Christmas as a young child was sometimes a little confusing – particularly for those of us who apparently did a lot more trying to figure things out on our own rather than actually discussing them with adults. We’re talking ages five or six here, not the teen-age years when we shunned adults entirely.

Sure, we got the Santa bit and we were happy to play along with the fallacy for as long as it would benefit us. Why raise questions about logistics and physical limitations if you have presents under the tree on Christmas Day? Yay, Santa! (The Easter Bunny, of course, met its fate much earlier. It was far less believable for anyone who had ever seen real rabbits up close. Just gimme the candy and let’s keep things moving here.)

We’ll take the 12 Days of Christmas as an example of my childhood confusion. Nobody, as far as I recall, ever explained these 12 days to my satisfaction. I only got one day of Christmas – two if you count Christmas Eve, when we often got to open one present. I felt like someone was cheating me out of at least 10 days when, I dreamed, the parade of presents from others should have continued marching on. We sang about all those days, though. The song talked about getting different gifts from a “true love” for each day. Anyone who would keep Christmas gifts flowing to me for almost two weeks was, in my opinion, “my true love.” Apparently even at a young age I could be bought. (Over the years it seems my price, if not my value, has increased.)

That isn’t to say that I didn’t have huge issues with the presents actually given in the song. I secretly hoped that my “true love” knew me better than to give me some of that stuff.

A partridge in a pear tree seemed like a very stupid gift. How do you get the partridge to stay there – wire his little feet to the branch? Two minutes after unwrapping it all you have is a pear tree with partridge poop in it. Hey, thanks! (When I was a little older and had more exposure to network television, I envisioned David Cassidy stuck on an upper limb of a huge pear tree, ostensibly in the front yard of the Brady household [lots of exposure to network television!]. I wondered if anyone would bother to help him down, and rather hoped not. Perhaps Bobby and Peter would throw rocks at him until Cindy went to tell on them. But I, not for the first time, digress....)

For the second day of Christmas, I had a bit of an issue with the two turtle doves. I knew what turtles were. I knew what doves were. The image of “turtle doves” both mystified me and frightened me a little. Were they doves that just flew really slowly? Perhaps they were flightless birds, like penguins, that couldn’t get off the ground because of the weight of their shells. Either way, they didn’t sound like a very good present. (Most examples of a good present had either the words Mattel or Hasbro on them. Hot Wheels and Matchbox were also acceptable labels, but only when received in sufficient quantity.)

I saw racial overtones in the whole “three French hens” gift. I knew what hens were. Why these were described specifically as “French hens” left me clueless. Were French hens better or worse than regular hens? Would you describe your average chicken as being an “American hen”? Were chickens in other countries different than chickens in America? If so, did they taste different? If different countries had chickens that tasted different, how did you know what something tasted like when people said it “tastes like chicken?” American chicken or someone else’s? I’m still not sure about the answers on this one. Chinese chicken dishes always leave me wondering.

By the time the song got to “four calling birds” I had the suspicion that the songwriter’s “true love” was a member of the Audubon Society or something. You’ve gotten four different types of birds and a tree. I wasn’t all that wild about pears as a child, so it made sense to me that the tree could be otherwise useful as a perch for all the avian gifts with which the songwriter had been bestowed; though again, it seemed that keeping them in place would prove to be the true challenge. I knew that “calling birds” weren’t really using a phone or something. But I didn’t know how these birds were supposed to be different from partridges, doves, and hens, since I instinctively knew that none of these were mute species of birds. “Four calling birds” seemed rather vague, (particularly after specifically mentioning turtle doves and French hens,) like there were different grades of “calling birds” and you didn’t want to embarrass your “true love” by mentioning that what they really bought you were the cheaper ones.

Despite the image of trying to fit them all on one finger at the same time, the “five golden rings” were the first gift that seemed to make some sense. Golden rings would have a certain appraised value for resale, for example. Golden rings wouldn’t require you to feed them or clean up after them, like the previous gifts. Perhaps, I thought, the songwriter had set their true love straight by that time on what constituted a good present. To me that didn’t include birds. Unfortunately, as the six geese a-laying, and seven swans a-swimming proved, this was not the case.

After that, the song turns towards the hired help, with receiving eight maids a-milking and nine ladies dancing. I was, at the time, too young to appreciate what a fine gift nine ladies dancing could be. But it sounded like we were getting more milk than we needed.

With the lords a-leaping, pipers piping and drummers drumming, (no doubt with the nine ladies dancing along), the entire scene of getting all these presents together in one place seems hopelessly chaotic. It’s no wonder that people like Allan Sherman and Bob and Doug McKenzie have replaced these original gifts with the more appropriate, more sensible fare for which these performers are known. After all, the song is relatively snappy, if slightly long-winded towards the end. The concept is straight-forward and understandable. All that’s really needed is some presents that make a little sense. In my case, I’m missing about 10 days worth of them.

You have to admire the reporters at the New York Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, etc. They would rather see their companies and their jobs completely flushed down the toilet rather than abandon the liberal propaganda that has so alienated their former readers and advertisers. Now that's dedication! Of course, they are hoping that Obama keeps his promises (which they believe) about wealth redistribution. That way they can have their needs met without even doing the slight work that they previously did. As the first to buy in to the present administration, the media will be the first to go down. Learn from their mistakes.

