I should take a moment to point out that on Friday, January 14th, I celebrated my third anniversary of blogging.
Not a bad run so far:
- 2200 Posts
- 442 Comments
Thanks for coming here day after day and reading my babbles!
Blog Anniversary
All Good Things….
It was ten years ago next week that I was first promoted into a position where I was a leader of others.
Sure, I had been in positions of responsibility before. As a young man, my peers selected me as Patrol Leader in my Boy Scout Troop. Later, I was selected as the Senior Patrol Leader. It was a difficult and humbling experience to be responsible for other people. It was certainly not easy.
I earned my spending money as a teenager by umpiring softball games each night at the city park – and then, after turning eighteen, by refereeing basketball and volleyball games as well. Hell hath no fury like that directed at a referee in an Indiana High School Basketball game. But I digress.
Ten years ago next week I was promoted to lead a small team of men and women in Columbus, Indiana. And that was the beginning of quite an adventure. A year and a half later, I found myself without a team in Baltimore, Maryland as an investigator. And then, not even a year later, thrown to the wolves in New Jersey leading a much larger team that spanned several store locations. Then a year in Cleveland.
And then in 1999, we packed up and moved to Boston. And we’ve been here ever since.
When I arrived in Boston in January 1999, I was one of only a handful of employees of my company north of New York City. We were the vanguard that established the base, hired the people, trained the teams, and then started up a huge operation. Now there are thousands of us – and we’re still growing.
There have been tough spots along the way – stupid mistakes that I made, silly things I did, and dumb acts I committed that got me in hot water. But it was all for a good cause – and we’ve had a blast doing it. But now it’s time to move on.
Eight years in the same position and six years in one place is a long time – I stayed here for personal reasons, but also because it was fun. As a history buff, it’s tough to pull away from the place where our forefathers first marched against the British.. to walk the trail where Paul Revere road.. to stand at the bridge where the minutemen first confronted the British under arms.. to walk the deck of the USS Constitution.. to stare with respect at the grave of Sam Adams, and John Hancock, and many others….
On Thursday, I was promoted to a new position at our headquarters in Minneapolis. In less than two weeks, I head up into the great white north to take on an entirely new challenge: staffer. I’m going to be a project manager of sorts working on a couple initiatives. I’ll be commuting back and forth for a few months and then relocating permanently.
For ten years, I’ve led teams. Now I’m just going to be a part of one. That’s going to be a major change. No more office, now I’ll be in a cubicle. Gone is the casual dress code, back into suit and tie… things are certainly going to be different….
I expect the work to be difficult, highly challenging, creative, and have a major impact on what we’re doing. And that excites me. There are few feelings quite like taking a vision, breaking it down, and building that into something that we can execute – and that’s going to be alot of what I do in my new role. And I’m really looking forward to it.
But I will always miss my team. There’s never been a challenge in my life quite like leading a group of talented individuals. But I am so much the better for having worked with them. I’ll always be proud to have been a part of their team.
Michael Moore – Shove It Up Your Ass
Want to see what a soldier things about Michael Moore? Take a gander at Michael’s Post over at A Day In Iraq:
Mr. Moore, I humbly implore you to take that award and shove it up your ass. As for making more Fahrenheit 9/11’s, more power to you, it’s a free country thanks to the people that you continue to exploit. I warn you however, as I have before, if I or any of my brothers appear in one of your films, you will regret it. To combat your propaganda I have purchased a copy of FahrenHYPE 9/11 to take with me when I leave in a few days. I know among someone’s DVD collection there is a copy of your film. When I hear of your movie getting passed around among the guys, I will get them to watch Fahrenhype 9/11. It’s sad that I have to include a DVD in my arsenal of weapons to combat the enemy.
Got My Eyes On The Prize…
When we began putting together our DVD collection after joining the DVD revolution late, there were two documentaries that I wanted in that collection. Ken Burn’s incredible The Civil War.. and Eyes on the Prize, the documentary about the civil rights movement.
