Customer Service

I received a note from a friend, telling me that she was seriously stressed because her laptop had died while she was in the middle of writing an article, so that now instead of doing actual work, she is doing PC recovery. I empathized with her. Unlike most people, she has a live-in tech support guy who can spend all the time necessary to keep her PC (and all of the others that they have) functioning happily and correctly, with all the latest gadgetry. He has the time, tools, and resources to get her PC functional again. But that doesn't ease the pain of having to go through it, or living without what comes very quickly to feel like an appendage of you. Its right up there with waking up to find out that the toilet has died. Having the PC just die on you when you need it is like biting down on a piece of tinfoil.

That instant-to-hand tech support is nice, though. Most of us don't have that. Even those of us who work for computer companies, where we use PCs all the time, don't have it. I work for one, and it is common -- so common as to be unremarkable now -- to have someone lose their laptop because the hard drive crashed, or because a piece of software stopped working, and they have to either a) send the laptop physically away to be fixed (sometimes they get a replacement; last week, a co-worker went from a laptop with Windows 2000 and all of the apps he needs to a desktop running Windows 95 and few of the apps he needed), or b) attempt to fix it themselves (I know of two people who were shipped a new hard drive which they were supposed to install into the laptop themselves). Your hardware dies, and your life stops while you address it. The idea that you need to drive the process of repair, instead of being able to go to a qualified person and have them take care of it, isn't right, either. But no one seems willing to recognize that as a problem, and more importantly, to fix it. The days of on-site tech support are over, at least in my little corner of the empire, and in other companies as well.

The concept resonated with an article in today's Washington Post about the dearth of service in retail stores, which the author partially attributes to the culture of sale clerks who cannot (or will not) take on responsibility for fixing a transaction that has gone astray -- in one example from the article, a desire to buy a bookcase which is in bubblewrap; the sales clerk didn't know if it was available for sale, her manager didn't know and said he'd have to get the store manager, and, when the store manager didn't respond to a page, said that the bookcase was not available. To which, the customer responded by personally finding the store manager, who said that of course it was for sale; there was a small problem with it, but he would knock down the price by 20% if the customer took it. The tale ended happily, but why couldn't the clerk have done the same? The answer comes, I think, from the idea that no one pays the clerk to take responsibility, and the effects of taking responsibility in a failed transaction can adversely affect the clerk's career. The idea of a mission statement -- remember them? -- was to give general guidance to employees when specific policies didn't exist, or would be too cumbersome to elucidate in detail; in this case, a mission statement could well have said that the clerk is authorized to take the same action as the manager. But when there is no good reason for the clerk to do so -- and a happy customer, in and of itself, isn't perceived as a good reason -- and there is good reason for the clerk not to do so -- the manager might disagree with giving a discount, or think that the discount was too high, and perhaps the book case really wasn't for sale -- then the clerk wouldn't want to take the risk, even if there was a mission statement encouraging her to do so.

The tie in between these two concepts is in the area of responsiveness to problems. No one -- yes, even me, glum though I am to admit it -- will respond to ongoing problems, because a) That’s Not Our Job, and b) Our Manager Cannot Be Counted On To Support Us If We Do It Anyway. There is no up-side. If you want to take the initiative to fix the problem, you have to take the risk. And you've got to do the job right -- mere desire, or 'gee, at least I tried', is not enough. I observed years ago that in a large company, if you want them to keep paying you, you can either Fit In, or Be Exceedingly Excellent (not just excellent). If you fit in, and are a good organization person, the organization will keep paying you; if you're Exceedingly Excellent, the organization will want you, and keep paying you. But if you don't really fit in, and you're not BEE, then you live each week knowing that they may decide this is a good week to get rid of you. So if you'd rather not be fired, you don't take chances -- such as giving out of the norm customer service. It's not worth it.

Not the way most people would choose to live their careers -- and yet they do. Somebody should fix that. In our family, one standing rule is: If it bothers you, fix it.

Does it bother me enough?

Fan Fan

We like fans.

If you came to our house, you'd think we like all kinds of air moving devices. We have a whole house fan. We had whole-house air conditioning (really, just the top floor, don't care what the installers promise) retrofitted, we have a couple of battered old box fans, and we have a ceiling fan in the living room, one of the bedrooms, and the library. And now we have another -- one was just installed in our bedroom. All four are Casablanca. Quiet, reliable.

But that latest one goes beyond what we expected. Two days ago, the night time temp was in the low seventies. We slept with the new fan last night, and this morning, not only was it significantly cooler than normal outside, it was cooler up and down the Eastern seaboard.

Is this cool, pun intended, or what?

Warning: Admiring Parent Ahead

This evening, my daughter again proved what a great kid she is.

For her writing assignment tonight, she put together a short article on what kind of career she'd like, and why, and what she'd like to do if she couldn't do that, and why. Not great literature, granted. But this is a kid who hated writing three sentences in a summer journal -- and now that she gets to pick the topics, she thinks its fun -- sometimes, great fun.

And tomorrow she wants to bake cupcakes for my birthday.

She's terrific. In lots of ways.

I Don't Hate George Bush

... I'm just not planning on voting for him.

I have come to the conclusion that in modern American politics, you are supposed to demonize your opponent. He's stupid, shifty, a liar, not to be trusted. She's crafty, two-faced, not up to the task, has a hidden agenda. I don't agree with that approach. Its been a long time since I heard someone say that in American presidential elections, we take two talented people, either of which could do a decent job, and at the end of it, we call one of them a loser. I don't think we've had an election where that has been true for a while. At best, I would say that we've been lucky -- and I say that knowing that others would not agree. But whether they're both up to the task or not, it seems that we are expected to look only at the worst, assume only the worst. Against George Bush? Then surely when he picked up that blind cripple, he was just doing it because it was fun to watch the crip fall again. Not on John Kerry's side? Then you must agree that when he climbed the tree to rescue Timmy's cat, he was really doing it to peer in the window of Timmy's maiden aunt. We're not supposed to think well of any action taken by the person we don't intend to vote for, and as the intensity of our dislike of the other guy increases, so must our willingness to assume the worst based on the skimpiest of evidence. I don't agree with that, because neither candidate is god or devil.

I don't like George Bush because I don't like his economic policies, and I don't like his failures in international diplomacy. I'm not fond of what he's done to us and to Iraq, either. When you roll them together, I can't see myself being safer, richer, or happier with him around than not. I don't think that things will get better if he gets a second term, and I think there's a decent, though not outstanding, chance that they will if Kerry wins.

Yet for all of that, I think there are things to like about Bush and about his approach to governing. I like the idea of faith-based initiatives; though I think they went overboard, I think the concept was valid, and still is. I like his willingness to proclaim that he is a religious person; though I think he feels that his particular faith makes him probably superior to others of different faiths, and certainly to those of no faith, he's willing to be up front about it, and say that it affects his view of life, and I like that. I think that his policies that reduce the control of government are generally good; though it feels as if he wants to strip away too much, much of what he wants to take away should be taken away. So I'm for him on that.

I think that if George Bush could make me consistently believe that he cares more about people like me, and less about people like corporate chieftans, I might waver in how I feel about Kerry. Concepts like "don't change horses in mid-stream", "better the devil you know than the devil you don't" would come in to play, and I might say "well, aw, jeez....". But he hasn't, and I doubt he will, so I won't. Barring major surprises, I'll be voting for Kerry in November.

But I won't slime George, because he doesn't deserve it.

Dick, of course, is another story entirely.

Politics

I just watched the Democratic campaign video. Most of it, I wanted to like, and I did. Some, I wondered about -- it was more than a little treacly, as if it would end with the Pope saying 'wow, I wish I could vote for that guy...What a saint!' . Once thing's for sure -- when I die, if they do a eulogy, I definitely want Morgan Freeman doing it.

I was surprised that it didn't mention that he had been divorced. There wasn't even a 'well, bad things happen' comment. His first wife was a non-person.  That bothered me. And I wasn't too thrilled to find out he has a brother. Bad history with presidents and sibs.  Though I did like the hamster story.

In a couple of months, Bush will be up there, same kind of stage, nodding, smiling, and garbling the language, but through it all  extolling what a wonderful job he's done.   And he has done some good things. He's done some stupid things, too, but he's hardly unique in that. The Democrats will likely start their own attack ads about the time he's coming to the podium, trying to make him sound completely clueless and totally inept.  Which he isn't, usually.  I used to wonder why politicians wouldn't at least offer the occasional nice comment about an opponent.  Growing up cured me of that thought.

If it weren't so serious, it'd almost be funny.

Creative Writing

My daughter is in her room, writing.  This is a remarkable event. 

Last week, after doing some complaining about the the journal we've been requiring that she keep during the summer (the legacy of her problems last year), she asked if we could try her idea -- we would give her a topic, and she would write about that topic. Dubious, but willing, I agreed. A little bit ago, we all came back from having dinner out with my mother -- it's her eightieth birthday in two days, imagine! - and I reminded her that she hadn't written anything.  She picked the topic 'Why are books better than TV', and came back with a short, well written, correctly spelled, and nicely organized paragraph on the topic.  I was flabbergasted.  This is a kid who doesn't like to write two or three sentences, and she just dashed this out.  In fact, when she was done, she pointed out that she hadn't written anything yesterday, and asked if it would be okay if she wrote today what she might have written yesterday. And thats what she's doing now. She says it's fun.

Wow!