Okay, I'm hoping this thought is one of the saner ones because I'm throwing it out there for the world.

The election has me in something of a funk. I'm really concerned that we are going to genuinely screw this one up as a nation. With one outcome, there will be riots. With the other -- well, there will be riots. Keep your powder dry.

The whole issue of Marxism and the redistribution of wealth had me trying to put a tractive example to what I consider the idiocy of the ideology from which it is born. So I did a google search on two numbers --- Bill Gate's net worth and the US population. So here's how the example goes:

Bill Gates is worth $56 Billion. That's the figure off the Internet and probably reflects his net worth prior to the market turmoil that we are presently experiencing. For the sake of my argument, we'll keep the number and move forward, understanding that it might be slightly inflated. The number I got for the population of the United States is 301,139,947 plus or minus whatever individuals have crossed the Rio Grande in recent weeks. Marxism/socialism says that the state has the right to take the $56 billion that is his and redistribute it to his fellow countrymen. It's very simple math, people. That means we would get $186.00 for every man, woman, and child in the country. What positive, lasting effect would $186.00 have for the average American? What permanent, negative effect would taking all Bill's money and leaving him with $186 have on his life? What effect would it have on his company, Microsoft, or on its employees, or on its survival? Due to the sad, irrefutable numbers the raw population statistics clearly display, attempts to redistribute to the large masses of poor from the pockets of the relatively few rich will much more significantly drag down the rich than it will uplift the poor. Moreover, the truly rich, who have homes in other countries, will simply go live there and give up their citizenship if they feel that taxation in America would be significantly more than in the other country of their choosing. A lesson for Obama: when the rich become targets, the rich will become foreigners. You're left redistributing among only the poor, which leads to the next axiom -- no matter how bad you have it, someone has it worse. In a Marxist/Socialist environment, this means you can't have too little for the government not to want to give it to someone less fortunate still. Do you really want to be in this sort of race to the bottom, seeing how efficient so many others are at wasting their time/talents/resources/opportunities? I await rebuttal.

On Open Source

I have always been a strong advocate for open-source -- applications, operating systems, protocols. Years ago, it was because commercial, proprietary software was out of my budget ($495 for WordPerfect 4.2!). Open source allowed me to be productive with a computer without having to resort to pirating software. Even today, I would rather spend my money on something else, like a bigger monitor or larger hard drive than a shrink-wrapped DVD of software that, regardless of its features, always includes strict restrictions on its use and complete contractural release of liability for its maker. What was I paying for again? Information should be free, as should the software tools to manage and manipulate it.

For the three answer sites, I decided to pull out the big gun of questions: "Is Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate authentic?" The sites on which the short form resides are either his sites or ones that have ties to him (sorry, factcheck.org is not as non-partisan as they want people to believe). Here are the results I got:

Yahoo Answers -- Yahoo Answers' top response was entitled "Is the birth certificate shown on Obama's site real?" For the sake of this argument, I clicked the link, which took me to a page that listed this as a "resolved question." However, a quick read through the posted responses below that claim showed that the question was not at all resolved, though it appeared to be in the minds of most all of the posters that answered either way.

Answerbag -- Answerbag wanted to know more to find the answer, like the subject -- there was a 'legal' category and a 'birth certificate' sub-category. Then it wanted to know if it was a 'conversational' or 'informational' question. I chose 'conversational' since I was not sure how the information should differ on this subject. Upon submission, Answer bag took me to a webpage that notably was taken up by two columns of Google Ads on the right half of the screen and a column of links to related questions on the left side. However, none of the questions listed fit what I asked. Some of them, such as the one dealing with whether a birth certificate had an expiration date, seemed to be of little value at all, particularly with the answers posted to it.

Askville -- Within ten minutes of posting the question on Askville, I got a response. A very long, well-documented response. Very professionally done. A response that would have taken much longer than 10 minutes to type. A response that clearly was either copy-and-pasted or carefully canned. A response from someone clearly on Obama's side and very likely on his payroll. They followed up with a personal email letting me know that they responded and pleading with me to read said response. After that, other responses started trickling in many derogatory and quite a few to pick apart certain aspects of the first response.

So the question remains unanswered -- Is Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate authentic? The fact that he filed a motion to dismiss and a second motion to delay discovery of evidence that included that birth certificate until after the court ruled on the dismissal has me suspicious in the Berg vs. Obama case (www.obamacrimes.com). I wonder, too, if visiting his grandmother is the only business that Obama will be conductng while he is in Hawaii.

I did, in fact, Google myself. Most of the pages on the first group of results are geneology pages about past individuals with my name. And one with my name that runs a Ford dealership in the NorthEast. No sign of my website, with is .com-ed but hasn't been updated in forever.

Okay, I admit that I read about and thought very interesting the collaboration between Nike and Apple's iPod that provides you with music and monitoring on your daily run. I didn't think it was interesting enough to actually buy the equipment or start running again. But I can see the benefit to runners.

In my opinion, technology is supposed to eliminate the need for me to sweat -- making sweat slightly more enjoyable is a distant second. It's not that I am against exercise. I would love to have that sort of free time.

