unraveling
30.Aug.03
You're not imagining things, there are more cars parked in your
neighbors' driveways and out on the street these days:
our cars started outnumbering our drivers two years ago, 1.9 to 1.75 per
household. The 0.86 bicycles per household apparently continue to
gather more dust than anything else: sliced
by mode of transportation, bike trips are lost in the other, and
only 1 in 12 individuals over 15 said they'd
made a trip by bike in the last week. As usual, our household is atypical:
4 bikes (with 5 seats), 2 cars, 2 drivers (with one more on the way),
both of whom made trips by bicycle last week.
Perhaps you're not reading this because you're out on the road for the
holiday weekend? In that case, do drive safely, so that you don't turn
into one of the
488
fatalities expected.
Do you roll your eyes when you see inserts in your billing statements
larded with fine print? Do you actually read through all that stuff, or
just skim on by and give in to whatever legal traps have been set for
you? Here's an idea:
send some of that stuff
back at 'em. This
news story from the Madison, Wi. Capitol Times is rather
heartwarming. "When their pest control contract was about to expire,
Margo Rebar sent the company her renewal check, but also included an
insert titled 'Addendum to Customer Agreement.' The insert urged the
company to 'read this insert carefully.'" (Thanks to Mark O'Dell for
those.)
If you've got some time, and bandwidth, and you're wondering
how everyday things are
made, from jelly beans to glass bottles, the Alliance for Innovative
Manufacturing at Stanford has just the site for you.
29.Aug.03
Here's my idea: I get a telephone system that I can program in six or
eight of my neighbors' numbers, with a single "alert" button on my end.
I press the button, and it quickly rings all the neighbors' phones, not
with the usual pattern, but 5 or 6 times in rapid succession -
RING RING RING RING RING. And then disconnects. Maybe a couple
of them will like the system, and install their own, so with their
selection of neighbors down the block, and so on. Then when anything in
the neighborhood happens that gets my attention -- the mailman's coming,
say, or someone is walking their dog down the street, or I can hear a
siren, or a hot air balloon is in sight -- I'll press the button so that
all my neighbors will know. That would be really great.
Speaking of obnoxious things in the neighborhood, here's
one
response to the annoyance of malware: help make the public aware
of the offenders. Not sure if the scope of the resistance is adequate
to the task, but it's worth a try, to ease the frustration, if nothing
else. I've had pretty good luck with
Lavasoft's
Ad-aware for keeping this stuff out of my hair. (Hmm, I see their
web style is broken on Opera v6.05, though. Bummer.)
The doxdesk.com of one Andrew
Clover offers a big catalog of
parasites
("unsolicited commercial software") with a script to detect these things
in your Internet Exploder installation. Another reason to have a
browser with more explicit cookie control, so that only invited parties
can leave things on your
machine. (Hint, Opera is one.) Of
course, having a less-than-mainstream browser (or O/S!) doesn't hurt,
either.
The
shipping business is big; bigger than ever. China's booming economy
is driving it, sucking in raw materials and pouring out finished
goods.
Speaking of good business, it may have taken him 36-years to pile it up,
but
$140 million still seems like a lot for running a stock market.
That's a lot of skimming for Grasso to take home that kind of green.
The NYSE, in case you were wondering, is a private, non-profit
organization.
Remember when Rosemary Woods supposedly did that contortionist trick
and "accidentally" erased 18½ minutes from one of Richard Nixon's
White House tapes? Ok, well maybe you don't remember that, it was 35
years or so ago. Coincidentally, Microsoft says they lost
35
weeks of email messages about their business dealings with
Burst.com ("and we don't have any backups, either"), just when they
would be most interesting for a little court case. Hmm, is Ms. Woods
working in Redmond, now?
After yesterday's spam poetry, Mark O'Dell forwarded the link to ActiveState's
Field Guide to Spam and its catalog of tricks, including the
"invisible ink" one (at the very end).
Hall of Technical
Documentation Weirdness:
Instruction sheets that say things like "Prythee no sport with stingy or
play asperity game. Winding finger have got bloodstream not wallk. Throagh
of peril," and pictures that are worth a thousand such words. I'm behind
slashdot in hearing about the site (who can keep up, for heaven's
sake?), but enjoyed the wider variety of wit on
the proprietor's blog.
I especially appreciated the tip toward the BBC's
What The World Thinks of America program. O wad some gift the
Giftie gie us... with
dozens of comparative graphics.
The antipathy of the French (among others!) is quantified. Which of the
following things about America do you think your own country should
aspire to achieve? The French answered oui most weakly
to economic opportunities, freedom of expression, democratic
institutions, military power and popular culture. 2% for that last one;
they like their own popular culture just fine, of course.
The story of the
attack of synthetic diamonds reads like good fiction, at least.
Brigadier General Carter Clarke (ret.) saluting his workers and his
interviewer is just one of many nice touches. De Beers is in the story,
of course, with "no comment" on the record. The government comes in:
will the FTC require "synthetic" labelling for man-made diamonds, so
that good old De Beers monopoly stones will be "all natural"?
Even better, they ruled in April 2001 that man-made diamonds couldn't be
called "diamonds"!
The Diamond High Council (I am not making this up) has an answer, too:
"It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created
last week."
The inventor of a
chemical vapor deposition process to make single-crystal diamonds
has already collected a veiled death threat.
27.Aug.03
Even though we all know spam when we see it, the task of automated
filtering is a fascinating contest between humans designing the opposing
systems. Perhaps you've heard of
Bayesian filters?
They identify spam by spam words, and non-spam by the absence of spam
words, collecting statistics from samples. As the reference sample
gains experience from what you put in the two buckets, messages are
sorted more and more accurately. It's one corner of the state of the
art in spam detection.
