The national debt is piling up like sales of Palin’s book, and the elite don’t understand how either of them got so huge. Taxpayers are trapped on a Willy Wonka boat, hurtling through psychedelic clouds of uncontrolled spending, while the President sits in the back and mumbles nonsense rhymes about imaginary jobs created in non-existent Congressional districts. The people lining up to buy Palin’s book are not the authors of this careless, carnivorous government… but they are expected to pay for it. The assertion that someone who connects with them, and understands their beliefs, is unwelcome on the national stage is just the latest variation of “Shut up and pay your taxes.” No one should accept that attitude from a government as incompetent as the journalists who fawn over it.

The meeting got off to a bad start when Oprah, 55, greeted Michelle. The TV host leaned to kiss her cheek, but the first lady stepped back and extended her hand instead.

Then Michelle, 45, seemed to ignore a question Oprah asked about the Obama children, instead taking a question from an aide and then returning only to chat with Gayle again – ignoring or forgetting Oprah’s question.

By the end of the day, Oprah felt roundly snubbed.

I just installed the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta.  I guess I figured if I was going to be an early adopter why not just go for it.

My first impression is that a lot has changed and it all seems overwhelming.  I never ran Office 2007, so I’m jumping right from 2003 (which I loved) to 2010.

So, this is my first experience with “The Ribbon.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, Office 2003 was the last time you’ll ever see the familiar toolbar that’s been around since Windows 3.1.

You go from this:

To this:

(click the images for the full size)

It’s a little jarring.  More than a little.  I’m actually more stumped by this change in Office than I was going from XP to Windows 7.

But, I’m going to give it some time.

The upgrade to Outlook 2010 looks good so far, as long as I can figure out the user interface.  If I was still in a corporate job I’d be most excited about the Quick Steps feature.  It’s basically a set of user configurable mini-macros to make repetitive tasks easy.

For instance, you can set up a quick step to forward an email to your team and pre-fill the content or body with FYI.  Or reply to a message and delete the original all in one step.

But, since I’m not in that corporate world, the best feature I’ve seen so far is that Outlook 2010 lets you change your “from” address easily.

There are some changes to how emails are grouped as well.  For instance, Z and I traded a few emails today, and when I click on the subject line, I get the rest in that exchange, kind of like gmail (but way less annoying).

More to come, I’m sure.  But I was pleased with the install process, and the product looks pretty good at first glance.

Obama arrived on the base 3:19 p.m. local time (1 a.m. Eastern Standard Time) and received a rousing welcome from 1,500 troops in camouflage uniforms, many holding cameras or pointing cellphones to snap pictures.

“You guys make a pretty good photo op,” the president said.

Standing on a riser wearing a blue suit and red tie, with a cluster of troops and a large American flag behind him, Obama expressed “the gratitude of the American public” and said his meetings in four countries over eight days in Asia will help deliver a “safer, more prosperous world for all of us.”

He got a huge cheer when he told them he was increasing military pay. “That’s what you call an applause line,” he said, before boarding his jet and taking off at 4:11 p.m.

This will be long.  Bear with me, please…

I used to have the worst boss.  For real.  I would put this guy up against anyone else’s “worst boss” and I think I might still win.  No, your crappy 19-year-old boss at the 7-11 or Wendy’s doesn’t count.  This guy was a VP at a Fortune 100 company.  Someone you’d think might be qualified in some way to lead people.  He wasn’t.

Some Background

The boss was the VP of IT at a major retailer.  I won’t name him or the retailer, but if you know me you already know who I’m talking about.  (We’ll call him Paul for ease of reference.)  I was the Director of Application and Database development (a mouthful).  Basically, I was the #2 guy in IT at the company.

I was put in place because Paul was failing.  The CFO forced Paul to hire me over his objections.  Paul wanted to hire a crony of his.  I didn’t apply for this job or seek it out.  I got a phone call one day that said the CFO wanted to speak to me.  He handed me a piece of paper, which was a job offer, and, in a moment of temporary insanity, I took it.

I knew going in that Paul sucked.  I had worked with him in the past.  I thought I knew what I was getting into.  I looked forward to the challenge.

I was wrong.  The guy was somehow worse than I expected.

The Signs

I could easily fill a book about my experience working for Paul, so I’m trying to keep to just the relevant points.  There is an ultimate point here, I promise.

The first sign I had that Paul was worse than I expected was when he publicly threw one of his subordinates under the proverbial bus.  In a meeting with all of the highest leaders in the corporation, Paul was asked about a project that was not going well.  He took no responsibility.  Instead, he blamed one of his subordinates, and said that this guy was lying to him about his progress and not cutting it in his job.

That wasn’t true.  In reality, Paul hadn’t ever handed the project off to his subordinate.  But Paul was very comfortable slandering this guy and basically neutering his reputation to save his own ass.

The next big sign came during a crisis.  One day email just stopped working.  No one had email anymore.  Obviously a complete lack of email is a major issue.

In a situation like this a leader would gather people together, get all the key players in the room, and make a game plan to figure out a solution.  Paul gathered up all of his personal effects, put them in his backpack, and declared to someone who was passing by his office that he was quitting.

