I was reminded of this opinion when I read this morning on CNN about Golf Channel host, Kelly Tilghman's, recent gaffe:

Excerpt from the CNN article:
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"Tilghman uttered the remark during coverage of Hawaii's Mercedes-Benz Championship on Friday, while she and and co-host Nick Faldo were bantering about how young golfers might challenge ever-dominant Woods.

Faldo said, "To take Tiger on, well yeah, they should just gang up for a while until ..."

"Lynch him in a back alley," Tilghman interrupted with a chuckle."
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It doesn't appear to me that this was intended to be racist. It doesn't point to inner racism coming out in a moment of weakness. She was just trying to be funny and made an honest mistake. I am constantly opening my mouth up to say something that I think will be funny or insightful, and realizing the second it's out of my mouth that it might be inappropriate or hurtful. Just this morning, my wife wanted to sit on the couch, and my daughter wouldn't move her legs, and even after Courtney told her to, Emma said, "I want you to sit on them." In a flash, I said to Emma, "Trust me, you don't want her to sit on them. Doh! You can bet I got a glare from Courtney. With humor, timing is everything. The faster your can respond, the greater the potential for humor. We don't always take the time to filter those statements. Like it or not, my brain has associated certain things, positive and negative, with every race on the planet. At some point in the future my brain may impulse my mouth to say something racially inappropriate before I consider the ramifications. That doesn't make me a racist, stupid perhaps, but not a racist. Tilghman has since issued a genuine apology to Tiger Woods,

Exerpt from the CNN article:
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who through his agent issued a statement saying he was friends with Tilghman and respected her, said, "We know unequivocally that there was no ill intent in her comments."
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Apology given, apology accepted, done. If Al Sharpton really cared about social justice and people he would see that the initial public outcry at Tilghman's comment, her subsequent and genuine apology, and Tiger Woods' forgiveness were information enough that the world doesn't condone statements like hers, and takes racial inequality very seriously. She's been suspended, and had her hand slapped, but he wants her fired. What!?

To me, the drunk rantings of Michael Richards and Mel Gibson likely point to repressed feelings and racial hate, but this was a simple mistake -- plain and simple. I know she's white and all, but demanding she be fired for that mistake seems way overblown. Tilghman is known for professionalism and speaks millions of words per year and six of them are unintentionally hurtful. Give me a break, 80% of the words out of Don Imus' mouth, trying to be funny, could easily be misconstrued and hurtful to someone, but I don't even think he's a racist.

It's not what you say, but how you say it.

Like I said, I should have left this one alone!

[Update: There's some great continued discussion of this post on a friends blog. Thanks Peter.]

[Update: My brother in law read this post while I was with him, his first comment, even before finishing, was that I may have undermined my position by starting the whole post off by calling the antagonist an ass. While I assumed a certain amount of license in rant mode, he may have a point. Thanks Dan.]

I've been using it without the baskets, but it came with two really cool baskets -- I'm not sure if those were standard or not. Regardless, It's perfect. Thanks Courtney!

On the Monday before Christmas, it occurred to me that I should probably get some stocking stuffers for Courtney. So I took the kids to Target and and amidst the kitchen gadgets I saw what seemed to be a reasonable approximation of the Brookstone corkscrew so I bought it. I also bought her a really cool digital meat thermometer that is awesome, but I digress.

Anyway, on Christmas day, I went to use it -- isn't that great when you get to use someone else's present -- and proceeded to remove the Houdini from it's container. As soon as I picked it up, I was struck with how light it was. The one from Brookstone had obvious heft; this one felt like it was made of cheap plastic. I then picked up the box, and it was still rather heavy. Curious, I ripped off the cardboard backing on the box and found a rock screwed into the back of the plastic. What's up with that!?

It appears to me that this rock serves no purpose other than to exaggerate the weight of the corkscrew and thus inflate your perception of it's quality. It seems to me that this constitutes consumer fraud, and I'm tempted to do something about it, what do you think? Granted, the hefty Brookstone corkscrew without the sleight of hand did break, so in that case weight did not turn out to be an accurate gauge of quality. Regardless, I thought this was pretty curious.

Wow, he's not online, and he doesn't even own or use a computer. Here is a successful sub-contractor with a friendly, professional crew who doesn't use a computer and hadn't heard of Amazon.

