When I don’t have to go to work in the morning - as would be the case during a week of vacation - I realize the absurd amount of chores that I’ve been neglecting at home.
Hey… Don’t laugh.
I think it may be reasonable to say that I will never have another real vacation again. I don’t really care about leisure - I would much rather feel that everything I do is functional. Utilitarian. I don’t care for plain old enjoyment - I only want to be engaged in enjoyable work.
I am reluctant to find full time office work now. It has always been hard for me to stick to someone else’s schedule. I don’t know how other people can carve hours out of their day to travel back and forth to be in the same place every day at the same times. Commuting time is a dead-weight loss if you ask me. It was true for me in school and it was still true for me with work: There may be some comfort in routine, but there is hypnotism also. A lot of people think I cling to what I know, but that’s not even half of the story. I wanted a structured environment, and all I got was a veal pen.
Posted in employment | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 05 Oct 2008 17:47:00 GMT
WETA is showing Wall Street tonight. I’ve always wanted to watch it. More so now that the real Wall Street is getting into trouble.
Small Is Beautiful
When I was in India, I bought a copy of E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful”. It’s a book that relates well with the Peak Oil school. I’ve read some criticism of Schumacher somewhere along the way, but I don’t expect every author I like to be 100% right, all the time. Do you?
Let’s just say for the sake of argument that we are headed into an energy scarce future. Survival in that future will not be easy - not just because there will not be enough easy wealth to go around (is there enough now?), but because not enough people have the skills they need to survive it.
Say what you want about Malthus, but I think he is going to be our guiding star once more, should we actually live long enough to see it. This many people extracting what they need to survive is not going to be viable. If we are successful, it’ll be hell on the planet, and if we fail… well, that’s a bit dark for this discussion.
I’ve mentioned price as a negative feedback mechanism before, right? It’s no different from the electrical feedback that stabilizes an amplifier - at the cost of reduced output. Did you want stability or maximal output? That’s a matter of taste, I guess. Like strapping a rocket on your car to go faster, but then, always in danger of being blown to bits.
High prices are a signal. They say: “Use Less”. If prices are kept artificially low, then people do not use less. It’s business as usual.
My feeling about “Small Is Beautiful” - and I think it deserves to have me defend it - is that the lesson applies at all scales. Big isn’t necessarily bad - size should be sensible relative to the goal. We see it now in space exploration: Small companies are getting into the launch business. We have NASA precisely because we needed an escape valve for all our excess wealth. In many ways it was a good investment, but I wonder at the cost of it all. How dearly did we purchase the benefits of the space age? Did we perhaps lose opportunities to do something better with that money? Things that we simply failed to imagine?
Maybe it’s just human nature to want to gamble with the whole wad - take stupendous amounts of surplus (even when the surplus is a temporary illusion and the next disaster is on its way, unbeknownst to us) and blow it on that one big spectacle. This may be why we also developed a brain. Maybe human nature was leading us astray so often that only the smart survived - those people who could prudently circumvent their human nature when it was most advantageous.
There is this presumption that solving the problems of each little individual is not worthy of our attention. Especially when we can have something flashy that no one person could have paid for. Credit and Banking are certainly necessary - I would never claim that there is nothing big worth doing - but, bigness for its own sake is misguided. The larger the goal, the more we need to be in agreement about whether it is worth pursuing. But, this doesn’t stop the scoundrels, who pervert the real good Capitalism does in creating wealth, satisfying needs, and improving the lives of all.
Who decides what is worth doing? And, for how much? Once again, it’s the price. If you create the illusion that gasoline is cheap, then people will drive like there is no tomorrow. If you structure a mortgage so that a poor guy with a family thinks his payments will always be that low, he will buy a house he cannot afford, then be unable to interest anyone in buying it at half the price later. And, if we allow Wall Street players to create bizarre investment vehicles where nobody can gauge the real risk - because it makes rich people so happy, chances are those things weren’t priced correctly.
Wall Street is a hell of a lot more complicated some 20+ years after the fictional Gordon Gecko, but I know GG is still the guiding light.
