DanKohn.com

In my continuing quest for world domination, I joined my homeowner association (HOA) board to help oversee the $1+ M construction project we’re undertaking to repair the rotted beams that were improperly sealed when the condominium was built 15 years ago (with a 10 year of statute of liability).

So, I was quite interested in this article on ‘privatopia’, and whether HOAs represent the end of the American Dream.

“Once the statute of limitations for suing the developer — usually one to three years — has expired, the association is on its own. Suddenly, roofs begin to leak, streets break down and the HOA realizes it needs to begin serious repairs.”

All true, although of course residential houses also tend to run into problems 15 years after construction. Especially when they are not well maintained.

‘Even when an HOA is well run and filled with great people, adds McKenzie, “it’s only one election away from a disaster.”‘ Also correct, but isn’t that also true for any democracy? Don’t all democracies get exactly the government they deserve?

The WSJ has an article on Sun’s victory against MSFT today that explicitly mentions “tipping”, the concept Malcolm Gladwell made popular in his book The Tipping Point:

Sun Microsystems Inc. won a huge victory Monday when a federal judge ordered archrival Microsoft Corp. to distribute Sun’s Java programming language while a private antitrust suit is pending. Sun earlier in December told Judge J. Frederick Motz that the market for software capable of supporting mobile Internet and other Web-based services was in danger of “tipping” toward Microsoft’s product, the .NET Framework.

Of course, “Tipping Point” is heading toward common usage. (Google News has 64 this month.)

However, I found the WSJ article interesting because it’s rare for such large economic value to be determined based on a popularization of theory.

Or, as Keynes said:

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct theory. Madman in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

Herbert Muscamp quotes Buckminster Fuller: “Vertical is to live, horizontal is to die.”

They’re brilliant proposals. I especially support building something bigger, taller, and more audacious than we had before.

Marx wasn’t right about much, but this superb WSJ story shows Poland becoming a NATO Disneyland for potential conquering armies:

“Poland’s convenient location in the heart of Europe attracted plenty of uninvited armies in its war-ravaged past. Now the country is cashing in, leasing more land and airspace for war practice than any other European member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to which it has belonged for three years. “Times have changed,” says Col. Klaus Haacke of Germany, which, under the Nazis, invaded Poland in 1939.”

We’ve come a long way.

Two weeks ago, I complained to my friend Tom Clyde that his play “Eternity Is in Love with the Productions of Time” was inapproachable because of the lack of conventional story arcs.

Now, here is David Edelstein on the new movie Adaptation:

While Charlie righteously blathers to a sexily elegant film executive (Tilda Swinton) that he has no intention of turning Orlean’s book about flowers and Florida swamps into a movie with conventional conflicts and characters who have “arcs” and “grow and change,” Donald is busy getting laid (courtesy Maggie Gyllenhaal), flirting with Catherine Keener (on the set of Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich [1999], shooting concurrently), and penning a wildly commercial thriller about a deconstructionist serial-killer.

Here is an entertaining NYT piece about the mild-mannered New Yorker writer who found that the movie adaptation of her book suddenly featured her as a character: “stoned on orchid dust, rutting in a greenhouse with a toothless nut, chasing down a screenwriter with a loaded shotgun”. We all hope for this kind of quote in the NYT: “I’m not a gun-toting floozy,” Ms. Orlean said.

Keith Dawson rightly complains about hassles in dealing with the switchover to my new mailing list.

I broke bloglet because I decided I’d rather manage the subscriptions in mailman, and just use bloglet to fetch new posts, concatenate them, and send them to mailman. Since I didn’t want subscribers to get two posts (from bloglet and mailman), and bloglet doesn’t allow me to unsubscribe people (which is why I preferred mailman), I deleted and then recreated the blog.

In my defense, though, this stuff if really hard. In summary, all former subscribers (and any new ones) will be on a mailman list that I can manage. Bloglet acts as a robot that fetchs my new posts every night and sends them to the mailman list. Everything should now be working right.

I’ve switched my blogging tool from Blogger Pro to Movable Type, based on feedback (and voting with their feet) from bloggers I respect. It’s a much more versatile, feature-rich offering, although it takes some Unix expertise (or $20 to the creators) to get up and running. I’m very happy with it.

I’m also moving my Yahoo blog discussion group to use bloget instead. Subscribers will see an announcement message from bloget, which they can ignore. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about the change.

Finally, please note that the best feature of MT is comments, so I’d like to hear what you think about some of these posts.

As always, please take a look at http://www.dankohn.com/blog/.

Mark Steyn in the WSJ writes an exegesis of John Kerry that epitomizes the art form of character-decimating essays.

WSJ.com – Lather, Rinse, Repeat:
“If you were to create an animatronic Democrat to exemplify all the most disastrous qualities of the 2002 election — the equivocating, the fundamental unseriousness, the reliance on biography even when no one’s interested — it would look an awful lot like John Kerry.”

“Are house-proud Californians ready to ditch their backyards and barbecues and embrace metropolitan life?”

I’m writing this from the Accra, Ghana headquarters of Rising Data, a call center and software development outsourcing firm that I’m planning to invest in (personal money, not Skymoon’s). Behind me, the first 6 operator-trainers are practicing answering calls (that will come over IP telephones) from DC residents calling their physican’s answering service. The offices are above Busy Internet, the largest Internet cafe in Accra, which is also conducting a Peace Corps training below. It’s quite a scene. More soon.