“How many men and women in the United States of America are running for President in 2012?”

…how would you answer? Ten, twenty perhaps? Many know the four contenders for the Republican Party Nomination. We know the incumbent President, coasting to re-nomination from his own Democratic Party. And yet, did you know that even the sitting President has to stand against as many as 37 pretenders to the throne of his own party?

Indeed the number of American citizens who have taken the time, effort and expense (at least $5,000) to actually file with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) is staggering. To date 342 individual citizens have jumped through the requisite hoops to be considered “official” candidates at the Federal level. Official in the sense that they may, should they bounce through similar state-level hoops, in turn appear on individual state ballots. You don’t have to file with the FEC, as Ralph Nader effectively demonstrated in 1996, but it helps.

Our fellow citizens and the labels they attach to themselves:

• American Independent Party : 2
• American Party : 1
• Citizens’ Party : 2
• Constitutional Party : 2
• Democratic Party : 38
• Green Party : 5
• Independent : 71
• Libertarian Party : 11
• No Party Affiliation : 32
• Other : 22
• Reform Party : 2
• Republican Party : 126
• Socialist : 1
• Unknown : 27

i.e. The shotgun approach of  ”Lets get some communication out and tell anyone who will listen that we are not like the other guy”. Contrasting with Carnival, parent company of Costa Cruises, who will be utterly destroyed in the aftermath of the Concordia accident.

“We operate all of our vessels to meet and exceed the requirements of the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) convention and the International Safety Management Code maritime standards, the international safety requirements which govern the cruise industry. Every crew member is well trained in the Company’s stringent safety protocols, participating in weekly safety drills onboard every one of our ships.

Our Captains are experienced seafarers with an average of 33 years at sea. All of our Captains come up through the ranks progressing from Second Officer to First Officer and then Chief Officer up to Staff Captain before they can become Captains. On average, it takes at least 15 years for a Captain to be promoted into that role. We further ensure that our Captains regularly undergo rigorous simulation training on navigation and bridge operations.

To assist our Captains and Officers while at sea, we have extensive navigation protocols in place. Our bridge operations are based on a two-person team approach. Accordingly, there are always two officers in charge of bridge operations, mandating strict adherence to operating procedures. Furthermore, our bridge teams follow pre-set voyage plans which are thoroughly reviewed and discussed by the Captain and bridge team prior to port departures and arrivals. In addition, all of our ships employ the latest state-of-the-art navigational equipment and technology to ensure that our bridge teams have the most accurate data regarding the planned itinerary.

Prior to every cruise setting sail, we hold a mandatory safety drill for all guests during which important safety information is reviewed and demonstrated. We also show an extensive safety video which runs continuously on the stateroom televisions should further information be required.”

I’ve finally settled into a software tool I am (mostly) content with, Google Picasa, and have begun this process anew. More than a decade of capturing photos of my two sons, while simultaneously not always effectively pruning and post-processing these images have resulted in 30,000 photos. Recent years are in better shape, having been effectively geo-tagged and facial-tagged but years of legacy shots are in rough shape. I don’t want to estimate the total time I need to sink into pruning, geo-tagging, facial ID, post processing and meta tagging these images. I know it will be well worth it but it is incredibly intimidating.

To make matters worse I find myself with a shoebox full of miniDV tapes, captured between 2000 and 2006. I gave away to charity (perhaps within the last year) my last DV camcorder but that issue aside I have sixty+ hours of DV footage to transfer. These tapes have been (relatively) well cared for but are butting up against the lifespan of the media.

Some back of the napkin math:

• 60 hours of transfer time (miniDV transfers over Firewire in real-time to a computer)
• 60 hours of computing time to transcode (approximate)
• 201 GB of storage required (8 megabit per second date rate, 60 hours of content)

This goes atop the current 32GB of personal video I currently have archived and 48GB of photos (granted that will drop as I prune). All told I am immensely grateful for CrashPlan and their unlimited cloud storage to keep all this content safe.

If I can only make the time to get all this content transfered, edited and tagged I would be in great shape.

Enter the wonderful (free) iCloud and “find my iPhone”. From a website I was able to log in, authenticate, know the location of our two iPhones, iPod Touch, iPad and two laptops instantly. Then… and this is the key… command the missing iPod Touch (via wi-fi) to send out a very loud sonar beacon that will chime endlessly until found… in this case hiding behind a piano music stand (where it would never have been found otherwise).

Thank you Steve Jobs…. you have conquered the lost keys challenge from the grave.

The expected steamrolling of the hapless Skins played out but there are few better ways to spend a Sunday fall afternoon.

• Check it out: http://m.orales.org

• 1994 Volkswagen Jetta
• 1997 Ford Escort
• 2002 Nissan Altima
• 2008 Volkswagen Rabbit

I love them, personally, yet can see knowledge of driving stick fading in society as a whole. Thinking the days of a manual in a small hatchback or four door sedan are fading…

A recent discovery (for me) is the massive, Nike Missile program of the 1950s and 60s. The installation of hundreds of sites around the United States, protecting population, industrial and strategic centers is completely staggering. Everyday citizens went about their lives at the height of the Cold War, in places like Dayton, Norfolk and Chicago under the blanket of surface to air missile batteries.

Equally impressive is the painstaking precision that modern enthusiasts have gone to to catalog these sites, complete with GPS coordinates and present conditions of the structures. I am inspired to hunt down some of these sites in my back yard.

• Order Popcorn Online in support of David Morales

Truth be told I stopped playing three of four months ago. I have not raided, with dedication, since shortly after our youngest son was born in February. As the new year crossed into 2011 my dedicated two or three nights/afternoons a week of raiding sunsetted. Gone was the era of my investing dozens of hours per week in game, progressing and spinning my wheels. The game changes were not a deal breaker, indeed towards the end the evolution of the world was for the best… real life and real life priorities shifted.

