Then today I saw this article today about how a school board had made a bad hardware decision and had to void a contract. It contained this quote at the end:

“Some parents weren’t happy about the program, judging by comments left on stories at local news outlets. Some kids’ grades have slipped, one comment said, “because it has become TOO important to socialize on the netbook and not turn in assignments or even do the required work.”

Read more: Indiana school district fights HP over netbooks – San Francisco Business Times “

When I was in 6th grade, our middle school had a big room full of TRS-80 computers. It was impressive, but for the most part the school had no idea what to do with them. We would do these little math quizzes and such, but a few of us spent most of our time hacking them to give us arbitrarily good grades on the quiz.

Thus, there seems to be an built-in rookie mistake in most school systems, which is to place the strategic technology thinkin’ on the hardware and not the software. They seem to be buying these things with very little strategic thought with regard to what they’ll be used for.

If the students are using them for facebook, games, etc. It’s not because they’re slackers. It’s because the slacker software is very well spec’d, designed, written, and implemented. Facebook has scads of developers. I’d wager that most of the educational software is either non-existent or just plain bad in these “every kid gets a laptop” plans.

(In many business organizations, technology is seen as a supporting role. Maintain the printers. Replace a bad network card. Implement software some other department decided on. Personally, I see technology as a huge strategic advantage. A company that integrates tech knowhow into it’s strategic thinking and decision making can absolutely whollop competition through better performance and cost savings. Technology shouldn’t be seen as the cost of doing business, it should be seen as a way to outthink your opposition.)

This is not to say that all schools are like this. While touring my alma mater for our 20 year reunion, it was clear that the rooms full of macs were being used for a purpose (multimedia, etc), and that there was an agenda at work.

It seems to me there needs to be a strategic role for technology in educational planning. Otherwise a ton of money is being wasted and alot of folks are getting rich gaming the system.

Since I’m paid to be a strategic I.T. person, I see a huge potential for the corporate world. I’d love to use these readers in our various board and committee meetings, which would avoid all that paper and make a more effective meeting. So we’ll be purchasing a demo unit of all the popular readers to see how they would display these documents.

Well, we’ll try all of them except the Kindle. The Kindle doesn’t support the formats we need. It’s basically a one-show pony and only really works with the Amazon store.

Which gets to the first major problem with all these e-readers. They are not conceived and produced as e-readers. They’re primarily e-storefronts for the various companies that make them. There is some notion of an interchangeable product, but it’s still locked down to the whims of the “content providers”.

Media players (iPods, etc) took off because the companies had no choice. People were going to be making mp3′s and playing no matter what. These mp3′s would play on anything that supported the format, and if you wanted to catch that wave you had to make an mp3 player. In this way, Napster set the stage for the iPod.

There is no such analog in the book world. There are not hordes of book lovers loading their paperback collection into book readers. You can download bootleg books, but the majority of folks will be building the collections via purchase…and the occasional Gutenburg freebie.

This will severely curtail the growth of the e-reader market. And you have to wonder how much time they have to capture the imagination of readers. Even with the price cuts, you can buy 15 books and an e-reader….or 30 books. That decision is going to be way too easy for most folks.

And what about libraries? Are you going to be able to borrow an e-copy of a book? Nah, there’s just still too much retail design in the e-reader market. I wonder if anyone has even thought of the corporate document angle?

I do like the Nook so far. I’ll post a full review later after I’ve had a chance to look at the other options. But no matter what people say it’s not going to surpass regular books any time soon.

Meanwhile, I have been going through a couple thousand comics at home. I did this about the time I saw the Marvel comic app for the iPad. Which led to some further thoughts about digital formats…but that’s for another post.

First, we’d go into the living room and sit in front of the TV in the two blue recliners. Many times we’d have ice cream and/or coffee. Golf would be on. Recliners would be engaged.

Then we’d talk about what was going on with jobs (or college, back in the day). He’d always be interested, with the sly implication that he was making sure that I was taking care of his daughter. As such, there was always some advice or input. Some of it was a bit too conservative for my taste, other times it was really excellent guidance particularly with regard to management and career strategy.

When the ice cream was finished, I’d set my empty bowl down on the coffee table in between the blue chairs. My intent was to return it to the kitchen in a few minutes, but my father-in-law would usually take both his and mine in before that.

About this time I would pick up the paper, which was always lying on the floor in front of the chairs. My father in law would say “hey, you need some light, don’t you?”

I’d say that I was fine, but he’d go turn on the light anyway. Over the years, in the houses where there were several switches, he’d hit the ceiling fan or other lights at random until the right one came on. Isn’t it strange that no matter how long we’ve lived in a house, we still have to hunt for the right switch when there are more than two?

Then after reading some newspaper and perhaps discussing the electronics in the Best Buy ads, he’d give me the TV remote and we’d both either doze off or keep talking about things for a little while longer. If a golf tournament was on we’d discuss golf, even though I’m a terrible golfer. Other times the kids would lobby for Spongebob which meant naptime for the adult males.

This routine occurred in some variant from the time I was 17 years old, which is almost 20 years.

I never realized it was a routine until a couple weeks ago when I sat down in that blue recliner with ice cream in hand and a paper at my feet. While the quiet noise of NickJr. echoed through the dim room, I ate ice cream alone.

I maintain that all of this talk about “when things get better” and “when the economy improves” are missing a key component: how?

I believe our economy is:

* Too dependent on government spending (Thanks Dems!)
* Way too biased toward established mega-business (Thanks Reps!)
* Gutting it’s manufacturing base (which results in over-dependence on consumption and debt)
* Way too engineered by elected officials. (Thanks everyone!)

All of these characteristics work toward one result–”bye bye growth”.

Now granted, growth has it’s own set of problems. But our economic model currently depends on it, and before you change that you better understand the implications. But it’s kinda hard to get that picture when several generations have only had half the pieces to the puzzle.

It looks like the Rep’s are going to make significant gains in Congress, partially due to this mess and partially due to the President’s Quixotic health care efforts.

This will not improve anything. It will just result in more anti-growth policies of a different tact. Meanwhile, the sea keeps receding towards the debt tsunami just over the horizon.

Because if you value marriage (your own, or in general) it’s important to think about why a 40 year marriage would end. I look at my wife and I know I want to be with her rockin’ on the front porch, or wheelin’ around an old folks home, or doing whatever it is that the elderly will do when we’re old. Which is in…um….a few years. Unless you count our recent date to Cracker Barrel and Hobby Lobby, in which case the future is now.

After examining family history and current trends, I’m pretty sure she’ll be in some sort of scooter and I’ll have completely lost my mind. Hopefully her scooter will be the levitating kind and I’ll have a genetically engineered cyborg service monkey to remember things for me. If not, then we’re going to need each other. If so, then holy crap…I want her to be there when I say “I told you so!”

Either way, it’s us until the end.

This might be something specific to my generation or just folks I know, but many of us have seen that careers, money, politics, houses, cars, etc. are really dumb things to get married to. And yes, people try to do that. Over-commitments to these are temporary and in the meantime they enslave you.

When the proverbial stuff hits the fan (or just ends up in a pair of Depends), you have your relationships–with God and with each other–and whether or not you believe there’s anything after that, those are far more rewarding.

So why do long term marriages end? We’ve all seen short relationships fueled by emotion and feeling that dissipate pretty quickly in vague I-don’t-love-you-anymore’s. But what can terminate a relationship that was by appearances based on commitment and by fact endured for decades?

I have no idea about any of the specifics regarding our former VP and his wife. But I do know that whatever happened is probably the result of decisions and behaviors over those years and decades. These things don’t just suddenly happen.

As you start to examine the lives of yourself and others, it’s amazing how decisions early on can drastically affect the years to come. Often decisions with negative consequences are made when things are going really well. Song of Songs 2 speaks of the “little foxes” that attack a garden when things are in bloom.

Proverbs 5 contains a pretty heavy set of warnings about consequences. These warnings are generally regarding the disasters from infidelity (loose cars, fast women in particular). These are big things, and obviously when you take a hammer to commitment it can fail suddenly. But what about little day-to-day things?

Proverbs 5, does say one thing that I have taken to heart in regard to this. When the Verse 18 says “may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.” I think it’s saying something regarding consequences of day to day behaviors. Early in our relationships, just about everything is about the other person. Generally we’re out to impress them, cater to them, and show them our best. We want to hang out with them. We bathe. We buy stuff and write things to them and let them know we’re thinking about them.

In short, we were youth and we were rejoicing like a Bryan Adams song. We were probably a bit cheesy and over-the-top.

Yet these are the behaviors of our youth. Why would we abandon them? Have we gotten so busy with kids, jobs, and life in general that we didn’t even realize they stopped? Have we equated maturity with a more stoic interaction? Are we avoiding problems that are much more serious than we want to admit? Have we devolved into desperate security?

There could be many reasons, but it’s a worthwhile exercise to take stock of our daily investment in our marriages. Is it rejoicing?

After consideration of these, I believe that a long term marriage doesn’t end at the end. It ends in the middle and just takes that long to ultimately wind down. The way to prepare for weeks, years and decades ahead is with decisions now. Take some time and/or money each day and week to devote it to your marriage. Make the decision to put some joy in it.

Because a cyborg service monkey is no comfort to an old man, no matter how awesomely cool!

However, “to the bitter end” conveys an excessively worldly approach on it’s own. So I figured I’d round it out with a little absolute Truth. Fortunately, Chris’ sermon on Sunday provided excellent material.

Habakkuk 3:17 Though the fig tree does not blossom and there is no fruit on the vines, [though] the product of the olive fails and the fields yield no food, though the flock is cut off from the fold and there are no cattle in the stalls,18 Yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the [victorious] God of my salvation! 19 The Lord God is my Strength, my personal bravery, and my invincible army; He makes my feet like hinds’ feet and will make me to walk [not to stand still in terror, but to walk] and make [spiritual] progress upon my high places [of trouble, suffering, or responsibility]! For the Chief Musician; with my stringed instruments.

Personally, I think “the bitter end” of what we’re doing is going to ultimately a good thing. Our failed experiment in government-god, fueled by cheap debt and energy, has left us much worse off than we know. It’s time to end it and start being human again, for better or worse.

And, no..this is not some nihilist view that it’s all about to go to crap and never come back. It’s not even a Christian view that we’re in the end times and that it’s all going to crap in preparation for the second coming (although the blood red oil in the gulf, frogs in Greece, earthquakes, etc. do look very end-times-ish).

History is chock full of “bitter ends”, followed up with rebuilding periods of varying lengths and implications. If we are indeed about to see one as I think, it will be an extraordinary opportunity to build something better. And besides, no amount of socioeconomic junk has ever stopped the cause of Christ…even when people have tried to stamp His name on it.