Community of Thought and Effort

One of the key, if underlying, themes in the Commission's report is that of the need for a community of thought and effort.   They speak of the need to share information; to have players be able to know when information is available, to be able to link disparate pieces of information in order to perform analysis and to create a coherent whole, and to be able to keep abreast of what is happening in other locations that's relevant to their own efforts.

This is not limited to anti-terrorist activities.

Years ago, I worked for a large computer company that attempted to implement a knowledge sharing activity.  It was a technological marvel that was only intuitively obvious to the people who built it.   I currently work for a large computer company that has been promoting the idea of resources on demand, and as part of that they have been encouraging us to create on-line profiles so that anyone who wants to know something that we know can query the system and, if desired, contact us.   That works fairly well, though you do have to get someone who is both knowledgeable in the field that you're interested in and able to speak coherently about it to people who, obviously, know less.  That's not a common ability, made less common by the tendency of people who understand technical details to look down on those who know less.

Its an interesting field, and I wish that I knew more about it.

The Commission

An amazing group.

I don't know of a better way to put this than to ape the words from the movie The American President -- these were serious people working on a serious problem, without quarter for political posturing or personal gain.  I felt better knowing that people of that stature were speaking for my country.

I've only read the summary of their findings, and I was startled and dismayed -- even just listening to the presentation where they spoke about them, floored me.  The magnitude of what they said, and the scope of what they described!  

Yet I would bet seriously that most of their recommendations are not implemented fully, that some are not implemented at all.   Having seen -- faintly, with no special insight -- the political turmoil that creation of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration brought, I have little faith that professional politicians can muster enough guts and force to bring about anything like what these remarkable people have pointed out as required if we are to have even a chance of combating these evil, vicious vermin.  Where can we find people of stature enough to lead us in this mighty struggle?

Trivial note: I love the voice of the governor who ran it. His cadence and phrasings were eloquent and memorable.  I'm sure I'm not the first to notice the resemblance between his voice and that of FDR.

But far beyond that is their message.  As Americans, we want -- I want -- a happy ending.  Doesn't look like one is in the offing, any time soon, if at all.

Why Tests Don't Work

From the About:Political Humor -- Bush Loyalty test

Your score is 3 on a scale of 1 to 10. You can't stand George W. Bush. You don’t hate him with the same writhing passion as many liberals do, but you believe he is a smirking, arrogant doofus. You will vote for Anyone But Bush.

From the About:Political Humor -- Kerry Loyalty test

Your score is 4 on a scale of 1 to 10. You believe that John Kerry has some redeeming qualities, but not enough to entrust him with running the country, much less the nuclear launch codes. It's possible that you might change your mind about him, but at this point, you are leaning against him.

Le Grand Fromage

One of the people where I work likes to refer to her boss's boss as Le Grand Fromage.   I smiled when I finally translated it.  Nice to know a little bit of French comes in handy. 

Machine-Augmented Translation

This article, from Dan Gillmor , concerns a coupling of machine translation with human interpretation. I think it's a fascinating concept, with obvious application potential.

One of the big problems in the American presence in Iraq has been a wall of misunderstanding and ignorance brought about by lack of language skills and a lack of information. Machine translation is getting better all the time, and we're seeing some of the results of that improvement here. The gear in the picture is a piece in the puzzle. From a satellite dish outside this tent at the Strong Angel II exercise, it's capturing and recording the Al-Manar TV station, a Hezbollah outlet in Lebanon. U.S. military and aid workers -- not to mention officials in Washington -- may find abhorrent what this and other Arabic stations are broadcasting, but they need to know what's being said; they need to understand what prominent Arab news outlets are saying about the U.S. occupation of Iraq and other issues. Audio is extracted from the news broadcasts, and converted to text in a speech-to-text program. Then the Arabic text is translated, also by a machine, into English. The results, twice removed from what the announcers have said, are rough approximations. But they capture the gist of the reports. The video, audio and texts (Arabic and English) go into a database. Sean Colbath, senior engineer at the BBN Technologies Speech and Language Processing Group, pulls out items -- short video quotes -- that look especially interesting or relevant to the key topics of the day. He bundles them into a file that goes to a human translator on the mainland, who gives an accurate rendering of what the broadcast snippet actually told the audience. This is a blending of human and machine translation capabilities, and it's a smart one. The machines get us part of the way. Humans capture more subtlety, but machines can winnow out a lot of the dross first. At the heart of the machine translation activity here is technology from Language Weaver, a southern California company. Impressive stuff, and it's barely at the beginning of what's possible. Colbath's gear is just one element in the translation tests here at Strong Angel, where people from the military, civilian, governmental and non-governmental spheres are testing new ways to communicate and collaborate in the aftermath of great human tragedy. Another experiment, which I have yet to see, sounds amazing: a chat in which you input in one language, someone gets your input in a different language and replies in his or her own tongue, which then comes back to you in your language.

Thinking About Thinking

I've been thinking off and on about about how hard it is for me to think through difficult concepts, or even to come to a point where I feel that I'm making progress in understanding difficult concepts.  For the longest time, I think I subconsciously believed the Heinleinist view that any problem could be solved with enough attention.   Perhaps thats the case, but if so, then the candlepower necessary to burn through the muck and get to a point of clarity is now frequently beyond me.  Maybe it always was beyond me, perhaps I used to think I had arrived at the POC when in fact I had not, perhaps I've just gotten dumber or more easily distracted,  or maybe the problems have just gotten tougher, but now it seems that I have to accept that there are things that I Just Won't Get.   I cannot easily say how inadequate this makes me feel, but it seems that, inadequate or not, I have no choice.  The only question is whether I'm going to give up entirely on understanding these difficult things, and accept Fox News and the like as my source of information and viewpoints, or generate my own, knowing that it will be full of contradictions and lacunae.

Mirror Dance

 
Which is actually the name of a novel by Lois McMaster Bujold, and one which I think is pretty good, but today is the name of the dance that I have found myself doing, once every hour or so.  I go into the bathroom, turn on the light next to the magnifying mirror, and try to convince myself that the swelling in the surgical area has gone down a little bit more.  And it actually has gone down some, both subjectively -- looking in the mirror -- and objectively -- when I push my chin out, it - mostly - doesn't feel odd, whereas before I could feel some stiffness there even without trying.  The stiffness is the sort of numb feeling (is that a contradiction?) you get when the dentist has zapped you with Novocaine, or Lidocaine, or Michael Caine, and for a while you don't want to drink anything that doesn't have a straw, lest you dribble furiously all over yourself.  Things are improving, but not as quickly as I want.  Of course, until the stitches come out, I'll look like the aforementioned monster, and the dark red around the stitches, outlining them like blood-colored Magic Marker,  contributes to the look. I've started growing my beard back, the better to cover whats happening here, but its going to be several weeks before there is any appreciable coverage.  At the moment, its just at the vagrant-stubble look, enhanced by the fact that my beard comes in at about 95% gray. Oh, hell, 98%.
 
Today was a slow day.  I worked from home -- to my surprise, I am really tired of working from home, having done it all week; I would have thought I could do it forever, but apparently not -- and there wasn't all that much to do.  I did get to sprint up to the Pizza Hut office and pay for those pizzas that I had delivered; the person who was supposed to go pay for them clean forgot, and the urgent pages that I left never got delivered.  Bet that would have done wonders for my rep -- here's five pizzas for all your hard work; you owe use $45 plus tip. Sheesh.

Prediction

One year from now -- perhaps a bit less -- there will be a strong-man in power in Iraq, he won't much like the United States, and certain publications in the US will be featuring articles titled 'Who Lost Iraq?'  And, who knows, maybe some will even be talking about 'regime change' and similar sterile phrases.
 

That's FRAHNKenstein, to you.....

Took the big honkin bandage off this morning. Sort of squinted at the chin, just in case it was...hideous.

Well. Frankenstein's monster has nothing on me.
 
Big ragged T shaped scar with many sutures, the whole area swollen and pretty numb. I look like I've been in a bar fight. At least, my chin does.  And I thought the idea of going to a plastic surgeon was so that the scar wouldn't show as much. Relaxed Skin Tension Lines, and all that.   Pretty prominent, at the moment.

But its okay. It'll get better.  The scar will fade, the swelling will subside, the discolored parts will return to normal.
 
And its still done, done, done.

Words are Cheap, but Pizza -- ah....

I'm a big believer in telling people when you think they've done well.

So on Friday morning at 11AM, I'm having five large pizzas delivered to the Outpatient Surgical area, for the delight and gobbling of everyone there. As a way of saying thanks, tangibly.

I know, I know, they didn't do anything for me that they don't do for every person who gets rolled through the doors. But they were effective and efficient, friendly when they had the time to be, and they made me feel like they cared, at a time when, frankly, I was scared.

They earned it.

Post IT Note

I survived it.

Doc said he did a 'sliding door' rotational graft, taking the skin from the side (and by the name, I'm guessing some from each side, but I don't know, can't find any literature on it other than stuff about 'repair of midline incisional hernias'; the key buzzword appears to be 'tensionless'). Said he'd be willing to discuss it with me when I next see him. Big thick honkin' bandage on my chin, three inches wide, stretches almost all the way down to the notch in my collarbone. Heavy enough to drag my chin down a bit. Comes off in 48 hours. I can't open my mouth very much, and my throat is sore (they said they intubated me). One cold mother of an operating room -- I was happy with just that flimsy gown and a sheet right up till when they brought me in, then I started to shiver -- which is apparently common; they had a stack of heated blankets ready. Got there at 5:40, prepped by 6:40, rolled into the ice chamber arund 7:30, woke up in recovery (whuzzat? Tawking t'me? hmm....lemme sleep some moah...) around 10, and out of there by 1.

