First things first.  What exactly is a music locker?  It is a private online storage space for your music.  It is not shared with anyone else.  You upload your music to the music locker and then you can listen to it via your web browser or an app on your smart phone.

What are the advantages of a music locker?   You can listen to your music anywhere you have a decent Internet connection.  You can have a single repository for your music instead of having it scattered across multiple devices and libraries.  What are the disadvantages?  Well, you need a decent Internet connection and you have all of your music in a single repository, so if you don’t have access to the Internet, you’re hard down.  Google Music allows you to listen to your music from any computer or smart phone, but you can only listen from one device at a time.

So how much music can be stored and what’s it gonna cost?  A lot and nothing.  A lot as in you can upload up to 20,000 songs in MP3 or FLAC format, with a maximum size of 250 megabytes per song.  Nothing as in there’s no cost (yet!).  That’s a lot of disc space for free.  If you uploaded 20,000 MP3 songs averaging 4 megabytes each, you would consume approximately 80 gigabytes of Google’s space.

Google Music is pretty simple to use.  You will need a Google account.  If you use Google’s Gmail, then you already have an account.  If you don’t, you should do yourself a favour and sign up.  If you have an account, the first step is to get your music uploaded to Google Music.  To do this, Google provides a small background app that installs on your PC, Mac, or Linux computer.  The app prompts you for your Google account ID and password.  You then select the folders that contain your music.  The background app then quietly proceeds to upload all of the music in the selected folders.  It may take several days to get all of the music uploaded, depending upon the size of your music library.  However, once a song is uploaded, it is immediately available from Google Music so you don’t have to wait several days for musical gratification.

Once you have some music uploaded, it’s easy to listen.  Just log into your Google account and either select the Google Music link or go to music.google.com.  Google Music is a very simple web app that mimics a typical MP3 player.  It allows you to search, view, and select music to listen to.  You can create play lists, select random play, etc.  It also downloads album artwork and allows you to edit the ID3 information.  It works with any browser on any OS that is capable of playing audio, which means just about any modern browser.

Google Music also provides an Android app that can be downloaded to your smart phone.  It has the same basic functionality as the web-based player.  Google Music turns your smart phone into an MP3 player capable of holding 20,000 songs without using a single byte of local storage for MP3 files.   I use the Android app frequently on my 3G Optimus and it works flawlessly when I have wireless connectivity.  I’ve experienced a few data drops when using 3G, but overall it works quite well.

Google Music beta is very basic which makes it easy to use.  I would like to see a few advanced features such as the ability to tag songs.  Otherwise, I’m quite pleased.  I use it to listen to music at work on my browser and at home I use my smart phone hooked up to our stereo to listen to music without having to change CDs, connect to my PC, or listen to FM radio commercials.

Music lockers are yet another example of cloud-based applications.   Apple and Amazon are also developing music lockers.  There are already other music lockers out there, but they will likely be crushed or remain niche players due to the resources and capital that Google, Amazon, and Apple can bring to bear.  It will be interesting to see how these three mega-companies choose to differentiate their music lockers.

If you like listening to your music on the go, keep your eye out for the general release of Google Music.

If you don’t watch Fox News, you are probably already aware that Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News implied that NPR was run by a bunch of Nazis. In an interview with The Daily Beast on Thursday, Ailes stated “They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view.”  The statement itself really isn’t surprising, because many of the talking heads over at Fox News frequently call anyone left of Reagan a Nazi.   Therefore it’s no big surprise that the head of Fox News has “Nazi” in his lexicon. When Ailes was called to task by the Anti-Defamation League (an organization dedicated to fighting anti-semitism), he apologized in the most contrite way possible by saying that he should have said “nasty, inflexible bigot” instead of Nazi. Not much of an apology, but that’s not why I’m pissed at Fox News.

The reason I started the previous paragraph with “If you don’t watch Fox News” is because if you do watch Fox News, you probably weren’t aware of Mr. Ailes’ statement.  Fox News isn’t letting their readers in on the fact that it’s chief executive made such an outlandish statement.

I just went to Google News and entered “ailes NPR” in the search bar. There are links to hundreds of articles, blogs, etc. across the media spectrum about what Mr. Ailes said.  Since I generally check both sides of a story, I next went to foxnews.com to see what they had to say.  There wasn’t anything on their front page, so I clicked on their search tool and entered “ailes npr” and sorted by date. Nothing came up related to Mr. Ailes’ statement or apology.  Next i tried searching on just “ailes”.  Nothing again.  I then entered “ailes nazi”, and again sorted by date.  More nothing. Finally, I entered “nazi ailes”.   Nothing about what Roger Ailes said, but the top listing was in regards to some stupid stunt that Keith Olbermann did back in July. By the way, Keith Olbermann is also crap when it come to factual, unbiased news reporting. However, the main point is that Fox News is unwilling to report and act upon offensive behavior when they happen to be the source of the offensive behavior.

