Manistee National Forest

Headde up to Northern Michigan for a backpacking trip this weekend.  Had a great time. Some of the highlights included the car getting stuck and subsequently removed from a snow drift.  A very cold night/morning on Friday/Saturday. Successfully making coffee Saturday morning, which I credit with keeping me Alive / Motivated  to start the hike, and some beautiful scenery.  Uploaded some pictures that I liked.  Can't wait to get back out there or anywhere else. 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday Poll

I'm going to start trying to introduce some recurring posts, mostly as a cop-out of having to think of posts as regularly.

Tuesdays are going to be poll days. You can find the polling button at the top right of the main page. Please vote.

Today's question is inspired by a comment that I heard on NPR in the drive in this morning. (I specify NPR not because it makes me sounds like a New England College Professor in multiple committed relationships. But because the subject matter). Today apparently is Paris's B-day and the announcer introduced her as "Socialite and factor in the 2008 Presidential campaign."

This made me think of some other potential NPR/Paris synergies and the poll is a result of that.

Please vote early and often and include any ideas that I missed out in the comments.

Tribute Post

I've been a bit busy at work and I want to use that as an excuse for my lack of blogging, but who isn't so I will avoid.  I also was on the road last week, but seeing as that has been the norm for about 2.5 years, I really can't use that as a good excuse either.  So maybe I go excuse-less and just try to pick up where I left off. 

I had planned on taking some time to write a nice thoughtful post, but after nosamrellim made such a nice request for a post, I thought it was better idea to change my blogging format a bit, so this is my take on the nosamrellim format, but with the Andy twist, despite it being a nosamrellim tribute post, any shortcomings and/or offense caused are all my own.

1. Wine corks are an awful idea.  I mean cork was the height of packaging technology about the time that wine was invented. But X,000 year later, can't we do better.  I can't count the number of times that I've either broke a cork, or had to cork a bottle of wine because I suck at getting the cork out.  Now I'm not talking about every other bottle or anything, but it's one of those things where you only remember if it has gone wrong. I don't remember the 99 time I successfully opened a bottle of wine, but i sure as hell remember 6 weeks ago when I accidentally pushed a cork through the bottle and the wine sprayed up and got all over my shirt.  I can't remember ever having ruined a shirt trying to open a beer?  It's really hard to jam a screw top down a bottle.

Furthermore, not only is cork sub-optimal in terms of ease, it also poses a significant risk to the quality of the wine.  When you taste wine at a restaurant, you aren't tasting it to see if you like it, you're tasting it to see if the cork has malfunctioned and the wine is now vinegar! This would only be an ingrained part of the wine experience if it was a relatively common occurrence. 

So cork is neither easier nor better at it's sole purposes which is preserving wine.  The only reason we still use it is tradition. And I'll admit that there is something to that, but with so much tradition in wine anyway, can't we take a pass on the cork.  Leave the French pronunciations, but for the sake of my pride and my dress shirts, I really hope we see more screwtop wine soon. 

2. One thing that there isn't enough of out there is people passing out pamphlets.  I love people who pass out pamphlets.  Yes! Give them to me. Let's communicate, share your ideas with me in a polite and passive way.  I don't want to be shouted at, I don't want you asking me "Do you have 5 mins for the environment," (which is insulting to the environment and my intelligence). But yeah, if you care enough to print something up, I want to read it. 

I grabbed one the other day outside my grocery store for vegetarianism. I looked at it and read it.  It took me maybe 5 mins, I read it while I was walking, and then threw it away.  I still remember what it said.  I'm not going to become a vegetarian, but i definitely thought about the pamphlet when I was ordering a slice of pizza later that night.  (I got cheese). 

It's not that I think I or many other people are going to be swayed by pamphlets, or that something going to change the world (although, I guess just ask Thomas Paine for proof that they can) but I really like the idea of people reaching out to others with their ideas. It's kinda like a blog, but a lot more personal. Thanks to google I do have some sense who reads this blog, but only in terms of bits and bytes. If I was printing up a pamphlet, standing on a corner and looking these people in the eye, I know I would feel a more personal connection to this thing.  It's good to hear new (even wacky) ideas about vegetarianism, Scientology or (wacky)Ron Paul.  Now I may think your idea/Ron Paul is ridiculous, but it still does me a world of good to hear about it. So keep passing that stuff out, I'm going to keep grabbing them. 

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Bankruptcy Update

Just so everyone is aware.  The foray into reader bankruptcy and rebirth has been a massive failure.
 
