Here are a couple pieces of media I’ve found helpful in figuring out whats going on:

1. This American Life did an excellent episode called Bad Banks which nicely explains the basic fundamentals of the banking industry.
2. Last week I half jokingly told friends on Thursday I expected to wake up Friday morning to find that the government had taken over the banking system. One of my friends passed on this link to an excellent 60 Minutes* piece on what happens when banks fail and are taken over by the FDIC (short story: Don’t Panic).

I think the best line from either of those pieces is from the This American Life episode when professor David Beim states:

The problem is not the banks, greedy though they may be, overpaid though they may be. The problem is us. We have over-borrowed. We have been living very high on the hog.

(emphasis mine)

And now, the rest of the story…

But this is a blog! I can’t just post some links without expounding upon my own poorly informed views! I’m an American dammit!

So here are some of my current thoughts:

• I’m pro stimulus package. If there’s ever a time for deficit spending its when the economy is in trouble and people need jobs. The wrong time for deficit spending is to destroy and then rebuild sovereign nations for no good reason.
• I believe the government should Take over all the failed banks. These too-big-to-fail behemoths should be taken over, parceled up, and sold off. Too-big-to-fail is unacceptable. The tax payers would probably end up paying a price for this, but consider it the War on Bad Banks. Over the past 8 years we’ve paid billions to fight a mostly phony “War on Terror”, why not spend billions on something that would have a positive result for humanity?
• In the future we need regulations similar to anti-trust laws to prevent so few corporations from wielding so much power. In the computer world we turn to distributed systems to provide redundancy in case of failure. The non-geeky world has a nice little saying for this: don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

The plan is the not chance the weather and stay overnight at the airport tonight to make sure to catch our 6:30am flight Monday morning. Here’s what happened:

• 9:00am – 4:45pm – Packing, checking Trimet service alerts and flight cancellations.
• 4:45pm – 6:00pm – Waiting at bus stop for a bus that never came. Met a cool guy named Rob though
• 6:20pm – Home, get call from US Airways our flight is canceled.
• 6:30pm – Power goes out.
• 7:00pm – 9:00pm – I go on a hike. Notice my wedding ring is missing. Spend next hour hiking and digging through snow looking for it.
• 10pm – Go to bed depressed, but quite warm in our sleeping bags under every blanket we own.

Monday

• 9:00am – Get up, still no power.
• 10:00am – 12:00am – Get crazy idea to try to make it to the Pitzer’s in the Focus. Took 15 minutes to thaw the car and drive 15′ to our house. Took almost 2 hours of the greatest neighbor in the world helping put my chains back on about a dozen times just to get my car parked in front of our house.
  Pitzer’s house is not going to happen.
• 1:00pm – Power is back! Yay! Now we just have to figure out how to save Christmas…

The best part is that the PGE (utility company) truck showed up at about 11:45am at which point my car was stuck chainless in the middle of the road.

• Job 1 is finding a place to live, so we can move out of our friend’s apartment.
• Job 2 is finishing up a project Chris Pitzer & I have been toying with for ages and really need to get live.

Stay tuned, and ping me if you live in Portland, OR and like Python, Linux, Web Dev, Open Source, and/or Beer. I’m always looking for exciting new contracting opportunities as well, although at the moment I’m pretty swamped with existing clients.

Right now its bed time because I’m dead tired and have a full day of apartment hunting and catching up on work ahead of me tomorrow.

If you care about my personal life, feel free to look me up on Facebook. This blog is my geek outlet, but I’m not promising my personal life is any more exciting.

Update: Just realized my fancy widgets aren’t showing up in feeds. Click through if you care.

Thanks to The Current I found my song for this summer:*

Michael Franti & Spearhead – Say Hey (I Love You)

It was just released today, and the whole album doesn’t come out until September 9th. Hopefully it will be on eMusic then!

Amazon’s MP3 player widget broke when I searched for the song, so you’ll have to make due with 2 other excellent songs I can’t get out of my head thanks to The Current.

* Yeah I know its pretty late in the summer to be picking a song, but I just hadn’t heard the one yet. Summer of 2006 was easy with Gnarls Barkley’s debut, but I don’t remember what the official song was last year…

My wife, Samantha, painted them and they were our only TVs for 3 years!

The Apple IIe was the first computer I ever touched, the first computer my family owned, and the computer I learned programming on. These monitors are originally from the Grade School I grew up in, so changes are I probably ran the following program on at least one of them:

10 PRINT "MICHAEL IS COOL!"
20 GOTO 10

(Note: No lowercase characters on the IIe.)

These are actually the only Apple products we own. I better stop thinking about it before I get too nostalgic and decide to keep one.

RIP Goldie and Striped