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.

The California Community College system (of which Sierra is a part) depends on funding from the State of California. The State also determines the enrollment fees that you pay.

To help address the economic crisis, the State has cut funding for all the community colleges, set limits on the number of students we can educate, and raised enrollment fees. We want you to be aware of significant mandatory changes we must implement beginning with summer 2012:

• Enrollment fees will increase from $36 per unit to $46 per unit.
• You will be allowed fewer attempts to try to pass a class. You now have only three chances to earn a passing grade A, B, C or Pass). Every grade of D, F, No Pass AND ‘W’ (withdraw) will ‘count’ as a try. It is especially important to know that this new regulation is retroactive and will apply regardless of what term or year you made a prior attempt.

Additionally, Sierra College is subject to other State and Federal regulations that have been changed for students who receive financial aid effective summer 2012:

• We offer many repeatable classes that you can pass and take again up to a total of 4 times. The new rules limit students to taking these types of repeatable classes (such as PE and Music) only 2 times and still have those units paid for by financial aid.
• The income requirements to be eligible for a Board of Governor’s Waiver (BOGW) have become more restrictive. If you have qualified in prior years you may not qualify beginning summer 2012.

Even with all of these changes, there are ways to make certain that you get the most out of your education here at Sierra:

• Register for the next semester at the first available time for your classes.
• Fill out a FAFSA (Financial Aid) to ensure that you are getting all of the financial aid you qualify for.
• Utilize our student support services to make certain that you are successful. For example: see a counselor, attend workshops, and take advantage of free tutoring.

Just as a reminder, the state made all of these decisions, so if you disagree with them, you can go here to send your input to the Governor, and you can go here to read his response in advance.

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

I needed a new tax ID number for a subsidiary entity. I’ve tried using their online system for two weeks. It’s broken and won’t issue new numbers.

After waiting on hold for 20 minutes and hearing “we’re busy serving other customers” about 15 times, a “Mrs. Jones” came on the line.

I answered her questions. She refused to list us as a “technology” company and insisted that we be listed as a “Create Software Technology” company (whatever that means).

We got to the end of the process, she read me the new tax ID number, and advised me I’d receive the formal letter in two weeks. Then I asked her to fax me the EIN letter.

Mrs. Jones: “Why do you need that?”

Me: “Because I want to open bank accounts right away.”

Mrs. Jones: “The banks are not open today.”

Me: “Yes, but rumor has it they will reopen in less than two weeks.”

This went on, and for various reasons, she refused to fax me the EIN number.

I’m sure that Mrs. Jones isn’t completely at fault. She’s just following rules or regulations. But we would not put up with this in the private sector.

People who treat customers like this get fired.

And it’s about time we fired the IRS and built a new agency from the ground up.

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+)

Last night, we were treated to a great presentation by the leaders of the 23 different Career and Technical Education programs at Sierra College.

One of the big focus points going forward is tracking student success via employment statistics after leaving our programs. That’s important to me, and I’ve written about it here before. It was great to hear that we’re tackling that.

I’ve posted the slides from that presentation here.

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.

Board Meeting Details:

• February 14, 2012 at 4:00PM
• Sierra College Rocklin Campus, Room LRC-133
• Main agenda items begin at 4:00PM, public comment for items not on the agenda at 5:40PM or earlier
• Meeting Agenda
• Contracts (General / Capital Projects)
• Warrants

Welcome to February, and yes, the second Tuesday of the month does fall on Valentine’s Day, but my board colleagues decided they didn’t want to brave the restaurant crowd anyway, so we kept our meeting schedule intact.

We’ll spend a few hours in closed session dealing with reviews and anticipated litigation, and then the meeting begins at about 4:00PM. We’ll be hearing an update from the Rocklin Police Department on our ongoing partnership to keep the Rocklin Campus secured. We’ll also be hearing a long-awaited presentation on our career and technical education programs, and plans to grow their impact and relevancy in helping students find great jobs.

If you’re in the 530/916 area, I hope you’ll join us to share your perspective. Or you can comment here and I’ll do my best to carry your input into the meeting.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Suffice it to say, when the old guard was in charge, the Journal didn’t bother to cover the good things happening at Sierra College. (I don’t know if it was a written or unwritten rule, but all of our progress at Sierra apparently didn’t fit the editor’s preconceived narrative, and he just ignored the news he didn’t like.)

So I cancelled my subscription and hadn’t bothered to read it more than a handful of times over the last six or seven years.

