Monthly Archives: February 2009

National Portrait Gallery

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I’ve been meaning to write a post about this since last weekend, but just haven’t actually taken the time to do it. The Sunday after Valentine’s, Cris and I decided to spend the day downtown and get some lunch at Teaism. In an effort to knock something off the “do before we leave” we thought we would spend a little time at the National Portrait Gallery. We quickly realized that a little time was going to end up being all day.

If you’re not a museum person than you should probably stop reading and move on. If you enjoy going to museums and seeing historical works and hearing the stories behind the paintings or pictures then I definitely recommend visiting the NPG.

In the most basic terms the NPG, co-located with the Smithsonion American Art Museum, is a collection of mostly paintings and photographs by or of Americans or America. The most notable collection is that of the official portraits of all of the past presidents.

If you go to the NPG definitely take a docent tour.  We think our tour guide had to have been an art history major or something because his depth of knowledge about the people in the paintings, the painters, and the stories surrounding the paintings themselves was incredible.  Because it was President’s Day weekend he took us through the tour of all of the president’s portraits, and I probably learned more in that hour and a half than I did in some of my history or civics classes in school.

Notable things about our visit.  We got to see the portrait of George Washington that was used to create his picture on the one dollar bill. Interestingly, the portrait was never finished in 20 years, even though it was a commisioned work, because the artist was really happy with the likeness and made copies from it for $100 a piece to make money.  It was so valuable to him because he actually had the president sit for him which allowed the accurate likeness, and the chance of him sitting for another portrait was highly unlikely.

The portrait of Bill Clinton is bad.  Honestly, its really bad, and it appears that the Clintons are pretty unhappy with it now.  While we were standing the with the docent a lady in our group started pointing out all kinds of things that were wrong with it technically in terms of the perspective that didn’t match other elements of the painting.  On top of that, I think the painting makes him look much older than he is and much more haggard. It looks particularly bad in comparison to Bush’s portrait, which is placed next to Clinton’s, which is actually a really impressive painting.  Interesting note about Bush’s portrait is that it is the first presidential portrait the shows a wedding ring, if I remember correctly.

I should also note the historical significance of the building. If memory serves me right, it is the third oldest building in DC behind the White House and the capitol.  It was originally built as the national patent office, and the Declaration of Independence almost burned there in a fire.  It was also the site of President Lincoln’s second inaugural ball.

The last thing that I’d recommend to do while you’re there is to plan to stop and have a snack in the courtyard.  Any explanation I could give wouldn’t do it justice, but its just a very cool place to just sit and relax for a little while.

All in all a great visit.  Less crowded than many of the other museums you’ll vist in DC, but just as cool in terms of the stuff that you can see on your visit.

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Spending vs. Tax Cuts

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One of the constants throughout conversations on how to improve the economy is the spending vs. tax cuts debate.  I think this guy makes some really interesting and valid points about the whole tax cut idea.  I just don’t see people taking whatever little chunk of tax break money they get back and spending it right now.  Chances are really good that they’re going to save it.  

The current banking system is a perfect example.  We done some stuff to help out banks in trouble giving them a ton of money to get the credit market started again, but they’re still not loaning out money.  I’m definitely not a big fan of our government spending a bunch of money when we have a ridiculous amount of debt and deficit like we have, but people have to buy things to bolster companies, which will in turn cause those companies to hire people, which will improve the buying power of the general public and things spiral up.

That’s a problem I’ve always had with trickle down economics.  There’s a basic assumption that if you give a company a tax break they’re going to hire more workers.  From what I’ve seen the last year plus, I think they’re more inclined to either sock the money away or give their executives a fat bonus.  I think companies are only going to increase investment in their companies when people start buying their products again.  Example: American auto companies are going to keep cutting workers until people start buying their cars again.  No amount of tax break is going to change that trend.

