I have been a member of a credit union since my first savings account. Now that I am married we have 2 accounts at two different credit unions. I have kept my original account and deal with another local Credit Union for our primary “banking”.

In all the years I have been a member I have always appreciated the benefits of “banking” at a credit union. Here is a great article that compares the two. http://lifehacker.com/5055408/why-choose-a-credit-union-over-a-bank
http://inovafcu.org/finance.talk/credit.union.difference.htm

I am often caught working on SharePoint and doing SharePoint development. This is an interesting task. There are a lot of options when working with SharePoint and doing development. None are really easy.

Some elements of development can be done with a little tool called SharePoint Designer 2007. Designer is really just an updated version of Frontpage. In this tool you can change elements on a masterpage, check in, update styles, and create basic workflow. If you have to do more than this or if you have some higher technical skills you will quickly leave Designer and use Visual Studio.

Using visual studio causes a few issues. First if you have XP or Vista for you development machine you are already at a disadvantage. Since you need SharePoint to develop for Sharepoint and XP and vista will not run vista you need to setup either a server or a vpc to develop. This was very frustrating for me. To get around this I have found a few tools to help.

1st there is an article and blog that claims you can run sharepoint on your vista box. I have heard of people trying this but it seemed too involved for me.

2nd - the option I like. Use a program called wsp builder. http://www.codeplex.com/wspbuilder/ This program allows you to create webparts or wsp files from your local machine (as long as you include the sharepoint.dll in the solution). So you can make a wepart locally and then deploy it to your sharepoint box.

Why would you do this. Well often you just have a few min to develop something and don’t really want to fire up a VPC to start coding. using wsp builder you can make the code base and then deploy the WSP to the server to test. Also, for deployment solutions from DEV -> QA -> production the WSP builder allows you to bundle all required files. This method is much cleaner than the xcopy / GAC method.

I have also found this very useful when doing design for SharePoint. In your solution you can create a directory structure the same way as the “HIVE” and the elements you ahve in your solution will be added to the WSP and then deployed to the server. So you can create a CSS directory and Image directory for your SharePoint design on the file system say in the _layouts folder. You can then deploy this through the wsp package.

There are a lot more features to the WSP builder, but I will leave it up to you to view the documentation. I use the Visual Studio Addin so I can deploy locally if I’m developing on the SharePoint server.

The recent federal government events that involve AIG and Freddy Mac, have made me start watching the news again. I realize how much I hate the news. People on CNN call for reform, Fox is asking the federal government how much help is too much, and NPR is wondering why we are helping the bankers. Overall they are blaming these companies for their practices and what they have done.

My own opinion is that we have a situation where the banks are only partially to blame. For years they have been using mortgages as a tool to have a solid return. They assumed that you and I valued our homes and would be willing to live up to our agreement and pay back the mortgage. The change in the recent years has been that we have not lived up to our agreement and are defaulting on mortgages.

So one of the main reasons for this “bail out” is us. The United States Citizens, we are as a group not paying back our debt. Therefore, the holding of these banks are falling in value (in some cases .22 to the dollar). We then, (news media) critique these companies for what they have been doing. Holding mortgages as investments, which was a common practice. But since we are not fulfilling our obligation these companies cannot fulfill theirs.

I am not saying that the banks are not to blame, they were part of the problem as well. They allowed people to get mortgages for 400k homes when a person was making 40k a year in salary. Of course a person who is making that much money cannot pay back the loan. However, the more I look at what happened I start to think it was our greedy society. More for less and we don’t care what it causes.

I think the bail out is a good choice, we can’t have our main underwriter and mortgage holders go under. Help them weather the storm and put in tools to help the banks get the right people the right loans and we may be able to make a come back. It is just going to take a while.

I’ve posted before about ISP’s limiting the amount of bandwidth you can use. In early August Comcast was ordered to stop it’s bandwidth throttling (here is a article describing what they were doing - http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/comcast-disclos.html)

I’m not against a fee for the amount of bandwidth you use, but what I don’t want to have happen is that I am being throttled or limited. If an ISP allowed me to purchase a specific amount of usage I would expect them to monitor my usage. However, in my current comcast agreement it does not state that there is a limit. From reading some blog posts I have seen / read that there is some type of limit that they will cut you off at. I am sure that I am under this limit.. but wouldn’t it be nice to know what that was.

The reason I would like to know is that since I use my cable modem for my home phone (VOIP), data backup, and entertainment (music). I would have to decide which ones to limit.

For example if I was getting close to the limit, I may set my Tivo to not download “Cranky Geeks” or I would not rent an netflix movie over the web. I could limit my offsite backups to every other day instead of daily. These are choices that I can make, but not choices I would like comcast to make.
It would be a very upsetting day if I tried to make a phone call and my VOIP would not work, and if I opened a browser and got a comcast page that said I was over my bandwidth limit.

In a world where nothing is free, I do not expect my bandwidth to be free. However, I do expect to know how much I can use and what the limits are.

All this ranting I did not want to forget that in the model that Comcast was using to throttle bandwidth they were actually selecting which protocols to limit (filtering). In a way they were really stepping on peoples privacy. It would be like filtering phone calls on a phone company level. Any phone call that had the word “P2P or torrent” in it would be dropped.

Here is a great article that asks the question if the operating system matters. With the volume of good “Cloud Applications” who really cares what you use to access the net. I am not completely sold on “Cloud applications” for security or longevity but they are currently in their infancy.

I have been thinking of getting an MSI notebook that I can use for email and browsing. I would get the linux version. Since the majority of items I do outside of work are use of Gmail, google docs, internet apps, and IM. I can’t see any reason to be tied to an OS. MAC, PC, or Linux it should not matter.

The only issue I see currently is that my job focuses on using Microsoft. Currently it is difficult to develop in .NET on any other platform that Microsoft.

Here is the original article.
http://lifehacker.com/5046542/does-your-computers-operating-system-still-matter

I was watching crankyGeeks and John Dvorak had a great suggestion. He mentioned that Adobe should come out with their own Linux Distribution made specifically for PhotoShop. Since the graphic design world has never embraced Linux due to the lack of tools like (PhotoShop and Fireworks).

If Abobe made their own version of Linux and a machine came pre-configured and optimized for Photoshop right from the factory this would be a worthwhile purchase for anyone.