Doug’s World

Wearing grooves in I-90

Man, I’ve been wearing grooves in I-90 the last few days. And they’ll soon have a table reserved for me at Bar 14 Ranch House in Ellensburg — I ate breakfast there Sunday (on the way to Spokane), then dinner Sunday (on the way back to Seattle with a load of stuff), then breakfast on Monday (on the way back to Spokane). But the move is going well — the cats will be living in Seattle by this weekend, and then we’ll be down to planning and executing the moving-truck day.

It feels good to be moving from a small business in Spokane run by people who have spent their entire lives in a single industry in a single region, to a huge business in Seattle that is run by people from all over the world, people with backgrounds in a wide variety of industries.

I think I’ll learn more in the new job than I did in the old job …

Imagine

OK, I feel better now, after listening to this beautiful mash-up:

George Bush sings “Imagine”

Are we really this gullible?

Good grief. Our President strikes again.

Yesterday, with support for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq at an all-time low (and likewise George’s approval rating), the U.S. intelligence community released a shocking new document: a 6300-word letter from Al Qaeda’s number two man to their head of operations in Iraq. As the CNN article said yesterday, “Senior U.S. intelligence officials call a letter from al Qaeda’s No. 2 man to its leader in Iraq “chilling” because of how “calm, clear and well argued” it is in urging preparation for a U.S. departure from Iraq.”

Well wasn’t that convenient. Surely that letter will convince those spineless Americans who want the troops to come home that that would be a terrible mistake. After all, we still have lots of money to make “rebuilding” Iraq, right?

Just one little problem. It turns out the letter was a fake. Of course, John Negroponte is still swearing that it was “verified by multiple sources over an extended period of time.” What else can he say? Bush values loyalty above all else, we knew that about him long before he was President.

Stay tuned …

It’s time for a new phone

Ah, the promise of convergence: the idea that eventually we’ll be able to carry one little device that is a phone, a PDA, a camera, a web browser, an email client; a PC for that matter. This has seemed so close for so long, but it has proven hard to get the details right.

I had a T-Mobile Pocket PC phone back in ‘02 that I thought was “the one.” It looked good on paper (most everything but the phone, in the list above), but it just didn’t work reliably. So after moving from a Motorola Star-Tac, Palm Pilot and Motorola PageWriter 2000 (remember those? they rocked) to that device, I reversed course and un-bundled into the devices I’m carrying right now: a Motorola cell phone, a Palm Tungsten C, and a Blackberry 7290. Oh yeah, and an Olympus Stylus Verve digital camera, for times when my wonderful Nikon D70 is too big.

Then I got this job at Microsoft, and I decided to look into Pocket PC phones once again. I want to play around with developing some applications for the Windows Mobile platform, and I also thought it might be good to do some research on the current state of small-device convergence. So after a bunch of reading on-line and swapping emails with a few people who know a lot about such things, I think I’ve found a winner: the Imate PDA2K.

I don’t actually have one in my hands yet, since they’re back-ordered most places, but I have one on order and should have it in 7-10 days. I’ll start posting details here when I get it, but these are some of the things I like based on the reviews I’ve read:

• it has a slide-out backlit keyboard; not having a backlit keyboard is a pain in the ass if you’re trying to type in the dark (something I’ve been known to do)
• it works well with pretty much every cellular provider on the planet, and is very popular with international travelers (another thing I’ve been known to do)
• it has a nice integrated camera
• the web browser has a true Java virtual machine; sorry, Blackberry, but the lack of that really sucked
• I like the way it looks

The bad news is the price: $800. But hey, if this is truly the silver bullet I’m hoping it is, I’ll use it so much the next couple of years that the price will seem insignificant compared to all the value I’ll get out of it. Right? We’ll see …

Favorite Liberal Blog?

I was recently asked (in my Microsoft interview) “what’s your favorite liberal blog?” To put it in context, the question went something like this: “I need to assess how you approach the things you’re passionate about, and I could tell on Mahugh.com that you’re pretty opposed to the Iraq War, so what’s your favorite liberal blog?”

I had no good answer. But there’s a blog that Megan pointed out to me recently (where’d you hear of it?) that is the best blog about the Iraq situation that I’ve seen yet: http://www.juancole.com/. The author, Juan Cole, is Professor of History at the University of Michigan and he clearly knows the actual situation in Iraq very well. (As opposed to the dumbed-down “freedom lovers versus freedom haters” view of Iraq that most Americans have been taught to regurgitate.)

I highly recommend Cole’s site, and also Anthony Shadid’s fantastic book “Night Draws Near” — I wouldn’t have understand nearly as much of Cole’s site if I hadn’t recently read Shadid’s book. Shadid is an Iraqi who grew up in Oklahoma, and he’s the only reporter who has won a Pulitzer for coverage of the Iraq war, among other things. He’s also a true reporter, which means he travels freely around Iraq risking his own life to get close to the men and women who are living in post-invasion Iraq. (As opposed to the flag-waving sycophants that settle for being “embedded” with U.S. troops.)

Well, I better not get myself going about Iraq, it’s after 4:00 and I need to get a couple things done before heading home for a bike ride …

- Doug

New Home in Seattle

The house hunt this weekend was a success. We looked at a few areas we just couldn’t picture ourselves in, and then found a funky little rental near Seward Park that will be a perfect home base for the next year while we figure out what we really want to do. It has just been remodeled so everything’s shiny and new, there are spare bedrooms for both of our offices, and it’s right across the street from a park on Lake Washington. A great location for jogging and biking, and also convenient to downtown and the South End (where Mom lives).

Now we just need to get moved in the next couple of weeks. How hard can that be?

- Doug

Hello world!

Well, I finally did it. I have a blog.

I guess I sort of had a blog all along, except it was one-way: I put content on Mahugh.com and people could see it. But now YOU get to tell me what you think. I may need to tone down my rhetoric, if anybody’s listening.

More later, after I RTFWM. (W=Wordpress, the blog software I’m using.)

- Doug