So what have I been doing for the past year? One word, work. In the past year, I’ve been doing a whole lot of hard work, something Hillary Clinton seems to think young people are unable to accomplish. From the NY Times:

She said that “young people today think work is a four-letter word” and “think they’re entitled to go right to the top with $50,000 or $75,000 jobs when they have not done anything to earn their way up.”

For other responses to her comments, see Time Magazine and the NY Post.

Did I miss the transition where Democrats became the crotchety old man yelling at the kids to turn the music down, while Republicans decided they were going to run free with the nation’s credit card?

Despite what the politicians say, all of that hard work has paid off. I’m buying a townhouse with Ms. No Name. It has two bedrooms, two and a half baths, fireplace, and two level deck. I posted a few pictures from the home inspection.

We close on June 30, so if anyone wants to help us move July 1-9, let me know and I will provide food and beer. I’m excited to finally have a place of our own, and we’ll be able to let Super Dog roam free.

During our research, I ran across a number of interesting sites:

• Zillow - shows estimated house prices and comparables
• Housing Tracker - shows inventory and price changes in the Washington metro area
• Fairfax county real estate tax records - shows assessed values, tax info, and previous sales
• Fairfax Neighborhood Profile - various stats vs. national averages

Photos from Chicago

Thursday, May 19, 2005

• Flight is scheduled to leave Dulles at 5:15 pm
• Mother nature decides to dump rain and fog on Chicago
• Flight is delayed
• All inbound flights to O’Hare are stopped
• Flight is delayed
• We finally arrive at O’Hare at 10:45 pm Chicago time
• Take the El with Cheryl and Friends

Friday, May 20, 2005

• Mother nature brings in the sunshine
• The girls and I go shopping on Michigan Ave
• Visit the Apple Store
• Drinks at the Hancock Building at the 96th floor lounge. - If you want to see the city, I highly recommend hitting the lounge rather than going to the skydeck. The $10.50 margarita is more than worth it compared to the $9.75 the Hancock Observatory will charge to go up to the 94th floor
• Aston Martin DB9 outside the Hyatt
• Dinner at Dublin’s Pub

Saturday, May 21, 2005

• Tickets to the Chicago White Sox vs. Chicago Cubs at historic Wrigley Field: free
• Deep dish Chicago pizza at Pizano’s Pizza and Pasta: $10
• Forgetting to take your camera to Wrigleyville: priceless

Sunday, May 22, 2005

• Ride down south to Hyde Park and the Frank Lloyd Wright Robie House
• Wandered through Millenium Park
• Frank Gehry’s Millenium Park Music Pavillion
• Watched the Crown Fountain spit water on people
• Drinks at the beach during sunset

Monday, May 23, 2005

• Head up to the Sears tower skydeck
• Picasso’s Untitled Sculpture
• Take the [El] back to O’Hare
• Watch the fire at O’Hare
• Arrive back in Dulles.
• Mother nature decides to dump rain and fog on Virginia

SecFilterSelective "HTTP_REFERER" "the-newest-member-of-the-sexagenarian-club" "allow"

Thursday, May 19 - Sunday, May 22, 2005

The Ultimate Plus

Indulge in a unique immersion package of intimate Wright experiences. In addition to the previous four Wright Plus events, enjoy Exclusively Wright Dinners on Saturday, May 21 at 7 pm. The exclusive event combines a magical Frank Lloyd Wright space and the exquisite cuisine of an acclaimed chef. The offerings of Wright-designed venues and chefs are: Avery Coonley House (1907), chef Michael Pivoney (Signature Room, Chicago); Harry S. Adams House (1913), chef Denise Norton (Flavour Cooking School, Forest Park); Avery Coonley Playhouse (1912), James Boardman (Lloyd’s Chicago); and Hills-DeCaro House (1906), chef Steven Chiappetti (Cafe Le Coq, Oak Park). Limited number of guests per home.

The Ultimate Plus Package: $1500 per person

Exclusively Wright Dinner only: $1250 per person

Your tax refund is scheduled to be mailed on April 29, 2005. If you do not receive the refund by May 27, 2005, please contact us again. We are unable to take any action until then.

Can someone explain exactly how they can schedule a date to mail my refund over a week in advance, but not send it out until then? If it’s already been processed, shouldn’t the Treasury cut a check and give me my money back? It only seems fair that since they’ve been collecting interest on it since I earned it, that I should get it back once I’ve told them how much they’ve overcharged me.

After over 2 years of pestering from my mom and I, my dad finally gave in and traded in the 11 year old barge for a more yacht like Acura RL. As you can see, its a beautiful car, and a blast to drive (although its still in the “break in” period). Enjoy the new car Dad, you deserve it.

In another show of how much GM just doesn’t get it, they have decided to add GM badges to all of their cars (Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Hummer, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Saab, Saturn) to show that despite all attempts to not suck, they just can’t escape the black hole (or should that be red). I think my mom may have taken her car company killing to a new level recently. The deceased Eagle (Chrysler) has since merged with Mercedes (Daimler-Benz) who are having continuous quality issues. With her Oldsmobile purchase 6 years ago, she killed off the second oldest surviving auto marque in the world, after only Daimler. Never one to rest on her laurels, she stepped it up a notch and has decided to take down all of GM. GM stock has dropped over 1/3 in the past year, with no end in sight.

I think its time to start persuading Mom to trade in the Oldsmobile for a nice TL to complete the Acura family set.

• Dwell - Architecture and Design
• Wired - Technology
• FastCompany - Technology and Business
• Inc. - Small business
• Business Week - General business

Clocky will wander around my room until I can find the evil sound and step on it to go back to bed. Remember, my quarter bday is coming!

