Events

Anne and I were discussing this morning how January is our least-favorite month. Apparently Cardiff University, Wales, professor Cliff Arnall agrees: Arnall found that, while days technically get longer after Dec. 21, cyclonic weather systems take hold in January, bringing low, dark clouds to Britain. Meanwhile, the majority of people break their healthy resolutions six to seven days into the new year, and even the hangers-on have fallen off the wagon, torn off the nicotine patches and eaten the fridge...

The BBC reported last week on a new workplace rule at a firm in Germany. The firm, which until recently had a staff of 16, forbade complaining or whinging in the workplace, on pain of immediate firing: [E]mployees have a clause in their contracts which states: "moaning and whinging at Nutzwerk is forbidden... except when accompanied with a constructive suggestion as to how to improve the situation." Ramona Wonneberger, chief executive of Nutzwerk, came up with the idea. She claims that "negative energy"...

I've asked Yak, one of the friends I mentioned Sunday, to give us his two cents. He gave us a couple of bucks and said "keep the change." And just before posting this, CBS and Time Warner announced a merger. Interesting, no?   I think the first idea I need to reinforce is that I am not a Democrat and do not embrace the hope that if Democrats can "take back" the federal government, this should in turn "take back" America. I do not believe there is a fundamental difference between Republican and Democrat...

Canada yesterday elected a minority Conservative government, sending Liberals home after 12 years in power. The Conservative leader, now Prime Minister-elect, Stephen Harper, has no plans to privatize the Canadian health system, nor to open up the country to a flood of immigrants from the south. But he is closer to the U.S. than outgoing Liberal PM Paul Martin was, a fact which crippled Harper's last run in 2004. Also at issue were some of the same social questions we're fighting over down here: Martin...

Another thing government does better than business: make businesses play nicely with each other. Cable companies and telephone companies are fed up with the free Internet because they have to carry it on their backbones for free. So they're looking for ways to charge for use, including creating premium access for a fee. One of the easily foreseen ways this "premium access" could manifest, as the Washington Post reports, looks like this: [Y]ou may one day discover that Yahoo suddenly responds much faster...

"[I]t has been a nervous year, and people have begun to feel like a Christian scientist with appendicitis."—Tom Lehrer We live in a nation founded by a conspiracy. A group of committed, passionate, and intelligent men met in secret for years, plotting and scheming, until finally they took arms against their own country and set up a radical left-wing government that subsequently became the model for the rest of the world. Grandchildren of those revolutionaries tried to do what they believed was the same...

Anne and I looked at an apartment today. Beautiful day, beautiful view, but the apartment...not so great. Still, it was worth the trip:

Adam Sharp, of Maryland-based Sharp SEO, actually read through the Justice Deptartment's Google subpoena. He posted a blog entry excerpting and linking to the actual Google subpoena which is, in turn, hosted on Ziff-Davis' website: In Google’s understanding, Defendant would use the one million URLs requested from Google to create a sample world-wide web against which to test various filtering programs for their effectiveness. Google objects to Defendant’s view of Google’s highly proprietary search...

Chicago got its first measurable snowfall since December 24th last night. As of 6 am CST/12:00 UTC, we have the following reports from area weather stations: Station Snow O'Hare 127 mm (6 in.) Midway 102 mm (4 in.) Milwaukee 127 mm (6 in.) Rockford 127 mm (6 in.) Sadly for cross-country skiiers, today's forecast calls for temperatures around 3°C (37°F), which is just warm enough to turn the snow into a heavy, soupy mess but not enough to ski along the lake. Speaking of heavy, soupy, messy snow, I will...

Three years from this moment, we will have had a new President for more than two hours.