I love the idea of exercise routines with the Wii. DDR can be considered really something very close, certainly on the higher levels. Alas, I don't have a Wii. Otherwise I would make my shirt that says "I can't workout without needing to take a Wii."

As far as accompanying exercise with appropriate music, I have done this all my life, starting with strapping a boom box to the handlebars of a BMX bike that weighed a fraction of what the music player weighed. That was back in 19-- uh, that was a long time ago. Viva la iPod.

I set out a goal for myself a number of years ago that my new bride considered at the time to be overly simplistic. In recent days, she has reconsidered the wisdom of this goal and agrees that it is indeed "worthy." So I'm tossing it out there for the consideration of others:

My goal in life is to be able to get up in the morning, grab the newspaper, and open it -- fully confident that there is absolutely nothing contained within it that could possibly have any undesirable effect on my life or lifestyle.

Of course, the goal changes with time -- the last time I got up in the morning and grabbed a newspaper off my driveway, Bill Clinton was still playing "Hide the cigar" with interns. I will settle for substituting "all online news outlets" for "newspaper." The fact that I'm not alone in this is very well proven by the plummeting circulation rates and revenues of traditional newspaper companies.

There have been many negative things written about Thursdays. I know that there have been scant occasions in my own diaries that I have been compelled to write anything positive on the subject. The bloom is very definitely off the week by Thursday. Having passed the midpoint, Thursdays are a natural point of reflection on the goals and aspirations you set for the week all the way back on Sunday and the progress that you have made towards the same. This almost universally is another source of depression, the treatments for which I have become an encyclopedic source of first hand information and anecdotes.

Maybe Thursdays should be outlawed.

We should change the calendar. We've followed this one for too many years anyway. I'm tired of months named after Roman caesers. We should have months with more meaningful names. We could name them after the characters on Seinfeld and Friends. It's "Soup Nazi" month. I was born on Chandler 10th, in the year of...never mind.

Perhaps the government can auction off months to large corporations as a way to make money, the way they do with sports stadiums. The deepest pockets would snap up the 31-day months and February could possibly be donated to a charitable organization. "And on the fourth day of ExxonMobil..." Then again, this has a certain risk to it. Either you are changing month names all the time as the fortunes of corporations rise and fall or you are stuck with things like the depressing "Month of Enron".

It might be appropriate if Christmas next year would fall on the 25th of Hammacher Schlemmer. Cadbury might want to sponsor the month Easter falls under, but would probably settle for October to capitalize on Halloween. For other countries to buy into this, it probably won't be achieved until the One World Government is established. On the other hand, I believe that's supposed to kick off this November, so maybe the idea isn't that ahead of its time. That would open up the bidding to other companies around the globe too. The month of Mahindra. You could even get a free calendar with the product from each month's sponsor prominently displayed during the correct month. Okay, maybe a bit too far.

How about if we cut out the AD stuff and start over again at 1. We could extend the metric system to time. Ten hours to the day, Ten days to the week. Wait, we're getting rid of Thursdays. Can't do that in a 10 day week. Forget metric time.

But what if we went through the expense and trouble of getting rid of Thursdays but people were no happier?

“Wednesday...the new Thursday."

Clearly there are some obstacles to overcome here.

Ah, it's good to be back for the encore performance of Web 2.X. It's like being asked to extend your run on Broadway when all the critics have written you off and the theatre management has demanded their key back.

I am not sure how I should reintroduce myself. I am a serial procrastinator who last left this blog with the promise of more and greater posts to come, yet never got anything online in the intervening year. I do have at least four drafts that I will finish and put online between the requisite class posts for 2.1. In fact, I finished one while I was pondering how I was going to proceed with this posting.

I just want to take a couple of lines at the close of this post to debunk the whole Web 2.0, 2.1, 3.0, x.x classification schema that seems to have arisen, mostly it appears, from the marketing departments of various online entities clamoring to proclaim themselves more advanced than their competitors. There is no Web 2.0. There's no 2.1 nor is there a 3.0. The web is a continuous, living, breathing entity. As such, it falls under the same rules for adaptation and survival of the fittest any other organism conforms to. There are no neat, tidy little dividers where someone can say with total accuracy "Web 1.0 ends here and Web 2.0 starts at this point." Are you homo sapien v12.1856 or homo sapien v 26548.0? Would your child be considered a major upgrade or just a mainenance update? One should never be afraid to patch their child's OS.

On the Subjects of Writing, Blogging

Until the Internet provided everyone with an equally loud voice, I didn't appreciate just how many obnoxious, ignorant, stubbornly-opinionated people there were in the world. I was doubly shocked at how many people couldn't spell, couldn't write a coherent sentence, or who thought that typing in all caps or adding rows of exclamation points helped get their viewpoint across.


I guess that my resistance to creating and maintaining a blog has always originated in the belief that I do have the intelligence and depth to have formed well-considered opinions on any number of subjects, ranging from politics to religions, economic theory to global environmental concerns. I have also kept the rationale that I prefer to control with whom my opinions are shared. I am not considering anyone unworthy of my ponderings and the conclusions I have drawn from them, but many have clearly demonstrated that they lack both the comprehension skills necessary to fully appreciate the end results and the desire to be confronted with a concept not of their own creation.


