I put in the vote for my preferred candidate this morning — along with all the other uncontested Democrats lower on my district’s ticket — so in just a few hours it’s time to sit down, pound some chips, and get my Electoral College / Twitter watch on. Before that, I will be lifting like a madman so I muscle the stress out of my system.

In case you’re interested, this is my 277-EV prediction. Gotta be optimistic but realistic.

I saw that Gawker’s sites, hosted by Datagram, are still on their Tumblr backup servers a full five days after the Sandy disaster first hit. I’m puzzled why any high-traffic site would use a hosting facility in NYC in the first place – aside from the flooding potential that was all too real this week, the real estate is expensive, electricity prices there are some of the highest in the country, and the climate is varied and humid enough that it requires lots of artificial adjustment. You’d want to locate your servers somewhere where:

1. Electricity is cheap to run all the servers and air conditioners,
2. Real estate costs very little so you can physically scale up as big as you want,
3. Small propensity for natural disasters like storms, earthquakes or floods,
4. It’s naturally cool and dry so you can make some use of the natural environment to keep the heat down, and
5. There’s easy access to telecom infrastructure to get your traffic out to the world.

Not sure which place would best fit these criteria — Denver? I guess I’ll open a facility located conveniently next to some craft beer and hiking in Boulder and get this thing going.

• I’m voting for a second term this Tuesday. I still haven’t broken the addiction to political news, so I have detailed nerd frameworks for my vote, but I’m not changing anyone’s mind so I’ll leave it at that. I did think this Economist quote from the mag’s surprising Obama endorsement sums up the problem with Romney, a guy who was a terrific boss when I worked at the 2002 SLC Olympics and otherwise makes a decent leader:
  

  This newspaper would vote for that Mitt Romney, just as it would for the Romney who ran Democratic Massachusetts in a bipartisan way (even pioneering the blueprint for Obamacare). The problem is that there are a lot of Romneys and they have committed themselves to a lot of dangerous things.

  Agreed. Other than that, I’m casting my vote and leaving the rest up to the majority, remembering that the local elections have a lot more to do with my daily life anyway.



• After my first winning week of the season, here’s how I suggest you lose your money betting on the NFL in Week 9:

  Last week: 8-6; Overall: 45-71
  At San Diego -8 Kansas City
  Denver -3.5 At Cincinnati
  At Green Bay -11 Arizona
  Miami -2 At Indianapolis
  Baltimore -3.5 At Cleveland
  At Houston -10 Buffalo
  At Washington -3 Carolina
  Detroit -4 At Jacksonville
  Chicago -3.5 At Tennessee
  At Seattle -5 Minnesota
  At Oakland -1.5 Tampa Bay
  At NY Giants -3.5 Pittsburgh
  At Atlanta -4 Dallas
  At New Orleans -3 Philadelphia

Chicago bisected bridges are the coolest. I think they should raise them every day just so I’m entertained at lunchtime.

• I’m one week late to the party on this, but I too have my informed-Internet-guy opinion on the outing of Redditor Violentacrez by Gawker. Short version? Totally OK with it and, in fact, excited to see it happen.

  The first question is always whether anything illegal occurred. This dude skated right up to the line of any number of anti-harassment and child-pornography statutes, but he apparently didn’t cross any of them. Question No. 2 is whether there’s a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech. Did the government get involved here? No, it’s two private actors. (Three if you count Reddit itself.)

  So with that out of the way, it’s situational-ethics time. I fully agree with this post at Popehat:

  Is this a bad thing? That’s a question I’ve been struggling with for years. To the extent that I think that it’s bad, it may just be because I disagree with the consequences that the marketplace of ideas produces in a particular case. If “Violentacrez” had said and did everything he did in public under his own name, I’d have no problem with the marketplace of ideas producing social consequences. So why, exactly, should Violentacrez expect to have a protected right to be free of those consequences? Put another way — why should someone who devotes himself to upsetting people, and who promotes creeper forums, not be treated like someone who devotes himself to upsetting people and promotes creeper forums?

