Year	Population
2000	3,254,821
2001	3,378,073
2002	3,486,831
2003	3,617,130
2004	3,753,081
2005	3,871,591
2006	3,982,512
2007	4,066,573
2008	4,115,871

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“Inland Empire” defined as the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario Metropolitan Statistical Area. Census data for 2000; 2001-2008 are Census Bureau estimates.

Wikipedia has a new capability to create books out of articles.  For example, a friend is on a trip this week to the Holy Land.  Based on her itinerary, I created a collection of articles that I thought might be relevant as background for her.

It’s quick and easy to do; you turn on the book creator function and then add links to your book.

There’s an option to export to .pdf, Open Office format (.odt), and even to a physical book publisher for a fee.  My book, which took only a few minutes to create, clocked in at over 500 pages and would have spanned two physical volumes.  I don’t think it’s worth it for the printed version — mine would have cost more than $50 — but for something like a Kindle or a netbook, an easy-to-read .pdf version would be a useful reference to have, I think.

He, like others in this genre — David Allen, Merlin Mann, the Four Hour Work Week guy, etc. — is enamored of this mystical idea of “Inbox Zero,” a pure land of bliss where every email is instantly answered and properly dealt with.

For a long time I accepted this as True and the Right Thing and felt bad that I always have thousands of emails in my inbox.

But, you know what?  They’re wrong: Inbox Zero is a pernicious, dangerous idea that creates more suffering than it relieves. It doesn’t conform to reality and it represents an outdated simplistic idea of what email is. My approach — which I suspect is your approach too unless you are either autistic or writing a book about productivity pr0n — is best described as Infinite Inbox.

That is, rather than thinking of my email inbox like a physical mailbox, which needs to be emptied daily, I think of it more like a newswire or some other kind of news feed. It just scrolls along, a never-ending stream of email.  My ‘inbox’  is a window into the stream, not a box that gets filled up emails.

Just in the same way that I don’t bother acting on most items in the AP wire or my Facebook updates page, so too I don’t bother acting on the majority of the email that comes streaming through. If I did, I’d go crazy; I have a family that needs my time, an old house to maintain, beer to drink.

So I do what all normal people do; we fish in the stream of the Infinite Inbox. I’ll read email from my boss and close colleagues or if the subject line seems important, but I don’t sweat emails I don’t read. They’re there anyway to be searched.

I used to maintain elaborate folders of email sorted by project and topic but I eventually noticed that I never looked inside of those folders. The way we find information, on the Internet or in our email, is by searching. If I’m on a conference call and someone refers to a spreadsheet they sent, I search for their name, sort by date and attachment and pull it up.  It takes no time and I didn’t waste any time earlier trying to decide what to do with it. I don’t mark messages with little flags or colors or tags or whatever.  If I’m really worried about it, I’ll print it out and put it on my desk so I don’t forget it.  Gasp!  That’s what people actually do.

There’s all kinds of flaws to this system and we really need smarter email assistants to sort and prioritize our email streams but Infinite Inbox is the way things are, unlike Inbox Zero which is for most of us an impossible and ultimately frustrating ideal.

Sometimes I feel the need to view subsets of my email stream, so I have views for “this week’s mail” and “messages addressed only to me” and other filters. But the idea that I could have, or even want, no messages at all in my inbox seems a little silly to me.

I guess I could drag everything into an archive folder to achieve that, but why bother?  There’s always going to be email piling up and the world continues to revolve on its axis.  When I come back from (unplugged) vacations, I’m always surprised by the twin observations of how much email I have piled up and how little has really happened; now I just spend less time worrying about keeping my inbox at zero and accept that it, like the world, is boundless.

In Redlands, heart of the citrus belt of Southern California, night raiders broke into Chinese camps on September first [1893]; Chinese were robbed in the streets of the town; and a mass meeting was called to protest further lawlessness. The disturbances soon became so acute in Redlands that, on the following day, the National Guard was summoned to the town and two hundred special deputy sheriffs were sworn in. The large growers protested loudly against the rioters calling them “hoodlums” and “anarchistic agitators,” and swore that they only hired Chinese labor because “we cannot pay the wages demanded by the whites.” But the rioting continued. On September third anti-Chinese raiders swooped down on Redlands, Chinatown, broke into houses, set fire to several buildings, looted the tills of Chinese merchants, and generally terrorized the Chinese. The Chinese protested that they were being beaten and robbed and called attention to the fact that although eleven rioters were arrested, not one was convicted. Under the Geary Act, any citizen could file a complaint against a Chinese laborer for non-registration. Hundreds of complaints were filed under this section, and the Chinese fled from the fields, trying to escape arrest and deportation, while the local press, witnessing the exodus, crowed loudly about “the purple-coated celestial-heathens” fleeing from the wrath of an “aroused citizenry.”

