Eubie's notes

Recent video of how folks elsewhere are as bad as Southern drivers in driving on icy roads.

Proof  others in the country are as bad driving on icy roads as Southern drivers .

Washington Post: An Old Dog Learns to Write a New Blog — J.W. Marriott Jr., who will soon be 75 years old, is not a computer enthusiast. He takes notes on legal pads during meetings. While visiting some 250 hotels around the world each year he jots down his thoughts on note cards, then slips them in his jacket pocket.. Now he dictates into a tape recorder and someone transcribes it for the web.

NY Times: Firms Fret as Office E-Mail Jumps Security Walls — More Internet-literate workers are forwarding their office e-mail to free Web-accessible personal accounts.

A growing number of Internet-literate workers are forwarding their office e-mail to free Web-accessible personal accounts offered by Google, Yahoo and other companies. Their employers, who envision corporate secrets leaking through the back door of otherwise well-protected computer networks, are not pleased.

NY Times: The Media Equation: 24-Hour Newspaper People — Having a blog makes me approachable, reader-friendly and engaged. Perhaps too engaged.

For those of you who don’t have a blog yet, think of one as a large yellow Labrador: friendly, fun, not all that bright, but constantly demanding your attention.

and

There has always been a feedback loop in journalism — letters to the editor, the phone and more recently e-mail messages. But a blog provides feedback through a fire hose. The nice thing about putting out a newspaper was that, at some point, the story was set and the writer got to go home. Now I have become a day trader, jacked in to my computer and trading by the second in my most precious commodity: me. How do they like me now? What about … now? Hmmmm … Now?

NY Times: Tax Cuts Offer Most for Very Rich, Study Says — Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply in 2004 than any group in the country.

The study, by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, also shows that tax rates for middle-income earners edged up in 2004, the most recent year for which data was available, while rates for people at the very top continued to decline.

I finished reading this month The great American tax dodge : how spiraling fraud and avoidance are killing fairness, destroying the income tax, and costing you by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele so I was already feeling a little put out about income taxes.

Link to the Congressional Budge Office report.

NY Times: Your Money: You’ve Hit the Jackpot. Now What? — If you fall into a lot of cash, you should pause before you spend and think about how much you’ve really won and how you relate to money.

WSJ: The Twilight Years of Cap’n Crunch — Silicon Valley legend John Draper made his name with Brains and pranks, before slipping to the margins. This looks at a legendary programmer, phone phreaker who developed software such as ez-writer and developing the technology that is now our modern telephone menus. But the world of technology changed and his eccentric personality was no longer tolerated. Now at 63, he lives hand to mouth, though he’s a legend in technology circles. He got his nickname when he found a whistles given away in the cereal boxes perfectly mimicked a telephone code.

Mr. Draper calls aging veterans like himself part of an “off-the-grid” community. Steve Inness, 47, helped develop touch-screen cellphone technology and does programming work for startups. In recent years, he’s lived on the floors and couches of employers; he was last seen hitchhiking in the desert outside Las Vegas. Roy Kaylor, 68, built one of the first electric cars in the early 1970s and contributed to a government-supported effort to develop the technology. He lives in a trailer without electricity in the Santa Cruz mountains. Mr. Draper’s recent lunch host, Mr. Bengel, 61, designed an electrohydraulic machine tool and says he has worked for several Silicon Valley companies.

Boing Boing: Adirondack “bushman” captured after 20 years in the woods

Alan G. Como, 56, was captured by police after eluding them for 20 years. He lived in the Adirondack woods of New York, burglarizing campsites to survive.
Big and muscular with little fat on his body, police said he is in remarkably good shape for someone his age who has apparently lived in the woods for at least several years.
“He’s a pro. He knows what he’s doing,” Cleveland said.
Only items needed for survival — clothes, sleeping bags, food and batteries — were taken during the burglaries, with the thief leaving behind valuables like jewelry and electronics, the sheriff said.

Michael Hyatt, president and chief executive of Thomas Nelson Publishers in Nashville shared productivity and other ideas in his Working Smart for a long time. Last month he decided to stop writing there, keep writing in his other blog — From Where I Sit, but keep the site and entries.

Here are some of the Working Smart items I don’t want to lose:

* My Daily Reading List
* Automated Email Follow-up — I’m afraid that in the race to get through the scores of messages that daily hit our inbox, we hit the proverbial ball over the net, but never really follow-up to see what happened when the ball arrives in the other person’s court. Was it hit back? Was it tossed to someone else? Or, did it just hit the court and lay there with a hundred other balls. If it was the latter, then you really didn’t accomplish anything.
* Tom Peters on Presentation Excellence
* How to Start a Blog — I would suggest that you be patient with yourself. Writing is like anything else. The more you do it, the better you get. If you have a little talent, and stick with it, you’ll eventually get into the rhythm and joy of it.
* Corporate Blogging Rules and Corporate Blogging Guidelines, Draft #2
* The Master Task List — For several years now, I have profited from using a “Master Task List.” This is a way to group your work-related activities so that you do what you were hired to do and keep from getting side-tracked by “trivial pursuits.” I first learned this technique from Todd Duncan, whose book, Time Traps, is a must read.