Managing Would Be Much Easier...

...if it weren't for the people. (Which brings to mind an article I read several years ago wherein the author points out alternate uses of the word 'manage', as in, 'Oh, the house burned down, the crops died, and our Internet service is very slow...but we'll manage'. Given that, how could being a 'manager' mean anything other than dealing with failure on a routine basis?)

When I was younger and more idealistic, I used to read management articles pretty often. I liked the articles in the Sloan School of Business magazine the most, with the Harvard Business Review being a close second (they were more global in scope than Sloan, but Sloan felt more realistic, as if they were written by the actual people involved, and not dictated to a furiously penning scribe). When I discovered INC magazine, I thought that this was even better, because it was about people working (for the most part) in small businesses -- anything from the family drug store to a company that employed about a hundred people. These people didn't have much truck with elegant theory, however intellectually satisfying; they wanted facts and direct, clear statements.

One problem posed to one of INCs advisors still sticks with me. A person said that he and his wife had started a business, hired employees as it grew, and prospered to the point where they wanted to take some money out of the business to buy his and hers Mercedes (or similar; I don't recall exactly). The question was, should they? On one hand, the advisor said, it was their business, and they could do whatever they chose with the money from the business. On the other, the business presumably relied heavily on the good will and effort of the employees; if they saw the owners strutting their new toys, they might become restive.

I recall this one, I think, because several years ago I worked for a large computer company which was solely owned by one man. The company was publicly traded, but he held a controlling interest. One year he decided it would be a dandy thing for his son to learn to fly a helicopter (the son ended up flying around the world, hop-scotching from one military base to another, courtesy of his father's connections). He had a small heliport built next to the main office building. Every couple of days, we could see the helicopter arrive, and the son (and sometimes others) would go out and lift off.

The helicopter was owned by the company; the company was owned by the man. Did this make it right? I know that very few of us seemed upset by the sight of the helicopter (it was fun to watch, actually, when the professional pilot would land it, because, among other things, he would land exactly aligned with the helipad's long edge, and he would apply the rotor brake so that the blade stopped exactly aligned with the body of the helicopter. Classy. ) We tended to think that 'them as has, gets'. But every so often, we'd think about what we were paid (and we were paid well) versus the cost to the company of that helicopter....and we'd get just a bit glum. I specifically recall one day when the helicopter arrived and the passengers walked out in business suits; on disembarkation, they all wore bathing suits. None who saw that felt much like working, afterward. The sight had demotivated us, even though, objectively, nothing in our work environment had changed.

To me, motivation is the key responsibility of management. It's not just money, or power, either. Maslow said it well, decades ago, with his Hierarchy (I mentioned it once to a fellow manager, during my tenure in that job, and was surprised to learn that he'd never heard of it). And I developed for myself (not first, but I thought of it before I read it) the concept that people want attention in varying degrees; some want you to know everything they're doing, and others don't want you in their airspace at all, but everyone wants recognition and respect for what they do. You can go a long way simply assuring people that you do see their activities, and that you value them. It doesn't hurt to point out, gently, that you likely value them better than they do, themselves, because when you value them, you don't see the nagging little doubts that everyone has -- the ones that say 'oh, you're not so good' or 'oh, you could have done that piece of work better'. All you see is the output, and so you can value them without distraction. I'm amazed how often that doesn't occur to people. Though perhaps I shouldn't be: when I'm in the doldrums, it doesn't occur to me, either.

One of the many managerial tasks that I never mastered past that point, though, was how you motivate people. I knew intellectually how to do it; the problem was in figuring out which of the possible methods would work with a given person. I recall a manager of mine, during that period, saying to me that he had to call in one of his employees and 'get him excited about' a task he wanted him to perform. He wasn't being evilly manipulative; he simply wanted this person to accept this task and run with it; further, to be enthused about it. I wished that I could have listened to his conversation, because it worked, and I wanted to know how to do it.

It only occurred to me much later that he did the same thing to me, too.

Bemused

To my amazement, I have actually gotten some comments on this blog. I did not expect that. And what's even more amazing, they were positive comments. They didn't tell me that I am not all that lucid, or that I write about things that are so boring as to make dust look captivating, or things that No One Cares About, Jack.

I am grateful to these people, because, truth to tell, I don't think that most people would find what I write all that interesting. I like to think about a lot of different things, but my thinking is pretty shallow, most of the time. Terrorism Bad. Chocolate Good. That sort of thing isn't deep, like you find in lots of other blogs. What's that saying about the Mississippi (and then there's the joke about the little kid who said he knew how to SPELL Mississippi, he just didn't know when to stop), that its a mile wide and an inch deep? I think sometimes that that's a good description of my range of interests. I like lots of things, but I don't tend to go very deep on them. Like the character said in Robert Parker's novels, I know more things that won't make you money....

Here's an obscure example. In my job, I deal with people who need to set up computing environments (man, does that sound stodgy), like setting up a new mainframe and all of the associated software. In the last go-round, one of the groups had a problem. They were trying to make software that used to run on one machine, and read from a database there, run on another machine but still read from that same database. To do this, they used a function called DDF, or Distributed Data Facility. Well, this jewel didn't work as advertised. It was way slow. So, with the calm, professional demeanor that we always exhibit, we went into panic mode alpha. Could it be this? Maybe its that? What about -- the soda machine? Could it be the soda machine?

No, it wasn't the soda machine.

As my little part, I started reading about how this communication is supposed to work, to see if I could figure out if we'd done something wrong in setting it up. This got me into reading about how you set it up, and what the pieces of software do, how they talk to each other, all of this. And I was really enjoying this -- to the point that when they came and said hey, we found the problem, you can stop now, I was disappointed. Because I was enjoying reading about this stuff that had absolutely nothing to do with me, or what I do for a living. It was just fun stuff.

That's what I like to do -- find something and learn something about it. But it has to be something that isn't relevant to what I do. Like Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes, said, Its only fun if someone isn't making you do it. So I know what the M in M&Ms stands for. I know what a curtain wall is, and what the Bundle of His is. I know that in a Minuteman launch center, you don't 'press the red button', you turn the key. I know how a bar code works (well, kind of), and what Bernoulli's Principle has to do with airplanes. I know what an algorithm is. Stuff like that. And that's the kind of thing I like to write about, too.

