this week i

got cited by gao for our report on medicare advantage bonus payments.  they rarely cite others, this is koabd.

spent another weekend at dad's..

and despite how nice his back porch looks

the national arboretum looks better

with bonsai california redwood

..and others as old as the seventeenth century.

listened to a lot of who hit john.  hey, they are pretty good.

4/26

this week i

hit ten thousand pageviews.

had hopkins happy hour at the metropolitan club.  the spread was extravagant..

 ..see that hair?  george snuck off for a swim..

..while i schmoozed with nobel laureates.  why?  what did you do on wednesday?

summed it up nicely.  notice the background.

went for late night burgers n shakes.  so this is my life right now.

spotted two excellent bumper stickers.  "darwin loves you" and..

learned ..from the linguists that counting in the sora language uses base twelve until thirty, then base twenty, then alternates between the two. ninety three spoken by saying, “four twenty twelve one.”  ..from pbs that the freedom riders "all signed our last will and testaments last night."  ..from ft that page and brin hold more than 50% of the voting shares of google stock.  and don't, won't get it.

mr gingrich said the nra was “too timid” and should lobby the un for the right to bear arms to be enshrined as a global right.

copy-edited.

watched david simon's lecture on the meaning of the wire.

when i started as a police reporter in 1982, the federal prison population was 34% violent offender..now..7%.

we don't need the bottom fifth..of our country.

every day that labor loses, human beings are worth less.

how many gated communities can we build?

wall street figured out that you can make a lot more money by putting out a shittier newspaper than a good one

i need to pay more taxes

what else are we going to throw on the altar of militarism

we look at democracy as a la carte

small town values will not save us..we're not going back to some rural agrarian bit of pastoral wonderness..hamilton was right

they get it.  that they're not part of our construct anymore, they're not part of our economy.  they're built for the other america.

if you're ever picked for a jury..if they're charged with..an economic crime.  they're charged with selling or using drugs.  and there's no attendant act of violence alleged by the government.  i would urge you to consider your conscience.. and to think about what it means to have another person in the american gulag..to be adding to the two, three million that we have under supervision and incarceration.  to the population that is becoming less and less violent, to the population that no longer has the right to parole in the federal system, to the population that now has mandatory sentencing in state after state after state.  think about what you're doing before you decide to convict that person.  or think..about the idea of jury nullification.  when the law is wrong..at that moment, you have an absolute ethical authority to..not be in pharaoh's army..vote to acquit.

totalitarian contempt of the poor

4/19

this week i

added a new sidebar on your right.  ramped the r twotorial count up to sixty.  that's two hours.

live in this.

would like to patent the next fad: you strap on a wireless internet-equipped tiny headset camera and wear it all the time - like those bluetooth earpieces - then publish your video’s feed on the internet, where anyone can watch the world from your vantage point.  when you’re doing something semi-interesting, you post an alert to facebook or twitter so friends (maybe strangers too) know to log onto your streaming feed.  maybe they can talk / type to you and other viewers in real time. smh already.

watched exit through the gift shop.  the main character is unbalanced.  banksy an instant hero.

drank beer with kristina, katie, and marcus under that.

felt slimy reading the 4-hour workweek.  full of hollywood wisdom and vacuous cheerleading for people who can't figure out how to fill in a u.s. passport application form on their own.  hustler tim ferriss seems to forget that it's good to work hard when you're young.  and that his advice to stop (his term) 'procrasterbating' can be summed up in a sentence: constantly re-examine how you spend your time, and don't multi-task.

suppose i should've expected multiple personality disorder boasts like..

i could be racing motorcycles in europe, scuba diving off a private island in panama, resting under a palm tree between kickboxing sessions in thailand, or dancing tango in buenos aires.

..from the title.  but as someone who loves to work while traveling, i was surprised to find how little we have in common.  despite describing resources on how to participate in philanthropic works abroad, the meat of the book quote-unquote teaches you to quote-unquote invent a product you can sell online that's just a re-labeled, marked-up consumer good whose profits you can live off of.  now here's my quote: "to manufacture a need, and then to profit off of it. add that to the roots of all evil."  the ship starts to sink on the ninth page, when he states a poisonous assumption:

this book is not about finding your "dream job."  i will take as a given that, for most people, somewhere between six and seven billion of them, the perfect job is the one that takes the least time.

agree that careers waiting tables are only fulfilling on payday, but when you dedicate your life to designing the robot waiter, it's a different ballgame.  on top of some advocacy of bald deception, he recommends that we all become garbage-peddlers on ebay. scale that to the entire society?  a pyramid scheme.. or is that only for the deserving, who paid $19.95 for the book?  thank god i didn't, and for paperbackswap.com.  worth remembering:

retirement as a goal or final redemption is flawed..predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life..nothing can justify that sacrifice.

get good at being a troublemaker and saying sorry when you really screw up.

the atrocious cost of inaction

turn off the audible alert..on outlook

people use children as an excuse to stay in their comfort zones..far from being a reason not to travel and seek adventure, children are perhaps the best reason of all to do both

4/12

this week i

updated our brief outlining medicare's role for dual-eligible beneficiaries.

got scientific about what twotorials to make next.  neither google trends nor google insight show enough r-project-related web searches to tell me anything useful, so what did i do?  typed "r how to" plus each letter of the alphabet ("e" shown below) - then wrote down the google suggest results.  this is what people are searching for r help with, so this is what i'll be recording.

listened, loved it.




watched the man who would be king.  would've been good if i could've figured out the main characters' motive.

want shazam to work when i do the singing.  you know, when you've got a melody stuck in your head?  for now, our only option is to sing it out until you remember enough of the lyrics to get a definitive result from a google search.  unsatisfying.

cooked up some chorizo.

still don't understand my own reaction to this npr spot of the raid that killed bin laden.  triangle-torn between the complexity of a raid, the horror of a death, and the end of an era.  the speaker's quiet perhaps the most emotionally provocative part.  superb storytelling, no doubt about that.

mostly kept my 2012 new years resolution to ignore non-ft / lrb / nyrb media, but garbage like this helps me remember why.  value your time.

test drove my new clear hotspot in the shadow of the smithsonian castle.

read heart of darkness, but missed a lot.  suppose i should read it again later.

one river..that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land

triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself

back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams..they were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because i felt so sure they could not possibly know the things i knew

4/5