Dale is buying a Honda

Jim loves charts so here is a good one on who owns what car companies:

Here is the link to the Map

American Idol brings hope...

My DVR watches American Idol. I just skip past the 30 mins of commercials.
My favorite part of Idol season is:
1. Vote For The Worst
2. Dial Idol

Dial Idol predicts who will get kicked off by testing the phone lines to see how often they are busy for each idol. While not as accurate as it was before the lawsuit, it saves you from watching the results show. Why do we let them drag it out for 30 mins just for the 1 min of info we actually care about?

Vote for the Worst tries to buck the system to gain support for the worst singer. This may help explain why Sanjaya was around so long.

Both of these bring me to my real point. Individuals have so much power these days (ignore 20 years of failed Rock the Vote) and the internet can help people get together. Here are some Flash Mob examples.

But our government is still a mess. They spend more time trying to stay elected than trying to get anything done. These tax rebates are a great example of this. The economy will not rebound out of a recession because we gave people some money to spend on Chinese imports. But I am beyond being frustrated with this situation because 10 years of Survivor should tell us that winners are never the most liked, most qualified, most athletic, most deserving, they are somewhere in the middle.

Traveling to Toronto and fielding questions from Canadians about our election process and why it has to take 2 years gives you a good objective view at how out of hand our system has become.

My hope for the future is that there is a web site where people can vote on the priorities and work plans for their elected officials.

This session you will:
Pass an alternative energy bill
Fix Social Security
Repeal the Patriot Act

You will not:
Hold hearings on Steroids or Spygate

And like any good W&DP, if they fall short of their goals given to them by those who elect them, then you vote them out of office.
How much more efficient would our government be if everyone went to work knowing this was their only term if they didn't get things done?

The special interest groups will continue to get their way in the government, because right now they hold the only key ($Money$) to getting these candidates re-elected.

The power people have is to ignore the money and vote out anyone catering to special interests, but we aren't efficient in getting together so we lose that power.

To help bridge the gap until that system is created, I think we need to start with VoteThemOut.com. Where we get together to vote out every single incumbent until the overall satisfaction with the government goes up (is 50% satisfaction really too much to ask of our government?).

HDTV Chart

Sick

I was in Toronto last week with some coworkers.
One wasn't feeling well on the way up and felt terrible by the time we got home.
Another started to be sick on the way back.
I managed to fight through and feel fine...until the weekend.

Toronto also had a foot of snow while we were there and the city didn't shut down.
We did have to push our rental cars out of our parking spots.

Luckily, I think I am done traveling until Mid March.

On the Road Again

Signs you have been traveling too much:

You wake up in Cleveland, drive (ride) to Cincinnati, drive to Dayton, fly to Newark, drive to New Brunswick then sleep.

Tomorrow I head back up to Toronto for a couple of days. By Toronto I mean the airport since my hotel and the plant are within 5 mins of the airport.

The worst part of traveling is knowing that Rachel and Lucy sleep better when I am not in the bed turning every 5 mins.

I know my Mom tracks my flights from home so I found a few more helpful links.

This one shows a map of turbulence reports:
Turbulence

This one tracks something a little more important:
Boo

Hopefully this will be the only trip in Feb.
Good news is I am Silver Medallion again which means... almost nothing.
I am an Emerald member with National rental car which feels like stealing. Sometimes I try to go to the counter but all they want me to do is hop in any car I want and start driving to the check out. I liked my Mazda 3 but my Impala was roomy.

"It's looking pretty good right now" that next week will be my first full week in the office in 2008.