Not only did my unread posts count climb quickly back into the 000's (like in 2 days) but unsubscribing hasn't seemed to help the problem one bit. Now I have been busy the past few weekends, and focusing on reading a couple different books before bed, but at the same time, I find it hard to believe that I am simply incapable of keeping up.
What's worse is that the blogs that are causing the most trouble are some of the ones that I really value.  Huff Post, The Guardian, Gizmodo and others who posts on an obscene frequency, a pace that I'll never catch up to, but who's posts I really do value. 
I'm at a bit of an impasse it seems.  I genuinely think I would be better served to control my reading list, but at the same time I really want to keep these blogs.  One option that I've considered it getting the Huff Post on the Kindle, and unsubscribing. I'm not sure if this is the way to go however, since I'm a bit uncertain about paying for the Kindle version for a blog that I can get for free.  Regardless, I'm going to give it a few more weeks and see if I can get caught up.  If not, I need to reevaluate something.
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North Country

As I type I'm driving back from a great ski weekend in Wisconsin. A lot of good friends (including a surprise visit from a fellow blogger who I don't get to see enough), good beer, good food and good midwestern skiing.

There's something really refreshing about the northwoods and being outside. At one point during the evening we all walked down to the frozen lake that our friends cabin was on. We walked out onto the ice with some beers and crawled through the 2-3 feet of powder that accumulated up there. Standing there staring at the stars it was a really cool feeling. Cold air on your face, fresh everything. Fresh air, fresh snow. I think it really taps into the part of the human condition that needs space, and needs contact with nature and needs raw, unrefined experience. Everything we do/eat/feel has been processed, shipped pasteurized, filtered. To get a raw experience every now and then is so critical to who we are. Putting down the brita, staying outside a little longer in the cold, feeling sore as hell from moving up and down a mountain all weekend.

I'm really lucky to be able to experience these things, and really lucky to have friends who do them with me, and lucky to have friends who share there nice things, cars, cabins etc that make it work.

All in all and fantastic weekend. Attached are some rudimentary pics.
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apologies

Apologies for the absence. I am heading up north for a ski trip to WI/MI so hopefully I'll be able to bang out some posts on the long drive to and fro.

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Engagement

Just watched a very good film, Lions for Lambs. Good themes, civic engagement, duty, honor. It's interesting because for as good of a movie as it is, and for as good as the cast was, I really hadn't heard anything about it.

The idea of civic engagement is a good one. One interesting thing about the movie was that it was very Greek themed. Not Greek like I was Greek, but I'm talking about ideas of the polis, the idea of being a citizen. Not in the passive sense that so many of us seem to enjoy that concept, of having rights bestowed on us in exchange for taxes and stopping at stop signs. But being an active citizen, engaging, debating, acting and all the good, active parts of culture that people seem so happy to shy away from.

There was another movie (based on a book of course) that also addressed ideas like this, 'Starship Troopers.' Yes believe it or not, 'Starship Trooper' was based on political theory, and a uniquely Greek Political Theory as well. 'ST' was about voting, and in that world, voting was only a right bestowed upon those who had served.

It's interesting how these Greek theories of the Polis, and the Demos still emerge, how they are still so rooted in our culture and heretiage, a heritage not of physical ancestry, but of moral, political and ethical ancestry. All valuable ideas. Maybe like another Greek was famous for saying, "there's nothing new under the Sun"


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Declaring Reader Bankruptcy

I love my Google Reader.  Love it almost too much.  I have somewhere north of 60 active RSS feeds that it pulls from everyday. I've never been really good about managing these feeds however, the posts pile up, thousands of them at a time. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing, but it does clutter up my reading experience.  I've taken to reading the New York Times on my Kindle every morning, but still my Google reader feeds still serve as a primary source of news, especially on some more specialized interests like tech/gadgets and the legal world, but it's also my best and main source for taking in commentary. What I want to do is to use this source of news, knowledge and information better, I want to immerse myself more in the topics and writers who I really care about, and drop the ones who just add noise. I trust myself to innately make decisions about what's important for me, but it's hard to monitor those decisions when each feed has hundreds of unread posts, and each category has thousands. So as of last night I have declared Reader Bankruptcy ( concept stole from Fred Wilson's Email Bankruptcy, who's blog never goes unread)I'm going to monitor my reading for the next week or two.  At the end of that period, I'm going to cull the feeds that have the highest percent of their material unread. This is of course an on-going process, I hopefully will be adding and deleting feeds most constantly now. The quantitative goal i am setting for myself is to never have more than 100-200 unread articles on the Reader.  I plan on posting my trends data as this goes on to hopefully track this progress. In the same vein, I also want to begin expanding some of my feed selections so, if anyone out there has any feed recommendations, I would love to hear them.


