There are two things that have changed this for me.

The first was racking up enough miles to earn elite status on Delta. That means I’m almost always in a spacious exit row seat, and once in a long while, a really spacious first class seat (for free). I feel totally spoiled by that.

The second was the MacBook Air. Where I used to have to pull out a six pound laptop that barely fit on the tray table and lasted about two hours into a flight, today I have comparable power with a battery I can stretch to eight or nine hours.

Now if they could just invent the cone of silence and gigabit wi-fi on airplanes, I could do video conferences with my team while flying cross country.

Soon.

A few days later, it dawned on me why that was.

We’d disconnected our phone line.

Cacey and I both carry our mobile phones around with us everywhere. We talk less on the phone and type more. We were just never using our home phone. So we killed it and saved $50/month.

Note to self: if I ever have to re-register to vote, do not update my phone number.

I do my thing, and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
and you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you and I am I.
And if by chance we find each other,
it’s beautiful.
– Fritz Perls

This morning on Fred Wilson’s AVC blog, a discussion broke out about Zynga and several folks took the position that Zynga, maker of social games like Farmville, is “morally” wrong. The argument is that it’s addictive and the sheeple just can’t help but be sucked in.

I can’t stand social gaming myself. Maybe some day I’ll try “Words with Friends” and like it, but I’ve tried a few of these games and just can’t get into them. They seem pointless to me.

But we’re a great country because we allow people to be themselves, make their own choices, and enjoy or suffer the consequences of those choices.

Then I arrived at Starbucks to do some work this morning. I don’t come over here every day, more like every few days. But I saw something that compelled me to write this comment.

EVERY DAY that I do come down here, there are two people, wearing their pajamas and headsets, sipping on cokes from McDonalds, playing World of Warfare on their laptops and slowing the Starbucks wi-fi to a crawl.

They never buy anything. One time the power went out, and I have never heard so much swearing over the preemptive termination of a WOW game in my life. Especially over an Internet connection that you’re not even paying to support.

As you might guess, I don’t have an incredibly high opinion of these folks or the values they hold dear (which appear to be pajamas, free wi-fi and WOW). If they’re unemployed, then I’m sorry they’ve fallen on hard times, but there are a million better things to do with their time.

But guess what? Those are my values.

And I don’t get to impose my values on everyone else.

So instead of banning Zynga, maybe we should ban whatever check they are getting that is enabling them to turn the safety net into a friggin’ hammock.

Because I’m not paying for their gaming habit, but I sure as heck am paying for their hammock.

Hat tip to @AndySwan for the quote.

I’m not nearly as much of a basketball fan as I am a baseball fan, but the “Linsanity” that has arisen over the last few weeks is inspiring.

It’s not just because of Lin’s faith. Though it is humorous to think about how it must really piss off Bill Maher to have the “Tim Tebow of basketball” arise in the news so quickly.

Forbes has an awesome piece this morning (thanks for passing it on, Nick) about 10 lessons that Jeremy Lin can teach us about winning.

In a nutshell, they are:

1. Believe in yourself when no one else does
2. Seize the opportunity when it arises
3. Your family will always be there for you, so be there for them
4. Find the system that works for your style
5. Don’t overlook talent that might exist around you
6. People will love you for being original, not a copy of someone else
7. Stay humble
8. When you make others around you look good, they will love you forever
9. Never forget the importance of luck
10. Work your butt off

The piece ends with a reference to one of Lin’s favorite Bible verses from the book of Romans: “…suffering produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”

Photo Credit: Getty

Stare at the colored dots on this girl’s nose for 30 seconds. Then quickly look at a white wall or ceiling and blink rapidly.

Congratulations, you just processed a negative with your brain!

(h/t Vic Gundotra on Google+)

We’ve clearly hit an inflection point with the product. I can see it in the user feedback and engagement. We’ve still got a ways to go, but the energy from our users is exciting to behold.

On days like this, I barely touch Twitter. My email sits unanswered. Voice mail stacks up. But my productivity is really high.

It takes days like that to build great products. So “no talk, just build” days will continue to be a part of my schedule for as long as I get to do this job.

Have a great weekend!

So head on over to the Riskalyze Blog and check out today’s announcement.

If you’ve been trying to figure out how to get invested without buying something that doesn’t fit you, or losing all of your gains in brokerage commissions, today is your lucky day.

I hope you’ll give Riskalyze a try.

If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing.

If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged.

It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.

Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever!

Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when the time of perfection comes, these partial things will become useless.

When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

Three things will last forever. Faith, hope, and love.

And the greatest of these is love.

I’m a very blessed man to know this kind of love. And that’s because I have Cacey Nichole Steward Klein as my best friend and Valentine.

I hope your Valentine’s Day is just as great as mine.

Windows computer makers are working on closing the gap, especially with the new ultrabooks, but they’re still a long ways off. And I’m so incredibly happy with my MacBook Air that it would take a LOT to get me to switch back. Not gonna happen any time soon.

Here’s an example of why it would be so difficult to pry me out of the Apple experience.

A few months ago, my “P” key cracked. It was a weird spiral fracture of the key’s surface. Over time, pieces of the key started falling off until you couldn’t tell it was the “P” at all. I type enough that I rarely look at the labeling of the keys, so it didn’t impair my typing, but I was bummed to see it happening.

Then, a few days ago, it started happening to the period key too. I’d never seen this before on any of the MacBook keyboards, so I thought I’d take it into the Apple Store and see what they said. Perhaps I’d been conditioned by my Best Buy experiences, but I figured the response would be “well, you must have done something to cause this damage” and an offer to fix it for $150 or so. (After all, the MacBook Air is a sealed device so it’s not exactly easy to get into it.)

I popped into the Apple Store at about 4PM yesterday afternoon. They had a Genius Bar appointment open at 4:15. A friendly young blue-shirted fellow (I assume he’s a genius, given the name of his desk) took a quick look and said “I have never seen this before on any MacBook.”

Ah, here we go. I’m used to this. I start to summon my best arguments for warranty coverage, and then…

“I’d just replace these two keys but I’m worried you have a bad batch of keys. So let’s replace the whole keyboard assembly under warranty, what do you think?”

I expressed my approval and he quickly whipped up the work order on his iPad, ran a diagnostic over wi-fi to grab the serial number and search for any other problems, and then arranged to have a manager meet me with my computer before store opening hours on Tuesday morning.

This is why Apple creates customers for life. Their inability to be cheap with their customers when it matters little creates a virtuous cycle of love, appreciation, vocal endorsement and repeat sales that have built the most valuable company in the world.

I hope that we can come even half as close at engendering that kind of loyalty and appreciation from our user community at Riskalyze. It’s tougher to do with a free product, but we’re going to do our best.

Nice job, Apple.

PS: Now you know why my Saturday blog post didn’t get published until Sunday. And I wrote this on Cacey’s iPad, which fortunately, has a keyboard. Today, I’m going to try plugging the Mac Mini into my office monitor and getting my work done, since most of my stuff is in the cloud. We’ll see how it goes…Tuesday can’t come fast enough.

Mark Zuckerberg has turned himself from a young hacker into a visionary CEO through hard work, huge risk and a lot of coaching and learning.

He’s also decided he wants to remain in control of his company. And that is raising “concerns” from so-called “corporate governance experts.”

Facebook’s corporate governance rules, which give shareholders little say in how the social networking website would be run as a public company, are raising the hackles of one of the largest U.S. investors, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System.

The pension fund, which has a portfolio valued at around $145 billion, is planning to send a letter to Facebook, hoping to engage the social networking website on corporate governance, two CalSTRS executives told Reuters in an interview on Monday.

Here’s the deal. Facebook is being very upfront about the rules of the game. If you want to invest in Facebook, you are investing in Mark Zuckerberg and his stewardship of the company. You will not be able to take control of the company as a public shareholder. Period.

“Corporate governance experts” do not invent the future. They don’t build things of value. And they don’t get to dictate the terms of a contract between a company and its investors.

If CalSTRS, or any other “corporate governance expert” doesn’t like the rules of the road that Zuck is laying down, there is a very simple solution: don’t buy the stock.

I predict there will be plenty of investors willing to take Zuck’s terms, but if there aren’t, Facebook will change course. It’s that simple.

Markets work.

But there are two kinds.

The first are what I’d call “traders.”

• They don’t care if a stock fits their tolerance for risk.
• They pick it because they think it’s about to pop. Up or down.
• They “design” a trade with an entry, stop loss and exit plan.
• They want to get in and get out fairly quickly. Could be a few hours, a few days or a few weeks.
• They’re the ones who have streaming quotes on their screen, and they refresh their broker’s mobile app six times a day.

If that description fits you, I can save you some time: we’re not designing Riskalyze for you.

You’re still welcome to use the product. If you find a way to use it that adds value to your investing, we’d be thrilled. And in fact, I’d love to hear it if you do.

But the other kind needs some attention. Let’s call them “investors.”

• They’d consider using an advisor or wealth manager if the fees weren’t so expensive, or if they had enough money to manage to make the fees worth it.
• They typically have less than $1 million to manage, and the sweet spot is between $20,000 and $350,000.
• They don’t want managing their money to take over their lives.
• They don’t want to design trades, do lots of hard math or make short term investments. That feels almost like gambling to them.
• They just want a balanced, diversified portfolio that feels safe, has a good chance to grow in value, and lets them sleep well at night.

If that’s you, then you’re definitely a Riskalyze investor.

Many of these folks, through no fault of their own, have lapsed into “buy and ignore” investing. Beyond hearing something alarming on Cramer, or watching the value of one of their investments plummet, they have no real process or rationale for knowing when to rebalance their portfolio.

