Is George W. Bush the worst President ever? Part 1 of 5

Is George W. Bush the worst President ever? Part 1 of 5

The web is filled with pronouncements that George W. Bush is the worst President of the United States ever (or not).  I thought I would spend a few moments on the subject. This is a multi-part post so come back later to read more on this subject.  Better yet, subscribe to the feed and you can get it delivered to your email or feed reader.

First, lets look at what the historians say about W or at least how they grade other Presidents.  Wikipedia has a pretty good write up on the subject so let’s start there.  As with all of the recent Presidents there is a lack of the number of surveys and rankings. We can see from the couple that are there that the Wall Street Journal ranked him 18th out of 42 and Siena put him at 23.  That is squarely in the middle of the pack and nowhere near the worst.  The worst Presidents tend to Harding, Grant, Andrew Johnson, Nixon and Buchanan.  Depending on your political bent, you could throw Carter or Coolidge into this mix for the worst.  W doesn’t appear to be in this company.

If you look at History News Network though, we get a slightly different picture.  There, Mr. McElvane cites several people and informal surveys that put him as the worst or among the worst.  Mr. McElvane is not exactly impartial though as his various writings on the web show (a quick look at Huffington Post shows he strongly favors Democratic ideals and liberal policies).  We can probably discount him as just another of the liberal herd that are saying W is the worst.

Rasmussen Reports did a poll that pretty much splits on the subject of being worst.  41 said the worst and 50 didn’t.  Unfortunately the poll didn’t ask was he among the 5 worst or the 10 worst.  To be honest though most Americans probably couldn’t get within 10 of the number of Presidents that we have had so this poll (and any other poll) probably is not a good barometer.

The US News and World Report interviewed Jay Tolson and he ranked the 10 worst Presidents.  George W. Bush doesn’t appear on this list but perhaps that is because he was being nice to a sitting President.  It is interesting that the reader poll that is on the page lists George W. Bush as the worst by 72% of the voters (as of this writing).  This is far from scientific or lacking of political slant since Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan make the worst 5 vote receivers but there is little historic push to list those two gentlemen that low.  Even Mt. Rushmore President, Abraham Lincoln, received 8% of the vote in contrast to most lists that put him at or near the top of the group.  So obviously, polling data doesn’t really mean that much.

What we need to do is grade the President on his actions for the important issues of the 8 year tenure.  Read the next post to start to dig into that subject.

More on this topic later!

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Groups (categories) in your iPhone

Groups (categories) in your iPhone

This may be incredibly obvious to everyone else but I have wanted to do a better job of managing my contacts on my iPhone.  When I used Windows Mobile, I could put categories on my contacts in Outlook and those categories meant something on the phone as well.  The iPhone doesn’t support categories so all my contacts (approaching 1000 at this writing) were in one big list.

I did a little experiment and found out that the Groups function on your iPhone includes not only your Global Address Book from your company, but also any sub-folders of your Contacts on the Exchange server.  This way you can divide different types of contacts (work, customers, family, vendors, etc. into different Contact folders on your server and they appear correctly on your phone.

Here is a screen shot of my folders in Exchange:

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and here is a screen shot of the Groups on my iPhone.

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To make the sub-folders available to you when you are addressing email or looking for contact details, in Outlook go to Tools|Address Book and then do Tools|Options in the Address Book.  This will let you change your search preferences on the different Contact folders that you have available (including your Global Address Book from your Exchange server).

Hope this helps!  I solved one of my problems.

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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RANT! Apple’s App Store hurts software sales

RANT! Apple’s App Store hurts software sales

By all accounts, save one, Apple’s iPhone has been an amazing success. When you factor

  • the number of competitors in the marketplace,
  • Apple as a relative newcomer to the cell phone market,
  • the strict relationship with only one carrier

it is amazing that the iPhone has had such a strong impact on the revenue of Apple as well as the sales of other phones.

The one area that Apple really needs to develop is the developer network. While the App Store is the best method yet developed for delivering software to a cell phone, it does not appear that it is a great commercial success for many of its developers.  The vast majority of the apps on the store are priced so cheaply (or free) that it is not likely that they will return a profit to their developers.

While there are more appropriately priced software packages on the store, the comments show that these have a smaller community than many of the free or cheap apps.  Why is this?

