It dawned on me the other day that the Mad Max movies make no economic sense. Sure, there was plenty of scarcity, and scarcity is the thing that economics focuses on. However, in studying econ, you learn that people substitute more costly things for those that are less costly when things get the most scarce. The biggest, most illogical economic feature of the entire movie is the use of huge, gas-guzzling muscle cars. Fuel is the currency of their world, as it is the most precious thing available, yet the inhabitants of this post-appocolyptic universe give power to those individuals with the most wasteful equipment. In the real world, the muscle-bound head hauncho would be riding on a mo-ped. You know, the kind that gets 30 miles to the gallon. His people would marvel at his ability to travel 60 miles on a gallon of gas! Efficiency is his source of power. [Geez, this post makes me realize why I’ve always been considered a geek!]

I found out yesterday that I was voted Outstanding Student in the Department of Information Systems by my professors. I don’t work hard because I seek accolades like this, but it does make all the hard work and extra hours of gleening my assignments for errors somewhat more tolerable. This is an acknowledgment that what I’ve done up to this point is what I should have been doing. The one thing I hope that comes out of this is that it’s important not to underestimate someone just because he comes from one of the most backwards places on Earth. We all are neither ignorant nor dumb, and we have as much potential as anyone else. Representing my area in a positive light is important to me becase we all do not fit the stereotype.

I will not let this go to my head. I don’t know anymore about computers now than I did yesterday before I found out. Nor is this a reason to let my guard down, as I have “many miles before I sleep*.” Hopefully it can never be said that the effort I put in is proportional to the amount of praise I get for it. That’s not how I operate.

*Walking by a Woods on a Snowing Evening, Robert Frost

I’ve seen every episode of Donald Trump’s reality show The Apprentice and tonight’s episode made me extremely happy! Omorosa is gone! I haven’t been this happy since Trump fired Sam. I didn’t hate Sam, I just thought he was an incompetent leader. Omorosa, on the other hand, was evil and self-serving. I realize the goal of the show is to win, but you don’t have to degrade those with whom you are competing on a show like this. That’s exactly what Omorosa did. She criticized every move that she didn’t make. I’m just glad Trump has enough sense to know that someone of her personality cannot lead a company.

I broke down and bought magicalsavant.com. It’s a more interesting web address than jerrytravis.com even if it is harder to remember. I may use magicalsavant.com if I sell my own software someday. Magical Savant Software has a nice ring to it.

Click here to read the interview that Bill Gates gave to PC Magazine recently. After reading it, you’ll probably be wondering how this man has amassed more money than anyone in US history. Michael J. Miller, editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, did the interview, and I feel he asked some very good questions that we all have been wondering lately. He asked Bill Gates why Windows has so many problems with viruses and worms. Bill’s response, from what I could distill, was Windows has problems with viruses because it’s so popular. What does the install base have to do with the fact that Windows easily allows viruses to run on it? In the small server market, Linux is fairly dominant and it’s rare when you hear of an exploit that cripples all these servers en masse. Granted, the popularity of Microsoft operating systems does help justify spending the time to write a virus. If Microsoft wrote a secure OS that was very difficult to write a virus for (Unix, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X…), it would be very hard for virus writers to justify spending so much time to do so.

Gates goes on further to deny, very streniously I might add, that Windows is not more vulnerable than Macs or Linux boxes. While other OSs have their holes and vulnerabilities, they are so much harder to exploit than those on Windows. That’s because the people who write other non-Microsoft OSs realize that if something can be broken, somebody eventually will. When you write code with that mindset, you try everything you can think of to break the stuff. Microsoft obviously does not think defensively. [Note: I do realize that a product as complex as Windows will have holes in it no matter how well it is written. Microsoft, however, with Bill Gates as its mouthpiece and figurehead, uses this an an excuse to allow too many bugs to be released to the general public.]

Miller asks Gates about the lack of improvements to the search speed of the popular Outlook email client. (The slowness of the searching speed in Outlook has long been a sore spot with those who use it and keep a lot of email.) Gates says that Microsoft could fix it, but then goes into a big load of crap about some new features in upcoming products. He circumvents the issue and starts plugging new products!!! This is so typical of Microsoft: Ignore the now, leave the broken unfixed, and add new features that 99% of computer users never use. Microsoft really needs to realize that new features are only part of the reason people like to upgrade software. Improving upon the speed, stability, and security of existing releases is just as important. Based on this interview, I think it’s safe to use Steve Jobs’ former favorite phrase: Bill Gates “just doesn’t get it.”

Here’s a list of (mostly free) utility software I use very regularly. I’ve used most of it for many years and have found that most of it takes the tedium out of using a computer effectively. Enjoy!

• SCWebCam3 – What I use to take snapshots of my desktop and upload them.
• Mozilla FireFox – A free, secure, open-source browser that has tabs and a built in pop-up blocker. Once you try it, you’ll never go back to IE!
• ZoneAlarm – A free firewall. With so many holes in Windows and always-on, high-speed connections to the Internet, it’s crazy not to use a good firewall like this.
• Style XP – Change more than just the colors of Windows with this theme manager. Once you get this program, thousands of free themes and visual styles are available at ThemeXP.org.
• PDF995 – The cheapest way to make decent PDFs. As its name implies, it costs $9.95, but it’s well worth it if you need to make PDFs on the cheap.
• SpyBox Search and Destroy – Great spyware removal tool. I use it now instead of Ad-Aware because it gets rid of more system hijackers.

This list could go on, but these are the titles I couldn’t live without.