That’ll make me eligible to be the President of the United States. I had planned on announcing my web2.0 candidacy, and do a Ze Frank-esque 1-year internship of running for president. I even registered a domain, “designed” a logo, and planned on doing a write-in campaign to demonstrate the power of the hype of New Media.

But in my research, I discovered 4 things:

1. Stephen Colbert is running for president, so I don’t stand a chance.
2. Even a write-in candidacy requires a crapload of paperwork and signatures and stuff.
3. Being a libertarian, it’d be ironic to try to be President and force my views of government on the population.
4. There’s this thing called Unity08, trying to do an end-run around the 2-party system. The guy from Law & Order (and TD Ameritrade commercials) is their spokesperson. Getting a Unity08 nomination means that someone else handles the election paperwork.

So, today, I do not announce my run for President. But I’ll consider it if someone nominates me for the Unity08 “party”.

I do hope I get an invite to Twine today, though.

And maybe some cake. I like cake.

But these two guys will definitely get one.

The lucky First Guy In Line is Greg Mayer from Charlotte Street Computers here in town.

I’ll take them some sausage, egg and cheese biscuits in the morning, unless the coyotes have already eaten these guys in the night.

To be honest, I’m not that much of a Smashing Pumpkins fan, but I think it’s cool that they’re breaking out of the normal box, and doing a rather odd tour this year. They’ve picked 2 cities to have a “residency” at. One of them is my town, Asheville, North Carolina.

9 shows between 23-June and 5-July at The Orange Peel.

They aren’t just rolling into town, playing a show, and retreating to the next stop under the cover of darkness.

It’s a freakin’ 13 day event.

Of course, events mean people. And people mean social networks. I guess.

Nonetheless, once again Ning pops up as the implementation behind Smasheville.com.  Go Ning go!

This evening, sitting around with my wife and our friend Jeff, he mentioned seeing a crapload of emo kids outside a local music venue. I immediately asked what an emo kid looked like. My wife suggested the kids from The OC. Jeff described what sounded to me like followers of The Cure.

Luckily, Wikipedia’s there to save the day. Then I realized that I’m old, and I don’t understand and can’t even identify this whole sub-culture of music. I do like Death Cab, but otherwise, I’m ignorant of it all. Wikipedia at least lets me feign knowledge of current popular culture.

It turns out that emo kids seem to be a mix of Robert Smith-alikes with a little punk thrown in, I guess.

At least I get to see Les Claypool next week.

Update

This post has become a magnet for commenters and people direct-linking to the image for their MySpace profile.  Image has been removed.  Comments are closed.

At university, though, a professor noted that a group of 20 people can somehow manage to perform something like King Lear in under 3 hours, including costume changes, dramatic emoting, and an intermission. Why the hell couldn’t we read the same words in the same amount of time?

I struggled because it was Shakespeare, and Shakespeare is supposed to be a high-brow struggle to read. But this observation by this professor completely changed my viewpoint.

Everyday we make choices based upon the perceived difficulty of a task. But every day, those perceptions can and should change.

There was a time that pumping gas was considered too difficult for most people to handle, so we had gas station attendants taking care of that duty. I think most people manage to fill their own tanks these days just fine.

What other opportunities to change the “difficult” into the “easy” exist today?

But are folks missing half of the equation? Sure, the phone is next to our head, but it’s also being held by our hands. And kids these days are sometimes holding the phone with both hands while texting, keeping their noggins safe from the brain-warming effects of radiation.

Who is studying the potential link between cellphone usage and hand cancer?

Mostly, I just liked this image.

It’s time to learn another human language.

Sure, you can speak French and sound sexy. But even simply pretending to speak French is enough to accomplish that. Everyone’s 4-year-old speaks Spanish fluently these days, and I simply don’t need to be shown up by a 3-foot-tall crumb muncher. That’s no good for the ego.

So, Polish it is.

I live in a small mountain town and figured correctly that our bookstore wouldn’t have any useful Polish courses on CD. Thanks to the zippy folks at Amazon, and my seemingly unending free trial of their Prime cheap overnight service, I possess the first 10 lessons of the Pimsleur system.