For this reason, you will rarely find in any of my emails, instant messages, or blog postings any emoticons whatsoever. Though it may mark me as somewhat old fashioned, I sincerely believe that the words I choose and their context should be able to provide sufficient evidence to the reader that the text in question was meant to be humorous or sarcastic or insulting. If a reader needs emoticons to appreciate the "mood" of my writing, then either I have failed as a writer or they have failed as a reader. Animated emoticons insult me more in that not only are they wasting my time, but also wasting valuable CPU cycles.


On the subject of being rather old fashioned, I have considered lately that the process of actually taking a pen in hand and manually writing out a letter to someone on well-crafted stationary has become such an unthinkable task that it has gained an immeasurable amount of class status to actually accomplish this. Unlike emails and instant messages, it is very difficult to multi-task while you are writing a letter by hand. You have to concentrate on what you want to say because you can not cut-and-paste a written letter together, though I guess people who create ransom notes are known for doing something fairly similar. And of course, mailing such a letter with the post office immediately adds class status to the correspondence by indicating to all that what you have written does not fall into any category of immediate, urgent, or time-sensitive material with which lower classes of people are forced to concern themselves. If you want to strike a blow against our modern, frenetic world, go buy some stamps, good stationery, and an ink pen. Extra points if it's a fountain pen.

Week #10 -- The Grand Finale

OMG, here I am -- at the end of week 10, with my shiny new MP3 player in the same building as myself. It's almost like Christmas, but without having to hide stuff and pretend that some other fat guy is going to break into the house to bestow gifts that my hard-earned dollars will continue to pay for well into the New Year, thanks to MasterCard and VISA. I'm so excited!

Okay, first I want to take offense at the calling of names that this week's lesson started off with. I thought an oxymoron was that guy on TV trying to sell me OxyClean. To be succinct, there is really such a thing as a video podcast, though it is only useful on-the-go to those of us who are graced to own the 5G iPod. You can, of course, sit around and watch video podcasts in iTunes (I am subscribed to VH1's Best Week Ever video podcast), but of course that doesn't make it any different than YouTube, except for that RSS auto-downloading bit. But disparage not the video podcast! It is the wave of the future, once you guys trade up out of your Shuffles and get an iPod with a screen. There's no reason to call it any sort of a moron.

I downloaded the audiobook UltraMetabolism: The Simple Plan for Automatic Weight Loss. I hope to have a chance to read it one day. Obviously, I hope to lose weight automatically one day, too, without any changes to my eating habits. Food and I just enjoy each other's company so much. Well, okay, I really enjoy food and generally it's been cooked enough that it doesn't complain about my company.


Right now, I am subscribed to the following podcasts: Computerworld TechCast, (to "Feed the Geek"); NPR: All Songs Considered, in continuous search of new music that doesn't totally suck; NPR: Car Talk, because if my brother and I ever spoke to each other we could do a show like this, and VH1's Best Week Ever, just to see what the quality of "professional" video podcasts is like. I think that all college courses should be available to the students (and possibly the public) as video podcasts. It's part of my whole belief that information should be free. As such, I can prove that I haven't trapped too much of it within my own head.

Well, what can I say about Learn 2.0. In the words of the Grateful Dead, What a long, strange trip it's been! We were exposed to some new and exciting sites, all building on the easy availability of data in our brave new, interconnected world.

Just remember, if you can think of a way to tie available information together and share it with others, you can create the next Google, the next YouTube, the next Flickr, etc. Tell the public what they want and then give it to them, like Steve Jobs does, and maybe people will one day be waiting anxiously for your new smartphone to start rolling into stores.

I will continue to blog for some time on this site, as there is much in our present society with which I would like to raise some protestations. Weeks 11-13 are "ketchup" weeks, so I will be exploring on my own. One of the things I want to examine closer (and pass along to others) is Web 2.0 Mobile. Okay, you have all this great stuff out there, but how much of it can you access away from your desk. Despite the hype, what can you (should you) be able to connect to on your phone or PDA. Does anyone with the tendency to own a PDA still have one that is separate from their phone? Inquiring minds want to know.

Week 9 - Music, Music, Music!

Okay, I am busy today because I have to do Week 9 and Week 10 today, since Week 10 is almost over and next week (Week 11?) I will be on vacation, swimming with the fishies. And by swimming with the fishies, I mean in a Jacques Cousteau fashion, not in a Tony Soprano/Jimmy Hoffa fashion. At least we hope not.

Thoughts on Copyright
As I have stated before, if I create something that others are willing to pay money for, as unlikely as that might be, I expect to be the one to receive the renumeration. On the other hand, I think that much of the cause for copyright violation is the price charged by the copyright holder for the art. Copyright says that your favorite artist's music is owned by Sony/BMG (just as an example). This is providing Sony with an effective monopoly on the sales and marketing of that art -- they can charge whatever they want and no one else can compete with them without violation of that copyright. While artists should be (but aren't always) appropriately compensated for their work, the actual publishing/distribution companies should be in competition for the buyer's buck for that art.

