Posterous, another YC company, has a wonderfully simple approach to blogging using email. It's as simple as it can get and very easy to use with the added benefit that one gets an archive of posts in their sent box. You can also text from your cell phone.

Is the World Really Flat?

Tom Friedman surely thinks so. A great book that puts together several trends since the fall of the Berlin wall.

In Hong Kong you can watch acres of containers being loaded onto ships bound for points west, the output of the huge factory China has become. But in the middle of downtown Hong Kong, at 6:00 am you can still find quiet places where stillness hangs in the air and only the elderly are out and about, playing Tai-Chi, walking, or just chatting with their friends about their grand children. You can see it on the net but you can't feel it and you can't smell it, without being there. Hong Kong in chinese means fragrant harbor.


I think it's not flat. The internet lets us see it all, all the time, but sooner or later we must pay closer attention to that which is right next to us.

The House and Maybe the Senate?

The people spoke yesterday, time for a change. The tasks ahead are enormous, how to make a peace in the mideast, how to bring our troops home and care for them, heal their wounds and get them back into schools or into the workforce, how to reinstate our civil rights and freedoms as Americans.

It's encouraging to see people pulling together, to see guys like Webb and Clinton shaking hands. I think we're largely one party now, a corporate party, but we were heading down a path that wasn't pretty and I'm encouraged to see us make this change.

"We can always change and change again." -- a famous New England poet

They want your attention!

It's amazing the quality of pictures one can take with a camera phone. This was shot with a Motorola Razor. The phone was free, the price paid by a phone company to keep my business. I worked on this attention thing for a bit but I guess the idea is too early. Our attention is valuable. I paid quite a bit of attention to Reddit for a while, as did enough other people for them to sell themselves to Conde Nast, well done! They gave me something of value, something that still provides some value though perhaps less so. But at the end of the day the money is flowing from the folks who advertise to reach out to us to sell us stuff we don't really always need. Most of what we do need comes from what's shown in this picture. We seemed to have forgotten how all that stuff works.

A room in your house I never visited

I recently learned that music is a language, in the formal mathematical sense, complete with syntax, semantics and theories. Of course it's far superior to mathematics as a language because everyone can hear it and appreciate it. Creating music however, playing it well, is an entirely different matter. Like mathematics it requires years of hard work, it's cumulative, and one's life experiences weigh heavily on the creative process.

Poetry is also like music in this sense of being a language, though perhaps a little more formal as it requires the use of a natural language.

As the sun sets the view from the upper field looking out toward the Whites over in NH is peaceful.

"There are three stones there, how shall we divide them up?", says the elephant. "I'm not sure", says the owl, "let's wait for the monkey and then we can split them".