Looking for information on what independent groups known as 527s have raised and spent on the 2008 election? Or how about who’s giving the most? OpenSecrets.org has the info. Want to know who in your area is contributing to which Presidential candidate? OpenSecrets.org has that, too. Want to how much the biggest fundraisers in Conress have in their war chests and from whom? Or who spends the most on travel? See OpenSecrets.org.

http://OpenSecrets.org

There’s also a database of fruits, vegetables, and nuts that has helpful information such as choosing the right produce and storing it once you get it home. For example, avocados are actually fruit and should be stored at room temperature in a paper bag until ripe. They’re sodium free, cholesterol free, and low in saturated fat. Strawberries, on the other hand should be stored in the refrigerator, but shouldn’t be washed until they’re ready to be eaten. Although Strawberries won’t last more than a few days in the refrigerator, almonds can last up to a year, if still in the shell.

I should point out that the site is run by a non-profit organization, PBH, comprised of “growers, shippers, packers, merchandisers, commodity boards, trade associations, food industry organizations, health insurers, health professionals, and retailers,” so its mission is a little self-serving. Not that this is a secret, though. I found this information after only a few clicks on the site. Nor should there be any belief that it matters to me a lick. Quite the opposite. I see this as an example of capatalism working. If society puts a value on something, people will find a way to make a profit. Fortunately, with proper growth and fair practices, each will learn that the best way to make profit is to invest improve and improve the field. In short, if society puts value in healthy living, corporations will setup helpful sites like Fruits..Matters.org.  Likewise, if society puts value in vice, corporations will do likewise. For examples, check out the technology behind an online poker site or any of the web cam sites.

It’s because of this underlying truism of capatalism that I bristle whenever I hear a politician talking about taking the profit out of the health care industry. I don’t disagree that health care has become very expensive and that too many people are left without adequate coverage, but the only thing removing the profit is going to do is cheapen the care. Along with the money our nation spends on health care comes the expectation of excellent, professional care. And in order to obtain this excellent, professional care we need to rely on the best and brightest to provide that care and constantly improve the field. If we were to, in fact, remove profit from this system, how are we to expect the best and brightest to go through the years of schooling, training, non-stop certifications, long hours, and often thankless work necessary if providing health care is tantamount to a philanthropic effort? It seems to me that we’d want to do the exact opposite.

Already we’ve reached a point where children don’t want to be doctors when they grow up - they want to be famous. Because we put such value on fame we’ve created a system where fame is traded like a commodity to be bought and sold. Where millions are made and spent on improving the technologies behind capturing a long-distance photo of a celeb bringing their clothes in to be dry cleaned. Where people are made famous for simply being famous, a la Paris Hilton, and they earn fortunes for it. They certainly earn much more than your General Practitioner who is probably still paying back his student loans.

No, if you want health care to improve, you need to put controlled money into the system. You make infrastructure changes. You streamline. You organize. You invest and improve. You find new ways to provide better care. You further science and improve the technology so that problems can be detected and diagnosed earlier. You attract the best and the brightest and you reward them for their efforts. If you put more value into health care, people will find ways to improve it. It’s in their own self-interest to do so.

"You won’t learn much about capitalism at a university. How could you? Capitalism is a matter of risks and rewards, and a tenured professor doesn’t have much to do with either.”
Jerry Pournelle

I mean, when I subscribed to Rolling Stone, I expected a magazine about music.  If they had book and movie reviews (which they do), then great, but primarily music.  I definitely didn’t expect it to have so much political content.  During this year’s 40th anniversary celebration, they’ve even dedicated whole issues to politics.  And what a liberal rag it is!  I guess I’m not surprised that a bunch of aging hippies would reminisce about the days of congregating on the Washington Mall, united, chanting slogans like “Make love, not war!” and “Ban the Bomb!” or tripping for days at week-long concerts where they knew they were making a difference, starting a revolution, and were never going to be like their parents.  It’s just not what I paid to read from a music magazine.

