I have recently started to run a stats program on this little piece of personal paradise. Among my favorite stats are the listings of what people were searching for when they found this site. Here are some of my favorites from the past month of February:

* picture of kissing horses
* making bagels, bialis
* manly stroller
* maybe move "bachelor party" montreal criminal record
* montreal full contact lap dance
* kosher dunkin donuts also serves bacon
* what's the heaviest fish tank in upstairs apartment
* x-ray condensor microphone airport
* playboy collector cards january prototype
* pregnant amanda hearst
* why stripper like asian man

I have some basic answers to the open questions that these suggest.

1. The heaviest fish tank in an upstairs apartment is 2000 lbs. I wouldn't recommend anything over a ton because your floors probably won't support it.

2. Strippers like Asian men because they are more polite than other men and they tip well.

3. Dunkin Donuts is not a kosher bakery but you can purchase kosher milk there from Garelick Farms in those chug containers.

4. Horses do not kiss. Anything that looks like a kiss is anthropomorphosing the horses. They do have long tongues though.

5. If you have a criminal record in the US then you should probably have your bachelor party in a foreign country. That way you can have a criminal record in more than one country after you go wild after a crazy night of drinking. Montreal as a city doesn't officially sanction or look to attract criminal bachelor parties. You also might be interested in watching the movie Very Bad Things.

6. I've found that the strollers that have real tires look more manly. The colors should also avoid pinks and light greens. But the only real way to appear manly with a stroller is to wear a wife-beater t-shirt and roll your baby around in a shopping basket.

7. The secret to making both bagels and bialis is that you boil them before baking them. Who would have thought of boiling a bread product but someone thought of it and it tastes pretty good with cream cheese.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

While this is still not very cool because I haven't added any interactivity to it yet so that people can do fun things by interacting with the photos but I now have a database driven flash file that is pulling each image using an XML file generated in PHP to query a database and the database can be loaded one directory at a time by running a PHP script on any directory of thumbnails (provided it is in the same base path - bimages in my case). Next I'll try adding some menus and a way to look at the larger version of the thumbnail.

The code is as follows:

Flash
PHP code

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I am not a tidy person. I have always strived to justify my general lack of interest in the order of things around me as a symptom associated with being a forgetful professor who is always locked into big ideas but can’t see the piles of garbage that get in the way. But I decided not to become a professor when I left college so I have little to use as an excuse save that I have realized over time that I am mostly a lazy person. Among the odd compensations for this in my life is to have a wife who is much neater than me who keeps my world in order as I try to increase the general chaos in my world. It is a good match for us in the regard that she is more obsessive compulsive and I take a laissez faire approach to living. Sarah worries and I keep her calm. I forget to take out the garbage and she lets me know when it is garbage day.

This weekend we started our search for a new location to habitate with some of the first realistic thoughts being put into where we might live if we were to grow out of this location in Brookline. We are not thinking that we need to migrate immediately given that Madeline still can’t do a full roll over and she has no siblings. But we know that once baby number two or three is born it is going to be impossible to roam about in two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a kitchen that is 50% occupied by a washer and dryer. The baby seating and rocking items that are growing out of the floor like mushrooms including a bouncy seat, swing, gyminee, car seat, high chair, rocking chairs, and a little foam seat will only increase in their coverage until we are in a fungal forest of jr. seating objects. So for now we figure it is only a matter of time somewhere between two years and eight before we will feel like we are old folks living in a shoe.

So we went to a private viewing of a condo on Saturday morning that as previously mentioned costs way more than we would ever have considered spending. Sarah’s initial rationale for this was to see what lots of money would get you and whether it would be worth it. Our sincere hope was to find that rich people live poor loveless miserable lives epitomized by their miserly living quarters that are so rank with the stain of opulence that it would cast a dark pall over the lives of any one to move into such a space. We also thought maybe that a more expensive location would be just another sham where people have figured out how to get your money by installing a bigger refrigerator or painting the walls with a secret green the color of wintergreen leaves.

So we went for our private viewing with a hope that we would be disappointed with the parking, the home, the view, the street noise, the neighbors, or the nasty restrictive condo rules. The expensive place we looked at unfortunately had a layout that looked the way a condo that I would like to live in would. It was about 2500 square feet on one floor laid out with a large kitchen, two open rooms in the front. The children’s bedrooms were perfectly children sized. A room to watch television in was cozy looking. They had a small room for a guest, a nanny, or a visiting parent sleeping the night. The dining room was just the right size for a dining room table and next to the kitchen where one belongs. The floors were a nice quality wood and I felt very at home looking at the closet in the entranceway hiding games like Monopoly, Scrabble, and Sorry. The master bedroom had an attached bathroom with a whirlpool tub with jets. They had a tandem parking space deeded with the location.

This condo that we were looking at looked like the kind of place that adults live in and I was struck afterwards about how the place we are living in today still has the feel of a place that a young sloppy bachelor might live in with his girlfriend. I believe that this feeling is the main reason for not going out to look at other people’s homes.

Beyond just being laid out well it was decked out in all of the glory of a home that is looking to be sold. The realtors have special staging activities that they do to move perfect looking furniture, nice paintings, thoughtful books, and decorate things to look like you would want to live there. For the home, the private viewing is the first impression, the first date, the immaculate ideal coming out party where the home can show how beautiful she really could be if someone let her look that good. And it had these teasing qualities like that it was marked down 20% from the initial offering because it hadn’t sold at the higher price that always makes me interested even if the marked down price is as astronomical as the original price.

So we had trouble sleeping last night and spent time looking at the site Zillow, a map system that shows the price of your neighbors properties with good accuracy. It is almost as amazing as looking at Google Earth to see aerial views of neighborhoods with price tags on each property. We discovered things like – It is really more expensive to buy anything in Brookline than in Newton and Bedford. So we have gotten nice and confused about what we are looking for.

Today we went out and looked at two more locations, both more in the price range of someone who isn’t a robber baron, and our general reaction was that they both were inferior to the place we saw on Saturday. We couldn’t imagine how anyone could live in these other poorly laid out hovels in comparison to this one really nice looking place that we saw yesterday. The place where every item was in the right spot including the girls bunk beds in their room painted pink and the curtains nicely matching the wallpaper or paint in each room.