I bid farewell to a game that held me, clutched, for the balance of five years. For many of those months and years I mainlined WoW, abstaining from all other entertainment.

In the end I am fully ready to walk away.

As with many, I first learned of his death via Twitter, as my feed exploded with platitudes, compliments, reflections and simple comments, coming across in a torrent. I am unable to count myself as one of the lucky few to have met the man personally. My closest contact with Steve came in a mass of many thousands, packed into the High Temple of Apple Keynote as Jobs delivered, with aplomb, the message of the day.

The occasion was the unveiling of the iPhone, January of 2007, at MacWorld San Francisco. Waiting in line with thousands of fellow migrants the excitement and anticipation was palpable. The spectacle of a Jobs Keynote lived up to legend. Clothed in his signature black turtleneck, jeans and sneakers Steve worked the crowd, his delivery and timing perfect. I have watched many pitchmen, many a executives make presentations. Steve was the best there was and the best the technology community has ever seen. Above all, Jobs was a man of passion, vision, poise and supreme confidence. He was speaking to the collective masses, believers in his vision for a technological future but all the while he was making a much broader pitch. Steve was transforming his company that morning. Twice before, in the preceding decade Apple lurched in new directions, first with a rebirth of consumer computing under the iMac and years later a new focus on personal content and media with the iPod. The iPhone pitch, it’s vision for a quantum leap in mobile communication and collaboration was equally important.

That morning, as Steve stood on stage, trumpeting the advantages of his new technological wonder, you shared his vision. You believed, as he did that everything that had come before was leading up to this. Every piece, every step along the way, building atop one another to some larger, master plan for the future. Flawed or perfect, correct or misguided Steve’s vision, for his company, for the industry, for society he believed to be the correct one.

Jobs’ second act at Apple is, unquestionably the greatest business comeback in American History. Steve, rightly, deserves the plaudits as an entrepreneur, industrialist and executive. Yet what separated Steve Jobs from many other leaders, and what makes him truly a special person is his overarching vision and force of will. As leader of Apple 2.0, Steve made missteps, errors in products and services however a unified, cohesive vision always outwardly guided his leadership. Vision, true confidence of where you want to move something, people, an industry, indeed a culture is far too rare in this world.

To this day, the brilliant advertising campaign, spawned by Jobs shortly after his return to Apple, Think Different, and its opening television ad moves me to near tears. Vision, passion, true belief in making tomorrow better than today need not be separated from business interests and the bottom line. Steve was a great man. He left the world better than he found it. His legacy upon technology and culture will persist. Steve thought differently and changed things…

A check of my profile on Tweetstats indicates that I tweet 7.3 times each day and the volume remains heavy. My 6,917 tweets play out as follows:

Likewise I gravitate to, and opt to share other’s content ~1/8th of the time, again, from generally a few sources I like and trust. My political news and content consumption, for example, generally comes from two meta sources (@TheFix and @Politico) while I further influence my filter by leaning on a (wicked smart) blogger (@FiveThirtyEight).

(Side note: @DangerRoom (Wired.com), damn cool defense, security technology blog. Just wanted to interject that.)

Looking at my common hashtags… ya know, I don’t know what to make of it…

Guess I like the Dodgers, Virginia… and Curling…

Visualizing the transcript from the Barack Obama / Hillary Clinton debate in Philadelphia in April 2008 reveals:

And here we see a visualization of the September 2011 Republican Primary Debate held in the Reagan Library in California:

To be fair there are not many patterns in the noise but I have a few take aways:

• The primary debate in 2008 was much more about ideas and fuzzy concepts (“people”, “believe”, “opportunity”) while the debate last night appeared to pivot much more on the tangible or concrete. Words like “government, “jobs”, “border”, “State(s)” coming up time and again.
• Ronald Reagan and attempting to grasp the mantle of Reagan still matter, a lot, to Republican Primary Voters.
• Mentions of “government” ranked in the top five or six terms for GOP hopefuls and would suspect it was often not shared in polite terms.
• I am surprised at the relative infrequent mentions of the current President, by name, in last night’s debate. It would appear far more fire was focused on rivals with on-stage broadsides.

A few of the recent hits we have tried out in recent weeks:

• Tilapia Piccata with Snap Peas – Very straightforward and slick use of the grill. Balanced flavor but choose the white wine carefully.
• Buffalo Chicken Twice Cooked Potatoes – Absolutely killer, don’t be shy with the buffalo sauce when preparing.
• Grandma’s Applesauce Meatballs – Perhaps better suited to a cold winter or fall night this meal turned out really fantastic when paired with buttered egg noodles.
• Blackberry Buttermilk Cake – My new favorite desert and discovered the need to plus up the amount of blackberries. Making great use of the spring form pan this summer (cheesecakes, torts, etc) but this is a killer cake and a great summer ender.

1) Don’t write a personal check to cover the cost of prostitutes.

2) Don’t pander or offer excuses with technical jargon (i.e. “My Twitter account was hacked“), you will sound all the worse to the people who actually know how these systems work.

3) Don’t compel your wife stand next to you, in some act of faux solidarity, at  press conference where your misdeeds are revealed. You will instantly earn the ire of an entire gender.

4) Don’t use a personal cell phone to sext when your significant other knows the unlock code.

5) Don’t use Facebook or Twitter to do anything remotely sexual, it always comes back to haunt you. Pro tip: Computer logs and screenshots have a nasty habit of never going away.

6) And for the love of God, don’t send any photos. Images have the nasty trend of etching themselves in the minds of the public.

Bonus: The coverup is always worse than the act. The lie of the lie always gets you in the end.