The blog of Ross Armer

All has been on hold as I assist with both my parent’s battle with cancer.  Here are the links to their respective blogs I have setup to keep friends and family updated.

Herman.ArmerFamily.com

Sissy.ArmerFamily.com

But Ross, you’re a anglo-saxon (white) male heterosexual with a white-collar middle-class job, how can you be a “liberal”?   I get this question every time someone works out that I am a (gasp) Democrat.  The puzzled look on their face always draws a smirk from mine. Even my 9 year-old nephew recently and urgently informed me that I couldn’t be a Democrat because I am not black. Much to his dismay I had to explain I was “one of them”.

I’m going to use this post to try and explain how I’ve come to the belief system I have even though I live in a part of the country where only 14% of my fellow white men voted the way i did in 2008.   I hate to keep bringing up the race issue but I believe the cold hard stats require that it can not be ignored.  Now for a few of the questions I always get…

1:)  ”So you believe abortion is OK then?”

Let me answer this once and for all… No!  I personally believe that abortion is wrong and, as a Christian, immoral.  Having said that, I also understand that I am a man and will never be pregnant and faced with that choice.   I also understand that Roe vs. Wade was decided over a woman’s right to privacy in regards to her own body and not over whether the fetus is a human life or not.  This last question is one that has yet to be answered conclusively by any non-religious formula.  The second Science confirms that the fetus is in fact aware and has a conscience then the constitution of these great United States require that it be protected.  One could also argue that the fetus only becomes its own being when it can live outside of the womb, this would also be a valid legal argument.  If, however, we decide all laws based on our gut reaction or our religious convictions then we then live in a Theocracy and I thank God I do not live in a country where our laws are based on a particular religious dogma.

2:)  ”Well, you must be a communist.”

This one always leaves me scratching my head.   The argument boils down to this: either you believe in a 100% free market with no regulation whatsoever, or you are Marx, Stalin, and Mussolini all rolled into one.  Just the slightest effort to research history and you will find that whenever unregulated capitalism is allowed to flourish that is inevitably abuses the immense power it obtains.  This is logical as profit is the only motive in such a system.  If you were one of the few that lived on the right side of the tracks during the time of the robber barons at the turn of the 20th century then you loved this system.  If however you were with the majority of the country that was hurt by the ruthless and monopolistic practices of the time, you knew and were correct to think that there had to be a better way.  Moderate regulation is key to a healthy free market, just as pruning is required for a more healthy tree or bush.

3:) “How can you believe in God and also be a Democrat?”

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I have more and more coworkers, friends, and family moving to the Mac and I thought it would be a good idea to make a list of a some of the must-have Mac applications.

1:  Qucksilver (Free) – Do anything on your Mac in just a few keystrokes. Extremely powerful and can be a bit overwhelming at first but well worth the effort.

2:  Bento ($49) –  The most user-friendly database and organization program you will ever use.  You can take your spreadsheets to an entirely new level or do some pretty sophisticated customer management.  Check out the demo videos on their site.

3: SuperDuper! ($27.95) – The simplest and most complete backup app for the Mac.

4:  CoRD (Free) – One for the geeks here… A great free RDP program to have remote access to your remaining Windows machines.

5:  Parallels ($79) – For those times when you need a full copy of Windows running locally.

6:  iLife ($79) – Comes free on new Macs but worth the purchase or upgrade if you don’t already have the latest version.

7:  iWork ($79) – Beautiful Microsoft Office replacement.

These are just the Mac-specific apps I run regularly.  I highly recommend you use these cross-platform apps as well:

1. Dropbox
2. Google Chrome
3. Evernote
4. Skype

Some guys have fast cars others fast computers, me… I have fast internet. Lately I had the oppertunity to add a second modem to my network to try and increase my speed beyond what my ISP offers on a single connection. Here is what I’ve learned over the past couple of days of dual-wan action.

My setup is a DOCSIS 3.0 modem capped at ~ 36 Mbps down / 2 Mbps up, a DOCSIS 2.0 modem at ~ 16 Mbps down / 1.5 Mbps up, and a fancy Cisco router to do the dual-wan load balancing.

Pros:

• You can get close to the combined total bandwidth with load balancing.  For me this is 52 Mbps down / 3.15 Mbps up confirmed sustained.
• Failover if one of the connections goes down.
• More bandwidth for downloading multiple things on multiple devices at once.
• Great for BitTorrent as it is not limited by the speed of the single connection back to you from a server.

Cons:

• You’re using two different WAN IPs and the websites / services you’re using have to be able to handle sending information back to you on these two different IPs.
• You need to bind YouTube’s video IPs to a single WAN as you will get “Sorry, this video is no longer available” errors on embedded videos half the time.  (74.125.0.0/16)
• Some browsers (Google Chrome) do not seem to take advantage of both streams.  This must be a limitation at the Application Layer as Safari, Firefox, and IE 8 all take advantage and use the combined bandwidth.
• At these speeds you’re connection is faster than most servers are able to give the information to you.  Just because you can download at 50 Mbps don’t expect to actually transfer at that speed even half the time.

I will update as I spend more time with this setup…