Through it all, God is sovereign and we can and will rejoice in the Lord. No matter what happens we know who’s running the show. And our cup is always overflowing.

It can be seen as a competitor to Supply Side economics which, while more recent label than Keynesianism, is considered by some to be the engine that built the (formerly) best economies in history–with the help of a whole lotta cheap energy. Supply side economics has slowly had it’s tail handed to it over the last few decades…

…because free market supply-siders sold their soul to wealth accumulation short cuts, trading the basic principles we learned in Henry Ford’s factory for policies that looked like supply side, but weren’t. Flattening out the tax curve does not mean that extra money at the top end will automagically build a factory. People figured this out pretty quickly and the Keynesians made wild progress by calling supply-siders “trickle-downers”.

Of course this only ruined the party for a little while. Trickle-downers soon realized it was a whole lot easier to accumulate gobs of money in a command style stimulating economy. They kept their supply side tattoos for nostalgia, but settled in to the cheap money party just as easy as everyone else…more easy, even.

So instead of building factories whose workers can afford to buy the very products it produces–you take those jobs, move them to factories with the overhead of Mola Ram’s Temple of Doom. Then give your former workers a “service job” and a credit card and convince yourself that the “information economy” means something. A few Ivy Leaguer’s and sharp country boys get rich on finance charges and naked body scanner patents. And when things don’t look so good, just tweak the “seasonal adjustments”.

It’s demand-side genius until the credit is used up.

Boom, everything grinds to a halt, the Keynesian Cult starts chanting “Stim-u-lus…Stim-u-lus…” We all buy iPhone apps that flash “when things turn around…..” on the screen while any true wealth producing industry crashes and burns in bubbles of increasing frequency. A generation that has grown up under this hollowed out debt feuled economy doesn’t see how insane this is. The stock market will go up. It always has.

Meanwhile, the intoxicating smell of free money becomes irresistable to politicians. Keynesian money injections get you elected, especially when they are legitimate, named applications of the economic theory. But hey…doesn’t really matter what you call it as long as they’re building a shovel-ready bridge or a jetfighter in the district.

And before you get to anti-politician, remember this is a completely rational response on their part. We vote that way.

Then slowly but surely the overall market realigns itself around the characteristics of Keynesian policies. No matter what fancy pants economists say, there is always a market. We saw it as our focus on consumption allowed huge swaths of manufacturing to be moved overseas. We see this today as the labor market is being converted to a great cinderblock warehouse of entitlements, defense contracts, and transfer payments.

And unfortunately because the government is the Great Decider in this market, lots of rich and powerful entities will latch on to the government to ensure that “Good Things” are the kinds of things that make them even more rich and powerful. Expect to see huge accumulations of wealth and income disparity as the government decides more and more. The hilarious thing about this is that they’re plowing that wealth into the very dollar they’re exploiting.

Contemporary liberals will mistake the gas for the brake pedal and attempt to remedy this with even more government control. Contemporary conservatives will all apply at Haliburton and Goldman Sachs in the hope of working for government one day. The citizens of the U.S., now primarily consumers, will continue to hang Chinese-made flags out on the 4th of July until grandmom’s social security check bounces. Then everyone will get all mad, go to a tea party meeting, and vote radically the same in the next election. Because no matter the rhetoric, we’re all dedicated Keynesians now. Dedicated to the bitter end.

For the last 6 years it’s been my daddy duty and joy to drive my kids to school. It started when it was just my daughter going to 5k.

It was a traumatic time for her, as little brudder had just arrived. She was faced with a completely changed childhood; 5 years old and driving off to “big school” while this new, invader baby got to stay home with mommy. During this time there was a certain point on the drive where she would softly start to whimper and cry…quietly because she didn’t want me to notice. By the time I got to carpool line it was nearly sobbing, and I had to let her leave the car with tears streaming down her face.

We had to reassure ourselves that she was going to be ok….that she wasn’t going to end up in prison someday telling Nightline about how her parents made her go to school. My wife and I were both first born, and we’d turned out ok….uh…didn’t we?

This lasted for a month or two until it slowly subsided. Fortunately by the time the year ended she was happily bounding off to kindergarten.

For the next couple years the drive ranged from quiet and pensive to loud and giggly. Sometimes she would stare out the windows or make shadows in the sunlight as it flickered through the trees. Other times she would quietly hum or sing loudly. And of course there were the times where she’d stream endless words at her dad about any subject in particular. Later on if she was quiet I knew she was studying for a test that day.

We’d often make up songs, some of which are long forgotten. Others will live forever, such as the Lamby Song, the Guinea Pig Song, and the Squeaky Mouse Song. There’s also a song about a renegade, law breaking bus driver we saw, but that one probably won’t make the cut!

In 4th grade, the drive changed–in a good way–as Brudder became old enough to ride to 4k at the same school. This added a whole new dimension of fun as the assertions of a strong willed 4 year old boy intersected with the reasoning of a dominant older sister. As before, any given day was different. Sometimes they wouldn’t say a word. Other times they’d have very in depth discussions. Sometimes they’d fight. Other times they’d sing.

From the beginning Sister would help Brother (most of the time without prompting) by buckling his seatbelt, holding on to his backpack, and carrying it for a short time at school. But soon Brother was doing all of this himself, and one day sister exclaimed that he was faster than she was at buckling his seatbelt. They both figured out the exact time they needed to unbuckle, which was shortly after the real road but early enough to give them time to get prepared for departure. We’d all chant “uuuuunnn…..buckle!” as we passed this point.

One day we had to take a different route to school because of traffic, and once Brother knew about this route he would lobby for it in his simple style. “Can we turn left today, dad?” It became his way of making the drive ‘ours’. If we had enough time I’d usually take this route when he brought it up. Around this point of the trip I’d always ask them “what are you going to learn today?” Together they finally saw the flaw in this question. I can’t remember which, but the reply was “I don’t know because we haven’t learned it yet”.

As she’d slide out of the car I’d notice the little toys my daughter had clipped to her backpack….a small stuffed dog, an R2-D2 toy, all sorts of random things that I knew would soon be gone because they wouldn’t be “cool”. God had blessed us with the ability to give her a happy and carefree childhood. And I thanked Him every day for that.

Then when my son would leave the car (after sister because he always got in first), there was a little smirk on his face as all sister’s friends would come over and give him hugs. “He’s so cute!” they would say, and I realized that having an older sister was going to be a huge advantage for my son one day. After they left, I’d loop around and glance over as they’d happily walk in.

This routine has been one of the most fun and rewarding experiences of my life. I know that next year will start it’s own set of routines and joys, but they won’t be like this was.

As I’ve said before, we tend to think time flies and that the best things are ahead of us or behind us….but if we just pay attention to right now, we’ll see that the best is in the present. Time doesn’t go so fast when you slow down and realize that wherever you are, these are the best years of our lives.

First of all, a socialism and/or communism generally have a policy of seizure and redistribution that applies to people who have already been born. In our case, most of of the money we’ll be spending (over the long haul due to interest) will be paid by future generations (either directly or via inflation). This is not socialism. It’s a pretty brilliant new conflict theory, but not socialism.

Second, socialism generally has a plan. Our government is clearly making this stuff up as it goes along…although like soc/communism there are people getting mega-rich in the process.

So while I don’t think we’re anything close to a socialist nation, I do think we are definitely entering an era of a “Command/Control” style economy.

All cats are animals, but not all animals are cats. Similarly, socialist economies are generally command/control economies, but not all command/control economies are socialist. So it’s a fallacy to to think that just because our government is increasingly legislating the minutiae of our economy, that this style must be socialism.

But they are legislating the minutiae of our economy. And it won’t be long before everything is defined in the lawbooks.

Want an example? Check out the laws on credit/debit cards. That’s right, the same political entity that told King George to go jump, who wrote the Bill of Rights, expanded our country and enshrined our freedom in Constitution and Law…is now writing a law that will make it possible for merchants to require minimums for credit card purchases.

This is a law. Think about that….not a regulation. A law. And it’s digging down into the nitty gritty details of how even the most basic transaction can occur.

Everywhere you look, energy, healthcare, telecom, the automotive industry, banking….everything, is slowly being installed into an economic framework wholly defined by laws. Very soon (if not already) we will be working in an economy that is set up and functionally defined by politically designed laws that are very difficult to change, much less eliminate.

If this had happened earlier, by law we’d still be riding horses.

Back in middle school (during the cold war) we actually learned about how these command/control style governments were bad and how free market capitalism was going to kick their tail. Apparently not all middle schools were teaching this.

When you combine the looming energy crisis, the eventual debt disaster of the Federal Gubmint, and the collapsing market efficiency of our command/control economy, it’s pretty clear we’re headed for a really dark period of American history. Hey, it happens. Let’s just hope there is some sort of eventual rational response that doesn’t end up in a huge, terrible war.

This point was notably absent in the most recent healthcare debate. This was primarily because there wasn’t really a debate–more of a rapid expenditure of political capital to ratify a bazillion pages of text as law–but it was also because Europe had actually started wobble pretty badly economically.

One person on Facebook tried to use that argument a few months back, and I said something to the effect of “If you read what’s going on over there, actually it is starting to cause major problems…it’s starting with Greece and will continue to Spain, Portugal, and throughout Europe”. And here we are. Europe is facing it’s very own collapse, and there are rumors that they will announce their own massive bailout this week….a bailout that will rival the U.S. bailout in 2008.

Basically what’s happened is that European countries have bankrupted themselves due to Socialist utopian policies (with a little bit of corruption tossed in). And I’m not just shouting “socialist” for effect here…that’s the name of the ruling parties. They call themselves that. Over there they don’t mind the term.

Granted, such a collapse would not be completely due to health care. Health care is only one of the policies that is bankrupting them. But the lesson is clear. Populist/utilitarian and government-centric policies can use debt to skirt the economic concept of scarcity for awhile, but sooner or later debt won’t work. Then you have:

A) a bunch of people who lent money to a supposedly secure and trustworthy government who now have nothing to show for it
B) an economy dependent on government spending that suddenly disappears.
C) a bunch of people that require government to survive (literally)

Then everything goes crazy while the socioeconomic and political layout is up for grabs. Riots in Greece are just starting.

The EU is a little different in that no individual state controls the money. This forces the situation to resolve more quickly because the country can’t just print money to pay the debt. Thus they have to either restructure their entire worldview or find someone else to foot the bill for a little longer.

The UK will last a bit longer with the pound because it’s their own money. They’ll try to fix things internally and it won’t be so obvious.

Like the U.S. bailout, a European bailout will simply kick the proverbial can down the road with more and more debt. The clock is ticking on all this. The can will hit the wall.

What made it amusing was that the parking job was fine. I’m very OCD when it comes to parking, and in this case it was almost perfect other than being a few inches closer on the left side.