That’s the problem we’re working to solve.

And when average investors can easily convert their investment ideas into decisions, and find it simple to keep their portfolio aligned with their risk tolerance, we’ll have succeeded.

This post originally appeared on the Riskalyze Blog.

Pinterest, one of the hottest startups of 2011, is…gasp…generating revenue.

Perhaps their “sin” is that they are generating revenue quietly. If you pin something from Amazon or the like, they append their affiliate code to it and make a commission off your purchase.

Revenue is not scandalous. It’s not a conflict of interest that requires a disclaimer. You’re using a free service. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that they’re making money off of things you do with the product.

That benefits you and them. It harms exactly zero people.

There is nothing noble about building a service that delights and adds value to its users, fails to find a way to cover its costs and make a nice profit for its founders and shareholders, and then ignominiously shuts down.

So let’s stop the Silicon Valley scandal game. Good for you, Pinterest. I hope you make a boatload of money, start making boffo profits, and become a lasting part of our lives.

I know you’ve already achieved that with my wife.

Honeywell is suing Nest for patent infringement on their amazing new Internet-connected smart thermostat.

Does Honeywell have an Internet-connected smart thermostat? No.

Do they have patents for an Internet-connected smart thermostat? No.

The silliest of the patents they do hold is the one for “displaying grammatically complete sentences while programming a thermostat.”

That’s right…Honeywell claimed that they invented the concept of displaying words on the face of a thermostat. And some nitwit at the Patent Office gave them the patent.

The patent system is designed to help society by promoting the publication of great scientific breakthroughs in exchange for a temporary monopoly to monetize them. If the inventor will agree to push science forward by disclosing the nuts and bolts of their invention, they get a short-term monopoly to make money on it.

There is no breakthrough here. No science. Just an idea so ridiculously simple that the word “obvious” should be stamped on it.

I have news for Honeywell: they didn’t invent words. Or English. Or the use of either in relation to a thermostat.

This is the kind of abuse that is giving patent system critics the grounds to propose its complete abolishment, which would be bad for innovation and ruinous for our country.

Forgot to hit send on this post I put in the can a few days ago. But it’s still three minutes to midnight, so here is Saturday’s blog post.

Listen as a five year old girl looks at logos and interprets what they represent.

The funny part is that it’s easy to tell that her parents drink Starbucks, drive Mercedes, gas up at BP and use Macs.

After all, didn’t that happen to MySpace?

I was about to write a post talking about why MySpace lost. Some bad technology decisions, some really bad product decisions and a general lack of innovation.

But instead, later yesterday afternoon, Mark Zuckerberg wrote this post for me.

He posted a picture of his desk.

THAT is why Facebook is worth $100 billion dollars.

And unless there is a big wave that they can’t get on top of (I think mobile is one big risk point for them), that’s why they’ll be worth even more in the future.

Great companies focus on their users and ship great products.

It’s what we’ve tried to embody here at Riskalyze. And if you look at the arc of what Facebook has accomplished since 2003, they’ve clearly accomplished that goal.

Because money is always tight in most companies (except Facebook, apparently), raises are given out sparingly. And because retraining internal employees to do new jobs feels like double work, new hires are typically selected from the outside.

So often, employees feel under appreciated or underpaid, and begin to notice that the only thing they can do to get new responsibilities or a higher pay check is to find a new job.

Of course, as soon as they do that, their old company will have to hire somebody new, and have to incur the huge costs of training that person from scratch. They would have actually saved money if they had given their existing employee opportunities and room to grow.

An acquaintance of mine down in the valley joined a startup called UpMo as VP of Product, and is aiming to change all of that.

Take a look at their short launch video…it’s a great idea and a great product that could really help companies keep their talent challenged and growing in their jobs.

Congrats to Rob and the team at UpMo!

Enjoy. And a big hat tip to Zack Miller for the video.

I hear you. “What? A physical letter? Like in the mail?”

Yes, in the mail. All the way from “across the pond” in London, England.

This new friend and I met in the comments on Fred Wilson’s AVC blog a few months ago. He wrote some very kind words in his note. I can’t wait until our paths cross and we can meet in real life.

Handwritten notes are a lost art form, for the most part. This one has inspired me to start doing that again.

Thanks, Rohan.

When did you get your last handwritten note?

Despite a ho-hum week, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has already gained more than 4.6 percent in the young year, and emerging markets have done even better. The Hang Seng index in Hong Kong has risen more than 11 percent, even counting time off for the Lunar New Year holiday.

In the United States, some strategists’ year-end targets are already at hand. Jim McDonald, the chief investment strategist for Northern Trust, for example, projected that the S.& P. would finish the year at 1,330. It briefly surpassed that mark last week.

“The market may have front-ended its returns for the entire year,” Mr. McDonald said. For the moment, he is not upgrading his forecast.

Then the piece shifts to practical advice, and that’s where things get ambiguous.

What is an ordinary investor, one with no claims to financial sophistication, to do under these circumstances? The same thing he or she should do under most circumstances: maintain a well-balanced, diversified portfolio while trying not to worry too much about day-to-day market noise.

Of course, investors trying to save enough for retirement or for a house or for a child’s education need to assess the amount of risk they can bear and the amount of time that they can wait for a return on their assets. Right now, Mr. Applegate advises investors to “underweight” equities and to add some riskless ballast like cash and short-term Treasuries.

That’s could be very sound advice for most investors, but how do you know?

Maybe you should lower your exposure to equities. But by how much? And how should that advice affect you if you’re 25 compared to if you’re 65, or if you’re already too risk averse for stocks?

That’s exactly what we’re working to solve at Riskalyze. An article like this might resonate with you and cause you to become less tolerant of taking big risks this year.

If you’re a Riskalyze user, you simply recapture your Risk Fingerprint, and your portfolio search will instantly reflect your heightened aversion to risk. Some users might see their allocation into stocks drop 5%. Others might see a drop of 10% or 15% or more.

There is no shortage of ideas about investing. We’re excited about building the “personalization layer” for investing, so that you can take those ideas and align your investments with your risk tolerance and beliefs about the future, in just a few easy clicks.

I hope you’ll give it a try.

From their rhetoric, it’s clear that Hollywood still hasn’t learned anything from this. And then it struck me…why don’t we teach them?

Since they’re so persnickety about licensing agreements, let’s amend all of our terms of use to require all movie moguls to use a special “Hollywood Edition” of our products.

Here are some of the special new features we’ll be giving them…

• Before you can do a Google search, you have to sit through five minutes of ads for Google Chrome, Chromebooks by Samsung, Android Phones by Motorola, and that amazing straight-to-video blockbuster, Google+. And oh yeah, don’t even think about trying to skip the ads. A cute little red “X” appears in the corner of your screen if you try to do that.
• Microsoft Word will no longer allow you to read or edit movie scripts that are obvious takeoffs from other movies. We get the message: remixing content to make something new is wrong. Bonus for us: this would have stopped you from absolutely ruining “Arthur” in the remake.
• If you fly off to your vacation home in the south of France, your Mac won’t boot up at all. Remember, it’s your fault for traveling – just buy another one with the right “region code.”
• Twitter still works fine in the Hollywood Edition. But all tweets are delayed for about three hours, unless you want to pay $10 a day to see them immediately. Bonus for you: every other tweet will offer you some really overpriced popcorn.

So enjoy “Hollywood Edition,” you movie moguls. Remember, we’re doing this for YOU because you’re the customer, and we want to make sure you’re well entertained.

Based on what we’ve learned from you, the best way to do that is annoying you to no end.

Then weeks like the last one come along. There’s an avalanche of work to do. And I can either choose to get the key things done, or to be organized. But not both.

I had to consciously choose to focus this week. To ignore the mounting piles of email. To ignore the stacked up voice mails. To ignore the task list with 38 overdue things on it.

I had to let go of order and simplicity, put my head down and get something done, which finally got wrapped up last night.

And while it didn’t feel good during that process, it sure feels good to have finished scaling the mountain.

Enjoy your weekend while I try to return some things back to order.

This is a combination of video and time-lapse photography…and it comes awfully close. Do yourself a favor: put it on full screen. Best 3 minutes of your morning.

Amazing! Thanks to my friend Casey for sending this my way.

So I cracked up when I ran across this send-up on Facebook…enjoy “If You Give a Mom a Muffin.”

If you give a mom a muffin, she’ll want a cup of coffee to go with it. She’ll pour herself some. Her three-year-old will spill the coffee. She’ll wipe it up. Wiping the floor, she will find dirty socks. She’ll remember she has to do laundry. When she puts the laundry in the washer, she’ll trip over boots and bump into the freezer. Bumping into the freezer will remind her she has to plan supper. She will get out a pound of hamburger. She’ll look for her cookbook.

The cookbook is sitting under a pile of mail. She will see the phone bill, which is due tomorrow. She will look for her checkbook. The checkbook is in her purse that is being dumped out by her two-year-old. She’ll smell something funny. She’ll change the two-year-old. While she is changing the two-year-old the phone will ring. Her five-year-old will answer and hang up. She’ll remember that she wants to phone a friend to come for coffee. Thinking of coffee will remind her that she was going to have a cup. She will pour herself some. And chances are, if she has a cup of coffee, her kids will have eaten the muffin that went with it.

My sweetie will vouch for the fact that this is 100% accurate. Have a great weekend!

You have a dream. You put together an organization and start raising money. You never have enough money to fund yourself forever…only to get yourself to the next big milestone.

