What is the Answer?

I just remembered that I still have this blog and thought it was high time I provided my devoted readers with another highly educational and highly entertaining blog post. I guess with the economy crumbling and transitioning to a change in leadership, it seems like a somewhat scary time. I've never been too involved in politics, but am trying to be more active and better informed. I want to throw out the question, what issues are most important for us to be focusing on and what can we do to best advocate our positions on those issues.

I just read a book by Newt Gingrich from a few years back, Winning the Future and I agreed with a lot of what he had to say. Some of the things he talked about that jumped out at me were energy, creating a more business-friendly environment in America (which he feels is currently overtaxed and over-regulated), and healthcare reform. National security of course continues to be a high-priority issue as well.

So what do we do?

Thirty-One Years Ago Today...Umm, I Mean Last Week

I'm a few days late with this, but I need to pay tribute to the woman I love, who turned thirty-one on September 12.

Jeanell and I have been married for over eight years now and it's been a wonderful experience to live life alongside her, through all the hills and valleys that it brings.

Jeanell is such a wonderful wife and mother and takes such good care of me and the boys. As most of you know, I spent the major part of a year and a half traveling every week for work and she supported me through that and took care of things here, working full time, taking care of the boys, doing homework, getting kids to practices, doing meals, just taking care of everything.

I've had the opportunity to be home for a few months now and it's been wonderful to get reacquainted and to be able to spend time together.

In a few more months, we'll begin another phase in life (again) and I am so looking forward to taking care of our new baby girl with my beautiful wife. She is one in a million.



Happy Birthday Baby!

Reading and Running Update

Haven't blogged for a bit...quick update on my running and some comments on the book I just finished.

I've more or less stuck with the running and ran a total of 24 miles this past week, with a long run of six miles on Saturday. I'm feeling pretty good, but am still not really dropping the pounds like I hope to.

My brother-in-law Cam ran the Park City Marathon and is planning to run the Logan Marathon here in a couple of weeks. I have a ways to go before I'm ready for that.

Just finished The Glorious Cause and found it a bit more difficult than some of the other books I've read, but it was still interesting. Some of the main things I found interesting...

• The wide variety of issues that led up to the war that basically all boiled down to the Colonies saying, "We ain't paying taxes to Great Britain." Benjamin Franklin, who at one point was in favor of reconciliation, tried to argue that the Colonies would accept "external taxes", but not "internal taxes" although the supposed line between these two types of taxes proved to be quite blurry.
• The difficulty that George Washington had in keeping soldiers in the army (not to mention keeping them fed and clothed).
• The importance of France in the war and the unlikelihood that the Colonies would have won the war without their assistance (guess we do owe some gratitude to those cheese-eating surrender monkeys).
• The details of the Constitutional Convention and how the ratification of the Constitution was not that easy. In fact, many people of the era saw the Constitution as being in violation of the very principles for which the Revolutionary War had been fought. Namely, that it created a powerful central government, not too different from the government they'd just fought a war to be free from.

My next book will be another Franklin biography (this one by Isaacson). I might knock out Sam Walton's ironically titled Made In America quickly first.

Of the Revolutionary Era books that I've read, I'd have to say that my favorites have been by Joseph Ellis (Founding Brothers and His Excellency). I enjoy the analysis that he adds in addition to just telling the story.

And It's Another World Record!

Like many of you, I've been watching the Olympics, particularly swimming, and wondered about the frequency with which World Records are being broken. I've read about this new swimsuit from Speedo called the LZR Racer, which has allowed it's wearers to break 44 world records since it's launch in February.

Now I'm all for progress and innovation, but I do wonder if "World Records" should be established based on some kind of standards or set of conditions common to athletes over time. If I set some kind of biking record on my regular pedal-bike and someone comes along and breaks my record using a ten-speed, are we really comparing apples to apples?

This argument carries into other sports as well. Users of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball will obviously be looked at in a different light, but could Babe Ruth have hit as many homers against today's pitchers? Or would better training and batting equipment have made him even more formidable?

Most NBA fans know that Oscar Robertson averaged a triple-double for an entire season, but did you also know that the pace at which the game was played in that era was much faster than today? And that Magic Johnson had a season that was just as statistically impressive, when adjusted for pace of play?

What are your thoughts on the world records and the Then vs Now debate?

By the way, if you're interested in statistical analysis as it relates to the NBA, but in a not-too-technical kind of way, I highly recommend John Hollinger from ESPN.com. I think most of his stuff requires an ESPN Insider membership (best $6.95/mo I spend), but once in a while you'll see a free preview article as well.

Reading List

With proper credit to my brother Alan, following is a list of books he recommended at my request when I started spending 4+ hours per week on an airplane. I've read a fair number of them and continue to work through it. Books I have read are in bold. Feel free to comment or give some other recommendations. And yes, I feel superior because I no longer read fiction (although I do feel slightly dumber for having read Glenn Beck's An Inconvenient Book).

