Credit Crisis Explained?

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

Who knows if this guy knows what’s he talking about, but the whole Credit Crisis thing seems to make more sense to me after watching this short video.  Click the link above.

Weekend & stuff

• we are really enjoying having the Laliberte grandparents here for the weekend
• my co-worker was nice enough to switch with me so I have the weekend off
• we might try out the museum today
• last night was movie night – Madagascar 2 and W. – both were mediocre in my opinion
• school is going well this semester, the best schedule and classes so far in the program
• a relatively small part of our time is spent studying the programming language C.  It’s one of the – probably the main language that was the pre-cursor to all that we have learned so far (as in JAVA, C#) – but it’s very different, it’s like I’m back in the first month of the first year… very annoying.
• we have gym class this semester, mostly floor hockey – it’s fun, and the hour of exercise goes by so much faster than trying to run on a stupid treadmill

Real Life Gas Mileage 2008 Toyota Matrix

10 Days ago or so we had a great surpise visit from our good friend Barry. Made us realize how much we miss having the guy around. Barry and I were talking about how annoying it is that when you buy a new car/truck the gas mileage on the sticker is so far off of reality. Here’s the real numbers for our Toyota Matrix over about the last year – this is an average of all our driving and may be off a bit from “input error”, which is another way of saying a couple of times when it was -35 out the ink in my pen froze and I couldn’t read what I wrote down for mileage.

L/100KM – 8.72
Miles/Gallon – 32.39
Highest Gas Price: 1.399 June 2008
Lowest Gas Price: 74.9 December 2008

Update: The government ratings from this site put the 2008 Matrix at:

City: 35 miles/gallon

Highway: 47 miles/gallon.

The site does look it has some great information, including a place to track your real world mileage and share it with others.

New Blog I’m following

I was perusing The 2009 Bloggies and noticed one blog that kept showing up.  So for the rest of that hour I was distracted throughout class by the Confessions of A Pioneer Woman.  What I found was a very well written, humorous blog written by a city girl turned cowgirl/ranching wife/mom/person – with great pictures.  Oh ya – looks like a great cooking blog too.  Anyway I was pretty impressed.  One more to stick on the Reader.

Back and Refreshed

Well the ol’ Dell is back online.  Actually went pretty smooth, although it will be few days until I have time for all the XP updates to download and install.  I had to track down drivers for my network card and my printer and so far that’s all I’ve needed. 

One thing I’m going to do different is go with Open Office.  At some point I had a disk with Office 2003 on it but I can’t find it anymore.  Now I have a copy of Office 2007, but am hesitant to install it, since it seems to be really slow on our laptop and will likely bog things down.  We’ll try out Open Office and see how it works.  I’ve also stuck the new version of Firefox(3) on (which seems really quick by the way) and will likely put Itunes and Quicken on as well.

The last upgrade is another 256MB of RAM I have coming, which will take the old beast up to it’s maximum 1GB.  No Vista for you Grandpa Dell.

Refresh

Well our Dell desktop just passed it’s 5th birthday and it was acting like it was the 95th, so I hunted down my Dell XP installation CD and with some help from lifehacker, I’m attempting to reinstall XP and see what happens.  My main worry is that I won’t be able to track down all the appropriate drivers, but hopefully getting rid of the myriad of programs that had accumulated over the years should speed things up even just a bit…

Opera Mouse Gestures

If you’re into this kind of thing, you’ve likely already tried it out, but I just downloaded the latest version of the Opera browser and it has some neat features.  I always liked the idea of Speed Dial, but the Mouse Gestures thing is really cool I think.  Seems fast as well.  The last version I tried a while ago had some issues with displaying some of the pages I frequent, but so far things look pretty good.  You can download it here.

Rain

All night.  Maybe that will make my new grass grow?

me

Nic – I thought you were some weirdo for a second talking about my child… nice of you to go and visit him.  I get weary of you sometimes too just kidding.  Brianne, aren’t you supposed to be in school?  That kid sure likes that Arlen guy.  I’m going to be there tomorrow night about 8:30.  If you guys aren’t busy on Saturday…

Coffee

You know how sometimes a cup of coffee just seems to hit the taste buds perfectly?  Yesterday was one of those days.  Just thought you’d like to know.