Stone, Camahort and Des Jardins have BlogHer.

Calacanis and Arrington have TechCrunch 50.

Steve Gillmor has The Gillmor Gang.

Loic has Le Web.

Klaus Schwab has Davos.

Tim O'Reilly has FOO Camp.

Tom Rielly has TED.

Etc etc.

There are a hundred tech, political and entertainment conferences each year, and people who speak every year at one or two of them (or more). It's good because you can hear what's on a person's mind, in their own words, with a chance to interact, once a year, like clockwork. Do that for five or ten years and you get somewhere, you hope.

These days I don't get many invites to speak. (Actually come to think of it I've never gotten a lot of invites to speak, I usually have to work at it. Basically I stopped working at it.) When I go to conferences I go as press, and I listen. I don't like talking from the audience. It may work for others, but it doesn't work for me. What works even better is watching on video, where the temptation to speak out loud is diminished (and harmless, expressing my opinion at a computer screen is like a tree falling in the woods with no one there).

I think I could do my part to draw people to a conference. But I wouldn't want to take on the responsibility for the whole show. I know what that entails, I've done it four times. When you take it on, it consumes most of your time for a quarter of a year. I just don't think that's a good use of my time, though it might be for others.

What I'm looking for is seven or eight people who have a blog or podcast following, who might want to partner on such an event. It would be an annual thing. There would be seven or eight slots, and they would be the same every year. We might recruit journalists or bloggers to lead the discussions, but the topics for each session would be driven by the seven or eight people. You could bring other people on stage with you. Demos. Videos. It's up to each person. The audience would be encouraged to participate, something like a BloggerCon, but not exactly. Each session would very much be driven and designed by the person whose name is on the session.

Berkman does something like this -- almost every conference has a group of repeat speakers. If you want to get an update on what they're thinking about, sign up for the conference. They're good speakers, intelligent thoughtful people. Teachers mostly, so they're good at presenting their ideas verbally. It works. I'd like to do the same thing, but with people from technology, politics and entertainment. I think there's going to be enough happening at the intersection of those areas over the next decade to make a series of annual events interesting. Of course there would be ample opportunity for schmoozing, which is why people really come to conferences, as we all know.

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A potential building site for a hotel or for dozens of luxury homes has gone up for sale in Seal Beach, a city thats virtually built out.
The 10.7-acre parcel at First Street and Marina Drive (click on image at right to enlarge), which is listed for $26.5 million, is currently vacant. But it has one of the best locations in the city, sitting about 100 yards from the sand on the edge of Seal Beachs Old Town district, just north of a beach parking lot and the Rivers End Cafe. It also abuts the San Gabriel River, including the river bike path with access rights to the water.
s just an incredible piece of real estate, and theres so much you can do with it, said Paul Bitonti, a vice president at Marcus Millichaps Newport Beach Office, which is representing the sellers.
Its zoned for a 150-room hotel, although the lot is big enough for a 300-room hotel or for 65 to 80 luxury homes in a city where new construction is rare, Bitonti said. One nearby beachfront home sold recently for $3.6 million, and another sold for $5.5 million, he said.

