Terrorists, Auditors, and Thinkpads

I was just thinking about terrorists, because I read a provocative article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. And before that, I had been thinking about auditors, because my job involves working with people who worry a great deal about what auditors think. And I was thinking about Thinkpads, the laptop made by IBM.

I am still reading the small, intense book about terrorism that I bought at a bookstore in London while we were on vacation, yet in a way I think that I learned as much about why terrorists do what they do from the NYT article, written generally on the topic of the hideous actions taken by kidnappers and terrorists in Iraq. The article is well worth reading, though intense (at one point, about three quarters of the way through, the writer says 'if you're still reading....', because he knows that this is not light stuff, not something that people enjoy having with their Sunday morning breakfast). He goes on to make several key points (not gainsaying all that went before); terrorists who perform and record hideous acts are doing so for two reasons: it raises their credibility with people who are moved by that kind of activity (raises what used to be called 'street cred'), and in so doing it makes them more of a 'player'; further, it brings others into their camp, if not up to their campfire, and inseminating them with the thought that truly, anything is permissible. And the other thing they do is present us, and any who have proclaimed a desire to eliminate them, with this conundrum: if you are seeking to eliminate the swamp rats, you'd better be willing to get face-down into the swamp. High tech, long distance weapons do not kill cockroaches; immediate, on the scene in-your-face actions do. In so saying, they are betting that a civilized nation will recoil in disgust from what is found to be necessary, and retire from the battlefield, leaving them the victors; if they do not, then they become ideologically the same as those they wish to destroy, losing any mantle of righteousness. I do not like this argument, as it is akin to 'yadda yadda yadda..and the terrorists will have won', but it seems to have several kernels of truth, to me.

Auditors -- well, one connection is simple: Auditors are corporate terrorists. And I would guess that they get the same message: truly, anything is permissible. Now, I don't deal with auditors routinely, but I do deal with and work for people who do. From that, I get the message that all bets are off. Used to be, you could be audited against general standards. Accountants had (and still have, I guess ) Generally Accepted Accounting Principles; doctors and lawyers have professional standards; other professions do, too. So your performance in what you do could be checked against those standards, however vague they might be. Over time, standards got tighter, thanks in part to our pals at, say, Enron (who recently filed to have their case moved out of Houston due to inflamed passions there -- said they couldn't get a fair trial. As if that were ever at the top of their personal accountability list. Or even on the list) and WorldCom and all of their ilk. Laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley, referred to by the cognoscienti as SarBox or Sox, came, intending to hold those executives personally liable for the integrity of their financial statements. Okay, thats fine. But now, apparently, we have auditors with a licence to kill. Not literally -- not yet -- but in all practical purposes. I recently was briefed on the results of an audit wherein the auditor wrote up things that he felt were 'inefficient'. Not wrong, not questionable, not opening a liability or exposure -- just 'inefficient'. And the corporation (for which read, the peons in my department) had to scramble before deciding that they could ignore the comments, this time.
I think what's happened is two things -- first, the people affected by the auditors and the audits directly, having to sit with them, spoon feed them information, and cosset them, are distant, organizationally, from the people who direct that they be sat with, fed, and cossetted. They simply don't know what its like. And second, the auditors are being told, find dirt. There's always dirt; if you can't find it, you're not any good at what you do.
This isn't the way it ought to be. Auditors can provide an honest, unbiased, standards-based look at how an organization performs, but they're being turned into corporate assassins by managers who believe that by unleashing auditors without restraint, they are crafting a personal and organizational defense, should legal liability ensue at some point. How could we have known about (fill in the blank) -- we let the auditors see all they wanted to! In essence, they're outsourcing insight of their own organizations, and the devil take the hindmost.
And as we know, corporate executives surely do know how to outsource.

