For example, the site responds to the smear that "Barack Obama Won't Say The Pledge of Allegiance/Won't Put His Hand Over His Heart" this way:

LIE: Barack Obama won't say the pledge

LIE: Barack Obama won't put his hand over this heart during the pledge of allegiance

TRUTH: View video of Barack leading The Pledge of Allegiance in the United States Senate.

It's about time a candidate confronted such fear mongering. Check out the site to see more rumors dispelled, including those about his faith and his wife.

…apart from reading your book, which is already a good thing, do you know about a company or consultant in Europe that could teach JQuery basis to between 5 and 20 java developers. Maybe do you deliver such a training program?

It sounded like an opportunity too good to pass on to someone else, so I told him that I would be glad to do it myself. Also, knowing that it would be more fun and much more manageable to conduct the training with someone else, I asked Jörn Zaefferer, a brilliant jQuery developer from Cologne, Germany, if he'd like to join me. He agreed, and Swissquote agreed, and the two of us arrived last Wednesday.

It was a good thing Jörn came along. Not only was he able to answer a few of the more difficult questions that eluded me, but the two of us were able to split up the group, which had grown to roughly 35 developers.

The training went very well, with the "students" showing enthusiasm throughout, asking insightful questions and working through the exercises we gave them with great skill.

Since I went with the sole purpose of conducting the training, I didn't really plan on sightseeing or going out at night. I fully expected that Jörn and I would take a taxi or train back to our hotel at the end of each day, maybe grab a quick bite to eat, and go to bed at an early hour. However, I soon realized that things would be quite different when Gwendal took us straight from the airport to an outdoor cafe by Lake Geneva for a beer and then to a restaurant where we met five or six other employees. The next night we went to Lausanne for a traditional Swiss meal of fondue. Bread and cheese for dinner. My kind of meal. At 11:30 when we left the restaurant, five of the guys asked me and Jörn if we wanted to go out to a bar for drinks. Apparently for them the night was still young. We declined

After the training on Friday, Jörn and I walked through the town of Morges, where our hotel was located, and ended up eating at a little restaurant with televisions blasting a soccer game. Switzerland is preparing to host "Euro 2008," the European soccer tournament next week, and the whole country has gone mad with Euro Fever. Despite the noise of the game, we had a nice chat while eating steak cheval. (rough translation: horse meat).

Saturday was a blast. Gwendal and his girlfriend's 15-year-old son, Loïc, picked us up early in the morning, and we headed to the Castle at Chillon, which was built in the 11th Century. We took a fascinating iPod tour of the place which lasted three hours.

Jörn's plane was scheduled to leave Saturday afternoon, so we dropped him off at a train station before heading to a "cafeteria" for lunch and then a cave expedition. The mouth of the cave was halfway up a mountain, but the trek was worth it. After wending our way through the cave's circuitous conduit, we arrived at a waterfall — inside the cave! Loic tried to climb into every crevice he could find.

On Sunday I woke up early to take the train to the Geneva airport and finally arrived home at 8:00 Sunday night. Even the most interesting and fun and rewarding trip could not keep me from missing my family while I was gone. My heart leapt at the sight of them coming towards me in the airport.

Is it just me, or is that an oxymoron? Isn't it like saying that something is completely partial? (And I don't mean partial in the sense of biased.) Anyway, it struck me as kind of funny.

It's not because I don't have enough time. Never had enough time. And it's not because I've lost interest. The sad truth is that I have too much interest—but it's the kind of interest that is easily diverted, distracted, and detained. Also, newer, smaller, nimbler online publishing mechanisms such as Twitter have jostled their way into my attention. Twitter enforces a 140-character limit on every entry, which basically ensures that no one publishes anything of consequence. Ephemera only, please. Here's an analogy: Twitter is to blog is to letter (as in "snail mail") as methamphetamine is to mojito is to single malt scotch.

But enough of this navel-gazing meta-blogging.