The counterattack is to put lots of non-spam words in messages
(preferably where the recipient won't actually see them, such as the
text version of a multipart-alternative MIME-encoded message), with the
"payload" thereby camouflaged to filters, at least. Today's sample is
from one "Kale Cohen," with subject "scrambler." It's obviously spam to
me, since I don't know anyone by that name. Using Outlook Express'
"forward" command, with outgoing messages forced to plain text, I see
the camouflage plain text, and can appreciate its technique (random
sampling long words from a dictionary) as well as its unintended
character of found poetry. (Inspecting the message properties / source,
I see the trick is white text on an expected white background in
an HTML-formatted message.) Here's half of it:
horsehair adherent potable member adulthood adequacies teasel savor
tansy materialized porcupine adhered milestones augustus identifier
bobwhite scientifically teleost accidently scrounge schooled
counterpoint humanity explainer anglicanism tenaciously barth exporter
hundredfold mechanically $RANDO MIZE tapestries breadboard booths ached
hues ackley borrower scales mawkish counselling blanche metamorphosis
craw tam coruscate matchless testamentary takings exponentiate bordered
adsorbate pouch saunter bodice pol templates acyclically exhaustable
breakfasts satire $RANDOM IZE exponentiated exclaim exemplifiers scented
addressograph excavates acceptors tactician mercenary bergen austria
polymeric actualization atkinson bounties brainstems bluster covalent
methodological blundered playmate
Arthur Blaustein, writing commentary in
Mother Jones, pretty well sizes up the current administration:
Leave No Millionaire Behind.
"The President and his party have cooked up the ultimate recipe for
keeping political power. A nation in a constant state of anxiety --
over the threat of terrorism, or a potential war -- is a nation off
balance. And that insecurity is the perfect cover to divert public
attention from the country's serious domestic problems and the
administration's political agenda....
"The Bush economic policies -- and the overtly antisocial political
priorities driving them -- are not based on a commitment to any high
principles such as freedom, liberty, equality, justice, or opportunity,
although such pieties are mouthed at the swivel of a camera. The
administration's policies instead are based on the very narrow personal
prejudices and biases of a group of men who have been motivated by the
acquisition of money and power. Bush and Cheney have constructed a
hypothesis to fit a simple notion: 'The plutocracy is good to me, so
I'll be good to the plutocracy.'"
Well, they've
rolled away
the stone, in spite of the protestors. You'd think it was the
original 10 Commandments the way these folks are carrying on. Of
course it never was about rocks or golden tablets, but about what's in
our hearts. Still some work to be done there.
Ellen
Goodman's take on the issue ties together the frayed thread
connecting us and other countries, other religions: "But these days we
Americans look at ourselves in the global light of places like Iraq,
Iran, Afghanistan. Our breed of democracy does more than let the
majority rule. It also protects the minority -- the Zoroastrian, Zen
Buddhist, Hindu, Atheist, Muslim -- and lets us live together."
It's not easy becoming part of one world economy.
Jim Burrill's lament about America exporting jobs is familiar, but
I don't think anyone can give him a response he'll like.
I'd heard of
Extreme
Programming without knowing just what was extreme about it. Turns
out that two people programming on one computer is the bulk of it.
Sounds like good social development for geeks if nothing else. (Will
it keep all the software jobs from going to India and then China?)
It won't stop the jobs of fundraising callers from being exported,
as the
Republican Party
demonstrates. Most of that work is done by robots, apparently.
Friedman:
We're not rebuilding Iraq, we're starting from scratch. And as news
reports today pointed out, it's not going to be cheap. The military
cost alone is a billion dollars a week, and the
infrastructure costs are on top of that. It's an amazing
undertaking for an administration -- and country -- that derided the
idea of nation building just a few years back. The challenge to
hide the
elephant of the economy(, stupid) is not going to be easy.
24.Aug.03
Comparing
American vacations with what the rest of the world gets makes our
allotment look stingy. (Excepting Congressional time off, of course.)
I'm a product of my culture, and "saved up" vacation over the years,
apparently not wanting to miss too much work. Last year, HP instituted
a new vacation plan as part of merging with Compaq, and now workers will
pretty much have to use what they're given each year or lose it (with a
few years' transition for those who have banked a bunch). At the
high end of the seniority curve, my current quota is a European
five weeks, which I've been using at about the same rate it accumulates
(one day per half-month, essentially) to stay under the "cap." On my
way out, I'll get all that saved vacation pay in a tidy lump. Then,
something a lot like vacation (without pay!) will stretch from
here to the horizon.
I'm still enjoying and observing the variety of reactions to the news
that I'm calling it a day. One friend on Friday was all smiles about
it, warmly congratulating me on the move and wishing me well. (Thanks,
Ralph!) He's not any more concerned about my lack of immediate big
plans than I am, and he expressed confidence that I'd do well in my new
"career." This morning, after
sailing at the lake,
another friend found it perplexing that I didn't have a clear answer to
"then what are you going to do?" He's worried I'll get bored. Could
happen, who knows? I'm willing to face that risk, though! I finally
decided that fear of being bored was not a sufficient reason for
continuing to work.
Now here's an idea to save some government spending, and harness those
thousand points of light at the same time: have
vigilantes
take care of patrolling federal lands.
The ORA prefers "citizen
volunteers," but they definitely do go in for insignia and
armaments.
Their "About Us" page says: "Certified as Armed Officers with the State
of Oregon, the Rangers do carry firearms for your protection and theirs,
however, their duties are limited in most cases, referring heavy calls
to traditional law enforcement." Indeed, the photo gallery shows jes
folks doing mundane volunteer work, with no gun play in evidence.
I'm thinking I'd find the woods to be an even safer place for my family
without wannabe cops on the loose.
Along with all the other Big Lies (sorry to sound like a broken record,
but there are a lot of them to talk about) is the one about how we've
got to cut our forests down before they burn.
Research paints a
different picture:
"...When fire does come, forests that have not burned for a long time burn
with lower intensity than more recently burned forests. What's more,
tree plantations experienced twice as much high-intensity fire as did
multi-aged forests. That's right: Young stands, whether created by
logging or by stand- replacement fires, are more flammable than forests
full of big old trees."