Met an 'extern'. Never heard that word before.

Done, by god.

One Day, and Counting

Not exactly sure how many more hours -- the hospital is supposed to call me tonight to tell me when and where to show up. I'm told that they will want me to hang around for a total of 23 hours, so I guess I'll have to bring my jammies. Or wear one of those butt-baring gowns! I'd rather have it done in the morning and go home that evening, but I guess afternoon, perhaps late afternoon, will be more likely.

I did some more reading up on plastic surgery skin flap techniques, and it looks like what this guy is going to do is most likely an 'Advancement Flap". Here's a quote from one site:

The term advancement flap usually refers to a flap created by incisions, which allow for a “sliding”movement of incised tissue. The movement is in one direction, and the flap advances directly over the primary defect. The basic design of an advancement flap is to extend an incision along parallel sides of the defect and then directly advance the tissue over the defect.

which sounds about right (like I'd know!). I suppose the non-technical term would be 'Cut some, grab some, sew some'. What a great party trick!

A Chance to Be Cut is a Chance to Get Cured

...which is a title I stole from another blog, and modified. But its a mindset that I'm working on keeping upfront, these couple of days. In three days, I'll be checking into a local hospital for an excision of a large skin cancer to be followed by a skin flap, aka skin graft, slicing skin from my neck (leaving one end attached) and stretching it up to cover the site of the excision. I'm still freaked about it, don't know why. Three days ago, I was quite calm about the concept, and now it begins to worry me a bit. I've done the math, working down a list of what might be troubling me --

Think he might not get all the cancer?
No -- I think he probably will, though I also think its possible that he might find other, unsuspected damage which will result in a much bigger operative area. I'm a little spooked that other than feeling my chin, he's done nothing -- no probing, no x-rays, nothing. He did ask if it has been biopsied, and he did look in my mouth once. Is that enough for a confident assessment?

Think I'll be in a lot of pain after the anesthetic wears off?
No -- though I am apprehensive about how much pain will there be, I believe it will be controllable; my track record with pain meds is that I never have to take them all, and usually only take a couple -- but that's for major dental surgery, not something like this. Plus, I'll be in a hospital for the first post-operative period, and I suspect that they don't spring right to giving you meds for things that they regard as minor surgery. Well, it's major to me.

Think I'll end up looking hideous after the surgery?
No -- there will be a period of bandages and sutures, but it won't be The Mummy-like bandages or Frankenstein-like sutures. One of the reasons for having this done by a plastic surgeon is for increased attention to the cosmetic quality of the result. Afterwards, I will have an obvious scar on my chin and a set of parallel ones on my neck; they won't be attractive, but I can compensate by growing my beard back, though that does take time. But there will be that initial garish period, and I don't know how long it will last.

---------------------------
Its not that I have nothing to worry about; I think I do, but the things are addressable and most likely controllable. I just want this to be over. And pain-free. And not hideous.

A chin like Kirk Douglas's would be nice, too.

In for a penny, in for a pound. Actually, several.

I just spent, on an annual basis, two hundred and eighty million dollars.

To put it more precisely, in fifteen minutes, I spent $8000, which is the cost of three round trip flights via Virgin Atlantic to London, plus hotel costs and incidentals. (I don't normally think of numbers with three zeros after them as being 'incidental', but when you start with about six thousand dollars right off the bat, that tends to happen.)

Now that we've committed (as Virgin puts it, non-refundable, non-transferrable, non-just about everything), its time to start thinking about exactly what we're going to do while we're there. This will be our Great Trip, having backed off from the Australian idea. We know when, where, name of the hotel, and what the local tube stop is. And even what it means when someone called you a 'facking muppet'.

What else is there to know?

July 3rd

I suppose it's a good thing that days don't have personality or emotion, or July Third would have a bit of a complex because it's not really known for anything other than being the day before the Fourth. Something like one of the groupies known mostly for hanging around really well known people (what was the name of that guy who lived at OJ Simpson's home?) I imagine December 23rd would be one, too (since the twenty fourth is The Night Before Christmas, but no one ever wrote a poem about The Night Before The Night Before Christmas, so the 23rd is a 24th groupie.) Someone, I think it was George Carlin, did a bit once about 'why don't we have a special name for the day after tomorrow the way we have a special name for the day after today', and that made sense to me.

Its getting warm out. I was just at the store, getting the week's groceries (though by the total you'd think I was getting the month's groceries; I suppose getting the pork chops and two pounds of bacon and sausage helped that total right up there) so I got to stroll in it for a while. I find that I've been a lot more aware of warmth, and of the sun, since finding out that I have this skin cancer. Having it scares me, and even just knowing that I have it scares me, which makes no sense -- why should the knowledge of something scary be in itself scary? Don't know, but it is. I have the surgery to get it cut out a week from this Tuesday, and that scares me, too. Not the cutting so much, but the graft - actually, a skin flap, which means they take more than just the surface of the skin; its going to be left attacted at one end and stretched to cover the site where the cancer is cut out. I'm apprehensive -- will I end up looking hideous (probably not) or have lots of bandages, like The Mummy (initially, maybe, though only around my chin and neck). I tell myself all of the things you'd tell a kid in similar circumstances, which is appropriate since I'm acting like a kid, but it isn't helping. I still have the complete order of the anti-anxiety med that I asked for, and two or three times I've thought 'maybe I should take some', but I've not been as totally spaced as I was about two weeks ago, so I just suck it up. Not that I'm against taking meds; I just don't think I need them. Yet. But I still want this whole thing to be over.

One thing I've noted in the supermarket is that elderly people (and some not so elderly) tend to stop about three feet just inside the door, to change from sunglasses, look for shopping lists, and all of that. The people who built the supermarket put a couple of those electronic checkers at the door, though I've never heard them go off, but they do a dandy job of constricting the flow of traffic; when someone is stopped in the far end of that flow (before it starts to spread out to various aisles and whatnot), and maybe you have someone waiting to get out, then you have all the makings of a mini-gridlock. Which led me to think about Paco Underhill's pretty interesting book, The Call Of The Mall, which spoke a bit about the design of malls and stores, but, alas, I had no answer. Just as well. Our supermarket is not known for being cheerfully receptive to customer comments, no matter what their ads might say.

Geek Tools

I never thought I was a capital-G Geek, but I did like to think I had more than a twinge of geekishness about me -- mostly manifested by the things that I think are cool, or interesting, or just worth hearing about. Lots of stuff in that category.

We just bought this last night. And I think its really cool -- stainless steel exterior, indicator lights, jet black interior -- the whole bit. Can't wait to try it out.

But I'm not sure what it says about my geekishness.

Blogs of Note

Good reading can be found at:

Life at TJ's Place
-- the manager of a stripper club talks about what it's like there. A lot more interesting than I would have suspected (and a lot less sexy, too)

Diary of the Food Whore
-- a professional caterer who really loves what she does.... when she isn't totally stressed out and ready to kill the next person who gets in her way, anywhere

Feet First
-- a doctor talks about things of interest to her -- some medical, some societal, all interesting

How good are these? Good enough so that even though they don't have an XML feed, so that I have to manually go to the site (oh, the pain ! ), I still take the time to manually go to the site, just to see what's happened since my last visit.

Go see.

What's Money For?

Which is considerably more glib than I actually am. We don't spend money foolishly, but our idea of foolish doesn't exclude having fun with it, as long as we feel that we can justify it. (All of which equivocation reminds me of a brief session I had with someone who was sort-of a psychologist, during a period when I was quite stressed at work; hearing my reply to a question about what I do for fun (answer: well... ), she said, dryly, "I can hear the joy in your voice"). But thats just the way I am.

In this case, the question is "How much is reasonable to spend for the travel (and lodging, but mostly travel) part of a one week trip to London, which we're contemplating for the end of the year". A friend whose thoughts I value (and who is significantly wealthier than me, though she wouldn't call herself rich, I bet) says that it is silly to pay a ton of money for travel; you'll only be on the plane for maybe ten hours, so just suck it up and save the money.' And she has a point. Round trip airfare to London, economy class, is about $1700, and via business, about $8000. For the extra money, you get better food, more space, things to amuse you during the flight, and access to the airport lounge. Those are all nice, but are they worth $6000? Objectively, you'd have to say no, they aren't.

But this is our Big Flight, maybe our only one for the next ten years. We were supposed to go to Australia for three weeks; that turned out to not be possible, and this is the substitute. This cost is proportional to that cost, so if we were willing to pay that (and we were), then, economically, we ought to be willing to pay this, too. And truth to tell, even if it wasn't proportional, still - it's the Big Trip. We don't get out a lot, we don't spend money freely. And at least one of us will be working for another ten years, so we will be able to replace those funds.

Isn't that what money is for? To be spent to enhance your life, to increase your satisfaction and enjoyment, to be fun? (Sotto voce: yes, when it's someone else's money...)

Ruminations and Cogitations, continued

Some interesting and scary things in the paper today. I guess, since I’m an American, what I find scary might not be what other people find scary, and it could be that I find these things scary because I don’t want to think of the things that really are scary. Say what you will about John Ashcroft – and I don’t like him, not at all – he probably has to think about scary things every day that would leave me shuddering under the bed.