That left a very confused group of people, and no leader.  We found Paul a few hours later wandering around the 7th floor.  He was going from PC to PC seeing if he could get the email to work.  He hadn’t quit.  He just had a breakdown of some sort.  When he came back he never addressed the packing up of the personal effects, or the disappearance.  He acted like nothing had happened.

The Confrontation

The email incident prompted a quite heated (and somewhat surreal) confrontation between Paul and me.  Words were exchanged.

I told him he needed to decide if he was going to work here or not.  If he was going to quit, fine.  If not, then he needed to get his head in the game and start acting like a leader.  His team needed leadership, something which he was not providing.

He responded in a bizarre way.  First he told me that “he had always been a high achiever,” and went on about how he had always had good review scores, and how he always succeeded at whatever he tried.  He used the phrase “high achiever” many times during this speech.

Then he said something that surprised me.  He told me that he “could do the jobs of anyone on his team better than they could do their jobs themselves.”  He then went on to name several positions, including mine, and note how he could do that job better than the person who held it.

Really?

This claim was shocking to me because it was so much the opposite of my philosophy of leadership.  I always sought out the best and brightest people for my teams.  I was proud of the fact that I couldn’t do their jobs better than they could.  If I could, why did I need them?

I built teams of people who didn’t agree with me.  We’d argue, debate, and in the end I’d make a decision, knowing that my decision was informed by a diverse group of opinion.  It was their job to bring their best, and my job to take all of the varying opinions into account and make a decision based on my view of the situation.

Paul’s view was different.  He thought he was the best and the brightest, all in one.  He also thought of himself as a “high achiever.”  He wasn’t.  Maybe he was in the past, but he was obviously now in a position that was over his head.  He didn’t have the skills or ability to succeed in a high level job like a VP.  He was a failure.

He was “downsized” a few months after the email incident.

The Point

So I was reading an article the other day, and this jumped out at me:

Obama, who is not without an ego, regarded himself as just as gifted as his top strategists in the art and practice of politics. Patrick Gaspard, the campaign’s political director, said that when, in early 2007, he interviewed for a job with Obama and Plouffe, Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Reading that did not surprise me.  In fact, it made things quite a bit clearer.

Barack Obama, like Paul, thinks of himself as a “high achiever.”  He thinks he is a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, more knowledgeable about policy than his policy directors, and on and on.

Perhaps Obama was once a “high achiever,” I mean, he did get elected President after being in the Senate for like 10 minutes.  But, like Paul, he’s now in way over his head.  And like Paul he got there by throwing the little people under the bus.

The Epilogue

The fact that Obama considers himself the smartest person in the room gives you perspective on his decisions.

No wonder he rejected all of his general’s plans in Afghanistan.  After all, Obama is a better general than his generals.

Barack Obama is a “high achiever” in the mold of Paul, the worst boss I’ve ever had.  I just wish we had the ability to downsize him before the damage he does becomes irreversible.

This takes the meaning to another level entirely.

And in Minneapolis nonetheless…

Fear of Commitment boyfriends and missing cars…

Backstory:
I’ve always had Mac laptops. After going through graphic design college, then owning a business in that field, I relied on the smoothness with which I could bang through projects and not have to worry about reliability… Until I started messing with system files. I’ve moved on to a different job, but obviously still use Mac, if for no other reason than how many programs I’ve invested in. Plus, I still do a heavy amount of design in side jobs, and as charity. Windows XP, SP3 is what I have to use at work, and the bulk of the technical work there has to do with developing and maintaining Access programs and web-accessible interfaces. So I thought I should get Windows onto my Mac to back up my work, and expand my development skills on my own. So I stuck Windows XP on there. Then Windows failed to start and failed to be fixed one day out of the blue (screen of death). And finally, when I wanted to give a friend a bunch of photos from my wedding and songs from iTunes, I realized that Apple had (over the years) proprietized the heck out of it’s files. Freedom, I yearns for it. So to open up my options I configured my laptop to boot to a selector utility (like Windows’ BIOS) that chooses between operating systems installed on separate partitions.

File-Neutering:
I gave this term to my new mission (I have no idea if it’s been used before). The mission is to eventually get as many files as possible out of databases or proprietary file formats and into file formats that have open-source and multi-platform alternatives. For instance, Apple locked up my photos into a database. So one photo album at a time is being dragged into separate folders to be labeled and organized however I want. iTunes’ protected AAC formatted songs are being burnt to disc and ripped into mp3′s (and yes, audiophiles, I’m smashing them because if I don’t have the storage space to listen to my music, I don’t care how “clear” and “uncompressed” it sounds, I won’t be dragging it around).
There are more complicated portions to this game, but I’ve excepted that a Garageband file isn’t going anywhere, and my Access DB’s just are what they are. PSD’s and plenty of vector formatted logos seem to have been getting more accessible thanks to open-source programs Gimp and Inkscape. Illustrator might dominate the pro logo crafting biz, but if you can take a couple days to open your mind and learn it, I swear you can do nearly all the important things and much faster than Illustrator with Inkscape, and for free.

