Capital is closed

I had a great week. Last Sunday, I left for Baltimore, Maryland, with my friend Robert Mayo to teach another of the Auction Technology Specialist courses offered by the National Auctioneers Association.

Monday night we went to the the Pier in Annapolis and ate oysters at a place called McGarvey’s Saloon. While the area of town appeared quite affluent, with brick buildings and very nice aesthetics, the meal was delicious though surprisingly affordable.

Tuesday we went with Sarah Sonke with Auction First as she took us on a guided tour of our nation’s capital. She used to live there for a time, and was quite good at taking us between the various sights and monuments.

We first stopped in front of the capital building, where I took the picture on the right.

Robert’s son is named Lincoln, so high on our list of priorities was the Lincoln Monument. We passed the mall and the various museums on our way from the capital to the Washington Monument. As we arrived at the Lincoln Monument, we realized it wasn’t going to be very easy to get there easily on foot, so we went past it and turned around by the Watergate and Kennedy Center. Coming back from another angle, we stopped just north of the Vietnam Memorial where we exited the vehicle. We walked through the Vietnam Memorial on our way to the Lincoln Monument, where we got several pictures and Robert purchased some memorabilia from the store conveniently located in the corner of the monument itself.

Once we got back into the vehicle, we continued our tour, driving as close as we could to the White House. We ended up by the Air Force Memorial, the Pentagon, the Jefferson Monument and the Ford Theater.

Before we left town, we ate at Ristorante Luigino where I had the petto e cosciotto d’anatra, or leg and thigh of duck. We were sitting among a bunch of suits who were loudly discussing the proposed automotive industry bridge loan [read: bailout].

The class was well received, as was the last one. We had a great time, and the restaurant connected to the hotel had fantastic crab cakes, which I ate at nearly every meal. The market catfish was also quite good.

Sale on political merchandise

We came back Thursday, getting to the airport about four hours before our flight’s departure, leaving us plenty of time to mill about. We stopped to eat one more crab cake at one of the airport restaurants before we left, and I also found a neat shop that had some political merchandise. They told me I wasn’t allowed to take this picture when I asked, but the coolness of the sale on McCain merchandise was too cool to pass up. I walked behind one of the shelving units and literally shot this picture from the hip.

As for the pictures, I’ve included some below. My camera sucks, and Robert’s was set accidentally to a low quality setting, so none of the pictures are really good as pictures go, but I thought I’d share nonetheless.

Don't forget to vote!

Politics is my Olympics. It’s like a Super Bowl in which we can all participate. I don’t follow sports very well, but I look forward to the circus that happens in this country once every couple years. This year’s final act has been a roller coaster ride.

Today is a special day. It’s a day when those of us who follow politics finally get to read the last page of the chapter we’ve been reading nearly exclusively for more than the last two years. Today, each state selects from among a subset of a large number of candidates for President of the United States in this election year of 2008.

How does this information relate to auctions or technology? The next president will have the ability, if not a perceived mandate, to make what could be drastic changes from our economy to foreign relations to the environment to national defense to our military involvement around the world. All of these issues are important, but they’re outside the scope of this blog. Our presence on the world stage is tightly integrated with the technology industry. That industry is directly tied to science.

How many times has public perception changed during the course of the last few thousand years? How many empires have risen? How many forms of government have been devised? How many fluctuations have we seen in mores? How many republics have failed?

All of the answers to the above questions are influenced, at least in part, to the sum of the knowledge of the human race. As time moves forward, we know more about the world. This accumulated knowledge, with a few exceptions, certainly molds new political ideas. Knowledge pulled us, perhaps kicking and screaming, out of the dark ages when, as the general public became more well-informed, they threw off the fetters of abstract, dogmatic teachings in favor of an empirical reality that better matched what they observed. When the church said one thing, and people observed another, the domain of the church - the unexplained - grew smaller. As we learn more, our knowledge becomes the basis of new beliefs as these new beliefs replace the outdated, older beliefs. Note the difference between knowledge and beliefs.

While science can be wrong, it is self-correcting. Any time science is found to be incorrect, the hypothesis is modified and retested. Once a hypothesis has been tested and found by many different, unrelated scientists to hold true under all conditions, it becomes a theory.

Some politicians don’t understand what a theory is. A theory is the closest science can come to fact. A theory is really a collection of facts that describe a phenomenon. Many politicians preface the term evolution with theory of in an effort to discredit it. They don’t understand that they’re validating it in they eyes of anyone who understands the scientific method. It’s like talking about the theory of gravity or the theory of relativity as if they haven’t been found to hold true in our tests.

There are a host of concepts that modern day con artists are trying to propagate on us as a culture. Alternative medicines like homeopathy, reflexology, acupuncture and chiropracty are fine if their placebo effect cures your headache, but can be the most immediate and dangerous of the pseudosciences to us if we try to use them to cure real diseases. Creationists, and their cousins the intelligent design crowd, fall into the same lack-of-any-credible-scientific-evidence-whatsoever group as those who propagate The Secret, the concept that wishing really hard for something happy to happen can actually make it occur. The fun party tricks of the likes of Sylvia Brown and John Edward can actually become harmful to those who believe in them and, in my opinion, demand legislation to protect the gullible, first amendment be damned.