The new guard seems to be taking a new and constructive approach. Covering both the good news and the bad news. Taking care not to cross the line into demagoguery. Writing good, solid opinion pieces on the side of the public interest.

Today, they published an editorial about the last six years of settlement agreements with public employees. I wrote about this back in November. It’s just wrong that state law tilts the playing field so far against the taxpayers and good stewardship of their money.

The Journal is absolutely right to call for reform in our state’s laws about compensation and employment. Their coverage of this issue shows a real understanding of the facts. So I just followed them on Twitter and I’m going to be a regular reader.

And who knows? They may even get me to subscribe again.

He also gave about 16% of his income to charity. I don’t know about you, but that’s also more than I gave. (The national average is 2%, which I did manage to beat.)

Lost in all of this is the simple fact that he worked for and earned all of his income. None of it was handed to him.

And in exchange for working hard, he gets to enjoy the fruits of his labors…after providing food stamps for 5,977 people, paying for the education of 75 students, paying the salaries of 44 privates in the US Army and paying for the Medicaid benefits of 159.

Rather than tearing down the rich and pretending that they are earning their money at the expense of someone else, perhaps we should be celebrating the successful. After all, they pay most of the taxes and make so much possible for the rest of us.

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!

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.

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.)

Robotic arms and automated manufacturing systems — along with jobs for graduates — come to life in the Mechatronics Lab at Sierra College.

Professors and students of the Rocklin-based community college say the forward-thinking program offers students an avenue to learn real skills for jobs that are in high demand.

The seven-course program teaches students how to build and maintain programs that fuse electronics, mechanics and computer systems, according to Michael Halbern, Sierra College Mechatronics Professor. He said it’s easy to find working examples of mechatronics all around. A few include ski lifts, automated manufacturing machines and robots.

Sierra’s program, which started in 2005, is one of only a few like it in the nation. Because of that, graduates often go on to work at companies like Telefunken, a microchip manufacturer in Roseville, and Schilling Robotics in Davis.

Halbern said the program’s hands-on approach to teaching makes graduates a target for employment.

“The fundamental part of our program is to turn students into taxpayers,” Halbern said. “Because it has such a broad range of skills involved, it prepares our students to apply for quite a number of employment paths.”

These students have put their skills to work building and repairing hybrid cars, gasoline pumps, ATM machines, gaming machines and any other complicated machines that include both computer control and mechanical technology.

In fact, before the recession started, we couldn’t even get kids to graduate from the program. They were all getting high paying jobs before they finished!

Bravo, Michael and team. Turning students into taxpayers is awesome work.

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.

Board Meeting Details:

• January 10, 2012 at 4:00PM
• Sierra College Rocklin Campus, Room LRC-133
• Main agenda items begin at 4:00PM, public comment for items not on the agenda at 5:40PM or earlier
• Meeting Agenda
• Contracts (General / Capital Projects)
• Warrants

This meeting will focus on a presentation from the college staff on workforce partnerships through the Sierra College Center for Applied Competitive Technologies (or “the CACT”, pronounced ‘CACKED’ since we tend to develop acronyms for everything around here).

We’ll also be doing the first revision of the college’s 2011-12 budget. We expect a $4.6MM deficit this year, which will bring our reserves down 11.59%, still just within the range of the Board policy to maintain prudent reserves of 8% to 12%.

On Monday, I’ll be posting some thoughts about Governor Brown’s budget proposal for 2012-13. It presents some major challenges and some opportunities to shape our future if we choose to seize them. Time will tell.

If you’re in the 530/916 area, I hope you’ll join us to share your perspective. Or you can comment here and I’ll do my best to carry your input into the meeting.

“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?

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!

Thanks to our crack team at the President’s Office, I’ve got an electronic copy of the audit for the 2010-11 fiscal year, which started July 1, 2010 and ended June 30, 2011.

Audit opinions are rendered in an odd code. A “qualified” audit opinion means you have work to do. An “unqualified” audit opinion means that there are no exceptions and the audit is clean. We’re very pleased that this is an unqualified, clean audit opinion.

You can check out the audit here:

• 2010-11 Independent Financial Audit
• Audit Cover Letter

If you have any questions, I hope you’ll let me know in the comments!

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.

Board Meeting Details:

• December 13, 2011 at 4:00PM
• Sierra College Rocklin Campus, Room LRC-133
• Main agenda items begin at 4:00PM, public comment for items not on the agenda at 5:40PM or earlier
• Meeting Agenda
• Contracts (General / Capital Projects)
• Warrants

We’ve got a relatively heavy agenda for this meeting. We’ll be reviewing the latest independent financial audit for the 2010-11 fiscal year. Our finance office always seems to pass audits with flying colors, but it’s a good opportunity for trustees to ask questions about the college’s fiscal health.