  The thing to remember is that the Internet is an extension of the public space. Internet anonymity is just a mask, so if you don’t want to be found out, you’d better buy a high-quality mask and take damn good care that you’ve glued it tight to your face before you go running down Main Street shouting every manner of obscenity, waving giant up-skirt photos of the very same people walking down the street next to you. And if your behavior is offensive enough to spark huge levels of interest in finding out who’s this asshole in a mask such that someone manages to follow you home, watches you take off your mask on the porch and then goes back to the street with an even bigger poster saying “THAT ASSHOLE MASK GUY IS MICHAEL BRUTSCH”? Karma is a bitch, and you should have known you could be found out at any time.

  Do I feel bad about him losing his job? Nope; that’s the benefit of at-will employment. What about his wife’s health insurance? Chalk that one up to the broader national stupidity of tying health insurance to employment in the first place. This is a case of reaping what you sow, and I hope it reinforces the fact that going online doesn’t divorce the consequences from the actions.

• And one more relevant piece: If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault.
• The editor-in-chief from my years at TIME, Jim Kelly, wrote a Vanity Fair article defending Tina Brown in the aftermath of Newsweek ending its print edition. Now never mind that only the dead-tree version of Newsweek, not the magazine itself, is going away; it’s frustrating that people assume the outdated print format is the whole of the magazine, but that’s not my issue with the piece. Never mind also that I think Tina Brown got way too trollish with the magazine. Jim writes that Newsweek, and the broader newsmagazine format, is a victim of Internet-media consumers caring more about their friends’ opinions on the issues than they care about expert takes and analysis. In truth people have always cared about their friends’ opinions, but the idea that people no longer want expert insight is just wrong.

  The problem here is that expert insight is defined very narrowly: a collection of people, writing under the same publication umbrella, who really know their stuff and want to help you understand their interest and outlook. This still exists! Themed content sites featuring expert analysis are all over the web. The big shift is that in this day and age, the expert is as likely to be publishing on his or her own than to be writing for a single title. Writers can be their own titles and are freer than ever to move between different publications and sites, providing both a richer base of opinion for outlets and a greater equity and sense of control to the writers themselves. Juan Cole from the University of Michigan (go Blue) is a great example of this: He knows a lot about the Middle East, he knows people want to know about the Middle East, and he started a very popular blog to connect the dots and get the expert analysis flowing. How does this at all show that expert analysis has been devalued? Throw in friends who read these expert opinions and now have the heightened ability to share them with via social media, and we’ve now shown that even those derided friends’ opinions themselves have a greater expertise-disseminating role than ever.

  Expertise isn’t dead, it’s just free to do its own thing. That’s unfortunate for newsmagazines, but a huge boon to inquisitive readers.



• And in the wake of a week where I almost broke even on picks and the Steelers won a game, my Week 8 locks. Some really strange lines on Yahoo! this week – system glitch?

  Last week: 6-7; Overall: 36-65 (ouch)
  At Minnesota -6.5 Tampa Bay
  New England -7 St. Louis
  At Tennessee -3.5 Indianapolis
  At Green Bay 0 Jacksonville (!!!)
  San Diego -2.5 At Cleveland
  At Philadelphia -2.5 Atlanta
  At Detroit -2 Seattle
  At NY Jets -2 Miami
  At Chicago -7.5 Carolina
  At Pittsburgh -4.5 Washington
  At Kansas City -1.5 Oakland
  NY Giants -1 At Dallas
  At Denver -6 New Orleans
  San Francisco -7 At Arizona

Crazy week at work, so I gotta keep it quick.

• I laughed way too many times at this not to include it. You can skip to 0:18 for the best part.

  I almost LOLd at my office just looking that up again.

• Be forewarned: I suck at this this year.

  Last week: 2-12 (!); Season: 30-59
  At San Francisco -7.5 Seattle
  At Buffalo -3.5 Tennessee
  At Minnesota -6 Arizona
  At Indianapolis -2.5 Cleveland
  At Houston -6.5 Baltimore
  Green Bay -5.5 At St. Louis
  Dallas -2.5 At Carolina
  At NY Giants -5.5 Washington
  New Orleans -2 At Tampa Bay
  At New England -10.5 NY Jets
  At Oakland -4 Jacksonville
  Pittsburgh -1.5 At Cincinnati
  At Chicago -6.5 Detroit

I’m in Colorado right now, and holy crap is this state beautiful. I even included a second Instagram photo just so you could get another glimpse of it:

I mean, damn! I imagined myself living here: I’d have to take up skiing again, which is hella fun but has already cost me one knee surgery, but the summer hiking here is totally fantastic. I’d be crazy healthy from trudging through aspen forests and eating high-altitude farmed lettuce. (Apparently this was a thing.) I can see the appeal of mountain life.

