Monthly Archives: July 2006

Math Magic

I just started reading Scott Flansburg’s Math Magic book. It’s all about more efficient and intelligent ways of doing math. It’s an idea I’ve long wanted to try–to increase my speed and ability to crunch numbers in my head. The hard part is practice–how do you make yourself good at this without a lot of practice? And how fun is it to practice adding numbers in your head? It’s easy to think of some periodic situations: shopping and budget balancing, for example, but after that I’m not sure.

I think I’ll write a small PocketPC app that can give me random problems to solve in my head, as well as time me and note improvements. Cool…any excuse to write a program!

Raising Taxes versus Lowering Spending

Every few months, our Senators and Congress-men and women debate taxes and whether or not to raise, lower, keep them steady, or blame others for doing so.

The main thing that I notice during this ridiculous political fights is that nobody ever talks about the most basic financial wisdom: Spend Less Than You Earn. Why doesn’t this apply to governments as well as individuals? Most people in Congress are very wealthy and presumably understand basic financial principles of wealth-building quite well. So why can’t they all exercise restraint and simply spend less? Raising taxes to cover budget shortfalls makes me very nervous because there is no amount of money that cannot be overspent! Raising taxes is not a real solution, just as earning more money isn’t a solution to your bad spending habits.

Qumana

I think, however, that I like Qumana better. The WYSIWYG is nice. Seems easier to use. I don’t need a lot of advanced features. It works simply and well. I’m not sure what I think of the drop-pad, however. It doesn’t really support how I typically write posts, but perhaps I can make some use of it. For now, I’ll probably just turn it off.

Overall, I think I’ll stick with this for at least a while.

w.bloggar

I’m out various offline blog editors. Currently I’m using w.bloggar. I’m not sure what I think of it. WYSIWYG is really a nice thing to have in an editor, but the ability to see the HTML is useful too. Probably the best editor I’ve used is Dreamweaver’s split-pane HTML/WYSIWYG interface, which allows you to view and edit either one simultaneously.

Also, their forums are filled with so much spam to be nearly unusable.

I’ll give it a try for a while and see how I like it. I really need to be blogging more…