Just makes you wonder, what kind of terrible life must a person lead to take the time to write such a mean spirited note? And how bad would it have to be to try and ruin someone’s day for little or no reason? What kind of issues must they have?

Today is national day of prayer. Send one up for that poor soul.

In this case, this was absolutely true. DTR stands for Define The Relationship–an episode in which one person (usually the lady) looks at the other and says “ok….where is this relationship going!?!??!” It can also be a friend who snaps a Z and says “girlfriend, when’s he gonna put a ring on that finger?”, and possibly if she’s evil “what has he done for you lately?”

My wife then reminded me of our own DTR experience, which I will now log for eternity on the Internet. Enjoy, grandchildren.

Our DTR occurred in 1993 at Cheeburger Cheeburger in Auburn, AL.

In this episode of Great DTR’s in History, a sweet, blonde, freckled type A girlfriend looked at her helpless oblivious boyfriend and basically said “so are you ever going to ask me to marry you?”. The boyfriend, clearly not prepared for the conversation, simply started laughing. Experts in human behavior would compare this action to a caveman accidentally charging a mastodon. Or maybe setting himself on fire. Or setting himself on fire and charging a mastodon.

The conversation escalated while the girlfriend became more and more agitated. Meanwhile, the boyfriend just kept on chuckling. Finally, the girlfriend left in disgust while the boyfriend went home and tried to figure out what to do.

Why would an otherwise intelligent boy engage in such suicidal behavior?

The problem facing the boyfriend was that he had just recently made the large purchase of a diamond engagement ring. He had done this after going into a bank with his father (as cosigner) to commit a couple years of minimum wage labor to finance the goods. Additionally, he had gone up to the workplace of the girl’s father to ask the man’s blessing on a marriage engagement (which the boy received).

The ring for various reasons was being shipped to his grandmother’s house. So there was no flexibility in popping the question.

In short, this poor guy was so worried that he would somehow spill the beans or otherwise telegraph his master plan that his little brain could just muster a laugh. It was all he could do to hide his emotions!

Eventually she forgave me, and we got engaged in February 1994 on the way to a sting concert. The rest is history.

The initial reports downplayed this leak, but I initially thought “is *any* amount of oil ok? Turns out, it’s much worse than initially reported.

If you’re in your mid thirties or so, the Exxon Valdez is the benchmark for oil-related accidents. In sheer volume of oil, this disaster will match the Valdez very quickly.

Valdez: 11 million gallons of oil
Deepwater Horizon will hit that in roughly a month and a half.

And to put it in perspective, Prince William Sound is larger than the gulf: 3000-5000 miles of shoreline vs about 2000 miles of US Gulf Coast.. 500-800 miles of PWS were affected by the Valdez. In other words, this will be more oil in less space.

The well is 35,000 feet deep, and 4000 feet of that is in the water. (for a comparison, the Titanic is 13,000 feet deep). It’s unclear how long it will take to ‘fix’ this problem. But if it takes several months this will be one of the worst disasters of any kind…ever.

Personally, all of this freaks me out. My mothers side of the family is from the panhandle of Florida, and beach trips have been a staple my whole life. It’s sickening to think of those environments being exposed to tens of millions of gallons of crude oil.

But from a general analysis…a few things are interesting to me about this. First, it’s interesting how such an epic disaster could sneak up on us like this. In two days oil will be washing ashore in the Gulf of Mexico. Wha? With all of our information-age bells and whistles, how was the potential for disaster not immediately apparent?

Second, this illustrates that not all oil is created equally. It’s very difficult to get some oil, very easy to get other oil. Most of the “easy” oil is going away. So when some company says they’ve found a huge reserve, this doesn’t necessarily mean our thirst for oil-based energy will benefit. It used to cost a couple bucks per barrel in Saudi Arabia. Now some places are spending 50-60 and more. 35,000 feet under the Gulf can’t be cheap.

Third thing is a test of “Oil Pollution Act of 1990″, passed as a result of the Exxon spill in Alaska. I’m all for low regulation and pro-business policies. But liability and risk should be a part of those calculations. Will this and other laws extract substantial enough amounts of cash from BP? Will it be severe enough so that spill prevention tech is a worthwhile investment? Will BP try to avoid it’s responsibility, or will it be “too big to fail”.

Lastly: the explosion. While this platform had a history of problems, it was not some minor facility. It had just drilled the deepest oil well ever. It was presumably well known in the industry. Now there’s a huge unexplained explosion that:

a) kills people
b) halts some rather significant policy initiatives regarding domestic oil drilling
c) creates a huge natural disaster of historic proportions
d) will result in substantial financial losses for large multinational company

Doesn’t that seem strange? I know there will be plenty of response to the disaster, but I hope there are some Federal agencies taking a keen interest into the cause of that fire. Sometimes a platform explosion is just an explosion. But it does seem a little too worst case.

During the presentation we were asked several times to vote for a tax extension on April 27th.

The tax extension will extend a property tax from 17 to 36 additional years, which will enable them to refinance debt that was originally used to build a substantial chunk of very advanced (and apparently effective) educational infrastructure. They talked about the cash flow, and that refinancing would free up 6 million dollars for new teachers, etc.

So it seemed like a great idea as presented, but this is not the freewheeling, borrowing times of the 1990′s or early 2000′s where debt was no big deal. As our effectively bankrupt county illustrates, refinancing debt can get a municipal governments in a heap of trouble. The City of Hoover is obviously a tighter ship than the county, but it’s still a dangerous world for governments and debt.

There are plenty of things a government can do to raise cash and hire teachers. But are they all good things? I wanted to find out exactly what the numbers were with this refinancing. Are we being asked to make great short term choices at the expense of long term flexibility? Or is the rate environment so favorable that this is a no-brainer? Are we shoveling more debt on future residents or is it a wash?

Unfortunately there’s not much of information out there. The only number you see consistently is the increased cash flow (approximately 6 million dollars per year), and that’s troubling. In the world of debt you can easily make a boneheaded long term decision for increased cash flow.

The only numbers I saw were these from this article:

The school system spends about $16 million per year making payments on that debt. On a per-student ba­sis, Hoover schools spend more on debt service than any other system in the state, Craig said.

The school system’s debt now is scheduled to be paid off in 17 years. With an ex­tension of the 24-mill tax, the system could stretch out that debt over a 30-year term, lowering payments to an estimated $10 million to $13 million per year during tough financial times.

(first of all, that 10-13 million dollar figure illustrates some spin of the message. It looks like saving 6 million per year is the high estimate and 3 million is the conservative estimate).

Other than the sample ballot, I can’t find any further info on the tax at the hoover web site.

Using this info as a blunt estimator, the cost of refinancing is as follows:

Current total payments (17 years X 16 million) = 272 million dollars
Optimistic extension estimate (30 years X 10 millioin) = 300 million dollars
Conservative extension estimate (30 years X 13 million) = 370 million dollars

So there you have it….extending this debt will cost anywhere from 28 million more dollars to 98 million more dollars over the term. Assuming this info as presented is reliable.

One thing should be clear, the city wouldn’t be saving any money. They’d be lowering the payments.

The problem I have is that this is a pretty broad range of figures. And it’s a large amount of additional money at the conservative end of the estimate. I’m also not comfortable with the presented 6 million figure (which seems variable), since we really don’t know what the final cash flow will be.

Lastly, the assertion that the money will be used for teachers is questionable…it’s my understanding that the money can be used for anything the city wants. As I said, we were very impressed with the school and staff and clearly we should give them every tool we can to educate our chillun’s.

But are we taking tools away from future generations with this decision? I realize dumping junk on future generations is the American way, but if that’s what we’re doing we should at least know how and how much before we vote.

I guess this is just a large amount of money to be throwing around in a small municipal vote during a severe recession. It could have significant implications down the road, and I don’t think we’re being given complete information. We see the catastrophic results that can occur. I hope this choice is being made in an intelligent way.

Over the last 10 years, I had developed a very bad sinus infection susceptibility. It had gotten so bad that I could count on at least 6 sinus infections all through the year. And these were bad…lasting a week or two with fever, loss of voice, etc.

Trips to the doctor really didn’t do much good. ENT’s basically said my physiology made it so that any problems would push me over the edge. When you depend on your voice, this life becomes a constant stress bomb. You start to plan out events and timeframes, watching the ‘event horizon’ of potential sickness and when you’ll be well again.

It also makes sinus surgery a risky proposition. You spend your whole life learning how to make things resonate correctly in your thick skull. Do you really want someone hacking away at it?

I was left to Z-Packs, Prednisone, and prayer….not in that order….and hope. I was hoping to just get them over with as quickly as possible.

Until this year. This year with the CD release concert I decided I was sick of living life in bondage to what was scientifically inferior organisms and theologically the product of sin and seperation. I was ready for my miracle, tired of payin’ my co-pays and just waitin’ for God to pull me through. I wanted to be more than a conqueror and claim these sinuses as echo chambers for victory.

And so far…it’s working! By now I would have had at least two major sinus events and misery. But I have had NONE. Zero. Nada. Not only that, but I feel great. Very little clicking and poping and icky feeling and general sinus ‘fliction.

Here’s how I’m doing it:

Alternating Zyrtec and Claritin. I’ve found Zyrtec to be more of a heavy hitter in the realm of antihistamines, but even that seems to wear off as your body builds up a resistance to it. Claritin is more hit and miss, but it works great as a buffer as you let your H1 receptors forget about that jerk Cetirizine molecule it used to date. After some time apart, “baby…I’ve changed”…..and Zyrtec is back in business.

A whole lotta Vitamin C. I like “Emergen-C”. The clever name never wears off, and it actually tastes like pop-rocks and Kool Aid. I’d probably drink it even if it didn’t have all that vitamin’y goodness. 2 to 3 doses of these a day seems to do the trick.

Sudafed. The real kind. On a day when my head seems determined to cause a problem, I hit it with a couple doses of red pills. The only problem with this is you have to go to the pharmacy counter and ask for it without looking like a meth head. So you try to get the 96 count packs that will last longer…which only makes it worse. Then you give in and start having fun with it. Jittery hands, darting eyes, and mumbling about the secret police will do the trick.

A Neti Pot. Yes, this is the weird one. But I think it’s the real deal, and probably the most effective part of my regimen. I actually poor salt water into my head and then let it drain out again. I do this every morning. It takes some getting used to but it has worked miracles. Once you get the temperature of the water right, it really doesn’t feel all that strange.

When you think about how much junk gets on our cars this time of year, imagine how much junk must be in our upper respiratory tract? It makes sense that this process helps. It’s a little weird, but it’s awesomely weird and I’ll take that any day.

So there you have it. Give this process a try, and maybe you’ll have success too!

This involves pondering the patterns of the whole and of the parts, and the mechanics in which they interact. I’ve worked at no less than 8 companies (not including consulting) since 1995, and there has been much to see.

