Republicans and Democrats

I'm a registered Republican....but most of the time, I vote Democratic, because I like the way they think more than I like the way that Republicans think.

Which is not to say that I dislike the way Republicans think. Sometimes, I like it very much indeed. I like the concept of privatized Social Security; the reason I am opposed to it at the moment is not because I dislike the idea, but because I distrust the people in power, those who would implement it. I doubt they've given a lot of thought to 'what do we do if it doesn't work, how will we protect those who need it?' I think that they are sufficiently distant from me that they honestly don't care what happens to me, and people like me, if their plan goes awry -- they'll just shrug and say that the plan was theoretically sound, and hey, at least big business owners weren't affected.

Democrats are not a lot better. I was on a mailing list from Democrats.org, and told them to drop me, because in two months I never once saw a mailing which spoke in any way about their plans, their desires. It was always 'we have to stop the Republicans, we have to stop Bush.' Okay, I agree. How? Show me that you're thinking, show me that you're evolving. An article in today's paper says that Democrats are viewing stopping the privatization of Social Security as a make or break issue, and that if successful they will challenge the idea of capping medical malpractice awards. As it happens, I like the idea of capping malpractice awards -- not totally fond of the idea, but I think its worth doing just because of what malpractice fees are doing to the decent doctors -- but either way, I'm dismayed by the Democratic rhetoric. Is that the limit of their ambition, insight, thoughtfulness? I thought that style of 'activity' went out with Gingrich. Though, come to think of it, he is around again, isn't he?

I saw something in the Sunday paper which distressed me more than I would have suspected that it would, and which got me fuming about Bush and co, again. A fellow wrote an article in the Washington Post titled "Don't Mind Me. I'm Just Doing My Job", wherein he describes what it was like to have a minder follow him around while he was interviewing people at one of the inaugural parties. The minders, he says, did not attempt to muzzle or control him, and except for one woman whose attitude seemed permanently set to Vitriolic, they were pleasant, even friendly. But they hovered next to him, mute reminders to the interviewed that everything they said, suggested, insinuated could and might well be reported back to Big Brother -- or worse yet, to Dick Cheney.

I find that kind of mind control to be entirely consistent with the Bush style, which was, you may recall, the campaign that required loyalty oaths before allowing people into their campaign rallies, and its entirely inconsistent with a free society. It confirms me in my drive to oust the Republicans.

Because that kind of action is just plain wrong.

Chilly Thoughts

Last night, we did something dumb. It didn't seem dumb as we thought of it, but in retrospect, it was. What we did was to rent The Day After Tomorrow, take it home, and watch it.

In case you don't recall, TDAT is a film about the extremely rapid onset of a new Ice Age over the northern hemisphere, the result of callous disregard for the effects of global warming. Dick Cheney (actually, a virtual clone) plays a nice supporting role as the hard-nosed politician who has no use for these fanciful notions -- he's more interested in handling the real-world problems that have cropped up, including torrential rains and a suite of tornadoes that have devastated Los Angeles. Its only later, as the thirty-foot-deep flood waters are surging through the canyons of New York City, and the cataclysmic drop in temperatures is turning all that water into ice and snow, that he begins to think again. Of course, by then, it's far too late.

We watched this movie, as I said, last night, when the temperature outside was in the mid-teens. As the movie went on, the room got chillier -- and I could not have told you if it was an actual temperature drop or the effect of seeing all that snow and icy wilderness on the screen. But whatever it was, I had bad dreams during the night -- dreams in which frost and cold played a major part. Eventually, I got up, unable to sleep, and decided to read some blogs, where I found an interesting article on the Institute for the Future's site about something they called Liquid Information. It led to a demo on the CNN site, where, among other things, I found this.

And then I couldn't sleep at all.

What's in YOUR Wallet?

This New York Times article, about a retirement system strikingly similar to the one that Bush is pushing, says some scary things:

Nearly 25 years ago, Chile embarked on a sweeping experiment that has since been emulated, in one way or another, in a score of other countries. Rather than finance pensions through a system to which workers, employers and the government all contributed, millions of people began to pay 10 percent of their salaries to private investment accounts that they controlled.Under the Chilean program - which President Bush has cited as a model for his plans to overhaul Social Security - the promise was that such investments, by helping to spur economic growth and generating higher returns, would deliver monthly pension benefits larger than what the traditional system could offer.

But now that the first generation of workers to depend on the new system is beginning to retire, Chileans are finding that it is falling far short of what was originally advertised under the authoritarian government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Now, to be fair (and its one of the debilitating characteristics of liberals that we do try to be fair), the article says that the problems that Chile is experiencing have two major sources, of which one is likely here, and one is not. The article even makes the point that the investment portion of the equation is actually doing quite well -- better than expected, in fact.

And the problems?

• Exorbitant handling fees on the part of the managers of these private funds, coupled with a strange reluctance to clearly state what those fees might be.

• A large percentage of the working population paid nothing, or very little, into the fund, and so they get very little back. The government, as guarantor of last resort, has to give them supplemental payments that were not anticipated in the original plan.

I can see certain politicians saying that 'Fees are just a normal part of doing business, and the government has no right to interfere with them; as for the other, well, they should have paid in more -- its their fault!'

Tread cautiously, and keep a filled mattress, folks.

House Plans

Over the last few weeks, we've been adding details to what we'd like to have in a retirement home. This is a grand wish list -- we don't expect to get all of it, but we'd like to get most of it. At some point in the next year or so, when (presumably) the flood of thoughts has dried, or slowed to a trickle, we'll start weighting them, so that the things we truly want are at the top of the list. Of course, we will have surprises, as we find that things we thought were trivial are actually important to us.

For example, a tray ceiling. We had one put into the breakfast nook when that was built, and we find to our surprise that we really like the touch of elegance that it added to the kitchen. I'm not one who usually uses phrases like that, but it seems appropriate here. The ceiling is a symmetrical octagonal drop down, with a very nice yet simple chandelier. We did not have lights put inside the tray, as we thought it would be awkward to have to change the lights, and we're generally comfortable with that idea still. In fact, a relative had a octagonal tray put in her ceiling -- its not symmetrical, though -- and seeing how lights can show up any imperfection in the ceiling, we're glad we did it this way.

And the dining room, with its hardwood floor and paneled wainscoting, is pretty nice, too. We've tentatively decided that we won't have both the nook and the dining room, so we're going to have to judge those carefully. Its entirely possible that we won't build, either, which means we have to think about what can be realistically retrofitted onto an existing house. We're not interested in essentially gutting an existing house!

But the process of thinking about it is fun.

Nipping NPR

Sometimes I understand why people don't like NPR.

Usually I like them quite a lot, when they do detailed pieces about things that interest me, or when the local NPR plays classical music. Actually, the NPR in Philadelphia -- they've got a better selection than the local folks.

But sometimes I don't like them at all. As yesterday, when they did a piece about the Marine helicopter that crashed in Iraq, and went on at some length about how old these helicopters were, how difficult to maintain, how comparatively fragile.

As they moved from reporting the news to interpreting it, I thought: And if the Marines had bought new helicopters, and used them, would I now be listening to an article about the waste inherent in military procurement when you have these perfectly suitable, if aging, helicopters available for use?

Sigh.

The American Scholar

I usually enjoy reading American Scholar magazine. I don't always understand it, mind you, as it is written and edited by some very bright people, indeed, but when I do understand it, I usually find that the material is interesting, literate, occasionally funny, and always something that I'm not likely to find anywhere else.

The article that I'm reading now, What the Inaugural Addresses Say About America, from the current issue, is a good example. It's by a fellow who has accomplished the prodigious feat of reading every word in every Inaugural Addresss, and has given a great deal of thought to their content. Drawing on that effort, he distills Inaugural Addresses to the following common themes:

1. I am not worthy of this great honor.
2. But I congratulate the people that they elected me.
3. Now we must all come together, even those of us who really hate each other.
4. I love the Constitution, the Union, and George Washington.
5. I will work against bad threats.
6. I will work for good things.
7. We must avoid entangling alliances.
8. America's strength = democracy.
9. Democracy's strength = America.
10. Thanks, God.

Just think of all the presidential speechwriters who could have knocked off work early, given that list!

He also mentions where the tradition of the inaugural parade comes from (it was a failed getaway), why there is a presidential reviewing stand (thank Lincoln), and asks this poignant question about inaugural addresses: ' Is there a single person, including the president, who can quote even a sentence from George W. Bush's 2001 inaugural? (In fact) can anyone quote a sentence uttered since "Ask not what your country can do for you?" '

Um.... no.

Sociable Security

Okay, that's not really the name. But here's some numbers, from today's Washington Post:

2018 - The year that Social Security payments will exceed the system's annual tax receipts, according to the middle of three SSA forecasts. The deficit would be made up by drawing down on the Social Security trust fund.

73 - Without changes, the percentage of promised benefits that that Social Security would be able to pay once the trust fund is empty in 2042. (Funds would come from ongoing tax receipts.)


69 - Without changes, the percentage of projected benefits that Social Security would be able to pay in 2078.


Have to admit, I don't know what they mean by 'promised benefits' or 'projected benefits' (already committed? expected to be asked for?) . But I thought these were interesting numbers, nonetheless.

