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America is in need of a single term president. We need someone who will get into office and do all sorts of unpopular stuff, approval ratings be damned. We need someone who will put policies into affect that sacrifice the short term to help the long term. We need someone who is okay being the villain.

Most of the problems that affect the country (and most of which extend into affecting the entire world) right now are thirty years old or older, and fixing them will cause bad consequences in the short term, at the expense of a long term payoff. No one wants to do anything about any of them, because doing so will kill any chance of a re-election. No party will let their canidate do anything, because it would make the party unpopular.

We need a president who doesn’t have lots of money in the stock market, or have large shares in major corporations; someone who has nothing to lose in the short term. We also need someone who is young enough that they can look thirty years into the future and worry about it.

We need someone indepenant to take office, who is willing to not only end tax cuts, but to raise taxes; perhaps change the tax structure altogether. A federal sales tax, or a flat tax, would make tax law easier for the layman and tax everyone evenly. This would (temporarly) hurt the economy, because of the legions of people who earn most of their living from taxes (Jackson-Hewitt, H&R Block, IRS employeees, CPAs, etc) but in the long term it would mean more money coming in, and less money going from government coffers into paychecks for desk jockeys.

Our environment is in a shambles, and the auto industry is a big part of it. We need to give them a real reason to make a good fuel-efficient vehicle. One idea: If a company can make a vehicle with 75mpg or whatever the lowest priced car on the market for over 180 days of a year, that company pays NO TAXES that year.

We need to repair our economy and job market. They have both gone to hell because it is cheaper to get goods from overseas than goods made in America. We can’t make American products much cheaper than China, because they have free labor, but we can impose tarrifs that make Chineese goods more expensive. Companies like Walmart will be in a lot of trouble in the short term, but once we reopen American factories and give manufacturing jobs to American workers, there will be more money in the economy. In the long term we profit.

Incidentally, cutting down on imports would also make the country a little more secure: fewer cargo containers coming onto American shores means fewer places that a nuke could be smuggled in.

We need to invest more money in education and research, because a future filled with dim people is not a bright future. Money spent on education should be spent on education, not athletics. This should be where the majority of our country’s money should go; more money should be spent on education than the military.

We need to take any idea of religion out of education; go with what is shown to give results. Whether you believe in evolution or not, you will not find any creationists working at a pharmaceutical research lab. The only jobs that require you to be a creationist are religious, which may be profitable for the individual but do no good for the country.

The military should be at home unless they are needed. We do not need to send our troops to help protect dictators who do what we say, or help insurgents overthrow dictators who don’t. Doing that is how Saddam Hussein got his biological weapons, and how Osama bin Laden recieved his training from the CIA in the 80′s. Unless we are defending our own borders, there is no reason for our military to be in harms way.

The president who can do all this will not see his approval ratings get out of the teens, and will in his own time be seen as the worst president in the nation’s history. But, in twenty or thirty years, people will look back and realize that this was the president who saved our country.

“Because he’s the hero [America] deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So, we’ll hunt him, because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian. A watchful protector. A Dark Knight.”

Let me tell you how I keep my blog up for under $30 a year. (It would be under $20 but I bought a second domain for my URL shortener).

Ever since I switched to 1&1 internet I have been dissatisfied. No really big problems with them that would make me recommend against them; I just felt they weren’t right for me. I don’t like their billing policies (why charge for my hosting in February then for the domain in March?), I don’t care for their control panel, I don’t like the way the user and host of my MySQL database are even more obfuscated than the password I randomly generated.

I had been thinking of packing up and moving to Lifehacker favorite Namecheap for a while anyway, so when Namecheap offered a to let me move my domain for cheap while helping wildlife, just as my 1&1 account was due for renewal, I took it as a sign from [insert deity here].

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I already had an account with NearlyFreeSpeech.net, one of Lifehackers five best personal web hosts. Rather than charge you by the month, they charge you by usage. However, this will almost always come out cheaper for a personal site. It may even be cheaper for a big professional site. They have a calculator so you can get an estimate of how much your site will cost, and I will be quite suprised if it is more than you are paying now. They are also the only host I know of that doesn’t make you pay a premium for SSH access; everyone gets SSH included in their hosting. You can sign up and feel your way around for free before you invest any money, and they don’t lock you into any contracts. They aren’t as easy to use as some hosts, but if you are familiar with Unix/Linux or the Mac OS X command line, you should be okay.

You don’t want to host your domain with them, though. For one thing, you are limited to a few TLDs. For another, domains cost about the same everywhere, but NFSN doesn’t have an affiliate program. Get your domain somewhere else that has one, then you can make use of that to pick up a few bucks on the side. Again, I recommend Namecheap.

Another reason is that you’ll pay around $10 a year for email forwarding from NFSN. Hosting it elsewhere lets you use their (probably cheaper) email forwarding to your existing email account, or you can set up Google Apps for your domain for free, as long as you aren’t going to have many users.

