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Very much interested in the concept of building new workspaces that would allow entrepreneurs the ability to use office space / collaboration space, have the ability to network, and have the benefit of a great infrastructure. It seems like the new workforce will be less office-oriented and more team-oriented, and it seems like there's a business that could be built to support that model. Thinking. Thinking. Thinking.

I'd like to take time today to list the things that I am thankful for. This is an activity more of us ought to do every day of the year, and in that spirit perhaps I'll try to do that more myself. Here goes.

1. I'm thankful that God has given His son, Jesus Christ, as an offering for my sins, and that I am a believer in Christ by God's grace.
2. I'm thankful for the Bible, God's word, which contains the truth about who God is, how He made the world and everything in it, and His plan of redemption for a fallen world.
3. I'm thankful for my wife Carol, who is a wonderful helpmate, a loving mother to my six kids, and a good friend for life.
4. I'm thankful for my children - Stephen, Colin, Bryan, Melissa, Beth Anne, and Amanda. They are a treasure and have taught me much about love and grace.
5. I'm thankful for my job. I work with good people.
6. I'm thankful for my family - my Dad, my mother and father in law, my brothers, my brothers-in-law, and all the kids, friends, and relations.

There's a lot more... I'll add more later.

I'm reading Seth Godin's book Tribes, which is a good introduction to the new model of how online communities work, how to lead one, and what are the dynamics of leading a group of connected individuals on the Internet. It's good reading - and the method Seth used of building excitement around the book was pretty interesting.

Seth built an online community called Triiibes, and sent an email out to people subscribed to his blog saying that if you pre-ordered the book, he'd give you a login to his online community that was all about the book - how to build a tribe, what tools are available, etc.

This built great excitement around the book, and caused a lot of people to pre-order it in order to gain access to the online community. I think there were lots of good by-products of the community, including a resulting Q&A book that followed on to the initial book release. The community helped write this Q&A book, so it's gravy for Seth - his "tribe" helped him create content for his site!

It's a great book / community / site / amalgam of lots of different things - pretty interesting model. I definitely recommend it.

It was a busy weekend - we did a lot of running around on Saturday, and then in the evening my dad was in a car accident. We wound up sitting in the hospital ER until 2:30 am getting him checked out.

Thankfully, he's just got a few broken ribs and is resting at home. We're really glad he is still with us.

I believe the average American citizen is not as stupid as you think they are - when they hear about a bill in Congress that will spend $700 billion in taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street, they start calling their Congress-person and let them know that they don't want to pay for someone else's stupid business decisions.

When Congress passed the Community Revinvestment Act (see this Wikipedia article ) back in the Carter Administration, they set in motion a lot of foolish decision making about loaning money to people who probably couldn't pay it back. In common sense terms, that was foolishness. The rest, as we say, is history.

Making the taxpayer pay for someone else's failures is not the American way. People generally understand that, and that's why the average Congress-person's phone calls were 10-1 against this plan.

There are probably lots of free-market solutions to most of this problem. And since Congress got us into this mess, they probably have to do something to get us out of it. I don't have a lot of confidence that they'll do it right - they seem to be completely at a loss at the moment. Perhaps that's a good thing - when they do something, it generally hurts us.

OK, so the news fast lasted about 2 days. I must say that during that time, there was more calm in my life. It was not easy - news is all around us. I had to avoid certain stations on the radio. I had to be really picky about which websites I visited.

In the end, there was a feeling like I was acting like an ostrich with his head in the sand. With all of the activity going on, I came to the conclusion that it's better to moderate the flow rather than go cold turkey.

I still maintain that we have way too much news these days. We really don't need to know most of this stuff. Life is too short to spend so much time fixated on it. So I'm going for the middle. We'll see how it goes.

I don't know about you, but the amount of noise surrounding the presidential campaign, the financial crisis, global warming, etc. , etc. is becoming deafening. I've noticed that I've become almost addicted to news - finding out what else is going wrong, what this person said about that person, and so forth. You find yourself spending amazing amounts of time tracking news.

This is a very brief but excellent article on the stakes for this upcoming election. Required reading.

So I've been playing with Twitter - I'm not so sure I like it yet. It's like blogging, but more instantaneous. I guess it's good for finding out what someone is doing RIGHT NOW, but I'm still trying to figure out if that's a good thing or not. At least with a blog post, you get to think about it, edit it a little, then push the publish button. With Twitter, it's out there. BAM!

We'll play with it some more.

Much of my thinking recently has been about the mobile web. I believe that in a few years we will do more surfing on our phones than we do on our PC's. This will be a giant change for our lives - ubiquitous access to the internet, anywhere, any time. It will also mean big changes in our devices.

The iPhone and Google's new Android platform, as well as the 50 bazillion Blackberries are the first wave of web-friendly devices that are serving up the mobile web. Sites will become more mobile-friendly or will use intermediaries to serve their content up in a mobile-friendly way.

Colin, in one of his blog posts, encouraged me to do more blogging. I'd like to - I'm a little restricted because I work for one of those companies that would likely send you packing if they found out you were blogging on company time. They have the technology and the wherewithall to find out about it too.

So, I'll try to do some stuff in my off hours. Now if I could only figure out how to blog from my cellphone....

Thanks for the nudge Colin.

I upgraded my Linux box to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, the Hardy Heron. The upgrade ran for several hours and then started giving me some errors trying to upgrade several packages, VirtualBox being one of them. Finally, I clicked OK on one error message telling me that the Update Manager was giving up, and it just ended with this cheerful dialog telling me that my box might be "unstable."

OK, although no one reads this or cares, I'll try to keep this updated. Don't know why - there are lots of people out there saying blogs are SO over with. Still, it's something to do. Like I need more to do.

I really need to upgrade this Drupal to the new version - should be easy, but all I need now is time. HA!

The following is a quote from Charles Spurgeon: