MacChuck

TUBELY IS SPAM!!!

2011-01-27T20:14:00.001-06:00

Everyone:

I stupidly clicked a link sent to me by a trusted friend (who apparently also stupidly clicked a link, etc.)

So if you get an invite from something called "Tubely" - PLEASE IGNORE IT.

...and sorry for the inconvenience.

Chuck Rogers

The One iPhone App You Must Own

2009-02-12T14:08:00.001-06:00

Computer programs aren't perfect. When they launch and later quit, they sometimes leave little traces of themselves behind. These memory fragments eventually pile up and start slowing things down. Restarting forces everything to clear out of town and reinitializes the memory "from scratch," so to speak. While this works, it isn't always desirable, since everything you were working on will have to be re-loaded.

Computers have had software programs that tend to these matters for years, but what about the iPhone? Yes, your iPhone is a computer and if you have ever noticed it running sluggishly, or find apps quitting unexpectedly, you can bet memory is getting tight.

Fortunately, there is now an application from IntelligentMobiles that addresses the problem. "Memory and System Info" displays the Free Memory, Used Memory, and Disk Capacity (both free and total) of your iPhone and lets you free up any unused memory that is fragmented. It also lists all the processes currently running on your iPhone.

I think this app is indispensable for anyone who has a lot of information on their iPhone. If you have ever had to force-restart your iPhone, or even just shut it off and turn it on again because it was acting strange, this app will be a real time saver for you.

Memory and System Info shows up on the iPhone as "system Info" and is available from the iTunes App Store for 99 cents.

2009-02-12T13:50:00.001-06:00

Advising a developer on how to effectively use Social Networking without alienating people.

Review: SongGenie 1.0

2009-01-28T11:29:00.001-06:00

By most people's standards, I have a massive iTunes library - 75,000 plus tracks and still growing. I have ripped all my CDs and am in the painfully slow process of ripping all my LPs. Along the way I have acquired many tracks through various means, including people who have given me a mix CD. As you can imagine, not all my tracks have the most complete information. So I took great interest in Equinux's new product, SongGenie.

What SongGenie does - or at least attempts to do - is correct misinformation and provide missing information for the songs in your iTunes library. I had already had a good experience with another Equinux product for iTunes libraries, CoverScout, so I was not in the least hesitant to try out their new product.

Here's how it works: when you first launch the program, it assumes your music library is in the standard location: the Music folder in your User folder on your Mac. In my case, however, all my music will not fit on the internal hard drive, so I have it on an external drive. This is no problem, as SongGenie's one and only Preference allows you to add other locations where your music is stored, as shown below:

You can add folders stored locally and on a network volume, as long as the network volume is mounted on your desktop. (Analyzing tracks on network volumes may take longer, depending on the speed of your network.)

I keep a subset of my main library - the tracks I like listening to most - on my MacBook Pro. The main library resides on my desktop computer. Fortunately, SongGenie has a Family Edition that allows the software to be activated on up to 5 computers. It took about 15 minutes to load the almost 2000 tracks on my MacBook's library. Loading the library from my desktop computer took considerably longer - over 24 hours - and the program unexpectedly quit once during the process (probably due to the large library). I noticed that as the number of songs loaded became larger, it took longer and longer to load more songs. Again, not unexpected, given the size of my library. The good news is that if you quit the program, it will take a lot less time to load your library whenever you run the program again.

Analyzing

Analyzing your library couldn't be easier. Once the library has been loaded, simply select the songs you want to analyze and then choose "Identify Songs" from SongGenie's Analysis menu. If you have a small library, you would probably want to select all your tracks before analyzing. If your library is larger (like mine), it is better to select smaller batches of tracks to analyze. Once you have a group of tracks to analyze you can use a couple of nifty filters to show only the tracks SongGenie thinks need editing, or you can enter a word or phrase to narrow the list down even further.

According to Equinux, SongGenie does its magic using an acoustic fingerprint for each track. Then, based on specific characteristics, SongGenie determines which track to work on and intuitively inserts the correct information in its user interface. A green circle with a check mark in it next to a field indicates SongGenie agrees the information in that field is correct. It is up to you to decide whether to accept or ignore SongGenie's recommended changes. If you agree with all of SongGenie's suggestions, clicking the "Apply" button applies the changes and moves you to the next identified song.

What is not immediately intuitive is what to do when you don't agree with all of SongGenie's suggestions. When this happens, you need to click the appropriate blue tag that points to the information you do want to change. After doing that, the "Apply" button changes to "Next" (since your changes have already been applied by clicking one or more of the blue tags.) If a tag isn't quite right, you can click directly on its text to edit it. This will make the blue tag appear again with SongGenie's suggestion, but clicking the "Next" button will still apply all your changes.

With the exception of the above, which felt a little clunky to me, SongGenie's interface is attractive and even compelling to use. It takes its design cues from CoverFlow in iTunes. The list of tracks can be sorted by clicking on a column title, and the Cover Flow-like space above the list will show the track which is currently up for editing.

SongGenie doesn't only list tracks whose information is missing. It also lists tracks that it thinks have incorrect information. This includes tracks with missing diacritical markings or that do not conform to SongGenie's style rules, as shown below:

"Style" rules are where your track says something like, "Bach is dead and gone" and it should be either "Bach is Dead and Gone" or "Bach Is Dead And Gone." If you are a stickler for this sort of thing (and I have to admit, I am) capitalization should be done consistently throughout your library, but the program should give you some options as to how the style should be applied. (For those of you who only want to normalize the style of your track info, Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes has the excellent "Proper English Capitalization" script.)

Making Changes
SongGenie addresses three pieces of information for the "problem" tracks it identifies: Artist, Song Title, and Album Title. If you are looking for an extensive tag editor, this ain't it (take a look at Lostify or TvTaggr if that's what you want). To accept the changes SongGenie proposes for the current track, click the "Apply" button. If you want to leave the track as it is, click the "Ignore" button.

It pays to look carefully at the changes SongGenie proposes, because not all of them will be changes you will approve. There could be subtle differences in the way you have a track tagged. For instance, in my library, I don't like having the disk number listed in the Album name for multi-disk sets (I use iTune's Disk fields for that instead). So if you blindly are clicking the Apply button, you may find tracks for some of your multi-disk albums have the disc number after the album name, while others in the same album may not. This will make iTunes think they are two different albums and might make it harder for you to find all the tracks to that album in the future.

Handling Errors

SongGenie had a problem opening the original file for some of the tracks on my hard drive (tags are written directly to the file on the drive, not sent through iTunes). When this happens, you will see the following error:

While it does tell you the file can't be opened, it suggests nothing that might remedy the problem. I could find no rhyme or reason for this behavior, either. At least on the surface, these files seem no different than any other track files - the play in iTunes just fine and can be copied in the Finder. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the support section on the Equinux website that addresses this matter either. In fact, as of this writing, there was nothing at all regarding SongGenie on the Equinux site, which suggests (to me, at least) this product may have been rushed to market in order to capitalize on the extra publicity from Macworld.

What It Needs

As a version 1.0 product, SongGenie performs acceptably well. In the future I would like to see an automatic mode that would allow it to go through one's library unattended. To facilitate that, the user needs to be able to tell SongGenie what to change and what to ignore. For instance, I think it would be great to have a mode where SongGenie could automatically find all the tracks where there is either missing information or the word "unknown" and automatically attempt to fix them, ignoring others. There should also be a preference for ignoring fully tagged songs, and an option to just automatically go through the library and correct style errors. Finally, there should be an option to automatically ignore all the files that can't be opened, and a list of those should be kept separate from any other errors generated in the program. These welcome additions would allow you to make several passes through your library automatically, which would eliminate having to go through each and every track manually.

If you have a lot of music whose track information is either missing, wrong, or inconsistent (and let's face it, isn't that pretty much all of us?), SongGenie is a worthwhile investment. I also predict what it lacks in version 1.0 will be addressed in future versions.

Summary

SongGenie 1.0

Equinux USA, Inc. (www.equinux.com)

$29.95 for single user version; $44.95 for Family Edition (up to 5 computers)

Pros: Finds a lot of missing track information, and can fix entries that are incorrect or not consistently styled.

Cons: No way to individually edit SongGenie's suggestions (or if there is, I couldn't figure it out); requires user pay close attention to suggested edits; no automatic mode; files that won't open have to be individually dismissed, which wastes time.

Final Verdict: WORTHY

About My Ratings

Rating something with stars or mice only tells you how the reviewer felt about the program well enough, but it doesn't take into consideration the fact that different people demand different things from their software. For that reason, I rate things a bit differently. "WORTHY" means it is a worthwhile addition to one's arsenal of software tools, but not necessarily "Essential."

Enjoyed This Review?

The Steve Jobs Effect

2009-01-05T19:23:00.001-06:00

A lot has been written about Steve Jobs, both rumor and fact. It is undeniable that the rise and fall of Apple stock is at least somewhat tied to his health. This is due to the "Steve Jobs Effect," and it is a dangerous thing. To have the fortunes of so many stockholders and employees dangling on every word written about this man's health is not a good thing, to say the least.

That's why I think having him not do this year's keynote is probably a good thing. The media and Apple's customers need to be weened from papa Jobs if the company is to thrive whenever his inevitable demise does happen. And don't get me wrong. I believe Steve Jobs is a visionary who rescued a dying company. But in doing so, it was more like saving his own child than turning around a failing enterprise. I am hoping, having been faced with his own mortality at least once, that he too, is learning to ween himself from Apple.

Recent Apple History - A Personal Perspective

I'd like to go down memory lane for a moment with you, if I may. I bought my first Mac in 1985 and haven't looked back since. From 1994 to 1997 I was privileged enough to work for Apple as their Small Business Evangelist. When I joined the company, it was in a regime change from Michael Spindler to Gil Amelio. Mr. Amelio was faced with a daunting challenge, and he got a lot of things right. I won't go into details here (as this is about Steve Jobs, not Gil Amelio), but if it weren't for the things he did, Steve Jobs could not have achieved so much success so quickly.

Shortly after Mr. Amelio brought Steve Jobs back to Apple - at first, as a consultant to the CEO - I was walking with some co-workers at Apple's Infinite Loop campus. I was asked what I thought about Amelio bringing Jobs back into the company. I replied "you wait and see, Steve Jobs will be running this company again before too long."

I don't know how many of my co-workers disagreed with me at the time, but one in particular thought I was nuts. "Why on earth would he want to take control of a dying company?" she asked. At the time, Apple was bleeding money not unlike the auto industry is today. Conventional wisdom (and strong rumor) was that Apple would be bought out and swallowed up by someone like Sun Systems.

"Here's the deal," I said, with everyone listening in. "Right now, Apple is like the New Orleans Saints. Losing seasons, coaches coming and going. But Ditka has coaching in his blood. If he takes a team like the Saints and turns them around, he becomes a hero. If he doesn't, he can always claim the team was too far gone when he got there." (Sometimes, in football, coaches are hired to rebuild a team, with little expectation that they will make the playoffs.)

"Steve Jobs is in exactly the same position," I continued. "If he succeeds in turning Apple around, he becomes more than a hero - he becomes a near god-like savior of a company with an immense cult following, unlike any other. If he fails, he can always claim the patient was already on life support and too far gone. But if he wins - if he wins, he saves his baby. What parent wouldn't take that shot?"

The Cancer Scare

In mid-2004 Apple announced that Steve Jobs had survived a brush with Pancreatic cancer. At the time, they said it was an extremely rare, less aggressive form of this normally fatal disease, known as an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor.

Ever since then, the media has taken every opportunity to fear-monger whenever he catches a cold. His keynote address at WWDC in the summer of 2008 gave rise to further speculation, as it was obvious he had lost a lot of weight, and even looked as though he had aged more than he should have. Apple's announcement that Steve Jobs would not give the Keynote address for the 2009 Macworld Expo was like gasoline to a smoldering fire. The flare up caused Apple stock to dip, and reports of his imminent demise starting surfacing again.

This latest scare, is nothing more than a hormone imbalance, if we are to believe the latest press release. And to be honest, it doesn't need to be believed by anyone. They either have found the problem or they haven't. He will either gain weight in the coming months or he won't. But one thing is inexorably true: he will eventually die, as we all will.

Who Cares?

Well, it looks like most of us Apple fan-boys do. And that's the problem.

People forget that before he returned to Apple, Steve Jobs ran two other companies: NeXT, which was acquired by Apple, and Pixar, which was acquired by Disney in 2006. I am sure most of us would find it silly to presume that box office returns for movies such as Toy Story or WALL-E might suffer due to Steve Jobs health rumors.

"But Chuck," you might say, "those are movies. Not companies. There were a lot of people involved in making those movies to whom the credit for success belongs." Very true, but by saying that, are you suggesting that Apple's success has little or nothing to do with anyone except Steve Jobs?

See, that's the problem - and Steve Jobs himself is partly to blame for allowing it to propagate for this long. Yes, he rescued Apple. But he didn't do it single-handedly. He already had a great team of people working for him at NeXT and those people were integrated into Apple. Steve Jobs didn't single-handedly engineer and design the iMac. As for engineering, Gil Amelio had as much to do with it as anyone. And it was Jonathan Ive who has designed so many of those wonderful tools Apple has produced in the past few years.

Here's another perspective: we know Steve Jobs is far and away the single largest shareholder in Disney, thanks to the Pixar acquisition. But the success or failure of Disney isn't tied to Steve Jobs' health. Why is that?

Because however relevant Pixar might be to Disney's future business, it will not be the hand of Steve Jobs that brings Disney from death's door. Not just because they aren't at death's door either - even if they were, most of us would not expect Steve Jobs to breath new life into the company simply by paying attention to it. (And if he did, we probably wouldn't give him the credit he deserved for doing so.)

Nope. The reason we tie Steve Jobs to Apple so tightly is because he is Apple, in much the same way Bill Gates used to be so tightly associated with Microsoft. Unlike Steve Jobs, however, Bill Gates has moved on, allowing others to take the limelight. To be fair, Microsoft already had an obvious second-in-command in the person of Steve Balmer.

Steve Jobs on Death

On June 12, 2005 Steve Jobs gave the commencement address for Stanford. During his speech he said the following about death:

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

You can get a glimpse of the man Steve Jobs has become from that paragraph. There can be no doubt he has had the courage to follow his heart and intuition. But if Apple is to be his legacy instead of just something he ran well while he was alive, he needs to take a step back and allow others in the spotlight, as he has done for Phil Schiller in the 2009 Macworld.