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Wedding Planning Shenanigans (Seriously, Elope)

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The last three weeks have been kind of nutty for us in terms of planning the wedding. Now that we have everything worked out, I think I’m ready to talk about it in a good humored way.

A couple of weeks ago we started feeling a little less than satisfied with the original place we had selected for our wedding ceremony and reception.  The venue was no less attractive but our comfort level with the people that we would be working with at the venue waned significantly making us wonder if the whole thing was going to cause us way more stress and way more money than we originally thought.

Around the same time Cris got a call from her firm out in LA to let her know that they were changing the training schedule for new associates to the week we were going to have the weeding. Because we had previously cleared that time frame for the wedding with them they were fine with us going ahead with our plans, but just wanted to let her know she wasn’t caught off guard.  Despite their assurances, Cris was understandably unhappy about not being able to go through the training with the rest of her associates group and grew concerned about the timing of things.

Those two things together suggested the world was trying to tell us something and we should maybe look at another place at another time, which we could still do because we hadn’t signed a contract with the venue yet.

We had already signed a contract with our photographer so we had to work within her schedule to find a weekend that she wasn’t already booked.  After checking the star charts, determining the coefficient of the mean, and determining the longitude and latitude of the “Lost” island we found a date…until we had a small panic attack about a really bad feeling that something was wrong with that date and moved it to the Saturday instead of Sunday.

After letting my family know of the change, my brother quickly informed me that I dodged a major bullet because my sister-in-law is going to be in a wedding the weekend before wich turned out to be another weekend we were looking at.  I should have taken more note of that and realized it was a warning that something was still amiss.

We moved on to planning the the rehearsal dinner but Cris kept having bad dreams and bad feelings that something was wrong.

A little tip, if you’re going to change your wedding date make sure your officiant is good with it.  My best friend from college, Devon, is going to do our wedding and when we gave her the original date she said it was fine and she didn’t have anything else big planned for the fall.  While we were sorting out all of the other schedule conflicts to try to nail down our new date I played a little bit of phone tag with Devon, but didn’t get in touch with her until I was passing on the new date.

This is when she, laughed and told me that her sister-in-law, who had scheduled her wedding around our date, had scheduled her wedding for the Friday of our new weekend.  In fact, when the sister-in-law brought it up with Devon she gave two weekends they were picking from, our weekend and an open weekend.  Of 52 weeks in a year, what are the chances we would pick the exact same weekend.

Because Devon is really easy going and awesome, she was willing to work out whatever needed to be worked out to get to our wedding.  Feeling like the monumental tool that I am, we set out and were actually able to accomplish getting the wedding moved back to Sunday and Devon is going to be able to come out and do the wedding, and her husband is even going to be able to come out with her.

To make all of that ridiculousness a shorter story.  New and final date is Sunday 13 September for the wedding.  Anything else comes up, we’ll just have to suck it up and deal with it.  Thank you to everyone that had to suffer through this process for your patience.  Hopefully, the rest of this will not be as painfully frustrating.

And if anyone had any doubts, yes I’m a tool.  Who doesn’t think to confirm with their officiant that they can do the wedding on a certain day?  And in happier news, Cris feels better already and is happy that she just wasn’t going crazy.

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WC Qualifying: US 2-0 Mexico

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Huge win last night for the US Men’s National Team over Mexico in Columbus.  It wasn’t the prettiest of wins, mind you, but ill take an ugly win over a pretty draw or loss any day.  I just thought that I’d share a few thoughts on the game and the performance of some of the players last night.

Generally speaking the team played okay.  It wasn’t flashy and it was a little scrappy at times but we did what we needed to do to win.

The defense looked pretty solid as we’re coming to expect from the pairing of Bocanegra and Onyewu in the center.  I continue to be surprised by Frankie Hejduk and his ability to play solidly for the US as a near senior citizen in soccer terms.  You’re never going to get a ton of exciting offense from him, but his defensive ability is something you can continue to rely on.  As has been the case for a long time, left back is still the position of greatest concern for the US.  Heath Pearce is alright in that position but I think its pretty clear that he’s not a renowned crosser of the ball and his defenses work could be improved.

