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So, the question has been asked: Where the hell am I?

I’m in Chicago, champ. I’m grinding through the winter just like everyone else. I’m kicking snowmen, drinking beers and yelling at the cable news nonsense. In short, I’m doing what I always do.

You’re going to hear a lot more about me in the coming months. You’ll hear a lot more from me as well. I’m going to add all sorts of content to this bare-bones Website in 2011 and I hope you’ll follow along. If you haven’t ‘liked’ me on Facebook, take two seconds out of your understandably busy day and do that now. I can assure you that if you follow me there you will remain in the loop.

So, what will happen to the radio show?

What will I do differently in 2011?

What will I be doing in the digital space?

These are all questions I will answer in the first week of January. I’ll only give you one promise moving forward: no more vagueness. No more questions. It will all start to make sense very soon.

In the meantime, let’s enjoy the final days of 2010. It was a great year, after all. I worked with some amazing people, learned more about media and marketing and a million other topics than I have in my entire life and I befriended some even more amazing people. If 2010 was a 6 on the volume knob, 2011 will be maxed out.

If you need to contact me, reach out.

If you want to grab a beer and talk shop, let me know.

If you’re a member of the group of South Loop goons I drink with, cheers. I’ll see you freaks in a matter of hours, I’m sure.

If you’re in South Florida, enjoy the sunshine.

If you’re in California, tell everyone I said “hello.”

From West Coast to East Coast, the Midwest and everywhere in between, thank you all for a great year. Thanks for listening. The show never ends; in the immortal words of Walt Disney, it just keeps moving forward. I’ll see you all in 2011.

Obama’s unemployment extension ignores the 99ers plight.

Americans who have been on unemployment benefits for a very long time might have felt a twinge of relief when they learned that the tax deal cut in Washington, DC this week would extend unemployment benefits for another 13-months.

But if those who have been on unemployment for close to the maximum time permitted in their state thought the new “extension” would keep them from getting cut off, they’ve made a mistake.

The “extension” does not extend the number of weeks on which anyone can collect unemployment. That number still stands exactly where it did before the extension.

So the 99ers, those who have been cashing unemployment checks for 99 weeks, won’t get an extension as a result of President Obama’s compromise with the GOP. And they shouldn’t. Though there may be some folks who have genuinely tried to gain employment through all means in that nearly two year period soaking up unemployment dough, most of them are simply avoiding what they consider worse than unemployment: underemployment.

Since the day I turned 16, save maybe for a month or two before I hit 18, I’ve held down a job. I worked at Papa Johns, making and topping pizzas for 12 hours at a time, moved boxes for a file archival company, delivered bottled water and somehow remained employed for my entire adult life. Granted, I may be more skilled and I may have a better social network than some of these folks who are out of work but I’m not afraid to be underemployed.

I believe the majority of these self-described ’99ers’ are simply people looking to find a job of equal or greater value to the one the lost. They want the same gravitas and the same paycheck. When they don’t get that position, for whatever reason, they refuse to reduce their expectations. A 60 Minutes piece on these 99ers shines some light into their motivations. Host Scott Pelley chatted with Marianne Rose, a 54-year-old single mother who was laid off from her position as a financial analyst in San Jose, California.

Rose was a financial analyst at a real estate firm. Age 54, she’s single with a grown daughter. After being laid off with about 100 co-workers, she spent her savings, lost her home and finally found herself sitting in a truck with her dog and all of her possessions.

She made a desperate call to a friend and found refuge upstairs in the home of strangers, her friend’s brother and sister-in-law.

“How long did you think you would be in here?” Pelley asked.

“Two weeks really. That’s all I thought,” she replied.

But she told Pelley it has been six month. “And not really an end in sight, yet.”

“What sort of things would you be willing to do at this point?” Pelley asked.

“Well, I can say that probably the lowest level position for me has been now to apply for a clerk, a county clerk and I just realized the competition is pretty stiff out there,” she replied.

A financial analyst in San Jose tends to make upwards of $120,000 per year, by all means a great job. So Rose gets fired from that gig and lets things spiral out of control to the point that she’s living in a truck with her dog. She acts as if she’s giving it her all but the lowest level position she has applied for is a county clerk job. Rose has gone from a $120k salary to a truck bed and the lowest she can stoop is to apply for a position that generally makes about $90,000 per year. And Rose is far from alone.

“60 Minutes” stopped by the soup kitchen in San Jose. Many folks used to think that they could see all the way to retirement. But now long-term unemployment is wrecking years of saving and planning by people like Lisa and Doug Francone.

Doug was a $200,000-a-year personnel executive.

“You must have thought that you’d get another job pretty quickly,” Pelley remarked.

“Yeah. It really didn’t cross my mind that I wouldn’t find something. The question was trying to take the time to find the right job,” he replied.

“You’d have a job in six months, a job that you liked in six months, and how long has it been?” Pelley asked Lisa Francone.

“Two years and three months,” she replied.

