Jared’s Blog

You might have noticed a few things have changed around here. I have finally bought a domain and moved my blog over. In the process, I decided to ditch the not-often-updated other sections of my site such as my music, art, and poetry. They may make a reappearance, but for now it’ll just be the blog. So change those RSS feeds and bookmarks. The new address is jrmehle.com. Much easier to remember.

Today, I’m supposed to be filled with patriotism. Instead, today only means I get a day off without having to take vacation. How can I be proud to live in America when America has so much wrong with it?

Recently, I saw Michael Moore’s new movie, Sicko. A scathing expose of the health care system in America. Many people don’t like Moore because of the way he spins information to tell his stories. Frankly, I tend to agree with most of what he says, so I look past it. This time around Moore spent relatively little time on camera and instead let a small group of people tell their stories. The message was clear, the health care system is broken. People who are sick aren’t getting the care they need to be well or even stay alive.

The movie hit very close to home 2 days after I watched it. We do not have health insurance at TheHoneymoon because it simply was never before needed at the company. As result, my coworker and I both are on continued COBRA coverage. My coworker’s former employer decided to close the business and thus ending my coworker’s insurance policy. She was told by one representative at the insurance company that her coverage would continue until the end of the month only to find out the next week that she was without any coverage at all. She was left with $700 in prescriptions to pay for. I watched her, tears streaming down her face, call the pharmacy asking them if she could pay for her prescriptions 1 week at a time. Sadly, stories like this are all too common.

We are fighting an undeclared war against an intangible opponent, terrorism. The deaths of soldiers long ago exceeded the number who lost their lives in the 9/11 attacks. President Bush insists that sending more troops to their death is the answer. Not to mention all the innocent journalists and civilians who get caught up in the battles.

We have a president who thinks he can do whatever he wishes. When he gets into legal trouble, he just changes the law or makes himself exempt. Most recently, he commuted the sentence of a convicted man because he thought it was “too harsh.” That’s right, Mr. Bush. Rich white lawyer friends of yours should never have to go to that awful place called prison. They can pay a fine and go on probation and that’s good enough. Oh please! Of course I speak of the Scooter Libby case which has now become another scandal. One of many in the past 8 years.

Yesterday, I read a striking story on Digg about a man who was moving. This man, a Holocaust survivor, was moving back to Germany because “…I’ve seen this before.” As a boy, the man had watched Hitler’s government commit atrocity after atrocity and no one did anything about it. The parallels between the Bush administration and Hitler’s government were too much. The man felt he was too old to do anything to stop it and so he was moving out of Bush’s grasp of power.

Millions of Americans will be drinking, BBQing, and watching fireworks today. I ask again, what is it they are celebrating?

Pownce is the newest site from Kevin Rose. Normally I’m behind everything Kevin does because he’s a geek like me. We share that common dork wavelength. But I’ve encountered a number of things that bug me about Pownce already.

First of all is the whole AIR thing. I don’t want to download AIR. Can’t Flash already run on the desktop outside of the browser? I remember E-cards from Streetwise working like that back in the day. What I’m really saying is AIR is too new and doesn’t yet have that killer application that makes me want to download it. Sorry Pownce.

Some other Web 2.0 shoe-ins are missing as well. Where’s my RSS feeds? I should at least be able to subscribe to a feed of all the notifications that come in. I’m also a little puzzled why Daniel Burka didn’t take the 30 seconds it’d take him to create a favicon. They are such an important branding tool. I guess they must all be Safari users.

It annoys me that there is a premium paid service. While it’s certainly within his right to charge for a premium service, something about it feels dirty. I’ve always thought of Kevin as a dork first and a businessman later. Digg Pro accounts coming soon?

In the grand scheme of things, Pownce is just Twitter (but without the heavy focus on mobiles) or Jaiku (without the feed aggregation). Surely these are features that could be added, but it always looks better to be the innovator. This seems to be what the Pownce team is aiming for with their 10MB (100MB for paid users) file sharing and events services. It will be interesting if to see if Pownce is nearly as successful as Digg. The news market was a crowded place when Digg came on the scene and social IM is looking more and more crowded every day.

Update: Thanks to a Digg story, I was able to get an RSS feed of my public posts on Pownce. Now you can find my pownces(?) in Jaiku.