I remember watching Eyes on the Prize in school in the late 1980s or early 1990s – for a few days during a history class. I don’t think there’s ever been a more poignant documentary about life in these United States – and one that every person should watch to understand the Civil Rights Movement. Course, I also think that history classes should travel to Fort McHenry in Baltimore to hear the story of Francis Scott Key, to the North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts to see where all of this began, and to Little Round Top near Gettysburg where Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the 20th Maine held the line and saved the Union army.. but I’m known to have rather extreme views.
That said, apparently I won’t be buying a DVD set of Eyes on the Prize, because of some overstrung copyright laws, as reported in today’s Boston Globe:
“EYES ON THE PRIZE,” the epic 1986 documentary series on the civil rights movement, contains a scene showing Martin Luther King Jr. on his 39th birthday — his last — in 1968. King, who was trying to take on poverty and the Vietnam War simultaneously, was under tremendous stress at the time, and his staff sang ”Happy Birthday” in an attempt to cheer him up.
But the producers of ”Eyes” almost had to leave the scene out of the finished documentary. ”Happy Birthday,” as it turns out, was copyrighted in 1935 and, following the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998, will remain so until at least 2030. Filmmakers have been known to pay $15,000 to $20,000 for just one verse, according to a recent report on documentary clearances issued by the Center for Social Media.
The song ultimately stayed in the film, but don’t plan on celebrating King’s birthday tomorrow by going to your local video store to buy a copy of ”Eyes on the Prize.” Thanks to rights restrictions on archival material used in the documentary, the 14-hour chronicle tracing the civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycotts in the 1950s to the rise of black mayors in the 1980s can no longer be released in new editions or shown on television. PBS’s right to air the film expired in 1993. Meanwhile, the VHS edition has gone out of print and a DVD release would require relicensing. (Complete sets of used videos are currently going for as much as $1,000 on Amazon.)
The problem goes beyond one documentary. ”We are crippling the story-telling of our own culture by the rigidity of our copyright interpretation,” says Patricia Aufderheide, who cowrote the Center for Social Media report ”Untold Stories,”
I’m friends with many artists and photographers and even a few cartoonists – I fully respect their views on copyright and share many of them. But issues like this just frustrate the hell out of me.
Let’s do the right things for Eyes on the Prize…
Two Years Since The Switch
Mike Wendlund, over at Tech:Knowledge writes of his experiences after two years as a user of Apple products… he “switched”!
I just celebrated my two year anniversary of being – near as I can – an all-Mac operation in my personal computing.
Ten overwhelmingly positive experiences have kept me strongly in the fold:
No spam – There is no better spam filter than Spam Sieve. It’s a Mac-only product and it catches 98 percent of my junk mail.
No worms or viruses – None. Zip. Zero. Not a single one in two-plus years now.
No adware/spyware – Same thing. These are non-issues on my Macs.
No crashes – It just doesn’t happen with OS X. I had one crash in December 2002, but I was running OS 9 at the time and it was a very old program (from 1994-ish) and I was curious to see if it worked. It didn’t.
I switched in December 2002 when I purchased the Apple Dual G4 Desktop and expanded that system in April 2003 with a Powerbook G4 Laptop. Now it’s nearly two years later and I’m still using both machines without any upgrades (other than new software).
My employer is a WinTel / Microsoft shop so I picked up a Motion Computing 1400D tablet earlier this year – and used in conjunction, these two machines make my life alot easier. But I prefer an Apple solution — why? Just look at the three items I highlighted from Wendlund’s blow… No spam, no worms, no viruses, no adware, no spyware, and no crashes.
You can’t beat that.
Besides, Macs are SEXY!
FBI Holds Onto Passenger Records
The Boston Globe reports today that the FBI has been keeping millions of records on air travelers who flew in the months before September 11th:
If you’re among the millions of Americans who took airline flights in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the FBI probably knows about it and possibly where you stayed, whom you traveled with, what credit card you used and even whether you ordered a kosher meal.
The bureau is keeping 257.5 million records on people who flew on commercial airlines from June through September 2001 in its permanent investigative database, according to information obtained by a privacy group and made available to The Associated Press.
Privacy advocates say they’re troubled by the possibility that the FBI could be analyzing personal information about people without their knowledge or permission.
