I was born in 1967. My parents were Boomers, born in the mid-40s after the war. The US has been at war for my entire life, and for the lives of my parents (only my mom is still living). At the end of WWII we fell right into the Cold War. The Cold War morphed into the War on Terror, and in the 80s we started a War on Drugs too. Just think about that for the moment. The country has been in a state of war and wartime reduction in freedoms since 1941. How can that not have a damaging effect on the culture of any country? There are very few people alive today in the US that remember what it was like to live in a country not at war.

In WWII we interred tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans. Through the 50s we harassed and abused citizens because they knew somebody who knew somebody who once attended a communist party meeting. Let’s not forget that a big part of why the USSR came to be a world power is the billions we gave them in support during WWII. We were forced to side with Stalin because our involvement in WWI can be connected pretty damn directly to the rise of Hitler and Nazism. (Our involvement in WWI resulted in the very one-sided Treaty of Versailles. Without that treaty Hitler probably never rises to power.) In the 80s we destroyed communities trying to root out demand for drugs. Today we regularly destroy innocent lives both at home and abroad over the War on Terror.

Do you ever stop to think about the price we are paying for all this war? I’m not talking money, although all the money wasted on these useless wars could have done a hell of a lot of good in many other places. I’m talking about the cost in freedom. These wars being fought allegedly to protect our way of life are in fact destroying our way of life. From the Red Scare of the 50s to the Drug Scares of the 80s to the manufactured fear of terrorists today, our freedoms as citizens are being eroded more and more. If you are paying attention at all you know that our current government considers the Constitution a minor inconvenience at best when it gets in the way of the War on Terror or Drugs or whatever. In 1999 Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun, famously stated, “You have no privacy anyway. Get over it.” At the time I thought McNealy was an asshole. Now I realize he was right.

All these wars we are fighting are at least partly our fault. If we don’t get involved in WWI Hitler likely never rises to power. That forced us to ally with Stalin to defeat Hitler, which helped the USSR become a global power. In the 50s we overthrew the modern and progressive Iranian Government and installed the Shah as a dictator / king. Iranians have been rightly pissed ever since and the extremist Mullahs in power today are the result of that overthrow in the late 50s. In the 80s were we forced to support the Muslim opposition to the USSR invasion of Afghanistan. Central to that opposition was a young Saudi named Osama Bin Laden. Later, we were forced to support Saddam Hussein as he battled the Iranians that came into power because of our meddling in Iran. It goes on and on. The US gets involved in a foreign country. Thousands and thousands of innocent people die. Eventually an entire generation of people that hate us comes to power in these countries. Every time our drones take out a wedding party in the middle east dozens of new terrorists are created. We’ve created just about every major enemy of the US in the last century.

For a country so hell bent on being in a permanent state of war, we sure do suck at it. Maybe we should give peace a chance. But that might be kind of difficult since there is really nobody around that knows what peace looks like.

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p>This post inspired by the Vampiric Memories episode of the Common Sense podcast.

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Politics History

It’s the end of the year, that time when talking heads start spouting off nonsense on all the issues of the day. The current “popular wisdom,” as evidenced by Kottke is that blogs are dead. To be fair, his actual post is a bit more nuanced than that, but he and all the rest are still missing the point.

Blogs are not dead, they are just all grown up. Blogs in 2001 were much like a 2 year old. They were often frustrating to manage, likely the throw a tantrum, and not do you what you want. By 2006 blogs were teenagers. They’d try anything. Photo blogs, micro blogs, link blogs, you name it. Pretty much any sort of web based publishing was forced into the blog format. It clearly was not ideal, but it was all we had. In 2013 blogs are now middle-aged. They don’t do wild things and try new stuff. They have figured out where they fit in the world and settled down with a comfortable publishing schedule. Today blogs are mostly for longer form, public content.

