Yes, let's be more like Europe

Rioters rampage, protesters block French airports

We really, really need to be more like France. Where the idea that you might actually have to work a bit leads people to stop working, block traffic, and eventually smash and steal things.

Reason # 5674329 why I hate the French.

Not just

a terrorist loving, self-righteous, incompetent schmuck, but a delusional terrorist loving, self-righteous, incompetent schmuck:

Carter declares his superiority to other presidents

In other Presidential fantasy news, Bill Clinton has respect for women, George W. Bush is beloved in New York City, and Barack Obama believes in free markets and limited government.

For a NotBlogger

Mr. Possum is pretty funny.

Before I Forget

Shana Tovah, everybody.

This is really starting to get old

Tiger escapes enclosure at Jungle Island

He's the most famous golfer in the world, rich beyond belief, and he can't just stay out of the news, can he?

Wha? Not that Tiger? Never mind.

A Secret Revealed

Mr. Possum has an alter ego

I'm surprised it wasn't grilled squirrel, but a secret ID isn't worth much if you can't throw them off the scent.

This place is still here?

Wow. What a mess. Empty seltzer cans, pastrami sandwich wrappers, and it hasn't been dusted in AGES. It's like someone abandoned the place, and it was too low-rent even for the squatters.

I suppose I should pick up a bit around here, but...

So where the heck have I been? Facebook, mostly, but up way, way past my eyebrows in work. When we last bloggified back in March, it was Passover. Now it's almost Rosh Hashana. I'm starting to feel like a three times a year blogging Jew.

While the world has moved on to critical topics of the day like:

• how the Tea Party is the home for Nazi Skinhead KKK Rich White European Male Neanderthal Troglodyte Homophobic Dumb Redneck Mean People (TM)
• any oil leaking (including teenage pimples) and uncleaned up is clearly the work of racists hating on the President, and we all know it's Bush's fault
• Brett Favre has retired. Brett Favre has unretired. Brett Favre has retired again. Brett Favre has...
• The US economy is as strong and vibrant as ever, assuming you meant as strong and vibrant as the economy of Burkina Faso.

I, on the other hand, have been buried in the details of launching an e-learning program across an organization that now boasts 42,000 employees and about 10,000 docs.

Oh - did I mention that we launched the first piece of content in early June, and we've had over 14,000 successful views since then? Did I mention that they still have me doing a million other things besides? So the short answer to the blogging conundrum that has bedeviled all of my legions of fans (yes, both of you) is that I'm too bloody tired to blog, and short of interesting things to write about. Not that this ever stopped me before, but...

Anyway, I take my lead as usual from the Master Possum hisself, and if he can not-blog, so can I.

Busy Busy Busy

Not cleaning for Passover, of course. That's for last minuting like usual. I do, however, have the perfect retelling of the Passover experience for this modern age:

The 2010 Facebook Haggadah

Enjoy whilst you eat your leavened or unleavened bread!

Is it just me?

Or is this a bit messed up?

Brooklyn brewhaha: Babies in bars

Does it actually need to be said that there should be adult spaces and kid spaces? Adult behaviors and kid behaviors? I sympathize with the stir-crazy guy, but that's life. You wanted a kid (I hope), you deal with the consequences. I have no problem bringing a kid out to a more adult-oriented space, but a bar is not my idea of the right spot.

If I think there's something wrong with the mindset of people, it's the inability to draw lines of appropriate and inappropriate behavior. I don't honestly think children should be exposed to alcohol at a young age (beyond ritual alcohol like communion wine), and not as part of the social experience. I also think grownups have a right to spaces that don't involve kids.

Sometimes I just don't understand the world.

Last Day of Lockdown

I took this week to lock down - no meetings, no projects other than the big, honkin', major video delivery portal I've been up to my eyeballs in. I started with a punchlist long as your arm that has since grown even as some things got removed from it. But it was nice to be able to focus on nothing but this project.

Oh, and the latest storm of the millenium that honked things up for two days. Mucho shoveling, and yes I'm sick of winter.

That said, I had my laptop and one of my portable hard drives, so I was all set to work from home. Thanks to a boss who thought it was a great idea. The children were not as compliant - more interruptions than I really wanted.