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Heller left unanswered a significant question: The level of scrutiny the Court must apply to the restriction on Mr. Booker's individual right to bear arms. As Heller notes, the "traditionally expressed levels" are "strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, and rational basis." The Heller majority acknowledged that it did not establish "a level of scrutiny for evaluating Second Amendment restrictions," but it left some hints. First, the Heller majority rejected Justice Breyer's "interest-balancing" approach, observing that it knew "no other enumerated constitutional right whose core protection has been subjected to a freestanding 'interest-balancing' approach." Second, the majority conceded that the District of Columbia law would pass rational-basis scrutiny and, since it ruled the District's complete ban on handguns unconstitutional, the necessary implication is that the rational-basis test is not applicable. The remaining options are strict and intermediate scrutiny.
Strict scrutiny is generally reserved for statutory restrictions that affect the exercise of certain "fundamental right[s]." The individual right to bear arms might well be a fundamental right, the restriction of which requires strict scrutiny. This conclusion is supported by the placement of Second Amendment within the Bill of Rights alongside this Country's most precious freedoms. However, as Justice Breyer points out, Heller expressly approves some statutory restrictions -- the types of people who may exercise this freedom; the places where this freedom may be exercised; and, the ability to buy and sell the objects of this freedom -- "whose constitutionality under a strict scrutiny standard would be far from clear." "Intermediate scrutiny is used, for discrimination based on gender and for discrimination against nonmarital children." Heller itself concedes that it does not "clarify the entire field." It consciously left the appropriate level of scrutiny for another day.
Rather than tackle this complex and unanswered question, the Court starts from a different place. Heller teaches that even though the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms, it is "not unlimited." Heller states that "nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms." A useful approach is to ask whether a statutory prohibition against the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill is similar enough to the statutory prohibition against the possession of firearms by persons convicted of the misdemeanor crime of domestic violence to justify its inclusion in the list of "longstanding prohibitions" that survive Second Amendment scrutiny.
The Court concludes it does. To reach this conclusion, the Court starts by comparing the constitutionally-sanctioned prohibition against firearm possession by felons with the prohibition against persons convicted of misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence. A person can, of course, be convicted of a felony which had nothing to do with physical violence and which would not necessarily predict future misuse of a firearm. Nevertheless, the law forbids any convicted felon, regardless of the nature of the felony, from possessing firearms and Heller constitutionally sanctioned this broad prohibition. [Footnote: The same point is generally applicable to the mentally ill....]
By contrast, the predicate offense under which Mr. Booker was convicted is defined in 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(9) as requiring "the use or attempted use of physical force" by someone who is a spouse, parent, or guardian of the victim or someone in a position similar to a spouse, parent, or guardian of the victim. [Footnote: Mr. Booker emphasizes that an individual may be convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence in Maine by reckless behavior; he argues that there is not a significant enough government interest to deprive him of his Second Amendment right if he acted only recklessly. However, the felony convictions to which Mr. Booker's predicate offence is being compared run the gamut of the mens rea spectrum, and a domestic violence offender's mens rea does not impact the Court's analysis under Heller.] If anything, as a predictor of firearm misuse, the definitional net cast by 922(g)(9) is tighter than the net cast by 922(g)(1). Turning to the governmental interest, the manifest need to protect the victims of domestic violence and to keep guns from the hands of the people who perpetrate such acts is well-documented and requires no further elaboration.
Based on the absence of a meaningful distinction between felons and persons convicted of crimes of domestic violence as predictors of firearm violence, the critical nature of the governmental interest, and the definitional tailoring of the statute, the Court concludes that persons who have been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence must be added to the list of "felons and the mentally ill" against whom the "longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms" survive Second Amendment scrutiny.

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WM (Workforce): What was the goal of the recent HR reorganization?
Crow: In 2002, when we put the HR positions in each of the stores, the objective was to create and implement common HR processes across the organization. The company had grown really fast, so we wanted to institutionalize those HR processes.
Flash forward to today. The good news is that those processes have stuck. They aren’t even HR processes anymore; they are part of the leadership model. When I talk to a store manager, they talk about talent management and career development as part of their job.
Today, the economy has changed, and we needed to make changes to be responsive to the business. It’s not about saving money and adding to the bottom line. It’s about redeploying the investment in our HR infrastructure into customer-facing hours on the sales floor. Since our store managers had done such a great job of institutionalizing HR processes, we could do that.
WM: How do you make sure that store managers don’t sweep HR matters under the rug?
Crow: Members of our district HR teams are in the stores every day. And they may be an associate relations expert, but when they walk into a store they are a generalist.
The stores are seeing their HR professionals anywhere from four to five days a week, and they aren’t doing transactional processes. They are engaging associates and working with management.
This isn’t scientific, but I was talking to some store managers in a roundtable in Arizona recently and I asked them how they liked the transformation. They said that they are seeing HR more now than they did in the past.
So listen, like any big company that is serious about associate relations, we have an Aware Line that people can call if things aren’t working. And I haven’t seen an increase in Aware Line calls since we made the change.
WM: As part of the HR reorganization, you hired 200 people for a call center to handle employees’ transactional HR questions. Why didn’t you save money and outsource it?
Crow: We stress service a lot in this company. The last thing I wanted to do was to not have our hands on the service when it comes to HR. If the Home Depot passion is about supporting each other, I’m not sure it would have made sense to outsource this.

