How many car dealerships do we really need? How many banks? How many corporate coffee houses? How many big discount retailers?

I haven't purchased a new car since 1994. My last used purchase from a dealer was in 2001. Yet in Lodi, CA we have at least 10 new car dealers. The population for Lodi in 2000 was 56,999. Within 30 minutes I have access to 2 auto malls and another just another 20 minutes up the road.

This is the industry that was hurting so bad it offered 0% financing during the last slow spot in the economy.

Just wondering...

You may have noticed Dot Net Nuke on this web site. Dot Net Nuke is an open source web portal framework written on the Microsoft .Net platform. I know that some people might say "Microsoft! Open source!". Well Microsoft is not open source but the framework for Dot Net Nuke is. DNN just happens to be written in .Net.

As a .Net developer myself it made sense to go with what I know. The DNN community is very large and the framework grows very quickly. Out of the box I had access to the site, skinning, localization for international support, login and user support, blogs, forums as well as excellent Google integration. For me it was a no brainer to develop this site in DNN.

So what's next? I'm looking over some free skins to spruce the site up. A good source of skins (and modules) is snowcovered.com. The selection is amazing and the prices match. Between the 2 a web site can be setup for almost nothing but time.

Although I do my own ho ...

Why Nonsumer?

My wife and I went on a savings spree a while back. We were concerned about not knowing where our money was going. I for one was concerned with my weekly expense of $300 for lunch, coffee and etc...

Being a programmer I thought I would use this as an oportunity to write a pocket pc application to track my spending. It was a fun little app and did it's job admirably. Of course I discovered it was easier to not spend money at all than it was to remember to enter my expenses.

On the occasional day I went without conducting commerce I would report to the Mrs that I had been a nonsumer for that day.

Now think about that. Of course I had been to work. I had traded the results of my labor for hourly compensation. I had used gasoline in my car and eaten food purchased from the grocery days before. Commerce still occured.

But I had avoided the corporate coffee house. I had planned my week better t ...