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Condensed knowledge for 2007-09-19

A bit of a health theme to this edition of condensed knowledge:

  • A new CPR technique was discovered. It’s called OAC-CPR (Only rhythmic Abdominal Compression). As its name implies, you only press on the abdomen, eliminating the risk of broken ribs, mouth-to-mouth, and fatigue from pushing so hard. Definitely worth looking into this!
  • Prozac found in the drinking water in the UK. Apparently so many people are on the anti-depressant in England, that it can now be found, diluted, in the water supply, after having passed through their bodies, into the sewers, through the water treatment plants, etc. Although the “experts” are saying there’s no risk, I doubt it. I mean, this is a drug, found active, in the water supply!
  • WD40 turns out to be a great help for bad joints. Despite the precautions written on the cans, rubbing it into the skin was of tremendous help to a man suffering from joint pain. Not sure that I’d recommend this.
  • Aspartame is the behind the spike in suicides for teen and pre-teen girls. Apparently, it’s a powerful mood-changer — it causes depression. Something to think about the next time you buy your children something with Nutrasweet or Aspartame as the sweetener.
  • Exercising in traffic is bad for your heart. Now that’s something I’ve known was wrong for some time. It just didn’t make sense to me when I saw people running on the sidewalk, next to heavy traffic, breathing in all those noxious fumes. When I run, I want to breathe fresh, healthy air, not someone’s nasty car exhaust. I just couldn’t get why they’d put themselves through something that unhealthy. It turns out the particulates from vehicle emissions decrease our blood’s ability to clot, and restrict the amount of blood that reaches the heart immediately upon exposure.
  • Mobile phones are as dangerous as smoking. So reads a recent headline… People have gone back and forth on the safety of mobile phones for years. Now the EU has finally decided to pick a side and take action. The article’s in Romanian, but what it says is that governments are starting to take mitigating action, first by warning people of the risks, and then by looking at ways to minimize exposure to WiFi radiation. They’re recommending that people go back to using wired Internet connections instead of wireless ones.

Now for some funny stuff:

And some economic discussion:

  • Greenspan on Iraq war, oil link. He confirms what I’ve thought and said for some time. In his talk with Matt Lauer, he touches on the housing bubble and the fiscal irresponsibility of the current administration, but he has no compliments for the Democrats, either. Last, but no least, he says the dollar may be replaced by the euro as the reserve currency of choice.
  • Transparent Investing: what your broker doesn’t want you to know. Here’s a site that offers a purportedly frank discussion of index investing. Definitely worth a look.
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How To

Get smart about money in 135 minutes

Two easy steps are involved with this:

  1. Take 90 minutes to watch Dave Ramsey’s video entitled “Dumping Debt“. It was posted to YouTube in 10-minute segments. Here they are: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7 – Part 8 – Part 9. This was possibly posted without Mr. Ramsey’s permission, so please consider purchasing the DVD from his web store. (via Get Rich Slowly)
  2. Take 45 minutes to watch Paul Grignon’s video entitled “Money as Debt” on Google Video. Trust me on this. You will be shocked. You will have your eyes opened, and then you’ll realize what makes the world go ’round. (Cristina, thanks for pointing this out to me!)

Since both of these resources were posted online at full length, and I’m not sure if they were posted with or without their authors’ permissions, you’d be smart to watch them now, while they’re still available. I do not endorse use of copyrighted materials without permission — and to be fair, I don’t know that’s the case here — but I did want to share this information with you. If the videos should become unavailable for some reason, then please consider purchasing them. They are worth your time and money.

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Lists

Great ads

I liked the Volkswagen “Unpimp your ride” commercials instantly when they came out. I’ve always liked clean lines and elegant cars. I think “pimped” cars are in truly bad taste. The mods are almost always done for the wrong reasons, and usually only to show off in garish fashion. The poor cars end up looking worse than before and make me cringe when I see them. Imagine my delight when Volkswagen decided to poke fun at the people who pimp their rides!

Meet Hal, the IT system admin depressed because Steve, one of his faithful servers, died… I don’t particularly like Hal or the ad itself, but it is effective and sticks in your mind. This was done in the style of the Apple ads, and was for Symantec’s Backup Exec software. Back when I used Backup Exec, it only did file-level restores, and was kind of difficult to use. Let’s hope the new version advertised here works better.

I don’t drink Coke and I don’t play GTA, but I thought this ad was pretty cool. It’s always nice to see the bad guys turn good. Two words also come to mind: synchronized serendipity. This ad is very watchable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkn1Ci9zqcY

Here’s another Volkswagen ad, this time for the Phaeton. The Phaeton is probably a pretty amazing car, and the Phaeton plant is a pretty amazing place full of innovative engineering, but unfortunately, the price is too high for the VW brand. It would have been much better to build Audis like this. After all, they’re the same company. But the ad is amazing. I’ve never seen shadow play this good.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zIODJsnqXE

Another Bud Light ad, this one about the best men who hired an auctioneer for their friend’s wedding. The beer ads are always pretty good, and not surprisingly so. Given the amount of money that Budweiser throws at their advertising, the ad agencies have to make sure they come up with the good stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcVYexixsmA

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Reviews

Zoom Search Engine: a powerful and inexpensive search engine for your website

Zoom Search EngineI’ve been using the Zoom Search Engine for over a year, and I’ve been very happy with it. But today I realized I hadn’t told many people about it, so I had to fix that.