Before and After Tsunami Photographs

.
Amazing photographs, at http://homepage.mac.com/demark/tsunami/9.html
.

Newt and the Democrats

From The Economist's Lexington column, about Newt Gingrich, and why he is being viewed with some interest by Democratic leadership:

"The biggest problem with the current Democratic leadership is not that it has lost the will to fight but that it has lost the power to think. When was the last intellectually innovative idea you heard from Nancy Pelosi, the current minority leader, or, for that matter, from Dick Gephardt, her predecessor? ....(T)he Democrats are in danger of turning into that most pathetic of all political organizations - a minority party that devotes all its energies to the blind defense of the status quo. By all means let the Democrats learn from Newt the fighter; but if they want to recapture power they need to learn from Newt the thinker, too."

.

I may grow older, but I'll never grow up

Proof of which is my attitude to the snow which is just arriving now, with an expected accumulation of six to ten inches. In our area, that translates out to something like four inches, virtually guaranteed.

I turned to my wife this morning and said in a tone of mock irritation that this snow was badly timed -- it should have come on Monday, so that I could take the day off. And then, recalling that I usually work from home on Monday, I changed that to 'should have arrived on Tuesday'. Having snow on Saturday, I observed, was the worst possible day -- it'll all be cleared by Monday morning, and there will be no delays, to speak of, at all. And no school delays, either, notes my daughter, to which I nod, commiserating.

I may grow older.....

Chaos Alley

It's going to be a chaotic weekend.

Saturday morning, my wife gets up at 4 to dial into a system upgrade.
Saturday morning, my daughter goes on a field trip, maybe.
Saturday morning, snow starts. Predicted accum, 6-10 inches.
Saturday afternoon, I dial into a system upgrade.
Sunday morning, I get up at 6 to dial into a system upgrade.
Sunday morning, my wife starts a twenty-four hour on-call.

And thoughts of Boston and terrorists keep drifting through my mind.

Oh, boy.

The Morning After

I have good news. As of today, we have less than four years left for George.

I was going to say 'George and company', but of course if the Democratic Party can't get energized and focused, the 'and company' will still be around after George departs for Crawford. I haven't been giving this a lot of thought, but when an article about 'who really won the election' or 'what were the real issues exposed by the vote' comes along, I read it, at least far enough to see if its fatuous nonsense or a reasonable article.

You can always tell the first type: they seem to be saying that while technically Bush won, clearly the voting patterns show that.... (you can finish that sentence). The other type of article might disagree with others of the same type regarding the origins of the win (some will say that it truly was a family and morality election, others will say that that interpretation is an artifact of how questions were asked) but it won't try to change reality. Bush won. Deal with it. So I read these things, putting the pieces together, and try to come in my mind to an understanding of what actually motivated the people who made the result that we're living with now.

One thing seems pretty clear. The people who voted for Bush in the small towns and byways of America weren't always yokels, not even usually. They were people who felt that he represented the better choice, either because he truly did reflect their values and aspirations, and he addressed their fears, or simply because he came to their state and spoke to them, and Kerry did not. Some of them are people I could like.

In multiple cases, Kerry's message didn't get through, or was distorted. Of course, both sides had their message distorted, or got it through, and it helped some and hindered some. It depends, a little, on what point you're trying to make.

Less than four years...Time to start thinking about what points the Democratic Party wants to make.

Quite the Day

This has been an interesting day.

I read in CNN where there is an alert happening in Boston because of fears that six people bringing a nuclear device into the city. Doesn't 'nuclear device' sound neat and sanitary? Like when we say IED (Improvised Explosive Device), because Roadside Bomb doesn't sound appropriately cool, appropriately professional. Sometimes I think that when we encapsulate the horror of something like that by making up these coy phrases, we lose something crucial, some essential in our understanding of the world. In making it something we can think about, we make it something that doesn't scare us at a visceral level. But it should.

Then I read that there are no-kidding pirates attacking freighters in mid-ocean, with a one hundred thousand dollar bounty for letting the ship leave. How long before freighters start emulating the old merchant clippers and begin to carry heavy armament?

Today is the inaugural. Freezing cold. Why can't they do this indoors? I know that all those folks want to celebrate their victory (excuse me: Par-TAY!), and its perfectly reasonable that they like the idea of gathering for that purpose, but in the cold? And the snow? Where's the sense in that?

And then there's Darth Tater.

At least my morning meter read was decent. Its been on the bad side, last couple of days, the result of some indulgence on my part, and I've been trying hard to get it back to the golden plateau. The top of which is, apparently, a lot narrower than I thought, with a crumbly ridge, and a slippery, fast ride down to the bottom.

Also, I learned today how IM works (but not how to make Lotus SameTime do the magic I want), and also where the phrase 'beyond the pale' came from. Plus, we got some financial statements in the mail with the year-end totals, and to our flabbergasted astonishment, we earned a significant amount on an account that we'd given up on as ever earning anything.

So, overall -- a good day. Kinda.

Who Deserves the Credit?

.One man deserves the credit.....

One man deserves the blame....

And Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky was his name !

Thank you, Tom Lehrer.

Supreme Court Term Limits

There was an interesting article in the Sunday paper about a proposal to effectively limit the terms of Supreme Court Justices, who are appointed for life, as outlined in the Constitution.

According to the article, the average tenure in the Court was about fifteen years, up until fairly recently. Now, the average tenure is about twenty-five years. Some people feel that this represents a great deal of drag on the relevance of the Court to current political opinion. Others feel that this isn't necessarily a bad thing, as the Court has to be able to, and willing to, take actions which are not always in tune with current thought.

But how to get around that Constitutional commandment? One concept is to appoint the Justices to the Federal judiciary for life, and to limit their presence on the court to eighteen years. After that point, the Justice would be considered a Senior Justice, available for consultation and for presiding on other Federal courts, but would no longer participate in the daily actions of the Supreme Court.

I think it makes a great deal of sense.

IM --> Pager ?

One of the many things I don't know is, how does Instant Messaging actually work.

Normally, I don't care, because I don't use it that much (though this article, Adoption of Instant Messaging in a Knowledge Worker Organisation, was kind of interesting, and agrees with the little bit I've read on the topic). But lately I've found myself thinking that it would be nice if I could get Lotus Sametime, which is the IM tool that my company, The Biggest Computer Company In The World, uses, to issue pages to me.

The reason is, sometimes when I am working from home, I will wander off into another room, for whatever reason, and when the ST pops up a screen, I won't always hear the chime. As ST is usually taken as an indicator of whether you truly are there, and as there is occasionally a suspicion that people working from home are actually downstairs watching the tube, taking a nap, or painting the shutters, I like to respond to it quickly. I always feel a little nettled when I come back into the room and the screen is up for, who knows how long. If ST would issue a page when its been up for, say, thirty seconds without a response, that would be nice.

ST has a companion tool called NotesBuddy that works with Lotus Notes, and which can, in its bag of tricks, be used to page you with new emails. Since I don't personally have to work out the linkage, its easy for me to think well, heck, how hard can it be to make SameTime, which after all comes from the very same company as Notes, talk to NotesBuddy (those who like groaner names can see this one coming: the new product could be called SameBuddy)?

Okay, probably not that easy. But still....
Someone starts a session to my ST client, which pops up a screen and starts a timer.
Thirty seconds later the timer pops. Gee, no response in thirty seconds.
Issues the page with the text message "Hey, get back to the screen!" and maybe even sends a message back to the original sender "NO RESPONSE; PAGING NOW"

How hard can that be? Huh?

Recording Information

I was just reading an article in the Sunday New York Times about Newt Gingrich and his activities in support of health care reform (if you'd told me a year ago that I would be doing that, I'd have looked seriously askance at you), and I thought "Gee, I'd like to make some notes about this article." Because thats the thing -- I read the article, I remember a couple of key points and thats it. But how to do it, given that I'm certainly not going to fire up the laptop or the PC to do it, handwriting is so old school (nothing to do with the fact that my handwriting is virtually illegible at speed, and sometimes less than that).

So I thought Well, what I need is a headset with noise-cancelling mike that feeds into a high quality portable tape recorder (or something with a mini-hard drive); then that gets uploaded into the PC and read by a speech recognition program to produce text output that I later read through for clarity. Oh, and an artificial intelligence system to organize, classify, and correllate the information. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Take care of it.

================
Well, except for the AI part, that was easy.

Organizational Effort

My company, The Biggest Darn Computer Company In The World, is trying to implement a standard that has to do with security, one of the great icons of our current world. They are tying themselves in knots trying to keep everyone involved, aware, on board, insert-favorite-buzzword-here. I like to remind them that 'coordination breeds contempt', and they usually laugh, but weakly, as replying "No shit" is considered to be rude.

I would be fascinated to know if anyone has done a readable study of organizational complexity vis a vis speed of execution of something like this. But as I don't know any social scientists, I guess I'll have to wait till some bright young person writes about it in an accessible magazine, like the Times Sunday Magazine or similar. Too bad.

Apple Pie and Congress

Apple pie:
This morning, my daughter and I made an apple pie. She pared most of the apples, I sliced them, we both fed the slices into the food processor, she mixed the slices with the rest of the ingredients, I unrolled the two pre-made circles of dough, she put down the bottom circle, scooped in the mixture, put down the top circle, melded the edges, cut the slits, I set up the oven and slid it in. Can't wait.