So, here’s a fairly significant story about something the head of Fox News says.  It’s all over the news (as well as the comedy channel). Yet Fox News, the undisputed loudmouth and bully of the media is as quiet as a church mouse. Total hypocrisy. That’s why Fox News is crap.

All those pages make for a pretty imposing stack of paper, as opponents are sure to illustrate.  At the recent health care summit, I noticed several copies of the bill were on prominent display, mysterious white towers of paper posing ominously for the cameras.  When trying to imagine what’s contained in all that paper, I think most of us have an image of 2,409 pages crammed with impossibly fine print full of impossibly complicated double-speak.

Today I downloaded the PDF version of the bill.  It is indeed 2,409 pages, but what I immediately noticed is that the bill is not crammed full of tiny incoherent bureaucratic jibberish.  It is mostly crammed with white space.  In fact, pages are exactly 24 or 25 lines long with overly wide margins.  Each line is numbered, and the entire document is heavily outlined and indented.  There’s acres of spare space in this document for bored staffers to doodle on.   If anything, the travesty of health care reform is the enormous amount of taxpayer money wasted on empty paper.

That got me to thinking.  How big is this document when formatted for normal people like you and me?  I was able to locate a text version of the document and imported it into OpenOffice Writer (similar to Microsoft Word).  I set the margins at 1/2″ inch and the font to 9 point Courier.  This is an efficient but very readable format that I frequently use when generating work-related documents.  I did not eliminate any white space or change the text/layout in any way.  What I ended up with was a document of 888 pages, or roughly one third the page count of the 2,409 pages of the PDF version.  That’s still a lot of document, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as the towers of paper I’ve been seeing all over the media.

Next, I wanted to compare the current health care bill to some similar piece of recent legislation to see how it compares in size.  What I found was the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 (Medicare Part D).  This is a good comparison, as Medicare Part D was written by a Republican congress and approved by a Republican president, while the current health care bill was written by a Democratic congress for a Democratic president.  I did a word count on both documents.  Medicare Part D (176,474 words) has a word count that is 46% (approximately one half) of the current health care bill’s word count (379,639 words).  That’s a significant difference in size.  However, when considering the vastly broader scope of the health care bill, the additional verbiage doesn’t seem to be relevant at all.  I think it is safe to say that our nation’s current health care issues are many times more complicated than the problems tackled by Medicare Part D.  If passed into law, the current health care legislation will impact Americans of all ages, whereas Medicare Part D only impacts Americans on Medicare (generally 65 and older).  Simply based on the problems addressed and the population affected, the scope of this bill is easily twice as large as the scope of Medicare Part D.

So what’s the point of my admittedly silly analysis?  I’m not really sure.  I didn’t download the health care bill for the purpose of evaluating it’s size.  I’m much more interested in it’s content and the impact it would have on me and my fellow citizens.  However, the first thing that struck me was that this bill is not as textually big as opponents claim,  nor as intimidating as it’s page count would indicate.  When set to a more realistic and efficient format, the page count drops dramatically from 2,409 pages to 888 pages.  When measured word for word against a similar document (Medicare Part D), the health care bill is a little more than twice as big.  When adjusted for scope, the health care bill is no more excessive than Medicare Part D legislation.

Just like the old saying “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover”, it’s important not to judge the current health bill on it’s size alone.  Those who are trying to invalidate the current health care bill based solely on the physical size of the document are judging the cover while ignoring the actual content.

I’m one of the nine-tenths that Mr. Hubbard refers to in his quote, and I’m also a weather bug.  My primary source of weather information is a great site called Weather Underground, or wunderground.com.  I began using this site because they had the most up-to-date hurricane information when hurricanes were bearing down on Florida back in 2004 and 2005.  If you’re not already familiar with this site, do yourself a favor and check it out.  But that’s not what this post is about.

One of the founders of wunderground.com is Dr. Jeff Masters, a noted meteorologist and expert on hurricanes.  Dr. Masters has a popular blog on wunderground.com that normally deals with developing US weather events such as hurricanes, severe weather, droughts, etc.  He distills all the wonky scientific data down to something that intellectual peasants such as myself can consume and digest.