Henry Ford
I use Henry Ford as my code word for a particular factory scenario. Whenever I tell people that I can’t unravel this issue, they tend to treat me like I’m an idiot. I, on the other hand (and I accept that I might just be missing something, in an intellectually obstinate fashion…) think that they are all just afraid to question the sources of received wisdom.
Henry Ford thought he could sell more cars if he paid his workers enough that they could also buy one. And, apparently it worked.
Every time I look, I see the factory, taking land, labor and capitol to transform some amount of material into some number of finished automobiles. You have fixed costs of setting up the factory (buy the land, build the shed, take delivery on the equipment, and pay the industrial designers), then you have variable costs to transform inputs to outputs (rubber, wood, and metal as the materials; electricity to run the machines; paychecks for the workers) What comes out is more valuable that what goes in, otherwise there are no profits. Economies of scale allow you to produce enough units to amortize the fixed costs as a small fraction of the variable costs. With their paychecks, the workers can afford to buy a car that they just participated in manufacturing. But all the workers together cannot buy all the cars - it takes them some time to earn enough for one, and during that time each worker probably contributes the equivalent effort necessary to build hundreds (hard to gauge with specialization, but it’s in there). The cars bought by workers are not going to be much more than 1% of the total. The other 99% are bought by people who are not employees. So paying your workers enough to be able to afford one of your cars is a bit of a red herring, if you ask me.
Going back to price… I think that profit may only be possible in cases where an input is undervalued. And, can you see now why the idea of paying the workers more sets of an alarm bell for me? If workers are so undervalued that you can pay them more and still profit, then what other input is being undervalued? The factory is “getting away with murder” - some externality that subsidizes the cost.
One of the things you notice in Open Software projects is that people will contribute effort without pay. They are being ‘paid’ in other less tangible ways. This translates to other workforces… Any time you can inspire people to take part of the full monetary value of what they do as something non-monetary, you’ve got a shot at success: Any worker can be proud of what they help accomplish - all the more so if it’s a tangible output. And, the bigger the better: “Hey, I put five rivets in that jumbo jet! - It wouldn’t fly without me. I was integral to the success of this great thing.”
Posted in economics, film-and-TV, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 05 Oct 2008 01:58:00 GMT
I have posessed a copy of Sir Peter Hall’s “Cities In Civilization” for quite some time now - the hardback was published in 1998, and I must have bought it within a year. It is quite the resource on comparative urban studies - he saw that there was a piece missing in the analysis of what made certain cities at certain times great. I’ve been nibbling at this thousand-pager a bit here and there, and it seems like a nice compliment to “The Riddle of the Modern World” - so many of those same issues are addressed by Hall. Any good remarks on economics are a special treat for me, and so the following bit about ancient Greece struck me:
“[The citizens of Athens] saw wealth as good and desirable, even necessary for the life of the good citizen. But its function was not to provide a base for more acquisition; it was the very reverse, to liberate the citizen from economic activity and concern.
Posted in books, economics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:43:00 GMT
Two of these photos are doctored. One of them is a tiki mug from the bookstore. It was probably used in a display at 7th Street. I was laughing at the large variety of cups left behind at my office. I know why some of them were left unclaimed - nobody felt that this tiki mug belonged to them - but with others, I have taken ransom photos. I have your mug. Maybe.
Now, this is why I got that drawing tablet: To zip through a quick “extract” filter in Photoshop, then save copies as I rotated the hue values on that new extracted layer.
Posted in photos, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:07:00 GMT
Today I met my librarian friend Elizabeth for lunch in Dupont Circle. She works in the library at The Society of the Cincinnati. Elizabeth is one of the nicest and kindest people I know. Yeah, I’ve seen her get angry or frustrated plenty of times - she worked for a stretch in the old bookstore, then with us in the office doing data entry - but she hardly has a mean bone in her body. She grasped quite quickly who I was and what my talents were, and she also connected naturally with the idea that most of us had the bookstore as a safe haven. With the loss of that safe haven, one of her first thoughts was to worry about me, and what I would do next. This sort of consideration is like bright sunshine for me after working for years in a dark basement at a computer screen.
I have no desire to stop working, or indulge in leisure. I also hardly have the savings for that. People who guess at my situation and predict that I should take a break are misreading me. The best tonic for me is to redouble my efforts on the kinds of work I enjoy. I ought to have more of a puritan work ethic, and I would prefer to focus that ethic on a new set of things. But it is first necessary to survey the landscape: I build on my skills relentlessly. I have always been adventurous in my mind, if not out in the world. Elizabeth and I agreed that now is the time for optimism. All along, with the bookstore or without it, we are living in a turbulent time. It can seem a weird coincidence that one small business should fail at this moment in macroeconomic history, but I say it is simply emblematic: The people spending money on books are the same ones now facing their own uncertainties. Their reluctance to spend is no accident, and it chokes every retailer stretched to the limit, counting on that revenue. If you believe in Schumpeter’s “Creative Destruction”, this is both tragedy and opportunity: Isn’t this the world’s way of communicating, invisible-handily, that it doesn’t want those bookstores? And, so it raises the question of what: What does the world want instead? To those of us who love books - and it’s a bit more complicated than that for me - it feels like a personal insult, but there must be beautiful worlds we may now create instead. For Elizabeth it’s a library, for me it’s also something to do with how people share what they know - the Internet, obviously. But, more than the tubes themselves, a way of balancing our lives and sharing the best of what we know. One of the simple things I can do right away is lend my services in web programming. And step one is to make new contacts. If I can support myself on freelance work, I can continue building my portfolio and work to my own peculiar tastes.
So we sat down together to eat pizza…
We were both mildly hampered by our hangovers. She had a story about a date last night with a French guy and wine with his rowdy friends. I had another night of watching presidential debates - the vices this time - over Oktoberfest beer at the Reef. Elizabeth had not seen either of the debates and wanted my opinion. They have trained Palin well: I didn’t notice a rout. There were times when a grin came across Biden’s face in reaction to something Palin said, and it pained him to have to wait for his turn to rebut her. But I didn’t find her nearly as ridiculous as she is accused of being.
Elizabeth didn’t know about the testimonials page on the Olsson’s web site, and when I mentioned it, she was curious about what people were saying. I was happy to report that it was mostly positive. There was a lot of outrage over the general economic climate threaded through many of the comments. I feel proud to be part of something that would give so many people such good memories.
Once lunch was over, Elizabeth suggested I come back to see her library. It is quite a place: The Society is housed in one of Dupont Circle’s great mansions - the home of Lars Anderson, Harvard Graduate and career diplomat. The library is very nice: Down a narrow flight of stairs I wasn’t sure what I would encounter, but it was ultra-modern. I got a the round of introductions and we talked more about the demise of Olsson’s with the library’s director. But, more importantly, we talked about the possibility of freelance work for me - I got the sense that web site maintenance is not Elizabeth’s primary responsibility, and that there must be ways to help her streamline her maintenance tasks. This is exactly what I was just doing in my old job. She was adding photo gallery pages from recent events, but they are all full sized high resolution images. Those pages take a long time to load. Clearly, they need to be resized - and a slide-show script wouldn’t hurt either. And, finally, a representative thumbnail for each event in the list would do wonders. I got a sense of her workflow, then tried to set her up with a different ftp client, but we couldn’t get a login on the first try. Eventually, I had to let her get on with doing it the hard way so she could have any hope of finishing it in a day.
So then I took a guided tour of the mansion. It is opulent to say the least. One double staircase was measured to fit an enormous painting of the crowning of a Venetian Doge (hmmm… actually it was the Doge’s wife who was being crowned…). There were Billiard rooms, Music halls, Drawing rooms in French and English styles. There were paintings, tapestries, sculpture and curio cases. Enough Japanese screens for their own exhibit - and an expert is coming to give a talk about them next month. Wherever walls were bare of art objects, the walls themselves were painted with allegories. The breakfast room with a replica of the view of the garden from their house in Brookline, Massachusetts. Every room had a distinctive marble patterned floor, and I’ve never seen so much carved wood all in one place. Members stay in the bedroom suites - there is one for each of the thirteen original colonies - but the Georgia room was unoccupied and we got to take a look.
So all told, it was a wonderful excursion. Hopefully a rejuvenating experience.
Posted in employment, web-craft, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:26:00 GMT
I can’t pinpoint the reason for it, but communication is often painfully time consuming. I have spent so much time listening to voicemail messages, talking on the phone and reading or writing emails over the past few days. It is hard for me to imagine being any more in-touch than I am now: When would I have time to DO anything?