• Also while here, we visited the By Nature Gallery, which is now my favorite store on Earth. Scientists digging for dino bones will usually donate the most choice pieces to museums, then this store purchases the best of the other fossils or mineral formations (quartzes, geodes, etc.) found in Utah, Ohio, South Carolina, Germany and other worldwide spots. (Apparently they tend to avoid purchases from China and Morocco because so many of the fossils there are high-quality fakes. The more you know.)

  This store sells only genuine fossils, and it blew my mind: you can walk in there and purchase an ichthyosaur skeleton, a hadrosaur egg, a saber-toothed tiger skull, an apatosaurus femur and even the full skeleton of a giant ground sloth. (At $900,000, the sloth fossil (slothssil?) is likely to end up in a museum.) Now I know where I’m going to blow all my money when I decide to adopt a high-powered destructive financial habit.

• Also, being in a battleground state, I initially felt bad about the huge number of political ads thrust upon the people here. But after just a few days, I’ve learned it’s fun to learn the lineup and guess by the first few ominous-sounding tones which ad it is. Romney has one that starts with a video of Obama saying “I’m Barack Obama,” but then it flies into all the questionably sourced ways that Obama is out to destroy all jobs and the middle class. They misdirection: that’s where they get ya.
• And the pro-football picks. I broke even last week – my ship is turning around, though that’s after it ran aground on an endangered coral reef and spilled millions of gallons in fuel oil into a marine reserve.

  Last week: 7-7; overall: 28-46
  Pittsburgh -6 At Tennessee
  Cincinnati -1 At Cleveland
  At NY Jets -3.5 Indianapolis
  At Tampa Bay -4 Kansas City
  At Atlanta -9 Oakland
  At Baltimore -3.5 Dallas
  At Philadelphia -4 Detroit
  At Miami -3.5 St. Louis
  New England -3.5 At Seattle
  At Arizona -4.5 Buffalo
  At Washington 0 Minnesota
  At San Francisco -5 NY Giants
  At Houston -3.5 Green Bay
  At San Diego -1.5 Denver

• In my former career, I was once a FED (front-end developer, for you n00bs) for Slate, where I spent my days beating up on XSLT conditionals and dreaming of a world free from IE 6. I therefore thought this article from OnlineTools.org did a good job laying the job out there for anyone who has no idea what a FED does and can’t see that FrontPage won’t do as good a job as an “HTML monkey”, to use the article’s term. Interested at all in what makes websites tick? Give it a read.
• I follow a lot of digital theorists and marketers on Twitter, but I’m always disappointed how many of them tweet motherhood statements like “Customers demand quality and support like never before” or “Are you digital? Your customers are.” Well great, but can you translate that into a meaningful strategy and set of observations useful to anybody? Because if you put some feel-good nonsense like that out there as your perspective, my thoughts are that “No, you can’t”. Not to mention most of your Twitter followers are probably other marketers who are well aware of these things, so I’m not seeing anything useful at all.

  Add some value, brah!

• I had to find the CAGR formula in Excel — big thanks to this link — so if anybody needs it, rock out with this (where D1 is the non-cumulative total for the final period and A1 is the total for the first period):

  =((D1/A1)^(1/((COUNT(A1:D1))-1))-1)

  Useful!

• And this week’s ill-fated NFL picks:

  Last week: 5-9; Overall: 21-40 (tied for 18th out of 20!)
  Arizona -1.5 At St. Louis (I’ve gotten Thursday game right only once)
  Atlanta -3 At Washington
  At Pittsburgh -3.5 Philadelphia
  Green Bay -7 At Indianapolis
  At NY Giants -9 Cleveland
  At Minnesota -5.5 Tennessee
  At Cincinnati -3.5 Miami
  Baltimore -6 At Kansas City
  At Carolina -3 Seattle
  Chicago -4.5 At Jacksonville
  At New England -6.5 Denver
  At San Francisco -9.5 Buffalo
  At New Orleans -3.5 San Diego
  Houston -8 At NY Jets

Daisy Cutter pale ale from Half Acre Brewing Company: one of Chicago’s finest.

