Derek Scruggs

I’ve heard a fair share of second-guessing about how the police and the administration in Blacksburg handled yesterday’s terrible events, particularly how slow they were to notify the campus about what was going on. I don’t pretend to know whether and to what to degree they were wrong, but it seems pretty obvious to me that every school in the country should have a Twitter channel and require every student and faculty member to sign up for it.

Yeah, a lot of people would turn off their phones in class, but plenty of them wouldn’t, and the people outside of class may have been able to identify the shooter before he got to second crime scene.

Surely this means the times they are a changin’.

The invitation extended to Vice President Dick Cheney to be the commencement speaker at Brigham Young University has set off a rare, continuing protest at the Mormon university, one of the nation’s most conservative.

Interesting thought about religion from Jonah Goldberg, in which he writes candidly and dispassionately about his (relative lack of) faith.

And then there are some of those discomfiting facts about human groups. Taking the population of these United States, for example, the least religious major group, by ancestry, is Americans of East Asian stock. The most religious is African Americans. All the indices of dysfunction and misbehavior, however, go the other way, with Asian Americans getting into least trouble and African Americans most. What’s that all about?

I have no idea if this assertion is borne out by the facts, but it’s consistent with the well-document phenomenon of relatively little violent crime in Europe and Canada even as religiosity is much lower there as well.

Every now and then some misinformed clown writes a letter to the editor about how problems in society would be solved if (among other things) we had prayer in school. I always want to ask those people why, except for that commited by Islamists angry about cartoons, violence is so low in <a href=”http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=norris_27_2″>Denmark</a> (scroll to chart at bottom).

Over the last couple years I’ve written (I think) four letters to the editors of the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News. Most recently I wrote one last week in response to this letter. Today they printed it. That makes three out of the four that have made it to publication. Woo hoo!

As an aside, I noticed that they recently started allowing people to post responses to the letters. An excellent idea since letters are so often edited for brevity.

For the last year or so there’s been a ton of articles about how MySpace, YouTube etc is creating a new generation of narcissistic exhibitionist teens who put it all out there and wait for the pedophiles to come knocking. On one hand, I agree that many teens may not know what they’re getting into and that parents need to pay attention and take reasonable steps to keep their kids safe. That said, I think the long-term impact of this phenomenon could be remarkable.

I’m hardly a teenager at 38, but in the last 10+ years I can trace practically all of the important developments in my life to exposing myself online. At a practical level, I really mean that I’ve met a lot of people (including my wife) simply by emailing them. Being exposed and relatively open online has also helped my business by helping me find customers, investors, partners etc.

My point? I’m probably in the top 10% of people in my age group in terms of leveraging online networking. The remaining 90% are too busy or set in their ways to take advantage of these new technologies (and understanding the etiquette that goes with them). When it comes to social networking, my generation is a bunch of old fogies with their VCR clocks doing this: 12:00

A much greater percentage of kids today intuitively understand this. Right now they’re doing sophomoric stuff on MySpace, but today’s teenagers will be looking for jobs in a few years, and in 10 years they’ll be the hiring managers. Of course they will take advantage of social networking tools like MySpace, Facebook etc and will look askance at anyone who doesn’t, just like I’m amazed when I occasionally meet someone who doesn’t have an email address.

(As an aside, while I was writing this post I got a phone call from someone in Belgium who has followed my company very closely online. It may or may not lead to a business opportunity down the road, but the fact that he knew who to call, even though I’m 7-8 time zones away in another country, is yet another example of this trend.)

Hat tip: The Social Networking Weblog

I was tagged by my business partner Steve Outing, so here goes.

1. My bachelor’s degree is in music education, but I wasn’t a musician. I was a drummer. (rim shot) I was in the marching band in high school & college. I loved it, but realized by my senior year that I didn’t want to teach. So I stuck it out, completed the degree and stumbled around for a few years before discovering the business world.
2. Even though I think of software as my primary business strength, I didn’t write what I would consider to be a significant amount of code until after I turned 30. My first company was a software company, and while I had a strong role in product development, actual coding was limited to writing a few reports. I wrote some Paradox, Lotus Notes and Quattro Pro (remember that?!) code/macros back in the day, but probably fewer than 20,000 lines before I was 30.
3. I’m a fairly hardcore atheist, but my wife is a recently converted Christian. The funny thing about that is, I grew up in the Baptist-dominated South while she grew up in godless China.
4. I love to play soccer and have been playing indoor soccer practically non-stop every week for the past five years.
5. I’m an information junkie, and I do mean junkie. So much so that about six weeks ago I had to go cold turkey and thus all the 300+ rss feeds from my feed reader because I was spending too much time on them. I resubscribed to a couple that we use internally and 3-4 others, but now there’s a high, high bar to entry to my feed reader.

