Do you have that in Mauve?

My number came up for jury duty. I think I've actually gone downtown twice over the past 30 years. That's not an oppressive imposition and I'm happy to go. But this time, the trial I got called out for was projected to be a four week trial.

 I requested a hardship exclusion, since four weeks out of the office would be pretty hard to work around - I don't have an employer to cover my salary while I'm sitting in judgement. I tried to sort out the level of effort to try and squeeze billable time around the court time and couldn't see it working.

 What's weird, imho, is that they excused me all together. Rather than throwing me back in the pool for a shorter trial. If they had a nice two day trial, I could have worked that in.

The Makers of Things

Surprisingly, perhaps, I share this enthusiasm.

In the late 1800s, the Brooklyn Bridge was built with no power tools, no heavy machinery, and only a basic, evolving understanding of how to make steel. It’s not these facts, but the stories surrounding the facts that inspire me when I take a good, long stare at a suspension bridge. But first…

More on the iPhone 3.0 announcement

One of the new features coming in iPhone 3.0 is the capability for an app to have what I'll call sub-purchases. The example given was a game you'd buy and then, from within the game, you'd be able to buy additional levels. Currently you have to buy a different version of the game, or get an update - which so far have been free.

But one point about this new feature is that you can't buy add-ons from within a free application. A developer can't give away the razor and sell the blades.

Why is that interesting?  Well, Amazon gives away their iPhone Kindle app, but sells content.

If I were Amazon, I think I'd like to walk away from the whole idea of the AppStore. Amazon has a delivery mechanism. They can handle micro payments. They want to give away their iPhone Kindle app and have you buy books from within it.

But they won't. Why should they give Apple 30% of each book sale? Their current model (the iPhone Kindle book sees everything you've purchased from Amazon, but you have to do the purchasing via a web page or a 'real' Kindle) will likely continue.

The AppStore is problematic at best. The whole idea of a cadre of Apple employees passing qualitative judgement on apps is astonishing to me. How can Apple seriously reject an iPhone app for obscenities when I can buy, literally, the 7 words you can't say on television on the iTunes 'Music" store?

The AppStore is probably great for the one-person shops who are developing an app in their spare time. It's probably even helpful for an entity like the New York Times, which lacks a software distribution infrastructure. But Amazon doesn't need their help.

Twitter

Twitter is a micro-blogging tool. Posts are limited to 140 characters each. You can see recent posts from me to the right, on this blog (so you only have to go to one place to check in.)  You can see the entire history here.

Google Street View comes to Bowling Green

For the longest time, Google Maps had fuzzy views of my hometown. I wondered if there was a secret government facility that the satellites weren't allowed to show. But that's in the past. In fact, Bowling Green has been photographed by the Google Street View minions.

I think all told I lived in four different residences in BG. But I only remember these two:

The first was 424 S. College Drive. This is the house that my sisters came to from the hospital after they were born. My dad and grandfather built the shed that you can see over the front car on the right. It's to their credit that it still stands 50 years later. And to the credit of the benign neglect of the current owners.


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In third grade we moved to 339 Sandridge. I lived there until we moved to California, the summer before my senior year, in 1973.  The back yard was as big as the front, if not more so, and there was only a woods behind that. You hardly felt cramped.

Across the street is what was then just an empty lot, but is now "Rainey Park" after the former owners. I played many a ball game in the lot. (The Raineys were David Pogue's grandparents. An older retired couple. I used to run letters to the mail box for Mrs. Rainey, for which she'd pay me 25 cents (in the late 60s!). After we moved to California, Mrs Rainey sent me a letter bragging on her grandson. I ran across the letter a few years ago and sent it to Pogue.)


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It does seem the quality of the photos of Bowling Green are reduced. Compare those with this picture of the current residence:

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Frank Rich is always worth a visit

This week is no exception.
What such G.O.P. “stars” as Sanford and Jindal have in common, besides their callous neo-Hoover ideology, are their phony efforts to portray themselves as populist heroes. Their role model is W., that brush-clearing “rancher” by way of Andover, Yale and Harvard. Listening to Jindal talk Tuesday night about his immigrant father’s inability to pay for an obstetrician, you’d never guess that at the time his father was an engineer and his mother an L.S.U. doctoral candidate in nuclear physics. Sanford’s first political ad in 2002 told of how growing up on his “family’s farm” taught him “about hard work and responsibility.” That “farm,” the Charlotte Observer reported, was a historic plantation appraised at $1.5 million in the early 1980s. From that hardscrabble background, he struggled on to an internship at Goldman Sachs.

On the Bailout

The internet is atwitter about CNBC's Rick Santelli meltdown over the support for some of the homeowners caught in the housing bubble. Some want to make him a star, some see him as a buffoon. I'm clearly with those who see him as an idiot.

The primary point of those who oppose the homeowner bailout is that taxpayers shouldn't be in the business of helping people who made stupid decisions.

Of course we do that all the time. President Obama is evoking FDR's comment - "Suppose my neighbor's home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose. I don't say to him 'Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15 ." (Which wasn't a New Deal comment, but a comment about Lend-Lease.). We have fire departments who will come put out a fire at your house, even if it was started because you had bad wiring in your fish tank.

We do all kinds of things, at the governmental level, to help our neighbors. However, the appropriate level of support is the basis for the fundemental political tension in our country. Where do we draw the line?

I just watched the Frontline overview of how the Federal government got involved in underwriting the housing bubble for the great captains of capital. The show is called Inside the Meltdown, and I highly recommend it. Key players, save the Secretary of the Treasury and Chair of the Federal Reserve, are interviewed. As are journalists from the Wall Street Journal to CNBC to the New York Times. I can't imagine a more credible overview that could be presented, in an hour, of how the federal government got into the banking business.

And here's the thing. We decided we were in the save-your-ass business last October when the Congress passed and President Bush signed the bailout bill. Shortly thereafter, the federal goverment invested $250 Billion in the top nine banks in this country to prop them up.

So, now, 11% of the $700 Billion set aside to resurrect our economy is going to be used to help homeowners. And the fire analogy still serves us. If my neighbor's house goes into forclosure and sits empty, the value of my house falls. Just as if a fire in their house isn't put out, my house is at risk.

The astonishing thing is that Santelli's rant has any traction at all. We're already in the game, the recipients of the cash so far have been the best and the brightest on Wall Street who created this mess by creating the market for sub-prime mortgages. The right wants to blame the homeowner who bought a garbage loan, but, oddly, let off the garbage salesman. Now we're spreading the love, lightly, down to 'Main St.'.

It's about time.