For those of you who don’t know (I didn’t), Pimsleur is purely an audio/spoken system. There’s nothing to read. The Polish speaker on the CD works backwards through sounding out words and there is just enough repetition to learn while keeping it all interesting.

So far, I can say

• Excuse me!
• Do you speak English?
• Are you an American?
• I understand a little Polish.

The package of 5 CDs is nice enough. I quickly ripped them to iTunes so I could drop them on the iPod. The CDDB is just whacked when it comes to the Pimsleur CDs, be warned.

Then, for the hell of it, I Googled for Polish resources in my town.

Lo and Behold! The local vocational college, about a mile away, has a Polish class starting next week. I’m heading back to school!

Last night, what started as a lark has now made it to the far other side of the world. I present the Mouthful of Mouse meme. About as useful and intelligent as the “5 things” meme.

Just photograph yourself with a mouse in your mouth. That’s it.
Do it! You know you want to!

I was tagged by Paul.

1. I love bluegrass music
2. I think SoBe No Fear energy drink tastes like grapefruit. It contains no grapefruit.
3. I can’t stand wikis
4. I have a fixation about female Australian pop stars, except Kylie Minogue. I’m not totally insane. She sucks.
5. I had 11 toes for a short while. Corrected by surgery. I don’t miss it.

I tag Michael, Mark, Pete, Kurt, and Lance.

Sending photos to Flickr, I’m finding I’m going to exceed the limits of their free-ride accounts. My first thought was “oh, I should go FlickrPro”. Then I decided to check out some other services before I go about spending money.

Currently I’m checking out SmugMug.

So far, I like the slideshow feature.  I think I like the themeability, but then again, I reckon I just want a Flickr theme.  I like the fact I can have multiple galleries. The downside to multiple galleries, though, is I no longer have just “my flickr,” but rather “my foo gallery on my smugmug.”  Flickr’s concepts of sets as pulling from a global gallery as an organizational tool may make more sense in the long run.  It’s not about what gallery a photo lives in, but which collection(s) the photographer has chosen to display it in.

Of course, as my wife said, “but everyone else is on Flickr”.

tivodecode spews out MPEG-2, which QuickTime can’t handle natively.  You can spend $19.99 at the Apple Store to get the MPEG codec pack, or use DarwinPorts to install MPlayer, which handles MPEG-2 just fine.  For free.

Bless all those opensouce geeks out there in the world.  Bless each and every one of you.

Milton Friedman

He played a role in the abolition of the draft and supported the decriminalization of drugs and prostitution.

Go hug an economist today.

Of course, I cheated by simply trimming down an existing beard, instead of growing a mo’ from scratch. I passed through an awkward Fu Manchu stage before arriving at the French-inspired ’stache.

I normally prefer listening to this station, but this week, when they are trying to convince me that my enjoyment of the radio and a tote bag is worth $85, they have actually reduced its worth to -$10. They should be paying me to listen to their fund-raising tripe. Yes, the station is valuable to me, but in trying to convince me of its value, they manage to destroy it all. Instead of actually making me remember that I should support them and trade $85 for a tote bag, they have sent me searching for alternatives on the AM dial.

There has got to be a better way for public media to raise the funds they need than to completely make themselves worthless during the fund drive. I listen to the radio in the car, normally while I’m driving. That is not exactly the best time to pick up the phone and make that pledge! On the other hand, I do use their website on a regular basis to browse the playlists. I do that while not driving. In fact, that’d be an excellent time to try to sell me an overpriced tote bag to fund their activities. Of course, their website makes virtually no mention of the fact a fund-drive is underway.

Yes, these obnoxious funding efforts to convince you of the value of their content (while completely screwing up the content) is simply the way it’s always been done. It’s time to find a new way. Listening to volunteer DJs umm and ahh their way through 15 minutes of describing all they great uninterrupted music and programs they have is just painful. Considering that Asheville is small, and it takes a maximum of 10 minutes to drive anywhere, 15 minutes of repetive rambling about the music I won’t get to hear before darting into the store isn’t serving their goal very well at all.

