Borasky Research Journal

If you're a regular reader here or follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I'm an open source enthusiast. Rather than spend electrons telling you why, or debunking the many myths about open source, I'll simply tell you how to get started and let you explore "how deep the rabbit hole goes" at your leisure.

First of all, you will need a PC. There are ways to do this with a Macintosh, but it's a lot easier in the beginning if you have a Windows-based system. I will assume that you have a Pentium II processor or newer, at least 512 megabytes of memory, a CD-ROM drive that is bootable, and a USB port. Machines with less hardware can sometimes be made to work, and there are specialized smaller Linux distributions that will work. But to get a "modern" desktop experience, you should have at least this much memory and processing capability.

And second, you will need a USB memory stick. Get the largest one you can afford. Try to get one without the "U3" software on it. If you do happen to get one with "U3", you can remove that by following the instructions at

http://www.u3.com/support/default.aspx#CQ3

Now, you'll want to choose a Linux distribution. By the way, you'll often see the word "distro" as an abbreviation for "distribution." The three most popular are openSUSE, Fedora and Ubuntu. I personally use openSUSE, so that's what I'm going to describe. But Fedora and Ubuntu are also popular, and one of them may work better for you.

openSUSE comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Even if you have a 64-bit machine, I recommend starting with the 32-bit version. There are still a few gotchas with the 64-bit versions in the way they interact with web sites, Java, Flash and other "rich media". Go to

http://software.opensuse.org/.

Select "32-bit PC", "LiveCD" and "standard". Then download the "Live CD Gnome" image and burn it to a CD. Instructions for burning the CD are at

http://en.opensuse.org/Download_Help#Burn_the_ISO_Image.28s.29

Now you have the CD. Boot it up on your PC. There will be a menu. The option you want is the "openSUSE Live (Gnome)" option. In a minute or so, you should have a green desktop with a start button in the lower left corner and a taskbar at the bottom. If the machine has wireless, that's the first thing you want to check out. On the taskbar, there is a little icon towards the center that looks like two monitors. Click on that with the mouse. If your wireless is working, you should see your network listed there. Just click on the button next to the network name and follow the instructions.

If you don't have wireless on the machine, or if the wireless isn't working, you will need to connect using a wired network. That should happen automatically when you boot the CD if the cable is connected to the network adapter port. If you can't get connected, or if the wireless isn't working but the wired network is, you can usually get help in the openSUSE Forum at

http://forums.opensuse.org/.

But I'm going to assume you're connected.

The next thing you want to check out is the sound. openSUSE and the other popular distros usually will have no trouble recognizing sound cards. Again, if the sound doesn't work, you can get help on the openSUSE Forum. But I'm going to assume the sound works too.

So what do you have? First of all, it's important to note that nothing has been written on your hard drive! When you reboot the machine and remove the Live CD, it will come back up just the way it was before! That's why you want the USB memory stick -- it's a place to store files that either openSUSE from the Live CD or Windows from the hard drive can read and write. But what do you have?

• An efficient operating system that manages your hardware. The 2.6.27 Linux kernel in openSUSE 11.1 is highly optimized for the hardware, much more so than even Windows XP.
• A web browser -- Firefox -- that acts just like the Firefox browser you may have on your Windows machine!
• An email program -- Evolution -- that has a user interface much like the Windows ones.
• An office suite with a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation package that can read and write many files from Microsoft Office.
• The Banshee media player.
• The F-Spot photo browser,
• And many more applications, including voice chat, instant messenger and sound recording. There are also games, of course. My personal favorite is "Same Gnome".

To start up one of these, go to the "Computer" button at the lower left of the screen and select it. The "More Applications" button will show you what else is there. For example, plug in the USB memory stick. A window will open up showing any files on it. Press the "Computer" button, then select "OpenOffice.org Writer". This will bring up the word processor. Create a document and save it to the USB memory stick. When you save it, the word processor will ask you what format you want to use. There are dozens to choose from, but the two main options are

• "odt" format. This is the native document format for OpenOffice. Use this if you want to share the file with someone who has OpenOffice.
• "doc" format. This is the standard Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP document format. Use this if you want to share the file with someone who has Microsoft Office.

When you're done exploring, go to "Computer" again. Select "Shutdown", then "Restart". The computer will reboot. During the reboot, eject the Live CD and the system will come back up in Windows!