I set up an account on Twitter a few months back, so I could leave ‘tweets’ online about what I was doing at any given moment. It’d be nice if I were say… locked up in an Egyptian prison. But without a web-enabled phone, I’d be stuck typing on my laptop at all times. That’d be all the tweets, with the self-referentiality of:
"Still at home. Still writing tweets."
"Wi-Fi went down, walked to kitchen, cycled power to the router, drank a swig of Pepsi."
How are these people still productive? They are not like me.
Posted in web-craft, computer-interface | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 02 Oct 2008 20:30:00 GMT
When I talked to my friend (and Olsson’s coworker from long ago) Troy, I told him that my choice of the wood-grain design for the Olsson’s Testimonial page was an attempt to capture a feeling I had about the wooden bookshelves. His reply was “and, it’s like a coffin, too!”.
Yes, well…
Soon we were off on a tangent: Because of that page, and the necessity that someone moderate the comments, I have been doing it. I didn’t see a setting for allowing all comments, and frankly, I wanted control over the nonsensical - like botnet spam or incoherent ravings. To which Troy replied “you mean, like a Sarah Palin speech?”.
Not… exactly.
So that was weird, but in “The Drunkard’s Walk”, Leonard Mlodinow reminds us not to be fooled by patterns we think we see in random events. Sarah Palin is obviously in the news, so for someone to mention her name the same day I was just looking at a Sarah Palin interview parody is not weird at all. Nor is it weird that the very same book about randomness should talk about Markov chains, which are the method that generates those fake Palin speeches.
And Markov chains are the mechanism I couldn’t recall that generated the text in that old program we had on our Mac when I was a teenager (what was that thing called?… I found it fascinating). I started to think about how to reverse-engineer that program recently, and came up with a sketch of associative arrays in Perl, or the essentially identical hash object in Ruby. If you think about it, Markov chains are just the framework - probability for any word showing up after any other - and, that means a couple of things, at least: 1) You have to have one program component learn these probabilities from existing texts, unless you want completely synthetic results (I can’t help thinking about music synthesizers vs. music sampling). And, 2) you might need a lot of memory to store a probability for each ordered pair of two words. This gets worse if you plan to extend the concept to what word will follow a particular combination of words - the so-called ‘memory’ of the chain. This is what suggests associative arrays in the first place - they’re more efficient for large but sparse matrices.
If you take a look at the Wikipedia page on Markov chains, you’ll notice that there are a lot of equations. One of my high school physics teachers was convinced that normal people just ignore the equations in a text. Therefore, good science/math writing has to explain everything well, but I love equations because they save me the trouble of wading through so much descriptive text. It’s the same issue with computer code, like when I wanted to tell those guys on the bus the other night about how the politicians should shut up and show me the code revisions they were proposing.
If you’re not going to look at the equations with me, just remember this: The probabilities in that article are context dependent - Every different Markov chain is like a chart with values for those numbers filled in. The numbers are a kind of ‘signature’ that we experience subjectively as uncanny reproductions of Sarah Palin speeches, or scholarly journal articles. Every different generator (i.e. set of those probabilities) applied to a specific vocabulary falls on a point in a multidimensional phase-space - an inherent product of the vocabulary itself (this is referred to as the ‘state-space’ on the Wiki). Even if you consider a two word ‘vocabulary’ like the Heads and Tails of a coin toss, the Markov chain concept implies a continuous space of different actual Markov chains for that vocabulary. Texts generated from those mechanisms are going to feel subjectively similar if the points in phase space are close - i.e., all the probabilities are close enough. This is fortunate, because an exact point in that space can only be estimated in practice: We estimate it by analyzing the texts we want to imitate.
But rest assured, I’m often exhausted by equations like the ones in that article. I have a threshold for what equations I can comfortably examine while reading, too.
I feel a bit relieved by all this: If I ever want to take a break from blogging, at least I know that I could write a Markov chain generator and train it to the previous posts. How long would it take for people to decide that I wasn’t just writing in a self-conscious imitation of my own style?