Here’s a key concept that, in retrospect, has shown itself many times. I doubt this observation is unique to me at all, but it’s fascinating to apply it to the world around. I’ll put it in italics so it looks real important:

The success of an organization depends on how it handles the difference and interaction between “operational” and “transformational” activities.

An operational activity is very simple. It involves doing the same tasks over and over very consistently and accurately. A bank teller, for instance, performs many tasks throughout the day….very accurately and consistently. A factory worker might assemble the same part over and over.

A transformational activity is deceptively simple. It takes something from one state, and changes it to another. A painter transforms. A car wash transforms.

These two aspects are very different. Yet they’re also very simple. Every activity can be labeled with one of these two categories. If it can’t, it can be broken down into sub-activities that fit.

..which is where most of the trouble begins. Activities are ‘nested’, which means that activities are made of sub-activities. From the atomic interactions of a cell in in a pilot’s arms, to the change in course of a bazillion ton 747, activities contain other activities.

Often activities contain radically different operational and transformational sub-activities. The car wash, for example, transforms many unique cars from dirty to clean. However, it does this very repetitively and with (hopefully) great operational accuracy.

This is important: Every time action passes from one nested action to the next, the different goals and traits must be seamlessly shifted. This shift routinely throws companies, churches, clubs, schools, banks, non-profits, and groups in general for a big loop.

It is not uncommon to see organizations ignore the shift altogether. Ever call customer support after a large company merger? Chances are that huge (probably individually profitable) transformation completely ignored the day-to-day operations involved in your call.

It is also common to watch organizations spend insane resources trying to make one type of activity act like another type. The federal government is great at operational concepts, but they’ll spend billions trying to transform in an operational way. It’s just not going to work. Instead of ‘nesting’ they just try to brute force it via reams of procedures.

You can also see this in how the government is trying to deal with terrorism. Shoe bomber? New operation: Check for shoe bombs! Liquid bomber? New operation: Ban liquids. If terrorists attack again, success will involve exploiting the disparity in transformational abilities and security operations.

When choosing leaders, management, or other decision makers (and we’re all leaders in some form or fashion), it’s important that they understand this concept. It’s also important to find people who understand their own personality and which way it leans. Most of us tend to find our comfort zone in one type of activity over another.

And that’s about it for a blog post. I could probably write a whole book on this concept alone, but I have some operational tasks to tend to.

First things first, the cause of the uncontrollable national debt is the Congressional control and domination of the budgetary process. This started in the mid-1970′s with the creation of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as part of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

The Federal Budget was never meant to be a product of Congress. It was supposed to be produced by the Executive branch, then approved by Congress. Over the last few decades, this process has been replaced by the following process:

a) The president submits a budget.
b) Congress chuckles and cans the whole thing
c) Congress makes it’s own budget and submits it to the president with about 15 minutes to sign it.

Probably the last serious challenge to this fundamental change occurred with George Bush Sr. George went toe to toe with Congress, even threatening to shut the government down. He was slaughtered politically. It was clear at this point that Congress had secured a (probably permanent) political advantage with its control of the budgeting process. Couple this with the ability to borrow without consequence via self-regulated deficit spending, and the rest is (and will be) history.

The Congress was never designed (explicity or implicity) to control the kind of spending it does now, and as such it has developed this ability through political evolution. Those who spent, survived…those who saved didn’t.

Every politician has now learned that deficit spending is the way to get elected. So it really doesn’t matter who controls Congress at this point….it will spend freely to the maximum capability of our economy and beyond. As mentioned above, the office of the President has been made irrelevant so that doesn’t matter either.

Further, this mismatched functionality of the Congress has existed for so long that a majority of citizens were born after the presence of a systemic, increasing Federal debt in the mid 1970′s. It’s what we know, and there is no reason to see it as a problem.

For years the numbers have been rationalized as “percentage of GDP” and “constant dollars” etc. But all of these arguments failed to recognize or address the fundamental problem: Congress controls spending, and it is politically rewarded to spend more and take in less. There will be no change in this equation….ever….because there is substantial political dis-incentive to change it.

These arguments that the “debt isn’t that bad” make alot of sense, until they suddenly don’t. Most of the people who downplayed the debt/deficit are oddly quiet now. This should scare everyone. But it doesn’t because “hey…we’ve spent freely for decades without a problem…clearly it’s not going to hurt anything”.

Instead, we have a cultish, Keynesian analysis that ever increasing deficit spending is necessary for economic stimulus. I guess this is what happens when the consequences of policy occur generations after said policy is implemented.

Yet even the most conservative estimates on the debt rely on wildly outlandish wildcard figures (usually economic growth figures) that will send in the mathematical cavalry and save us all. Even if this did happen, Congress’ mismatched political goals will kick in and we’ll just spend more.

(And this doesn’t even take into account the amazing cheap energy benefits that are coming to an end).

So any honest look at the numbers shows that the U.S. will eventually outspend it’s ability to borrow, and will then be in a serious pickle as it either defaults on the debt or begins printing money to meet obligations. Either solution would result in a collapsed economy and Federal government due to hyper-inflation or the sudden disappearance of Federal dollars in the GDP, or both.

At that point it can be said that the grand experiment of American brand Freedom Democracy failed. Which is ok. Sociopolitical failure is part of history. Maybe our descendants will turn their minds toward divine providence again and build something better.

Cheery thoughts! I know. But human history is not generally a tale of long, blissful periods of stability. We’ve been very blessed to have avoided problems until now.

Yes, the book reader is cool. Yes, you can stream movies. Yes, there will be cool apps for it. But all of these are true of a $300 netbook, which by Steve Job’s own criteria is the reason the iPad was invented.

So let’s look at some of the hardware comparisons. I’ll use an Asus Eee netbook from Best Buy.

Cost:
iPad $500
Eee $310

Screen:
iPad 9.7 inch – 1024×768
Eee 12.1 inch – 1366 x 768

Weight:
iPad 1.5 pounds
Eee 3 pounds

Ram:
iPad ???
Eee 1Gb

Storage (this is a big one):
iPad 16Gb
Eee 160Gb

GPS/Compass
iPad Yes
Eee No

Networking
iPad Wireless
Eee Wireless and wired

Camera
iPad No
Eee Yes

USB
iPad None
Eee 3

Battery
iPad 9-10 hours
Eee 6-7 hours (higher capacity available)

There’s more, but basically the only real hardware advantage is the cool touchscreen and the weight. And there are significant disadvantages in storage. Battery life is sorta an advantage, but you can get a high capacity battery for the Eee that will make it last 10-12 hours.

Then there’s the keyboard. Whereas people who use it say the iPad touchscreen keyboard is surprisingly good, it’s a pretty safe assumption that it’s not good enough to do a large amount of typing given the reviews. Then when you buy a bluetooth keyboard, all that convenience of a single touchscreen goes out the window.

Some people would argue that with the Eee you’re getting Windows, which is inferior to the iPad…but I completely disagree with this. We’re not talking Mac OS vs. Windows here. We’re talking iPhone OS vs fully featured Windows, and the iPhone OS has significant limitations that don’t impact phone usage–but are terrible for laptops.

The much-talked-about lack of multitasking is a big problem. You can’t run multiple programs at once.

The whole process of getting files in and out of the iPad is evidently a convoluted mess. If you type a document or make a presentation, you have to go through some procedures get the files out if you need to work on them somewhere else. The Eee supports thumb drives, external drives, etc. right on the laptop.

Also, with the Eee you can move files from your digital camera in less than a minute with the built in cardreader. I shudder to think of how long it would take to do this with an iPad without an accessory…and even if you have it I wonder how easy it is to move the files around. Ever tried managing photos on an iPhone? Good luck. This is only practical if they’ve done considerable re-engineering for iPad.

In short, iPhone OS is great for a little computer that fits in your pocket, and it soundly kicked the techno-hiney of any phone out there when it came out. But the shortcomings will make it very impractical for laptop-style computing over anything longer than the short term. I can just tell that any attempt to replace a laptop with an iPad would slowly fail through the attrition of convoluted inconvenience.

But it’s a great eBook reader. And it is. But that’s a pretty expensive eBook reader, and the jury is still out on eBooks with regard to how prevalent eBooks will be. Plus you can install several free ebook readers on a laptop.

Gaming will be awesome on the iPad. But it’s also awesome on a Nintendo DSi, which is much cheaper.

It just seems that beyond all the hype and whiz-bang, this device isn’t going to solve many of existing problems or be any better at critical, meat-and-potato tasks. It may create entirely new markets for certain software or media, and the nature of the interface may create some interesting new applications, but will these be big enough to justify huge numbers of sales that will “change computing as we know it”? That’s a tall order.

In a simple sentence: it was really great. Two completely different services with wildly different music and visuals. Yet Theology was identical, the topic was identical, and even the outlines of the service seemed to be nearly the same.

This week I have also enjoyed the richness of remembrance on the web via blogs, facebook, and tweets of people from other denominations and Christian groups. It’s been a true life study of Ephesians 4 and 5.

I know Good Friday can seem like an odd holiday for non-believers. But this is it in a nutshell: That God saw fit to save a hopeless people by sacrificing himself in our place. Today is the brutal and ugly part of that equation. But Sunday is on it’s way, and that’s when hope became clear.

It’s been awesome to observe and share that hope this week in it’s many facets yet singular purpose. How beautiful is the body of Christ!

Which makes me wonder if there will be a substantial aftermarket for increasing the ‘pep’ of cars after manufacture. Or if it will suddenly become economical to make wasteful electric cars.

In other words, there is clearly a market for people who want vehicles whose unique characteristics make it impossible to get 34 mpg. So make those things guzzle electricity instead of gas. All electric is green and efficient right?

It also means buy an SUV right now, because they’re gonna be golden in about 6 years.

Click here for the facebook event….

A2 church is above (to the right) of Pet Supermarket in Vestavia. Which is right across from Honeybaked Ham.

View Larger Map

Here’s Bing Maps:

Me: “Did you hear the storms last night?”

Daughter: “Yes, it was VERY bright….you could see it with your eyes closed and then the thunder came and it was either right away or took awhile and you really didn’t know…sometimes it was like BOOM right away and then other times it took awhile and then just kinda rumbled…then I realized I was completely awake and waiting for more thunder and…..”

Wife: “What about you, son? Did you hear the storms?”

Son: “Yes. I heard it.”

Wife: “well what did you think?”

Son: “asleep.”

One nice thing about technology is that it tends to operate on a survival of the fittest principle. Not survival of the prettiest (Apple) or survival of the best marketing (MS) or survival of the cheapest (Linux)…but survival of the fittest.

“Fittest” contains that whole basket of factors that individually miss the point. It’s more fun to think about why each of the factors are and are not important, then see how it plays out in reality.

