"owning" a part of the company

In Stock Plan, Employees See Stacked Deck

New York Times
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

Published: May 29, 2008

A group of former employees are accusing U.S. Sugar insiders of scheming to enrich themselves by buying workers’ shares back on the cheap.

people work harder and feel more attachment to a company they partially or wholly own. so companies like to offer ways for employees to be part of the company success to encourage them to do things like work overtime or for salary employees work more time for free. but here's the catch that these sugar workers fell into. they didn't really own a part of the company so they didn't have a chance to know what was going on with the company. their retirement company owned the stock. they were also screwed because the stock wasn't trading publicly so they didn't know the value of the stock. stock options also fall into this problem. sure you profit when the company rises in value but you still aren't a shareholder so you can't know what is going and vote on the direction of the company. i think every company that offers their stock as a retirement option or offers stock options to employees should be required to have each person have at least one real share or vote in the company. not that everyone would be informed even in that case, but at least that way if one person in the company did discover something they could mobilize all the other employees to vote against something.

Fat and happy

Okay, I'm not really fat yet, but I just came out positive on a pregnancy test. And yes, that was the goal. :)

$50 in Sod

$50 in sod from Lowes for about 150 Feet^2. mom helped me rip the old stuff out, and dad sacraficed the van to haul the sod and then helped me lay it. Thanks!

ganstagrass

http://www.gangstagrass.com/
strikes me as really funny. a mash of hiphop music and bluegrass.

Canon Hack

I was reading over on lifehacker that there is a group of developers working to add functionality to the canon point and shoot line up CHDK. the change is made by putting boot files on your SD card and then booting the camera into a new mode. the changes arn't permanent. support for super high speed, time lapse, more video codecs, battery indicator, and raw mode are just a few of the features this adds. they have an open scripting language (new version of basic) that you can use to write your own scripts (motion sensing, etc..). as a co-owner of an SD1000 i'll be looking into this.

NTFS junction point

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_junction_point details how to use junction points as 'live shortcuts' - effectively creating a virtual folder at the OS layer that is exposed to programs transparently and you can control the contents. sounds useful for mounting a ../my documents/encrypted folder inside your home folder - instead of bolting true crypt onto a drive letter.

Weazel News

grand theft auto 4 mocks many things. but i found this particularly funny.
weazel news (think what other news channel is small & furry & right-wing). it even includes the headline "Government officials address Dark Cerulean 4 threat level"

GPS tracker

"The Open GPS Tracker is a small device which plugs into a $20 prepaid mobile phone to make a GPS tracker. The Tracker responds to text message commands, detects motion, and sends you its exact position, ready for Google Maps or your mapping software. The Tracker firmware is open source and user-customizable."

looks interesting.

ribs on wheels

big jim's ribs on wheels is still rolling. amazing.
I must have been in 2nd grade the first time I saw the truck in Franktown.

updated 09-08-2008
check it out. big jim from a 2007 article in the rocky mountain news (I was always a post fan)

the dude hangs out in the same place so much, i think he's actually captured in google street view. amazing!

wait, wait, my bad. after poking around a little more. i think this is really him HERE

Just in Case

so google desktop got stupid yesterday and took up the whole screen so i closed it and went along with other work. today i went to mount my truecrypt file and the window was stuck off the screen as a result somehow of google desktop's fubar. i didn't want to reboot... so if you ever wonder how to get that window back on screen check out this poist.

3Cent HDMI cable

to bad my equipment is all old. if I Had anything that needed HDMI, i might actually consider paying 3 cents for the cables from amazon. don't be to suckered in to far., you still have to pay 2 bucks or so for shipping, but hey.... not to bad.
Eforcity 2 Meter HDMI M/M Cable

micro steam car

If I have to do teen/preteen events like childcare, VBS, or Pathfinders guest speaker, i'll definatly try to do the micro steam-car hands on.