To gain market traction, you focus in on your niche. On the Republican side, Mitt Romney is focused on economic and national security conservatives. Rick Santorum is focused on social conservatives. Ron Paul on the libertarian-minded folks. They’ve each gotten some level of traction with their respective “niche markets.”

But one key difference comes after you start getting traction.

If you’re a presidential candidate, you really have to expand beyond your initial niche market and start appealing to a broader coalition (hopefully without losing many initial supporters) or you’ll never win a diverse set of primaries, much less a general election.

But if you’re a startup and you’ve chosen your niche well, you can build a profitable, growing and incredibly successful business without expanding your target much at all. You certainly might want to at some point, but there are plenty of successful companies who never do.

Riskalyze is laser-focused on the needs of non-day-trading self-directed investors. The folks who open an E*TRADE or TD Ameritrade or Charles Schwab account and manage their own brokerage or retirement account.

I don’t know if we’ll eventually expand our focus beyond that market niche. But I do know this: we’ve got a game-changing product that has clearly struck a chord with that kind of investor.

So that’s where our focus will be for a long time.

You can check out the interview here.

If you aren’t already a fan of Tradestreaming, they’ve got some incredible resources and an awesome weekly email newsletter with interesting links. Check it out at Tradestreaming.com.

The stated goal behind these bills – combating piracy – is not a bad one. I believe strongly in intellectual property rights. (And the technology industry has created the most valuable intellectual property of the last two decades, so I suspect most tech people do too.)

But these two bills are really not about piracy. They’re about one industry trying to get Congress to give them an uneven playing field over another – and equip the government with the tools to “take down” sites without due process.

Google has the best explanation of these bills and a petition you can sign to tell Congress “stop piracy, don’t end liberty.”

I hope you will.

But there’s a lot of new technology being developed that will significantly change how we interact with our computers. Microsoft work on motion control is a good example. And voice recognition is gaining ground is well.

As you can see from that typo, voice control just isn’t perfect yet. It’s taking me a long time to write this blog post via voice control on my android. Much longer than just using a keyboard.

Someday, will be able to speak fluidly to our computers and voice control will just work.

But not yet.

Today, we remember a man who proved that you can change the world with simple courage, and the willingness to do the right thing.

If you haven’t listened to Dr. Martin Luther King’s entire speech overlooking the National Mall in Washington DC, today is the day to do it.

Thank you, Dr. King, for upholding the self-evident truth that everyone is created equal.

Your dream is well on its way to becoming reality.

Lots of people have written lots of things about Tim Tebow.

He’s not the first athlete to express his faith on the field. He’s not even the first one to do it in a noticeable way.

But what I love about Tebow is how he’s consistently ignored the critics, put his head down and played his heart out. You can feel his passion to win.

And simply because of that, whether he wins or loses today, he’s a winner in my book.

The Governor has proposed a 7% increase in state spending, from $86 billion to $92 billion. Then at the same time, he announces that we have a $9 billion deficit. Well, I’m no math expert, but it seems to me that we’d only have a $3 billion deficit if he hadn’t have raised spending 7%.

Meanwhile, revenues are actually climbing without an increase in tax rates. It’s a fragile piece of progress that raising tax rates could destroy and send plummeting in the wrong direction.

And in that budget proposal, the Governor makes education his last and lowest priority.

His partisan supporters may want to disagree, but let’s look at the facts: the Governor decided to throw our education system overboard as the “chum” for his $7 billion tax increase initiative.

He’s told the voters that if they pass his tax rate increases, he’ll use those new dollars to increase education spending. And if they won’t, he’ll savage education with cuts.

In response, the taxpayer-funded machinery of the education establishment has lined up and agreed to reward the Governor for this slap in the face by telling all of us that “we’ve got to support the Governor’s tax initiatives…if we help him, he’ll help us.”

Here’s an idea: why don’t we grow a spine? Why don’t we tell the Governor that education is far more important for the future growth and prosperity of our state than the alphabet soup of government bureaucracy that he’s funding?

Before we threaten voters with cutting education, maybe we should threaten to cut the California Acupuncture Board, or the Office of Administrative Hearings, or the Division of Apprenticeship Standards, or the Arbitration Certification Program, or the Board of Behavioral Sciences, or the Office of Binational Border Health, or the California Biodiversity Council.

And gee, I’m still only in the Bs.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s because the voters would vote down these tax increases and demand that our state government get leaner, more focused and more efficient with taxpayer dollars.

I can imagine the debate in the Governor’s office. “Nah, voters are chumps. They’ll never figure it out. We’ll just throw education overboard, and the big money will come swimming right over to us.”

It’s wrong to use education as bait for tax increases. And the community college system should stand up to the Governor and tell him that.

So whatever you do, don’t forget that you can’t believe everything you read. (Hat tip to my friend George for this piece of morning humor.)

This is a striking graph, using numbers from the White House Office of Management and Budget, to demonstrate the size of our nation’s budget deficits as a percentage of GDP.

While you can’t completely ascribe one President’s deficit to that President’s policies…after all, much of the economy and the policies driving spending are in place when a President takes office…the question we ask ourselves as voters is “are this President’s policies making us more fiscally sustainable, or less fiscally sustainable.”

The second President Bush clearly took a number of steps that pushed us in the wrong direction. And President Obama has clearly accelerated us in the wrong direction.

The next President – whether elected in 2012 or 2016 – will be hitting the brakes and changing direction.

In fact, one could argue that even if President Obama is re-elected, he may be forced by the laws of fiscal gravity to do the same.

Time will tell.

He is again recommending that everyone plan on money magically falling from the sky. This year, the new funds will supposedly come from his new proposal to raise taxes, which he claims will raise $7 billion dollars.

Of course, the last time we tried to raise taxes, it was projected that the higher rates would give us $10 billion, and tax revenues ended up dropping $9 billion. I don’t see how we can “afford” another tax increase at that rate, but maybe the Governor has some kind of magical powers I’m not aware of.

If the tax initiative is voted down by the voters (likely), or the revenues don’t materialize after the rates increase (even more likely), the 2012-13 budget triggers will cut community college funding by $525MM (the effect on Sierra would be another $5MM to $6MM).

So we have a big challenge on our hands. Fortunately, we spent 2005 to 2009 aggressively building our reserves, so we have a chance of navigating our way to a safe landing.

One thing is clear: it is a moral imperative that we don’t take these cuts out on our students. Focusing budget reductions on cutting courses for job training, degrees and transfers is the equivalent of amputating your leg because you stubbed your toe.

Instead, we’re going to have to take the hard steps to reshape how we deliver education, so we can serve more students with the funding we have.

This isn’t complicated; it’s just hard. Change is hard. But change is here whether we like it or not. And let’s remember that most of our community are paying more in taxes than they ever have before. It would be wrong to take out our budget problems on them.

“We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on Facebook, we shall fight on Twitter and the blogs, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength, we shall defend our old-fashioned way of reading, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight in the libraries, we shall fight in the bookstores and in the streets if we must; we shall never surrender our books.”

I’m a huge fan of my Kindle, for a variety of reasons. I love having my entire library come with me across countries, across continents, in my pocket, and in long lines. I read far more because of it.

At the same time, I still buy certain kinds of books in their paper form, particularly presidential biographies, which I love to collect.

What do you think? Do the benefits of e-books outweigh the drawbacks? Or do you love e-books so much that you can’t imagine buying dead trees any more?

If you’re interested, you can read more about the process that Cacey and I used to set those goals here.

Today’s post is focused on the last three categories: intellectual, family and social.

Read 16 books. I’m not sure how many books I read last year, but this year I’m going to try and keep track. I want to read 1 book a month, plus 1 bonus book a quarter. I generally read business, history and fiction books. I do 90% of my reading on Kindle, though the first book I’m starting, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobelist Daniel Kahneman, was a gift from a good friend and mentor of mine in paper form.

Learn to play through one saxophone book. I own a saxophone that I don’t know how to play. There, I said it. I also own several starter saxophone books. I don’t have time to take lessons this year, but I’m going to teach myself to play through one of my sax books by the end of the year. First step: getting it out of the case and putting it in my office.

Plan 2 date nights with Cacey every month. I love hanging out with my sweetie and we need time away from our kids to talk, think and have fun together. I am hoping to overachieve this goal, but we wanted to set ourselves up for success. That’s 24 hot dates in 2012.

Do a 1:1 “kid date” every month. We’re both going to take one of our kids out on a one-on-one “date with dad” or “date with mom” every month. We’ll alternate so that each of them get to do this every month with alternating parents. This can be as simple as going to McDonald’s and getting $1 ice cream cones, or it can be going out to dinner. We’ll err on the side of simple.

Do 6 planned family activities on Sunday afternoons. With my job as intense as it is, it’s really easy to just zone out on Sundays. 6 times a year, we’re going to do better than that and plan an activity to make memories with our kids. Whether it’s taking them to Apple Hill or taking them to the park to play, we hope to do this way more than 6 times, but that’s an absolute minimum.

Have Spencer play t-ball this summer. One of the ideas I scratched down was “invest in developing our kids’ talents.” Emma is still only 2, so we don’t have a specific activity she’ll do this year, but Spencer will be 5 this summer. He just finished doing Taekwondo over the winter and really excelled in it. So we think t-ball will be a great outlet for him this year.

Host 10 dinners and a party at our house. We constantly say “we want to have that person over for dinner” and then it doesn’t happen. So we’re working on having 10 different small dinner parties and one larger barbecue party at our house (1 per month, except for December). We’re focused less on inviting good friends we see all the time and more on folks we don’t know well enough. I’d invite everyone who reads this blog, but we don’t have a very large house, so my apologies in advance if you don’t make it to one of these.

