Brain Break

Taking a bit of a brain break from writing papers to cruise around the internet. Good stuff everywhere. Like unemployment is up in nearly every state. Well, our personal unemployment rate increased from 50% to 100% this week, so no big surprise there. And of course it's Friday, so two more banks were seized by the FDIC. That brings the total number of failed banks so far in 2009 even with all of 2008.

And from the HCHSBTSPODTUTBGTUTHADHOI department, we have wee bits of snow in Nevada, and... um... slightly more in Colorado. Good thing the EPA is attempting to finish off the economy to save us from all this snow and cold.

And from the When Will The Suits Ever Catch Wise department, the "owners" of Pirate Bay were found guilty today. These idiots will never figure it out; no one needs file sharing networks to share files. There is e-mail, IM, VPN's, and for the truly paranoid, darknets and sneakernets. My entire music collection (4,600 tracks so far) fits on a USB key I can pick up for the price of dinner out for two people. In 18 months, it will be half that. And 18 months after that, they will be given away free at computer shows. Or for the same price (but slightly less convienence) I can buy an external drive that can hold around 36,000 tracks. The size of an MP3 (or MPEG-2) is not increasing, so it isn't hard to see where this is going. Unless you are a lawyer working for the RIAA or MPAA. (shrug) The law of the internet is adapt or die. I see dead people.

And as everyone knows by now, we have a household income of $0 right now. We'll do OK for a while, but once I'm done with school and we do our trips that are already bought and paid for, we have to decide where we are going to land. We'll probably try to stay here just because I can't deal with packing and moving everything again. We are still getting things situated from the last move. Our first task is to decide if we keep Debbie's medical insurance or not. The cost will be substantial to keep it, but we need to figure out if the cost of not keeping it will be even more substantial. After that, we need to decide what we can do to make some cash. It may just be a collection of odd jobs for a while. I have a couple ideas once I'm not doing school work 8-10 hours a day, and Debbie is chasing down a few leads as well. But if nothing shakes loose by mid-summer, we will probably start looking around for someplace else to live that has jobs and is relatively cheap, warm and dry.

Thanks for all the thoughts and prayers in the comments over the last couple days. We're doing OK and have several options open to us, so no one needs to send us a box of canned goods or anything. At least not yet.