The easy part is installing Action Streams. Download, unzip, copy items to the correct location within your Movable Type installation directory. The difficult part follows, as the documentation is practically nonexistent. Here is what I did, though:

"Looking for a role model? You’d do worse than Denmark. Forbes named that country the best in the world for business. According to the magazine, Denmark has public policies that foster low inflation, low unemployment, low taxes, free trade, innovation, protection of intellectual property and the development of technology. In operating their businesses, it is worth noting the Danes are energy independent through wind power for electricity and technologies that convert pig blubber to heating oil."

No, Mr. Ferguson, it would be hard to make the United States or any State more inept and bureaucratically rigid as Denmark. Stagnant population growth (0.295%), low immigration (a measure of a country's desirability for finding new opportunities), and marginal tax rates for middle income (by US standards) reaching over 63% make Denmark a very, very poor example, indeed. I lived south of Denmark for over a year and every Dane I had ever met, whether in Germany or Denmark directly, complained about the ridiculous tax structure that afforded little upward movement for the average citizen, which limited their ability to pursue individual, productive desires and interests. Think of it this way, until mid July of each year, you will have spent the previous months paying your dues to the State. It is only after July that the money you have worked hard earning is actually yours. The motivation to work harder and/or be more creative is nullified by the fact that whatever extras you do earn, most of that will go to the State.

"Sorensen, who graduated from business school in Copenhagen, found himself earning the equivalent of more than $100,000 before he was 30 - and paying 63 percent of it in taxes...'When you are at 63 percent tax, you don't look forward to the evaluation with the boss to get a raise," Sorensen said. "You look for more vacation or a training course in the tropics - something that you get the full benefit of.'" (High income taxes in Denmark worsens a labor shortage - International Herald Tribune)

Denmark's low poverty level and unemployment is masked by the fact that the State doles out money and "jobs" to persons by earmarking huge portions of the working class's income towards those people. It is similar to the idea that there were no unemployed in the socialist/communist Soviet Union. While statistically true, as they say, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Mr. Ferguson should have stopped writing there. His idea that, "Wisconsin must seek to define those industries or technologies that are crucial for future economic development. The state should then push development of those industries or technologies through the full benefit of public policy instruments and expedient action..." is absolute nonsense. The government - i.e. no governing body, nor State institution - has ever been successful at guessing which ideas will become the next commercial hits. There have been cases where state fostered development of technologies has eventually reached the public and been the catalyst for new opportunities. GPS and Cellular Telephony are two examples. The state was working for a solution to a logistical problem in both of these cases and hadn't foreseen the possibility that your average citizen would find a use for these products - vis a vis mobile phones and in-car navigation systems. This is very different than saying the State should decide which new ideas/technologies are desirable and subsidize them. Let me put it this way: a product was developed because there was a specific, tangible need. Said product was then applied to unknown or unforeseen needs. This is not the same as saying we don't know what the need is for technology xyz, but we're going to subsidize it anyway.

It is surprising that as a consultant and former executive at two Silicon Valley companies, Mr. Ferguson is confused that infrastructure and legal consistencies - i.e. safe and reliable transportation, communication, legible/understandable laws etc. - are the same as providing bureaucratically driven "vision" to business development. Let me say this as a businessperson: leave me alone. Give me a consistent low tax burden and easy-to-navigate rules and regulations and I will provide the success you and your visionaries think the State is there to provide. Furthermore, the State does nothing more than muddle the playing field and cannot be held accountable for the inevitable mistakes it will make. The markets I and my business colleagues serve are very swift at telling us whether or not we are heading in the right direction. A measure of responsibility is handed down by way of business growth or shrinkage. We don't need more "help" from the State. Sure, there are plenty of us that wish for handouts and I believe those of us who do are not only lazy, but ignorant of the long term damage handouts do to any free market system. Socialism in its grand form - i.e. central planning - has had its day in the Soviet Union and modern day China. It lost the battle and will continue to lose the battle because markets and people's desires cannot be planned and they cannot be foretold by some any visionary - from the State or elsewhere.

By the way, all of the "subsidized employee training, property tax concessions, low or interest-free loans..." are patently unfair. Why are we being slapped with the financial responsibility for supporting your new wave of innovation just because our companies and our staff have been successful and providing a product to the market that is of obvious desire? Where do we stand when it comes to fostering growth and success? In your scheme of investing in future technologies, nowhere. You seem to forget that those new industries you wish to "help along" will not only stand on the shoulders of those who have already succeeded, but trample them to the ground through the process of recklessly transferring away from them what they have rightfully earned for themselves and need for future investment. Shame on you for suggesting such a thing.