Another I also subscribed to, fortunately, did talk about music.  Unfortunately, it went out of print and my subscription had to be transferred to something else.  That’s how I ended up with Entertainment Weekly, fortunately a very good magazine, an easy bathroom read.  That’s also one of the negatives with ordering a bunch of magazine subscriptions at once online.  Some of the offerings don’t last very long and the companies I’ve used don’t have very good customer service.  I could never for certain know what was going on when a subscription would suddenly start or stop.  Worse still, all the mail in our neighborhood gets spread around the block.  It’s a regular occurrence to see the streets filled with people redelivering the mail about twenty minutes after the mail carrier has been through.  I never know if a subscription has ended, been cancelled, or if it’s sitting at a neighbor’s house.  I kid you not, one day two of my magazines were delivered to the fire station!  Joe down the street said he’d drop them by but I never saw them.

It could be worse though.  Maggie subscribed to People and it never even arrived.  The subscriptions start in like 6-8 weeks, so it was months before she realized there was something wrong and called.  It turned out that particular company didn’t offer People any more, so she had to transfer her subscription to another magazine.  All she wanted was People and it was so expensive that she now has like a fourteen year subscription to something she didn’t even want.  I wonder what she’ll get next when that magazine goes under in the next decade.

One magazine, Angels on Earth, came every two months and was a short subscription.  It ended too soon and I would have renewed if I had known but it just stopped showing up without any kind of renewal option.  Angels on Earth details stories from amateur contributors about how they feel blessed or thankful or connected to something bigger.  I’ll have to find it online and subscribe again.

Heroic Stories is a lot like Angels on Earth.  It, too, wants to “make the world a better place” through positive, uplifting stories, but it’s nonsectarian.  Angels on Earth can be a little too religious or literal when it comes to angels.  HeroicStories.com is inspiring in its simplicity.  The stories they share often pertain to our every day lives and offer ways to make a difference without much effort.  A recent story line and related discussion centered around the idea of keeping a few extra, cheap umbrellas in your car to give to a stranger in need.  I know I’ve passed people in the pouring rain and felt like I wanted to help, but stopped short of offering a ride to a stranger in the middle of nowhere.  With a little foresight and thanks to Heroic Stories, I can be ready to at least offer them some comfort.

http://www.HeroicStories.com

1. Dear Head on the Wall by Alejandro Escovedo
2. Thanksgiving by Jason Anderson
3. By Your Side by Coco Rosie
4. The Search by Dolorean
5. Another Lonely Day by Ben Harper
6. All Will Be Well by The Gabe Dixon Band
7. The Truth Comes Out by Corb Lund
8. Hoquiam by Damien Jurado
9. Sinnerman by Nina Simone
10. It’s Good to Be in Love by Frou Frou

The AFI also maintains standing Top 10 and Top 100 lists of the Greatest Films of All Time. The most recent entry into the Top 10 list was from 1993, Schindler’s List, but I’m hoping 2007’s Superbad is going to crack the list in this year’s voting. The top 100 includes 2001’s Lord of the Rings (#50). The list are voted on yearly and the nomination list is already available for 2008. AFI site membership is free, but full Institute membership begins at $50 and includes access to databases, a commemorative booklet, a magazine, and tickets to the film festivals. Larger contributions will net tickets to the annual AFI Life Achievement Award Tribute Gala.

http://www.afi.com/

Netdisaster.com is goofy site that bills itself as an “absolutely useless” site that “simulates the destruction of the target-site by a disaster.” The methods of “disaster” range from spilled coffee to worm infestation, and even paintball gun attacks. Just enter the URL of the site to view, select the method of distruction and have at it. If you select the auto mode, you can still click on the hyperlinks on the displayed site and enable the method of attack on command by pointing to it. Any options including the URL can be changed in the filter frame at the top of the web page at any time and the help sections are detailed and well written.  Note that blog engines use the same kind of filter frame and will most likely conflict and disable Netdisaster, but there is an alternate viewing method that will work in some instances (use the Alt button or read the FAQ information specifically about this kind of problem).

