End of Quarter Roundup

The big stories (but not the only stories) here this past quarter have been the Swine Flu outbreak and the economy.

For some personal notes, we have been having some record breaking heat here in the middle of Texas, and this may go down as one of the hottest summers on record. South and west of me, the ranchers are in dire straights and the cities have begun to restrict water use because of drought conditions, but it really hasn't affected me personally, yet. I have been reading a book on the heresies of the "prosperity preachers" and will be doing an initial review of the book shortly. (I still plan to do one more article on the "Year of Biblical Living")

GEEK ALERT: Despite being written for a general audience the next two paragraphs are quite technical in nature. If you are a non-geek, simply ignore the terms you don't understand, and you will still get three quarters of it.

My search for new software goes on, but I have decided to use an Open Office spreadsheet for my check book register. If you are looking for good FREE office software, Open Office is my recommendation. Not yet perfect, but getting there. And so many offices now use Excel or some other spreadsheet for a general purpose tool that I recommend almost everyone learn to use it. (More on that later.)

For a Personal Information Manager, I have settled on EPIM, which has version 3.02 out. Support for Win2K is not expected to go on much longer, but the authors patched it for Win2K compatibility for this version. Now to find some good journal keeping software.

Now for some notes on my writings for the past three months: I have managed not to publish and then update any posts, but one of my political posts generated some worthwhile remarks.

I do a lot of my writing by commenting on other peoples blog entries, here are some of the more significant comments.

Home Prices May Be Lost for a Generation
The linked to story here is worth reading

Economy to Shrink for "Some Time"
or "Obama's pep talker gives dismal review"

While I did not comment on this one,
it is a real good read about how some
big banks are gaming the mortgage mess.

I think I actually do more writing as comments
on Combat Effective than anywhere else.

Automakers, Bailouts, and Greed

Cowards and Sheepdogs

Dead Pirates

Daily Bad News - Should we freak out?

Mortgages Cramdowns and Contracts

Recovery, or Bear Market Rally

The Conflict between good and Evil,
the Bible and the Scammers

Conservatives don't Make Themselves Heard

Inflation, and Where does Money Come From

The People of the CombatEffective Crowd

Long winded Discussion of Political Wind shifts

The ongoing Economic Crisis

Just some political BS here

Just some economic BS here

Blue-Ray - the expensive
new toy - will people eventually buy it?

Opening up a discussion on the Happenings in Iran

A contrast on possible TARP bailouts

And there you have it. If there is any doubt, not only does this let people who use blog following and blog reading software keep up with stuff that doesn't show up on those tools, but it also ups my "update count" by one, with a lot of links. Kinda cheating, but kinda useful.