Jeber’s

The Weekend Beat

Some unusual music to get your weekend started off with rhythm.

Obama, day .5

It’s been a reality for half a day now, Obama is president. He wasn’t elevated to sainthood. He is not the chosen one of god to lead us into the promised land nor is he the anti-christ. He’s a guy. A smart (being learned is not a crime or sin), articulate, deliberate, former lawyer and educator, guy. We’ve also seen that he’s a professional politician. He knows how the game’s played. He’s no Jimmy Stewart, no Mr. Smith. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We expect a CEO to know how a company runs and what has to be done to accomplish the company’s goals.

At this point I’ll say he was a success if he just manages to keep things from getting any worse over the next 4 years. He cannot treat any problem before us as “business as usual”.

The economy isn’t just bad, we’ve seen how the system can be played and we will be far more hesitant to trust others with our money in the future. The weaknesses and potential for abuse of capitalism have been made clear. We are going to have to rebuild the economy while at the same time redesigning capitalism.

Not much different in foreign relations. We face an enemy both physical and economic. If we carelessly attempt to destroy terrorists at all costs, we risk not only destroying our economy but could destroy the country we’re trying to save. We need to not do the terrorist’s job for them.

Obama’s on a tightrope, and when you’re first learning to walk one, simply not falling off is a big accomplishment at the start.

Cleo gets a makeover

In case it’s not clear, I should point out that Jeber’s is my personal blog. Here’s where I post any old thing I think of or come across on the ‘net that doesn’t fit into any of the topics that I blog about elsewhere. I have a tech blog and three with different takes on social issues. I even have a blog for my workplace. But Jeber’s is me, it relects perhaps most accurately my eclectic interests.

Lately I’ve been obsessing over my dog, Cleo. I apologize to you non-dog-lovers, but I’m just so blown away by her attitude, her innate good behavior and her silliness I just can’t stop talking about her. Thanks goodness my Flickr stream already had a lot of non-Cleo pictures in it or people would think I can only photograph a single dog.

In order not to highjack my own blog with picture after picture of Cleo, I’ve set up a separate page for my favorite shots of her. But that page is about to change.

I’ve found a cool new application called Jalbum. I’ll be using that to create a java page of all my favorite Cleo pics. It should be up shortly. I hope you enjoy viewing it as much as I had creating it.

(Note: I just learned one interesting tidbit about jalbum. Don’t try to share it with MySpace. It appears to be a violation of their TOS. Thankfully I was notified before I allowed it so I didn’t get my account closed.)