Thinkpads -- well, maybe they don't know enough about outsourcing. I've got a Thinkpad that was issued to me by the company that I work for. Its an acceptable machine -- not as sleek or light as the Dell laptop that my wife's got, and with no where near the battery life (the battery meter was built by IBM's marketing department, I think; in one on-battery editing session, it went from '61 minutes left' to '49 minutes left' in about six minutes. And isn't that what marketing people do -- say performance is going to be about twice as good as it eventually turns out to be?) It's a slow, cranky machine, too -- waiting for it to boot all the way up is about a 5-7 minute process; I sometimes imagine little gnomes inside, down in the engine room, swearing as they shovel coal into the boiler that's being stoked to provide power. I half-expect to hear a steam whistle blow, hear a slow chuff--chuff--chuff.... The Dell comes right up -- not instantly (which is what we all want, I think), but in about half the time. Its nice.

I do know that I have unreasonable expectations when it comes to PC software. I expect elegance and functionality. I get good enough, with bells and whistles. Sometimes the bells and whistles are appreciated, and sometimes -- as in the case of the latest release of Quicken -- they annoy and irritate me enough that I delete the product and swear in the general direction of California (which, last I heard, was where Intuit is based).

Take mainframe capacity planning, for example -- a subject about which I know a little. I think that for, oh, seventy or eighty percent of it, doing the planning is pretty straightforward. Put the numbers in, turn the crank, look at the output for reasonability. That kind of planning should be readily accessible to anyone with an interest. Does such software exist?

Hah.

Once you add the complication of performance -- not just 'will this workload fit into the space that's open in this box' but also 'will it perform to these standards', then you start getting in to modeling. There are some very bright people working in modeling of computer software, and they know buckets of interesting things, including things that perhaps are only of interest to other modeling geeks. Poisson distribution, anyone? So I would understand that software for them would be more difficult to understand and to use. But I've seen some of it, written by some very bright people, and I've been told by others that this is truly excellent software. Which has led me to the conclusion that either I'm not as knowledgeable as I think about it -- totally possible -- or the emperor really doesn't have any clothes.

I know, I know -- if I'm so smart, why don't I write some of this stuff?

How does inability, so I can't, and lazyness, if I could, hit you?

Late Night Thoughts

I astonished my wife in bed tonight.

We were both drifting off to sleep, talking about this and that, and got onto the subject of religion, when I told her that the thought of death terrifies me. She knows that I am not fond of religion - I like the idea of religion, I like virtues they promote, but I don't particularly care for the institutions - so she was surprised to hear me say that, since she personally gets a lot of solace from the practice; consequently, she would think that if the idea of death terrified me, I'd want to be involved more with an organization that promises death won't be a bad thing. I guess it makes sense, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I think that religious people are looking for security in their daily lives and hope for the future, both of which are good things; they also want a sense that their life matters to someone -- I suppose in this context I should say Someone -- because it often doesn't seem to matter to anyone whether they live or die, prosper or fail. I’d like that security, but I can’t seem to find it in religion. Or anything else.

So dying terrifies me. I want to believe that either I just go out, never to be heard from again, or that my consciousness gets recycled into another body ( I like the idea of reincarnation, because it implies that I have the chance to see again people that I would like to see again. I guess it also implies I'll see people again that I didn't want to see again, or at all -- Hitler reincarnated? ) But the possibility that yes, there really is a judgment, that scares me. Because no matter how benevolent a God there is, I just can't see that deity looking me over and saying Yep, come on in. I'm not a bad person, but I'm not particularly Good.

That series of thoughts about the reason for religion got me to thinking about sports teams. I am not a sports fan. I don't understand how people can get excited about sports. Admire it, enjoy it, sure, but to listen to the discussions at my office, they attach their identity to some degree to how well 'their' team did. Tiger Woods not doing so well? They agonize over his decline. The Red Sox win? They are deliriously excited. I wondered if its a spin-off of the religious idea -- that by identifying with the team or the player, they're saying that there is a part of them that is rich, powerful, respected. I'm sure there are people writing sociology papers and dissertations on this kind of thing. I'd love to read them. I might not understand them, but I'd love to read them. The cool part is, half would say Yes and half would say No. Well, some might say It Depends.

