My Best Writing of 2007

Photo by adactioThe year is over. If you’re into the Gregorian calendar, that is. Else, it’s only Dhu-Hijja 21, 1438 (if you’re Muslim), Teveth 22, 5768 (if you’re Hebrew), or Dey 10, 1386 (if you’re Iranian). If you happen to be a Unix machine rather than a person, you can kindly refer to this day as a time() value of 1199059200.

But for those of us who like the western calendar, I suppose it’s somewhat of a milestone since our year changes tomorrow. It’s been 365 days since that happened, so it’s supposed to mean something, according to the people that tell us what things are important in our lives. I believe most of those people work for Hallmark.

Sadly, some people will drink themselves into idiocy because they believe it is a legitimate reason to celebrate. They will celebrate brashly and proudly as if somebody somewhere has accomplished something today. They will not think once about the consequences to their body, the risk of taking someone’s life during their reign of alcoholic terror, or whether they should spend the day being productive and useful to America. And they will certainly not begin to consider that their whole “raison d’ĂȘtre” today was brought about by a correctional change to the Julian calendar that Pope Gregory XIII declared to be “the” calendar in 1582).

So, since I am compelled as an American to also celebrate this day, I will do so by compiling a summary of my best writing from each month of 2007. You may read it before hitting the clubs tonight so that you will have something pithy to discuss with your drunken friends. I only ask that you credit me completely for giving you at least the perception of intelligence during your bouts of drunken rage. It’s only natural that I insert my intellectual property rights into your freedom to assemble and make merry, else we just wouldn’t be red-blooded Americans, right?

January 2007

Why Reading Blogs is Crucial to being Smart: If you missed it, now’s your chance to catch up. Hopefully, you took my advice and have been reading more blogs all year and are smarter for doing so. But the advice still applies to 2008, so feel free to play a little “catch up” with us smart people.

February 2007

Enthusiasm: If you want 2008 to be a better year, maybe you’d better re-evaluate your church and your job by reading this post. Still one of my favorites - and kind of a short post for all you folks that think my articles are too long. Foul knaves!

March 2007

Mac Users are Dense: Sure, it got me into trouble a bit with the Apple fanboys, but it was so true. And still is. Even though I might by a Macbook Pro soon. But, I digress.

April 2007

You Don’t Have to be a Geek to be Computer-Savvy: I wrote this intending it to be a series, but it never panned out. Probably because I didn’t get too much feedback on it. No even called me to task for not working more on the series. So, maybe it was too geeky, after all. Let me know what I did wrong. I’ll fix it. Seriously. Well, I’ll look into it, at least. Probably very soon.

May 2007

Top Ten Ways to Use your Upcoming Vote to Punish your Children: I only wrote one post in May and this one was it. So, the cheese stands alone. And I originally had written this for the 2000 elections, so it has stood some test of time. With the upcoming furor over the 2008 elections, this one will be a very timely read.

June 2007

Organizing Sent Email: A problem that still has not presented an easy solution, despite all the promises of the information age’s dawn of a new era. Even Gmail fails miserably at this.

August 2007

I wrote nothing. That’s right. Absolutely nothing. Because I was busy. Or maybe because I was undisciplined. Probably more of the latter than the former. But, now that I’ve been challenged, I won’t let that happen again. You have my word.

September 2007

12 Reasons to Walk Out of a Job Interview: I really poured my heart into this one. I was counting on you to Digg it, Stumble it, and get me Slashdotted. But you failed me once again, my faithless readers. But, I think that it is one of those little gems that once discovered, will catapult me to the top of the blogosphere. If you missed it, now’s your chance to redeem yourself.

October 2007

Who is your Authority?: This one got started with an unnecessarily long telephone conversation with my brother Chad in which we ran the gauntlet on trivial issues that better neither of our lives, but somehow make us think we might be more in agreement on certain things than not. Choosing the right books to read is definitely one of those issues that, for some bizarre reason, we can talk about for hours while wives and girlfriends fall into a state of unconsciousness wondering if their “man” is perhaps part of some cult. Choosing books is one of those subjects. And the Miami Dolphins. Probably everything else, we disagree with each other. We try to tell ourselves that this is normal in sibling relationships. Deep down, I believe we both suspect that it is anything but.

November 2007

Death to Techie Primadonnas: I had a few good posts in November, but I had the most fun writing this one. And that’s really all that matters: my need to entertain myself by writing posts that I find interesting. Your opinion of my posts counts for absolutely nothing. Except when you comment on them publicly. Then you get a gold star in my little black book. Don’t you like getting gold stars? They are so reaffirming, are they not?

December 2007

San Francisco is Completely Whacked: Sure, this post was about an event that was almost two years old. And sure, this post is full of right-wing bluster from yours truly. And yes, some people will probably get all sensitive and politically correct and just downright sniffly when they read it. But, this is the kind of stuff I like to write. This is why you pay me the big bucks to write this blog. Because where else, seriously, are you going to get that kind of confrontational attitude in your life? From reading Yahoo news? From cruising the “A-List” blogger’s blogs? I think not. Let’s face it. You need a little challenge in your life. You need your beliefs to be pushed just a smidgen. I’m a nice guy. I don’t bite. With this post, I picked the perfect focus event to really highlight some of the polar extremes of a cause I find detestable. If you disagree, it’s up to you to prove me wrong. I stopped trying to prove myself wrong back in the 10th grade. It was just an exercise in futility.


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