So I’ll stick to the things that scare me but aren’t in that league. Ashcroft comes to mind because of two articles in today’s Washington Post. In one, a guy says that while he was flying, and doing a crossword puzzle, he jotted a piece of dialogue for a book that he’s writing. He wrote this line on the edge of the paper where the crossword was: “I guess this is the bomb.” Another passenger saw the note, alerted the flight attendant, and this guy got to spend extensive quality time with cops and feds, none of whom seemed all that interested in the possibility that they were wrong about him, and it ended up that he was told he would now be on a ‘watch list’.

Its easy to make fun of this, just like its easy to make fun of that guy who wanted to blow up the airliner by using a bomb in his shoe. Wouldn’t have been so funny had he succeeded. Thinking that a person is a threat to an airliner because of something he jotted down on the side of a crossword puzzle seems ludicrous and dumb – but ludicrous and dumb people do pose a threat, and we pay humorless people to deal with that threat. Including people like Ashcroft. And including people like the unnamed person who scrambled a fighter jet in Washington to check out the light aircraft that was carrying a traffic reporter, just like it always does, where it always does, in touch with air traffic control all the time. It ended well, but mysteriously, as apparently no one could be found to say that they asked for the fighter to be scrambled, or even to say that they thought scrambling it was a bad idea. If that plane had been carrying explosives, flying under the cover of its normal mission, would the fighter have been able to stop it, or even get close to it? What about locking on for a missile attack? The light plane, remember, cruises at around 70MPH, and the fighter, around 400MPH. I’m thinking of the fighter to helicopter missile attacks in Blue Thunder, which as you may recall didn’t turn out all that well.

So when humorless people do things like stop and interrogate other people who jot down threatening phrases in public places, or check out apparently normal planes that could be a threat, they’re not doing something wrong. But since that also infringes on our traditional view of how Americans act, it feels wrong.

I don’t know about other people, but I haven’t figured out which it is, yet.

Be careful what you wish for....

Which, granted, is a very lame phrase even if Uhura did say it in Star Trek IV to that snarky ensign who ended up getting locked into the closet.

A few days ago, I was whimpering about not having enough to do, and how I wished I had more, and yesterday, the opportunity came. I got a call around 1:30 to the effect that a customer wanted a piece of software installed, and how it would be appreciated if I would do that. And oh, yes, they'd like it operational when they came in on Monday. At that point, I said 'Did they mean the Monday that is in one day, or the one that's a week from this Monday?' And you know which one they said.

I spent about three hours on the PC, downloading the package from the vendor's site (really glad I was doing this from home, with the cable modem; had I been doing it at the office, with the anemic network we have there, I'd still be doing it today). And talking with the customer, and the vendor's contact for my company, and the vendor's contracts person, who is the keeper of the sacred datecode, without which, you can install all you want, Jack, it isn't going to work. But after about two hours, I thought I had it knocked, no problem. Then I learned that when the vendor had changed from version 5.1 of their software to 5.2, they had made Substantial Changes, which translates into You Have To Reinstall The Whole Package. Oh, fun!

After trying to upload to the mainframe for a while, I tossed in the towel and drove into the office, where it took about two more hours to get the upload completed. Things went pretty well at that point, and by about 9PM I thought I was done. I'd say Start, the product would come up, spit out all kinds of status messages, say 'Ready'.... and then shut right back down again. Not being too bright, I tried it about fifteen more times, and each time, same thing, except that sometimes it'd kick out error messages, too, like 13E abends, which say that a subtask hadn't quite finished running when it was told to shut down, or errors from Unix, saying that a task was ended even though it hadn't been undubbed yet.

Finally, an hour later, I thought, hell with this, and called the vendor, telling them what I was seeing, and the guy said well, the only time I've seen this before, the TCPIP port you're using is already in use by another task. So I renamed the port to something else, and, hey presto, it came up.... and stayed up. Damn!

Fooled around with it a while more, entered some commands just to see that it really would respond, then I called the person who had originally asked me to do it (taking some pleasure in the fact that I was calling at 11 at night), and told him it was in, it was up, I was done. Which pleased him. And I then shut down the laptop, put it away, and thought "Damn. Forgot to shut down the task." So I called Ops, asked them to shut it down, and, after some confusion, because they'd never heard of this task before (obviously, since I'd just built it), they did, and I went sleepily home.

Be careful what you wish for. Someone might be listening.

But you know what? It was fun.

Ruminations and Cogitations

This has been a weird week, and I'm in a weird mood. Some good things happened, though.

The most recent good thing was that we went out to dinner for my wife's birthday. The dinner was pretty good. We went to the Olive Garden, which is Fine Dining around here, and a very popular place. I felt badly -- I didn't get her anything, not even a card. She always says that I don't have to, and I know that's true because its true when I say it, but still.... you want to get something as a recognition. She didn't mind, but I still want to do something.

Buying stuff. I have found over the years that what they say is true, at least for me -- buying stuff does not guarantee happiness. I know that's a trite observation, and in a way its hardly new -- we neither of us have ever felt that buying things just because you can is a desirable thing. I don't understand people who buy new, flashy cars (though I like the cars) or gleaming, blinking audio systems (though I like the systems) or even new clothes when the old ones are perfectly good (though I like the new clothes, especially the Tshirts I just got from Lands' End; yum). I think maybe I like the idea of having new stuff; I just don't like the idea of paying for it.

Yet I'm not cheap, not in any real sense. I just don't like spending money for things that I don't really feel like we need. We recently bought a new dining room table -- actually, it'd be a new dining table, wouldn't it? Why do we say dining room table? Well, why do we say salmon but we say tuna fish? -- and having used the table for a while, I can say that its very nice to have, yes indeed. It is solid and comfortable, and the PIR post I made a few days ago notwithstanding, I am glad that we have it. It was Worth The Money. But a lot of things aren't, at least not to me, and I try not to obviously envy people who either have the money to get this stuff without having to think about the cost, or just get it; to hell with the cost, put it on the credit card. How money works -- how people use it -- has always interested me, a little bit. I recall, years ago, when I lived in South Dakota, courtesy of the Air Force, how people would buy houses downtown for the duration of their stay, and at the end of it -- usually about three years later -- they'd sell them again. I was quite pleased with myself when it occurred to me that they weren't actually buying the house; they were renting it from the bank. I was wary of that idea -- what if no one wanted to buy it when I was ready to leave? What does it cost to get an electrician, a plumber, furniture? I wasn't ready for any of those things, so I didn't even try to get a house. The pleasure of ownership wasn't Worth The Money. That's part of the thing about buying a birthday gift -- its got to be Worth The Money. Some amount of the cost can be directed just to the pleasure of getting it for her -- I'd unquestionably spend more money for her than I would ever spend for myself -- but still, there is the WTM consideration. Jewelry, for example. I've never bought into the idea of A Diamond Is Forever. Does that make me cheap? Maybe just a little....

Another Good Thing that happened this week is the drama camp that my daughter is attending. It's small-potatoes stuff -- even little theater is more advanced than this is -- but she's enjoying it. The play is going to be held at noon today, and of course I'll go. I am glad when she enjoys things like this, because its sometimes quite difficult to find things that she does enjoy. Part of it is that she's not comfortable with making friends in a crowd, so the mass activities at the regular camp don't appeal to her. She's a friendly, open kid, and she enjoys having friends -- but only in the micro sense. In that way, she's a lot like me, though she's better at the concept than I am. Like most parents, I wish I could give her the social skills that I never really mastered. If being part of this drama group helps her there, I'm delighted --but even if all it does is give her something to do, and maybe a sense of accomplishment, that'll be a good thing, too.

Work has been slow this week, even by normal standards. That's made me glum. I really want to be busy, I really want Stuff To Do. Not so much that it drives me crazy, or fills every waking moment with an awareness of its looming mass, but enough so that I feel that I'm contributing something. I get a lot of my sense of value from what I do at work, and if I don't do a lot -- well.... And yet I was surprised to find this week that this doesn't necessarily translate into a desire to try new things. This was an unpleasant surprise. What happened was that a colleague told me of a technical tool that could make one of our systems run better, and I found to my surprise that reading the manual, I had almost no interest in doing it. I'm not sure why. It could be that the concept scared me, but I don't want to believe that. I told my group's manager (I always think of him as the group's manager, not as my manager) that I don't mind failing, but I do mind not having the opportunity to fail. Well, that's true, but not as true as it could be. The truth is, I do mind failing, and I think I've lost my taste for trying new things because I'm getting afraid to fail. You can see how that would be a disturbing realization. I don't like it.

So much for now....

Not Really Goofing....

I'm not really goofing off, at the moment. I am officially working; I have my pager on my hip (both on my hip and on, period); I have gone through emails and responded as needed, and I am using my work laptop to do it. I am Working.

It's also true that I am sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the birds, and looking out at a perfectly glorious day; I am barefoot, wearing shorts and a light blue Tshirt, and sipping coffee while I leaf through a book. So, I'm not really working. More like, I'm holding myself in readiness, should the need arise.

This is, in fact, exactly the condition that the people who reluctantly pay my salary (not just me; they're reluctant to pay anyone's salary, as if they could get away with never paying, then their P&L would be fabulous) were referring to when they balked. Am I working? No, truth is, I'm not. Am I avoiding work, delaying it, refusing or failing to do what I should be doing? No, not at all. Nothing is waiting for me.

I suppose that one way to look at this would be that if I have nothing to do, then I ought to be finding things to do. Because unless one works in valhalla, there are always things that could be done to improve the common weal, the working environment. Thats true. But I am not going to do them, because I have found, over the years, that it simply doesn't matter. Perhaps thats my failure, an inability to see how things could be grandly better, and to contribute my mite to efforts that could possibly lead to such improvement, knowing full well that by myself, I can't change them. And its true that at one time, I though that even if I couldn't change the totality or anything approaching totality of the environment, I could at least make an effort. But I don't think that way any more. I see a problem, I fix it. I see something I can make better in my small realm, I do so. But I don't try to change the world, the nation, the state, the city, the street. Just my little part.

But I'm not goofing off. Much.

Guess the Army was right!

Had a fairly intense conversation with my group's manager, the other day, the nut of which was, you're doing what we asked you to do, and you're doing it well, but we don't like paying full time for you to do it, because obviously, it doesn't take all of your time to do it. Which, as it happens, is true, but the proof of it was that I have time to a) dial into a recurring teleconference held by his boss's boss (capo di tutti capi? Not quite...), and they wondered how a grunt level person would have time to do this, and b) when he would hold his own team meetings, and at the end invite people who were remote (like me) to hang on and listen to the local stuff, I would -- thus proving that I didn't have enough to do. I thought that volunteering to sit in on these things demonstrated a certain amount of interest in how the organization works, above and beyond what is normally shown, but that wasn't how it was perceived. And since the organization runs on what they call 'claim codes', which is to say, billable hours, the people paying the bill objected to paying for me full time when part of the time -- obviously ! -- I had nothing to do.

Now this is a decent guy, trying to do his job with a minumum of bureaucracy.... and even I know that when a group manager gets that way, you'd better just nod and smile abjectly ....so that's what I did. Offered up some defense, but it didn't matter, he'd already come to a conclusion. Whether it was his or his boss's, I don't know. I'm disappointed in him and for him, though. He's better than that. So am I.

But the old Army aphorism was right. Don't volunteer.

PIR

About a week ago, we took delivery of a new dining room table. It's quite nice -- here's a picture, though that isn't where we got it -- but we now have a small problem.

We occasionally have pizza for dinner, and sometimes we'd have it in the dining room. How unconventional! When it would come, we'd grab plates and drinks, drop the box on the table, and have at it -- which is how that table got a nice glossy spot where the heat of the box, um, damaged it. But not a lot. And sometimes the plates would sit there for a while before getting cleaned up.

But this is a nice table. It seems a bit -- I don't know, awkward? tacky? -- to put down something to protect the table from the pizza box -- along the lines of putting heavy plastic on furniture to protect the fabric (and yes, my family has been known to do that, too; your thighs never quite forget that feeling of plastic sticking to them). But neither do we want to damage the table. The first spill - gasp! We could, I suppose, just leave the pizza in the kitchen, which is all of ten steps away -- but that does ruin a bit of the spontaneity of the event. What's next, napkin rings? Though we do have these napkin rings that we almost never use....


File this one under Problems of the Idle Rich.

Is this Panama?

Driving home, feeling the humid, sultry heat, watching the steam rising from the hot pavement, all courtesy of a day of +80 degree heat and our recurring late afternoon rainstorm. A whiff of damp warmth came in through the van window when I rolled it down at the mailbox... instant change from frigid air to soggy dampness.

But no new complaints today, and a couple of nice things happened. My distant acquaintance is speaking to me again -- I'm delighted by that, more than might be obvious. My daughter's unhappiness with some arrangements at summer camp were addressed to her satisfaction, so that's good. And her final grades came back from school, better than expected. All goodness.

Got involved with a discussion about a technical problem that one of our customers had yesterday. Four people, each representing a different technical discipline, and two non-techs trying to get us to speak English. We didn't come to an answer, but it was a fun discussion. Well, I had fun, anyway. It was an interesting question -- see, the deal is that our customer runs a financial application that lots of people need to talk to, either directly or via an application somewhere else that needs info from it. To do this, they either run a job on our system (a big iron mainframe) that talks to the financial database directly, or they dial in, using a session manager that connects them to an application on the mainframe, and run queries against the database, or they use some unknown (to us, anyway) kind of remote application to connect to one of a series of servers that in turn establish a session with network software on the mainframe that then talks to the database. At about mid-day, the session manager started kicking out error messages, saying that it couldn't hear anything from the application -- it was talking to it, but the application wasn't responding. People who were trying to sign on were reporting very long response time -- hanging, is what its called. About thirty minutes into this, the customer shut down one of the servers, and about twenty minutes later, the problem went away -- error messages stopped, response time went back to normal. Question is, what caused it? Well, the roomful of technical experts said, looking slit-eyed at each other, thats a tough question, you know, could be lots of things... so one of the non-techies asked what I thought was a very good question: next time this happens, what information do we want, and where will we get it? Cause you know, you just know its going to happen again. Reprise the slit-eyed scene.
I love that kind of stuff. Course, I love even better figuring it out, and we're not there, yet.

One month from today, plastic surgery. Not looking forward to walking around with stitches in my chin. Hope it doesn't look hideous; hope even more than the surgeon doesn't say Hey, what's THIS?, halfway through the process. I kid about having a nightlight put into my chin so I can read at night, but truth is, I just want this to be over.

But overall, things are good here in Saunaland.

Dueling Headlines

From Google News....

US court-martial to hold pretrial hearings for three soldiers next week
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) A US Army court will hold pretrial hearings next week for three soldiers charged with abusing Iraqi inmates in Abu Ghraib prison, a coalition legal officer said Monday.


Somali Charged with Plotting to Blow Up Ohio Mall
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Somali man living in Ohio was charged with plotting with al Qaeda supporters to blow up a shopping mall in Columbus, Ohio, Attorney General John Ashcroft said on Monday.

Hmmm......

Working from Home

I'm working from home today, and will be, on Mondays and Fridays, for the summer. The reason is to let me retrieve my daughter from the summer program at a relatively early hour, like 4:30, without having to cut out from work way early to do so. This way, I start my work day about half an hour earlier, and end it about ten minutes later. That is the rational brain reason. Underlying it is the emotional brain reason, which says that I want to work from home because it saves me an hour of commute time,plus the associated gas. It also isolates me from the noise at my office. Truthfully, the noise isn't that bad, but sometimes, it is. I don't care for people goofing around a lot. A little, sure. A lot, no.

I feel guilty about working from home, though. Feels like I'm cheating. When I'm at the office, that same background noise that can be irritating is also a hum that says yes, you're doing the grown-up thing, you're At The Office. When I work from home, it's not there. I do about 90% of the same stuff no matter where I am. Most of that remaining ten percent is paper-oriented stuff that can only be done there, and the rest is walk-up stuff where the person decides to wait until they see me again. Delaying the first a day or so is not a problem, but I don't like the idea of delaying the second. Part of that is that I don't think it's professional of me to make people wait (okay, they could IM me, and some do, but some don't), and part is that people tend to draw quick assumptions that you're somewhere slacking off -- and as I've said, I tend to feel that way, too. It leads me to question my own professionalism.

I think I need more to do.

So That's What Homilies Do

I take my daughter to church on Sunday mornings, the 7:30 Mass, which is the one that doesn't have singing. I don't care for the singing, and neither does she. Truth to tell, though, neither of us particularly cares for the mass anyway. We don't get anything out of it. I go because I think she should; she goes because I make her go. I'm not sure this is a terrific arrangement, but it's probably not all that unusual.

This morning, the pastor gave the homily. He's been the pastor for a long time. His homilies are not very dynamic, but he tries, and I think that he means what he says. I've had the full course of Catholic school, though, which tends to bend you pretty sharply one way or the other. You either become a true believer, or you shuck it all off. I don't usually get much from the homily.

This morning was different.

He told a joke, which he likes to do. The jokes are usually pretty corny, but he usually gets a polite laugh (though he got a bigger one when he remarked abruptly, having walked away from the lectern at the end of his sermon, 'Hey, I didn't have the mike on! Could you hear me? Hate to think I did all that work and all you saw was my lips moving!). But what he said today caught my attention.

He said that a lot of people don't like things the way they are. They don't like their job, their marriage, their kids. As a result, they hide from the things they don't like -- lingering in thoughts of how great things used to be, or mulling over how nice life would be if something great happened. But they don't take even a small step toward fixing the things that they don't like, and so, usually, those things don't change. They won't tell themselves the things they don't want to know -- your marriage stinks, your kids are out of control, you're not very good at your job -- and they won't even think about the possibility of trying to fix any of it. They cringe away from the idea.

I know about this.

Purely aside from my reaction to doctors, about which I've spoken, I know about cringing from things I don't want to face. About three years ago, I wanted to create a spreadsheet to give me a general idea about how much money we'd have when we retired. I was flabbergasted to discover how little that would be. As it turns out, I had forgotten a couple of income sources, and I had overstated one expense, and I had forgotten that one expense would not last past another ten years or so -- but I was so stung by the experience, that it literally took me six months to get back to making the spreadsheet work. I would see it in the list of files, and think 'I should work at that', and I would shiver at the thought. And this was just a spreadsheet, not a person, not a family, not a job. Scared the bejesus out of me.

So while he was saying all of this, I was thinking, well, yeah, that's true, but you don't understand -- I'm fat, and I can't seem to lose weight; I don't take care of myself or my chronic medical condition, which never gets better and stays that way; I don't get stuff done that ought to be done .... and then I thought - well, just what the hell do you think he's talking about? And who?

