August 2008 Archives

Here are my observations on what is sure to be a real fun time (à la Matthew Baldwin):

7:13 PM: Shots of people crying at the sight of Obama. None of me rolling my eyes.

7:14 PM: Phew, he accepted the nomination. Now I can turn off the TV.

7:16 PM: Joe Biden: "Right back atcha, Barry!"

7:16 PM: Finest statesman of our time. Love of my life. Is he referring to himself in the third person already?!

7:19 PM: All of our woes are the result of George W. Bush. If only that were true, we could have impeached him. The problems go far deeper than that and Obama, McCain, and their ilk are symptoms of the underlying cause.

7:20 PM: "Enough. This moment, this election is our chance to keep in the 21st century to keep the American promise alive." Oh brother.

7:21 PM: If I didn't know better, I'd say that this was an assemblage of offramp beggars what with all of the "Change" signs.

7:22 PM: McCain has voted with Bush 90% of the time. What about a Senator who has voted liberal 100% of the time?

7:23 PM: Nation of whiners. Wasn't that Cheney?!

7:24 PM: He doesn't know any whiners? That's a bald-faced lie.

7:25 PM: No tax relief to the poor. Uhh, the poor don't pay taxes…

7:25 PM: "It's not that John McCain doesn't care; it's that he doesn't get it."

7:26 PM: If only people were really "on their own" in America. *sigh*

7:27 PM: Uh oh, he's going to trot out "commander in chief of the economy." I just know it!

7:29 PM: WHY IS EVERYONE CRYING? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?

7:30 PM: Sweet, I think he's done.

7:31 PM: Damn. This is like The Dark Knight: I keep thinking it's over, but then it starts right back up.

7:31 PM: "I am my brother's keeper. I am my sister's keeper." Oh boy. This is the face of evil right there.

7:32 PM: He's going to spell out exactly what change means. Yeah right!

7:32 PM: 10 years to ending dependence on foreign oil from the Middle East. Wait, is he going to start offshore drilling and tap ANWR? Sweet!

7:35 PM: $100 billion "investment" in renewable energy. Does he have that kind of money?

7:36 PM: He just described a program of indentured servitude. That's just grand.

7:38 PM: Great, now I'm crying. I don't think it's for the same reason though.

7:38 PM: Stick it to business and the rich, who are going to bend over, take it, and shit out jobs. Sounds like a feasible plan.

7:40 PM: Now we get to hear about his program for the literal "nanny state."

7:41 PM: He took a stand against Iraq and for Afghanistan … from the rarified air of the Illinois State Senate.

7:44 PM: I wouldn't compare myself too closely to Roosevelt (Assistant Secretary of the Navy) or Kennedy (war hero) if I had no military experience whatsoever. They were Democrats and so are you but that doesn't confer anything.

7:46 PM: "We can disagree without challenging each other's character and patriotism." What's he been doing for most of his campaign in general and this speech in particular?

7:49 PM: Gay partners aren't allowed to visit each other in the hospital?

7:50 PM: Wow, that was approximately 3 minutes from imploring a change in political tactics to character assassination.

7:51 PM: "This election isn't about me, it's about you" electing me.

7:53 PM: One good thing about Obama's speech is that it isn't littered with homey anecdotes referring to specific people in the audience. That's change I can believe in.

7:54 PM: Oh yeah, there's the MLK reference. If he says, "I am his dream" I'm a-gonna puke.

7:54 PM: He's excellent at reading from teleprompters, I'll give him that.

7:56 PM: Yay for Obama. The sermon's over.

Color me unimpressed. I'm no McCain fan, but Obama basically promised everything to everyone. I felt like he was going to channel Oprah any minute, "You get a car! You get a car! You get a car!"

"Because, once you've decided you're 'right,' it only makes sense to employ the tactics you loathe in your adversary. That always works out." — Merlin Mann, in a tweet

"Indeed, no one within a light year of humility wants the kind of power and gaudy glory that Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain so desperately seek." — Don Boudreaux, "Humility, Schmulity"

In my off-the-cuff quick review of The Dark Knight, I said that I would write up a lengthier one after I had seen it a second time and could focus on a couple of points that confused me originally. I saw it again a couple of weeks ago and it really didn't hold up well the second time.

Most intriguing the second go round were The Joker's villainous experiments in game theory. The one involving Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes tied up in warehouses full of explosives but on opposite sides of town didn't originally strike me as anything special originally, but it was more obvious this time that Batman actually went to save Rachel and that The Joker had consciously switched the addresses. That meant that picking one over the other meant that the one chosen is the one that dies. Much more dastardly than I had originally thought and it also made it understandable why Batman "chose" to save Harvey Dent.