We’ll also get a preview of the new SierraCollege.edu, which is set to go live in January; hear a presentation on the Sierra College Natural History Museum; and get an update on athletics and Title IX.

This also happens to be our annual board organization meeting, where we elect a Board President and Vice President. It has been an honor to serve as Board President during this last year.

If you have any feedback, please don’t hesitate to leave it in the comments, and I’ll carry it into the meeting! If you’re in the 530/916 area, we hope to see you there.

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?”)

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.

Over the last thirty years, the State of California has enshrined a peculiar principle into the law: that public employees have a “property interest” in their job. This concept doesn’t exist in the private sector…once I have a job, I can lose it if I fail to perform. Not so in the public sector – they “own” their jobs like they might own a house or a car.

The result is that if Sierra College needs to end its relationship with an employee for a less than routine reason, the employee has the right to engage in a tangled series of notices, appeals, grievances, cross-appeals, hearings, and appeal hearings. This is how we hear the horror stories of LA Unified spending $3.5 million dollars to fire only seven employees.

To avoid that mess, the college will at times enter into negotiations with an employee to achieve an amicable resolution where the employee agrees to resign and they are paid the remainder of their contract (or a smaller amount).

Such agreements are subject to a public records act request, as well they should be. Often the employees in question want to keep them quiet, but they gave that up the day they became a public employee. It’s public money, and the public has a right to know.

This particular issue came up again with several old agreements. They were decisions negotiated by the college leadership in place in prior years, under authority delegated to them by the Board of Trustees. As our new VP of Human Resources came aboard, he was reviewing processes and requested that the Board further note these agreements for the sake of transparency.

So we did, and it just reminded me of how ridiculous it is that the state forces us to even use these kinds of agreements. Over the last seven years that I’ve served, the Board has taken a number of steps to make these agreements less expensive when they must happen, and altogether rare.

We’ve asked managers to be extraordinarily careful in the hiring process and to choose wisely. We would rather hire slowly than hire badly, given the state’s onerous laws and regulations.

We’ve also asked managers to dramatically increase the quality of performance reviews and documentation of employee problems. This can allow us to exercise “termination for cause” when appropriate, reduce the likelihood of expensive litigation, and in many cases, reduce the amount paid out to the departing employee.

And we’ve expressed our desire that the State change these laws and start defending taxpayer interests instead of stacking the deck in favor of public employees who need to leave their jobs. Sierra College has a large number of very good public employees, and no good public employee should be fearful about reforming such a process.

That is indeed a high honor from my colleagues across the many school districts in our region, but the credit for what we’ve accomplished at Sierra College equally belongs to all of my amazing board colleagues. We are a team, and I am honored to be a part of it.

I would have been at the dinner, but alas, I was on a plane headed home from Chicago. Given how enjoyable it is to fly with a head cold, I have to tell you that I would much rather have been with all of you there at the dinner.

We’ve got a lot of work to do to make education effective and accessible to everyone, and to focus on delivering real-world skills to our students, instead of just checking archaic boxes. Grateful to be a part of this effort with you all.

College education is incredibly valuable. I’ve learned a great deal from many of the courses I’ve taken.

But something really interesting is happening in the world of higher education.

First, employers long ago figured out that just because you have a degree doesn’t mean that you know how to do useful work.

And second, in our quest to increase access to college to more and more people, simply possessing a degree isn’t really a key differentiator any more.

If you are going to college so that you can get a piece of paper, that’s not going to automatically translate into success afterwards.

If you are going to college so that you can gain useful, productive and marketable skills that will allow you to create value for someone else, your chances of success skyrocket.

Focus on learning skills, not on checking archaic boxes that don’t matter any more.

Board Meeting Details:

• November 8, 2011 at 4:00PM
• Sierra College Rocklin Campus, Room LRC-133
• Main agenda items begin at 4:00PM, public comment for items not on the agenda at 5:40PM or earlier
• Meeting Agenda
• Contracts (General / Capital Projects)
• Warrants

This meeting will focus on presentations from college staff on two different academic programs: the drama/music department, and Academic Foundations (also known as Basic Skills).

One of the challenges that every community college faces, especially in an era of declining resources, is how deep our remedial efforts should go when students arrive who aren’t prepared for college-level work.