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Honesty and the public sphere

I have to be honest, originally, I thought that the Tim Geithner tax situation was no big deal. From what I understood at first, he was working for an organization that didn't withhold tax for the US gov't and given how complicated our tax code can be, it didn't surprise me that there were errors, sure 30-40K seems like a lot, but when you are operating at the income levels that a lot of senior public officials operate at, not unsurprising.

But as more information has come out, much of it condemning to Geithner, and painting him more as a tax evader or at the very least an opportunist, I have begun to re-think my position.

Where the defense previously was "well it was a human error!" I could buy that, but if the reason for confirming him now is that "it in our national interest to look the other way on this..." I just can't get in line behind that.

How quickly some people seem to forget that it is the lack of transparency, and opportunistic greed that got us into the economic mess we are in now. Not only does appointing Geithner send the wrong message about the important steps towards transparency and reconciliation that we need to take, but I also question his fundamental strength of character to help lead this country out of our dark hour.

I have given Obama a lot of leeway in appointing people whom I feel represent a bit of a betrayal on ideological ground, but I'm ok with that, there is nothing wrong with a lefty president appointing left-center advisors. But I do have a problem if he betrays the trust I and so many others have put in him to be a more honorable and just leader, Geithner's tax evasion represents an old, and a wrong way of doing things, and no amount of smarts or connections can make that right.

I sincerely hope that BHO withdraws the Geithner nomination. Otherwise I've found my first great disappointment a lot sooner than I have hoped or expected.


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telling

I thought this was a pretty telling photo from the "Youth Ball" at the Inauguration. It's a Digital Youth...

New Commenting System

Student Nerds, my other blog, recently switched over to Disqus to host their commenting. Since I want to try to keep stuff as simple as possible to manage and inegrate, I have done so as well. I tried to preserve old comments but that was a bit tricky so we will see if it works. I hope you guys find the new commenting equal to or greater than Intensedebate. If people feel a preference however, let me know and I will certainly consider switching back.

A Moment

A lot is going to be written and has been written about the inauguration tomorrow. Some people are already cynical. But I'm not one of them. I came home after watching Che in the theaters last night, a movie that will warrant a blog post later, and I turned on a replay of the concert at the Lincoln Memorial. It was Bruce Springsteen playing his (awesome) song "The Rising" a song about 9/11 nonetheless for the President-Elect. And I thought about Lincoln, and about the Blood, the gallons and gallons of American blood that was spilled in the civil war, I thought about broken necks and burnt crosses and opportunities denied and about fire hoses and German Sheppard and jim crow and brown and the Topeka board and so many things that happened before me, but so many things that are bigger than any of us ever will be on our own.

This is an inauguration, and the peaceful transfer of power is always a cause for celebration. But it's more than that, it's the culmination, or at least a waypoint on the journey that all those events above lead to.

Tomorrow will be historic, and tomorrow will be world changing.
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Red v Blue

This is from an old story on 538.com (which if you're interested in politics and NOT reading 538, that needs to change) http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/12/red-states-gaining-ground-but-migration.htmlThe analysis basically outlines what has been a growing trend in the past decade, or historically blue states losing population and historically red states gaining. I think on the surface that might be something that a progressive would be worried about, putting their control of Congress at risk but I don't think that's the whole story. The states gaining seats are almost universally Southern or Western states, and they include many states who Nate Silver is classifying as Red, but who went for Obama in '08 or at least where Obama had a significant and surprising showing, AZ, FL, GA, NC, OR, WA, SC. Really the only states who are gaining seats that are truly Red are TX and UT. I think it's important to keep in mind that gaining a seat is a backwards looking event. These States already have the population that is going to give them the additional representation. So if that holds, maybe the fact that Obama won is not inspite of the growth of these states, but because of it. If Latino immigrants (a voting bloc that the Republicans squandered and lots) are swelling the population of the Sun Belt, it's more and more likely that this last bastion of Republican strength is eroding. I think that this, more than anything should be the clarion call to the GOP that they need to reinvent themselves and reconsider those issues that keep them from being winner these voters. The conservative and republican message can be very compelling if presented the right way, this is a classic need for re-branding and realigning to meet the changing times. The Obama election is just one data point, and certainly his success does not exist in a vacuum, a product of demographics alone, but it revolutionary impact cannot and should not be dismissed. The country as always is changing and it's important that both parties work to change with it, otherwise they will increasingly find themselves irrelevant.

