Credit is NOT bad
Posted by lemiffe in Economy, Life, Society on Oct 3rd, 2010 | 0 commentsCredit is not bad
But the way we use it IS
Edilberto Salazar, 35, married, with one daughter, is a man that I met over two years ago while working for an IT firm in Mexico. This man owed over $200,000 (£10,000+) pesos to the bank, more than $100,000 (£5,000+) pesos in taxes, plus his mortgage and personal credits at department stores. He is one of those guys that saturates one credit card, then applies for another to which he transfers all his overdue credit from his other card, and so on.
He is just one of many people I have met in several years that has the same problem. Endless calls and letters, harassment, and bad looks from friends and family. The truth is that he is just one in millions caught in the same situation.
Credit was created as a way of obtaining something we want *now* and paying for it later, at an interest, of course. Interest rates and other surcharges are the building blocks of banks, lending companies and other financial institutions. In fewer words: Banks charge for the “benefit” of lending you the money you need right now.
But it’s not just money nowadays, is it? Back in the old days it was mostly about a means to purchasing the home you’ve always wanted, or paying for a costly operation, or buying something you really need urgently. Nowadays the amount of things you can do by credit is enormous: Clothes, home appliances, cars, luxury items, handbags, mobile phones, phone contract payments, payments for other debt you may have in other financial institutions, education, even a haircut for goodness sake. Just about anything can be “purchased” on credit, and if the store doesn’t have its own credit line, you can probably still pay with your Amex, Visa, Mastercard, Maestro, etc.
But the concept of “free money” is what has started the massive wave of debt. We saw it recently with the credit crunch, but we’ve seen it previously countless times. And it’s not about individual people any more, it’s about entire countries indebted to others.
Why did this last credit crunch occur? Because of the sub-prime mortgages, the ratings of CDO. MRS, ABS and other deals, the lending, selling and packaging of these deals amongst banks and world-wide financial institutions, etc. They thought the gold mine would never end, and when it looked like it was depleting they found another way of marketing and selling the same deals as new products to investors, creating new indexes in the stock market, and eventually tying everything up in a way that a credit crunch became unavoidable.
But it’s not the banks fault, nor the investors, they are just looking for ways to make more money. The fault lies within the general public, as described by Tetsuya Ishikawa in his book “How I caused the credit crunch”. Credit allows you to have a house before you can pay for it, clothes without any money on you, and more importantly, operations and medical care when you do not own enough money to pay for them.
We all need money for certain things in life, but we also ought to have some decency (or put more straightly: intelligence) and analyse all options into consideration. Credit is a tool, an aid through difficult times, it is not free money, and it often results in a much higher cost than what you could have paid originally for it. Interest is a killer.
So if this opened a wound in you, try to sort out your problems, and lay off credit for life unless REALLY needed.
Weekly Highlights (12/09/2010)
Posted by lemiffe in Photography, Weekly Highlights on Sep 13th, 2010 | 2 commentsCheers to a successful week!
It was an interesting one. I have started working part-time from home, only going to the office on Fridays, and it has changed my perspective on many things. Now instead of taking the bus I take the train to a railway station nearby and I cycle the rest of the way to work (20 minutes to the office, 30 minutes back) which is quite a good exercise and I get to see very nice places.
Unfortunately I got lost last Friday and ended up in the village of Croy instead of Croy Railway Station (20 minute detour) but I found this magnificent bridge:
So I finally found the right way and it happens to pass next to a beautiful loch near Westfield, Cumbernauld. I just love the scenery:
Anyway, hopefully you’ve also had a great week and lets hope this one is even better!
Is Ubuntu the right option for you?
Posted by lemiffe in Apple, Computers, iPod & iPhone, Microsoft, Operating Systems, Technology, Ubuntu, Windows on Sep 13th, 2010 | 0 commentsWhen you ask a Linux fan “I am buying a new computer, should I get Ubuntu or Windows 7?”, they usually vouch for Ubuntu straight away, many times without considering the actual needs and limits of the user. They usually recur to a slur similar to the following: “Ubuntu is like Windows but much safer, plus you can open Microsoft Office documents, you have Firefox, it is much harder for you to get infected by a virus, and in many ways is easier to use than Windows”.
