On September 12, 2001, my baby momma was accosted by a cranky old geezer while driving. Knowing how she drives, it was probably her fault, but that’s not the point. The point is that the codger in question argued not with her driving, but with the lack of a flag visible anywhere on her vee-hickle. “I’ve got my flag,” he growled, “where’s yours?”

Indeed that was his flag. He was flying a flag of fear and knee-jerk nationalism. He was flying a flag that would wave well over imperialism, torture, extraordinary rendition, and a shadow economy. It was a flag whose shadow obscured the loss of civil liberties, and darkened a culture so divided and defeated that sometimes it was all we could do to cover our eyes and ears and wait….and hope.

During the 1980 presidential race, Ronald Reagan ushered in an era of conservatism with the phrase “It’s morning in America,” and I suppose, for some people, it was. If you were a businessman, or a banker, or the AIDS virus, it would be a good run for you and your kind. But for many, it was still the darkest of nights.

Now, 28 years later, it’s a new morning in America. A man of vision, integrity and intelligence from a traditionally marginalized segment of our society, offers an invitation to be our better selves.

Most of you know that I run with a pretty liberal crowd. We are sad about California in the midst of our national glee. We display rainbow flags, not stars and stripes. I, for one, have never displayed a flag, because I thought it belonged to that old man (who may or may not have been John McCain) who almost got into an accident with my baby momma. That flag waved over his country, not mine.

So I ask that crowd “What about now?”

On January 20, 2009, when this is once again my America — not perfect, not above argument or disagreement, but hopefully, ba(ra)ck on track — I’m going to put a flag somewhere prominent. It may be on this site, or on my car, or at my house.

Why? Because I’m looking forward to being proud again, the way I was when I found out that my president took time out of his busy schedule to be fellated by a chubby girl named Monica so he could get back to work and be the best president he could be.

Well, maybe not exactly like that, but proud just the same.

So let’s fly that same flag over a better country on 01/20/2009.

Who’s with me?

Ok, if you’re like me, you hear about the bailout of AIG, Fannie & Freddie Mac, the collapse of Wall St. investment banks, and so on, and it just adds a new shade of uncertainty to the amorphous anxiety that forms the wallpaper of your day-to-day existence.  It all seems so incomprehensible.

My big questions are things like:

• We just gave AIG an 85 thousand million dollar loan. That’s right — a billion is a thousand millions. Where did all that money come from, and if we had it, why didn’t we give it to the morons who took mortgages they couldn’t afford instead of the assholes who gave them those mortgages?
• What does this mean to me? Is it funny because I don’t know these people, or scary because somehow it means I can’t buy myself a new video card for Christmas?
• Whose fault is this mess and where do I go to kick them in the pants?

Well naturally, I went poking around the Internet for answers, and found them in an astonishingly clear explaination from Michael Greenberger, as interviewed by WHYY’s Terry Gross on her show Fresh Air.

BTW, Greenberger is the director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland and the principal deputy associate attorney general at the Justice Department. Not exactly a treehugger who’s just going to tell me what I already think, and somehow capable of making all this understandable.

Here’s the bottom line: Our government isolates success and socializes failure. So when you get rich by gaming the system and lying through your teeth, you get to keep all that money. But when all your fancy footwork causes you to fall on your face, somehow, it becomes my problem.

Here’s a link to the show. It’s about 40 minutes long, but I believe it’s required listening for anyone who wishes to consider themselves an informed citizen.

Enjoy.

The fact that I had a prototype Large Hadron Collider (fig. 1) back in the 80’s takes nothing away from their remarkable acheivement.

fig. 1

Ok, so I’ve tried just about every browser I can think of, from Opera to IE, from Seamonkey to Camino, and I’m a happy Firefox user, up through the rev 3 beta cycle and into final release. But for the first time since Mozilla, which for all the world sounds like a Bravo show about a giant, out control interior designer, I’m really excited about something new on the horizon from Google. 