Posted in politics, programming, books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 02 Oct 2008 13:49:00 GMT
It’s strange to work in a place for 21 years and have it suddenly evaporate - But I can’t really say I was caught by surprise…
The past few days have reminded me a little of when I drove through Texas last summer: I saw a lot, but didn’t get to take my time and record my observations. When work has that kind of urgency, my quality of life suffers dearly. I have had the exhilaration of pushing myself to the limit on tasks I knew couldn’t be redone later. But it also left me with the lingering illness often associated with stress. In addition, I was humping a lot of baggage home, which sometimes left me exhausted.
Not that it was all pushing myself to the limit… What made it worse was the down-time; the frustrations; the planning for a future that backfired in the end. I would have loved to go out with a whimper. The reality was different.
Sunday there was a meeting of all the department managers. I was ready to work a normal Sunday - and if I sat around not preparing for the future, I could just hasten the end. But, then it turned out that I couldn’t hasten the end after all: It had already been decided. I was even placing book orders on Sunday morning(!). It’s a delicate maneuver, sharing information with just a select few, while keeping it secret. I couldn’t even tell my friends and family, lest it somehow get back to me - that made me decidedly unwilling to talk to anybody if I didn’t have to.
By Monday, all I could concentrate on was making sure not to leave any of my possessions - I was going to have to make several trips, and I didn’t have that many days in which to do it. I’d been turning my office into a home away from home, and I uncovered things I didn’t even remember I had. I discovered many items of value that were not company property at all, but supplies purchased by and for the collective - mostly people who were long gone. It was at about this point that the Airport store called with a computer problem. It was really the communications link failing. Then, as people arrived at the other stores, three more links failed. It only added insult to injury: I couldn’t believe the common-mode failure was a coincidence. The theory I didn’t want to believe was: Verizon didn’t really postpone the leased-circuit move. They must have picked that day to knock out the lines we would stop using after we moved the computer to Dupont Circle. And, the worst part was that it took them nearly 12 hours to resolve one of the four circuits. I never even bothered with the others. Not my problem anymore.
We got paychecks and (most of us) had to go cash them at a different bank - where they have the payroll account. Next, I mailed a big box of free reading copies to a friend in need of books, then I shuttled some stuff home. I didn’t work all that hard Monday - but that was just the calm before the storm. Frustrations, as I said before. When I was back for round two, I started working on website alterations. In the meeting Sunday, one of the General Managers handed out the flyers to post on the door Tuesday telling everybody we were closed for good. There was a note about going to the web site to leave comments - ‘testimonials’. I had a moment of panic - “Nobody asked me if this was feasible!” But, calm down, Evan… The solution took shape in my mind so fast that I knew immediately how to do it. It’s one of those moments where just a mere word changes everything, and you realize that it hadn’t occurred to you before because the situation had changed in the interval. I came back Monday afternoon to set it up…
In September 2006 - it’s nearly two years to the day - we had to migrate the whole site to Network Solutions. It’s a story I’ve told here before. On the old host, there was no blogging option that I knew of (lack of control on my part probably played a role), so I went with what I knew: Blogger. That worked all right until I started having absurd difficulty publishing posts. At the peak of it I had six or seven people writing on separate blogs, and if there was trouble all abound, it could take days to get everybody straightened out. I was threatening to move everybody over to Wordpress - the system available on the Network Solutions host. It never happened because it would have required tedious copying post by post, and I also didn’t see a way to fake the time stamps so that I could reflect the real times old posts were written. Well, none of that mattered for this project. I just needed one post page with the comments turned on, and we would never need to manage posting again. I thought it would me much easier than it was: I picked a wood-grain design template that reminded me of all our wooden shop fixtures - a visual break with the look of the site so far - then I inserted filler text and put it away for the night. I was even home in time to watch Terminator at 8.
But by 9:30, I was passed out. I heard the phone ring, and knew if must be Marina calling me from Texas, but I wasn’t able to move quickly, and I rationalized my failure with the sure knowledge that I would not have the stamina to stay awake for an entire conversation.