It’s important that we recognize and pay attention to the stances held by our politicians. From Kansan Sam Brownback’s fear of stem cells and evolution to Alaskan Governor Sara Palin’s doubt that global warming is man-made to Senator Barack Obama’s remark that the science is inconclusive regarding the alleged link between autism and vaccinations - all of which are destructive to the public well being - those who make up our government are many who have questionable if not deplorable stances on scientific issues.

We must hold our politicians to the highest standard, a standard above belief and pseudoscience, above mores and norms, above religion and superstition. We must hold our politicians to acknowledge and respect the domain of science and that of the peer-reviewed scientific community.

The most brilliant political mind who never ran for office was a guy named Aaron Sorkin. He said, “Decisions are made by those who show up.” Show up tomorrow. When you vote tomorrow, make sure that you think about science as you pull the lever.

I was 28 years old on September 25

I had a ton of cake on September 25. Purple Wave Auction started September 25, 2000, at Longhorns Saloon in Aggieville selling a sporting goods auction. I started working there about a year later on September 1, 2001, only 10 days before September 11.

Purple Wave was eight years old on September 25

The cake is a lie.

We’re slowly gathering around the 56″ view into Ole Miss for tonight’s debate that nearly wasn’t. I’m glad McCain figured out how to multitask.

Our friends over at Dream Not of Today are posting real-time coverage, so make some popcorn, turn on CNN and join in.

Here’s a nice, juicy morsel from our friends over at www.dreamnotoftoday.com that needs to be spread far and wide. There’s a joke here about Palin, but I’ll let you make it.

Today he was ranting about how the liberals (said, of course, with audible disdain) were trying to make political hay with Bristol Palin’s pregnancy. He said the ‘rest of America’ had already moved on.

First, let’s ignore how thie ‘rest of America’ is actually the liberals he dispises and focus on this simple concept: liberals care about Palin’s daughter in the same way they care about a lost puppy. They want to help it, feed it and give it a good home, unlike the Republicans who want simply to eat it.

Liberals don’t factor Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy into the political equation. It’s something that happens and, like the sex lives of political candidates, it won’t effect how Palin would govern. We liberals have plenty of hay to make over the issues and what kind of governor (used generically) she would be were she to hold a higher office than Governor. The political group with the most desire to make a big deal out of her daughter’s predicament is exclusively the right-wingers, who see it as an affront to their monotonous abstinence-only drone that continues to fail to produce real results. Perhaps she’s not as conservative as she was made out to be. Or, perhaps, and I think this more likely, she’s not as good at leading and demonstrating those conservative values as she was made out to be.

I spent a fair amount of time today immersing myself in Google’s Chrome. I watched the live announcement today and downloaded it within a few minutes of it being released to the public. Unlike the server shortages that plagued Apple with it’s last big product launch, Google’s offering was easily conveyed to the multiple computers on which I installed it.

Chrome has a new Javascript engine so it’s fast. Balls fast. Melt your face fast. It’s running on Webkit so it’s pretty. Kate Bosworth pretty. Kate Bosworth in 21 pretty. I tried to get it to run on Linux using WINE and, while I got it to load, it didn’t work well enough to render any pages without crashing. It puts Firefox to shame in the coolness category, and while it has a ways to catch up when it comes to community and available plugins, it’s still faster and sexier and what I’ll be using until Microsoft puts IE8 on the ground.

Aaron Traffas, Lucas Maddy and Chris Goering

Thus ends the three-day weekend of relaxation. Today was the best day by far. Erica ate with us this morning and when I dropped her off she ended up with both of my cell phones. There is an unexplainable sense of peace that accompanies the knowledge that nobody can contact you.

It’s weird having Erica here and Megan gone. My sisters are quite similar and yet quite different. I’m excited to get to know her as I got to know Megan.

I’m watching Chelsea Lately with Lucas and Diane and plugging away at finishing the new shows section of the website. My mother was in town all day Saturday and never contacted me because she thought I was in Omaha because that’s what my website said. We had booked a show there and when I Twittered regarding its cancellation I never got around to updating the convoluted event calendar that was nailed on top of Wordpress. That’s all fixed now, as the new shows section now includes all shows, both upcoming and past - all the way back to the first launch of the site when Trevor Burgess and I were playing at Fats.

I’m typing away on my Apple slim aluminum keyboard. It’s the one I poured nearly a full cup of coffee into a couple weeks ago. I dried it, wet it, dried it again and when it wouldn’t work I’d left it for dead. A week passed and I tried it one more time and it’s been working well ever since. I guess I bought a pair to have a spare. With all the damn computers around here, I guess it will get plenty of use.

I’m selling my Cloudbook at Thursday’s auction. I couldn’t ever get the wireless to work as well as I wanted, though it seems I’m not the only one. The graphics always seemed weak, though VIA just released an open source driver for it.

I’m currently rocking the ASUS EeePC 900. It’s quite possibly the finest piece of equipment on which I’ve ever laid my hands. I turned it on long enough to hit restart on the Knoppix distribution of Linux so that I could install Ubuntu. I had good luck with Ubuntu-eee as opposed to Eee-Ubuntu. Everything worked pretty much right away. I had to load a different kernel to get the microphone working so I could play with Skype with Diane.

I got Diane an Acer Aspire One as an early birthday present. It’s slightly bigger than my Eee, but the difference in the keyboard size is pretty huge. It also runs Windows XP, which is pretty much a must for her iPod Touch. It was also crazy-cheap, weighing in at $349 at Best Buy.

It seems like John McCain’s Eskimo running mate’s daughter is knocked up. How fun.