We all have a computer at home that we paid for, we all have our ISP account that we monthly pay for, with the router we paid for, and cables our society paid for from our taxes, and satellites our governments decided to put up there. “We” as global community paid for and developed and built a global digital network, that makes everything easier and faster and cheaper because there is no truck or airplane or shop-shelf, Sony and pals get to use all that free of charge, that makes their promotion and distribution also cheaper, faster, easier.

Sony and pals do use the digital distribution network but continued to charge shop-shelf prices. The abuse of the digital network as such is largely on the part of the music and movie industry.

To put it in perspective : if I sit outside a bar and some waiter comes and asks what i want to drink and gets my drinks and keeps an eye to see when my glass is empty and asks if i want something else or offers the daily lunch, i give the man a tip, 15% or more.

If the bar has no waiter, i dont pay a tip.

If companies charge shop-shelf price in a digital market, you can expect a wave of ‘hacking’ and illegal versions flooding the market, mainly due to dissatisfaction with the perceived overcharging by the suppliers. P2P-networks were the chosen platform for a while, or sites like YouTube. It continues until the market reaches a new price level agreement between supply and demand, or a new business model.

Steve Jobs finally introduced iTunes, 12 songs for 12 dollars, a completely legal digital distribution network. That is for music close to the old price level, just without the cost for the case, transport, and shop shelf (we are going to miss Steve Jobs).

Horses for courses, where MySql, PHP and HTML are native to the web, PHP/HTML suck as table GUI,no offense, I just got extremely frustrated with it today. Another way to get the data off the web onto my desktop is using FTP/ODBC and enclosing MySql tables in my MsAccess desktop database. It has it perks but it works. If you want to try it check with your host (if you are not self hosting) if your host allows external access to your mysql server. For local servers it works flawless.

Download the odbc connector

Over at Dev.MySql they muist have heard my screams of agony an programmed an ODBC (open database connectivity) driver. Windows supports the ODBC standards hence in Office you can use external databases if you install an odbc driver for the database type.

Create the system datasource

Once the driver is installed you can add the MySql database as open database to Windows (odbc works via the operating system) and link the tables in MsAccess. Start by opening the Windows configuration screen and open System manager, where you can access the ODBC Datasources and open the ODBC Administrator screen :

Pick the tab System DSN and choose Add… to select a driver : the new MySql ODBC Driver.

Then comes the magic bit : when you click Finish, the MySql driver pops up its own configuration screen :

The data you fill in is the same login data used in WordPress wp-config.php : the mysql database host, login and password, and what database to select. When you are done, you can make more than one ODBC Sources so you can add every WordPress install you have on the web to it, provided you have access to the mysql server. A lot of hosts do not actually allow it, but mine do.

So far so good, the Datasource is now known in the Windows operating system, now we go to MsAccess.

Enclose the tables in MsAccess

Under External Data pick ODBC Database :

In the screen that opens, pick the Link data option :

And in the next screen pick the tab with machine data sources : this picture shows both my new localhost database and the juust.org database so I will pick that one (it is in Rotterdam somewhere on a server)

When I pick that one the driver kicks in and connects to the remote database, retrieving a list with tables for me to link into the database, for the occasion I will link the Ak_Twitter table of the WordPress Twitter Tools plugin that has my most recent Tweets :

And click okay and Voila :

The tables are linked

Note: if you get an error “server has gone away, ( ask your host to) set the connection timeout to 300 or more

How to set Word up as WordPress editor ?

Make a document and pick from the File menu “Save and Send”, and you get an extra option to publish as blog post.

Once you pick that it opens an editor for blog posts, that pn the background uses the XML-RPC interface. Word starts a wizard the first time, that you can also access by “manage accounts” in the editor menu :

But let’s start by clicking Save and Send : Word will ask you to register an account, iow your wordpress blog website.

When registering you can pick from a whole list of blog types, of course I picked WordPress

In the dialog ‘new wordpress account’ you enter your XML-RPC end point, the directory of your blog with /xmlrpc.php, that is where you can post to your blog. Username and Password can be your normal username and password, you can also register separately at the blog. That would be my choice.

Of course these days blog posts all have pictures, and in the account dialog in the lower left corner there is a button “picture options” where you can specify how you want uploaded. You can use an FTP upload but in my case picking the blog provider (iow let WordPress handle it itself) works out of the box.

Once you click OK you also get a warning about the visibility of your login and password, XML-RPC posts are text files and your account user name and password are not encrypted when sent to the blog XML-RPC endpoint. There is little risk in it but it is a point that has to be made.

When you agree to continue you can edit your post. And when done, publish.

…and out came this post. In the WordPress editor you can add some tags and categories if you publish as draft, but you can also specify a category in the  Word editor..

Word offers a lot of picture effects yet it outputs the result as  .png images so it works without css3 dependencies, and outputs very clean html markup. Just for the picture effects and total ease of editing it gets a 5 out of 5.

At first you pay 98% interest and 2% debt, at the end you pay 2% and 98% debt. In the netherlands we have a specific regulation that allows for deduction of the interest payment from taxes, that benefits startup families and can lower the tax pressure from roughly 35% to 30%. After 20 years on average people make more money and can do without the deduct.