Thoughts on DRM
DRM is the spawn of Satan. If I have purchased a work on CD or DVD, I should be able to use that disk freely as long as I am not making money off that purchase. I should be able to make copies of it for backup purposes, transpose it into other forms for playback on non-native player devices, and create derivative works from it. As such, I have a very negative view of anything that restricts those rights. Fortunately, very few forms of DRM have avoided being trivially subverted. I like to see the death of DRM as much as Steve Jobs. He's in a better position to accomplish it, however.

Music Sites
Back in the late 1980's, I was flipping through a copying of Yachting magazine, green with envy for the avarice and ostentatious display of wealth that the glossy, full-colored pages provided. For young boat lovers, Yachting magazine is the equivalent of classy porn.

To my (shame? credit?), like other porn magazine that have come and gone through my life over the years, I actually read the accompanying articles. Now I know most of you, particularly the ones who feel that they should have some indignity over the subject as presented, are wondering how this relates back to music. Well, one of the articles in that copy of Yachting magazine was called "The Top 10 Boating albums." The article interested me -- what do people who have the disposable income that could allow them to buy a 110' yacht (or a record company!) listen to?

I took this list, and I went out and bought these 10 albums. Some, like Steely Dan's Aja, were well-known to me already, so purchasing them in an attempt to emulate the happy, successful, care-free lifestyle as portrayed in Yachting was easy enough. But there were some that I had never heard of, being raised as I was in the constant presence of '60's, '70's and '80's pop music. Two of those albums stick in my mind -- not just because they had funny names and were completely unknown to me, but because they both became a couple of my favorite groups in their respective genres. The first was Little Feat's Waiting for Columbus. It is the definitive piece from the group, and live to boot. Unfortunately, the CD version drops "Don't Bogart That Joint" which the album and double-length cassette both had. Obviously, some moralistic space-saving on the part of the record label. The only other southern rock group that I was really familiar with at the time was Lynyrd Skynyrd. The second album was Pat Metheny Group's As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls. Today, I own every album Pat Metheny (or his group) has produced, including his No Tolerance for Silence, which is 60 minutes of continuous freeform guitar which even most diehard PMG fans can't endure.

Still, when I went into LivePlasma and entered Pat Metheny Group, I was surprised how closely Steely Dan was linked, though clearly from the Yachting article I am not the only audience the two have in common. I was also surprised by how few of the linked groups and artists I did not have at least a single album from. Then I chose Chicago as a group, and was surprised to see that Steely Dan again was just a couple hops away. I wondered if a group could "purchase" associations to sought groups on the site. So I chose Secret Garden and was pleased to see that Steely Dan was nowhere in orbit around the group.

I have bookmarked Last.FM. My intention is to take those groups unfamiliar to me that circle the groups I do like in LivePlasma and give them a listen. I think the combination of the two site will be a powerful way to find new music. Though you can get a discography of a group in Amazon from the LivePlasma site, the Last.FM site will play the whole song for you -- not just the 30-second snippet that Amazon offers. I could listen to Last.FM all day (if it didn't bog down the network).

MyStrands was nice and I might use it in the future for its complete discography for artists, but it didn't really grab me as having more potential than many other sites. Upto11.net, whose name I certainly appreciate, gave me very different results from what LivePlasma seemed to provide. It appeared to be a more international selection, based on what others say they collect in addition to what you have entered as search criteria.

So now I'm going to put on my headphones, go back to Last.FM, and do Week #10. Post coming soon....

As promised, here are the pictures from my department. It took me a while to get them in place.

This is the Millennium server. Everyone who connects to Millennium is operating off this server. He's pretty heavy duty.
This is a small switch we use for testing. This was just a test of my camera's "macro" focus.
This is our main core switch. Somehow, on some port, everyone in the organization is connected here.
The sleek, perforated steel face of a Dell PowerEdge server.
The bright blue beacon on the back of the Ironport server.
Abort...abort...abort...


Okay, those are my pictures. Another week down.

Yea! Another week of Learn 2.0 under my belt. I can almost hear my MP3 player from here! Though there is nothing this week that really breaks new ground for me, I’m sure that I can turn it into a record-length blog posting anyway.

I had a Flickr account even before they were swallowed by Yahoo, but I don’t remember my login. Fortunately, my Yahoo login allowed me to quickly get up and running again. To test, I stuck a picture of one of my sons out there http://www.flickr.com/photos/8722708@N05/534679833/ without much trouble. I will probably restrict access to much of my collection to friends and family, once I start to really populate the site.

I found Tom’s pictures. Clearly, hunting is a part of his life he pursues passionately. I’ve personally found that catch-and-release doesn’t work nearly as well with geese as it does with fish. Either way, I have a pact with the wild kingdom – they leave me alone, and I will only pursue them for food by proxy. For example, Mrs. Paul and that Gordon’s guy do my fishing for me. I can give the end product the hot oil treatment, but all the processing between swimming and cooking belongs to someone else.