Doug is used to making a big fat $200k annual paycheck so clearly he doesn’t want to haul his ass down to Home Depot and move lumber from corner to corner for $38k. But guess what? You don’t have a choice. Well, I guess you can just give up like some of these folks and hit the soup kitchen for a decade or so but if you want to play ball, you don’t have a choice. Eventually you have to get over yourself. You may have made a great living at one point in your life but you did so because someone thought your work was valuable enough to justify a paycheck that large. If the jobs dry up, so do your options. Eventually, you have to realize that it’s time to lower your expectations and accept the best job for which you are qualified. Even if that job is something you would have scoffed at from your previous employment perch. After 99 weeks, it’s time to get real and get over yourself.

As I said in the first paragraph, this doesn’t apply to everyone who can’t get a job. There are people who are legitimately trying to get hired at whatever job they can find only to be shot down time and time again. There are good people who are dealing with a stroke of bad luck. But I believe there are far more people who are too ashamed to take a position lower in stature than the job they lost. There are more of these 99ers who simply lucked their way into a position they are not truly qualified for who now find themselves unprepared to take a massive pay cut.

I can honestly say that if they bottom fell out and I lost my job today I would have no problem swallowing my pride for 6 months, a year even, and returning to that Papa Johns pizza joint I worked at more than a decade ago. I wouldn’t hesitate to go back to the water bottle deliver grind, if that was my best option. I’d be back at the record archival warehouse, wheeling the giant ladder unit over for another box retrieval – from the top shelf, of couse.

If you truly have the skill set you believe you have, it will only be a matter of time before the right position (with the right paycheck) surfaces and no employer worth their weight in salt would refuse to hire you because you currently toss pizzas at night.

So, seriously, if you’ve been on unemployment for 99 weeks, the jig is up. You’re not getting an extension as a result of this deal to extend the Bush Administration’s tax cuts and it’s time to get a job. Any job. Hit the pavement tomorrow and don’t come home until you’ve locked down employment of some kind. You’ll feel better about yourself, your family will feel better about their future and you can still use your free time to climb the ladder back to your previous paycheck. As they say, it gets better.

Wikileaks is under attack with no Web host and blocks abounding.

WikiLeaks website has been shut down temporarily, after Amazon censored it. Joe Lieberman apparently put pressure on Amazon to pull the site. But the cloud service provider isn’t talking. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers accuse Amazon of being selective with its freedom of speech defenses.

Making a martyr out of your enemy is never a good idea. The United States and other governments that feel threatened by Wikileaks lead an effort to shut down the whistle blower website right now. Amazon, the site that has hosted Wikileaks for some time now, has pulled the plug on the site. Wikileaks has been under near constant DNS attacks for the past week or more. Their funding, much of which arrives through PayPal donations, has been cut and PayPal has blocked the Wikileaks account.

PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We’ve notified the account holder of this action.

All of this accomplishes nothing. If anything, it only furthers the myth of Julian Assange’s power and credibility. Wikileaks is not the problem. Assange is not the problem. This censorship will actually turn those who may have been put off by the obvious partisanship of the Wikileaks spokesman and his spinning of the content of these leaked cables to defend him in the name of freedom of information and free speech. I’ll repeat the most important line there for emphasis. Wikileaks is not the problem. If you shut down Wikileaks, ten clones surface and the target simply moves.

This is just like the record companies, sensing a brewing craze of illegal downloads online, targeting of Napster in 2000. After millions of dollars in court fees and a years-long process, the record companies essentially neutered their perceived enemy only to find dozens of clones had popped up and the crowd of those downloading illegal Mp3s had grown exponentially. The Web is not linear and titans of industry in the music world found this out the hard way. They never truly recovered and continue to struggle financially. It didn’t quite work out, did it?

So if Wikileaks isn’t the problem, who/what is?

The problem here is the ease at which these classified documents and cables were accessed. Let me hit you with a little nugget of information that almost always goes unmentioned in this debate: nearly all of the information leaked by Wikileaks.org to-date has come from one person. I’ve talked before about Bradley Manning and pondered the reasons such a minor figure had access to this trove of information. I’ve talked about how easy it was for him to burn a CD with all of these documents and an encrypted video and upload them to a website designed to leak that information. But if it wasn’t Wikileaks.org it could have been anyone. The data could have been leaked via torrent on the Pirate Bay or in a dozen other ways. The U.S. government is now treating the rash without questioning how it got there. And the information leaked before Manning burned that CD? Much of it was captured through a supposedly secure channel (the Tor Network) that Assange had access to; he and others captured information from Chinese hackers using this channel and posted some of it online. Most of it was inane and boring but it allowed him to launch the site boasting of more than ’1 million classified documents from 13 countries.’ It was all a mirage.

Until the user-base of 3 million people with access to this information is whittled down to a smaller, more manageable number, we will continue to see leaks like this. It didn’t take Wikileaks or the Internet (neither existed at the time) for the Pentagon Papers to surface. The platform release is truly unimportant when you have no control over the crowd with access to the information. The United States and other countries would do better by getting their classified ducks in a row than by launching an attack on Wikileaks.

And honestly, why has no one been fired over this yet?

It’s amazing what people will actually complain about, isn’t it?