*  The quote above is from his Factories in the Field: The story of migratory farm labor in California (Archon Books, 1969), but that was the easiest online reference I could find; my original source is his excellent Southern California Country: An island on the land (Duell, Sloan & Pearce: 1946), p. 90.

It came with Windows XP, which ran okay. I tried hackintoshing it but it was too nerdy for me and Windows 7 came out in RC around then and I put that on it instead, which works great.  I’ve upgraded the RAM and the HD on it and one thing that’s nice about the machine is how easy it is to work on.

But lately I’ve been running Moblin on it and, after some jiggering to get the wireless working, I think I’m in love. Moblin is a new netbook operating system from the Linux Foundation that Novell is working on along with Intel. It’s based on Linux (Mobile + Linux = Moblin, see?) but the UI has been completely redesigned. It’s different than the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which is a version of Ubuntu designed for smaller screens; instead, Moblin is different, in the way that the iPhone UI is different than Mac OSX.

Moblin assumes you’re using your netbook for web browsing, checking email, maintaining a calendar, IM’ing, blogging, listening to music or watching videos — doing those social media things that the kids are all into. It’s a recognition that a 9″ screen is not suited for all desktop applications; they’re there, if you need them, but the new UI puts these other activities front and center and hides the others. It’s very well done and worth checking out.

I really think that these very small netbooks are a different category of thing; they’re not just small laptops. I have an old IBM Thinkpad x40 that I’ve used for many years now on consulting projects and it works fine as a real working computer. (Going back to it from the Dell is a revelation; the keyboard, especially, feels huge, which is absurd for a 13″ machine.) At netbook size, you need something different than a remixed desktop operating system, which is what Moblin aims to do.

Plus, these netbooks are cheap; at $200, I’ve started to wonder about using one as a Skype phone instead of buying another cordless phone system or trying to figure out how to use VOIP at home.  And there must be a lot of other uses for a cheap little netbook running Moblin besides DVD player and Skype phone.

HP “Create Amazing” – Director’s Cut byKeith Loutit from Bob Gifford via Andrew Sullivan.

[09 Nov 2009: well, this video got pulled until the director clears rights with HP et al.  -- too bad; it's very cool, and I was providing free advertising for HP]

If you asked a Spaniard about US (or South American, or Australian…) wines, you’d get pretty much the same reaction as if you’d asked an American about Spanish beers; they theoretically probably exist but why bother?

At my local grocer, though, Spain has been relegated to a district of Chile, apparently.

(click through for details)

It would be funnier if it wasn’t so creepy.

The I-10  in California changes character as it goes east from ocean.  It’s a typical southern California multi-lane concrete freeway in Los Angeles that becomes  something out of a Mad Max movie in the Inland Empire, especially around the Colton rail yards.  By the time it reaches Yuciapa, it’s settled down again into a lanky western interstate.

No doubt that this personality can be defined by factors like traffic density, the physical landscape, the number of exits, development alongside the highway (either preceding it or because of it), and the condition of the actual road.  But the people driving on the road play a big part, too, in defining its character.

Whatever the cause, it never ceases to amaze me that a highway can have a personality.  Generalizing a bit, highways  in the IE are insane.

I thought that New Jersey, where I grew up, was the last word in traffic until I moved to Boston.  Even driving in Manhattan, which has a peculiar but clearly understood set of  driving protocols, was better than Boston.  Boston’s got bad, nasty, aggressive drivers and crummy roads.  Nothing worse than Boston.

Then I moved to the Inland Empire.

Rather than try to convince you by anecdote, see this report on road rage by the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership.  It’s out of date by now, but they measured deaths attributable to aggressive driving and the IE was the top-ranked metro area in the country.

It wasn’t even close; measured in deaths per 100,000 people, the Inland Empire scored 13.4 while second-ranked Tampa was at 9.5.  New York City (including northern NJ) was 36th, with a score of 2.6, and Boston was 37th with 2.1.  That is, drivers in the Inland Empire are six times more aggressive than Boston drivers.