Revolutionary Era

Mayflower (Philbrick)
The Founding Brothers (Ellis)
Benjamin Franklin: The First American (Brands)
Benjamin Franklin (Isaacson)
His Excellency (Ellis)
Washington’s Crossing (Fischer)
1776 (McCullough)
The Glorious Cause (Middlekauff)
John Adams (McCullough)
Alexander Hamilton (Chernow)

1800s

Andrew Jackson (Remini)
Andrew Jackson (Brands)
Team of Rivals (Goodwin)
Abraham Lincoln (Donald)
The Battle Cry of Freedom (McPherson)
Manhunt (Swanson)
The Devil in the White City (Larson)
Titan (Chernow)

1900s

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (Morris)
Theodore Rex (Morris)
No Ordinary Time (Goodwin)
Freedom From Fear (Kennedy)
Truman (McCullough)
Master of the Senate (Caro)
President Kennedy (Reeves)
Robert Kennedy: His Life (Thomas)
The Best and the Brightest (Halberstam)
Simple Justice (Kluger)
First In His Class (Maraniss)
My Life (Clinton)

Middle East

The Six Day War (Oren)
From Beirut to Jerusalem (Friedman)
Guests of the Ayatollah (Bowden)

Sports

When Pride Still Mattered (Maraniss)
Luckiest Man (Eig)

9/11 - Afghanistan

Ghost Wars (Coll)
9/11 Commission Report
The Looming Tower (Wright)

Iraq

Plan of Attack (Woodward)
Cobra II (Gordon)
The Assassins’ Gate (Packer)

Other Good Choices

Black Hawk Down (Bowden)
Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner)
The Prize (Yergin)
The World is Flat (Friedman)
Longitudes and Attitudes (Friedman)

Wal-Mart

Last Saturday, Jeanell and I happened to catch a documentary entitled "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices." Now we probably have a little different feeling about Wal-Mart than some because Jeanell has been employed there for the past seven years. There are definitely accusations made against Wal-mart that I am in no way qualified to respond to, particularly related to human rights and the environment, but I did want to comment on an area where I feel Wal-Mart is maligned a bit unfairly.

We constantly hear about how many Wal-Mart employees are paid a wage that puts them below the poverty line. The thought that comes to my mind is how many of these positions are intended to be "primary bread-winner" jobs? It seems the vast majority of jobs in retail pay a wage that would not support a typical family of four. I realize that my experience is anecdotal, but Jeanell has looked at various employment opportunities in our area including Old Navy and Vulcraft (where I work) and was able to make a higher wage at Wal-Mart than either of those places. I guess it just seems to me that most jobs in the retail sector will provide supplementary income, but will not work as the only source of income for a family. I would doubt that a cashier or stocker at Target or Albertson's is paid sufficiently to support a family either.

So is Wal-Mart just picked on because of its size? Is it easier to group all the Wal-Mart employees together and make generalizations about them than to compare them objectively to the retail sector as a whole? Or is the argument that employees in the retail sector used to make a reasonable wage before Wal-Mart came into the picture?

I don't know the answer, but wanted to see if any of you had any strong feelings one way or the other about Wal-Mart or if anyone could show me where I'm wrong.

Diet and Exercise

Unlike many Americans, I have put on a little weight over the past seven or eight years. In fact, I'm probably fifty pounds heavier now than when Jeanell and I married in 2001.

Well, the past few weeks I've tried to increase my exercise amount from zero to little in an attempt to maybe shed a few of those extra pounds. (According to the Wii Fit Jeanell gave me for Father's Day, my ideal weight is ~154 lbs. I'm thinking I probably won't get there.)

It's been three weeks and I've done fairly well with doing some jogging (started at two miles, worked up to three) at least five nights/week. Unfortunately, when I weighed in yesterday, I was two pounds heavier than when I started this increase of exercise.

I guess that's the problem with exercise as a weight-loss tool. It takes hours to burn off calories through exercise that it takes minutes (for me, seconds) to eat.

I've decided one of two things (or probably both things) need to happen for me to lose some weight. First, I need to build up my stamina so that I can exercise for longer periods of time and at a higher level. And second, I need to eat better.

Eating better is where I always seem to run into trouble for a few reasons. One is that I have a deeply ingrained psychological need to finish whatever is placed on my plate. I rarely bring food home from a restaurant despite the excessive size of the portions and I'll generally make myself sick rather than admitting I can't finish something and throwing it away. Another problem I seem to have is that most of the eating I do is because I enjoy the flavor of the food rather than simply to satisfy hunger.

A Few Tips

Because I work in the IT world, people often ask me questions about what computer to buy, how to solve common computer problems, etc. I thought I'd go ahead and share a few tips, tricks, and hidden gems.

If you're looking for a good search engine, jot this url down: www.google.com. While not yet a household name, Google can help you find whatever you are looking for on the Internet with surprising accuracy.

Interested in buying and selling things online, keep this name in mind: EBay. Never used it myself, but I hear that lots of people become millionaires overnight with EBay. I believe my brother Scott used to date someone that had a whole business plan that revolved around selling Guess jeans on EBay. Don't know whatever came of that (or her, for that matter), but I'm sure EBay did it's part.

Still using the Internet browser of the Evil Empire (aka Microsoft). Maybe it's just my crappy computer, but Internet Explorer seems to take forever to load. Give Mozilla Firefox (www.mozilla.com) a try.

Looking for a new PC or laptop, here's a company that you may not have heard of: Dell (www.dell.com). I hear they have some really great deals.

Can't find enough sports news and opinions on the Internet. Give this url a try: www.espn.com. I especially enjoy the columns and podcasts of The Sports Guy, Bill Simmons.

Don't know what a url is? Try typing this address into your Firefox address bar: www.wikipedia.com. From there, you can search the site to find out what a "url" is. Or, thanks to the magic of the Internet, you can just click here. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia created by the collaborative effort of all of humanity. Well, at least all of humanity that has a computer and an Internet connection. Well, I guess you really need to have a lot of time on your hands as well. One thing you don't need is to know what the hell you're talking about. You can add whatever crap you want to any article.

Well, hopefully these tips will help many of you to get more comfortable with the Internet. Let's hope so, because Web 2.0 is already upon us. (I have no idea what that means).