One final note: many of the applications on this Live CD will also run on Windows. Firefox, OpenOffice and Evolution, for example, are all open source applications and can all be downloaded and installed on a Windows machine.

Loading mentions Retweet

The R programming language was recently featured in a New York Times article (http://bit.ly/iaqQ). I've been an R user since 2000, so I've collected some resources for people who want to get started with R.

The first place to start is the R Project web site at http://www.r-project.org/. Next, you'll actually want to install R itself. There are several options, depending on your environment.

• Linux
  • Using your distro's native packages. Most Linux distros either have R available in the base repositores or have it available from external repositories. The advantage of this is that it will be integrated with your package management system. The disadvantages are that you may not get the latest version of R, and there is no uniformity between distros about how R itself is named or how many R libraries are packaged.
  • Download a package from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). Select a mirror at http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html. Then follow the "Linux" link at the top. That will give you packages for Ubuntu, Debian, Suse and Red Hat. Red Hat includes Red Hat Enterprise 4 and 5 plus Fedora 8, 9 and 10. Suse includes 10.3, 11.0 and 11.1.
  • Build from source. Instructions for doing this are at http://cran.fhcrc.org/doc/manuals/R-admin.html
• Windows or MacOS X
  • Select a mirror at http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html.
  • Follow the Windows or MacOS X link in the top panel, just under the Linux link.
    
    • On Windows, follow the "base" link and download "R-2.8.1-win32.exe". It's a standard Windows installer, which you just run.
    • On MacOS X, download and install "R-2.8.1.dmg"

I usually build R from source on my Linux machines. Once you've got R installed, you should have most of the documentation. But everything is also available on line at http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html. You'll definitely want to read the Introduction at http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.html and the FAQ at http://cran.r-project.org/faqs.html.>

Loading mentions Retweet

At the request of the Silicon Florist aka Rick Turoczy, here are my predictions for 2009. While he only asked for predictions about the local scene in the Portland area, I can't resist getting more general. After all, it is the end of the year and I am snowed in. :-)

1. PDX Technology
   
   
2. Sadly, I don't see any way to avoid job destruction in large organizations in the first quarter of the year. The lucky ones will be the ones who "only" need to institute hiring freezes. I do think the shrinkage will be smaller here than in other parts of the world, and I think the worst will be over by the end of the first quarter. General technology is too important a component of infrastructure for it to sink too low in my opinion.


3. Three technology areas where there will be intense focus, both in large and small organizations, are performance engineering / capacity planning / tuning, "green" computing and security. As you may know, the first of those three is my specialty, so I am probably biased in that respect. But organizations can no longer "just throw hardware" at scalability problems, nor do they need to tolerate poor-performing applications.


4. Some of the other posters at Silicon Florist were predicting a "march towards being the center of mobile web development", etc. While I'm not very familiar with what's going on in that arena, I think that's an over-optimistic projection for a variety of reasons.

   First of all, while gadgets and gizmos are cool, the emphasis of the incoming Congress and White House is going to be restoring the health of the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE), transportation / automotive and other more fundamental sectors. And after that, they're going to tackle health care, science and education. While we in Portland are blessed with Tri-Met, a bicycle-friendly culture and a climate that's usually conducive to mobility, there are places that are hurting very badly. So think food, clothing, shelter, and transportation before you think "Pac-Manhattan".

   Second, there are too many competing "mobile platforms" -- Blackberry, Android, iPhone, other "smart phones", etc. They can't all thrive, and some probably won't even survive. And finally, I think that the "smarter" mobile platforms get, the more security / privacy disasters there are just waiting to happen. Still, I'm hoping someone more familiar with this technology will step in here and tell me why I should be more optimistic. :-)



5. What I think will continue to survive and maybe even thrive here is open source. Remember, though, the mantra is "Free as in freedom, not as in price." Portland is blessed with some major names in Linux, PostgreSQL, Ruby / Rails, Perl, Smalltalk / Seaside, and others. And a number of large companies here -- big names like IBM, HP, Novell, and Intel -- pay people to work on open source projects because it is in their best financial interests to do so.