Oh.

Now, I don't think my life is going to now be a series of illuminated steps in the darkness, just because a homily gave me something to think about. I am just as capable now of ignoring and defering as ever before.

But I at least know that someone thinks that change is possible, that improvement is possible. It can be and probably will be a bitch, and its not a guarantee, but if you try, truly try, then yes -- its possible.

Giving that sort of hope -- I guess that's what homilies do.

Chin Music

I'm pretty sure that that's a way of slyly saying 'A lot of talking, not a lot of saying.' That's kind of what I'm in the mood for, though, at the moment, and it's even one of the things I've been thinking about.

Found out about three weeks ago that a really large lump on my chin is a basal cell carcinoma. As cancers go, it's pretty small potatoes, but anything like that on your own personal body is unsettling, and this one was big enough to cause the plastic surgeon to express surprise. Came to figure out, too, that I've likely had it for Quite Some Time, because of a combination of things -- my beard covered it, doctors that I see for other stuff didn't notice it (or when they did, thought it was something minor), and, mostly, because I didn't push the question with them, because I don't like going to doctors, because they tell you things you don't want to hear. I realize that's stupid -- I have known that for some time. Now I really know it. In about four weeks, I'll have some plastic surgery, and it should be corrected. The carcinoma scares me, the surgery kind-of scares me, and the 'should be' scares me. So much so that last week I asked my local medical people for some kind of tranquilizer, because, frankly, I was freaking out. Not running, ranting, and shouting, but fixating on it and not sleeping. They gave me some. So far, I haven't had to use it. Hope not to, but it's nice to have.

I also found this week that a friend of mine -- I guess 'acquaintance' would be a better term -- whom I know only via email may be getting ready to end our electronic acquaintance. She tells me that she's just becoming more guarded about who she talks with, and since she doesn't really know me.... well. I guess I understand that. It's what I'd advise my daughter to do. Can't say I like it much, though. But its a funny thing -- protesting Hey, I'm Normal! sends exactly the opposite message.

And we learned on Wednesday that a) the woman who comes one day a week to spend time with my mother, whom we like very much (both of them!) may be quitting that business. She spends a lot of time with infirm people, and it's getting to her, and b) the cleaning crew that does our house once every couple of weeks told their boss that they're quitting, en masse. They did want to tell us that they liked my mother, though.

Good news is in short supply this week -- which may be partially why I am so taken by the Varley book. No, on second thought, that's not it. It really is a good book.

I could use some lazy, hazy days in the hammock, though, right about now.

John Varley is a Good Writer

...which I realize is like saying 'And that Isaac Asimov, and that Robert Heinlein, man, they're pretty good, you know?' People know this already. Nevertheless, I wanted to say it, because I like sharing information, and heck, who knows, someone might stop by who's looking for a good read.

The novel is Red Thunder. Its the kind of book that I can lose myself in, looking up after twenty minutes have passed that I didn't even notice go by. The plot is fun, the characters are believable (okay, there is one... but I want to believe in him, so I will.)

I'm starting to care about these people, and I'm only on the fourth chapter.

Red Thunder. Good read.

Man, This Makes Me Feel Old....

I was just wandering through the list of Favorites on my browser, and came across this page, which is dedicated to a squadron that I was part of when I was in South East Asia -- Korat RTAFB, Thailand, to be exact. I clicked on a couple of the pictures, and smiled. And then I thought: that picture is more than forty years old, dude....

I don't care. It reminds me of my youth, and I like it.

Late night munchies

Living life asynchronously, at the moment -- went to bed early, while the others were awake; then I woke up just as the daughter went to bed and the wife was signing on to work to look at a job she had run, which meant that I couldn't check email. So I did what most people would do -- went out to the kitchen and found something to eat.

I was reading a magazine, the other day, that's oriented to people who really like to fix up their homes with lavish technologies. (Actually, the phrase that came to mind was 'people who like to tart up their homes') I know, the magazines are intended to sell the concept, but even so: small microwaves and refrigerators for the master suite so that you don't have to trudge all the way to the kitchen for a midnight snack? A central command post controller in the kitchen so that you can see if the garage door is open? Speakers in the halls so that you can listen to the soundtrack of the movie playing down in the media room? Good golly.......

I read the magazine to get some ideas, and I did. Obviously, I'm not doing enough to support the economy. Think I'll buy some books.

Iraq. Prisons. Torture. Us.

I hate being on this side of the torture question. I hate thinking that maybe its okay.

Is any action, any attitude all right as long as it destroys a despised and hated foulness? What if it just weakens the foulness? Do we back off? Or do we then say that we need to kick it up a notch, because the level of intensity we were at was not good enough, not meeting its desired purpose?

Who gets to decide? The instruments of the action? Or someone else?

And if we truly got material from what we did that could not have been gotten any other way, and if that material was truly worth it -- was the action ok?

Why isn't this obvious to me?

Beheading.

They're animals. Pure and simple. Rabid, frothing at the mouth, animals. They dishonor their heritage, their religion, and their nation. This foul act begs for revenge.

I hope we don't do it. Justice, absolutely. Revenge -- I don't think so. My gut says yes, smash them, smash them all, they, in fact, the whole region, responds to strength, not mercy. My brain says 'The cycle has to stop somewhere.'

Want to bet they didn't have this discussion?

Gas prices and the stock market

Let me see if I've got this straight.

Gas prices are going up because demand is up, reserves are down, and the base cost is up.

Because gas prices are going up (among other things), the feeling is that 'inflation is back'.

Because inflation is a bad thing, the cost of loans is expected to go up as an anti-inflationary measure.

Because the cost of loans is expected to go up, corporate profits are expected to go down.

Because corporate profits are expected to go down, people sell stocks now.

Because people sell stocks now, the value of the stock market goes down.

Because the value of the stock market goes down, the value of stocks, overall, goes down, and the net wealth of the country is less (barring direct and cost free transfers into other financial instruments).

Ok, I think I've got it.

I've heard that the reason grown-ups like to ask kids what they want to be when they grow up is that the grown-ups are still trying to figure that one out, and are looking for ideas.

I think that's true.

I had a bit of a pleasant surprise in the reading department this week.

I have a running list of books that I want to read. I've been keeping the list for years, ever since I realized that I would buy a book and then not get around to reading it for months, by which time it would frequently be out in paperback. Adding insult to injury, I was finding that a lot of the books that I bought weren't as good as I had thought they would be. I seemed to have developed the gift of hitting the best part when I was skimming it in the bookstore, and finding out only at home that the rest was not up to that standard. So I started my list. When I took a year off, I promised myself that I would get the list down. At its peak, it was up around 75 books, and I did get it down -- to about 68; hardly as many as I wanted to have read during that hiatus.

About two weeks ago, I realized that the list was pretty big again, and since I was looking for something to read that wasn't technical (or at least not intensely so), I thought to order some books through my local library's interlibrary loan system. My library has a somewhat cumbersome process for doing that. It's manual, and it uses a different ILL order card depending on whether the book is being reserved within the library, ordered from the library system of which they're a part, or ordered from another system entirely. That might make sense to a librarian, but it makes no sense to me. On a couple of occasions, I was halfway through a card before realizing it was the wrong one. What joy! What made all of this particularly irritating is that I had the info on the book -- title, author, ISBN - already keyed into spreadsheet that I had made while searching the library system through the Internet. To then take the digital information and hand write it so that someone else could key it into another computer system was offensive to my sense of How Things Should Be (which, admittedly, is sometimes much sterner than it ought to be). Plus, I notice that the more I have to write, the less legible my writing becomes. I'm sure the librarians really enjoy that.

So this week, I thought to ask the librarians if I could do it digitally -- fill out a form on line, or send them an email with my requests. To my surprise, they said yes. Its clearly something that, if lots of people asked for it, they'd not do, but I gather that this is an unusual request for them, and they were willing to honor it. I even told them that I'd be willing to pay a premium for this additional service. I think a buck a book would be reasonable. I suggested that they consider adding this feature to their web site. Doubt that will happen, though -- I get the impression they are part of The Official Library Computer System, and changes are not made to that lightly.

Still, I'm pleased. Now I just want to see if the books ordered this way actually do come. I hope so -- I just added two books (The BeeKeeper’s Apprentice, and The Working Poor) to the list. Gotta read, gotta read.

Two words I like.

Refectory.

Clerestory.

Solid, substantial words. I like 'em.

Sitting in the car at a light, I did the math.

I use twenty gallons of gas every two weeks, mostly going to work and back. That works out to 520 gallons a year. That ignores long trips, of course.

Gas is now about 50 cents a gallon more than it was three months ago. Assuming it stays that way -- and Dick Cheney's pals will make sure of that, and then some, I bet -- that works out to $260 more a year out of my pocket.

That $260, at the current gas price, would pay for about 138 gallons of gas, or 69 round trips to work. That's about 6 round trips a month. So, if I worked from home 6 days a month, I'd break even. More if -- and when -- the price goes up, of course.

Seems like a no-brainer to me.

I just went outside and took about fifteen pictures.

