Finally Back on Track
My VAIO is back. The pop, crackle, snap has been repaired. All of my draft blog posts have returned. So I should be back to posting on a regular basis, starting tomorrow morning.
First up: the next installment in the “It’s Time to Change the World” series.
I hope your enthusiasm for this series of posts hasn’t waned in the last few weeks! The need is even greater than it was before.
Aaron Klein
Sitting in an airport making a connection to Chicago and thought I’d clear something up.
I’m not the Aaron Klein who is Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy in President Obama’s Treasury Department.
I’m also not the Aaron Klein who is Jerusalem Bureau Chief for WorldNetDaily and wrote the book “The Manchurian President” about President Obama.
I guess I’m somewhere between those two.
Glad I could clear that up… 
Happy Thanksgiving
My extended family has much to be thankful for.
Despite hard times, we all have food, clothing and shelter. For the most part, we all have work that allows us to provide for our families. We’re all in fairly good health. Our faith is strong.
And despite the fact that many of us disagree with our country’s direction, we ought to celebrate the fact that this country affords us incredible freedoms — the same freedoms that the pilgrims above were celebrating 388 years ago.
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, and don’t forget to be thankful!
A Great Dodger Game
I’ve lived in Northern California for 23 years, but I was born 15 minutes away from Dodger Stadium and Dodger Blue still runs in my veins. There still hasn’t been a World Series moment to rival 1988 with Kirk Gibson and Orel Hershiser.
(Gosh…I’d sidebar about marrying a Giants fan, but fortunately Cacey isn’t too nuts about baseball.)
Anyway, my buddy Clayton is a lifelong Cardinals fan, and he and I have been wanting to see a game together. The last regular season series between both teams was last week, so we put it together and made it happen.
Now, for those of you who think Facebook and Twitter are useless, I twittered a few weeks ago that I was going to go down for the game, and my good friend and real estate magnate Christine Schlittenhart responded back and said she had a family connection with some free tickets! (And in case you’re wondering, of course I’ll report the gift on my disclosure form as required by law, even though it has zero connection to my elected role.)
So I flew down on Sunday night, and worked out of Clayton’s law office on Monday. Got to see several old friends, and then we headed to the game that evening. My dad and brother met up and joined us for a great evening of baseball in great seats on the second deck.
The Cardinals did end up pulling off a 3-2 win, but we all had a great time nonetheless, and the Dodgers are still the best team in the National League (and almost all of baseball, except for the cursed Yankees).
Mobile Posting
Looks like I’m all set to post via BlackBerry now. Assuming we can find wi-fi, this should come in handy during a particular trip to Ethiopia!
Disqus
If you didn’t notice already, I switched this blog to the Disqus comments system a few days ago. It went off without a hitch, and imported all of my WordPress comments nicely.
Now, there’s all sorts of cool commenting functionality. You can tweet comments, or log in with Facebook, or set up a Disqus profile (coming from someone who hates setting up profiles: it takes 3 seconds, really). And I don’t get any spam or lame marketing e-mail with Disqus.
One really cool feature: when you comment on the blog and someone responds, you’ll get an e-mail with their response. All you have to do is click reply and type in your response, and your reply will instantly be posted here. How cool is that?
I first learned about Disqus from their venture capitalists, specifically Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures. His blog is avc.com and is a great read. So thanks Fred, and know you got yet another new user for one of your portfolio companies through your own blogging.
Landon Brownell, 1989-2009
Some very dear friends of ours lost their brother last night in a tragic car accident. He had flown into Sacramento and was just 20 minutes away from home in Bakersfield when he fell asleep at the wheel. He was only 19 years old.
I knew Landon less well than many others in our circle of friends, but he had a funny sense of humor, and we greatly enjoyed spending a little time with him in Sacramento this past March at a wedding of one of those friends.
It’s so hard to understand something like this. We stand but a few inches from a canvas, and from our vantage point, this part doesn’t look so good. Yet God is painting a huge masterpiece and eventually, we’ll be able to see the entire picture.
Landon will be missed, and tonight, our hearts and prayers are with the Brownells.
UPDATE: In the several times I met and spent time with Landon, I’d never heard about one of his many accomplishments: winning chess tournaments. His tragic death is the top story right now at the US Chess Federation web site, among numerous other blogs devoted to the game. All remember him as “the great sportsman who would shake your hand after a match, win or lose.” What a great legacy.
I’m Enjoying This. Are You?
I use Google Analytics to get a sense of who is reading my blog, and since we launched the new site on March 18, readership has exploded. Part of this has to do with Facebook and Twitter friends reading posts, but I’m sure a lot of it has to do with how integrated the site is.
Comparing March to February, we had 154% more visitors, 231% more pageviews, and we’ve apparently started developing more returning readers, because the percentage of visitors who come that are brand new dropped by 6%. We had a 60% boost in people coming from Google searches, too.
So, thanks. Writing, twittering and facebooking has been fun this past couple of weeks, and I’m going to keep it up. It’s helping me to clarify my own ideas, and hopefully, it’s connecting many of you to your community college in a new and exciting way.
What are we missing? What could we use more of? I hope you’ll leave a comment and let me know.
The best is yet to come! Stay tuned.
A New Site
Hi friends,
So, you may have noticed several things about the old web site. How the blog was separate from the site…how the blog posts on the site home page wouldn’t automatically update…and how things generally would get out of date?
Well, if you care to know, that’s because the site was built in something called ColdFusion, the blog was on something called TypePad, and nothing knew how to talk to anything else. So now, we’ve modernized, redone everything, and integrated it all up into a technology called WordPress. Pretty cool, huh?
That means only one site to keep updated, and it will be so much easier for me to not fall behind on posting stuff so often. (And I can post stuff from the BlackBerry too!) So I’m excited, and I hope you are too.
So let’s start a discussion. Let’s generate some new ideas. Let’s talk about business, technology, education reform, politics, pop culture — you name it.
I can’t wait!
Aaron
