Urban Onramps

Y que?

I think I’ll stop off at the Apple Store and see what’s new.

Beowulf, Blue Planet, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Nacho Libre, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Ratatouille, The Royal Tenenbaums, Step Into Liquid, U2 Vertigo Concert. Yeah.

I think I was in ninth grade. Maybe it was tenth grade. I truly can’t remember. At the moment I can’t even remember if my high school was a four-year high school or a three-year high school. But I do remember that the person in this photo was a legend in his own mind, he was on his way to being a Chicano in the NBA, and he had decided by this time that he would attend Biola University after high school.

Kafi sent me these images from the in-laws’ house in Brooklyn. It’s Sam and Gaby, and then Gaby playing in a box.

Don’t the specifics of this conversation between Obama and British Tory leader Cameron sound a lot like how President Bush has actually done his work as President?:

ABC NEWS: MICROPHONE PICKS UP PRIVATE CONVERSATION BETWEEN OBAMA AND BRITISH LEADER ON NEED FOR VACATIONS AND “THINKING” TIME

At British Parliament today, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, met with Tory Leader David Cameron. Seemingly unaware of an enormous fuzzy boom mike held by ABC News’ Eric Kerchner, the two chatted casually — and privately.

“You should be on the beach,” Cameron told Obama. “You need a break. Well, you need to be able to keep your head together.”

“You’ve got to refresh yourself,” agreed Obama.

“Do you have a break at all?” asked Cameron.

“I have not,” said Obama. “I am going to take a week in August. But I agree with you that somebody, somebody who had worked in the White House who — not Clinton himself, but somebody who had been close to the process — said that, should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be…”

“These guys just chalk your diary up,” said Cameron, referring to a packed schedule.

“Right,” Obama said. “In 15 minute increments…”

“We call it the dentist’s waiting room,” Cameron said. “You have to scrap that because you’ve got to have time.”

“And, well, and you start making mistakes,” Obama said, “or you lose the big picture. Or you lose a sense of, I think you lose a feel…”

“Your feeling,” interrupted Cameron. “And that is exactly what politics is all about. The judgment you bring to make decisions.”

“That’s exactly right,” Obama said. “And the truth is that we’ve got a bunch of smart people, I think, who know ten times more than we do about the specifics of the topics. And so if what you’re trying to do is micromanage and solve everything then you end up being a dilettante but you have to have enough knowledge to make good judgments about the choices that are presented to you.”

By the way, this is a remarkably good approach to leadership.

Read it yourself

Yo, this article appears in Wednesday’s local newspaper:

NONPROFIT TO REVEAL SOLAR PANELS
Pasadena Star-News
By Samantha Bravo, Correspondent
Wednesday, July 23, 2008

PASADENA - Installing solar panels to cut back on energy costs was not particularly high on the list of priorities for Harambee Ministries.

Harambee is mainly concerned with keeping kids off the streets by providing them with a safe learning environment through after-school and summer programs.

But when the Leadership Pasadena Class of 2008 approached Harambee Executive Director Rodolpho Carrasco with the idea of “going green,” Carrasco said the solar move was a lot more doable than he first thought.

After a $15,000 rebate from Pasadena Water & Power and another $15,500 in donations, the $33,000 project ended up costing Harambee just $2,500.

The solar panels being installed this week will decrease energy costs for the private nonprofit organization by 70 percent.

Leadership Pasadena is a group of active leaders from the Pasadena area seeking to promote a stronger community. Carrasco said Leadership Pasadena considered two other nonprofits before choosing Harambee as the project recipient.

Leadership Pasadena raised money for the project, bringing in $10,000 from the Pasadena Community Foundation and $5,500 from private donors.

In addition to saving the organization money, the solar panels will benefit the organization in several other ways, Carrasco said.

“This is a learning opportunity for the children,” Carrasco said.

“We have to teach them differently now, how to manage and limit energy consumption.”

