Geek Soap Box

I was walking down a very dark and deserted street in bucolic Hoboken, New Jersey, at around 1:30 AM Sunday morning, heading from a local bar to where my car was parked seemingly a mile away.  Nothing bad happened, rest assured, nor did I expect it to, honestly.  But it started an intellectual exercise in [...]

Hi, my name is Ted. If you are reading this Web site, you probably already know me. If not, or even if you do, allow me to reintroduce myself. Like I said, my name is Ted, and I am a member of the working poor. You don’t hear a lot about us in the mainstream [...]

Blog Maverick: Tax the Hell Out of Wall Street and Give It to Main Street It should always be the natural reaction of any lover of freedom and liberty to be inclined towards opposing any new proposed tax, especially those proffered in the name of the public good.  This blog post from Mark Cuban, though, [...]

I could see the smoke from miles away on the Whitestone Expressway, a thick acrid black shroud of destruction tearing its way through a commercial strip in my hometown Jackson Heights.  In the aftermath, it would turn out to be a  four-alarm fire of questionable (or at least “unknown”) cause and all storefronts on the [...]

First things first: I owe a tremendous amount of money in unsecured credit card debt.  This total has accumulated incrementally over the years, across any number of individual cards and carriers, and is the result of questionable spending and poor bill management.  This situation is completely my fault; I acknowledge and accept responsibility for such, [...]

One of the most stunning stories to hit the Internet in the past weeks has to be the saga of Newsday, the traditional Long Island newspaper owned and operated by the enigmatic Dolan family. Back in October, the paper took its entire Web presence and placed it behind a subscribers-only firewall available only to area [...]

With over 500 tweets collected and logged into an Excel spreadsheet related to the Cadillac Escalade Hybrid, certain key phrases and reactions become readily apparent.  One simple way to organize and display this data is via a “word cloud” — a randomized visual display of the most-repeated words in any given accumulation of text, with [...]

Let’s face it, our lives are pretty decent, and for that we should consider ourselves blessed.  We in the United States and other nations of the “West” are not torn apart by political strife, genocide, or cataclysmic natural disasters.  For the most part, we all are able to wake up each morning, safe and sound, [...]

A post in two parts: I remain forever amazed at how little the politically devout actually know about marketing and messaging their platforms to the larger masses.  Without question, politics inspires a certain form of relentless passion in engaged individuals, but that passion often creates a sort of “mandatory call to action: you must agree [...]

Browsing through the usual chatter on Twitter this AM, I was struck by random speculation and questions everyone has related to what is currently happening in Iran, and how/if the United States should respond. Let’s start with the Middle Eastern nation itself: while I have not yet seen Jimmy Carter personally step forward and endorse [...]

Sometimes I love my adopted career path. Stolen shamelessly from Jonathan MacDonald.

I don’t know about you, but if it ever comes to pass that I need to be cut wide open and have my insides poked and prodded by a trained specialist, I want to be freaking out cold when it happens and remember nothing upon awakening. In India, though, some revolutionary new techniques involve keeping [...]

No doubt spurred into action by my scathing post from last night, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced today that a large array of AIG senior managers have graciously agreed to return their not-so-justly earned bonus compensation in the name of the greater good of the citizen taxpayer. Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of [...]

Somewhere, Mike Taibbi must be swelled with paternal pride.  While elder Mike has toiled over the years at network broadcast affiliates — doing the occasional snow report and/or covering Groundhog Day festivities for the local news — his son Matt has gone all “Cameron Crowe” and gets to write for Rolling Stone.  Meaning, lots of [...]

The Web site Investopedia defines “perfect competition” as: …characterized by many buyers and sellers, many products that are similar in nature and, as a result, many substitutes. Perfect competition means there are few, if any, barriers to entry for new companies, and prices are determined by supply and demand. Thus, producers in a perfectly competitive market [...]

The semi-famous utterance above originated with Joe Schmo himself, Matt Kennedy Gould, as he looked around and found himself the only hint of reality ensnared within an otherwise completely fabricated world.  Looking around at today’s incredibly whacked-out political scene, I can’t help but ask the same question.  Did the rest of the world take stupid [...]

March really must come in like a lion and leave like a lamb, because when I left for Dixie on Tuesday the temperature stood in the frigid teens and 12 inches of snow blanketed bucolic Douglaston.  Today, it’s approaching 70 and I just drove around town with the sunroof open.  Perhaps I brought the weather [...]

We all remember the story from a few months back where the head honchos from the three US automobile manufacturers went to Washington, DC to lobby for their own federal bailout…only they took private charter jets to get there from Detroit. The tone-deafness of the story left such an indelible impression upon the public that [...]

Despite having virtually unchallenged reigns to power in both the Executive and Legislature, I think it’s going to be a real hoot to watch events unfold over the next few months to year. We are not even at Inauguration Day yet, and already the American Left looks to be in utter disarray and at its [...]

So, instead of posting to this blog, I have been working furiously on researching my final paper for a management class on the current subprime lending crisis. Rather than look at it from the perspective of who’s to blame — the lenders or the homeowners — I chose to tackle a different perspective: that our [...]

First time maybe ever I’ve chuckled at something that came out of Vanity Fair. H/t to The Big Picture.

It’s the type of horror story you can only imagine might occur on the busiest shopping day of the year. A store worker trampled to death by an out-of-control mob, and a pregnant woman rushed to the hospital to boot. Amazingly, when asked by workers to then evacuate the store, the crowd refused to quit [...]

I may forever either lose or completely regain my conservative bona-fides with this statement: Freakonomics recently had its readers interview former presidential candidate Ron Paul, and damned if it didn’t prove fascinating and thought-provoking. There are many aspects of the “Ron Paul Phenomenon” that utterly frighten me. His take on monetary policy and isolationism could [...]

You know what I would love to hear a presidential candidate put forth as part of his/her platform one day? A call to completely revitalize our decaying railroad infrastructure. Railroads are what built the United States, transporting supplies and a fresh, eager citizen base further and further down the frontier, a phenomenon that later became [...]

Wired published a closer look at presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Hussein Obama earlier today that focused the scorecard on certain technology issues near and dear to the hearts of Internet geeks everywhere. Issues such as broadband access/affordability and Net Neutrality may not be en vogue in an age of economic bailouts and overseas [...]