OS X 10.6, Windows 7 Home Premium, and Ubuntu 9.10:
I have to admit, I’ve become shamefully excited about these latest OS versions. It’s like everything I used to complain about in college is being fixed some decade later! And all the cool features I used to wish for… IE automagically splitting the screen to two half-maximized windows so you can view as much of both as possible. Mac still has to catch up on that one, but Win 7 and Ubuntu do this in spades. I would easily recommend to anyone who can do this, split whatever computer you get to run it’s proprietary OS and a Linux install. I went with Ubuntu because it’s well-known, easy to use, and it’s getting all the press, so the user-base has forced compatibility and reliability that might not have been there. Yeah, some day maybe I’ll be poking around in Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, but this is good for now.
Briefly, in regards to the need for 3 systems, Mac has the most assets for what I need. Programs and abilities geared toward what I do. Windows is pretty (now) and supports things I do for my day job and games. Ubuntu has tools that can get into computer guts quicker and easier, and it’s FREE. It should also be noted the the bugless Zach experience award goes to Apple. Windows 7 and Ubuntu have had exactly the same percentage of fixless bugs for me so far (and oddly, it seems the exact same percentage of fixed bug as well).

Notable comments about the OS versions compared to previous versions…

OSX 10.6 Pros:

• Faster than 10.5, at least for me.
• Right clicking actually feels fully integrated! (except in Garageband, where you can only click with it in like two places)
• The Finder is more intuitive and has better options

OSX 10.6 Cons:

• iTunes is even more locked up and does a bunch of background stuff. Hooray for you if you have an iPod, so does everyone else. Free software is widely available to transfer files to and from. I would recommend that versus letting iTunes’ remarkable fragile and bloated structure control your entertainment. (I lost a couple hundred megs of files because of a corruption, very un-mac-like).
• iPhoto stuffs all your pictures into a database, not folders. It organized based on dates regardless of what groupings or albums you create. And if you edit a file and save it? It saves the new file as well as the original, with no option to delete it. BLOAT.
• They still haven’t figured out that people hate taking the time to manually move and resize every damn window.
• They’ve started (in a very Windows fashion) to push products you don’t have from within the OS’s functions. The most obvious are iDisk, MobileMe, and Time Machine.

Windows 7 Pros:

• It’s so pretty! I mean seriously, it actually makes doing things more fun! They finally figured out that if they make superficial aspects of operation more pleasant, it increases productivity for core functions! Congratulations MS, you actually out-did Apple on Apple’s 2nd most famous feature.
• New buttons on stuff. They’ve done some re-thinking about the standard names of menus and functions which is generally not bad.
• Improved UAC. I’ve been bugged a few times by it, but their version of sudo works pretty slick.

Windows 7 Cons:

• Microsoft just bought the rights to your mother. They own everything you do and say and think while Windows is running, probably. I’m not saying they could easily get into your files, but I’m definitely not saying they’re above doing so.
• They still have a registry. It makes me nervous. Despite the fact that they’ve been aware of it’s inconsistency, unreliability, corruptibility, and obsolescence, they refuse to switch from it like Mac refuses to maximize windows properly.
• It’s hideously expensive. I would never be running it if Jacci didn’t have a college email required to get this educational discount. Ended up being $30 and the cost of a burnable dvd.

Ubuntu 9.10 Pros:

• FREE
• Insanely easy to install. You burn a cd, start up from the cd, walk through a few options. It identifies your hardware and gets your drivers for you.
• New software store program in which nearly everything you shop for is FREE.
• Ubuntu is not interested in owning your mother.
• Once you install the FREE Compiz settings manager, the visual effects are almost as pretty as Windows 7, and way more customizable and fun to mess with.
• Once you install the FREE translation tool called Wine, you can run plenty of Windows XP software natively, as in, no emulation or restarting required.

Ubuntu 9.10 Cons:

• You can break it. I mean you could break Mac and Windows too, but it’s not easy to do so accidentally. In Linux, you still have make an attempt to know about what you’re doing if you’re in system settings and uninstalling things. That said, I’m no genius and I’ve never busted it.
• If you’re a gamer, you’re probably not going to find what you want.
• If you need highly professional level software, like CAD’s or high quality sound/video editing, you’ll still need to pay for your OS.

So that’s my perspective so far, and I’m sure I’ll have plenty more stories that relate to this.

The U.S. Senate Rules and Administration Committee oversees a network of restaurants, cafeterias and coffee shops throughout the Senate complex on Capitol Hill.

Its crown jewel is the ornate Senate Dining Hall, where senators and their guests are served by waiters wearing jackets and ties.

But there was a problem: The restaurant operation was losing lots of dough.

Why? For starters, the food stunk. Many Senate staffers preferred to flock across the Capitol to lunch at the privately managed House cafeteria. It offered more options and tastier grub.

***

In the 1980s, you see, the Democrat-controlled House brought in a private contractor, Restaurant Associates of New York, to manage its cafeteria operations. Its food is so good — and its operations run so well — that Restaurant Associates paid $1.2 million in commissions to the House between 2003 and 2008.