The dumbest guy in the room

In a room full of senators, their staff, press people, and the president, the one who is least qualified to be making executive decisions on far-reaching policy is the president himself.

And that’s exactly how it should be.

I’m all for hyperbole, but…

It amazes me sometimes the vitriol espoused by some people over various political folk (Mrs. Palin, I’m thinking of you in particular). The hatred they arouse is truly awe-inspiring at times, but I only sort of understand it.

Let’s get a few obvious things straight: Obama, Palin, Biden, you name any one of these “controversial figures” and I’ll strongly disagree with them on many different topics. I’ll vent frustration over the dumb things they say or the bad policies they support. There are only few times, likely, you’ll see me agreeing with them on anything.

But hate? I don’t think so.

In fact, I’m sure that, were I to meet any one of them in person, I would be struck fairly well by how charismatic they were. Obama, Bush, Clinton… any one of them would be impressive in person. I’ve not met any of them personally nor been anywhere near them (and I doubt I ever will) but you don’t get to be President of the United States without having a bit of charm and presence.

Well, not usually.

Spoiler alert: the state of the union is strong

The always-sarcastic-but-in-that-cute-and-quirky-feminine-way Katherine Mangu-Ward over at Reason sums up my feelings on the SOTU:

Last year, 48 million viewers saw the speech, clocking in at about 20 percent of the U.S. adult population. That's nothing to be ashamed of. We should be happy that 80 percent of American adults found something better to do at 9 p.m. on a weekday than listen to a politician talk.

I happened to be one of those unfortunate 20 percent last year, but only because I was following along as Reason live-blogged it. And I did it again this year, too. I swear next year I’ll actually try to have some alcohol ready for the annual drinking game fun.

As for my reaction to the actual speech… see also.

Practicing with columns

Communication is such an important skill in so many careers and yet it seems it is often taken for granted. Part of the reason that I do these long pseudo-essays in semi-formal op-ed style is to really force myself to practice writing. I spend a lot of extra time trying to be careful about sentence structure, word choice, and style.

In college I got a lot of practice out of necessity; many assignments required writing, and sometimes lots of it. Now that I’m in the professional world, the obligations are far fewer. Sure, I write instructions, documentation, and long emails sometimes, but not nearly as often to keep up my “strength” and most of the stuff I write day to day for work are hardly a literary exercise. Forwarding jokes, pictures, and blurbs to co-workers doesn’t count.

Doing these posts forces me to organize my thoughts and express them intelligently and, if possible, entertainingly. It’s not easy, and I don’t claim to be particularly good at it yet. I’ve only been doing this a few months now, but I hope that after a couple of years I’ll be able to see some progress. At the very least I’m hoping I’ll not lose the practice I gained in school getting a creative writing minor (as an aside to my computer science major). Better yet, I hope to improve. Only time will tell, though.

Don’t get me wrong: I am interested and passionate about the topics I discuss here, but I admit that it’s also a good way to force me to practice writing. Being able to express ideas clearly and successfully and persuasion… these could be very useful skills to have in the future.

New PC assembly: it’s LEGO for adults

I’ve always enjoyed putting together computers. As a geek, cars were never really my area of expertise and it was nice to have something “hands-on” that I felt confident about. So when deciding on my new PC, I looked forward to getting to build it up. Really, though, it’s nothing to be too proud of: as Jeff said, “It's dead easy, like snapping together so many LEGO bricks.”

Manufacturers make it really simple and just about everything is color-coded these days. But it’s been fairly straightforward for as long as I can remember, even back in the Windows 95/Pentium days.