• My friend Mike linked to this NYT article about the birth of the Internet. It spotlights the creation of the Internet as a political football in the government vs. private industry debate, which was news to me: The Internet’s founding history is generally known as the series of milestones from ARPANET, Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the National Science Foundation and assorted university computer-science departments — so I was surprised off the bat that there’s an argument that the proto-Internet was the product of private industry. (Not surprisingly, this started at the Wall Street Journal.) The Internet as we know it since the 1990s was certainly shaped almost entirely outside the government, but the original underlying concepts for things like network structure, TCP/IP, etc., sprang from public funding of one type or another.

  The author ultimately promotes the idea that peer networks were key to founding the Internet, and that they drive almost all innovation. This is true in a way, but he leaves out the fact that most of those clusters in the Internet’s founding steps were academic institutions frequently funded by the state — the ideas that formed the Internet originated outside of market pressure.

  If you ask me, the Internet is a model for exactly how the American innovation economy should ideally function: public funds for exploring science and technology that might not seem profitable at first glance, working with private know-how to perfect and disseminate the things that change society. Not only the Internet but GPS, semiconductors, robitics and blah all grew out of the Cold War’s tightly knit partnerships between public-funded academics and private companies’ marketing and product development. I think if we lose that link between the two by trying to argue absolutely for one or the other, or when we use a generic term like “networks”, we’re losing sight of a huge engine of progress.

• I’m posting my picks here not as actual picks you should use, but as a service in which you take the opposite of my picks, then use that to win. If picking over .500 on the week is considered a win, I’m currently 0-3 after finishing 2nd in my league last year. This makes me the New Orleans Saints of Pick ‘Em.

  Last week: 4-12; Overall: 16-31
  At Baltimore -12 Cleveland (starting off consistent!)
  New England -4 At Buffalo
  At Detroit -4.5 Minnesota
  At Atlanta -7 Carolina
  San Francisco -4 At NY Jets
  San Diego -1 At Kansas City
  At Houston -12 Tennessee
  Seattle -2.5 At St. Louis
  At Arizona -5.5 Miami
  At Denver -6.5 Oakland
  Cincinnati -2.5 At Jacksonville
  At Green Bay -7.5 New Orleans
  At Tampa Bay -2.5 Washington
  At Philadelphia -2 NY Giants
  At Dallas -3.5 Chicago

We’ve had the dog for more than a year and they still hate each other. Chill out, bros.

• I was talking infamous content farm Demand Media with a coworker the other day and we got onto their accounting fiasco. It seems they faced some deserved scrutiny for their financial practices: Instead of tracking the cost of writing as an expense on the income statement, Demand capitalizes the cost of an article and treats it as an asset on the balance sheet.

  The trickiness here of making profits look higher by taking out the expense is indeed trickiness, and I really dislike Demand for all the junk content it puts out there. (Try going to Livestrong.com and search “lycopene” – it’ll return a solid 30 articles about the exact same thing but with slightly differing headlines.) But in the Internet era of long-tail content, I don’t completely disagree with this idea. Demand articles, centered on health, humor, lists, general info and DIY, “depreciate” much more slowly than a topical article from, say, Slate that’s only relevant in the first few days after a news event. As a result, you can sell ads against it for years, and it’s even designated as “inventory” by ad sales.

  So yeah: creative accounting, but not ridiculous.

• Brussels sprouts have become my favorite vegetable. With a mom who told me for years that brussels sprouts were one of the worst foods on Earth, I believed they truly were until I finally ate for the first time at age 31. (!) Growing up, she always ate them boiled, which truly does sound like the worst food on Earth. Meanwhile, this recipe for grilled brussels sprouts is the best thing that ever happened to charcoal grills and skewers. So my question is: did everyone in America forget how to cook vegetables for 80 years?

  I get the appeal of canned vegetables – they keep forever and whatnot, and that’s good when times are tough. But why did the country forget that there are methods of cooking vegetables that don’t require moisture? Roasted vegetables are the bomb – carrots, corn, peppers, tomatoes, beets, even broccoli – but I don’t think anyone I know ate a roasted vegetable outside of Thanksgiving. If it’s not steamed or boiled, it must not be a vegetable.