So there you have it: most of my intellectual, family and social goals for 2012. What did I miss?

If you’re interested, you can read more about the process that Cacey and I used to set those goals here.

Today’s post is focused on the financial, spiritual and physical categories. This will be the least specific and shortest post because many of them aren’t things I would post online. But I’ve still got a few good ones to list.

Pay down debt by $x. We have some opportunities that could come into our reach in 2013, but only if we pay down our debt by a fairly audacious amount. So we set a pretty audacious goal with specific targets for how much we were going to pay down, and in what order. We’re going to monitor our progress twice a month.

Grow cash reserves to $x. It only takes having a “liquidity crisis” once to learn this lesson and I think that happened for me 15+ years ago. If we have to tap our cash reserve, we work to build it back up in a month or less. But most of the time, it just sits there and collects interest. When you have it, you don’t need it. (How much should this be? Ideally, enough to cover 3-6 months of expenses. I wish mine was that large. It’s not.)

Read through the New Testament. I’m a Christian, so reading the story of God creating a new covenant of hope and promise with mankind is meaningful and important to me. Cacey and I both use YouVersion on the web and on our phones, and they have an awesome daily reading plan. I picked one called Project 345 and I have it delivered by email (I’m anal retentive about clearing out my inbox so that will make it happen).

Work out 12x per month. This means I’ll continue to shoot for hitting the gym 3x a week. Working out at hotel gyms will count, too. I try to do 15 minutes of weights and 25-30 minutes on the elliptical. (This is the primary place I get my reading time in, too.) What changed? If I can’t get to the gym 3x in a week, I’ll have to make it up. I’ll either go 4x the following week, or I’ll make it up by going for a 30-minute run that week.

Develop and stick to a food routine (by Jan 31). I’m a creature of habit when it comes to food. I usually find my 1 or 2 things I order at a restaurant and stick to those. I want to create a better routine for how to make good food choices, especially when traveling.

So there you have it: most of my financial, spiritual and physical goals for 2012. What did I miss?

If you’re interested, you can read more about the process that Cacey and I used to set those goals here.

Today’s post is focused on the “career” category and most of my goals are posted here. There are a few company goals around things that we aren’t ready to announce yet, so I won’t post those.

If I didn’t know how to make something measurable, I used the words “develop plan” so I can work on making it so. If there’s no deadline listed, the deadline is the end of the year.

Deepen my product design and management skills. To do that, I’m going to identify 3 books to read and 1 conference to attend on that subject. I don’t particularly love conferences, so unless I think it’s going to be a kick-butt one that will really be a game-changer for Riskalyze, I’ll cut that part and stick with the books.

Get really proficient with CSS + PHP. I wrote my first code in BASIC when I was 12 years old. I’ve written HTML, CSS, ColdFusion and a little bit of PHP. It’s critical to my job to understand the architecture of all of this technology I work with, and I’m pretty good at that. But I want to go a level deeper this year and be fully capable of coding a web app by myself, even if I never do. I’m convinced it will make me a better startup CEO.

Develop plan to do networking events more efficiently. I like meeting people. I’m a pretty social person. But networking events are very polarized for me: either I feel like I’m right at the center of the action the whole time, or I feel like I’m using my time inefficiently. I’m not the least bit interested in making superficial connections and firing off business cards like scatter shot, but I think I can approach this better.

Develop plan to deepen relationships with tech leaders and journalists. I have some great friendships in our industry, and I really value them. I want to deepen and broaden the friendships I have with great entrepreneurs and tech journalists. I think I can give more value than I take in a lot of those situations, and I want to be in a better position to do that in 2012.

Decide whether to run for re-election in 2012 (by June 15). I’m entering my eighth year as a Sierra College Trustee. I’ve been elected to the Board twice, and my colleagues have elected me Board President for two of those eight years. I’ve accomplished much of what I set out to do, but I love Sierra and am passionate about education. Is there something great I can add by running for another four year term?

Fix the Academic Enrichment policy and stabilize the budget at Sierra College. I have two major policy goals this year at the college. First, making some changes to our policy for academic enrichment students (high school students trying to complete college courses). Second, we need to get our budget on a stable track to return to balanced status. The state budget is undergoing a real reckoning and there are no easy answers.

So there you have it: most of my career goals for 2012. What did I miss?

As recommended in Dave Ramsey’s book, EntreLeadership, we set our goals across seven key areas of life: career, financial, spiritual, physical, intellectual, family and social. Here’s the process we used to set our goals.

1. Brainstorming. We started with a nice, clean whiteboard. I wrote the seven categories on the board with room to write ideas under each category. Then we brainstormed things we wanted to do or accomplish under each area. We didn’t filter for bad ideas or unachievable goals…any idea or concept made it onto the board. This took about 30-40 minutes.
2. Convert to Goals. Then came the hard part. I opened two Word documents on my screen (one for each of us) and listed the same categories. Then we went through and converted each idea into a specific goal. To make the list, the goal had to be very specific, and have a measurable way to see whether or not we’d achieved it. This took about 3 hours for us (with kid interruptions).
3. Review and Validate. Then we took that list of goals and really thought through each one. Was it really possible to do all of these things? Or were we setting ourselves up for failure? A few of our goals ended up getting cut. It’s not that they weren’t good or important…it’s just that other things were more important. This only took 15 minutes.

So that’s it…about 4 hours dedicated to building a more productive and purposeful 2012.

The rest of this week, I’m going to share some of the goals I set. A few of them are personal and will remain that way. On some of them (like financial goals), I’ll edit out the numbers for privacy.

But you’ll have a good sense of the choices I made. Maybe your comments will inspire me to add or change my goals, and maybe you can use some of mine for yourself.

A few of these icons are unchanged from the art we purchased, but most of them were completely different. I spent several hours in Photoshop changing their meaning to fit our purposes.

Anybody care to speculate what each of these icons represent?

I’ll give you a hint: the new feature is called Snapshots, and it’s the obvious next step after you’ve built a Riskalyze portfolio that you love.

The first person to accurately guess the purpose for even one of these icons gets a brand-new Riskalyze t-shirt. (They’re the comfy American Apparel kind, too.)

Guess away! You have to put your guesses in the Disqus comments below to qualify, otherwise I won’t know who wins.

It’s a great piece that he wrote, and I hope you enjoy it.

For Sierra College trustee Aaron Klein global adoption issues are personal

Colfax resident, wife work to aid, educate orphans in Ethiopia

By Gus Thomson, Journal Staff Writer

AUBURN CA – Through the eyes of Emma Klein, the youngest child there, Thursday’s citizenship ceremony at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services building in Sacramento was no big deal.

Plenty of talk by grownups, lots of smiles and people raising their right hands at some point.

For the adults and older children assembled – 138 in total, representing 19 different nationalities – the ceremony was the landmark moment in their lives where they received the official piece of paper showing that they are U.S. citizens.

Emma’s ceremony was the latest chapter in the personal mission Emma’s parents, Colfax couple Aaron and Cacey Klein, have taken on to help in small and large ways to ease the plight of orphans.

Aaron, well-known as a Sierra College board president, and Cacey, a blogger and decorator, have adopted two children over the past four years – a son, Spencer, now 4, in 2007, and Emma, now 2, early last year.

Both U.S. citizens by right of their adoptions, Spencer and Emma now have the official papers the government is increasingly requiring for future international travel. Both children became naturalized citizens the minute they stepped on U.S. soil but the citizenship certificate is an important piece of paper to have, said Sharon Rummery, of the Immigration Department.

“They’re citizens but they don’t have anything to show they are until they receive their certificate,” Rummery said.

Spencer was born South Korea and Emma was an orphan living in Ethiopia. While Spencer was receiving his citizenship certificate, the Kleins were in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, preparing to bring Emma back.

Aaron Klein said that the ceremony is a special one for his family.

“I think adoption has been a huge blessing for us,” Klein said.

Klein’s sister, Dora, is an adopted member of his family, having been born in Rumania. The Kleins decided to start their own adoption process in June 2006 and worked with Sacramento’s Holt International Office.

Holt social worker Lusandra Vincent said that since Emma was adopted, politics have closed adoptions in Ethiopia.

“There are a lot of politics in international adoptions but I think the nation will open again,” Vincent said. “But many other nations are looking for good families for their children.”

While adoptions are now closed in Ethiopia, the Kleins have continued to help that country by assisting the village of Adami Tulu to fund and build new classrooms. The doors opened on one school in January 2010 serving 80 children.

Fund-raising to construct another school should be completed in the coming year, Klein said.

“There will be about 800 kids there in the fall,” Klein said. “They’ll get an education and be fed two meals a day – breakfast and lunch.”

The Kleins visited the south of Ethiopia when they adopted Emma and seeing the poverty and the needs of the people was a life-changing experience, Aaron said.

“There are 163 million orphans in the world,” Klein said. “It’s a huge problem and it’s growing.”

Merry Christmas!

My daughter Emma officially became a United States citizen yesterday, just about two years to the day since my son Spencer did the same.

That means only 16 more years until she starts voting and taking over the world.

Here is Whitney Mountain’s great article in the Sacramento Bee, and I’ll post the equally great piece from Gus Thomson at the Auburn Journal tomorrow.

138 children get citizenship certificates in Sacramento ceremony

By Whitney Mountain

Many signed their names with ease. Some scribbled their names on the line with illegible penmanship, too young to sign in cursive. Others were so young they couldn’t use a pen, needing their parents to sign for them.