So as I was about to go to play with a computer or two as I am apt to do I looked around at the piles of junk that have accumulated on the dresser by the bed, clothing on the floor, the papers and magazines on the coffee table, computer desk, and started compulsively neatening and cleaning things up to try to at least make the best of where we are and try to live a little more like the imaginary people living in that condo yesterday who had everything looking just perfect.

Posted by Dan Housman at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On Friday night Sarah had made plans to do a girls night out at 28 degrees in Boston leaving me with Madeline. So I decided the night was a perfect time to call in some reinforcements and had Dave and Zoe come over for dinner. Since Lineage, the replacement for Lucy’s opened last week I scheduled us to go out to eat there to check out the new menu at a bistro. Stepanie happened to be in the neighborhood to do her taxes so as Sarah was waiting for her cab expecting the buzzer to call her out for her girls night out people kept arriving at the door. I assured her that the 10 kegs being delivered were not for a party while she was out and she was off for her night out and we were off for a walk around the corner to scout the new cuisine.

I am happy to report that my first experience with Lineage was a positive one. There was ample seating area for Madeline even if we had to park her in the route that the wait staff walk through from the kitchen to the dining area while we waited to be seated. Madeline was happy the whole time falling asleep after fifteen minutes into the wait. We ordered a number of appetizers including tuna tartare, a pizza with porcini mushrooms and truffle oil, goat cheese/mesclun salad with walnuts, and cod cheeks in a sauce that had mini-onions and raisins. I would highly recommend any of the appetizers but I was most surprised by the tomato sauce that the cod cheeks were in. It was tastier than most sauces.
For the main course we split two entrees, a perfectly cooked medium rare steak with cheesy mashed potatoes and those thin string beans that you usually get at a wedding. The steak came with an excellent mushroom sauce. We also got the gnocchi with mushrooms and it was also very interesting with high quality mushrooms in it and a great consistency for the sauce. They offer the gnocchi for about twice the price with lobster but we abstained. Our wine was a Multepulciano that went well with the food. Since we had left room for desert we ordered the chocolate mousse and Pancetta with blood orange sauce and caramel. Both were quite good. I thought the ’smores were a bit of a silly idea for six bucks but some people probably have a different response to the idea of getting a ‘smore. In general I think that Lineage on Harvard street is as good of a bistro as the Washington Tavern and has the advantage of ample dining space and convenience to a nook in Coolidge Corner.

At dinner Dave mentioned that he had found a great Turkish diner tucked away on the street that the police station is on. I had never thought to go there before and had been whining plenty about the lack of a good diner near city hall. Martin’s doesn’t really cut it because it is very cramped and Sarah has some bad memories of morning sickness there. The Turkish place is called something like family diner and had an interesting mix of ethnic Turkish food and standard American style diner fare. I ordered a Turkish breakfast as a mystery foreign food that turned out to be was a sub-par Cobb salad like thing but with Turkish food. It basically was a collection of bread, cheese, feta, cucumbers, and olives with some jam. But Sarah and Amanda ordered eggs that looked like they were satisfactory (despite the mushrooms in Sarah’s omelette coming from a can). It isn’t really a sit-down diner set-up but operates close enough to the Paramount’s breakfast scenario without the big lines and scramble for seats that it is still a very good option.

Having sampled some more foreign cuisines we returned to our home at Zaftigs this morning to find in shock that Zaftigs has taken down the DannyO art that had been there since I can first remember going to Zaftigs. They even took down the painting of a Zaftig. I will miss the art that was there before since I always secretly wanted to get rich and buy the collages of the car, the girl, or the bar mitzvah. All is not lost at Zaftigs for artwork. They replaced the older, large scale, DannyO art with new smaller items by DannyO including a cute series of cars that would look amazing in any child’s room and one of the prudential building at night. I tried to determine what had happened by inquiring with our waitress but she was unable to adequately explain where the older pieces went. She made it seem like all of the pictures in Zaftigs were for sale with a price tag and that DannyO had decided to rotate them. But it wasn’t clear if Zaftigs owned the paintings or the artist owned them or DannyO owned Zaftigs. We also didn’t receive our standard bagel chips with olive sour cream spread which could be an unfortunate indication that Zaftigs has jumped the shark.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

At the end of a Thursday I was already feeling a little run down after finding nothing of interest at Hollywood Video in the new releases. They are still holding out on “The Man”. Any movie with Eugene Levy is bound to have some positive moments. I had decided to make a quick run over to Stop and Shop to grab some chicken to broil for our standard Ceasar salad. The shopping was quick and fine including some vindication of our tastes given that they have finally stocked both Newman’s Own Limeade and French Vanilla Yoplait after multiple fruitless incidents searching in the dairy section. When, haggard, I arrived at the checkout counter I picked a line that was so short that I could just place my items onto the conveyer belt to have them conveyed down to the nice cashier sitting awaiting them. I hadn’t researched before taking 8 individual Yoplaits onto the belt that the person currently interacting with the cashier was a type 1 supermarket line delaying disaster.

The woman ahead of me in line was probably 80 years old. As I looked over the latest periodicals to learn about key incidents like the break-up between Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes or the secret meeting between Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey I noticed that the nice old lady in front of me was disputing a charge from the items rung-up in the register. Unfortunately she was having trouble, due to advanced degeneration of her eyesight, reading the monitor designed to allow you to read your receipt before it is published. So after she argued for a few minutes that she couldn’t read it another cashier suggested to my poor cashier to print out the receipt so that she could read it in print. He did so and she then burst out with the accusation that she had been overcharged for apple sauce. The apple sauce had been advertised at 10 for 10 dollars or one dollar per jar and it had rung-up as $1.45. The wonderful woman in front of me demanded a reason why the amount was different than her expectations. The cashier referred her to the manager who normally sits behind the counter where lottery tickets are sold but who was probably hanging out with the butcher in the deli area talking about frozen shrimp. So a bagger girl who looked to be about twelve ran to the customer service area, grabbed a circular, and let the woman complaining about the cost of apple sauce know that the problem was that the 15 oz. Size of Stop and Shop apple sauce is the one that is on sale and not the 25 oz. Size that the lady had placed in her cart.

The 12 year old girl didn’t realize that antagonizing the lady by pointing at the circular and huffing with an aloof attitude wasn’t going to appease an angry woman insistent on fixing the system so the lady become more infuriated rather than less infuriated and demanded to have the apple sauce stricken from her cart and order. The cashier complied and he offered her a new receipt without the apple sauce which she then studied to ensure that no hancky-panky had occurred from the Stop and Shop corporation trying to steal from her through bait and switch signage. She then finally managed to get the manager paged and the manager came over and committed to check out whether the signage was misleading on the apple sauce or if it was actually the woman’s mistake.