On the subject of skateboarding, I can only say “Tony who?” Dude, I lost interest in skateboards at the speed in which the lamination on my first driver’s license cooled. As a child – as a younger child, anything with wheel was either transportation and my chance to escape and explore, or it was a Tonka/Hot Wheels-type toy which offered a chance for gratuitous violence and destruction. Once I had my driver’s license, I was ready to combine the two. I accumulated more cycling/skating miles than every other member of my family combined – ten-fold – before I got my license. In Mississippi, you could (can?) get your license at fifteen, and it was a watershed moment in my life. Okay, we hit some kind of shed, I was really going too fast to make out the details. One of the truisms I hold dear in life is that it doesn’t matter how much fun it is to jump something on a skateboard – it’s infinitely more fun to jump it with a 1979 Dodge Magnum XE with bad ball joints and the front torsions cranked all the way up.

So what would I search for at Flickr? Well, one thing I found was a picture of a restored 1968 Lincoln Continental. http://www.flickr.com/photos/25955360@N00/404961403/ It’s the same year, model, and color as the one that I drove back in the early ‘90’s. It lacks some of the character marks (surface rust) that mine had, but it’s very close. It was an incredibly comfortable, quiet, smooth, and thirsty car, consuming a gallon of premium (leaded) for roughly every five miles of forward progress. Sitting behind the wheel looking out over the hood was like standing in the endzone of a football field (or so I’m told – see previous posts about my lack of sports knowledge/interest). The hood seemed to stretch forever in front of you. The image would have been heightened by a goal post hood ornament, but for 1968, Lincoln didn’t put hood ornaments on the Continental in an attempt to reduce the sparkly pieces of the car and make it more “European.” “Really?” I thought, when I read that in an old automotive magazine. There was nothing faintly European about the Continental (despite its name), except that its turning circle was about the size of Western Europe and its aerodynamics were similar to the Berlin Wall. Oh, and cornering in it at any speed would make it lean like that famous Italian tower. (Whose idea was it to build a 6000-pound car with no sway bars?)

I was proud of my Lincoln. Some days, I was just proud that it ran and I could (sorta) afford to feed it. Looking around Flickr for cars I used to own and cars I’ve wanted to own, I can see that many people are proud of their cars. Sometimes this is for good reason – there are 79,000 results if you search for “Ferrari”. Sometimes for no reason whatsoever – there are 187 results if you search for “AMC Pacer”.

I stopped searching after a while because I was testing my wireless provider’s “high-speed” data connection and it… well, high-speed is a relative term, so I think they are safe from a legal standpoint. (“Now you can download from the Internet at speeds that rival semaphore…”) I’m just glad I’m not reliant on them for connectivity 95% of the time.

I love Creative Commons. I think that if anyone should make money from the pictures that I take, or the elegant prose that I create, as exampled here, it should be me. However, I am definitely an amateur photographer. I have a friend who speaks passionately about f/stops, shudder speeds, film speed, lighting and composition, focal length, etc. I know how to turn my camera on and which button to press to make it take a picture. I can zoom in and out, and I know how to set it for night mode to spy on my neighbors. I have learned that the term “white balance” doesn’t refer to a racial integration issue.

I’ll have to wait to get my supervisor’s approval for my images before I can post them. They will be part of the next post to this blog. I promise.

Learning online, for me, is as comfortable as learning offline but is much more convenient. Learning online generally is more flexible in the hours that you can participate, as opposed to structured, classroom instruction with its set hours and outrageous textbook prices. I have offered to help someone (name withheld) who has not advanced beyond the first couple of weeks, but they declined.

RE: Life.exe: My particular build of Life.exe keeps throwing up error messages about missing .dll files – money.dll, time.dll, etc., Sanity.dll keeps crashing the system, which takes forever to restart, and the work-for-a-living module consumes too much of the system resources. Some people claim that this is an optional module, but I have found that the system doesn’t run without it unless you happen to have one of the rare Life.exe Silver Spoon Editions. While these sound like what most people would want, the downside to running the Silver Spoon Edition is that when it crashes, all the news media are alerted. They then want to debug the system in public forums. Suddenly everything that was ever linked to your system at any time in the past is fair game for criticism, and a host of people are second-guessing where the breakpoints should have been. Still, it’s better to run Live.exe as ‘root’ than as a ‘user’ or even ‘anonymous’. These days, trying to running Life.exe as ‘anonymous’ really removes all your effective rights, and we don’t even want to get into the issues of running it as ‘guest.’

So, until next week or I get pictures approved, I’m outa here. Have a good weekend, everyone.

And we're back. Time flies when you're...yeah. hey there. Let's get to this. I really did enjoy the sites and selections this week. You'll see.

Trainco -- I liked the Trainco site, and its sweatin'-to-the-oldies MySpace potential. It got me thinking about "fat socialism". Fat socialism is where everyone's body fat belongs to the state. If I happen to put on a few pounds over the weekend, it's okay because one of my Trainco comrades lost a few pounds in that time period. It will all balance out. Then I thought about how I could hook a keyboard and mouse to a stationary bike or treadmill so that I could get my work done while I perspire. I'm still working on that. On the other hand, I thought it was a great idea to take one of those old generators, you know that the cheap light kit for old bikes had, where it rubbed against your tire sidewall with its little wheel to generate power, and use it to recharge your iPod as you rode your bike. You could design a Pod docking station that fit on your handlebars that had speakers, for the safety conscious who don't ride with headphones on. It'd be great. Except those old generators didn't really make much light unless you were doing 30 mph down a hill, or you stuck it against a car tire, going down the highway. Never mind. That didn't end well.