But the hands of every child at the immigration services ceremony Thursday afternoon held tight to the symbol of their new nationality: an American flag.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service presented 138 children and young adults with citizenship certificates in a ceremony held at the USCIS Sacramento Field Office, providing children of immigrant citizens and American adoptive parents a milestone and a document proving their citizenship.

“These children’s parents were kind enough to apply for the certificates for them so they will always be able to prove that they are U.S. citizens,” said USCIS spokeswoman Sharon Rummery. “It’s basically the birth certificate of their nationality.”

Rummery said that many of these children may have watched their parents apply and study to become American citizens. So having a ceremony to celebrate their own citizenship is meaningful for them, she said.

“The kids are all freshly scrubbed and the parents are all happy because they’re at the end of the process,” said Rummery. “We try to make it special for the kids, and the moms and dads as well.”

Aaron and Cacey Klein of Colfax celebrated their 2-year-old daughter Emma’s citizenship certification Thursday after adopting her from Ethiopia in 2009.

Their son Spencer, 4, whom the Kleins adopted from South Korea in 2007, received his certificate two years ago.

“It’s a very special thing to be an adoptive parent in a multicultural family; we are first and foremost Americans,” said Aaron Klein, “but as we adopted both of our kids, their cultures meshed together with ours, and that really is the wonder that is America.”

The Kleins missed Spencer’s certification ceremony two years ago because they were called to Ethiopia to get Emma and bring her home. But Klein said that when Spencer received his ornate certificate in the mail, they told him: ” ‘This means that when you grow up, you get to vote and help decide who the president is going to be.’ He thought that was really cool.”

After Thursday’s ceremony, Emma, along with 137 other young people, will be able to do things like vote, apply for Social Security cards, and get their driver’s licenses with ease.

“This is proof of citizenship that they can use their entire lives,” Rummery said.

Klein said the U.S. government is not only allowing these children to prove their citizenship, but also helping these children feel like members of society and part of American culture.

“They often say you can go to China and it doesn’t make you Chinese; you can go to Russia, but it doesn’t make you Russian,” he said. “But when you come to the United States, you really become an American.”

Photo Credit: Hector Amezcua, Sacramento Bee

It’s been an amazing year. We did our best to document it in our annual Christmas letter. This is the third year we’ve done this letter on the web, instead of mailing it out on dead trees.

» Read our 2011 Christmas Letter

To all of our family and friends out in Twitter, Facebook and blog land, we hope you have a wonderful holiday season and a Merry Christmas!

Yesterday I went to Walmart and demanded that they give me a cartload of merchandise for free. This demand was not well-received, so I didn’t get to the second part of my plan which would have involved criticizing the job performance of the people who were giving me free stuff.

Okay, I didn’t really go to Walmart and demand free stuff. You probably knew that because it sounded ridiculous on face value. We all understand that no entity can survive for long if it gives away its resources while asking nothing in return. And this leads me to my point: In the United States, 51% of adults pay zero federal income tax, and yet they have the right to vote. That’s the very definition of a system that can’t last.

I’m not sure where the tipping point is. So far, the power of the non-tax-paying majority has been blunted by the influence of political parties and the misdirection of the media. If the majority ever figures out that they can legally confiscate the wealth of the minority, tax rates will double overnight. My best guess is that the United States will go into a death spiral at about the point that 55% of adults pay no federal income taxes. We’ll probably get to that point as baby boomers continue to retire in large numbers.

The minimum requirement for a war is that everyone has to understand which side they are on. Paying zero federal income taxes draws a dangerously clear line. As soon as someone influential (Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, etc.) coins a catchy name for the non-tax-paying majority, everyone will automatically know which side they are on. That’s when the United States will unravel.

My recommendation for putting a safeguard on the state of the union is that every adult citizen should pay federal income taxes, even if it is just one dollar per year. For the benefit of the country, it is important to blur the line between rich and poor. By analogy, no one cares that senior citizens get discounted movie tickets, but it would be an issue if the tickets were totally free. Every theater would be clogged with senior citizens and the theater owners would go broke. There’s a huge psychological and practical difference between discounted prices and free.

I realize that taxing the poor produces little income. That’s not the point. What matters is that everyone understands we’re ultimately on the same side. I think our system of government needs that. The poor obviously pay a variety of other governmental taxes, and that probably helps blur the lines. But it can’t be healthy that the people who have the power to control the federal government’s budget don’t have any responsibility for funding it.

[Note: The best way to quote me out of context is something along the lines of “Cartoonist recommends increasing taxes on the poor!”]

Now the question is…are we reaching the tipping point faster than he thought?

My sweetheart turns 29 again today. For the second time.

I am a very blessed man to have met her, somehow convinced her to team up on this great adventure called life, and spent the last 11 years side by side.

Don’t tell her I told you this, but she is an amazing friend. She is smart and insightful, and I love to sit and talk to her over a cup of good coffee. (Or bad coffee, for that matter.)

She’s a patient mom to our two kids, who, contrary to the hilarity of our tweets, are still very much kids when they get tired.

And she’s a compassionate advocate for the cause of the fatherless that we both care so much about. She’s even turned her last two birthdays in a row into fundraisers!

I love you, Cacey Nichole Steward Klein. You’re the best. Here’s to another great year in your wonderful life.

GDP is what we tax to get the revenues to pay the bill for entitlement spending. We’re growing our spending way faster than we can possibly grow our tax revenues.

So the question isn’t “why can’t people pay just a little bit more so we can keep giving out free stuff?”

The question is: why doesn’t the federal government have to live by the same rules that our families do, namely, that you can’t grow spending in excess of your income like that without triggering a debt crisis like the one we find ourselves in.

(And…”what did they put in the water in Washington DC in 1966?”)

So he goes to Steve Jobs and tells him that they need to delay the launch and redesign the stores to get them right. Jobs comes around to the belief that he’s right, and that’s exactly what they did.

In retrospect, we had a moment a little bit like this about two weeks ago.

A few minutes after our Monday morning team meeting, I had a scheduled product meeting with Levi, our Director of Engineering, to talk about how to implement “discovery” (helping to surface investing ideas for users to try out in their Riskalyze portfolio) and “execution” (helping users figure out how to take action after they finish building a portfolio).

And then he lowered the boom on me – showing me how our user experience had gotten off track, how we were emphasizing the wrong things, how our design was trapping us into making bad design decisions.

I hated to admit it, but he was right.

I had seen the red flags for a few weeks, but I kept thinking to myself “we’ll fix that later.” Given the amazing algorithm improvements that Matt, our Director of Core Technology, had just shipped, along with the kudos and thumbs up from several visionaries in the investing and tech fields, I felt like we could get along with the product we had.

But in that moment, it became abundantly clear that Levi was right. We needed to fix these things so core to our user experience if we were going to really engage users with the product.

So we hit the reset button.

That added another week to our schedule, but it’s probably one of the most important weeks we’ll spend.

And this Thursday, you’ll get to see the fruits of this work – a brand new Riskalyze, unlike anything you’ve seen before.

Way easier to use. Incredible discovery of new investing ideas. An awesomely simple way to put your Riskalyze portfolio into action. And an elegant way to get started and make Riskalyze fit into the flow of how you invest now.

We can’t wait for you to give it a whirl.

This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for a family that loves me.

I’m thankful for a job that I love to do.

I’m thankful to work with a team of people I admire and appreciate so much.

I’m thankful to advocate for a cause I care so much about.

I’m thankful to be a part of making our community, our region, our state and our country more prosperous through education.

I’m thankful for each of you who I get to talk with every day through this blog, Twitter and Facebook. (Yes, even the trolls. It’s Thanksgiving.)

I have so much to be thankful for. And despite all of our problems and our challenges, we have so much to be thankful for as a country. Let’s not forget that.

So like the pilgrims of old who sought out freedom and found it here, let’s raise our glasses in thanks for all that we’ve been given.

Happy Thanksgiving!

“The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don’t work even harder than we did in 2008, then we’re going to have a government that tells the American people, you are on your own. If you get sick, you’re on your own. If you can’t afford college, you’re on your own…that’s not the America I believe in. It’s not the America you believe in.” -President Obama

Ever since the story of Cain killing Abel and then flippantly asking “am I my brother’s keeper?”, the appeal of community has been strong for us as humans.

But notwithstanding the demagoguery and partisan nature of his comments, there are two missing elements in the President’s call for a deeper sense of community: effectiveness and sustainability.

First, helping our community is most effective from the bottom-up, not the top-down. The successful businessman who funds five scholarships at the local community college is much more invested in the outcome for those five students than the one who writes a check to Washington DC to have his money forcibly redistributed to solve the same problem.

Second, you can’t build a community without sustainability at its core. We’ve proven that if we turn the safety net into a hammock, we never actually get the community we were promised. If it’s anywhere in the stratosphere of being equally rewarding to receive as it is to produce, we will inevitably bankrupt ourselves and never achieve that sense of community we seek.

So yes, it takes more work and thought to build an effective and sustainable sense of community. Yes, having such a community requires that we interweave the principles of individualism and responsibility throughout it. President Clinton actually understood this.

I’ve come to believe that President Obama simply doesn’t have the life experience to grasp it, because his policies don’t actually achieve his stated goal. In fact, they’ve achieved exactly the opposite in spades. They’ve dug the hole deeper for us all.

On a whim, I submitted the link to Hacker News. I’ve done that before. The HN community is a pretty awesome group. They vote up the posts they like, and you get some nice readership there.

But apparently this one struck a chord. And then it hit #1 on Hacker News.