So What Happens Now?

Exactly what is happening, believe it or not.

Whether by choice or because of health issues, Steve Jobs has taken that all important first step towards insuring Apple will be a legacy that survives him well into the future. Just as Bill Gates has taken a step back, so must Steve Jobs.

It will be tough, no doubt. But to put a stop to the incessant clamoring about his health, it is an absolute necessity. To remain a healthy, vibrant force in technology, Apple must make it clear to the media and its customers that there is more to the company than Steve Jobs. Their effects on the company and its products must be known as we move forward.

I wish Steve Jobs a long and healthy life. Make no mistake, I want him to remain CEO for as long as he is able. But for the sake of Apple's future, maybe it is time we see more of his more-than-capable first tier of lieutenants, if only to give the media and the investors the assurance they need that Steve Jobs health need not concern them.

2009-01-01T12:48:00.001-06:00

Trying to hang over a new leaf this New Year's Day. I mean "turn." Yeah, that's it.

2008-12-17T19:56:00.001-06:00

Definitely less shoppers out this Xmas, but still too many for me. Glad to be at Coop's for a libation.

2008-12-17T17:07:00.001-06:00

Waiting for others to finish at mall. PEOPLE! This is what Amazon is for!

2008-12-16T22:51:00.001-06:00

New Orleans entered fog season early this year. Let it fog, let it fog, let it fog!

2008-12-15T22:00:00.001-06:00

Now THIS is what I call a Christmas letter! http://surl.com/8cilf

2008-12-15T15:43:00.003-06:00

It's probably my fault it rained today. I should have never said I was
cleaning the garage.

2008-12-15T15:43:00.001-06:00

It's probably my fault it rained today. I should have never said I was
cleaning the garage.

2008-12-15T10:39:00.001-06:00

OK - can't put this off any longer. Today the garage gets cleaned!

2008-12-09T18:09:00.001-06:00

Robin Williams on Obama and Bush. Very Funny! http://snurl.com/7pquf

2008-11-25T12:31:00.001-06:00

Great Country song - Apple and Google and Gold. http://budurl.com/yhlz

2008-11-19T14:04:00.001-06:00

Thinking about a flu shot? Think again. http://budurl.com/sk2f

2008-11-19T13:57:00.001-06:00

This is really funny. David Pogue's gift guide. Just let it sit there after loading. Don't click for about 5 minutes. http://budurl.com/pwdk

2008-11-17T20:54:00.001-06:00

Have an iPhone? Love Bacon? You need this. http://ping.fm/4Rxkg

I Want this Unboxing Experience on My Next iPhone

2008-11-17T13:23:00.001-06:00

I ran across this today. Absolutely hilarious.

Refreshing Change in the Wind

2008-11-12T10:04:00.001-06:00

With the elections over, I have heard from more than one pundit that it might be back to politics as usual in Washington, even for the incoming Obama administration. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Take this article from the November 11 New York Times. The ethics rules Obama is imposing on both his transition team and administration are among the most strict and sweeping ever. Here's a quick rundown:

Anyone who lobbied in the past 12 months is prohibited from working in the fields of policy on which they lobbied.

Any lobbyist must cease all lobbying activities during the transition.

Appointees to the administration will be barred from working on matters involving their former employers.

Those who leave the administration will be prohibited from lobbying anyone in the administration for the duration of Obama's presidency.

All political appointees must disclose publicly every meeting with any registered lobbyist.

There is some wiggle room in the new restrictions. Lobbyists can still work for the transition team (and presumably the administration) as long as they do not work in the areas for which they lobbied. Also, the rules only apply to "registered" lobbyists - which are those who personally lobby federal officials on specific issues. This allows many experienced people who may work for lobbying firms but do no direct lobbying to get involved with the transition and/or administration.

Lobbying has been a pet peeve of mine for many years, as it follows the "squeaky wheel gets the grease" logic. Having a lobbyist without ethics restrictions in the administration gives unfair advantage to the areas of policy for which they lobbied. It is the political equivalent of insider trading.

Having these restrictions in place should make it harder for corporations with deep pockets to sway federal policy to their favor. Like everyone else, I am adopting an "it remains to be seen" attitude about all of this, but so far it seems that Obama is the real deal and represents the most refreshing change we have had to the political landscape in decades.

Be Careful What You Wish For...

2008-11-11T09:43:00.001-06:00

Wouldn't it be great to have portable black hole you could take with you anywhere? Just be careful how you use it!

Phrases to Forget

2008-11-08T14:50:00.001-06:00

When it comes to writing a blog, paying close attention to whether or not your words resonate with your audience is key. It's not rocket science, after all, and even though some people may think it's a nightmare, you don't need to devote 24/7 of your life to it. What you do need is to always try to come up with something that is fairly unique so at the end of the day your reader can walk away feeling like they either learned something or enjoyed themselves.

I personally try to write about things that strike me as interesting on the theory that others who enjoy my writing will find it interesting as well. Occasionally, I will get an email from someone who suggests I shouldn't of said this thing or that thing, but with all due respect, it's just a blog. Get over it. Irregardless of whether you could care less or not, it ends up being just six of one and a half dozen of another. Some people will get it, and some people won't; some will be offended while others will laugh.

For instance, at this moment in time I am writing because of an article I just read listing the top 10 most annoying phrases. OMG, did I just use all of them in only three paragraphs? Absoloutely. I sure did - and a few others to boot.

And that's the name of that tune.

Big Huge Tip of the Day

2008-11-06T11:47:00.001-06:00

(or "How to Piss Off Friends and Enemies Alike.")

Yesterday I found a huge resource for links with web design tips and tricks. As I am trying to brush up my skills in this area, this was interesting to me. Just before going to bed I started going through them. There were hundreds of links, so I just sorted them out, bookmarking some with Instapaper and others with Delicious. so I could go back to them later. I'd made it through about 300 of these links when I received the following direct message via Twitter:

Re: "How To Avoid Being An Ass On Twitter"... does it say anything about tweeting every website that you Digg? [hint, hint] ;-)

LOL

Turns out that every web site I bookmarked in Delicious was being sent out as an individual Tweet. ARGHHH!! Well, here is how that happened and how you can avoid doing it as well...

Recently, I have been spending quite a bit of time trying to get my head wrapped around the connectivity that is emerging between social networking sites. In theory, this has the potential of expanding one's presence on the web exponentially with very little effort. Imagine, for instance, that every time you digg a story all your friends find out about it as well, whether they are on Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.

This is where FriendFeed comes in. Once you create an account in FriendFeed, you can add your login information for other accounts, such as Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Amazon, StumbleUpon, etc. Every time you do something on one of those sites, FriendFeed records it and sends it out for your friends to see via Twitter.

This is great for most of the time when you might see one or two interesting stories, or if you bookmark a few sites a day in Delicious. But I tend to look at these things in groups - which can get understandably annoying for those subscribed to my FriendFeed. So I tweaked the settings some today, and hopefully this will fix the problem.

Your Secrets, Revealed

This brings up a very interesting situation, however. When I don't think someone else will be interested in something, I tend not to Digg it - or I think twice about bookmarking in Delicious: do I really want everyone to know I visited the world's stupidest website?

If we extend this to the rest of those enlightened enough to use Digg or Delicious or a similar service, what happens is we get a picture of another person that is filtered through the lens of what they want the rest of the world to see. In itself, this isn't a bad thing - it mimics the real world in the sense that all of us do things that embarrassed us.

But it does contribute to the overall popularity (or lack thereof) for things on Digg, and can shape the opinions we have of someone else. Over time, we can even see the phases our friends go through as they explore different topics.

So, the lesson of the day is this: if you decide to use FriendFeed (and I encourage you to do so - it is very cool), remember to turn off publishing if you are going to be bookmarking tons of links, or if you spend a lot of time digging stories. Another option would be to use Delicious for the links you don't mind everyone seeing, and another service (such as Magnolia.com) for those sites you are saving to look through later.

For those interested…

you can see my Delicious bookmarks at http://delicious.com/thechuck2237.

you can visit my FriendFeed page (and subscribe) at http://friendfeed.com/thechuck

you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thechuck

you can see what I am digging at http://digg.com/users/thechuck

…or if you prefer…

FaceBook

I'll be blogging more about social networking at some point in the future.

The Beatles's Hard Day's Night Chord Mystery

2008-11-01T13:40:00.001-05:00

Did you know there was a Beatle's Hard Day's Night Mystery? Me either. But apparently, scientists and musicians alike have been trying to figure out how they did the opening chord to "Hard Day's Night" without multi-tracking. Here's the chord in question:

The secret, it turns out, is that producer George Martin played five notes on the piano.

You can read the complete article here.

Fascinating.

Synchronized Presidential Debating

2008-10-29T11:29:00.001-05:00

I found the first presidential debate pretty interesting. If nothing else, you got to hear each candidates policies side by side. I missed the second debate, but I didn't find the third debate as interesting. Follow the link below to find out why.

Synchronized Presidential Debating

Wassup? - 8 Years Later

2008-10-26T11:46:00.001-05:00

Remember the clever Budwiser "Wassup?" campaign? The original actors reprise their roles to make a pretty compelling statement about how much things have changed - and how much NEW change is needed. Make sure you watch it to the end.

Me Again - Have You Made Up Your Mind Yet?

2008-10-23T16:15:00.001-05:00

I know most people who read this probably have similar views to mine. And believe me, I DON'T like standing on a soapbox about politics! But I ran across this today, and just had to share it:

PLEASE!

Tell everyone you know to get out and vote on November 4th. Tell them to think carefully about where we were 8 years ago (can you say "budget surplus?") and where we are now (can you say "second great depression?"). Ask them if they really believe John McCain can bring the change we need. If they think he can, ask even if that is true, do they really believe Sarah Palin is qualified to be president of the United States. (Remind them she thinks the VP is "in charge" of the Senate.)

If that STILL isn't enough, have them watch the above video. Have them vote responsibly because Opie, Andy, and the Fonz want them to.

Another Explanation for the Wall Street Crisis

2008-10-22T12:28:00.001-05:00

Wow! Is this ever good. As you watch it, keep in mind it was filmed in 2007!

Mysteries of the Economy Revealed

2008-10-17T12:14:00.001-05:00

Yes, that's right. In this tiny blog space I am going to unveil all the mysteries of the economy. Ok - not really, but I am going to point you to some real cool videos that are non-biased and will totally open your eyes as to the real nature of the problem facing the U.S. economy.

Before we can understand how the economy got this way, we need to understand the very nature of money. Money, of course, is a symbol - a placeholder for value, if you will. The pieces of paper and metal you trade for goods are no different than the Wampum used by the 13 original colonies because the Europeans did not want their money devalued by the "risky" venture taking place across the Atlantic.

Whether we are talking about Wampum, Dollars, Loonies, or Rubles, they are all placeholders representing wealth, while the real value stays locked away safely somewhere else.

Or does it?

My good friend Ford (the person, not the car company) sent me some links to some fantastic videos on YouTube that explain - in very easy to understand terms - the very nature of money and how governments (not just the US) are literally "conjuring" money from debt - which goes a long way to explain the current economic crisis. The video is almost 50 minutes long and is broken into 5 parts on YouTube. Here are the links:

WHere Does Money Come From? (Money as Debt)

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

OK, so let's see if we can turn this into an elevator story: The way our system is set up, governments (including ours) have created a monetary system where borrowing money "conjures" up more money out of nothing. When money becomes "tight" (in demand), more money is "conjured" by raising the debt to real money ratio until the system eventually implodes on itself. So, by putting over 1 TRILLION additional dollars in play (the $700 Billion bail out, plus the additional $330 billion Emperor Bush poured into the global economy), banks get more money so they can make more loans to create more debt so more money can be "conjured," thus, in all likelihood, creating an even bigger problem for the next president.

Still don't get it? This should make it easier to understand:

No, really. Watch that again. Not only is it entertaining, but it is one of the least painful ways for us to even start to fathom the world of hurt we are all in.

So whose fault is this?

It is really easy for Democrats to blame Republicans, Republicans to blame Democrats, and for Independents to blame both. In truth, there are a lot of different people to blame — on both sides of the aisle and in between, Not the least of which are the American people themselves. After all, it is one thing to make credit so easy to obtain, but no one forced us to take advantage of it, did they?

There is a great article on FactCheck.org called Who Caused the Economic Crisis? You can read the entire article yourself (and you should) but it does quote The Economist magazine, who reported the problem is one of "layered responsibility," and provided the following partial list of those alleged to be at fault:

The Federal Reserve

Home Buyers (More or less, us)

Congress

Real estate agents

The Clinton Administration

Mortgage Brokers

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan

Wall Street firms

The Bush Administration

An obscure accounting rule

Collective delusion (Us again, with all of the above)

I can't promise that Barack Obama will at least put in motion the changes we need to make sure this can never happen again. Heck, I was actually disappointed when he said he would vote for the plan and encouraged others to do so. But he cannot be entirely blamed for that. If you were him, would you want to inherit the state of the economy had the bailout not passed?

What I do know is that McCain is not the answer. I know that the Clinton administration - for all its faults - handed Bush a surplus, and he squandered it on warmongering to fill the pockets of his cronies. I fear that McCain will just be more of the same.

All the bailout does is buy the next administration time to come up with a better plan, and whatever that plan will be, it will not be an overnight fix. If you lay part of the blame at the Clinton Administration and Greenspan, then it is fair to say it took us at least a decade to get the economy in the state it is in today. Let's hope it does not take us another decade to turn it around.

How To Opt Out of Credit Card Pre-screening Offers

2008-10-06T08:55:00.001-05:00

Are you getting tired of all those "pre-screened" credit card offers? Here's how to opt out of all of them at one time.

Go to OptOutPrescreen.com and fill out the form.

That's all there is to it!

I signed up about three months ago. With the current credit crunch, it's hard to tell if it worked, or if companies are just scaling back their offers. But I can tell you that I haven't received a credit card offer in the mail for at least 6 weeks!

Bill Gates Ain't So Bad (But Windows Still Is…)

2008-10-05T18:19:00.001-05:00

I was reading an article in Newsweek that reminded me Bill Gates "left" Microsoft earlier this year. Of course, he isn't really leaving - and much too big a deal has been made about his "departure." He will still remain Chairman of the Board and when he is in town he will reportedly spend one day a week in the office.