In fact, one could argue that free-market/capitalist driven technology is the ultimate arena for observing the concept of “the fittest”. It is the perfect arena for science, because if the science doesn’t work…the widget is not long for the world.

Unlike Darwinism or “Natural Selection”–largely an academic concept subject to the same religious bias and political shenanigans it’s proponents like to ascribe to religion–market driven technology requires science to be right for it’s very existence. A quantum computer isn’t going to be purchased if the understanding of quantum mechanics is not correct. A hose must be compliant with fluid dynamics. And people aren’t going to purchase an airplane ticket if the wings don’t work.

Unless you’re B.A. Baracus, who just “ain’t gonna get on no veiled creationist plane, Hannibal!”

But this post is not about that. It’s about Facebook, and it’s about my attempt to post on something other than the world-eating doomed collapsing economy.

I found this little gem from a post on a blog I read:

If you really are, or want to be, my friend, drop me an email, write me a letter, give me a call, stop by for a visit — you know, like a friend would.

This is one of those fascinating phenomenon to me. People love to criticize the impersonal nature of the current social networking fare, then cling to older technologies that are just as impersonal, if not more.

Is email any less impersonal than Facebook? Is a telephone call? How is a letter more personal?

And this one’s a doozy when you really think about it: How are our normal personal interactions (“hey, how are you?; fine, you?”) any deeper?

Any technologist has to develop some keen senses on resistance to change. It’s difficult to determine if a system is having problems, is poorly designed to interact with humans, or if said humans are just not diggin’ the fact that they have to change their habits. For the life of me I can’t find any criticism of social networking that’s not in the “not-diggin’-change” category.

In contrast, my relationships have been greatly enriched by the application of this technology. Latest example? My wife and I just discovered that a neighbor 3 doors down from us has cancer. This man was a substitute teacher of ours, and actually paddled me in 8th grade (long story…big misunderstanding). We’ve lived in this neighborhood for 9 years and didn’t even know he lived there!

So whatever Facebook is doing, the technology is turning out to be fit enough to blow away alot of junk from prior technologies. I’m still waiting to hear or see any decent criticism.

I b’journal’d a few weeks ago about those nekkid body scanners for airports. I also talked about how laughable it was that the government was assuring us that they could be trusted with nekkid X-ray pictures of us, because they had policies.

They also said that the images couldn’t be stored, even though their own bids required the ability to store images…and they showed pictures in the article which were obviously stored.

BTW, they are planning to buy 1000 of these things over the next couple years.

So along comes this little issue of schools spying on kids in their bedrooms with laptop cameras. You get a free laptop from school, and they install spying software to “recover stolen laptops”. That’s the intent and policy at least.

This spy software was used to take pictures of kids and confront them about suspected drug use. Which I guess is an undocumented feature. They also gave access to police. Which is an unconstitutional feature. But you know…living document…war on drugs…”Federal interest”….yadda yadda. We’re all just making this stuff up as we go along anyway so a few eggs are going to get cracked in this omelette.

Anyway, just goes to show you how far you can trust the absolute power of the government when it seeps into the circuits of digital cameras.

This country just plows on like a runaway ice cream truck, dispensing goodies to some and running over others. We just kind of look on…eating our ice cream and wondering what happened. Just how crazy is this country going to have to get?

Our economic system has become a black box. The grand economic theory behind the whole thing is to shove a bunch of borrowed money into the black box, and then um….”when things return to normal” and “when the economy improves”.

Part of this is because the system is so complex. The other part is that it’s been tremendously successful and we just didn’t have a reason to try and understand it anymore, particularly when it’s so profitable to squabble over the output.

So how did this happen over the last few decades? Here’s my take.

Since the 40′s, nukes have freaked everyone out. Anyone who could do serious damage was too afraid to do it. Mutually assured destruction kept everyone relatively calm. The losses and pain of WWII left everyone with no appetite for another global conflict (this time with nukes), and Vietnam convinced people that regional conflicts aren’t all that nice either. Until fairly recently, if conflict was necessary people got in…got out…and moved on.

This provided a great economic environment where even military spending built stuff.

Energy was amazingly cheap. I’ve blogged about this before, but oil is awesome. There is no source of energy like it. It contains huge amounts of energy in an easily accessible form. No matter what people say, nothing can compare. For 2-5 dollars in production cost you can pull it out of the ground and turn it into many thousands of dollars in value. Thus, the more oil you burn the more wealth your society creates. And in the last 50-100 years we really got our oil burnin’ on. People think that burning oil is a symptom of economic growth, but I think it’s a huge, huge cause of it.

As a result of these 2 factors, the industrial age hit full swing. We all got used to it’s luxuries. Then two additional things happened.

First, we had several generations who (in the aggregate) grew up in this new world and never knew what it was like to live in poverty, fear, and/or scarcity. Wanna go to the beach? That’s 2 hours in the Chevy. Wanna live in a house? That’s a 20 minute commute and security is not a concern. Go to Highschool or College and employment is assured. Every year our economy will grow and that means a cost of living adjustment and a raise. Invest enough money and this growth will provide a relaxing retirement for you and your spouse. And if you’re going to murder someone just don’t do it in the front yard because that’s a violation of the neighborhood covenant.

As we got used to this setup, we forgot the economic mechanism of our prosperity. (Spiritually, we decided we didn’t need God because hey…this setup showed alot of promise.) We saw the future of plenty, and they don’t have God or price tags in Star Trek.

Second, we got greedy. Capitalism became about giving stuff to large, established businesses. Populism became government jobs and benefits. We sold off our manufacturing, then mortgaged everything else with personal, corporate, and government debt. When that ran out we changed the rules to allow for risky numbers games called “finance”. When that collapsed we went to the last hope…government debt. This debt is now growing at unsustainable levels which are only possible because there’s no other “safe” place to put money.

So here we are…a few hundred million people used to a world of constant economic growth, cheap energy, and easy money. All three of these are very much at risk, and the loss of just one would be catastrophic to this world view. The only thing keeping this going is government debt, and that’s not going to last.

If we look very closely at our assumptions about the world, we’ll find that they are based not on any understanding of the way it works. Almost all of them are based on how the world has affected us–extrapolated into the future. We better pop the hood on this thing, and quick. Sooner or later the phrase “when things return to normal” might not have that same zing to it.

So like any corporate, Christian dude in a casino I asked myself “Should I even be here?” I found the answer to be obvious…but the question to be highly irrelevant.

Gambling is an inherently dishonest activity. It implies that you’ll be a winner but in reality the odds are completely against that. Then again, all of marketing is built around that concept. You’ll be a winner if you just wear these clothes, have this electronic device, etc. The odds of me looking like one of those models in an ad are much lower than my chances of winning 50 bucks in a slot machine. But I’ll spend 50 bucks on a pair of jeans. No problem.

Gambling is also entertainment. I see little difference between some of the cutesy slot machines and the games at Chuck E. Cheese. Ever seen a kid proudly walk out with a 50 cent toy…for which he paid $20.00 to get the tickets necessary for the trade? It’s a scam if you try to justify the cheap toy, but it’s alot of entertainment and alot of fun.

Gambling as a good tax source is just plain bad policy. The stories of how it negatively impacts the areas in which it thrives are many. Ask anyone who runs a community financial institution before and after about the negative impact.

But Gambling does employ people. You can’t shut down every textile mill in the south, preach about a “service economy” and not expect them to see a casino as an excellent employment opportunity. Would Jesus be for free trade with China? What kind of question is that?

It tends to affect the poor in the hardest way and very negatively. This makes any benefit to education seem a little morbid. It feels like the kind of thing that’s illegal to import but just fine as long as it originates here.

Gambling doesn’t create wealth. Instead, it tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. But didn’t our recent mortgage bubble do the same? Doesn’t the stock market have many of the same characteristics? I’ve heard many investment professionals point to a graph of the Dow and say “The stock market has always gone up over the long haul”. Isn’t that like saying “everyone leaves a winner!!!” while the finance industry hauls off a huge rake?

What’s the difference in a dog track owner and a fella in the Hamptons checking on his 3 million dollar bonus? Does it make us any more uncomfortable that the bonus came almost directly from the Federally guaranteed labor of our kids? Do we preach about that in the pulpit?

We assume that the property 3 exits out will be valuable one day. Things are always growing…things are always going up, up, up!

Isn’t our current neo-capitalist world–where we think the world is a black box, and if we put enough money in that black box we’ll all be able to chill out at the lake with sweet tea and a golden retriever–isn’t that inherently dishonest?

Gambling is very easy to be against. It’s very sad to see someone falling asleep at a slot machine at 2 am. It’s sad to see people wandering around a smoke filled room with an oxygen tank. I can think of a thousand reasons to outlaw it. But that’s only due to perspective.

Is it really smart to have huge chunks of political capital flowing around the question “Should gambling be legal” Isn’t it really missing the point to ask “Should Christians gamble?”. Isn’t asking these questions, by definition, too late? Shouldn’t we see the bigger picture here?

I think we should look at our world as a whole. I think we’d find we’re all sitting at a table doubling down. If we’re any more honest than a casino billboard we’ll admit that we’re all trying to beat the house. I think we’re all feeding time and money into a system that has become something very different than we originally thought. Do we have time enough for countin’?

This has been Mike’s Kenny Rogers moment for the week.

“oh sure, that’s a gathering…but it’s not a Christian gathering”.

It bothers me to see this constant distinction between “getting together” and “church”. I don’t see how this distinction is Biblical. The activity is clearly different whether you are getting together to eat, or to watch a game or movie, or go to a worship service or a Bible study. However, the community and continuity of our Christian lives, both together and individually, should not be.

To me, this gathering-vs-christian-gathering dichotomy reinforces the whole “this is my church life but this is my regular life” problem. We act one way at church building–in the language we use, the way we dress, the music we listen to, and the way we think. Then we flip a switch when we leave. Those of us who have been members of large churches know that this change often happens before you leave the crowded parking lot!

A big part of the problem is the ministry and program concepts where we route activity through process and procedure, sign everything in triplicate, put things on the calendar and wait for final approval from committee. Obviously we have to be organized in some form to be the proverbial good stewards of what we’ve been given. But it’s easy to overthink things and displace the original intents and goals with the little-g god of policy.

To atheists, agnostics, unbelievers, non-church-goers, etc. These false dichotomies are obvious, and they translate into hypocrisy. They also translate into gimmick, like God and/or The Christians wants to trick you into coming to church.

I think that if we can start getting away from our industrialized model of church factories and move into a model of church communities, these problems will take care of themselves. However that change must be real, it can’t just be form only. We have to get to the point where our lives as followers and believers of Christ have continuity of purpose. And this must happen both individually, as groups within the church, and the church itself.