Enough navel gazing. I was reading an article about the US Presidential election, the other day, and was startled to read that 'many undecided voters are going to wait until the day of voting to decide who they'll vote for. They'll use a heuristic to decide." Heuristic? I know what a heuristic is -- so do you; its a rule of thumb, more or less -- but to see the word in print in a newspaper was as flabbergasting as if they'd said 'They'll flip a coin, and of course the odds are not, exactly, fifty-fifty, though they are very, very close.' It was a literate, accurate phrase. I'm not used to seeing that in the newspaper. I did wonder what the heuristics used would be, though. Well, Laura Bush is a charming person, but Teresa Kerry seems a bit tough; I'll vote for Laura, I mean, George. Democrats are for the little guy, Republicans are for the big guy; I'm a little guy, so I'll support the Democrats, and vote for Kerry. Hmm... Somewhere, some probably has this stuff figured out, and uses the subliminal and not-so-subliminal images in their ads.

How many red ties, white shirts, and blue suits do these guys have, anyway?



1) Mars and Murray. The company was founded by Forrest Mars and Bruce Murray.
2) Window wall. Used in a building where the support comes mostly from the core, where the elevators and such are.
3) Heart muscle that transmits 'electrical' impulses between nodes.
4) One big key for the commander, one small key for the deputy. On my mark, three, two, one, turn, light on, light off, missile away.
5) Binary code, with white/black being 1/0. Position matters.
6) The shape of the wing, seen edge on, makes the air flow slower on the bottom, where it's flat, than on the top, where it's curved. The slower air has more pressure, which generates lift. Though I did once see an old Army Air Corps writeup of an accident which listed the crash cause as 'insufficient lift in the air'.
7) It's what you get when the former vice-president dances. (Sorry.)

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Breathing Deeply

A couple of articles I've seen lately have said that as things go, both political parties are convinced that terrible things will happen to the nation if the other party gets its man into the White House; further, that the other party will absolutely attempt to, if not outright steal, then certainly take advantage of every loophole, backdoor, and side entrance that they can in pursuit of grabbing victory. And I have to admit that while I cannot believe that my party would do that, I have only a little trouble in believing that the other guys most certainly would.

Its when I find myself thinking that, that I realize it's time for a deep breath. Should the wrong person win, the world will not end. If he does (the cowardly sneaking cur), I will take a deep breath and get on with my life (whats left of it, now that he and his crony are firmly in power). And I will try hard not to think 'By god, next time we will steal the damn thing.' I am better than that.

I do hope (in a minor way) that if my candidate wins, that we don't gloat too much. (Because you know that if they win, they'll treat it like a mandate from on high, and they'll be doing conga lina dances down Pennsylvania Avenue). But a little gloating, from the forces of truth and light...surely that would be okay?

Terrorism, continued

An article in today's Sunday New York Times details at great length the proposals, plans, and actions that were taken by a select group of Bush Administration officials in preparation for what they expected would be the capture of a large number of terrorists, including senior members of Al Qaeda and related organizations.

It is not a surprising article, because both the plans and the attitudes of the people making the plans has been described before, but it is chilling nonetheless, because the underlying and driving conceit of the people making the plans was that regarding the nature of this nations legal response to terrorism, only they alone knew best; further, that adherence to standard, existing legal practices would not only severely limit their ability to respond to and limit terroristic activities, but would provide aid and comfort to the terrorists.

Like John Galt, they determined that swift action, of a type to be determined by them alone, was necessary, and the devil take the naysayers. They made their plans secretly, cutting out major portions of the government and its processes at both senior and junior levels, acting with only cursory regard to existing legal tradition and conventions, feeling no need for legal, let alone Constitutional, support, save only what they themselves had created and approved. They felt that whatever action they thought right, was right, de facto, and objections to their actions were pusillanimous, misguided, and possibly seditious.

They acted as a cabal within the United States government.

And most of them are still there.

That's Why They Call Them Terrorists, Kent

I've been doing a little bit of thinking about terrorists and terrorism lately.

Thinking about terrorism makes me feel queasy inside, like when I contemplate the idea that people who look perfectly normal -- people who look just like me -- are pedophiles, and could be in contact with my child every day. It turns my stomach, and I don't want to even acknowledge that such things exist. Yet I think that I have to think about it, because its part of my world and my child's world.

Terrorism is the same thing. I don't want to think about it, don't want to acknowledge that it exists, and not even just exists, but exists in a particularly vile way. Its almost as if I can accept it, distastefully, if it only touches people that I really don't care about, but when it starts to touch people that I do care about, people like Ken Bigley and the woman who was just kidnapped who is the directory of CARE in Iraq, then I have to start thinking about it, trying to grapple with the idea of terrorism. Because as long as it is this amorphous blob, it's the bogeyman inside my bedroom closet, and there is no way to defend against it, let alone defuse it.

Not that I think I can do anything about it -- I doubt that I can. But its part of me to think that if I at least understand it, or have the beginnings of an understanding about it, then I will be able to begin to deal with it, in my own small way. In a way, it makes terrorism less emotional and more susceptible to analysis and attack.

To that end, I picked up a small volume titled Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, by Charles Townshend, and published by Oxford Press.

It is not fun reading. Although written in dry, lucid prose, it is difficult for me to be relaxed when I am reading it. My reading speed goes way the hell down, and I find myself going back to earlier paragraphs again and again, trying to remember the key points, the structure that the author is building to understand the origin and structure of terrorism. But although I am only a little bit of the way through this thin book, I have to say that he is doing a good job in providing the history of the concept, and in providing a method of analysis and explanation for what is still -- at least to me -- a difficult and inexplicable phenomenon. It helps me understand why these people do what they do, much as reading about how a pedophile or a serial killer views the world.

I resent having to know this terrible kind of thing, but I believe that it's necessary.

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Am I Biased? OOOOOHHHHH YEAH.......

When I see a roadsign for The Other Candidate, I think its a damn shame that people stick these things in public places, and I want to drive off the road and bump over it....but when I see a roadsign for My Candidate, I nod and smile.

When I hear that Nickelodeon held a mock vote, pointing out that they'd picked the winner in the last four elections, I scowl when I think they said that The Other Candidate won.... then smile when I realize that they said My Candidate won.

