Apple Fan Boy

I’ve been called this recently and I would agree. I fell in love with the “it just works” way of Apple. When my wife goes to the mall, I tag along so that I can visit the Apple store. I own a MacBook Pro, and iPhone and and iPod. I also have loads of attachments for the mac; gadgets like the Bose Sound Dock for the iPhone and wireless keyboard and mouse for the laptop. I have tons of software and enjoy working and playing on the mac. I’m messing with xCode and iPhone programming, use parallels to run windows so that I can VPN and RD into work.

I can’t think of anything negative to say about the mac.

My problem… I need to run Visual Studio and Sql Mgmt Studio from anywhere. I picked up a Virtual Machine solution for this but I don’t enjoy it because running OSX and my virtual machines does not give me the performance I desire. I do throttle each but it still does not compare to native speed.

I decided to install the Windows 7 RC1 and boot to it rather than the VM solution. This way I get full dedication of my machines resources to the operating system I choose. It took a little over 30 minutes to do the install, call it 40 if you include the windows and driver updates.

I’m in shock. “It just works”. And it is really really fast. Granted it is bare bones and I am rocking 4gb of ram but this thing cooks. It doesn’t have the bloat of Vista (well it might but they swept it under the rug). It’s snappy, looks great and makes me want to use it. Thank you Microsoft!

Now, for my foot-in-mouth moment: If Microsoft could move Windows 7 to the mobile world and make the Zune HD a little more natural to use like the iPhone, I think they'd really have something they have been missing… A smart phone/pda contender. Let’s be honest, the iPhone, from a human usability perspective, just does it better than any other. They are bound to that silly AT&T contract and Microsoft is not. Ditch the Surface and get this HD phone available from any carrier. Put Win7 on the Zune HD or similar device, nail an app store, destroy Google Android and remind everyone that great software does not have to be open source.

The twitter complaint card

Raise your hand if you like to vent out loud? I sure do and so do millions of twitter users. I've tried to be cautious with what I vent about on twitter because it's public and permanent. You don't want your foul mouth rants following you where ever you go. Sometimes, though, you get frustrated enough that all bets are off and the venting flows freely.

That was the case for me a couple of weeks ago when my recently upgraded Qwest connection went down. For about two days it was randomly disconnecting until finally it just died. Both my wife and I work from home and we go to school full time. Our internet connection is just as valuable to us as water and food. Well, not really, I'm just trying to be dramatic.

I posted the following message on twitter in frustration with my internet connection "#qwest Internet is down. I wish they would tweet or email stating such...". Four minutes after sending that tweet I received a tweet back from @TalkToQwest asking for my billing number. A couple of tweets later I have a phone call from a tech guy at Qwest. When I say tech guy, I mean someone who "knows" tech like I know software. It's almost as if the Fizzbin keyword was spoken for me via twitter.

After my quick tech call, I had a tech person at my door within a day or two and they fixed the issue. No annoying tech call for me where I had to talk to 20 different people and tell my story ten times over. I didn't waste hours of my life trying to solve the problem myself. I simply vented using twitter as my audience and it payed dividends for me.

I'm curious why a company would monitor twitter and provide great customer service on a social network and still maintain such horrible customer service standards via their call-in numbers or normal website. + 1 for qwest on the social front. -1 for paying someone real money to do this and not focus on your other major areas of customer service.

While I'm on this topic, I thought I'd mention my hatred for Papa Johns. Not the food; the food is great. I recieved an email from them with a coupon. While my wife and I were running errands with the offspring, I decided to order from them via this coupon. I clicked the coupon and tried to pull up the phone number of the nearest resturant. No dice, their zip code finder could not find me even though I was standing in the same strip mall that the resturant sits in. So, I used Google maps on my iPhone to get their phone number. I placed my order on the phone with them and gave them the coupon. They rejected and said that it was a website only coupon. Are you freaking kidding me? So I went to the website and tried to order my pizza. They tout a mobile optomized website, one that I don't need because I rock an iPhone but hey, mobile optomized means fast and that is exactly what I wanted. Imagine my surprise to find out that their registration process is more difficult than applying for a freaking credit card. You call that mobile optimized? Why on earth would you serve up a giant registration for to a potential customer on a mobile device?