Carrasco said he hopes the solar panel installation also challenges the whole community to think in the long term.

“The change that needs to happen in a neighborhood like ours isn’t going to happen overnight,” Carrasco said.

“This is a lifetime investment.”

Harambee will publicly unveil the solar panels Thursday. Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard will be on hand. A community dinner and presentation by Leadership Pasadena and Harambee leaders will follow.

Residents are welcome to attend. For more information, call (626) 798-7431.

Larry Kudlow:

If a drilling bill ever passes Congress, oil prices will keep on plunging — perhaps all the way to $75 a barrel, which is the profitable break-even point for lifting the extra barrel of oil. That would drive the Dow to somewhere between 15,000 and 16,000, and it would have a huge tax-cut effect on the economy. And, of course, it could completely change the November election outlook in a highly favorable way for the GOP.

The conventional wisdom says Republicans are gonna get clobbered again this fall. But drill, drill, drill would overturn that wisdom. More drilling today would have the potency of the Reagan tax cuts 28 years ago in the 1980 landslide race. But the GOP has got to make the case. And deregulating oil, which is great policy, would offset much of the bad policy pain coming out of the Fannie-Freddie housing bailout.

I found myself thinking about this blog post throughout yesterday. I didn’t plan on it. But the implications seem significant. Two truths according to Jeremy Zawodny:

(1) A lot of people seem surprised to learn that tons of people every day are “searching” for ebay.com or aol.com or just “ebay” or “aol” even though they can type those things into their address bar and get exactly what they want…. They’re domain names or domain names without the .com on the end of them. Lots of people search Google every day for “yahoo.” People search Yahoo for “google.” And AOL. And eBay. And so on.

(2) …normal people can’t tell the difference between AdSense style ads and all the other links on most web sites. And almost the same number don’t know what “sponsored results” on the Search Results Page are either. It’s just a page of links to them. They click the ones that look like they’ll get them what they want. It’s that simple.

I’m thinking about how to incorporate these truths into all the web sites I manage. Deep stuff.

Check them out: Solar Panels installation at Harambee, Day One

This Thursday is the public unveiling of solar panels on one of our Harambee properties. This project was done in partnership with Leadership Pasadena, a civic group here in town. We are looking forward to the energy savings as well as the inspiration toward alternative energy. Yes! Me, myself, Mr. “Commence The Drilling.” Hey, I think we need to develop all types of alternative sources of energy and reduce our dependence on oil. But I’m not afraid of oil, nor nuclear power (to take a page from our French friends).

It will take another two days for the installers to complete their task. We should be live for Thursday’s public event. We’ve also got the local newspaper coming out tomorrow morning to shoot some photos. Dig it.

I was driving away from the house and forgot my iPod. We have an iPod hookup in our van that is built-in to the stereo system, so it’s just a matter of connecting a small cord jack from car stereo to iPod. I never imagined hooking up my Sidekick phone to it. But there I was, and the thought just crossed my mind. So I reached for the jack, stuck it into the Sidekick. It crackled for a second, and I thought, “I just screwed up bigtime.” But then it just worked. I’ve got 7 or 8 drm-free songs on my phone, but you better believe I’m going to fill the phone’s disk now. Next frontier: What will playing mp3 on the car stereo via my Sidekick do to the phone’s battery life?

Wikipedia:

“This film [There Will Be Blood] was the second co-production of Paramount Vantage and Miramax Films to be released in as many months, after No Country for Old Men (which won the Academy Award for Best Picture).”

Interesting. I wonder if it was the same executive or executive team that green-lit and shepherded these two projects. Someone should have received a promotion. One movie gets Best Actor (Blood, Day-Lewis) and the other Best Picture. Another detail: Both films had budgets of $25 million and made over $70 mil (to date).

