Video Response to This American Life's epidsode of "20 Acts in 60 Minutes"

To listen to the podcast I'm discussing you can download the mp3 here.

My thoughts on This American Life's podcast "20 Acts in 60 Minutes". I feel for those of you who go to West Point. It must be like pledging a fraternity everyday of college. What better way to say "I'm sorry" then to put it into a song? Be sure to get to know your colleagues names. Sometimes we don't know why we are successful. Sometimes, its just an Irving (fluke).

Video Response to This American Life's epidsode of "Million Dollar Ideas"

To listen to the podcast I'm discussing you can download the mp3 here.

My thoughts on This American Life's podcast on Million Dollar Ideas. Why do all Asian food places seem the same? MIT entrepreneurs make their best elevator pitches to potential investors; Cheese is the new heroin; Phillip Morris knows cigarettes kill and that's good for society since your early death saves money; Michael Larson proves you can beat TV game shows (while possibly doing one of the only honest things in his life).

Video Response to Common Sense with Dan Carlin's "Looking for a Left Hook" podcast

To listen to the podcast I'm discussing you can download the mp3 here.

My thoughts on Dan Carlin's Common Sense podcast on bringing back jobs to the US. Why is it we allow American corporations to off shore labor under conditions we would never allow here in the US? Because we don't like "those" jobs and we like cheap stuff. Ending trade agreements would certainly bring back jobs but would "cheaper" jobs raise income in the middle class? Where have all the "good" jobs gone?

Blogging is Tough

Ok, so I haven't blogged in months but why does it have to feel like a chore? I enjoy blogging and sharing ideas and hearing from others with differing view points, I just have to do it on my own time. Don't fret, I've got a list of ideas of topics I've been wanting to write about. Unfortunately I never feel like posting them because they are never good enough or complete. Most are technical writings but in order to do them justice I feel I must include pictures or videos. Text is so web 1.0.

Anyways, I'll post a random thought that is complete enough to stand alone. I'll try to get the technical ones flowing more as those are certainly more beneficial than my personal opinion.

ScribeFire + Images = Frustration

So yea, I spent like an hour trying to format and upload those images correctly. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake. The images copied into ScribeFire's text area easy enough but when I clicked to publish it I was prompted for every single image. Next time, I'll be sure to INSERT THE IMAGE FIRST rather than just copy/paste.

Why Blog?

Wow. My first entry on my blog. I've been keeping a personal hand written journal for years but have never gotten around to posting stuff on a blog. The reason being, I could not see the use but now that I've embraced web 2.0 I understand why this means of communication is so great. Over my years of surfing the web I've come to find myself reading other people's blogs more than the main stream websites. Mainly because people post stuff that you won't find on the big websites. Microsoft is a good example. As great of a software company as they are everyone will agree that their understanding of users is pretty pathetic. When I upgraded to Office 2007 I wanted to keep 2003 but despite Microsoft's attempt to make it easy there was/is several bugs that users have had to suffer through. Luckily a guy who worked at Microsoft had a personal blog devoted to helping users make the switch.

As an IT guy, political enthusiast (thanks to Ron Paul), economic theorist (thanks to Adam Smith), and religious/philosophical/theologian fan (thanks to many but mostly to John Piper & Ravi Zacharias) I hope to share my thoughts and findings with the rest of the world.