In the bubble one brand-new idea was the interest-only mortgage, where you pay the entire sum at the end when you sell the house.

There are arguments for it, and arguments to never go there.

That would seem amazing, average joe can refinance his 200K house and pays only 70% compared to an annuity mortgage.

Problem remains that in a free market the price is what the market pays for it, and if 50% of the market is the average joe population the market has a 1000/mo budget, through competition the market price of houses goes up :

Without the payment on the main debt, the prices on the housing market becomemore volatile. If interest goes up the prices drop, part of the mortgages can become a risk to the houseowner and bank, who can even lose their triple-A and that drives the interest up even more.

If Joe bought the house at 2% 600K and the price drops to 450K with 3% interest, Joe has a 150K net debt that is not covered in the sale of the house. 20 Joe’s is a million dollar problem. 200.000 Joes is a 10 billion dollar problem. We have roughly 3 million Joe families so we would have a 150 billion dollar problem.

A strong argument not to go there.

The second problem is the release of funds in the refinance round, the old mortgages were annuitary and some were almost completely paid. Selling a 200K 4% for 300K 4% frees 300K and that will largely be spent in the overal economy. It could amount to 300 billion for the netherlands, 20.000 per capita that is not structural growth.

The basic spend on housing, gas water electricity, municipal and state taxes, health insurance didn’t change, and much of the extra funds is spent on luxury. The baby-boomers were 45-55 at the time so they benefitted most from the refinance round, and could suddenly buy a Bavaria yacht for daddy, a timeshare pensionada home in Spain or Portugal, adventures on the stock exchange, music, computers, extra dinners.

With as result the yachtbuilders booming, expanding, entire new factories for ships, and now the entire demand is gone and half the companies go bankrupt. Construction of pensionado village in Spain and Portugal is over, sadly it was mainly the pension funds that invested in these projects (another reason not to go there).

Building capacity to satisfy extra demand in a bubble is a waste, there is no structural long term demand. John Maynard Keynes hinted at that, it is wise for a community to save money when things go well to support spend when things go less well, and choose a long term stable balanced growth.

In keynesian thought the state is the complement or maybe superego  of the population and in these phases increases taxes and cuts budget and spend on education, culture, health care to dampen excessive growth, once the economic growth slows down the state  lowers taxes and spends more. The state spend is complement to the populations spend and together they spend in a stable growing pattern. That allows for stable turnover for companies and stable employment, and would prevent building up bubble luxury overcapacity.

That remains a critique on my part, part of the crisis is caused by the egotism of the baby-boom. The baby-boom demographic segment is 30% bigger than normal, we have 6% “extra” population in that segment mainly in countries involved in WW2. When voting, they can outvote other demographic segments related to life phase issues.

The baby boom itself causes an independant extra demand in lifecycle related products of 30% in the west, and also a 30% drop in demand for these products as they move towards the retirement home. They could simply be used to catering to their own needs, for them the growth in business would always seem related to their lifecycle products, as if society actually shapes itself to satisfy their needs.

All in all, that makes the main search engine marketing tip for the next ten years Granny Gift shops on the web, lots of photos of happy little toddlers that make Granny happy, with $20,- gifts for Granny’s own grandchildren. Home delivery so Granny does not have to go out on the streets.

There is a 30% extra demand in the segment throughout the west (unless the pension funds go belly up). In 2015 there is 50% more demand for “happy 70th birthday” cards in the Netherlands.

Just some random thoughts.

I am going to get some coffee, I have a very stable coffee demand pattern that I *must* stafisy, my demand is very stable and long term a-cyclic.

Dat sloeg aan bij de roomsen, die van oudsher zeer vatbaar zijn voor waanideeen, en bij de fascisten, die naast waanideeen ook geen behoefte aan democratie hebben. Bij elkaar ruwweg 20% van de bevolking die zich mogelijk herkennen in Henk en Ingrid, de waanideeen van Wilders.

Wilders ligt bij het behartigen van de belangen van zijn waanideeen Henk en Ingrid regelmatig overhoop met ander partijen omdat die de belangen van werkelijk bestaande mensen behartigen.

Het lijkt me overigens raadzaam voor de Lebensraum van Henk en Ingrid dat Geert contacten met psychologen mijdt.

[toegevoegd : GeenStijl besloot er ook eens wat over op te merken]

Yes, that is far better than working in finance or IT :)

Yesterday we set new records with an 8bft wind in our back sailing to the islands, but for today we decided to give it a rest after two clippers collided in the harbor. Quite spectacular, the sound of 3 inch cables snapping and beams breaking. Clippers are roughly twice the size of a barge, weighing in at 150 tons and measuring 120ft. As today there is apparently a bit too much wind today even for the bigger ships to handle, we had a word with our guests and decided to stay docked for today. Sometimes a 60ft barge is really very small :)

So we just hang around on one of the islands (23c sunny warm weather, wish you were here).

Since me and my girlfriend got together, you know what her fantasy has always been? Petting an elephant while giving it peanuts! When we where in the bed room going our thing she asked if I could act like an elephant and she could feed me peanuts. Now she bought an elephant costume for me to wear which is extremely hot inside and she wants me to be on fours while she pets and pretends to feed me peanuts. She won’t let me do anything else! What should I do?

A question on Yahoo Answers :)