AaronKlein.com

The news is still trickling out, but we’ve been matched with our little girl in Ethiopia, after starting the process back in October 2008!

Emma Nichole Asnakech Klein (her Ethiopian name is pronounced AS-NA-KESH) was born on April 18 of this year, and her birth mother gave her the Ethiopian name, which means “no one is like her”.

She is currently at the Holt International Care Center in Durame, and we expect to travel to Addis Ababa in two to four months to bring her home, depending on the legal process and visas, etc.

We do have a photo of her, but the rules don’t allow us to post it publicly for security reasons, until the adoption is finalized in the United States. Can’t wait to share those with you all!

UPDATE 1:52PM: I should add that Spencer spent the first half hour kissing Mommy’s computer screen, and telling me about Baby Sister Emma coming home.

This may be unpopular to say with some of my conservative friends, but I’m starting to wish Bill Clinton was President again…

“President Clinton believed in the public sector, but he thought that his responsibility to the long-term fiscal condition of the country ruled out a significant expansion of the government in the economy as a whole,” said William A. Galston, a former Clinton policy adviser who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “What is unmistakably clear is that the trajectory of the Obama administration - whether it’s four years or eight years in office - will be the reverse.”

It’s becoming all the more understandable why Candidate Obama was so critical of the 1990s. It’s as if the theme of this presidency has become “the era of big government is not over, and we’re here to prove it!”

Great piece in the Lincoln News Messenger about the award for CTE (”career and technical education”) garnered by Lincoln High School. Sierra College has a partnership with the school to develop some of those programs.

Another of the many programs Lincoln High received the award for is iDesign, where students use advanced computer numerically controlled machines in the manufacturing process.

“These are the exact machines they would use when they graduate and get jobs,” said iDesign teacher Scott Seacrist.

The program is partnered with Sierra College and this was the first school year the machines have been used.

“It’s cutting edge,” Seacrist said. “It adds a saleable skill and gives them knowledge of high-technology equipment.”

Seacrist added that he tries to make the projects fun so students can make clocks and three-dimensional mazes as projects while learning skills they can use in a job.

» Read the Entire Article

Photo Credit: Lincoln News Messenger

I know a certain Athletic Director who is a little excited about this. In fact, he’s quoted in the press release.

The California Community College Commission on Athletics and National Alliance of Two-Year College Athletic Administrators (NATYCAA) has named Sierra College third in the nation for overall athletic excellence.

“This will be Sierra Colleges 4th Trophy in the last 6 years since the NATYCAA CUP has been in existence. One 1st; One 2nd; and two 3rd place finishes. Our coaches and athletes have done a great job. I couldn’t be prouder. We’re going to need a bigger office soon to display all the trophies…not that I’m complaining!” commented John Volek, Dean of Athletics.

Since the establishment of the NATYCAA cup in 2003-04, Sierra College Athletics has ranked in the top four positions.

» Read the Entire Press Release

My amazingly talented wife has created a great new blog at CaceyKlein.com. Her posts will cover food, entertaining, nutrition, fitness, reading and scrapbooking. You can also follow her on Twitter!

We also moved all of the posts from the blog we’ve maintained for Spencer’s homecoming to Cacey’s new blog, so everything’s in one place.

I know this isn’t the ballpark of many of my readers, but I’m too proud of her not to let you all know!

What do Paul Krugman and Congressman Paul Ryan have in common beyond their first name? Until now, not much.

What’s worrying both Krugman and Ryan is the rapid increase in the federal debt - not so much the stimulus-driven rise to mountainous levels in the next few years, but the huge structural deficits that, under all projections, keep building the burden far into the future to unsustainable, ruinous heights. “The long-term outlook remains worrying,” warned Krugman in his New York Times column. Krugman strongly supports President Obama’s spending plans but bemoans the shortfall in taxes to pay for them.

Ryan flays the administration for piling new spending on top of already enormous deficits. “This isn’t a temporary stimulus but a ramp-up in debt followed by a greater explosion in spending and debt,” he told Fortune, predicting a day when America’s creditors will start viewing the U.S. Treasury as a risky bet. “The bond markets will come after us with a vengeance. We’re playing with fire.” Krugman favors far higher taxes, while Ryan wants to curb spending, but for now what’s so big and so dangerous that it distresses such diverse types as Krugman and Ryan - and should scare all Americans - is the Great Debt Threat.

» Read the Entire Article

Graphic: Fortune Magazine, (h/t to Jerry Simmons for sending me the article)

I’m a heavy user of e-mail — between 300-400 e-mails a day. There are some definite strengths and weaknesses to the different e-mail platforms.