I don’t write this blog for the stats, but I do check them once in a while to see what’s been popular with readers. This is what my Google Analytics graph normally looks like:

This is what it looks like after a post goes to #1 on Hacker News:

So thanks to all you HN people who subscribed, or followed me on Twitter, or became a new Riskalyze user! Hopefully, this blog will live up to your standards with interesting posts, though I can’t guarantee they will all discuss beer.

If you’re reading this and feeling incredibly guilty about not getting me a birthday gift (ha!), that’s awesome.

Because here’s what I want for my birthday.

Let’s get a huge head start on the next phase of the Adami Tulu Project to build a school for 500 orphans and vulnerable kids in Africa.

You can give $33 in honor of my old age.

Or $29 to make me feel young.

Or $10 to remind me how lucky I’ve been to be married to my sweetheart for the last ten years.

Or $4 to remind me how long I’ve had the awesome privilege to be a dad.

No matter what amount you give, not a dime goes to administrative salaries here in the US. It all gets put to work where it belongs.

We’re on a mission to end the global orphan crisis by keeping families together and giving people the self-sufficiency to pull themselves out of poverty. And you’ll have made a difference.

So thanks in advance.

You’ve made my birthday great.

Click Here to Donate

A politician in Washington DC decided that if neighborhoods with high unemployment just had more entertainment opportunities, people would gather, rouse their spirits and gain the motivation to look for work again.

So he creates a new government-backed loan program to encourage banks to lend money to small businesses that want to entertain the unemployed. The politician calls this “free market principles at work.”

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit.

She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar.

To solve this problem, she comes up with an ingenious new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later. Her local bank taps the government-backed loan program and gives her an interest-free line of credit that she doesn’t have to make any payments on for three years.

Heidi keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger and all of her patrons heartily agree that they will start paying back the money “soon” when they find jobs and things improve.

Word gets around about Heidi’s “drink now, pay later” marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi’s bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit.

By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi sees no resistance when she increases the price of wine and beer to $18 a glass. Her sales volume spikes tremendously, and her profit margins are incredible. It almost seems too good to be true.

Back at the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert traders figure out a way to make huge commissions by packaging up the loans to Heidi as “Drink Bonds” which are then bundled, rated AAA by the ratings agencies, and sold to investors on the international securities market.

Because the drink bonds have such wonderful returns – I mean, who knew you could get blue-collar folks to pay $18 for a glass of beer? – naive investors everywhere generate incredible demand for the bonds, driving up their prices.

A couple of years later, even though the drink bonds are still rising, a risk manager at the local bank notifies Heidi that it’s time for her to start paying down her line of credit, so the bank can pay back the bondholders.

Heidi then pulls out her ledgers and demands payment from her patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics, they are somehow incapable of paying back their drinking debts. Heidi is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and Heidi’s 11 employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, the value of Drink Bonds fall by 90%.

The collapsed value of the bonds destroys the bank’s liquidity, and prevents it from issuing new loans, freezing credit in the community.

The suppliers for Heidi’s bar had granted her generous payment terms, as well as investing their pension fund into Drink Bonds, so they claim bankruptcy too and lay off 150 workers.

The default on the Drink Bonds throws the entire economy into chaos, as investors become fearful that other bonds may be equally “safe.” The markets plunge, lose half their value, and many companies begin laying off workers.

Fortunately, the bank, the brokerage houses and all of their respective executives are bailed out by a multi-billion dollar cash infusion from the government, because as the President says, “we need to help the people who need help.” The government also announces a series of regulations to “fix” the problem.

The funds required for the bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle class, non-drinkers who have never set foot in Heidi’s bar.

And that, my friends, is pretty close to what caused the Great Recession.

(Edited and adapted by me, original author unknown.)

The new Steve Jobs biography comes out and he’s told President Obama “you’re headed towards being a one term President” and lists the union stranglehold on education, and the anti-jobs regulatory climate as two reasons why.

I’m driving through Nevada City the other day (not exactly known as the capital of bedrock conservatism) and the Subaru with a Patagonia sticker in front of me is now sporting a bumper sticker that says “can we all just admit that Obama was a mistake?”

Something is happening. People of all stripes, all backgrounds, all points of view are coming to a few conclusions.

• No one political party has a monopoly on good ideas.
• We’ve been doing the exact opposite – bailouts, regulations, big new entitlement programs – of what we need to do to get our country moving again.
• Protesting doesn’t solve problems, voting does.
• Protesting doesn’t create jobs. Voting to create the right environment for job creation, and working hard to create opportunity for yourself will.

Peggy Noonan says it best: the President’s body language is communicating that he knows America is coming for the keys.

I haven’t decided who I’m going who to vote for yet, but I think we’re only a few months away from discovering who the 45th President of the United States will be.

(And if you’re a fan of President Obama, don’t panic. The Republicans are incredibly good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. So even if the President can’t win, the other side can certainly still lose.)

UPDATE: My wise cousin, who we call “The Other Aaron” pointed out in the comments that “protesting doesn’t solve problems, voting does” is a statement that on its face doesn’t make a lot of sense. And without the context of what I meant, he’s right. So I expounded a bit more above.

It has been interesting to round the bend of 30 and see how things are different. I don’t know what’s magical about your age starting with a “3″ but people stop talking about what a wonder kid you are. You’re supposed to be doing important things. It feels different.

I never made a “30 under 30″ list in a magazine, and I have no idea if I’ll make one of the “40 under 40″ ones, but I do know this. No matter what happens to me from here…

• I have a wife who is my best friend, closest confidante and the most beautiful woman I know.
• I have a son who is smart, talented and growing up to be an incredible young man.
• I have a daughter who is beautiful, engaging and full of spark and energy.
• And I have an extended family that is second to none.

If no more “good” things came my way after today, I’d still be one of the most blessed people on the face of Planet Earth.

I’ve only had two people unsubscribe from the daily email so far…but this is just a reminder that I pay a few bucks every month to a company called Feedblitz to make a weekly email option possible.

So if you don’t want to get an email from me six days a week, just click here to subscribe weekly.

I wouldn’t want to get an email from me six days a week either.

“It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about.”

The average federal worker’s total compensation rose from $122,697 in 2009 to $126,369 in 2010.

Meanwhile, 25 million private sector Americans are out of work.

I know a lot of wonderful people who work for the federal government, but this kind of comment is just amazingly out of touch with the facts.

It’s the kind of thing that leads people to believe there are two Americas after all: the one that works for the federal government, and the one that doesn’t.

#1: I wanted to fully convey every part of my thoughts on a subject. Rather than writing a few paragraphs about something, I felt like I needed to write a masterful 1000-1200 word post talking about all the nuances of an issue. Which naturally takes more time. And as it turns out, those who bother to read my blog actually like the concise posts better (like this one, and this one).

#2: I worry about whether one of my circles will get bored. I have three distinct audiences for this blog: the tech startup and investor community who I love interacting with at Riskalyze; the supporters, colleagues and staff I work with at Sierra College; and the adoption and orphan care community who I advocate alongside of as an adoptive dad. Will I lose my adoption friends by blogging about technology too much?

#3: It took too long to find a great photo for each post. I love great photography and illustrating a post with a great photograph or visual seemed really important to me. And I still think posts will be more effective that way. But some concepts are hard to find illustrations for, and requiring myself to find a visual for each post ate up a lot of time I didn’t have.

The silly part of each of those mental blocks is that the alternative was not to blog at all. If I couldn’t convey every nuance of a subject, I’d convey none. If I might bore one of my circles with a post, I wouldn’t engage any of them at all. And since I didn’t have time to find a visual, I wouldn’t write the words at all.

So those excuses are gone.

I’m going to try to blog once every day, except when on vacation. They will often be short, concise posts. I’ll often post without any photo or visual, largely because I wrote the post on my Android while mobile. And if the topic is boring to you, use my multiple feeds to subscribe only to what interests you.

These posts will be on topics I’m thinking about or working on that day. I’m going to focus a little less on sharing my point of view and more on raising questions and talking ideas. I hope to learn from all of you in the comments.

I’m excited about this because writing on a more regular basis about technology, education policy and the global orphan crisis can really help me to “beta test” ideas, and increase the velocity of progress on all of these things that I work on.

So that starts tomorrow. And if I mess up, you have an open door to call me on it via the comments, Twitter or Facebook.

Update: I meant to write “weekday” when I wrote “every day” above. I’m not going to blog regularly on Sundays, but I will go ahead and do Saturday posts…because I really am having a blast with this new, easier approach. It’s made blogging fun again.

As we’ve designed Riskalyze, we’ve tried to find a balance between two seemingly contradictory values. On the one hand, we want to deliver a simple, elegant and powerful user experience. On the other hand, we want to give users as much choice and control as possible.

A few of you have asked why we were requiring users to have a Facebook or Twitter account in order to use Riskalyze. I was all set to write a blog post explaining that it was all about balancing those two values…and then we discovered something we didn’t know.

I’m excited to announce that we’ve found a way to achieve both. Starting Friday afternoon, users won’t need a Facebook or Twitter account to use Riskalyze.

Here’s how we got there.

During our beta testing, it quickly became clear that a user’s experience with Riskalyze was incredibly better when they had feedback from their friends on their list of possible investment choices. A Riskalyze portfolio is only as good as the possibilities you feed into it…so it was critically important that we make it “one-click easy” for users to get those opinions from their friends.

When it comes to Facebook, there are two official ways to facilitate that kind of sharing: the “Like” button and direct posting.

I had serious concerns about using the “Like” button for this purpose. When the user clicks the button, they have very limited control over what actually gets posted to their Facebook profile. There’s no “double check” or ability to change the content of that Facebook post. It can really annoy users.