Since she had a tab to pay and a set of groceries to bag she decided to complete the transaction sans apple sauce on principle. The bill came out to $13.87. Her response was to write a check for $33.87 and to obtain a cash back of $20.00. While she was slowly writing out this check she then complained that customers don’t have all day to spend at the supermarket. This moment was when I realized that my thousand hours of zen relaxation training had paid off as I looked over at the frustrated cashier and didn’t even laugh.

So finally I was rung-up with my yogurt, chicken tenders, and limeade after about twenty minutes of watching the Stop and Shop drama. The cashier was highly apologetic about how patient I was and I mentioned to him compassionately that we will all get old some day. I wheeled my small cart full of booty out of Stop and Shop and on my way out I passed the woman and the customer service manager. The manager was placing a 25 oz. jar of Stop and Shop brand apple sauce, valued at $1.45 into the old lady’s cart and telling her that the mistake was theirs because of the mix-up of the signage around the apple sauce sale. I wheeled my cart out to the lot, drove home, ate a French Vanilla yogurt, drank some Newman’s own limeade with seltzer, ate some chicken Ceasar salad with freshly broiled chicken, and watched “The Sweetest Thing”, with Sarah as Madeline slept – But I had a craving for potato pancakes with about 25 oz. of apple sauce.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In my reading of Fear and Loathing in America my interest in Hunter’s letters increased significantly as he approached the dates that covered writing and publishing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. F&L in America gives plenty of references to Hunter doing plenty of interesting drugs including his firm stance that a part of his candidacy for Sheriff of Aspen was that he would continue to do mescaline on a regular basis. But the volume of mind-altering substances referred to in F&L in Las Vegas was incredible. On the back of the Las Vegas book it summarizes the basic premise that a gonzo journalist and his lawyer had a crazy adventure in Vegas that the average traveler out on a bender could only look at with awe as a religious achievement to bent living:

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…. Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge…”

When I first met Sarah two weeks after we had met I had a business meeting in California that took me through Las Vegas on a flight where I met her for some fun in Vegas. We sat by the pool at the Excalibur, sipping drinks and listening to the dim sound of the repetitive Disney style musac in the background, and I read F&L in Las Vegas to Sarah using my best impression of Johnny Depp in the movie who was probably doing his best impression of Hunter himself.

At night we went out to Nephrotite’s lounge in the Luxor tower and drank until about 2 am although we were having trouble getting drunk because of the extra oxygen pumped into the air to keep people from falling asleep while gambling. We left Vegas on a Sunday night skipping our original flight because we were busy playing black jack and drinking free booze on the floor of the MGM Grand which we learned was originally designed to resemble the emerald palace from the Wizard of Oz complete with the yellow markings on the rugs guiding drunken gamblers to the tables to represent the yellow brick road.

I don’t owe the Fear and Loathing book anything with regards to having a continued long term relationship with Sarah. But it is something like a favorite song that I can get a little sentimental about to remember the care free and more wild state of mind I was in when we first met. It's only buddy in the first books that Sarah and I read is Tom Robbin's 'Still Life With Woodpecker, "yumm", that I loaned Sarah because she is a red head.

While Hunter’s Vegas story as a whole smells of hyperbole, and Hunter helps because his style is always hyperbolic – like when he thought the only way to get rid of a girl was to feed her to the lizards in the desert - the amazing thing to learn in F&L in America is that by his own admission: Thompson wasn’t on drugs while working on F&L in Las Vegas.

He wrote in a letter to his publisher – “The only thing that vaguely alarmed me about your letter was your statement to wit: ‘You know it was absolutely clear to me reading Las Vegas that you were not on drugs…’ This is true, but what alarms me is that Vegas I was very conscious attempt to simulate a drug freak out – which is always difficult, but in reading over I still find it depressingly close to the truth I was trying to create.”

So while this isn’t as big of a discovery as the guy who dragged Oprah through the muck with a thousand little pieces I did find it interesting that Hunter, one of the more interesting authors, generally wrote sober even if he did get twisted from time to time.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Sunday Sarah and I were returning from our morning brunch at Eastern Standard with Matt B. and the Falkoffs when we saw a sign for an Open House pointing down a side street off of Beacon. Since we have been eyeing the living spaces that everyone else lives in and it was only near the end of the daily house tour schedule at 3PM we decided to drop-in and warm the baby up. We have been thinking about our future need to switch nests to accommodate more of the little tykes in the coming years and now that we are out and about with Madeline we figured it couldn’t hurt to begin looking two or three years before it becomes necessary to move. The people at the Open House were the owners although it was an awkward scene with an ex-husband, his ex-wife, and their child, an eight year old boy, showing the condominium to us. The boy had made fresh chocolate chip cookies to demonstrate the fine craftsmanship of the kitchen and modern appliances recently installed. The ex-husband was an electrician so the condo was wired with audio cable for speakers throughout and he had also installed lighting in a ceiling.

It is hard not to look at someone else’s perfectly staged living space and think to yourself – wow why can’t I live like this. Just seeing some of the appurtenances of their living space made me want to improve our little world. Some of the things that they had were fixable in our world. Like they have a wooden block cut-out of their son’s name on the door for the child painted creatively. We could make one of those for Madeline’s room. The modern stove would be a big step up for us since our attempt to make cookies last night wasn’t quite as successful with the stove where I first need to light it from below and then it doesn’t have very even heating. The egg timer we used didn’t alert me in time before I burned the bottoms of the cookies.

But some things just can’t be changed where we are living. We only have one bathroom and it would take a massive reconstruction to add a second one. We aren’t going to be able to install that working wood fireplace that was running in their dining room. We aren’t going to be having a dining room either since we only have two bedrooms and a living room. And even if we do choose to put a Weber grille in the open courtyard of the condo or smuggle one onto the roof we still won’t have a porch in the back where we can grille a steak, burger, sausages, or vegetarian tofu medley in the summer.

So I think it was good to see how other people live. We aren’t going to be putting a bid on the $650K condo since it actually is not much bigger than our space and we weren’t serious about moving just yet. On Sunday Sarah has already scheduled us to have a private viewing of a condo that costs $970K and is twice the size of our place just down the street on St. Paul. We also are unlikely to want to purchase that but we do want to know what that kind of money will get you in this neighborhood of ours.