My primary platform is Microsoft Outlook, and there are some key strengths there. First, it’s the best way to connect to a Microsoft Exchange server. Exchange integrated with BlackBerry is the best mobile e-mail solution on the planet, bar none. (If anybody disagrees, let me know and I’ll write a blog post to foster that debate!) One of the other big strengths with Outlook is that you can use the natural motion of drag-and-drop to attach files to messages, or save messages inside tasks, etc.

My secondary platform for almost all of my other accounts is Gmail, or more accurately, Google Apps (which lets you use Gmail for your own domain name, like aaronklein.com). The Gmail platform has some great strengths too: low costs, incredible speed, amazingly good search (it applies Google’s search technology to your e-mail), and you don’t have to worry about storage space or backup — it’s all in the cloud.

Of course, each platform tries to compensate for the other’s strengths. Google is increasing integration with BlackBerry, but it’s still not nearly as good. Outlook 2007 is now integrated with Windows Desktop Search which is exponentially faster than before, but it doesn’t scale…Outlook still slows way down when you have more than about 2GB of data in a file.

To solve that problem, Outlook has an AutoArchive feature that will transfer older mail to a different Outlook data file. The problem is, that Outlook file will eventually get quite large too. If you leave it open, it slows Outlook down. If you close it, it won’t be indexed by Windows Desktop Search, so it’s practically useless.

What I realized is that I can get the best of both worlds by transferring mail from the Outlook world to the Gmail world as a permanent archive: it lets me shrink my Outlook data files to a manageable size, and keep my archived mail very searchable, accessible and stored in the cloud.

As a sidebar: I don’t keep all of my e-mail messages. There are several organizations I’m involved in where e-mail retention policies are established that determine when messages get deleted. But I end up archiving much of my personal and work related e-mail, and some categories of messages date back to 2002.

Here are the steps I took:

1. I downloaded Google E-Mail Uploader. This only works with Google Apps accounts that run on your own domain name, and won’t work with a Gmail.com account (hopefully they’ll remedy that soon).

2. I created a new Outlook data file. To do that, click on Tools / Account Settings, go to the Data Files tab and click Add. Make sure to name this file something like “Mail to Archive” so it doesn’t get too confusing!

3. I moved the messages that you want to archive from your main folders to that new data file. For safety, I selected the e-mail I wanted to archive, and held down the Ctrl key while dragging it into the corresponding folder in the new data file so that it would copy the messages.

(After verifying that they copied successfully, I then went back and deleted those messages in the primary folder…and then I emptied the deleted items. But I really didn’t want to lose those messages!)

So at this point, you should have the mail you want to archive in the new data file, and all of the mail you want to keep in Outlook in your main data file. I chose November 2008 as my cutoff, and figure that by the next time I need to archive, I’ll know whether to keep 12 or 18 months in Outlook.

4. I launched Google E-Mail Uploader. After closing Outlook, I could select the archive folders I wanted to upload, and it started. The tool preserves your folders by creating the corresponding labels in Gmail. The entire process took 22 hours for about 3.5GB of e-mail messages, but I could easily pause the process, exit the uploader tool, and restart the process later without missing a beat.

Voila! Years of e-mail stored safely online in the Gmail platform. I can easily search it and find old messages, and forward them to my current account if needed.

Have you tackled this problem before? Any twists on this idea that could make it easier for people?

I don’t think this is what President Obama meant when he said he wanted government to “help people who needed help.” (h/t to John Stoos for forwarding this to me…)

He sleeps under a bridge, washes in a public bathroom and was panhandling for booze money 11 months ago, but now Larry Moore is the best-dressed shoeshine man in the city. When he gets up from his cardboard mattress, he puts on a coat and tie. It’s a reminder of how he has turned things around.

In fact, until last week it looked like Moore was going to have saved enough money to rent a room and get off the street for the first time in six years. But then, in a breathtakingly clueless move, an official for the Department of Public Works told Moore that he has to fork over the money he saved for his first month’s rent to purchase a $491 sidewalk vendor permit.

“I had $573 ready to go,” Moore said, who needs $600 for the rent. “This tore that up. But I’ve been homeless for six years. Another six weeks isn’t going to kill me.”

The bureaucrat told Moore that she found out about his business after reading about his success in this paper.

I believe this bureaucrat’s photo can be found in the dictionary under “heartless.”

» Read the Entire Article

Photo Credit: San Francisco Chronicle

I’ll preface this post by saying: Apple has some great technology. I’m a huge fan of many of their products. I love my iPod. I’m a former iPhone user and still like many of its features.

But Apple is annoyingly stubborn about some pretty important things. Among them are no keyboard on the iPhone, sealed batteries on many products, and the tendency to build closed systems (like how until recently, music you bought on iTunes couldn’t be played on any player but an iPod).

There have been a lot of recent comments about how it’s too bad that the iPhone is tied to the AT&T network, because that network is so slow. To which I say…if you look at some of the design decisions behind iPhone, you’ll understand that it’s Apple’s own fault!