But he will be scaling back his involvement with the company to focus more on his philanthropic efforts, which you can't tell by his prominence in Microsoft's new ad campaign. Which leads me to the topic of this post, Bill Gates Ain't So Bad (But Windows Still Is…)

Of course, it is easy to play the nice guy when you have more money than just about anybody else on the planet (depending on whose statistics you check) - and I don't want to take anything away from that. But Bill Gates has been portrayed at times as some kind of money-grubbing ogre who shipped shoddy products, but through marketing chutzpah was able to capture a monopolistic critical mass of the world's computer users.

Here's the thing: like Apple, Microsoft became very big, very fast. Just like an ocean liner, the captain might steer the ship, but he is not totally responsible for running it. In fact, over the years Bill Gates has shown he not only cares a great deal about the products his company ships, but also many of the frustrations of Windows users everywhere.

There is a gem of an email that was made public during the US Government's antitrust case against Microsoft. You can read the entire email thread here (PDF, 5 pages). The juicy part starts on page 3 in an email where Bill Gates describes in blow-by-blow detail his frustration in attempting to purchase and install MovieMaker from the company's own web site. In the original email he details not just his frustration with finding and buying MovieMaker, but with the process he had to endure with Windows just to get to where he thought it might be installing.

In the email thread, one of Microsoft's employees immediately starts to minimize the issue by saying "Bill's situation is worse then [sic] my personal experience…," and another says "nor am I yet sure the best way to handle the complex mess of coordinating between product teams,…" and then it goes on with each of the stakeholders in the issue restating how complex the issue is, but no one stepping up to take ownership.

I think this is a pretty good glimpse of how Windows got where it is today. You have a lot of competent, talented people writing code and building processes in their own teams, but no one has thought about the "connective tissue" that is needed to make the entire system work together. Try as he might, Bill Gates (or his successor, Steve Balmer) can only steer the ship so much. When you are dead in the water, steering won't do any good.

Apple went down this path too, before Steve Jobs returned to the helm. But it was not Steve Jobs who got Apple back on course - it was Gil Amelio, Apple's CEO before Steve Jobs took over for his current stint. I was working for Apple at the time and I remember sitting in an employee meeting where he discussed how he was consolidating Apple's hardware and software engineering efforts. Instead of 4 different logic boards, there would be 2: one for desktops and one for laptops. Instead of going to 3 different places in the system to address networking issues, there would be one, etc.

In a way, Gil Amelio was as much the father of the iMac as anyone. The first "Bondi Blue" iMac had a logic board that was practically interchangeable with the company's laptop computer. While the iMac definitely owes its success to Jonathan Ives and his design team at Apple that gave the it a distinctive look, and to Steve Jobs' uncanny ability to market directly to people's sensibilities, it was Amelio that set the ball in motion. Who knows what might have happened had he not taken that one step to reduce costs by making their manufacturing processes more efficient.

Even Bill Gates recognizes Steve Jobs' genius, btw. In another email from the antitrust trial, gates said "Steve Jobs’s ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right and market things as revolutionary are amazing things." In that one email, Bill Gates encapsulated most of what is wrong at Microsoft: the lack of ability to focus in on a few things that count. Unfortunately, that is what many companies lack - even some of the smaller ones with whom I have been associated. Many people call it "the vision thing."

So Apple makes well-designed stuff. We all know that. So why is Windows still so bad? Why are people dropping Vista to go back to XP? Because the parts do not work well together. It is as simple as that. Just like the email thread I referenced above illustrates, the various pieces of Microsoft are not designed to fit together. They are encouraged to run as efficient, autonomous units instead of become part of a colony - and this organizational philosophy becomes obvious in the way the different products the company offers - and even the different pieces of its flagship Windows operating system - are put together.

So I congratulate Bill Gates on the massive fortune he has gained, and for his willingness to make the world a better place with a large portion of that wealth. But, for the simple reasons I have reported here, I still don't do Windows.

Pigs with Lipstick

2008-10-03T23:13:00.001-05:00

You know from the title what this post is about, don't you? That's right - politics.

I normally try to stay away from Religion and Politics when blogging for the same reason you do at cocktail parties. But this time its different. Too much has gone wrong. There is too much at stake to get the election wrong. So I am just going to come right out and say it: it is absolutely imperative you urge everyone you know to vote in the upcoming presidential election, and to not throw our future away by voting for McCain. We absolutely must overcome the Republicans who would vote for this person and his policies.

And here is why I believe this...

I Am Not A Democrat

First, lest any of my gentle (Republican) readers might think I am the enemy. I am not. I voted for Reagan, Reagan, Perot, Clinton, Gore, and Kerry in the last 6 presidential elections. I vote for who I think is going to be the best leader. Which really brings me to the point of this post.

While it seems I lean Democratic based on the past few elections, it would be fairer to say I lean anti-Bush. I actually was leaning towards Bob Dole, but Dole made (in my opinion) a fatal mistake during his campaign - which is the same mistake McCain is making today.

Dole's fatal mistake was that he became a different person during the campaign. Before the campaign, he was jovial and self-depricating. His humor was genuine and endearing. During the campaign, however, someone - I don't know if it was the Republican Party itself or his so called professional handlers - convinced him that in order to win the election, he had to appear "presidential." The problem was, to them, presidential meant "serious" and "down to business." You certainly couldn't make fun of yourself - someone might not no you were kidding and think you were stupid or something.

And now McCain has done it too. During the last election I commented that I thought I would rather have McCain as president over John Kerry. I don't know - maybe it was the way Kerry carried himself - or the fact that he, too, had been told to "act presidential." Whatever it was, John McCain seemed to be the "democrat" of the Republican party, with opinions and attitudes that were far closer to the center than they were the right.

Now, however, it is like the Republican Party made it clear to McCain that the only way they would back his candidacy is if he "towed the party line" including the Bush Doctrine. Without a "pinky-swear" promise to continue the policies of the failed Bush presidency, he would have had no chance to be the Republican candidate.

No Third Term of Failure

Let's take as non-biased look at George W. Bush (OK, as non-biased as possible). Don't worry, I'm going to tie all this together in a little bit.

In an unscientific survey of historians, 81% said the George Bush presidency was an overall failure. If you consider George's Resume, it rapidly becomes clear how inept the Democrats were in putting up a candidate in the past two elections. For instance:

He ran for Congress and lost.

Bought an oil company, but (strangely) could not find any oil in Texas. The company went bankrupt.

Bought the Texas Rangers and quickly made management decisions that made them one of the worst teams in baseball (while he owned it).

While Governor of Texas (which he could not have won without his father's help), he changed pollution laws that resulted in Texas becoming the most polluted state in the nation, with Houston replacing LA as the most smog-ridden city.

Set a record for most executions by any governor in US history. (Which is a good thing, I suppose, if you are pro-death penalty.)

As president, he spent all the surplus gained during the Clinton years and has single-handedly allowed the US economy to get in the worst shape it has ever been since the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent depression.

There were more foreclosures in a 12 month period than ever before in US history during his presidency.

And the list goes on and on. You can see more (a lot more) here.

Not to sound too much like a politician, but let me be clear on this: I don't think John McCain is a bad person. His daughter was on Larry King a while back and he asked her if she thought both her father and Obama were practicing dirty politics. She said "I think politics, by its very nature, is dirty."

Even Barack Obanma, who promised to run a high standards campaign, has stooped to negative campaigning - but not to the degree or level of dishonesty that McCain has. It has really turned into a "I'll say anything or do anything to get elected." And that is really sad.

No, John McCain has changed his politics in order to become president. That's a bad thing, folks - and whether you are pro-Obama or not, it should be enough to sway you to anti-McCain. Now there will be those who say "wait a minute, Obama has changed his positions on things, too."

True enough. But from what I can tell, Obama - at least for the most part - changed his stance on things based on new information, or even correction of misinformation he was previously given. In studying this person's policies, I really can't find anything substantive where he has completely reversed course on some issue simply in an effort to get elected.

In closing, I'd like to reiterate something. I don't like politics. I don't like the rhetoric and the 20 phone calls a day we get telling us why we should vote one way or another for some candidate. (There's something the next president can do - make politicians and charitable organizations honor the "Do Not Call" registry). I won't allow signs for any candidate, party, or politician on my lawn, in my window, or on my car. But there is just no way I can believe we aren't in for a whole lot more hurtin' if John McCain is elected president. I also am not voting for Obama solely because I am anti-McCain. I truly believe he is the best option to implement the changes we need to turn this country around - for our place in world opinion, the economy, health care, and a host of other reasons.

Aspiring Chef Dies Hours After Making Ultra-Hot Sauce for Chili-Eating Contest

2008-09-29T11:17:00.001-05:00

OK - those who know me at all know I like hot stuff. The hotter the better, usually. But I am also quick to point out that I don't just like hot for the sake of hot. If there is no flavor to go along with it, I'm not interested.

Only 2 or 3 times in my life have I actually embarked on a hotter-than-hell epicurean experience and regretted it. Usually I just revel in the endorphin high that comes from eating hot stuff in much the same way a runner gets his or her endorphins going after a good run. Of course eating very spicy foods is not for the feint of heart, and one should always be prepared by putting a roll of toilet paper in the fridge over night.

And then there's this guy:

In a feat worthy of a posthumous Darwin award, he gives his girlfriend's brother a spoonful (which would probably be enough to get most people to down a gallon of milk directly from a cow's utter if necessary). But no, this guy eats a plateful - a frickin' plateful - of his own homemade concoction that, just after tasting, caused him to say "Wow, that's hot."

Shortly after consuming the liquid fire, he starts to itch all over and then he dies in his sleep.

To be fair, it might not have been the hot sauce that caused his death, but it certainly couldn't have helped. To paraphrase the Mythbusters: I'm a professional. Do not try this at home. EVER!

Read the news story about his suicide by hot sauce here.

Fun Quiz, but Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

2008-09-16T10:04:00.001-05:00

I found this little diversion via digg.com:

47 seconds

Created by Bunk Beds Pedia

Yes, that's right - it is apparently not enough that there is actually a site out there dedicated to everything you might want to know about bunk beds (and probably a lot you didn't). The site has a quiz that determines how long you could survive with a Velociraptor.

Speaking of useless minutiae, did you know "minutiae" is the plural of "minutia?" I didn't. I thought "minutia" was its own plural, like "data."

So each of the totally useless bits of information I gave you in this post are, by themselves, "minutia" (I think I am up to 5 or 6 at this point, depending on how you count), but together, they are "minutiae."

Who knew?

Watching Ike and Wasting Time Until The Power Goes Out Again

2008-09-11T21:45:00.001-05:00

So we are getting caught up on some TV, and doing a little web surfing - all while paying more than passing attention to that thing called Ike out in the Gulf. The winds have kicked up here, and since Ike has gotten much bigger and come further north than anticipated, they are now forecasting Tropical Storm force winds for here in New Orleans overnight tonight and into tomorrow. The slow moving storm has been steadily pushing water towards Louisiana, and parts of New Orleans east are already flooded in areas near the Industrial Canal. Don't worry, though - the areas are not residential and are prone to flooding during storms.

Areas outside of the levee protection area could see storm surge as high as 9 feet. This will put a terrible toll on places such as Grand Isle and southern parts of Terrebone and Lafouche parishes, which were already hit hard by Hurricane Gustav last week (which had a storm surge of 12 feet, btw). Judging by what I have seen so far, it looks like we could get an inch or two of rain here (no big deal), and I estimate a 35% chance that power will go out sometime between 1AM Friday AM and 1AM Saturday AM. The winds should die down again once Ike moves far enough north. The kicker in all this is that it is entirely possible that Dallas experiences Category 1 Hurricane force windows on Saturday evening and Sunday. I don't know if that has ever happened before.

So how about that diversion? Here is something fun to do:

According to Wikipedia, a Meme is "consists of any idea or behavior that can pass from one person to another by learning or imitation. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, gestures, practices, fashions, habits, songs, and dances. Memes propagate themselves and can move through the cultural sociosphere in a manner similar to the contagious behavior of a virus." Apparently, Richard Dawkins coined the term in his book The Selfish Game (1976). I'll let you follow the links to learn more about him and the origin of the word "meme."

I really have no idea how this is supposed to work, but "The Food Meme" has spread virally among many blogs out there. I can't see much value in it except that a). I was surprised at all the things I have tried (and how many things aren't on my "don't try" or "don't try again" lists); and b). that by publishing the list, I suppose you, my gentle readers (as Asminov would say), learns a bit more about me. So, without further ado, "The Food Meme," complete with instructions on how you can participate on your own, if you so choose.

The Food tasting meme

Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
Bold all the items you.ve eaten.
Cross out any items that you would never consider eating (or eating again)
Optional extra: Post a comment http://www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

To make the filling out of this form and generating the HTML for it a bit easier, someone named reddywhp has played around with some PHP. Go to http://reddywhip.org/lj/foods/ and fill it out there. After filling it out, you will be given the code to copy and paste into your blog.

Livejournal users, remember to use your LJ-Cuts (whatever that means)!

Venison
Nettle tea
Huevos rancheros
Steak tartare
Crocodile
Black pudding
Cheese fondue
Carp
Borscht
Baba ghanoush

Calamari

Pho

PB&J sandwich

Aloo gobi

Hot dog from a street cart

Epoisses

Black truffle

~~Fruit wine made from something other than grapes~~

Steamed pork buns

Pistachio ice cream

Heirloom tomatoes

Fresh wild berries

Foie gras

Rice and beans

Brawn, or head cheese

Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper

Dulce de leche

Oysters

Baklava

Bagna cauda

Wasabi peas

Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl

Salted lassi

Sauerkraut

Root beer float

Cognac with a fat cigar

Clotted cream tea

Vodka jelly

Gumbo

Oxtail

Curried goat

Whole insects

Phaal

Goat's milk

Malt whisky from a bottle worth $120 or more

Fugu

Chicken tikka masala

~~Eel~~

Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut

~~Sea urchin~~

Prickly pear

Umeboshi

Abalone

Paneer

McDonald's Big Mac Meal

Spaetzle

Dirty gin martini

Beer above 8% ABV

Poutine

~~Carob chips~~

S'mores

~~Sweetbreads~~

Kaolin

Currywurst

Durian

Frog's Legs

Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake

~~Haggis~~

Fried plantain

Chitterlings or andouillette

~~Gazpacho~~

~~Caviar and blini~~

Louche absinthe

Gjetost or brunost

Roadkill

Baijiu

Hostess Fruit Pie

Snail

Lapsang souchong

Bellini

Tom yum

Eggs Benedict

Pocky

Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant

Kobe beef

Hare

Goulash

~~Flowers~~

~~Horse~~

Criollo chocolate

Spam

Soft shell crab

Rose harissa

Catfish

Mole poblano

Bagel and lox

Lobster Thermidor

Polenta

Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee

~~Snake~~

Gustav Update #11 - Wrapping up with Random Thoughts

2008-09-08T09:50:00.001-05:00

As life returns to normal here in the Big Easy, I thought I would share some observations about how the government handled Gustav.