Maybe I should put a grill in the back yard this summer?

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night we had three different disaster messes, each the responsibility of a separate family member. Sarah began the evening while we were watching the latest episode of Lost by knocking over a full glass of cranberry juice and soda in the bedroom. The spill reached onto my Fear and Loathing in America book staining a good chunk of the pages red. So I mopped the juice down with half a roll of paper towels and we continued our evening. After this I decided to play airplane with Madeline and she was happily flying above me when she launched a full stomach full of half digested milk onto my lap. The results looked like this:

Since I was feeling quite smug about not really having been responsible for the first few accidents of the evening during a break from watching the movie, The Chumscrubber (heavily influenced by Donnie Darko but not as good), I went to get some leftover Bertucci's pizza and walked over to Sarah while she was feeding Madeline in the baby's room. I had figured that the pizza would be plenty stable since it was cold and leftovers. But the pizza disagreed with me and started dropping spatters of tomatoes and tomatoe sauce onto the white rug in Madeline's room.

So last night we proved that we are a schmutzy family with the genetics of the character Pig Pen from Peanuts in case anyone wanted to map them.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was playing with Flash to see if I could make a simple photo album that you load images from pre-existing URLs on my web site. For now it loads them from an array of items that I put into the Flash file itself but I could take it a step further and have it get the array from a database on the web server through an XML file output through PHP and MySQL or something like that. But for now it hopefully should work. One challenge with it on my machine was that it triggers some security garbage because it is loading the images to the desktop. But here it is in raw first draft form...

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday was Valentine's day. As a part of a longstanding policy of desynchronizing from the world of people trying to mark-up products Sarah and I have decided to celebrate Valentine's Day the other 364 days of the year by being generally decent to one another and kissing whenever people aren't looking.

As a matter of course I recently learned from Tom Robbins the strange origin of kissing. Apparently kissing wasn't invented until recently in history. Robbins wrote in Wild Ducks Flying Backwards, "kissing, as we know it, was invented by medieval knights for the utilitarian purpose of determining whether their wives had been tapping the mead barrel while the knights were away on the crusades. If history is accurate for once, the kiss began as an osculatory wire tap or oral snoop, a kind of alcoholic chastity belt, after the fact."

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Having been assigned to promote the podcast, episode one of Entropy is live today, I went to the itunes web site to register it with them. What I noticed were all of the free podcasts and video podcasts already available for free through itunes. I only had time to briefly look at a video broadcast of a tiki bar with a doctor, another guy, and a woman talking about things that was not interesting enough to keep my attention for more than twenty seconds. But I do believe there is something to be said for the medium. I saw a glimmer of the tournament starting to come alive. With few barriers to publishing video content the long tail of publishing is rushing to fill the many gaps left open by the mainstream media. We'll soon be able to find large chunks of niche items and creative productions straight from every city. Our local improv troupes will be recording their sessions and putting their funniest bits up for viewing, the street musicians will broadcast semi-live from Porter Square, odd ducks will overdub old porn movies in Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (MST3K) style. Any wacky concept or new sub-culture has a chance to go pop in the big tournament of Internet media.

I haven't figured out who will make money at it yet but my best guess is to back the standard winner of any tournament - the promoters and the ones running the tournament themselves. If it's itunes - power to them. If it's those Allaire brothers then so be it. I for one plan to be one of those poor shmoes contributing as best I can at the bottom of the heap in the widest stretch of the pyramid and will be loving every minute of making media that only the the bold and brave with iron visual cortexes and ears of steel will attempt to imbibe.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Note to my mom...

I was reading the latest Tom Robbin’s book (Wild Ducks Flying Backwards). I thought you’d find this interesting.

“Joseph Campbell is the world’s most foremost mythologist. Early in his long life, he combined Sir James George Frazer’s discovery that strikingly similar motifs show up in the folktales of all the world’s cultures, with Carl Jung’s notion that myths are metaphors created to illuminate human experience. Thus, doubly inspired, Campbell became a maverick scholar, his books and lectures often scorned by academicians but adored by poets, painters, and enlightened psychoanalysts. His genius was not so much in his exhaustive scholarship, however, as in his intuitive recollection of the importance and relevance of myth to every human soul.”

According to Robbins in 1988 there was a six-part series entitled Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth released by PBS for television after Campbell died in that year. It sounded quite interesting if it is possible to find it through a movie rental service.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I spent Sunday trying to recover from Friday night. I am sorry to say that I didn't have a two day hangover from some go crazy binge of alcohol and partying in the city. Nope - I was witness to Madeline pulling her first all nighter. She wasn't necessarily angry all night long but she kept getting fussy and bored and would cry without constant paternal or maternal entertainment. So throughout the night I would sit with her and attempt to provide this entertainment in the form of holding a blue rhinoceros in front of her, holding and rocking, playing with the settings on the many battery operated sleep inducing toys that are all running low on batteries. So by Sunday morning I was ready for a full day of sleep given that we were out and about on Saturday. But Madeline also was happy to make it clear on Sunday that she is not ready for Sunday morning cartoons and prefers that human form to provide proper activities to keep her calm.

So I finally have succumbed to a weary feeling of lack of sleep due to having an infant of my own. We had been proud of ourselves and tried to hide that Madeline was sleeping well and that we had found good tricks like breastfeeding in bed to get us sleep in the first few weeks but whatever consistency we think we can create with a 7:30 PM sleep schedule Madeline can easily break through with a whopper of an all night party on a Friday night.

So I have decided that having an infant of your very own can often be most like driving on a long cross-country driving trip. I'm not talking about a trip where you get to Montreal after six hours and cut loose once you get there. I am talking about a trip where you are driving at 11PM at night and you are lost on the highway two hours away from your hotel. I am talking about a trip where you have to get from Tijuana to Seattle in four days and you can stop only long enough to egg Starbucks headquarters before a four day drive to pick-up some cowboy boots in Austin Texas. The trouble is that you can't take your hands off of the wheel for long. Someone is always responsible for making sure that the baby doesn't starve, burn, cut, freeze, fall, drown, suffocate, dehydrate, stain, bruise, scratch, rash, defenstrate, wither, or bore.

Any attempt to do otherwise will land you, your wife, your parents, and the baby in a fit of crying so loud and piercing that neighbors will explode the building with TNT with you and them in it in order to make it stop. You can try to type or think or make a phone call but it won't work. The baby is in charge and you need to concede defeat and start providing some entertainment or milk. Just keep your hands supporting her head and keep driving all night long. Then maybe you can catch a few winks while your wife lets her wrap her hand around a finger for a few hours on Sunday afternoon.