And when I hear polls saying that The Other Candidate is likely to win, I grimace and tell myself that these damn polls are all over the map and can't be right ....but when I hear polls saying that My Candidate is likely to win, I nod and think Yes, they've unquestionably got it right.

MAN, do I want My Candidate to win.....

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When did Mike Become a Liar?

I'm sitting here in front of my Dell Dimension 8100, wondering when Mike Dell became a liar.

Clearly, he did -- or Bill Gates, or both -- because I've seen the ads showing the guy with the Dell just having his eyes blur, the ISP service and the XP switching between apps is so fast, and I'm lucky if it switches in less than five seconds.

Course, it could be Comcast that's lying through their teeth, too, as I got to watch the 'Comcast High Speed Internet' logo for, oh, two minutes while I tried to get into email.

Could just be that oh, they neglected to mention it has to be a completely empty 2.6Ghz machine with, oh, about two terabytes of RAM and, oh yes, absolutely no body else on the line between you and the ISP.

But me, I think its simpler. I think they're lying, singlely and collectively.

Like they care what I think.

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Smoke

I just opened the bedroom window to get a little cool air, and I smelled a wood fire somewhere close. As I don't live in a forest, it's not alarming. Our neighbor has a wood stove, and I know of a couple of people in this development who do, too. It's a pleasant aroma.

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Sunday Night Reading

This evening, I read a number of things.

For one (or two) I read the Sunday papers. I read the Washington Post, of course; if I’m going to get any Sunday paper at all, I’ll get the Post, because I like the light reading in the Style Section (and trying to see if this week the Style Invitational will be good; it is, about a third of the time) and in the section that I think of as ‘Style 2’ because I can’t remember what its called; I also like the comics, and then going slowly through the paper itself. I usually leave Section One until I’ve read the others, as it requires more of an intellectual commitment than I am always willing to make.

I just tried three times to spell Willing as Whilling; for some reason, that just looked right.

My style in leaving the first section till the end will bag me, though, if I’ve picked up the Sunday New York Times, because they split the first section into two physical sections; more than once, I've gone back to Section One only to find that the article is continued in the second physical section, thats now somewhere on the pile of stuff that I've read. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to get both the Post and the Times -- they’re not likely to have different news, though they have substantially different secondary articles, and their spins on the major articles are usually different. What I do is, I pick it up at the store and look at the article that’s on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine. If it is something I want to read, I’ll get the paper; otherwise, not. You can pretty much count on me getting the paper if it has something about politics, society, or technology, and pretty much not if it has something about someone bemoaning the state of affairs. I have no use for that.

The Times magazine was about food, this time. I got it. Most of the articles were okay, nothing great, but I did read an article about two restaurants in Martinsville, West Virginia. That was pretty interesting, especially since it didn’t occur to me till the end of the article that what he was really talking about was the political landscape -- people who like/want change versus people who don’t.

The Post Style2 section had a recipe for brownies that I’d like to try. It was part of a couple of articles on political get-togethers. I’m not much of a joiner but there are times I wish I could talk with people about politics. Seems like that’s fraught with peril, though. Its got to be people who are willing to listen as well as talk. Not even sure I can say I fit that definition. Sometimes I think my intellectualism doesn't go very far down. I did find myself mulling over the definition I'd heard about the difference between conservatives and liberals is that the latter like to include everyone -- well, most everyone -- and feel that it isn't legitimate political discourse unless they do, whereas the former like to include just those who think their way, and no further; whats the point? I'm a liberal but there are times I wonder if liberals are too inclusive for their own good.

So those are two things I read. Then I also read a couple of articles that I had saved from papers that I’d bought before we left for our trip, and I leafed through an issue of The Economist that had also come. (I was surprised not to see The Economist on display anywhere in London. Guess I just was not in the right place.) Then I started to read one of two small pocket guides that I had bought at Foyles Book Store -- one is an introductory guide to Saint Augustine, and one is an introductory guide to the concept of terrorism. I am reading the second one. It is not fun reading, and I’m not sure I’ll read the whole thing, short as it is, but it is oddly satisfying.

And that’s it.

The Intelligent Use of Computers

I was thinking about programming the other day.

I know that programming is a word with lots of meaning, and one of the ones that I don't mean is when you create a marketing program that uses bright, glossy magazines. I don't like those, because they tend to act as if all they have to show is bright, smiling faces, and I'll think Gee, I'd sure like some-o-DAT! Gives glossy a bad name.

Which is why I am always surprised to find that I not only like the brand magazine that the Chrysler Corporation puts out -- though I think, based on the masthead (and how come its called the masthead? Sounds nautical...) that it's actually published by Meredith Publishing, with content supplied by Chrysler -- but that the magazine is effective at what it is trying to do -- ie, it predispoes me to think kindly of Chrysler, especially when it comes to buying a new vehicle. Its unquestionably a marketing tool, but its well done. I usually admire things that are well done, particularly hamburgers.

But that isn't what I was thinking about.

The programming that I was thinking about has to do with the art and science of making a computer do things for you so that you don't have to do them yourself. I call myself a programmer, but that's not true. It used to be, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and presidential candidates were always assumed to be upright, forthright, and truthful, but it hasn't been true for years. Decades.

This is what I want. I have to log on to multiple remote sites every couple of months, just to make sure that my password is up to date. By multiple, I mean something on the order of ninety or a hundred. The process is just about the same in each case. I make a connection to my company's network. I either select the system I want directly from a menu, or I select an entry from the menu that brings me to a logon screen, from whence I get another menu, and then I select the system. I give it logon information, which either delivers me into the system I want, or delivers me to yet another menu from whence.... and so on. If the password has to be changed, I change it, and I write it down on the special supersecret spreadsheet I keep with all of my ids and password. And then I sign off again.

This is incredibobbly tedious. Repetitive, done the same way each time. Prime meat for a computer.

Now, I will bet serious money that there is, somewhere, a programming language that is powerful enough to automate this... and simple enough that someone like me can use it. Kind of like what Visual Basic was like, when it first started. Something truly simple. Even Java, I regret to say, is beyond me.

If I could find a package like that -- and it wasn't too expensive -- I'd buy it, use it, and propagate the idea to the people I work with, who all have the same onerous problem.

Because I really do believe in the slogan that a company I used to work for used:

The Intelligent Use of Computers.

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So - Was It Worth It?