Congress:
"Why stir up a political hornet's next...when there's no urgency? When does the program go belly-up? 2042. I will be dead by then." Representative Bob Simmons (D-Conn)

...and if pro is the opposite of con, what's the opposite of progress?

Power Needs

Well, it looks like possibly I'm going to need another plug. And possibly an uninterruptible power supply. I just learned about NAS -- Network Attached Storage. NAS lets you have storage that is not tied to a single PC, but rather accessible from any PC in the network. In our case, we have the one home PC (despite minor agitation from the offspring, we still have just the one), plus each of us has a take-home lap top PC. Both laptops have wireless capability, and can talk to the Netgear router, as does the home PC and the cable modem. That's our little network.

As I understand it, the NAS box (whatever one we get, if and when) plugs into the router, and thusly becomes accessible from any PC. Our printer, which is currently hard-plugged into the home PC, and not accessible from the laptops (the files on the home pc aren't, either, despite the assurances of my network guy at work that it's really easy to do), can plug into the NAS device, and in theory become accessible to the laptops, while still being accessible to the home PC.

But the big deal is that the NAS box can give a huge amount of storage (or what counts as huge now; check again in a year). The smallest box I saw was 160 gigabytes; the largest was 1.2 terabytes. They physically range from the size of four hardcover books to about twice that. And with stuff on the NAS box rather than the individual PCs, it would be immediately accessible if we swapped to a new PC. No data swapping. (Probably just data files, though. I don't think that I want to contemplate what it would take to make Windows accept remote executable files. I'm sure its possible, I just don't want to contemplate what it would take to make it work.)

Downsides? Oh, sure, you betcha. For one, if you have something fail on the NAS box, then hey presto, you just lost a lot of storage. Not sure if they come with internally redundant backup. For another, they're not cheap -- by my standards, anyway-- starting at around $500. And of course, there's The Power Question. I wasn't kidding about the UPS concept. We already have the router, cable modem, speakers, two printers, and phone modem plugged into the surge protector. I think there is one slot left.

But it's sexy!

Drug Recommendation

I don't normally make drug recommendations. My opinion is just mine, and not worth a hill of beans when it comes to comparisons with other people's experiences. But I've come across one that is really good at doing what it's supposed to do.

It's called Lantus, and it's a long-acting insulin.

It took me taking it for a month before I starting seeing benefit, but now I'm on day four of acceptable blood sugar readings in the morning. For me, this is virtually unprecedented. I don't know if it will continue. I don't know if Lantus will be shown to have unacceptable side-effects. But I do know this: for me, so far, it works.

I don't work for the company that makes it, and I didn't get anything for this recommendation.

Product 19

About two years ago, when I started this blog, I mentioned a book, '19', which I had greatly enjoyed. This past week, I was delighted to receive an email from the author's wife, mentioning that she had seen the writeup and wanted me to know that the author, Roger Hall, was, at 85, still alert, active, and visiting book shows. I asked if he would mind autographing my copy of 19 -- and he graciously agreed. It's going off in the mail to him this weekend.

Before sending it, off, though, I spent a little bit of time last night leafing through it again, picking out some of the scenes and phrases that I had really enjoyed. The author has an eye for detail, and obviously enjoys well-turned phrases, scattering them throughout with grace and style. The chief character is thoughtful, wry, and funny; his chief is an alert, incisive veteran of OSS who resides in an elegant manor (and manner); his companions are smart and interesting people who you'd like to know. Even the bad guy is nicely sculpted.

Are there downsides? A couple. The book, set in the sixties, can be dated at times: people avoid eavesdropping by turning away from the window, or sitting in the corner; the agent admiringly refers to his boss's new suit as 'a wild set of threads'; the main antagonist disguises himself in Ashanti costume and wears a piece of bone to offset his Afro; the lissome girl secretary wears micro-minis to work. Mere details that don't detract from the delightful romp.

19 is an elegant treat, and a lot of fun.

Google and Firearms

I was just looking over an article about Google Hacking, to which I was led by an article on SiteDigger 2.0. SiteDigger is intended to allow companies to more easily find sensitive material about them on the web, so that they can control it. Google Hacking is intended to do the same thing, though (possibly) for less noble purposes.

It occurs to me that since this wouldn't be possible -- or as possible -- without Google, this might imply that Google has a moral responsibility to control how its product is used.

If it does, would this logic follow through with guns?

Observation

This deal with Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston has gotten enough play that even I've noticed it -- and I can go for years without knowing who the current hot items are. So here's my take.

They were married for, what, seven years?

They're more well known by a factor of, what, ten times that of a normal person?

So, doesn't that equate to being effectively married for seventy years without muss or fuss?

What's so amazing shouldn't be that they split up -- it should be that they lasted that long under the glaring spotlight of gasping columnists and obsessed fan junkies.

Mathematically speaking, anyway.

Helping

Quite some time ago -- on the order of decades ago -- I read an article on the question of foreign relations and foreign aid. The basic question was, why does the United States offer foreign aid? It boiled down, as I recall, to three reasons:

1. Bribery of one sort or another
2. Quid pro quo
3. General niceness

There was an article in the New York Times yesterday where the question was raised again. Only, in keeping with how things are these days, it was edgier. The question was, is the outpouring of United States aid to tsunami victims going to have any effect on the way that this country is perceived?

The general take was, no. One person said that of course the United States would give lots of aid; people expect that, people are used to that, but of course no reasonable person would expect that people who are opposed to us now would alter their opinions simply because we gave aid. That would be insulting to them.

Its fair that they not change their opinions. Narrowminded, but fair. They didn't ask us to give the money. "We can't be bought", and all that.

But that they expect that we will, of course, give money -- and not just money, but lots of money -- that isn't fair. They have no right to expect that, or indeed anything at all. The only people who can have that expectation of us is ourselves.

Fortunately for much of the world, and unlike much of the world, we do see ourselves as having the responsibility to help when we can. Even when we're slimed, even when our people are being killed, we do. We're not noble (though some of us certainly are), we're not perfect (though some of us come damn close), but we do. We help.

I like that.

Economic Foolery

We were talking at breakfast this morning about this, that, and the other, and got onto the subject of the proposal to reduce the amount of increases to Social Security through the mechanism of tying the increases to inflation rather than to salary. I had just mentioned that though I recognize the need for action, I didn't like the method, when it abruptly occurred to me that these are politicians proposing this. That means that the chances of them actually meaning exactly what they said is fairly slim. They might well be doing it to stake out an extreme position, so that when they come up with their actual plan, it'll sound moderate by comparison.

Somehow, realizing this doesn't make me feel better.

Remote Thought

How about a memory button on a TV remote, so that as you flick through channels, you can tag/untag likely viewing candidates. When you're done, you can cycle just through them, not all twelve zillion channels.

Just my little contribution to the couch potato brigade.....

Ribboning the Wave

There are a lot of cars with wrapped-ribbon magnetic things showing support for various concepts, mostly having to do with the war in Iraq, but also other things ranging from breast cancer eradication to funding for homeless shelters (there's an amazing list of causes and associated 'awareness jewelry' here). ..Similarly, people in Hollywood like to wear ribbons to public gatherings for roughly the same reason. So --

How long till a ribbon comes out that looks vaguely like a wave , to be sported by people who've donated to tsunami relief?
.
.

Improvements

Today was a little better than the other day.

I got the yearly evaluation, and went up a quintile, which was good. It doesn't mean I got a lot better, but it was gratifying, nonetheless, especially as it makes more likely the career move that I've wanted. Not guaranteed, but not out of the question.

I started on that project that the customer wanted, and found it to be rather snarly, as they didn't really know what they wanted, just that they wanted what they had before, only newer. Yet I was pleased that I came up with a way to do it, and that when I hit roadblocks, even the guy who had done it for them for years was stumped. Again, gratifying.

I think what I could use right now is A Nice Cup of Tea -- what we referred to for a while, upon our return from London, as American Tea (ie, strong, but not road tar) -- along with one of those terrific Mrs. Fields Chocolate Covered Graham Crackers. Yum. And maybe a little bit of reading in the British Navy book. Its a little intimidating (big book), but well written.

The weather's gloomy, but I'm better.

Gamer buys $26,500 virtual land

According to an article on the BBC site, a gamer has paid actual money to purchase the rights to a virtual island -- one that is part of a multi-player computer game. According to the article, he plans to earn the money back by leasing and selling the resources on the island to virtual settlers.

I think this is fascinating. It reminds me of the joke I heard in a macroeconomics class years ago which postulated that all of the gold in the world was shipped to an island so that it could be easily protected. The next year, when someone went back to look, the island had sunk -- but the economy chugged right on. It didn't need to see the money, it just assumed it.

Obviously, there had to be effort in the creation of the virtual island, so you could say that the price paid reflects that effort and profit on it. But more than that, this says that you can earn money for things that do not exist, but which are valued by someone else.

That really tickles me. I don't know what comes next, but I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Observations

Today was not an overwhelmingly great day.