I remember reading one of the Aubrey-Maturin naval novels (which I loved, pretty much all of them), wherein Maturin, the scientist (among other things) says confidently "I am a urinator", to the surprise and dismay of the captain, who tries to cut off his conversation, only to have Maturin continue on, it becoming apparent that what he is referring to is the act of diving (I think with the aid of a diving apparatus, not sure). I wondered at the time what word could possibly be taken to mean 'diving' when it currently has the meaning it does. All I could think of was that sleazy joke about Uranus and Klingons.

The author of one of the blogs that I like to read mentions that her favorite musician is Barry Manilow, and then says 'Deal with it". I was tickled by that concept, and by her aggressiveness about it. I think it makes perfect sense that she should like him -- the older I get, the more I appreciate music that's presented well, and done with style and flair. Not to say that there aren't musicians whose work appeals mostly to people much younger than me who do it with the same level of professionalism, but I don't know of them (after all, they're not talking to me). Manilow delivers, no doubt about it. I was surprised, the other day, to realize that I enjoy the singing of Tom Jones. I remember liking his work, oh, thirty years ago, but still? And yet, he fits the bill -- he's professional, he's creative, he does it with flair. He delivers.

Back to sleep.

This is not an Onion article....

...though it does make me want to cry.

From CNN/Money

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - ABC affiliates in at least eight states will not televise the network's broadcast of the World War II film "Saving Private Ryan" because they fear repercussions from U.S. regulators.

Affiliates in Alabama, Georgia, Iowa, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia said they were worried about running afoul of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington.
WOI-TV in Des Moines, Iowa, for example, said it decided to pre-empt the Academy Award winning film, which depicts several violent battle scenes and contains foul language, over concerns about possible fines by the FCC.

"Would the FCC conclude that the movie has sufficient social, artistic, literary, historical or other kinds of value that would protect us from breaking the law?" WOI-TV President Raymond Cole said in a statement appearing on its Web site. "With the current FCC, we just don't know."

Janice Wise, spokeswoman for the FCC's enforcement bureau, told Reuters it had received calls from broadcasters asking if the film would run afoul of the agency's indecency rules. Wise said the commission was barred from making a decision before the broadcast "because that would be censorship."

"If we get a complaint, we'll act on it," she said.

It's an interesting question.

It's the responsibility of government to rule on the acceptability of what's presented in a public medium. Greatest good for the greatest number, and all that. They can't censor, but they can and should offer an informed opinion. To say, in effect, 'we won't give guidance on how we'd rule, but we will come after you later if someone complains' -- well, that seems just plain rude. My gosh -- even the IRS offers guidance on how they'd likely rule. Not every time, but in significant cases, yes. I think that when you're at a point where you aren't sure if something would be viewed as legal or not, that qualifies.

Not playing 'Gotcha!'

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Talking with the Teacher

This evening, we had a scheduled Parent-Teacher get together. It was pleasant, with the child playing ringmaster based on a script (literally) drawn up by the teacher. Since the script included multiple time when the child wrote down what she was going to do in the future to address the (not many) deficiencies, I asked for a copy of it to bring home. This surprised the teacher. Maybe all of the other parents have excellent memories.

But what got my attention was when the teacher rattled off the child's grades for this period == two As, four Bs. Not great, not bad. Drop her GPA some, she could be President.

Then I noticed that both of the As are things she doesn't like - Reading, Spelling.

And three of the four Bs are things she does like - Math, Science, Social Studies.

She does better in things she doesn't like. And worse in things she does.

Huh?

Comfort Food

My tastes in food are plebian. I know that. And I have been willing on occasion to try new foods -- though my idea of new foods tends to be imported strawberry jelly instead of Welch's Grape.

