Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

Seth Godin is spying on me. How else to explain that he just wrote: "what it means to be an author is changing for the first time in a hundred years [...] the author is the ringleader, cheerleader, ringmaster, organizer and jack of all trades of a process that might not ever end."

Sure, he claims that's his takeaway from Craig Mod's essay "Post-Artifact Books and Publishing", but it seems more likely he's been following the writing and publishing of the Definitive Guide to Drupal 7.

Just made the 14 hour, 23 minute trip from Sissonville, West Virginia to Wellfleet, Massachusetts in just over 11 hours.

Thank you, ye gods of speed traps, for clearing them out of my way.

I never thought it would be my personality to be the fastest car on the road – in my grandfather's minivan no less – but except for a couple attempts at having a pace car, and once in traffic, no one passed me in the whole 815 miles i was on the road.

Gwen Bell – 15 Minutes to Live
"We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live.
1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes.
2. Write the story that has to be written.

Dear person, every person, any person,

I've missed most news coverage, but i heard that Obama said "justice has been done" with our military's extra-judicial killing of Osama bin Laden. This is disconcerting given the lack of judicial process in this instance and the broader contempt for rule of law and legal process exhibited by the Obama administration and its predecessor. Not that i consider courts to be the only legitimate arbiters of the broad concept of justice, but when it's the president of my country talking about the crime of mass murder...

Catch 22: If your e-mail inbox is not acting as your TODO stack, it would not matter that it has 87 e-mails in it. But if it weren't acting as your TODO list, it wouldn't have 87 e-mails in it.

My band o' unrequited love has been lost. I've been wearing it, a Rakhi thread signifying love and protection between a brother and a sister (and i learned later that in Indian popular culture it is what you do not want someone you are falling in love with to tie on you), since 2009 August 5.

[very disorganized and the tangents need to be re-planted elsewhere but there's good stuff here]

An unabashed Milton Friedman acolyte made the point (a quotation?) that as long as exchanges are freely made between people, the net benefit has to be positive by definition.

Yes-- exactly-- but-- and there is a huge but-- there's little practical difference between a force-coerced exchange and an economic-coerced exchange. Indeed, it's the history and present of inequality to use force to back up the imposition of economic injustice.

Research the hell out of the costs born by society due to the way McDonald's does business:
- unhealthy food, cost of health care, lost productivity
- trash produced
- environmental destruction where cows graze, such as Amazon destruction
- loss/degredation of the local water table due to the parking lot
- contribution to global warming due to traffic
- underpayment of employees

One or two volunteers stand outside each of the 15,000 McDonald's 24/7 (or quickly learn when the busiest times are) and cheerfully ask people to pay a tax on their purchase to reflect its true cost.