Cindy Sheehan has given up her protest, leading a lot of war supporters to cheer. She was staunch anti-war figure and did have a family member pay the ultimate price for her right to say what she said.

I do not necessarily agree with everything that Sheehan said but something in the article that I linked to above struck a chord with me.

“I have tried ever since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful,” she wrote. “Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives.

“It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years, and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.”

I must say that I agree wholeheartedly with her and it’s a tragic realization. Americans are ignoring the events that surround them and the cost is just now being realized. Soon, if something does not change, we will be a nation of television watchers with very little understanding of what is happening around us.

Sheehan also points out a flaw in the anti-war movement, personal egos. The egos of those who have the ability to enact change have crippled the anti-war movement and in my mind, the Democratic Party, from making any serious advances.

Life is fragile, so the one thing that irritates me more than anything else is when I see a child maneuvering freely in a moving vehicle. How do parents allow something like this?

This morning I watched two children, neither older than five years old, roll down the rear passenger window and stick their bodies halfway out of the car. The driver, who I assume was the parent, did not seem to mind at all. I wonder if they would have noticed if one of the children fell out.

Of all of the precautions a parent could take a seatbelt is the most simple. You buckle the child in, you tell them not to touch it, and you reprimand them if they do. Even better is a car seat. These parents who blow off the law will either be responsible for their child’s death or for that child’s misunderstanding of rules and authority.

I just cannot believe that something so easily preventable is ignored so very much.

By now, the news that Roger Clemens will be returning to New York to play for the Yankees has reached almost everyone who cares about baseball.

Some have voiced their opinion over the matter and their disagreement with the move while Yankee fans think it could change things for them.

Here in Houston the mood is a little different. We are sad to see him go but at the same time cannot wait for the revolving door to hit him in the butt as he walks out. He is a great pitcher, when he’s on. When he’s off, you might as well write-off the game and hope for the best.

At some point you have to ask yourself, “Should I retire finally?” and I think Clemens has skipped over that and is now asking himself “Do you think they’ll let my skeleton pitch?”. I am sure if Hakeem Olajuwon announced that he would be making a comeback to the NBA, people would laugh him out of the press conference.

So, Yankees fans, you can have Roger. You can cheer him on while asking yourself, “Why am I paying $14 for a hot dog”, then remember that you have “The Rocket” and shovel another $12 to the vendor for your peanuts. I on the other hand will be enjoying the Astros with a half-priced hot dog and an all around good team, not a bunch of overpaid fellas with egos bigger than their batting averages.

I flew to Dallas this past Tuesday for a meeting and testing turnover. The flight took-off at 6am, giving me the following view as we popped out of the clouds:

A good majority of business people really hate flying, airports, and the whole travel process. I seem to thrive in it. Yes, at times the stress of it gets to me, but the fact that I get to fly 40,000 ft. above the earth and see things like the above makes it worth it.

The fact that I love to fly doesn’t hurt either. In fact, even though I bring a book and my iPod on flights I usually stare out the window for at least 30 minutes, just out of sheer elation that I am above the ground and heading somewhere new. I probably look like a first time flyer but it doesn’t matter, I am amazed by flight and do not mind showing it.

In the last few months I have narrowed down my reading list significantly, sticking only with things that I want to read and dropping all of the stuff that is not fulfilling. Recently I have found myself struggling to read everything, especially when I am subscribed to TUAW and Lifehacker (which get a lot of updates everyday).

The way I am handling this is by not reading everything in every feed, just reading what I want and then marking the entire feed as “read”.

Any other ways to deal with this problem?

I am posting this from Love Field (DAL) on the treo. My only complaint with the phone so far is the keyboard, it is really cramped together…

It appears that British Airways does not want any of their customers to think of Virgin Atlantic as a better possibility. They have reportedly edited a cameo of Richard Branson (Virgin Atlantic’s founder) out of the James Bond film, Casino Royale.

British Airways has been suffering from bad press lately and this just shows that they may not be the best choice for airline when making your travel plans.

I happened to catch a glimpse of the film on my flight back from Boston and saw the scene that was edited. I guess Continental does not feel too threatened by Branson.

I am only going to make one post on the tragic events that enveloped the Virginia Tech community yesterday. My reason for this is that I feel the media is definitely covering it enough and I really do not want to give the killer any more face time than he is already getting.

For the next few weeks we will hear what could have prevented this incident, what the school could have done, what the school should not have done, and everything in between. In the end, all this is is an attempt by people to find some reason for why this happened and a proper area to place blame.

This is a tragedy with no plausible explanation, no matter how hard we try to come up with one. The 32 lives taken away yesterday will not be justified in any way by an explanation or blame. Instead, the blame and explanation will receive the majority of television time while the faces and stories of those who were killed will fade away… Sadly.

Sitting in a restaurant that we frequent entirely too much, we realized that the table next to us was filled with a few folks who had had a little too much to drink.

As we waited for our food to arrive we listened to their conversation for entertainment. I should note here, we were not eavesdropping, they were speaking loudly enough so that anyone within a ten-foot radius could clearly understand them.

Halfway through their conversation and they started discussing who does the lawn and who does not. One man (pictured here, second from the right) turned to his wife and said, in a deep southern accent, “You didn’t marry no yard man…Didjya?!”.

He kept going, mentioning that he was not going to do shrubs or bushes and refuses to weed-eat, claiming that it is the worst part of the lawn.

At this point we were fighting to keep our laughter in and though our service that night from the restaurant was terrible, it was worth it because of this exchange.

I have been using Google Reader for a few months now and I have come to realize things that I would love to have in a feedreader.

For one thing, I would like to be able to “tag” feeds and specific articles in a feed for organization and easy lookup purposes. It is cumbersome to have to go and manually find an article down the road from when you read it originally, tagging would make the process a little better. Google currently has the “Star” feature, which is great, but it leaves articles all in the same category, “Starred”.

The folder/category concept in Google Reader is great but lacking. I would love sub-categories and the ability to temporarily disable a feed being updated.

The penultimate feature would have to be notes for articles. Adding a note to an article that I read, then sharing that article (and the note) would make life a lot easier. This leads into a small feature that would also make reading and sharing of articles much simpler, sing article sharing. Sometimes I come across a single article who’s parent “publication” has a feed. I do not necessarily want to subscribe to the entire feed, but instead the single article.

All of these features would make me an instant fan, in fact, I might even be willing to pay a small price to use those features. Suggestions?