Retreat by Charles Krauthammer

"For a man whose presidency is marked by a courageous willingness to think and do big things, this nomination is a sorry retreat into smallness."

Good line from an opinion piece about President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. It is disappointing to me that he picked a political ally rather than a judicial expert. As George Will said in another opinion piece, if 100 experts were asked to choose their 10 top Supreme Court prospects, she would not be named in any of the 1,000 spots on the list.

White Sox Top Red Sox 5-3, Sweep Series

I'm a hometown fan - Dodgers and Angels all the way!

But it's hard not to cheer for such a hard-luck team as the White Sox, or the Red Sox last season.

The Angels will beat the Yankees and face the White Sox in the American League Championship Series to see who gets to the World Series. Whom to cheer for?

Ah, this is where sports becomes so fun - waiting for those magical moments when heroes emerge and legends are made.

The 400 Richest Americans

Now look at this list. 4 of the top 5 are technology fortunes, and 5 of the top 10 are from one family.

How things change and yet stay the same.

1 William H. Gates
2 Warren E. Buffett
3 Paul G. Allen
4 Michael Dell
5 Lawrence Ellison
6 Christy Walton
7 Jim C. Walton
8 S. Robson Walton
9 Alice L. Walton
10 Helen R. Walton

Top Movies

I love lists. All kinds of lists. To-do lists, popularity lists, lists of statistics.

This is a list of imdb.com's top 250 movies as voted by members.

What are your top movies? Mine (as I try to gauge their impact on my life, not necessarily the movies I would most like to watch):

1. Brother Sun, Sister Moon
2. Groundhog Day
3. It's A Wonderful Life
4. The Wizard of Oz
5. Star Wars
6. The Deer Hunter
7. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
8. The Princess Bride
9. Rocky
10. Ordinary People
11. Lawrence of Arabia
12. Young Frankenstein
13. A Shot in the Dark
14. Saving Private Ryan
15. The Incredibles
16. 2001: A Space Odyssey
17. Forrest Gump
18. Patton
19. Chariots of Fire
20. The Seven Samurai
21. To Kill A Mockingbird
22. The Bridge on the River Kwai
23. The Great Escape
24. How the West Was Won
25. Tora! Tora! Tora!
26. Terminator
27. The Matrix
28. Gone With the Wind
29. Raiders of the Lost Ark
30. The Sons of Katie Elder
31. White Christmas
32. Little Big Man
33. True Grit
34. Twelve Angry Men
35. The Godfather
36. The Sting
37. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
38. Glory
39. The Killing Fields
40. The Parent Trap

Pacific 10 Makes Grade

I love articles like this that cross disciplines - in this case, testing the intelligence of football players.

Of course, it helps that it demonstrates the superior intelligence of UCLA student-athletes.

Brilliant 'Get Smart'

Don Adams, 82; Fought Evil and Got Laughs as Agent 86 on 'Get Smart' - Los Angeles Times:

"It was the height of the Cold War and the James Bond spy craze when 'Get Smart' debuted on NBC in 1965 with Adams as Maxwell Smart, Agent 86 for CONTROL, a Washington-based counterintelligence agency."

One of the greatest satirical series on TV. When I was an undergrad student, my roommates and I would watch reruns every night at 11:30 after coming home from the library. A comedic classic!

DVD Fight Intensifies

DVD Fight Intensifies: Microsoft and Intel to Back Toshiba Format - New York Times

Yikes! Another format war!

Does this mean we'll all have to buy two formats of DVD player for the next generation of discs?

Or, like with DVD-R and DVD+R, will every machine just support two standards and we choose on which version of the disc we buy?

Is the world we live in destined to offer a confusing array of choices? A few people figure out what they like best, and the rest of us that really don't know the difference and don't care, just follow?

I guess that's the price of not having a world dictator. Wait, wasn't that supposed to be Bill Gates? Let's see if he can make everyone else to follow his lead.

How 'Bout Those Bruins?!!

After Fast Start, Future Looks Bright - Los Angeles Times:

I don't care that the three overwhelming wins came against hapless oponents. The important thing is that the team believes in itself. They're winning the "Inner Game of Football" which is really what separates champions from also-rans. So when they face some quality opponents, they'll believe in themselves and keep playing hard, and maybe good things will happen.

Plus, it's a lot more fun to watch teams that are excited and think they are going to win. That's the one wrap against Terry Donahue. Though he built a quality program that always did very well, they never made it to the pinnacle. And you got the feeling that no matter how good they were, that they were always worried...that he was always worried.

"The last time UCLA started 3-0 was 2001 and the Bruins won their first six, reaching a No. 4 national ranking, before losing four in a row and finishing 7-4"

Now the start to that season was a lot of fun. Until the wheels fell off. A few good years under Bob Toledo and Cade McNown, though hampered by a porous defense and ultimately succumbing to scandals and team bickering.

Yorkshire Tales

Last year we started making Sunday evenings a family reading time. After having our normal Sunday evening meal of leftovers, we each pick a chapter from a current book we are reading and read them to each other.

I've been reading chapters from a James Herriot book, "Dog Stories." What a great storyteller he is! His stories are charming, humorous and interesting, transporting us to a different time and place - where he served as a countryside veterinarian in northern England 50 years ago.

My wife and I got hooked on his books 20 years ago when we were newlyweds and didn't have a TV. We used to regularly read his stories to each other in bed at night. Now we are having the fun of passing on these dear stories to our two boys.

They are also very human stories, profiling human character traits in their interaction with animals, and inspiring us to be better people.

Making the World Better

An interesting observation by this columnist on differences between the "Left" and the "Right." He says the Left focuses more on making society better, while the Right focuses more on making people better.