Yes, the Wizards of Mountain View have blessed the masses with yet another free piece of technogeniousity. It’s a clean, beautiful, and elegant Web browser called Google Chrome. I’m writing this blog post in it right now.

If I were you, and a Windows user (sorry ladies Mac users, Windows only for now) I’d download a copy straight away. Get it here.

Ok, I get a lot of flack from you meatbags about the digital services I pimp on this blog. From Plurk to Twitter, from Jott to IWantSandy, I get teased about living in a virtual world. With that said, I made a major leap forward recently into the world of smartphones by ebaying an old Blackberry 7290. I call her blackCherry.

I couldn’t be happier, really, except that she’s a little long in the tooth and doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of her younger sisters. But for 33 bucks, I’m amazed at how much more connected I am to the things that are important to me.

Why?

Because I realized, once I had blackCherry all dialed in, that I my primary method of communication is not voice, it’s data. I might  make or receive two or three phone calls in a day, but I get way more than that in emails, text messages, tweets, etc. I don’t need a phone that gets email, I need a data receiver that can make phone calls, and that’s what a Blackberry (or a Treo, or an iPhone) really is.

Now honestly, I don’t think I’m so far ahead of the curve on this, I just think we’re lulled into lowered expectations because the analog we have for personal communication devices is the telephone rather than the computer.

So I’m asking my readers to ask themselves, in a world of ubiquitous connectivity, what would your ideal device do? Is more of your relevant communication (personal, professional, however you want to define it) voice or data? What should be in your purse or pocket based on how you really live? Is your cellphone working hard enough for you?

Easy one first.

So simple, so full of win.

HitMeLater — they call it a snooze button for your email, and here’s how it works: Forward any email you get to 24@hitmelater.com and it will resend it to you in 24 hours. Or you can send it to 7@hitmelater.com, and it will resend in 7 hours. Or you could send it to tuesday@hitmelater.com, and it will resend it to you the next time it’s Tuesday. Free, no signup or registration required. Just use it. Check it out here.

Ok, now the hard one. It’s called Ubiquity-Firefox and it’s an application that runs in concert with the Firefox browser. Here’s the deal — you install some software on your computer, and while running Firefox, you’re able to hit CTRL+Space to open up a command window. In this command window, you can type something like

wikipedia Chastity Bono

or

google Thurston Moore

and look up thoses entries directly from your browser, opening in a new tab. No mousing required.

You can also type things like

Twitter I’m so glad I found Ubiquity-Firefox.

and update your Twitter status directly from Ubiquity.

With a little further twiddling, you can type things like

calculate 256/16

and get a correct answer.

It’s sixteen.

That’s just the beginning though. It’s really an exciting app, and I’m sure there’s going to be so much more happening with it. Why is it hard? Well the short answer is, it’s not really, it’s just beta software so you’ll encounter some errors, and some things won’t do what you expect them to all the time.

The long answer is that you first install Python, the world’s greatest scripting language.  You don’t have to actually use it. You just have to have it. Then you have to install Mercurial, a version control system that’s used to distribute the application — once again, there’s very little interaction with Mercurial, it’s just how the software gets installed.

Then you type in a little of this and a little of that, and voila, you’re as cool as me.

Almost.

Get the full skinny on usage and installation here, and enjoy!

For four days in August, two-thousand and eight, I was a single father. My BFF and baby momma was in Florida standing by a friend in need, and it was my job to keep G alive until Mother returned.

I learned three important things during this time.

1. The only reliable way to know an object’s current location is to have placed it there oneself.
2. Just because someone says she doesn’t have to use the potty doesn’t mean she doesn’t.
3. G and I sometimes have widely divergent tastes in literature.

All in all though, I enjoyed my run as superDad. I really do have the best kid ever. It made me a more confident father, and made broke my heart a little bit for single parents. I knew it was going to end soon, and that made all the difference. Welcome home, T.

Come join me on Plurk — It’s a microblogging community like Twitter, but way cooler.

PS: I’m still gonna use Twitter.

For a while anyway.

Prolly.