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Super Diamond

Went to the Neil Diamond tribute band, Super Diamond last night at House of Blues Chicago. It was a lot of Fun.

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Is Slow Growth Always Worse?

One of the underlying themes that has played a central role in the debate about stimulus, tax cuts, and reviving the economy in general is that advocates of the free market seem apolcolytpically opposed to any systemic changes that they feel will lead to slower growth once the economy gets back on it's feet.  The idea that even though the rapid growth of the financial and housing sectors (which coupled with the decline of our industrial base formed a increasingly larger part of the mid-2000's economy) is a major, major fundamental cause of the sever recession that we are in, that this should be the benchmark of our return to "normal" seems insane to me? Would a slightly lower normal rate of growth, measured by GDP or per capita consumption or whatever, necessarily be a bad thing?I'm not suggesting that people start sacrificing their quality of life here, or that we retreat into austerity as some sort of penance for our sinful ways, merely that we check the previously insatiable demand for more and more consumption.  Rather than bigger boats, bigger houses, and bigger debt. What if people read more, or saw more AAA baseball games or grabbed a beer rather than a vacation down Mexico way.  Downsized the house a bit. 10,000sq ft is a lot,  a lot more than a couple needs.  I think that though the GDP might take a hit, the growth that we do experience will be fundamentally stronger, and if you ignore GDP as the only measure of quality of life, then we might be living better lives as well.
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Gender and the Modern Experience

I could have twittered this link. But I felt that the pictures were funny (and maybe true) enough to warrant a post.


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Apple and the Closed System

This probably deserves a longer post, but I just wanted to make a few quick observations about Steve Job's announcement today that he will be taking a 6-month leave of absence.

1. From a corporate finance perspective this is nuts, we are in a deep recession, near-depression where trust is one of the most valuable assets. And here we basically have confirmation of what most of the "in-the-know" people have known for a long time, that is that Job's is dying. But Apple has decided that lying about this is better. That is short-term thinking and untrustworthy. They will pay for this

2. This lack of disclosure is very much in Apple's DNA. They are a closed company. Music with DRM everywhere (that is now changing with iTunes+ but too little too late I say), iPods and iPhones you have to hack or jailbreak to get to function like a normal device and so on and so forth. Open always beats closed, in corporations, in technology, in society and so on. Apple's had a great run, but this closed system of theirs, and the corporate structure that it gives birth too has caught up to them. The "IBM-Compatible" machine won the 1980's platform war, and not because of the IBM part of the equation.

3. I hope apple sticks around, not cause I look forward to their new devices or their new laptops etc, but because they are the constant reminder that to win, to stay competitive, companies products and devices must constantly become more flexible, more adaptive and more useful or design and UI-geeks will catch you. If we didn't have an iPhone, we wouldn't have a Palm Pre. If we didn't have OS X, we wouldn't have windows 7. Apple is important in what it inspires others to do. And that's an important role indeed.


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Click after Reading

I want to give a shout out to my blogger-buddy in arms Lowell on a great first post. Some of the best times of my life have been spent listening to Lowell talk, especially about the Saw series of movies or about his love of dogs. If his blog is anything like those conversations, it's a must read for entertaiment, commentary and insight. Here's a link to his first post

http://lowellforthesoul.blogspot.com/2009/01/company-open-house-true-view.html

check it out

Traitor

I just saw Traitor with Don Cheadle. It was a pretty good movie, especially for the "Thriller" genre. I recommend seeing it for sure.

One of the most appealing parts for me was how it treated Islam. Unlike many of the other recent action movies set in the middle east, the Muslim characters in this movie was not defined as "good" or "bad" based upon how close to Western values they adhered, in fact we see the main character (cheadle) pray on a muslim pray rug a number of times, speak arabic and recite the Koran a number of times. This is a big deal to me as I feel that as a culture, our acceptance or rejection of others, especially on religious grounds, is an important part of our identity.

I try to be very tolerant of other people's views, I certainly don't always succeed to the extent that I should, but I try. But there is a certain set of beliefs that I have no interest in understanding or absorbing, and that is religious intolerance. It disgusted me during the most recent election to here people say "well, Obama's a Muslim so I can't vote for him." Or some variation of that. Thankfully, this sentiment is mostly contained to right-wing fring elements of the political discourse, (not exactly a demo that BHO had a good shot at winning over anyway) nevertheless it was very disheartening to me to hear.