So here’s why I did it.

16+ years of information technology work and management has finally impacted my mindset to a point where it affects my life decisions. To me, a tech purchase (including a car) is about functionality, reliability, and “industrial strength elegance”.

I look at a Sony desktop with all it’s bells and whistles and immediately think of things that I don’t need. I am appalled at how fragile Macbooks are. I consistently find places in cellphones and PDA’s of all brands where I’d rather have a shortcut than a pretty looking interface (the original Blackberrys excelled in this area). Little plastic parts make me nervous.

Our desire for fancy-pants technology is working against us in terms of quality experience. I had a rear projection TV for 10 years with no problems (in fact, it’s still in use at our church), but my Vizio lasted 16 months before developing flickers and lines. What good is high def if the picture goes bad?

In short, our throwaway high-tech world has become expensively annoying.

The automotive world has started to look the same way. All these fun little bells and whistles on today’s cars are pretty much just one more thing to break. When my Saturn died, all the ‘cheap’ and/or ‘high value’ options were questionable. I needed something that would “just work”, and be cheap and easy to fix when it didn’t.

If you’ve been in IT long enough, you eventually get asked “What is a server anyway”. And the answer is very similar to why I bought this car. A server is a computer with the best components, solid physical construction, high performance, and built in resiliency. There is no ‘sizzle’ in a server to draw your eye in a display at Best Buy. It’s about getting the job done for days, months, and years on end….with no planned downtime. And despite what you might think, servers look pretty cool too.

Ford’s Police Interceptor is the server of cars. It has a basic and heavy duty drive train; high performance brakes; A durable, tight suspension; A rugged and kid-proof interior. The body is modular and easy to fix (the way cars used to be). There are tons of these vehicles out there and they are all standard. The car is well documented and you can get to all the parts if you want to fix or modify something. Like I said: “industrial strength elegance”.

It was cheap too. A comparable normal car would be tens of thousands of dollars, and I found this one for four digits. Even with the added fuel expense, I’m anticipating this vehicle to be much cheaper over the next few years. I guess we’ll see!

Here are some pics of the new ride:

Still looks like a police car, and people are on their best behavior until they realize you’re just some dude in a white car.

Also looks like a grandpa car, but that’s ok. I can’t be defined by my car. Don’t label me man!

Nope, I won’t be putting spinners or 19 inch rims on it. The nice thing about ‘normal’ tires is that I can buy high performance, long life tires for 100 bucks each.

Yep, the spotlight is still attached. And it’s bright! I can blind the cat from across the yard.

The engine on this baby is immaculate. Very well taken care of. It looks brand new.

Steel brake lines. You won’t find that on cars that cost 4 or 5 times as much.

The back seat of patrol cars is modular. They rip out the original seats and install the plastic and the cages. This one had an original stock seat installed after it was de-commissioned. The back door latches are still disabled though, so I have to fix that. In the meantime it’s the ultimate child safety feature!

Also note that the floor is a rubberized plastic floor. I’ll get some decent floormats, but it’s nice to know you can scrub it out if the kids track in mud or something.

Another minor project. The police install department specific electronics in the middle. I’ll have to get a 3rd party armrest. There are some really nice ones for under $100.

In many ways, this car is more of a traditional sports car than most official “sports cars”. Today a sports car is more of a touring automobile. This no frills, basic instrumentation is more in line with days of old. The only problem is it’s missing a tachometer, which would usually be considered standard issue.

Full size spare, and I could fit my old car in this trunk.

The vehicle is a hackers dream….power everywhere, all sorts of little connections and settings. There are several modification guides that show you how to how to customize the car to a wide range of specs. Different departments and agencies do different things to them.

So there you have it!

(BTW, people joke about me wanting to look like a police officer…but that ain’t it. It is amusing to watch people suddenly obey the law because the car looks like a law enforcement vehicle. But I don’t really have any desire to be shot at because someone thinks I’m something I’m not. Plus, I know and respect many people in various areas of law enforcement and I would never disrespect them by trivializing their calling in such a way.)

My take: Security is a process, but it’s not a procedure. In the U.S. we try to package things into procedures instead of really addressing the problem in an organic and adaptable way. This is particularly true of Government.

First of all, they tell us that the images “can’t be stored” as the news reports show video of the scans. Duh. If someone wanted to store the pictures, all they need is an iphone. Snap a picture of the monitor and you’re done. If you’re really fancy and run a porn website called “hotbabesattheairport.com” then you’ll probably need a nicer camera. But you get the picture (and they will too).

Second of all, there’s no way they’re going to buy devices that won’t store images. That’s like saying “we’re going to watch security cameras, but not save the video”. If they’re going to prosecute or tackle someone with a bomb, they’re gonna save the picture that led them to do that.

And we’re talking about an agency that’s had plenty of issues with honesty by it’s employees. So if there’s way to store images from the machines themselves, they will.

Of course nobody’s perfect. That’s why we don’t trust them with naked pictures of us. (Unless you’re a celebrity who needs a PR boost).

It’s laughable. The government thinks we’re stupid. And they’re probably right. We’ll be unhappy about it, but then get used to it, and mumble something about “well if it saves one life it’s worth it”.

Just to re-boil this down to what it is: We’re trusting government people in staff level positions to look at naked pictures of the population. Just wait….as these scanners become more common the pictures will end up on the internet.

When some fella (after twittering about it for a few days) successfully makes it onto a plane with a bomb hidden from even these scanners (use your imagination), what else will we be asked to give up?

It’s amazing to me that in these airline attacks the intelligence fails again and again with information we *do* have. But every time they claim they need more info to protect us. And everytime it’s the privacy of normal people that goes away.

I do remember one time they canceled school due to cold weather. It was -50F wind chill. more than a minute or two and your face started to freeze. That’s considered a bad learning environment anywhere.

It’s funny the things you remember . For instance, when the temperature is in the teens the exhaust from your car tends to condense in the air much longer. It’s been like that this week. And the way the dusting snow drifts back and forth on the interstate in little waves when it’s very cold.

When I was little we would pretend that the taillights on the cars were spaceship engines, and the exhaust condensation was the smoke from some advanced propulsion technology. When it was snowing, the snow looked like the stars of hyperspace in Star Wars. Like many kids of the 70′s and 80′s, much of my daydreaming time was spent pretending I lived in the Star Wars universe.

(Some of our generation still live there. Just go to the back room of any comic shop.)

Some concepts were borrowed from other shows…like the bridge on the way into town was the Stargate from Buck Rogers. And generally the enemies were more Cylon-like (Battlestar Galactica).

So this morning we drove to school in a heavy snow flurry, and I decided to educate my children on space flight. They were in the back seat, so naturally I designated them gunners.

Dad: “when I make this turn were launching right into the heart of the fleet!”

Daughter: “what?”

Son: “OK!”

Dad: “Canon, there are 5 on our left, you get them….Melodi, there are 10 on our right…take ‘em out!”

Son: [laser noises...cool ones] Got ‘em dad!

Daughter: [laser noises...girl version]

Dad: “We’re hit…lost our left engine…diverting power…..I think we’re still going to make it to school”

Daughter: [giggles]

Son: [laser noises]

My son continued to make laser noises for the rest of the trip, taking out any minivan, honda, or SUV that came into the port zone. My daughter moved on to discuss some topics of Meteorology.

Driving my kids to school every morning is one of my favorite things in the world to do. I only have a few more months before they go to different schools and everything changes. I hope to savor every remaining minute of it. Unless we need to put some heat on a Chrysler-borne Cylon. First things first, you know.

All of the gifts we wanted as kids (and grown up kids) all had the same type of promise. “If I have this, then things will be better than they are now.” And for the most part it was true. To varying degrees the presents delivered on their promise.

But it was temporary. Toys broke. They became obsolete. The ‘new’ wore off. And we eventually had to go back to school anyway! However, the original Christmas gift delivers on it’s promise…and has a very long warranty.

The best part of Christmas is that it is part of the Good News (Gospel) of Jesus of Christ–that the God of the Bible is not a distant god. He became one of us and showed us how it’s done. He then went on offer himself as the ultimate sacrifice for our sin and imperfection.

We give gifts to each other to symbolize this wonderous act of love and giving. It’s a great tradition and it has the ability to bring out some of the best in us. But it all points to this most miraculous gift ever.

The birth of Jesus Christ was an amazing gift. It shows how deep the father’s love runs. It was just what humanity needed!

This was a biggie. For months I longed for a Big Trak. A friend had told me about it, and did such a good job that he should have gotten commission. It was over 30 dollars of pure electronic goodness. And then there was the box….I mean just look at it:

You wanted this thing on your side. So when I saw a present appear under the tree that was the same size as that box, it was all I could do not to carefully open it and verify the contents. A true test of will. This was probably the most eagerly anticipated present of my childhood.

The Big Trak was one of the few toys that actually delivered. Id did everything it said it would. It looked amazing. The sounds were cool. It moved like a tank.

The programming was reliable and challenging. I spent hours making it drive courses around the house….shooting certain things, people, and animals with it’s flashlight laser. And the Big Trak lasted for years.

Eventually I convinced my mom to buy me the transport attachment, which completed the set but didn’t add too much. The connector broke a year or two later.

One day one of the axles on the main unit broke, and I tried everything to fix it. Different epoxies, glues, and fasteners. I even made a crude fiberglass-like axle to try and replace it. All to no avail. The Big Trak was history.

It may be floating around somewhere in my parents attic, and I can’t decide if it would be a good or bad thing to see it. It lives in my memory as one of the coolest toys ever.

(BTW, here’s a nifty site: The Big Trak Homepage)

(Yeah, I know…my granddad talks about getting fruit for Christmas and loving it. I’m not complaining. I’m just pointing out how vast the differences are between what’s available to generations.)

Few things illustrate this difference better than the Starbird.

This was a spaceship toy that was downright awesome. And I don’t mean the trying-to-relate-to-a-younger-generation “awesome”. It was the real deal. It looked awesome (still does) and it had awesome electronics in it.

Touchscreens? No. Wifi connections to a worldwide network? No. Uber-cool features du jour with the latest firmware? No. But just look at this advertisement (I think this one is from England…audio is very low…not because it’s from England….that’s just FYI.):

If you tilted it back, it’s engine sound would go up. And if you tilted it down the engine sound would go down. And it had an unprecedented laser sound. Yay technology! Of course we had to have one.

Oh, and that whole front part was a detachable ship–a concept which was strangely central to a certain very popular Scifi show that came just a few years later.

Here’s another recent Youtube video, which is slightly disturbing given that the guy is a grown man. I expect Chris Hanson to bust in at any minute:

We also got the “Intruder” model and eventually the command base:

In some ways the command base was the coolest, because it had plenty of open-ended play opportunities. This made it more fun than even our Star Wars toys because lacking a complete backstory we made up our own adventures.