This morning, I open up my news reader (these days, Google Reader) and see a blog entry over at Cafe Hayek from Russell Roberts on this very issue. Here is a taste:

"Once upon a time, Fannie and Freddie were partners in a business. Well, it wasn’t exactly a business. It was almost a charity. Not quite. It was sort of a government agency. Or maybe it was all three together. When Fannie and Freddie talked to investors, they acted like a business. When they talked to the government regulators, they acted like a government agency." (Who is to blame? by Russell Roberts)

My head is about to friggin' explode.

Just because you want a poor family to receive health insurance such that your next visit to the doctor does not drive them further into the poor house, it does not follow necessarily that handing said responsibility to the government will solve the problem.

You state that you wish to help people in need, that we all need to sacrifice. We all need to be willing to give of our excesses. And I agree. That is a motto to live by. Whether or not it is because you believe in Jesus or Karma, giving is good. It does not follow, however, that it is the job of government to manage said transfers of money.

You wish for adequate this, fair that, and equitable practices and yet you deem a system whereby coercion is used to subjugate everyone to a planned order of life that follows your every whim is the manner in which to wish to achieve your goals is adequate, fair, and equitable.

You condemn one side for their voracious taking of civil liberties in the name of protecting our borders, yet you rot our internal system that has created the wealth you depend on with ideology that says fair is not fair and just means doing what you think is right.

You're an idiot.

Crystals of silver halide that are exposed to light are "triggered" so that they will reduce to black particles of metallic silver during development. On exposure, the light produces an invisible latent image composed of crystals that will form image silver when developed, but have not yet undergone any detectable change. Portions of the film which have been exposed to great amounts of light yield a considerable deposit of reduced silver upon development, referred to as a higher density; areas of film exposed to less light yield less silver, or lower density. Thus the image on film is negative, dark areas of which correspond to bright areas of the subject. When printed, the dense areas of the negative give relatively little exposure to the paper and produce a light area on the print, and the low negative densities produce dark print areas. Thus a second reversal occurs that re-establishes the original relationships of lighter and darker values.

9c. Ownership of Content: You retain all ownership rights in your Content. However, by posting Content to Oosah, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to Oosah (and its successors) an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, assignable, royalty free, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, distribute and to prepare derivative works of such Content in connection with the Site and any current and future services offered by Oosah, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. (from Terms & Conditions)

As with many of these types of agreements, I understand why Oosah wants perpetual rights to your content - to do with it as they please forever - but it is not something I am interested in handing over to anyone; whether or not they are providing me of some type of compensation in return. This is the same type of verbiage that recently caused an uproar over Google's Chrome browser (i.e. in their first EULA, they received and retained ownership over any content created and/or uploaded via their browser). I'm not sure if the content I create will ever be worth something, but I do have enough foresight to know that by passing on perpetual rights to my copyrighted works, I give up the ability to control what happens to it. When I'm taking the time to create things on my own time, on my own dime, I at least wish to control what happens to it in the future. You never know what type of value your works may have as time goes on.

Perhaps you don't care whether or not you retain ownership of your creations. That is up to you. Before you sign up for a service, however, be sure to understand what you are giving up in return for what they are giving you. Good luck to Oosah. Sorry, though, its not a service for me.

Red Scarlet (from the founder of Oakley)

Nikon D90 (nothing special until you realize it does 720p video)

D90 is on pre-order in hopes of arriving before our October Germany trip. I'm not convinced yet because I truly love my D3 and D300, but this could end up being the bridge between video and photography I've been looking for. Plus, the idea that I can shoot video and control depth of field is extremely exciting.
After reading the Wired article on Scarlet's big sister, Red One, it is really amazing what someone (i.e. Jim Jannard) can do when they are passionate about a subject and don't buy into the idea that it can't be done (of course, his financial successes haven't hurt, either).

* Well, when you're paying someone a salary and working towards the long term growth and survival of your company - not only for your sake, but that of the many, possibly hundreds of families that depend on your existence - you tend to take things like people not working while they are supposed to - and being paid for it - somewhat seriously. No, this is not a perfect world, and no, we don't expect people to be scurrying about like lemmings all of the time, but for the most part, our wish is to see product made in a sensible time frame with perfect quality. For that to come to fruition, you can't have dead weight!

*Not that being a large customer matters. Customer service matters no matter who you are and what you contribute to our overall sales.
**Actually, that is not all it took. This had happened a few times before and this time was enough.