The ferry experiment, in which The Joker loaded two ferries with explosives and then gave the other boat's detonator to each set of passengers, was much more disgusting the second time. Originally, I thought that the convict's taking of the detonator and throwing it out the window was a moral statement that they should have refused to play The Joker's twisted game. Further, I thought that the other ferry's wavering and refusal to push the button at the last minute was a wrestling with a difficult decision and opting to not partake of it.

However, I'm now convinced that it was a sacrificial act and very repulsive. By waiting, they had effectively doomed both boats to destruction by The Joker—they did not know that Batman would save them. In the face of a serious emergency, they chose to forfeit the responsibility of a decision. It is possible that The Joker would have wired each detonator to blow up the ferry that it was on or blow them both up—it's certainly feasible that there was a nihilistic trick up The Joker's sleeve—but they had no way of knowing. Either way, both groups clearly did not value their own lives.

The biggest revelation with the second viewing was that it's not nearly as good of a movie as I thought. The disjointed subplots first felt like the painful inhalation when you come up for air before being dragged down: one concluded and then another one immediately began. This time, though, I could see how they just extended the movie into discomfort. It's as if there were a brainstorming meeting prior to the start of the script and they couldn't decide on a single, coherent plot so they just took the top three ideas and went with them. This time, it was just tedious.

I still think it was a good movie, just not as great as I had thought.

"When we hear about rent control or gun control, we may think about rent or guns but the word that really matters is 'control.' That is what the political left is all about, as you can see by the incessant creation of new restrictions in places where they are strongly entrenched in power, such as San Francisco or New York." — Thomas Sowell, "Random Thoughts"

The Goldwater Institute just filed a lawsuit calling into question Arizona's Clean Elections system and I'm very excited to see how it turns out. It is but a drop in the bucket in dismantling the free-speech limitations inherent in campaign finance regulation. But a drop's a drop and the current system has always struck me as absolutely disgusting in subsidizing individuals to run for public office.

I don't support bums on street corners and I'd don't want to be forced to pay for politicians to campaign.

I was further heartened to know that one of the plaintiffs in the case, Tony Bouie, is running for state representative in my district. His situation is indicative of how ugly the law really is: when he, a "nonparticipating" candidate, passed a threshold of spending, his "participating" opponent in the primary got nearly a dollar for dollar matching contribution from the state.

The lawsuit correctly notes that this will have a chilling effect on political speech by both the candidates and their contributors. The ostensive purpose of the law is to level the field so that well-connected or incumbent candidates don't have a spending advantage when campaigning. But there are a host of reasons why one candidate may raise more money than another—popularity, more drive, efficient money collection—that don't involve any sort of corruption.

The law rewards lackadaisical campaigning: one need only read the before and after finance reports of most campaigns to see the marked difference that the Clean Elections funds engender. In countless reports I've surveyed, the campaigns run very lean prior to disbursement and are suddenly paying for campaign dinners, computer hardware, and cell phones once the money rushes in. That's a mundane objection that speaks to the corrupt incentives of the system, but the real problem is far more insidious.

When faced with the significant donations and expenditures modern campaigns require, politicians seize on regulating the behavior rather than examining and addressing the causes. And the cause is very simple: getting into the halls of government and wielding ever-increasing powers is lucrative. Companies and individuals will pay substantial sums to get their needs heard because the consequences of inaction are enormous: failing to support lobbyists or make the right donations can lead to onerous regulations on your industry or even its wholesale wipeout.

Campaign contributions have not subsided after decades of regulation and restriction—they've just morphed and transformed to skirt the reforms. The basic problem has never been addressed: taking the incentive out of the political equation by limiting the power of government. Sadly, that sort of reform is never considered and this lawsuit—noble though futile—doesn't attack this angle.

Jack Handey's What I'd Say to the Martians and Other Veiled Threats is easily the funniest book I've read in recent memory. If you're familiar with Deep Thoughts or Fuzzy Memories from Saturday Night Live, you may be surprised to learn that Jack Handey is an actual guy who writes like that normally.

You'll find this collection of essays, short stories, and sketches funny throughout if you like his particular style of humor, which I do. You'll appreciate the helpful asides in "My Nature Documentary":

Show monkey finding binoculars. Monkey learns how to use binoculars. (Have plenty of film, because this may take a long time.) Monkey climbs up tree and scans horizon. We see his point of view, which finally focuses on yes, the giraffe! He screams (BB pellet) with joy.

Or the view of self presented in "How I Want to Be Remembered":

According to our scientists, with their electronic soul trackers, Jack is in Heaven now. And not just regular Heaven, which any jerk can get in to, but special secret Heaven that even some angels don't know about.

There's much to be learned about management from his essay on "The Respect of the Men":

You don't get the respect of the men right away. You can try, by getting down in the dirt and begging them for it, or by kissing their boots, or by doing your funny cowboy dance for them. But trust me, these are not going to work.