Karwoski’s teachers grade papers by giving examples of better answers for those students who make mistakes. But that approach meant the kids often found their work covered in red, the color that teachers long have used to grade work.

Parents objected.

Maybe I’m blowing this out of proportion, but I think this signifies a much bigger problem with students and parents today, no one wants to take responsibility for their errors and take the opportunity to learn from them. Instead, they’d much rather complain about having their feelings hurt because they didn’t study. Now parents won’t have to worry about being offended when signing their kids’ failed tests with a big red F, instead it will be sparkly purple with little hearts and stars showing that even though your child showed up to class, they couldn’t answer more than ~70% correct. That will definitely encourage them. (Oh, and if I had never learned from my mistakes, I would have spelled that definately, which of course is WRONG!!!) If teachers are taking their time to give examples of the correct answer(s), use the occasion to better yourself/child and be glad you live in a school district where the teachers are, what’s the word for it, teaching! Why don’t you take the time to sit down with your child and help them out with their homework instead of going to complain to the school board.

Hell, I sound like a bitter old man, and I’ve only been out of school for 11 months, or maybe it was the way I was raised. Thanks Mom and Dad.

A year ago, I had just been offered a job, was in Daytona Beach, Florida for spring break, was reading Oracle Night by Paul Auster, and listening to Appleseed Cast. Now I’m working said job, reading Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, and listening to Christopher O’Riley playing Radiohead on the piano. At least I still get a spring break with my grad student friends.

See ya in a week, hopefully with tons of new pictures. Now that I’ve finished packing everything into one carry-on, it’s time for my 3 hours of sleep until I have to get up.

Blogs are not a person2person tool. Posting on a blog is a person -> audience tool where the audience can choose to listen and chime back.

I believe this is the epitome of why there is such a buzz about blogs, and defines the direction in which they will continue to expand.

Push-Technology

Almost a decade ago there was a company that created quite a stir in the online arena by the name of PointCast. PointCast was a client application that you ran on your computer, selected your news sources, and the PointCast servers would “push”. This was the beginning of push-technology. You could get stock quotes, business news, magazine articles, from sources that joined up with PointCast. This all seemed to be a precursor to the dot-com boom, but PointCast fell victim to the boom as well.

When Push Comes To Shove, Push Loses

What does a burnt out dot-com like PointCast have to do with weblogs? It is proof that the free-market works.

Proprietary push technology has been replaced by good old fashioned pull-technology (HTTP GET) in the form of client syndication. The syndication formats themselves provide freedom of choice, RSS and atom each with different levels of features that content providers can choose to implement.

These formats are not mutually exclusive, there are no signed contracts restricting content providers from only providing one syndication feed, they can provide either or both.

Jamie Zawinski (of Netscape fame) once stated:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

This will soon be true for RSS and atom. We will see syndication integration into email clients, web browsers, text editors, coffee makers, etc.

Weblog tools such as WordPress and MovableType have made publishing not only web content, but have also made syndicated content instantly available. (See Rebecca Bloods’ weblog history for more background) Weblogs have become big business, with Google acquiring Blogger, Microsoft creating Spaces, and SixApart acquiring LiveJournal. All of the weblog tools continue to fight for marketshare.

Business Impact

How do weblogs fit into the corporate technology structure? As Alex stated, email covers person to person communication. Email can also extend to cover person to distribution list. However, this gray area may be better suited for a tool that has flexibility. Think about all the distribution lists you’re on. There’s one for your team, one for your project, one for your sub-project group, one for the system administrators, one for each of the functional teams, and so on. Now what if you send out an email to your team members, then later a person from another team needs that information? Someone has to dig through their archives and find the email thread and forward it along hoping that all the pertinent information is included.

Internal weblogs simplify this situation. Employees can post short blurbs, links, and articles for all other interested employees. Frequently asked questions can be answered with a simple link to an existing weblog post. In depth conversations can be retained with the original information, and links to new relevant information added as necessary. Information is only an intranet search away, solved by a rack server Google will gladly sell you.

Now we begin to see why companies like Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and Google are so interested in weblogs. They are all interested in spreading information faster and more effectively. Some have taken towards marketing, while others are targeting developers, and other have spread the spectrum. As we see how information can be spread throughout the world, we can imagine how it can be spread inside a corporate environment.

Microsoft has Scoble to spread all sorts of marketing information. They also have their MSDN blogs to spread developer info. Sun has their employee blogs available externally, and encourages other employees such as Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML. CIO Jonathan Schwartz has his space for spreading the Sun gospel. IBM isn’t about to miss out either with their developerWorks blogs, Mark Pilgrim, and Sam Ruby, although they don’t have as many externally available weblogs as Sun. Yahoo! has embraced RSS with their My Yahoo! customization. They also have a resident tech blogger in Jeremy Zawodny. The search team has its own place for all things search related. Google is almost lagging behind everyone else in the external blog game. They have the official Google blog which merely serves as a PR soapbox for their latest lab experiment, such as the amazing maps. Ebay has made an attempt to jump on the wagon with their founder Pierre Omidyar’s blog, but haven’t updated in forever. You might note one big tech company missing from this list, Apple. Their notorious secrecy may be one reason they have yet to really embrace the weblog world. The upcoming version of Mac OS X Server will come with Blojsom to provide a one click weblog server, and the next Safari browser will integrate RSS feeds. We’ll see if they continue to play catch-up to the rest of the weblog world.

These are only some of the externally available resources, there are no doubt many internal sources for each of these companies.

Also, don’t miss N.A.D.D., the management glossary for decipering business conversations, and incrementalists vs. completionists.

There are a ton of posts and articles to read. Definitely worth the time check out.