Jay McGavren's Journal

This article suggests that a minimum wage hike is essential not just to everyone’s livelihood, but their safety as well…

> If the gap between rich and poor gets too large, and if > those at the bottom feel they have no meaningful route to > the riches at the top, then the fabric of society will > fray, or even come unraveled entirely. … > Shortly before I arrived in Brazil, a British tour bus was > hijacked and robbed in broad daylight on the way from Rio’s > international airport to a ritzy beach area. While I was > there, two Supreme Court justices were carjacked on the > same road. > Overall, the murder rate in Brazil is five times that of > New York City. … > The New York Times reported recently on a World Bank study > concluding that if Brazil had the much lower homicide rate > of Costa Rica, Brazil’s GDP would have been three to eight > percent higher in the 1990s. > As one economist explained in the article, “You have money > spent on guarding stuff rather than making stuff.” And when > international investors look around the globe, they choose > safer places.

http://finance.yahoo.com/columnist/article/economist/19750

Boosting the minimum wage is just giving a man a fish, though. Let’s teach him how to fish by raising education funding as well.

It seems I never just sit down and pick a programming language up… I flirt with it for a couple years, trying to convince myself that I really need it.

Well, I’m really liking Ruby now. The reason is the whole “Ruby classes are never closed” thing. Feel like going back and adding methods to a class? Go for it. Want to add methods to an individual object? It’ll create a virtual class for that object behind the scenes. Mixins aren’t so mysterious if you view them as a batch-adding of methods to an existing class.

Diana’s been watching Alton Brown on Food Network. This is a bad thing because it convinces her we need all kinds of kitchen gear. It’s a good thing because this week alone, I have enjoyed from-scratch cinnamon rolls, and this lovely little chili recipe:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_28231,00.html

It still blows my mind that my wife not only understands what it means to “fire up a Perl interpreter”, but appreciates the overhead involved.

I have chosen… wisely.

Annnnd… the car’s back from the shop. $60 to find that a bolt was missing from the brake assembly and replace it. It wasn’t the CV joint at all.

Did I mention the last people to work on the brakes were my father in law and myself? And I doubt the mistake was my father in law’s. I really need to stick to coding.