  To finish: vegetables + dry heat = greatness.



• The week 3 NFL picks: Slight improvement last week, but still off to a slow start. Home teams are on a roll this year, so here’s hoping the ones I pick keep that going.

  Last week: 6-8; Overall: 12-18
  At Carolina -2.5 NY Giants (doh)
  At Chicago -7.5 St. Louis
  At Dallas -7.5 Tampa Bay
  San Francisco -7 At Minnesota
  Detroit -3.5 At Tennessee
  At Washington -3 Cincinnati
  NY Jets -2.5 At Miami
  At New Orleans -9 Kansas City
  Buffalo -3 At Cleveland
  At Indianapolis -3 Jacksonville
  Philadelphia -3.5 At Arizona
  At San Diego -3 Atlanta
  Houston -2 At Denver
  Pittsburgh -4 At Oakland
  At Baltimore -3 New England
  Green Bay -3.5 At Seattle

Classic Northwestern roller coaster last Saturday – but it ended well this time. 2-0!

• A while back I speculated that using real names in the comments sections of websites would reduce their horribleness. Now that so many sites are implementing Facebook Connect comments, we have a chance to see how that’s shaped things. Anecdotally I’ve noticed:

  Fewer comments overall. Your average Chicago Tribune crime story used to see maybe 10-15 (mostly racist) comments from anonymous handles; now the count is more like 4-5.

  More adamant comments with less conversation. You’re less likely to see replies to a comment in FB’s system, which hides more than 2-3 replies at a time. That said, it feels like people are more likely to talk past each other – less “ur point iz totally gay” and more “I’m saying this thing I want to say while barely mentioning you or what you said”.

  I’d say that’s all preferred over “ur gay” YouTube comments anyday. I still think comment sections are 93.4% value destruction and only 6.6% value-add, but that’s a positive shift from a solid 99.88% value destruction. Vindication: I have it.

• A political post worth reading even when you’re tired of political posts – check this one, form an opinion, and you’re done until November: “Obama by the Numbers”, Esquire.com
• I’m geeked to see the return of the NFL dialogue at Slate / Deadspin. Lots of tearing down of the NFL – while I agree with that, I had this say on Slate:
  

  All the criticisms of the NFL leveled in these exchanges are spot-on: They’re greedy, they’re hypocritical, and they know we’ll all lap it up like the idiot fan masses that we are. But what’s missing here is just why the writers are still lapping it up, too: Stefan goes so far as to hint that Goodell is a hypocrite for trying in any way to make the game safer (probably true), but then Stefan is still here as a football fan.

  I like to think I’m at least moderately empathetic, so of course I cringe at the horror stories of TBI and wonder if there’s some way to keep the game around but cut down on the destruction. But I’m just as bad: I find myself on the couch watching RedZone every Sunday no matter what outrage keeps happening. I’d like to hear the writers explore why they do the same even after such vehement denigrations.

  That “frozen tundra” appeal still works for the NFL’s basic product, I’d say, because as much as it sucks that the NFL recognizes that and uses it to sell us tons of nonsense, it’s why we all come back year after year.

• And this week’s NFL picks. So I’m not yet in NFL-gambling-oracle mode: just 6-10 in Week 1, and I had to watch the Steelers lose to Peyton Manning’s bionic neck in the process. But it’s all good, because it’s only Week 2 and I have plenty of time to climb back and get my Delphi on:

  Last week: 6-10
  At Green Bay -5.5 Chicago (off to a good start)
  At NY Giants -7.5 Tampa Bay
  At New England -14 Arizona
  Minnesota -1.5 At Indianapolis
  New Orleans -2.5 At Carolina
  At Buffalo -3 Kansas City
  At Philadelphia -1 Baltimore
  Oakland -2.5 At Miami
  At Cincinnati -6.5 Cleveland
  Houston -7.5 At Jacksonville
  Dallas -3 At Seattle
  Washington -3 At St. Louis
  Pittsburgh -6 NY Jets
  San Diego -4.5 Tennessee
  At San Francisco -6.5 Detroit
  At Atlanta -3 Denver

Twice this week I thought, “X would be a good thing to post on here,” then by the time I got to WordPress, I had completely forgotten X. I need to finish that API for my mind to fix this problem.