Unquestionably. No attention paid to the standard responses, the sort of thing that you say to teachers and school administrators so that they will purse their lips and stamp their forms and sigh and allow that perhaps, just this once, in view of the great educational benefit... no attention paid to that, it was unquestionably worth it.

We of course received different impressions, different delights, each of us, but there were common wonders as well. We all liked the London Eye. Benefiting from the low number of tourists at the time, our capsule was half full, allowing us to walk back and forth, looking at the other capsules, up and down river, and over into the City, watching Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament from multiple levels and angles. My daughter delighted in simply sitting on the floor, up against the curved glass, watching as the skyline slid by.

And we were all taken by the Tower of London -- amazed that it wasn’t a single Tower, but a series of buildings and castles, complete with a moat (now dry, with a running track and tennis court), all sweeping up from the Thames, the Tower Bridge looming in the background. The grounds reeked of history to each of us, and we all listened with guilty fascination as the uniformed Beefeater (who said that they did not in fact know the origin of the name; all suggestions welcome) told us of the goings-on at the execution spot, and how one woman managed to get away almost to the end of the hill before being hauled back to be hacked to pieces. He told us too of the great Crown Jewel heist that almost made it, and would have had they turned right instead of left -- and that a little known fact was that the ER on his uniform stood, in his case, at least, for Extremely Romantic -- and this after his twenty-plus years of service to the Crown, culminating in recognition for honorable service -- or as he put it, ‘twenty years of undiscovered crime’.

Even the famous Tube had its charms, once we discovered how to manipulate it, taking the Bakerloo line down past Baker Street, sliding around on the Circle Line, navigating the Northern Line. It was hot, and crowded, at times, but it was still fun. And the Westminster Station was not to be believed.

But the single most amazing spot, one where we could have returned again and again, I think, was Westminster Abbey.

I’m not a religious person, and so the building did not fill me with any degree of religious awe. But that left lots of room for awe at the sheer history of the place -- the thought that the building had been there for almost a thousand years, that the names emblazoned on walls, and floors, were the living history of England. And even if it were not, the size and majesty of the building, the glass in the windows -- it damn near took my breath away.

All right, it did take my breath away.

Conversation with a Taxi Driver

When we were returning to London's Heathrow Airport this past Monday for our much awaited return home, we fell into conversation with our vehicle's driver about our trip -- what we'd seen (what? You didn't ride on a double-decker?) , what had taken our fancy (Westminster Abbey, certainly, and the Tower of London complex), what had surprised us (the multiple different accents of the native British, and the multiple foreign languages in use), what had charmed us (standing on Westminster Bridge, listening to Big Ben, feeling its tones resonate through us, thinking: This isn’t a recording, this isn’t a movie, this is the actual Big Ben, the one you heard in the audio clips from World War Two). And then we got onto the subject of the US Presidential elections (the driver thought that Bush would win despite Iraq). That led to a shallow detur into the concept of terrorism, when he told us a couple of things that surprised us.

For one, he insisted that the Al-Qaeda organization was unable to work effectively in Britain because that the British security organization, which he thought might still be called MI-5, had instituted a program to permeate public places with their own undercover personnel, who were alert to activities that were out of the norm. For example, he said, if you went to a shopping mall and simply sat and watched the people, you would see that there were some apparent shoppers who came and went repeatedly, carrying the same packages, going in the same direction as before, again and again. I thought it possible, but also possible that they were simply disorganized shoppers. The proof would be if you came back day after day and noted them -- by which time, if they truly were undercover policemen, they would have noticed you.

But the thing he said that really surprised us was that he thought that for all of the diversity of thought and opinion in Britain, there was a commonality of hope and support for the country as a whole. He thought that it would be inconceivable for most British people, no matter how they felt, politically, to foster or foment damage to the country, because it is their home, and they would simply not be able to harm it, or to help others to harm it. He was sure that terrorist organizations existed in Britain, but because of that basic core support for the country, he doubted it would be able to ever amount to anything.

This struck us as a remarkably naive view, but we hoped that he was right.

Trips Shouldn't Founder on Food

We stayed too long.

That’s surprising to me, because this trip was stretched to take every available day, and at nine days was only a brief part of the trip that it was standing in for, which was to have been a three week trip to Australia. Yet what we found was that after seven days, we began to grow irritable -- parents more than the child. A great deal of that was due to lack of what I’ll call ‘reliable’ food.

What we found there was that most of the food just didn’t suit us. It’s difficult to explain why -- it’s not as if the food was that of an alien race, and other visitors eat it happily -- but for whatever reason, we just couldn’t find food that we liked . Breakfast seemed oriented to people who liked small portions, delicately prepared. French toast, for example, was exquisitely made -- and each of the pieces of bread was about the size of two postage stamps. An excellent arrangement of berries, along with a large pot of creme fraiche, came along, so the presentation was artful -- but it was an appetizer. The ‘standard English breakfast’ sounded promising -- sausage, bacon, cereal, juice, muffins, coffee -- but the sausage was a massive, oily cylinder of meat (the casing; the inside was bland); the bacon was ham, in my terms; the cereal was effectively granola (from back when granola was just the province of Euell Gibbons), the coffee was industrial strength road tar, and the muffins were damn near cold. The juice was pretty good, though I found that if I hadn’t eaten anything, taking a gulp of it would knock my blood sugar down to my socks.

And lunch, and dinner, pretty much the same thing. About mid-week, we started looking for places that sold ‘real food’ that we might recognize -- Italian, for example -- and found some good stuff, but also surprises. Wonder exactly what kind on meat is in that ravioli? When the lasagna came, it had no sauce on it, and just a small decanter. By Friday, we had broken down to going to American places -- Mickey D’s, for example -- and even there, things weren’t quite right. My daughter’s McFlurry was smaller, the flavor was different, and the toppings were alien to her. My single hamburgers were lukewarm upon delivery. Dinner at Pizza Express was remarkable, because both times -- even though the meal was good -- I had to hustle downstairs to the john to barf. No idea what. And the pizza from Pizza Hut was disappointing -- smaller than expected.