A couple weeks ago I set a goal for myself—to read a book in its entirety. Any book. It has been at least three months since I have done that. Bad sign. The book I'm working on now is called The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. The title made me a little skeptical, but after reading just a few pages, I fell in love with it. The author, A.J Jacobs, is hilarious. The book chronicles his attempt to read the Encyclopædia from A to Z. Each letter of the alphabet gets its own chapter, in which Jacobs discusses a handful of the more interesting, bizarre, inspiring, or creepy entries. Throughout it all, he weaves in a personal narrative about his self-improvement plan and the reactions he gets from his wife and friends and complete strangers when he tries to regale them with anecdotes from his new storehouse of knowledge.

The book is making me realize all over again how very little I know. For example, if you asked me before yesterday what the northernmost state in the USA is, I would have been able to tell you that it is Alaska. But, if you asked what the westernmost state is, I probably would have guessed Hawaii. Easternmost? My guess would have been Maine. But the correct answer to all three questions is Alaska!

Every once in a while, he discusses an entry that I know a little bit about. And, as pathetic as it may be, I get a giddy joy from it. When he gets to the entry on John Hanson, a smile sweeps across my face, because I already know that he, not George Washington, was the first president of the United States. But after I read it, while riding on the bus to work, the smile turns to laughter.

He's sometimes referred to as the first president of the United States, thanks to his role as president of the Continental Congress in 1781. The first president wasn't George Washington—that's a good fact to mention at the bar, assuming you want to get kicked in the groin and have your glasses broken.

It's a good thing I don't have to worry about laughing uproariously in public and looking like some kind of lunatic, because half of the other people on the bus are manically rocking back and forth or talking to themselves (or unseen others) at the top of their lungs.

This book is right up my alley—light, funny, condensed. I just hope I can finish it.

Update

I forgot to mention how I knew about John Hanson being the first president of the United States. He was a Swede. By the way, so was Jonas Bronck, the guy after whom the Bronx was named.

The process of writing the books was an arduous one—stressful and time-consuming, to be sure, but also enjoyable. I learned more while writing than I ever could have otherwise. In a way, it reminded me of my first years of teaching, when I spent a whole lot of time flying by the seat of my pants, learning new things that I'd have to teach hours later.

The first book, Learning jQuery, was published in June; the second, jQuery Reference Guide, followed a month or so later. By the end of 2007, Packt had sold 3,333 copies of the first book and 887 of the second—many more than I had expected. They also managed to license its translation into Korean to another publisher, and, I think, they struck a deal with someone else to have it translated into Portuguese.

The reviews from blogs and amazon.com users have been (almost) unanimously favorable. Here is a sampling:

As with jQuery itself, there's a lot to like about the book (which shares its title with a great website dedicated to the library). The authors cover all sorts of real-world UI issues - progressive enhancement of input forms, client-side validation, visual transitions during Ajax calls, manipulation of tabular data - and show how to code them in jQuery.

Personally I appreciated this as you could watch a simple css/html page become an enchanced interface with real world implications.…

My point is that there is something in this book for every level of javascript developer, from beginner to expert. I highly recommend it!

If you're already using jQuery or getting started with it, both of these books would be a great addition to your desk.

I found this an extremely easy and interesting read, with the example based approach keeping me engaged in how each situation could be enhanced with use of jQuery.

The book can be read from start to finish, as it is interesting, keeps you engaged, and gives information in a logical order. It contains many useful tips and functions, a lot of which I never knew about until reading the book.

After every chapter, I found myself reflecting on how thorough and well done the examples were. Each one starts out with a simple piece of code (probably the way you or I would accomplish some task). Then, it adds something. Then, it factors something out. Then, it encapsulates something. Then, it adds some more functionality. At each step, I kept thinking, "Brilliant! I can't believe I never thought of doing it that way."

Karl was an English teacher in a previous life, and keeps a semi-regular blog called English Rules. I mention that simply to say that his literary wit shines through in this book. For a code related book, it is quite entertaining. From the readability of his writing, to the quotations he uses in code examples, it all flows together very nicely. The code examples are top-notch, which is surely a reflection of the authors' proficiency, Jonathan being a CTO at his day job.