• Politics-following types like me are wrapped up in convention coverage, but it’s important to remember that local and state politics way outpaces national when it comes to impact on your everyday life. To think selfishly about it: the federal government affects a much larger number of people, but what really matters is who’s more into you and your life each day. My father-in-law agreed heartily last week, noting the irony that he hasn’t bothered to learn the name of his own council rep in Florida despite regularly watching the news and keeping up with the national stage.

  So the next time your life literally stinks, ask yourself who deserves the blame: the President, or the Streets and San guy?

• Now that pro football has rejoicingly returned (!!!), I’ve been visiting NFL.com every now and then for my dose of league propaganda. You’ll note that the NFL, just like the NBA, MLB and NHL, has all of its teams’ websites on a templatized system of subdomains that I’m sure is commonly administered. (Managed services for that data center is one high-pressure job at this time of year.) Co-branding abounds: we’re not supposed to think of the NFL as 32 teams, but as one league.

  This is the smart way to do it because of the way the Internet has changed sports fandom: Back in the pre-web dark ages, you got the box scores from around the league and the heavily skewed coverage of your local team, but that was about it. Now we’re more likely to get our sports news from a national outlet like ESPN.com than we are from just WTAE and the Post-Gazette, so it’s an array of coverage from an array of perspectives. As the fans are moving to a league-wide view, the pro leagues (in their infinitely market-centered way) are shifting their digital-marketing structure to follow: they don’t want fans to be fans of just one team, but of the sport and the league that governs it. Roger Goodell applauds this observation, but suspended me for four games for analyzing the NFL’s business model on more than a blind-obeisance level.

• Speaking of web development, I wonder how many people nerd-raged the way I did when a Citibank radio commercial, as an allegory for confusing work discussions, said, “Should you use HTML or CSS?!” Not only is HTML no longer a geek-only concept, this question doesn’t even make sense: it’s like asking whether you should use the television or the cable box to watch TV.

  The number of nerds angered by that has to be at least in the hundreds. There have therefore been very few instances where the anger of hundreds has been as petty and ridiculous as it is right now.

• With the news this week that organic food isn’t necessarily healthier than conventional food — nutrition-wise, at least; I assume organic’s lack of pesticides still makes it the preferred option for maximized third-arm avoidance — I think it’s time to celebrate the food that is the key to both eating healthy and saving money: the frozen vegetable.

  I don’t know why frozen vegetables don’t get more props than they do. I hear a lot about food deserts and fresh produce, and yeah, fresh produce tastes WAY better 90% of the time. But when I was a cheap lad of 22, and even today when I’m a cheap lad of 32, frozen vegetables were the way I added healthy balance to my diet while I kept grocery spending at ramen-noodle levels. Seriously, a large bag of store-brand peas, broccoli or mixed vegetables is only $1, and that bag is at least five meals’ worth of greenery right there. The American Frozen Food Institute needs to get out there and rebrand as a savior of healthy eating for the less fortunate.

  Clarence Birdseye, my stomach and wallet salute you.

• And finally, the NFL picks return. Last year I finished 145-112 picking against the spread, which was good enough for second place in my league of former TIME.com coworkers. I guess some of them could conceivably read this and enter the same picks as me, but that would be some stalker-level stuff that would indicate a much bigger problem than cheating at Yahoo! Pick ‘Em football.

  NFL WEEK 1
  At NY Giants -3.5 Dallas (oops)
  At Chicago -9.5 Indianapolis
  Philadelphia -8.5 At Cleveland
  At NY Jets -2.5 Buffalo
  At New Orleans -7 Washington
  New England -5.5 At Tennessee
  At Minnesota -4 Jacksonville
  At Houston -12 Miami
  At Detroit -7 St. Louis
  Atlanta -3 At Kansas City
  At Green Bay -5 San Francisco
  Carolina -2.5 At Tampa Bay
  Seattle -2.5 At Arizona
  At Denver -1.5 Pittsburgh
  At Baltimore -6 Cincinnati
  At Oakland -1 San Diego