We have a great effort, started by President Chavez, and continued now by President Duncan, to better coordinate expectations with our feeder school districts, and ensure that their students are fully prepared for college by the end of their senior year in high school.

I’m looking forward to this report. If you have any feedback, don’t hesitate to leave it in the comments, and I’ll carry it into the meeting!

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.

The LA Times recently had a headline article claiming that we’re spending large sums of money on college students who eventually “drop out.”

The problem is…they have the wrong definition of college success.

Success after college is finding a great job and becoming a productive, taxpaying citizen. Yet our measurement systems don’t view that as success…they view taking another class as a success.

We’ve built a government so large that we need every productive taxpaying citizen we can get just to keep it afloat. So for heaven’s sake, let’s stop developing measurement systems and programs focused on keeping people out of the productive economy.

Let’s measure our success based on the employment status and income growth of our students for the ten years after they leave us.

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.

Board Meeting Details:

• September 13, 2011 at 4:00PM
• Sierra College Rocklin Campus, Room LRC-133
• Main agenda items begin at 4:00PM, public comment for items not on the agenda at 5:40PM
• Meeting Agenda
• Contracts (General / Capital Projects)
• Warrants

This is a relatively light meeting, beyond some personnel issues we have to deal with, and a report on our accreditation follow-up.

If you have any questions or input for the meeting, please leave a comment or send me an email message!

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.

Board Meeting Details:

• September 13, 2011 at 4:00PM
• Sierra College Rocklin Campus, Room LRC-133
• Main agenda items begin at 4:00PM, public comment for items not on the agenda at 5:40PM
• Meeting Agenda
• Contracts (General / Capital Projects)
• Warrants

This meeting will be action-packed. Our September budget adoption is the top item on the plate, and we’ve approved the use of our reserves to buy us time as we work over the next year to re-align our expenses with our newly lowered state revenues.

We’ll also formally approve the college strategic plan that we spent time reviewing in August, and do our board self-evaluation to discuss where the board can improve in helping to drive the college’s progress forward.

If you’re in the 530/916 area, I hope you can join us and share your opinions!

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.

Board Retreat Details:

• Saturday, August 6, 2011 at 8:00AM
• Sierra College Rocklin Campus, Rooms LR-201 and LR-133
• Main agenda items begin at 8:00AM, public comment for items not on the agenda at 12:45PM
• Meeting Agenda
• Contracts (General / Capital Projects)
• Warrants

As planned since our organizational meeting this past December, the Sierra College Board is holding two retreats this year, and our second one is this Saturday. One noticeable change is that our new President is aboard, and so we’ll be spending most of the morning hours with him, setting up a framework for evaluation.

In the afternoon, we’ll come back into open session to work on strategic planning, priorities and goals for the rest of the year.

We’re all excited to have the year-long board vacancy filled in advance of the retreat, and we are looking forward to swearing in our new colleague, Bill Halldin, at the beginning of the meeting.

The public is always welcome at our meetings, though retreats typically draw less attendance than meetings where we vote on policy decisions. If you’re in the Rocklin area, you’re welcome to join us and share your opinions at the meeting. As always, if you leave a comment below, I’ll do my best to carry your input into the meeting directly.

It takes 120 units to graduate from the California State University system with a bachelor’s degree. Each of those units carries a tuition fee of $162 (as of 2011-12), so many smart students end up using the community college system for the first 60 of those units, which drops their cost to $26 each.

(Not only are those students saving 41% on their college costs, but studies show that students who spend their first two years at Sierra College actually have a higher GPA in their senior year at a university, when compared with students who spent four years at a university. We just do general education better.)

There’s an open secret that represents a huge roadblock for these students, though: rather than making our system of higher education easy and understandable to navigate, each CSU campus is allowed to set its own standards for which college transfer credits it will accept.

The result is a “square peg, round hole” problem that drives students crazy and wastes taxpayer dollars for no good reason. Students take 60 units at Sierra College, transfer to a CSU school, and then discover that they have to retake some of their courses to graduate.

According to Linda Michalowski at the Community College Chancellor’s Office, some transfer students have to retake as many as 40 of their 60 community college units because the CSU schools won’t accept them!

This is an insult to the professionalism and rigor that our college faculty and staff bring to the process, and to the incredible investment the state is making into higher education. There is no excuse for allowing this practice to continue.

Governor Brown applied for and was awarded a $1 million Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant that will work to align at least 10 more degree programs with each other, forcing the CSU system to accept the college credit that inbound transfer students have earned.

