White House Communications Feedback

Mark Leibovich writes in the New York Times Magazine, 'The podium job [of White House Press Secretary] is all-consuming, especially in an age when daily briefings are televised. As Axelrod says, “You can send markets crashing and troops in motion by one slip of the tongue.”'

Isn't this a sign that we have our feedback loop out of whack? If we engineered a car such that operating the turn signal incorrectly caused the freeway to back up wouldn't that be a problem?

focus follows mouse

Steve Yegge gives this a much more thorough treatment on his blog. But if you want to fix Terminal.app so that focus follows the mouse between Terminal windows then this
defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES
does the trick.

link to Put Change.gov under Revision Control

A concrete suggestion from Tim O'Reilly for improving transparency in government.

Campaign Analytics

I am really interested in how much money Obama raised from small donors vs large donors. Does the argument "even if he has some 'large' donors it doesn't matter because even if he looses them they are a very small percent of the total" make sense?

This story has a bit of info on the topic.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/11/20/obama_raised_half_a_billion_on.html

Firefox vs Safari

I am not looking to write the definitive guide. I don't even consider myself a browser afficianado. But I do dabble and now I am finding that I forget why I choose one over the other.

I use Firefox as my day to day browser for a few reasons:

• phishing filter (no longer after Safari 3.2)
  
• adblock plus
• renders more sites correctly than safari
• force windows to open in tabs
  
• all my stuff (history, bookmarks, etc) are already there
• center click in safari doesn't open a background tab
• clicking on an RSS feed adds it to google reader (could I get Safari to behave this way?)
• when you cut and paste something into blogger it works on Firefox but not for Safari
  

Of course Safari has some things going for it too:

• respects the home/end key fix to make home go to beginning of line and end go to the end of the line

asset allocation vs asset diversification

Work just changed our 401k options and has made lifecycle funds the default contribution. They also took away Asset Allocation funds (Conservative, Moderate, Aggressive) and replaced them with Lifecycle funds. So I am thinking about what the right strategy is and how to do the transition. There doesn't seem to be much information on how to handle single events. Everyone says that allocation is important and that you should re-allocate periodically but doesn't give any advice on the nuts and bolts of doing so. There isn't anything that says "I have decided to change my strategy here's some things to consider". I get that I can't know for sure what will happen over the next few months but all of the sources that I have found don't seem to say anything about what do differently if you assume that the market (and the US economy as a whole) is generally doing well or generally doing poorly. I realize that the whole point of long term investing is that you need to find a strategy and stick to it but given that I have a whole bunch more information about what is going on this month and this year should I make different tactical decisions about how to implement the strategy?

Anyhow that lead me to flip through Living and Learning by Robert Keebler and Daniel Pinkerton and something struck me which I hadn't grasped before. They make a distinction between asset allocation and asset diversification. They define asset allocation as the choice of which asset classes to own and define 4 asset classes: cash equivalents, fixed-income investments, equity investments (including real estate), and tangibles (precious metals, commodities, collectibles). They define asset diversification as the selection of investments within those asset classes. This is a slightly different way to slice things than what Quicken presents. Quicken gives 7 asset classes (8 if you count no class) that divide Keebler and Pinkerton's classes further by separating equities into US Large Cap, US Small Cap, and International Stocks and fixed income into US and Global Bonds. It gets to the same point I suppose but the way Living and Learning presented made it simpler to me.

Wedding Planning Tips

• Use a google spreadsheet or zoho sheet (or equivalent) to store your guest list. this means everyone (bride, groom, parents of each) can view it no matter where they are and updates can be made without confusing which draft just ended up in your inbox
• We wanted to try out both weddingchannel and theknot but found that it was confusing to have 2 homes on the web. It might be worth setting up a fake wedding (don't use your real name or email address) on each and see which you like better (after a couple days you'll probably know). The advantage of using a fake name is that when your friends go searching for you they won't find the wrong info. We ended up going with the theknot because the free wedding web page seemed better but the checklist from weddingchannel was way better.
• If you need to post more text than will fit in the dialog box on theknot use the spammers trick of linking to a jpg of the text (we were able to get theknot to accept some basic html)
• If you're psyched about the music at your ceremony (friends performing or whatever) look into recording the audio from the church's sound board -- I wish I had an audio recording to go with slide shows and so forth. (Not to mention I think the priest's sermon was pretty good but I can't remember any of the details...)
• Buy thank you cards at the same time as invites -- you can get 'em cheaper and it's one less thing to worry about later. (Unless you are using post cards of wedding photos as thank-you cards - I've seen that work pretty well for some of my friends)
  

Welcome aboard

Apparently my years at sea have had more influence on me than I would have guessed -- who knew that the first thing that popped into my head for the title of the first post would have a nautical ring to it.

And I guess the nom de blog is nautical too. Though it has more to do with the fact that Moby-Dick is the most visibly prominent title on the bookshelf across the way. If a computer asked, "What should I call you?" with a copy of Moby-Dick staring you in the face what would you answer?

Call me