robbecker.com

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting much lately. In fact, this is my first post in over two months. But I promise you that the rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated.

I’ve had ideas for posts. They would have been great, I promise you. One was going to be titled Is robbecker.com relevant? in which I pondered whether personal sites/blogs like this one are becoming irrelevant in the shadow of Facebook and the quickly-evolving world of the social web.

The post I’m really sorry I never wrote, a follow-up (of sorts) to my post about George Bush, would have been my great opus. I would have called it I am Barack Obama, and in it I was going to discuss what the election of Barack Obama meant to me — not from a political point of view — but from the point of view of someone who has experienced being an outsider, an other, a man without a community. I was going to show how I saw much of myself in a black man with roots in Kansas and Kenya, and how, for the first time, I felt like this country had a president whose life experience and outlook I understood and could connect with.

Unfortunately I never did get around to writing it.

So what’s happened to robbecker.com? Well, perhaps I’ve caught a case of the winter-time blues and lost a little bit of my posting mojo. And it’s also true I’ve been kept busy lately between work and school and home. But those keen observers out there might have also noticed some subtle changes to the site that belie the big changes going on behind the scenes, as I have been revamping much of the internal workings of the site. It’s a long, slow process that gets done only when I find a little free time to work on it. And since I’ve spent most of my free time this winter shoveling snow, it’s taking longer and going slower than I had hoped. But as new infrastructure is rolled out and reaches a (close to) finished form, I’ll try to make note of it so everyone can go play with the new stuff.

In the mean time I expect that updates will continue to be few and far between for a while. But rest assured, Paul is not dead.

And I still have all my fingers.

I imagine that most people have their formative politician; the man who colored their view of politics and government at the time when they became aware of what a president and a government can actually meant to their lives. My formative politician was George W. Bush.

I didn’t vote for G.W. in 2000, but I wasn’t particularly concerned when he won, or didn’t, or sort of did. And in my mind, his presidency didn’t begin until 9/11, 2001. Can you remember anything he did as president before that day?

I was a youthful editor of my college newspaper then, and all my memories of 9/11 revolve around that ramshackle, old office. We all rallied around our president in those days that followed — us newspaper nerds, us Americans. And as I sat on that beat-up old couch in the office and watched Bushy standing in the rubble of the WTC, I remember thinking, “Thank God he’s our President.”

In the weeks and months that followed there was Afghanistan, then WMDs, then Iraq. I participated in many vigorous debates around our big, brown, faux-wood-laminate meeting table. This was a college newspaper, in New York City, and so the sharpest young minds of our modest school would debate any and every thing that our government did. I relished those debates.

I defended my president in those days. I believed, to my core, that — especially at a time like this — we had to trust our leaders. We elected them to lead us after all. We had the best minds hard at work in Washington. They knew more than we did. We didn’t have access to the information they had. If W. said something that didn’t sound honest, I ignored it, assuring myself that there must be good reason. I brushed aside arguments that started with Vietnam (in the past, get over it!) or Halliburton (leftist conspiracy theory!).

I heard people say that we had no exit strategy for Iraq, and thought to myself, “Don’t be ridiculous, our President and our Secretary of Defense would not invade a country without an exit strategy!”

Doh!

The enormity of my naiveté began to crystallize around the time we finally acknowledged there were no WMDs.

I used to hold our president in special regard, and G.W. taught me never to do that again. I’ll never blindly trust government again — and that makes me sad. Wiser, perhaps, but sad.

See them all here!

I loved this tasty bit from a snarky op-ed in the New York Times

The idea of American exceptionalism doesn’t extend to Americans being exceptional. If you excelled academically and are able to casually use 690 SAT words then you might as well have the press shoot video of you giving the finger to the Statue of Liberty while the Dixie Chicks sing the University of the Taliban fight song. The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it.

Check out the photos from our Mini-honeymoon!

Hot off the digital press! — the first images from our wonderful wedding day yesterday, complements of Joe and his iphone!

This one got a little retouching complements of Rob.

Microsoft, the company that everyone loves to hate, has fallen to an all-time low. As reported on the New York Times Bits blog, Microsoft has begun a \$500 million campaign designed to convince you that Vista isn’t really as bad as you heard. From the microsoft website …

We know a few of you were disappointed by your early encounter. Printers didn’t work. Games felt sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest Windows wasn’t always living up to your high expectations for a Microsoft product.

How the mighty have fallen. I can’t imagine Bill Gates would stand for this if he wasn’t too busy trying to save the world.

UPDATE: Check out this great article from the New York Times detailing the whoes of Vista through Microsoft’s internal correspondence.