When there isn’t any significant weather to blog about, Dr. Masters will widen his scope to include larger climatological matters such as climate change.  Dr. Masters is first and foremost a scientist.  He is committed to the scientific process but also understands that science serves humanity, and thus science must coexist with and to some extent even depends upon politics and governance.  Dr. Masters has recently written several excellent blogs that discuss the messy intersection between science and politics.  Three blogs are relevant to the climate change debate, but they go beyond climate change to illustrate how our political system can be gamed by special interests.

If you have any interests at all in the climate debate, regardless of your position, then please check these blogs out, especially the first one.

• The Manufactured Doubt industry and the hacked email controversy
• Embattled UK climate scientist steps down
• Don’t shoot the messenger

Colton turned 21 a couple of weeks ago.  The two of us have already gone out for a beer a couple of times.  He even bought my beer the last time out.  Now that’s progress.

Akaylee is now a freshman at the University of Florida.  She graduated from high school with her International Baccalaureate diploma and 20 college credit hours.  She picked up six more credits over the summer at UF.  She is rooming with one of her best friends from high school and has joined a sorority.  Akaylee had a tough summer.  In June she lost her former boyfriend (with whom she was still very close) to a senseless act of violence.  It was a really tough blow on top of all the other transitions in her life.  She remains deeply affected by the loss, but she is strong.  Kelly and I are proud of how she has handled herself.

Kelsee is a sophomore in high school.  Due to a zoning change, she attended a different high school her freshman year than the one Colton and Akaylee graduated from.  This year we were able to get her transferred back into the high school that Colton and Akaylee attended, and where most of the friends she grew up with attend.  She is already doing much better than last year, both academically and in extra-curricular activities.  She made the JV soccer team even though she’s been out of soccer for three years.  She is also involved in a club that helps chaperon handicapped kids at events like Special Olympics.

We have formally added another member to our family, even though she’s been an informal member for more than two years.  In May, we adopted the little girl we’ve been fostering since 2007.  Her name is Kylee.  She’s such a sweetheart and a true gift from God.  Just to keep things interesting, we’ve also started fostering another little girl recently.  Never a dull moment.

Now for the pictures.

Colton and Kylee…  Go Gators!!!

Kylee at the Florida Aquarium

Kelsee and Kelly before Kelsee’s sophomore Homecoming dance

Kelsee and her best friend before Homecoming

Kelsee and her Homecoming date.  Akaylee attended last year’s senior Prom with this boy’s older brother.

Akaylee and one of her best friends

Akaylee in her dorm room

Move over Akaylee and Kelsee.  Daddy has a new favorite little girl.

Kylee’s first trip to Disney World

So why did Obama win?  My theory is that the Nobel Committee is actually awarding the American people who used the ballot box to reject the unilateral and militant policies of the neoconservatives.  Obama, through his 2008 presidential campaign and election, became the defacto face of this change in attitude.  Therefore, the Nobel committee gave it to him, or more aptly, stuck it to him.  The conservative pundits went apoplectic, as expected.  Even the mainstream media seemed a little out of sorts, not knowing how to handle the situation.

It’s apparent that translating campaign rhetoric into tangible results is a little more difficult than Obama and his relatively inexperienced staff anticipated.  However, at least Obama is beginning to restore our standing within the international community.  Many so-called “patriots” strongly disagree with international cooperation, and thus disagree with Obama’s stated policies.  When an international institution endorses Obama with such a prestigious award, it provides even more “evidence” to the hard right that Obama is pushing an international agenda.

I say more power to him. Our world is more interconnected than at any time in history.  We are less than 1/20th of the world population, a fraction that is growing smaller every year.  Yet despite our modest share of the world’s population, we are considered the leader of world. Not just the free world, or the industrialized world, but the entire world.  Even countries that refuse to explicitly acknowledge that fact, such as North Korea or Iran, must implicitly shape their policies to recognize our leadership role.  We did not earn that international respect at the end of a gun barrel.  We earned it through a century of engaging the rest of the world.  We earned it by working with other countries throughout the world to accomplish our combined goals.  We earned that respect because we led by example.

While I don’t think Obama was ready for, or even wanted the Nobel Peace prize, by awarding it to him, the Nobel committee is recognizing that America is ready once again to lead by example.

When it comes to comedy, I have a Monty Python over-the-top sense of humor, which Zombieland tickled to perfection.  The “zombies” are the same dull, lifeless, flesh-eating zombies in every other zombie movie beginning with the Night of the Living Dead, but with a twist. These zombies are fit.  When they see a potential victim, they don’t just lurch towards the lunch line, they sprint.  That adds a little excitement to the zombie genre.

The main character, Columbus (Jesse Eisenber), is an obsessive-compulsive who lives by a series of pragmatic rules for dealing with zombies.  The rules, occassionally posted on the screen for our gratification, are simply hilarious.  For example, Rule #1: Cardio.

While struggling to return to his home town in search of his family, Columbus meets up with Tallahassee.  Tallahassee is a flamboyant cowboy (Woody Harrelson) who’s only remaining goal in life, other than avoiding being eaten alive, is to score any remaining Twinkies before their expiration date.  The two form a perfect odd couple as they negotiate the zombie strewn landscape of post-apocalyptic rural America.  One trying to find his family, the other trying to find edible Twinkies.  Soon they are fleeced by a pair of innocent looking sisters, Wichita and Little Rock, played by Emma Stone and Abigail Bresslen (Little Miss Sunshine).  The girls quickly steal Tallahassee’s ride, leaving Columbus and Tallahassee stranded and outwitted.  Eventually they all meet up again and learn to trust each other just enough to travel west to California in search of an amusement park that is rumored to be zombie free.

Once the foursome reaches Los Angeles, there’s an awesome cameo scene which I won’t reveal.  Suffice it to say that casting gets an A+ for this one.

The movie is full of great quotes and one-liners.  It will certainly become a cult classic, ala Shaun of the Dead.  Like Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland is less about zombies and more about dysfunctional people trying to build or repair relationships in a cold, callous world.  In any case, it’s a great ride.  Zombieland also features an eclectic soundtrack, with everything from Metallica to Willie Nelson.

If you have a delicate disposition, Zombieland is not for you.  If gratuitous violence and vulgarity make you uncomfortable, then pick another movie.  I should also mention that my wife thought this movie was stupid, and promptly fell asleep.  We have differing views on what constitutes a good comedy.  On the other hand, if you secretly wished that Quentin Tarantino would make a comedy, then you don’t want to miss Zombieland.

I’ve always been fascinated and horrified by World War I.  The brutal conditions and senseless butchery that took place during the trench warfare along the western front is hard to imagine yet was a reality for millions of soldiers.

I had a great uncle who was an American “dough boy” in WWI.  After my uncle’s death, my father brought home a box containing my uncle’s WWI kit, including his helmet and gas mask.  As a young boy with a big imagination, I obviously found this kit to be a treasure trove.  Later, when I was in junior high school, I read All Quiet on the Western Front, a popular novel about a German soldier’s experience on the front.  It was quite a moving book, but provided no historical perspective on what caused the war and how it was fought.  Through the years, I’ve had a latent interest in WWI, but never really took time to learn more than the basics.  What little I did learn about WWI was exclusively through the American lens, focused only on our country’s participation, mainly at the end of the war in 1918.

Earlier this summer I was sorting through our family collection of books, looking for books we no longer needed so they could be donated to our local library.  I found a book I wasn’t familiar with, called The Guns of August.  It was a reading assignment for my daughter in her high school World History class.  It was written in 1962 by historian Barbara Tuchman.  From the sleeve I saw that it was a Pulitzer prize winner.  I immediately became interested and decided to add it to my stack of books to be read.  Somehow, it filtered to the top of that stack.  I just finished reading it last week.

The Guns of August is a historical look at the “events” leading up to WWI and the critical first months of the war, August and September of 1914.  If the book is any guide, then the events causing the war were secondary to the mindset of the various heads of state and military leaders of the countries involved.  A war across the European continent was inevitable, not so much because of events, but because so many of the players involved were egotistically unable to avoid a war.  This explains why the assassination of a relatively minor prince in a relatively obscure part of Europe would escalate into the largest and bloodiest war the world had experienced to date.

The book looks at WWI from the perspective of five different countries, Germany, France, Belgium, Russia, and Great Britain.  Political leaders and military generals from each country are analyzed.  Keeping track of all the various players is a daunting task for the reader.  The payoff is a balanced analysis that wouldn’t be achieved by looking at the war solely through the perspective of one country or one individual.  One thing the book does not deliver is the battlefield experience.  While the book covers in great detail the various movements and engagements of armies and navies, the book rarely drills down to the actual combat experience.  On the other hand, the book vividly sets the scene and mood as the various generals make their fateful decisions.