Which led to the real reason this toy was great. It also provided great sound effects for our cassette tape recordings. I would sit around with a cassette deck and record adventures of my all of my toys, stuffed animals, action figures, etc. This is pre-computer days, remember. (I still have some of these cassettes.)

The Starbird was an excellent toy for making the sound effects in these epic audio masterpieces.

So there you have it. The Starbird.

(And here a couple other articles)

I see these things and I have to chuckle. In the U.S., a great deal of our personal data is completely available to everyone. In some cases for just a few bucks.

Have you ever wondered what happens to all of that information you give when you use the discount and membership cards? Ever wonder how they knew you’d need those coupons for Pedialyte or Mighty Dog? Ever wonder what they can legally sell about this information? The answer is everything.

Any law against indexing your purchasing habits by your credit card? Any laws against selling it? Nope. And if there are it’s probably an opt-out plan…fully disclosed in the fine print.

I shudder to think of what the phone companies (particularly cell/wireless) can legally sell. We already know they’re immune from any liability in giving anything and everything to the Federal government. Both Republicans and Obama set us up for that one.

And honestly, if they are doing something “illegal” who’s going to sue them? When the information on millions can be stored in a $50 thumb drive…where’s it all going?

It got this way because nobody pays attention to the actual laws that are passing. We read a bumper sticker, get happy and vote for “our guys”. Meanwhile, every company and trade group in the world ensures that they can do whatever they want with this information. I’m sure it was tucked in to the various “What’s Awesome for America Omnibus act of 200X” bills that always come up (for the children, of course).

The time to worry about our digital privacy was about 13 years ago, and it would have required laws that our Congress is, quite frankly, incapable of passing. That time has come and gone. No sense worrying about it anymore. Just relax and enjoy the fact that most corporations are too incompetent to really bother us all that much.

(BTW, if you have used a credit card online, it HAS been stolen. It just has. Don’t worry about it, but don’t ever use a debit card online.)

We had Sears “Tele-games”, which was the Sears Toughskin version of the Atari VCS (later called the 2600). It was effectively identical, but we had only ever seen the Sears version

Youtube has tons of Atari ads out there. But here’s one from Sears.

Note how the word “Atari” was never mentioned….and it was “sold only at Sears”. Just goes to show you at Sears was a retail mafia back then. “Yeah we’ll sell your stuff, but we have to call it our own name. You’re getting paid, so just hope we don’t alter the deal!”

I shudder to think of the suits and facial hair of the Sears execs who brokered that deal.

So why did we want Tele-Games for Christmas instead of “Atari” ? Well, Before 24 hour news, it was perfectly acceptable for kids to chill at the Tele-Games demo booth while mom went to shop for polyester and dad went to wander the Craftsman section. OK maybe it wasn’t acceptable, but we got to do it! I’m wondering now exactly what that meant…..

So we logged many hours at the Sears tele-games demo. It was a great place to meet the other aficionados and try out the latest/greatest.

It was there at that booth that we’d decide on the next target for our allowance and yard-work cash. This was an important phase, and one I use to this day. There was technology available but limited resources…which direction would we go?

A big score was Pitfall. That one was awesome. I remember it took awhile for the Activision games to show up since they weren’t official Atari games.

The two worst? Pac-man and E.T.

E.T. took the epic story of a boy befriending a stranded alien and replaced it with the pixelated storyline of stepping in gum on the way to the library. Yee-haw. We’re lucky things like “V” came along to restore proper perspective.

Pac-man was even worse because we labored for a couple weeks digging gravel out of our yard to earn the money to buy it. Our rural road was made of gravel and tar, and that year the snow plows got a bit aggressive and deposited a few cubic yards of the gravel in the front lawn. Dad paid us something like 50 cents a bucket.

Remember all those kids working for Mola Ram in Indiana Jones 2? Just like that. Except those kids got an ancient Sankara Stone and we were stuck with an awful reminder that you weren’t in an arcade.

Somehow we had convinced ourselves that Pac-Man was going to be good even when we saw for ourselves that it wasn’t. I mean, it was pac-man right? Another early lesson in tech.

Back to Tele-games….Just to show you how random my memory is, the record section was right across from this area in Sears, and occasionally when waiting my turn I’d wander over to look at album covers. I always ended up at this one, which I found fascinating:

I could just tell nobody messed with this guy while he was walking home from the school bus. Years later my social studies teacher was a Mrs. Nugent, and we always asked her to say hi to her son Ted for us. I’m not sure she got it but I bet she did.

Then along came Intellivision, which split the neighborhood and turned friend against friend in the struggle of public opinion of which is best. Which means this one is to be continued….

This was where the famed “Dragon’s Lair” game eventually showed up.

To this day I could walk into that building and point to right were the game was, probably to within a few inches. That’s even with the Chuck E. remodelling job.

Dragon’s Lair utilized the combination of laserdisc tech and normal video games to create a very unique gaming experience. Here’s a modern screen cap on Youtube:

I wanted this game in the middle of 6th grade. I’m talking the full size, arcade style version of the game. Ran about $3000. At some point I was probably delusional enough that I thought I’d get it. But there was a reasoning behind all this. And it had to do with grades.

For some reason people always just assumed I got good grades, this was not the case.

From K-6th grade, I was in no less than 5 different schools, and each of them had a completely different philosophy. This included the practical rural mid-west school, the in-town Montessori-ish school, and what I call the “brutal ABC’s” approach in the South. By the time I was in 6th grade, I really had no idea why I was in school or what I was supposed to be doing. It was just someplace you went to get lost in the shuffle.

What I figured out pretty quickly was that I was supposed to get good grades. I didn’t know what that meant but I knew that my parents seemed to have limitless resources when describing the rewards for such an achievement. Thus, I was able to work out a deal: Straight A’s = my very own Dragon’s Lair game.

Turns out it was a safe bet on my parent’s part. I never even came close to straight A’s in middle school. I did figure things out by my freshman year in HS but by then the Dragon’s Lair deal was history. So, no…I never got this! No chance!

Now you can download the whole thing on PC (probably for iphone too). But back then it was the unachievable awesome thing I wanted for Christmas.

Update: Jason emailed me the iphone version of the Dragon’s Lair ap. There really is an app for that….

On a side note, the princess in the game bears a striking resemblance to my wife. So maybe I did get the game after all.

Behold the Kenner X-wing Fighter.

93% of all male children in the 70′s had at least one Kenner Star Wars toy….

…..of those, 60% had parents that said “hold on to those, they’ll be collectors items one day”.

….which lasted about 15 minutes. So from here the breakdown is:

Note that this chart is completely bogus, as I gave up on the gag once I achieved the “pac-man eating pizza” effect. That’s some fancy Excel-fu right there.

So I got this, and I was thrilled at the LED/buzzing laser action. My parents were thrilled to have to align those stickers.

I wasn’t thrilled that the R2 was fixed in the toy, as I didn’t have my own R2 yet. Also, the fact that I only had the desert version of Luke (vs. a pilot) was a bit troubling. But it didn’t matter.

We went on a trip shortly after that and I remember lovingly transporting the X-wing around. Come to think of it, that may have been a birthday gift. Oh well…I spent way too much time on this post to go back now!

We moved during Christmas 1982 from Iowa to Alabama, so technically I didn’t get it then. Instead I got it a couple months later for my birthday. But it was still something I wanted for Christmas.

Back then, the choice of a computer was much different. You had the upper tiers of IBM and Apple. In the middle range you had Radio Shack and Commodore. Then there were the Atari models and the TI. At least in my world this was the spectrum.

I didn’t really care about that though. The real question was: “What did Ricky Schroeder use to hack into the pentagon”? (go to about 3:30).

No, I’m not kidding. This is why I liked the TRS-80 Color Computer.

Plus, radio shack was a staple visit in any trip to the mall. So there was constant exposure to that machine.

As luck would have it, TRS-80 knowledge would come in handy later on. In the 80′s it was a symbol of educational advancement to have a room full of computers at your school. Never mind that very few of the teachers knew anything about them or what they could do, much less how to educate with them. But they needed a room full of computers and our middle school was not going to be caught without such a room.

Most people have no idea how Radio Shack is even in business. Their business model seems to be overcharging for batteries then selling you a 3 year service plan with them. So how they convinced our school buy 15 or so TRS-80′s for their educational showroom…I have no idea. But they did, and by the time we had lab time a handful of us knew more about them than anyone….especially the teachers.

In lab time, we basically had an online multiple choice quiz. At then end of the quiz, it would print out the score for the teacher to view. We edited the program to do all sorts of things…from displaying a random message (that would quickly disappear)…to automatically giving us a good grade on the quiz. It was never a perfect grade. It would pick a random number and subtract it from the perfect score, so as not to arouse suspicion.

We probably learned more through the hackage than we did from the quiz. However these days I’m sure we would have been kicked out and charged with federal computer terrorism or something. Such is life.

But there it was…Christmas 82/83!

The love of such futility didn’t come from nowhere. We had plenty of practice as children the 70′s and 80′s drinking deep from the unsatisfying fountain of a rapidly maturing consumer culture. And as it is now, the spigot on this thing was opened wide during Christmas.

Now that there have been billions and billions of dollars invested in the internet, we can stream commercials from that ancient era on a whim. So I’m going to do some posts outlining the various trinkets I wanted for Christmas as I grew up.

Up first: Tobor!

This little robot was actually just a motor with a swiveling wheel and the ancestral technology used in The Clapper. The ‘remote’ was a clicker that made a loud noise to activate said clapper brain, so really anything could set it off…a hand clap, firecrackers, the sound of your little brother banging on your door….

And if you ended up with two of them click-clacking away in the same room. Let’s just say skynet was still a few years off.

Really, this robot was about as “remote control” as a cat–inasmuch as you can yell insanely at a cat and make it run for it’s furry life.

But even then, there were only two actions. Go in circles, and go in a straight line. The commercial tries to make this sound awesome. “To circle. To proceed forward. To circle. Or to pick up the service module….” Yeah, and picking up that small plastic “service module” was about as likely as getting a girl to play with this thing. (Both of which happened in the commercial).

So was the Tobor a bad toy? Of course. But we knew it’d just be a few years before real robots were doing all our household chores while we got in our flying cars to go to the mall and buy more stuff.

In other words, it didn’t stop us from wanting it. And that was the name of the game for 70′s and 80′s toys.

Adam Wright (Act of Congress) wrote the music to this, and I did the lyrics. Adam’s also BGV’ing and playing guitar somewhere in there. Jacob’s got all the other guitars, except the slide which is Michael Swann. Jamie Rogan is on drums. And Jason Elgin made it all worth listening to.

Thanks for listening!

Are we so different you and I?
Are we having trouble seeing eye to eye?
I guess everybody’s got excuses and dreams
and agendas it seems these days.

