Many of you probably know, that I don’t get very political on my blog, or my podcasts or anywhere else for that matter.  However, currently depending on the EDD for money coming in, its really rough with how out of date their system is.

Below is a letter I sent to the Governor via his website at: http://gov.ca.gov/interact. Will I get anything, beyond a generic thank you e-mail? Probably not, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to try right?

What are your opinions?

Hello Governor Schwarzenegger:

As one of the huge numbers of unemployed people currently in California, I was curious if you had given any consideration to making the EDD section of the state more budget conscience?

With some very small amounts of their full budget, it seems to me that you could probably wipe out a portion of their budget.

First point, why do the bi-weekly reports of job searching need to be mailed back and forth?  Some quick calculations would show they spend: $420,000 for every million letters they send out. Instead, why doesn’t the state do direct deposit, and allow the forms to be put online?

This would speed up the process of processing forms, and lower costs related to mailing checks out.

Also, for when a check has been mailed out, why must people call in to find out? This morning between 7:51 AM and 8:24 AM I wounded up calling about 26 times to find out my check was written today. The previous 25 times, I was told that they were to busy handling other calls.

This should be relatively easy to turn into an  internet based form, that people can check via their computer. And it would also save the state all of the money it wastes telling people that the EDD is having to many calls to answer theirs.

California is known for being the leaders in many areas, why is it our EDD section is so far behind?

Thank you,

Chris Moody

So yesterday I decided to purchase a Fujifilm FinePix S2000HD 10MP Digital Camera with 15x Optical Dual Image Stabilized Zoom. This will be my first in what will hopefully be an on going set of reviews. I do have a link here to where you can buy it Amazon, however because a local store was offering a package deal on this camera with some other stuff, I did decide to buy it locally.

I’d actually been looking at this camera for a while, and decided it wasn’t going to get any better than it is currently priced (at least not till it becomes outdated by something newer).

First off, this is my first ever “prosumer” camera, its a bridge between the camera’s that look like an old 110 film camera and the DSLR cameras. So while this does have a lot of point and shoot functionality, getting used to where every thing is on the menu does take a little getting used to.

I would recommend that anyone who has bought this camera certainly at least glance at the 148 page PDF that is included on one of the CD-ROMs, it goes into a lot more depth than the dead tree manual that it comes with.

Of course, you want to see examples of what the camera can do right?

This is the camera using natural lighting.

This is a sample of the camera in Text Mode.

As I get more familiar with the camera, I’ll post better pictures.

So this past weekend (Black Friday Weekend) I was at LosCon 35. And overall I have to say it was much better than my first experience there, which was LosCon 34.

Some interesting points I picked up:

• Science Fiction commonly doesn’t stay on TV, because TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) will only air Sci Fi that has been produced in such a way that the “average” person can get it. However the “average” person won’t like it because its Sci Fi, and the Sci Fi people won’t like it because its been to generalized, for the “average” person.
• Wil Wheaton (yes I can say I actually met him) doesn’t like for one person to ask to many questions, “Sorry can you repeat that, I tuned you out there for a second.”
• While Larry Niven may not understand being an author in the world of New Media (as far as I can tell, he doesn’t even have a website that is actually his) I do have to give him special Kudos for eating his breakfast Sunday morning somewhere that anyone could come up and ask him questions.
• Larry Niven looks very much in Real Life as he did when he visited Second Life once.

After I managed to get this it occurred to me, that I should have also asked D.C. Fontana and David Gerrold for their autographs on the same piece of paper also. Regrettably, I didn’t see either of them, after I got Wil’s autograph: