This is not really a blog post, but I couldn’t let this go by without commenting.

Here is a quick atta boy to James C. Smith.  Last night on the news I heard about Mr. Smith, a crossing guard at Lansdowne Elementary school, who pushed a child out of the way of a vehicle and was himself hit by the passenger side mirror of the vehicle.

According to the news report the driver of the vehicle had their vision impaired by ice build-up on the windshield.

Thank you James C. Smith for your quick thinking and your selfless act of service.  And to the driver, buy a $1.50 scraper!

Last week was a stressful week for me.  My political career started and ended in a span of 6 hours (see last week’s post), I had problem after problem to solve, and then on Saturday I found myself immersed in php code for about 6 hours without looking up.  By the end of that time I was seeing double.  Part of the problem is that I’m not a programmer and I’m really not very good at php at all.  Actually, php noob is an aspiration for me.  But I did manage to accomplish what I wanted to do and it worked, so I’m happy.  I think a lot of the problem was that I didn’t know exactly what I was doing and was stressing out over things that should not have been a big deal.

So on Sunday I decided to unplug.  I didn’t even turn my computer on except to check some emails, and I purposefully left my BlackBerry and my Droid in on my computer desk turned off.  I actually watched some television (ok, technically that is not unplugged, but for me it is a change of pace).  I also read some and took a nap.

Last night I did feel a little guilty about it all, but today I am reaping the benefits.  I must say I feel great.  I think I’m going to start scheduling in one day a month to purposefully unplug.

Leave me some comments and let me know what you do to “reboot” and get rejuvenated.

This year is a mid-term election year for congress.  The media is working full force already covering the political climate, researching candidates, trying to get leaks from the parties on their candidates, devouring statistics from every poll that comes out.  And the local and state races in my area are no different.  Yesterday was the last day to file paperwork to run for most positions.  I must admit, I had my paperwork complete and notarized and ready to file, but decided not to because someone else who is very qualified filed to run for that position as a Republican before I did and there is already a plethora of Democrats fighting it out.  And I did not want to waste money and effort in a primary.  Besides, I prefer to work behind the scenes consulting and helping out.

I get asked a lot of questions about why I am such a political junky.  I really can’t answer that.  But I can remember that at 12 years old I would go to my parent’s room, sitting on the foot of the bed, and watching the Watergate hearings for hours on end on a small black and white TV they had in there.  I was fascinated by it all.  From then on I was hooked!

Today, I watch politics, read about politics, and study strategies and trends of different races.  Not because this in any way has anything to do with my job, but because it is more of a personal interest or hobby of mine.  So while a lot of people are dreading all the ads and talk about politics this year, I am looking forward to it.  For me it is the reason I watch college basketball, or play chess on my computer.  It is the strategy I like.

Given the way this year is already shaping up, it is going to be a year of political strategizing.  I can’t wait to see who executes their strategy the best claims check mate in November.

Last night the League of Women Voters sponsored an event where our Mayor gave the State of the City address.  I attended and would like to say it was riveting, but in actuality it wasn’t.  If you read the paper or local blogs you would have known most of what he told us.

Although, I did learn that in 2010 our council is going to take up the long awaited issue of the “chicken ordinance”.  It seems this issue has not been looked at for over a 100 years!  How can this be?  I am glad to know that in these times when states are failing and municipalities are facing bankruptcy because so many people are laid off and not contributing their fair share to the payroll taxes, our council will finally take up addressing the fact that people can have chickens in their back yard.

I’m not 100% sure how many chickens I’m allowed to keep, but given the economy and the fact my company has not given me back the 10% of my salary they took last year or the other lost benefits, I’m thinking a few eggs a week would be pretty good.

Perhaps after they correct this massive oversight, they can address trying to bring some jobs to the area!  But this is an election year and the way things are shaping I suspect the new council that takes over next year will have to do that.

Oh, I need to run, the egg timer just went off.  Bon Appetit!

This Wednesday evening, January 13, 2010, I’ll be recording TechTalk with Chad Hembree live at the Smokehouse in Berea, Ky.  We’ll be talking about some cool gadgets and announcements from CES this year.  Jason Hartnell and some others will be there, Chad has arranged some give aways and some dinner specials, so come on out and join us.  Check out Chad’s newly designed web site at http://www.chadhembree.com/ for more info.  Hope to see you there.

I’m one of these people who plan. I have long range plans and short range plans, most tasks I undertake start with a plan. It is the execution of the plan I sometimes find difficult to do. Sometimes I get so focused on a plan or task I am totally oblivious to all that is around me. I can be working on something, reading something, or playing World of Warcraft while the world was ending and I’d never notice until either I was finished, or in the case of the end of the world the electricity stopped flowing.