6. PDX in general
   
   
7. As I noted above, we are blessed with Tri-Met and a bicycle-friendly culture, so we managed to shrug off the high gasoline prices this summer. But as the current "Snowpocalypse" has showed, we are no less vulnerable to Mother Nature than other places. There is going to be a substantial hit to local businesses from this event. Other than the standard advice of keeping emergency supplies on hand, there's not much anyone can do about it. And let me remind everyone that we live in a seismically active area, and there is more construction on flood plains than I think is wise. Let's just say I think we will have our readiness tested again in 2009.


8. I don't have children or grandchildren in school, so I'm not an expert on the situation in the educational system here. But when there's an economic downturn, the schools suffer. I think that's wrong -- very wrong. And I hope I'm wrong here, but I am predicting a decrease in the quality of public education in Portland for 2009. Again, I'm hoping someone with more knowledge will chime in and give me reasons why I should be more optimistic.


9. On a positive note, I have been and continue to be impressed -- even wowed -- by the leadership skills of the people I have met in the technology and blogging communities in 2008. I think we will see a number of successful events here in 2009 as a result of this, and I think we will see some of these leaders enter public service. I've got my number two pencil all sharpened and ready. :-)


10. Technology in general
    
    
11. I think there's going to be a major shakeout in technology. As I noted above, I think there are too many mobile platforms and too many other risk areas in mobile computing. Other "hot" areas that are vulnerable are virtualization, "cloud computing", consumer electronics in general and "social media", whatever that is. Again, think food, clothing, shelter and transportation, not cool gizmos.


12. I think everyone expects Yahoo to find a buyer. But what if they don't?


13. I think there are going to be major changes at the highest executive levels at Microsoft and Apple. And this isn't just based on rumors about Steve Jobs' health or the personality of Steve Ballmer.

    For Microsoft, it's based on the disaster that is / was Windows Vista, failure of Microsoft to acquire Yahoo, and the apparent inability of their engineers to provide a solution for the botnet problem. For Apple, again, it's the plethora of mobile platforms, portable media players, netbooks and laptops. They can defend their market shares in telephony and portable media players only by cutting costs, and I don't see how they can possibly defend against the onslaught of Windows 7 and low-cost open source devices as capable as a Mac. I may be biased because I have never owned an Apple product, but there are reasons for that. :-)



14. I don't think Google can sustain their current trajectory. I haven't looked at their financials recently, but they have ventured into a number of areas where they don't have a compelling advantage. There's a saying in the markets: "No tree grows to the sky." I'd look for them to cut loose some things that aren't panning out, and I wouldn't count on advertising subsidizing all of their other services too much longer. Microsoft may well have the last laugh in a "Google - Microsoft war". :-)


15. Everything else
    
    
16. The incoming Congress and White House have clearly communicated their intent to improve the lot of the middle class. I'm not sure how that's defined, but I'm guessing that if you are reading this, you are not middle class. :-) So I wouldn't look for any help from "the government" until the "middle class" has the resources to take advantage of your goods and services.


17. I think the "recession" is going to be shorter in the USA than the general consensus of predictions in the USA. But I think it's going to be longer and deeper in Europe and Asia. I think the FIRE sector is healing nicely, there should be a boost when the television industry cuts over to the newer technologies in the spring, and I don't think there is either a major upside or downside risk to gasoline prices. But I expect the transportation sector to remain chaotic because of the terrible balance sheets of the automobile manufacturers and airlines.


18. To end on a positive note, I think there are going to be some major advances in world politics, human rights, the environment and the global war on disease and poverty in 2009. For example, I think we'll see another US-brokered deal between Israel and the Palestinians. I think we'll see the fall of several oppressive regimes, and I think we could even see Korea re-unified in 2009.

Loading mentions Retweet

I am now running openSUSE 11.1 on both of my machines. Although I did not plan to switch my workstation from Gentoo, I finally gave up trying to get the desktop that I wanted -- Gnome 2.24 with Compiz. So I bit the bullet, backed up everything, reformatted my hard drive and installed openSUSE 11.1-RC1. The official 11.1 release was today, December 18, 2008, and I'm in the process of updating the machines to the released version.

Let me talk about the little things first. There's the color scheme. openSUSE out of the box is dominated by a pleasant green background. Ubuntu, on the other hand, is brown and Fedora a deep blue. Gentoo defaults to a dark blue / purple. I'll take the green, thank you.