Our midfield played a respectable game with Michael Bradley being a bright spot.  Kjlestan didn’t have the impact on the game people were hoping for following his hat trick against Sweden.  Beasley was pretty active throughout and worked to get into the mix, but I fealt his impact on the game was spotty. Dempsey had a pretty solid game and looked very comfortable on the ball.

Including Donovan with Ching in discussing the attack, we didn’t get enough from them. Donovan was pretty active getting and giving the ball, but we need him to have a greater positive impact on the attack than what we got last night.  Ching didn’t have his typical blue collar performance of holding up the ball and laying it off to the midfielders to then go forward.   He just wasn’t as involved as we’re used to seeing.

For me, Bradley was the man of the match.  In addition to his two goals, he played very solid defensively from box to box and he did it without getting a card.  He has had a tendency to be a little wreckless in his challenges in the past but last night he displayed a great deal of composure in the timing of his tackles and choosing when to go to ground for a slide tackle.  Another thing I really liked to see from him was a willingness to strike the ball from range. Too often as a team we try to find the perfect shot from inside the box and we’ve needed somoeone to take a chance and hit one from distance.  If his confidence and willingness continues to increase along with his ability to hit those shots on frame it could definitely pay dividends in the future.

We came away with a win, but there are a few things that we will need to do better to keep winning games.  When Mexico went down to ten men we should have pressed forward a little more and gone for the jugular.  They just lost their best defender and captain and we didn’t seem to put anymore pressure on them then we were before his dismissal.

Also, we didn’t manage the end of the game well enough.  We were up a man with about ten minutes to play and we started bunkering back just trying to hold onto the lead.  We arguably controlled the midfield through most of the game and should have continued to do so.  Instead we started dropping deeper into our own end and didn’t put enough pressure on their back four or midfield.  That’s something that our strikers, particularly Altidore, who had fresh legs should have been doing.

All in all, a result we should be happy with.  Our record against the Mexicans at home raises to 9-0-2 with this win, and possibly ends Sven Gorin Eriksson’s run as the Mexican national team head coach.  This also puts us in the driver seat for qualification for the WC next summer, which many feel is a foregone conclusions.  Our next qualifier comes next month away to El Salvador.

Oh, and in case anyone hadn’t figured it out before last night, Rafa Marquez is a dirty hack.

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Google Chrome Convert

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I think I’m ready to call it official and say that I’m a convert to using Google’s browser Chome.

Up until pretty recently I’ve been a devotee of Firefox and I would say that I’m still a pretty big fan.  I will keep up with development of the browser’s new features and improvements, but for the most part I’ll be using Chrome for most of my browsing needs.

Here are a few thoughts on what I see as the advantages and disadvantages of Chrome in comparison to Firefox.  I’m not going to address Internet Explorer because I don’t like it and try to avoid using it whenever I can.

The goodness of Chrome:

At the most basic level, I think Chrome is a faster browser overall. It seems to load much faster than Firefox does. Also, it seems like it does a better job of loading webpages quicker.

One feature I love is that you can set the browser so that it will automatically set a couple of pages to load up on startup.   Every day when I get home I always pull up Gmail, Facebook, and the admin page for this blog.  The way I have chrome set, those three pages are loaded in three separate tabs as soon as I open it up. Maybe this isn’t a unique feature in Chrome but that’s where I found it so it gets the credit.

Another feature I love is when you open a new tab it gives you thumbnails of pages the sites that you visit the most.  its sort of like having having bookmarks in a graphic setup as soon as you open a new brower window.  Its a pretty simple thing, but I think its really cool.

The badness of Chrome (features it doesn’t have that I wish it did):

First and foremost, I miss having Sage in Firefox.  For that matter I’m not aware of any solid RSS reader for Chrome yet, and I hope that is something that gets addressed very soon.  And for what its worth, my browsing life was made happier when I started using Sage.