Here’s the description posted alongside the video:

This social experiment was carried out using hidden cameras in a townhouse complex in Johannesburg. Don’t condone violence by doing nothing. If you or anyone around you is experiencing domestic abuse please call the POWA helpline on 083 765 1235 or visit www.powa.co.za Counseling services and support is available.

It may be a bit jarring, but the campaign makes an incredibly solid and valid point. People are quick to complain about something they see as annoying. But when that annoying thing is a seemingly violent altercation between jilted lovers, we tend to ignore it in the name of staying out of a couple’s ‘personal business.’

Years ago, I was at a gas station in South Florida and I saw a couple fighting in the parking lot. The man was huge, he probably weighed more than 300lbs and was at least six feet tall. The woman was overweight but much shorter than him. As I walked by I watched the guy literally punching his wife in the face. She was fighting back but her lip was bloodied and she was crying. I didn’t even stop. I did nothing. I just walked by and went on my way because I was scared to intervene. I think we’ve all be guilty of this at one point or another.

Yet if that same couple was in a car taking too long to exit a cherished parking spot, I would have immediately honked the horn and started screaming. In one case, I’m apt to leave them alone and in the other I’m annoyed and interested in intervention. I feel terrible for not saying something to that man. I could have called 911 at the very least. I didn’t. I walked past the quarreling couple, bought a six pack of beer and a pack of smokes and went about my business.

Next time, I’ll react.

Why are we so prone to ignore domestic abuse incidents?

Debt collection after death takes a ridiculous turn.

I’ve always thought your debt should die with you but times change and tactics evolve. We’ve seen plenty of stories in the past few years, as debt collectors get more and more desperate, about collection efforts targeting widows and other family members in an effort to reclaim owed money. Now, I’ll be damned if my brother is allowed to run up a huge debt and leave me with it after he passes (let’s hope I go first, natch) but imagine if those same smarmy debt collectors took it to the next level. Should you be held responsible for the debts of your friends?

WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 (UPI) — Consumer advocates say the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has asked for trouble by revising rules for collectors chasing debt from people who have died.

The new rules allow for a wider circle of people to be contacted, beyond family members and the legal executor of the estate. There is also the term “spouse” that some advocates say is inaccurate as a marriage ends when one of the partners dies. The Washington Post reported Monday.

Some advocates warn that some debt collectors will press even friends to pay the debts of someone who has died, using a “moral obligation” argument, the Post said.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

If I join my (fictional) wife on a last-night-of-her-life spending spree, sure, you could make an argument that I should be held responsible for any debt accrued. But, beyond that there is little wiggle room here. There’s no way in hell that I should have to pay for a family member’s poor financial decisions and if I knew I could be held responsible for the credit pitfalls my friends fall into, well, I would have put an immediate stop to their spending habits long ago. Problem is, I don’t have that authority. And if I have no authority over the financial decisions of a person, I certainly shouldn’t be held responsible for their debts.

But the FTC argues ‘debt is debt‘ regardless of life.

“The debt doesn’t disappear when the person dies. It’s still a valid debt, and the collector can still collect it,” said Joel Winston, FTC associate director of financial practices, the Post reported.

That seems like a pretty wide goal post. I’m of the opinion that unless debt can be directly tied to an individual, the debt should die with the debt-holder. Chasing around these zombie accounts and attempting to shame friends and family members into paying owed monies through some bunk ‘moral obligation’ push is ridiculous. And, really, debt collectors, are you really going to claim moral high ground here? After some of the economic horror stories I’ve heard over the last few years, that seems comical.

Errant elbow strikes President Obama’s lip, 12 stitches needed.

President Barack Obama, with an ice pack over his mouth, looks out the second floor window of the White House during the arrival of the official White House Christmas tree.

CNN says it wasn’t Reggie Love, who both assists President Obama and plays basketball with him quite often, but no one else has been named. We know that Reggie Love, Obama, ‘friends and family members’ were among those on the court today but the person who smacked the president in the mouth with a flying elbow remains anonymous. A pool report says it was a 5 on 5 game. Subtract Love and Obama and you’re down to 8 suspects.

Why does it matter? It doesn’t really. Hell, the former Vice President shot a guy in the face once. Remember that? Still, I would feel absolutely horrible if I was playing hoops with the President and I caught him across the lip that hard. If I was the President, I’d point out that if this happened in North Korea, Iran or even Bolivia, the offender probably wouldn’t have left the court unscathed. On a relaxing day after Thanksgiving, as I get ready to hit the bar with some friends, it’s a real pat on the back to know our country is still so free that you can walk away scot-free after bloodying the President’s lip. Then again, if we don’t know who did it, how do we know they walked away at all?

Update: The elbow-throwing player was Rey Decerega of the CHCI.

Decerega issued a statement through the White House late Friday. He did not immediately respond to an e-mail request from The Associated Press for independent comment.

“I learned today the president is both a tough competitor and a good sport,” the statement said. “I enjoyed playing basketball with him this morning. I’m sure he’ll be back out on the court again soon.”

He didn’t exactly apologize, did he?