Just a "What's Up"

And the answer is, "Not much." I did get most of the things done yesterday that I wanted to get done. The big task was catching up on all the financial stuff after being gone for over a month. That took many, many hours of data entry, account reconciliations, funds balancing, etc. Usually, I do a little bit every day, but with me in one state and our data files in another state, it just piled up. Ugh.

The other task accomplished was to finally get all our photos off the camera and on Flickr:
A random prickly pear cactus in bloom.
Debbie's niece's graduation open house.
Our time in northern Michigan.
The job search road trip.

I don't have descriptions on anything yet, but I will work on those this afternoon. Or evening. Or tomorrow. Or...

I still need to burn a DVD for Debbie's mom with the latest versions of Firefox and IE along with our last batch of pictures. With a dial-up connection, it is virtually impossible for her to get to these things. on her own. When we were staying there, I tried to just get some Windows security patches and it was nearly impossible. I didn't dare try to download an entire software package, so we'll do it snail mail. Whatever works.

As part of catching up on things, I finally got over to Yahoo Finance's Tech Ticker. I don't seem to have missed anything. All the same people having all the same arguments while all the market indexes wobble around in a narrow range waiting for consumers to load up on 56" TV's and designer clothing. Meanwhile, consumers are refusing to play the part of a patsy like they have the last twenty years and are instead paying off debt and saving 7% of their take-home pay (18 months ago, the savings rate was -4%). Silly people. How dare they act as if the money they earn actually belongs to them. Everyone knows the world works best if everyone transfers their entire wealth plus their children's future wealth to .05% of the world population!

Meanwhile, as we continue to look for work, I find this little picker-upper:

Here are 10 reasons we are in even more trouble than the 9.5% unemployment rate indicates:

- June's [unemployment] total assumed 185,000 people at work who probably were not....
- More companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave....
- No fewer than 1.4 million people wanted or were available for work in the last 12 months but were not counted....
- The number of workers taking part-time jobs due to the slack economy, a kind of stealth underemployment, has doubled in this recession to about nine million, or 5.8% of the work force....
- The average work week for rank-and-file employees in the private sector, roughly 80% of the work force, slipped to 33 hours....
- The average length of official unemployment increased to 24.5 weeks, the longest since government began tracking this data in 1948....
- The goods producing sector is losing the most jobs -- 223,000 in the last report alone....
- The prospects for job creation are equally distressing. The likelihood is that when economic activity picks up, employers will first choose to increase hours for existing workers and bring part-time workers back to full time....

Huh. That's cheery.

After spending the last two days on the computer, I need to spend some serious face time with a book. Of course, it's a book about computer stuff....