That last one makes me blush every time I read it, but for the record, any wit that appears in the book, literary or otherwise, comes not from me but from Jonathan. He's a brilliant guy. And funny. And a great writer.

Also, in the interest of fairness, I should cite another reviewer, who described Learning jQuery as "a little dry in tone, not to the extent that it is unreadable. But I did find that it was best studied from in limited periods." Oh well. Can't win 'em all.

Incidentally, The New York Times recently posted this article about blogs leading to book deals. That's basically what happened to me, with the Learning jQuery blog. The only difference was that I was offered less than 1/100 the advance that the guy in the article got. If I had to give one piece of advice for others who are considering writing a computer manual, it would be this: Do it because you love to write or because you love the subject matter or because you love stress and mental anguish, but not because you want to get filthy stinking rich. There are no computer book author equivalents to J. K. Rowling (or even Dav Pilkey).

When Vern was in college, he had his own little cottage industry providing custom-made pants for all of his friends. I still consider the two pairs he made for me twenty years ago the best pants I've ever owned (though they stopped fitting me long ago). For his wedding Vern made his own suit, the bride's dress, all of the groomsmen's suits, and all of the bridesmaids' dresses.

He gave up the tailoring gig a while ago, but he has replaced it with other crafts. A walk through Vern's house is like a trip through a museum. The dining-room table, for example, is a gorgeous work of art that he built and carved with intricate floral designs on its legs. As I write this, Vern is installing a parquet floor in his garage out of wood that he has scavenged over the years.

Vern now works as an independent bookbinder, specializing in antiquarian book restoration for universities, museums, and private book collectors.

So when I read about the art of Brian Dettmer, I immediately thought of Vern. I was going to email him a link to Dettmer's "altered books," but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted others to see both of their work.

Dettmer selectively carves portions of pages to reveal astounding three-dimensional collages hidden within a book's contents. You can see more of his art installation, Altered States (explorations in media modification), at the Aron Packer Gallery web site

FOCUS

Sara has been actively involved in a task force for the school association that runs our kids' elementary school. The school system is looking for ways to cut costs as enrollment has declined and debt has increased in recent years. One of the options being considered is to "consolidate" the elementary schools, shutting down all but two of them. However, a number of parents, alumni, and friends of the schools have serious concerns about this option. Sara and others have formed a group called "Friends of Christian Urban Schools" in the hopes that they can collectively persuade the administration to consider other courses of action. In particular, they're encouraging people to sign an online petition to keep Oakdale Christian Elementary School, our kids' school, open.

And that's where I come in. Sara asked me to quickly put together a web site with a copy of the petition so that people can add their names to show their support. The site will soon have more information, but for now, you can check out the petition, and add your name if you wish: FOCUS: Friends of Christian Urban Schools.

Scooter Girl

A lot has changed in Nicole Tieri's life since she was seen in the opening rounds of American Idol a few years ago. After acting in a musical theater production, she moved back to New York City (where she had attended college), got married, and is expecting her first child in June. She also recorded an album that is soon to be released. She'll be performing three of the songs from the album early next week at a conference for the National Eating Disorders Association, so she asked me to whip up a couple web pages for people who want more information about her and the new album. Although it's still in a bit of a rough, early state, you can take a look at it here: Nicole Tieri.

1. Four-day work week: after a summer of Monday-through-Thursday work, they realized that they were getting roughly the same amount of work done as they had when they were working five days a week. So why not enjoy three-day weekends?
2. Funding employees' passions: If people want to pursue a hobby or interest or whatever, 37signals will help them for it, as long as they blog about what they've learned.
3. Discretionary spending accounts: All employees are getting a credit card so they can buy books or software or attend a conference without having to ask first.

They are a small company, with only 10 employees. They've been hugely successful over the past few years, and their small size is intentional. They've repeatedly spurned offers of corporate buyouts and huge sums of venture capital. Their main tenet is keeping things simple -- from the software they produce to the way they run their company. Their outspoken, rebellious attitudes have garnered them a huge devoted following as well as quite a few critics.

