I like order and simplicity in my life.

Then weeks like the last one come along. There’s an avalanche of work to do. And I can either choose to get the key things done, or to be organized. But not both.

I had to consciously choose to focus this week. To ignore the mounting piles of email. To ignore the stacked up voice mails. To ignore the task list with 38 overdue things on it.

I had to let go of order and simplicity, put my head down and get something done, which finally got wrapped up last night.

And while it didn’t feel good during that process, it sure feels good to have finished scaling the mountain.

Enjoy your weekend while I try to return some things back to order.

I climbed Half Dome a few years ago, and I’ve yet to see a video or photograph that does justice to the wonder of Yosemite.

This is a combination of video and time-lapse photography…and it comes awfully close. Do yourself a favor: put it on full screen. Best 3 minutes of your morning.

Amazing! Thanks to my friend Casey for sending this my way.

Our local newspaper has recently gone through a leadership change with a new editor and new publisher, and I have to say that I’m impressed with the changes.

Suffice it to say, when the old guard was in charge, the Journal didn’t bother to cover the good things happening at Sierra College. (I don’t know if it was a written or unwritten rule, but all of our progress at Sierra apparently didn’t fit the editor’s preconceived narrative, and he just ignored the news he didn’t like.)

So I cancelled my subscription and hadn’t bothered to read it more than a handful of times over the last six or seven years.

The new guard seems to be taking a new and constructive approach. Covering both the good news and the bad news. Taking care not to cross the line into demagoguery. Writing good, solid opinion pieces on the side of the public interest.

Today, they published an editorial about the last six years of settlement agreements with public employees. I wrote about this back in November. It’s just wrong that state law tilts the playing field so far against the taxpayers and good stewardship of their money.

The Journal is absolutely right to call for reform in our state’s laws about compensation and employment. Their coverage of this issue shows a real understanding of the facts. So I just followed them on Twitter and I’m going to be a regular reader.

And who knows? They may even get me to subscribe again.

Everyone is in a hubbub today about Governor Romney’s tax returns. The guy paid $3.2 million dollars in federal taxes. I don’t know about you, but that’s more than I paid.

He also gave about 16% of his income to charity. I don’t know about you, but that’s also more than I gave. (The national average is 2%, which I did manage to beat.)

Lost in all of this is the simple fact that he worked for and earned all of his income. None of it was handed to him.

And in exchange for working hard, he gets to enjoy the fruits of his labors…after providing food stamps for 5,977 people, paying for the education of 75 students, paying the salaries of 44 privates in the US Army and paying for the Medicaid benefits of 159.

Rather than tearing down the rich and pretending that they are earning their money at the expense of someone else, perhaps we should be celebrating the successful. After all, they pay most of the taxes and make so much possible for the rest of us.

If you’ve been following this blog for any amount of time, you’re probably aware that the Adami Tulu Project holds a special place in our hearts.

We’ve been honored to be a part of the leadership team that has raised over $300,000 to build classrooms at these schools. We are true believers in the idea that delivering great education and two meals a day will help families to stay together, break the cycle of poverty and begin to put an end to the global orphan crisis.

Late afternoon on Friday, we launched the next phase of the project: child sponsorships.

Most child sponsorship programs are $30-$36 per month. We’re a volunteer-run program without any US administrative staff managing the program. So we’ve been able to keep the cost very low…just $19/month per child!

So Cacey and I decided we’d sponsor two of these kids…one for each of ours.

Spencer is sponsoring Minyahel…remember his story in “Just a Little Bit More“?

And Emma is sponsoring Etalamahu, a five year old in Lower Kindergarten…and did you notice, these photos were taken right in front of the new classroom building you all helped to build last year?

In a little more than two days, we’ve already had 26 kids sponsored and there are only 162 left before every single one can stay in school, learn the skills they need to break the cycle of poverty, and get the life-changing food to allow them to stay with their families or caregivers.

This isn’t the long term vision for funding these schools. Our next step is to raise up in-country business ventures to fund the school’s operations and make the entire project self-sustainable. We can’t wait to come back to you and say “mission accomplished.”