http://www.netdisaster.com/

For example, I’ll never understand Serendipity. It just didn’t make sense to me. I just couldn’t swallow that two people who hit it off so well and felt so strongly for one another would act so ridiculously. Kate Beckinsale, who has wow factor, stars as Sara who meets Jonathan, played by a harmless John Cusack, while out Christmas shopping in New York. The two hit it off immediately, seem to fall in love, and then for reasons that aren’t clear to me, throw up their hands and turn it over to “fate.” They write their phone numbers down but instead of exchanging them, they just throw them away. Ok, well maybe they didn’t actually throw them away, but they may as well have. She writes hers in a book and gives it away, and he writes his on a $5 bill that she spends on some candy. Oh, come on! Who does that? I might be willing to concede that somewhere, sometime there were two people who could have been this flighty, but if there were, I’m sure they didn’t act as pithy and seemingly together as the two characters that had been introduced in the beginning of this movie.

To me, the movie plays out like the old joke about the sailor whose boat is sinking so he prays to God for help. When a boat comes by to offer the man a lift, he refuses and instead insists that God will save him.  The boat leaves but the sailor continues to sink. Another boat comes by to offer the man a lift, and he again refuses insisting that God will answer his prayers and save him.  However, the boat leaves and the craft takes on more water until a third boat comes by and offers to take the sailor aboard but he again refuses. Finally, the boat sinks and the sailor dies only to find himself standing in heaven before the Almighty. The sailor drops to his knees and begs the Lord to know what he had done to forsaken Him and why He let him drown. God pauses a moment and then asks, “What about the three boats I sent?”

Even in the frame of the movie, this “serendipitous” decision to let fate decide if the two are meant to be is shown to be an absurd move. Although the phone numbers eventually work themselves into each other’s hands, so much time has gone by in the interim, including marriages to other people, that it can hardly be viewed as a raging success.  I don’t know if he does or not, but I’d be willing to bet my dad liked Serendipity.

None of this is to say that I thought We Are Marshall was as poor as I thought Serendipity was, but I thought they missed the boat with a lot of things. The story is of the true Marshall University football team who was nearly wiped out along with all its coaching staff in a horrific 1970 plane crash. In the film version of events, the real attention grabber was coach Jack Lengyel, played by a cartoonish Matthew McConaughey who evokes a faint glimpse into how he must have looked to the police the night of his infamous bongo playing arrest in October of 1999. Lengyel is a great coach and humanitarian who helped rebuild the Marshall University football team but he was only one player in a story rich with notable characters.

William “Red” Dawson, who was a recruiting coach for the team and had not been aboard the plane while out on a recruiting trip, is viewed as an important figure in both real life and in the film version by being given to the able Matthew Fox from Lost. However, there are just too few scenes or lines of dialog for Red to come across as anything more than a periphery character. Likewise for Marshall University President Donald Dedmon, who had successfully petitioning the NCAA to allow the Marshall frehsman players to take the field. Dedmon is well played by brilliantly by David Strathairn. Although Strathairn has more film to work with than Fox, he isn’t given the dialog he deserves and the film misses a perfect opportunity for his character to plead his case to the NCAA, which would succinctly underline the whole moral of the story and why it was important for the team to take the field to pay respect to their deceased teammates, friends, family, and neighbors.

I think opportunities were also missed by not better profiling more of the returning football players who were suddenly expected to, for lack of a less obvious term, pick up the ball and run with it. After the crash, the team’s surviving kicker, Tom Bogdan, hung up his cleats and never played football again, too overcome with guilt for not having been with the team on the trip. In the film, Bogdan is played by Brian Geraghty, who looks like Wes Bentley from American Beauty with about 25 pounds on his frame - something about the eyes, but the portrayal feels hollow with only scenes of Geraghty brooding and none of him appearing to cope with real emotion.

Reggie Oliver was a Marshall University freshman quarterback who was suddenly one of the teams veterans and the new starting quarterback. It was Oliver who orchestrated the team’s first win of the season on a pass to Terry Gardner. After Marshall, Oliver went on to play professional football in the WFL before going on to coaching. However, although Arlen Escarpeta appears to get more screen time as Oliver than even Fox does as Red, I somehow never felt connected to him either or that he had any struggles fitting into his new position both on and off the field.

