Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Use all of your skills to offset tough economic times

Manufacturing jobs may have left the country but there are still jobs in service industries as well as in creative design occupations.

You can scramble around looking for jobs like you used to have or you can take stock of your skills and assess the opportunities to put them to good use.

Look at the situation as one of potential exchange. Someone needs something done, can you do it and get some worthwhile exchange for it?

If you keep your eyes open for opportunities to help others in some way, you are likely to stumble across an opportunity that you will not find in the want ads.

The other side of the coin is to look at what your former customers are doing now instead of buying products or services from you. Small businesses that are still operating after four years of economic uncertainty have figured out what customers are willing to pay for and have adjusted their product offerings accordingly.

If you do not have useful skills or products that are in demand, perhaps it's time to regroup and figure out what skills and products are needed and wanted and do whatever is necessary to produce what is wanted.

Keep on refining your offerings even when you achieve a measure of stability because we may be in for many years of increasing uncertainty.

Try to develop multiple sources of income.

California Declares War on Suburbia

Look at our own New River Valley Planning District Commission plans and you will see the seeds of this california fiasco are already sprouting.

Planners want to herd millions into densely packed urban corridors. It won't save the planet but will make traffic even worse.

By WENDELL COX

It's no secret that California's regulatory and tax climate is driving business investment to other states. California's high cost of living also is driving people away. Since 2000 more than 1.6 million people have fled, and my own research as well as that of others points to high housing prices as the principal factor.

The exodus is likely to accelerate. California has declared war on the most popular housing choice, the single family, detached home—all in the name of saving the planet.

Metropolitan area governments are adopting plans that would require most new housing to be built at 20 or more to the acre, which is at least five times the traditional quarter acre per house. State and regional planners also seek to radically restructure urban areas, forcing much of the new hyperdensity development into narrowly confined corridors.

Related Video

Transportation consultant Wendell Cox on why California pols want to force people into denser urban housing.

In San Francisco and San Jose, for example, the Association of Bay Area Governments has proposed that only 3% of new housing built by 2035 would be allowed on or beyond the "urban fringe"—where current housing ends and the countryside begins. Over two-thirds of the housing for the projected two million new residents in these metro areas would be multifamily—that is, apartments and condo complexes—and concentrated along major thoroughfares such as Telegraph Avenue in the East Bay and El Camino Real on the Peninsula.

Preserving Memories of Times Past

Some of you have long playing albums which still evoke fond memories of good times with dear friends. Everyone who has seen this Steven Stills Manassas project had a story of their own to share about the music of their younger days.

Our lives are made brighter by the concerts we attended ot the music we played or danced to when we were finding love and discovering ourselves time and again.

These albums may no longer be playable because vinyl is not a "forever" medium, but the memories linger on. You can preserve your album covers and give them new life in your den or office. They may become a conversation piece that will provide hours of pleasure for you and your friends.

Neighbors Win Court Round Over Wind Farm Noise

March 23, 2012, 6:55 pm

Reposted from http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/neighbors-win-court-round-over-wind-farm-noise/

By DIANE CARDWELL

Matt McInnis for The New York TimesOne of the three wind turbines in Vinalhaven, Me., illuminated by moonlight. The turbines, which residents say are especially noisy at night, have red flashing lights to alert low-flying aircraft.

A legal petition aimed at reinstating a state rule for limiting noise at a controversial wind farm in Maine can proceed, a judge ruled on Friday, denying a motion from the farm’s developer, Fox Islands Wind, for dismissal.

Since the farm – three 1.5 megawatt turbines – began operating on the island of Vinalhaven in late 2009, neighbors have complained about the noise from its 123-foot spinning blades, especially at night. After receiving many complaints, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection found in 2010 that the installation had been too noisy on two occasions. In 2011, Fox Islands Wind submitted a new operating procedure to remedy those infractions.

The state agency then drafted a new set of rules, a condition compliance order, that accepted the wind company’s proposal but added a requirement that it actively show it was complying during certain testing periods and to stop operating if it was not.

Then last June, according to Friday’s ruling, Patricia Aho, a deputy environmental commissioner and former lobbyist for the power company’s law firm, took over as acting environmental commissioner. She finalized the new regulations but removed the provision that Fox Islands actively prove its compliance.

The next month, the group of neighbors filed their petition to review that order, saying that it was “politically motivated, arbitrary and capricious, contrary to law, unsupported by substantial evidence, and the product of an abuse of discretion,” Judge Michaela Murphy of Kennebec County Superior Court noted in Friday’s ruling.

The power company then filed a motion to dismiss the petition, saying that the court did not have jurisdiction over the matter. But Judge Murphy found that it did.

Whether or not Ms. Aho’s decision ultimately holds up, she said, its legality or lack thereof “must be argued and considered at a later stage of these proceedings.”

Getting strange results from your Google searches?

For the past few weeks, I have been having trouble with my Google searches.

The links on the search results were being hijacked and I was being redirected to non related sites. This was a huge pain as I use search engines constantly every day. This happened with every search engine I used, not just Google.

I would search for silver powder and would get a list of actual suppliers, but when I would click on the link, I would get redirected to a home loan scheme or a link farm of some sort that had nothing to do with my search terms.

My Avg systen was blissfully unaware that anything was wrong and showed nothing out of the ordinary.

SOLUTION

I downloaded and installed Microsoft Security Essentials and in 4 minutes it had spotted a file called: Win32/PossibleHostsFileHijack and I was able to download a fix from the Microsoft site in minutes and it cleared the problem up immediately.

If your searches are going astray, you might want to check out Microsift Security Essentials.