Posted by Dan Housman at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In an odd twist of fate Joe Adler from my AEPi fraternity days wrote a book on Baseball hacks. I have a copy of it near Madeline's crib but thus far reading from it has not been satisfactory for putting Madeline to sleep. She is a fan of the page with Chernoff faces on it (pg. 188) although I believe that Joe made a special effort to make the Boston Redsox look more evil than the New York Yankees bassed on his personal bias. At a minimum that page could be used for creating a new cartoon series about each baseball team. Toronto and Tampa Bay both look like worried midgets, Anaheim looks like a chinese coolie, and Cleveland is the only team that really looks like a human but looks mostly like A Rod. The book is quite good not just for baseball fans but also for some fun exercises in statistics that could be used to help president Bush to get kids more interested in math and science through the guise of baseball and gambling.

Joe was interviewed about his book on NPR and it can be found temporarily at Future Tense and should be archived at the February 13th episode page.

Posted by Dan Housman at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jeremy while obsessing about the quality of the sound and focusing all of his brain cells not dedicated to filtering the Internet dating scene has tasked me with figuring out how to properly enclose and promote the revival of our college radio show in the form of a podcast. The initial test can be found on a blogger blog called Entropy and packaged as an RSS feed using Feedburner.

Among the interesting things that I found for promoting the podcast was the Podzinger site. It is a search engine that indexes podcasts into text and then allows you to search for the content and load the section of the podcast that raised your search results. At first glance this appears to be some incredible technology. What I found interesting about it given that I have been doing some research into the speech to text world is that Podzinger is a BBN technology. Now for those people who are unfamiliar with BBN, they were a big time government contractor building among many things the original infrastructure for the Arpanet, the government’s private predecessor to the public Internet. One speech to text expert had mentioned to me that BBN had a large contract in the 80s building speech to text for the government, probably the NSA, in order to filter international telephone calls. The system would convert International conversations to text and then identify conversations that might be worth listening deeper into for national security. If BBN has been working on this technology since the ‘80s for Uncle Sam then they probably are going to be getting to the point by now where they are good enough at it to really recognize what it happening when people are talking. They might even be better at it than the Microsoft Speech to Text engine.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I probably shouldn't be angry with Google since everything they offer is free but today they ticked me off twice because of their free but only available to certain special user policies. My basic response is that if they want to have free services available only to some people then I should be one of them... or I will do mean things to them like write that they are doing evil things with respect to Gmail and Google Analytics.

They offer a free analytics service but you need a special invitation code to get into it and you can only use Gmail with a different invitation code. In order to test a desktop search feature I needed a gmail account but I couldn't get one because they aren't freely available.

"You cannot log into Gmail using your Google Account username and password. Gmail is in a limited test period and is only available to a small number of people who are helping test and improve the service before it is made more widely available. If you have been asked to test Gmail and have not yet created a Gmail account, please click on the link in your invitation email."

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After a long day with only some scraps of crap to show for it after having a quite unproductive attempt to drive the company forward I am left at the end of the day humming to myself some of my favorite depressed and often suicidal (based on the deaths of a few folks on the list) song lyrics to cheer me up. Yeah. I am not one of those people who listens to crap by the Monkees when I’m in a crappy mood. I want to hear people in pain to make it clear that I’m not the only one out there feeling like I want to crawl into a cave and hide there until the aliens arrive.

‘And I … feel – cold as a razorblade, tight as a tourniquet, dry as a funeral drum.’ – Pink Floyd, One of My Turns

‘And you run and you run to catch-up with the sun but it’s sinking, racing around to come-up behind you again.’ – Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon?)

‘Thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes. I thought it was there for good so I never tried’ – Leonard Cohen, Famous Blue Raincoat

‘Everybody knows that the dice are loaded. Everybody knows that the game is fixed…Everybody knows that the good guys lost. That’s how it goes. Everybody knows.’ Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows

‘I’m wearing the shoe ‘till it fits and I’m calling it quits’ – Aimee Mann, Calling it quits

'It's not going to stop 'till you wise up. Not it's not going to stop - so just give up.' Aimee Mann, It's not going to stop

‘I’ll fake it through the day with some help of Johnny Walker Red. Send the poison rain down the drain to put bad thoughts in my head. Do you miss me? Do you miss misery, like you say you do?’ – Eliot Smith, Miss Misery

‘I see a red door and I want it painted black. No colors anymore I want them to turn black.’ – Rolling Stones, Paint it Black

‘But I haven’t seen Barbados. So I must get out of this.’ Tori Amos, Me and a Gun

‘I would gratefully appreciate it if you see him tell him I’m at the park with my girlfriend and please tell him Angela and I don’t want our two dollars back. Just him.‘ Hair, Frank Mills

‘I hurt myself today. I focus on the pain. The only thing that’s real’ – NIN, Hurt

‘This is the end, my only friend the end.’ The Doors, The End

‘I’m so ugly, but that’s okay, ‘cause so are you. We’ve broken our mirrors. Sunday morning is every day for all I care.’ Nirvana, Lithium

‘I see my light come shining from the west unto the east. Any day now, any day now, I shall be released’ Bob Dylan, I shall be released

‘In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade and he carries a reminder of every glove that laid him down and cut him till he cried out in his anger and his shame I am leaving, I am leaving but the fighter still remains.’ Simon and Garfunkle, The Boxer

'She lives with a broken man. A cracked polystyrene man. Who just crumbles and burns. He used to do surgery on girls in the eighties but gravity always wins...But I can't help the feeling I could blow through the ceiling if I just turn and run.'
Radiohead, Fake Plastic Trees

‘..don’t leave me…. all by myself’ Moby

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was good to see the Steelers win the Superbowl on Sunday. We had a little gathering in Newton but it wasn’t nearly as intense as the past few years with the Patriots in the big game. Before the game Sarah and I took a walk around Crystal Lake with Madeline. At one point on the lake just after getting off of Beacon street there is a cove where you can climb into the water. I have some good memories of that cove like the time that I went skinny dipping with Ami and Ilana after college and getting covered with leeches. It also was the site of the closest I ever came to getting arrested.