23.Aug.03
Under the cover of "compassionate conservative" spin, the Bush
administration is hell on the environment, far worse than Reagan's team
was. Osha Gray Davidson provides the details, writing in Mother
Jones magazine:
Dirty Secrets. The list includes: gutting key sections of the Clean
Water and Clean Air acts; crippling the Superfund program; seeking to
cut the EPA's enforcement division to its lowest level on record;
reducing fines assessed and criminal prosecutions for environmental
violations; no longer adding any species to the endangered species list;
opening millions of acres of wilderness to logging, mining, and oil and
gas drilling; denying the importance (if not the existence) of global
warming. The agenda comes from the bureaucratic core of
the administration, with
industry lobbyists writing the score. Remember
the "energy task force" that Dick Cheney led, and for which secrecy was
so important? It's so important because if the American people knew
what was going on, they would be adamantly opposed to what's going
on.
TomPaine.com collects a
Rollback
Reader of Bush's environmental record.
The US Open
without the Williams sisters will be like a day without sunshine.
Venus has been in the last 14 grand slam events, and she and her sister
have played for the championship in 6 of the last 8.
It's not quite a butterfly in the Amazon, but a
powerline sagging into a tree in Cleveland seems closely related
to the story of unexpected consequences from everything being
connected.
Fair and balanced US District Court judge Denny Chin suggested that Fox
News
learn
how to take a joke, denied their request for an injunction against
Al Franken and his publisher, and called the motion "wholly without
merit, both factually and legally." Franken's still reveling in the
free publicity. "I never really had any doubt... In addition to
thanking my own lawyers, I'd like to thank Fox's lawyers for filing one
of the stupidest briefs I've ever seen in my life." It didn't exactly
get laughed out of court, but close enough. Is Fox News smart enough to
know when they've been had, or do you think they'll appeal to support
their assault on the First Amendment?
The governor of Texas finally put an end to the
nightmare
of 35 people of Tulia, convicted by the bogus testimony of one
Thomas Coleman. Coleman was once named 'Outstanding Lawman of the Year'
by the Texas Narcotics Control Program. (Presumably the other 3 of the
38 were convicted in something more than just Coleman's testimony.)
22.Aug.03
Ah, fond memories of my old home state came back while reading
this story about Sally Baron's obituary in The Capital Times.
"She'd always watch CNN, C-SPAN, and you know, she'd just swear at the
TV and say `Oh, Bush, he's such a whistle ass!' She'd just get so mad,"
Bettilyon said. Memorials in her honor can be made to any organization
working for the removal of President Bush.
21.Aug.2003
Henry Waxman's
Politics
& Science index provides amazing documentation of the Bush
administration's promotion of ideology over science. There's a long
list of examples where they have "manipulated, distorted, or interfered
with science on health, environmental, and other key issues."
From A ("Administration officials have never acknowledged that
abstinence-only programs have not been proven to reduce sexual activity,
teen pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease. Instead, HHS has changed
performance measures for abstinence- only education to make the programs
appear successful, censored information on effective sex education
programs, and appointed to a key panel an abstinence-only proponent with
dubious credentials") to Y ("The Bush Administration has suppressed
important information about continuing ecological problems at
Yellowstone National Park in order to avoid international attention")
and 19 stops between.
Do voters care? Or is it OK to ignore science if you agree with the
ideology?
Roy Moore's
adventure with
the 10 Commandments continues, with his 8 fellow Supremes standing
against him (although not removing his administrative powers over the
building in question), and a whole bunch of impassioned supporters
standing behind him. What is it about separation of church and state
that these people don't get, I wonder? Let Judge Moore put the damned
rock in his front lawn if he wants to, but it has no business in the
lobby of the State Supreme Court building.
But in the meantime, it's great theater. From the
New York Times' account: "The muggy plaza was clogged with dozens of
little girls wearing Jesus T-shirts, bearded men with thick arms and
Confederate flags on their backs, black people, white people, the young,
the old, the in between, a man who had walked from Texas dressed in a
monk's frock and another who had driven from San Diego in a red truck
with a sign that said 'Shame on America.'"
And this: "(O)n Wednesday hundreds streamed into Montgomery to chant,
kneel, pray and cry on the steps of the state's highest court, shouting
out the Almighty's name and at times lying on their bellies to block
passers-by."
Ashcroft's road show is
coming to Boise, how thrilling. Our local ACLU spokesperson asks a
simple question:
"If Mr. Ashcroft is truly confident about the Patriot Act, why
doesn't he welcome public dialogue? What's he afraid of?"
This is rhetorical, of course. He's obviously afraid of public
dialogue, and photo ops with bare breasted statues. (We don't allow bare
breasts in our town, so he should be OK.)
Coke alert (*):
SWAT hand signals. Thanks to John Paczkowski's
Good Morning Silicon Valley and somebody named John for that.
I was over there reading stories with catchy headlines like
Dell trims prices, HP market share, and
HP posts third-quarter employee surplus, not quite so funny.
(* The Coke alert notifies readers to swallow whatever they may be
eating or drinking before reading the following, lest they spew upon
their keyboards while laughing.)
Texans in exile again,
this time in New
Mexico, hiding out from the rest of the Legislature who are
apparently bent on Tom DeLay's bidding to gerrymander the Congressional
districting so that a passle of new Republicans get sent to DC from
Texas.
"The Governor has indicated he will continue calling special sessions
until the Republican redistricting plan is enacted, despite the fact
that the Republican-controlled Texas Supreme Court recently rejected the
Governor's writ of mandamus filing to compel the Senators to return to
the Senate. Meanwhile, eleven Democratic state senators are exiled from
their state, unable to be with their families, friends, and
constituents, for fear of being arrested as part of a partisan power
play by Republicans. In the most recent indignity, Republican Senators
voted to fine the absent Democrats up to $5,000 per day, and to revoke
parking and other privileges for their staffs as long as the Senators
are away."
Hey would you look at the
compassion fairly dripping off this guy? That is so
sweet...