I'm wondering what my friends and family — and others who happen to read this blog — think about what 37signals is trying to do. Are they being too idealistic? Are they on to something big here? Are their "workplace experiments" applicable to other companies, or is there something unique about 37signals that lets them get away with this? Is this kind of thing a luxury that very few companies can afford, or is it something that companies can't afford not to do if they want to be successful to the extent that 37signals has been?

By the way, my last few entries haven't generated any comments, so I'm not even sure if anyone is reading this anymore. I know my writing has been sparse lately. I'm hoping to post a bit more frequently now, since I've freed up a little time for myself.

Update

Turns out my self-pity about not receiving comments was premature. A recent surge in "comment spam" forced me to tighten the moderation controls, which resulted in a few perfectly legitimate comments being labeled as "junk." I've restored those comments and changed the controls again to what I hope is a better level.

Also, Kevin mentioned the problem of customer service in a comment below. I failed to mention this in my post, but the 37signals folks have a customer service rep who has not yet shifted to the four-day work week. They're looking to hire another rep so the two can stagger their on-call days. You can read more about this situation from the current customer service rep herself.

The categories of optimism and pessimism do not exist for me. I am a prisoner of hope. I am going to die full of hope.

Wow. That's the kind of hope I'd like.

"The prospect of having fans understand what I'm saying and repeat it in their language (drew me to) the company," said [rapper] Prodigy in a phone interview just before he began a jail term for illegal gun possession.

The rest of the article is pretty interesting, too. Apparently, some company has figured out a way to layer Prodigy's vocal characteristics onto his lyrics after they have been translated into any of 1,500 other languages and spoken by a third party. The result is a song with all the instruments, synthesizers, and so on, accompanied by what sounds like Prodigy rapping in Urdu or Swahili or Mandarin. While some of the comments below the article suggest that this technology is not quite ready for prime time, it'll be fun to see where it goes in the next few years.

You can read the full article at Wired.com: "Software Morphs Rapper Prodigy Into Global Cipher"

Apparently there are quite a few people doing this sort of thing, with a quickly growing group of "sleeveface" photographers on flickr.com and elsewhere.

(via FreshArrival)

Ben and Lucy have been learning to skate with "Uncle" Paul LaGrand at the local hockey club. Last Saturday I decided that it was about time I tried to learn a little myself, so in a few days I'll be joining them.

A few weeks ago while decorating the Christmas tree during a particularly warm and fuzzy family afternoon, Ben turned to Sara and said, "I'm having a moment — a moment of happiness like a bear who ate all the honey from the bees."

Ben and Lucy and I were sitting in the car in the grocery store parking lot, waiting for Sara to buy some milk and apples (almost sounds too wholesome to be true, doesn't it?). Lucy and Ben were jabbering away in the back seat while I was up in front, trying to listen to NPR. I have no recollection of what was on the radio, but I distinctly recall Lucy complaining to Ben about hitting her imaginary friend, some character that she hijacked from one of her favorite books. Ben apologized and explained that he didn't see the friend. Then he went on to say, "I have an imaginary friend, too. But he lives in Chicago, so I don't see him much. His name is Pea Brain." I'm pretty sure Ben's friend didn't come from a book.

The past few days we've been playing a game called Blockus that Sara got me for my birthday. Unfortunately, most games that my kids can play are terribly boring for me. Blockus, however, is a blast. Even though it requires a fair amount of strategy, Ben and Lucy have been holding their own against me and Sara. Fantastic.

The kids' favorite line from the dramatic reading at the Christmas Eve service last night was King Herod's, "I am the king. And I intend to stay the king!" They had a fun time repeating that about 100 times last night.

Ben asked me what "geek" means yesterday. The timing was a little odd, since he has been calling me a geek for the past year or so. Anyway, I naturally tried to put a positive spin on it: "A geek is someone who is smart — someone who is usually good at...umm...umm." When he saw me sputtering, Ben interjected: "Psychological warfare?" Well, no, that isn't exactly what I was about to say.