It's been a long time since I've done any photography, and I had forgotten how much fun it can be to look for the right angle, look for something to frame, something to make the picture come alive. I'm not a stylistic photographer, but I like to think that what I take is worth keeping -- which I suppose makes it odd that I routinely throw away seventy percent of the pictures that I take. That'll likely happen this time, too. The motivation for the shoot was that someday -- not soon -- we'll be selling this house, and we wanted a photograph showing the house with the landscaping in bloom. Got some nice ones. I wandered around in the street with a ladder, stepping up on occasion for a better angle (the house is on a very slight rise), and occasionally kneeling to get some up-close photographs of some of the more striking flowers. I thought to invite the family out to the landing, and took some shots of them, too, at the conclusion of which, the daughter borrowed the camera and took some shots, herself. She said she really loves doing it, and me, I love that she loves it.

Hope they come out.

This morning, I was teasing my wife about not knowing how to make 'peanut bobbles', and how every other family has a wife who knows how to make it, and that the knowledge is passed down from generation to generation, but I seem to have been left in the lurch, and didn't this call into question the whole likelihood of the marriage surviving? In the middle of which, our daughter came into the kitchen, and I looked at her and said 'Can you beleive it -- this will shock you -- your mother doesn't know how to make peanut bobbles!" She stared at her mother with a stunned expression, and her mother said 'Do YOU know how to make peanut bobbles?' Whereupon the daughter smiled and said "Kids don't have to know. Only moms are supposed to know how to make peanut bobbles.'

Is she cool, or what?

I currently work for the largest software company in the world.

I used to work for the second largest, although as things go, its probably about the fifth, now.

Both companies say and said repeatedly how important people were in the delivery of their service.

Both have cut back dramatically in training for their technical people, the sources of their technically oriented products, and one of the sources of their success, to the point where it is rare to get any training at all, and reservations are voiced even about taking electronic courses which cost nothing.

What should one conclude from this?

To characterize each company's management as, say, 'lying sacks of shit' does comes to mind....but that would be childish, immature, and wrong.

Besides, the excrement would be offended.

Stray thoughts on a rainy April morning.

April showers bring May flowers. That is holding true -- our front yard's landscaped area is starting to come into bloom, and when it is fully there, I will again envy the people who live in more temperate climates, where the flowers are always in bloom. They probably don't appreciate them as intently as we do, but I like to think they do notice them.

My daughter and I just went for a short walk. It was intended to be a longer one -- she even wore a down vest that she liked -- but it got cut short when she noticed that the sleeveless vest was doing nothing to keep her arms dry -- arms that were cold to the touch, too. If her mother had been here, she'd have been sure that the daughter went out properly protected, but I exercised the guy's right to say heck, she's not gonna die, and this way, she'll learn without me telling her. And that apparently worked -- she stopped at one point and suggested that we make a quick loop back to the house, and have some hot chocolate on arrival, too. I asked her if it was getting chilly, and she nodded. I noticed that, too, I said -- and that was all.

We have the Sunday papers stacked on the kitchen counter, and as it was just below the cabinet where the sprinkles were (can't have ice cream without sprinkles), the daughter stopped to read the headlines. She asked me why people were still fighting in Iraq if we had already found out that Iraq doesn't have massive weapons. I didn't have Condi Rice here to help me spin that one, so I simply told her it was a group of people who didn't want us there, some of whom had further agendas. She thought that it was dumb of them to fight us if we were trying to help them, and I think that a bit, too. I like clean answers, but there aren't any there. I do think its intriguing that the guy in power who used to be a military guy is the one pushing against a military solution, and the guy who wasn't, is. Food for deep philosophy, there.

I am quite taken by that YCC concept car that Volvo made. If this is a realistic example of what women designers can come up with, we ought to get lots more. I like it so much (except for those doors) that I can even accept the comment one of them made (it might have been an American, actually; I've heard it both ways) that once you meet a woman's expectations, you've exceeded a mans. That sure does seem to be true in this case. Though it leaves me wondering: if it were available, would I buy it or the Prius? The attraction of the Prius is lessening the use of gas. I like the idea of sticking it to OPEC, and I'm sure that my refusal of five hundred gallons a year would bring them to their senses right away. Except that economically, I think they *are* in their senses -- getting as much money as they can for their product, right now. And they could be getting more, too. I'm sure they've noticed that.

I hear where a woman came up with a site whose name is, I think, Down With Bush, and where the ultimate expression of acceptance for that concept is that you shave off your pubic hair. So far as I know, its limited to women. I wonder if women are as taken by the idea of a guy without pubic hair as guys are for similarly shaved women? I admit, I find the idea tittilating, but I always feel stupid when I think about it. I mean, whats the big deal? I recall reading quite some time ago that in societies where things we hide, like breasts, are exposed, its very rapidly accepted as normal to see them. In my one foray to a nude beach, I noticed that -- just like I noticed the boat going back and forth . Remember the song lyrics about 'a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking'? Sheesh. Maybe guys never do grow up.

You know what would be cool? Being able to have the cell phone plug into the audio system of the van, so that while I am driving to lunch I can still listen in to a teleconference, using the speakers of the audio system. Okay, its probably possible, but not for me. Not yet, anyway. Someday....

The other day, I was thinking about the price of gasoline. I use about 12 gallons a week, mostly driving to work, which takes about a gallon each way, so at the local average about about $1.70 a gallon, I pay about seventeen dollars a week for the privilege of driving. That's up about two bucks per week. I wondered how high it would have to go before it affected my consumption. I guessed that for me to make a change, the price would have to increase up to about $2.50 a gallon. At that point, I’d be paying around thirty dollars a week, and that, I’d notice.

Those thoughts came back to me as I read in the Sunday paper that some people feel that an increase in gasoline taxes would reduce dependence on foreign oil by reducing consumption. It would probably reduce consumption overall, but I would bet that it wouldn’t affect it for everyone, or even most people, because the driving they do, they have to do.They don’t have a convenient alternative. Until the price got so high that it cost more to commute than the person earned, they’d continue to pay. Like me, they’d likely notice the difference, and grumble, but they wouldn’t use substantially less.

Buying cars would be a different matter. The demand for fuel economy is probably elastic with respect to gasoline prices to a lesser extend than usage; as prices go up, people are more likely to think about the mileage that they expect from a new vehicle when they are researching the purchase. But e-ven then it's questionable - I doubt mileage is a major factor in what vehicle to buy, though it might be a factor in differentiating between acceptable vehicles.

Several months ago, when my partner and I were both pretty busy, and were finding it difficult to come up with ideas for dinners that could be accomplished quickly, we started a list of meals that we liked. It had two columns -- one for things that took a little bit of time, and one for things that took longer. We went through a couple of iterations of how to organize the list -- one of the first tries was Hard to Make, Easy to Make, and another was Weekday/Weekend -- but it settled down pretty quickly into QUICK and LONG. QUICK is something we can make quickly, and LONG is something that takes effort, and is expected to be seen again at some point. QUICK is as you’d expect; things we can make almost on the fly -- burritos, hamburgers, soup, grilled cheese, and the ever-popular Round Food, a.k.a. pizza. The LONGs are more complex, or at least take more time to make than we usually have during the week. They’re expected to generate leftovers. In fact, some of them generate so many leftovers that the output is bifurcated into something we eat and something we store, and that second category is split again into something we store to have later in the week, and something we freeze to have in two or three weeks -- or longer. An example of that is the Bean Bake, which I dearly love; it’s a simple recipe that takes a while to cook in the crockpot, but once done, I know I’ll want it twice, perhaps three times in one week -- and then not again for a while. So, some we eat, some we store, and some we freeze, to be found weeks or even months later when we’re roaming through the kitchen saying Don’t we have anything to eat?

In our house, it works out that if someone is going to make a complex breakfast (meat, waffles, coffee, muffins or toast), it’ll probably be me; if someone is going to make a complex dinner (more than five minutes prep time), it’ll probably be my partner . Lately, though, with all of the time that my partner been putting in with preparations for the school’s Science Night, our dinners have been a little on the basic side, even if she’s the one making them; if I make them, you can pretty much count on them being of the soup or spaghetti level of difficulty. So, we thought that this might be a good time to start doing a little revamping of the menu list, the better to motivate one or the other of us to actually make the meal. To that end, I took two of our cookbooks into the bedroom, settled back, and started leafing through the first one. It happens to be one that we bought for our child, but though it is a ‘kids cookbook’, it’s a real one, with real food in it. Insofar as I eat like a kid, this is a cookbook for me, but some of it is advanced for my tastes. Still, its a great place to start, and indeed I came up with two things to try. One is a simple spaghetti sauce. A couple of years ago, we thought to try to make our own sauce. I had visions of the scene in The Godfather where the round guy -- what was his name? Don’t recall, but I do remember a line he had after they’d just shot the chauffeur and were abandoning the car - "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli." -- is stirring the huge pot of sauce while commiserating with Michael’s troubles. It turned out that it was a lot more difficult to make the sauce than I thought it would be, and since then we’ve discovered the Newman’s Own brand of sauce. I had originally been against buying it (or Emeril’s, or any other sauce with a recognizable name) because I thought heck, how good can it be? But it turns out that the Newman’s sauce is actually quite good, and that’s been our staple ever since -- and probably will be even after we try the one from the book. But the one in the book is really quite simple -- carrot, celery, garlic, tomato and puree -- so what the heck, we’re going to try it. It’ll just be the two of us; our child believes that to have any kind of pasta other than angel hair is an abomination, and to have any topping other than butter and a lot of grated cheese compounds the offense. We’ll see. The other thing we’ll try out of that book is a form of french toast. We all like FT, though since we discovered the delights of freshly made waffles, especially made our way, which is to say, with white chocolate chips in the batter, with a side of sausage or bacon, it’s been a tossup. But this sounds good -- cut the bread into star shapes, make the FT immersion batter, fry it in hot oil, sprinkle cinnamon on it. Crunchy French Toast. We’ve still got a little vanilla ice cream in the freezer, too, so we’ll likely have that on top. That’s actually the kid's idea, and its a good one. First time I bit into it, I recalled the story of how the ice cream cone got started. Don’t know if it’s a true story, but I like it.