In no particular order, I found that my stomach rebelled at the consumption of a couple of tacos (and without anything particularly obnoxious on them!); learned that a co-worker whom I think of as 'the idiot' is going to move to a group that I've been agitating to move to; was informed that an account for whom we'd offered to provide some basic services is taking us up on it - their first request is for a custom set of files that our predecessor created -- and right now, too, please; a project which has been hanging fire for about six months is now considered urgent; and, I get to spend about two hours manually updating my ID on about 85 systems, because my employer, the Largest Computer Company In The World, hasn't seen fit to automate the process. Though we did just hold a mass conference on Improving Our Processes, how nice.

I also found myself thinking about the state of affairs in Iraq, and I learned that one proposal for 'saving' Social Security is to reduce payments. Insert bitter post-election comment here.

It is hard at times like this to be even guardedly optimistic. Not that I'm an optimistic sort, normally, but maybe -- just a little bit. Not today, though. I took advantage of the sour stomach and went home for the afternoon, sleeping for an hour on arrival, and then reading a bit about the British Navy. Tomorrow it might be icy, which translates out to Working From Home. I have to remember to be grateful for that -- I know its not all that common.

We'll see how tomorrow goes.

New Impressions

The Washington Post has changed its comics mix a bit, mostly with good results.

One of the strips shows two characters observing that it's a new year. They sit quietly for two panels, then one says 'So far, I'm not impressed'. Thats probably been true for the vast majority of New Years. We know in our hearts that there is no reason to assume anything better or worse from the world simply because a calendar has rolled over, yet somehow we always hold out that frail hope, whether it be for diets, our jobs, or the world in general. We're always hoping that next year will be better.

Here's to optimism.

Book Review

Finished The Last Ship.

Here's a tip.

Don't read a novel about nuclear holocaust and the resulting devastation unless you're planning on having very interesting dreams, including one where you're back in the Launch Control Center. Whew. Its been decades since I did that for a living, but the memories live on -- the ever present hum of the motor generator, the flickering indicator lights, the feel of the fabric on the crew chairs...And the task itself...First time I did a keyturn in a simulation, I had nightmares. Not that bad this time, but still, not fun.

Did bring me back to how we used to think about these things, though. Mutual Assured Destruction, MRV vs MIRV, Circular Error Probable, throw weights, redundancy, and all of that. And then we look at Al Qaeda and refer to those as the good old days.

Shudder.

.

Javelin

After I replied to a comment about my earlier post regarding artificial intelligence, I promptly forgot about the topic for several hours. This morning, I picked up one of the books that I'm reading -- The Last Ship -- and, wondering if one of the tools mentioned repeatedly in there, a sighting device called Big Eyes, really did exist, I did a web search, finding that yep, it sure did. Somehow, being at the PC reminded me of my search the other day regarding the IBM Piquant system, and I thought it might be fun to look to see what else might be readily available out there on the same topic. In this manner, I came to a product known as Javelin -- Justification-based Answer Validation through Language Interpretation. Its a pretty slick concept, and puts the lie -- well, partially -- to my glib statement about AI being mostly language parsing. The article cited includes this:

(P)attern-based approaches don’t represent the meaning of the patterns they use, and it is not clear whether they can be generalized for more difficult, non-factoid questions....

Practically useful question answering in non-factoid domains e.g., intelligence analysis) requires more sophisticated question decomposition, reasoning, and answer synthesis. For these hard questions, QA (Question Answering) architectures must define relationships among entities, gather information from multiple sources, and reason over the data to produce an effective answer. As QA functionality becomes more sophisticated, the set of decisions made by a system will not be captured by pipelined architectures or multi-pass constraint relaxation, but must be modeled as a step-by-step decision flow, where the set of processing steps is determined at run time for each question.

Now, I have to admit that it took me five minutes to repeatedly read that before I understood it, and even then, I'm sure I didn't get it all. But what I did get was this: systems such as Piquant could be useful for answering straightforward quetions. (Not sure about the reference to factoids, which I've always taken to mean 'stuff that could be true, could be made up, but in either case is of a trivial nature'; they seem to mean 'its true, but perhaps not all provable'. Thats my guess. ).

But when you get to the requirement to evaluate information -- not just regurgitate it -- you need the ability to dynamically establish a structure where you can meld information from multiple sources, rate it based on the perceived (detected) validity of the source, and then use it to create an answer to the question. As the methodology evolves, it could become self-modifiying so that the steps it takes to answer one question might change as the next question comes along.

My first reaction is, sure this stuff will work on any but the most constrained scale -- aka 'then a miracle occurs' -- but actually, its kind of cool. Obviously, there are some pretty bright people out there.

Why CVS Doesn't Mean CVS

I'm given to understand that the name CVS (the pharmacy chain) stands for Courtesy, Value,Service. I picked that up from an article about the corporation's owner, several years ago, and as the article basically said that the guy was a greedy thug, it's possible that it actually stands for something way less complimentary.

There's a branch of the chain (why don't we call it a 'link' of the chain?) not too far from us, and for most of the time that we've lived here, we would do our drug stuff there. Cleanup in aisle three, cocaine spill, was always fun. But over time, we found that we could order drugs through the mail. It was usually cheaper, and it was usually more convenient. And, more important, it always meant that we didn't have to deal with the people behind the pharmacist's counter. That was the key selling point for us, not having to deal with those folks. Never liked that. Of their two pharmacists, one was supercilious, and of their rotating staff of clerks, most were dumb. Not all, but most.

This afternoon I remembered that again. My partner ran out of a drug, and the mail order people hadn't notified us till late that the renewal was going to be delayed. So, sigh, I volunteered to go. Buckle on the emotional shield, buttress the insulation around the reaction emotions. I knew I would very likely get irritated, because That Is What They Do. Even my mother, who would speak well of Attila the Hun, gets irritated by them.

Told the clerk that I was there to pick up an order. She found it, and her eyes widened. This is expensive! she announced loudly. I love that part. A quiet voice doesn't seem to be in the repetoire of these people. Hey, Mr. Hendricks, that anti-itch cream working out okay for you? Those new style panty liners to your likin', Miz Jackson? While I was there, the clerk spoke loudly to two people. Both elderly, so we know they must have been hard of hearing, right? Sigh.

I told her I'd write a check for it, and she stared at me. This is OVER TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS! she announced loudly. I contemplated a gentle No Shit, Sherlock, but that would have been crude. So I smiled, and said How much? And wrote the check. She looked at it for a moment -- perhaps not used to the concept of people just paying for something -- and handed over the drugs.

Another sale for mail-order drugs, hey?

Growing Older

I have been happily thinking about a new house, and how we'd like it to be better than the one we're in now. There's not much wrong with this one; we're just thinking towards the time when my mother is no longer with us, and our daughter is off on her own life. So, we're thinking of a smaller house, with the kinds of things in it that are important to us.

But one thing saddens me about this. It's not a great insight, but here it is: A retirement home almost necessarily implies a degradation of opportunity.

A degradation of opportunity because almost invariably, when 'spirited seniors' are shown exuberantly enjoying life, 'staying active', its either playing golf, visiting the kids, or being involved with activities such as docent at the museum, volunteer at the library, or magazine-cart-pusher at the hospital. I've read that my generation is the first to generally reject the idea of 'old age', but all of those images that I've mentioned still carry that thought to me. I don't mind getting old, but the idea of getting old and irrelevant bothers me a lot. I don't have a greatly satisfying career now, but I am skittish about giving it up for shuffleboard. I want to do things that matter. (That much of my professional life hasn't met that test, I'll ignore, thank you.)

I don't know how to address that feeling of old = irrelevant. Maybe when I truly am old -- and the older I get, the older Old gets -- I won't care. Or maybe by then I'll have come to a better level of knowledge, a higher level of wisdom.

Right now, though, the prospect is scary.

Last DUH moment of 2004

At least, I hope so.

Reading an article about an AI technology labelled 'Piquant' by IBM. Found a news thread on Slashdot that talked about it and the concepts behind and related to it, to some depth.

About half way through, realized that most AI is actually language parsing and inference.

Gee, really?

.
.

Artificial Niftiness

I just came across something that startled me.

I mentioned a few posts ago (at least, I think I did) that I occasionally find myself wishing that I were more up to date on the applications for artificial intelligence. There is no logical reason for this -- I don't work in the field, and given that what little I know is because I'm a self-taught amateur, there is vanishingly little likelihood I'll ever get a job in the field -- but I just like it. The idea of 'artificial intelligence' fascinates me. So much so, in fact, that one day, when I was musing about it in the lightest of ways, I forced myself to stop and answer this question: What exactly would you like to know better about AI? Programming? Applications? Packages? Societal implications? And then watched myself mumble 'um, you know...cool stuff, like HyperActive Bob.' You see the level of my intellectual involvement.

I didn't make up the name of that app, by the way. Its real, and its cool.

Anyway, I was poking around with that concept this morning, and came across a site with this on it:

This elective introduces the study and application of artificial intelligence, and its application to military and strategic domains. It provides an executive level overview of various AI technologies including knowledge-based systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, intelligent agents, and natural language processing. Students will learn the applicability of each technology, and will be able to determine if AI technologies are appropriate for specific problems. Student research projects will expose students to AI research for center of gravity determination. The elective is presented through a combination of readings, lectures, class discussions, and research. Assigned readings support upcoming topics. Out-of-class project work is conducted in a series of scheduled lab periods. Through class and lab work, students and instructors will collaborate on an ongoing research project called Disciple-COG. The goal of the Disciple-COG project is to build an intelligent agent for analyzing and determining strategic and operational centers of gravity. Students will adapt case studies in center of gravity determination to teach an intelligent agent to reason about the same. Most sessions will draw on the Disciple-COG research to present the AI topic at hand.

