I’ll be working on my first couple of full wordpress themes for this site and for cobwebsconsulting.com over the next couple months, so be on the lookout.  Not too proud of having used someone else’s theme for so long.

Over the past six or so months — actually I think it’s been since I went to An Event Apart Chicago ‘08, which makes sense — I’ve had sort of a design awakening. As long as I’ve been creating things on the Internet, I’ve always leaned toward the developer side. After all, I came to it after taking classes that required programming in C and Java, so naturally I gravitated toward PHP. But that conference made me start to realize how important design was.

It was one of those things I always knew in the back of my head, but never really thought about, how with almost everything you use or see somebody has specifically given thought to how it should look, so that it will be as visually appealing as possible, easy to use, and help you get whatever you need accomplished (whether or not they accomplished those goals is another matter, at least assume they tried). Now that’s a big part of what I think about when I walk around.

Example: I went to dinner with about 10 or so people a few days ago. I was sitting near one end of the table, and behind a person at the other end, maybe 8 or 9 feet away from me was an old poster for some street fair in the 1980s. The last hour of dinner I just couldn’t tear my eyes away from this poster. Every time I stopped talking to someone my eyes would inevitably go back to it (of course I foolishly didn’t think to take a picture of it). The thing I noticed was that from the distance I was, I could still see the drawing (of a Toronto trolley car) on it perfectly well, and could also read the name of the event and the dates on which it took place. There was other writing on it, what looked like names, but that info was obviously less important because it wasn’t visible from where I was sitting. I kept thinking how someone had purposefully thought about what information was most important and made sure to design the poster so that people glancing at it from a distance would be able to discover that information. Yeah, it’s a small, basic thing, but it’s the kind of thing that I’ve started to take note of and think about when I’m trying to design a site. Baby steps.

I went to the doctor a few days ago, one that specializes in allergies. We really want to get a dog later this year, kind of like a present to ourselves for the past 10 months, but I was pretty sure that I’m at least somewhat allergic. My cousin used to have a Boxer that I loved playing with, but I had to make sure I washed my hands and face afterwards otherwise my eyes would get red and itchy and I’d start sneezing a lot, etc. So I wanted to get tested and find out what I can do to minimize the effects once we actually go get a puppy (hopefully a boxer).

Now I generally regard myself as pretty healthy. I’m not in the best shape, and I no longer regard myself as near invulnerable, but generally healthy. I’m not against taking a whole bunch of medications, if they’re necessary, but I’m not a fan of just taking a bunch of stuff if it isn’t actively keeping me alive. I go in for the testing and find out that I’m allergic to dust mites, mold, and dogs. I tell the doctor how I had asthma as a kid and that I have some dry eye stuff I’m dealing with now. I thought it would be a quick convo with her — I say I’m kind of allergic to dogs, she says here, take this medicine and do these things to minimize it, boom, we’re done.

I was incorrect.

It’s all still kind of a blur, but somehow the doctor ended up writing 2 or 3 prescriptions and giving me three different samples of products that she had written the prescriptions for. Apparently she expects me to use some nasal spray once per day, take Claritin, and use an inhaler 15 minutes before I go play ball. And this is in addition to getting dust-mite repellant sheets and covers and a HEPA filter when we get a dog. There’s no way I’m going to take most of that stuff, even if I was ok with spending that much money, there’s no way I would have the patience for it. The Claritin, filter and dust-mite stuff, sure. The prescription medications? Not a chance.

It just seems a little wrong that a healthy person can go in for a specific purpose and end up with a cornucopia of medications like that. Why is all of that necessary? I felt like she was just throwing a bunch of stuff to me that I would have to take for the rest of my life. Not interested. Not at all.

Ok, so I don’t know all that much about everything going on in the financial sector, the root cause of the problem, or how to solve it, but there are a few things about what’s been going on the past few weeks that kind of bother me.

First, I don’t trust this plan by Sec Treasury Paulson. It just doesn’t smell right to me. He’s claiming that the reason why Merrill, Lehman, AIG and all these banks failed is because they have all this worthless derivatives paper that is based on mortgages that people have stopped paying. So the solution he proposes is for the taxpayers to buy up this “worthless” paper at a price that is supposedly fair to both parties so that the companies can have enough capital to lend out and go about conducting business as usual. Now like I said, I’m no expert, but if all these smart financial people can’t put a good price on it to enable the companies to work the situation out themselves, then why should the government be doing it? As I see it, they’ll either end up overpaying or underpaying.

Now if they overpay, that means the U.S. government (the taxpayers) end up losing money on this deal, and I’m not a fan of that, obviously. But if they underpay, then the companies won’t have enough capital to sustain themselves anyway and they’ll still fail. If by some chance the government is able to set a price that everybody thinks is fair, then why should the government have to commit any money at all? If people know what a fair price is, then they’ll be able to make their own deals without our involvement. So why do they need $700 billion again?

Second, as I understand it, all this paper that these companies are holding and can’t get rid of is essentially the right to receive money from payments that people make on their mortgages. The problems started because people got mortgages that they couldn’t really afford, so now they can’t make the payments and the banks end up foreclosing on houses that nobody wants to buy (I’m going to put aside whether the blame for these mortgages lies on the people that agreed to them or the people that were pushing the mortgages, both sides should share plenty of blame).

So if the paper is worthless because people can’t/aren’t paying their mortgages, wouldn’t helping people restructure their mortgages in a way that is bearable for them solve all the problems? Less people losing their houses, more mortgages being paid on time, and so then shouldn’t the value of the derivatives rise as well? I understand some money would eventually be lost, since the home prices would fall, but I see no reason why people that bought the houses (and end up getting their mortgages restructured) shouldn’t take a little bit of a loss because they can’t sell them for a profit, and the companies that sold these mortgages shouldn’t take a loss by having the value of the instruments drop and be worth less in the long run. Unless that kind of adjustment happens things will just remain artificially high and invite another crisis somewhere down the line.

I don’t know if this analysis is overly simplistic, but it makes some sense to me. I don’t see why such a big deal should be made about saving these specific companies. Let them declare bankruptcy and let other companies pick over their carcasses. I mean, this country is supposed to be about capitalism and creative destruction right? So let it happen. I’m just getting flashbacks of the Patriot Act when somebody from this administration comes in front of Congress and says the proposed bill must be passed immediately otherwise there will be dire consequences. I think things will be fine until January 21. I just don’t trust Democrats to have the backbone to stand up to be steamrolled, especially during election season.

It’s kind of weird. I’m sitting here at my computer at work, and for a span of maybe 15 or 30 minutes, I’ve gotten no emails (work or personal), no IMs, no text messages, no phone calls, no new articles or posts popping up in my feed reader, no messages or status updates on twitter or facebook, and I don’t even hear anybody walking around outside my office. It’s kind of creepy. I keep sitting here thinking, that there has to be something going on in the world or with somebody I know right now, so why haven’t I got any notification at all about it?

So what do I do with such a nice little moment of peace and quiet and absolute silence? I go write a blog post. Go figure.