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As health care becomes an increasingly prominent U.S. political issue, it strikes me that there are two issues:
1. How do we pay for routine, preventative care?
2. How do we pay for catastrophic, unforeseen care?
At present, we use the inaptly named health insurance for both, but theres no fundamental reason that it has to be that way. In particular, there is no reason that we need our health insurance to pay for routine care, just like there is no reason we need our homeowners insurance to pay for our water bill. In both cases, we have a very good idea what our expenses will be, and we can plan accordingly without the need to insure against significant loss.
Indeed, right now health insurance combines an insurance component with one that is not insurancethat is, protection against unexpected and significant lossat all but rather pre-payment (possibly shared with your employer) of expected expenses. In itself, such is not terribly efficient, but the real problem comes from the mis-alignment of incentives. You, the consumer, pay a fixed insurance premium and (provided your copays are low) essentially none of the marginal cost, so it is no surprise that Americans over-consume care that doesnt do much good. And since you dont directly pay any of the cost of care, you are not sensitive to price changes, contributing to the significant inflation we see in health-care costs.
So what we need, then, is health insurance that is actually, well, insurance. If nothing unexpected and expensive happens to you, you pay for your own health care and budget accordingly, but if something bad does happen, youre covered by your policy.
Of course, such policies do exist now, but again, the incentives are all wrong. Wed be more than happy to choose a lower-cost, high-deductible option if our employers made it worth our while by giving us, say, half of the amount they saved on the premiums in cash, but as it is, with us only paying 20 percent of our premiums, the faux is the cheaper option, all things considered.
Which brings us to another problem: the preferential treatment for employer-provided coverage. Again, were prime candidates to buy insurance on the open market, except that by doing so, wed be foregoing a significant amount of our total compensation, especially considering that benefits, unlike income, are not taxed. If instead of paying for health insurance firms just paid employees the money, individuals would be more likely both a) to buy actual insurance rather than just pre-paying and b) to avoid needless consumption, since such would affect their cost and not just their insurers.
I should add, also, that Im not such a cold-hearted capitalist as to think we shouldnt provide health care for those that cannot afford it. Im all for that, especially with respect to children. But for the vast majority of us, who can afford both basic serviceswhich, again, likely would be cheaper if providers actually had to compete based on costand insurance against unexpected illness? The current system is economically inefficient, overly expensive, and outdated.
Im not sure whatever new legislation we getand given the momentum at present, its hard to imagine we wont get somethingwill be an improvement overall. But given the extent of inefficiencies in the current system, any decent legislation probably will be an improvement in at least some of these respects.

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, offers one yardstick: "If you can't straighten up your house in 20 minutes when a guest calls to say she's coming over, then you have a problem." But ultimately, your best barometer is whether, when you look around, your home feels comfortably orderly or uncomfortably disorderly.
You could lock yourself in for 48 hours and do a marathon cleanup. But for those who find decluttering a daunting task--and that would be most of us--it's easier to tackle the problem in small bites.

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Yay, we're home. It was nice to be back in Vancouver saying hi to folks, but it's tiring being in different places and seeing everyone in a crammed packed visit. It was the longest I've been back there since our wedding ~6 years ago. There were only a few people on my list that I didn't wind up seeing, which is actually pretty good for a trip.

I had originally said that I was going to keep my pain killers where they were for a few weeks, but I realised that I'd managed a couple of times to forget to take some and lasted 5-6 hours, so I dropped one anyone. It means that the flight home was a little creakier than I'd like, but my "hard" gnome-sudoku time has also dropped from ~45 minutes to ~15 minutes. :)

We got our visa renewed successfully, so no there isn't any stress of whether we're suddenly going to have to move, find new jobs, etc. So here's to the start of a boring (life-wise) 12 months starting now!

I'm back in the office tomorrow.

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