First, every facet of government really had their act together this time. Evacuation, while not without its problems, was handled well. People got out, and the plan to evacuate people by planes, trains, and buses seemed to work. More importantly, those people were also brought back, instead of stranded in some far away city.

The streetcars start running again today, which - for us at least - is one of the biggest signs of normalcy in the city.

Entergy really came through as well. As of 10 PM last night, 99% of Orleans parish had power, and 73% of people in Louisiana who were without electricity due to Gustav had it again. This is an amazing achievement.

While many stores are open reduced hours, the problem this time seems to be that they are running out of stock, not so much for lack of employees. While many stores remain closed, it is not difficult to find groceries or gas at all.

The fact that the city and state allowed the Saints to play in the Superdome on Sunday is another sign of how quickly the city is recovering. Initially, it was thought they might play in Tampa instead, but Ike's original computer models suggested it might turn onto the west coast of Florida.

Driving through New Orleans, it is obvious the wind became stronger as you went from east to west, just from the amount of fallen limbs and debris piled up on the curbs. Even in the six miles or so from the French Quarter to the Jefferson Parish line, it was kind of amazing to see the difference in wind damage.

Given their experiences with Gustav, it is not surprising that many residents are saying they will not evacuate for the next one. I must admit - given our evacuation gridlock experience, I am more apt to ride out the next one and leave afterwards - when traffic is clear. I still worry about debris disabling our mini-van, and that is probably the only thing that would get me to leave for anything less than a Category 4 at this point.

Thank You Apple & AT&T

The iPhone turned out to be an invaluable tool both during the storm and upon our return. As a cell phone, it helped us find out what businesses were open before we wasted gas going there. As a handheld computer, it allowed us to check radar and visit news sites to keep up to date on what was happening back home while we were evacuated.

With local landline phone service down, it was important AT&T get their cell towers operational again in southern Louisiana as soon as possible. Apparently, this was done as soon as winds dropped below tropical storm strength. Even during the storm, we were able to text message back and forth with people who had stayed.

We Still Don't Like Ike

Governor Bobby Jindal has declared a state of emergency as a prelude to Ike. Right now, the storm is on track to make landfall somewhere between Mobile and Houston, with the most likely spot being southwest Louisiana. This would definitely not be good for the coastal parishes, who were hardest hit from Gustav. (Some rural areas will not get power back until sometime in October.)

Declaring a state of emergency allows Louisiana to keep the National Guard troops and equipment on the ready to deploy as needed in response to another storm.

The projected track for Ike would have to take a considerable turn to the east in order to inspire me to evacuate again, but we are watching it very closely.

This will be the last Hurricane Gustav update. Hopefully, updates for Ike will be even fewer, or - if we are lucky - not necessary at all.

Gustav Update #10

2008-09-05T20:25:00.001-05:00

We made it back in just over 7 hours, which is pretty close to normal for the trip from Dothan, AL to New Orleans that includes a stop for dinner. Everyone ate until they were uncomfortably full at Lambert's Cafe. I told Fay at dinner that Lambert's is one of the very few places I will actually eat until I am miserable, and revel in each and every sigh of discomfort afterwords.

There was a simply astounding police and National Guard presence when we arrived in New Orleans. We literally could not drive anywhere without seeing the flashing lights of an emergency vehicle of some kind. All of them were patrolling. Although there was still a dusk to dawn curfew in effect, police had instructions not to stop anyone unless they appeared to be loitering or up to no good. We were able to travel to Mikey & Juli's house, then to Adam & Jarret's house, then to Cary & Andrea's house, and finally to our house without incident.

From a distance, the city looked normal. The lights were all on in New Orleans East as we came from the Twin Spans on I-10 towards the middle of the city. The French Quarter and CBD (Central Business District) all had power. Ironically, everyone who travelled with us had electricity except for us. So we sweated ourselves to sleep last night with the windows open, listening to post-storm reports on WWL radio and the sound of a generator across the street.

This morning I walked around the house and found a few pieces of roofing and some wood that blew into our driveway. As with Katrina, the debris was not from our house. I unpacked the hard drives and other things I had packed to take with and started getting everything connected again in anticipation of the electricity coming on at some point. Officially, the local power company was reporting Orleans Parish would be 100% energized (powered up) no later than September 7th.

Since we had no electricity and very little food, we headed down to Coop's Place for lunch. Many of the regulars were already there, but since it was one of the few places already open, the place was packed with people looking to get fed.

Working with Murphy

I am sure you are familiar with Murphy's Law: [INSERT LAW]. Well, the best way to beat Murphy is to work with him. Anticipate his next move and act accordingly. Since all we knew about when the electricity was supposed to come back on was that it would be on no later than Sunday, we decided to take Glenn Cozzi up on his offer to use his generator. My theory is that the sooner I go to the trouble of getting a generator running, the sooner the electricity would come back on.

I am happy to report it worked. I fired up the generator and ran extension cords to power the refrigerator, a couple of fans, a light, and 1 computer. Within an hour, the electricity came back on. Ah, air conditioning, we missed you so.

No Internet Yet

We have electricity, phone service, cable TV - but no Internet. Right now, my iPhone is the only way I can get email, surf the web, or post to my blog when at home. Hopefully that will be remedied within the next day or so.

We Don't Like Ike

With Gustav still fresh in our memories, all eyes are now on Hurricane Ike, which is forecast to go just south of Florida - perhaps across the Keys - and then curve north. Right now, the projections are for it to curve well to the east of New Orleans, but we are very much in the cone of possibility at this point. One of the things I noticed from the forecast models is that one of the models show it taking a straight line towards the mouth of the Mississippi river from the southeast.

The odds are we'll be fine, but we do need to pay attention to this storm, which is forecast to be a Category 4 as it reaches the gulf. It looks like it will be next Tuesday or Wednesday when we will know something more definite about where it will make landfall.

Gustav Update #9

2008-09-04T10:34:00.001-05:00

So why wasn't Gustav the "Mother of all Storms" as Mayor Nagin predicted? I did a little research yesterday, and here is what I came up with:

To understand what happened (or more accurately, what didn't happen), you first need to understand how hurricanes work. Tropical storms and hurricanes rotate counter-clockwise. They get their fuel from the left side of the storm, which the engine (the "eye") pulls in and swings it around the bottom and to the right. The reason the upper-right (northeast) quadrant is the strongest is because this is where the outflow meets the inflow. Centrifugal force comes into play, too. As the storm gets stronger, it becomes easier to "fling" the moisture out at this point.

Meteorologists disagree somewhat on how storms grow in size. Obviously, it has to do with available fuel, but what makes one storm a compact 100 mile in diameter category 4 versus a monster like Katrina? The majority seem to agree it has to do with how high the storm's clouds go - how tall it is. But here is where they seem to disagree a bit. Some think that compact storms have taller clouds because the fuel goes up and swirls around the eye. Others think wider storms have taller clouds because there is nowhere for the fuel to go because it is constrained by the outward bands.

Whatever the reason, they seem to agree that Gustav didn't become the monster it was supposed to because of wind sheer in the upper atmosphere on the left side of the storm that was present as the storm emerged from Cuba. Although it was over the Loop Current (which provides plenty of fuel), this wind sheer essentially acted like a hair dryer, evaporating the moisture before it could be sucked around the eye and used for fuel. Once it got north of the Loop Current, it encountered a deep pocket of cooler water which further inhibited intensification.

Meteorologists are also conflicted as to why the storm started moving faster as it got north of Cuba. The theory that makes the most sense to me is that the lack of fuel essentially made the storm lighter. With less weight to carry, it was able to move faster. Faster moving storms are also less capable of gathering strength. It was able to maintain some of its strength because the shallow waters near the coast were warmer, and its trajectory allowed it to gather a lot of fuel as the eye remained over water a lot longer than it would have if the storm was traveling straight north.

Whatever the reason, we are grateful to Mother Nature for all it did to prevent Gustav from being far worse than it could have been.

New Orleans City Update
Apparently, garbage services resume tomorrow, and SDT already has the French Quarter cleaned up. Since they have electricity (and Coop's has air conditioning) we may be spending a lot of time there.

A quick check of the traffic sites shows no major slow downs in the New Orleans area. Hopefully, anyone within a couple of hours either left yesterday or is leaving this AM. If we are lucky, maybe we won't encounter anything worse than something like morning rush hour traffic.

People

As I mentioned in an early post, Jeff "Coop" Cooperman, Laura Roe, Barry Franklin, Jason Palmer, and a few others rode out the storm in New Orleans. We heard from Coop last night. Coop's Place is open and doing gangbuster business, just like it did after Katrina. Sysco is even delivering food and supplies already.

Jeff Underwood also rode out the storm. Since Katrina, Jeff has purchased Buffa's on Esplanade Avenue just across from the French Quarter. Buffa's is open as well an doing great business.

Joe Fontana evacuated to Memphis and is heading back today.

Glenn Cozzi rode out the storm in the French Quarter and said his lights didn't even flicker. The news is not so good for us, according to Glenn. He drove by our house this AM and checked things out (he has a set of keys). He said everything is fine - no damage - but we don't have power. Hopefully it will be on by the time we get home tonight. If not, he said we can use his generator.

Going Home

The troops here are busy packing and cleaning. I told them to unleash their inner Thing 1 and Thing 2 and make this place cleaner/better than how we found it.

Lesley Weakley has been an amazing/fantastic/wonderful hostess and we all hope we are welcome here again should it be required to evacuate again.

Since we pretty much ate all the food we brought or bought, we are going to head out for breakfast in a little bit so Fay can get her iHop fix before we hit the road. We hope to be on the road sometime between noon and 2 PM.

The lack of power obviously means a lack of Internet when we get back. I will try to post through email on my iPhone, but the best way to get short updates will be to follow me on Twitter.

Gustav Update #8

2008-09-03T13:18:00.001-05:00

Although New Orleans is still under a mandatory evacuation order until 12:01 AM Thursday (at which time it becomes a voluntary evacuation), the checkpoints have been removed, and people are being allowed back. We are going to leave tomorrow, however, simply because the thought of spending another 10-12 hours in a constant stream of traffic that rivals the worst Los Angeles traffic jam you have ever been in just doesn't appeal to us.

There is an interesting article that appeared for awhile on www.nola.com (which is the New Orleans' Time-Picayune newspaper's e-news site) entitled "Next time, we're not leaving." The article was taken down shortly after it was posted, but someone put it up anyway.

In the article, the author pretty much accuses Nagin and other government officials of lying about the potential severity of the storm. In particular, it calls Nagin to task for calling Gustav "the mother of all storms" when it was still 900 miles away. I can't agree with everything he says. For one thing, I'd much rather the government err on the side of caution, rather than even implicitly encourage people to stay, and then have really bad things happen.

The one thing I do agree with, however, is that something has to be done about the speed at which people can evacuate, as well as the availability of gas, food, water, and restroom facilities along the evacuation route. I may err on the side of caution again just to see if they learned any lessons from this evacuation, but if we have a similar experience, it might be hard to convince me to leave for anything less than a Cat 4 in the future.

We are all more than ready to return to our homes, but we also all agree that waiting another day may make both the travel experience and the available resources in New Orleans better. In the mean time, all eyes are on Tropical Storm Ike. The various forecast models are all over the place, but this also has the potential to enter the Gulf, and it is on a similar track to that taken by Gustav.

I won't post tonight unless there is new significant information to write about, but I will post again tomorrow before we hit the road.

Gustav Update #7

2008-09-02T21:24:00.001-05:00

Well, Mayor Nagin says we can come back on Thursday. They are doing a staged re-entry, called "Tiers." This is different from Katrina, where they allowed people back based on zip code. "Tier 1" are government officials and contractors, as well as anyone affiliated with the health care system. They were allowed back in today.

"Tiers 2 & 3" are people who own businesses and need to check on inventory in order to get their shops up and running again. They will be allowed back tomorrow. Everyone else is allowed to come back on Thursday.

Nagin said he wished he had a few more days before having to open the city. I am sure he is under quite a bit of pressure, as at some point, the federal government would have to start handing out subsidies again, like they did for Katrina. He also said that anyone "in a fragile state" or with special needs should not come back yet. Further, he said that anyone that does come back will "be on their own for a few days."

This could mean we won't have electricity for a while, although I did talk to Barry Franklin today, who stayed and said the French Quarter, Uptown, and the Bywater all had power. (That doesn't mean we have power at our house, btw. I have been trying to call, hoping my answering machine will kick in, but so far all I get is a phone company message about trouble with the system.)

Right now, our plan is to leave early afternoon Thursday (as early as we can get these late night bartenders to move). We are going to stop for dinner at Lambert's Cafe in Foley, AL, which is about 3.5 hours from Dothan. From there we will probably stop at a grocery to get some food and head on in. I'll post tomorrow with any more details I find out.

I did hear from Steve Edwards. He and his family are heading up to his mother-in-law's house in Chicago for a couple of days. Depending on what we find out when we get back to New Orleans, they are planning on coming back on Saturday.

Gustav Update #6

2008-09-02T12:58:00.001-05:00

It does indeed look like New Orleans actually did dodge a bullet this time. Storm damage is extensive, but not as devastating (at least for New Orleans) as it was with Katrina. Entergy estimates a minimum of 850,000 customers are without power. More important, however, is that New Orleans and Baton Rouge have been cut off from the national grid. They are essentially an island when it comes to electricity. The only power being provided in the region is that which is being produced locally at the various plants.

All of the roads leading into New Orleans are being heavily guarded to prevent anyone from getting into the city. The earliest anyone can possibly get in would be Thursday. Even then, there might not be electricity for several days.

The evacuation for Gustav represented the largest in US history. It is estimated 2 million people, including 1.1 million from the New Orleans metropolitan area (which includes communities on the north shore of lake Ponchartrain) evacuated. Not counting "first responders" (local police, firefighters, and National Guard) it is estimated there are less than 10,000 people in the city of New Orleans.