I also really miss the “Undo close tab” feature.  I have a tendency to open a ton of pages when I’m bouncing around the Internets.  At some point I get to a place where I start closing down the ones that I don’t want anymore.  Inevitably I realize that I just closed one that I didn’t want to close right after I hit the button. On Firefox you can just right-click and “undo close tab,” but I’m not aware of a similar feature on Chrome.

The last thing is totally random but I still don’t like it. The button to stop loading a page is on the right side of the interface, which is the exact opposite of what I expect so I can never find it when I want to.

Despite my current complaints, I see Chrome as the best browser fit for me at the moment.  I’ll check out the newest version of Firefox when they release it, because I’ve heard its supposed to make some great improvements in terms of speed and page rendering.

Okay, I lied a little.  The reasons I don’t like Internet Explorer is because its clunky.  In my experience its the slowest of the mainstream browsers.  Also, b/c it has the largest marketshare, more hackers are inclined to exploit the vulnerabilities that are found in the browser.

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I Hate “Concierge Medical”

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For anyone unfamiliar, concierge medical is where you pay a stupid amount of money so that you can apparently bother your doctor anytime you want. Basically, you pay a yearly membership fee of anywhere between $1500-$4500 to have access to your doctor more than he/she probably wants you to and more than you’ll probably need.  Understand that’s all that membership fee gets you.  You still have the regular expenses for care and insurance accrurals that you normally would.

If I look at the situation objectively, I could see where this kind of system would be a good thing for people who are in the doctor’s office all the time.  I’m not one of those people and I got booted from the practice I was going to because my doctor went to concierge medical and I wasn’t going with him.

I wouldn’t be so annoyed about this if the situation would have been made more clear.  When my doctor made the switch I got a number of mailers explaining that he was switching to the new system, but the way it was presented it looked like he was going to go to another practice and I was given the impression that I was going to be rolled over to another doctor in the practice.  I was given this impression because the last time I went in to the doctor, last January, they had me see another doctor, but apparently my regular doctor wasn’t around and the new doctor was just doing me a favor.  Hence the reason I got the stiff arm when I tried to call in to my doctor last week.

One of the other doctors that I tried to get in with last week wanted a $1900 membership fee.  Given we’re only going to be here until May I didn’t think that was the best deal in the world.

From some brief reading I did on the whole concierge medical thing, the reception has been mixed.  Some practices tried with little to no success.  Apparently, others have fared better in making the sansition.  From my perspective its a crap idea, but I only go to the doctor once a year so what do I know.  Well, I guess I do know that I’m not looking forward to finding a doctor when we get to th California.

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What the Republicans Think is Waste

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After reading this article I felt compelled to share my thoughts.  Some of what they complain about I agree with.  Some of what they complain about makes me think they’re playing rubbish political games.  One basic issue I have is if the spending is only going towards propping up current operations, I don’t think its the best use of money.  I really think that if we’re spending this money, it should go towards getting tangible things that will benefit the country while giving people jobs.  The country gets something while people make money that will spend, which will help bolster the economy.

Read it and tell me how foolish I am.  My comments are in italics.

• A $246 million tax break for Hollywood movie producers to buy motion picture film.  - Agreed, this is total rediculous, crap, stupid pork spending.

• $448 million for constructing the Department of Homeland Security headquarters. – If you saw what they work out of now, you’d understand.

• $248 million for furniture at the new Homeland Security headquarters.  - Easy there tiger.  What kinda furniture you getting?

• $600 million to buy hybrid vehicles for federal employees. – Let’s see, the American auto industry is in the crapper, the federal fleet uses American automobiles, this will help reduce pollution through cleaner emissions.  Sounds like a terrible idea to me.

• $150 million for Smithsonian museum facilities. – I’m not getting the stimulus from this, but maybe I don’t follow.

