The following arrived in my inbox today. I said WOW out loud.

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later.

She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).

Word gets around about Heidi’s “drink now, pay later” marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi’s bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit.

By providing her customers’ freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi’s gross sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and
increases Heidi’s borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics
as collateral.

At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert traders transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then bundled and traded on international security markets. Naive investors don’t really understand that the securities being sold to them as AAA secured bonds are really the debts of unemployed alcoholics.
Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation’s leading brokerage houses.

One day, even though the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi’s bar. He so informs Heidi.

Heidi then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since, Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and the eleven employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS drop in price by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the banks liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.

The suppliers of Heidi’s bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms’ pension funds in the various BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.

Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multi-billion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from the Government. The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers.

Now, do you understand?

Can’t download Google Chrome at work or school?

Getting the Installer download failed, “Error code=0×80072f78″?

Google Chrome

Your firewall is likely blocking the installer from downloading the program. The Google Chrome setup file that you download from http://www.google.com/chrome/ actually downloads another file which is the actual program.

Many blogs have reported that you can download this other file and install Google Chrome on computers not connected to the Internet and those with firewalls blocking the installation by downloading directly from http://dl.google.com/chrome/install/149.27/chrome_installer.exe. (There are a few other variations.)

That location no longer works, however, and here’s why:

See the 149.27 in the URL? That’s the version number and there’s a newer version out. Thus, Google has canceled that particular version in favor of the newer one. Remember that this is beta software and there are mistakes and bugs.

So, how do you find the correct download?

You need two things: 1) The above URL and 2) the current version number.

1. You already have the URL. It’s http://dl.google.com/chrome/install/149.27/chrome_installer.exe.
2. You can get the current version number from visiting http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/ and searching for the most recent BETA post. It has to be a beta.

As of today (May 26th, 2009) the most recent beta release is 2.0.172.30 so … take the last two numbers, substitue them into your URL, and you have the download URL for the current beta release of the Google Chrome Offline Standalone Installer! As of today, it’s

http://dl.google.com/chrome/install/172.30/chrome_installer.exe

Enjoy!

And no, I don’t know how this might change once the product is no longer a beta. For now, this should work and knowing how long Google’s betas can last I’d say that could be a long while.

Source: Snow Rollers in Idaho – The Blog of Record.

Snow Rollers

Source: Life is a Matter of Choice – Aklan Online Community

There’s some great wisdom in this article. Some great lessons on life and living it to the fullest are here.

With Tom Daschle’s bid over, the obvious choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama Administration is former governor of Vermont and physician, Dr. Howard Dean!

Howard Dean

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/28016916@N08/2785066953/

I am old enough to remember his bid for president in the early days of the 2004 election. It is unfortunate that the “Dean Scream” ended his chances or we might already have universal healthcare in this country. The state of Vermont under his leadership had excellent health services and I hope he can do for the rest of the country what he did for Vermont.

Visit http://deanforhhs.com/ for more information or to get involved!

My father, Don Smith, was a weather forecaster in the Air Force. As part of a project during this time he researched snowfall inMcDowell County, where he was from. With only two exceptions over the entire period that records had been kept, he discovered that McDowell County gets significant snow accumulation only under a very specific set of circumstances.

• The Jet Stream must track down into the Gulf of Mexico and then angle up between Asheville and Charlotte. (The closer it passes to Asheville the more we get. Any further west and the mountains block most of the snow. The further east it passes the less we get. Due to the angle, the storm clips the southern Appalachian Mountains and snowfall for McDowell County tapers off to nothing by about Charlotte.)
• There must be a low pressure area (clouds with precipitation) that forms or strengthens in the gulf and then rides the jet stream to our location.
• As the low pressure system passes over us the air temperature must be at or below freezing at ground level and all the way up to the cloud layer. (If it’s freezing above but warm at the surface we get rain. If it’s warm at the surface but the ground is frozen we get freezing rain. If it’s warm above but freezing at the surface we get hail as the precipitation starts out as snow, melts to rain, and then refreezes.)

As noted above there were only two exceptions to the above pattern when my father looked at the records. One of those exceptions was a massive storm that came west over the mountains from Tennessee. The storm was so massive and moved so fast that it didn’t expend all its precipitation climbing over the Applachian Mountains so McDowell County got snow. The other exception was a Nor’Easter that came from the east. If my memory is correct the Blizzard of ‘93 was also a Nor’Easter and counts as a third exception.

My cousin Chris Jones who graduated from MHS back in the 80s sent this to his mom (my aunt) who in turn sent it to me. It’s an interview with Danny DeVito about a movie called Death to Smoochy in which Mr. DeVito mentions Nebo, NC!