But there are times when I need comfort food, and today was one of them. I am, I think, still disturbed by the outcome of the election. I thought I was getting over it -- after all, I started thinking about politics (and how to handle this calamity which has befallen my country), and economics (and how to save my money when this maniac's fiscal policies cause our economic structure to crash around me) . Hey, I was getting over it.

Apparently not. I've been sleeping a lot, ten hours last night, an hour today, and even though today was atypically beautiful and warm, I was tense, out-of-sorts. Even a good book hasn't helped.

So, tonight we had comfort food. Spaghetti and home made meatballs. The meatballs are superlative (he said modestly); significant ingredients include extra bread crumbs, for softness, and lots of parmesan cheese, for tang. Half of the batch was reserved for future use, and we had six of the remainder, simmered in and served in Newman's Marinara (excellent stuff). And we even had some wine.

Bliss.

Economic Wizardry

I just had an odd thought. Gee, how unusual.

According to a news article, we can expect some interest rate hikes as a result of the surprisingly strong job market. My first thought was, okay, that makes sense. But then I thought 'the economy has two components -- a base component that is what it actually produced and consumed, and a flexible component that adds some or a lot to it, as a result of expectations.

Say the economy was expected to produce $100 of goods, but it actually produced $120. This might lead the Fed to say that interest rates, which used to be, say, 1%, are now going to get bumped to 1.1%, to act as a brake. So interest earnings that would have been, say, $1.00 (100 * 0.o1) will now be $1.32 (120 * 0.011) -- and people will put the two together and say 'Hey, things are good - the level of the economy used to be $101, now its $121.32 -- production went up $20.32!' When in fact, it only went up $20 -- the rest is interest, ie, funny money that you can't make forecasts on, because interest levels can be changed at any time.'

So, if you're trying to gauge how the economy is doing, do you take that funny money into account, or not?

Processes

I work for a company that maintains large mainframes. We make lots of changes to them on a weekly basis. Over the last year or so, the number of problems we've had has gone down substantially. Usually, those problems have come out of nowhere, and we couldn't have anticipated them. Sometimes, we could have, had we known the right question to ask, but we didn't because you don't ask the question until the problem has occurred. I suppose we could have a list of every possible question - - but the list would grow weekly, and pretty quickly we'd be doing nothing for the first three days of the week but running the questions.

So now the people we work for have noticed this reduction, and they're asking: what'd we do to improve?

What they want to hear is that we decisively analyzed our processes, identified and isolated key elements which were prone to failure, and installed redundant and failover components such that failure in the primary component did not compromise the integrity of the system. They want the equivilent of Evidence-Based Medicine.

The truthful answer is, sometimes you're lucky, and sometimes you're not. We try, and we're experienced, but lately, we've just been lucky.

Making Friends

I was thinking about the whole idea of making friends, this evening. Not exactly sure what brought it up -- I was keying in some stuff for work, and found myself musing about this blog, and the couple of people that I've corresponded with, briefly, as a result.

You send your child out (Go out and play) and you tell them to 'make friends'. And they do, with an effortless style that only the most self-assured of us can do, once we pass our twenties. They have fights and spats, and they announce that 'I don't like Zoe any more', who was her best friend last week. You nod seriously, while thinking 'kid stuff'. But most of the time, they just do it - they just go out and meet people, make friends.

I've never been much good at that. I hear of people who still keep in touch with people they knew in high school, who are members of organizations, who are not spooked by the idea of getting to know new people, and I wonder: how do they do that? Its not that I stay at home, and hide in the closet. And its not that I am spooked by the idea of talking to people I don't know: I delight when the opportunity comes to talk to large groups, because it's something I'm good at.

But making friends -- one on one -- well, as Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott said in quite another context -- that's hard.