But in the mean time, we hope you’ll consider making your own dent in the universe by sponsoring one of these awesome kids.

If you have kids, you’ve almost undoubtedly read the children’s book “If You Give a Moose a Muffin.” Spencer loves that book, and we read it a lot in our house.

So I cracked up when I ran across this send-up on Facebook…enjoy “If You Give a Mom a Muffin.”

If you give a mom a muffin, she’ll want a cup of coffee to go with it. She’ll pour herself some. Her three-year-old will spill the coffee. She’ll wipe it up. Wiping the floor, she will find dirty socks. She’ll remember she has to do laundry. When she puts the laundry in the washer, she’ll trip over boots and bump into the freezer. Bumping into the freezer will remind her she has to plan supper. She will get out a pound of hamburger. She’ll look for her cookbook.

The cookbook is sitting under a pile of mail. She will see the phone bill, which is due tomorrow. She will look for her checkbook. The checkbook is in her purse that is being dumped out by her two-year-old. She’ll smell something funny. She’ll change the two-year-old. While she is changing the two-year-old the phone will ring. Her five-year-old will answer and hang up. She’ll remember that she wants to phone a friend to come for coffee. Thinking of coffee will remind her that she was going to have a cup. She will pour herself some. And chances are, if she has a cup of coffee, her kids will have eaten the muffin that went with it.

My sweetie will vouch for the fact that this is 100% accurate. Have a great weekend!

A presidential campaign is a lot like a startup in some ways.

You have a dream. You put together an organization and start raising money. You never have enough money to fund yourself forever…only to get yourself to the next big milestone.

To gain market traction, you focus in on your niche. On the Republican side, Mitt Romney is focused on economic and national security conservatives. Rick Santorum is focused on social conservatives. Ron Paul on the libertarian-minded folks. They’ve each gotten some level of traction with their respective “niche markets.”

But one key difference comes after you start getting traction.

If you’re a presidential candidate, you really have to expand beyond your initial niche market and start appealing to a broader coalition (hopefully without losing many initial supporters) or you’ll never win a diverse set of primaries, much less a general election.

But if you’re a startup and you’ve chosen your niche well, you can build a profitable, growing and incredibly successful business without expanding your target much at all. You certainly might want to at some point, but there are plenty of successful companies who never do.

Riskalyze is laser-focused on the needs of non-day-trading self-directed investors. The folks who open an E*TRADE or TD Ameritrade or Charles Schwab account and manage their own brokerage or retirement account.

I don’t know if we’ll eventually expand our focus beyond that market niche. But I do know this: we’ve got a game-changing product that has clearly struck a chord with that kind of investor.

So that’s where our focus will be for a long time.

A few days ago, I appeared on Tradestreaming Radio. It’s a 40 minute interview about Riskalyze and how we’re working to revolutionize self-directed investing with the science of the Risk Fingerprint.

You can check out the interview here.

If you aren’t already a fan of Tradestreaming, they’ve got some incredible resources and an awesome weekly email newsletter with interesting links. Check it out at Tradestreaming.com.

You may have noticed that Wikipedia and Craigslist are down today. That’s in protest of two bills, “SOPA” and “PIPA”, which have been bankrolled by Hollywood.

The stated goal behind these bills – combating piracy – is not a bad one. I believe strongly in intellectual property rights. (And the technology industry has created the most valuable intellectual property of the last two decades, so I suspect most tech people do too.)

But these two bills are really not about piracy. They’re about one industry trying to get Congress to give them an uneven playing field over another – and equip the government with the tools to “take down” sites without due process.

Google has the best explanation of these bills and a petition you can sign to tell Congress “stop piracy, don’t end liberty.”

I hope you will.

As many as you know, I still use a smartphone with a keyboard. I simply can’t type as well on a touch screen.

But there’s a lot of new technology being developed that will significantly change how we interact with our computers. Microsoft work on motion control is a good example. And voice recognition is gaining ground is well.

As you can see from that typo, voice control just isn’t perfect yet. It’s taking me a long time to write this blog post via voice control on my android. Much longer than just using a keyboard.

Someday, will be able to speak fluidly to our computers and voice control will just work.

But not yet.