Next, there's the installer. As someone coming from Gentoo, with my main install technique being about four shell scripts custom-written for my partitions, I'm not sure I'm the greatest judge of installers. But with openSUSE 11.1, you boot the LiveCD, double-click the installer, answer the usual questions about time zones, disk partitions and logon IDs, and 20 minutes or less later, you're done! I haven't done a stopwatch test against Fedora or Ubuntu, but openSUSE feels faster.

Next, there's the matter of the default processor type. Why on Earth are Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat and most of the other distros still defaulting to i386, when you can't get an i386 with enough RAM to run the distro anyhow? OpenSUSE 11.1 defaults to i586, and the LiveCDs are i686. If I have to settle for pre-compiled code, it should at least be pre-compiled for processors people actually have! I'd go one step further if I were running a distro ... I'd compile everything at least for SSE and let the people with inferior processors use the embedded distros.

On to the more substantive matters. How much of it "just works?" Given the constraints of open-source software, just about everything. There are usable open-source Flash, Java and PDF tools in the main open source repositories, for both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. It recognized my USB wireless adapter and the distro carries the required firmware. It recognized and correctly configured everything built in to both of my machines. Sound works. Wireless works. Ethernet works. The only place where I needed to install a non-OSS package was the nVidia driver on my workstation.

Licensing: openSUSE used to require a "click-through" acceptance of an EULA to install, but no more. The openSUSE community has decided to make it easier for people to redistribute their software, so now there is simply an open-source license. This is modeled after the license Fedora uses. I haven't looked at Ubuntu recently, so I don't know how it compares.

System administration: again, coming from Gentoo, I'm not sure I'm the greatest judge of how easy a Linux system is to administer. But I haven't had to edit a config file by hand yet, so they must be doing something right. :) The biggest thing I've had to "get used to" is loading all the required "-devel" packages for the software I custom-compile, like R, GGobi and QuantLib. And there are "patterns" in the YaST administration panel that bring most of them in with a single click. One little touch that's just amazing -- there's a "command not found" feature. Let's say someone sends you a ZIP archive and you go to the command line and type "unzip archive.zip". If you don't have "unzip" installed, it will tell you the "zypper" command to install it! Does anybody else have that?

The flies in the ointment? Just a few:

1. I still don't think the KDE4 desktop is ready for prime time. The one that's on openSUSE 11.1 doesn't crash as often as the one on openSUSE 11.0 did, but I still found myself having to drop back to a command prompt to start up applications. I guess that's not really an openSUSE issue, though. Their KDE4 isn't different from others as far as I can tell.

2. Ruby 1.8.7: the default Ruby that comes with openSUSE 11.1 is Ruby 1.8.7. Most Rubyists I know prefer 1.8.6. As an aside, I don't think jRuby is packaged yet for openSUSE, and I think it should be.

3. Repository responsiveness when updating: all the time I was running 11.1 RC1, I had numerous timeouts in the network that required retries. It does not seem to be any better now (with the default repository on the first day after the release), but I have switched to a nearby mirror at Oregon State University and that seems to have solved the problem. The flip side of this is that their "Metalink" setup for distributing the ISO release media files was an absolute speed demon ... I got 12 MBits per second download speeds consistently over two DVDs and four LiveCDs this morning minutes after they flipped the "on" switch!

4. There were a couple of times during the beta test cycle when the kernel object and source files in the repository had different version numbers. That made it non-trivial to install VMware Workstation 6.5.1. But shouldn't I be using Xen or VirtualBox or QEMU anyhow? :)

In short: for my usage, it's better than Fedora 10, Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Debian Lenny, mostly because of the newer kernel and the easy accessibility of non-OSS packages when I need them. And it's better than Gentoo because Gentoo no longer seems to have a functioning release engineering process. So ... color me green and call me a lizard. :)

Loading mentions Retweet

http://www.addsyou.com
username=MjAwOC0xMS0yOCAxNzowNjo0OA==

Loading mentions Retweet

Number 5: openSUSE 11. As you probably know, I'm a raving Gentoo fanatic, so it might surprise you to see another distro make it into the list. But here it is. And the *reason* it's here is twofold. One, because I think Gentoo has dropped the ball one too many times. I want to run Gentoo 2008.0 on my laptop -- I really do. It's a royal pain to have to know configuration details for two distros, and I'm not about to take Gentoo off my workstation unless the distro actually dies. But the Gentoo Live CD and Live DVD wouldn't even boot on the laptop.