At other times I am very easily distracted from my plan. Both of these sometimes get me in trouble.

Recently I had made a 5 year plan to work toward a specific goal. It is sort of a personal goal so I won’t mention it here, but I allowed myself to get distracted and try to cram that 5 year goal into about 5 months. This resulted in lots of problems for me, and actually caused me to suffer a pretty good bout of depression as I felt tasks mounting and not moving forward fast enough. And I was putting a lot of pressure on myself.

I used to be Gimli, you know, the dwarf in Lord of the Rings. I would pick a battle and rush in with a big battle axe swinging. Then when I got to the other side I would look back at the carnage to notice I had damaged as many allies as foes. But as long as I emerged victorious, that was ok, collateral damage.

Then I started the phase in my life where I bought a Franklin Planner and everything was neat and orderly and had a plan. But sometimes I found myself planning to the point of paralysis. I had a great plan, a flow chart, all kinds of analysis but never got anything done for analyzing it.

Now I have found myself needing to find a compromise, maybe Legolas, the elven archer. Carefully picking my targets, and picking my battles smarter not bulling ahead blindly flailing my battle axe indiscriminately.

And as for my 5 year plan, well it is back on, maybe not in 5 years, but in a reasonable amount of time I can accomplish it and still keep my sanity

It’s been a while since I posted anything to this blog site.  The truth is I have been up to my elbows in other projects and helping other people get their blogs up and running.  While distracting me from my own, it has been a lot of fun being a part of new sites starting up.

I’ve also been part of an exciting project that has been in the works for sometime now and kept getting pushed to the back burner.  I can’t say a lot about it right now, but it should launch in the very near future.  Even with all the depressing news about the economy and the healthcare debacle being bantered about there are some exciting things happening and as I said earlier this year, some great opportunities.

I have friends setting out on new career paths, starting new firms, doing free lance consulting, and I’ve been working literally around the clock joining up small businesses and social media.  Great things are happening for those willing to take the risk.  As the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.  Find a need and fill it, you might be surprised at the results.

This week we are seeing history in the making.  I’m not talking about the fact that Iran has a coup d’etat going on. They had one of those about 30 years ago.  I’m talking about the way the coup is being orchestrated and information is being disseminated.

During the first Gulf war we all remember CNN reporters reporting from hotel rooms as the war was starting, and the video of cruise missiles flying past the windows.  Who can forget the rooftop video of the dark night sky, air raid sirens going off, and the site of anti-aircraft tracers spraying up into the night sky?

Then came the Iraq war, with reporters imbedded inside military companies.  Grainy video shot inside a humvee as it bounced along some dirt road through the Iraqi country side,  occasionally stopping for a fire fight with Saddam Hussein’s army.

During the election last year, John McCain and Barak Obama vied to become the leader of the free world.  Two men with very different backgrounds and very different ideologies, Barak Obama’s campaign embracing new forms of social media technology for the first time in any campaign, McCain running a very traditional, old school campaign.

Young people flocked to Obama rallies, not only in the United States, but anywhere in the world he went. He pumped up the crowd with his dynamic speeches, carefully lifting his words off the teleprompter and working the crowd into a frenzy like a rock star.  Stories filtered through the media about Obama and his addiction to his Blackberry, the campaign offices filled with Macs instead of traditional PC’s, and he soared to the number one position with the most Twitter followers.

McCain was playing to crowds much smaller, older, recounting his story and his sacrifice to the country he loved so much.  Sometimes struggling to get the speech out.  Often times becoming the butt of jokes to the young, tech savvy Obama supporters.

Fast forward to another election, the election in Iran between incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi.  Just when it seemed Mousavi would pull off the victory, the announcement was made that Ahmadinejad was the winner by a landslide.  Actually, according to some sources Ahmadinejad came in third behind Mehdi Karroubi Etemad-e-Melli.  Mousavi’s supporters took to the streets in protest, wearing green scarves, hats, anything they could to show their support.  The protests grew much larger than anyone imagined.  And the world took notice, sort of.

While the Iranian government tried in vain to block the flow of information to and from the protestors, millions of people all around the world received information via twitter, 140 characters at a time tagged with hashtags like #iranelection that were rebroadcast over and over.  They sat huddled over their computers receiving and sending information.  Twitter avatars and web page banners were changed to green to show support.  As the government in Iran tried to take down servers, people all over the globe were setting up new proxies and getting the addresses to the young Iranians.  The old guard Iranians had met their match.

