I do not like watching the news because of the extreme devastation in the Gulf Coast region. I doubt any of us can fully appreciate the anguish that those people are enduring. The whole situation is sad and tragic beyond comprehension.
Please do what you can to help. Here is a link to the American Red Cross.
Thank you.
I was somewhat surprised by the markets' strength yesterday. And so far today, the market is down. The market has no memory from day to day whatsoever. How does one begin to make sense of these gyrations?
Because we are coming to the end of the month and end of the quarter, and because of the various cross currents of high energy prices and Katrina, I am simply staying on the sidelines. I remain cautious in my outlook, though not pessimistic.
A strong part of my cautious outlook is that I think people are underestimating the effects of high energy prices. While we have not seen any strong negative effects, I am not confident that we will escape them.
In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Bhushan Bahree wrote a Page One article Why Oil's Surge Hasn't Damped Global Growth (subscription required).
"The cost of continuing economic growth will be rising oil prices," says Philip Verleger Jr., an oil economist and senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington. Oil prices may well rise to $100 a barrel, but that alone wouldn't trigger a recession, Mr. Verleger says. The rise in oil prices "ends when the global real-estate bubble bursts."While crude oil-prices recorded another record in nominal terms last night, the record in inflation-adjusted terms would be over $90 in April 1980. Energy futures spiked Sunday evening, as traders got a chance to react to the new and dire course charted by Hurricane Katrina. In overnight electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, October crude-oil futures opened up more than $4 from Friday's close of $66.13, topping $70 a barrel for the first time.
I will take the other side of the argument of Verleger Jr. At $100 or more, economies around the world will definitely feel the effects. How can I be so sure? Go to the BP Statistical Review, and download the Microsoft Excel™ workbook and look at the tab Oil Consumption — barrels.
Toward very bottom of the tab we see that the total world consumption in 2004 was roughly 80.8 million barrels per day. Of that, 3.8 million barrels were consumed by Former Soviet Union countries and another 28.2 million barrels were consumed by Emerging Market Economies. So about 30 million barrels of approximately 80 million barrels were consumed by the poorer nations of the world. I doubt strongly that these economies can withstand $100 per barrel oil prices without suffering strong negative effects. Emerging markets tend to be manufacturing and agricultural product focused—both of which are heavy users of energy. If a substantial portion of the emerging markets suffer, even us in the developed economies will feel some effects.
Moreover, Europe is not bubbling with economic strength either. An additional burden of $100 per barrel oil price certainly would not help.
When you put together the negative effects from emerging markets and from some European countries, I believe the world economy would slow at $100 per barrel oil price. I just hope we do not get to that price level where we will learn who is right and who is wrong.
Just to continue with my prior post, if you are interested in blogging with Movable Type version 3.2, I highly recommend FutureQuest Inc. as your host provider. FutureQuest has an outstanding uptime record. Moreover, it provides excellent security and safety of your applications and data as well as provides a very friendly community through its bulletin board. I have written a brief tutorial for those interested in starting with Movable Type on FutureQuest.
I am just learning more about blogging and Movable Type. I am going at my own pace in terms of learning more about HTML, XHTML, and CSS. I likely never will learn JavaScript and some of the other related technologies. Fortunately many people are willing to answer a few quick questions and provide assistance. I find FutureQuest's board very helpful in that regard.
I also find writing much more difficult than I thought. I like writing, but I also make many mistakes. When I look back at some of my prior posts, I am amazed at what I did not catch earlier. So I am finding that blogging is good practice for improving my writing. In summary, if you are interested in learning more about Movable Type version 3.2 but are a little intimidated, I have provided a brief tutorial at FutureQuest.
Good luck!
I have decided to postpone upgrading my Specious Argument Weblog temporarily. With version 3.2, Six Apart, the developers of Movable Type, have dramatically changed the main template and CSS style sheet. I have been poking around and am quite excited by the changes, but I want to learn more before I delve into the guts of the templates and style sheets. At Movable Type's News and Announcements StyleCatcher: Easy Styles for Movable Type 3.2, Anil Dash indicates that more documentation will be forthcoming soon.
We'll soon be publishing more details about creating your own styles that fit the Six Apart standard, as well as stripped down templates with only template tags and basic markup for those of you who would rather get your hands dirty building your own HTML and CSS. This documentation should make it easy for designers and developers to see the benefits of this new markup structure, and why we've made these changes.
That said, Nick O'Neill is the author of a new StyleCatcher Plugin that allows users to choose among very attractive templates. I think this is beginning to show the power and flexibility of the new templates and style sheets. You can download the StyleCatcher plugin from StyleCatcher 1 Plugin Page.
For those wanting to better understand the guts of the templates, please view TypePad Weblog Page Structure. No, that is not a typo. It is TypePad. That is correct. TypePad and Movable Type are now sharing very similar, if not identical, HTML layouts. And Arvind has created a very useful tool at Movable Type Style Generator to adapt your CSS style sheet quickly. With your changed CSS sheet, your site is now customized to your liking.
I am confident that with a bit of learning, Movable Type users will gain much more freedom to innovate and create interesting designs. Moreover, I anticipate that there will be many designs that users can choose from or modify to suit their own. My thinking, which could be wrong, is that the new structure is similar to the CSS Zen Garden in that there is one structure that allows for an infinite variety of designs. In a similar fashion, I believe Six Apart is standardizing on a flexible template that will allow for an infinite variety of designs. Soon different users will be creating their own unique designs based upon the standardized templates. And then users will have more choice in templates and will be able to use other designs as a springboard to their own unique creations.
Overall, I think these changes, though dramatic, will be a strong plus for Movable Type. But before jumping in, I want to wait for the additional documentation so that I better know what I am doing. I hope within a couple or few weeks, I will have upgraded to my blog, including templates and CSS stylesheets, to version 3.2
For those of you wanting to start a brand new weblog, I strongly encourage you to jump in with both feet now. Use one of the default templates and begin to learn Movable Type. Very soon you will begin customizing your own weblog.
This weekend's Barron's Magazine mentions rss aggregators in an article titled Real All About It (subscription required). Because I recently wrote about this subject, I will simply quote from the article.
One of the easier news-syndication programs available is FeedDemon from Bradbury Software (www.feeddemon.com, $29.95 to register). The program has hundreds of news feeds built in, which you can customize so you're not faced with stories about Britney Spears when you'd rather be reading about insider trading.
FeedDemon's screen has a three-part layout that lets you skim through available articles quickly. On the left, you'll see a list of Channel Groups, such as Business, Entertainment and Technology. Clicking on a group displays all the online publications, Websites and blogs that are available within that channel. Should you click on a particular link, the center pane will display all the headlines available. When you click on a headline, the content of the article is displayed in the right-hand pane.
Certain publications will allow only a paragraph or two from the article you want; with a click, you can open a new window that will take you to the originating Website and let you read the article there. FeedDemon also includes a search tool that looks for other news feeds that might interest you. You can try it for free for a limited time.
On Alex Barnett's blog, there's a terrific tutorial for using FeedDemon entitled "RSS 101." Check it out at www.extremepodcasting.com/screencasts/usingrss101.htm. Barnett's screencast, which will run automatically in your browser, describes how to set up an RSS feed very eloquently -- turn up your speakers to hear him chat through the process in his charming British accent.
If you have not tried RSS and FeedDemon, I encourage you to do so.