That's the plan for two meals, this next week. If I can come up with two more additional things to try for the first time, we’ll add them to the menu list, and that’ll be it.

Went to the barbers, got my usual chop and hack job. Barbers don't think, they run by muscle memory. Probably not completely true; definitely not completely not. Got home, found out that the nurse practicitioner I have been seeing, is going to quit the practice. Bummer. Takes me a while to warm up to any doc, and we were just getting somewhere.

I've always been fascinated by architecture.

I'm not sure that fascinated is the right word, but what the hell. And I guess always isn't the right word, either. Double what the hell. I've always been fascinated by architecture.

Both the style and the substance intrigue me. The style: making shapes that excite you, move you. The great hall of St. Peter's cathedral, or St. Patricks. When I hear designers talk about things like moving from a small space into a large one, so that you get the gradually growing sense of width and mass, that grabs my attention. I wonder how you learn how to do that -- if its something that you have to be born with, but which can be enhanced by training, or whether anyone can be taught to do it (though even then, the best, I guess, can do it better, no matter what). But how do you know what's possible? And where does it start? Got to believe that it comes from a whole lot of messing around with models, literally just playing around with shapes to see what clicks. Sure, some are major flops, delightful only to purists of the art, but man, when you play in a ballpark that visible, you've got to accept that. Look at all the dazzling buildings in Houston, San Francisco, Chicago, New York.......

And the substance: making a building that works -- that lays out space in innovative ways. Curtain walls, staggered elevator shafts, multiple elevators in the same shaft. My goodness. And the materials they're made of -- how do you find out what’s even possible? I recall reading about why an I beam is that shape. How long were beams the way they were before people figured out that half the mass of the thing wasn't contributing to the support it offered? Or at least, cost more to have than it offered as support? And new solutions to old problems. I remember reading about a building which has a moving mass of concrete half way up its height that acts as a damper when the building is swayed by high winds, keeping it stable, or, at least, more stable. Wow! What kind of mind can think of stuff like that?

Maybe fascinated is a good word, after all.

Today I get to meet with the auditors -- the Corporate Auditors; when people mention them, you can hear the capitalized initials in their voices. I don't have a problem with the concept of auditors; I think of them as keepers of the faith who, by their rigidity, pull an organization toward the pole that the corporation says it hews to all the time, religiously (The analogy of the Taliban does occur to me). What I've got a problem with is the basis of audits, and response to them.

BASIS: Too much of audits are based on the whim and bias of the auditor. While some, and perhaps even most, of this is based on expert and/or experienced knowledge, much of it is based on the bias of the auditor, and what a given auditor expects and chooses to accept. What's acceptable to one is not acceptable to another; it might not even be acceptable to the same auditor at a later date.

RECOURSE: In corporations, there is no recourse from what an auditor chooses to write up. Even the IRS can be beaten into submission if you're willing to spend the time and money, but auditors have no similar back door. Most times, a manager will just roll his eyes and advise you to go along. That's not right.

I know its not that straightforward. When you delve into the intricacies of any human system, there are plenty of opportunities for disagreement. One person thinks a change is minor and should not require oversight; another thinks it's major, and ought to be reviewed. Usually, the second view is that of a person who doesn't personally have to wait for the oversight -- but that doesn't make them wrong.

Resilient systems allow for human error. About two months ago, I sneaked in a change. It was a change that was needed, and was valid -- but I forgot to get prior authorization, and waiting to get authorization at that point would have meant public notice that the change went in late. So I just did it. Was that wrong? Yes, unquestionably. I did the wrong thing, just so I wouldn’t be held to blame. A better answer would have been that I remembered to get authorization -- which is why there is now a piece of note paper on my cubicle wall with the name of that system in big black letters, to remind me that yes, I am responsible for that system, too. And if an auditor asks why I have that system name written there -- I'll -- ah....prevaricate.

Fascinating article in the Times today on findings regarding the effectiveness of stents vs cholesterol/blood pressure reduction in the reduction of likelihood of heart attacks. Really, really interesting stuff.

Whenever I see an article about concierge medical services, I read it. And I usually stop when I hit The Phrase. Sometimes it shows up in the beginning, sometimes in the middle. But it's always there.

From today's Washington Post: Doctoring at Your Service

"Eichelberger and Blakeslee say they were forced to try this new model for patient service because the managed health care system had been cutting doctors' fees. "I had no choice. It was my only way to actually stay in business," Blakeslee said. "I would have been out of business in three years for financial reasons." ..."This is not an easy road. This is not get-rich-quick", Eichelberger said. "We're probably making a little bit more money than we did before. But we know that we have potential for growth."

And there it is, again.

Of course, who can blame them? Do what you want to do, the way you want to do it? Desirable. And have less annoying paperwork? Excellent. And your customers really do get better medical treatment? Faster, more focused, more comprehensive? Outstanding. And earn more at the same time? Stellar. Go for it.

Why can't they admit that the increased dollars are attractive? Do they think it will detract from their image as noble healers? And, if so, is that so bad?

Another bullet dodged.

After the failure of the second remote control for the Sony DVD/VCR player, we had thought to stop by Circuit City to look for a replacement unit. We did this grudgingly, as the idea of replacing the entire unit simply because the remote doesn't work does not fill us with happiness. Bad enough that the remote is a modern masterpiece of non-design, but to have to replace the whole thing.... well.

We were in the store for quite some time, looking at units ranging from a very inexpensive DVD player to a quite expensive DVD player/recorder with 80 GB hard drive. After wandering back and forth, thinking about the method that we'd use to connect the player to the TV in a way that would allow connection of the old VCR (which we still have), we balked. None of the options, from the cheapest to the most expensive, sounded right to us. A combination of gibberish on the units (what in the hell is 'Double ReMastering'? One unit proclaimed this ability) and on the advertising copy (how expansive is 80GB for video recording? Is that ten minutes or ten hours?), along with the thought that we had just done this, why were we even thinking about doing it again -- convinced us that we weren't going to buy spontaneously, no matter how long we had to wait for the remote's replacement.

Which was in the mailbox when we got home. Zing!

That's not to say that we won't eventually do a massive replacement. We've agreed that when the television dies, we'll replace it with a flat screen unit that can display letter box format but is not necessarily high-definition ready. What I'd really like is the ability to mount the television up above the mantel, where there is a socket, though no cable or antenna connection. I understand that there is the capability to have wireless television connectivity; I don't know how to do that, though, and I certainly don't trust the people at Circuit City to tell me, no matter that I did once see an article about a person -- one person, one Circuit City -- who was quite good at it. If it becomes commonly possible, that's one thing. We're neither of us pioneers.

We'd also like to replace the audio equipment that's in that room. It currently consists of an amplifier that I bought when I was in Thailand with the Air Force (which is to say, 30+ years ago), a turntable, and a cassette deck. There's also a pair of speakers hung on the wall which were once connected, and now are not. The basic problem there is two fold; first, I detest the design of pretty much all amplifiers; they are black in black on black. I want something with elegance, style, simplicity, and color. Come on, it is possible. And second, the newer amps (which means, those built in the last fifteen years ) don't accept turntable input. I resent having to buy a module just to connect them. I know that that makes me sound like someone who resents that there are no decent buggy-whip makers these days.

An interface to the PC (or the local LAN) would be nice. A Tivo would be good, too, because we do watch television on occasion (why, just last night we watched Men in Black; how cutting edge is that?) , and hard drive recorders make more sense than tape, provided you can watch one thing from the hard drive while recording another. Can't do that with tape. Oh, and being able to watch something from the hard drive while the timer is set to record something else, or even starts to record something else -- that would be good, too. Can't do that with tape, either.

We vaguely know what we want. We vaguely know how it's might be possible. We just don't know how to put it together so that it actually works, and we know of no one we trust to guide us, impartially, on this. No matter how many cheery Circuit City ads we see.

Good thing we enjoy figuring things out.

I've come to the conclusion that any job which is described using the phrase "your .....professional', as in 'your financial services professional', 'your window repair professional', your television and audio professional', is more than likely referring to someone who is undertrained and unempowered. People who can actually do things -- who iknow what to do and can do it of their own volition -- don't have that phrase in their job title. They actually ARE professionals.

One of the sayings that I like is 'Sometimes wrong, never uncertain'. Not universally applicable, but it comes into its own on occasion -- as this evening, when I had a quiet discussion with my daughter about the mechanics of having her period (or as she referred to it, "that end of sentence thing"). She knows what will happen, and how it will manifest itself, but she didn't really know how she'd handle telling the teacher that she had to go to the bathroom right now, and she couldn't see herself going up to her in the middle of class, whispering urgently while other kids milled around. I had a couple of ideas about that, which she accepted with some relief. I told her that if she needed to talk to someone, and there weren't any girls around to talk to, she could talk to me, and I promised not to laugh or think that what she was saying was gross (though, truth to tell, I could have done without learning a couple of details about her friends that she mentioned as proof that they knew what they were talking about.) She told me that she knew that while the whole process might be messy, it wouldn't hurt, and I agreed. Like I know.

But what the heck. Sometimes wrong, never uncertain.