Ido’s Blog

I’ve stopped paying attention to the stock market these days. Oh, I keep tabs on it frequently but I’ve removed the Windows Vista gadget I used to have in the sidebar that showed me how the market is doing in a “realtime” basis. It’s too depressing. I’ve already done all that I can at this point to shore up my own finances. Back when this plunge was first starting I moved my 401k investments out of stocks and into bonds and money market funds. I’ve moved my wife’s IRA to bonds. Where I can’t do that I’ve left the accounts alone with the hope that when the market rebounds…which it will…I will at least recover my investment (albeit I may be an old man by then) or make good on it in a big way.

What disturbs me is the lack of leadership at the top — both from the White House and from Congress — in addressing this issue. After asking for $700 billion dollars to buy these toxic mortgage backed securities that helped drive this mess, Treasury Secretary Paulson has now decided that doing so is too complicated and would not provide the needed effect of calming the markets and providing some sense of confidence. Instead, he’s investing that money in the banks themselves. Unfortunately, the banks apparently are intent on either sitting on that money (like the American consumer is doing with whatever cash reserves they have) or using it for acquisitions and mergers. That, of course, hasn’t helped at all nor has it resulted in the much needed relaxation in the credit markets. The idea that this money would help cause a “trickle down” effect that would settle the upset American economic market seems to have failed. I, personally, would posit that the Reaganomic idea of “trickle down” has now been clearly shown to be the “Voodoo Economics” that President George H. W. Bush once claimed. Perhaps Secretary Paulson should use the other half of the $700 billion dollars that he’s got in a “trickle up” idea — instead of giving the rest of the bailout money to banks and other financial institutions give every household in the country $100,000 and let them spend it to help jump start the economy. Since “trickle down” doesn’t work…perhaps “trickle up” will.

I read Paul Krugman’s latest op-ed piece in the New York Times and it doesn’t really give me all that much hope. Yet he’s right…we’ve got a complete drift in economic policy due to an administration that is apparently unsure of what to do (or unwilling to do what it needs to do) and a Congress that is biding it’s time…for what I don’t know. What I do know is that the lack of action by the administration (or their claims that they are not sure of what action to take next) as well as the statements made by Congressmembers such as Senator Carl Levin yesterday are going to really drive the American consumer into a bunker mentality that perception will become reality. Consider this statement made by Senator Levin yesterday

We cannot allow the issue of which source of already appropriated funds will be used for the essential purpose of preventing the economy from sliding into a depression, which is a real possibility if one or more of the domestic auto companies goes under, given the impact of the auto industry on millions of jobs, on suppliers that are in most or our states and on all of our communities which have Big 3 auto dealers.

Levin, Carl, “Statement of Senator Carl Levin on Bipartisan Agreement to Support Auto Industry,” November 20, 2008, found at http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=305179

I’m certainly not claiming that Senator Levin is stating that we are already sliding into a depression but such statements can cause real fear in American consumers and they will respond accordingly — by pulling back even further on whatever spending they are already doing and that will, in turn, contribute to the slide into a depression.

What’s happening now is a mess created by this administration with it’s lack of real economic policy, by a Congress that is, and has been for years, truly partisan, and by a Fed Policy Board Chairman that argued too much for allowing the markets to regulate themselves. But, let’s be honest, it’s also caused by an American consumer that bought on credit as far as they could go and by a system that threw all the basics of lending out the window in the pursuit of short term riches. We have forgotten the very basic concepts of economics — you don’t get something for nothing. And now, many more of us may well lose everything.

After quite a long while I’m finally focusing a bit more on blogging on some of the cool technologies I get to play with as part of my job. Ok…well, maybe it’s not technically part of my job but I find it fun to do this anyway.

Before I get into the details of AD RMS and setting it up I wanted to note that I scored an HP DL380 from a friend for under $300! It’s got 2 x 3.06GHz Intel Xeon CPUs, it had 2GB of RAM (which I recently upgraded to 12GB), and it’s got 6 x 36GB 10,000 RPM UltraSCSI III drives with a RAID controller. I’ve set up as my VM server (although I unfortunately could not load Server 2008 with Hyper-V on it since that requires a 64-bit system with a CPU that either had Intel-VT or AMD-V virtualization technologies) and I’m slowly building out my VM lab. Now if I could just find some inexpensive 72GB drives for it to replace the 36GB ones I’d be a happy man. But enough of that digression.

I set up AD RMS according to the Step-by-Step guide on TechNet as well as following any pointer from Tony Trivisan’s blog on MSDN.

I set up my Virtual Machine environment as follows:

This is slightly different than the Step-by-Step guide on TechNet. The reason is because when I first installed the client and put Office Professional 2007 on it I discovered that I could not create restricted documents. It turns out that Office Professional 2007 cannot create restricted documents but it can consume restricted documents. In order to actually create RMS controlled documents you need either Office Professional Plus 2007, Office Enterprise 2007, or Office Ultimate 2007. It’s a little detail that Microsoft does not convey very well. Nevertheless once done I was able to create a simple test document, apply restrictions to it, and then open it up as a separate user. All in all a very useful test.

One thing that I would point out — I used a self-signed certificate for the RMS licensing server in order to enable communications using SSL. You will get prompted to accept the certificate every time you open the document if you don’t put the certificate into the Trusted store on the machine. I’ll explain how to do that in the next post.

Once again Jesse Jackson has managed to open his mouth and insert his foot. It seems that the two are magnetically attracted to one another. While I don’t necessarily attribute much to the New York Post, this piece caught my attention.

As Jackson put it the most important change in American foreign policy will be the end of “decades of putting Israel’s interests first” (Taheri, Amir, “The O Jesse Knows“, The New York Post, October 14th 2008) and that “‘Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades’ remain strong, they’ll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House” (Taheri, Amir, “The O Jesse Knows“, The New York Post, October 14th 2008).

Now, Obama’s campaign has already made it quite clear that Jackson does not speak for or advise Senator Obama. It is quite clear from the quote above that the good Reverand is still as anti-semitic as he has always been and goes so far as to bring back the spectre of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in his quote. He is trying to portray American Jews as being a fifth column in America and using our supposed power to guide American foreign policy.

Normally I would discount the Rev. Jackson as being a has-been and a wacko…but I, as a Jew, do worry about the untested Obama. My hope is that Biden’s experience will temper Obama’s lack of it in this area and will result in a continued strong support for Israel. I have no immediate problem with Obama’s willingness to speak with Iran and other enemies of the United States. Both Generals Petreaus and McKiernon believe that we should pursue dialogue before military actions and I feel that they have some experience in this matter…clearly the Bush doctrine hasn’t gotten us anywhere but mired in Iraq.

My biggest concern is that an Obama administration will be overtly hostile to Israel and pro-Palestinian given the fact that Senator Obama has relied on the likes of Daniel Kurtzer, former Air Force Chief of Staff “Tony” McPeak, and Anthony Lake as advisors. However, I believe that Senator Obama is smarter than to take the advice of this group seriously. I feel that Senator Obama is still the better choice as he can help put America back on track…and a strong America is the best support for Israel. As it is, we will have to wait and see on November 4th.