Frankly, this is long overdue. And it needs to happen faster. If one CSU program accepts a course for credit, every CSU school should be required to accept that course. If I were Governor, I’d sign that law today and let the universities sort it out amongst themselves tomorrow.

We can barely afford to make this investment once, much less twice.

Board Meeting Details:

• July 12, 2011 at 4:00PM
• Sierra College Rocklin Campus, Room LRC-133
• Main agenda items begin at 4:00PM, public comment for items not on the agenda at 5:40PM
• Meeting Agenda
• Contracts (General / Capital Projects)
• Warrants

I have been ridiculously forgetful this entire week, and just now, I discovered something else I forgot to do: this blog post about today’s Sierra College board meeting! My sincere apologies for the delay in getting this up.

We expect 90% of our business at this meeting to be focused on appointing a replacement for our colleague Elaine Rowen-Reynoso, who resigned her seat to focus on her recovery after a long absence from the Board.

We received 23 applications for the vacancy, and as of this hour, we currently have 20 applicants still in the process (several withdrew or did not meet residency requirements for the seat).

If you’re in the Rocklin area, I hope you can join us and share your opinions at the meeting. As always, if you leave a comment below, I’ll do my best to carry your input into the meeting directly.

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.

It is always a tragedy that in tough economic times, school districts have to cut their budgets and many have to resort to laying off teachers in order to survive. So far, we have avoided the layoff of any permanent teaching positions at Sierra College, and it’s our hope that we can continue to do so.

Yet it’s also a tragedy that in the many districts where teacher layoffs have occurred, we use an antiquated “LIFO” system that forces out some of our best teachers, regardless of how great they are at their jobs.

LIFO stands for “last in, first out” and California currently requires that teacher layoffs be based on seniority rather than teacher quality. The result is that tenure, originally designed to protect teachers from being fired when their curriculum or research ruffled feathers, is now being twisted to stop bad teachers from losing their jobs.

I have yet to meet a single good teacher who believes that “LIFO” is the way to decide which teachers should be laid off when budget cuts arrive.

Worse, LIFO policies disproportionately impact at-risk schools, which have the highest number of new teachers, who are the first to lose their jobs in a layoff.

Something has to change.

Students First is a nonpartisan organization, helmed by education reformer Michelle Rhee, that is undertaking a state-by-state fight to save great teachers by changing these antiquated and dangerous policies.

They’ve had tremendous success so far, with legislation passing in Florida, Tennessee and Nevada.

I hope you’ll join the effort and save great teachers.

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.

Joel Klein, a lawyer in the Clinton White House and Justice Department, recently served as Chancellor of the New York City school system. His recent op-ed in The Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal begs the question: who represents the interests of students?

Teachers are extremely effective messengers to parents, community groups, faith-based groups and elected officials—and their unions know how to deploy them well. Happy unions can give a politician massive clout, and unhappy unions—well, just ask Eva Moskowitz, a Democrat who headed the New York City Council Education Committee when I became schools chancellor in 2002.

Smart, savvy, ambitious, often a pain in my neck and atypically fearless for a politician, Ms. Moskowitz was widely expected to be elected Manhattan borough president in 2005. Until, that is, she held hearings on the city teachers-union contract, an extraordinary document, running for hundreds of pages, governing who can teach what and when, who can be assigned to hall-monitor or lunchroom duty and who can’t, who has to be given time off to do union work during the school day, and so on.

The contract defied parody. So when Ms. Moskowitz exposed its ridiculousness, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), then headed by Randi Weingarten, made sure that Ms. Moskowitz’s run for borough president came up short. After that, other elected officials would say to me, “I agree with you, but I ain’t gonna get Eva’d.”

Politicians—especially Democratic politicians—generally do what the unions want. The unions, in turn, are very clear about what that is: They want happy members, so that those who run the unions get re-elected, and they want more members, so their power, money and influence grow. The effect of all this? As Albert Shanker, the late, iconic head of the UFT, once pointedly said, “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.”

Union power is why it’s virtually impossible to fire a teacher for non-performance. In New York City, which has some 55,000 tenured teachers, we were able to fire only half a dozen or so for incompetence in a given year, even though we devoted significant resources to this effort.

The extent of the problem is difficult to overstate. Take “rubber rooms,” where teachers were kept—while doing no work—pending resolution of disciplinary charges against them, mostly for malfeasance, like physical abuse or embezzlement, but also for incompetence. The teachers got paid regardless. Before we stopped this charade—by returning many of the teachers to the classroom, unfortunately—it cost the city about $35 million a year. (Still costing more than $100 million annually are the more than 1,000 teachers who get full pay to perform substitute or administrative duties because no principal wants to hire them full-time.)