The triathlon I referred to above (on the 13th of July) went pretty well. Even though my race times this year have been far better than anything I could have accomplished in years past, I’ve still been left feeling like I could do so much better. I felt good about the races (breaking 1:20 hr for the Sprint distance stuff felt really good - especially considering I had all of three hours of sleep the night before the Bigfoot Triathlon), but there are always a few things about each race that could go better. I struggle like hell on the run. Right now, that is the demon of my race. I know I could do better on the swim, simply because I don’t put enough time into training for the swim, but I’ve decided not to worry about that until this winter, when I can put some focus on pool time and simply trudge through the laps. I also know my bike has much room for improvement, but because I rarely feel destroyed after or during the bike, it doesn’t worry me much. Psychologically, the bike impacts me the least of the three disciplines. The run is a whole other story. The first two races (nice, short Sprints) were miserable during the run. I had a horrible side stitch and simply couldn’t get my heart rate to a level where I could semi-relax and just run. When I compared my pace and heart rate to training data, they looked nothing alike. At 175-185 bpm, I can now maintain a pace of 7:30-8:00 min/mi. Some days it gets even better, but the average is such. During the races, my heart rate was pegged at 178-180 and I could barely meet a 9:00 min/mi pace. That grated on me mentally, not to mention the fact that I was physically going through enormous pain. Well before the Grand Haven Tri (the Olympic distance one), I finally figured out the cause of the stitch: Ultra Fuel (a Twin Labs carb drink). I always used Ultra Fuel for post workout recovery - both in my lifting days and especially when I started tri training. I had used it mid workout for rehydration on occasion, but I hadn’t ever really thought much about whether or not it would cause cramping. For whatever reason it simply doesn’t jive with my body when in the middle of heavy activity. At the Grand Haven tri, I tried Hammer Perpetuum (I knew I was taking a risk only having used it two or three times beforehand, but frankly, nothing could have been worse than what I had experienced before) and it worked like a charm. No side stitch. The problem was that the triathlon was turned into a duathlon because the surf on Lake Michigan was reaching 4-6 ft. levels and was going to make the swim impossible (unless we all wanted to run/swim along the shoreline). So, the 1500m swim was replaced with a 5k run. 5k run / 40 k bike / 10 k run. Oh gawd… I pulled off the 5 k run much faster than I had thought I would … and fell apart when I hit the 10 k run on the tail end. I couldn’t do better than a 9:00 min/mi and at one point, exactly 5 k into the run, I desperately wanted to quit; quit the run and quit the sport for the next month (or however long). It is amazing the games your mind loves to play with you when you’re struggling mentally and physically. (Within 30 min. of ending the race, I was already thinking of the next one - and what I could do better. Thankfully my mid-run depression ended pretty quickly.) The most interesting statistic from the race, though, was even with my perceived level of pain, my heartrate stayed below 175 for most of the run. For whatever reason, whenever I crossed the 170 mark and tried to kick the run up a notch, I started to fall apart.

Despite having finished the race faster than I thought I would, I am still really disappointed with the run. Even without the side stitch, I still ran like crap. I now realize how much more room there is for improvement this season. The problem is that with each crossed finish line, comes new (harder) goals. It isn’t decided whether or not I’ll join Josh for the Lake Geneva tri in September, but I know my last planned triathlon is in Las Vegas (actually Lake Mead) at the end of September and I’m hoping to leave everything on the course - in a good way.

The problem now is that I need some direction in restarting my training. As I write this, we’re on our way out of town until the end of the month and we’ll be in a place where I simply don’t have access to the training equipment and courses that I’m used to. Plus, I won’t have access to a bike, a huge part of my training and is my main motivation in getting through some of the harder days (I really do enjoy those rides - easy and hard alike).

Josh and I committed ourselves to a relatively hard program from Gale Bernhardt’s book, Training Plans for Multisport Athletes, but I’m not going to be able to do many of the workouts (e.g. the bike rides) because of not being home. My plan is to follow things as closely as possible, but only the next few days will show how possible this will be.

My biggest worry at this point - without any real data from previous training or coaching (I’m on the fence about “wasting time in getting one for the two months I have left this year - especially considering how pricey it can be) - is how much is realistically doable before September 28th and how much the week I just took off, plus what may happen while I’m gone, will effect me.

This is what I call training paranoia and is the main reason why I want to work with a coach on some level next year. Depending on how the last race ends, I’m seriously thinking of moving on to the half Ironman distances and sticking with that distance for some time to come. We’ll see how the next few weeks increase or dispel these worries…