Term as president? Good one!
Tags: [bill clinton, fidel castro]Launchy and Digsby
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been using some new programs that have had big impacts on the way that I use my computer. They have been so useful, I’d like to share!
The first one up is Launchy, a keystroke launcher for Windows. What is a “keystroke launcher,” you ask? It’s a program that lets you launch programs using keystrokes instead of the Start Menu. Launchy is pretty simple: All you do is hit Alt-Space and start to type the name of a program in your start menu. It will recognize what you are typing and give you the option of opening it with the enter key.
So, for example, if I want to open Firefox, I just press Alt-Enter and start to type “firefox.” By the time I’ve typed “fi” the option to open Firefox appears, and I can just click enter. Or, if I want to open Google, I type “goo” and I can hit enter.
What makes Launchy great are all of the options you can give it. You can associate your favorite websites with Launchy commands. You can associate programs outside of your Start Menu with Launchy commands. And here’s the kicker: You can point Launchy at a directory and have it index any file type you wish. For example, if you point Launchy at your music folder and tell it to index your .mp3s, you’ll be able to play any mp3 simply by typing in some words in the name of the mp3 file. Personally, I use Visual Studio most of my work day, so I pointed Launchy at my projects folder and told it to archive all of the .sln files. Now I can open any project just by typing the name of it in.
As silly as it sounds, I think you’ll save more time than you know by skipping over your Start Menu when you want to open a program. All you have to do is think of the program you want to use, start to type its name, and it appears on your screen. I took a few screenshots to show how the program works.
Let’s say that you want to look up the latest news on net neutrality. Normally you’d go to your internet browser, go to news.google.com, and then search for “net neutrality.” With Launchy, you can just press Alt-Space, type in “News [TAB] net neutrality” and you’re there!
Now let’s say that you want to work on a Vitalist API .Net project that’s almost ready to be released. Just press Alt-Enter, then type in “vitalist,” the option will appear.
Just give it a try for a week or so, and I bet you’ll never want to go back.
The next program that I want to introduce is Digsby. Digsby is a program that integrates IM, email, and Facebook into one application. It doesn’t have all of the features that Trillian supports, but I think it’s friendlier. And for those that use online mail services like GMail, Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail, it lets you manage your email without going to the particular site. If you get an email alert that you know is spam, you can mark the email as spam from Digsby. Again, big time saver.
It even lets other people talk to you through Facebook or HTML widgets. If you look near the upper-right portion of the screen, you’ll see a Digsby widget that will tell you whether I’m online. If you want to send me an instant message, all you have to do is type it, click enter, and it will appear on my computer! Here’s an example of what I’ll see:
Thanks to Flibbertigibbet for showing me this Digsby feature. After I saw it on his blog, I had to have it!
Launchy is available here. Digsby is available here, but it’s under a private beta. There are a number of invite codes floating around the
internet if you don’t want to wait for the first public version.
Keep your light rail to yourself, Kansas City
If you want an example of the problems with democracy, you should read about Kansas City’s affair with light rail. For the past ten years, there has been multiple ballot proposals for increased taxes for light rail or public transit in general. It’s hard to find the exact ballot proposals and their dates, but the votes went something like this:
1998: No
1999: No
2000: No
2002: No
2003: No
If their goal was to poll Kansas City’s opinion on the idea of light rail, they would have had their answer. Obviously, that wasn’t their goal. After each one was voted down, proponents just gathered the signatures they needed to get another measure on a future ballot. They wanted Kansas City to vote in the proposal, and in 2006 they finally got their wish.
2006: Yes (53% to 47%)
With a tiny majority of voters who bothered to vote in that election, they finally had what they needed. They declared that the public had finally spoken, and they wanted light rail!
But what about all of the past elections where it was voted down? That’s the past!
But what about what they want today? Should we continue to vote on this as we have in the past? No, the public has spoken!
But what about the rights of those citizens that might not want to pay for a light rail system? Tough, the public has voted!
This is what happens when individual rights are put up for vote. Rather than persuade you to voluntarily contribute to something, people can go to your neighbors and try to convince them for your help. And in the same way that proponents for things like these don’t care for your opinion, they don’t really care for the opinion of others, either. They want light rail, not your opinion. So long as they get 51% or more at one point in time, and they suddenly have the mandate to use the government’s power to do what they want — no matter what it costs or who has to pay.
The solution is to recognize the government’s proper role: the protection of the individual’s right to his or her life, liberty, and property. Everything the government does should fall within that scope. And obviously, building a train for John and Jane Doe to take to work is not valid.
Anyway, here’s the reason I had to explain the situation. While listening to the radio on the way to work one morning last week, I happened to catch an interview with Kansas City’s mayor, Mark Funkhouser. He was questioned about getting neighboring cities and counties to pay for some of Kansas City’s things, and he said that people need to recognize that many of the things in Kansas City were “regional” assets that everybody in the area should all pay for. And since the average wage in Kansas City is $30,000 less than the average wage in neighboring Johnson County (where I live), it’s time Kansas City’s neighbors paid their share.
It’s bad enough that Kansas City chooses to waste their money and time on things like light rail. Now they want to tax non-Kansas City residents for their decisions, too!
Funkhouser held a mayoral “summit” with the mayors of neighboring towns last week, and I was afraid that it would be the first step towards a tax on me, an Olathe resident, for Kansas City. So, when I read the news on Monday, I was happy to hear that the mayors of Johnson County cities, including my mayor, did not attend the meeting. And I love one of the responses I read here:
“I’ve got a real job I’ve got to do,” Olathe Mayor Mike Copeland told Prime Buzz this morning. “I’m not a full-time mayor like (Funkhouser) is. At $700 a month, you’ve got to have another job that pays the bills.
Said Lenexa Mayor Mike Boehm, a banker by trade: “It’s on a work day and I’m busy.”
Nobody has the right to tell me how to spend the money I earn. And that goes double for governments of areas where I don’t live. Keep your hands to yourself, Kansas City.
And as a side-note: I like the idea of elected political positions being part-time positions. If the government’s role in our lives is reduced to just protecting our individual rights, I think that politicians would have much more free time on their hands. Probably enough time to do something productive. 
Pro-choice and consistency
I was listening to talk radio in the car yesterday, and I heard a religious conservative complain about the liberal, “pro-choice” lobby. I don’t agree with the man, but it made me think of a question for the liberals the man was addressing:
Why shouldn’t the right to choose what you do with your body apply to your choices in health care?
Liberals are usually considered “pro-choice,” and the reason is that they believe a woman should have the right to decide what she does with her body. But when it comes to health care, the belief in that right seems to go away. Socialized health care is all about forcing people when it comes to what they want to do with their money, what doctors patients can see, what doctors are allowed to do, and overall limiting what health care is available. And that’s in direct conflict with the right many claim to uphold: the right to choose what you do with your body.
If that logic was applied back towards the issue of abortion, it would be like saying, “Yes, you have the right to choose an abortion. But, you’ll need to meet with one of our counselors first. Then if you are approved, you must go to the doctor that we have assigned to you. You can only do it within the time frame that we have selected, and you must pay the government-established rate. Now, exercise your right to choose!”
I believe that individuals should have the right to choose what they do with their bodies. I wish people would uphold that right more consistently.
Tags: [abortion, individual rights, socialized health care, universal health care]