If that doesn’t convince him/her, they might end up with the classical “you can get cool effects that look like Mac OS X by installing Compiz”.
However, in my personal experience, Ubuntu is not for everyone. I have recommended it before (As part of the Dell-Ubuntu offering), I have heard other people recommend it to others, and I witnessed the Ubuntu-boom when netbooks gained popularity; The return rates were much higher for Ubuntu netbooks as users generally dived in because of the price tag not knowing that what they were receiving was essentially not Windows.
That said, Ubuntu is a great distribution of Linux. I’m sure most hardcore Linux fans would debate me on that issue, however, in terms of usability and getting things done fast, I regard Ubuntu as top of the pack right now.
So I have developed a little insight into the main features of Ubuntu to help newcomers choose whether they want to install Ubuntu or hang on to Windows or Mac OS:
Viruses
There is no escape from viruses, on any single operating system, however, in Ubuntu it’s much more difficult to get infected by a virus as the system has directory-based, user-based and computer-based security instead of only user-based security found in standard versions of Windows. This means that a virus could only potentially wreck the directory where it has installed itself in Linux, while under Windows it can wreck havoc in any directory it chooses.
Most system file changes under Linux require administrator password which gives you extra control over what is going on with your system.
Internet
It is basically the same thing as a Windows PC with the exception of not being tied down to Internet Explorer. Firefox comes pre-installed on Ubuntu, but you can install Chromium (Google Chrome for other OSes) and it is pretty stable nowadays. Flash/audio usually works out the box, unless you have an old computer with unsupported hardware. There are quite a few other browsers you can install from the software installer with just a couple of clicks.
Audio
Ubuntu comes with a default audio player called Rythmbox, I am not very fond of it as I am used to iTunes, but it plays your music, has playlists, visualisations, and common functions found in most audio players. One of the problems I have encountered with this audio player is that it verifies your whole playlist every time you open the program, so if you have a massive playlist it may take a couple of minutes to verify each file still exists.
Rhythmbox, banshee and guayadeque are really good open source audio player equivalents and the first 2 allow iPod syncing easily. I tried syncing my iPod Touch a year or two ago without success and found out that there was an encryption system on the iPod Touch which made it hard to sync with anything other than iTunes. Apparently I have been proved wrong as I’ve been told by several people on Google Buzz; You can supposedly sync to an iPod Touch nowadays.
There are several recording programs which I have found easy to use, however, I haven’t found any professional open-source programs that can substitute great sequencers that run in Windows such as Cool Edit Pro, Live, etc.
Video
Comes with necessary codecs for standard video, and if you want to play AVIs and WMVs you can always get the necessary codecs for free. The OS tells you which ones you may need when you try to play an unsupported video. This means: No messing about on-line trying to find codecs hour after hour through spam and adware filled websites.
Documents
Well, obviously OpenOffice.org is the way to go with this one. OOo is pre-installed with Ubuntu. I don’t love OOo but it is compatible with MS Office 2003/2007 and gets the job done. It lacks a few features available in MS Office 2007, and doesn’t have a great look-and-feel but hopefully some day the guys will develop a more competitive version.
Graphics Design & Editing
GIMP is a complete graphics editing suite, it can’t compete against Adobe PhotoShop in any way, but it gets the job done, however, it does have a bit of a learning curve if you are used to Photoshops GUI. I would compare it to Paint.Net on Windows. It has layers support and a full set of tools but the interface is not that intuitive.
Programming in PHP
If you are a PHP programmer you will find LAMP has everything you need to get started with about 3 clicks.
Programming in .NET
If you are a .NET programmer you might find MonoDevelop quite useful. You can develop using C# code mostly compatible with Windows. I haven’t tried out Mono on Ubuntu yet as I generally use my Windows box to code .NET but I have heard it is quite good nowadays.