Me and Lois Lane

In one of the Superman movies, three criminals escape from the Phantom Zone and make life generally uncomfortable for Superman and anyone within about five miles of him. One of the subplots is that Lois learns his secret identity; at the end of the flick, he mesmerizes her, so that she forgets it, and, as a side effect, all of the devastation that's been visited on Metropolis, a city that probably has a standing designation as a federal disaster area. Coming to, she looks around the newsroom and cheerily asks 'So, what's new with the world?' And reaps a harvest of stares.

Now that the election is over, I feel some identification with that. Driving in to work this morning, I caught a brief article about Arafat's condition, and thought "Who?" And then it came back. Oh, yeah, Arafat, Palestinian, got it. Its as if while the campaign was going on, I swapped completely out of this world and into one where it really mattered that I keep up to date on what was going on in the political zone, have opinions on troop deployments and gay marriage and transportation funding. And then, when the bubble burst, here I was again. Life slowed down to sublight speed, and the most important thing was whether we remembered to get milk, whether I had sent out that email I meant to send, and, oh yeah, I really should call my periodontist. Major political schemes have no being in that world -- they simply don't exist; they're completely phase-shifted out of sight. Life is quieter now. And that's not a bad thing.

Though every so often I find myself thinking "There's something about Clark Kent...and Superman...right on the tip of my tongue..."

Thinking about that Map

This evening, flipping through channels -- pressing harder on the remote when the channel seemed to have anything about the election -- I stopped and went back to one channel. It was the Weather Channel. I turned to my wife and said 'Isn't it nice to see a map that doesn't have blues, reds, and notes about electoral votes?'

The image of that last map put up with CNN sticks with me. And though I desperately wanted Kerry to win -- my wife said this evening that I seemed to be furious at Kerry, and I was, for most of the day -- I have to reluctantly admit one thing. If Kerry had won Ohio, and therefore the election, resulting in a map that was blue along both coastlines, dipping down across Pennsylvania and into Ohio, then up, and left the other 60% of the states red -- I would have thought that there was something wrong with the map. Because regardless of population centers, it doesn't seem right for someone to get to be President when they haven't won in a majority of the states.

That could be my simplistic view of life, burning me again. Because it could be that, guess what, nobody wins a majority of the states -- more accurately, nobody wins because they won a majority of the states. They win because a majority of the people voted for them, regardless of where those people reside. Just happens that the population density is greater near the water.

Yet for some reason, the idea of winning without winning a majority of the states -- that bothers me.

That Hurts.

It really does. I haven't cared so much about an election since....well, I think I was in high school, and not actually sure what an election was.... When Kerry conceded, I was so incredibly pissed as not to be believed. Not because he'd conceded -- that made sense -- but because something I really wanted had just died. I just listened to part of his speech to the troops, but I had to stop listening, because I was still furious.... furious about how it turned out, furious about the fact that we'll have that smug SOB and his cronies around for another four years.

Inside of me, something is saying okay, okay, but look -- you don't like it, but that political map is telling you something. That amendments against gay marriage passed in multiple states is telling you something. That more conservative people are getting elected is telling you something. That people on both sides stole lawn signs is telling you something. And if I have any intelligence at all, I have to listen, and to learn from it.

I heard someone say that now the Democrats will form a circular firing squad. Maybe thats true. And maybe now I understand why people get crazy and join ultra leaning groups. I don't think -- I don't think -- I'll do that. But I do know this. I'm going to start paying more attention to politics.

But not this weekend. I won't be reading the news sections of the Sunday papers. Because it'll still hurt too much.

Well, this is scary....

At 9:45 EST, Bush has 170 Electoral Votes, and Kerry has 112. Which means that Bush is about 63% of the way there, and Kerry is about 41% of the way there.

Put another way, if this keeps up, I won't have to worry about tamping down the Democratic urge to be supercilious.

Okay, there are no results from Florida, Pennsylvania, or Ohio yet, but I assume PA will go for Kerry, and Florida for Bush, so thats not terrific news.....

(sigh) Four. More. Years?

If I Get Much, Much Better....