So what’s the Zoom Search Engine? It’s a beautiful piece of software written by WrenSoft, an Australian web software company. Here’s what I think is amazing about it:

  • It’s inexpensive: the Standard edition is $49, and the Professional edition is $99. (I have the Pro edition.) There’s also a free edition for smaller sites. A side-by-side comparison of the different editions is available on the WrenSoft website.
  • It’s small in size, but feature-packed. The executable is 1.65 MB. Bloatware this is NOT. It is small and it packs a powerful punch. If you don’t believe me, install it, then run through the various options. There are a LOT of them!
  • It does the job — no crashing, no malfunctions. In over a year of serious use, with it running daily to index a lot of files for most of that time, it didn’t crash once. It just did its job.
  • Tech support is great, and included in the price of the software. I needed to contact them twice to ask them about some advanced configs for the app, and they responded within 12 hours. What’s more, they actually solved my problem. There were no excuses and no passing the buck.
  • It’s a scalable piece of software. Not only will it index small, simple sites, but its indexing engine can use ASP, PHP, JavaScript or CGI. The CGI engine can be used for enterprise sites – we’re talking hundreds of thousands of pages here! Not only will it index sites hosted on web servers, but it will also let you put a search engine on a site that runs off a CD or DVD.
  • It spiders and indexes most document file types with the aid of free plugins that work with the paid editions of the software. They’ve got plugins for Word, WordPerfect, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Flash and FlashPaper, and Rich Text formats. Having used all of these plugins over the last year, I can tell you they work a treat. They certainly do the job, and there’s no false advertising involved.
  • It’s a customizable and flexible piece of software. You possess the search index. You have access to the actual files used by the search engine, and you can tweak the engine and the index as you please. You can adjust everything. I can’t think of any other solution on the market that will let you do that. When it comes to this, it beats Atom and Google and any other solution, hands-down. Google’s search appliances are a black box. You can play with the options, but you don’t have access to the search technology. You can’t pop the hood and have a look at what makes their searches tick.

So how exactly have I been using the Zoom Search Engine? It’s been powering the site searches on Exprimare and the Road Management Catalog, among a few others. While Exprimare is a fairly small site (it’s my consulting/portfolio site), the Road Management Catalog is a big site in terms of the content, file types and number of pages. It belongs to the World Bank, and vendors of various road construction, measuring and testing equipment have accounts where they submit company information and upload brochures in various file formats. The Zoom Search Engine’s job on that site is to index all of the uploaded files, all of the various companies’ info, the regular site pages, and to make them all available in the search index. It’s been doing a wonderful job over the past year, and I love it. I’ve scheduled it to run every day, and to index all of the files. When it’s time for it to start, it does so automatically. It spiders the site, builds the index, uploads it to the site through FTP, then closes automatically. I don’t have to do anything other than adjust search parameters here and there as the need arises.

Here is a screenshot of the main app window, just as it’s indexing the Road Management Catalog. Once it’s configured, it spiders the site (you can set it to start multiple threads so the indexing goes faster) and then it goes about its business.

Zoom Search Engine

When it’s done, it gives you an index status report, to let you know what it found. It also outlines in red any indexing errors, such as files or pages it couldn’t download or index.

Zoom Search Engine

If I had to talk about the many configuration tabs, I’d have to reproduce their user manual. Instead, let me just show you a screenshot of one of them, the Indexing options. How cool is this! I get to decide what gets indexed, what gets boosted, and how words get joined. And this is just a small sample of what the app can do.

Zoom Search Engine

A lot more screenshots are available on the WrenSoft site. Their support section is extensive, a forum is also available, and their tech support is only an email away.

The Zoom Search Engine is an amazing product, and well worth its price. As a matter of fact, I’d call it underpriced. It’s a tremendous value given its functionality. So if you own a site and have been looking around for a suitable search engine, don’t settle for something that’s overpriced or inflexible. Get something that’s been tried and tested, something that’ll work, something you can use on a daily basis and tweak until you get just what you want.

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Thoughts

The US has a negative bank balance of what?!

Stumbled onto this entry on Vinnie Lauria’s blog, listing the bank balances of various world countries. At the bottom of the list… the US of A. Our bank balance: $ -829,100,000,000. Say what?! Yes, according to the CIA, so it’s got to be true.

How about the US Budget? How’s that? Well, according to this chart, compiled with data from the Congressional Budget Office, our 8 years with GW Bush have been wreaking havoc on the budget.

Not really comforting news, is it? And we want to keep spending how much on the Iraq war, in order to bring “peace and stability”, and oh yes, let’s not forget, “democracy”, to that region? Isn’t it about time someone put a stop to our runaway spending?

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