Perhaps use the internets better, and go after your listeners while they’re on your website. Annoying your customers is not necessarily the best way to make them part with their money. Even if you throw in a tote bag.

I’m finally home after a trip to San Francisco to meet my co-workers. It truly was surreal, in that I’ve been working for The Job for about a year, and had never met a co-worker, aside from Pete. When I joined, the team was 3 other people, and we were all in different states. New York. North Carolina. Michigan, California.

Now we are 18.

This is the first funded startup I’ve been a part of, and it’s been fun to watch the growth of a company. I think we’ve assembled an excellent team of talented individuals. It certainly is a rather eclectic group (no, the children are not employees).

It is somewhat strange being the odd-man-out, clear across the country. This trip through, to finally meet everyone, helped solidify the realness of it all. When everyone is in different states, you’ve got a hip distributed team. When there’s just one guy in the hills near the moonshine shack, he’s just a remote worker. Ultimately, I wouldn’t trade my grits and banjos for the world, and am grateful that an organization such as Radar is jiggy enough to keep a hillbilly round. But while proximity doesn’t matter to Subversion or Jabber, we are all humans, and faces do matter.

I’d like to travel out there more often, and I aim to finally locate and hook up the iSight.

The point to this post? Technology allows you to never actually meet humans, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Some may claim that Chuck Norris is the next pirate-alike meme. I, for one, do not accept this conjecture. Chuck is merely a waypoint on the route to ninjas.

Ninjas are the next pirates. Ninjas are where it’s at. Ninjas are hip. In fact, December 3rd is the Day of the Ninja. I suggest wearing ninja garb all day, particularly if you’re flying or conducting business at government buildings. Everyone will get a good laugh.

Tonight, the wife and I sat down to enjoy some wholesome television, including Moral Orel and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. We quickly learned that our child, currently fast asleep, had set a parental control code and limited us to TV-13 or somesuch. I was unable to guess what the boy might’ve used for a code, so I turned to the interwebs.

After some Googling around, I learn that the only solution is to call TiVo customer support.

First, you get dumped into an IVR system that attempts to have a conversation with you. Instead of the obnoxious “press 1 if you are having trouble with…”, you simply must speak your troubles into the phone, and it’ll route your call accordingly. In theory. Instead, you get to have a conversation with a rude, dim, and deaf IVR system.

I was taught, as a child, not to interrupt when someone else is speaking. But the IVR never stopped talking. It’d tell me to state my problem, and then just keep yammering away about other options I might have, or that I could try using tivo.com, or perhaps I would like to answer a survey. Being a parent, I’m aware that if someone is talking, they certainly are not listening.

The IVR had difficulting understanding the word “no” even. Just like a child.

Ultimately, after enough cursing, I got bumped to the queue to speak to a live human… if I wished to wait an estimated 15 minutes.

After 40 minutes, I do finally get to speak to a human. During the 40 minute wait, I was reminded a dozen times that I could use tivo.com to solve my problem. Of course, tivo.com is what ultimately told me I had to use the phone.

Once I had Dusty (a very helpful and friendly support person, I must admit) on the line, I gained some insight into the workings of the TiVo parental control system. He provided me with a 4-digit code that would work until 4pm tomorrow. This was without contacting my device or having it dial in for an update. It would seem that in addition to the user-set parental control code, there is a secondary code that can be derived from a combination of the device service number and the date.

Considering the annoyance of the faulty voice-recognition IVR and the long wait times, I fully expected TiVo to have to send me a piece of physical postal mail with the code printed on a piece of paper in 4-to-6 weeks. I was pleasantly surprised.

Of course, no matter how annoying or evil TiVo gets, I’ll remain loyal. We tried the ReplayTV and returned it within a day. Anything through the cable provider is bound to be even worse, both in terms of technology and service.

I find the entire premise of modernizing the game to be off the mark. Is the fact that kids these days don’t understand cash really what has contributed to the decline of “game night” in American families? “If only this simple board-game had a battery-powered keypad…” my wife said to me just the other night, while playing a game of chess.