20.Aug.2003
The John G. Ashcroft road show is not just in defense of the USA
Patriot Act (please remember, this act has nothing to do with
patriotism, but is rather an acronym, for "Uniting and Strengthening
America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and
Obstruct Terrorism"), it's also a lead-in to the next big chunk of
legislation he has in mind: the
Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act of 2003 ,
or "VICTORY" Act. (Hmm, where's the "Y"?) "Y" are we prepared for yet
another escalation in the War on Some Drugs? It seems to be part of the
strategy to call everything we don't like "terrorism": the draft bill
would reclassify some drug offenses as terrorism... and so enable
subverting the Constitution, no habeus corpus for enemy combatants,
secret trials and all that?
Let's hope that exposure to the light of day sends this cockroach of a
bill scurrying back to the darkness the way it did for Patriot II.
If your hometown's not on the Ashcroft tour, you can visit the new
website that tells you how
wonderful USA Patriot is. And since it's a free country (for the
moment), you can also visit the
ACLU website to get a possibly more fair and balanced view.
Speaking of that, Fox News' legal attack on Al Franken's new book is
giving a fairly balanced kick in the butt to potential sales. The
publisher ordered another 40,000 copies and
pulled the
publication date up by a month to capitalize on the windfall.
I'll probably check it out when the price goes down. I did certainly
enjoy Franken's first book,
Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot: and Other Observations.
On the other end of fair and balanced (that would be unfair and
unbalanced, I guess), we have
Verizon
vs. the Communications Workers of America:
"Verizon Wireless, asserted in court papers filed late on Monday that
union officials violated the company's trademark by using the 'Can you
hear me now?' phrase last week during a conference call with
journalists. In turn, the Communications Workers of America, one of the
two unions representing Verizon workers, filed a lawsuit in federal
court yesterday, accusing two Verizon executives of violating federal
wiretap rules by listening to the conference call."
Here's a humorous introduction to
getting
those inkjet cartridges refilled. Don't miss the "Terms and
Conditions" page linked at the bottom to make sure you're using the
information properly.
The ink was barely dry on the articles talking about what a superstar
Carly Fiorina was for executing the Compaq/HP merger when the company's
3rd quarter results came out and
the
castigation began anew. "Heck, if this is the merger that is saving
Hewlett-Packard $3.5 billion a year and the Compaq side is still in the
red, what does that imply about Compaq's real value? Either the company
was worth well shy of $19 billion or Fiorina hasn't done much of an
integration job."
One of the causes of the earnings shortfall mentioned was overly
agressive PC pricing. Yet Dell is making plenty of money, and their
response to today's news was to
cut
their prices. Ouch.
Apparently too many pesky employees is part of the problem too, and
HP
says it'll drop another 1300 of them. I guess I'll be contributing
to that bottom line pretty soon, too.
Maybe SARS
didn't
go quietly into that good night after all.
The next big virus, Sobig.F, follows the last big worm without much
of a pause to catch our breath. I've seen several bounce messages from
strange servers, for messages I know I (or my computer) did not send, so
mischief continues to abound.
Here's an exciting new web property:
georgewbush.com, with the top
story that... "Bush-Cheney '04 Launches Grassroots Action Web Site."
Y'all come! W. says "My campaign is going to take a hopeful and
optimistic message to the American people," so I wonder if that means
we're going to get down off of Terror Alert level Yellow one of these
days. "I came to office to solve problems, not to pass them on to other
Presidents and other generations." Hmm, so the burgeoning deficit
doesn't count, huh?
The top story on that other GWB web property,
gwbush.com, looks a bit more
interesting, actually: "The 3rd Annual Crawford Retreat: President's
Statement Kicking Off His Month-Long Fund-Raising Fiesta & Buckaroo
Photo-Op Hoedown." This month off in August isn't just fun and games:
"Indeed, all month long, me and Karl will be hopping in the F-250 for
one-day road trips anywhere he can find a high-capacity conference
center filled to the rafters with folks rich enough to fork out
$2000 to listen to me stutter through some cue cards for fifteen
minutes. You see, I broke all the records back in 2000 by spending $60
million on my campaign, and I'm aiming to double that this time."
I see
Tom Tomorrow is now fair and balanced, too. Bob Harris' guest blog
entry about Arnold's hallucinated political epiphany is a hoot, that
famous Nixon-Humphrey debate in 1968.
And speaking of August vacations, the Supremes were too busy (or too
certain) to bother hearing
Jesus Castillo's case, after he was convicted
of selling an adult comic book from the adult book section, to an adult.
The jury in the case never bothered to decide whether the book was
obscene, strangely enough. Maybe John Ashcroft can help with this
disturbing dissemination of adult comic books, too.
Maureen Dowd, on the
Magnet
for Evil in the middle east:
"The Qaeda and Ansar zealots, along with old Baath soldiers and new
foreign recruits, are intent on keeping Iraq in anarchy, even as
Afghanistan also slips back into chaos, with a reconstituted Taliban
fighting machine killing 90 in the last month." It's a lot easier to
maintain anarchy than it is to restore order.
18.Aug.2003
A random walk down blogstreet turns up a nice link from
Dave Winer to this
WSJ.com article about search. Google is still the top dog for me,
but Lee Gomes says to look out for AskJeeves after they bought out
Teoma.
Krugman:
blame deregulation for the blackout, because no one wants to pony up and
support transmission lines. It will make the Libertarians see red, but
my suspicion is that he's right about this. If power generation is
deregulated, we need excess capacity to create the slack for the system
to support choice. But no one has the incentive to increase
transmission capacity, because that part isn't deregulated.
One counter argument is that we should go ahead and deregulate it all,
but the idea of deregulated electricity transmission strikes me as
quite insane.
While we're on tomorrow's Op-Ed page, don't miss the fair and
balanced
piece by
Paul Newman, getting after the Department of HUD for usurping his
residuals.
17.Aug.2003
Answers to
questions about the blackout still don't include the essential
why?: "Three transmission lines in northern Ohio tripped off, and
a cascade of outages darkened the Midwest, Canada and New York, leaving
millions in the dark. What caused the Ohio lines to trip remains a
mystery." (In the Q&A, they note that "altogether, the average
American uses nearly 12,900 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. The
world average: 2,200." What's included in the "altogether," I wonder?