• $1 billion for the 2010 Census, which has a projected cost overrun of $3 billion. – Stimulus?  Crap idea.

• $75 million for salaries of employees at the FBI. – As a civil servant (admitted bias alert) I have a serious issue with calling this waste.  The American people want to be safe and have good roads and have clean water, but they don’t want to pay for it.  Maybe doesn’t belong in a stimulus bill, but I’ll support it anyway.

• $500 million for flood reduction projects on the Mississippi River. – I think its pretty clear that we’re not exactly squared away with dealing with floods of the Mississippi River.  If we’re building things this is exactly what we need, especially b/c it will save money in the long run.

• $10 million to inspect canals in urban areas. – Huh?

• $6 billion to turn federal buildings into “green” buildings. – See similar comment about buying hybrid cars.  Plus, many of the federal buildings in DC are old and really crappy and need to be refurbished anyway.  Make them greener in the process.

• $1.2 billion for “youth activities,” including youth summer job programs. – Programs to get more people working even if for a short period of time, putting money in their hands, that they will in turn spend on consumer products, which is what poeple aren’t doing now.  Terrible idea.  Why would we do that?

• $160 million for “paid volunteers” at the Corporation for National and Community Service. – a volunteer is someone who is unpaid by definition.  If they get paid, they’re not a volunteer.

• $850 million for Amtrak. – are we building or subsidizing.  Building good, subsidizing bad.

• $75 million to construct a “security training” facility for State Department Security officers when they can be trained at existing facilities of other agencies. –  Nice try State

Just my thoughts.

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Most Frustrating Morning in…

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…I’m not sure how long. Seriously, this day started out crappy in many ways.

Here’s the morning in all its play by play awesomeness. Woke up about the time I needed to be leaving the house to get to work. This leaves a non-morning person in even more of a grouchy mood.  Wasn’t feeling well when I woke up but decided to go in anyway.  That turned out to be a mistake.

Once I got to work I decide to call to make an appointment with my doctor only to find out through a really random set of circumstances that I’ve essentially been booted from my doctor’s practice. This will get further explanation in a soon to follow post cause doctors are really peaving me today.

I finally get a hold of a doctor that can get me in today and make an appointment. I leave my office with plenty of time to get there only to find that smoke has been reported in one of the metro stations between me and where I need to go so they aren’t running trains through there.  So I go up to catch a cab to get to another station to get to where my car is parked and I end up trying to hail a cab at the same corner as a guy with a significant limp and a cane. Yeah, I lose.  And seriously would I really want to win that one.

Its about this time that I realize that the paperwork the doctor asked me to fill out before I got to my appointment is filled out sitting on my desk.

The cab I grab almost gets hit by, what I can only assume is, a blind woman driving a Lexus who thought it was a good idea to parallel park in a space on the left side of the street from the right lane.

Thankfully, the hilarity stopped there.  I wrote most of that on the metro ride out to my car, and thankfully nothing bad happened after that.  Looking back on it now with some perspective, this was nothing like my sister’s weekend so I shouldn’t complain.  It just highlights for me my general good luck and how much getting off on the wrong foot sets the tone for the day.  Here’s hoping for a better day tomorrow.

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Happy then Sad: GI Joe Movie Trailer

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I hear that they’re making a GI Joe movie and I get excited.  What guy that grew up watching GI Joe cartoons wouldn’t get excited?  GI Joe was a very important part of my childhood.  I mean where else would I have learned that knowing is half the battle.

Sadly, my excitement waned significantly when I saw one of the trailers for the movie.  While this looks like it could be a pretty cool action movie in and of itself, its the furthest thing from GI Joe.  It looks like the same thing that happened with Miami Vice.  Though I never saw it, I heard it had nothing of the flavor of the original show.

This movie will probably make money based on the name, which I think its an absolute crime.  If you’re going to make a movie based on GI Joe, make it about GI Joe.  Don’t fool people by trading on a name, but having none of the real “real american hero” stuff there.

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