My belief is that few people are willing to pay 10 bucks for an app when they don’t know how it will work and screenshots are a poor tradeoff.  Some developers have rigged up “trials” on their website. Solitaire Forever does this quite effectively.  I don’t know what technology the folks at Solitaire Forever used to have the product work in such a multi-platform environment but it is a great model.

Additionally, Apple could help the situation by allowing software to expire after a certain amount of time.  This would allow software developers to time limit the software and adopt the try-before-you-buy (TBYB) model that is so popular in desktop apps.  This is done in a small way by some developers when they offer a less functional “lite” version of their software but that is difficult for the developers to manage and difficult for customers to deal with.

APPLE – PLEASE INCLUDE TIME EXPIRATIONS IN THE IPHONE OS!

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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iPhone makes easy password typing

iPhone makes easy password typing

Typing a password on a small keyboard is typically a chore. I have used a variety of mobile devices in my career and have always dreaded typing in passwords.

While the iPhone is not as easy as your full keyboard it is easier than any other mobile device you probably have ever used.

First, the iPhone pops up a large rendition of the key tapped. This makes it easy to change your mind if you have tapped the wrong key. This is easier than a chiclet keyboard like that of a Blackberry which makes you commit to the key that is depressed.

Second, the iPhone displays bullets in the password field like it should. But it displays the actual character of the last key tapped so that the user can hit the backspace key.

Congratulations to the great user interface developers at Apple.

This post was created on an iPhone.

Newt’s list is awesome!

Newt’s list is awesome!

Newt Gingrich wrote a great editorial in the Wall Street Journal recently that includes 7 “achievements” that he thinks should be offered as prizes similar to the X Prize Foundation’s prizes.  Personally, I think the idea of prizes to drive innovation is great and wish that the government would do this on a regular basis.  Newt’s list is a great first start and there are probably others but if we have too many it would dilute the importance of the targeted list.

I do question Mr. Gingrich’s 7th item.  While certainly noble in intent, it doesn’t appear that it is measurable enough to warrant a big prize.  Perhaps a prize for the public school system that gets 99% of their non-special needs kids to some extremely high level of attainment on a standardized test.  If we use the SAT as an example, the school system that can get 99% of their kids to over 600 on the SAT test (the average is 515 out of a possible 700 and that was for college bound seniors – the challenge would be for ALL students in a public school organization).

In lieu of government funding, I am willing to help.  If someone would create a fund to go after these causes, I would contribute.  I can’t put a billion dollars into the kitty but I would definitely write a check for $100!

Here is Newt’s list from WSJ.com

1) A low-cost vaccine or preventive intervention for malaria — possibly the single biggest potential improvement in the quality of life in poor tropical countries.

2) A modestly priced, mass-manufacturable hydrogen engine for cars, which would be the biggest single contribution to reducing carbon loading of the atmosphere and reducing subsidies through high oil prices to dictatorships.

3) A cheap method for turning large quantities of seawater into fresh water.

4) A reusable system that could get people into space at 10% of the current cost, thus enabling genuine space tourism and launching an age of exploration.

5) The first privately financed permanent lunar base.

6) A method for reusing nuclear waste to make Yucca Mountain, Nevada unnecessary as a repository.

7) A method of learning math and science that kids like, and that enables us to leapfrog India and China by breaking out of our unionized, bureaucratic curriculum. This would enable us to replace “No Child Left Behind” with a more effective education model that could be called “Every American Gets Ahead.”

This is the type of leadership that we need in Washington.  Someone should name Newt Gingrich to be their Vice President so that he could actually do something about things like this.

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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TBYB at the iPhone application store

TBYB at the iPhone application store

I tend to agree with The Fishbowl that it would be great to have a try-before-you-buy at the Apple iPhone store.  It would help alleviate the fear factor of hitting BUY when looking for an application for the phone.

I think the only saving grace to not having this capability is the very easy comments feature in the store.  A few weeks ago, when the iPhone was first coming out, it was all a crapshoot as to the quality of the software.  Now that every application has a couple dozen comments, the cream easily floats to the top.

I also wish that Apple would require their vendors to have a better website to explain the apps.  In some cases, the sites are incredibly bare and almost non-existent.

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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