Until reading this book, I never realized how close Germany came to completing her military strategy and how far reaching her objectives were.  Had Germany taken France in the first month and thus been able to focus all of her energy on Russia, I can only imagine how different the world might look today.  WWII may never have been fought.  The threat of communism would have been replaced by the threat of imperialism.

On a related note, I found much in this book that directly conflicts with the recent American phenomenon of arrogantly bashing the French as cowards simply because they chose not to join us in our adventure in Iraq.  As this book notes, 1 in 28 French citizens perished as a direct result of WWI.  1 in 3 French men of military age were killed or wounded.  The French fought against a larger force and superior artillery during the first months of the war.  Yet in the end, despite a flawed military strategy the French were able to stop the German advances and stabilize the front.  This forced the Germans into a war of attrition instead of the fast moving war that Germany’s overall success depended upon.  The French payed a high toll in humanity to stem the German tide.  On several occasions, the French lost more men on a single day than the Americans lost to battlefield injury during the entire war.  While criticism could be directed at France’s military strategy and execution, it is blatant ignorance of history to malign the French as being cowards.

As someone who appreciates history, I very much enjoyed reading The Guns of August.  I would highly recommend it to like-minded individuals.

In a nutshell, Mr. Martenson is predicting a convergence of three global trends that will result in a general breakdown of our current financial system within the next two decades.   Mr. Martenson has created a series of 20 online video presentations, called the Crash Course, that builds his case for economic collapse.  The presentations are entertaining and chock full of interesting data.  I’m not 100% bought into his timeline of doom, but I certainly agree that we can’t sustain our current economic paradigm forever.  Unless you are already a professor of economics, you will certainly glean some valuable information from these presentations, regardless of whether his overall predictions come to pass.   I recommend investing a few hours to view and digest these presentations.

I should mention that Mr. Martenson doesn’t see the collapse of our current economic system as necessarily leading to the collapse of civilization. Quite to the contrary, he sees opportunity for positive social and economic change.  Don’t confuse that last sentence with tree-hugging socialism.  I would guess that Mr. Martenson leans towards free-market libertarianism.  He doesn’t suggest big government solutions or environmental extremism.  In fact, he really doesn’t preach at all.  He just presents the data as he sees it, and how that data is leading towards tipping points that will affect all of us in a big way.  In the final presentation, Mr. Martenson does have a few suggestions on how we could individually prepare for these changes.  However, his recommendations seem a little vague, given the detailed analysis he provides in the previous 19 presentations.

Mr. Martenson is very good at converting overwhelmingly large or minute data points into entities that mere mortals can grasp.  For example, he vividly portrays how big a trillion dollars really is.  Since our government is chunking trillions of dollars of taxpayer money around the economy these days, a trillion dollars is a pretty important number to conceptually grasp and understand.

Each video also has a transcript, which I personally found more useful than the video.  With the transcripts, I could quickly review a topic I didn’t fully absorb the first time through.  As I mentioned previously, watching these videos or reading the transcripts in their entirety will take a few hours of your time.  I believe it will be a few hours well spent.

While bald eagle sightings on our lake are relatively rare, we frequently see ospreys circling over our lake. They will watch for a fish to come near the surface and then dive almost straight down, landing on top of the unsuspecting fish. The osprey will then struggle to fly out of the water and back to their nest with their fresh fish dinner. A couple of times I’ve witnessed an osprey catch a fish that’s too big for the bird to gain altitude. They will struggle to get off of the lake, and eventually realize they must let go of the fish or crash back into the water.

A few months ago, I had the unique opportunity to see both a bald eagle and an osprey on our lake. My neighbor and I were talking out by the lake. An osprey swooped down near the center of our lake and caught a fish. Normally, the ospreys will immediately fly off to their nests once they catch a fish. This time, the osprey continued to circle around our lake, only about twenty feet off the water. We noticed the odd behavior of the osprey. After about a minute, we realized why the osprey wasn’t flying away. Circling about one hundred feet up was a bald eagle, obviously interested in stealing the osprey’s fish. The eagle slowly descended and began chasing the osprey while staying above it to keep the osprey from flying away. After another minute or so, the eagle began chasing the osprey in earnest. The osprey flew between some houses and out of our view with the eagle in pursuit. After a few seconds, the chase returned to the lake and continued for another minute or two. Finally, near the center of the lake, the eagle dove down and made contact with the osprey, only about twenty or thirty feet above the lake. The osprey dropped the fish and before it could hit the water, the eagle snatched the fish in mid air and flew off with it’s prize.