In terms of what comes through our meter, the two of us use
about 3,500 kWh a year, which would
put us way below the world average, but that's just at home.)
Why hasn't the system been upgraded? "The cost, environmental
opposition and the unwillingness of communities to locate new facilities
near homes." Those latter two reasons sound much like the same thing.
No one wants to be near a high voltage transmission line. Blame the
Greens (who are they, exactly?) if you like, but the so-called
"BANANA" problem -- Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything --
is a community thing, not a particular party or movement.
16.Aug.03
The power back East is (pretty much?) back on, and now it's time to
figure out what went wrong. All of a sudden, the unglamorous work of
power engineering is of intense interest to millions of people,
especially in making this never happen again. Today's
NY
Times story about the cause is a bit confused, in no small part
because the experts are still sorting things out, but also because it's
an complex subject. Some of the analogies and description don't match
up with alternating current (AC) power distribution, but I thought this
one was wonderfully apt:
"The problem is that the power grid is like a game of tug of war, which
works as long as neither side -- the generating stations and the load
centers -- wins. If one side falters, and the rope moves too far,
everyone on the other side will fall down. In this case, the power
swing, no matter what its precise size, sharply destabilized the flow of
power, and eventually produced some first, specific failure."
In addition to the precipitating event, and the regional problem it
caused, lots of people are trying to figure out why many of the
provisions to keep outages contained failed to prevent a cascading
problem that resulted in the largest blackout in the nation's history:
almost 62 terrawatts of capacity from about 100 power plants
dropped offline. The NY Times reports that (the state of) New
York's demand was 28.5 TW, almost half of the total lost in 8
states and 2 Candadian provinces.
If you can handle Flash (and you have a free subscription), don't miss
the interactive graphics, especially "The View from Space," comparing
the eastern seaboard on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. The
advice from Baghdad is amusing, too.
The
end of SARS in China, for now. While we were all obsessed with the
349 people who died of that disease in the last year, how many tens of
thousands died from other, more common things, and traffic
accidents?
Today's spam scam:
mail
purporting to be from Citibank, concerning my
checking account. Since I don't have a Citibank checking account, and
since it came in with an attachment, it's doubly suspicious. My SOP for
inspection is to have message preview turned off, and to "forward" the
message before opening it, with my mailer configured to forward in plain
text. Inspecting the message source shows that "Citibank" is actually
one Kok-khiang_Annnora@rocketmail.com, and the body is base64 encoded
HTML. She, he or it is sorry for any "inconvinience" but would like
me to "Click here to access our Terms & Conditions page and not allow
your Citibank checking account suspension." I'm not going to fall for
that, but I bet some of the recipients will, just as they will open the
message in HTML with insufficient protection against malicious code.
Moments later, I accidentally opened the message by deleting the
previous one while viewing it. (Usually I dispatch all spam before
doing any "stack" operations, but I saved this to show Jeanette and warn
her about the symptoms.) I hope my security settings are as strong as
needed! The HTML "letter" included a stolen logo, and made a pretty
convincing looking letter (other than that funny spelling error), with a
link pointing to a website well-concealed by URL-like userid/password
noise before a numeric IP address and a call to a perl script with my
email address passed as a parameter. Nasty.
Salam Pax is still
blogging from Baghdad
and now
The
Guardian is publishing some of his stuff, too. This account of
British vs. American occupying forces is interesting. The latest
entries talk about 50+°C heat, which might drop below 40°C
at night, if you're lucky. I can't imagine that. Not having
electricity to run air conditioners is a Big Deal.
15.Aug.03
22 years ago today, Jeanette and I and a bunch of our friends and
family climbed a path on Moscow Mountain, sweating in the morning
mid-August sunshine, to celebrate our marriage. I have a lot of
memories of the day, but the one that keeps coming back is Jon Norstog's
reading of a Kabir poem.
Experiencing nothing shuts the iron gates;
The new love opens them.
The sound of the gates opening
wakes the beautiful woman asleep.
Kabir says: Fantastic! Don't let a chance like this go by!
Googleholes:
the built-in myopia of our modern oracle. (Sorry, Steven,
but if anything has ever deserved that title, Google does. No reader
here needs an example, but just to make the point, I didn't bother
digging out our wedding text, or
The Kabir book but just gave Google the punchline in quotes to save
myself the trouble of typing quatrain #9.)
As the news stories describing the big blackout in the East continue,
I'm forced to wonder: if we don't know exactly what caused the problem,
how can we be so certain that
it
wasn't caused by a terrorist exploit of a system weakness? It's
certainly reassuring to hear our leaders tell us that it wasn't
terrorism (as opposed to the color-coded threat levels, giving us
unspecified cause for anxiety), but having Bush appear before the news
media and state facts with authority seems a bit ludicrous. Have the
press secretary do that, so we all know that it's just a functionary
passing on what s/he's been told.
Jeanette found a book for me out of her library that I wished I'd
started reading about, oh, 10 or 20 years ago: Richard Nelson Bolles'
The Three Boxes of Life and How to Get out of Them: An Introduction to
Life-Work Planning. As I go for box #3 (with some expectation of
reprising #2 and #1 sooner or later), it seems like a good time to read
it. The classic
What Color is Your Parachute? is by the same author. Money is no
excuse for not getting The Three Boxes: Amazon's new and used
copies start at 8 cents. Plus shipping, no doubt.
14.Aug.03
How nice for New Yorkers that the lights should go out for a while, and
let them enjoy the just-past-full moon and Mars. I hope the logistics
don't interfere with the opportunity too much. (Oof - 2 hours stuck
in a subway train? No thanks for that.) When the lights come
back on, they'll all have a renewed appreciation for infrastructure,
governments, civility.
I wonder why no nav lights showed on the ferries in this picture of
Manhattan at sunset? They kept their lights off in solidarity?
Around the world in
171 chapters:
that's a lotta time in the saddle. Thanks to
Mike R.
for the link.