I inherited the espresso maker - I was the only one who ever used it regularly. It’s small and sturdy, something that has paid for itself already and would actually fit in my kitchen. People assumed it would be really heavy, but some of that is the water tank. I wasn’t carrying the water home. We could consider it as payment in kind for Tuesday, which would never go on a paycheck, and which turned out to be my most excellent deadline ever. For some reason, I thought I’d be able to roll home around noon. Once again, I had to sit idle, waiting for content contributions - and exploring how to pack everything I still wanted to take home. So the real job only got underway after two. I had a major kung-fu session, rapidly navigating the admin interface for a blog tool I had never attempted to use before (Wordpress), learning the relationships among the stylesheets and template files on the fly, with an audience looking over my shoulder - an audience very picky about print-quality fonts and fractional line spacing aesthetics. By 4pm and after they brought me a sandwich, I had the thing largely tamed - the sidebar cruft had to be removed with no real navigation or outbound links intended. Not exactly brain surgery, but make one wrong move and you may never figure out exactly what you damaged. (And, I remember vividly how my Marketing Director was reluctant to learn simple HTML editing because it was so easy to break the code…) Firefox and the developer tools I had installed came in handy: I love the “outline current element” feature, but I learned how effective it could be in showing my non-technical audience the spatial extent of tags. CSS editing on the browser window always seemed like a great idea too, but the sheer speed I could attain with it today was liberating.
It also made my eyes hurt. And my stomach a bit queasy. Or, was that the sandwich?
After wrapping up, I got a ride from one of the Arlington crew. He said a whole group was meeting for drinks at Lucky Bar in Dupont Circle. I didn’t want to shun the group - many of whom didn’t know me well, but I had to fight that queasy stress-induced feeling all night. It wasn’t until I was home a couple hours ago that the knot in my stomach finally started to unwind.
But now, I’m zipping along on a still-frazzled energy. And, I wish I could get some sleep. I still have to decide what to do with the rest of my life. And if there are any other desirable formats for that life I just haven’t discovered yet. When I wake up, I’ll have to run out for a bag of espresso beans and get the machine set up. It’s usually a good idea to run it at least once a day.
Hey, don’t forget to check out the slow evolution of the Olsson’s website on the Wayback Machine…
Posted in olssons | 3 comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 01 Oct 2008 05:09:00 GMT
There was a guy waiting for the bus last night, flouting the rules on audio devices. The mini-speakers attached to his bag were pumping out soul music, and it didn’t stop when we were on the bus. His taste in music was relatively inoffensive - not my choice for tunes, but it didn’t distract me from reading… What distracted me was the conversation he started having with another guy - who, coincidentally, was also trying to read. Soul Music looked over at the aging, light-skinned hipster and said “Now, I know you listened to the debate.” Hipster had a thousand times more class than the youngsters who normally interrupt my bus-time reading. He was reluctantly drawn into a conversation with Soul Music, just as I eventually was, one pithy reply at a time. Soul Music drove the conversation with his folksy indignation. This is Obama country around here, and these are Obama people - liberal to the core, no matter their skin color - people who grumble over the “stolen” elections of the past, and wonder at the sense of giving in to the needs of the merely greedy. At one point the African man sitting between the two was examining the contents of his worn Walgreens shopping bag, and I swear I saw him crying over receipts of some sort. No, he was definitely trying to hide his sorrow over something printed on those slips - grocery bills? lotto tickets? For a moment there, I thought it was our fault - I was worried that the conversation was too depressing for him.
I had my economic theories at the ready, and I tried to inject some balance. I said that everything both the politicians had said was meaningless, to some general agreement, and I said that they have no choice but to be meaningless if they want to win. But what I did not say was this, not sure if it would even help: “Hey, look, I program computers, and so when they say they’re going to decrease our dependence on foreign oil by investing in alternative energy, or that they are going to end wars and bring the troops home… I need to see the code for how they intend to accomplish that, otherwise it’s all just hot air”.
But, these are not the men who will know the details - it’s about teamwork and leadership, and so maybe it’s not such a bad thing that we elect them “Miss Congeniality” (which apparently Obama has lost repeatedly in the senate). They need to impress the other men in suits to do their bidding. I’ve been saying that the job of president has become progressively less important as time goes by. They must inspire the actions of others, and so it isn’t so weird to elect the cheerleader Bush over the technocrats Gore or Kerry. And that’s just charisma.
Posted in politics, DC-roaming, ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:35:00 GMT
