Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

I discovered a great election news blog today [called Dow Jones Insight Election Pluse] that shows off some interesting visualization technology which Dow Jones sells in conjunction with Factiva and other info sources.

I'm a huge fan of Marc Andreessen and I have no doubt that his thoughtful endorsement of Barack Obama [ blog.pmarca.com: An hour and a half with Barack Obama ] will have great influence. However, I suspect that many who follow Marc were already persuaded by more emotional "anything but Republican" feelings and had made up their minds anyway. I can relate to that, that's how I felt after eight years of Clinton. What I like about Obama is that, with McCain, for a change after nearly sixteen years he gives us two decent candidates that we might actually be proud of. In my mind, both could be acceptable leaders. I sincerely hope that they have a thoughtful and civil debate which helps us all sort out the right way forward for America. Marc's characterization of Obama made me think about why it is that I support McCain and I'm grateful to Marc for that. Of course I was not fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to meet McCain personally as Marc did wit...

At the end of her WSJ column today mourning the passing of Bill Buckley, Peggy Noonan said something that resonated with me: I share here a fear. It is not that the conservative movement is ending, that Bill's death is the period on a long chapter. The house he helped build had--has--many mansions. Conservatism will endure if it is rooted in truth, and in the truths of life. It is. It is rather that with the loss of Bill Buckley we are, as a nation, losing not only a great man. When Jackie Onassis died, a friend of mine who knew her called me and said, with such woe, "Oh, we are losing her kind." He meant the elegant, the cultivated, the refined. I thought of this with Bill's passing, that we are losing his kind--people who were deeply, broadly educated in great universities when they taught deeply and broadly, who held deep views of life and the world and art and all the things that make life more delicious and more meaningful. We have work to do as a culture in brin...

Zach and Noah both started playing basketball at our church league this year and both of them were really great. I think I've got a couple of future basketball stars on my hands.

When the Times' story about John McCain's integrity hit the street today, ironically I learned about it from Google when they swiped the story from the NY Times and published it at the top of Google's news feed. That suddenly made me realize why, after nearly forty years, I've almost completely given up reading the once great New York Times. There are four reasons: First, the NYT vertical content (i.e. Business, Science, Technology) is second rate. It's not competitive with other more specialized, up to date and faster paced Internet sources of business, technology and science news. Ok, I could live with that if the other things I liked were good enough. I don't subscirbe to the paper edition of the NYT because I don't want to cut down trees, and I don't have time to read it everyday anyway. I live online now and I need and want something that's well organized, easy to navigate when I need to know something, and takes good advantage of today's te...

This is my grandson Parker. He was four months old a few days ago and is the sweetest baby you'll ever see. I think Parker is going to be a thinker, what do you think?

Saw this on Geek Parenting site. These kid's sites are awesome, I had no idea that so much existed for geeky kids.