The other approach is to ask for permission to directly post content onto the user’s Facebook page. Many sites abuse that privilege, but most are careful to give users full knowledge and control over the content of what is posted. That’s exactly how we approached it, creating a special step in our signup process to ask that question, and letting the users see exactly what the post would say in advance.

The problem is that many users are rightfully leery of giving those kind of permissions to any third party service, because they’ve been burned before. And it was frustrating to us to have to ask for blanket permission, just to make it easy and elegant for our users.

So here’s what we discovered yesterday: the Facebook “Share” button is still available to us. Yes, Facebook has discontinued active support for the button, but it still exists and works on thousands of sites. Most importantly, it will make “getting opinions from friends” incredibly easy for our users, without any authentication or special permissions.

When you click the Facebook “Share” button or the Twitter “Tweet” button, we’ll pop up a small window from those services, so you can review and revise it before it gets posted.

So starting late Friday afternoon, you’ll be able to create a Riskalyze account protected by a simple username and password. For those who still prefer not to remember another password, we’re still going to offer one-click sign-in with your Facebook or Twitter account. But we won’t ask you to authorize us for posting permissions, because there’s no reason that we need them.

Yes, Facebook might eventually take active steps to disable the “Share” button, and if that happens, we’ll need to rethink this approach for the benefit of our users.

But for now, we’re incredibly excited that we can deliver more choices to our users, while still giving them control over their sharing, and an elegant, powerful experience with our product.

Ann’s review was incredibly great, and I hope you’ll give it a read.

She raised two interesting points that I wanted to address here on our blog.

It was interesting to read that Ann started out testing a $1,000 investment, and ended up with the Risk Fingerprint of an “astronaut” – someone with the risk tolerance to shoot for the stars. That resulted in the algorithm putting 100% of her portfolio into stocks.

If you don’t use a dollar amount that is highly accurate, and carefully consider each Risk Fingerprint question as if that real money is at stake, the fingerprint that gets captured will inevitably be wrong – which will make the portfolio wrong for you too.

When people put in a “token” dollar amount in relation to their real portfolio, they will inevitably be more risky with that money than they would with all of it.

So Ann illustrated really well why answering the questions with “real consequences” in mind is key to capturing a Risk Fingerprint that gives you a useful portfolio at the end.

And it’s also a good reminder of why we’ve committed to the Riskalyze Security Promise, so our users can be confident that we will never sell, share or disclose their confidential dollar amount information.

I think we can do a better job of communicating how connected “accuracy” is to the results during the Risk Fingerprint process, and we’re going to work on that.

Tomorrow, I’m going to blog about why we made the tough decision to use Facebook or Twitter authentication, and why all of the data we had from our beta testing group made it clear that was the right decision for our user community.

This post originally appeared on the Riskalyze Blog.

A new day has arrived for investors.

We’ve been working around the clock for the past few days trying to get everything ready. And we’re excited to announce that after seven hard months of work, Riskalyze is finally here.

Like many web services, we’re choosing to call this our Public Beta. Gmail kept that label for about five years; we expect we’ll lose it in far less time than that. But while we’re open to the public and anyone can join our community, we’re not quite ready to call this new service “perfect.”

Yet we also know that it’s time to open it up for broader use, because we’ve already gotten such great feedback from our amazing group of beta users. They are using it to build incredible portfolios, create and follow amazing lists of stocks and ETFs, and find new investments that fit them.

And by the way, we’re not resting on our laurels either. On Monday, we have a very exciting announcement that affects every employee at 1,498 different companies across the United States. (Hint: This amazing new feature is live, so you can find out our news right away by creating your account today.)

We’re just getting started.

So I hope you’ll take five minutes right now, Riskalyze yourself, and find investments that fit you. If you create your account right away, you’ll have the very cool “Charter Member” badge on your profile, as a small electronic token of our thanks.

Investing is broken. We’re excited to be well on the road to fixing it.

We all remember where we were on 9/11.

I woke up, thumbed through my BlackBerry and saw the awful news that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. I flipped on the TV and moments later, watched as a plane appeared on one side of the screen and seconds later flew into the second tower…where I had stood just five months earlier on my honeymoon.

The world changed that day.

I remember the news anchors commenting that the Secret Service didn’t want the President back in Washington.

I remember the President, right before ordering Air Force One to take him back to the capital, speaking with moral clarity that “freedom itself was attacked today by a faceless coward…and freedom will be defended.”

Thousands of men and women in our military and intelligence agencies, led by two commanders-in-chief, have done a remarkable job of keeping us safe in the ten years since.

We still live in a dangerous world. But right now, my two kids are growing up in a time when our worst terrorist attacks happened before they were born.

I pray that will always be the case.

We will never forget.

This past Friday, Dr. Martin Luther King entered his rightful place in American history beside many of our greatest American presidents with a memorial in Washington DC.

It took 87 years to end slavery. Another 100 or so years to end segregation. And about 40 years after that, this country elected its first African-American President – a proud moment for our country, whether you agree with his policy views or not.

Dr. King took an idea enshrined in our Declaration of Independence – that all people are created equal – and turned it into a movement that changed the world and transformed the future for my daughter and every other little girl like her.

I’m incredibly thankful for his work.

Today, we’ve still got some work to do to fully realize the dream articulated by Dr. King and shared by so many. But it’s a dream that is reality for most. And that’s worth celebrating.

I just can’t wait for my next visit to Washington and visiting the new memorial.

But the premise of my post was that this was only a down payment on taking the much bigger steps to arrest the deficit, balance the budget and start paying down our national debt.

I think it’s abundantly clear that the markets have absolutely zero confidence in that next step ever coming to fruition.

I’m an optimistic guy. I tend to believe that fiscal gravity – a force just as powerful as the idea that if I drop something, it will fall downwards and not upwards – will compel governments to take the steps they must take.

But the markets may well be right (they often are), and even the most cautious optimism may well be misplaced. Bill Gross struck that tone with his note today, pointing out the real problem is not the $10 trillion of outstanding debt, but the $66 trillion of future liabilities at net present cost.

All I can say is, it was fascinating to watch people flipping their economic outlook on Riskalyze from optimistic, to pessimistic or sideways.

If the President and Congress want to reassure the world that America is still a good investment, they should cancel their recess, forget this thing they call “baselines” and start building a new federal budget from the ground up.

I’m going to find a way to put up with the view from my office for this week. We’re blessed to be spending the week with my inlaws in a sprawling beach house over on the California coast.

I didn’t really have time for a vacation, what with the Adami Tulu Project trip coming up in August. So I’m working from here Tuesday through Friday, and I’ll hang out with the family in the evenings.

I’m hoping to catch up on a lot of big projects and do some blogging. Somehow I’ll manage to deal with such a beautiful view.

You can go to Wordle.net and create a “word cloud” from your blog, so I thought I’d check it out. A word cloud will show the most common words in your posts as larger text.

I may have been writing a lot about Riskalyze recently, but it will take some time for that to get bigger, since I’ve written a lot more about our schools, apparently.

I did think it was too cool that the words “exceptional teachers” were smack in the middle. We do have a number of them at Sierra College.

I’ve had two “bad habits” with social media. I accept every Facebook friend request. I follow back everyone on Twitter.

This led to 3,200 friends on Facebook and 6,000 followers on Twitter.

The result is an overwhelming amount of spam from event invites, app requests, group additions, messages and Twitter DMs.

It’s made the signal-to-noise ratio on Facebook and Twitter really bad for me. Too much noise, not enough signal.

So I’ve come to a tough conclusion: I have to change how I use social media.

The interesting thing is that most of those 3,200 Facebook friends and 6,000 Twitter followers are real, awesome people who I enjoy interacting with. They follow my work in technology, or at Sierra College, or perhaps we know each other from advocating for adoption and orphan care.

But a bunch of them aren’t, and I’m making it worse because I’m doing it wrong.

I’m not going to give up all the wonderful things I get from social media. I’ve learned incredible things from people sending me @ replies on Twitter. I’ve gotten great input in my elected role at Sierra College from folks on Facebook. I’ve developed really important business relationships and deepened real-life friendships.

And I’ve even made a few amazing friends that I haven’t even met in real life. (One of those friends in particular is one of my favorite people in New Hampshire…you know who you are!)

So here’s what I’ve changed.

• I’ve converted my old Facebook profile to a page using Facebook’s migration tool, so I haven’t lost all of my friends. All of my posts will go there so I can keep talking with you, interacting with you and commenting on your stuff too.
• I made a new Facebook for personal friends so they can invite me to events and such. If you know my e-mail address, you can probably find it. I won’t be posting much to that page, though…if I don’t want it public, I don’t put it online!
• If you know me personally (online or offline), please feel free to friend me on my personal page. Facebook wouldn’t let me friend everyone I knew on my old profile, so please don’t feel snubbed or anything. Just be patient while I try to get all 500 to 600 personal friends accepted.
• If you don’t know me personally yet, I hope I’ll get to know you soon.
• And finally, I’m not going to follow everyone back on Twitter. I’ll try to skim through and follow back the real people who look interesting, but I know I’m going to miss a bunch of great people. If I should be following you back, send me an @ mention and say hi! I try to read all of those.

I’m hoping these changes will make social media an even more powerful tool than it was before for talking, interacting and getting to know you.

Don’t be a stranger!

Update: Just to be clear, to “know me” isn’t necessarily to have met in real life! There are a number of people I’ve met in real life who I don’t know. There are a number of people I’ve only met online who I really know. If you feel like we know each other, please go ahead and friend my personal Facebook page (just be patient as I catch up). The goal here isn’t exclusivity, just the elimination of spam.