Looks pretty cool with simple materials.

car clicker crack

remote car opener/click cracked. Interesting article.

audio book

Got me a small .mp3 player for $8 off buy.com - Sansa C140 refurbished.
So far it's only crashed on one .mp3 and makes a great tool for audio books.
Thus far, Robert Heinlein's 'Citizen of the Galaxy' has proven quite good.

I've got 27 other Robert Heinlein books, so hopefully the others are as good as this one.

64kb

What can you do with 64KB? now much you say. try fr08, one in a long line of series of absolutely amazing demos. they even have a tool you can build your own.

FR08 was way back in 2000-2003. my computers not fast enough, but those of you with decent hardware should try the next generation: kkrieger that is a nice looking FPS in 96kb. if anyone gets that to run let me know how it work.
visit http://www.werkkzeug.com/ and get yourself a copy of the next generation tool werkkzeug3 TE

if any/all of that floats your boat, take a look at debris, the latest demo at 177k or so. again, this one is a no-go for me as i'm on a geforce2mx. yeah, its 2008 and i'm still partying like its 1999.

to see the best of 2007 try http://www.scene.org/awards.php

Populating Mars

find out if you are material to populate mars as part of the Virgle pioneers.


me?

"Well, you're distressingly normal and could conceivably adjust to life as a deep space pioneer, though we recommend instead that you leave the Mars missions to the serious whack jobs who scored over 130 and instead finish year 3 of law school, tuck your toddler into bed, design Web 2.0 applications, run for Congress or do whatever other normal, healthy, middle-of-the-road thing you're currently doing with your normal, healthy, middle-of-the-road life. If you're determined to give Virgle a try, though, you can submit your video here."

yahoo pipes

I'm a little behind the times. it seems that pipes.yahoo.com has been around for about a year. summary: take just about any data source, strip its RSS or similar feed, route it through pipes and filters you design in a graphical environment, and then see what spits out the other end. i like this one, a super meta search engine that has returned some more relevant info than I was able to get out of google directly.

monoprice

i've never bought anything from monoprice but looking through a few of there things looks like some prices are hard to beat. $10 for 100ft of cat5e, wow. update: hmm.. they appear to be right down the street. interesting.

turn a sphere inside out

keyboard shortcuts

Microsoft has been nice enough to publish all the strange key combinations we [nerds] have all come to love. check out some of the more complete lists at kb/301583 . at the bottom, theres even some info going all the way back to win95. i know maybe 1/2 of whats in the list, and actively use maybe 1/4 of it. heres some i found interesting, and a few i use all the time.

ALT+double click - display properties - this is faster than rightclick properties for sure, which i use all the time

Left ALT+left SHIFT+PRINT SCREEN (Switch High Contrast either on or off) i absolutly Love this one. its very useful for walking up to someone that is blind and just saying 'hey, i'll take care of that for you' it also sabotages a perfectly useful computer if the operator is under 50. give it a try, you'll like it as both help for seniors, and a sabotage weapon. don't worry, you can repeat the sequence to revert the useless machine back to useful when the operator abandons it.

Windows Logo+ L (Lock the keyboard) i think ctrl+alt+delete, select shutdown, etc.... will work, but thats just clumsy. ctrl+esc, and then select loggoff and do a bit of clicking around will get you there too.

Windows+R - i always used ctrl+esc, up arrow, up arrow, enter (um, can't remember the rest) and then with xp's new default start menu, my old sequence only works on half the machines. I use this mostly for fast access to CMD, winword, excel, notepad, pbrush as it takes way to long to navigate the stupid start menu (its fun to watch people navigate that monster) and if i do have shortcut icons that are on the desktop and not in a link bar, theres no hope of finding them on my desktop.

CTRL+SHIFT+ESC (Open Task Manager) - this ones stupid, its the same as CTRL+ALT+Delete

Windows Logo+BREAK (Display the System Properties dialog box) - sure beats rightclicking on my computer on the desktop if you hid your icons.

alt+PRINT SCREEN (capture current window) i use it daily for screenshots of the active window in conjuction with pbrush (or paint.net). for the non nerdy, this puts an image of your screen in the clipboard, and you can paste it into an application that supports images. holding the ALT just does the active window.