Dogster/Catster -- I noticed that the Catster site was copyright 2007 by Dogster, Inc. I can imagine the people from both sites in the boardroom fighting like....well, never mind. The first thing I noticed about the Dogster site was that the advertising on the site seemed geared entirely toward the fairer sex in a stereotypical sort of way -- Schick Quattro for Women, Oreo 100 calorie pack, Bounce fabric softener, etc. I looked at the most recently added dogs, but I have to admit I didn't get any further than #6 of the 288,303 most recently added dogs. Either they have a different idea than I do about what "recently added" means, or nobody is listening to Bob Barker on the Price is Right when he implores people to have their pet spayed/neutered. While I'm sure that so many of these people are very proud of their little substitute for family or social interaction, there is just so many cute pets one can stand at a time. Like children, unless it's yours, your interest diminishes quickly. I did notice that among the cats, there were 213 Fluffys listed, 4 King Louies, and 1 Mangey. I couldn't find a single Mrs. Haversham, and I am deeply disappointed in you people.

Disclaimer: I am a dog person. I appreciate the senseless love and affection in contrast to most cats I know, whose attitude when you feed them is, "It took you long enough. You are dismissed. Please go see about my litterbox as you leave my exalted presence." One of my cat friends describes her cats as very generous because they allow her to live with them. No no. Wrong. I don't presently have a dog because I don't have much yard. It's a form of cruelty to have a big dog of the breeds I like and not have the space to offer them free range.

Blufr -- like Yahoo games, Blufr seems to bridge the digital divide going the other way. Sure, you have technology. Are you doing anything positive with it? Is it being used to improve the lives of you and your family? Or is it all just...trivial?

Chug'd/Bottletalk -- now here are a couple of sites more people can get into. I was never really into beer or wine. My attitude growing up (which I'm still doing) was that the majority of people who drink something alcoholic do so to get drunk. With that in mind, there are many different options that are more efficient at achieving that end result, without all the excess calories of beer or the sulfites of wine. Tequila works very well, from what I've been told. I think as responsible citizens, these sites should also offer links to the AA website.

Youplay.com -- I swear, boss. Sudoku was on Learn 2.0. It was part of the curriculum. Really. I didn't feel that I had given it proper consideration without a few hours of studying the intricacies of the game. You can ask Tom.

What I found of Web 2.0 for Street Racing was really a lot of shared videos. Some of them looked like dress rehearsals for Faces of Death clips. I didn't see anything necessarily that allowed users to claim number of wins, list opponents, pink-slipped cars for sale, etc. Maybe I should make my own site. Probably would run counter to a law or two in most states. Then again...did I say street racing? I meant competitive yarn spinning. Yeah...

Okay, I'm playing catch-up this week. The tsunami of things last week has subsided, my computer has dried out, and we are ready to go. (We are always ready to share our opinion, as we have found most people are. Martin Luther did it by defacing a recently-refinished cathedral door. Ted Kaczynski did it... well, with a bang.)

Propsmart -- I liked where Propsmart was going with the MLS/map integration. Though I'm not in the market to change houses, there are several families in my neighborhood that are. I blame this on my children, personally. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any of these homes listed on Propsmart. I am concerned that someone could miss their dream house by not having a more complete picture of what is available. I don't know what database Propsmart is using for their home listings -- the local MLS is incredibly paranoid about non-realtors being able to access their site, so I don't see where they would just be handing out the info to another website for a mash-up. Still, the idea was great, and if the map hadn't been constantly jumping on my screen, I would have thoroughly enjoyed the chance to see what houses comparable to mine are fetching these days.

Learn 2.0 libraries -- I was surprised to see that there weren't that many Learn 2.0 libraries out there. I can only think that either the rest of the libraries are waiting for this computer fad to pass so they can get back to reference the way it should be done (from thick, dusty tomes), or they are holding off for Learn 3.0 so they can get the jump on everyone else.

MotorMapUSA I was again surprised to find out that there were more Ferraris for sale within 1000 miles of my zip code than there were libraries with Learn 2.0 courses in the world (63 vs. 48). A red convertible sports car was suggested, so that's what I came up with. Here's a good "almost" Web 2.0 application -- you enter your zip code and it displays on Google Maps concentric circles that represent how far you could drive your Ferrari with the increasing likelihood of it breaking down. You could see that Jacksonville would be in the green area, you had a pretty good chance of getting there, but Dallas was in the red area, where you stood almost no chance at arriving without needing repair. They wouldn't be perfect circles, either, because of road speed and traffic conditions. You could then overlay how far you would have to fly the mechanic in to fix the car, factor in the average cost of repair and localized price of gas (you stop often), a probability ratio by jurisdiction that you'll be ticketed for speeding, and la veeola, you can estimate how much it costs to drive your Ferrari from any one point to any other point in the country. I had my eye on a lovely $118,000 SuperAmerica, but figured I would need another 15% above that to drive it home from North Carolina.