I especially liked the science-ish article on "The Animals Around Us":

Or consider even smaller animals, which live unnoticed among the hairs of our private regions. They are called crabs. No, don't worry, they aren't actual crabs. And they certainly aren't large enough to eat, unless you could somehow get thousands of them. But they are with us, year after year.

My favorite nugget is entitled "Attila the Hun's Greatest Speech," which is introduced as the source for many of the most famous orations in history and consists entirely of famous lines interspersed with motivational statements to the assembled Huns like "Caesar, tear down this wall! Or at least open the gates and we'll tear it down for you."

I could go on and on selecting bits from this short but hilarious work, but I'm pretty sure that I'd run afoul of copyright soon. I found myself guffawing on more than one occasion; if these quotes or his earlier work tickled your funny bone, I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Go Daddy's bringing Merlin Mann out to give a new talk tomorrow and I'm pretty jazzed. You may recall that he came out for an earlier event just this May for his Inbox Zero talk.

I'm excited for this presentation because its subject matter has been on my mind lately. I've been experiencing a debilitating sense of ennui and a lack of motivation. After much introspection and deliberation, I think I've located the source: too many great ideas and a fundamental uncertainty about which is the best course of action.

When I say too many great ideas, I mean it. At this moment, I've got some compelling ideas to contribute to an open-source project I've taken over—I still need to write up a blog entry about that fine mess I got myself into; a book idea that is unique, unprecedented, and possibly the start of an entire franchise—two actually, but the second one is going to require the first to be very successful; an iPhone application that could make me some decent side income; a historical project that could bring me enormous satisfaction; and a raft of business ideas that are all feasible to varying degrees.

In the face of all these nearly-equally viable choices, how do you pick one and set yourself to it? Normally, I'd consider a matrix of factors like which one has the most potential, which one lends itself well to maximizing time with my family, which one fits in with the life I envision for myself, and which one is best suited to my strengths. But there's no clear winner in this regard.

So I stew and dawdle and get distracted easily. That lack of focus makes me upset because that's not me! Any time I start to make some progress on one of these big-ticket ideas, some inner voice nags that another one is a better use of my time. Meanwhile, I'm caught up on my feed reading and on top of Twitter, which makes me even more unsettled because I know that these things are not the best uses of my time right now.

Merlin is not going to tell me anything I don't already know. Heck, I am even familiar with all of the techniques he's listed in his slide deck. But maybe his talk will be rousing enough to jar me from this rut, to just pick one from the many and get things done.

Then again, maybe writing this blog entry itself has provided sufficient impetus.

[The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Go Daddy Software, Inc.]

Today, a co-worker and I, both fans of the iPhone, were discussing how to do text selection and cut/paste operations. I'll confess that I didn't have much of anything to add to the conversation beyond being a good listener and carefully considering his ideas.

He had a pretty decent notion of using one finger as an anchor position while the other could drag around to set the other anchor. With our hands, you could cover the screen completely and even handle scrolling through longer documents. We weren't really sure how to implement the cut/copy/paste side of the equation, but we guessed that an alert panel with applicable buttons would suffice.

After seeing David Friedman's tweet about his take on the subject, I knew that he had nailed it perfectly. His solution is captivating in its simplicity and obviousness. If any Apple iPhone engineers are reading this and haven't read his entry, get out of here right now. Also, hey, good job on the iPhone—can you pull some strings and get me in the beta program?

The iPhone as trackpad is just genius, sheer amazing genius.

For years, I've struggled with finding a decent set of tools to practice Getting Things Done. I started with the Hipster PDA and moved on to some notepads and Zen To Done. I've tried just about every permutation of Web-based application. Heck, I liked GTD-PHP that I bought the domain and host the project for free.

But none of them have worked for me. The Hipster PDA was good but it suffers from all of the problems of paper-based systems: there's no indexing or searching and you always have to carry around a pen. The notebooks were even more inconvenient; the desktop applications didn't help if I wasn't carrying my MacBook which I almost never do; and the Web applications had monthly fees and required a computer with Internet access to function. So I bided my time and kept on the lookout for the Holy Grail.

I can confidently tell you that I have found it! It's OmniFocus by OmniGroup. It's Mac-only and $79.95 but it suits me perfectly. Its power stems from the fact that the desktop application at home can sync with the desktop application at work which can sync with the iPhone application in my pocket. $79.95 (plus $19.99 for the iPhone version) is certainly expensive, but I found it invaluable after using it fully for its 14-day trial.

It has a bunch of nice touches: parallel or sequential task lists, quick entry that really is, the focus modes. It's a competent implementation of GTD—the incidentals of the UI aren't important. But the syncing is worth every penny of the cost. When you're away from a computer, you have access to your projects and contexts. Check something off and it's synced to your home and work computers. It just works—you never have the problem of managing database files and shuttling them between the computers in your life.