The second reason I'm running openSUSE on my laptop is that it configured my Belkin wireless USB adapter out of the box. No other distro has done that.

Number 4: The R project. I'm beginning to think R is going to get a lifetime achievement award. They are now at 2.8.0 and it just keeps getting better, the contributed package library keeps getting bigger, the number of books about R keeps growing, etc.

Number 3: seekwatcher, blktrace and fio. These are related tools that let you dig into the Linux I/O block layer in great detail. If you work with I/O-intensive applications, you absolutely need these tools. If you don't work with I/O-intensive applications, buy some more cores. :)

Number 2: The 2.6.25 kernel. Why? Partition statistics are back! The memory statistics are less bogus! The schedulers are better! Red Hat ... if you don't backport some of these goodies to RHEL 5, you're missing a good thing.

Number 1: PostgreSQL. I've spent good chunks of the last two months hanging out with PostgreSQL fanatics and they have managed to convert me to one. Now, I don't have enough experience with MySQL to make a "transition" to PostgreSQL difficult, but just on the licensing and performance considerations alone, PostgreSQL is a winner.

So, what about Ruby? Well ...

1. The fiasco with the vulnerabilites and lengthy communication disconnects were bad news. I think the dust has settled, but a lot of people were left with a diminished perception of the community.
2. 1.8.7 was a mistake ... pure and simple.
3. Once I get my current project (Perl and R based) done, I'm going to start using 1.9.1 in earnest. I don't have a lot of "legacy" code that will only run on 1.8.6, so I'm going to take advantage of the new virtual machine.

Loading mentions Retweet

Instead of useless Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates, here's what I'd like to see:

1. President Bush, Barack Obama, John McCain, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke in a Town Hall meeting, answering questions from ordinary citizens about the economic situation.

2. After the end of the meeting, the five men meet for one working day and hammer out a consensus to be put to the Congress.

Loading mentions Retweet

As you might recall, a couple of weeks ago, I finally decided to get a personal portable music player. I'm opposed to such things on general principles, mostly because they're all digital computers that have been crippled in some way or another to provide specific functionality, for a price not a whole hell of a lot less than a fully-functional programmable digital computer with an operating system.

It was more or less a spur-of-the-moment thing. I found myself at work on a Saturday and didn't want to miss Edmund Stone's film music program (The Score) on http://allclassical.org. My PC does not have a sound card. So on my lunch break, I went downtown to the Radio Shack to buy an FM radio. When I got there, I started looking at the iPods. But it turns out the iPods don't have an FM tuner -- you have to buy an add-on. But the friendly sales person said, "But we have the Microsoft Zune, and it does have a tuner." Sold -- one 8 GB Zune!

So now I have this Zune, and a few hundred classical CDs I'd like to rip, but have been putting off because I didn't believe in iPods. Well, as it turns out, ripping classical music CDs for a Zune is sometimes a non-trivial exercise. First of all, there is the compression issue. Classical music CDs are notoriously difficult to compress accurately, so I decided up front to do everything in a lossless format. For that, the Zune uses Microsoft's lossless WMA.

But the real problem is that the Zune's track lookup and collection management functionality is, well, "less than optimal". In fact, it's "less than good enough". If you use the built-in ripper in the Zune software, perhaps 70 percent of the time it gets the right metadata. But that other 30 percent is totally garbled in many cases. What's worse, there are known issues with the Zune's software sometimes mixing tracks up after they have been correctly loaded into the database! These issues are mostly troublesome on multi-CD box sets -- even if they get correctly identified by the Zune up front, they can get mixed up.

So I finally (today) got something that usually works. My thanks to http://tinyurl.com/6kjnwq for the top-level pointers to the ripping piece, to Musicbrainz -- http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardDownload -- for the tagger, and to MediaMonkey -- http://www.mediamonkey.com/ -- for the tagger that works when the others fail.

1. Setup:
   1. Download and install Windows Media Encoder 9 -- http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx
   2. Download and install EAC -- http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
   3. Download and install the Microsoft Zune database reset utility. -- http://tinyurl.com/2hbd7r
   4. Configure EAC as described in http://tinyurl.com/6kjnwq. You want WMA lossless compression.
      