Towards the end of the week, when we were both starting to feel a little nauseous routinely, we started to wonder if it could be the tap water. We weren’t experiencing the Trafalgar Two Step, but by that point we were eating so little, there weren’t many suspects left. So we just drank bottled or heated water. Did we have to? We have no idea -- but we were getting desperate. It was about day seven, and we felt the vacation slipping away. On Friday, we barely went out at all. We did what we could, not knowing what it was that was making us nauseous -- just knowing that it was something, and it was different than what we were used to.

At this point you might say well of COURSE its going to be different, and that what we saw was as close to being American and still be different as it was possible to be, and that’s true. And we didn’t make a Herculean effort to find good places to eat, so its possible that we passed dozens, hundreds every day. We just didn’t know how to find them, and having that question hanging over us each day -- are we going to find someplace decent today? -- got to be draining. It didn’t help that having this focus on food made us feel oh so American Tourist -- think pot bellied man with Hawaiian shirt and big camera. It wasn’t the way we wanted to be, but we didn’t know how to fix it.

We do now.

Next time, one suitcase will have soup, cheerios, and granola bars.

And the address of Kettners.

London and Back

We went to London.

Stayed for Nine days.

Which, as it turned out, was Two days too long.

Not because of the city, which could captivate you for days, weeks, years.

But the food.

I should have known. I'm a picky eater, and the food is generally regarded as not the reason that people come to England.

Me, I think the food is why they won the Battle Of Britain.

If they can eat that food, that way, every day -- and like it -- they're way tougher than anything the Germans could throw at them.

By the last day, I was so tired (why do they give you just a heavy blanket (okay, a duvet ) for a room that with the AC running at full blast doesn't cool down past, oh, sixty degrees?) and so queasy (actually puked three times from lingering aftertastes), I would get out of breath walking twenty five feet. I was wasted. Pitiful.

I know that people from other counties look at what we cheerfully eat, and try not to gag. One Australian friend asked if we truly did eat something called 'peanut butter and jelly sandwiches'. Then again, she was the one who told me about Vegemite.

Don't get me wrong. London was great, and I'd go again.

But I'd bring Rice Krispies. Granola bars. And a portable fan.

C Note World

And not the one in the middle of the eighty-eight keys, either.

For about the last year, I've carried a hundred-dollar bill around in my wallet, tucked away in the small pouch that also has a couple of band-aids. I liked the thought that if something amazing came up, something beyond what I'd normally experience, where a credit card was not available, I could still make a good stab at handling it. I didn't really think I ever would, but I was wrong. Today, I did.

We went to a local city to 'experience' a mass hot-air balloon launch. I can be dreamy about some things, and when it comes to that kind of thing, I most certainly am. I see deferential waiters refilling crystal flutes, chamber music, nicely dressed people, and all around, the whuff and chuff of hot air balloons being slowly, languourously inflated by cheerful, energetic people.

I do not see people selling funnel cake, fried Oreos, hot dogs, apple slices with caramel drizzled on them. I do not smell the droppings of a pony ride, or hear children stampeding anywhere. Nor do I hear a christian-oriented guitarist singing cheerful songs about how good it is to find the Lord above, below, and all around you. Oh, and I don't see price gouging for parking, either.

Guess which reality I found myself in? Hint: the parking was what let the C-note see the light of day.

But there was a tethered balloon (one of the one-and-a-half hot air balloons we saw the whole time that we were there), and the offspring and a friend went up in it, peering over the side at the ground that seemed so far below. They liked that, so that part was good.

And we got lost coming home.

The NRA and Iraq

I know this is a simplistic observation. Sometimes, it's the only kind I make.

The National Rifle Association thinks its perfectly okay for people to have weapons out the wazoo. Hand guns, shot guns, rifles, machine guns, bazookas, tanks, you name it. They say it's part of the culture.

People in Iraq have weapons out the wazoo. Hand guns, rifles, machine guns, mortars, mines, you name it. They say it's part of the culture.

Would the NRA, if asked, say that it was perfectly okay for Iraqis to have all those weapons, despite what it means to our troops and those of other nations? As well as any other stray foreign nationals? And any Iraqis that the weapons wielders take a dislike to?

Silly me. Of course they would. They'd say it proved that the Iraqis were civilized. If under-armed.

Sigh.

Midnight Thoughts

I am not a particularly religious or philosophical person. But over the last week, I've woken up more than once from a sound sleep to some variant of this thought:

No one -- no one at all -- gets to die and not find out if there really is any form of afterlife. And if there is, absolutely no one gets to evade it. If there really is judgement, everyone gets judged. If there really is reincarnation, everyone goes through it. Everyone.

Enough to make you start lighting some candles at your local church. Or paying a little more attention to your moral compass. You know, just in case. I've tried wrapping some rudimentary college-philosophy-course logic around it -- the 'do well, and if there is an afterlife, you'll be better off, but whether or not, the world will be better off ' sort of thing -- but the truth is, it's just a scary concept.

Though the thought that I might see a friend who died last year is comforting. I really miss her.

The Wanting of Kerry

In The Wanting Of Levine, a decades-old novel from which most of my political knowledge comes ( before then it was Advise and Consent; at least I've updated my knowledge base by ten or twenty years), Levine comments to an associate that the political convention is stocked with a lot of political amateurs who, thinking that they see a wave of support, can be stampeded into getting on to the bandwagon.

I wonder if that is what is happening with Bush. And, in reverse, to Kerry. Another way to ask that question is, why are Bush’s poll numbers improving, and Kerry’s are decreasing. In The American President, the character of the pollster says that ‘The country has mood swings’, and I agree with that assessment. I think that people are starting to shift their opinions, even though most of them (including, too often, mine) are on the order of what Heinlein once described as 'the process of what they called making up their minds'. Putting it another way, we're usually emotional in how we make up our minds, and so I suspect the reason for any poll movement is predominantly based on emotion -- how we feel.

I am not unalterably opposed to voting for Bush, but it is unlikely that I would do so. His approach to life is too corporate, too politically motivated, too ‘old Texas mentality’ for me to feel comfortable with him. And yet, if he managed to do the right thing most of the time, handling the big issues as I think they ought to be handled, I’d be willing to go his way. Because I do agree that the idea of regime change is an unsettling one, and because I know that my side is no more morally correct than his. For every instance where I see hidden agendas, I am sure that my side has them, too. Being Democratic does not automatically mean being better.

Basically, I could vote for him if I thought that I could trust him -- to do the right things, to be a trustworthy person. But I don’t. I think he is steered by polar stars with which I do not agree.

