It's not all about him.

While watching President Bush's press conference, I was struck again by a couple of characteristics of his public speeches:

1. He uses the word "I" an awful lot. While it's good to know that he puts himself in the middle of the discussions and actions, rather than pointing to an amorphous government, it seems that he's personalized it too much. It's as though he's trying to convince us (or himself) that he is important, relevant.
   
2. He uses the phrase "hard work" an awful lot. "It's hard work." "This is hard work." It's not even used as an excuse, but as a statement that he is, in fact, working hard.
   

I don't care to psychoanalyze him too much, but this sounds like an employee pleading to a boss. "I worked hard on this TPS report. It may not look like much, but I worked hard. You've got to give me credit for that." It can also sound like a son who is trying to prove himself to his father. "I worked on this really hard."

And, while it should surprise no one that he would avoid answering difficult questions, I think that the President took it to a new level. His response to a question regarding Michael Chertoff's "gut" feeling about a terrorist attack this summer wandered further than Omar the Tentmaker riding a drunken camel.

One final thing. He was asked how it was that we wound up so ill-prepared for the post-Saddam challenges, he first said that he had asked Gen. Tommy Franks and others on the Joint Chiefs if they had sufficient soldiers and materiel. They all responded in the affirmative. We have since learned that they were gravely wrong. So, now, the President exhorts to trust the commanders in the field to tell us what's going on in Iraq and when it will be safe to leave. "Trust, but verify," Ronald Reagan used to say.

YouTube - DEC - Glimpse of the Future, 1994

This slideshow provides images of some of the web pages that were available in 1994. My first experience with the web was in the autumn of 1993 when someone posted information to our internal collaboration forum (Notes) about a browser (Mosaic) and server. As soon as my jaw returned from the floor, I began following links as quickly as I could find them.

YouTube - DEC - Glimpse of the Future, 1994

Let's hear it for mediocrity

We watched the Boston Pops Fourth of July hooptedoodle on TV. Liberty Mutual was one of the sponsors. Their tag line was, "Yes, there's an insurance company that's as responsible as you are."

Now, why would I ever want to do business with a company that is as responsible as I am? Ever! That's like saying I want to take singing lessons from someone who sings as well as I do. If a company can't do it better than I can (and how hard would that be?), then we'd both better just keep walking.