13.Aug.2003
All the signs and portents and registration at Capitol High School
(for our niece) pointed to today being Decision Day. No more reveling
in the myriad possibilities, weighing multiple job offers, moves to
different cities, whatever, it was time to decide. My decision
was to take the generous incentive to clean out my desk and reduce the
corporate headcount by 1. The denouement is going to take some 3
months, but I just happen to have nothing but time at the moment. My
favorite response was from a college chum who works at the same site.
"I'm going to take the WFR," I said. "You scumbag!" he replied,
obviously out of envy. As I've told friends and family, it's time to
practice retirement. If it doesn't work out, I'm going to say it was a
sabbatical. What am I going to do? Hey, I don't have to decide right
away, but I've got some ideas. Check back later.
The Blaster worm is the latest Microsoft bane on the loose. WinXP and
Win2k are the targets this time, and aside from hosing your local
machine and creating general traffic jams on the 'net, the ultimate
target is a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on
windowsupdate.com. I suppose the technopath(s) who came up with the
idea felt this was appropriate karma for the company whose operating
systems have the vulnerability, but it creates a lot of collateral
damage.
eEye Digital Security has a good detailed description of the exploit,
how to detect it, remove it and prevent being attacked.
Microsoft's page is also a must-visit if you're running WindowsNT,
Win2000 or WinXP and aren't certain that your machine is properly
patched. The malicious code is set to turn on this Saturday, August
16th, at which time it will doubtless be well-distributed, and bring the
internet to its knees. Please do your checking, cleaning and protecting
before then!
Do people in Lebanon still have a sense of humor?
It looks like
some of them do
anyway!
The DLC vs. the rank and file:
"Let the Right retreat to where they belong: the Republican Party."
-- The Black
Commentator
12.Aug.2003
CD piracy - 30 to 40% of the total market. Yet another reason to
figure out how to sell music over the internet. Heard about the report
from Greg Aharonian's
Internet Patent News Service,
with this dry commentary:
You know, a word of advice for IFPI. I read this data and think to
myself, "given the few prosecutions for this crime, it sounds like a
safe crime to get into". Heck the report could easily be turned into a
recruiting poster for priates - "Steal Music. Make Lots of Money. Don't
Worry about Getting Caught." IFPI might want to report its problems
differently.
Here's good news:
the UCITA standby committee is discharged
by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws.
UCITA (I pronounce it "you cheetah") is the "Uniform Computer Information
Transactions Act" which a big team of lobbyists tried for a long time to
foist upon all the states. Depending on which side of the argument you
believe, it's either "anti-individual, anti-artist, anti-fair-use copyright
law that would benefit only large corporate intellectual property holders,
especially in the entertainment and software industries" or
"accepted and familiar principles of commercial contract law,
(providing) fundamental rules for licensing contracts between users and
vendors."
The NCCUSL had already
conceded defeat in February, withdrawing their motion to have the
American Bar Association endorse the package. Only Maryland and Virginia
had rolled over after years of persuasion in every state.
11.Aug.2003
Today's big news is that our Lootenant governor is going to stay right
where he is: Dirk's not going to be head of the EPA,
Utah's
governor is. That's OK by me! But how is it for the country's
environment? Well, we can't be too surprised to learn that Leavitt
is pro-development and a friend of the oil and gas industries.
The count of
moons in our solar system is incredibly beyond anything I learned in
school. Sixty-one moons around Jupiter?! Three-fourths of those
have been discovered in just the last 6 years. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus
and Neptune have 124 moons among them. At 0.6 to 6 miles diameter,
Jupiters last 45 moons look more like debris than satellites.
The Science
Times index has links to a couple interesting graphics, "When
Jupiter was Very Young," and "Discovering Jupiter's Moons."
9.Aug.03
Yet another opportunity to live an artistic existence, if only for a
little while: this year's
Burning Man
with an organized parade of
playa windsurfers. Mention of the DMV suggests a certain amount of
institutionalization along with the living art, but so it goes.
(It is the Division of Mutant Vehicles, but it has the feel of
authority just like the real one.) Crowds need crowd control, sooner or
later.
8.8.2003
Frank Gaffney, Jr., commenting on the
Faux News
website tells us that the big lie is that George Bush is a liar.
He didn't lie to us! It was all based on what he believed to be true at
the time! The Democrats are the big liars!
This little essay does not appear in the no-spin zone,
to be sure.
74-year old Norma "Duffy" Lyon has carved up a little celebratory
rancid butter,
in the shape
of a Harley Davidson motorcycle. A tasteful honorific for the
company's 100th anniversary.
7.Aug.03
The Consultant Debunking Unit gets after
"Who Moved My
Cheese?" That the bestseller is completely lame (or was the review
too curt?) is not a huge surprise, but a
94-page hardcover?! That is A-mazing alright, but more for what
it says about our credulity than how to cope with stress.
In case the Cheese worked for you, you won't want to miss
Who Stole My Cheese?!! : An A-mazing Way To Make More Money From the
Poor Suckers That You Cheated In Your Work And In Your Life and
Who Cut the Cheese? A Cutting-Edge Way of Surviving Change by Shifting
the Blame by Mason Brown. It seems like "Cheese for Dummies"
can't be far behind.
The ultimate in outsourcing -
Primate
Programming.
"Well, well, well. President George was in one hell of bind this week
when it turned that that Saudi Arabia funded Al Qaeda, not Iraq.
Realizing we'd invaded the wrong country, Bush did the honorable thing:
he's come out against gay marriages." More humor from
Greg
Palast. Oh wait, it isn't really that funny, is it?
Bob Cringely's looking at
head
count and figuring that "offshoring" isn't going to improve the
fortunes of companies that figure they're paying more than they need for
labor: productivity is all about doing more with less, not with doing
the same with cheaper.
6.Aug.03
I've been on the road, interviewing for a new job. Here are some of the
adventures along the way.
Monday
Sitting in the plane, at the gate, waiting for our fire detection and
supression battery to charge up. This is the first time I've flown out
of Boise since they opened the new terminal.
