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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