Whoa, I thought, this sounds pretty cool. Must be some high density think tank, deep in the groves of academe. Some kind of joint project between RAND and the US Army, something like that.

Well, I got the Army part right. That description is for a course intended to give Army mid level officers an executive overview of the technologies and their capabilities, and its taught at the US Army War College's Center for Strategic Leadership, Knowledge Engineering Group, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It's a think tank, but one with real world applications and real world students.

How far AI has permeated our society!

Malpractice Article in Washington Post

There's an interesting article in the Washington Post today, by Marc Fisher. It's currently here, and says this:

Here's what is clear: Doctors pay vastly more for malpractice insurance. Insurance companies don't want to be in this business. The number of claims against doctors is flat. The average verdict against doctors who lost cases has tripled since 2000, although the total paid out by insurers doesn't account for the boost in premiums.

I don't know if insurance companies don't want to be in the business -- seems to me, if they didn't want to, they'd just stop writing policies. Course, maybe that's happening. And I don't know if claims are flat. Bet that is one of those 'it depends how you count them' things.

He also says that professional discipline of bad doctors is largely ineffectual (is that true? I think so, but only the AMA and state agencies would know, and they're not talking), and that payment of monies to the victims of malpractice doesn't have social value (I don't agree, but there should be limits.)

His final point: the basis for this situation is an erosion of trust. My take is, he's right. I'm less likely to sue if I trust the doctor -- and if I believe there is a vigilant professional inquiry system in place to catch the things I can't see, and determine if I should be compensated for them.

Both professions have problems. There are unscrupulous lawyers -- but not, I bet, most of them. There are incompetent doctors -- but not, I bet, most of them. There are grasping lawyers -- but not, I bet, most of them. There are smarmy doctors -- but not, I bet, most of them. There have to be lawyers who see this situation as a blot on their own profession. There have to be doctors who really want to get it resolved, and not just lifted from them.

But just try to find these people. Find a lawyer to say that most doctors are competent, and that even in the best of medical circumstances, mistakes happen -- and that many patients aren't in the best of medical circumstances. Find a doctor to say that most lawyers are competent, and that when someone is injured due to a doctor's malfeasance, they have a right to redress.

And while you're at it....find the Easter Bunny.
.
.

Decimal Points

Several years ago, some friends went to Spain and, while there, bought a jacket for the husband as a spur of the moment thing. They translated the exchange rate, decided well, it was a little pricy -- about $80 -- but what the heck, it was a splurge on a trip. When they'd been back home for a while, one of them was processing the credit card bill from the trip and stopped in shock. Apparently, when they'd done the math of the exchange rate, they'd slipped a decimal point.

Last week, doing last minute shopping at a Nordstroms, I bought several items for my partner, including a nice red jacket, charged them, went home. At the grand unveiling, she tried it on and liked it. It was then put away along with the other gifts.

This morning, looking at the outstanding credit card balance, I was stunned. Turned out the nice jacket was not $41.50... I'd slipped a decimal point.

I dithered for a bit, then talked with the partner, who, without taking a breath said 'Ship it back'. And its in a box now, waiting to go back.

This evening, she turned to me and thanked me. For what, I asked. "I've never worn anything that expensive before", she said.

Is she great, or what?

SimBuilding

We've been discussing retirement homes, in a desultory sort of way. I think I want the Sims to build it for me. Click, click, pick some options, done. Of course, we'd be astounded by the price. There are some homes going up not too terribly far from where we live, and we were surprised to see that they were being advertised at a base price of $150,000 -- and just now, we noted that the base price is $190,000. For that, we're sure, you don't get mahogany inserts, thick sound insulation, or lavish accoutrements. You get a decent, not outstanding house.

We're not sure what we want. We know that it will almost certainly be a ranch style, with one bedroom, plus another room that is usable as a guest bedroom, a living room with big, comfortable chairs, someplace else for the television (we're not opposed to having it where we hang out to relax, just would prefer it to be elsewhere, preferably in a soundly sound-insulated room). Kitchen (room rather than area, would be our preference), possibly with a table, definitely with bright lights. Not necessarily a dining room, but if not then some extra gloss for the kitchen. Tile, hardwood, carpeting, good-quality cabinetry where appropriate. Not lavish, but not skimpy, either. Good sound insulation, especially around the bathrooms (who wants to hear?) . Wired for internet access, of course; wireless connectivity, preferably, and ditto for the modest sound system. A goodly number of bookcases. Security system. Attached two car garage. Total square footage indoors of, oh, about 1800 square feet, maybe something less. Not too much outside area, as neither of us is really a gardener. As for exactly where, we're like a lot of people -- we want to be close enough to a major city (or second-tier city) to benefit from it without having it impact the quality of where we live. Close enough to medical facilities for the inevitable needs. Good libraries - a decent college or university would be good. Some, but not an overwhelming amount of culture. Not too much 'outdoors' stuff -- we don't ski, ride horses, or the like; about the most is bicycling. We like to walk, and a park to do it in would be nifty.

Yep, we ran out of money about half way through that, I do believe.

Why is it...

.
that it's okay for those people to air videos of hostages being beheaded, and mess halls being blown up, but its not okay for us to publicize their people being killed by us?

Don't bother, I know the answer. I just don't particularly like it.
.

C + 1 Thoughts

This morning, I continued my tradition of keeping one gift back until the end of Christmas Day -- this time, seriously till the end, as the recipient stayed downstairs to watch the tube, while I sacked out. She found it under her pillow when she came, but chose to wait till this morning to open it, which I thought was nice of her. I started doing this because I want to stretch out the image of Christmas, to get away, as much as I could, from the feeling that Christmas was a masive disgorgement of presents, and then its Okay, I've Opened Them, Got Some Good Stuff, Didn't Get Some Stuff, What's On Television? It seems to work. I have heard of (not personally known) families that do it in waves -- so many at 8AM, so many at 10AM -- and that would work, too.

After wandering around a bit in a post-sleep daze (I slept well last night, unlike the last couple of nights), I pulled on an overcoat and went over to the supermarket, which I found to my dismay that they didn't have the Washington Post, my paper of choice for Sunday reading. NY Times, yes, Post no. Bummer. I'm willing to believe that it is somehow connected to the cold (its not frigid, but it is chilly - about 17 degrees F) so that they couldn't get the trucks out, or the shipments to the train, or whatever.

That started me thinking a little bit about retirement. We were talking about it last night -- we're pretty much agreed on what kind of house, but not where; I'm still up for Australia, and my partner is thinking 'maybe a bit further north in Pennsylvania' -- but now I have an added item for the ten or so that I wrote on a sheet of scrap paper -- has to be somewhere that, if remote deliveries of the Sunday paper I like are delayed, I can still get it.

And it doesn't have to be the Post -- that's just the best of what's available here. Years ago I subscribed to a service that would send you one Sunday paper from a range of cities, once a month. It would arrive on Wednesday or so, and while there were some duds, some were quite good. I'd do that again, if I could find it.

Happy Post , no pun intended, Christmas!

Adventures in Sim City

Today is Christmas, and if you could see our den, you'd know that Christmas definitely happened here. Shards of paper and wrapping everywhere. People walking around in new clothes, carrying new books. and playing new games.

Actually, one specific game. Sim City 4 -- Deluxe Edition. It was a gift to the offspring, from her aunt. She asked me to install it, and she then spent some time doing the basics of setting up a city. Watching her from time to time, I thought gee, that doesn't look all that hard. The potential for complexity is surely there -- multiple options, multiple possibilities for each option -- but it looks like you can start slow. I mean, heck, she's just a kid, how hard can it be.

So while she's downstairs, I thought, I'll do this, I'll give it a try. Ten minutes later, I've finally figured out what button to push to start things off. I'm not saying there aren't ten more I could have pushed, just that I found one that started one of the tutorials. Note: One of the tutorials. Looks like there's about seven of them.

Years ago, I played a game called Adventure, also known as Colossal Cave. You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike... That game challenged me, and still does (I found a site that runs a simulation for it; apparently, there's more than a couple). Sim City is light years past Adventure. It awes me. And my daughter just picked...it...up.

I think I can see the end of my years as the All Knowing Father.

I want her to be resourceful and insightful, and this is one of the ways that it starts, when she realizes that she can do it, she can take control of parts of her environment and make things happen. She's moving towards not needing me as a source of insight, and I'm glad for that.

Merry Christmas!

Parallel, as in NonIntersecting

Several years ago I had the delightful good fortune to take a year off from work. At the time, the stock market was going vertical and the phrase 'irrational exuberance' hadn't yet entered the lexicon, so I and my partner thought it was entirely likely that I would never work again. Instead, she would continue to work for several years, and I would pick up the slack at the house -- doing more cooking, cleaning the house, running required errands, and so forth.

One of the things that I would do was vacuum the house. When I saw in a comic's column (I think it was Dave Barry) that he would simulate vacuuming by dragging two sticks in a parallel path through the house, I recognized a kindred spirit. Although I knew that vacuuming did something, it wasn't always apparent to me what that something was. But since my partner valued it, I did it. I value her opinion, and I like it when she is happy.

