Fiat Lux

By way of Ezra, Nancy Grace & The Animals. I have no idea if this thing is real or fake, but either way it is VERY funny.

WARNING: May not be work safe.

I'd be a lot more outraged by shenanigans like this: White House won't rule out Libby pardon if they were not so utterly predictable from this administration.

I've definitely got outrage fatigue. And it's showing in my blogroll too; in recent months, the balance has tipped from "mostly political blogs with a few others thrown in" to "business and tech blogs, food blogs, and a few political blogs too". Six years of this administration has taken its toll: I am tired of being angry, and reading the same rants by the same people over and over again isn't interesting anymore.

This might be related to why Obama seems to be doing so well lately. I can't be the only person out there who is sick of the anger, the divisiveness, and the screaming. A Presidential candidate whose unique selling point is a passionate call to positive action can seem mighty attractive when you're burned out on the other emotions.

Just in time for the 4th of July -- Jason and a crew of dedicated hot dog fans have survived The Great Off The Broiler Hot Dog Tasting of 2007 and come up with a set of recommendations.

Worth a read.

We spent last night down on Stanford campus with some friends, picnicking, enjoying a concert, and finally, a fireworks display. Great weather, good friends, good food, and a good time.

Except at the end. The soundtrack for the fireworks was a standard Boston Pops set of classic American war music. The glorification of war and of American armed might in the music struck me as both ironic and sad, given how badly the war in Iraq is going. Usually, when I see fireworks, I find myself thinking about John Adams and how he though the 4th should be celebrated, and wondering what he would think of the America of today. This year, though, I mostly though about the soldiers over in Iraq, and what they might be thinking of today.

The sooner they all come home, the better.

I did a push-up today.

That may not sound like much to the more physically-fit of you who read this, but let me assure you, for me, that was a big deal. It was the first full push-up I've done since my high school gym class days.

I've never been a big fan of working out, frankly. It always seemed like a boring, sweaty chore more than anything else, and since I was lucky enough to be naturally on the thin side, I never really bothered with it.

Until this year, when Scott started biking regularly, and dropped 25 pounds. I took a look at myself in the mirror, and realized that I wasn't the same skinny thing that I used to be. And so, after much procrastination, over Memorial Day weekend I finally joined a health club.

I did it right and have been seeing a trainer once a week, as well as working out on my own, with a mix of cardio and weight training. And I'm starting to see some progress. I have to work harder to get my heart rate up on the treadmill. I'm using a higher weight setting on some of the machines. And tonight, I did a push-up. Maybe in another week or two, I'll be doing several of them.

It's a small step, but I did it. And I feel good.

Back about 7 or 8 years ago, I was in the lounge at an industry tradeshow -- I think it was ISPCON, but I'm not sure -- hanging out and shooting the shit with about a dozen assorted techies & entrepreneurs. At one point, someone looked around the circle and said, "gee, we could start a hell of a company with the talent in here." Everyone laughed.

Years later, someone has taken that idea and run with it. And I really wish I'd known about it before it happened, because it sounds like an amazing experience.

Good luck, VoSnap!

Here's a news item I didn't want to see this Sunday:

Cindy Sheehan, the soldier's mother who galvanized the anti-war movement, said Sunday that she plans to run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unless she introduces articles of impeachment against President Bush in the next two weeks.

Sheehan said she will run against the San Francisco Democrat in 2008 as an independent if Pelosi does not seek by July 23 to impeach Bush.

On the one hand, part of being an effective activist is being able to take extreme action that will draw notice to your cause (PETA is particularly good at this) and Sheehan is certainly attracting attention. People are listening, people are taking, and the issue is getting more light shone on it. In that regards, the threat is effective.

On the other hand, I think it's a terrible idea. It's bad for Pelosi, it's bad for the Democrats, and most important, it's bad for Sheehan herself. It was only some six weeks ago that she announced that she was retiring from the anti-war movement. Some retirement -- launching a career in electoral politics with a third-party attempt to try to take down the Speaker of the House?

It sounds more like a recipe for additional personal and financial heartache for a woman who has already suffered quite enough. She won't win, and she'll probably further hurt her reputation (and her emotional stability) by trying.