A look at the history of O’DonnellWeb is instructive. When I added blog software in 2001 (the site has been online since 95) my posts were a mix of one liners, short music reviews, links with little to no added commentary, and some longer form writing. I had over 5000 posts on the blog at one time. At least 3000 of them were formats that were not well suited for a blog. For several years a script created a post out of my Delicious links and created a daily blog post with new links. That’s not really a great use for a blog. The links aren’t categorized, and hundreds of them were long dead a few years later.Those posts are all deleted. So are hundreds of other link posts that are dead on the other end. I also deleted hundreds of short comments on current affairs that were pointless out of context years later. Many posts were family update types of things that were on the blog because I had no better options in 2003. Today, Facebook is much better place for those posts. The 280 odd friends at Facebook are really the only people that would care about those posts anyway. What’s left here is somewhere near 2000 posts I think, and I could probably cull those quite a bit if I were so motivated (I’m not).

My point is, my blog didn’t die just because I only update it 2X a month instead of 5X a day like I used to. As web publishing matured better tools were invented and those things that were never well suited for blogs anyway moved to the better tools. A lot of people were blogging mainly to keep up with friends and family. Those people have moved to Facebook. People that liked to share links have moved to Twitter. Blogs have settled into an equilibrium where the available tools are being used in a manner that makes best use of the typical blog- unlimited, uncensored space to say something.

Death is a bad thing. Blogs are middled-aged, and it’s a long way from middle-aged to dead.

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Tech

Cal Newport is a professor at Georgetown who recently wrote a book explaining why following your passion is bad advice. He also wrote a story on Huff Post recently on the same theme. In other news, Huff Post is passing off ads for books as editorial content. But that is a subject for another post, and probably not much of a surprise anyway.

Professor Newport refers back to Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame to support his thesis. However, his thesis exhibits a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of following your passion. I’ve watched dozens of episodes of Dirty Jobs. Every single person they ever profiled on that show was passionate. How the hell else do you get up and do some of those jobs every day? If you are going to do something every day for 20-40 years you have to be doing it for more than the paycheck. That is the very definition of passion. If you are happy your itch in life is being scratched. Every single one of those people got something big from the job, even if that something big was nothing more than financial security or a sense of accomplishment from helping others. If financial security is your passion and pig farming delivers it, you just followed your passion right through a pig farm.

Another example. I’m passionate about computers and technology. However, by the time I realized this I was seven years into a sales career with a mortgage and two kids. So I turned my passion for computers and software into a career selling technology. Yes, if I could do it all over again I would probably be a software engineer. However, a series of choices made that career difficult to pursue, but I stayed close and for 15+ years I’ve made a living as one of the few technology sales people that doesn’t need a sales engineer within 3 feet at all times. I followed my passion, just not the obvious and direct route. I’m successful in tech sales because of my passion for technology. I’m not passionate about sales at all.

I would argue that most successful and happy people are following their passion. That passion may be money and power, and the person may be a royal asshole or Congressman, but they are in fact following their passion. That passion may be math, and the person may be an actuary. Maybe the passion is hiking and the person has a job that works a 4 X 10 day so that he can hit the trails every Friday morning. The number of passionate hikers is much larger than the number of available jobs at REI. A lot of those people will need a less direct route to fulfilling the passion. Most of us will probably end up taking the indirect route.

Newport ends with what he thinks is a more appropriate sound bite. “Don’t follow your passion, let it follow you in your quest to become useful to the world.”

I can’t imagine a more dreadful existence than just being useful. Robots are useful. Tools are useful. People are passionate. Life is not a dress rehearsal. We get one shot on this earth. Find your passion. Follow it to wherever it leads you. And have fun doing it.

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Education

About two years ago I proclaimed my intention to eliminate as many of Google’s services from my personal work flow as possible. About 10 months later I announced my failure. However, I didn’t really fail as I never gave up. Today I am mostly Google-free in my personal work flow. My employer utilizes Google Apps extensively, so there isn’t much I can do about that.

The first change I made two years ago was change my default search engine from Google to Duck Duck Go. That change stuck and I rarely need to do a secondary search on Google. In fact, DDG as always done a much better job of filtering out the spam blogs that tend to gum up the first page of results on Google.

Google shutting down Reader forced my hand in that area. I installed Tiny Tiny RSS and haven’t looked back. It works just fine and the Android app is good enough.