We ordered Dreamweaver through TechSoup all the way back in the winter. We received all the items we ordered (InDesign, Microsoft Office, etc.) except that one. I’ve waited for months for Adobe to make more of the downloadable product available, but nothing happened until two weeks ago. I emailed a request to the TechSoup people, and they replied by saying that they’ve been authorized to send a boxed copy for the same price (25 bucks, I think). All good. So I’m still waiting. Not that I have very much that I do with Dreamweaver anymore, since I maintain the Harambee site using Wordpress, this blog is in Wordpress, and I’m updating my article archive using wordpress. I had to do something funny the other day, however, and I really needed a stand-alone HTML editor with some power. So I’ll keep waiting, but I’m really hoping to see this new Dreamweaver app this week.

My birthday is later this month, but we’re going to celebrate it tonight at Red Lobster. I dig Red Lobster, and I’m glad that Sam now loves shrimp (we munch on shrimp cocktail platters whenever Mom remembers to buy one on a Costco outing).

Air travel is a bazillion dollars. Unless you use American Airlines‘ “price and schedule” option in the “book a reservation” section of their web site. It will show you just about every flight they have that fits your general criteria, and it will tell you exactly what seats are available at what price. So I just found a $175 one-way ticket cross country. I stick with American, I’ve got status with them (which helps when you are trying to get the last standby seat on the mid-week flight from Chicago to LA), but I may fly Virgin America once or twice this summer.

Over the past 24 hours the wife and I have been doing massive Ofoto uploads. Kafi is doing scrapbooking (Creative Memories, etc.) and I’ve got lots of family photos in my iPhoto. So I think I’ve now learned what will break the internet in the future: downloading files is one thing, but uploading lots of stuff takes a LONG time. A long long long time. It slows down my computer while I’m trying to work. Oh well.

We’ve got a friend named Arne visiting Harambee right now. He leads a mission agency in Denmark called Impact. Impact has sent us a number of wonderful volunteers over the past six years. He’s passing through LA on his way from Chicago to Tegucigalpa. We saw some sights and places yesterday, and today was really wide open. Other Harambee volunteers agreed to take Arne around town. So I was left to pick some spots for him to see on his first-ever visit to the City of Angels. What do you pick? I went for “memorable,” particularly sights that he would be useful for him in the context of leading a missionary-sending agency. Here’s the path I chose for him:

– visit Skid Row in LA: he’ll see the worst in our city, and can reflect on how bad things can get when human misery combines with the unexpectedly negative consequences of well-intentioned social engineering
– drive on Sunset Boulevard from the 101 Freeway to the 405 Freeway: they’ll see a wide range of what LA has to offer as they drive from Hollywood (which goes from fairly seedy to ultra hipster) into Beverly Hills and then into Bel Air
– go from Sunset to Santa Monica Beach & Pier, with a short drive up the Pacific Coast Highway: they’ll see landscape they’ve seen in numerous movies, TV shows and commercials; plus the pier is a place to see people from all walks of life
– drive home from the pier to Pasadena: wherein they will hit Olympic-level traffic and wonder how traffic on a Saturday evening can be as bad as business day rush hour

Me? I’m trying to stay awake and stay available for my family. Kafi is off scrap-booking. Grandma is here and about to take the kids to the big Pasadena Public Library. I’m going to drop them off and then go find boxes for shipping some stuff to our friends in Valpo, Indiana.

And it’s humid. I feel lethargic. But that might have to do with the great steak and bratwurst and potatoes we had for dinner last night.

LINKS

• Americans are calling the shots — with gusto — at the Lambeth conference:

The absentees have inadequate representation at the conference, but they could have made their voices heard had they bitten the bullet and come to Canterbury.

Bishop Gene Robinson is not invited, but he is coming anyway, ensuring that his viewpoint and beliefs remain at the forefront of peoples minds’. At Gafcon, the African bishops were with likeminded individuals, effectively preaching to the converted, but at Lambeth there are far more hearts and minds to be won. There is still time.

• Low-fat diets not the best for weight loss. I knew it.

• Obama takes the “faith” out of faith-based initiative. I may have already blogged this, but in case I didn’t.