Honestly, we’re talking about Monopoly(tm), the game who still has Rich Uncle Pennybags as its mascot. The kids these days don’t understand a five dollar bill, but they’re down with the top hat and handle-bar mustache of the rich, white, oppressive, capitalist male?  Really? Maybe they should just put the mustache on top of his head, instead of the hat, and rename the game to Trump(tm).

I appreciate capitalism, and that Parker Brothers needs to make a dime (or have their account credited in some fashion), so they are attempting to adjust to the market. But man, you’re screwing with a classic, something that needs no screwing with. If you want to capture a slice of the market, don’t go zorking about changing things on something close to everyone’s youth. Go invent a new game for the youth of today. Leave us with our Monopoly(tm), our 6-1/2oz Cokes in a glass bottles, and stop mucking things about.

Of course, we’ll all learn in a few years that the whole event was just a sham while they changed the recipe for the dice, removing sugar and replacing it with high fructose corn syrup. It’s just a part of the conspiracy.

Digital isn’t always better. Sometimes a big-ass knob on a distinct device is functionally better than a whizzy-bang brushed metal UI without a dedicated knob.

Yes, I know the iPod doesn’t have a knob. It has an iKnob (aka, the clickwheel with the nipple in the middle).  But it’s knobesque nonetheless.  And the screen is always visible.  No repeated command-tab to find it.  It’s just right there.  On the desk.

I pinged my attorney, and his wife is letting him out of the house for a jamband road trip up to Asheville. I remember the days of it being difficult to get Dead tickets (though, I’ve been close enough to see Jerry sweating all over his guitar) so was quite pleased to find tickets still availlable for this Asheville show. Alas, through Ticketmaster. But after being suitably brutalized by their “service fees”, I’ve got 2 tickets en-route.

(And yes, referring to my school buddy as “my attorney” is an affectation and reference to Hunter S. Thompson.)

(That’s the official Codehaus grill, procured for the Codehaus Incendiary Summer Front-Porch Conference two years ago.)

I think we should also encourage people to not fear math.

Average (or arithmetic mean), as a statistic, is, well, below average. The median is a much better metric. Then you can go hog wild and calculate the standard deviation. Once you know that, you’ve got a much clearer picture of what your data represents. While a median is better than a mean (an average), knowing the variation between points gives you a feel for how (in)consistent your data is.

Bill Gates, Mother Theresa and a steel-worker walk into a pub…

Their average net worth is around $30 billion.

Their median net worth is likely $60,000.

A-ha, you think you’re clever, using the median instead of the average.

Then you figure the standard deviation, give up making any assumptions about this group, and just have a beer with them instead.

Yes, that’s Arkansas. Turns out that Wal-Mart is has the same influence (or more?) as some small countries.

My evil plan came together tonight as I sat idly on the couch flipping through an eWeek, while my wife gave tech-support to her father. I love it when a plan comes together.

(The photo on the right is George Peppard, who played Hannibal Smith on the A-Team)

I really need server-side spam nuking… 3 days offline, 1414 new messages, 98% of which are spam.

Uh, yeah, gimme 3 of the Lucky Sevens, um, 4 of the Golddigger’s Delights, and 4 of the Mucho Moneys

Of course, then they stand there, trying to reserve their place in line, in case one of those 11 tickets is a winner.

The state estimates it will take in $400 million in sales during the remaining 9 months of this year.   I love how they call it an “Education Lottery”.  Hopefully the money will be used to improve statistics classes in our local school system.

But that shouldn’t stop folks from doing it.

Even more disturbing, the version of this commercial airing in my area has replaced the tagline of “Chocolate is better in color” with “Choose Fun!” I think it’s pretty obvious that the M&M plucked from the hippie swirl definitely did not get to choose fun. At the end, the camera pulls back and shows how we humans are like M&Ms, swirling around. Waiting to be grabbed by a creature larger than ourselves and popped down their gullet.

Fun indeed!