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Archive for the ‘Just a Thought’ Category

Moments ago, I handed my ballot to my mail carrier and for some reason a calm came over me as I realized I am now done with this political process for this election period. Come November 4th, our country will decide on a newly elected leader. It’s pretty likely we won’t have a unified country after this happens and it’s a certainty that things will get harder before they get better; I only hope people will pull together and start digging in, rather than pointing fingers and hoping “they” will fix it all. We the people have put us here, we have elected the people that are in office, WE are supposed to hold them accountable, and voting is part of it. The ugliness of this season has revealed a really horrible side of our political process, but I suppose we should be happy we’re allowed to take part in one at all.   The rest of the story...

First, I’m not a financial advisor, but feel like I simply must share a bit of information with homeowners out there. Maybe it’s because I think about folks feeling like they have so little control over their own money these days, or maybe it’s just my way of saying, “It’s your money, put it to work!” Having worked in the real estate industry for many years, I often saw people escrow their tax and insurance payments. Break this down for a moment: if you have an escrow account, you pay extra each month to have someone else send payments to your property taxing authority, plus, they send your payment for your homeowner’s insurance. In between, what is that money doing? It’s pooled with other people’s escrow accounts and earning amazing amounts of interest, but not for YOU. Instead, the managing entity has tons of these payments sitting in accounts, building interest for their company. It’s not illegal, it’s not even immoral, it’s just not working hard for you.   The rest of the story...

For this Blog Action Day post, I decided to explore a bit of the poverty that flourishes right here in my own country. Being the “richest” (I use this term loosely, as we are swimming in trillions of dollars of debt right at the moment) nation in the world, it’s hard to fathom our own citizens being unable to enjoy seemingly ordinary things like education, healthcare, clothing, or even food. According to the 2007 Census Bureau numbers, in 2007, 37.3 million people were in poverty, up from 36.5 million in 2006. Certainly that number can be expected to climb, given our current economic situation. When you look at these figures, what pops into my mind is that common airplane speech we get at the beginning of a flight: “Help yourself, then help the others around you.” It makes sense in this case, too.   The rest of the story...

There’s no mystery to the fact that hard work usually pays off with good things. Even Samuel Goldwyn said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” I believe this translates into many things in our daily lives, not just our work. The flip side of that is overdoing it, losing sleep, and for me and many other creatives, not enough breaks in the day or work week, resulting in burn out and a lack of “ah ha” moments.  If you’re like me, I will sometimes work so hard, so late, that even the greatest or simplest idea or solution seems just out of reach; but some how, as if by magic, if I let go and get to bed, the answer is usually revealed in the morning. Okay, so it’s not magic, but more a function of the cognitive unconscious that allows us to tap that creative storehouse.   The rest of the story...

While it’s all wonderful and great that new releases of software arrive just in time for holiday giving, it’s an abomination to me that such an expensive program doesn’t just get some good updates and call it a day.One such product is Adobe’s CS4, which is planned for release in October. (For those of you that don’t know about it, it’s a mainstay tool for many graphic and other media professionals.) Really, I’m all for “bigger and better”, but if a tool is as expensive as this one, it should really make my work easier and have a very intuitive interface, which I would say has never been the case with this product. It should also have “knock your socks off” enhancements, not just little stuff that you’d expect any way or reasonably believe should be in an occasional free update. Instead, folks will have to take some more classes to learn the new tricks and others that are already behind the curve to begin with will have to decide if plunking down the extra dough is really worth it. To me, it’s a travesty for the small/boutique designers who don’t have the tremendous resources to throw after yet another version. Updates and new version are for the big shops, certainly not the little guy. The price tag? Take a seat, then read:   The rest of the story...