My First YouTube Video

It's an historic event worth blogging about. After using YouTube for over a year now, making playlists, adding favorites, subscribing to other members' channels, a spectator anxious to be a part of the game, I finally downloaded adequate screencasting software and set out to show the world the eons that it takes to load up Microsoft Flight Simulator from double-click to pushback.

Please remember this video is by no means intended to be great or a masterpiece. There is something wrong with the resolution, the end title is displayed for too short of a period, and I cannot yet get any audio.

I recorded this video with CamStudio and did post-production with Windows Movie Maker.

You can look forward to bigger and better videos from me down the road!

You Can Squidoo It!

The trouble with sharing your expertise with the world on the Internet tends to be that, even if you are an authority on your subject matter, to make a web page you usually need a lot of ancillary knowledge related to web design.

With Squidoo any registered member can create a web page by populating the page (or 'Lens' as they call it) with prefab modules and filling those modules with text, pictures, video, and a lot of other types of media. All of this with absolutely zero of knowledge any HTML or HTML editors. Squidoo levels the playing field, taking the ability to get content online out of the sole domain of web geeks.

That said, there are goodies here even for the web developer pro. With Squidoo already being well-known by Google, your pages are almost instantly indexed after publication. Even if you know HTML, creating pages with Squidoo is a cinch, and if you know little about computers a large community of Squidoo members are more than happy to help. And don't forget if your page is above average you get paid!

I've made a number of pages on many different topics:

My Internet HQ:

• Rodney Lewis' Homepage

A guide to flight simulators:

• Civilian Flight Simulators for PCs

My favorite movie:

• The Corporation

Another movie I like:

• Let The Right One In

A guide on researching movies:

• Online Movie Research

My favorite TV show:

• Strangers With Candy

A guide on Windows Vista:

• Surviving Windows Vista

Squidoo is the brainchild of Seth Godin, entrepreneur and author of numerous business books. Godin has been running businesses since he was a child and has worked for such firms as Yahoo! As well as being its owner, he is an active participant

Have Your Copybook Ready!

These guys are going to be big someday! The lyrics aren't that impressive but the singing and the instrumentals totally rock! You can visit Jack Morgan at MySpace.

Write that down in your copybook and turn it in to your instructor now!

Burying Digg

I can't believe Digg deleted my account! Their decision, according to their e-mail, "is final and irreversible." It never stated that they actually had any real evidence of me sending spam, merely that I had been reported by a user to have had sent spam.

I think I am an honest user of the Internet. If you look around at some of the different things I've written you will see a lot of stuff I've written about wanting to see the Web be more than just a place to shop, but to remain and be even more of the immensely valuable tool that it is to so many people. I am no spammer. I get spam and I hate it, so why would I do that to others?

These are the unforgivable things I did to deserve a summary life sentence of banishment from Digg:

• I cut and pasted a two-line signature my comments. The first line was my full name, the second was a hyperlink to my homepage
• I 'dug' a few of my blog posting and some webpages from some of my sites

I never meant them any harm and I never did anything explicitly against their vague and nebulous terms of service that I can honestly tell (I triple-checked). I am hurt by their their willingness to delete my account in such a rudely cavalier fashion and offer me no recourse whatsoever. I have to admit that I still think Digg is a great idea and I'm also saddened to not be allowed to be a part of that anymore for the rest of my life. It's not of much consolation to search around and find out they've done this to many others as well.

There is a part of me that is led to believe by the way it all happened that they think I'll be back tomorrow under a different e-mail and username perhaps, but, unfortunately for them, I am especially angry that I've lost the dozens of favorites I had saved up, to some excellent places on the 'Net, that are now gone forever. I'm really pissed about that.

So I will never be a user of Digg again, my decision "is final and irreversible."

A Barack Obama Revolution?

The ever-progressing march of freedom is unstoppable. The time is coming when humankind will shake off all oppression and oppressors at least as we currently know them. Some think this can and should be averted and spend a lot of time in dread that it will happen; I know it is not only quite necessary but also inevitable and spend a lot of time praying it comes to pass soon. I only worry that maybe it isn't just years or decades but maybe centuries or even millennia away.

After every POTUS election the new president-elect always professes that with this new Presidential Administration things are finally going to be different. We will at last have a government that truly knows its purpose is to serve the people, instead of the other way around.