A friend and I were swimming in the late evening on a hot august day. A police officer spotted us swimming in the lake outside of the designated public swimming zone. He waved us in and then gave a long speech about how illegal it is to swim in the lake and went over the potential for it to go onto our permanent records and ruin our future lives. The officer then called my parents to let them know that I had been breaking the law. My father had a chuckle about it when he received the call since he is no fan of the policy that people can’t swim in lakes. I think the officer was just collecting every high school student in town into his little arrest book. I bumped into him at a wrestling meet a few years later and he bragged that he had every student in the high school in his book with the crimes they had committed. I challenged him because I thought I was enough of a goody-goody to be in his book. Sure enough he had me in the little notepad with the date and time of the lake swimming incident.

Sarah noticed a beautiful house across the street from where I had been stopped for swimming. I remember that house because it was Anna Rosenblum’s house. Her father was a famous sculptor and in 9th grade during French class I had developed a crush on my partner – Anna Rosenblum. We had gotten together to study, practice, write a sketch or something in the house. It had been the closest to a date with a girl that I had been on so I was flush with hormones, pheremones, and insane developmental illnesses. She was wearing a pair of 80’s pre-faded and pre-torn blue jeans. Due to an intense mixture of fear in all directions I panicked and pretended to hate Anna in front of my friends to avoid embarrassment. I then played a prank on her that roughly equated to providing an imaginary secret admirer. Since I was too chicken to actually be the secret admirer it was easier to make it into a mean prank than to be straightforward about it. The massive fear in all directions is the odd thing about being in 9th grade. You are afraid of girls, being unpopular, failing in school, disappointing your parents. It’s a scary time. You do very strange things that one would only expect to see in a bad teen movie. For this reason alone I am willing to believe any motivation for a character in a bad teen movie.

I have been thinking often about fear lately. Maybe it is because the US is so focused on these people called “terrorists”. Terror is the extreme of fear. But using fear to control behavior is nothing new. In marketing we don’t focus on what products can do but what pains the products can alleviate. People don’t buy things –five blade razors, luxury motor cars, political mantras, or enterprise software unless they are convinced that the purchase will alleviate a fear that has been nagging them for ages. So us marketing folks try to highlight the chronic pain that they or their organization is in and suggest the potential circles of hell that they will land in if they don’t purchase our product. Some people tend to think that only a dictatorship can be run on fear but a pure democratic capitalist society with everyone marketing their own personal messages of fear are bound to accumulate a large collection of fear. So do we really fear the terrorists because of the murderous crimes that they perpetrate or because of the media machine, politicians, and corporations have something to sell and the fear is the easiest way to get us to buy?

So just to return to the big marketing event - the Superbowl. We do get some football sugar to help the medicine go down. But the medicine this yaer is to buy cars that run on corn power. Somewhere hidden between the State of the Union and the Superbowl is some secret pact between the politicians, the farmers, and the automotive industry to give our American car manufacturers an edge. We're moving to corn power according to the Superbowl advertisements and it is coming too fast for the foreign car companies to make better cornmobiles. Since we control our own super economy we may as well take advantage of the monopoly by adjusting the scales. Maybe we can avoid some foreign wars this way. Isn't that the idea behind the cornmobile. Go daddy go!

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It isn't fair to expect the people in the speech to text division of Microsoft to translate what Madeline was saying. So instead Sarah and I spent some time telling it a story after I had trained it using the Aesop's fables and excerpt from some novel that it requested. After about 30 minutes of training here is some fabulous speech to text poetry (excerpted and mildly modified). We weren't stoned but I can imagine that this technology is something that stoned college students around the world can't wait to get their hands on.

Your own tax plan.com plan name is old and I see you will happen now to take a new price. But no tax man.com. I mean, I'm I've even had been now over taxed until you had not modified my idea, But I am affected by this . The reason they are used in the house defense plan is because it is the perfect tool. It is a list of rooms with the word and they can turn it into a real back door by the dozens. We were very well in hand and it comes up with very fine. I mean we may know that you can be one for when they heard that when I was a mime they said Mahlmann over a five. Call in the debate statements about moving the team.

"Send a mailto: to Debbie Ito so that I can tell myself that you fall in the hope that you can not need the old, We'll need what I'd had. You are now losing and used by the denied. No is the palace museum of art snow. He will not have seen us stopping this year and in the two we will have to support." said bill gates and no, I am two melons and I am buried in a lot while why did our lab travel at all but not been ranked. The lack of the line has done in and out of time a line of fire. Nineteen sumerian banks in an Airport issued by Dean was caught Mike. He is known to have been in an interview with the latest addition to the top. He gets to lead to what I know is the new beetle sex.

No high today for the mature are to now self-examine. It lacked but it did not involve your pitch. What I need I meet its even I'm going to come to you if you get anyone to visit to Rome. I will kill you and your children and you will be directed into stuffed animals. An even did not know how to top stop the cop who went to rock the stop. I said to the man if you don't file a tax.com then you may as well as read the error that will satisfy the Islamics to the the line. You have black citizens in alliance's and AOL in December!

Posted by Dan Housman at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Madeline was making it tricky to do work so I downloaded Microsoft's speech to text SDK and let her cry at it for about five minutes (She was crying already). While I thought she wanted milk this is what Bill Gates and his friends thought she was saying:

"the half and half-half of a long long long long a long-and-a long time and then than the than the shuttle a long and them know that the-road France homeland long and a LAN man in the a way that the fish and new go shows long long- long- and no one should and in long long if long- long and the fish in the hash the-envelope- will long and the who in the than in the Hirsch- and the -law that alone and will- I'm Noah Wyle sugarloaf on low-unless home loan. Who love them to use them home along long long long long and go home and fish and will have her know- long long long haul along on the show and then if only the home loan-only-E.-long and and the -the AM when he H., I have a half-moon wrong and the fish and loan/ and no although no long term warm- nation Heights/O. L. O. S. O. Morrow-one those low know a guy who now own home will long long-old and then long and then the than the wrong way and long- known them and the and the long time and then the and only that-that's no long long long long long- and long long long and and and and and and the long....."

Posted by Dan Housman at 01:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Madeline has reached some great milestones this week. The big thing is that she has started to become aware of things enough to manipulate them with her hands. The best example of this is that when she is in her swing or bouncy chair with a bunch of bead like toys on an arched piece of metal she will push them up and down as if she is using an abacus. This also extends to hanging objects like the birds and bees that are a part of most baby gyms and toys. She can now purposefully bat at them and often hits them to make them spin. She also responds with a lot of wonder at mirrors and is smiling more often when I dance above her while doing beat box style songs.

