I found this excellent talk by Guy Kawasaki to be quite motivational:

I’ve spent the last few months working on Spreedly with 3 friends. It’s been a wonderful experience working together to create a business.

BJ Lawson is an outstanding candidate for US Congress. He has tremendous potential to improve this nation. I’m quite excited about his campaign.

I’ve been friends with BJ for many years now. He’s a man of integrity and he’s just who we need to bring some sense back to Washington.

This article makes me wonder. It’s another case of government “officials” overriding the wishes of parents.

Should I be surprised? We have compulsory education laws saying that our children must be in school for X number of days. Where did government get the right to tell us what our children ought to be doing?

I created a rails plugin to help me keep clients up to date on the status of projects. This post is an update to the original svn_messages plugin.

The plugin now uses capistrano 2 (Multistage). I use it in 2 instances - whenever I deploy a site, and whenever I send a weekly status report. For a deployment, this is what I type at the command line:

1

cap staging svn:deployment_report

This gives me the following output:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

Deployment to staging (Revision 34)
I deployed the latest.  It includes:

* Started adding user registration system. (domelia)
* Now translating validation errors and their attribute names. (bjones)
* Reorganized views a bit. (domelia)
* Now sending activation email when user signs up. (fsmith)
* Added support for "remember me" when logging in. (domelia)

I could have also typed:

1

cap production svn:deployment_report

For a weekly status report, I type the following:

1

cap svn:messages r=70 u=domelia

70 is the oldest subversion revision I care about. domelia is me. I specify this because I only care about the svn commits that I personally made. This gives me the following output:

1
2
3

* Started adding user registration system.
* Reorganized views a bit.
* Added support for "remember me" when logging in.

I like the plugin because I can keep clients up to date and spend very little time doing it.

To install:

1

svn export https://terralien.devguard.com/svn/projects/plugins/svn_messages vendor/plugins/svn_messages

If you’d like this deployment report to happen every time you deploy, you can add the folllowing to your deploy.rb:

1

before  "deploy:update_code", "svn:deployment_report"

Jim Rogers is a quite successful international investor who clearly understands economics and how to make money. I find it quite interesting that he refers to Ron Paul as “the only candidate who has a clue what’s going on in the world.” Ron Paul is the only candidate Jim Rogers has given money to this election cycle. Rogers also says that Ron Paul is the only candidate he’ll vote for. He refers to the other candidates as clowns who are contributing to the problem.

For many decades now, Republicans and Democrats keep taking turns being in power. Each group works to make the federal government stronger in different ways. But the goal of both is the same – grow the federal government and make it stronger. They both hurt the cause of liberty and they both disregard their oath to uphold the Constitution. As each term ends, the government is an even stronger, more coercive monopoly than when they started.

Republicans and Democrats help each other. Each thinks it’s ok for the government to dictate how we live our lives and how we spend our money.

For many decades now, Republicans and Democrats keep taking turns being in power. Each group works to make the federal government stronger in different ways. But the goal of both is the same – grow the federal government and make it stronger. They both hurt the cause of liberty and they both disregard their oath to uphold the Constitution. As each term ends, the government is an even stronger, more coercive monopoly than when they started.

Republicans and Democrats help each other. Each thinks it’s ok for the government to dictate how we live our lives and how we spend our money.

It seems that the tendrils of government continue to expand. The article Bush mortgage plan includes rate freeze gives some details about how the federal government is planning on meddling in the housing market to try to fix the problems that their previous meddling caused.

Why is it that we think that government intervention is the answer to the problems caused by previous government intervention?

Bush’s plan will probably delay the subprime mess until after he leaves office. Then conservatives can blame the next president. Fixing the problem is not the goal. Passing the buck is. If we were serious about fixing the problem, we’d eliminate the federal reserve and allow competing currencies.

I just saw this article about how Vivendi games will buy a majority stake in Activision. So these two companies have come together and voluntarily decided that they’d like to merge. The sentence that struck me was, “Providing regulators and Activision shareholders agree on the deal, Vivendi will own 52 per cent of the entity…”

Say what? Providing regulators agree on the deal? Why do regulators even have a say in a voluntary transaction between consenting parties? Isn’t it annoying that we have to ask permission from government bureaucrats? It’s just another indication that we ain’t as free as we think we are.