It was a day I hoped would never happen, but I sat down this weekend and updated my little US national debt clock to display over $10,000,000,000,000. I say it's a sad day because despite what some people say (that the further in debt our country is the more prosperous we are) I find it hard to believe we're better off because of the debt we've just taken on. The whole concept of "money as debt" just seems corrupt. Then again, I'm not an expert on economics. Maybe having our national debt increasing at the rate of $36 per millisecond is a good thing.

The debt clock started when a friend e-mailed me a years ago and asked how to do a counter like a clock that starts at a specific point. He needed it in Flash so I whipped one together and sent it to him and then realized I could maybe do something worthwhile by putting it out there for people to use. I did.. and it hit myspace and facebook.. and I'm currently seeing about 65,000 views of it each month. I encouraged people to download it and install it on their own servers (it's not sucking too much bandwidth, but they shouldn't have to wait on my server for their page to finish loading..) so I'm not sure how many views it's getting that way.. I know it's being used on quite a few political web sites (both Republicans and Democrats running for Congress for example), in articles, and on some personal web sites.

I don't fuss with the accuracy of it since I figure if they can pull a number like $700,000,000,000 out of thin air just because it's "a really large number" then there's no point in trying to be too accurate on anything based on numbers provided by the same folks. I like to think that over the last few years I've helped a tiny bit to raise awareness of our out of control spending.. I can hope it's not too late to sort things out and maybe someday I'll be able to reverse the clock.

I was working at about midnight the other night when I heard my little VPN app scream that it'd lost connection.. I noticed that I couldn't get out to my favorite site and checked my DSL modem.... the status light was off. So the next morning I got up and saw it was still off. I called the DSL provider, we went through the standard power off/on stuff and the regular checklist and the guy in India said he'd overnight a new modem (it still hasn't gotten here..). A little while later I remembered something from my CCNA 1 class - check "layer 1" first.

So I swapped out the line between the modem and the wall jack. The lights came back on. I took that phone line and tested it with a phone and it was bad... heh. Always check layer 1 first.

"The investments by Cisco also include a commitment to expanding the company's Cisco Networking academies to add 300 to the company's exiting 200 academies in China."

Which translates into 500 schools in China teaching networking using (presumably) Cisco or Linksys equipment. This is a fraction of the number of schools using the Cisco curriculum in the US, but the fact that Cisco is more than doubling the number of academies in China is noteworthy.

full article here
(the "exiting" typo was caught in the 11/05/07 article in Information Week magazine btw.. for you typo hounds out there.)

I have a defective SCD23 sitting on my desk.. it's a paperweight for the most part. I blogged about it in the past mostly to pass on the info that there's a sorta workaround to get the defective CCD working for a short while. It was ripe for a class action, and finally someone is doing it. Basically the CCDs came from a bad batch that were sold to multiple camcorder manufacturers. All other manufacturers issued a recall and offered replacements - except Samsung. Samsung replaced the ones that broke under warranty, but for those of us who rarely used the camcorders the CCDs didn't fail until after they were out of warranty... but the breakage was clearly from a manufacturing defect that Samsung knew about before our warranties ended.

So expect to see the ones on eBay get snatched up.. because if you're holding a defective SCD-23 when the class action dust settles then the odds are you'll be getting a replacement for that paperweight. And if you've got a defective SCD23 then get on that class action pronto like.