With Madeline getting more sophisticated we are preparing for the next phase of her life – college. Actually we are more preparing for when she can sit-up in a chair and eat. Oddly despite being able to sit-up in a chair and eat for over 30 years, neither Sarah or I have configured our lives to do this often in the apartment. We generally eat using the coffee table while watching the Family Guy or another DVD. But since we have an Italian Prima Poppa rocking high chair we wanted to be able to eat at the table with Madeline. So Sarah chose a nice high table to go with the high chair to install where our bookcase in the living room was. We picked-up the table on Friday and I assembled the high chair on Saturday. The high chair assembly wasn’t without some humor. It is possible to assemble it wrong. See below: Note the chair is a rocker!

BTW: I posted more photos of Madeline from the past few weeks this morning.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For those of you who live near Harvard Street you may have noticed the under new management sign for the kosher chinese restauant around the corner. I wish I had known that they were going to change from kosher Hunan style food to kosher Beijing style food so that I could have a kosher chinese food taste test. Instead I'll have to carve out some time to order out there to see what the big fuss about new management is all about.

In other news for Harvard street restaurants; Lucy's is no longer in business. I wasn't ever able to fully appreciate the Lucy's vibe. It was a little too upscale and chique for my taste but without the real benefit. The location is going to be replaced by an actual replacement restaurant unlike the Captain's Quarter that became an MRI imaging center. I have a couple pieces of advice for the new owners for the property that once was Lucy's.

Suggestion 1 - Don't serve tofu bacon. I accidentally ordered tofu bacon at Lucy's and I would have been better off going to Stop and Shop for a snausage or going into the Oscar Meyer labs to try a meat fruit roll-up. The tofu-bacon experience was the last time I went into Lucy's based on my own decision.

Suggestion 2 - Make a good and affordable breakfast. Let's face it - we are surrounded by bagels including Kupels, Finagle, Brueggers, and Dunkin Donuts on three corners. So we don't need another bagel place. But the only places to get breakfast are Zaftigs and Martin's. We used to go to the B&D deli but it mysteriously closed due to some tax problems after about 80 years being in business. Zaftigs is awesome for breakfast but also comes with a three hour wait on a weekend morning. Nobody goes there anymore because it is too popular. Sarah won't go into Martin's because she had morning sickness there and vomited in their tiny bathroom. So we make our own breakfasts these days because nobody supplies a good menu filled with eggs, bacon, toast, french toast, and the other typical comfort foods needed for a good breakfast.

Suggestion 3 - Make a good $8 burger. Everything that I said about breakfast goes for burgers. Zaftigs makes the best burgers in the neighborhood but they have a long wait. The pizza joints can't figure out how to make a hamburger and the Coolidge corner clubhouse doesn't quite get it right. If you don't know what a good burger tastes like go down to Houstons and order one. It shouldn't be so hard!

Suggestion 4 - We have had some successful food come to Coolidge corner in the past for years. The mains one I can think of are the Vietnamese place - Pho Lemongrass and the fancy Italian place - Pomodoro. Ask them what they did to make their stuff work well in the area as new restaurants.

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nothing keeps me from sleeping like one of those dreams where a giant cockroach the size of a large rat tries to climb-up my pant leg and then refuses to die even after it is split in half while still inside of my pants. The smell was something like bean dip. The dream was likely spurred on by the return of our unwanted guests in the kitchen. The mice are back and partying harder than ever. We are in dire need of another cat and I intend to use the promised Christmas gift from Nick, Sarah’s sister’s husband, which was to use his household tools and knowledge to block the open mouse holes in the kitchen. We also will be investigating our options with regards to borrowing cats again in case anyone is going on vacation and needs a cat sitter for a month.

On Monday I took care of Madeline by myself for the day for the second Monday since Sarah has returned to work. When Yuval told me that they hired a nanny to watch Gabriel when he worked from home I had at first thought that I would not have a problem multi-tasking between my work and a sleeping, quiet, and easily distracted by shiny objects young being. I was very wrong about this. Wrong enough to eat my computer screen. It is not just difficult to get work done while watching a baby it is nearly impossible. At least it is nearly impossible to design a web site including graphics, text, and messaging. I was working on a new site to talk about the healthcare data warehousing that we are doing and made some progress but about as much as had I been working during hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. I don't think it would be frustrating to just watch Madeline but to try to work and watch Madeline is a constant challenge. So I will need to concede that watching a baby for a day is a full time job and try not to get frustrated if I don't get as much work done while I am spending the day with her. I also want to avoid singing that Harry Chapin Cats in the Cradle song.

I did get some good quality smiles out of Madeline during the day. The smiles are almost impossible for me to get snapshots of. They happen mainly when I do things like talk in the language of Jabba the Hut and then swing my tongue around wildly. Then when I get the camera out to take a picture her eyes roll up into her head when the red focus thing fires and she looks like a shocked mammal rather than a smiling baby. It is my new goal in photographing Madeline to capture more smiles. I have enough non-smiling pictures now and am willing to go on a smile photo safari with her.

The Superbowl is this Sunday. Here is my prediction. Steelers 24-Seahawks 17. Go AFC. I am a Steelers fan and if the Patriots were to be carted off to another city then I would be a Steelers fan over any other random team. I like the teams that wear black and seem mean. That is what a football team should be. I like the old style Madden Raiders. The Steelers have some of that hard hitting style. I also always love the irresistible force running back and not just some tall guy but a man like Jerome Bettis who charges right into a stack of people and moves them backwards or at least they think to themselves – this is really going to hurt when he hits us. Bettis is the guy who would win at Red Rover-Red Rover and he is a nice guy too. This is in contrast to a team like the Colts who showcase a quarterback who gets paid more than anyone else in the league and waves his hands in the air to change plays at the line of scrimmage. I wouldn’t be a Colts fan even if I lived in Indianapolis. I don’t have a big problem with the Seahawks and they even have the son of Mosi Tatupu playing for them but I am rooting hard for the Steelers on Sunday and despite seeming not to care about the game because the Patriots aren’t in it I’ll still be able to pay a lot of attention to the game.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While I wouldn’t vote for the guy I did manage to read through Bush’s 2006 State of the Union Speech to get a feel for where Bush and the American leadership is coming from. I read the transcript on CBS.