United's ticket counter is last in line, behind Southwest,
Horizon/Alaska, Delta, Northwest, apparently placed in order of current
business success. Passengers have to walk the furthest from the United
counters to the gates, and in spite of that, the lines were longest at
United. Are they just that much slower at getting people through? No,
they probably do have more customers, still. One gal in front of me had
a box of frozen fish with her, dry ice inside to keep them that way.
That agent wanted to know -- needed to know -- how much the dry
ice weighed. She did not know, and I guess the resolution was that she
carried the box on rather than checking it. Too much dry ice and we all
suffocate? The improbability of it didn't faze the agent. He had a
Rule in mind, and Rules must be adhered to. When it was my turn,
everything went according to the script, although the agent had no
explanation for why the automated check-in kiosk hadn't worked for me -
nothing special on my ticket. Perhaps because I'd used a "VON ALTEN"
credit card and my ticket was for "VONALTEN"? (The one-word styled VISA
card worked the next time; electronic check-in is great when it
works.)
At the crowded gate, we learned that there was some sort of battery
problem, but that they had a replacement plane ready if need be. Later,
we learned that the counter agent didn't know anything more. Then that
the rumor that one of the Chicago or the Denver flights had been
cancelled was false. Then that the problem was either a battery or a
circuit breaker. Then that there was to be a test, after which we'd
know whether the plane was OK, or whether we'd all be moving from gate
10 to gate 21. Hurray, it's OK!
Boarding in "Seating group 3," I walked past the mostly full front of
the plane. the plane was pretty much full. United's latest plan for
expediting seating is to fill the front of the plane first. Brilliant.
They've almost replicated Southwest's seating arrangement, with the
substitution of "most come, first served" instead of "first come," and
involving about 5 times as much human and computer time to solve the
problem.
But hey, we're all getting to Denver (aren't we?) at the same time, it's
not that big a deal to me. The wing's not in the way of my view back
here in 21A, and by the time we get going, the morning sun may not be on
this side of the plane, either. The guy on the microphone just told us
that "30 minutes may have been optimistic" for getting the battery
charged; the charger started at 45A, needs to get to 5, and it's at 30
now, 20? minutes after they started. The folks making connections in
Denver (half of us? more?) are not so sanguine, they're starting to get
nervous. One woman in the boarding area was talking about a 25 min.
connection, that's toast.
Got a nice view of Lucky Peak on the way
out. One kite bobbing and weaving, heading for the dam, must be Jon
Bolt or Tom Caviani. One boardsailor in the main reach, a mostly white
sail, powered up OK. 8:30-ish, a sailable if not spectacular
morning.
Tuesday
DIA - The "caution -- moving walk is nearing its end" recording is
boring into my brain at the Qwest business center. SFO's conveyor
doesn't have audio; are people in San Francisco smarter than those in
Denver? I got here about 3 hours early, totally relaxed and casual,
anticipating a leisurely expense-account lunch and dessert, catching up
on email, and then a flight to San Diego and an evening with my folks.
Just before lunch, I took a look at the departures screen, and noticed
that with a bit more alacrity I could've caught a 2:30 flight to SD
instead of the 5:20. There's a 5:05 also, but it didn't seem worth the
trouble to change for that. Tempting fate, besides.
I had a Chevy of some sort from Avis, didn't catch the model. I'd
downgraded to a "compact" from the default midsized, for almost no
difference in price and still twice as much space as I needed. It had
manual window cranks, a quaint design feature. But some junior whiz
kid in Detroit figured that it wasn't important for the front windows
to roll all the way down - they left a little nip exposed at the
trailing edge of the door, making me wonder what he was smoking.
Note to engineering: windows should expose the full window
opening when fully retracted. Duh.
The other notable automotive detail was trying out the E-470 tollroad on
my return from Ft. Collins to DIA. $3.50 to cut a big corner between
the airport and I-25 seems to be enough to deter nearly all of the
potential traffic. I had the knee-non-jerk reaction to the exit sign on
my way up. Tollroad? No way! I had plenty of time at the lights along
104th street to look at the map and realize that it was worth whatever
they were charging to skip all that. It looks to save about 10 miles on
the ground, or about the $.35/mile the IRS figures it costs to operate a
motor vehicle. What's it worth to drive 70 mph with no traffic and two
quick stops at toll plazas (or none, if you have the speed pass), versus
stop and go to get to the "free" way and then heavy city traffic on I-25?
More than $3.50 to me (especially when I'm on an expense account).
On the way down, I watched the early afternoon thunderstorms forming
along the front range, considered the perspective at the high end of the
Great Plains and on the Mississippi side of the Continental Divide,
thought about the potential identity adjustment ahead of me, changing
from an Idahoan of close to 30 years to a newbie Coloradoan. (I'll have
to start with learning how they spell that.) Coming from deeper in
Rocky Mountain obscurity, I don't think I'll have anything to prove, but
the "I've been here for" clock gets reset all the same. With a check of
my voicemail, my status as uncommitted/all options changed in an instant
to "offer in hand / relocation pending," on the other side of the divide
in my career at the same time as the geographic one. Called Jeanette
and confirmed that what I thought was going to happen had happened, and
talked about my morning driving tour of Ft. Collins, neighborhood
shopping. At some point in the process, I realized that all those
attractive houses were promising, but that it did require a house for
sale to create meaning for us. Those little details.
Jeanette sounds like she's crossing the divide, as well, reconciling
herself with the idea of moving out of the house we're in, leaving the
community we've come to know so well, leaving familiar tasks,
obligations, opportunities positions of importance, starting from
scratch one more time. It's a Big Deal.
Flying to SAN in the company of three man-children from Iowa, on their
way to boot camp. They started off rowdy and funny, but mid-flight ennui
has kicked in now. I encouraged 19B to join 19D over in 19E, giving me
and a young girl space between us. When I got here, I asked if she
knew who was in 19B, trying to gauge how much to settle in, and she said
she didn't know, she was travelling alone. "But I'm pretty sure
it'll be full," she added. Her aplomb made me observe that she seemed
like a pretty experienced flyer; she assured me that she was,
although she was travelling without her mom for the first time.