"Because Judeo-Christian values have always understood that the world is made better by making people better. On occasion, of course, a great moral cause must be joined. For example, it was religious Christians who led the fight to abolish slavery in Europe and America. But in general, the way to a better society is through the laborious and completely non-glamorous project of making each person more honest, more courageous, more decent, more likely to commit to another person in marriage, more likely to devote more time to raising children, and so on."

If that is true, then is there any more important work than spiritual growth and character formation?

Calculate Your Life Expectancy

This will get you thinking about how long you've got, which ought to get you thinking about what you will do with it!

"Teach us to make the most of our time,
so that we may grow in wisdom."
Psalm 90:12

I Love My Gmail

This article gives some tips for how to use your gmail account as a private online journal.

I've signed up for several gmail accounts this year, and I love them for the fact that:

1. I can use separate accounts for different projects - all the email for a particular conference I'm planning is linked to one account
2. I can use accounts as online filing cabinets. They are effectively my email backups. I use a different email account, but forward a copy of every email to my gmail account, where it will be stored for a long time (currently 2.6 GB of free storage!)
3. This article suggests using your gmail account to write notes to yourself. Great idea!
4. They come with SSL connection for connecting to your computer's email client, giving more security/privacy than other email services.

writing sensible emails

Here's a helpful article on getting your emails read and answered.

Interesting observation: only 3 kinds of work email - inform, request information, or request action.

My favorite advice: state up front what the purpose is for your email.

Lots of good other tips.

Bridget Redux

I thoroughly enjoyed the original Bridget Jones movie. Charming and witty, it was a funny and touching look at the life of urban singles.

The sequel is an excuse for spending more time with Bridget, but with no compelling story or new character development. It was reminiscent of Ocean's Twelve, a movie I really disliked, as a vehicle for tagging along with the characters. I didn't dislike Bridget II, but it wasn't very meaningful or even very enjoyable.

Da Vinci Dollars

Just another reminder of how out of touch Hollywood producers can be.

This article explores how the makers of the "Da Vinci Code" movie are trying to tone down its anti-Catholic message. They even explore using the movie to attract religious attenders:

"The phrase I heard used several times was 'Passion dollars'; they want to try to get 'The Passion' dollars if they can," said Ms. Nicolosi, referring to her conversations about the film. "They're wrong," she added. "It's sacrilegious, irreligious. They're thinking they can ride the 'Passion' wave with this. And I said, 'Are you kidding me?' "

The book has been hugely popular, and I'm sure the movie will be also. But it's amazing to think the producers believe they can tap into a religious audience. And it's scary to think that people are getting their view of religion from this novel, which is ludicrous as far as its premise, and patronizingly polemic in its presentation (all the smartest people know the truth about this, it's just the simpletons who are kept ignorant by the wiles of the church).

Searching for Intimacy

Is blogging a kind of reverse-voyeurism?

Why do people want to publicize their intimate details, like their finances written about in this article on bloggers revealing their money matters?

I think it's a hunger for intimacy in a world where we've got more relationships and more communication than ever, but less-fulfilling connections with other human beings.

Top 10 Tech Products Ever

Here's CNET's list of the products that have changed our lives. #1? The iPod (2001)

Hard to believe it's only been 4 years, they seem ubiquitous!

#2 is Tivo, which will make its debut in Singapore in December - though run by the cable company and coming with a hefty premium.

What would make your list??? Wow, hard to narrow down on what doesn't qualify - TV, radio, computer, phonograph, electricity, lightbulb?

My list for the past 25 years:
(items that have most influenced our lives)

1. Personal computer (1987)
2. VCR (1981)
3. Cell phone (1999)
4. CD player (1985)
5. Digital camera (2003)
6. PDA (1999)
7. iPod (2004)
8. Camcorder (1985)
9. Playstation (2002)
10. Gameboy (1997)

Wonka Flop, Lemony Flip

There was some wonderful imagery in the movie "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." The boy playing Charlie is really endearing.

But once we meet Willy Wonka the movie really dives. We lose touch with the human stories - Charlie and his family, the other kids' character flaws, Willy's aspirations.

Johnny Depp's interpretation of Willy is just too weird and distracting, and the children and their parents are made too grotesque to be really human. In the end, we find Willy as this flawed ante-hero who needs to be saved by Charlie. The innocent child becomes the hero for the scarred adult, rescuing him from his disfunctional past.

There was a good moral that comes through in the end, but the telling was disappointing.

On the other had, "Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events" really plays the exaggeration of its characters perfectly and beautifully.

The story is caricatured in a fascinating way, and the characters display total humanness in the middle of it. The surroundings and settings are extreme, but it is a very human character story, told in an entertaining way.

Will Podcasting catch on?

One of the benefits of having an ipod is listening to books on tape and recorded programs on the go. Twenty years ago, I was a big fan of Prairie Home Companion and used to record the radio broadcasts on cassette tape.

I was excited about podcasting when I first learned about it earlier this year, hoping this would be a way to get mp3s of broadcast shows. Now it sounds like podcasts' popularity is set to take off with their inclusion in Apple's new edition of their iTunes software.

The unfortunate fact is that most of them are not that interesting. A lot of them are home-made, and the interesting shows still aren't in podcast format (I don't know why - can't they include ads in podcasts as easily as in broadcasts?) It is a great vehicle for distributing education and entertainment. I hope the quality of programming booms to take advantage of the interest in the format.

Then & Now

This is me 2 1/2 years ago when we bought our first digital camera.










Now here I am 2 weeks ago buying our second digital camera : )





Notice any difference?

Is it the light? The white balance settings? I haven't been getting much sun lately? The first salesman was clearly the superior photographer? I was happier then? I bought a crummier camera this time? Or???