We got him.

Nearly ten years after a September morning we will never forget, Osama bin Laden is dead.

Revenge never feels good, but justice certainly does. And justice is now done for 3,000 men, women and children killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and aboard four airliners.

I could not be prouder or more thankful for the men and women of our Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, CIA and others who we’ll never know had a hand in this.

Somewhere last night, a handful of Navy SEALs were clinking their beers in celebration of justice done.

We owe them a lot.

Viva USA!

Today is my last day.

My last day working with a team that I’ve had the privilege to lead for four years.

My last day working for a boss who has challenged, coached and supported me for four years.

My last report for the weekly management team e-mail we all read on Monday. (I won’t be reading this one next week.)

That’s a lot of "lasts" for one day.

At 5:00 today, I technically don’t have any job responsibilities until Tuesday. That feels just a little bit strange, to be honest.

Cacey, the kids and I are taking a long weekend on the coast…to rest up, recharge and get ready for the exciting challenges ahead of us.

No blogging, probably not much tweeting. A lot of reading.

We get back on Monday evening.

I predict that Tuesday will be a day of firsts.

Some of you are involved in education reform, are employees at Sierra College, or are supporters of the work I’ve done there since 2004.

Others of you are involved in the adoption and orphan care community, either as adoptive parents yourselves, as advocates for ending the global orphan crisis that touches 163 million children, or as supporters of the Adami Tulu project to build a school for orphans in Africa.

And while I’ve always written about business and technology here and there, I’m sure there will be a growing group of readers primarily interested in my new startup, Riskalyze. I’d love nothing more than to share some great ideas here and have some really smart people like you help make them better.

Despite the three distinct audiences, there’s no way I’ll ever be posting to this blog more than once a day on a regular basis. I just don’t have time.

But there are plenty of you who belong to just one of these groups, and you just don’t want to be bothered with my posts for the other two audiences.

So with the help of a cool tool called Yahoo Pipes, I created three new feeds so that you can have only the posts that you want delivered to your inbox by e-mail, or to whatever web site or software you use for reading blogs.

So you can subscribe to all of my posts, or just the posts about one of those three areas of interest. You’ll find these feeds in my sidebar to the right of this post, and it looks like the example at left.

All three of the new feeds will still include “general” posts and the odd post here or there about my family or things happening with me personally. In fact, if you want a sampling of what’s included with each one, just click the orange “RSS” button beside each of them to check out the prior posts included in that feed.

Some people have suggested you can’t have a blog about three distinct topics. But I really couldn’t stop blogging about any of this – they are all things I’m passionate about.

I hope you find this useful!

I hope you’ll indulge me for a minute so I can share some exciting personal news.

I’m joining a brand new startup company as CEO.

Here’s a little bit of the story about how it happened.

My 20-Year Career at Age 32

I’ve always had the good fortune to work with entrepreneurial companies – from my dad’s distribution business where I started packing boxes in the back room at age twelve, to a web consulting firm I sold, to a business ops software company that built a great team and a great product, but ultimately didn’t get funded.

All in all, the good has always outweighed the bad. There’s just nothing like being a part of limitless opportunity – and that’s what the American system of entrepreneurial capitalism is all about.

During the last four years, I’ve spent most of my time leading global product development for a financial services firm with operations in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago. That gave me the chance to broaden my experience with consumer marketing and international. It’s been a great privilege to work with an incredible team of people there.

And now, that chapter is coming to a close and a new chapter is opening.

For the last fifteen years, I’ve had a front row seat to watch technology – and the web – change the world and remake how we go about our daily lives.

When I started messing around with this stuff in the late 1980s, “twitter” was something that only birds did and “facebook” was what happened when you fell asleep while reading. We didn’t have Kindles or iPhones. (Heck, we didn’t even have cell phones – I remember when my dad had a pager so we could make him stop at a pay phone and call us!)

The New Opportunity

As I’ve spent the last four years building technology products and interacting with some of the world’s most brilliant market traders, it’s been fascinating to watch how they all deal with risk. Every economic decision we make is motivated by one of two things: seeking opportunity, or avoiding pain.

If you think about it, how we see the world through that lens of risk is very personal to each of us – you might even say it’s like a fingerprint. And yet it also changes over time. Our own job, our finances, national security, world events and the financial markets cause us to constantly shift a little bit closer to seeking opportunity, or a little bit closer to avoiding pain.

Earlier this year, I was presented with a fascinating opportunity. There’s some incredible technology that can actually capture that “risk fingerprint” from each of us, and let us use it to make better risk/reward decisions. It’s groundbreaking stuff, and nobody has ever tried to do this quite the same way before.

The new company is called Riskalyze. I’m joining the company as CEO on March 1.

We’re going to take that raw technology and transform it into a set of products that will fundamentally change how the world makes risk/reward decisions.

I’m incredibly excited about the challenge that lies ahead. For one thing, you’ll be hearing more from me on business and technology topics I haven’t been able to write about before. (Financial Services is a highly regulated industry, so corporate policies prevented me from writing much about it.) I’ll be sharing a lot about what we’re doing as our story unfolds.

In fact, I’m hoping the “regulars” who follow this blog – everyone from friends and colleagues in business, to folks at Sierra College, to people in the orphan care and adoption community – will be intrigued enough to try this out when it’s ready. (If that’s you, go ahead and comment on this post, and I’ll make sure you get a “Backstage Pass” to check it out before it launches!)

I had to hold this post until I could meet with my incredible staff and share this news with them personally. It’s been a privilege to lead them for four years. It’s also tough to leave an incredible boss, who taught me a lot and gave me all the support that I needed to be successful. I trusted her with my career for those four years and she never let me down. I owe her a debt of gratitude.

So there you have it – one chapter closes, and another one begins.

I can’t wait to get started.

100 years ago this week, a child was born to middle class parents in Tampico, Illinois.

That little boy grew up to become the President of the United States.

And then in 1987, he stood in Berlin and said the words that his own State Department criticized as naïve and provocative, words they edited out of his speech twice (he just kept putting them back in).

“Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

And just two years later, that wall came down. Freedom and democracy took hold in Eastern Europe. And the world has never been the same – we saw the long-term effects in Cairo today.

Thank you, Mr. President. The world is safer and more secure, and America is a better place because of your selfless service to the American people.

We had a great Christmas and really enjoyed our two kids at such great ages (Spencer is three and a half, and Emma is one and a half). We had our traditional "three Christmases" this year – Christmas Eve with Nana and Papa (Cacey’s parents), Christmas morning at our place, and Christmas Day with Grammie and Pops (my folks).

New Year’s Day marked a year since we landed back on US soil with Emma. It’s just amazing to think she’s already been a part of our family for the majority of her short life. We just can’t imagine life without both of these two adorable kids.

I have some really exciting things to share with you about the Adami Tulu project, and next week’s Sierra College board meeting. I’ll try to write that over the weekend!

A little over a week ago was the 55 year anniversary of a moment.

The establishment said that the value of a human being depended on the color of their skin.

The establishment said that if a white person got on a bus, a black person should stand up and move to the back.

The establishment said that was the way things were, and compliance would promote peace and tolerance.

The establishment was wrong.

And a tired woman named Rosa Parks – who decided enough was enough – changed the world.

As the dad of an African-American daughter, I’m so grateful that she had the courage to do something radical for her time.

So now the question lies with the rest of us.

Will we comply with the way things are because it’s the “reasonable thing to do?”

Or will we see our own opportunities to change the world…and take action?

I love how Bing chose to remember our veterans today and had to share this powerful photo. We live in the land of the free, because of the brave.

Thank a soldier, sailor, marine or airman today for their service.

Photo Credit: Bing.com / James P. Blair / CORBIS

My VAIO is back. The pop, crackle, snap has been repaired. All of my draft blog posts have returned. So I should be back to posting on a regular basis, starting tomorrow morning.

First up: the next installment in the “It’s Time to Change the World” series.

I hope your enthusiasm for this series of posts hasn’t waned in the last few weeks! The need is even greater than it was before.

My grandfather served in the United States Air Force during World War II and Korea, and on Memorial Day, he is often in my thoughts. I hope you take a few moments on this important day to remember the men and women who have given all for our freedom.

I’ve been all but absent from blogging for the last ten days. Part of it was work responsibilities, with a big event coming up in Silicon Valley in a few weeks. Another part was that I’ve been working on a series of posts about a cause very near and dear to my heart, and that has taken up a lot of time. Getting closer to sharing those with you.

In any case, I think that I’m back in the saddle tomorrow. Hopefully those of you who are regular readers didn’t mind the absence too much.

Have a great Memorial Day and remember that freedom is never free!

(Mobile, feed and e-mail readers: embedded video above.)

As you may remember, before he was President, Ronald Reagan was an ambassador for General Electric, touring the country and making speeches at their plants, as well as the host of the company’s weekly television show on CBS.

Today, GE is remembering President Reagan’s leadership by sponsoring the Ronald Reagan Centennial Celebration. I love the quote from the ad: “Because long before he changed the world, or led a nation, or governed a state, he inspired our company.”

On days like these, I sure miss President Reagan.

(E-mail and RSS feed readers can click through for the video.)

Most of you know that I haven’t been the biggest fan of President Obama’s policies, but he absolutely nailed it today and deserves credit for the speech that he delivered in Oslo while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations could not convince Al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.

“…whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped to underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.”

Thank you, Mr. President, for recognizing our brave men and women in uniform for the tremendous sacrifices they have made to make our world a safer and more secure place. They deserved that speech, and you deserve our thanks for writing it.