In this Information Week article, found via a quick Google search, in February 2006, only 64% of US households are online. Of the 36% who aren't online, only 2% have a desire to get online. I don't really have time to find more recent data, but one can assume that things probably haven't changed too much.

I'm curious to know how much that demographic has been inadvertently marginalized by the assumption that, "everyone's online these days." This was refreshing and a good reminder that we could in fact live healthy and productive lives without computers and the internet. Unless of course you build websites for a living.

How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook

"Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: "So-and-so has sent you a message." Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn't telling -- you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote "Hi again!" on your "wall.""

In some cases there might be a "wisdom of crowds," but the manner in which we consume "social" websites is more reminiscent of a herd of demon-infused pigs about to run off a cliff.

Taken completely out of context, this reminds me of a C.S. Lewis quote, "We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

But then again, until something better comes around Facebook is still my queen, and I think it's about time to change my status.

IMAP is true synchronization between a client (iPhone) and a server (Gmail). On the iPhone it gives you access to your labels as IMAP folders, and your Inbox contains what's truly in your Inbox. You can effectively label an email by moving it to a folder, but it doesn't seem to be possible to move it to more than one folder so you're limited to one label per message. All labeling, deletions, and sent items are synchronized with your Gmail account in real time. If you want to access your mail from more than one location via IMAP, the synchronization features make this a lot less error prone. I noticed that if you decide to click cancel when composing a message, it asks you if you want to save it. If you do save the message it ends up in an iPhone Drafts folder instead of the Gmail Drafts folder, so it won't be synchronized. I've only used it for a day now, but it's a huge improvement over POP, and makes using my iPhone even cooler.

Update: I found a new label in my list of labels called "[Imap]/Drafts" and in that label was my draft that I had previously saved on my iPhone.

"That's just one of the many grains of sand that make Windows a giant sand castle of suck."

I know it's bad form to laugh at your own joke, and it's even worse to then blog about said joke, but I thought it was pretty funny. But then of course, maybe you had to be there.

As for my concern about ease of use and integration with iTunes, Amazon's service works great. You have to download and install an Amazon MP3 Downloader to help manage the download process. I'm not entirely sure why this is necessary, but I'm guessing it's to help ensure that your downloads were successfully downloaded, how many times they've been downloaded, allow you to pause and restart, etc. Since the Apple store is browsed only from within iTunes (read proprietary web browser), this sort of thing wasn't necessary. Since iTunes is such a good music player, none of us are mad that we have to use iTunes to browse their store. We weren't so happy when Microsoft did something similar with Internet Explorer, but I digress. Once the music is downloaded it's immediately available in iTunes, so integration with iTunes is seamless.

There were a few small hiccups with the store, but they weren't that big of a deal. After purchasing my first album, I tried to use the back button to browse for more albums and ended up downloading the album twice. When this happened, the first time download of the album was still processing so I had plenty of time to cancel the accidental re-download. Surprisingly, there wasn't a way to delete queued downloads in the Amazon Mp3 Downloader, so I had to let it download and then manually delete the second copy of the songs. Also, the installer didn't register the amz extension with the currently open Firefox window; perhaps that isn't possible. On restart Firefox recognizes the new extension fine and correctly launches the downloader.

From this point forward, if Amazon has the album, I'm going to purchase it there, I would suggest you do the same. If not, I'll still use iTunes. Oh yeah, just so Amazon gets the in the last word, many songs and albums are cheaper on Amazon. $0.89 cents a song versus $0.99 and $8.99 an album versus $9.99. The Crane Wife by The Decemberists was a full $2.00 cheaper.

[Update: If you enable iTunes Plus in the Apple store, you will always see the DRM free versions of songs/albums if available. The DRM free iTunes songs are more expensive individually at $1.29 a song, but it appears that you can still get the DRM free version of The Crane Wife through Apple for $9.99.]

What's up with the legal drinking age being 21? We've all heard the age-old complaint of most sub-twenty-oners, "I can die for my country and can't buy a beer, what's up with that!" We treat our college students like children and then expect them to act like adults. I'm not saying that if we move the drinking age to 18 that it will mature this age group overnight, but I think we have to do it. It's one step to solving a much deeper problem of lowered expectations and standards. Our society doesn't really expect our 18-20 year olds to make wise, intelligent decisions -- heck we don't even expect most people to make good decisions. Eighteen year olds are adults -- In truth, most 13 year olds are adults. We've coddled our children so much in this country. They were doomed to make poor decisions the first time we gave in to a fit in order to keep them quiet. When we failed to teach them delayed gratification by spoiling them in the name of love. When we failed to model appropriate adult behavior. We need to raise our expectations for good behavior and start being surprised again by bad behavior. At the very least, I will hold my kids to a standard that should make them stand out amongst their peers, even if I only partially succeed.