Mail was a major sticking point for a while, mostly because I had a web host that had puny email offerings, but I didn’t want to undergo the hassle of moving 5 or 6 web sites to a new host. So I kept trying various email services and never being happy. Once I finally gave in and moved my web sites to a host that provided reasonable email storage it’s been fine. ODonnellWeb email is all run from the web host, so I don’t need Gmail at all. I had a Gmail account from back when they were still very hard to get, so that address is in 1000 places. I forward Gmail to my domain account and change the addresses as I can. However, I suspect that Gmail account will always exist, but I just won’t use it. I’m using my old 1990s Yahoo address as my sign up / throw away email account.

Calendar has been another PITA area. I’ve installed several open-source calendar tools on my web account, only to find them all lacking in some way. For now I’m on Yahoo Calendar, which isn’t ideal. However, the Caldav syncing seems to work more consistently than Google’s ever did so I Caldav it to Thunderbird on my desktop and the stock calendar on my phone so that I don’t need to use the Yahoo Android app for anything.

Photo sharing is another area where I’ve been able to mostly get rid of Google. I do cheat and let photos from my phone backup to Google, but they stay marked as private. I have gotten lazy at times at shared photos from Google+, so I’m trying to not do that. I have an open source script on my server that indexes and displays photos. It’s not as pretty as Google+, but it’s functional enough for the relatively few photo albums that I share. I did check out the new Flickr, which is very nice. But then I’d still be depending on a service I don’t pay for.

I have an Android phone and a Nexus 7 tablet, so it’s debatable if I’ve removed Google from my life at all. At least they are open source though. I think the lesson here is that if you are willing to learn to work differently, not necessarily better or worse, just different, you can mostly avoid Google products online.

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Tech FOSS

My Yahoo account dates back to the 1990s. For the first half of this century I still played fantasy baseball and football on Yahoo, so I was still there fairly frequently. Since I gave up fantasy sports a few years ago my time on Yahoo has been limited to logging in once in a while just to keep the account active.

My increasing frustration with Google has led me to look for alternatives for just about every Google service I was using. This process was documented on my blog. I eventually moved my blog to a new host just to get sufficient email storage to run my email on my domain account. Calendaring was my sticking point., I simply could not find a decent calendar solution. I tried running a few open source projects on my server, but they failed to work well enough in a lot of different ways. So this week I took another look at Yahoo calendar. It seems to be syncing with Thunderbird just fine, and it’s a Caldav connection so it is two way. Google still doesn’t support caldav particularly well. So I think I am a Yahoo Calendar user again.

My.Yahoo.com has also been recently updated, and it is a worthy replacement for the recently killed iGoogle, if you are into start pages. I’m not, but I just spent a few minutes updating mine to see how it looks. It’s pretty damn nice.

I’m also back to using my Yahoo email address as my subscription sign up / throwaway email address. However, I still believe it important that you not rely on a free email service as your primary email account. Remember, if you aren’t paying for it you are not the customer. You are the product.

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Tech

You know, Nature just isn’t fair! I headed out this afternoon to chase a lone cell in Fauquier county that was severe-warned, but it died down pretty quickly after I intercepted it in southeastern Fauquier. I checked radar several times and saw no ot…

As the graphic shows the SPC has Virginia bordering a slight risk and under a “SEE TEXT” label, meaning roughly a 5% chance of severe weather in our area. An approaching front, a lee trough, high dewpoints, and a strong sun may combine to provide yet …

As I wound up mowing the grass this evening I noticed a cell just to the east, so I grabbed my cameras and darted off to a couple of observation points. These showers, growing under an upper level cold pool of air, didn’t provide much (if any) lightni…

This video was taken looking southeastward from Rte 1 in KG county. It has been sped up several times. Check out the wallcloud formation and possible funnel spinups under the rain free updraft, then watch as a cell in the foreground shows up and exhi…

Here’s the video of the funnel I witnessed this afternoon. (The funnel starts out in the left center of the frame.) This was taken just after I swung the chasemobile around from facing west to facing east after the rain free base had passed directly …