2. Ripping a CD:
   1. To rip a CD, place it in the tray. EAC will read its table of contents.
   2. Label the tracks using the EAC "freedb" database. This is done using "Alt-G". I haven't had this step get the wrong answer yet, but I've only been doing this for a few hours. If this step does fail, EAC will let you label the tracks by hand and submit the labeling to the "freedb" database, which is probably worth doing.
      
   3. Rip the tracks. Select them all with CTL-A and rip them with Shift-F5.
   4. Repeat for all of your CDs.
3. Tagging the tracks:
   1. Open up MusicBrainz Picard.
   2. Follow the instructions at http://musicbrainz.org/doc/HowToTagFilesWithPicard to tag the tracks. This usually works because you have the tracks already correctly labeled from step 2.2. If you skipped that step, your odds of this one succeeding are much worse. By the way -- the Musicbrainz database will sometimes have the composer or artist's name in the original language. I mention this because a huge part of my collection is Russian music and I think it's extremely cool to open up a CD containing music of Сергей Васильевич Рахманинов or Дмитрий Дмитриевич Шостакович. Of course, I'm sure you could survive with the upper-case letters from A - Z in a pinch. :-)
   3. If the step 3.2. fails, open up MediaMonkey and use it to tag the tracks. I've only had one CD so far that I had to do this on.
4. Reset the Zune database with the Zune database reset utility.
5. Open up the Zune software. Your collection should now have correctly labeled tracks. Sync your Zune and they should be correctly labeled there as well.

Yeah, it's a lot of work. Quite frankly, I think Microsoft needs to hook up with "freedb" rather than whatever database they're using in the Zune ripper, and they also need to fix the database scrambling bugs in the Zune software. But I also doubt very seriously if the iPod is any better than the Zune at this task -- ripping uncompressed multi-disc CD box sets and getting them correctly labeled onto the device. If you've got an iPod, please feel free to comment on whether you've had or haven't had track labeling problems.

Loading mentions Retweet

Let me say right up front -- I'm not going to tell you who I'm going to vote for. There are two reasons for that:

1. I really haven't decided, because I haven't seen how the four candidates have performed under pressure, and
2. Even if I had decided, I believe in the secret ballot.

So, some random musings on what I've seen so far.

• Barack Obama is not a Muslim. But, then again, what's wrong with a Muslim President? Absoultely nothing! There's nothing wrong with a Catholic President, a woman President, a Jewish President, a Mormon President, an African-American President or even an atheist President. There are exactly three qualifications to become President:
  • You have to be 35 years old or older,
  • You have to be a native-born citizen, and
  • You have to win the election or succeed to the Presidency.
• The Democrats who are now attacking Sarah Palin are doing their candidates a disservice and should stop it! Now!
• As Damon Runyon said, "The race is not always to the swift, nor that battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet!" The strongest candidates are going to win this election.
• I've seen enough elections to know that there are always those who complain about one or more of the candidates as "the lesser of two evils", complain about how unfair the process is, and (rightfully) bemoan the fact that the caucus/primary and "Electoral College" processes are mathematically biased. One man does not have one vote -- a voter in New York has more votes than I do, living in Oregon. But nobody ever seems to get around to proposing a Constitutional amendment to fix it. Instead, they propose Equal Rights amendments, amendments to allow naturalized citizens to become President, amendments to mandate a balanced budget, line item veto, limit abortion, etc. I've heard it all before -- I don't want to hear it now.
• If you've already made up your mind, please don't try to convince me to join you, give money to one side or the other, wear buttons or put bumper stickers on my car, or do any of those campaign things. I did that exactly once in my life -- I was one of the phone bank volunteers the year Barbara Roberts was elected Governor of Oregon. And she won.

If there are debates, I'll probably watch them. Quite frankly, I don't think either a Republican or Democratic victory in November is going to make much difference in the succeeding four years of my life, or, for that matter, in anyone's life except those inside the Washington Beltway. As Amber Case has pointed out (http://caseorganic.posterous.com/dont-let-speed-sacrifice-quali) people don't optimize, they satisfice. Unless the winner turns out to be a criminal, they will do just fine, and so will we.

Loading mentions Retweet