I heard from our friend Keith Davis in Hammond. Their house survived with no major damage.

Today's menu includes the rest of the meat "rescued" from The Joint, as well as Chicken and Sausage Gumbo. We'd rather be home, but we don't need to be miserable.

Gustav Update #5

2008-09-01T22:15:00.002-05:00

So far, it looks like Gustav's bark was much worse than its bite, at least as far as New Orleans was concerned. I heard from Coop about 5PM CDT. The power is back on in the quarter and they are opening up for the evening to serve anyone who want to eat. In addition to Coop, Barry Franklin, Laura Roe, Jason Palmer, and a couple of other employees road out the storm in New Orleans and are there to keep the place open.

The Weather Channel and CNN are reporting that winds are down to a sustained 16 mph. It looks like there is one more major band of storms that will be going through later tonight. The biggest concern with this set of storms will be the possibility of tornados.

We continue to keep a wary eye on things, however. Mayor Nagin reports that the sewer system is not functioning. The thought of 300,000 people who can't flush coming back into the city doesn't excite me in the least. We also are mindful of the fact that it looked like New Orleans escaped the worst of Katrina until well after the storm had left the area. In fact, by 10:23 AM on 8/29/05 I was already writing about how New Orleans had dodged another bullet. It wasn't until the morning of the 30th that we started seeing the extent of the damage. So we are very much in a wait and see mode here.

Everyone is getting along great. It is a little like The Big Chill, with 15 people staying in a pretty big house, except no one died (well, except for Nigel the cat). Everyone is anxious to get home, but understands this is part and parcel of life in New Orleans, and everyone is happy to chip in to make this as fun as possible under the circumstances.

Assuming everything checks out tomorrow, we hope to be on the road home as soon as Wednesday or perhaps Thursday. We'll see what happens tomorrow.

Gustav Update #4

2008-09-01T11:26:00.001-05:00

As I am writing this, Gustav has just made landfall near Cocodrie, LA. It is a category 3 storm. Hurricane strength winds are starting to pummel New Orleans. This storm is different from Katrina. Katrina's eye went east of the city by about 40-50 miles, so the city was spared the worst winds in the Northeast quadrant. Gustav puts that quadrant right over the city.

The levees on the west side of the Industrial Canal (the one that obliterated the Lower Ninth ward) have overtopped, and perhaps breached. Water is flowing into the city in this location like a river. Be prepared to see a flurry of conspiracy theories about this. Those of you who followed by web site after Katrina might remember that I questioned how the feds chose to spend their money in fixing the levees on the Industrial Canal after Katrina. Here's what I had to say in Update #74 on May 6, 2006:

Maybe it's just me, but since the Lower Ninth was prettty much decimated already, wouldn't it have made more sense to put in some temporary protection over there and shore up the part that protects what wasn't so badly damaged?

Here's the deal: they built this massive flood wall on the east side of the Industrial canal, which protects a largely unpopulated lower ninth ward. While they did some shoring up, the west side of the canal did not receive the same kind of attention as the east side. This is pure physics, people. The east flood wall is stronger and higher and the water needs somewhere to go. It seems obvious to me that the west wall is going to give with any kind of storm surge. Since the storm is literally pushing water against this wall, overtopping or a breach is almost inevitable. Seems like the powers that be are using mother nature for urban renewal.

I understand Shell Beach, where Coop had his boat before Katrina, is experiencing a 10 foot storm surge right now. Coop pulled his boat up to his house before the storm. CNN is also reporting that the Mississippi River is running in reverse, at least on the surface, at New Orleans. We also know the power is out throughout the city.

Our Trip

We left New Orleans about 3 PM yesterday (Sunday, 8/31/08). Our caravan this time included Janis and myself, Cary and Andrea, Adam, Jarret, and Coop's bartender (and good friend) Fay Sanchez in our van, and Juli Green, her boyfriend Mikey Dressler, and Allan Fickling following us with four cats in Juli's car. Of all the wonderful, generous choices we had for places to go and people with whom to stay, we narrowed it down to two: The Chili House in Meridian, MS (owned by some Coop's out of town regulars), or Dothan, AL where the mother-in-law of Fernanda Weakly, who used to work for me at MacSpeech. Availability of gas was also a consideration. Although I topped off the tank on Saturday, we had done a lot of running around helping others prepare, so we were down to about 3/4 of a tank, with no more gas available in New Orleans. The plan was to head northeast on I-59 into Mississippi rather than straight east on I-10, which runs along the coast. This would be safer as the outer bands started coming in, and would also provide more choices for gas.

We thought we had it in the bag. There was hardly anyone on I-10. We went 70 miles per hour all the way through the city, across the twin spans, past Slidell, and onto I-59. At the I-10/I-59 split traffic was forced northward onto I-59, so we couldn't have gone east on I-10 if we wanted to. For the first 6 or 7 miles we were able to continue traveling 70 mph. Then we hit the evacuation traffic. Contraflow started just south of the Louisiana/Mississippi state line. With traffic at pretty much a standstill on the northbound lanes, we cheated and crossed over to the southbound lanes (which were now traveling northbound). We weren't the only ones. We were going 70 mph again for a about 6 miles, then back to a dead standstill. The next 24 miles we averaged 5-6 miles per hour. The exits were blocked. No one could exit if they wanted to. It didn't matter, however, as all the gas stations along this part of I-59 had run out of gas hours before.

Just south of Poplarville the traffic in the southbound lanes (including us) were shifted back to the northbound lanes. The shift over process took a little over an hour over a two mile distance. Traffic started moving a little faster, but was still slow because everyone else who was running out of gas was exiting at Poplarville, which was also the first exit in Mississippi at which cars were allowed to exit. Thank God (and Steve Jobs) for iPhones! we already knew there was no gas in Poplarville. We had information that there was gas in Lumberton, so we exited at exit 35. At this point we had less than 40 miles to go until empty, and Juli's car was down to less than a quarter of a tank. The gas station at the exit was closed, so we pulled into a parking lot to stretch, allow those who smoke to do so, and regroup. While we were there, someone driving a Mississippi Department of Transportation truck pulled in and asked if we needed any help. We asked about gas stations and he told us about several within a short distance. We were able to fill up the cars, get some refreshments, and take a badly needed bathroom break. We had been on the road over 6 hours to go a distance that normally would have taken a little over an hour. Along the way, however, we encountered our first casualty: Mikey's cat Nigel died while we were in the evacuation standstill. Nigel was 19 years old. Mikey and July buried him underneath a flag pole in Lumberton.

While we were in Lumberton a police officer told us a tornado had touched down in the French Quarter. As you can imagine, this scared us. We were able to get through to Coop at Coop's Place, who told us a tornado in fact had NOT touched down. It turned out that funnel clouds were sighted and there was a tornado warning, but no touch down. Back on the road.

The plan was to drive to Laurel, MS and then decide whether we were going to keep going northeast or cut to the east to head to Dothan. While on the road we heard from Coop's regulars Kevin and Bob, who were at a standstill over 20 miles south of Meridian. As we continued north (we were now traveling at about 60 mph), we listened to WWL radio out of New Orleans and learned the backup near Meridian was getting worse. One person called in to report the backup was now just north of Laurel, which is 60 miles southwest of Meridian. No one had the stomach for sitting in bumper to bumper traffic again, so we decided to cut east just south of Hattiesburg, MS on US 98. At this point, we were 300 miles from Dothan, AL — about the same distance as if we had left directly from New Orleans. We had no choice. The only place to get gas was north, not east.

The rest of the trip was smooth sailing. We took US 98 to north of Mobile, AL, where we stopped to get a bite to eat at a Waffle House. The stress was running pretty high at this point, so I sat down with a couple of people and talked them down a bit. It was only a minor issue, but I didn't want it escalating as we still had 3 hours to go. At this point it was after midnight, and around 1AM when we finally got on the road again. We took I-65 northeast to US 84, where we gassed up, and then headed pretty much due east to Dothan. There was hardly any traffic on these roads from the time we left I-59 near Hattiesburg - something for which I was very thankful. When we did pass a car, it almost always had Louisiana plates. While listening to WWL radio we found out it took someone 5 hours to get from Hattiesburg to Meridian. The problem was apparently people who got tired of gridlock on I-55 and took US 98, US 84, and I-20 east to I-59. It turns out that although we had to go a further distance, we arrived in Dothan about the same time we would have arrived in Meridian. We pulled in at around 4AM - 13 hours after we left. This trip would normally have taken about 6 hours (and New Orleans to Meridian is only about 2.5 hours!).

People

I don't have too much information on people yet, but here is what I do know:

Fay Sanchez, Allan Fickling, Juli Green, and Mikey Dressler are with us, of course, as are our kids and Andrea.

Kevin and Bob made it past Meridian, although I don't know where they ended up.

Kattai and Kathleen left on Friday. I can't remember where (Fay knows), but they are safe.

Jaclyn McCabe is staying at a friend's house in Memphis.
Steve Edwards and his family made it to Blytheville, AK. They left about 5 AM and pulled into Blytheville around 8:30 PM. Steve said it took over 4 hours to get from his home to the I-10/I-55 split.

Coop, Laura Roe, Barry Franklin, and Jason Palmer chose to ride out the storm at Coop's Place.

Mike and Nichole Moses left early and made it to Gatlinburg, TN.

What's Next

Well, it is certainly too early to make any decisions about what we are going to do. The storm has to completely pass from the New Orleans area and the local authorities need to assess the damage. We will hunker down here until at least Thursday, unless they say we can come back sooner. Katrina taught us how to be nomads, if necessary, so we will try not to be too much of a burden on any one of our friends for too long. Hopefully it won't come to that.

But for the immediate future, well, it is Labor Day and what better thing to do than BBQ? Both Allan and Mikey work at The Joint, which has some of the best BBQ ribs anywhere. They brought a bunch of ribs and some other goodies. Janis and I also brought fixins' for Chicken and Sausage Gumbo. We can't offer much, but we do make sure our hosts eat well.

Get Faster Updates
Do you know about Twitter? This is a neat little thing that allows its users to "micro-blog" what they are doing. There is a limit of 140 characters and there are a variety of programs for the iPhone that allow you to add pictures, GPS location, etc. Last night, I posted to Twitter as we were traveling (don't worry, I didn't text and drive - we were either stopped or someone typed for me). You can sign up for a free account at http://twitter.com/home. Once you have done that you can follow my posts at http://twitter.com/thechuck. You can also follow my Twitter posts on my Facebook page.

I'll try to update what I find out about people tonight, as well as anything else I find out that you may not be able to hear about on the news networks or weather channel.

Gustav Update #3

2008-08-31T11:39:00.001-05:00

We took our vote, and the consensus is to leave. It was not unanimous. Given the latest projections, I am not in the least worried about water damage at our house, but there are three things that do bother me enough that I think evacuating is a good idea:

Tornados.

Damage to the car from flying debris.

Lack of basic services after the storm.

So we are leaving. We hope to be on the road between 2 and 3 PM. Currently, our plan is to take I-10 east out of the city, then I-59 north to Laurel, MS. At that point, we will decide whether to continue north to Meridian (where we have some friends that offered to put us up), or east on US 84 to Dothan, AL.

Rest assured, we aren't taking any chances with our safety. I'll post again as soon as I can.

Gustav Updates #1 & #2

2008-08-30T14:58:00.001-05:00

With Gustav taking aim at us in the form of a Category 5 hurricane, it is time once again to send out my periodic hurricane updates. I will send first via email, and then post here as time permits. If you don't already receive my hurricane updates and would like to, please send me an email at thechuck@mac.com.

Gustav Update #1 (August 29, 2008; 6:45 PM)

Yesterday I send the following message to my Hurricane mailing list:

Well, I was going to do a lengthier 3rd Anniversary of Katrina update, but with Gustav giving us plenty of warning, Janis and I have been keeping busy getting our ducks in a row, so to speak.

Nonetheless, I did have time to do a small update, which you can view at www.macchuck.com.

For those of you who haven't called or sent a text message yet, we haven't decided whether or not we will be evacuating for Gustav and probably won't decide until sometime on Sunday. If I had to make a decision right now, based on what I am seeing so far, we would stay here as the winds will probably not be much more than tropical storm strength (again, based on what we know now).

Believe me, we will take no chances, but please remember, our house had absolutely no damage from Katrina, so we actually feel we might be safer here than with the nutbuckets on the road for anything less than a direct hit.

I'll keep you updated as things change.

Gustav Update #2 (August 30, 2008; 2:30 PM)

Today, Janis and I have been busy moving things out of the yard into the garage and cleaning coolers and water buckets. The state police is ready to start contra flow on the Interstates as early as this evening (it was not supposed to start until tomorrow).

Gustav was just upgraded to a category 5 during FEMA's most recent news conference — and it hasn't even hit Cuba yet. The area of Cuba it is going to go over is flat and narrow, so significant weakening is not expected to happen. One ominous sign: the Sunday paper just arrived.

We are going to continue to prepare for both staying and leaving. Today we are getting our important papers together and packing clothes. We also cleaned all our coolers and got out the styrofoam coolers we have been saving for just this occasion. We went to the store and picked up some last minute provisions. Whether we stay or leave, we will have the fixens' for some awesome gumbo to feed people.

Tomorrow we will fill the bathtub with water, as well as two 5 gallon coolers and a bunch of pickle buckets, in case we need clean water. We have two full tanks of propane, should they turn the gas off.

We will be taking a vote as a family tomorrow at 11AM as to whether to stay or leave - a vote which will not be final by any means, should we decide at that point to stay. We can always leave a bit later. The important thing will be to see what the storm's track and intensity forecast is tomorrow (Sunday) AM. We do know that it is highly unlikely for it to hit Louisiana as a Category 4 storm, let alone a category 5.

Remember the Walmart that was looted after Katrina? There are now 200 New Orleans police cars parked in the parking lot adjacent to it. Remember the scene at the New Orleans Convention Center after Katrina? There are now 1500-2000 National Guard troops stationed there using it as a staging area. My only concern is why they brought in about 200 howitzers there as well. What the heck do they need those for?

For Katrina, New Orleans had approximately 1600 police officers, 200 of which left the city. Today, as I write this, there are about 1500 police officers in the city and another almost 2000 National Guard troops in town. New Orleans is in a much better position to handle this storm.

