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“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.”

— Oscar Wilde

For seventeen years (yes, seventeen) I’ve used a planner. It’s a rather unassuming one: small, black, and just right for taking notes in meetings, remembering birthdays, and keeping track of my daily to-do lists.

And for the last five years or so, I’ve had to endure people asking me why I use such an old-fashioned item. “Come on– paper? You actually take notes on paper?” For a guy who’s pretty tied into the technology world, and who uses a computer eight hours a day every day, it sure seemed primitive.

Every year I have to buy refill pages, and these days Franklin sells those things for about forty bucks apiece. That adds up to a pretty hefty sum over the years, and I was thinking the other day that for the price of a couple of refills I could probably pick up a used PDA on eBay or something. So I started poking around, reading reviews, checking compatibility with Linux (of course!), and generally giving some serious thought to whether I should take the plunge and join the twenty-first century.

I found a nice little Sony Clie on eBay and managed to snag it for $80 (two years of refills, hey) and just received it yesterday. Of course I had to play around and figure out all of the little spiffy things it can do, and then I had to figure out how to link it to my Linux system and synchronize my calendar, to-do list, address book, and whatever else came to mind. It turned out to be pretty easy, and now I’ve got a cool little glowing screen to take everywhere with me. It’s a fraction of the size of my old planner, and of course can store a gazillion little tidbits of information.

Of course I’m going to have to unlearn (as Yoda would say) seventeen years of habits, but I can already see ways I can be more efficient with this little guy. So it should be an interesting journey but one worth the trouble.

Sadly, I’m not quite hip enough to have an iPhone yet.

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

Ahoy matey, today’s Talk Like a Pirate Day. Be sure to roll your R’s and use words like “ahoy”, “matey”, and “wench” in your conversations.

“Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.”

— Edward R. Murrow

Here are some numbers from the U.S. Treasury Department:

09/2001 $5,807,463,412,200.06
09/2002 $6,228,235,965,597.16
09/2003 $6,783,231,062,743.62
09/2004 $7,379,052,696,330.32
09/2005 $7,932,709,661,723.50
09/2006 $8,506,973,899,215.23
09/2007 $9,016,288,006,279.21

That’s the total outstanding debt of the United States over the past six years. Note how it’s gone up more than 50% in that time… the causes are varied, but I think even Bush apologists would admit that the Iraq war, the War on Terror, the crumbling economy, and the poorly-planned tax changes have all contributed to this economic nightmare.

Who’s going to pay for all of this?

Today I made some cinnamon rolls, layered with a quarter-inch of frosting apiece. Awesome.

Every now and then I get the urge to make some, but they’re a bit of work and involve the bread machine– the one piece of technology in our house that I don’t understand– which means I more or less have to convince Laralee to fire it up and make the dough for me. And she always refuses because they’re so incredibly delic– err, unhealthy.

But today I broke her iron will, mostly by rubbing her shoulder. Go figure.

(Her shoulder was sore because we spent yesterday afternoon tossing a frisbee and a baseball around, and apparently her arm wasn’t up to the task. So a bit of massage felt heavenly and after a bit of negotiation she agreed that in exchange for a good shoulder rub she’d make the cinnamon roll dough.)

“If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?”

— Scott Adams

There’s exciting news in the entertainment world today: Disney is working on a sequel to the 1982 classic Tron. Sweet. I remember watching that as a kid– I would’ve been ten at the time– and being astounded by the amazing computer graphics. We might laugh at that kind of stuff now, but it was landmark work back then.

And a factoid that I learned: the video game was so popular it actually earned more than the movie. Speaking as a guy who plays Armagetron (shown below) every now and then with the kids, it’s a simple but strangely addictive thing.

In a shocking survey, 59% of Americans think our country is “worse off” than it was prior to September 11, 2001.

I think the reaction of jsager on Digg sums it up nicely:

Now that’s a funny ad.