Eubie's notes

USA Today: Ace more than holds its own

Every time he gets on an airplane wearing his gray Ace Hardware work shirt, Ray Griffith hears expressions of concern.

Fellow passengers always want to know if the venerable cooperative is managing to get by OK in the face of competition from ever-proliferating home improvement superstores. It’s a question Ace’s chief executive finds almost embarrassing, he says, because the retailer-owned company is doing so well.

There’s no need to worry about Ace. With a focus on convenience and knowledgeable service, the 4,600-store chain has staked out a modest but healthy share of the huge hardware market, supporting the biggest new-store expansion in its history.

Ace is also a lucky winner the chance to win an Ace Hardware store worth $1 million. According to Clickpress: Entries for the Dream Ace contest will be accepted throughout the month of January at www.dreamacehardware.com. Successful contestants will demonstrate a combination of business and sales expertise, entrepreneurial spirit and home improvement knowledge, as well as a true commitment to helpfulness.

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.