Also, what they call "assisted evacuations" are happening. The storm has 17 places identified throughout the city where people can go if they have no other way to get out of town. A city bus picks people up at those spots and takes them to Union Station, where they get on a bus or a train. So far they have moved over 5000 people out of town and are planning on moving as many as 35,000 out this way. They have 700 buses on contract, each of which holds 50 people.

The Mayor has asked that all tourists leave New Orleans now. The last flight out of New Orleans will be at 6PM tonight.

This just in: Janis' part-time boss (who is a retired petroleum engineer) has some inside information from the forecasting service used by the oil companies that there will not be any flooding by our house, but it will be very windy. They are still projecting the storm to curve and go west of the city as a Cat 2 or 3.

Should we decide to leave, we will probably go to Dothan, Alabama. The mother-in-law of the person who used to work for me at MacSpeech has asked us to come there. (She stayed with us for Mia's third birthday party.) It is about a 6 hour drive normally, so we think probably 12 hours under these circumstances.

Tonight we are going to have dinner at Coop's Place - to check up on people and make sure we have their phone numbers, as well as help eat some of the remaining food (we are already pretty cleaned out, except for what is frozen).

For those of you tracking the storm, here is my favorite site:

http://www.stormpulse.com/

Exciting times. I'll write more as I can.

On Favre

2008-08-07T10:51:00.001-05:00

I am not an avid sports fan. For the most part, I am a "fair weather" fan who loves to see certain teams go all the way. The only way I'll watch a World Series is if the Cubs are in it. Hockey doesn't interest me at all, and I'll be watching anything but the Olympics. I admit I'll be keeping an eye on the New Orleans Hornets this year, but otherwise, I haven't followed basketball since Michael Jordan played for the bulls.

But then there is professional football.

I will follow the Packers and Saints win or lose. There is something about the game that piques my interest and motivates me to keep watching. But I must admit the latest chapter in the Favre-Packer relationship has me puzzled.

Favre Partly to Blame

To be fair, Brett brought this on himself. I can understand how he felt when the Giants stunned the Packers and their fans by knocking Green Bay out of their Super Bowl bid last year. He told the media that he was retiring because anything short of a Super Bowl victory this year would be disappointing for him and with so many good teams, such a victory could not be assured simply by his return.

I get it. He was tired - exhausted even - from playing one of his best seasons ever. He was shocked by the loss. Even so, he should have kept his mouth shut and waited for things to settle down before making any rash decisions. Like Michael Jordan, to stop playing the game would be like trying to stop breathing. Anyone who followed Favre's career at all knows this about him, even if he did not know it about himself until earlier this year.

If you don't think Favre is motivated to play, consider this: the Packers offered him a $20 million marketing deal to stay retired, which he turned down. That's a lot of future-generation-little-Favres' college educations to pass up.

Packers Also to Blame

As much as all of this could have been avoided had Favre just waited until this past spring to see how he felt about playing again before saying anything, I feel the Packers have made a huge mistake by letting him go. For the past 16 years the Packers have been defined by Brett Favre's leadership. To not have #4 leading the team - especially after such a great season last year - is very perplexing.

But it is all about business, after all. Aaron Rodgers is getting old sitting on the bench. The Packers, mindful of this and with Favre waffling regarding his return, bet the farm on Rodgers. Their commitment is commendable. Their desire not to go back on their word to him shows their integrity as a business. But businesses are about money, and sometimes circumstances change that require them to make tough decisions.

For instance, considering Aaron Rodgers seems to be either extremely unlucky or injury prone, the Packers acquired two promising, extremely talented backup quarterbacks in Matt Flynn (from LSU) and Brian Bohm (Louisville). Bohm was named the 2005 Big East Offensive Player of the Year while Flynn lead LSU's Tigers to victory in the BCS Championship game last year. So, should Aaron Rodgers not work out, they have plenty of talent. Like I said, it is strictly business. The Packers will have no problem replacing Rodgers with either Flynn or Bohm should it become necessary to do so.

But was that really the best business decision?

Brett Favre is a brand. To not be in a Packers uniform tarnishes that brand. It is as simple as that. The Packers originally said they would not trade him to a conference rival because they were concerned with "tarnishing his legacy." Bull. They were concerned the coveted combination of Favre and Randy Moss might beat the pants off them. It is as simple as that.

I totally understand Favre's desire to play. Professional athletes hardly ever retire after a good season. In fact, most professional athletes either retire from an injury, or when their performance degrades to the point they can no longer compete at a level expected from them by themselves, their team, and their fans. Favre - coming off one of his best years ever - should have known at least that much about himself before retiring.

Where are the Owners?

The Green Bay Packers are unique in that they are owned by a community of shareholders, most of whom live in Green Bay. I don't know the extent to which stockholders have rights in a situation like this, but I do know that each stockholder has voting rights. I also know that an owner of a team can instruct its coaches to do certain things - whether they want to do them or not. Finally, I believe the owner(s) of a professional sports franchise has a responsibility to see the team is managed in a way that represents the best potential financial success. It seems to me the stockholders of the Green Bay Packers have failed both the fans and the team by not forcing the coaching staff and management to retain Favre.

Packers Took The Biggest Risk

The biggest shock will happen during this football season. Odds are the Packers will not make it to the Super Bowl under Aaron Rodgers. As Favre already pointed out, there are too many other good teams out there. I want you to pay close attention to the Packers this year and wait for the head coach or GM to utter something similar to the following phrase:

We knew going into this season it would be a rebuilding year for us.

Remember - you heard it here first, folks.

There is no need for a rebuilding year. Favre had a great offense at his command last year. The key players are back, and the offense has been shored up with their draft picks. This year's team - with Favre as Quarterback - would have been as talented as the 1996 Packers who went all the way. Perhaps even more so, as the current offense does not depend on guys like Desmond Howard to make the key plays.

While I think it unlikely that either the Favre-less Packers or Favre-enabled Jets will make it to the Super Bowl this year, I think it would have been much more likely that Green Bay could have made it with Favre at the helm. A Super Bowl victory does wonders for a team's bottom line and will carry them many years. Even without a Super Bowl victory, I think the Packer's won-loss record would have been much higher if they had retained Favre.

But what happens if the Jets do go all the way - or even just get in the playoffs and the Packers do not? All the bad decisions of the coaching staff, the management, and the stockholders (for putting up with the coaches and managers) will be exposed, and the damage to the franchise will be just as lingering as would a Super Bowl victory or playoff appearance would be beneficial.

At the end of the day, Brett Favre has to play until he can't any more. It's in his nature, and the Packers should have found a way for him to do that in Green Bay. The Jets were willing to give up Chad Pennington, who was a first round draft pick and is loved and respected in the Jet's locker room. With Matt Flynn and Brian Bohm on board, the Packers should have been willing to do the same with Rodgers to make room for the one guy who eclipsed even the legacy of Bart Starr in their history. As a die-hard Packer fan, I think they owed him that much - and I believe it was their best business decision as well.

Of course, maybe I am wrong. Maybe the Packers know something I don't (I certainly hope so). Maybe they will go all they way with Aaron Rodgers. If they do, I will be cheering them all the way.

Sliding Doors and Hugs

2008-07-20T15:55:00.001-05:00

There's a nice little movie called Sliding Doors, which stars Gwyneth Paltrow and John Hannah (Brendon Fraiser's brother-in-law from the Mummy movies). The movie examines two paths a woman's life could take, all based on which side of some sliding doors on a subway train she ends up on, which in itself is due to whether or not she bumps into someone on the way to the train. During the course of the movie, we see both paths unfold, in parallel and see how that one small change sends her life in different directions.

Yesterday (July 19, 2008) was all about sliding doors for us.

We took Juli Green, a friend whose iPhone had developed a problem, to Baton Rouge so she could have it checked out at the Apple store. Adam was supposed to go with us, but he bowed out at the last minute to nurse a hangover acquired the night before.

Apple replaced Juli's iPhone in no time and we went off for pizza at Fleur De Lis Cocktail Lounge, which happens to have the best thin crust pizza in Louisiana. I was driving, so no booze. I had iced tea. On the way out of Baton Rouge we stopped by Kohl's department store. Just before heading back to New Orleans we picked up a couple of sodas and a root beer float at Wendy's for the hour or so trip back.

Interstate 10 between New Orleans and Baton Rouge has become more of a raceway, with people traveling 80-90 mph or more. While I am no stranger to speeding myself, I wasn't in the mood for it on the way back. None of us had anywhere we had to be at any particular time, so I got off the interstate at Highway 61, about 1/2 way between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

From the early 1940's until I-10 was built, Airline Highway was the main thoroughfare between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. A fun, but unsubstantiated rumor is that then governor Earl Long had it built so he could get to New Orleans faster to see Blaze Star, a stripper with whom he was having an affair. It is a 4 lane, divided highway for most of the way. Today, it is much less-travelled than I-10 and also gives one the opportunity to see such communities as Gramercy and LaPlace, which I-10 bypasses. It also affords a much closer look at the Bonnet Carre Spillway. Traveling Airline Highway also misses the construction on I-10 in New Orleans, which can become quite congested.

In other words, we were having a lovely day. Got an iPhone replaced, ate some great pizza, did some shopping, and were having a relaxing drive home. Just past the New Orleans airport is where things went south, so to speak.

Cell phones are wonderful things. At one time or another I am sure most of us wondered how we ever got along without them. In fact, if you just stand on a busy street corner in most cities and watch the cars go by, roughly 1 in 3 drivers will be talking on their cell phone. If you are one of those people, stop right now. Here's why:

Chuck & Janis' Jeep after the accident

We were minding our own business, nearly home, and I had come to a complete stop behind two cars, the first of which was waiting for oncoming traffic to clear so they could turn left. Janis was in the passenger seat, and Juli was in the back seat, installing applications onto her new iPhone. I had left enough space between our Jeep and the car in front of me to switch to the right lane to get around them. As I look in the rear view mirror, I see a pickup truck bearing down on us at full speed. Janis said I was about to speak, but all she heard was my intake of breath and then BAM!

We were rear-ended full force by a pickup truck going 50 mph. Juli said it was one of the loudest noises she has ever heard. We were hit just to the right of center and pushed us over the thin median strip (which was more of a curb that divided the opposing lanes), into oncoming traffic. The force of the impact pushed both of the front seats down to their reclined position, one of them hitting Juli in the face. In this reclined position, I held onto the steering wheel and managed to get us around the two vehicles ahead of us and out of oncoming traffic, back into our lane, narrowly missing a head-on collision with a large SUV (who also swerved). Still not sure how I avoided hitting anything myself. We finally came to a full stop 150 feet or so from the spot of the impact. It took me a full minute before I had enough presence of mind to turn off the engine and look around.

Janis and I seemed OK, but Juli was definitely in shock. She started to hyperventilate, so I told her to focus and started breathing with her. (Those Lamaze classes 27+ years ago finally paid off!) A little blood was coming out of her nose, which had already swollen up a bit. At this point, we were all pretty sure she broke it.

The driver of the pickup that hit us was reaching down for his cell phone and didn't see the stopped traffic ahead. His airbags deployed and he declined medical attention. Not sure of how badly Juli might be hurt, we called 911 and asked for an ambulance. She was taken to East Jefferson Hospital in Metairie, where they determined her nose was not broken, but her neck was strained. Janis and I were not hurt, although I appear to have a bruised and swollen knee and a few pulled muscles (mostly from holding onto the steering wheel in that reclined position). Janis says she feels guilty because she is not sore at all.

I called Cary, who had Adam come in and work for him so he and Juli's boyfriend Mikey could come out in Mikey's car to get Janis and me. We then went and waited for her to get out of the hospital. While at the hospital I removed my glasses and felt something sticky on the side of my head. I got a little worried, thinking it might be blood (mine or someone else's), but since there wasn't any blood anywhere else and I had no pain in my head, I quickly ruled that out. It turns out Juli's root beer float hit me in the side of the head during the impact. After Juli was released, we returned to Coop's (Juli and Mikey live in an apartment above the bar). We are borrowing Mikey's car right now until we can contact our insurance company and start getting things figured out.

While at Coop's, one of the regulars there chided us for being at a bar right after the accident (it wasn't right after - it was about 4 hours after it happened). He said it weakens our case. I am not sure how much of a case we have, since no one was seriously injured, but I do know this: there are two types of people in the world after an experience like that - those who go to church and those who go to a bar.

The regulars at Coop's - our extended "bar family," - all gave us hugs when we arrived. These were not your average hugs, either. They were your extended glad-you're-alive-I'm-going-to-squeeze-the-stuffing-out-of-you type of hugs, and we were all very happy to receive them, as things could have turned out far worse.

The Jeep is, of course, totaled. The repair costs would obviously be more than the value of the vehicle at this point. The other driver was a delivery person for Papa John's, which is a good thing, because they are required to carry insurance. People have already advised us to call Morris Bart, but I don't know. I am not a litigious person, and we need to see what the insurance company is going to do.

So Sliding Door #1 was when Adam decided not to come along. Given his height, he would have been in the passenger seat and Janis would have been in the back with Juli, and both could have been hurt much worse.

Sliding Door #2 was Janis's request that we stop at Kohl's department store, which delayed us enough to put us in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sliding Door #3 was when Janis decided to do her computing work in the front seat instead of the back. Had she been in the back, she may have had her computer open at the time of impact and both she and it could have been hurt.

Sliding Door #4 was my choice to pull off the interstate and take Airline Highway instead.

It is human nature to blame oneself. "I should have stayed on the Interstate," or "We shouldn't have stopped at Kohl's." But the truth is that these are just a random series of choices that could have gone one way or the other and who knows - perhaps making the choices we did saved us from a worse fate on the Interstate.

The only blame here goes to the guy reaching for his cell phone. He should have known better. So please - if you don't have handsfree - don't talk on the phone or text or google while driving. I gotta believe that in many ways, being the person who caused the accident is probably worse than getting hit, and I would hate for any of you who read this to be in that position.

I'll post an update as we find things out.

By the way, if you'd like to see Sliding Doors, it will be on The Movie Channel (TMC) tonight (Sunday, July 20, 2008) at 9:30 PM and tomorrow (Monday, July 21, 2008) at 5:00 AM.

Hot Dogs and Vaseline

2008-07-03T11:34:00.001-05:00

I came across this picture while surfing today:

Apparently this was all the person was buying - which in itself leads one to wonder what his 4th of Juiy BBQ is actually going to be like. But that isn't what struck me as most relevant. The picture was taken by someone else and posted to the Internet.