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at photography, maybe someday I'll be half as good as these guys.

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Light Thoughts

Not knowing all that much about physics, I can be easily impressed by demonstrations of facility there. In The Cuckoo's Egg, by Clifford Stoll, a graduate student in physics, he said that for his (doctoral?) examination, he was asked why the sky is blue, which he answered effortlessly. He was then asked to explain the concepts of diffraction and diffusion, which he'd used in the first explanation. And then he was asked to speak about the effects of diffraction on the molecular level ... you get the idea. I don't think nearly that abtrusely, but this morning, as I was sitting at the breakfast table, I was looking at the light playing on the barn across the field from us. It was a very soft, gentle light, almost a Vermeer quality, and I mused a bit about what causes that quality of light. As far as I could go, though, was 'dust in the air. Or something like that.' No challenge to Clifford from me.

This may be my morning for confusion. Part of it was my dream, last night, wherein I was back in college, trying desperately to make my way through a milling crowd, all of whom seemed to know where their classes were on this first day. I didn't have a clue. I went through the cafeteria line twice, on the chance that it was posted there. I circled the big table that had just tons of leaflets, pamphlets, books, computer printouts, newspapers scattered across it. I went up to the information desk, with no help. I even went outside of the building, into the crisp fall air, and thought to call the main office, asking them where the class information was, only to hear 'Its in the lobby. Where you were.' I never did find out.

Not to read too much into it, but I wonder how much that dream reflected my political thoughts of late. I suppose I ought to be glad that if I was dreaming of school, it was at least college -- if it had been high school, there would likely have been slogans on the walls like Don't WORRY, Vote for KERRY, or Don't be a TUSH - Don't Vote for BUSH. High school slogans are not notable for their elegance of expression. I recall that one poster, trying to get people to come out to be in several plays that the drama folks were doing, said in large letters HEROIN, and then in small letters 'or hero, you should come to the drama department'. That one didn't go over too well with the faculty.

Maybe thats what my subconcious is telling me. We need some adults to be in charge.

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Vote, or live with the consequences.

Vote!

Vote for Kerry if ever you can.

Vote for Bush if you really, really must.

But vote!

Apples and Oranges

I've never actually liked the concept of 'comparing apples and apples'. I know what people mean when they say it -- you want to ensure that you're comparing compatible concepts -- but to me, its always made more sense to compare apples and oranges. The differences are obvious -- seeds in the middle, seeds in the fruit; on a tree, on a bush; apple pie, orange...um.

But I like it when you can make comparisons like that. I have to watch out for that, in fact, because I so much like that kind of comparison, I have to be sure that I'm not boiling things down too far. Occams razor cuts both ways.

Years ago, when my wife went to the Million Mom March (I surprised her with a sign in the front yard praising her actions; I liked that she was getting to do something she really wanted to do), I spent some time trying to understand why gun owners are as they are. I'm not a gun owner, and I didn't understand why gun owners were -- and still are, of course -- so vehement about their defense of having guns. When I would see what I thought were perfectly reasonable suggestions -- you have to have certified training before you can have a gun; you have to prove that you lock up the gun; trigger locks -- I would be amazed at the ferocity with which people would say Absolutely Not! Some of them, like Charlton Heston, I could ignore; I figured he's been crazy since Planet of The Apes. But others seemed like reasonable people, and I wanted to understand why they thought as they did.

So, when a group called The Second Amendment Sisters set up shop at the MMM rally, I took note of their web site, and I wrote to them. Got into a series of emails with a woman who strongly believed the the Second Amendment said, by god, exactly what it said -- shall not be abridged, I think the wording is. But she also felt strongly that gun owners have the responsibility to be safe with weapons. We differered on some things, but I got to understand that for some gun owners, at least, it came down to this: gun ownership meant independence and taking responsibility for your own actions. I couldn't agree with the conclusion, but I did agree with the statement, and I was glad I asked. I learned that gun owners can be reasonable, even when I don't agree with where that reason brings them.