Wikimapia -- I can now proudly say that I put my neighborhood on the map. Then I couldn't think of anything to write about it, so I left it uncommented. I like Wikimapia, but I don't know, like Wikipedia, how the site gets moderated. Lake Apopka was listed as the dirtiest lake in Florida, which is probably both true and unkind. What's to keep people from zooming in on a neighbors house and saying something libelous, like "Big @$$#0[3 lives here." Uh, wait. I'll be right back.

Okay, with that out of the way, I just want to say that I enjoyed all the library apps, except the interfaces to a few of them seem to be a bit spartan. Not a single site played the Chicken Dance like Chug'd (wait, that's that next week). I do intend to use BookMooch in the future. I did notice that my search for Mein Kampf turned up nothing. Does that mean noone has the book, or the people who have it aren't willing to part with it? Hmmmmm.

It's just Meez.

On the disappearance of TV viewers
I'll admit, I have done my part to tank Neilsen's ratings over the past few years. I have not watched live TV since just after 9/11. My house has three TiVos in it -- all networked together so that I can watch anything that any of them are set up to record on any TV to which one may be attached. However, I rarely even watch things on the television, because I download them to my computer and can have them running in a window in a corner of my screen while I am doing something that may or may not be as crucial and life-affirming as watching television.

I also can download my shows from the Desktop to either my iPod or my phone, but since neither really has the screen or battery life for heavy video consumption, I tend to stick with it on my laptop, when portability matters.

Slingbox is great for those who must watch something either live or recorded in the time since they left their living room, susceptible as it is to the issues of bandwidth when streaming a show. You either didn't plan ahead by downloading the show in advance or you're trying to watch it too soon after it's been recorded. It may be weeks before I catch up with a show, though I usually don't run further than an episode behind in Lost when I can avoid it. I watch television, when at all, for entertainment. That King of Queens will be just as funny a few weeks from now when I get around to it. I know the network is confident of that because they plan on showing it a thousand more times in syndication.

Do I care if the networks and advertisers are tracking my every move? Not really. I care if the government and the military are tracking my every move. But they probably aren't too worried whether I fast-forwarded through that car commercial or held off watching it until I could get a good deal on the thing at a used lot.

Thoughts on MySpace and YouTube
MySpace and YouTube reinforce my cynical feelings toward people in general by reinforcing the statistic that for every one worth meeting (or video worth watching or Myspace page worth visiting), there are literally hundreds out there that are a complete mess and a total waste of time/disk space/oxygen (as may apply). And who decided that the library would be listed as an 86-year-old female? Just sexist, it is.

Thoughts on Web 2.0
Web 2.0, for the most part, is still amorphously defined. Does it have to come in your web browser? Like blogs, videos, or applications such as Google's word processor and spreadsheet programs? Or does Web 2.0 include items that leverage the technology of an interconnected mass to communicate thoughts, ideas, and information -- Second Life, Skype, Google Earth, etc.? The Web 2.0 video exemplifies the sort of wide-spread changes that people working in technology strive to achieve. As with any source of social upheaval, technology will separate the winners and the losers. The use of technology demands careful thought. Through technology you can eliminate hunger. But through technology you can also eliminate The Hungry. We will be judged on how we use technology just as assuredly as we will be judged on every other gift or talent that we possess.

Per the assignment, I will reflect upon the results I received from Grokker and my RSS feeds.

First, I created feeds to several different sites of interest -- Dilbert, Slashdot, and Wired to "Feed the Geek" and NYTimes Automobiles and CNN.

I am a visual learner, to answer the question of learning styles posed by our illustrious leader. I pondered a while on how people could pass through the different styles of learning (visual, aural, tactile, kinesthetic) at different levels of insobriety, thusly: He saw that the young lady at the bar was cute, talked to her a while, but when he tried some tactile learning, her boyfriend insisted on teaching some kinesthetic lessons.

I originally created this blog site a couple of years ago. It languished through several transitions in the technology (and Google's purchase of Blogger) until now. We're back. We're badder than ever. I stripped out my earlier posts because I am resurrecting this site for a work project, known as Learn 2.0. I left the old title because, well, that explains it, really. Doesn't it?

Because it is related to work, it is understood that numerous subjects would be considered inappropriate (or at least unprofessional) to broach here -- one of the main reasons my previous posts were removed. So without any reference to religion, politics, or any characteristic that makes us individuals (sexual orientation, ethnic origin, social or economic status [real or perceived], upbringing, or tendency to root for the Red Sox) which could be commented on in such a fashion as to offend any reader, we're left with little to say. For example, you can't relate someone's tendency to root for the Red Sox back to their upbringing in such a way as to question their social status. I don't follow sports -- I think that the Red Sox play baseball, but there's enough reasonable doubt in my mind that I would have to acquit them of that charge if I were the jury.

So we can probably talk about the weather. It's been smoky. We could use more rain. This is yet another area where I'm happy to let Southern California "lead the nation" as they like to consider themselves doing and would rather not be in direct competition with them for space on the front page of the nation's newspapers. Add the brush fires to the mudslides and earthquakes and you can see what they have in lieu of hurricanes to balance against their normally picture-perfect weather. Hopefully that doesn't offend any Californians.

Thanks for reading my blog -- quick crawl through a less-diseased portion of the outer cerebrum that it is. I invite comments.