Politivi

Thoughts on technology, politics, and culture.

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Entries from March 2008

LAPD Cmdr. Andy Smith - Downtown hero

March 31st, 2008 ·

There was a great, inspiring article in yesterday’s Los Angeles Downtown News.  Commander Andy Smith of the LAPD was profiled in the newspaper as a ‘good bye’ from the downtown community.   Smith has accepted assignment to South Bureau Criminal Gang Homicide Group, where he should continue his string of successes.
When you have advocates for the [...]

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Tags: commentary

Why you should upgrade to WordPress 2.5

March 31st, 2008 ·

I upgraded my blogging platform to WordPress 2.5… there are some pretty big improvements over 2.3.x on the admin side, including a cleaner interface and dashboard widgets (full feature list here).
If you’re blogging, you should consider using WordPress, and if you’re using WordPress, you should upgrade to version 2.5. Of course, there will [...]

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Tags: technology

The Periodic Table of Investments

March 27th, 2008 ·

Tonight I went to a seminar on personal investing given by Michael Johns and Robert Sherman at the LAJCC.  These guys did a terrific job, and it was exceptionally nice of them to volunteer their time.
Anyway, I usually pick up a few tips at these types of events, and this was no exception.  One interesting [...]

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Tags: investing

Lawrence Lessig’s slide shows and the Change Congress movement

March 27th, 2008 ·

Stanford Law professor, Lawrence Lessig, has been up to his usual awesomeness.
A few months ago he rolled out two excellent slide shows on why he supports Barack Obama (here and here).  I definitely recommend checking these out… they are both reasoned and persuasive.
My own introduction to Lessig’s work was through a different slide show on [...]

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Tags: politics

Customer Service Greediness

March 26th, 2008 ·

Matt Heaton, the founder of BlueHost (the firm that I use to host this site) wrote in his personal blog about the difficulty in balancing customer service needs of hundreds of thousands of customers [link].  He writes that the vast majority of folks contact customer service as needed, and don’t exceed the normal unspoken boundaries [...]

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Tags: business

Hillary Clinton is not the experienced candidate

March 24th, 2008 ·

John McCain is the experienced presidential candidate.  Though Sen. Clinton’s shot at taking the nomination is very dim at this point, the ‘experienced candidate’ message she has worked so hard to put out there is quite simply wrong… and continuing to use ‘experience’ as the primary basis to measure her candidacy will only end in [...]

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Tags: politics

Wall Street Journal Makeover

March 23rd, 2008 ·

The NY Times reports on changes underway at the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Murdoch has said that he wants to broaden The Journal’s appeal with more general-interest news. Now, the front page has shorter articles and more breaking and nonbusiness news, and particularly favors politics. The paper has set aside pages for world news and added [...]

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Tags: commentary · media

100% Edible (And Vegetarian) Flying Spaghetti Monster

March 22nd, 2008 ·

Evil Mad Scientist wrote up an article on how to make food-grade googly eyes (they’re not just for kids anymore). This is certainly an important scientific breakthrough, but I’m all about the application, not the theory. So I read on and learned about their first religiously-inspired creation: 100% edible flying spaghetti monster [...]

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Tags: culinary

Affiliate Summit a ‘thug conference’? I must’ve been at a different one.

March 21st, 2008 ·

Jeremy Schoemaker ponders how long it will be until someone gets killed(!) at one of the Affiliate Summit conferences.
Pardon my language, but WTF? I was just at the last Affiliate Summit in Vegas not more than a month ago… and the closest it came to violence was when that ClickBooth guy ate the last [...]

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Tags: affiliate marketing

LinkedIn launches Company Profiles - Will companies cry?

March 21st, 2008 ·

LinkedIn, my favorite of the social networks, has rolled out an awesome new feature called Company Profiles (as reported in TechCrunch, full walk-through available here). Heretofore, I used LinkedIn as a rolodex and for competitive intelligence, but this new feature is truly game changing.
The user-supplied information, though prone to all sorts of error, gives [...]

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Tags: commentary · technology

Circus Mac-simus (OR: Hot dang , I can’t wait to get a better rig)

March 21st, 2008 ·

My old pal, Ben, over at Abobe of Clarus is reporting that he has freshly scored the new MacBook Air. Me? I’ve been running on this same AMD Athlon for the past 4 or 5 years. At the office, I’m very happy running a 20″ iMac with dual processors and plenty of [...]

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Tags: technology

Goldman Sachs no longer offers employees free soda

March 19th, 2008 ·

GS has discontinued the practice of free soda for employees.
As Valley Wag points out, this is Silicon Valley’s favorite perk. I guess Wall Street types can’t be lured in with the promise of bottomless sugar water.

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Tags: business