Still, progress is being made and I have a half a hope that we'll be in reasonable shape by our departmental deadline of March 1. This is going to dramatically change how we deliver online media, especially online education, and I'm hoping to make some important people fall out of their chairs when they see this thing in action.

Of course, next week I have to go back to talking to people.

PS Had to go through the haloscan switchover. Not sure how much I like the new commenting system, but I also backed up my comments in case somebody figures out how I can import them into blogger. Whaddaya think?

Project Management

I'm posting this everywhere. Courtesy of Rick Brookhiser over at National Review:

The Six Stages of a Project

1. Enthusiasm

2. Disillusionment

3. Panic

4. The Search for the Guilty

5. The Punishment of the Innocent

6. Praise and Honor to Non-Participants

This describes so many, many of the projects I have been involved with. I'm thinking I should add it to the planning documents of every project I am part of.

In other news

I saw this headline on ESPN.com

Top two females are sole Horse of Year finalists

and couldn't help thinking it was about time Julia Roberts and Sarah Jessica Parker got the recognition they deserve.

Interesting discussion

over at Volokh's place:

Entrenchment Provisions in the Health Care Bill

Heard the guest host on Dr. Bennett's morning radio mention that there are provisions in the Soak the Rest of Us Healthcare bill stating that it could never be repealed. Made me wonder if that's actually true.

Leaving aside whether the author of the piece is correct, the comments section has some interesting - if a little esoteric to me - discussions about the rights & rules of legislators and their legislation.

Not that it's going to stop this train wreck, but...

I sense

a forthcoming protected group:

Study Reveals the Angriest Americans

Al Sharpton will soon begin protesting on behalf of Angry-Americans. It's only right they get their own minority group.

A Faint Ghost of Thursdays Past

That echo of halcyon bygone days must be the Thursday Three, reasonably to be expected to return for the first time in more than two years. El Possumo Grande has not-blogged a not-Thursday Baker's three:

1. What one person are you most thankful for this year?

Other than, of course, my wonderfully perfect and well behaved family, I'm probably most thankful for the new VP around here, whose complete and utter disregard for "how we do things around here" got me out of a bad work situation into a much, much better situation.

2. What one thing are you most thankful for this year?

This is going to be very work-centric, but probably the new media management system we're installing. It's given me a tool to learn, and an opportunity to demonstrate both expertise and leadership on an initiative that I think will dramatically change this organization. It's totally change my attitude towards my job - I'm interested in it again.

3. What one event are you most thankful for this year?

To round it out, I'll stick with work. The social media conference I went to in July was directly responsible for my shift to my new job.

BONUS: 4. So, how’s it going? How’ve you been lately?
Still trying to shake the various ailments - lingering cough, etc. Busy as can be, but mentally a lot closer to stable since the change.

Remember when

George Bush got all that grief for calling himself "the decider"? I'll take that any day over our current "agonizer":

Obama Won't Take Any Current War Options, Official Says

I'm sorry - you get elected president in order to make decisions. That's why it's called the chief executive - you execute things (not generally people - that's usually for governors).

I understand that Democrats and liberals are focused on domestic issues rather than foreign policy, which is why he can decide to ram a poorly conceived healthcare plan down the throats of an electorate that doesn't really want it.

But c'mon, man, just make up your mind on Afghanistan for cryin' out loud! The president is refusing to make a call because he doesn't want to take responsibility, and unfortunately for him and the rest of us, that's what the job is all about. Go ahead - refuse to provide more troops if that's what you want. Or send the troops your commanders have asked for. Just quit screwing around and make up your mind, willya?

Gimme the decider over the Agonizer in Chief any day.

This is wrong

on so, so many levels:

Santa Dreidel

I understand there are many intermarried people, but the whole point of the Chanukah story was the defeat of another faith (OK, pagans, but you get the point) by the Jews who refused to surrender their God.

I guess hip kitsch offends me when they start messing with my faith.

Something occurred to me

while reading this post:

Columbia University Graduate School of The Internet

Now, the post itself I think is very much on target about the need to train journalists properly for the brave new world of the internets. And while I suspect I know Mr. Rosenblum's political leanings, I don't know them for certain and they're tangential to my issue.

He says:

The school was founded by a rogue businessman, Joseph Pulitzer. He was the Rupert Murdoch of his day. He tried to expurgate his many sins by building the school. Instead, he compounded them. He succeeded in creating a factory for ‘good employees’, but he infantalized an entire industry.

