I can't resist.  This is important. If you happen to know someone who is considering voting for John McCain just ask them to spend five minutes and two seconds watching this: That's it.  5:02.  It probably won't change many minds, but it's hard to ignore.  If they don't buy it, fine.  But we should be crystal clear on what is at stake here. There's a very difficult-to-understand mess going on Georgia (no, not the Atlanta kind), and McCain continues to talk about Georgia joining NATO and NATO issuing a "strong response" to the Russians.  What's going...

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time considering what things I can do to make me a better person, specifically in terms of what my net "existence footprint" is, in kind of a overblown, wholistically hand-wavish way.  Some of these things have become cliche - carbon footprint, energy footprint, waste footprint - and some are just the net-effect of being on the planet for a little while, both positive and negative.  I think that if you're a thoughtful, observant person, these things are hard to ignore.  But it turns out that no matter what you do, you can...

The Seattle area is a great place to live.  If you can handle the long streak of overcast skies in the winter, everything else is great. Unless you're a sports fan, that is.  Our professional sports teams, collectively, have exactly one Championship.  In 1976.  In basketball.  That's it. And while hope springs eternal for those teams, at least we had good old UW Husky Football, right?  As a UW Alum, I love me some purple.  UW was a major force in NCAA Football up through the 1991 National Championship team.  Followed up with 10...years...slowly...going...downhill to a Rose Bowl victory in...

If you want to see what kind of dogs people in your neighborhood have, just go run on a weekday, while school is in session between about 3pm and 5pm. Why?  It appears that "walk the dog" is a regular guest on the chore list of kids and teenagers a like.  And that's when they get it done, 3-5pm, weekdays.

Since moving from Spokane to the West side of Washington State in 1992, I've done the 280 mile drive many, many times.  I used to, uh, push the speed limit and could often do the drive, door-to-door, in about 3:45. Over the last few years, a few things have happened.  First, I've gotten a little older, and a little more risk-averse.  Second, I've gotten back into bike racing.  And third, I've gotten more concerned with my energy usage. My old driving pattern was to stick it just under 80 and cruise across the state.  In my Audi, this...

I moved over to a new blogging platform about two months ago.  I got most things ported over, but was having trouble getting it to redirect the old blog feed address to the new one.  I finally got that figured this morning so now when your blog reader pings, it's actually picking up my posts again, so all the posting I've done since the move is coming down all at once...

I often think back to the sports I did in junior high and high school, and the things our coaches had us do.  I had some great coaches back in the day - Mr. Jones as my Cross Country coach in junior high - Mr. Brown as a track coach in high school, and later Les Schroll as my cycling coach.  All of them played a big part in helping me grow as a person and as an athlete. But one thing that I think about is some of the things that were conventional wisdom back then, and stated as...