Hillary captured the essence of this attitude somewhat comically way back when she was running against Obama and attempted to mock him, caricaturing his optimism in a speech, theatrically promising a laughing audience in Providence to "let's just get everybody together, the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know that we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect."

Though it is common for a new POTUS and their handlers to cast their election as a revolution, I have never seen this behavior more pronounced than during Obama's campaign and post-election transition period.

A part of me really wants to have faith that the system works, that soon after Barack Hussein Obama and Joseph Biden are sworn in on January 20th and the Inaugural festivities have ended, the American public can start cashing those checks for meaningful change that Obama has been writing for the last couple of years through his campaign promises.

I want to believe that though the Government is made up of humans—and because to err is human there will probably always be some corrupt, ineffectual or otherwise flawed officials, laws, programs and bureaucracies—nevertheless the Framers were genuinely inspired by divinity. Though I don't call myself patriotic, I want to believe what every hard-line jingoist already does, that the American political system is special and has what Chinese philosophers call the Mandate of Heaven.

I want to believe there is something particularly just about American justice; that there is something particularly equal about American equality.

Then there is another undeniable part of me that I would experience no matter who got elected, even if my original candidate Ron Paul himself was about to be inaugurated. It is hard to believe it really matters at the end of the day who is POTUS and I know a lot of people personally who agree. How unwittingly fitting for Hillary—after having poked fun at Obama's message of hope—to go on to say, "Maybe I've just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be. You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear."

The implements of the assorted forms of slavery of all people regardless of color or religion or gender or nationality are so insidious not only because they are invisible to those who only see with their eyeballs but also due to the fact that the chains are not held as much by modern-day bogeymen like the Rod Blagojevichs and Bernard Madoffs of the world, but are indeed held by the very masses said chains keep in bondage through the public's failure, for one reason or another, to adequately participate in their governments.

Those who know that the greatest obstacles to our liberation originate from within know that the human species still has a long way to go, that the degree of transformation required will mark nearly every facet of our lives and will run too wide and too deep to be brought about by such a superficial event within the big picture as a POTUS change.

It is my fear that the metamorphosis may require an upheaval such as to result in a break in the continuity of what I have heard called the Establishment that has heretofore been unprecedented within my lifetime. I wonder if it makes me patriotic that I will be sad if America loses her aforementioned precious Mandate.

Still, my pessimism is tempered by the exuberant vigor of the celebrations of Election Night. I will never forget the lady from behind the deli counter at Wallingford QFC excitedly telling us that employees upstairs in the break room have called down to say that it was just announced that Obama won. There was an electricity in those grocery store aisles, and in the streets coming home when I could hear the sounds of fireworks coming from all directions, that lasted for many days.

Watching a video of the impromptu gathering of people in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood right after the big announcement that made the rounds among my friends in the weeks following the election, I worry that all those who railed against the Bush Administration will rest on their laurels now that Obama has won, yet at the same time, seeing hundreds take to the streets in spontaneous dancing and celebration and knowing many more took to the streets with joy all over the nation, I cannot help but have a renewed faith in the place from which all government powers come: the People.

A Different Kind of WoW

If you pay taxes of whatever kind in America you likely contribute to my college education as I currently am a recipient of Federal and State student aid. You've been paying for me to sit at home and study for over a year now (well, not to mention the thirteen years of K-12 in various public schools in Tacoma, Charlotte and finally Puyallup) and I appreciate it, hopefully I can show it someday by using my education to humankind's benefit.

In the meantime, to thank you, and in the interest of stretching those dollars as far as possible in these financially-challenging times, I want to start posting entries about each class I take, allowing my readers the opportunity to learn with me to as much of an extent as possible. It is my intent that, should you choose, your meticulous and diligent personal study of these blog entries as a guide to the subject matter at hand will provide you with something approximating a college education without necessarily being in college at the time. If you are a student at a college or high school hopefully these study guides are a helpful supplement to your teachers' classroom instruction. Any level of focus on the material presented should result in a net gain of knowledge, it's your job to apply it usefully and benevolently.

I will typically follow a short discussion about the class in question with a somewhat organized list of resources provided by my instructor. In addition, perhaps, I may add some resources I think my instructor would have. Whenever possible I prefer to link to a free resource. When I can't find class material freely available on the Internet, I will try to provide an appropriate Amazon.com product link, otherwise I will just omit it.