My first thought was "is this an invasion of privacy?" But a moment or two of thought leads clearly to the conclusion it was not. The hot dogs an Vaseline were clearly visible to anyone in the store, including the other customers and the check out person. The fact that we all get to be in that same check out line for this moment in time captured in a picture is irrelevant.

This got me to thinking about the traffic and crime cameras going up around New Orleans:

Traffic and crime cameras.

I was driving with a friend the other day, and he commented about how he didn't like the traffic cameras. He thought they were an invasion of privacy. I asked why he thought that way, and he said because he is getting tired of "big brother" watching your every move.

Red light stop, green light go, yellow light go very fast.

Let me digress for one moment: Janis and I have traveled all over the U.S. in the past year. In every city we see rampant abuse of the yellow caution light. These people take the above quote from 1984's Starman very literally, and I must admit, it is a pet peeve of mine.

I really am sick of everyone treating life like it is their own personal "me" decade. What happened to simple courtesy? Yes, we are all in a hurry - but those stop lights are there for a reason. When you run through an intersection when the light is red you endanger yourself and others (at worst) and at best, you delay the normal flow of traffic, delaying everyone else's life in the process. As Spock said: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.

OK - so like I said, I was driving with this friend of mine who feels traffic cameras are an invasion of privacy. I asked him "do you think it is OK to run a red light, or to speed up when it is already yellow if you absolutely know the light will turn red before you get through the intersection?" He said "no, of course not."

I then asked him that if a police car was present and saw the vehicle go through the intersection illegally, would he think it is a good thing or a bad thing for the policeman to pull over and give the driver a ticket. "That would be great," he said. "We need more police doing exactly that to cut down on this sort of thing."

You know where I am going with this, don't you? By the end of the conversation, I had made the case for traffic cameras. First of all, they only take pictures of offenders, not every car that goes through the intersection. Next, they really are like having a policeman at that intersection 24/7. This frees the police up to do more important things, like - oh, I don't know - catch bad guys with guns?

The same is true of the crime cameras. These cameras aren't peering into your home, examining what you do behind closed doors. They are out in the open, taking pictures of people doing things in public. They are seeing no more or less than what anyone else might see with one exception - they do not rely on human memory in order to report what they see. They are no different than the hot dogs and Vaseline. If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear. If, for some reason, you feel the need to do something wrong - do it behind closed doors, not in public.

The moral of the story, boys and girls, is this: in this day and age, the details of your life are available to strangers in so many different ways. The beauty of this is that it allows us all to bask in our individual uniqueness - and that is the part of this new age that should be embraced. We have the choice to learn about others in ways that were never before possible - the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Mac vs. Windows - a Real World Analogy

2008-06-06T13:03:00.001-05:00

An employee of a client of mine asked me why he should get a Mac instead of a Windows computer. He wanted what, in my opinion, was the number one reason. After a moment of thought, I told him it was because Windows is much more susceptible to viruses and spyware. He said "How so?"

This is what I told him.

Imagine coming home after work and you open your closet to change clothes, and hanging there is an ad for J.C. Penny. You go into your bathroom and there are ads everywhere for toilet paper, toothpaste, deodorant, etc. You then walk into your bedroom and there, on your bed, are ads for Linens and Things. As you walk from your bedroom to your kitchen, you notice there are maybe 100 people in your house - all uninvited - placing these flyers everywhere.

So now you have to go around your house and clean up all the flyers, and doing so is made all the more difficult from all the people in your house who are making it hard for you to move from one room to another. After finally getting rid of all the flyers and ushering the people out of your house, you sit down to eat dinner.

The next morning, you wake up and you aren't feeling so good. In fact, you are feeling downright awful. So you go to the doctor. After running some tests he says you have not just one virus but hundreds of them, probably left by some of the people who were in your house the day before. At this point, your doctor tells you something quite astonishing:

"Oh, this is quite normal. In fact there are well over 10,000 viruses out there that they could have infected you with. Here are some prescriptions that should take care of them."

So you get the prescriptions filled, and then you call a security company to install equipment and post an armed guard outside your home to make sure this doesn't happen again.

Now, think for just a minute about what a much more crazy world this would be (yes, even crazier than the one created by the Bush administration). Yet, everyone in this crazy world thinks that is normal and acceptable - just the stuff you have to put up with in order to live your life.

Well, not everyone.

There are some people who build extra special houses. They are a little more expensive, but they are virtually impervious to home invasions that leave advertising all over the place and infect you.

Which home would you want to live in? That's the difference between Windows and Mac. I am admittedly a Mac bigot - but it just doesn't make sense to me to pay less for a Windows computer, just to have to install a bunch of extra software to keep it from getting "sick," or slowing down from all the spyware. If you are going to spend extra money anyway, why not just buy something that doesn't have those issues?

There are, of course, many other reasons why I think Macs are better than Windows (not the least of which is that I can now run all the Windows software on them as well, if I want - without endangering my Mac stuff, btw). But I won't go into them here. I really just wanted to write all this down while I was thinking of it.

Cate St. Seafood Station, Hammond, LA

2008-05-28T17:28:00.001-05:00

When you think of Sushi, Hammond, Louisiana is probably not the first place that comes to mind — or the second or third or hundredth, for that matter. But if there is a finer place to get Sushi in North America, I don't know about it. Seriously.

Janis and I drove up to Ponchatoula last night to visit with our good friend Keith Davis and to pick up a couple of projects he was working on for me and to take him and his family out to dinner. Keith suggested the Cate St. Seafood Station in Hammond, which is just a few miles north of Ponchatoula. This is the old train station in Hammond that has been converted to a restaurant. Keith just happens to do some odd jobs for the restaurant's owner, John Wong. Once we arrived Keith could also not resist telling us that we were now on the "Wong side of the tracks." Blame Keith for that one, not me.

Here is my endorsement: if you are going to visit New Orleans, this place is worth the 1 hour drive (gas prices and all). It is that good.

We started off with the "Bonzai Bomb," which is a large Jalapeno pepper stuffed with crabmeat and a special Tabasco cream sauce, then fried in Tempura batter and served with a sweet sesame sauce. Janis ordered California rolls, which are as good if not better than any you would get in any other Sushi restaurant. Here's where things get interesting. While the girls decided to go for more conventional meals (which they loved, btw), Keith and I stuck with the Sushi. The owner's son prepares the Sushi. We chose a couple of items off the menu and let him pick a couple of others.

We had Cajun rolls, N.O. Saints rolls, Bayou rolls, and a brand new creation called "Cowboy roll" which had Tenderloin on top and a combination of crawfish and asparagus in a Tabasco mayonnaise. While they were all fantastically good, it was the Cowboy roll that put us over the top.

So next time you are going to visit New Orleans, plan on taking a trip to this amazing seafood restaurant with us!

Key West Trip - Wrap Up

2008-05-24T12:22:00.001-05:00

We're all back at home safe and sound after a fantastic vacation - probably our best family vacation ever. Here's a summary of the last couple of days.

Key West Trip - Day Four

We started the day with breakfast at Blue Heaven - the one place you can't miss if you go to Key West. Adam and Jarret rented bikes so they could see more of the island. Cary and Andrea opted to sleep in instead.

We have no idea how this happened, but somehow Janis managed to get blueberries on her forehead and chest at the same time:

That confused look on her face is because Adam, Jarret, and I all looked at her at the same time and burst out laughing. She had no idea what we were laughing at until I took the picture and showed it to her.

After breakfast, Adam and Jarret went off for more exploring of the island while Janis and I wandered around and did a little more shopping. We then headed back to our hotel and took a dip in the pool. Cary and Andrea went to the beach and then joined us at the pool, as did Adam and Jarret. Adam bought some Mojitos for everyone. A very relaxing time.

We decided to do sunset on one of Key West's many sunset cruise boats. The boat had a live band and bottomless beer, margaritas wine, and champagne - along with plenty of appetizers. We all agreed there is no better way to see the sunset in Key West:

Cary looked right at home with his new hat (and his "My Name Is Earl" pose):

As you can see, everyone had a great time:

While you might think that the sunset would be the highlight of the trip, on this particular cruise, it wasn't. As we were coming back into port this sixty-something year old man hauls off and belts this big guy wearing an LSU T-shirt, knocking one of his teeth out. Apparently one of them had gotten in the way of the other earlier and the LSU guy spent the rest of the evening taunting the sixty-something guy until he had had enough. We had to wait in the harbor until the police and an ambulance arrived. Sunset and a floor show!

The only other thing I found interesting on the cruise was this guy's foot:

I found it interesting because judging from the tan lines, he only owns one pair of shoes.

After getting off the cruise, we headed back down Duval street and happened upon Key West's smallest bar:

As a joke, they keep a hula hoop on the wall:

As we ambled down Duval street, Andrea and Janis did a bit more shopping and headed back to the hotel, while I proceeded to beat the boys at pinball at one of the local watering holes.

Key West Trip - Day Five

We stopped for the night in Deltona, Fl and visited with my cousin Charlene. Janis met Charlene for the first time last year when we were in Florida. This was the first time Charlene and her kids got to meet my entire family.

Charlene had quite a spread put out for us with pizza and some of the best fried chicken I have ever eaten.

Key West Trip - Day Six

Our final bit of driving involved one last stop in Orange Beach, AL where we had dinner at Café Grazie, an excellent Italian restaurant where Adam's former girlfriend Megan works. From there we drove the final 3 hours back to New Orleans where we were greeted with one of New Orleans' famous torrential downpours.

What a great vacation! You can see more pictures in my web gallery.

Key West Trip - Day Three

2008-05-20T09:12:00.001-05:00

By miracle or modern science we were all up and about well before the crack of noon. We decided to do some shopping before heading out to see more sights. Jarret was very insistent that I tell you he bought over $500 of clothes - which was especially important to him since he had never bought anything that cost over $40 until now.

Adam is jealous of the coat. 100% silk. Thousands of spiders worked their web-spewing keisters off for months in a Korean sweat shop just so he could look good. He also bought a new shirt, sandals (they go well with the coat), short pants, and long pants. Oh - he even bought a walking cane!

I think our favorite place to shop in Key West is Fast Buck Freddies. Sort of a Tony Bahama meets Spencer Gifts meets Banana Republic meets the Johnson Smith Company. After everyone had had their fill of shopping it was off to El Siboney - the best Cuban restaurant on the island - for lunch.

We decided to walk down to "the Southernmost point in the continental United States." More about that in a minute. Along the way we see this:

Not very inventive, but I would imagine those walking back to one of the hotels on that side of the island after hoisting a few may welcome the information lest they confuse it with a statue of a really tall, thin person. Adam wants to put a chain with a lock around it and write "This is a pole lock." Get it? Yeah, I knew you would.

So here is the thing about the Southernmost point: As Key West is an island in the middle of an ocean, it is not actually part of the continental United States. In order to call it the southernmost point in the continental United States, you have to allow that bridges connecting islands embraces those islands as part of the mainland. Sort of like the Enterprise extending her shields around another ship in Star Trek.

All this reminds me of my favorite bar bet: Name the most southern, northern, eastern, and western states. This is not a trick question. We are talking about all 50 states, not just the continental ones. I'll bet you a beer you don't get this one right. (Unless I have already shared this with you, of course.) I'll reveal the answer at the end of today's blog.

We walked back to the hotel and rested it bit before enjoying yet another spectacular sunset. This time, we watched it from the rooftop terrace of the Crowne Plaza hotel, cleverly named "The Top." It is the tallest building in Key West, so the view was spectacular. (You can see it in the web gallery.) Want to know how much fun we are having on this trip: look at these smiling faces:

After the sunset we stopped downstairs for some appetizers, then we headed out to find a patio bar where we could enjoy the tropical climate, watch the Hornets game, and play Mexican Train Dominoes.

As with all New Orleans professional sports teams, it seems we are always a bride's maid but never the bride. The hornets lost their first home game in the playoffs. Unfortunately, it was Game 7 so it will be the Spurs - not the Hornets - heading to the left coast to play the Lakers.

We accomplished all this at The Green Parrot, Key West's oldest bar. This is really our kind of place. Cary loved the sign that says "The Management is not responsible" and wants to get one for Coop's Place. Most astonishing, however, is that they have the exact same poster in their men's room that I have in our bathroom in New Orleans:

It's called "Proverbidioms" and is a poster where you see how many proverbs or cliches you can match with their picture.

After a couple rounds of dominoes, it became apparent that a couple of the lighter weights in our party needed more food. So we headed next door to the Meteor Smokehouse. The bartender asked Adam where he was from. During the conversation he mentioned he worked at a bar in the French Quarter. The bartender abruptly cuts him off and asks "which one." Adam says "Coop's Place, across from Margarita…" The bartender cuts him off again and says "That's why your face is familiar. I was in there with a friend of mine that lives in New Orleans."

Turns out he knows a couple of regulars at Coop's. So I guess we'll be going back there tonight. Just goes to show ya: ts a small world, (but I wouldn't want to paint it).

So another day in paradise, and the miracle is I not only lived to tell about it, but didn't hurt myself too bad in the process.

Oh - the bar bet. Here you go:

Southernmost: Hawaii

Northernmost: Alaska

Westernmost: Alaska

Easternmost: Alaska

I know what you are thinking: "you said it wasn't a trick question." It's not. The Aleutian Islands cross the International Date Line, making Alaska both the westernmost and easternmost states. Look it up. Those of you who didn't get it can buy me a beer next time you are in New Orleans. Those of you who DID get it will have to come to New Orleans to collect.

Key West Trip - Day Two

2008-05-19T09:34:00.002-05:00

Sunday May 18, 2008

With the long drive and a good night's sleep behind us, we are ready for the final leg of our journey to Key West. On the way we stop at the Holiday Isle Resort and have Rum Runners at the original Tiki Bar. Word has it that years ago, when a new owner or manager took over the bar, he had way too many bottles of certain ingredients. So he invented a drink using all those ingredients and called it the Rum Runner.

After Rum Runners and lunch on Islamorada Key, we drove the last couple of hours down to Key West, checked into the hotel and promptly did exactly what you are supposed to do on vacation - nothing. After doing nothing for a couple of hours - mostly with our eyes closed - it was time to check out the fabulous Key West Sunset.

As Key West sunsets go, this one was not all that spectacular, with the sun setting first behind some clouds and then behind an island just to the west of Key West (and you thought Key West was the western most - HAH!). But I guess it is true that Key West sunsets are a lot like pizza and sex: when they are good, they are very good. And when they're bad, they're still pretty good.