I don’t think that Kerry is a ‘nice guy’, but now I want to see him kick ass and take names. I want him to punch the Republicans in the areas where they're soft - on the rationale for staying in Iraq, on the stuttering economy, on the war on terror (and while we're at it, how exactly do you have a war on something so nebulous? I think a better name would be The Effort to Create a Climate Which is Generally Iminical to Terroristic Activities, but I guess TECCWGITA -- Tech Wuh Jitta -- does lack a certain ring.) But focus on the broad issues, not simply on the Republican issues, because that's how you engage the public, which isn't happening now. Drop the talk about swift boats and whether Bush cheated to get out of the draft -- it’s not relevant now. Talk about what’s happening now, and what is expected to happen. Don’t get limited to the sexy items or the ones that only one side wants. One of Bush's great strengths has been his ability to talk and talk and talk only about what he and his handlers want to talk about, so that the debate devolves to only what he wants to discuss. Kerry cannot wait for George to agree to discuss the broader spectrum of issues, because George -- and more specifically, those who do the heavy thinking for him -- isn't going to do that. He won't touch them unless he doesn't have a choice.

The time to punch hard is now.

Timing is Everything

A few days ago, we decided that our daughter should stop taking piano lessons. She enjoys it, but just didn't have the time for practicing during the week, due to heavy homework pressures, and resented giving up half an hour on the weekend to do it.

We felt badly about the decision -- visions of 'lifelong pleasure through piano' fading in our minds -- but it seemed reasonable. Plus, we would save money on the piano rental, and on the insurance for value of the rented piano.

Today we found that a neighbor is selling their piano for a decent price.

The Art of Politics.

From today's New York Times--


"...(T)he recent Democrats...believe in the old Progressive view that if you give the public the facts they'll see through the lies. Republicans have more of a sense that the public likes to be entertained and that issues are essentially dull."

- Lewis Gould

By criminy, I think he's got something there.

Paging Doctor Fashion

From today's Sunday Times 'Sunday Styles' section:

What I'm Wearing Now
In a workplace where scrubs and sensible shoes are always in fasion, Dr. Teena Shetty violates the dress code with flair. Dr. Shetty, 30, typically wears high heels, flowing skirts and fine jewelry (along with a white doctor's coat) while seeing patients....

Do patients assume that since their doctor is fashionably dressed, the doctor is successful, and therefore good?

Or do they resent the idea that their illness paid for it?

I think the latter.

Object of Desire

Cameras are sexy. For me, they are objects of desire.

I was just at the Noah Grey photography site, admiring his work once again, and noted that one page had an image of a Leica in the corner. Matte black.

I wanted it.

I don't need it. I don't do any photography to speak of, any more.

I still wanted it.

I still want it.

Oooohhh.......

The Redmond Has Landed

Well, according to Windows Update (motto: We're not tracking private information about you, honest), I have SuckerPunch2 now installed on my PC.

I'm not all that impressed by the Security Center -- I particularly liked their suggestion about how to find out if you have a software firewall installed -- 'Look for programs with names that suggest a firewall' -- but it is nice to have, since it lets me turn off the Tiny Personal Firewall, with which I had gotten increasingly irritated. I know, the Windows Firewall is not as slick, but thats okay. At least, till I find out what holes it left open.

But one thing that does please me is that IE now has a pop-up blocker built-in, and you can customize it to allow pop-ups on certain sites, or of a certain intensity. I like that.

So, on the whole, not bad. So far, anyway.

Sheesh.....

Well, this has been a fairly putrid week.

Labor Day, we cancelled plans to go out to a local festival because my daughter had what looked like chicken pox, but which turned out to be a severe allergy reaction, though from what, we don't know. She's hoping its hamburger, which she hates.

Yesterday, I came down with a hacking cold and had to take both aspirin and Nyquil before I could get to sleep. Woke up feeling loggy and denser than normal.

And today, it's raining.

What's tomorrow,surprise audits?

Labor Day, Labor, and Laborious Thoughts

A cool Labor Day morning. As we do every Labor Day, one of us recalls the comedian's line from several years ago, about how odd it is to celebrate labor by taking the day off. I seem to recall that the celebration is actually in recognition of the solidarity of labor rather than the function itself, but whatever -- its a funny juxtaposition.

The older I get, the more I find that I am reluctant to do labor that I don't particularly enjoy. I like to think that I have an independence of spirit about that, but what I actually have, I think, is more of a willingness to slack off -- to not give my all to something where I don't think that it's a worthwhile use of my talents. Or isn't particularly interesting. Not that I think my talents are all that great, but they're there, and work that doesn't take them into account doesn't get my devoted attention. Which puts me in mind of an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show wherein the newsroom manager is trying to decide who to give a bonus to. The obnoxious announcer says that while he has been giving his all, if he got more money he would give more than 100%. The manager replies that he doesn't think he wants to see this guy giving more than 100%, given what he knows 100% is like now.

Classic management theory -- by which I mean "the management theory that I've read in the last ten years, and with which I agree" -- holds that managers look out for the health and effectiveness of their organization by looking out for the happiness and productivity of their employees. I don't know if that was ever widely true (I'd like to think there were places where it was ) but it's certainly not true now, particularly in large organizations. Now, managers have to hustle just to survive, and the good feelings of their employees are at the bottom of their list of things to worry about -- when they're on the list at all. I have believed for some time that you are responsible for your own happiness in business, now more than ever. That I haven't been happy means that I have myself to ultimately blame. Part of that unhappiness comes from actually believing those management articles, I realize.

I've got to stop believing what I read.

Happy Labor Day.

Just for Fun, Linus?

I've just been reading Linus Torvald's autobiography, Just For Fun, which is a mistake, all things considered.

Not that it isn't interesting reading -- it is. He comes across as a real person, who isn't the altruistic hero that I thought he would be. Got the book because I've been curious for some time about how Linux got started, and how one person could do all of that, and the book lays it right out. It's a thin book, and I'm about three quarters of the way through it, and I'm having a good time with it. So thats not which it's a mistake.

