Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

chronicling life in a digital world

Bush Suspends Minimum Wage in Federal Contracts

Proclamation Apparently, there’s provisions that state the Labor Secretary sets a minumum wage to pay various levels of laborers and “mechanics”. Well, Bush has suspended this provision. It’s written into the provision that he can, and in some circumstances, I can understand why. But we are talking about Bush, and Cheney, and I can see how some corporate contractors seize an opportunity to not pay laborers a federally mandated min. rate, but still charge their “normal” fees. So prior to the Hurricane, a skilled worker in NO would have been paid a certain rate if working on a federal contract, now he will be paid less. Good thing those tax cuts went to those who needed it most…

Bush Suspends Minimum Wage in Federal Contracts was published on Sunday, September 11, 2005 at 11:56pm and tagged Politics, rants, Bush, hurricanes and economics. Respond to this article by writing the first comment.

Trickle Down Economics?

Census Economic Briefing RoomsHmm. Household income stagnat in real dollars, poverty up, uninsured Americans, up, homeownership down a percent, yeah, sounds about time to take a vacation. If my fellow Americans do not put this Administration and those that have supported it on a very long vacation starting next year, I’m gonna start pricing guns and land in Montana…anyone else in?

Trickle Down Economics? was published on Tuesday, August 30, 2005 at 5:37pm and tagged Politics, rants, Bush and economics. Respond to this article by writing the first comment.

Just a guy wandering the intarwebs looking to make sense of life.

Note to self, check to see what time a store opens before driving there. Sidenote - 11am, really Ikea?

Side Notes

I’m always on the prowl for cheap (read FREE) iPhone apps, and finding a simple source for such is no easy task, at least in my searches. Unfortunately, all the sites I’ve found that cover this type of information are so full of ads and poorly designed, it’s impossible to actually find anything useful. I have however recently discovered at dealmac.com a RSS feed specifically for discounted iPhone/iPod Touch apps.. I can’t say that I’ve actually found any great deals yet through it, (I haven’t had a chance to play the recent “Let’s Golf!” game posted today), but it’s a start. And don’t get me wrong, I have no problem paying for a quality app, and do so with perhaps too regular of frequency, but still like finding a deal when I can, especially on games, which I know I’ll only play a few times, or very rarely.
Do you have any sites or feeds that you’d care to share? Tips on finding apps on sale?
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I was pleasantly surprised this afternoon by a comment left here on the site that my first Habari theme, Mzingi, had been ported to another CMS, WolfCMS. Though I’ve since passed Mzingi off to the official Habari project, and is now owned by the community and part of the official download, it’s a bit rewarding to see it deemed worthy of porting. You can see a demo of it in action as a WolfCMS theme.
It’s also nice they gave attribution on the official site. I’d not heard of the project before, seems like a young project that is a fork of another CMS project, but their site describes the project as something akin to Habari.
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It’s always great to see new themes released for Habari, even if they are ports. Florian has ported the WordPress theme Clean Home to Habari. The theme’s name aptly describes the design, a clean, black and white two column design with contrasting red headings. The theme seems to be coded for trunk, that is, using the areas feature. One thing I noticed is that the theme still has some cruft from WP, calling for a dynamic sidebar (widgets) with some text that also references a text widget and and admin options. I of all people can understand though of wanting to get something out before working out all the kinks, so I’m sure he’ll update it as soon as the areas/blocks feature is fleshed out a bit more. I also don’t speak German, so it’s quite possible he references that in the post announcing the release.
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You’d think “Canada’s best magazine”, The Walrus would at least link back to my bookmarks if they are going to use my graphics in their post about Infinite Summer. Heck, they didn’t even change the name of the image from the 5x bookmark file. Real professional Nav, real professional…
At least they didn’t just hotlink to the image in my post.
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I’ve recently been using Safari 4 beta, mostly because I had been too lazy to get more RAM, and Firefox was just too damn slow with all the apps I’d have open on only 1 gig. Now that I’m at 4 gigs, I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox, especially with the comments I’ve been reading about the speed improvements of the next version (3.5??). Another reason I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox is that Firebug is just far superior to Safari’s built in inspector. To that end, I’ve recently come across two add-ons for Firebug.
The first, Firefinder, is a handy tool to “find HTML elements matching chosen CSS selector(s) or XPath expression”.
The second is one that Google previously used internally. Today they open sourced it and released, Page Speed. Page Speed allows developers to “evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.”
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