Conclusion
There’s an online community of help and support if you have any issues: Forums on the official website, lots of other independent forums, an IRC channel (or various should I say) on #ubuntu on Freenode: All of it completely free.
Go ahead and try the Ubuntu Live CD before installing it… You can download it at the official website, burn it onto a CD and try it out before installing anything.
Thanks to Mark Skinner who resolved my questions about iPod Touch syncing on Rythmbox.
On the usefulness of tablet computers
Posted by lemiffe in A.I., Apple, Business, Computers, Google, Internet, Microsoft, Operating Systems, Products, Technology, Windows on Sep 13th, 2010 | 4 comments
I recently read an interesting article on TechCrunch which talks about the 6 or so operating systems geared towards tablets which will soon have to face a battle for who gains the most popularity in the limited market of tablet PCs.
Linda Lawrey posted this article on her Google Buzz which sparked a discussion about who might be coming out as winner, but it also generated a conversation about why anyone would want a tablet in the first place. I think 3+ million iPad owners would have something to add to that conversation, however, my post is not about that.
I personally believe tablets are useful for certain things today: While not exactly great for use on-the-go such as mobile phones they are useful as a replacement for net-books, say, for use while having a coffee at Starbucks, for taking notes while at meetings, or as a bed-side computer to check mail and browse the web before bed. But my thoughts about their usefulness are centred on the future: Internet-powered centralised intelligent home & office devices.
I can see them integrated to each room in a house, possibly on the wall, where one can quickly browse their calendar, program their alarm, control the lights of the house, communicate with the house’s security system, view CCTV video from other rooms and program DVR recording, control other digital devices from their room, etc.
Imagine: You’re going to bed so you go to your wall and program the alarm clock for 8 AM, you also program your children’s alarm clock for 7:30 AM, activate the home security system, and set up chilled-out relaxing music for the bedrooms in the house. You also program the device to start up the radiators at 6:00 AM and the hot water at the same time. At the same time you set up the A/C to maintain a certain ideal room temperature during the night. John, your kid, doesn’t like the music so he gets up and sets his own device to mute for his room. You wake up to the sound of music, increasing gradually in volume in each room, as a start to a great new day.
You might have a party that evening and you are having a discussion about a certain word definition, or the location of a country, so you get up, unplug the tablet from the wall, and perform a search on Wikipedia, bringing the tablet to the table and sorting out the discussion in moments.
In the office, you create a powerpoint presentation with interactive graphs and cool pictures on your PC. You store it on the local network, pop in to the conference room, take a tablet down from the wall, then you can discuss the points and make changes directly on the tablet, making the meeting a more productive one than the usual guy talking in front of a projector while people take notes. Not good enough? Connect a pico-projector to it, then you can have your boring meeting with the capability of making changes or taking meeting notes directly on the tablet, which makes the use of paper basically redundant.
So how useful do you believe they are? Useful enough right now? Or more useful in the near future?
Bi-Weekly Highlights (05/09/2010)
Posted by lemiffe in Photography, Sightseeing, Weekly Highlights on Sep 7th, 2010 | 1 commentTwo weeks full of madness, fun, work and partying! I have switched to part-time at work as I am starting a Masters degree at the University of Edinburgh. This picture is from a couple of weeks ago when they started road works outside my office and I had to walk a great deal to the nearest bus stop. It was worth it, beautiful plains to take pictures of. Blurriness is intentional.
So I moved to Edinburgh a week ago, and one of the first things I did was take a stroll through Princes Street all the way to St. Andrew’s square. This is a picture of the castle taken from Princes Street.
A few days ago we had the Edinburgh Fireworks as a close to the Festival… beautiful. A camera can never capture the full glory of fireworks, but I’m posting this picture anyway as a memory.
I climbed Holyrood yesterday with my best mate. 1 hour cycling to/from my house, and 2 hours to reach the top and get back down again… Good exercise!
So that’s all for this week… cheerio!