Now today's Post says that the question between Bush and Kerry can be capsulized (is that a word?) in the fact that Bush feels vehemently that attacking Iraq meant attacking terrorism, and that you beat terrorism by attacking terrorism, whereas Kerry feels that attacking Iraq meant giving people who were predisposed to become terorists, but hadn't, the rationale to do so; by so doing, we made more terrorists than we stopped.

Black and white. Apples and oranges.

As it happens, I think they're both right.

By attacking Iraq, we did attack a place where terrorists lived and operated, and we made life difficult for them. But we also made life difficult for people who were not terrorists, and we made some of those people willing to cross that line. Attacking was not a good/bad thing; it was a bad thing done with good reason, and with both good and bad results. Bush was not wrong for attacking, but he was wrong for not stopping when it became obvious that the cause was not valid. Kerry is right for saying that we've boosted the likelihood of terrorism, but wrong for saying that this made the original attack wrong.

Apples and oranges are much easier.

Responses

Okay, sometimes I'm a little slow.

I just found out that when I send an email response to someone who's been kind enough to write to this blog (which then gets forwarded to my email box), my response goes to a 'no-response' box. Which I am guessing means it went into the bit bucket.

I'm really sorry. I just went out and posted responses to the ones I could find, and I'll look some more in a bit. I really do appreciate comments, and it appears that I've made it look like Yeah,yeah, who cares.

Not at all true.

Political Theory, Political Action

I'm not a great political theorist. My level of political sophistication is more Mayberry, RFD than Thomas Jefferson. Although I know that the Vice President of the United States did, in fact, suggest that a United States Senator should perform a sexual act upon himself, I tend to think of that as happening 'out there' -- not related to where I live. And I'm only faintly bemused by the idea that organizations dedicated to ensuring a fair election are coming here -- not to learn how to do it, but to do it.

That was then, this is now.

Yesterday coming back from grocery shopping, I was a little surprised to note that a home up the street from ours didn't have its Kerry yard sign any more. Gee, I thought, I wonder why. Then I came over the rise to our home - and stared.

There wasn't a Kerry sign there, either.

On the off chance that a large blue and white sign could have somehow become invisible, I got out, walked over, touched the slender post upon which the sign had resided. Post, yes. Sign, no.

I was furious. I wanted to race down the street and hammer at the door of every house with a Bush sign, asking which of them was the SOB that had done it. I didn't do that. I did go to the other house and ask, did you lose your sign? And when they said that they thought it had blown away in last night's storm, I pointed out what had happened to me. And that all of the Bush signs were still there. They were startled. They said it made them feel creepy, to know that people like that lived around here. Me, too, I said.

As it turned out, the woman works near the Kerry headquarters in a local city. She told me where it was. I drove down there, still fuming. Parked, walked into a hubbub of activity. Finding out that they were not equipped to take credit card donations, I darted out to an ATM, withdrew a sizeable amount of cash (sizeable for me, anyway), came back, gave it to them. The woman at the reception desk was -- well, she looked at the money and said 'How much money are you giving me, anyway?' Not as much as I'd like to, I replied. I took three Kerry signs, and left.

One for my neighbor, should she want to replace the stolen one. One for me, now taped to our lamp post, with the light on (it'll be on till the election is over), and one to sit in the front dashboard of the van, to be used if needed. In other words, if the SOBs take the sign from the lamp post.

I know. In the great scheme of things, this is nothing. Do a Google search on 'stolen yard signs', and you find out its happened in lots of places, on both sides of the fence. But this happened to me. Remember the defintion of a conservative? A liberal who's been mugged? My house had been mugged.

What kind of people can do this sort of thing?

One other thing.

It occurs to me that if reelected -- oh, god, I hope not -- Bush doesn't really have to worry about impeachment. Who would do that -- knowing it would make Cheney president?

Shudder.

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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.