“Somewhere, someone got the exact wrong message."
The Sunlight Foundation has it right. We have got to push for more transparency in government, not less. Why don’t we know where all of these ridiculous add-ons to bills come from? Who’s saying what to whom? If you push for one thing this year, push for transparency. I don’t care if you’re a D, R or something else, this topic will help all of us.
Hal says his Devils are Streaking The Wrong Way, but being on the other end of last night’s game. You never feel quite as good about the win when the other team’s main goalie is on the bench (especially when he’s a perennial killer of the Bruins), but a win is a win, and it was good to see the lads focus through the 3rd period.
Paying off the old team: $51M Six years of paychecks: $52M Private plane to bring him to the new stadium: $50K Schilling, Beckett, Dice-K, Papelbon and Wakefield: Priceless
Here’s who I like and don’t for online shopping so far this year:
Big Winner: Zappos. Great selection and free shipping. Ordered at 11:00pm, ship confirmation came at 2:30am the same night. Free shipping on returns, too!
Doing good: B&H Photo, Patagonia, Amazon. Good shopping experience, reasonable shipping rates, good web notifications.
Big losers: Sundance, Circuit City. I was going to buy something small on Sundance last night and they were going to charge me $11 for 7-10 business day shipping (10 days would put it past XMAS), and a minimum of $22 for anything faster.
While I hope you are going to have some nice office activities around the holidays, the title of this post was meant to be literal - what is going on in your office building on December 25? How about Jan 1?
For most of us in the US and other locations abroad, the answer is “pretty much nothing”. In fact, at Sun, many of our engineering facilities are closed for the whole week in between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
“Today is the last day of the 109th Congress. They worked for 218 days over the course of two years. And 19 of them, 15 Republicans and 4 Democrats were, or still are, under federal investigation. Great job guys. Don’t let the door hit you."
(Via GOOD Magazine.)
Web Hosting Speed Issues…: “About three weeks ago I became obsessed with finding out every major inefficiency with our code, with Cpanel, and with Linux itself (The OS we run our hosting company on)."
This is in a post from Matt Heaton, president of BlueHost, the hosting service I use for NearWalden and some other domains. There’s a gzillion hosting providers out there. Why did I end up with BlueHost? a) their prices were competitive, b) they had an extensive online forum, and c) their president had a blog.
Can Energy Efficiency Be as Sexy as Solar?: “It’s long been axiomatic that energy efficiency is the awkward stepchild of renewables – that is, that it’s sexier to install cutting-edge renewable-energy technologies like solar panels than to engage in more prosaic (and less-visible) measures to get more value out of each BTU or barrel."
This is the start of an excellent post on Worldchanging by Joel Makower. Almost 30 years ago then-president Jimmy Carter tried to get us to take efficiency seriously.
I want to put an idea out there that I think is going to be very important to the long-term question of sustainability. The good news is that there’s a catchy name for the idea, so hopefully it will stick around.
This idea originated with Steve Heller, one of the senior scientists here at Sun Labs. Steve’s observation is that there are some major shifts that will (hopefully) happen that will get us a long way to sustainability, but that there are a very large number of small things that will have to happen as well.
If you’ve been wondering about what the Microsoft-Novell deal is all about, this report from a Ballmer Q&A is instructive. Sounds like this is the first step in a an attack on the IP base of Linux.
Its the old pattern - do a deal with one of the weaker guys which validates your attack on the rest.