The graduates of the school long to be good employees - to work for The New York Times or The Washington Post or NBC News or CNN...

The report on the Future of American Journalism was written by two lifetime employees. Leonard Downie Jr., spent a lifetime at The Washington Post, as an employee. He rose to be Executive Editor but he still got that weekly paycheck. Michael Schudson is a lifetime academic. He also has spent his life getting that printed paycheck every week.

Nice guys though they are, they are hardly the right people to ask to figure out the future of journalism. What they have been bred to do for a lifetime is to figure out where the next paycheck is going to come from. And that is what they came up with in their report. Pretty much devoid of any other ideas, they came up with ‘ask the goverment or some foundations to write more checks’.

I don't have an argument with his primary point, but I am wondering about this disdain for people collecting paychecks. This is not the first time I'm seeing this around - there was an episode of Miami Ink a while back with a young woman (flat out gorgeous, by the way) getting a tattoo of a robot to symbolize her father's "enslavement to corporate America". She was determined to avoid ever working a "real job." There are other examples.

What's bothering me is this idea that there's something wrong with going to a "regular job" and collecting a paycheck. Perhaps the world does need Joseph Pulitzers and Bill Paleys, but we can't all be at that level. None of the big time movers would ever have gotten anywhere without the paycheck collecting shmoes working for them. That's not exactly what journalism (or any field, except maybe Hollywood) needs - everybody's a CEO, nobody does the grunt work?

This bothers me more coming from liberals (as I suspect Mr. Rosenblum is) only because they pride themselves on their support for the working people of this nation. But sneering at people who collect paychecks is not terribly supportive. Would I like to be a chief instead of an Indian (scusi - Native American non-leadership voluntary tribal participant)? Sure, but I don't have the ideas and I don't really want to work that hard. I've chosen to prioritize family and personal life over the commitment to work that being a chief requires.

This is not just liberals, by the way, though I think it's more common there. It's a curse of the elite and the hyper-driven to think there's failure in the ordinary. Not necessarily a bad thing - great advances in every aspect of life require the kinds of people who won't settle for the ordinary. But it's awfully arrogant to sit back and write off the paycheck takers as failures. A lot of us do things that allow the hyper types to do what they do in comfort, safety, and freedom.

New math

Overloaded day + lack of sleep + overstuffed sinuses + no weekends (Thanks Hebrew Calendar!) = 1 extremely spaced-out Dan.

I need several naps.

It's Just Not Fair!

Reason #24576 why I can do without Obama, his administration, and their hangers-on:

Steven Chu: Americans Are Like ‘Teenage Kids’ When It Comes to Energy

Let's leave aside the correctness of the whole "the earth is being destroyed every second by fat Americans who won't give up their high standard of living" mantra of the First Church of the Green Mother (A. Gore, Pontifex Maximus). I concede freely there are things we can do to reduce waste.

What's bugging me is the sheer unveiled contempt the Nobel winning hack has for us, the great unwashed. It's the nanny mentality these people have to the ordinary folks that escapes out of them when they speak freely. The "elites" of this nation - the policy wonks and the politicians and the think tankers and the rest - are utterly convinced that we're too dumb, too unschooled, to inept to decide for ourselves what to do.

Don't get me wrong - there's plenty of this on all sides of the aisle, and frankly it's sickening. Most of these losers and nerds have never had a real job - it's been academia and "community-based service" for their entire lives. They've never had to meet a payroll, they've never had to work overtime, they've never had to budget a damned thing. And yet we're the ones who "have to understand how important this issue is."

It's a waste of breath, but here's a news flash for Dr. Chu. I'm not a moron. I happen to disagree with you. You haven't made a case to me that says you're right. I'm not a recalcitrant 15 year old - I'm waiting for an argument from you that holds even a drop of water. You mistake my refusal to sell all I own and live in a yurt for simple-minded ignorance; it's in fact a refusal to surrender the gains made by generations before me so I could live comfortably and provide for my family in the way I see fit.

If there's hope for limited government, it's when ordinary people stand up and let these egotistical wastrels understand that we're a lot smarter than they give us credit for. The proof will be if we actually vote these knuckleheads out of office.