Blake Smith‘s sport was soccer and basketball before finding himself in the position as the new kicker for the football team. Even Kathy Ireland was given more to work with during her portrayal of a soccer-player-turned-kicker in the comedy Unnecessary Roughness than was affored to Smith in We Are Marshall. Smith’s life is reduced to only a brief clip in which he gets his shot on the team after a coach sees him kick a ball out of the soccer field. The actor who portays Smith is Billy Bennett who, according to IMDB, doesn’t have any other credited roles as of yet.

It’s not just the portrayals of the team and administration that I thought were lacking, but those of the rest of the community as well. I never really believed that this was a community that was dealing with a loss, much less one as tragic as this. Ian McShane, who may be most known for playing Swearengen in HBO’s Deadwood, plays Paul Griffen, a composite of the grieving parents. McShane is a master at expressing deep emotion through intonationg and expression, but even he comes through as a two-dimensional character stuck on the third stage of loss, anger.

Maybe in a strange way it could be considered fitting that a movie about the calamity that struck Marshall University on November 14, 1970 ended as it did, full of promise, much of it left unrealized. I just can’t help wonder if the community that lost so much didn’t deserve a better shot at getting something back this time around.

"I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.”
Christopher Reeve

http://CPRInstructor.com

I’ve always loved how towns and cities build and maintain parks for no gain other than to give their citizens some place to relax or play a game.  I’ll always support the construction of skate parks.  I would never argue against the creation of more parks even if the last time I set foot on a skateboard, it was narrow and made of hard plastic with rubber wheels that would catch on every pebble or patch of sand.  You shouldn’t have to be boarder to get behind the idea of a park for kids to entertain themselves with physical activity.  I also love that if you don’t like the particular parks in your town, you can just go over to a neighboring city and hang out in one of their parks instead.

In most areas of the country there’s even plenty of subsidized transportation to get you there.  I just read somewhere that Boston was ranked #2 in the top list of cities that are accessible by foot.  The transit system, the T, is a great example of government in action.  There are 5 different subway and streetcar lines (red, orange, green, blue, and silver), plus the commuter rail, buses (diesel, electric, or LNG), wheelchair vans, cars for the handicapped or elderly, and even boats.

Or if you prefer, there’s a massive, regulated hansom industry in Boston.  That’s one thing I miss about living out here in the sticks: taxi availability.  We can get on the commuter rail and be in Boston in about 30 minutes, but we can’t get a taxi cab to take us down the road to a St. Patrick’s Day party.  But, I digress.

The government has been providing for us in many areas for a very long time.  Unfortunately, it feels like all the big ideas, all the revolutionary government projects, all the greatest things about this country, were undertaken far too long ago.  In simpler terms, what have you done for me lately?

I don’t mean to be glib, because it’s not something I take lightly, but where’s our space race?  Where’s our Hoover Dam, Statue of Liberty, or Mount Rushmore?  Where’s our Chicago’s World Fair?  Where are the bold projects that lead the way?  Particularly lacking is the government’s involvement in technology.

In the past thirty years, computers have gone from obscure thinking machines for mathematical functions to penetrating most aspect of our daily lives.  A computer was probably involved somewhere along the way in the construction or delivery of everything we buy, wear, eat, use, or consume.  My alarm clock has a computer in it.

With all this heavy reliance on computers for banking, commerce, communication, management, construction, or entertainment, I find it a little disturbing at how hands off the government has been in leading the way.  Instead of action and leadership, we get regulations and bureaucracy.  Of course, the greatest project thus far in computing is the design and implementation of the internet which was performed by a government through DARPA, but since that was over thirty years ago, it can’t be considered a recent input.  Where are the great new projects that show that the government recognizes it’s a digital world and some things need fixing?