The third young man is in 20A, and 18C is open; they could've talked 20C
into moving to 18C and had a half-row to themselves, but didn't have
the speed of imagination to make it happen. 19B's first reaction to my
invitation for him to move was to say he didn't want to sit between two
guys, 'cause he was going to get enough of that in the coming weeks, but
ultimately friendship drew him out. 19F is really 19A; Emily sat in
the wrong seat, but the flight attendants talked the business guy into
swapping for simplicity. Is he annoyed at his misfortune? He's got
headphones on, eyes closed with the sun on his face, seems content.
Before we'd climbed all the way through the turbulence along the front
range, Emily said "Ok, I'm bored, how about you?" I laughed as I paged
through the WSJ, said "I think I'll be alright." When the computer came
out, tall and skinny 19D asked "got any cool games?" I said "sorry," and
he was disappointed... for me? Or for himself, as if I'd invite him to
play on my machine? The latter, I think -- the world is all for him
right now, right up until the moment he gets off the bus at Camp
Pendleton. TV is now pacifying the lot of them, an
episode of Friends.
Wednesday
Driving "to work" Wednesday morning, I was going the direction away from
traffic for a while, from Solana Beach, up and around Lake Hodges.
But connecting to I-15 got ugly. The radio road report explained why,
an accident just before the exit I needed, with no alternate route since
I-15 has the only bridge over the lake on my map. The accident was
cleared to the shoulder well before I got there, and traffic sped up
after everyone had had a look. The car that got hit from behind was
about half as long as it used to be, the other was badly mangled.
Welcome to California driving.
After another full morning of interviews, and an hour and a half with a
manager in another organization, I felt pretty well used, and started
yawning through the afternoon, drive to SAN, fly to SFO, hustle to a
mechanical-shortened connection, fly home to hot BOI.
3.Aug.3
Our normally reticent cat did a little territorial defense this morning,
scaring up a young, white cat we hadn't seen before, chased it out of
the backyard and up one of our spruce trees. When I showed up to see
what was going on, Sami abandoned the chase, and the invader stayed
treed. Two hours later, back from church, the cat was still up the
tree, and now complaining about it. I got a ladder and relived the
cliché of feline arboreal rescue, trying to coax it to me with
kitten talk, then some cat food. It moved around a bit to get close
enough to touch me once, show its scratched up face, and then retreat
into the prickly boughs where man does not follow. The arrival of one
of the neighbor's toms didn't help matters (although it did add to the
conversation), and while trying to ease to a lower branch, new cat
slipped, hung on briefly by the forelegs and then plopped the remaining
7 feet to the ground, not much worse for the wear. Good luck to it, but
I hope the trauma convinces it to return (or hang out) somewhere
else.
At church, we talked about poetry, with only half of the teacher-student
pair who were to present, present. (The younger half having landed a
summer job in Guatemala, teaching English at a Mayan girls school.
Where were such opportunities during my high school summers, I want to
know?) After description, discussion and example of a
sonnet, I was prepared to create one of those more challenging
forms, but the assignment turned out to be a
haiku,
better suited to the limited time available. Here's mine:
Job search
Wave's edge, rushed river
eddy caught, spun me around
bright new view upstream
Bush was happy to let the head of the CIA take the blame for the
"willful deception" in his State of the Union address, and now it
appears that someone in Washington is willing to
divulge classified information about CIA personnel to intimidate
those who speak truth to power. You'd think Poppy would be able to
convince Shrub not to mess with the Company.
But just in case you've been distracted into thinking there's only
one lie running around, consider this catalog of the
tapestry of lies (PDF) behind
the war in Iraq.
The
Yangtze's rising to flood the Three Gorges, much of which I'll never
see. If not for SARS, I would have had a chance. So it goes.
At six inches an hour, floating boats will be easy, but seeing what once
was will be very hard. It sounds like it'll be more lake than Gorges by
November, when we're scheduled to have our chance to see it.
(Thanks to JQT for the tip to the New Yorker article.)
2.Aug.03
Krugman:
"Whether pretending that the war on terror -- not tax cuts, which have
cost the Treasury three times as much -- is responsible for record
deficits, or that those hugely elitist tax cuts are targeted on working
families, or that opening up wilderness areas to loggers is a
fire-prevention plan, Mr. Bush has taken misrepresentation of his own
policies to a level never before seen in America."
Frank Rich on the
brewing hubbub around Mel Gibson's movie about Jesus' final 12 hours,
"The Passion": "(T)he real question here is why Gibson and his minions
would go out of their way to bait Jews and sow religious conflict,
especially at this fragile historical moment."
First I heard about "Traditionalist Catholicism" too, a movement that
rejects the Second Vatican Council.
Walter Williams examines the
pattern of
deception emanating from the Bush administration: "Outright lying is
not the administration's modus operandi; willful deception is."
That may be putting too fine a point on it. Willful deception is
outright lying by other means.
1.Aug.03
Clay Shirkey's essay,
"A Group Is
Its Own Worst Enemy" is about online groups, and the software that
supports them, but it's also about any old group (which is increasingly
likely to have an online component). It's fascinating reading.
The point about reputation management being driven by emotion was
particularly interesting for me to consider. An analytic approach to
understanding reputation is necessarily incomplete. "If you want a
good reputation system, just let me remember who you are. And if you do
me a favor, I'll remember it. And I won't store it in the front of my
brain, I'll store it here, in the back. I'll just get a good feeling
next time I get email from you; I won't even remember why. And if you do
me a disservice and I get email from you, my temples will start to
throb, and I won't even remember why."
Shari Caudron's
piece on Carly in Workforce Management fairly gushes about
HP's dynamic CEO. I take it the magazine is big on take-charge guys and
gals. It's interesting to read this sort of thing with the informed but
limited perspective of an insider, and weigh which things are true,
false, overstated, and so on. I can't (or at least won't) help you sort
out which is which, but can recommend this as a fine example of a
hero(ine) story. Enjoy it as literature if nothing else.
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
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Wednesday, 01-Oct-2003 21:44:21 MDT
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