The reason that its a mistake is that I have this character flaw that when I read something about someone whose achievements I admire, I start to get the feeling that maybe I could do something like that, too. This completely ignores the fact that the people with the admirable traits usually have something, and sometimes several somethings, that I don't have, most notably a combination of brains -- which he is very modest about -- and a goal. I've got brains, sure, but no where in that league. And as for a goal, my most challenging goal seems to be surviving the crap that I've been getting in the way of work at my job. In no significant way does this make me different than tons of other folks, but somehow when I read these things, I start to think that maybe I could do it, too. Not write an operating system, but -- something. Something worthwhile, something notable, something -- satisfying.

It usually takes about three to five days for the feeling to go away, and then I'm back to normal. But for a while, there...

Spending Money

Probably the worst time in the world to be thinking about spending money for things that you don't need is right after you've transferred money into your checking account to pay bills related to both taxes and vacations....and found that you didn't transfer enough.

Its not a major deal -- our theory is that while taxes are considered routine expenses (and therefore have to be paid out of routine income; failure to be able to do so means that we need to rethink how much money is going into savings versus checking), vacations are capital expenses which can be paid for out of savings -- money fund, savings accounts, things like that.

You can't do that all the time, of course, which realization has given me a very small appreciation of the mental gymnastics that professionals go through when they decide if corporate expenses can legitimately be charged to available funds, or if they have to be met through recurring earnings (its one of the places, I bet, where the jiggery-pokery happens when the CEO wants earnings to look good). But it makes doing the transfer a little more soothing, emotionally.

Still an unsettling experience, though.

Chocolate: good for blood vessels

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-08/31/content_1928711.htm

BEIJING, Aug. 31 (Xinhuanet) -- Greek researchers have found that eating dark chocolate seems to make the blood vessels more flexible. Now for some news to make chocolate-lovers feel less guilty: eating dark chocolate seems to make the blood vessels more flexible, which helps prevent the hardening of the arteries that leads to heart attacks. China Radio International reported Monday. Researchers at Athens Medical School in Greece studied 17 healthy young volunteers and found that eating dark chocolate may improve the function of the endothelial cells in the walls of the blood vessels for at least three hours.


...and the conga line through the center of Hershey, Pennsylvania wraps right past the Penn State Heart Center.....

Assertions of Power

In an article "Formidable Bush of 2002 Now Merely Life-Size" in today's Washington Post, the following appears:

In its own way, that answer was of a piece with the values Bush has followed at every major juncture of his presidency. It is a brand of politics that believes the assertion of power can create the reality of power - and that it is preferable to act boldly and make other politicians accommodate Bush's agenda rather than try to accommodate their doubts.

The writer presents that as an example of a defective style of governance, but that statement makes sense. In the absence of clearly-stated power, or limits to power, why should a person placed in a position of authority and responsibility refrain from expanding into a vacuum? Clearly, action can generate the assumption that that action was legitimate. Even when there are objections -- the Constitution doesn't allow this; the guidelines didn't intend that -- action generates its own legitimacy, and that legitimacy can ease its way into the popular assumption of 'how things are supposed to be'. To quote that great constitutional scholar, Forrest Gump, 'Legal is as legal does'.

Pursed Lips, Furrowed Brow

When the house air conditioner kicks on, the fan runs at a (presumably) constant rate.

It sucks the air at a steady rate through the air filter

The suction makes a whistling sound.

Wonder if you could estimate the level of clog in the air filter by changes in the frequency of the whistle?

Fun with Other Computers

This has been quite the day.

I got up early to submit a job on a remote computer system. And I spent the day watching the job run, waiting for it to complete. I needed it to complete so that I could say my installation of a product was correct.

And it would not complete. It kept abending -- failing. No idea why. Tried all sorts of things. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

And at around 3:30, the person who told me how to do this blithely mentioned an 'oh, I forgot to tell you.....' so that the step which ran for two hours, last time (before failing) ran in 30 seconds.

Sometimes, I could just go postal.

More fun with Microsoft

Late last night, I found a Microsoft Knowledge Base article which specifically addressed the problem I was having in getting OE reinstalled -- that being, the installer would stop because it detected that the identical verson was already installed. The fix was to zap the registry and tell it that the version was not installed. And then do the installation.

OE still isn't working 'right' -- but we can send and receive emails again. Which is all I want out of an email package.

MSOFT (XP + IE + OE WAB) = FUBAR.

Just spent about six hours over two days trying to fix a problem with Outlook Express. It couldn't open the Address Book. And since it seems to do that when you try to open a screen to create mail, I couldn't send any mail.

Unquestionably my fault -- deleted some registry keys without backing up the registry first. Dumb, stupid, criminal, I know.

Restoring the registry keys did no good.

System Restore was as non-helpful as usual.

Did a reinstall of XP -- what they call an 'upgrade', though I don't know why. It was the recommended action (the other being, install from scratch, I guess). Course, that was a hardcoded recommendation on the page -- ie, it didn't ask anything, it just recommended it. Like a sleazy used-car salesman or insurance pusher. Didn't work. Did pop up with some new annoying things, but maybe they were there when I first installed ZP. Got rid of the ones that I could.

Created another ID for the pc, tried using that. Looked promising. Outlook could open the (empty) address book but it couldn't import the address book from the original ID. Pointed it to the folder where it was, and the display didn't show it. Dammit, I know it's there -- File Mangler shows it! (Excuse me, Explorer. Ahem. ) I copied the file to the Temp directory, and then Outlook could see and import it. Ah, progress. But I couldn't get that identity to import my folders. Though, with the gibberish string that MSoft uses to identify the ID, down in the Identities section, I couldn't even be sure I was trying to import the right old ID folders, anyway.

I said ah, crap (and other things), I'll do the install from scratch. Deleted the new id...and suddenly, Outlook with the old ID works. Well, mostly. Now, when I switch from ID to ID, it either a) only goes to the id that's listed in Manage Identitites as the one to use when starting a program, or b) if that box is unchecked, it glibly says hey, I don't know who you are -- so select your id again.

But it works. I can send mail, open the address book.

I can't hardly wait to see how this PC acts with SuckerPunch2 installed, though. Or how many 'improvements' Msoft slipped in there.

=================

Update: I displayed the Registry Keys, and exported them. That was apparently enough to fug up Outlook. Can't open the AB again.

Joy does not adequately express my feeling.