This past weekend, I got to do something very strange (to me) in pursuit of that same goal. I earnestly and seriously told her that I thought it would be a good idea for her to spend time while we were at Nordstrom's to take advantage of their 'bra fitting specialist'. She'd mentioned wanting to do it, every so often, but she was reluctant to spend the money. Her comfort was, and is, very important to me, so I urged her to do it, and she finally agreed. After it was all over, she told me that it was a good idea, because it turned out that she had been wearing the wrong size. I said that I was pleased that she would be more comfortable now. She informed me that, actually, she couldn't feel a difference; it just looked better to her now. Felt the same, looked better.

Can't you tell if you're wearing the wrong size? What exactly did the fitter do, then? I decided not to ask. Even though it sounded to me like the fitter had done the equivilent of dragging two sticks, it seemed a good idea to just accept it. For one thing, I don't wear them, so how could I possibly know what its like, or whats important to someone who does? For another, even if the fitter really did just drag the sticks, my partner is happier now. That's worth a lot. That the fitter did something worthwhile was one of the things I just have to accept, like parallel lines not intersecting.

At least, in a Euclidean universe, she's happy, I'm happy.

Feeling Funny

Not funny as in funny, but funny as in odd.

A little bit of that comes from looking across the farmer's fields -- he gave up on cows, as being too much work at his advanced age, and now just grows corn -- and looking at the soft blue light on the barn and silos. Its beautiful. The thing is, how often do you get the urge to say that something is beautiful? Its a funny feeling.

Most of it comes from a Washington Post article about a solder who was seriously injured in Iraq, and the slow process of healing, wondering if 'he' will ever come back -- whether his brain is damaged, too, what will his life be like. Its a good article.

And the rest comes from an article about people who go to a homeless shelter for Christmas and put on a carnival. Its a feel-good article that makes me think, as articles like that always do, that I ought to do something like that.

But what really grabs me is that for both of those articles, I know -- I know -- that in less than a week, I'll have forgotten about them.

And that makes me feel less than dirt. I can think of good, solid, reasonable reasons why, and all, but still. Less than dirt.

Funny.

Not Really Making It

From what I just read, I've just been faking it when it comes to being Santa.

An article in the local public TV magazine talks to several people who've been Santa for decades, and they all say that they've gone home with black and blue marks from being kicked, squelching from being peed on, been interrogated as to the name of Mrs. Claus, the names of all of the reindeer, and various other bits of trivia.

They say you 'have to be on top of your game', 'be ready for anything', and 'never promise anything'. They say it helps to have a real suit -- one guy has one made from 800 rabbits; wonder if he mentions that to the kids? -- and a real beard, or at least one 'applied with prosthetic glue'. They relate kids telling Santa that Mom could use new underwear because she walks around all day wearing underwear with holes in it, and, oh by the way, she has a special friend who sleeps over when Dad's away. And sometimes tales much more dire than that.

Gee. And all this time, I thought the idea was just to talk to the kids. Maybe deprogram them from the cult of acquisition, a bit. And to really, really listen. Guess I've got stuff to learn, hmm?
.
.

Information just wants to be free.

How do you make an information structure work?

Boy, does that sound pompous. Its a side effect, I think, of the fact that I don't really even understand the question that I'm trying to ask.

Let me put it another way. People have information that must be shared with others. I'm thinking here of something like a cube, with a person at each vertex. Person A wants to know something, and it happens that Person B knows it, but Person A doesn't know that. Person B wants to tell someone something, but doesn't know that Person C is the one to tell. Person C -- you get the idea. Now take that and muddy it up a bit -- Person A doesn't even know that Person B even exists -- and expand it -- there isn't one Person A, there's an Organization A with a lot of Persons inside it. And, oh yeah, the cube isn't just a cube, but a multilevel hypercube.

So how do you make the information flow? How do you even know if its flowing at all?

There are people who are writing and researching this question, and a hundred just like it, coming at it from different points and different attitudes and different goals. I stumbled across just one of them the other day whilst reading through the list of sites at Yahoo that I mentioned in an earlier post. Which one? Um...its in the list of sites that I visited yesterday. Who can remember? But that point was made yesterday. For today, lets just assume that I really do remember the site and say that okay, so I found one person. And I assume there are thousands others. How do I find out what they're saying? I'm not talking about at the deep molecular gotta-know-(fill in the blank) technology down to the twelfth degree before you can even understand the conversation. I'm just saying, how do you find out what's going on, generally, in the world of people who think about stuff like that?

Or is it impossible? Does the information kind of have to resonate and reside solely in that tight universe until it finally gets chewed on enough so that it can be released to the outside world? Because before that point, it just isn't ready for prime time? Just isn't comprehensible to the outside world? Does information have a point before which it can't be released into the wild?

Years ago, I worked in Boston for a computer company, and I thought it would be a novel idea to step across to Cambridge and pick up some computer learning over at MIT. I spoke to a person in their admissions office who was a little unsure of my qualifications to be even thinking about this, and I pointed out that Hey, I did this for a living. They gently pointed out that the things I did every day were things that MIT people had done ten years ago. Day one, I was already ten years too late.

Okay, I know I can't overcome that. But if I want to know more about something -- in this case, how information flows through an organization, how you track it, how you enhance it -- and I'd like to know more about it than Popular Science can tell me, where do I turn? Is it Popular Science, then MIT Tech Review, then straight to the Phd theses?

There's gotta be an intermediate step in there. Doesn't there?

Things of Quality

I like it when I can use things that are made well. Usually, the things that I use every day are 'good enough' -- not slapdash, but not elegant and well-formed, either. Which I suppose is fair: after all, I'm not elegant or well-formed, either. But the other day I got the opportunity to use something that is made well.

Every year, we have a small, quiet post-holiday season get-together at our house as a way of decompressing from The Holiday Season. While the tree is still up, and the house is still decorated, we invite several neighbors and friends to come over and, as the invitation says,

Come when you want, talk a bit, have some munchies, listen to holiday music, relax. And you don’t even have to clean up afterward. What could be better?

The last couple of years, we put this note on an index card and dropped it into their mailboxes, but this year I wanted to do it a little differently. My wife found a notecard in a stationery store while she was in Philadelphia. I liked it at first sight. It has a good heft, the style is nice, the colors are nice. Yes, it's expensive, but not wildly so. I think it's worth it-- so much so that after looking locally, I went to the web site of the people who make it and bought two more packets, just to have them.

http://www.crane.com/PrdSell.aspx?Name=pc3296_EcruwhiteCardwithHunterGreenBorder

Good stuff.

Magical

(There must be a word -- a pejorative word -- for the delay between when you want to write something in Blogger and when the damn screen actually paints. I used to think it was just the slow link here at work (my personal theory is that there is a robust cable just bristling and crackling with information, plugged nicely into the outside of this building's wall, and just inside the wall is a gnarled old man who reads each bit from a screen, laboriously taps it out on a keypunch, rolls across the room and feeds the keypunched card into a reader, and only then does it get sent to my computer.) but now I think that Blogger has a really slow front end, and little motivation -- remember, its free -- to make it faster.)

Ahem.

I think I'm more sensitive to this than I normally am because for the last hour or so I have been breathing helium. Specifically, I've been looking at the list of computer-related websites and blogs that is presented at Yahoo, here, working my way down the list and reading the ones that a) sound interesting and b) are understandable by me. In case you're curious, the ratio of the number that they present to the number that I look at to the number I actually understand works out to be about 10: 5: 2. Ah, well.

The one thing that I get out of all the sites that pass this filter is that things are seriously changing in the world of communication. I suppose that 'communication' is a very pale way of describing the mix of information management, portability, and computer-based tools (is there a better word? I mean, a non-buzzword word?). But to read these pages is to see not only the future but in many cases the actual present. Granted, Somewhere Else. Not at the company I work for, not at the place I work; and more certainly not at the semi-rural area where I live. ( Not that living in a rural area must necessarily imply technology that's at the Leave It To Beaver stage, as I've seen a number of articles showing people living thusly whilst still happily telecommuting, surfing the net, and watching ten zillion television channels. It just takes more money than I'm willing to invest. It would be fun to see just what it really would take to get up to that level, though. )

But somewhere, these things are happening, and they're happening now. Wonderful, magical things. Information flowing in amazing ways, from amazing mixtures of sources, just gushing out. Slowly, this gushing is becoming a torrent of possibilities that can and most likely will change our lives. Learning about this torrential flow is exhilarating. It fills me with excitement about the possibilities for improving not only life but all of the things that make life bearable, make it fun.

Of course, being magical, it helps to actually believe in magic. And I mostly do. So though I know that just because something worked for one person, one time doesn't mean it will work for me... and that there is certainly a difference between it working for someone who is a certified technogeek, heavily into acronym-rich concepts, and me, picking one out at Circuit City, still, the idea that its possible is captivating. And I admit it: I'm captivated, enticed, damn near seduced.

But there is a catch, and it lies between my ears. I don't know how to make this stuff work right here, right now. And the reason is that I don't know enough, and I can't remember enough, and I just can't do it enough.