And that makes getting things done the focus rather than maintaing your system.

Myrhaf just posted a list of reasons why Obama might not be so bad. Myrhaf's list follows a similar train of thought that I heard from a conservative co-worker a couple of weeks ago. My co-worker had said that he was starting to lean towards Obama because he was just a good speaker and he wouldn't be able to get things done.

Leaving aside who would be the worst choice for the cause of liberty (mostly because they're both awful), I just can't understand this line of reasoning. He's a rock-star president, he spouts platitudes, and he makes gaffes. All of these are true. But that doesn't mean that he'll be ineffectual as president.

Far from it, in fact. I think that he is presenting the Obama that people want to believe in; I believe that the public persona is a phony carefully designed and playacted in order to get elected. Put another way, this is an Obama that people can believe in—a more faithful version would be unelectable.

I believe that he's got a very well-defined agenda that is known only to his inner circle. And I believe that, if elected, he will shepherd this vision through a very-willing Congress and foist it on the nation quickly. Before you know it, his far-left liberalism will be the law of the land and the cause of liberty will be set back decades.

My evidence for this is admittedly circumstantial. I think it's compelling but there's not enough of a voting record or public speeches outside of a campaign to cite. Here's what I've got:

1. He talks about "economic justice." Anyone who's spent any time in the halls of academia can recognize that this is code for socialism. And that's being generous: most of the times I've heard the phrase used were in explicitly Marxist harangues. He's been using it frequently. As dumb as I think the idea is, his use of it belies a lack of sophistication.
2. He wants to make national service compulsory. This one is not terribly hard to divine since he's said as much in a speech and Myrhaf's written an excellent entry on the subject. This program freaks me out because it runs so obviously counter to the idea of individual rights yet no one seems to oppose it. Those who do are derided with strident vitriol or chastised as having a "poverty of ambition." His wife candidly states it: "Barack Obama will require you to work. … That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone." This is not Bill Clinton's AmeriCorps or the WPA: this is servitude, plain and simple. And once the government gets a slave labor force, there's no telling what pyramids it will erect.
3. He wants to establish a "civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the military. Holy Sturmabteilung, Batman! The full quote from his "A New Era of Service" speech:

   "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

   For some reason, that section wasn't included in any of the transcripts sent out by the Obama campaign. This is not minor league fascism, folks. There was another underestimated leader in history who believed that "individual salvation depends on collective salvation." I'm not the only one who has noticed some striking similarities.
4. He's got strange bedfellows. I'm not really talking about Jeremiah Wright, who I believe to be relatively lightweight. I'm not necessarily even talking about his earlier associations with William Ayers and Frank Marshall Davis. I'm more worried by the fact that he's a darling of the most liberal of the left. They see something that he's not showing to the rest of us. They've invested their hopes and money in him because they think he's going to be their champion and bring forth their (and his) ideals. Can you even imagine the appointments that this guy will generate? Al Gore for EPA administrator? Lawrence Lessig for tech czar? Cornel West as anything?
5. He gladly plays the race card. By positioning opposition to him as racist without offering a shred of evidence to indicate that that's what they're doing, he can effectively negate them and have his way with certain groups. Unfortunately, I think this would play especially well within Congress, whose members are always running for re-election and can't afford even a suggestion of racism.

Is this proof that he'll get his programs enacted or even that he has programs in mind? Possibly. My main purpose in bringing these points up is to encourage people to not underestimate him: he wants you to think of him as a lightweight who is only interested in making speeches. That's what'll get him elected, or rather that's what'll keep people home on election day. The cult of personality angle will only get you so far in understanding the presumption of Obama.

I was at QuikTrip tonight when some teenaged girls bought some Red Bulls. This apparently offended the gentleman behind them (and in front of me) because he made some comment to the cashier, who was still muttering to himself and incidentally me when it was my turn. The cashier told me that they're (Red Bull) probably going to be on a restricted list soon because of the twenty-year-olds having heart attacks. Then he said that until then they were perfectly legal and snorted, "Capitalism! Harrumph."

Never mind the irony of the gentleman who originally was outraged by the teenagers' purchase of legal stimulants while simultaneously buying a carton of cigarettes and a six pack of beer. Never mind the cashier spouting off political views to a customer he doesn't even know. Never mind the inanity of seeking a ban on a 12 ounce energy drink that contains half the caffeine of an 8 ounce cup of coffee.

For me the supreme irony was that this cashier disparaged capitalism in its very temple. It is hard for me to imagine a convenience store of such variety and value as QuikTrip existing anywhere besides a capitalist economy. (Side note: I'm not at all suggesting that we live in a capitalist economy—but we certainly are among the freest economies in the world.) Sadly, none of these responses occurred to me at the time.