Clarkson Energy Homes

Words are important to writers. I think I have written enough to be called a writer. I don’t make my living writing, so perhaps I am not a professional writer, but I have been paid for writing in the past and expect to be paid again.

When I run across an inappropriate use of a word, two things come to mind. Is my assumption about the usage correct and should I inform the user of the inappropriate use? Generally, I find I am usually correct and tend to not point out the poor usage.

I often run across instances of people using the word proof when they really mean evidence. After seeing an instance earlier today, I first ran to a dictionary to confirm that they were not synonymous. I then did a Google search to find a comparison of the terms.

Sure enough, I hit this little thread. I’m not going to sum that page up. It’s short enough to read and get a great idea of the difference between proof and evidence. It still amazes me how easy it is to do research in the World Wide Web. What an amazing time to be alive.

In real estate investing propaganda I often see terms like “50 cents on the dollar” or “buy property for half off.” This is bull shit, folks. Any product sold is worth exactly what the purchaser paid for it. A house which sells for $50,000 is not worth more than $50,000. We know that because it sold for $50,000, not for more than that.

Is is possible for a person to buy a house in the morning and sell it immediately for a profit. With a double closing I could do it in one trip to the closing company. Though it is a rare deal, it might be possible to buy a property for $50,000 and immediately turn around and sell it for $100,000 in one transaction.

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I keep running across web sites on the Internet which tell all the exciting features of a product except the price. Either the price is missing or I have to fill out some form for a price.

I just want to reach out there and slap the owner upside the head. Holy Crap. What were you thinking? You spent money on advertising and marketing. You did all that research and planning to get me into your store. You told me about the benefits and why I needed your product right now, today.

And then refuse to sell me your product. I can only draw two conclusions. Either your price is to high and I won’t be paying it. Or you think your product is one-of-a-kind and no one else is selling something similar or competitive, with an on line price.

Guess what? You might be wrong. And you might be losing sales because of it.

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I guess this is more a reminder to myself than useful information, but here goes.

Recently, I read up on PHP 5.x header() function. I ran across this tidbit of info.

HTTP/1.1 requires an absolute URI as argument to » Location: including the scheme, hostname and absolute path, but some clients accept relative URIs.

I don’t know about you, but I find RFCs incredibly boring, so I’m glad that some insomniac took the time to find this gem.

Following this standard eliminates another problem in a different language. In Perl, many people correctly use CGI.pm to perform redirects. The CGI manual gives the same advice. Use full URLs to redirect.

Here’s a mini guide to redirection: (Basically, you just print the redirect out.)

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I just got off the phone with the former owner of EAAHosting.com. He has one of those cautionary tales that was really tough. It just dawned on me that I completely forgot to ask his name.

According to his story, EAA Hosting started out small and gained a lot of customers fast. Soon, they were able to get better pricing from the larger server wholesalers, but they kept their CRM on one of the smaller server companies.

Some time last year, fatnetworks.com took down the server which housed their CRM and all their customer contact information. While most of their customers were located on other servers form other more stable providers, they went out of business because they lost all their customer information.

Apparently they could not get fatnetworks to get the server back up and couldn’t get them to recover their lost data.

So, we can learn something form their mistake. Do not use a Customer Relations Manager program which does not come with some type of off-line or remote backup. Do not rely on CP or H-Sphere to manage all your customers unless you can back up the database they use.

Personally, I would never have thought to take this step.

Barak Obama is touting a tax credit for college tuition. I can only hope that this is just a promise and will not come about. I read recently that a politicians job is to make promises. It’s not their job to fulfill their promises, just to make them. Why would I be against a tax credit?

One reason was given in a short interview on my local news station. The speaker said that students could go to bigger schools. In her opinion, the tax credit would allow students to spend more on education, but Obama wanted to help people save money on tuition.

Left only to the market, if the price of education was too high then colleges would have to reduce their prices. The reason we might need a tax credit to help people afford education is if we are already doing something which inhibits this market mechanism.

Instead of offering a tax credit to fix the regulation, why not just repeal that regulation which messes up the market in the first place? Why does “doing something” have to add more laws? Since the market works all by itself, why not make “doing something” mean getting out of the way of the market?

Sometimes it does it subtly and sometimes it does it obviously, but regulation always changes the market place in ways we may not understand. It seems to me that Consumer Law attempts to give power to consumers because some people are convinced that large firms have all the power. But do they?

In a free market every trade is voluntary. There is no legal method to initiate force. Not even government can initiate it. Free market advocates often complain that there is no need for anti-trust or consumer law.

Take, for example, the scenario of a dominant market player (like Intel) using its size to drive other players out of a particular market by lowering its prices so much that they are sometimes selling below cost.
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I ran across this web site this morning. Here’s a quote from the January 2008 page.

As far as I am concerned if an answer to a question isn’t in the bible, then the you have no business asking the question. A few years ago when my wife suddenly had to get an emergency c-section I was scared. But I didnt turn to any book about quarks. Luckily I had my palm pilot with me, which just happened to have the entire King James bible on it! I read a few passages that gave me the strength to pray for her and the baby to get through this ordeal. I sure didn’t need any useless trivia books about quarks to find comfort in.

I have very little use for science. In fact it is in impediment to getting close to God.

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The jQuery JavaScript library offers some quick and dirty solutions to many problems. I was perusing a jQuery email list when I ran across a simple problem that a beginner JavaScript coder like me could solve. I’ll simplify it a little here to focus this article.

Basically, the poster wanted to add form fields to a table, but he wanted to increment a field counter in the HTML and in the id and name tags. Just to make it a little more difficult, the field numbers needed to be padded with leading zeros.

Adding the table rows is trivial in jQuery and it turns out that leading zeros are pretty easy too. I like the “everything is an object” approach to JavaScript. You can extend even the built-in objects including the String object. Let’s tackle that first.
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The U.S. has 4% of the world’s population and consumes 25% of the world’s power.

This time I heard it on the NBC Evening news. The reporter never bothered to ask why the speaker made this comparison. What the Bleep do these two things have in common?

Okay. At first glance this statement seems to hold some substance. What could only 4% of the world’s people be doing that accounts for so much power usage? Hmm. I wonder if production might tell us something?

Gross Domestic Product provides of the best measures to compare countries or populations. According to the International Monetary Fund the 2006 World GDP was $48,245,198,000,000 and the U.S. GDP is $13,194,700,000,000. Isn’t it a coincidence that the U.S. GDP is about 27% of the World GDP and the U.S. power consumption is 25% of world power consumption?