What kind of person do you see
when peaking into this heart that brutally
beaten down with failures taunts and insecurities?
I am cynical it seems these days…

So what’s the point? where do we go from here?
Throwing bricks to get our fix and missing the heart of the issue.
I’d like to say there’s a better way, so let’s change
cause love remains in the middle.

What penance is there left to pay?
Have we disengaged and thrown it all away?
I just want peace of mind and coffee with my cream
But I’m still cynical it seems these days?

So what’s the point? where do we go from here?
Throwing bricks to get our fix and missing the heart of the issue.
I’d like to say there’s a better way, so let’s change
cause love remains in the middle.

Hearts of stone will never get it
Love will find us if we let it
Hearts of stone will never get it
Love will find us if we let it
Hearts of stone will never get it
Love will find us if we let it

What’s the point? Where do we go from here?
Throwing bricks to get our fix and missing the heart of the issue.
I’d like to say there’s a better way, so let’s change
’cause love remains
love remains
love remains in the middle.

Love remains in the middle.
Love remains in the middle.

This one is a few years old, but a favorite by many.

Interesting tidbit: There are NO electric instruments in this song at all, with the exception of bass guitar. It’s all acoustic guitar, mandolin, bosouki…I think maybe there’s a banjo in there too. Pretty cool….

This is a song written for a church series a while back. The theme words were “grow, relate, belong”.

The plan is to release the whole project as a free download in January or February, when the holidays have worn off and people are looking for something new. I still want to focus on “house show” gigs instead of church gigs, so stay tuned for that.

This one is a “girl song” for my amazing and wonderful wife.

Thanks for listening!

(As always, production and engineering magic by Jason Elgin, BGV’s from Adam Wright and Rodney, and alot of rock n’ roll from Jacob Bunton)

But I gotta tell ya, Ubuntu has this thing rockin’ as a desktop. So far, everything has “just worked”. There have been a few excursions into the command line and a couple googlin’s to find out some particular way the system things. But even then the information was readily available. Overall it’s been an amazing experience.

After installing the nvidia drivers, graphics were beautiful. I’d say they’re better than MacOs any day. Very crisp and basic. The X screensavers occupied me for several days just seeing what they’d come up with. Yes, I know…I’m easily distracted.

I had to install a seperate DVD burning package to burn some DVDs, but so far that’s working well too.

The word processing packages haven’t been really put to the test, but it’s OpenOffice…and it seems to be pretty snappy. The browser is Firefox, so that’s all standard. The flash plugin was easy to get working, and it actually seems to be better in Ubuntu than in windows.

This is definitely not the Linux of a couple years ago. This will definitely find a place alongside my Windows box and Macbook.

It’s worth noting that they might not even be great days. Maybe they’re something profound or something you’d want to re-examine. Maybe it’s actually a bad day on which you have much more perspective at the end of your life.

Lately I’ve come to appreciate more and more that the effort to reach a ‘steady state’ of goodness and contentment is really impossible in our broken world. Things ebb and flow up and down, and they are constantly changing. We should take note of the moments that are profound when they are happening. We’re really guaranteed nothing, and each of these moments may be something we’re taking for granted but will one day become worth watching.

There are obviously the “big days”. A wedding day. The birth of children. But I’m talking more about the days in-between, before, and after.

I’m going to think on this, and see if I can write about at least 10 of these.

One of the quotes bugged me a bit. It said something like “Herbert Hoover decided to take no action, deciding that the free market would correct the situation”. That’s not a direct quote, but it was something like it.

This was very irritating because it matched so much of the rhetoric today. People want to blame the free market for our predicament, and people want to see the free market as our savior. The problem is that the free market is completely irrelevant when government operates at this scale.

You see, just moments before this quote the program had been outlining the effects of The Homestead Act, in which any citizen could get 160 acres if they promised to improve the land. When all the good farmland was taken, they upped it to 320 acres. To sweeten the deal, they’d give you a train ride out to the land so you could get started.

So almost 100 years ago the Federal Gubmint decided “this is the way things should be”. Then it began minting Gubs–creating a massive relocation of capital, wealth, and people…resulting in…surprise!….Disaster. Then the free market is supposed to clear that up?

It’s just like today. The government decided that “this is the way things should be”, and they create massively distorted, multi-trillion dollar entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Then disaster strikes and it’s the result of the “Free market run amok” and “tremendous lack of regulation and oversight”.

Here’s something that everyone must understand. When our increasingly huge government decides “this is the way things should be” then creates and deploys massive chunks of policy and capital, that’s not a free market. But here’s something else. The free market can’t clean up the situation either.

The only answer to a massive, government created bubble is to let it explode, cause the damage, then try to find some sort of free market resolve in the effort to start anew.

I know the free market is not perfect, and there are roles the government has in that world. It’d be nice to actually try to enumerate them and solve these issues instead of pretending we have a free market.

We’ll have no shortage of government-formed bubbles to practice on. The carbon credits market will be a bubble. Whatever our government decides on health care will result in a bubble. And then there’s the massive, unsustainable bubble in Federal debt. That may just be the one that takes the whole thing down.

They give their own summary, but the basic gist is this. A long time ago copyright was simple: Give the people who make content a short monopoly to make money from their work, and then release that content into the public domain so that everyone can benefit.

So eventually Mickey Mouse would become public domain. It’s how we have some of the great works of our time.

Now, however Disney and crew have gradually boiled the frog of sane copyright and turned it into a giant moneymaking scheme designed to perpetuate profits for companies at the expense of fair use and the public domain. (It’s a monstrosity of misplaced moral imperative that is all-too-often embraced by Christian ‘content producers’, IMHO).

The problem arises when there are works that have value, but no original copyright holder to ‘release’ the works. They’re stuck.

As the article suggests, we now have mountains of works that are in danger of either being lost, relegated to a shelf somewhere, or trapped in a proprietary digital, controlled, pay-to-read library. Why? So Mickey Mouse can generate billions for centuries to come and no content can ever…EVER result in not making someone money.

Centuries ago the most intellectually damaging event to content was the burning of books or the destruction of a library. Today it’s the completely legal “protection” of content.

Yet if you ask the average person, we have no idea how many fair use rights we’ve already lost (and continue to lose).

This summer it has definitely been this. Without getting bogged down in details, the last couple years (and in particular the last month or so) have really been about bridging the gap between “young guy/new dad” with “middle-aged guy/dad of teenager”. My daughter isn’t a teenager yet, but she will be soon, and I know from study and extensive discussions with my wife that this will be a critical time for her and my role as Dad. Plus, from a career perspective I need to change gears a bit and make sure that I’m doing the right things for this next phase.

So what is important? What is the machinery that will sit under the hood here? It’s not technological machinery, but you can literally catch glimpses in the technology of the age.

We have one of those LCD screens loaded up with family pictures that rotates every few seconds. Also, the screen saver on my Macbook is set to do slideshows of my iPhoto collection (now 25k plus pics and climbing all the time). So it’s pretty common around our house to see pictures from the past years. Plus, we’ve been digging through alot of old stuff in an attempt to clean and parse through what’s important to keep. Obviously these artifacts get older and older the more we have!

It struck me that the pictures I always stop to look at are the beach pics. Oddly enough, this is something my wife noticed as well, but separately. The beach is not really a particularly pleasant place. It’s hot, salty, sandy….there are a ton of reasons not to go. However, we love it. And we love pictures of it. I think I know why.

If you live in Alabama, beach trips are filled with and punctuated by constants that refer back to past trips. Even the trip down is like a narrative of years past. There are restaurants, gas stations, funny convenience stores, car washes, and general small town bits of flair that evoke trips of many years past.

“You remember stopping there on the way to spring break?”

“This is where we stayed with your parents, right?”

“Heh…here’s the turn we missed on that trip right after we were married”.

Beach trips for us are completely filled with little reminders, and although some of them gradually erode away through construction and weather…one thing you can’t change is the shore itself. There’s always sand, water, salt, and heat. And all those things that would otherwise be unpleasant are the very things that evoke past experiences.

But it’s more than just the humanistic value of experience. It’s about relationships. And in this case our relationships with each other. Our parents, our spouses, our kids, and our friends. These summer vacations use experience as a gateway to an appreciation of relationship.

So back to that article, the “Second trend” was that money spent on experiences, and in particular experiences with friends or loved ones, was generally perceived as money well spent. I think that’s the engine that will drive this phase in our life.

I’m not going to go for the big, stupid house. I’m not going to go for the big, stupid car payment. I’m not going to bolt for a job that may result in a few more dollars to be dribbled away in this con game economy.

Resources will be applied to experiences that enhance relationships. Relationships with Christ–the Savior of my soul, with my beautiful wife, with my awesome kids, and with the amazing collection of family and friends that I have been blessed with.

It’s also not about the president. As we’ll see, the president simply cannot control spending. And this is the problem.

The Executive branch is supposed to send a budget to Congress, and have it approved. But that’s not the way it works anymore. It may occasionally occur if all the branches are controlled by a party, but it is not administratively true any longer.

Nowadays, the president sends a budget to Congress, who employs about 100 people to stand there and laugh at it. Then Congress passes whatever they want, although it has to have enough reckless spending in it that the President will look cruel and heartless if he doesn’t pass it. This is pretty easy to do.

Any cursory look the news coverage surrounding spending will confirm the dysfunctional (and some would say unconstitutionally excessive) role by Congress in spending. They don’t talk about the president. They talk about Senators and Reps.

How did this happen? Congress seized the power over the budget in the mid-seventies, about the time they created the CBO. If you look at the Federal debt numbers, that’s when it started and it hasn’t stopped since.

We are now so dependent on this spending that the President is powerless to control it. The last real effort was George Bush Sr. in 1990 or so. The response to the prospect of a government shutdown made it clear that the electorate would hammer any President who tried to limit it’s relentless spending growth.

Now we’re stuck. Our economy and lives are becoming so dependent on the Federal credit card that any effort to get to a balanced budget would lead to immediate collapse, either through a gaping hole in GDP (spending) or a massive confiscation of cash (taxes). No, there’s not a combination that would be any less destructive.

Unfortunately, this can’t continue forever. All debt bubbles collapse. This will be no exception.

I’d say we passed the point of no return in 2001, ironically under the watch of a government dominated by a “fiscally conservative” Republican party. However, we’re going to accelerate to the eventual destination under Dems via healthcare and stimulus.

Hey…at least the Dems have a category for their crazy spending. It looks more purposeful than the Rep’s “Random stuff we’re spending on while nobody is looking” category. The only Rep category that was arguably worth it was “defeating the commies”.

Anyway, there may still be time if we all suddenly wake up and realize that “our guys” and “our parties” and “our entitlements” are the problem. Heh.