The pain, grief, and anguish that Cindy Sheehan feels over the loss of her child, and the extent to which those demons drives her, is not something I can begin to wrap my brain around. But surely, there's other ways to expunge that pain and those demons than by an action so destructive to herself and to the cause she is trying to fight for?

Had a rough day. Scott took a spill off his bike en route to work, so we spent a few hours in Kaiser Hell getting him checked out. All's well now, but it was a long and draining day.

So, as I was cleaning out my overloaded e-mail in-box tonight, I found this jewel that Jason sent to me a few days ago.

Too funny!

An excellent nugget of advice from Seth's Blog this lovely Friday afternoon:

The art of marketing is not finding more money to do more marketing. It's figuring out how to tell a story that spreads with the resources you've got.

Oh so true.

I was in Girona. *sigh*

Two quick food & cooking related notes from the past weekend:

1) We've made the Roasted Tomato & Fennel soup recipe we came up with several times over the past few months, always to great acclaim. As a follow-up, Scott decided to try a new version of the recipe with a medley of roasted root vegetables (carrot, parsnip, and turnip, plus a leek and some garlic cloves). We weren't sure whether beef of chicken stock would go better in this version, so we did a split-test and did half-batches in separate pots with the different stocks. The result was tasty, but not quite as successful as the tomato-fennel version. We'll try again with some other combinations in the not too distant future.

2) We saw Ratatouille. I share Ruhlman's highly positive take on the piece -- with one caveat. My feminist funnybone got dinged by the fact that the movie was set up so that Remy the rat ALWAYS knew better than Colette when it came to food. She's presented as a highly talented line cook who worked her butt off to get where she was. Couldn't she be right at least once?

Sports gambling -- and the NBA in general -- isn't something that normally crosses my radar screen. However, if this NY Post column is accurate, even I know that an accusation of fixed games in the NBA is a very big deal indeed. The last thing any professional sports league needs is allegations of fixed games.

That said, the article makes it pretty clear than only one referee is under investigation, and if that's the case, then one bad ref should not tank the whole system.

I'm settled in at WordCamp and feeling like there's a big red "L" for loser on my forehead, because I'm using my clunky old Windows laptop instead of a nice sleek Mac, plus of course I'm typing this into MovableType.

Other than that, I'm stoked for the day. I'll upload some photos later.

UPDATE 10:40 AM: Well, someone else already has photos online. I'm in this one.

UPDATE 11:15AM: Next up, Om Malik and John Dvorak. Funny opening:

Om: I'm a Mac, you're a PC.
John: Yeah, whatever.

Although to be fair, Dvorak is much less of a ranty old guy in person than he is in his columns.

UPDATE 11:45AM:
This is an interesting discussion. Here's a few more tidbits:

Om: Comments are what makes blogging. It is the biggest crucial difference from mainstream media. You have to engage (except for the morons). Moderating is the key to success.

(Me: In other words - FU Dave Winer!)

Om: You are responsible for the tone at your site. If you keep the discourse polite the readers will response. You have to go on the assumption that people are inherently nice.

John (to NY Times guy): if you can't filter out profanity but filter in 'Dick Cheney' then your filters suck.

John: Rating comments is useless. unless you're looking at restaurant reviews.

John: A writing tip - it's really an old newspaper trick - read your piece out loud before you send it out. Really out loud, not just pretend. You'll be amazed at the number of errors you'll catch.

Plus, a really funny discussion of why it's OK to call someone a douchebag but not a crook

Update 2:45PM:

I didn't post any notes from Lorelle VanFossen's session, and now Jeremy Wright of b5media is up. Jeremy invited some audience members to join him, so now Eric from ICHC is up as well. Neat!

Got to be honest, so far this afternoon I am not hearing anything earth shattering, certainly not to someone who's been blogging for a while. I'm also in need of more caffeine, which may account for my flagging interest level.

The side conversations have been fun though. I had a nice chat with Stormy of bargaintravel.com.

Update 5:15PM
Robert Hoekman's presentation was quite good and I took a bunch of notes, but I'm hitting info overload in a big way, and Matt Cutts is talking. I'll see if I can get some of the notes on later.

I got home after midnight yesterday and am too pooped to make it back up to the city today for the 2nd half of WordCamp.

I did have a great time, though. Got some stickers to bling out my ancient laptop, a way-too-small t-shirt (Damn you, American Apparel!) and I even got to meet the inimitable Cheezburger, who's quite a nice guy.

