Dick Cheney's No Dick Nixon

In his famous Checkers speech in 1952, Richard Nixon was so aggrieved by allegations he misused $18,000 in political funds that he ran down an itemized list of his personal finances, showing the world that he hadn't grown rich in public life:

I have made an average of approximately $1,500 a year from nonpolitical speaking engagements and lectures. And then, fortunately, we've inherited a little money. Pat sold her interest in her father's estate for $3,000 and I inherited $l,500 from my grandfather.

We live rather modestly. For four years we lived in an apartment in Park Fairfax, in Alexandria, Va. The rent was $80 a month. And we saved for the time that we could buy a house.

Now, that was what we took in. What did we do with this money? What do we have today to show for it? This will surprise you, Because it is so little, I suppose, as standards generally go, of people in public life. First of all, we've got a house in Washington which cost $41,000 and on which we owe $20,000. We have a house in Whittier, California, which cost $13,000 and on which we owe $3,000. My folks are living there at the present time.

I have just $4,000 in life insurance, plus my G.I. policy which I've never been able to convert and which will run out in two years. I have no insurance whatever on Pat. I have no life insurance on our our youngsters, Patricia and Julie. I own a 1950 Oldsmobile car. We have our furniture. We have no stocks and bonds of any type. We have no interest of any kind, direct or indirect, in any business.

Now, that's what we have. What do we owe? Well, in addition to the mortgage, the $20,000 mortgage on the house in Washington, the $10,000 one on the house in Whittier, I owe $4,500 to the Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C. with interest 4 1/2 per cent.

I owe $3,500 to my parents and the interest on that loan which I pay regularly, because it's the part of the savings they made through the years they were working so hard, I pay regularly 4 per cent interest. And then I have a $500 loan which I have on my life insurance.

Well, that's about it. That's what we have and that's what we owe. It isn't very much but Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime that we've got is honestly ours. I should say this -- that Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat. And I always tell her that she'd look good in anything.

Vice President Cheney, who has spent all but five of the last 35 years as a public servant, has amassed a net worth of $94 million during that time.

That would buy a lot of Republican coats.

Politics · 2006/05/16 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

Jake Savin Has Been Assimilated

Jake Savin recently left UserLand Software for a move to Microsoft:

I've accepted a new job as technical program manager at Microsoft, working on the MSN/Windows Live team, and Monday morning I begin my first day of work.

It's been a very productive six years at UserLand, which has seen blogging go from obscurity to commonplace, RSS and XML-based syndication go from experimental to mainstream (even required), web services go from dream to business model, and podcasting go from non-existent to the big time.

I've relied on Savin often over the years for help with UserLand's publishing and programming tools, especially when I was writing Radio UserLand Kick Start. I didn't know he was also a music mogul in Dallas until he joined the RSS Advisory Board and I had to write his bio.

Rock on, Jake!

2006/05/16 · Comment · Link

Outsourcing My Weblog to India

Vivek Seal, a technology journalist in India who writes for Global Services Media, has posted a comment on Workbench addressing American critics of outsourcing:

I am a reporter from India and cover outsourcing scenario. I have few points for you people to get the exact picture and then make your conclusions about sourcing McDonalds customer care business to India:

1. We do not have call centers using Skype to interact with the US or European customers. There are dedicated fiber optical lines with the apt bandwith for the communication purpose
2. If it wasnt for India, many IT companies would have been making less money (IBM, Microsoft, HP, Dell. So eventually your companies are gaining a lot as well we are gaining a lot.
3. Even if the order taking business is outsourced to India, there would be a proper training program (2/3 months) to cater to different accents and the process.
4. If a person from Bangalore is able to do a job in less than half the cost and with more efficiency then that rationally a best thing for all the parties around it. No matter what.

All I wanna say is give India a chance to improve this world.

I'm concerned about outsourcing, though I try not to get all Lou Dobbs about it. I feel like it puts huge downward pressure on American jobs and wages, both white collar and service industry, because so much of our work is capable of being performed overseas. To me, the only winners will be the corporations and enterpreneurs who figure out how to exploit the cheap, well-educated labor for as long as they can, but even those folks will eventually suffer when Americans can no longer afford our extravagant standard of living.

But I want to give Seal a chance to convince me otherwise, so I'd like to outsource this weblog to him for a week.

Workbench receives around 11,000 hits a day over the web and syndication, and many of the readers are fellow technologists who've been in the first wave of Americans affected by outsourcing. He'd have seven days to show us how outsourcing improves the world.

He also could blog on politics, the pope or anything else he likes, since this is a personal weblog written by an author with poor focusing skills.

I'll let you know if Seal accepts the offer.

Programming · Politics · 2006/05/10 · 21 COMMENTS · Link

Don Park wants to fire the RSS Advisory Board:

I don't know what the hell is going on over at the RSS Advisory Board but it is starting to make my skin crawl. Who is behind all the recent activities? Whoever it is, let me say this to that person: RSS is not your milk cow.

I know many of the newly appointed members and, although I think they are wonderful people, I suspect they are being taken advantage of because I don't see why they are needed.

Rss · 2006/05/09 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Requesting a MIME Media Type for RSS

In March, a member of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team asked the RSS Advisory Board for a recommendation on the MIME media type for RSS documents.

One of the most reliable ways for software to distinguish different kinds of files on the Internet is through a media type, an identifier that's part of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions standard.

Web servers return a Content-Type header that identifies the kind of file being returned, such as "text/html" for an HTML page, "image/gif" for a GIF graphics file, and "application/atom+xml" for Atom syndicated feeds.

RSS documents lack an an official media type.

If a media type was defined for RSS, when a user opened an RSS feed in a web browser, the browser could open the document with the user's preferred software -- just as browsers crank up an MP3 player when a link to an MP3 is clicked.

Media types must be requested from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority with a formal RFC that chooses the desired type, explains the nature of the content, and describes why the type is needed.

The advisory board is teaming up with the RSS-DEV Working Group, the developers of RSS 1.0, on a shared request for a media type.

Jon Hanna, Bill Kearney, Greg Smith and I have prepared an application to request "application/rss+xml" as the official media type for RSS documents.

We're floating a proposal to both groups to support this media type and encourage its use for all versions of RSS, whether they use RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication.

Rss · 2006/05/09 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Matthew Bookspan Joins RSS Board

Matthew Bookspan, the director of product management for the RSS aggregator developer Attensa, has joined the RSS Advisory Board.

Bookspan worked at Microsoft for nine years and was part of the company's team for Internet Explorer versions 3 and 4. His experience with web content syndication goes back to Microsoft's Channel Definition Format (CDF), an early attempt to foster XML-based content sharing that predates RSS.

He worked on user experience for Microsoft's Windows, Office and SQL Server software and holds several patents for software design. He's a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley. Welcome to the board, Matthew!

Rss · 2006/05/08 · Comment · Link

Doctors Diagnose Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington did not die of syphillis, according to a review of medical records from his death in 1915.

Washington's records show that his blood pressure was 225 over 145, nearly double the 120 over 80 that is considered normal.

The records also show that a blood test ruled out syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease that was widespread at the time and thought to be a particular problem among black people ...

The 91-year-old inquest was conducted for this year's Historical Clinicopathological Conference, a yearly event where doctors get together and play House with a famous person of the past who had a clinically interesting demise.

2006/05/06 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

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