A clear example of this lack of leadership is the continued presence of spam.  Why isn’t anything being done about spam?  The government has tried to deal with spam by passing nearly meaningless laws. Even when ledislators “get tough” on spam enforcement, it means that they’ve enacted measures to allow their constituents to do all the heavy lifting and sue some spammers for deceptive advertising or for not providing an opt-out.  These laws are based on the ability of the citizens to track down the spammers, serve them with papers, get them to appear in civil court, and prove the case.  Have these laws had any effect?  Has your inbox noticed the difference?  Mine sure hasn’t.  I still get spam at work and home and that’s after the emails have passed through about 4 different spam and anti-virus filters.

Spam is nearly impossible to fight from the receiving end.  And even if you do stop it from eventually getting to your inbox, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t sent.  There could have been hundreds or thousands of routers, switches, and computers which had to carry the message all the way there only to be refused and then bounce the message back, most likely involving a different path than the way it came, involving even more equipment.  Rejecting spam can take up twice as much bandwidth as having received it.

The worst part about spam is it never, ever stops.  When I first setup the email server at work in about 1995, I got in the habit of reading the email logs.  I remember right from the get-go, we regularly got email addressed to two usernames that didn’t exist at our company.  Our company name is similar to those of many other companies that operate around the country, and clearly two people from one of these other companies with a different, but similar, URL got onto some kind of mailing list.  For years, these same two names appeared every single day as the target of email, even though a message had never gotten through to a recipient - every single one was bounced.  A few years ago we outsourced our email server and I don’t bother reading the logs, but I’m sure that if I did, I’d see the same two email addresses today.

Spammers don’t care if they ever hit their target.  They’re just throwing crap at the wall and hoping something sticks.  They’re just playing the percentages and since it doesn’t cost them anything to send the emails, those percentages can be pretty low and still equate to a fortune.  Why isn’t the government making any real effort to stop it other than enacting regulatory laws that put the burden on the citizen?  Can you imagine the outcry if every night there was a knock at every American’s front door with someone pitching a bottle of snake oil or a peek at some dirty pictures?  Yet that’s exactly what happens to us regularly through email and its left up to every individual, company, or ISP to police the situation ourselves.

The U. S. Postal Service seems to me to be a prime governmental body to be involved in advancing the cause of email.  With the competition that has sprung up in the way of package handling and the reduced volume due to online invoicing and bill paying, an excellent stream of revenue for the U. S. Postal Service would be to charge money to deliver an email in the same way that it charges to deliver a letter.  In exchange for this fee, they could provide services like confidentiality, security, authentication, a confirmed receipt, and tracking information.

Not every email should have to pass through the USPS.  In the same way that you can hand-deliver a card or box of cookies to your neighbor’s house, you should be able to transmit emails peer-to-peer the way it’s done now if you choose.  But, I think a government-protected email address should be afforded every American if they should choose to use it.  I might not use it if I just wanted to ask a friend if he wanted to get together after work some night, but I would if I wanted to send out something important or receive something private.

Another advantage with using the USPS is that tampering with the mail is a federal crime.  So is using the mail for the commission of a crime.  The same could be made true of USPS email.  If some shyster spammer passed an email through the USPS, the weight of the federal government should come down on him.  In the movie, Tom Cruise was only able to take down The Firm after he had gathered evidence of billing fraud and brought down the mighty hammer of the government due to the realization that the fraudulent invoices were sent through the US mail.

Chances are most spam would drop anyway even without the threat of felony prosecution.  If a spammer had to pay money for every email sent, it could change the percentage game enough that spamming wouldn’t be such a lucrative business after all.  At the very minimum, it would get spammers to care more about whether their emails were reaching an audience at all, let alone an interested one, and thus stop knocking at doors that weren’t being opened.

The USPS would also resolve another problem with email: the difficulty in changing email addresses or managing multiple addresses.  You can now keep the same phone number when you change cell phone carriers, but if you change ISP’s, you’re SOL.  I wouldn’t know where to begin if I ever left my job or cancelled my Verizon DSL.  I’d have to plan for at least a month to hope to get half of my subscriptions, correspondence, newsletters, and registrations switched over to a new address, if it’s even possible at all.

