Computing

02
Mar
By Bob Weeks

Articles of Interest

Obama's budget, Citigroup rescue, Twitter, climate change, lobbying. The Era of Even Bigger Government: There is very little to be happy about in Obama's first budget (Veronique de Rugy at Reason) Does the Obama budget work? According to this author, some of the accounting tricks used in the past are gone, but dissembling remains: "To cut the size of the federal government, one actually has to, you know, cut programs. While Obama's overall numbers do show a spending decrease between 2009 and 2010, he actually increases many categories of spending, which remains far above 2008 levels in any case. In…
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27
Feb
By Bob Weeks

Articles of Interest

Subsidizing Bad Ideas What are some of the things wrong with the president's plan to solve the mortgage crisis? Howie Rich of Americans For Limited Government explains: "First, the plan is emblematic of America’s new “dependence mentality,” which is advanced by politicians like Obama who rhetorically extol the virtues that once made this country great while they systematically remove brick-by-brick the incentives needed to make it great once again. Second, it’s more of the same smoke-and-mirrors Washington politicians employ to hide the true coming-and-goings of your tax dollars in our nation’s capital. Third, it rewards many of the same financial…
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09
Feb
By Bob Weeks

Kansas voter data difficult to use

At the Kansas Meadowlark, Earl Glynn has an article that illustrates some of the difficulties that researches face when working with voter data. I haven't done nearly as much of this as Earl has, but I can tell you there have been times when I've been quite frustrated with voter data that I've received. I've had to spend time manipulating data in order to get it into useful formats. The Meadowlark story is Comparing Voter Registration to Nov. ‘08 Ballots in Allen County. Too Difficult?
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04
Feb
By Bob Weeks

Please Back Up Your Data

You really need to back up your computer data. It's as simple as that. There is no form of computer storage that isn't vulnerable to data loss. Sooner or later, a loss is certain to happen. The consequences can be tragic. There are several ways to perform this vital task of safeguarding your data. One way is to purchase an external disk drive. For around $100, you can buy one that's probably larger than the drive that's internal in your computer. These drives often have software that automatically copies data from your computer's drive to the external drive on a…
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04
Feb
By Bob Weeks

The Google May Shut Off Data

One of the fascinating things about having a website is analyzing how people happen to visit your site. For many sites, referrals from a search engine like Google or Yahoo are a big source of visitors. This means that someone used Google to search for something, your site appeared in the results, someone clicked on the result, and therefore came to visit your site. Generally, you can tell what search terms the visitor typed into Google or whatever when they performed the search that led them to visit your site. This is, as you might imagine, very useful information. It's…
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02
Dec
By Bob Weeks

Maggie Twitters

My friend Maggie Thurber from Toledo explains a bit about Twitter and tweets. See Do you Twitter? from her blog Thurber's Thoughts. You can follow me on Twitter by clicking here.
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17
Sep
By Bob Weeks

New Computer Setup Today

Last night I bought a new desktop computer. I'd been needing to for a while, as my current computer was about five years old. Everything was becoming slower. I run a lot of software, such as Google desktop indexing (and even another desktop indexing program, if you can figure that out), and my old computer was just overwhelmed. Plus, last week at the State Policy Network conference I became convinced of the power of video to report and tell a story. So I bought a video camera. My old computer was way underpowered for video, so that's part of the…
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