Then there were the several teachers accused of sexual misconduct—at least one was found guilty—whom union-approved arbitrators refused to terminate. The city was required to put them back in the classroom, but we refused to do so. Of course, the union has never sued to have the teachers reinstated. It just makes sure these deadbeats stay on the payroll with full pay and a lifetime pension.

It’s little surprise, then, that American kids don’t get the education they deserve. When I demanded reform as chancellor, I was regularly told by friends and foes alike that impatience is immature, challenging the educational establishment is a losing strategy, collaboration is necessary, and controversy is bad. It was bad advice, typical of the status-quo thinking that dominates American education.

Consider the common refrain that “We’ll never fix education until we fix poverty.” This lets school systems off the hook. Of course money, a stable family and strong values typically make it easier to educate a child. But we now know that, keeping those things constant, certain schools can get dramatically different outcomes with the same kids.

Take Texas and California. The two states have very similar demographics, yet Texas outperforms California on all four national tests—across demographic groups—despite spending less money per pupil. The gap amounts to about a year’s worth of learning. That’s big.

At individual schools, differences can be breathtaking. One charter in New York City, Harlem Success Academy 1 (founded by Ms. Moskowitz after she left politics), has students who are demographically almost identical to those in nearby schools, yet it gets entirely different results.

Eighty-eight percent of Harlem Success students are proficient in reading and 95% are proficient in math. Six nearby schools have an average of 31% and 39% proficiency in those subjects, respectively. More than 90% of Harlem Success fourth-graders scored at the highest level on New York State’s most recent science tests, while only 43% of fourth-graders citywide did so. Harlem Success’s black students outperformed white students at more than 700 schools across the state. Overall, the charter now performs at the same level as the gifted-and-talented schools in New York City, all of which have demanding admissions requirements. Harlem Success, by contrast, selects its students, mostly poor and minority, by random lottery.

Critics try to discredit these differences. Writing last year in the New York Review of Books, the historian Diane Ravitch argued that schools like Harlem Success aren’t the answer because, as a group, charter schools don’t outperform traditional public schools. Yet even Ms. Ravitch had to acknowledge that some charter schools get “amazing results.” If that’s the case, shouldn’t we be asking why they get much better results—and focusing on how to replicate them?

A full-scale transition from a government-run monopoly to a competitive marketplace won’t happen quickly, but that’s no reason not to begin introducing more competition. In the lower grades, we should make sure that every student has at least one alternative—and preferably several—to her neighborhood school.

We pursued that goal in New York City by opening more than 100 charter schools in high-poverty communities. Almost 80,000 families chose these new schools—though we had space for only 40,000; the rest are on waiting lists. Traditional schools and the unions have been screaming bloody murder, which is a good sign: It means that the monopolists are beginning to feel the effects of competition. And at the middle-school and high-school levels, where students are more mobile, we can create community-based choice systems or even citywide ones. New York City high school students now have citywide choice (with some geographic priority), and schools know they have to compete for students.

Despite the tough politics involved, change is possible. In New York City, it took a mayor willing to assume control over the system and risk significant political capital. It also took time: Mayor Bloomberg and I had more than eight years together, while most urban superintendents serve for about three and a half.

Most of all, it required building political support. Toward the end of my tenure, reformers were fighting to lift the state-imposed cap on the number of charter schools allowed to open. The teachers unions opposed our effort precisely because our expansion of charter schools had been so successful. In fact, six months earlier, they had helped defeat a similar effort.

But this time, families with kids in charter schools and their community allies were prepared to help us fight. Philanthropic and business interests raised millions to support the mobilization effort, run ads and hire lobbyists. We prevailed, and the state legislature raised the cap substantially.

As Shanker put it in a surprisingly candid speech in 1993: “We are at the point that the auto industry was at a few years ago. They could see they were losing market share every year and still not believe that it really had anything to do with the quality of the product. . . . I think we will get—and deserve—the end of public education through some sort of privatization scheme if we don’t behave differently. Unfortunately, very few people really believe that yet. They talk about it, and they don’t like it, but they’re not ready to change and stop doing the things that brought us to this point.”

We have a lot of work to do to make our school system focus on serving kids instead of adults. Let’s hope our nation and state’s leaders start getting this right.

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.