WoW doesn't just refer to a MMOG anymore. For Fall Quarter of 2008 at North Seattle Community College I took a coordinated studies class combining and integrating introductory surveys of the disciplines of economics and anthropology called The World of Work: From Africa to Wall Street. The idea behind CSP is that one learns more from a class combining disciplines than the equivalent instruction in two separate courses, so please try to see each field of knowledge in terms of the other as you progress through the following material.

I know it's cliché but, in all cases but especially this one, please be careful and draw your own conclusions from the following material. Try not to read too much through the lens your biases, but also keep in mind your sense of what is right and just.

Week 1:

• CIA World Factbook (read about all African nations)
• geographia — Africa

Week 2:

• Economics for the Citizen by Walter Williams (Wikipedia)
• The Original Affluent Society by Marshall Sahlins (Wikipedia)

Week 3:

• The Library of Economics and Liberty's "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read" (Wikipedia)
• Economic Anthropology by Melville J. Herskovits (Wikipedia)

Week 4:

• In Praise of Cheap Labor by Paul Krugman (Wikipedia)
• Ohio State University Department of Anthropology's Southern African Foragers

Week 5:

• The James Liberty File Collection's Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt (Wikipedia)

Week 6:

• The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits by Milton Friedman (Wikipedia)

Week 7:

• Hoover Institution's Race, Culture, and Equality by Thomas Sowell (Wikipedia)
• Migrant Africa by Aderanti Adepoju

Week 8:

• The Corporation as a Command Economy by J. Bradford DeLong (Wikipedia)
• The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars' The Coming Revolution in Africa by G. Pascal Zachary

Week 9:

• Harvard University Department of Economics' The Cost of a "Living Wage" by N. Gregory Mankiw (Wikipedia)

Week 10:

• Dynamic Capitalism by Edmund S. Phelps (Wikipedia)

Come On Down to Kate's Pub and Meet Some Friends of Mine

My good friend Gloria has thrown together a little informal weekly shindig at my all-time favorite bar ever Kate's Pub (Lost in Seattle | Yelp) near where I currently live at the time of this writing in Seattle's Wallingford neighborhood. We head over every Wednesday after South Park, arriving at about 11 to 11:30pm and staying until they close.

It started when, one Wednesday night a couple years back, we decided to go over to the nearest bar to our house for a drink. Little did we know that Wednesday is karaoke night at Kate's Pub, and for most of us going that night, once we managed to get a few stiff shots of Irish whiskey down had this new-found courage to sing in front of a small audience of people that we can fancy are at least as wasted on alcohol as we are.

After a few weeks of this Glo had gotten together a few colleagues from Seattle Hempfest and some other assorted friends sympathetic to the causes of ending the drug war specifically and the maintenance and advancement of our civil liberties in general. Glo's little group, now called 'Happy Hempy Hippies,' had started a new tradition.

Now normally I am not a bar person. I may be known have a drink or two on occasion but I cannot stand most bars or the so-called 'bar scene.' I hate the cheap rickety tables, the black pressed-board walls, and the spent pull tabs everywhere. I find the meat market, crystal meth-esque vibe of most drinking establishments extremely white trash-tacky and beyond depressing.

Kate's Pub is something else entirely. While not overbearing, both the interior and exterior are warmly lit and inviting. The real stained-wood tables and careful attention to detail regarding interior design give the place an authentic, original feel. The food is inexpensive and of high quality and the barkeep doesn't skimp on the drinks. If that isn't enough, Kate, the bar's namesake, is often there to add a genuine human face to her establishment, greeting her customers warmly and in the trenches with her employees. Kate's Pub's presence does a phenomenal job at complementing the atmosphere of the Wallingford neighborhood.

For about US$15-$20 you can have a complete night with a few drinks, a good meal, tips for the waitstaff and DJ's, and still buy a drink for that hottie sitting at the table over there.

Happy Hempy Hippies may not manage to make it happen every week, but if you're in the neighborhood you can drop in anytime for a good meal and a drink in a friendly, down-to-earth place. If you're not in Seattle but you ever have a chance to make it out this way for a visit, you would really be missing out on a lesser-known local treasure if you didn't put my favorite bar, Kate's Pub, on your itinerary.

Kate's Pub
309 Northeast 45th Street
Seattle, Washington 98105-6133
(206)547-6832