There could be other advantages of having a central clearing house for email.  Virus disinfection could be handled on a higher level than it is currently being handled through the “go-out-and-buy-whatever-package-you-think-will-work-update-it-regularly-never-open-any-attachments-and-pray-for-the-best” approach that stands now.  It would also help if the virus could be traced back to the first registered citizen that released it to the internet so it could be stopped at the source.

Email is only one of the problems that I see as affecting us on the technological front.  There are also serious problems with the patent office, the copyright system, open document standards, internet commerce, and allowing some very powerful corporations to have the power to dictate terms for the regular use of the systems on which our country’s computers are based.  These are only the things I can pick off the top of my head, but each is ripe with problems, misguided intentions, and example of a laissez-faire attitude toward technological innovation. I don’t expect these or any of the other problems facing the industry to be corrected with the wave of a wand, but shouldn’t we expect that at least something be seriously attempted?  Let’s build today’s equivalent of the NASA space program and stop pushing the burden onto the citizen.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
George Bernard Shaw

Excepting only a few recent album purchases, I’ve kept up with ripping all my CD’s and have every song encoded as an MP3 with artist, album, track, title information. Now recently, since using iTunes, I’ve been adding album art to all my MP3s. The album art displays on the iPhone when a song is played and appears in the album view display on both the phone and the desktop version of iTunes.  I think sliding through the album covers and selecting one to play is the most impressive example of the advantage of the touch navigation and the iPhone’s beautifully rendered graphics.  The Mac makes it easy to add the art because you can simply use a search engine’s, like AllTheWeb, image search function and drag the source image right to the album. It’s also great that if the source image has since been removed and is no longer available, you can just drag the thumnail representation right off the search engine’s results page.  Oddly enough, sometimes these thumbnails even look better than the source image for rare songs where few alternatives available.

I’ve always manually defined the artist’s name on compilation albums because I want the songs to appear when I sort by artist and not just when I search for an artist’s name. For example, I would want Sweet Jane to appear if I were browsing through the Cowboy Junkies, and not have it be sorted with the V’s under “Various Artists” just because it happens to be from the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. Storing the albums this way never seems to occur to programmers who write MP3 software and result in somewhat of a mess. For example, in any album view or sort, iTunes treats each song like its own album and separates it from the rest of the tracks. For these, I click select each of the songs on the album, use the Mac’s command-I function, and assign the album art to all the songs at once through the properties window that pops up.  You can also assign multiple art files to your songs, but I haven’t seen a need for that yet and have only assigned one per.

I found a nice widget that automatically looks up whatever song is playing if it doesn’t already have art and finds an image from one of several defined sites (e.g. Amazon).  It’s a good tool because it’s very simple and does exactly what it sets out to do, but I found that I could usually find much better, clearer images on my own.  I also found that it doesn’t like the way I name tracks from compilation albums any better than iTunes, and results in locating the art for the album on which the artist originally released the song and assigns it to the whole album, which is a nuisance.  Another album art tool I’m using is a screen saver that wallpapers the screen with rows and rows of artwork, then randomly flips each one and replaces it with a different album.  I don’t know if it’s new with OS X Leopard or had existed in Tiger too, but I’ve only just noticed it recently.

I also experimented with the iTunes’ store’s custom ringtones, but wasn’t satisfied with the results. To create a ringtone, you need to have purchased the song through the store, so I had to buy a single I already owned, then buy the ringtone made from the track.  I got to pick and adjust the sample of the song that I wanted to rip to a ringtone, but that was more of a curse than a blessing. What I thought sounded great on the Mac is a muted, delayed mess on the iPhone.  I left so much of a pause at the beginning that I might as well have selected dead air.  Now, whenever Maggie calls, the iPhone stops playing music and I hear absolutely nothing and realize it’s her before a note has played, which is not what I was looking for in a ringtone, at least not for $5. I’m going to start checking out some make-your-own ringtone tools and some of the free sites out there and report back what I find. Once I get some that I like, I’ll write how to load them on the iPhone.

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.”
Frank Zappa