Nagel Family Website

Funny thing about politics lately are the endorsements coming in. The Kennedy’s are endorsing Obama, Guliani is endorsing McCain. I’m sure there are others, and more to come.

Endorsements are like the nail in the coffin for the other candidates. Why? Because nobody wants to support a loser, so they wait until their adviser tells them who will win, then they endorse that person (whether they believe in him/her or not).

That endorsement swings voters, making the candidate even stronger. Then other politicians, unions, etc. endorse the candidate, bringing in more voters to his/her side. The snowball continues to grow. And when those candidates win, the endorsers look enlightened to the general public and are sure to receive perks from the winners.

I thought Levitt & Dubner wrote about this in Freakonomics, but can’t find a reference now.

Looks like McCain & Obama will be going head to head in November. The question is, who’s going to be their running-mates?

This entry was posted by Eric on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

The group I train with reached a whole new level of push-ups today, as we did 4-person group push-ups. We did this at the end of class, so were a bit tired, but still managed to do at least 3 together. I think we need a coach to keep us synchronized next time. Here’s what they look like:

With some more practice, I’m sure we can get 10 solid ones in a few weeks.

This entry was posted by Eric on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 8:32 am and is filed under Fitness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

I noticed today that the Google Reader added a little color to their favicon. No big deal, but why?


I’ve also noticed that Google changed the “more” link… reordered some things.


The question here is, months after adding YouTube as an option, why do they still link it incorrectly? They’re using the “q” parameter, and linking to:

http://www.youtube.com/?q=buffalo&sourceid=…

Rather than using what YouTube is expecting, search_query

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=buffalo&search=Search

Common guys… fix it, please???

This entry was posted by Eric on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

As the self-proclaimed Director of Common Sense for Google, I think that earns me a spot on Apple’s Board of Directors. Unfortunately, Apple didn’t ask me about their latest shot at the Apple TV and why it will fail.

The new Apple TV is an improvement over the first version, but it’s still lacking the one feature that, I believe, will allow it to become as mainstream as the iPod: ability to play existing DVDs.

See, we all bought iPods because we could rip our existing CDs using iTunes, then load it onto the iPod. But there’s no feature in iTunes to rip a DVD (then play it on the Apple TV), and the Apple TV itself doesn’t have a DVD drive. Until one (or both) of those features are added, Apple TV will sit on the shelves.

Strike 2, Apple.

This entry was posted by Eric on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 6:55 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

I’ve been hearing a lot about Cloverfield lately, but I just heard on CNN that it’s causing some people to experience vertigo. Well, cross that one off the list of movies I’d like to see. Heck, I was feeling sick just watching the CNN news report.

BTW - Cloverfield was produced by J. J. Abrams of Lost fame. Lost Season 4 starts in just 1 week (woot!)

This entry was posted by Eric on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

Very slowly, I’m accepting this whole “Web 2.0″ thing. Yeah, I know it’s been around for a while now, but I have to see a service in use for a while, and understand why it’s better than what I’m currently using before I’ll move to it.

I’ve been blogging before it was called blogging. In fact, my first site (found in archive.org) has a first post date of September 27, 2000. I wrote the software that ran the site myself, and it wasn’t pretty. Then I moved to a packaged system which was clunky and ugly, then I moved to Blogger, and finally to Wordpress in October of 2006. I’ve been with Wordpress since then, and see no reason to change - Wordpress rocks!

My first big (and this was BIG) move was when I switched my email from an Outlook / POP combo to Gmail and Google Aps. One day, I just signed up, switched my MX record, and started using it. Very smooth transition.

Last year, I joined Facebook. So far, it’s only wasted my time and reminded me of all the people that I don’t remember from high school. The only good thing about Facebook is that they have a very nice mobile interface. Other than that, it’s a waste of my time. I should just get rid of it.

Yesterday, I decided to give del.icio.us a try again. My bookmarks were getting out of control, and Firefox didn’t do a good job keeping them organized for me. So I moved my bookmarks to del.icio.us, keeping a few in my toolbar (ones that I use multiple times a day) and adding a few to the Google Bookmarks service (part of the Google Toolbar).

I think I have a good balance now, with my common & temporary bookmarks in del.icio.us, bookmarks that I use almost daily with Google (Plesk login pages, PPC & Network login pages) and ones that I use multiple times a day in the toolbar (Google Reader, Gmail, Weather, Yahoo Finance portfolio).

So what am I doing on my desktop, that I should move to an online service? What other Web 2.0 services do you use, that I should look into?

This entry was posted by Eric on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 9:02 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.