The first big chunk of the speech was dedicated to working to convince people that we need to stay the course in Iraq and suggested that we need to open some new fronts in places like Iran. I happen to agree that leaving Iraq at this stage in the interests of American security, saving troop lives and costs, is a bad policy. I understand that we made some major mistakes in how we went into Iraq, predominantly through a false misleading pretense of WMDs, a weak coalition that failed to get support from other major countries, and a totally ridiculous estimate of costs. Among my first reactions when I saw the budget for Iraq was that if it was going to take $80 Billion to invade the country then why wasn’t there a discussion of what it was going to take to rebuild the country. Basically if you are going to blow-up a building and replace it your budget should include a lot more than the budget to blow the building-up. But rather than destroy one regime just to run away and have it replaced by another tyranny we should work to build a stable self-sustaining representative government before returning our military home.

I did find this line below entertaining:

“We are the Nation that saved liberty in Europe, and liberated death camps, and helped raise up democracies, and faced down an evil empire.”

What makes it odd is that the people that we define as terrorists and insurgents like to call America the evil empire. So from an outside perspective evil can be conveniently defined to be – the other guy’s way of doing things. In the case of the Islamist fundamentalists the evil is the opposition to a faith based rule according to Islam’s religion. That doesn’t seem to stop Bush from pushing his own faith based agenda.

"Wise policies such as welfare reform, drug education, and support for abstinence and adoption have made a difference in the character of our country....Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research – human cloning in all its forms … creating or implanting embryos for experiments … creating human-animal hybrids … and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creator – and that gift should never be discarded, devalued, or put up for sale. "

Here he is putting in his two attacks in the pro-life agenda. The first is that we are going to accept a plan using abstinence and adoption as an alternative to birth control, sexual education, and abortion. Most pro-life arguments suggest that if we just had more adoption programs then abortion could be ethically made illegal. How many kids have Bush and Cheney adopted? The other objectionable area is the attack on human cloning as an egregious abuse of medical research. Basically he is saying that stem cell research is ethically wrong. But to start with “human cloning in all of its forms” is somewhat comical since most genetic research of any kind involves some form of cloning of human DNA. Isn’t a plasmid used for basic research a human-animal hybrid? Anyways the man has a screw loose caused by religious beliefs that I will refrain from calling evil.

" We need to encourage children to take more math and science, and make sure those courses are rigorous enough to compete with other nations. We have made a good start in the early grades with the No Child Left Behind Act, which is raising standards and lifting test scores across our country. Tonight I propose to train 70,000 high school teachers, to lead advanced-placement courses in math and science … bring 30,000 math and science professionals to teach in classrooms … and give early help to students who struggle with math, so they have a better chance at good, high-wage jobs."

Not to complain but is training the teachers more in advanced placement courses the solution? Maybe it would help if we actually taught evolution (science) in schools. It also wouldn't be a bad idea to pay teachers more or to create stronger incentives for people with a math and science education to become teachers. Or how about helping to fund childrens educational television effectively so they don't need to beg for private funds to produce programming that is for the public good? In general teachers and the education system isn't as respected of a profession here as it is in other countries. It would be nice if someone could fix that problem.

Among the “evil” things Bush is doing has been the warrantless wire taps. We mean warrantless not that they weren’t necessary but that they are not overseen by a legal process so any surveillance on anyone could fit into the program without anyone knowing about it. He tried to push this into the realm of a security plan:

“I have authorized a terrorist surveillance program to aggressively pursue the international communications of suspected al-Qaida operatives and affiliates to and from America. Previous presidents have used the same constitutional authority I have – and Federal courts have approved the use of that authority. Appropriate Members of Congress have been kept informed. This terrorist surveillance program has helped prevent terrorist attacks.”

This is an interesting dance for Bush because on the one hand he is trying to say “Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terror. Every step toward freedom in the world makes our country safer, and so we will act boldly in freedom’s cause.” But on the other hand he is defending a policy that is clearly ignoring a constitutional freedom called the fourth amendment.

Not from Bush’s speech tonight. “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Maybe he just should have said - we should repeal the 4th amendment.

Another front laid out for us is the future fight in Iran. “The Iranian government is defying the world with its nuclear ambitions – and the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons.” I am not sure where it will lead but at least this time America is going to “rally the world to confront these threats” rather than go out and dive into a conflict without the world behind them first. At least the guy learned something from Iraq. Get the world behind you before charging into another country on the basis of spreading democracy. No wait - we are going to charge in this time because they are making a weapon of mass destruction. Well he learned that it works to go after the WMD FUD.

Bush also thinks that the American worker is the greatest worker in the world.

"With open markets and a level playing field, no one can out-produce or out-compete the American worker. "

I wonder if the American worker has a bad enough math and science education to believe this? Having taken a look at what global competition has given as evidence in information technology and manufacturing I have to say that with open markets and a level playing field, China and India can out-produce the American worker. That is unless the level playing field means that we enforce wage equivalence and lifestyle standards of third world countries.

I was glad about the plan to improve IT for healthcare. We will make wider use of electronic records and other health information technology, to help control costs and reduce dangerous medical errors." It makes our consulting business prime for some growth.

The other interesting area was that they are paying some lip service to alternative energy strategies to reduce our dependence on oil.

"So tonight, I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative – a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research at the Department of Energy, to push for breakthroughs… (like) zero-emission coal-fired plants; revolutionary solar and wind technologies; and clean, safe nuclear energy, cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips, stalks, or switch grass (to) help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.”

Good idea! Someone should have thought of this one sooner. Wait haven’t we been talking about alternative energy for a very long time but in reality doing far more research and far less implementation? The problem is that oil is still too cheap to use other types of energy because everything comes with a cost. IMHO - The real solution…. tax the crap out of oil companies in order to represent the real costs (like wars in Iraq) to force more reasonable economic incentives to come about. Create a national nuclear energy infrastructure like we did with the nuclear arms infrastructure to compete with oil. The most likely result of this plan is that we are going with the status quo and need to wait for the price of oil to get really high to force Toffler’s third wave economy to compete with the non-renewable resource economy.

In all I am behind the stuff about staying in Iraq and spreading democracy as an alternative to theocracy, getting ourselves off of foreign oil, and improving American education and medicine. It would be nice to see some consistency like understanding science enough to keep God out of our test tubes and government, respecting American democratic liberties, and investing more money in creating a culture of education in the US as well as building real strategic national energy programs other than research.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)