The conversation starts about 3 minutes in and ends about 6 minutes in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOiqG-dQVnE 

Nebo is famous!

My Curriculum Materials

• Moved to http://www.box.net/shared/e81oxeyk43

My Web Sites

• Daniel Smith’s Personal Blog is my personal space where I can post about anything of interest – and often do!
• Dragons Can Be Beaten, my Writing Web Site, contains book reviews and topics of interest to writers.
• Problems to Solve, my Teaching Web Site, covers all things related to School, Computers, and Education.
• Trust Without Reservations, my Science and Religion Web Site, is an outlet for me to explore my faith in Jesus Christ and especially how that relates to modern science. I do not believe there is a contradiction between the two.

Sneakers (1992) Movie Poster

As a graduate school requirement, my wife and I were given the option to create a detailed movie guide. After much time and effort, we have achieved the following movie guide for the 1992 movie, Sneakers starring Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, David Strathairn, Dan Aykroyd, River Phoenix, Mary McDonnell, and Ben Kingsley.

Introduction

The activities in this guide align with the ISTE National Educational Technology Standards (NETS). Focus areas are in computers, information skills, and technology literacy. This study guide is intended for grades 9 – 12, but can be used with other grade levels. These activities can be modified as needed by the teacher based on student aptitude and prior knowledge. Sneakers is rated PG-13 for brief sexual references.

This movie guide is 17 pages long and follows Gavriel Salomon’s Interaction of Media and Cognition and Learning (1979) model called AIME, the Amount of Invested Mental Energy. Teachers should follow the AIME strategy when implementing this study guide to maximize the educational learning potential and understanding for students.

Movie Overview

Sneakers is a light-hearted heist movie with plenty of comedy and romance about computers, hacking, ethics, government espionage, security, secrets, cryptography, deception, betrayal, and little black boxes. The characters model critical thinking skills and creative thinking about technology. On an ethical level, it’s an account of how computers have changed our daily lives both for the better and for the worse.

Despite the fact that its debut was back in 1992, Sneakers has aged surprisingly well. The surveillance techniques and other technical aspects that appear in the movie can still be found today nearly two decades later. One wonders how this movie got so much so right so early.

Plot Synopsis

Marty is the leader of an unlikely team of professional computer hackers that hire themselves out to company executives in order to test their company security systems. This happens to be a real job called Sneaking (as opposed to Hacking, Cracking, or Phreaking) hence the title.

Based in San Francisco, the team is contacted by two NSA agents who want them to steal a top-secret black box containing a homemade computer chip capable of breaking any secret code. The team decides to accept the job and eventually acquires the black box.

Once they discover what the chip is capable of doing, they become entanglement in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse between the National Security Agency and organized crime who also want possession of the chip. They end up handing the chip over to the wrong people and must recover it to clear their good names and prevent themselves from going to jail inside the high-stakes world of government espionage.

Download

• Sneakers Movie Guide (DOC)

Photo Gallery

Ever heard the phrase, “All change is not improvement but all improvement requires change”? I see God wanting to bring about a new creation on planet Earth. I don’t see the current world as the culmination of perfection, so I think there is room for improvement.

I hear people occasionally say that God is constant and unchanging. But is this so? If God is 100% constant to the point that he will not or cannot change, then how do we as Christians explain away Exodus 32:14 (quoted here in context)?

7 Then the LORD said to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. 8 They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’

9 “I have seen these people,” the LORD said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people. 10 Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation.”

11 But Moses sought the favor of the LORD his God. “O LORD,” he said, “why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people. 13 Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever.’ ” 14 Then the LORD relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.

“Relented” in verse 14 sounds like a “change” word to me. Moses even violated God’s direct commandment to leave Him alone to accomplish His divine wrath in verse 10, but God does not hold it against him.

There are other nebulous passages too like Abraham’s pseudo-sacrifice of Isaac. God told Abraham to kill his son, but stopped him at the last moment. So I don’t think God is 100% constant and unchanging in every situation. God certainly let Moses sway His opinion of the Israelites – though some bible scholars see this as more of a test of Moses than a reflection of God’s personality. Personally, I fail to understand why it must be one or the other. I think this beautifully illustrates both the character of God and Moses’ love for his people. God brought this out by putting Moses in this situation. Thus, I think it’s clear that God is more complex than a mere description of His being constant or unchanging accurately reflects.

Furthermore, until Jesus’ return, I believe God uses human beings to accomplish His will and it is God’s will that I consider improvement. He in fact chose us to partner with him in transforming and restoring our world for Him and to Him. We can do nothing apart from Him, however, but he does use us. Therefore, until Jesus’ return, we are the vessles of change in our world.