I can't find enough to read that will keep me up to date, so that I know what's possible. When I find it, I can't find enough of it, so that I get past the breathless-wonder articles and down to the ones that admit that it can fail... even if they don't talk about exactly how. When I read enough, with enough detail, I remember only a vague general outline of what I read. And when I do remember in some detail, I can't see how to apply it where I live, where I work. And, when I do find it, do remember, do sense a way to apply it -- I can't change anything except in my own little orbit.

I can accept that. But I want more. Even subject to all the qualifiers above, I want more. Want to believe its possible. Want to figure out whats possible, here, and make it work. Here. Because when I do get it to work, when I can put the pieces together and remember them, understand them, see them fit together, I just know it's gonna be -- magical. Maybe not quite as magical as the articles I read now, but still: magical. I really want to believe that.

Helium? I hope not.
.

Doing the Dental

I am quite proud of myself.

I went to have my teeth cleaned today. That's a pretty minimal thing for most people, and it should be for me, too. But because I'm pretty good at denial, it's something I can easily forget, or cancel. If I should miss an appointment, its two, three months easily before I even try to make another . I'll defer for any reason at all. Haley's Comet, you say? Better cancel. Holidays on the horizon? Bad time -- better cancel.

I feel quite sheepish, and I know this is not adult behavior (its not even decent kid behavior). I do it because there is always a good chance that while I'm at the dentist, I'll learn something unpleasant. It was on a routine dental visit that I learned that I have -- excuse me, had -- two teeth that needed to come out because they were abcessed. It was on another that I found out I'd need a root canal. And even if none of these occurs, dental visits are almost always fraught with opportunities to have someone say I'm not doing things right, or not doing enough things, or both. Flossing? Not often enough. Wrong kind of floss, too. Brushing? Not well enough -- and have we mentioned brushing your tongue? (When they said that I thought they were joking. Dentists don't joke about things like that.) Replacement of the partial bridge on the horizon? You'd better believe it. Get used to the idea of being partially toothless for a while (dentists don't seem to think this is a problem).

So, whether they're about to spring on me that I need major work done, or am just being personally defective, I don't enjoy the process of going. Nobody does, of course. In fact, I've read once that being a dentist is a very stressful job. You're right there, almost literally in your face, causing some degree of pain to someone else, and that person is radiating a certain degree of discontent right back at you. Who could like that? I suppose its possible to have a non-stressful visit to the dentist, but I'd have to be woken up to drive home.

As it happens, this year I missed the appointment in June because I was going to have surgery on my chin the next month (I said I would defer for any reason at all), and I didn't even try to get it rescheduled until November, thinking that well, it'll be at least two months till -- and they said ah, we have an opening on December 15th, come on it. Arghhhh.

But its done. I acted like an adult, and I did it.

This time.
.
.

Bad Idea # 3,402

Don't tease your partner about how it'd be a much better idea to attend Christmas services via phone (press one to donate ten dollars; press two to give us your credit card number and let us pick the amount) , web site (click on the flashing chalice to attend Communion; click here to play the MP3 version of the sermon, or download this PDF file) , or mail (beat the rush; mail in your attendance in November) , rather than in person.

She won't think it's all that funny, and she'll think it's even less funny when the offspring, who knows no limits, starts elaborating on the ideas. No parking! No crowds! Atttend in your PJs!

As Martha might say: It's a Bad Thing.

PC Hardware

We just bought a Logitech MX Laser wireless mouse for the house PC . ..It's awesome.

Why?

1 - it does not eat batteries, as the Microsoft Wireless Mouse (yecch, pfah) did. Instead, it has one rechargeable battery. An indicator on the top tells battery strength. The batt will recharge when the mouse is dropped into its holder. If there were nothing else, this would make this mouse clearly superior to the Microsoft Wireless Mouse (grumph, tchah). No more feeding two new double-A's every 30 - 40 days.

2 - It is studded with useful little buttons -- zoom, scroll up, down, sideways, flick up the task bar to switch between active applications. Even its buttons have buttons.

3. - It's more comfortable than its predecessor. The MWM was ergonomic; this one is comfortable. Can't explain the difference, but both of us can feel the difference. This is a Good Mouse.

The other selling point, that it is a Laser Mouse, doesn't mean that much to us. But the three I've listed most certainly do. We like it a lot.

Death to the MWM. Long live the Log Mouse.

Air Girl Scout

If my daughter's girl scout troop got the use of a corporate jet to fly to a major city for a day trip, I'd be surprised and delighted.

A friend who is a Girl Scout troop leader, and is hyperactive even without that stimulus, is a manager at a local coporation. She has arranged for her troop to have use of the corporate jet for a day trip.

Why do I think that this is unfair?. What I think is, that reaction says something unflattering about me and my motivations. It suggests that I envy good fortune when it comes to others, if I think it didn't have an equal chance of coming to me or mine.

Gosh, self analysis is fun......

Another One Bites the Dust

Another Cookies With Santa, that is. Two hours and a little bit more, in The Chair, smiling (not that you could tell through the beard), jokiing, teasing, and listening as hard as I could to soft voices, some of whom seemed to have no idea what they wanted for Christmas, and some that had a very good idea, indeed.

Three noteworthy occurrences in the stream of kids.

One of the kids who had a very good idea of what she wanted had a mother. Said mother took the opportunity of a break in the flow to come over, sit in my lap, and murmur that she'd been very good, and would prefer diamonds, rubies, or a Mercedes. Racy reparte not being in the Santa image, I murmured back " Baseball, Ruby Dee, and Mercedes McCambridge"?

One girl, looked to be about fourteen, who clearly didn't want to be doing this. I gave her the option, as I do with any kid old enough to possibly not want to be doing this, to sit on my lap or stand, and she said Stand, with a great finality in her voice. She stood and even smiled for the photograph, but when we were done, I asked her what she wanted for Christmas, and she just grimaced. "Too old for this?", I asked. "Yes", she replied, striding off, "and so are you."

And one woman, who walked up with a tall adolescent behind her. "This is my son", she said. "He's very big outside, but inside he's very young." He moved awkwardly, did not speak, or even meet my eyes. But when we were done, he looked at me and shook my hand. Made me feel humble.

Some general notes.

When a kid was dressed well -- not squeaky-clean, like for The Formal Portrait, but nice, with complementary colors and the like -- I told them. Sometimes, you get the feeling no one has ever complimented them before on something like that. I don't think its going to change a kids life, to have an unknown adult tell them this, but you never know.

One kid had a really nice smile, and I told her so. She denied it, so I told her again. She shook her head. Finally, I said "Look at me. Look me in the eyes." She did. I leaned really close and I said "This is Santa talking. You have a nice smile." And she smiled.

When I could, I suggested books as gifts. A couple of kids seemed surprised and thoughtful.

Once again, its done. And once again, I'm glad I did it.
.
.

Furniture Chess

I'm looking for a desk. It's going to be the opening move for a game of Furniture Chess.

The house PC has been resident on a small Queen Ann style desk in the room we call the library (a 10 x 10 bedroom), and over time we've found ourselves starting to run out of space on it. I put my laptop on the corner, and I have the keyboard for our PC on the center of the desk. Two speakers on either far corner, a bankers lamp, and a stack of whatever papers are being worked on -- it gets crowded pretty quickly.

Additionally, the daughter could use an actual desk to do homework on. She does it on the kitchen table (which, now that we use the dining room table much more frequently, has become pretty much entirely dedicated to her homework and projects). She has a small, kid-sized desk out here in the living room, but I doubt she's sat at it since she was three. Strictly speaking, she doesn't need a desk, but, in the timeless tradition of parents, we want to think that having One Place For Her Stuff will encourage neatness and organization.

So the plan is, buy a new, bigger desk for our stuff; move the QA desk out here for her to use (and put a new computer on it, said new computer being the old one that her grandmother will give up if we ever get her new one up to her), and pitch the kid desk. We'll likely give her the thin monitor from this PC, too; as I said, the desktop for the QA desk isn't that large.

First step: Pick the new desk. We're thinking something of quality, with plain, simple lines -- this Craftsman style is what we have in mind -- and we'd like to get it locally. Nothing against the company that I linked to, but you want to touch these things before you buy them. I did drop the store a line, asking if I could get a sample of the finished wood before I buy it. They'll likely say no, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

More as we do it. We need to figure out how to get the 'new' PC to talk to the printer, which at the moment is hardwired to the house PC. The router doesn't accept USB connections, which is what the printer is. This should be a Minor Problem. Should be. Stay tuned.
.
.

Rumsfeld

I suppose now Mr. Rumsfeld will scuttle back to his armored cave in the Pentagon, muttering darkly about insolent soldiers who take unfair advantage of offers to ask him tough questions, and actually do so. Possibly, like his boss, it's been a while since he met an actual tough question. Not a hard question, not a complex question -- a tough question, one that questions his assumptions, his style. Though I am sure that he's a tough guy in his own mileu, he most assuredly isn't up to the physical toughness of the people who asked him the question. They have to be careful every day of getting blown to bits. All he has to worry about is a sharply worded email. As I recall, this is the same guy who asked why having to stand for long periods of time, arms outstretched, at Abu Ghraib was a problem -- why, he personally stood for long periods, working at his stand-up desk. What's so tough about that?

He is out of touch. He should be out of office.
.
.

Wet Night Thoughts

It's a rainy Thursday night, and, except for the guinea pig, I'm alone. The offspring is at a girl scout troop meeting. They've merged the troop with another one, and so instead of having two meetings, one hour each, every month, they have one that lasts about two hours.