But I don't worry too much. Because we as a nation have always listened to our better angles shout down our lesser demons when it come to religion. True, we have never elected a non-christian to the presidency, but there was a time when people spoke of JFK being Catholic in the same ways that people now speak of BHO (falsely) being Muslim. But we rose above. We do always rise above. This may seem to be a long way from my original point about Traitor being a good movie, but they are related. For Pop Culture to produce a movie with an appealing muslim character, with real (albeit superficial) muslim characteristics, that is a step forward. That is moving in the right direction and it is a signal that faith in us as a tolerant, accepting and therefore decent people is not misplaced.

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Comments are on

There might have been an issue with the comment system earlier. I refreshed and now they should be working...sorry for the issues.

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Drive Time

I recently started a new job in the suburbs. I had to buy a car and now I have roughly an hour commute to work. and back every day.
This commute was very intimidating and a huge concern and consideration to me as I was debating taking the job or not.
I'm a big fan of public transportation, I don't take it as much as I should, but I always liked the taking the train to work on the rare occasions that I actually was in the city. For all it's problems, the CTA is very reliable and inexpensive given the service it provides.
After a week of this commute, I feel like my fears and concerns were a bit unfounded. I've actually liked the commute so far. For one, on a good day, if I leave early, the commute really is only 40-45 mins. Only about 15 longer than my train commute was. It's definitely more stressful to drive then it is to ride a train but that brings me to my next point. This week I've been listen to NPR, both to and from work and I've been loving it. Now I know it can be considered "elitist" radio. But it's both informed and inspired some good thinking in the car. World affairs, the economy, and the social discussion that the radio provides is so different than what television or the newspaper does. Elevated but tangible, direct but in many ways interactive. It has been fantastic and has turned what I've feared to be dead time into something valuable and worthwhile.
Things can clearly change, ask me in 6 months if I still feel the same way and it will probably be very different, but for now I'm really enjoying the drive.


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Comment is Free

This is going to be post at studentnerds.com/blog soon, but what I say here goes double for my readers (if you're out there??) Here. The biggest thing about this however, it is incumbent upon me to write content that interests and maybe inspires you guys. Don't know if I'm capable of that, but it's a goal, so let me know how I'm doing.

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"Comment is Free

It's not just a quote, or the motto of the Guardian's influential blog, but it's also an important tenet of journalism. But when Scott wrote those influential words, journalism and publishing was a very different business today. The cost of putting words to paper, and exposing that paper to the world for review was much higher. The internet is changing that every day, While I can report the exact cost of running www.studentnerds.com/blog, I can assure you that it is much much cheaper than an industrial printing press

and national distribution network. Many blogs and website (and hopefully this one) actually make money (how does $40K per month sound?).

The internet hasn't reduced the importance of facts, they are still sacred, maybe even more so. But I do believe that it has increased the value of comment. The world has become a big coffee shop, a university, a newspaper and a library. We are all, or at least should be, both producers and consumers of content, of facts and comment.

The Student Nerds try to add to this debate. We hopefully provide valuable facts about ways to back up PCs and share documents and music. We also try to add (what we consider to be) worthy comment as well. We hope you guys read and enjoy what we write. But more importantly, we hope you guys are inspired to contribute as well.

Part of this goal of this blog is to create a dynamic community, the intellectual equivalent of a game of "First Bounce or Fly" we (only by virtue of being authorized on the blogger account) toss up and idea, review or fact and if we do our jobs right, hopefully someone catches it and runs with it, agreeing, disagreeing, and adding to what we have presented. The comment system that we have added to the blog, IntenseDebate

is a great tool for tracking and monitoring comments, people can give comments 'thumbs up' or down for comments that they read, receive and send email responses to what others have said, and track members of the community that they find insightful. We hope you all sign up (you can also comment without creating an account of course)

One of the most enjoyable posts that we have made was Praz's Google Docs post, both because it was an excellent post, but also because of the comments that it spawned (16 of them!), starting on the original topic, open source software, but eventually turning to not only Google, but Microsoft, cloud computing and start up DNA. I learned a lot more from the comments than I ever would have if I just wrote about it. There's a new model of journalism, and if Scott was alive today, his quote might look more like this

"facts are sacred…to the extent that they free people to comment"

We hope you guys will feel free.

--
Andrew W. Watterson

Back at it tomorrow

I've taken a extended absence from blogging due to starting a new job and thus, having a new schedule. I will be back tomorrow and am working on finding a new time to keep on rocking the blog. See you soon.

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