Moving on

As you can see, I have not blogged here in a long time now. Like any fad, the personal blog has come and gone (plus, .blogspot.com has become a decidedly low-rent address.) Sharing your life online has become simpler—and a lot less verbose—with social networks. Never the less, I have been writing from time to time at other sites.

• Most recently at Medium, a more modern storytelling/blogging service
• I’ve also written several articles for my friend's travel site, The Hostel Life

There are also a smattering of more technical and niche articles around that I will not link to here. I would say ‘find me on FB,’ but I’ve recently given that up too, so I'll just leave you with my Twitter @froese and LinkedIn.

New material

I know I’ve said this before, but The Persistent Itch is back! I’ve missed having the recurring surge of creativity and intellectual stimulation required for coming up with a new posts for this blog. The following ideas have been bouncing around in my head for a while, and I am now committed to start writing posts beginning with these subject.

• World Resource Allocation

Who is to blame for ever increasing fuel and food costs? Bush, OPEC, speculators? No, actually the proverbial “starving child in China” and others in the developing world are “at fault” for trying live the life we in the west are accustomed to—and therefore we can’t really blame them.


• Islam’s Last Gasp

Terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, refugee unrest in and around Israel, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the rise of Islamic parties in Egypt and Turkey, and even riots in France and England seem to point to a rising tide of Islamic extremism around the globe. However, I posit that this is actually fundamentalist Islam’s last gasp; an overwhelmingly young demographic in most predominantly Muslim countries are actually yearning for western products, music, and popular culture; those young people that are embracing extremist Islam are actually a tiny minority.


• Fair Trade

Juan Valdez gets an extra fifty cents per bag of coffee, which is great, but if I have to pay an extra three dollar to give him this fifty cents, is is really worth it? I suspect that, due to the less efficient supply chains of “sustainable, fair trade” companies, Juan gets a smaller percentage of my purchase price when I buy “fair trade.”


• Local Food

For all the talk of “food miles,” I suspect that a carrot shipped 500 miles in a Wal-Mart tractor-trailer (that is packed to the roof) actually has a smaller carbon footprint than the carrot brought 50 miles into town by the friendly, local organic farmer in his pickup truck or box van.


• Gift-o-marketing complex

Just as there may be sinister military/industrial complex convincing our leaders in the White House and Congress to buy, buy, buy expensive new weapon systems, associated goods, and services, there is a very real and sinister force that is influencing us to buy and gift items to friends, family, and acquaintances for an ever-increasing number of holidays and special occasions. I would not be surprised that within the next generation these marketers will have convinced Americans that it would be socially unacceptable to not exchange Arbor Day gifts among friends and family.


• Personal investing strategies

They say to build wealth, start an investment account with as little as $500; while I understand the sentiment, I think it’s downright stupid with for someone with $5000 or more of credit card debt—which is most Americans.


• Save by NOT buying at all!

While this concept is so obvious that I can’t imagine needing to expound on it, apparently a lot of people don’t seem to understand that unless you really need/require something, in the long run you will be happier and more prosperous by delaying or even denying yourself the purchase of unnecessary goods—more of my minimalist philosophies.

On the computer front, I have a new laptop—with which I am writing this right now—the diminutive Asus eee series 900. It’s a great little computer that attracts attention wherever I go and does 90% of what I need it to do—all for just a little over $500! Despite its ultra-portable form-factor, I actually don’t drag it around with me most of the time because I have a computer in my pocket that lets me surf the web, check my email, or jot down a note—the Apple iPhone. Thanks to Ziphone.org I didn’t have to sign up for the pricey AT&T data plan—especially since the EDGE (GPRS) data network is so slow it’s practically unusable.

Red Bank Hydro
After a nearly year-long lull in this project, the motor/generators were finally installed earlier this year, and as of 21 May 2008, we are officially making power! Unfortunately, this coincided with a drought period here in South Carolina, meaning we are only able to generate a fraction of this plant's potential, and only during the peak hours of 12:00-22:00. I have been gradually designing and installing progressively more sophisticated controls; the next step is to install a water level transducer and program the PID functionality of the PLC to ride the level of the lake. YouTube video

Twitter
As if blogging is not enough of a chore, I signed up for “Twitter” the micro-blogging (140 character maximum—for SMS) service. I did it only to secure http://twitter.com/froese but who knows, I might occasionally throw some status updates out there, so follow me if you have an account; in any case, I’m adding the feed to the right hand column here.