I spent some of the time wrapping two Christmas presents. I'm not a particularly good wrapper, but I try, and with the help of a lot of Scotch tape, I get it done. I was going to look into ordering some gifts on line, but that didn't work out. Partially, it was because the site of choice, Bloomingdales, has such a good security system that it won't let me order without giving it the secret password -- and their offer to mail me the secret password seems to have a glitch, as it's been about twenty four hours, and no password has dropped, ker-chunk, into my email box. I suppose it's a good idea, because what I was going to buy was just a little silly something, and I didn't really need to order it. I wonder about the effectiveness of Bloomingdale's online systems, though, when things like this happen. Years ago, the chairman of Scandinavian Airlines Systems said that it was important to keep the tray tables clean, because the passengers could see them, and if they were dirty, the passengers got a 'dirty' image of the airline. They wondered about the things that they could not see, if the things that they could see were in bad repair. I am willing to bet that the failure of Bloomingdales to send me a forgotten password -- or let me just reset it on the fly -- doesn't really call into question the integrity of their electronic operations. But it did cost them a sale.

Instead, I went to a recently opened branch of Coldwater Creek, and I bought two nice pieces of clothing there. The store is in a small shopping center that's recently opened not too far from where I work. They're trying to make it an upscale deal, so along with CC there is a J Jill, a Talbots,an Ann Taylor Loft, a Bombay Company, and some others. Have to say that both Talbots and J Jill seemed to have a bit of a problem with the idea of a guy walking around, looking at women's clothing. I don't think that they thought it was creepy -- the way that the people at Victoria's Secret did, first time I went into one of their stores, years ago -- but they just didn't seem comfortable with me there. I noticed that the salespeople -- all but one women -- went up to women as they entered, but they didn't for me. No matter. I found stuff that I liked in Coldwater Creek. Part of it was that I just liked the way the store was decorated and laid out, which includes that they did not have rock music playing, as J Jill did, and Ann Taylor. Talbots had some nice music, and they did have one nice burgundy silk blouse that I thought about -- but I'd already both the things at CC, so I wasn't too moved. I still want to get more, but if this is all I get, it will be okay.

So this evening, instead of shopping, I wrapped the two presents, and then I watched West Wing for about 90 minutes. One was a current episode that I'd taped last night, and the other was an old one. I will almost always watch West Wing, if its on.

I hear the garage door. I think I'm about to not be alone.

Excel - lent

This morning, I did some work with Excel, and whether it was because I was in a relatively decent mood, or the stars were aligned, or what, it went pretty well.

I was looking at numbers from a performance reporting tool that gave measurements about how well certain things were running. There were about six different classifications of numbers, and each had about 72 measurements per day, and there were a total of five days worth of data. (Why do I feel like ending that with ...how many men were going to St. Ives?)

But I got it downloaded and dumped into Excel, plotted the values, and it told me something useful. In a way, I didn't need to -- it simply gave me a graphic image of something that I (and lots of other people) already expected (that this computer was seriously overloaded) but now I could see it; further, I could compare workloads (yes, the pain is mostly being felt by the least important workloads) and I could look at one workload over time. Performance and capacity people like this kind of thing, so I was having fun.

And unlike the last time, I didn't think 'gee, if this is fun, maybe I should do lots more of it!'. Okay, I did do one more days worth of data, and won out again: the chart clearly showed that although things were still tough on the machine, a change we'd made had had the effect of improving things for them.

I was pleased.

Yesterday was Amazing

...for a couple of reasons.

One was, I got the Christmas lights put up outside. We have a couple of evergreens in our back yard -- one was installed when we had some landscaping done about fifteen years ago, and the other was our attempt to have a live Christmas tree indoors which we would then plant outside. Both are huge -- about twelve feet high for one, fifteen to twenty for the other -- and while I realize that by redwood standards, they’re minuscule, they dominate the landscape back there, and we like that. Two years ago, I had the thought to put lights on one of them, and this year, going out to do it again, I found that I had to scavenge another string of lights just to get two thirds of the way up. You’d think the thing was growing, or something. They come on with a timer, and its just so nice to look out in the darkness and see it glowing there.

The other was, we did something spontaneous, and we did it, as my partner likes to say, ‘as a family’. We were eating dinner, and spoke a bit about the movie that my wife and daughter had gone to see while we were up at her mother’s house. This was while I was swearing under my breath, and not so far under, at the Dell That Would Not Start. My daughter said that she liked the movie and all, but the one that she really wanted to see was National Treasure. This took us by surprise. You realize, I said carefully, that this is not a kids movie. There are no cartoons, no princesses, no goblins, no ponies. I hate ponies! she announced. And I want to see that movie.

We shared the Parent Look across the table (can we/should we/is she old enough/we'd have to leave pretty much right away) and the long and short of it was, we did it. And you know what? We had a great time. She got most of the ins and outs of the script( though there were times where she shuddered and turned her face away from the screen, and I had to promise to tell her when it was over). She was riveted by the action (it helped that she'd been to many of those places). And to cap it, on the way home we actually discussed the plot with her. She spoke lucidly about it, and she actually liked the parts that we liked. Amazing!

Pretty cool.

PBC ABCs

Its come to the end of the year, which in my company means that it is time for PBC assessment.

PBC stands for Personal Business Commitment. When I started working here, four years ago, I thought that this would be an interesting and valuable tool to allow me to see how my contribution -- granted, a pittance -- affected the profit and survivability of the organization as a massive whole. I have always had a serious problem with the concept of Me as a significant affector of corporate success, both because I have found it very hard to believe that what I do in any way affects the organization, good or bad, and because I could not for the life of me think of a way in which it possibly could. Show up, handle problems, install software, keep your head down, and don't leave too early seemed to be the order of the day, and that was what I would do. Now, at last, I would have a criteria that I could use to see how I really did affect the organization. I didn't expect to find that I had much impact, but I was looking forward to finding out.

As it turned out, PBCs were a pipe dream.

They consisted of overblown statements issued from managers four and five organizational levels away from me, and supplemented by the managers between me and them -- statements like 'Contribute to the overall profitability of your business unit by reducing costs by ten percent while increasing market share and customer satisfaction'. All very noble, but how? Where? With what? I am sure that my group's manager would not agree, but my thought was that, basically, they wanted lip service -- they would certainly have liked more, but the truth was that for most people, the regimen I mentioned a few sentences ago was all they could do. They certainly could not reduce overall costs, and as for market share, they hadn't the slightest idea what our market share was, let alone how it might be affected. That was, and is, Other People's Job.

It saddens me to come to this conclusion, and I would very much like to be proven wrong. I am willing to admit that there is at least a chance that so long as I believe I can't affect the organization as a whole, I won't. I settle for doing what I can, where I can, and hope that that's enough.

Insofar as salary and pay in general is partially affected by this, though, there is a certain anxiety regarding whether what I wrote as my 'achievements', though true, will be found up to the mark. I guess I'll find out this month.

Normally, I'd Be Exhausted

...at about this time, because today is the day that the company for whom I used to work holds their Breakfast With Santa, and I would have been sitting for about two hours as kid after kid clambered up and talked to me. I would have been thinking longingly of something cold to drink -- just as I was leaving, one year, the Coke delivery guy gave me a free one, and all I could think of was the old Coke ad -- and of getting out of the suit, knowing that the T Shirt and underwear would be soaked in sweat. One year, I didn't wear the T Shirt, and got to drive home with clammy clothes. What fun.

As I think I mentioned earlier, the reason I begged out this year was one that I couldn't really tell them -- that being, that I disliked when the family of the person doing the photography for the event clambered over me for their individual and group shots. It's silly, I suppose, but I felt unappreciated, and I didn't like that part of it, so I just didn't do it this year. We'll see about next year.

That won't be a consideration next Saturday, though, when I do it at one of the local hospitals. They have a good turnout, and they really seem to appreciate the effort that I and all of the others involved put into it. The first year, they equipped me with two rather sexy elves from a local college. Last two years, it was a middle-aged woman, which wasn't nearly as visually interesting, but I had fun anyway. I really enjoy it. I'm hoping that I'll get the chance to see any kids who happen to be in residence in the hospital, too.

Every year, I wonder if I should go out and buy a Santa suit. What I'd really want, I think, is one of the old fashioned ones, with a robe rather than the jacket and belt, and I'd want real boots, too. Then I realize that the setup would cost about $400 or so, and my enthusiasm wanes substantially. Come to think of it, thats exactly the cycle my mind goes through when I mull over getting a big screen TV, too. I think its called Reality Sets In.

Ah, Christmas.
.
.
.-

Rather Broke...Aww.....

I guess I'm just not a sentimental kind of guy. Or perhaps its that I don't really get it. Certainly the disparity of my wishes and what actually happened in the last presidential election might suggest that.

So explain it to me again.

Why, exactly, should I care that Tom Brokaw is quitting? Ditto, Dan?

Is it one of these '"Well, we're news media people, and they're news media people, so we think they're something special, so of course we want to hype it" things?

Or is it "Well, see, people trust Tom and Dan, and we're sorry to see them go because we have no viable replacement for either of them, so there goes our market share'?

I really don't get it.
.
.



.
.