NY Times:Fundamentally: 25 Years of Conventional Wisdom, Down the Drain
NY Times: Drilling Down: Web Passes Papers as a News Source
NY Times: As Vacant Office Space Grows, So Does Lenders’ Crisis
LA Times: Flat-screen TVs to face energy-efficiency rules in Calif.
WSJ: Why We Fall for Financial Scams
BoingBoing: Top 500 worst passwords
WSJ: Small House, Big Loan Spells Trouble
Washington Post: Economy Pushes Some to Seek Extra Work
Steve Snow, the founder of Charlotte’s free web service, Charlotte’s Web died last month at the age of 60.
Snow was earlier a journalist, and he and I had common backgrounds and shared the hobby of woodworking.
In the mid-1990s, there was concern over a digital divide between those who could afford computers and internet access and those who could not. Several cities started free webs and offered dial-up email and tex-based web browsing, using Lynx. Charlotte’s Web was one of those free web services and was started in 1994.
He wrote of his early experiences about the web in 1993.
Charlotte’s Web lasted for five years and its operations were eventually absorbed and then disbanded by the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. By then, most libraries had installed computers and internet access and free e-mail was available from Yahoo, Hot Mail and others. According to the Charlotte Observer, Charlotte’s Web had 10,000 accounts when the library system took it over.
Steve was also active in One Special Christmas, a group that makes and auctions handcrafted wood products to raise money for children’s charities. After he left Charlotte he eventually worked as a counsultant in Asheville.
Myers Park Hardware at the intersection of Providence and Queens was one of my favorite hardware stores in Charlotte. It was convenient, the advice was good and the best part was a contract post office. Those little post offices are convenient and never as crowded as the post offices.
Myers Park Hardware closed in December. I haven’t heard what will be done with the building or site. I don’t think it’s going to remain inactive for long. It’s too active a intersection. Here’s the story from September from the Charlotte Business Journal when the store’s closing was first announced.
While traveling for the holidays, I bought gas at Midnight Oil in Ooltewah, TN for $1.36 a gallon. It wasn’t a fluke, another gas station across the highway was selling at the same price and other stations in the area were selling around $1.40 a gallon.
Using the calculators Measuring Worth.com, here’s the equivalent of the retail price of gas at 32 cents a gallon in 1968:
In 2007, $0.32 from 1968 is worth:
| $1.91 | using the Consumer Price Index | |
| $1.54 | using the GDP deflator | |
| $2.07 | using the value of consumer bundle * | |
| $1.97 | using the unskilled wage * | |
| $3.23 | using the nominal GDP per capita | |
| $4.86 | using the relative share of GDP | |
| * The 2007 observation for the unskilled wage is estimated. | ||
I used 2007 numbers because the site uses only annual numbers and 2008 numbers are not available yet.
Unfortunately, the suppliers are doing what they can to make sure prices don’t stay this cheap for long.
It’s almost become a tradition that we’ll meeting Michael somewhere around Vanderbilt before he flies back to Chicago. Starbucks is always a good choice.
WSJ: Greenbrier Resort Put Up for Sale — Congress may lose its nuclear bomb shelter.
WSJ: The Doomsayers Who Got It Right
Washington Post: Credit Freeze Puts Chill on Dealmaking, With Volume Down 29%
WSJ: Crude Reality: OPEC’s Really Cutting Oil Ouput-So Far
Tech Crunch: Top Social Media Sites of 2008
Footnoted.org: And the worst footnote of 2008 was …
WSJ: Microsoft’s Web Browser Loses Ground
WSJ: Companies Tolerate Ads for Free Software — Good news for Google Docs and Zoho.
CSMonitor: A cook’s favorite, sturdy tool — With proper care, cast-iron cookware can last generations. I know some that believe in these skillets, such as those campers who use dutch ovens but most cooks shy away from it. This writer says the secret is coarse salt, water and oil. That’s similar to the suggestion here on How To Season a Cast Iron Pan.
More photos at the Cracker Barrel in Franklin, Ky.
And me with some of my aunts and uncles:
These are the brothers and sister who live near my Dad. This was taken on a foggy and drizzly morning after Christmas.
NY Times: Airline Flies a 747 on Fuel From a Plant — the plant was a jatropha, which needs little water or fertilizer and can be grown almost anywhere — even in sandy, saline or otherwise infertile soil. Each seed produces 30 to 40 percent of its mass in oil, giving it a high per-acre yield, specialists said.
Washington Post: Obama: America’s ‘First Online Social Networking President’ —Obama Won With Web’s Help. Now, How to Govern Using That Community?
Wired: YouTube, Twitter: Weapons in Israel’s Info War
TechCrunch: Holiday E-Commerce Sales Fall Flat
TechFlash: Zunes commit ‘mass suicide’
Religious Intelligence: Church of England puts its faith in Al Gore’s investment arm — The Church of England’s Church Commissioners have gone green, investing £150 million with former US Vice-President Al Gore’s environmentally minded investment firm, Generation Investment Management.
Guy Kawasaki: Ten Tiny Things Every Small Business Owner Should Do in 2009