everyday

via: CNN

OBAMA: You know, my job is to make sure that, here in the United States, the American people feel confident that I’m going to be advocating for their interests, that I’m going to keep them safe.
The way to do that though, I believe, is to make sure that we’re paying attention to the rest of the world, their hopes, their aspirations, as well, and that we’re leading with our values and ideals, and not just with our military.

With all recent news regarding the impending mortgage crisis, especially the FDIC takeover of IndyMac Banc Corp., I think it is time to stop bailing out large corporations and simply let them fail.

If “we the people” keep bailing out these large corporations, then the large corporations will never need to exercise restraint. They will be able to make enormous profits off of us by making foolhardy business decisions knowing full well that should things turn out badly, the people that they just raped will offer up their hard earned tax dollars to shore up the corporation so they can do it all over again. We need to end this vicious cycle now.

If we bail out anyone, it should be ourselves. I say, take whatever money we are planning on using to bail out the large mortgage lenders and secure the sale of the their loans to more solvent banks. I don’t think we should be helping out the banks, we should be helping the people. We should restructure and underwrite the loans that are failing and offer them up for sale to banks that aren’t failing. This way, we avoid the looming crises and people don’t lose their homes.

Of course, this will only be a temporary solution. A more permanent solution is to regulate the mortgage market so that sub-prime loans can not happen.

The New York Times is reporting that Toyota is planning to stop production of it’s Tundra truck and Sequoia SUV for three months this year to adjust for decreasing demand (Toyota Scales Back Production of Big Vehicles). They have also decided to re-purpose a new plant in Mississippi to manufacture their hybrid Prius instead of trucks.

I think this is a fantastic move for Toyota who, in my opinion, misjudged the market when the revised their truck lineup to make the Tundra and Tacoma trucks larger. This is especially true of the Tacoma, I owned a 2004 Toyota Tacoma and absolutely loved that truck. I thought it was sized perfectly. The new Tacoma is larger, but doesn’t really add any more utility. It seems as though Toyota made the truck larger for the sake of making it larger. I would have preferred that they focused on making the existing truck better, not just bigger.

Netflix has acquiesced to the pleadings and demands of their customers and sent out a notice that they will NOT be doing away with multiple queues. Yay! I was seriously concerned about this. I was worried that I may need to cancel my account, even though I truly enjoy the service. Good job Netflix, how about next time, you just don’t decide to cancel aspects of your service on a whim.

It is really hot in Southern California. The “record breaking heat” kind of hot.

Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!!

http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix/statuses/839088619

You may have noticed some new graphics on the site, specifically the following in the upper left corner:

Up until this point, I have remained fairly silent regarding my thoughts about who should be our next President. I was very interested in the campaign of Ron Paul, unfortunately he has not received the Republican Party’s nomination.

I won’t spend a great deal of time here talking about why I think Barack Obama is the best choice, but I will say that I do think he is the best choice.

I received a notice from Netflix that, effective September 1st, they will no longer be allowing users to have more than one queue. LAME!

I currently have the “2 at a time” plan with 2 different queues. This allows my wife and I to each get one movie at a time from our respective queues. This is such a convenient feature that I am not sure I will want to continue using the service should they discontinue the multiple queues. I would like to know what bean counter came up with this brilliant way to increase profits. Perhaps I can provide some advice, reducing the costs to operate your service will be meaningless to your bottom line when your customers leave.

Here is a link to some very, very lame corporate marketing / used car salesman language Netflix is using to “sell” this feature removal as a “improvement” to their service. Ha!

Having just watched the Boston Celtics defeat the Los Angeles Lakers in the fourth game of the NBA Finals, I can confidently say that 34 is greater than 24. 34 being the jersey number of Paul Pierce of the Celtics and 24 being Kobe Bryant of the Lakers. While Kobe is most certainly one of the best, if not the best player to ever play the game of basketball, he was literally shut down by the very impressive defense of Paul Pierce.

The Celtics came back from a 24 point deficit to defeat the Lakers on their home court at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. This was a phenomenal come back spurred on by the Celtics coaches decision to have Paul Pierce guard Kobe Bryant, which allowed the Celtics to avoid having to double team and provide help to aid in the defense against Kobe’s amazing scoring ability. The combination of Paul Pierce gaurding Kobe and Kevin Garnett shutting down any open lanes to the basket really kept the Los Angeles Lakers off balance and allowed the Celtics to manage one of the biggest come backs in NBA Finals history.

In my work as a Network Administrator for a school district, I run into problems with email click-through marketing techniques rather frequently. The specific problem is with click-through tracking of email advertising campaigns. Since we are a school district that provides internet access to minors, we tend to filter our internet traffic rather heavily. This filtering wreaks havoc with most click-through advertising emails.

For instance, an email is received inside of our network with a link to:

<a href="http://www.rs6.net/?kna76dv978y34qtib33t897jk1bt4hq3fr897&site=www.theactuallink.com">www.theactuallink.com</a>

The user thinks that when they click on theactuallink.com that they will be taken to theactuallink.com, they are instead taken to rs6.net and then bounced through to theactuallink.com. This causes a great deal of frustration with our users. We constantly receive phone calls that our internet filter is blocking theactuallink.com, when it is in fact blocking rs6.net, and rightfully so.

I imagine that this problem will only increase as more and more companies increase the amount of internet filtering they do to comply with various laws and regulations. So, what is the solution?

I would highly recommend never, ever rely on a 3rd party to bounce your links through. If you need to track the effectiveness of an email advertising campaign, then invest the time and resources to roll your own tracking. That or use a tool like Google Analytics that will not break the link even if the tracking itself gets blocked. I know that a large number of the emails are generated by non-profit organizations or businesses with limited budgets that are running their email advertising campaigns through a 3rd party, but I think the time has come to abandon the 3rd party and either hire the talent or develop it from within to avoid losing your audience entirely. There are a large number of free, open source applications that will allow you to run email advertising campaigns so the cost for software would be negligible. Hardware costs and requirements are ever decreasing as well, so the excuses not to are few.