Hoshnasi

Is what my mom always says. “If you hangout with criminals or people who do things many people look down upon then you too were share that same scrutiny and distrust.”

It seems to me there are two ways to go about about looking at this.  Mr. Obama either believes in the things that Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers believes and he is on a dangerous fringe.  A fringe that exists on the conservative side as well, but is dangerous none-the-less either way.

Or he just aligned with these gentlemen to gather votes.  Support from Rev. Wright gives Mr. Obama credit in the black community, which he didn’t really grow up in being raised by his white grandmother.  Its hard for me to accept that Mr. Obama doesn’t believe most if not all of the Rev. Wrights ideas and beliefs.  Its not merely a stepping stone if you spend more than twenty years sitting in the same pew.

As for Bill Ayers, Jesus.  If you have great political aspirations why would you even THINK about being in the same room with a husband and wife who might have bombed government buildings.  Its just not worth it!

Maybe I’m just feeling the great void of free time now that the wedding has come to successful completion.  In a way it feels like I have graduated all over again.  You remember whats its like for that year after you graduated.  Sometimes you’d wake up in a cold sweat thinking you missed a class.  Thats kind of where I am at.  Its not that I don’t have things to do -far from it actually.  I just don’t really want to be spending ten to twelve hours a day at work, designing software and coding.  I’m more about living then sitting in this cube.

Back to the point though, the pop in the back of the head is that moment of inspiration that sometimes happens to lucky people.  That clear vision and path to a seemingly insurmountable task or goal.  I have three things I want to spend more time on.  The first is a very easy path for me and thats going back to school for my MBA.  Which only requires a few things from me, time and dedication.  All the other normal headaches of going to school at this point are old hat.  The next is get much, much better at playing the harmonica.  Again, time and dedication here too.  One other nagging problem though is the wife doesn’t care all to much for the instrument.  I tell her its only because I am truly awful that she has no appreciation.  She remains skeptical.  The final goal is to write.  Which I have spoke about alot here recently.

Writing to me seems like the one creative flow I could actually tap into.  However, I’m at odds with myself just putting the pen to the paper and going for it.  Blogging here is easy for me, I’m just “speaking” in another way (type) about something I’ve been thinking about.  With writing (mainly fiction) I find that I just can’t get around my own mental hangup of living a very strict tangible existence.  Working on software doesn’t help one nurture a creative story telling skill.

So like anyone with a “fixer” personality I thought I didn’t have the right tools for the job.  So now I have a few notebooks lying around and a brand new Dell Mini 9, all of which I am hell-bent on using.  I just need that spark, something that will breathe through me, to guide my hand as I heard many writers describe.  Whiskey is often the answer for many who get stuck without words.  In my case I’m scared I’d need an awful lot of Jack Daniels to help me un-stick the ideas bottled up in my head.

Is the first big story the hardest?  Or am I making an attempt to climb a mental Everest without even “hiking” a day in my life?

Its been a recent observation of mine that people don’t want better millage in cars. Instead of taking personal action to improve gas millage most people want technology to work around them. I’m sure plenty of you reading this are shaking your head and saying “No, people want real change in the cars available”.

To you I say think about this. How recent was the last time you were at a stop light that just turned green and saw a Prius speeding off the line. Or some other hybrid doing eighty or more miles an hour on the highways. There is a wash of great cars on the market that delivery impressive MPG, the problem is most of these cars are lacking in one thing… Popularity. The Prius sees record sales because it is popular, because the green movement is the talk of the town. However, few of the Prius owns actually drive the car to conserve gas.

We lost something since the gas crisis of the 70’s, there was a rule -an understanding that any quick motion on the gas pedal will decrease gas millage exponentially. During the crisis, people used to imagine that an egg was behind the gas pedal and used light and slow pressure to keep the imaginary egg from breaking. We can’t say the same for how people drive today.

Today, it is far too common to see a driver of a MPG friendly car smash the gas pedal to achieve some sense of speed or power. Mainly because the MPG friendly engines do not produce much power for the obvious reason that the engine is saving on gas. So now, if you were to compare a situation where one driver is pushing his fuel efficient low power engine at 100% to keep up with a conservative driver in his moderate MPG sedan running his engine at 60% all the strengths of the MPG efficient car are lost.

I look at it this way. Car makers only stand to make more money off car sales when they release cars with better gas millage. This may seem obvious, people will sell their current cars to get the latest and greatest MPG value but I also think there is a double edged sword here. A pretty decent percent of people lured by the MPG will end up selling their new wonder cars for the lack of power they provide. Since again, they are not going to drive like people in the 70’s did.

Sure gas is expensive, but currently its not hard to come by and frankly if nothing is going to stop a driver from driving a certain way -mainly quickly or attempting to keep up with people who drive fast- they would be better off keeping their original car. That is if living green and caring about mpg are truly prime concerns.

I guess I have just seen to many people in California racing around in MPG wonder cars that I had to rant. A little tip for hybrid owners. The electric engine switches over to gas at a certain MPH range (somewhere around 30-40). If you constantly slam the pedal off the line you end up depleating the batteries VERY quickly, so the gas engine runs longer to replenish lost juice. Also, going over 65 MPH on the highway greatly reduces overall MPG. Try and keep the needle at 60.

Well my Mini 9 came in, with some shipping BS, but mostly with little fan-faire.  I opted for the Ubuntu verison.  Which surely limits my list of available software, that doesn’t mean I can’t make it work for me though.

Today, while lamenting my works complicated 802.1x internet connection and even more mind-numbing Linux to Windows AES WPA2 certification I realized the Mini is the PERFECT offline GTD companion with a little help of my Rite in the Rain.  My pocket pad of paper accompanies me everywhere these days.  Really helping me stay organized planning my recent wedding and honeymoon with my wife.  However, I needed a vetting location.  Somewhere that was more organized, easily sorted and mostly portable…  Also, works offline.

The Dell mini 9 fills this role.  I downloaded Google Gears, so that I can store a local database and keep all my vetted GTD actions locally via NextAction.

Tomorrow, I plan on grabbing a cup of coffee, opening my email and adding new actions to my Mini.  I’m already looking forward to completeing and tracking action metrics.