UPDATE: Photos on Flickr.

Most people who move to the suburbs do so in order to raise a family in a "good" school district.

Not us. We moved to San Mateo to get more bang for our housing buck, better commuting options, and more walkability. Our address scores 77 out of 100 in the "Walk Score" at this fun mashup site I found tonight.

Our last apartment in San Francisco? It had a Walk Score of 55.

So I decided to give Twitter a try. I've added a badge to my Facebook and to the "Misc" section over on the right-hand column here.

I rather doubt that the world is going to care about the mundane details of my life, but what the heck, let's give it a shot. Feel free to follow along, or if you Twitter too, let me know!

Kevin Drum Has a good post up today about the difference between a potential Obama foreign policy as compared to a Clinton foreign policy. I agree with his take, and even better, he has a nice summation of why all this actually matters:

It's rare to have a discussion about foreign policy that actually revolves around a concrete point, and by foreign policy standards this one counts as at least a mud brick point. Basically, do you think the United States should, as a routine part of its foreign policy, say that it's willing to talk to any country that's willing to talk to us? That the mere act of talking isn't a tacit capitulation to a rogue regime's demands?

I sure think so, and not just for the obvious reason that talking can sometimes lead to actual results. The bigger reason is that if you talk routinely, then the mere act of talking isn't a tacit capitulation to a rogue regime's demands and can't possibly be spun that way. It's just something we do.

Emphasis added. Good one, Kevin.

So in cruising through Techmeme recently, one issue that keeps popping up is "Facebook bankruptcy". Jason Calcanis has had enough. Om Malik thinks he has a point (although Scoble doesn't). I think they are asking the wrong questions.

It seems to me the issue is not so much whether or not Facebook sucks -- for the record, I don't think it does -- but the nature of celebrity in a connected world, and more specifically, of celebrity in a realm where the downside of fame is less a part of the mental map.

It's expected that for an actor or a singer or even a sports star, part of fame is that people want to know you, in any way they can. You'll be accosted by fans looking to shake your hand, get an autograph, or pose for a photo. Your phone number and home address (not to mention your e-mail) will be a guarded secret. I could go on, but this stuff is so widely known and accepted that I really don't need to belabor the point.

On the other hand, only a tiny number of people in the tech world have ever had to deal with the fame effect on a regular basis. Until social networks came along, that is. Now, people whose day to day lives were previously normal are experiencing the Internet version of the fame effect. And no surprise, they don't like it.

I suppose I don't blame them. I've only been recognized once, years ago, on Long Beach Island the summer I was doing stock theater there. It was a weird feeling.

I don't read Andrew Sullivan regularly, but Ezra called this piece on Clinton and Obama to my attention today, and it's quite interesting, especially this bit:

Clinton has internalized to her bones the 1990s sense that conservatism is ascendant, that what she really believes is unpopular, that the Republicans have structural, latent power of having a majority of Americans on their side. Hence the fact that she reeks of fear, of calculation, of focus groups, of triangulation. She might once have had ideals keenly felt; she might once have actually relished fighting for them and arguing in their defense. But she has not been like that for a very long time. She has political post-traumatic stress disorder. She saw her view of feminism gutted in the 1992 campaign; she saw her healthcare plan destroyed by what she saw as a VRWC; she remains among the most risk-averse of Democrats on foreign policy and in the culture wars.

It's an insightful take on Clinton and who know, Sullivan might even be right. He goes on to compare her with Obama:

The traumatized Democrats fear the majority of Americans are bigoted, know-nothing, racist rubes from whom they need to conceal their true feelings and views. The non-traumatized Democrats are able to say what they think, make their case to potential supporters and act, well, like Republicans acted in the 1980s and 1990s. The choice between Clinton and Obama is the choice between a defensive crouch and a confident engagement. It is the choice between someone who lost their beliefs in a welter of fear; and someone who has faith that his worldview can persuade a majority.

Traumatic events will have an impact, that's a given. The real question is, what lessons do you learn from the past, and how do you choose to respond to it as you move on in life? I understand Clinton's risk-aversion, but given that significant repair job that the next President is going to have on their hands, I'm not sure that someone whose impulse response is to be cautious is necessarily the right person for the job at this point in time.