I should point out that my children's behavior is not a point of pride. If my son is anything like me, and my daughter is anything like my wife than we're in for a roller-coaster adolescence. I even thought twice about using the word adolescence. Implicit in that is the notion of not quite an adult; and possibly lowered standards for their behavior. My 4 year old daughter and 6 year old son are already capable of adult-like manners (not that we don't constantly need to remind them). Regardless, I think we should expect great things, and try to prepare them for those great things as best we can.

Next week, I'll vent about the government requiring adults to wear seatbelts, and my tax dollars paying for public service ads about getting fat people to take the stairs instead of the elevator.

A while ago I discovered Dale's Pale Ale (DPA), brewed by the Oskar Blues Cajun Grill and Brewery in Lyons, CO, and as you intelligent (or sober) readers have guessed, it comes in a can. The can takes absolutely nothing away from the experience. I'm going to go so far as to say that the can actually enhances the experience. DPA is awesome, and very drinkable.

If I've lost any credibility, I'm about to lose more. My father in law drinks Budweiser, mostly in a bottle but often in a can. I've come to appreciate not only the beer, but especially the can. Perhaps because he's an ex-Marine (if there is such a thing as ex), and he owns a rifle (you're not allowed to say gun to a Marine trust me), but mostly because of it's drinkability. Perhaps I should defend myself. Budweiser does in fact taste like Budweiser. It's not as tasteless as some of my peeps would argue. It is a mass produced beer intended to appeal to, well, the whole world, so it's certainly pretty simple. However, I could pick Budweiser out of a hidden taste test every time, and have actually come to like it; It's really not that bad, and on certain occasions is perfect. Just don't get me started on 'light beers.' Moving on to the can -- I think it's easier to take a pull from a can. There, I've said it. It's easier to drink from a can. There's something satisfactorily innate in drinking beer out of a can, especially when it's good beer like DPA.

It used to be that the can imparted a metallic taste to it's inhabiter, but I think that chemistry and manufacturing have caught up with this one. Whatever it is that they are lining their cans with, just works. DPA tastes as good as if it came from a bottle. About the only danger is that it's so good and drinkable, they tend to go down fast. Actually, here's what the Oskar Blues folks say on their website with regard to the can's coating:

"But then we discovered that the belief that cans impart flavor to beer is a myth. The modern-day aluminum can and its lid are lined with a water-based coating, so the beer and the can never touch. Cans, we discovered, are actually good for beer. Cans keep beer especially fresh by fully protecting it from light and oxygen. Our cans also hold extremely low amounts of dissolved oxygen, so our beer stays especially fresh for longer. Cans are also easier to recycle and less fuel-consuming to ship."

I'm not really sure about the 'myth' part, since I cseem to recall metallic tasting beer, but it seems to work for them. Ummm, I guess that's it. Please forgive the glut of superlatives, they are complements of DPA ... hic!?

When I initially decide to ride in the Shenandoah Mountain 100, I noticed that the 25th annual Shenandoah Valley Century was happening the following weekend. I decided then that it would be cool to see if I could complete two 100 mile events back to back. I didn't want to commit to the road century until 1. I finished the first event, and 2. recovered enough to ride another 100 miles. Thankfully, I did manage to finish the mountain century, and by mid-week, I felt recovered enough to give it a shot.

My only goal for the day was to beat last year's time. I finished in 7 hours and averaged 16.8 mph (up from 15.1 mph last year). At the end of the race I felt a lot stronger than last year. I improved 20 minutes from last year's finish time. I thought I would have made up more than 20 minutes given the faster average speed, but I'm guessing I must have stayed a few minutes longer at each rest stop.

There were approximately 300 people racing that day. This picture was taken at the start of the race. As you can see, I managed to be the last guy to start on time. I'm sure there were some additional stragglers who started late. It was a lot of fun.

I did keep a sharp eye out for lightening bolts, as this was the second subsequent Sunday I've missed church to participate in a biking event.