The Itch

When I created The Persistent Itch (and its predecessor found at joel.froese.com/blog,) I intended it to be a travelogue—for the benefit of friends and family back home (and myself, so that I didn’t have to repeat the same thing to everyone via phone, IM, or separate emails.) Despite promising myself that I would continue to write after I returned home, there just hasn’t been much incentive to do so. I enjoy writing topical posts, but they do require more effort, and—since my primary audience is no longer reading this blog—I see no reason to do so.

The remaining three topics I promised you on March 14th, as well as a further theory on economic development and a scathing review of Michael Moore’s Sicko that I’ve been meaning to write, have been put on the back burner indefinitely.

I say all this to say that I am returning The Persistent Itch back to its roots; on Thursday I fly to Vienna to meet my girlfriend, and then we will fly on to Split, Croatia where we will meet friends for a week of sailing the Dalmatian Coast down to Dubrovnik. Expect glowing reports and stunning photographs starting next week.

In family news, the Froese family grew by two within the last three weeks as Jordan (left) was born to Micah and Debora on July 6th and Hutch (right) was born to Simon and Sarah on the 19th. All of the babies, parents, grandparents, and uncle are happy and healthy!

The Persistent Itch is back!

To my few remaining faithful readers I apologize for not writing in over a month now. February is my first month-long break in blogging since January 2005; I will try not to let this happen again. To that end, I’ve come up with 5 new topics, which I may flesh out and publish over the next 5 weeks or so.

• Insurance is a rip-off. Your premium is always going to be greater than your average expected loss.
• Bio-fuels are unnatural. Actually, good old crude is the all-natural (organic) choice in fuels.
• New business idea: Responsible Insurance Co. The challenge: come up with objective criteria that could be used to legally select a low-risk pool of policy holders—resulting in substantially lower premiums for these “responsible” individuals.
• New business idea: The Global Warming Fund. OK, I get it, global warming is real. Now where can I invest to make money from the inevitable consequences. Seriously, I'd like to see people putting their money where there mouth is—betting for climate change.
• New business idea: Ante-Diamonds. Because diamonds are a girls best friend…we need a substitutes for “Blood Diamonds”

As far as life in Columbia, South Carolina goes: I feel like it is summer already. Daylight savings time began on Sunday—meaning I bicycle with a group of friends every Tuesday and Thursday night now—and the weather so far this week is cooperating (today it will be 82F – 28C!)

On Blogging

I’ve been blogging nearly continuously for 3 years now. So, naturally, I’ve given some thought to why I do this. I started my first blog when I went to business school in Vienna in 2004. It was intended as a way for my friends and family to keep up with what I am doing without sending out individual emails (or pestering anyone with bulk emails.) As such, it was successful; my audience grew by word of mouth to include all kinds of friend, family, acquaintances, former colleagues, and classmates. Granted, it was not a steady audience (except my mother, who would ask my father every morning if I had written anything new,) but this is the beauty of a blog: friends who had “not visited [my] blog in a while” could easily catch up, since a month’s worth of post can be easily read in one sitting. However, one unexpected person I found out that I am writing for is myself—specifically my “future self.” It turns out my blog is also my diary; I actually enjoy reliving the heady days of grad school, for example, by reading something I wrote a year or two ago. Of course, I would not actually write a diary (that is something only teenage girls do,) so blogging for an audience is an incentive for writing my personal history. However, this dual usage leads to some conflict, namely self-censorship. Due to the broad audience that could potentially read my blog, I often have to choose my words carefully. It’s not that I lead a particularly scandalous life, I just don’t want to bore my audience most of the time (sometimes, though, I do nerd out for the sake of my brothers.) Never the less, many times I redact large portions of what I write in Microsoft Word before I even post it (which, by the way, is good advice for you students out there: don’t write up to a minimum word count; write past it, then cut out the weak portions, leaving only the good stuff.) The other issue is that some characters that make up this ongoing story of my life like to maintain a lower profile. I have little compunction about sharing my life on the Internet, but I’ve found that some people don’t like the idea of me writing about or posting pictures of them on my site. Therefore, I have become more guarded—practically, I have adopted a first-name only policy. One particular young lady has made it clear that she did not want to appear here, but recently has relented, and even ask “why am I not on your blog?” So—without further ado—here is my girlfriend, Mirena.