Karl turns FORTY next week and I was wondering if you might help me celebrate him, if you'll pardon the expression. If you have time, would you mind emailing me a few kind words that I could share with him on the 20th? I was thinking you might share your earliest memory of him, or your fondest memory, or maybe just one of the things you like most about him. I myself can think of several! :)

Thanks all. I really appreciate it.

In case you missed the smoking-gun evidence, I have the coolest wife in the world.

So, Sara read a few of the email responses to me before dinner, and I'm about to read a few more. I'm trying to savor them, even though it feels a bit like reading about some vaguely familiar person whose name I can't quite remember (my difficulty with accepting praise is something my therapist insists I overcome).

My deepest and most heartfelt thanks go out to all my kind, sweet, loving friends and family members who responded to Sara's request. The many wonderful people in my life are perhaps the most tangible evidence of God's presence in my life. Thank you all for blessing my life with your love and friendship.

It turns out that the man was Sigmund Freud. Well, not the real Sigmund Freud, but a sculpture created in the likeness of Freud. Apparently, it's some sort of public art installation that has been making the rounds of cities throughout the country — only this time someone forgot to notify the authorities ahead of time.

Although Freud still had his bird's-eye view this morning, I don't know how long he'll remain suspended there, so I thought I'd better take a picture of him before it's too late.

Coincidentally, I'm working on a freelance project now, building a web site for a group of psychoanalysts. I'd love to know what they would have to say about this work of art.

What does that impact look like? Here are a few of the revelations from the article:

1. "The performance gap caused by an hour's difference in sleep was bigger than the normal gap between a fourth-grader and a sixth-grader."
2. "Sleep disorders can impair children's I.Q.'s as much as lead exposure."
3. A school district in Lexington, Kentucky, "moved its start time an hour later. After the time change, teenage car accidents in Lexington were down 16 percent. The rest of the state showed a 9 percent rise."
4. "sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine."
5. "Five years ago, already aware of an association between sleep apnea and diabetes, Dr. Eve Van Cauter at the University of Chicago discovered a 'neuroendocrine cascade' that links [lack of] sleep to obesity."

Abandon All Hope?

With the mounting evidence that we, and especially our kids, need more sleep, we're confronted with the challenge to undo years of lifestyle choice and habit. Fortunately, Ashley Merryman, in an accompanying article, suggests a number of ways to get our kids to sleep more. I was pleasantly surprised as I read it, because it goes beyond the clichés and superficial fixes to offer some really useful advice.

Not So Fast

Just when I was getting used to having one more thing to be anxious about, I came across an article in the New York Times last week: The Sleep-Industrial Complex. While not addressing children directly, it casts doubt on some of the recent claims about our need for sleep. The article blames drug companies and mattress salespeople for contributing to our lack of sleep. In their efforts to sell solutions to sleep problems, they're making people more anxious about their sleep, which in turn makes people less likely to overcome their sleep problems without the aid of drugs (or a new mattress?). Ah, the vicious cycle.

The one thing that can help us sleep well at night, according to the article, is a change of attitude. Apparently, behavioral-cognitive therapy really works here. The less we're worried about our sleep, the better our sleep will be. Sounds like a truism to me.

Free Advice

Now that I've read these articles on sleep, I feel fully qualified to give everyone expert advice. Ever the altruist, I offer my surefire strategy for optimum well-being in three easy steps (and it's completely free!):

1. Being awake is for fools. Try to sleep as much as humanly possible. Eight hours a night is a good start, but 18 is better.
2. Remove all connections with the outside world. Any semblance of a social life will only interfere with your main objective, blissful slumber
3. Stop worrying, or you'll ruin your life! Now! Quit perseverating on how little sleep you're getting! Thinking about it is only making it worse! Relax. Your sleep problems are your own fault. RELAX!

Sweet dreams.