After the sunset we stopped at the Hog's Breath saloon for some raw oysters and a dinner. Yum. After dinner we are walking along Duval Street and we here this guy singing "I'll Keep Your Poop In A Jar," a Hayseed Dixie tune about love lost, but remembered in an oh-so-special way.

What a great way to start the Key West experience! Here's this guy, wearing a Kiss T-shirt with a pair of panties around his neck, singing about poop in a jar. Apparently, this song is one of his trademarks as he sells T-shirts that say "poop!" on them. He was astonished when we started singing along with him. He couldn't believe we knew the song, so I had to show it to him on my iPhone.

As the evening progressed, he would ask the crowd to shout out the name of an artist and he would do a song with just his acoustic guitar and a vocoder. Let's see, he did Pink Floyd, Dave Matthews, The Kinks, The Cars, Styx, Toto, Journey, and a bunch of others. He has been voted Key West's #1 entertainer, and he deserves it. His name is Matt Avery, by the way.

We spent a few minutes on the hotel's rooftop terrace, and left Janis and Andrea at the hotel. Cary, Adam, Jarret, and I found the Meteor Smokehouse - a nice little place Janis and I found last year - and sat on the outdoor patio drinking beers and smoking some Key West cigars. Around 11:30 we called Coop's Place and did a remote shot with Barry and the rest of the gang there.

After the Meteor, it was on to the Bottle Cap - the place Janis and I called our "Coop's Place" away from home in Key West. At midnight on a Sunday in the off season, Key West is pretty much shut down, so I was wondering what I would find at the Bottle Cap. This is where all the locals hang out after everything closes, apparently. After a beer, the night (and the last couple of days of driving), combined with the alcohol was taking its toll on us. Cary, Jarret and I decided to head back to the hotel, while Adam stayed at the Cap to play some pool.

On the way back, we decide to get some breakfast at Denny's. I know what you are thinking: "you went all the way to Key West and you eat at Denny's?" I know, I know. But at 1 AM or so in the morning and with a Robert De Niro-sized Raging Buzz there is nothing better in the world than a Super Bird or a Moons Over My Hammy. So with our belly's full and a fun first day in the Keys behind us, we ventured off to dreamland back at the hotel.

Key West Trip - Day One

2008-05-18T17:36:00.001-05:00

Saturday May 17, 2008

We left New Orleans about 3:30 AM Saturday morning and drove straight through to Miami Beach. Cary and Andrea stayed with her cousin Tanya in Surfside (which is just north of Miami Beach), while the rest of us stayed at the Holiday Inn. We had an ocean view room on the 8th floor.

After we got settled in we walked down the boardwalk about 28 blocks to T-Mex, a Mexican hole-in-the-wall place that was featured on Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations show a couple of years ago. Cary and Andrea met us there shortly after we arrived. T-Mex's claim to fame? Very reasonably priced Mexican food, a good selection of Mexican beers, and the Stupid sauce. Adam and I had the Stupid sauce, everyone else wussed out. Sunday morning Adam wished he had put some TP in the freezer overnight. Me? I just wanted more Stupid sauce.

After dinner we walked about a block to the home of Miami Ink, a tattoo parlor that is featured in a show of the same name on The Learning Channel. Janis has been talking about getting a tattoo for years, and tonight - with her family in tow - was the night. The question was, what to get and where to put it?

After combing through their books, nothing was jumping out at any of us. So we called our local New Orleans tattoo goddess, Juli Green, who offered one bit of advice: make sure it has something to do with New Orleans.

Using a necklace Andrea was wearing, the tattoo artist came up with the following design:

A little while later, she had a beautiful Fleur di lis inside a heart on her leg:

While Janis got her Tattoo and Andrea took pictures, Cary, Adam, Jarret, and I went to "The Deuce." Mac's Club Deuce. Reportedly one of only two true, original dive bars in Miami Beach, and with a name that starts with "Mac's" how could we not go there? $8 shots of Maker's Mark and $5 Miller Genuine Drafts, Bull Riding in Hi-Def on the TV and one pool table, strangely situated at an angle under the pool table light. Adam won most of the games of course.

With the Stupid sauce coursing through our veins, and all of us quite literally stupid from lack of sleep, it was time to call it a night. But in the process, several goals were achieved: I had the Stupid sauce, went to The Deuce, and Janis finally got her tattoo.

See more pictures in my Key West web gallery.

Man dies in spitting contest plunge

2008-05-18T16:15:00.001-05:00

Man dies in spitting contest plunge

From correspondents in Zurich
May 14, 2008 07:58am

A SWISS man died when he fell from a hotel balcony during a spitting match with a friend, a Swiss newspaper has reported.

The daily Blick said the 29-year-old man took a run-up from inside the room so he could spit further, but lost his balance and plummeted 6.4m to the street below.

He died in hospital.

The man had suggested the contest when he and two friends returned from a disco to their hotel in Cadempino in Switzerland's Italian-speaking Ticino canton in the early hours.

One of the men went to sleep, but the two others decided to see who could spit furthest from the balcony of their room.

Whiskey Geeks Keep Moonshine Tradition Alive

2008-05-17T18:24:00.001-05:00

We made it to Miami Beach - our first stop on the way to Key West - safely. Tonight we are going to walk along the beach down to Club Deuce to play some pool, then go across to Locos Tacqueria to try the "Stupid" sauce. (We'll take pictures.)

Saw this and couldn't resist sharing…

Whiskey Geeks Keep Moonshine Tradition Alive: "

Making moonshine has gone from a backwoods black art to a high-end hobby practiced by 'whiskey geeks' with a taste for top-shelf hooch.

Unlike their bootlegging predecessors, who cooked up big batches of white lightning and distributed the illegal booze out of the backs of cars, today's moonshiners focus on quality rather than quantity.

'It took me years, but with practice and dedication you can make any spirit every bit as good as a commercial distiller,' says Dave Robison, 42, owner of Pioneer Spirits, a single-batch distillery in Chico, California. 'You might not be able to reproduce it exactly, but it will be as good as anything you can buy on the top shelf.'

Home distillation of liquor used to be the province of backwoods bootleggers. Up until 1974, when the world price of sugar skyrocketed, commercial moonshiners throughout the Southeastern United States made enough money making hooch that it was worth the risk of getting caught by federal revenuers.

Today, making your own liquor is as illegal as ever, and a lot less lucrative. In fact, it's considerably cheaper to buy it off the shelf.

As a result, today's home distillers are quintessential do-it-yourselfers. Many are engineers and techies, much like the liquor connoisseurs who attend the Whiskies of the World Expo each year in San Francisco. 'We have a whole audience that we refer to as the whiskey geek,' event founder and organizer Riannon Walsh says. 'I think 90 percent of them are techies.'

John Spidell misses the moonshine tradition. A former federal revenuer, the 65-year-old spent the first half of the '70s 'busting up' illegal stills in North Carolina. His job sometimes required living in a sleeping bag under a piece of canvas for weeks at a time, watching a big still, waiting for the owner to appear. Smaller stills got less attention.

'A five- or six-hundred-gallon outfit wasn't worth wasting time on,' he says. 'I'd go back to my vehicle, get the C4 explosives and blasting caps, and I'd blow it up. There were only so many of us, and only so much time.'

Spidell was blowing up simple pot stills, which were used to distill mash made from sugar, water, yeast and hog 'shorts' (corn feed for hogs). After it was fermented, the mash would go into the boiler, where it was heated.

Because alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, the vapors that rose from the mash contained more alcohol than the mash itself. Those rising vapors traveled through an angled lyne arm to a condenser, traditionally made of copper coil. The condensed spirits were collected and redistilled until they reached a sufficient proof, then bottled in quart-size mason jars or gallon-size plastic milk jugs.

Bootleggers delivered the illicit liquor to 'shot houses' in the cities on Wednesdays and Thursdays, ensuring they were stocked for the weekend.

Today's home distillers are more likely to build a small reflux still and hide it in the garage. Unlike a pot still, the vapors rise through a column packed with copper wool or another high-surface-area material before being directed into the condenser. A beer keg makes a good boiler, and a homemade column and condenser are within the reach of anyone with basic welding and soldering skills and access to copper pipe.

The packed column makes the reflux still more efficient than a pot still, so it produces a higher-proof spirit on the first distillation. Still, the average home distiller isn't making any money on the endeavor.

'People are trying to keep a tradition alive,' Robison says. 'They're not selling it. That's looked down on in the home distilling crowd. Most people I know aren't making more than a gallon at a time. Some people on the forum come from the moonshiner tradition, and we've learned a lot from them. But I've never met anyone who makes it for money.'

Robison runs the popular Home Distiller forum with more than 2,000 registered users and 50,000 unique visitors per month. Other online home distilling resources include Smiley's Home Distilling and American Distiller.

Depending on the efficiency of the still, home-distilled alcohol can vary from 120 to 192 proof, or 60 percent to 96 percent pure alcohol.

The concept may be simple, but high-quality home-distilling isn't exactly easy. The moonshine tradition spawned a lot of misinformation, which Robison tries to rectify on the forum. First and foremost, he makes it clear that home distillation of liquor is illegal in all 50 states and just about every country, save New Zealand.

Besides being illicit, white lightning has earned a reputation for blinding and killing people who drink it. Many sources attribute these effects to methanol ('the heads'), which boils off naturally during an early stage of the distillation process.

'The heads will make you blind if you drink it, but I defy you to try to drink it,' says microdistiller Michael Heavener, co-owner of Highball Distillery in Portland, Oregon. 'If it doesn’t make you wince when you smell it, it's probably not going to make you go blind.'

The real culprit in poison moonshine was usually radiators, according to Spidell. 'Copper coils are not the most efficient condenser. If you're making 10,000 to 25,000 gallons at a time, you might immerse a truck radiator in the water. Chemicals in the moonshine leach out lead salts from the soldering. As a result of that, here comes the lead poisoning.'

Made properly, home-distilled spirits are as safe to drink as any commercial liquor. Still, Heavener warns, 'I'd be more concerned with the danger of explosions.'

Most stills are heated with propane burners. Purified ethanol is highly flammable, and its clear blue flame can be difficult to see under certain conditions. Open flame plus high-proof alcohol equals one potentially explosive combination.

Even innocent mistakes -- such as using lead soldering or plastic parts in the still - can lead to serious consequences. So Robison encourages would-be home-distillers to do their homework first and make liquor later.

After all, he says, 'This ain't stamp collecting.'

"

(Via Wired News.)

OK - A Blog It Is

2008-05-16T14:48:00.001-05:00

I finally did it. I have joined the Great Blogosphere.

During the last couple of years I've been trying to find the time to modify my web site. In the process I ignored one of the things that made the web site popular in the first place - frequent updates. So while I am still trying to figure out how and when to update the site, I decided to start this blog.

So why the sudden entry into the Great Blogosphere? Let's see if I can get you caught up with our lives, with a Cliff Notes update. Let's work backwards from today:

Key West, Here We Come

Janis and I spent last Easter weekend in Key West and fell in love with the place. Having experienced the before and after effects of a hurricane there is no way we would live there, but we do see it as a place we'd like to visit ever so often. So we are leaving tonight to take the entire family - Cary, Andrea, Adam, and Jarret - for a family vacation. We are really looking forward to it. Look for some posts, as well as updates on my Dot Mac Web Gallery.

Unemployed

MacSpeech closed their "Louisiana office" on April 18th, leaving Janis, myself, and one other person out of a job. No official reason was given, and I won't go into details here. It wasn't a complete surprise, but it represents a sad state of affairs and the closing of a major chapter in my life. As the Key West vacation was planned months in advance, we have taken the past month off to catch up with some projects around the house and explore options. I'll have more to say about what I will be doing in the immediate future around June 1st.

The Wisconsin Trip

Just before being laid off from MacSpeech, Cary and I, along with a couple of other Coop's Place employees took a trip north. We made the trip so Travis - a cook at Coop's Place - could visit with his Grandfather in southern Illinois, who has taken ill. Barry, another bartender at Coop's Place went with. As we were going to have a couple of days to waste, Cary and I decided to take Barry up to Racine so he could see where we came from. (During evacuation from Katrina, we spent some time in Barry's home stomping grounds in Kentucky). I took a few pictures, mostly of the Wind Point Lighthouse and at the Historical Museum, which you can see here. I haven't added any titles, and you probably won't find any of them interesting unless you know the people and places in the pictures.

Cary and Andrea Got Married

Yep. You heard right. Cary and Andrea were married on the levee across from Jackson Square on April 9th. While we weren't necessarily surprised by this, it did happen very suddenly. From what I understand, they were planning on getting married in January. Then Andrea's mom and aunt decided to come to visit from Ecuador. As they would not be able to afford another trip to the states in January, Cary and Andrea decided to move up the wedding. Cary took Janis and me out to dinner at Maximo's Italian Grill on Monday, April 7th. I knew something was up because Cary works until the wee hours of the morning on Monday at Coop's Place and normally can't be rousted with anything short of nuclear weapons on Monday. Basically, it went something like this:

Cary: What are you doing on Wednesday?

Me: This Wednesday?

Cary: Yes, this Wednesday.

Me: Nothing we know of. Why?

Cary: Well, if its not too much trouble, I was wondering if you could come to my wedding at 5PM.

A master of understatement, that boy is.

It was a beautiful wedding, with all the typical New Orleans sounds: trains, boat whistles, police sirens, street vendors, and even a brass band towards the end. You can view pictures here and here.

New Orleans

New Orleans is still here, and thriving. The "sliver by the river" is beyond what it was before the storm - in both population and the number of businesses that are open. The part of the city that was flooded is recovering slowly. Estimates are that it is 2/3 to 3/4 repopulated. But there is still a lot of work to do. The important thing to know is that New Orleans is definitely open for business again, and since tourism is the #1 industry, we need you to spread the word!

The Rest of the Family

Adam and Cary are both still working at Coop's Place. Adam works Monday thru Wednesday evenings and Cary works Thursday through Sunday evenings. Jarret left Coop's Place last summer to start working as a Cook at the Orleans Grapevine. He loves it there, and I highly recommend it as a place to eat when visiting New Orleans.

More to Come

Well, time to start packing for the Key West trip. To those of you who have been bugging me about an update, I hope this will satisfy you for a while. Now that I have decided to join the Great Blogosphere, maybe I can update more often.

Chuck Rogers