mrclay.org

“Thank You Friends” was the first Big Star song I heard, hanging out with Dan Francke listening to a Time-Life cassette comp he ripped from his dad.

Kathleen and I have been lucky enough to be able to carpool until now, leaving our neglected Tercel “Tercy” (see right) to the rats and other inhabitants. The Good: runs well, good mileage, heat works. Bad: cramped driver’s seat, smells kinda like feet, back doors don’t open from outside, battery leaks out in a few [...]

(Written July 2007)
The digital dark ages is already a reality for a lot of people who grew up with hosted e-mail services like Compuserve and AOL. A lot of those users had no choice but to accept the loss of all their received and sent e-mail when they unsubscribed, the service went under, or their [...]

In no particular order, I hope…

the release of IE8 will spur organizations currently standardized on IE6 to finally bite the bullet and either upgrade their users to IE8 or move them to other browsers. Killing off IE6 (and IE7 really) will significantly decrease web development costs and reinvigorate CSS by opening up a world of [...]

In the U.S., dealership lots and ad papers swell with recent model used cars in great condition. Sometimes near-working vehicles are abandoned. People around us choose to buy new cars they can’t really afford every day, or at least they were.

If you’ve fooled yourself that this is not true, you need only to check yesterday’s New York Times to sober up. In cultures where women still have little value, for at least a dozen years some men have thrown acid on the faces of women, and are rarely punished. In a recent case, girls with [...]

A real Gainesville treasure just a few blocks from our house. Last weekend we were there with Kathleen’s mom and my parents.
March 2003

2008

When government regulation is completely removed from the picture, business thrives, and one industry has a particularly impressive success story. Its products are produced where costs are low and sold elsewhere with monumental margins. In fact these extraordinary profits help this industry overcome enormous hurdles of distribution; not even incredibly powerful organizations with endless supplies [...]

Recently the Gainesville PD conducted a prostitution sting that busted a particularly vile couple who solicited sex in front of the woman’s six year old son. In addition to the prostitution charge, the woman was rightfully charged with child abuse. I heard about this on the radio, and the report included a quote, I’m guessing [...]

I see this as the bravest statement made in the 2nd Obama-McCain debate:
I think [healthcare] should be a right for every American. In a country as wealthy as ours, for us to have people who are going bankrupt because they can’t pay their medical bills—for my mother to die of cancer at the age of [...]