Boston deploys solar-powered compacting public trash cans.


Smart, very smart.

Let's hear it for The HOTSOUP.com team, Republican strategists Matthew Dowd and Mark McKinnon; Democratic strategists Carter Eskew, Joe Lockhart, Michael Feldman, and Chip Smith, Internet gurus Allie Savarino, John deTar, and Bart Barden; and former Associated Press political reporter Ron Fournier. These guys seem unaffected by virtually every development on the internet since 1999.

I can literally hear them playing foosball even as I type this.

Here's their claim:

HOTSOUP will create a new community of influence among those in government, politics, business and entertainment who make the decisions and those who want to impact them. It will bring the inside world out and the outside world in, and create a richer dialogue and stronger connections among all of these Opinion Drivers.

Then they ask us to select ONE issue or concern we wish we heard more about from the MSM only they call it the mainstream media.

What’s your opinion?

Q: What issue or concern do you wish you heard more about from the mainstream media and your leaders?
a) Ethics/honesty in American life
b) Making government work
c) The environment
d) The Iraq war
e) Faith and family
f) The changing U.S. and global economies
g) Other

Oh, and the childish(like?) flash intro asks us to ponder the following:

• Can a single act change the world?


• How do you separate work from play?


• Can terrorism be defeated?


• Why don't leaders lead anymore?


• Why doesn't anyone care about my opinion?

So, what's the deal, these guys were behind on their self-help reading AND their Wired Magazine subscription?

Maybe the internet IS a series of tubes after all. On the upside, I feel seven years younger.

This move is such a killer. I'm not even taking the brunt of it. Poor D. Hopefully the true madness ends today and he can just sleep for 20 hours.

Soon comes the garden-variety daily craziness of alighting temporarily in the dwellings of our friends, dispatching stuff to our basecamps and incrementally organizing some of the truly miscellaneous boxes in storage. In short, we look forward to ramping down from full-bore Insanity to just plain crazy.

Oh, and if you are looking to buy a condo in Ballard in early 2007, come here for the lowdown on a set of two buildings. Three words: JUST SAY NO.

One of my current challenges is to innovate project management in a system that works pretty well. In other words, products/services deliver pretty predictably, when there is critical path slippage, mitigating strategies are put in place, products and services are regularly rated as satisfactory or better, and, in the big picture, performance is break-even.

So, I come to this task with the following questions:

1. Are we collecting the right data?
2. Does the data we collect give us a pretty accurate snapshot of any given project's technical and economic performance or position?
3. Is the data that we are collecting perceived as ancillary to those who report it such that data reporting is seen as overly onerous?
4. Can the data that we are collecting perceived as useful to those who are responsible for reporting it?
5. Can the data collection be made more self-enforcing, and how?

So, we're moving.

It turns out that ever since we moved in, my friend D. has been thinking of ways to make a pully system work so that we could offload heavy stuff without muscling it down three narrow lights of split staircases.

Specialist & Tru Skool Daru (VIP Records). Lend it your ear at BBC Asian Network's Friction Programme, Monday 26th June 2006- last 10 minutes of the show.

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