The iPhone is like a computer with an Internet connection (albeit a relatively slow one). The iPhone mail program connects out to your mail server, and painstakingly downloads a list of messages. Then when you tap one of them, the mail program connects to the server again and painstakingly downloads it. The entire process takes time before you ever start reading your message.

(As a note: Apple claims to now support “push” e-mail, where the server pushes e-mail to the phone. But it’s not true push e-mail. In those cases, the server can “ping” the iPhone and say “hey, I have messages for you…come and get them.” Then the iPhone goes and pulls the message list down again.)

The BlackBerry has true push e-mail, and it gets there by having a centralized network operations center (”NOC”) that takes e-mail in from your server and then spoon-feeds it to your phone over the mobile network. The result is much more efficient use of bandwidth, and much higher e-mail speeds.

For example, when the BlackBerry NOC gets a message, it instantly pushes the first 32KB (about 32,000 characters of data) out to the phone. (Often, that’s the entire message.) So when your BlackBerry “pings”, you can instantly tap the message and you’re reading it. No delay, no connection to the server, no wait for it to download.

And as you keep reading the messages, the BlackBerry NOC keeps spoon-feeding it to the phone. So you rarely ever have to wait for it to download the rest.

Here’s another example of why this works so much better. When you move a message to a folder using BlackBerry, the message gets moved on the phone, and the phone queues up a command to the NOC telling it to move that message in your inbox. If your connection blips or you’re out of range, the command will go through as soon as the BlackBerry reconnects.

In contrast, when you move a message on the iPhone, it tries to connect to the server and send the move command to your mail server. If it goes through, iPhone then re-asks for the now-shorter message list and your message disappears on the phone. But if iPhone can’t reach the mail server, it just undoes your command and the messages pop back into your inbox. It’s just annoying.

One more. Let’s say I get an e-mail with a 6MB attachment actually meant for a designer at my company. With BlackBerry, I can hit forward, tap out a message that says “hey, here are the files — please start on this tomorrow” and hit send. The BlackBerry simply sends my note to the NOC with a command to forward the entire message on.

On the iPhone, I’d have to download the 6MB attachment, tap out my note, then hit send and retransmit the entire 6MB message. That would take 10 minutes or so, and about 192 times more bandwidth. And you’re surprised the AT&T network is getting congested?

Apple has repeatedly mocked the BlackBerry NOC, calling it a “single point of failure” (meaning of course, that if the NOC goes down, BlackBerries don’t work).

That’s true, and it has happened, once or twice a year. But I’d rather have the BlackBerry experience 363 days out of the year than have the incredibly slow iPhone experience for 365.

iPhone is still incredibly cool, but it would be far better if Apple would be a little less stubborn and focus on architecting products to cause less customer frustration.

The Obama administration has proposed using federal funds to prod school districts into closing the bottom 1% of schools over the next five years, and then reopening them with new leadership and new teachers.

In the private sector, troubled businesses undergo turnarounds all the time. Rather than closing and reopening, a new CEO is brought in, usually from the outside. That new CEO develops a plan, evaluates the leadership team and the people with fresh eyes, makes changes to the team, sets fresh goals, and requires accountability for results.

I think this may be one of the things that President Obama has gotten right. But regardless of what you think of this policy, I find it interesting that they’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to get around the tenure and union rules is closing schools and starting from scratch. And based on this article, even that may not make it possible to get the bad teachers off the public payroll.

“If we turn around just the bottom 1 percent, the bottom thousand schools per year for the next five years, we could really move the needle, lift the bottom and change the lives of tens of millions of underserved children,” Duncan said.

In particular, the administration wants to fix middle schools and high schools, focusing on “dropout factories” where two in five kids don’t make it to graduation.

Duncan, a former Chicago schools chief, has plenty of experience with school turnarounds. Chicago targeted several public schools for turnaround, eight of them last year, while Duncan was still in charge. It’s too soon to know how the eight fared.

What happens to teachers when an entire staff is replaced depends on local contracts with teachers’ unions. In Chicago, some lost their jobs, while some reapplied and were hired.

But in New York, many whose jobs were eliminated by school closings wound up in a reserve pool of about 1,100 teachers who have continued to receive paychecks while working mostly as substitutes.

Don’t get me wrong: I think unions played a significant role in building a middle class back in the 1800s and early 1900s. And there are some areas where they could play a positive role today. But it’s largely become about political power and legislating advantage for themselves…just take a look at the California budget mess as a prime example.

When tenure and union rules protect poor performance and mediocrity in our kids’ education, perhaps it’s time to consider what we value more. The vast majority of teachers who work hard and care about their students have nothing to fear from change.

Bottom line: when you have no fear of losing your job for poor performance, you’re not incentivized to work hard. We’re actually lucky that the vast majority of teachers care so much about their students that they do so without the incentive.

» Read the Entire Article