”The FBI collected a vast amount of information about millions of people with no indication that they had done anything unlawful,” said Marcia Hofmann, attorney with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which learned about the data through a Freedom of Information Act request.
And I say. BIG DEAL.
I believe in privacy. I’ve been a member of the ACLU since I was 16 years old – I’m a long time member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations – and I’ve written a ton of letters and done some individual lobbying about issues like the Clipper chip, digital telephony, and other issues.
But you also have to draw a line about what’s reasonable from the standpoint of investigations – and I’m trying to see the issue here.
If you think the FBI really has the time to go digging through these records to see if you and your mistress were flying somewhere together because they’re trying to co-opt your vote – then I recommend that you pull the tin foil hat down a little closer around your ears to block the alien rays.
More Love from Victor Davis Hanson
As always, Victor Davis Hanson provides a perspective on the War in Iraq that I had not considered:
Second, our very success creates ever increasing expectations of perfection for a postmodern America used to instant gratification. We now look back in awe at World War II, the model of military success, in which within four years an unprepared United States won two global wars, at sea, on the ground, and in the air, in three continents against Japan, Italy, and Germany, and supplied both England and the Soviet Union. But our forefathers experienced disaster after disaster in a tale of heartbreak, almost as inglorious as the Korean mess or Vietnam tragedy. And they did things to win we perhaps claim we would now not: Shoot German prisoners in the Bulge, firebomb Axis cities, drop the bomb — almost anything to stop fascists from slaughtering even more millions of innocents.
Our armored vehicles were deathtraps and only improved days before the surrender. American torpedoes were often duds. Unescorted daylight bombing proved a disaster, but continued. Amphibious assaults like Anzio and Tarawa were bloodbaths and emblematic of terrible planning and command. The recapture of Manila was clumsy and far too costly. Okinawa was the worst of all operations, and yet was begun just over fourth months before the surrender — without any planning for Kamikazes who were shortly to kill 5,000 American sailors. Patton, the one general that could have ended the western war in 1944, was relieved and then subordinated to an auxiliary position with near fatal results for the drive from Normandy; mediocrities like Mark Clark flourished and were promoted. Admiral King resisted the life-saving convoy system and unnecessarily sacrificed merchant ships; while Bull Halsey almost lost his unprepared fleet to a storm.
The war’s aftermath seemed worse, to be overseen by an untried president who was considered an abject lightweight. Not-so-quite collateral damage had ruined entire cities. Europe nearly starved in winter 1945-6. Millions were on the road in mass exoduses. After spending billions to destroy Nazi Germany we had to spend billions more to rebuild it — and repair the devastation it had wrought on its neighbors. Our so-called partisan friends in Yugoslavia and Greece turned out to be hard-core Communist killers. Soon enough we learned that the guerrillas in the mountains of Europe whom we had idolized, in fact, fought as much for Communism as against fascism — but never for democracy.
But at least there was clear-cut strategic success? Oh? The war started to keep Eastern Europe free of Nazis and ended up ensuring that it was enslaved by Stalinists. Poland was neither free in 1940 nor in 1946. By early 1946 we were already considering putting former Luftwaffe pilots in American jets — improved with ample borrowing from Nazi technology — to protect Europe from the Red Army carried westward on GM trucks. We put Nazis on trials for war crimes even as we invited their scientists to our shores to match their counterparts in the Soviet Union who were building even more lethal weapons to destroy us. Our utopian idea of a global U.N. immediately deteriorated into a mess — decades of vetoes in the Security Council by Stalinists and Maoists, even as former colonial states turned thugocracies in the General Assembly ganged up on Israel and the survivors of the Holocaust.
After Americans had liberated France and restored his country, General de Gaulle created the myth of the French resistance and immediately triangulated with our enemies to reforge some pathetic sort of French grandeur. An exhausted England turned over to us a collapsing empire, with the warning that it might all turn Communist. Tired of the war and postbellum costs, Americans suddenly were asked to wage a new Cold War to keep a shrinking West and its allies free. The Department of War turned into the Department of Defense, along with weird new things like the U.S. Air Force, Strategic Air Command, Food for Peace, Alliance for Progress, Voice of America, and thousands of other costly entities never dreamed of just a few years earlier.