Happy New Year! First post in like, a year, and I’m sitting at home with a nasty flu. I figured getting my blog(s) and personal web sites updated was just the right amount of taxing my brain could use to keep me from falling asleep, yet still come nowhere near to adding to my weakened state. I mean, blogging with Jekyll is a blast. I was doing so, but in a moment of cheapness, I moved to Jekyll and pushed my built website to Heroku for free! The bad part about that is that Heroku won’t keep your site spinned up unless it has users, and well, my writing style and content probably has a bit to be desired.

On top of that, I was using Octopress, then Jekyll-Bootstrap… Not I’m just using Jekyll and Twitter Bootstrap - and when I tried to purge them from my site, I created a bit of a mess. So much a mess that I let blogging slide for a while. I really haven’t done anything interesting as of yet. We’ll see where that goes.

But now we’re back on target! I’ve got tons of “what about” kinds of posts in Evernote, that I figure I should just copy and paste into here. If I deemed the topic interesting, well then, somebody else must have.

Enough for now!

More to come!

Well, the Octopress experiment is over - It seemed a bit too complex to be able to change a theme in the way I wanted… And using plain old vanilla Jekyll seemed to work find - especially when it comes to applying themes like Bootstrap. So now I’m back to using plain old jekyll. I need to clean a few things up, but aside from moving code snippets back to a pygments way of defining. I’m set!

That should mean I blog and have more content on this site…

If you’ve been watching the news and the slow-moving-train wreck of the European Union, I sit here and wonder how and why smart people are doing dumb things with the world economy. If and when the Euro does go down, imagine the costs of currency switching in all those EU countries. Not only is that going to be a drain on each of those economies, it will also dampen an already weak world economy. This is going to hurt the US. What’s worse is that the US economy is in such bad shape as it is, I’m not sure how much more it can take.

This is particularly bad new for Obama, as no matter what, this is his economy, and if things get worse, he’ll really be certain of a single term.

If there is any silver lining in all of this, we will be able to look back on how the EU painted themselves into a corner where some countries (Greece, Italy and Spain) couldn’t operate within the narrow financial constraints that the EU imposed on them. If things do fall apart, I hope that painful lesson only has to be felt once.

At any rate - here’s some good reading on the crisis (IMO):

• The Economist
• Paul Krugman has been talking about this potential breakup for a while, and it’s been really interesting to watch. Just search for ‘euro’ on his blog.

The other sad point in all this (to me) is that politicians are more stubborn in the US, and while we don’t have the same kinds of issues as the EU, we’re still in a heavily under-performing economy. Our politicians (many of them) are certain that the only way out is less spending and more austerity. It’s like there’s no lesson learned from the Depression or Japan of the 90’s…

I saw this link in today’s NY Times. Everything mentioned in this article seems to be in sync with what I’ve learned from Chi-Running - but just presented in a way that makes it much easier and more natural to understand. Gotto go try this!

So, while I’m getting much better with vim, my only complaint as of a couple of days ago, was, IMO, my constant use of jklm/bw in normal mode. Specifically, when navigating around in a file, I found myself hitting too many j’s and k’s to get to the right line, and then a bunch of b’s or w’s to get to the spot in that line that I want to edit.

I know how to use Ff - but they didn’t seem that great of an option. That’s why I switched to EasyMotion and remapped (this may be considered sacrilege) my f and F to easymotion - w and easymotion - b. Now, I can find myself zipping around in a file. It’s pretty automatic, and I’m just wondering if other vim users do the same, or do they consider that too costly of a hack. I mean, I never used f or F until now…