==================
Update: Poked around, deleted some programs, got an alert from XP that an update had arrived (I keep expecting SuckerPunch2 to show up via FedEx, carried in by a burly guy who's knees are giving out from the weight of the code). Updated, rebooted, and now oe kinda-works again. This must be what it's like to live on the slopes of Vesuvius. Was that thunder?

Bureaucratic Humor

From the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission web site:

"Committed to improving the quality of life for area residents, the Commission strives to create a synergy of economic vitality, environmental stewardship, historic preservation, customer service and fiscal accountability."


Went through there yesterday afternoon, east to west.

Pop quiz:
Does the phrase "EZ PASS ONLY FLASHING YELLOW LIGHT" mean

a) EZ Pass can only be used in lanes with a yellow flashing light.
b) Only EZ Pass can be used in lanes with a yellow flashing light.

Extra credit:
c) How visible are the yellow lights in bright sunlight?

Bonus question:
d) Does the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission web site accept email?

No hurry. Ignore the massive truck with Liberal, Kansas on the driver's door, a driver with a heavy hand on the air horn, and DANGER CORROSIVE EXPLOSIVE on the rear doors of the trailer.

Answers:
A) Unknown.
B) True.
C) Not very. They're on top of the toll booths, silhouetted against the sky. But you can see them from the plaza. Of course, traffic backs up way before that. See Liberal, Kansas, above. Reflect on ironic humor.
D) Nope. You can call, though.

Who says bureaucrats have no sense of humor?

Not So Thrilling

I usually like what I do, and as a result of just taking a week off, I'm not immediately nauseated by doing it again, this coming week. I suppose it isn't the greatest feel-good thought in the world, but it occurs to me that what I do would be considered pretty damn nice by people who have to actually work for a living. Not that the people at my office don't work -- they do, with varying degrees of energy and enthusiasm -- but they don't work hard, like gardeners and truck drivers. As I heard someone put it once, there are jobs that you shower before, and there are jobs that you shower after. Mine is definitely one of the former. So it's worth doing, even if I have to hold my nose while doing some of it. Offends my technical sensibilities, doncha know.

Some backstory -- when I was hired, I thought it was for a techie job. Turned out it was for a job that a clerk could do. I didn't like that, but since I didn't think I could get a job elsewhere, I settled for whimpering and moaning about it, sayng that I wanted to do other stuff -- techie stuff that I liked and knew how to do. After a while, the fellow who was my group's manager at the time said, well, okay, you can do this other stuff, too. After a while, my group's manager changed, and he asked me if I'd do the primary job for some other accounts, too, and I said that I would. It wasn't strenuous, I liked looking at other places even if the basic task was about as challenging as stirring soup, and it made him happy.

But now the skies darkened. The people at my account, looking to cut costs, said well, hell, we don't actually want to pay for you full time because the stuff you do doesn't take all or even most of your time. Which was true. So, they complained to my group's manager, and he said that he would like to find more for me to do. I pointed out that while I was willing to do more, I would really prefer it to be in the other area -- the one I liked. He said that he understood it, and then came up with several new things. None of them were in the area where I really wanted to work. But okay, they pay me, and all that, so all right. ((grumble, grumble)) Po' me.

Today I found out that while we were on vacation, that same manager had tried to get in touch with me to help them handle a problem. The problem was in the area that I want to work. I felt like that character in one of the Police Acadamy flicks who is found banging his head on a police cruiser. A bystander, asked to explain, says 'There was gun play -- and he missed it.' That's me. Damn, I wanted to do that! But, upon reflection, there was more. It occured to me that while the manager wasn't willing to let me do more work that I liked, he was willing to use those talents if the company needed them. But only then.

At the moment, I'm a bit - - ticked. And I’m finding the prospect of going back to work -- not so thrilling. I will, of course. But for the first time, I'm thinking that an end to my employment here is not five or six years from now (when I was thinking about retiring). It may be sooner than that.

Now, I'm not a person with a lot of initiative, and though my wife says (and means) that I can quit at any time, I'm not ready to do that. Our finances are in pretty good shape, but they do assume that I'll be earning this salary for the next five years. I don't know of any way around that. Though the management articles I used to read suggested that good managers listened to people, and let them (i.e., me) do what they could do well, that doesn't seem to pan out in my local version of Real Life. If I did have initiative and guts, I'd just bail, and do Something Else. Of course, I've noticed that by and large, the only jobs people get when they bail tend to pay a lot less, while demanding more. My golly, some are even 'shower after' jobs.

So.... right now, the job situation is Not So Thrilling. Po' me.

Superbus

Back from a week off, visiting relatives, and generally trying to forget about work, which is less thrilling than normal, about which, more later. But first, the Superbus.

Visiting in-laws, and it turned out that two relatives of theirs, which I suppose made them relatives of ours, were visiting. Didn't care for them too much --- a bit too loud, mentioning money-related items a bit too often. We met them at a brunch arranged by the relative, at a restored mansion (which seem to pop up in Connecticut all over the place), and I thought that would be the end of them. But they turned up at the relatives's house when we stopped by for a last-night's visit. And with them, they brought -- the Superbus.

That's not what the maker calls it. The maker is Winnebago, and they call it the Journey . Forty two feet long. Twelve feet high with the suspension air bags inflated. One hundred gallon gas tank. Queen size bed. Three televisions -- one full size one over the center driver's console, one smaller one tucked into the wall of the bedroom, one medium size one below, in the storage compartment -- it slides out for use when you're barbecuing on the grill (which also slides out). Satellite dish that erects and locks on while you're driving so that you don't have to wait till you're stopped to watch those TVs. Corian countertops in the kitchen area. Dishwasher. Microwave. Full size Sub-Zero refrigerator. Full size shower. Apartment size washer/drier tucked into the bedroom wall. Two couches in the plush lounge area (twelve feet wide with the sides extended). Small dining table/PC work station. GPS locator. Bose stereo system. Carpetting throughout.

No perimeter defense system or roof-mounted lasers, but heck, what do you expect for only (gulp) Five Hundred Thousand Dollars. But they got it for less. And actually, they weren't as money-arrogant as I thought. Kind of nice, actually. My cousin said that I liked them more, the more I learned about how much money they had. Hmm....that one touched close to home. Guess I'm touchy about that kind of flagrant success.

The Superbus. Making Volkswagen Beetles tremble from Florida to Maine, and points west.

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.