Sandro

Anyone use Solar City? I'm inclined to get their system, and I believe an existing customer can get a significant referral bonus if I name them.

Any of my Boston-area friends:
1. have a car with a center-console handbrake
2. automatic transmission
3. willing to trade for a few days with my well-worn minivan
4. in the next few weeks
?

Gregorian's ready for his driving test, and they require it be in a vehicle with a center-console handbrake. They'll supply a vehicle for $90, but he's never driven anything other than our minivan, and I'm thinking during-the-test isn't the best time to try.

I'm trying to change the Internet so that instead of living inside facebook, twitter, youtube, pinterest, etc, etc, people will have their own, separate online identities, and the things they now do inside those sites will just be apps. (And you'll be able to switch apps whenever you want, and interact with folks who use different apps. No more social lock-in. Lots of freedom to innovate.)

You can read a little more about this at crosscloud.org, but right now I'd love some feedback on one of the key points.

If you were going to have a stable identity outside of these apps, a place where people could contact you, where you could see your own stuff, where people could see the stuff you wanted to share, what kind of domain name would you give it?

Some people will buy their own domain name (I was lucky enough to get hawke.org long ago) but I don't think most people will want to do that. They'll be fine with a subdomain like sandhawke.livejournal.com.

I think of these special high-functionaly websites as "pods" (which originally stood for "personal online database"), and I have several domain names on which I could provide these subdomains. Which ones would you be happy to use for yourself and comfortable seeing other people use? It's a bit like your email address is today; you'll be telling it to people in various circumstances, and perhaps seeing them around everywhere.

Please let me know which ones I should focus on. It would be a pain and perhaps rather confusing to support all of them. Thanks!



Feel free to suggest others in the comments, if you know they are currently unclaimed. (Once you start checking, it's amazing what's already taken.)

Also, feel free to reblog/share this, if you think it's cool.

Anyone have a dentist in the Cambridge/Belmont/Newton/Waltham/Lexington area who they like an trust? I've realized I don't trust mine very much.

If you haven't pledged yet, please do. It's our best chance to save what's left of american democracy.

For the fun of it, you can pledge via my pledge page, and then I can see just how motivated folks are!

Do I know anyone in Seattle who's got some crash space for my son July 17-22? Hotels seem a bit much; a couch is more than enough.

(And yes, he'll be turning 18 while there, but that's just coincidence. He's going for a sporting event.)

My camera isn't good enough to capture the view outside my window: in the building across the way, through the windows, I see people playing ice hockey. On several different floors, around the 35th floor.

I have about 20 cubic feet (3 very large boxes) of clothes to pass on, mostly girls clothes for ages 4-8. I'm happy to drop the boxes on your porch in camberville/newtwatertham; otherwise they'll go into some random charity input stream.

Awkward situation. A parent of a kid who knows one of my kids emailed me to arrange a playdate. But my kid doesn't actually like this other kid. The initial email was constrained to a time we were busy, so it was easy to just say that. But then the reply was, "okay, how about one of the next few weekends?".

What would you do?

If you were this other parent, what would you want me to do?

Bonus - apply this to adults, too. What do you do if someone wants to get together some time, and that's not how you want to spend your time? Have you ever emailed a friend an open-ended invitation like that, and they didnt reply? What did you make of that?

(Latest installment: my kid says, well, okay, I guess, invite her over. Does that change your answers?)

The lefties (usually my people) seem to think the Tea Party has made a big mistake and that it will cost them.

Looking over the list of what will actually get shut down, I don't think so.

You see, it's only the "non-essential" stuff that's getting shut down. And at this point, the people have zero interest in paying for anything "non-essential". For 5 years now, in their own budgets they've had to cut "non-essentials", so why shouldn't the government?

It's like the sequester -- everyone said "this will be so horrible" -- but I haven't heard one story of actual pain it caused, except to a gov't employee.

Is there a point where "essential" personel also stop working? If the Tea Party makes *that* happen they'll get into trouble, but I doubt they will. I think this is exactly what they want -- to point out that much of the gov't is "non-essential".

Also, on the debt ceiling, ... that will be interesting. Yes, it's a terrible plan to default on your debt because then the cost of credit tends to go up (and any rise in interest rates when you're $17T in debt would be murderous), but I can't help wondering if lenders really have anywhere better to put their money. As long as T-Bills are still the best option, even if they're not as good as they used to be, folks will use them. Still, it could be very, very, very, very bad.