The world is not the same place as it was 30 years ago. Now the younger generations are connected via social media sites to other young people all over the world.  And they are constantly connected, communicating with each other 24/7 via Facebook, Twitter, text messages and a plethora of other sites.

And where, during all this, was the mainstream news media?  The network that brought us live pictures of the Gulf war starting, of the cruise missile flying past the hotel windows, was showing Larry King reruns.  Immediately hashtags started hitting the internet– #cnnfail. 

But here is the most ironic part of all.  The man who embraced the technology and wooed the young people to gain election turned his back on them.  Calls went out on Twitter for President Obama to at least quietly show support of the Iranian people by wearing a green tie the next day.  Instead he made a wishy washy statement, straddling the fence so as not to offend anyone.

And the man who the young people laughed at and didn’t support called on President Obama to “speak out that this is a corrupt, fraud, sham of an election” and that “the Iranian people have been deprived of their rights.”

The greatest photo op in the world of Air Force One flying past the Statue of Liberty cannot match that of a lady in Iran, wearing a green scarf, carrying a sign that read “Where’s My Vote.”  A speech delivered with all the skill in the world read from a teleprompter and broadcast around the world cannot match the passion of a 140 character message hurriedly typed by a student in a dorm room, risking his life, “My friend has been shot #iranelection.”  The high definition video of Michelle Obama shopping in Paris will never mean as much as the shaky, grainy, cell phone video of an Iranian police guard shooting into a crowd of students from a second floor window.

So while CNN, Fox News, and most of the other media looked on, the face of world news was changed forever.  And the man who understood the medium during our election was trumped by the man who understood the message and lost.

I recently read that the US Postal Service announced that it ended its first quarter (Oct. 1 – Dec. 31) with a net loss of $384 million due at least in part to a decrease of 5.2 billion pieces of mail compared to the same period last year.  They are projecting a decline in volume this year of 12 – 15 billion pieces of mail.

They say it is because of the recession.  I say that there are two reasons.  Number one is the fact that they keep raising the cost of postage because they are losing money.  This makes it more costly to send mail so people send less, so the cost goes up again.  Do you see a pattern developing?

The second reason is that they keep cutting back the hours the post office is open.  The hours are now 8:30 – 4:30 through the week.  I’m sorry, but how are people who work supposed to do business with them?  I can’t give them money if I wanted to!  Not to mention the fact they are looking at going to 5 day delivery instead of 6.

Let’s sum this up, we have the USPS losing money, so they raise the cost of postage and close the doors so you can’t send mail even if you could afford to do it, and they are cutting service from 6 days to 5.

I have been trying for two days to by 2 cent stamps to offset the increase that made the remaining stamps I had obsolete.  I went to the post office, they were closed, the stamp machine was gone from the lobby and there was a sign telling me I can buy stamps at Wal-Mart.  When I get there, they don’t have 2 cent stamps but would be glad to sell me 44 cent stamps, along with milk, bread, bottled water that costs more than gasoline, and a tabloid telling me the John and Kate Plus 8 people are having affairs.  My $1 worth of 2 cent stamps, that I wasn’t able to get, now cost me $58.34 in impulse spending and now I know way more than I wanted to about John and Kate.

Perhaps the answer is for Wal-Mart to get into the mail delivery business, I bet they can do it faster, cheaper, and more efficiently.  You could just go there and pick up your mail; I know some member of my family seems to be there multiple times per day anyway.

I vowed a long time ago to avoid blogging about politics on here, but occasionally I can’t help it, something so crazy comes along I just have to comment on it.  This one is about a city in Ohio who is having a mayoral primary election today.

 Recently I was in Portsmouth, Ohio where some of my friends live and near where I grew up.  I still read my local hometown newspaper online just to keep up with what is changing, or not changing for the most part.  Portsmouth has, I believe, 7 candidates running for mayor.  They take the top two finishers and those two will campaign from now until the general election to be voted on again.

Now in this time of economic hardships for countries, states, and towns, why not just have one election?  Take the winner of the seven candidates and make them the mayor.  This would save the city the money of running two elections.  The polls would just have to be open once, people would just have to go out and vote once.  And if the people knew the person elected would be the mayor, perhaps they would vote for the best candidate the first time and not just vote for their friends in the primary.

This same scenario plays itself out over many elections all around the country.  Billions could be saved on ballot printing, paying poll workers, running campaigns twice not to mention the pain we have to endure of the ever increasing campaign length, ahh, but that is another post best left to another day.