After you have set up your NFSN and Namecheap accounts, you will need to set up your domain to point to your site. Set up to use the NFSN DNS, and then follow the directions in this FAQ entry.

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At this point you are already going to save a lot of money on your site, but you can really crank up your savings using CloudFlare. CF is for servers what OpenDNS is for clients: it handles their DNS for them, while adding safety and speed features on as an added bonus. It is free and really easy to set up; so easy I’m not going to walk you through it. Once it is set up, though, it will cache several of your resources, saving on bandwidth charges from NFSN while speeding up your site. After it is working, cancel your DNS from NFSN (CF replaces it anyway) to save an extra $3.65 a year.

Make sure you have plenty of time before doing any of this though: there are several DNS changes required through this entire process, each of which can take hours. If you use OpenDNS (and you should) then their CacheCheck feature can help, but you can still spend an entire weekend easily moving your site. However, the savings can be well worth it.

Related articles

• CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster (thenextweb.com)
• Namecheap raises $20k for Save the Elephants following GoDaddy CEO’s hunt video (thenextweb.com)
• Protect And Speed Up Your Website With Free CloudFlare Service (makeuseof.com)

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I am a big fan of Google Chrome. Technically, my wife uses Chrome, and I use Chromium, to spare us the hassle of logging in and out of the computer as a whole to switch users. But either way, I love a lot about Chromium, but don’t care at all for the syncing built into it. It is slow and messes stuff up more than I care to think of. Since almost all of my data is in various clouds, I don’t have much use for sync anyway. However, the one area that always throws me off when I have to reinstall my profile (I use the unstable development branch, so this happens every couple of months) is my extensions. I have quite a few that I can’t work without, and since I don’t want to sync them, I figured I should keep a list of them somewhere safe. I decided that in doing so I would also let everyone else know about the ones I use, so maybe someone else can find something new and useful.

I will keep the list updated as I discover useful new tools, and you can view it at surber.us/chrome.

I also moved my domain to Namecheap, am hosting my content at NearlyFreeSpeech.net, and have moved my email and the such to Google Apps. I am happy with all three; much more so than I was with 1&1.

Speaking of moving, the wife and I moved from our apartment in Saginaw to one in Fort Worth. It is nicer, larger, and slightly cheaper. We moved because it is closer to our new job. I have (once again) switched jobs, and now work at Sam’s Club, alongside my wife. At times I miss Walmart, but giving out free samples is the easiest job I have ever had. In the six months I’ve been doing it, I have gained ten centimeters around my waist!

Related articles

• Are the reports of blogging’s death greatly exaggerated? (editdesk.wordpress.com)

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(Enough for all the family)

Ingredients

• 1 Elephant
• Brown gravy (lots and lots)
• Apple Cider (lots and lots) – optional
• 2 Rabbits – optional

Instructions

1. Cut the elephant in bite-size pieces; this takes awhile.
2. Marinate in lots and lots of apple cider.
3. Add enough brown gravy to cover and some spices to taste.
4. Cook over kerosene fire for about 4 weeks, or until tender.

Notes

This will serve approximately 3,799 people. If more are expected, add the 2 rabbits. But do this only if necessary, as most people do not like hare in their stew.

I have been irritated at the fact that the various links I find and wish to share wind up in various silos (my Google Reader shared items, my StumbleUpon favorites, links in various tweets and dents, Facebook posts, and Dugg items, to name a few). I have tried using various social bookmarking services, but these all wind up as another blasted silo I am stuck in. I am going to start linking to stuff I really like using my blog. I will still like stuff on the services I find it on, but if you want to see my absolute favorite links, make sure you are following my feed.

HTML5 presentation

There are some misconceptions that shell scripts are only for a CLI environment. You can easily use various tools to write GUI and/or network socket scripts under KDE or Gnome desktops. Shell scripts can make use of some of the GUI widget menus, warning boxs, progress bars etc. You can always control the final output, cursor position on screen, various output effects, and so on. With the following tools you can build powerful, interactive, user friendly UNIX / Linux bash shell scripts.Creating GUI application is not just expensive task but task that takes time and patience. Luckily, both UNIX and Linux ships with plenty of tools to write beautiful GUI scripts.

via 10 Tools To Add Some Spice To Your UNIX Shell Scripts.

But instead I got carried away sending updates to identi.ca. I put the small things in there as they happen, and since most of my blog entries are a bunch of small things put together that kills most of the point of posting.

Sorry.

However, I have something large enough to be worth an entire entry… the wife and I moved! We are now living in Saginaw, not too far from where I work. Her sister had been living with us, and sharing a car with us. We lived 18 kilometers from work, and since we both work in the same building, but different shifts, this wound up being two or three round trips a day. Needless to say, gas was financially killing us. She got her own apartment a couple of weeks ago, walking distance from work. The wife and I got our own apartment a week later (last Friday) 5 km away. We are still in the precess of getting all our crap moved over here (we drive a Kia Rio and can’t afford a moving truck yet) and are surrounded by boxen, but we love it.