And now I’m passing on the tags to Brad Feld, Christine Herron and, oh, what the hell, the Dalai Lama.

Several months ago Denis Lavoie stumbled accross some of my posts about China. He was looking for advice about organizing a trip there for the University of Washington business school, so we talked by phone and I put him in touch with a couple of contacts I have there.

Since then he’s done the trip and posted a very nice blog about his travels in China, which includes lots of great photos.

Check it out, especially the toilet. One thing he doesn’t mention but which I strongly recommend ifyou travel in China - carry toliet paper with you at all times! Public restrooms often expect that you will bring your own.

Over three years ago, just before the start of the Iraq war, the Onion nailed it:

Is our arrogance and hubris so great that we actually believe that a U.S. provisional military regime will be welcomed with open arms by the Iraqi people? Democracy cannot possibly thrive under coercion. To take over a country and impose one’s own system of government without regard for the people of that country is the very antithesis of democracy. And it is doomed to fail.

The editorial wasn’t funny. Rather, it was the counterpoint that presciently captured the essence of the current debate: No it won’t (scroll down a little to see it).

I reluctantly supported the Iraq war because I believed the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq was an imminent threat. Shame on me for being too trusting.

I bring this up now because I was pissed about a letter from someone named Dave Petteys in this Sunday’s Denver Post. (Scroll down to “Intel Terror Report,” near the bottom.) He, like the rest of the Right, is trying to spin the National Intelligence Estimate that says the Iraq war has created more terrorists. In his letter he says:

The assertion that “fighting terrorism is what causes it” implies that ceasing to fight would cause terrorism to disappear. This is like saying pulling weeds in your garden is what causes them to grow.

That would be true if the Iraq war had actually been about fighting terrorism. We now know it wasn’t. The Onion obviously figured it out long before I did.

I wrote a letter back to the Denver Post challenging Pettey’s attempt to conflate Iraq with the War on Terrorism. They’ve printed my last two, so maybe this will be the trifecta.

Letter writer Dave Petteys (10/1/06) must be confused. He says that the Pentagon, who issued the National Intelligence Estimate, is wrong to say that “fighting terrorism is what causes it.” In a sense, Petteys is right; fighting terrorism doesn’t cause terrorism.

But that’s a non-sequitur because that’s not what the NIE says. Rather, it says that launching a war on false pretenses against an Arab state with no connections to Al Quaeda is a rallying cry for would-be terrorists worldwide, and there are now more of them than ever. Crucially, the terrorism infrastructure has become more robust because more sympathizers are willing to support them financially, with safe houses, at the polls (Palestinian Authority elections) etc.

We’ve seen this before. It happened in the 80’s after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan for similarly bogus reasons. And the Soviets used torture too. That worked out real well for them, eh? Just think if we could’ve used that $300 billion we’ve spent on the war actually fighting terrorism…

The simultaneously funniest and saddest part of this whole issue is that the Onion newspaper, a weekly satire tabloid popular on college campuses, predicted this state of affairs before the war in a mock editorial titled “This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism.” ( See http://www.theonion.com/content/node/34144) The pro-war counterpoint was titled “No it won’t.” This nicely sums up the current debate. Too bad it took 2,700 American lives to get from there to here.

This is a picture of a laundromat I used to frequent a few years ago. Now with free Wifi!

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After my initial frustrating disorientation with switching to the Macintosh, including a couple times where I almost decided to return it, I’ve drunk the Kool Aid and decided I’m now a Mac-head. I won’t rehash all the great stuff about the Mac that so many others have been saying for years, but I think the ultimate reason I’ve decided to stick it out is because Mac OSX is simply a superior operating system to Windows. During the 90’s Windows started to catch up to the Mac and in some ways became the better OS, but Apple’s embrace of a Unix-based OS, combined with their truly world class design sense. Has put the Mac back out in front by a mile, and I don’t really see how Microsoft can catch up without doing something radical. Vive la revolucion!