Needless to say, I opened my big mouth on twitter again "Papa Johns has the WORST mobile experience. Mobile should be fast & fluid. No long a$$ registration process. #fail". Unfortunately for me, Papa Johns does not have a dedicated twitza (that's a pizza twitter person) to review negative comments about them.

Rethinking the Global Money Supply

More talk about ditching the US Dollar as the reserve currency in this article.  What do you think will happen to the exchange rate of the US Dollar if all those countries who use the US Dollar as a reserve start selling those dollars?

The U.S. response to the Chinese proposal was revealing. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner initially described himself as open to exploring the idea; his candor quickly caused the dollar to weaken in value—which it needs to do for the good of the U.S. economy. That weakening, however, led Geithner to reverse himself within minutes by underscoring that the U.S. dollar would remain the world’s reserve currency for the foreseeable future.

Does the US Dollar need to weaken?  Higher oil prices, higher food prices, and higher car prices are what we need?  Is the problem with General Motors and Chrysler the strong US Dollar?  The dollar has been weakening for years.  I went to Europe in 2002, and a Euro cost about $0.88 – It cost about $1.60 just prior to the market crash of 2008, where a rush to the perceived safety of the US Dollar caused it to strengthen.  That means that a $30,000 Chevrolet Tahoe cost 34,091 euro in 2002, and 18,750 euro in 2008.

It should be the job of the US Government and the Fed to protect the US Dollar – not weaken it.  By the way, “overly expansionary monetary policies” is another way of saying “Printing too much money”

The end of the world as we know it

The bad news for me is that i often sound like a crazed lunatic when I start describing my beliefs of the coming economic collapse.  The good news is that I’m in good company.  When people ask where I'm investing, i tell them that I’m mainly into gold and oil ETF’s, since I want to preserve what little savings I have.

I often get the question “What good is Gold?”, and “It’s just a perceived value.”  I am not good at countering that argument, especially since I’ve only been buying it for 6 or 7 months, but I do like to refer to this article by former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (written in 1966, twenty years before he became fed chairman).  The last two paragraphs really hit home with me:

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

 

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.

  The article is titled “Gold and Economic Freedom”, and it goes into great depth of why Gold is real money, and the best form of currency.  A Currency that is backed by and redeemable in Gold cannot be inflated.  In fact, for most of the history of the United Stated of America,  Gold, along with Silver, was the primary asset backing “gold certificates” and other certificates of deposit.  Up until 1971, the US Dollar was redeemable for a fixed amount of gold – not to Americans – FDR made that illegal when he cut the value of the US dollar in half in the 1930’s.  The first three sentences of the Alan Greenspan quote above bears repeating:

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold.

The US eventually had to drop the Gold standard because they were printing money without actually acquiring the gold to back it up.  Foreigners, who could own Gold, were redeeming their US Dollars for the stated exchange rate, causing the real value of the US Dollar to drop.  Had the US not made it illegal for it’s own citizens to own Gold, then the US government would never have been able to print money without Gold to back it up.

Gold is real value, paper money is not.  If the exchange rate of paper money to Gold goes up (more paper money per ounce of Gold), then it’s obvious that the paper money supply is being inflated.  It seems very apparent to me that the real indicator of inflation should always be the the exchange rate of Gold to the US Dollar.

Alan Greenspan says “Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.”  Which brings up this chart of the past and projected US Budget Deficit:

And then there’s Gold:

It’s a lot easier sounding like a crazed lunatic when the numbers are on your side.  I think I’ll continue to put my savings in Gold.

Confidence in the US Dollar continues to erode

Brazil and China eye plan to axe dollar

In what was interpreted as a sign of Chinese concern about the future of the dollar, the governor of China’s central bank proposed in March that the US dollar be replaced as the world’s de-facto reserve currency.

In an essay posted on the People’s Bank of China’s website, Zhou Xiaochuan, the central bank’s governor, said the goal would be to create a reserve currency ”that is disconnected from individual nations” and modelled on the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights, or SDRs.

Hold on to your hats – the US Dollar is dropping like a stone: