CoinStar Sucks

I had used the CoinStar counting machine once before, to count up my pennies when I had a bunch of them accumulated. They charge 8% of your change value for the convenience of counting it, which I considered a little steep, so I had the rest of my change counted somewhere they don't charge you anything (South Lake Tahoe).

However, I'd seen ads about using the machines to convert change into gift cards (with no fee). And I figure I hit Starbucks often enough to justify getting a card. So I went in today with my accumulated change, dumped it in (about $65 worth), and picked "Give me a new Starbucks card".

The machine took about a minute or two grinding away thinking about it, apparently couldn't contact the mothership, pope, Grand Poo Bah or whatever controlling entity it uses, and said "Nope. Can't do it. I'm giving you cash instead."

And they charged me the 8% fee. No choices, no options, no "choose another gift card", no "give me my change back".

Needless to say, CoinStar is now on my black list.

Still Warm

It's 2:30 in the morning and it's still 84 degrees inside my house. I've had the fan running since 6pm and it barely made a dent. I like warm weather as much as the next guy, but this is just silly.

Bad Day

My plan for today was to get a haircut and have new tires put on my car for the track day on monday. Unfortunately it seems like I got a bit too much sun in San Diego, and came down with a bit of sun/dehydration sickness.

And, let me tell you, today was a lousy day to be sick.

My house has no air conditioning. Most days that isn't a problem; Mark put in sufficient insulation to keep the temperature down to a reasonable level for most of the year. Excepting those few days where it gets really hot.

For those of you that haven't guessed by now, today was one of those days when it got really hot. And instead of doing what I normally do on those days, which is either going in to work or finding some excuse to hang out in the mall, I was either on my couch or in my bed trying to sleep.

I have a fan set up that's pulling some air through the house, giving me a little bit of a breeze. It seems like it's pretty ineffective -- the thermostat inside the house says it's 92 degrees -- until you go outside the house, and realize that, yes, it's effective. Because outside it's a balmy one-oh-three.

Fortunately I'm feeling a bit better now (I'm complaining, which is a sign of good health), so it may be time for a quick jaunt to, well, anywhere that has AC.

Sunny San Diego

I'm in San Diego for a conference, which has more or les swound down, so I got a little bit of time today to play tourist. I went and toured the Midway, which has been turned into a museum. For such a large vessel, it's amazingly cramped. Apparently by the end of its service it was carrying almost a thousand more crew than it was designed for.

I took a bunch of photos, but I'm waiting until I'm back home (tomorrow) to dump them on to my computer.

I'm now linked

Sachin just shot me an invite to LinkedIn, a business-oriented social networking site. Of course, I probably don't need to tell you that, because apparently I'm the last one in the world to create an account there...

I've spent a couple hours that I could have spent productively checking my email or reading news online (well, I suppose I could have worked, but that just doesn't sound nearly as appealing) sorting through my contact list and seeing who had an account there. The answer: pretty much everyone.

The answer? Pretty much everyone. The only ones I found who didn't have an account were Jeff and Adam. Even Grace had an account.

I'm so behind.

What I Want for Christmas

I need one of these. Seriously.

MS Selling Spyware?

A recent class-action suit filed in Washington and California is suing Microsoft for violating the spyware laws of those states. This article in the Register about the "Windows Genuine Advantage" (a.k.a. "cripple your computer if you're using a non-verified copy of Windows") program talks about what MS says WGA does, and what it actually does (a lot more).

One of the interesting parts of this was the relevant portion of the Washington state anti-spyware law that's being used:

(1) Induce an owner or operator to install a computer software component onto the computer by intentionally misrepresenting the extent to which installing the software is necessary for security or privacy reasons or in order to open, view, or play a particular type of content; and

(2) Deceptively cause the execution on the computer of a computer software component with the intent of causing the owner or operator to use the component in a manner that violates any other provision of this section.

I'm sure they'll manage to weasel their way out of the "intentionally" part through a finely-developed case of corporate amnesia ("We did what? I'm sorry, we deleted all records of everything we did more than 30 days ago. I forget. Next question?"), but perhaps a little bit of public shame would clairify things.

Pointing Out the Obvious

Microsoft and Cisco are backing a patent challege based on the "obviousness" clause of patent law, which states that an invention must be non-obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art. It's been appealed to the Supreme Court, in the hopes that the court will put some teeth into the "obviousness" clause and stem the tide of 1-Click patents.

Murder Mystery

I just finished reading "The Black Dahlia" by James Ellroy, an author who was recommended to me. The book is set in post-WWII Los Angeles, and depicts a gritty, hardnosed police department with some shady mob connections, that isn't afraid to bend the rules every now and then to get a conviction.

The book is an engaging read, especially since you never actually meet the title character. Her life is revealed through interviews with her friends, associates, and ultimately with her murderer. There are no innocents in Ellroy's story -- all the characters have significant lapses in moral character, and even if the guilty are punished in the end, justice is not necessarily served.

This is the first book in a four-book series set in the same period (the most famous being "L.A. Confidential"), so I'll probably plow through the other three fairly soon.

Julia's Bike

Adam and I went dirt bike riding for the first time in about a month and a half. Had a good day (i.e. no one got hurt), then when we got back and put the bikes in the garage, we realized that Julia's bike (which has been living in my garage for the last few months) hadn't been started in a while, and she probably wouldn't be able to ride until she recovered.

Poor bike.

So we pulled the bike out and started it up. It was unhappy from sitting and had to crank for a while, but eventually it fired up. And then we figured we'd ride it around a little bit to warm it up. It's not a street bike, though, so where to do this?

We clearly needed to ride it around the back yard.



Hey, I wonder if you can do wheelies on this thing? Let's find out...



Why, I do belive you can.

Rest assured, Julia, your bike is in good hands.

Ethanol Wars

A CNN article with a new take on Ethanol -- according to the article, the adoption of ethanol is a foregone conclusion, and the only debate is over what it will be made from. The most straightforward answer -- sugar -- is apparently complicated by subsidies and the corn lobby, which make it too expensive to import sugar (it competes with high fructose corn syrup. If you wonder why every soft drink and candy bar contains it, that's why).

But corn is not efficient to use as a fuel. It's a high-maintenence crop -- you burn around a gallon of ethanol to create a gallon of corn ethanol to the pump.

So companies are looking into other ways to produce ethanol. Importing refined sugar ethanol from Brazil is one possibility, but might run afoul of the corn lobby, again. The big-bet alternative seems to be making ethanol from the non-edible portions of plants (or non-edible plants). This is where the President's oddball comment about "switchgrass" in his state-of-the-union address comes from.

Also interesting is that the increased ethanol content in new gasoline has apparently doubled the price of fuel-grade ethanol.

Broken Skate

I managed to break my hockey skate at a game the other night. In my first shift, unfortunately, which pretty much canned the rest of the night for skating. I did a pretty good job of it, too:
You can see the whole frame has separated from the bottom of the boot. You can't really see it here, but all the rivets that hold the frame on have rusted completely through, and snapped. Also, there's a little crack in the frame around the third rivet.

I think I got my money's worth out of this pair.

"Interest Tapering Off"

According to a recent article I read, interest in embedded Linux is "tapering off". Which just goes to show that sometimes it doesn't matter so much how many design wins you have, as who those wins are.

Witness this article which said that:

Vodafone, NTT DoCoMo, NEC, Samsung, Panasonic and Motorola are joining forces to work on an open source operating system for mobile phones based on Linux.

To me, this says two things: first, that the handset manufacturers see that the money is in services and applications, and not as much in the handset or its operating system. Second, that they have no interest in paying per-set royalties so that all phones run on WinCE.

Interesting to see that Nokia, which is also interested in Linux for mobiles, isn't on the list...

New Blog

I've created a 12 Shots Blog for discussion/announcements, since it seems like we're on track for that...

Disingenuous

The ACLU has brought a lawsuit against the U.S. government over its warrantless wiretapping program. The government has sought to have the case dismissed on the rather disingenuous grounds that the plaintiffs aren't sure they're directly affected by the program.

Coppolino said that the plaintiffs' beliefs that they are among the likely targets are insufficient to establish that they have been directly affected by the program.

"You don't get standing by saying the president has a program, and I'm concerned it might cover me," he told the judge.

Of course they aren't sure. You won't say who's targetted and who isn't. By that logic, conveniently, no one has grounds to challenge the program because no one can be sure they're on the list.

Creative lawyering is bad enough when it's being used to, oh, say, get O.J. off the hook for killing Nicole. But it's really disturbing when it's used by the government to pass of its activities as legal.

E85 Hits the West Coast

A gas station in San Diego has started selling a wide variety of fuels, including E85 (85% ethanol/15% gasoline) and BioDiesel. Once you get over the heart-stopping price of high-grade gas ($3.73, read it and weep), a couple interesting things come out of the sign: bio-diesel is only $.10 a gallon more expensive than dino diesel, and E85 is a whopping $.74/gallon cheaper than high-grade gasoline (a fair comparision, since E85 is about 100-105 octane).

Of course, at present, the only cars that can use E85 are cars that come dual-fuel from the factory, or pre-'74 cars that have been modified to run on ethanol. But it's a start.

Banlieu 13

Saw "District B13" tonight, which is a French maritial arts/action film. Adam and I laughed at the plot synopsis, since it's basically a re-done "Escape from New York". But it was a well done film, and enjoyable as such -- lots of long-running chase scenes, mostly on foot. Parts were very similar to this Russian Climbing video. If reading subtitles doesn't bother you (and it's an action film, so you can probably figure out what's going on anyways), then I'd recommend it.

The backstory of the movie is that a neighborhood is so full of undesirables and criminals that it gets walled off from the rest of the country, and services within the wall are gradually cut off. Then the government "loses" a low-yield neutron bomb and sends in a super-duper SWAT guy along with a local Robin Hood-type character to get it back.

Proof that you can still make a good film without spending $100M or blowing up everything in sight. Come to think of it, nothing blows up in the entire movie...

12 Shots Rides Again

Had lunch with Jon and Ethan (and Ethan's minion) today, and around stuffing our faces with burritos, Jon raised the prospect of ressurecting 12 Shots as a charity event. His reasoning was that the original charter of 12 Shots as a big house party had run out of steam as the organizers got older (and got married, chimes in Guy), and that we needed a different motivation to bring people together. A charity event, where people give $10 or so at the door, and the proceeds go to someone relatively noncontroversial, seems like a good thing to organize around.

Personally, I think people could be talked out of $20 for a charity event. Since 12 Shots XII finished up with roughtly 800 people, and we didn't really have any desire to throw an event that size, I don't have any problem upping the donation amount a wee bit. Besides, you feel better if you can say you rounded up $4000 for charity...

Also, after some reflection, I realized that getting drunk for charity has a long and honorable tradition. It's just that people usually dress better when they're doing so.

Spectrum Plot

Ran across an article for the GnuRadio project, an open-source software radio implementation. One of the most interesting things was seeing a spectrum plot of the radio frequencies between 0 and ~450kHz, and which ones are used and unused.

The theory of a software radio is you could put a single, fairly simple chunk of hardware on your computer, and at that point it could transmit and receive pretty much anything -- walkie-talkies, AM/FM radio, GPS, HDTV, you name it.

All of a sudden a few geeks have scared the crap out of the FCC and MPAA. The FCC because, well, airspace is their turf, and the MPAA because they see control of transmission mediums as a way to prevent "piracy".

Anyways, the spectrum plot is interesting because, among other things, it shows how little of the existing broadcast spectrum is being used in everyday life. Software-defined radios are already here in a number of commercial products -- we'll see if open-source SDR results in cool new tech or nasty new leglislation. Or both.

Those Who Ignore History

I've just gotten to the part of "Cobra II" where the U.S. has declared, by executive fiat, that major combat operations are over in Iraq, and it will be transitioning to post-war operations. Rumsfeld is putting significant pressure on Franks to not only stop deployment of further units to Iraq, but to plan for removing the units already there. Franks' plan (or, more accurately, guidance from the administration) is that the existing 140,000 troops would be reduced to somewhere around 30,000 within six months (that would be November 2003), and reduced further to a skeleton advisory force afterwards.

For those of you wondering how well this plan turned out, here is a chart of the strength of U.S. ground forces in Iraq from 2003-2006.

"Do not innovate on business models. " -- Guy Kawasaki, presentation at TiEcon 2006

This is something I've run across in the start-up world, and it's as true there as it is in politics. If someone tells you that the rules have changed, the old rules do not apply, and everything is going to be different this time, do not walk to the nearest exist. Run screaming in fear.

At its heart, this is the one, basic mistake the administration made -- the assumption that they could sufficiently control the conduct of the war so to simply lop off the head of the Iraqi government and leave the body intact, thus entirely eliminating that mess post-war operations phase. Administration planners, instead of starting with assumptions and working towards a goal, started with a goal and worked backwards to find their assumptions.

It's not that people didn't know that these requests were illogical -- Jay Garner, McKiernan, the Joint Chiefs, and most of the rest of the people tasked with implementing the war and the post-war knew there were serious problems with the assumptions being made. However, with the administration's mind-set firmly fixed, information only flows one-way, and the commentary that "Hey guys, this isn't going to work" never got back to the president.

Admittedly, hindsight is 20/20, but sometimes reading this book so painful I have to, well, put it down and rant for a while.

Hang Together

In the early days of the Iraq war, Dave Williams' Apache helicopter was shot down, and he was taken prisoner. After a few days (and nearly getting hit by a friendly airstrike) he was placed with some of the survivors of the 507th Maintenence Company.

He has an interesting anecdote about talking with one of his Iraqi guards:

"The Iraqis had a hard time understanding something," Williams recalled. "Shoshana is Panamanian. Edgar is Hispanic. Joe is Philipine, and Patrick is from Kansas. The Iraqis could not conceive how we could all have been in the same army and not fight one another. One Iraqi said to me, 'You no fighting each other? Why?' "
-- From "Cobra II"

Strange Lawsuit

Those who have known me for any length of time are usually aware that I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but the latest lawsuit against them by Adobe has left me scratching my head. Adobe has been promoting PDF has a de facto standard for some time now, to the point that Massachusetts adopted it as such in its requirements for official document formats. There are many non-Adobe products which create PDFs, including a variety of open-source products, OpenOffice, and Mac OSX.

Which is why Microsoft was a little surprised when Adobe threatened to sue them for antitrust for including PDF creation in the next version of Office. After all, it's no more than what's being offered by their chief competition. Adobe apparently feels that this would kill the market for Acrobat.

They might find some sympathy in Europe, but my feeling is that Adobe just got hit by the law of unintended consequences. They opened up PDF as a format to drive adoption, effectively making it a standard. And if it's a standard, anyone can implement it -- even if they have 90% market share. Standards are explicitly exempt from the rules of anti-trust, since it is in the public interest that companies comply with them.

Sorry, Adobe. Of course, if you're looking for more product revenue, there's a big Linux market that would probably be interested in Flash creation and video editing...

Testing useless tech. Post by

Testing useless tech. Post by email allows me to post from my phone. If i ever travel where my phone it could be a neat feature.

Update: The main drawback to the feature is that, on my current V710, it's so clumsy to send a message by banging away on the number keys that it would effectively prohibit me from posting anything of consequence. For example, it probably took me almost two minutes to pound out the simple test post above, but only 30 seconds or so to type in my much-longer update on the computer...

Blog Guilt

Mark and I were IMing the other day, and talked about a shared phenomenon we've experienced: blog guilt.

Blot guilt is that mild guilty feeling you get when you haven't updated your blog in a while. For me it usually kicks in after about a week without a post. For me it's usually a realization that I haven't posted in a while, followed by the nagging question, "Is my life really so dull that I haven't come up with anything blog-worthy in an entire week?"

Sometimes I console myself by saying that, actually, all sorts of interesting things are going on, but some of them are in the if-I-told-you-I'd-have-to-kill-you category, so they just can't be put up here. So this week I'm assuaging my guilt by meta-blogging.

There is no problem in computer science that cannot be solved by an extra level of indirection --David Wheeler

Davie Goes to Hollywood

Dave has hit the big time. Our man with the blue hair got the lead quote in an article from the Cannes film festival:

"Other companies are working on it (the idea), but at the moment they are too expensive, and the rights protection is too strict. We are also building a community feature into the site, and I think we are going to be the first out of the gate," said Dave Le, Jaman's senior designer.

All that and he still had time to shoot a few virtual rolls of film, too. Still waiting for the photo with Angelina, though.

The Difference About Iraq

"I've got mixed emotions about this. We've conquered a country today and for the first time we started it." -- Lt. General Michael "Buzz" Moseley, Bagdhad, April 2003

Whirlybirds

My old computer died on me, so I splurged and got a good game-capable machine to replace it. I bought the components from Central Computer instead of going to Alienware or somewhere similar; it's really not that difficult to build a high-end machine. Mainly because there are very few choices -- you pretty much go in and say "What's the best X. Okay, I'll take that. What's next?"

The only difficult was that they didn't have the CPU I was looking for (Athlon FX-62) in stock, so I had to get another CPU (3400) to fill in until they come out in a couple months. But other than that, it has a GeForce 7900 GPU, a 750GB hard drive, and an Asus motherboard with all the bells and whistles on it. It claims to have built-in wireless, but I haven't managed to get it to work yet.

So, naturally, I can't let all this CPU power go to waste, so I picked up a copy of Battlefield 2 and started playing. BF2 is a full-battlefield first-person shooter, so not only do you have soldiers running around, but the maps are huge, so you pretty much need vehicles to cover them. And they have a big selection, from tanks, jeeps, APCs to helicopters and jet fighters.

I've spent the last day trying to learn to fly a helicopter. BF2 has a simplified model of how helicopters fly, but it's still considerably more realistic than any non-flight-sim I've played, and as a result the easiest thing to do with a 'copter is crash it. Even getting off the ground and hovering is no small feat, and being able to land where you want to (say, in a small confined space) takes some serious tap-dancing on the keys.

Grace's Blog

Oh, and I managed to convince Grace to get a blog, as well. Now we just need to goad her into actually posting something...

Shoot, between Grace, Danger, and Mark, we could have our own little blogosphere going.

Danger

I've been getting a good kick out of the danger blog. Don't know where Katie comes up with this stuff. My favorite is this one:

I have a new goal in life: be larger than the cat. Boo outweighs me by several pounds. If I am to conquer of the world, I am going to have to be bigger than the cat.

I think Danger has a good handle on life. Start small, work your way up.

To Live and Shop in L.A.

I flew down to L.A. this weekend to visit with Grace and do a little shopping. We did a whirlwind tour of the local mall, and picked up a pretty good new collection of clothes. Then we headed down to Melrose to fill out my growing collection with a few more shirts and some cool shades.

Nate stopped by on Saturday night and we tried to go out to a couple local bars. Apparently L.A. has developed a charming habit of holding people outside the bar even when the bar isn't full, in order to create the illusion of exclusiveness. So after a couple of tries we gave up and went back to Grace's place.

We knocked back some scotch there while discussing various abtruse theoretical concepts. It is Nate, after all.

On sunday Grace and I went to breakfast at a charming little restaurant. On the way back from breakfast we passed Maria Shriver heading into Starbucks (Grace spotted her, I was oblivious). As soon as she pointed her out, I looked up and saw about 8-10 guys from her personal protection unit, complete with black Tahoes, earpieces and don't-fuck-with-me expressions.

Grace thought they were Secret Service, but I figured they were employed by the state, since the Gubernator is a state and not a federal employee. Turns out they used to be part of the State Police, but they got merged into the CHP back in 1995.

That's right, the Terminator is being protected by John and Ponch.

And on a less serious note

Another article from Spiegel magazine, this one about the sex research industry. Sex and money have always gone together, but for years this natural pairing was hampered by the restriction that, in most societies, you couldn't actually sell sex.

Then, in the late '90s, researchers stumbled across a drug that could give even an old senator a rock-hard jimmy, and all of a sudden big pharma saw money in sex. And not just in the traditional drape-supermodels-over-it-and-it-will-sell marking type money, but in making an actual dollar profit off each individual act of sex.

And people have a lot of sex. That's a lot of money.

What's frustrated these guys for years is that Viagra only really works for men. And, well, men already want sex all the time, which kind of limits the market for Viagra to people where the equipment has a hard time working. The real market is women. As the old joke goes:Now, if you could make something that could turn women on, then that, as they say, would be money. And that's apparently what researchers have found. So now it's not can we, but should we?

The Worst Possible Answer

I read in the English version of a German online newspaper that a US judge has dismissed a case against a Khalid al-Masri, a German national, on the basis of national security. According to the article,

A US federal court in Alexandria, Virginia rejected the case he brought against former CIA director George Tenet and other spy agency employees involving kidnapping, torture and mistaken identity. The court argued the case would risk exposing national security secrets that are key to Washington's efforts to battle terrorism.

Now, the only reason I can see that a case like this would "expose national security secrets" is that if some of the allegations made by al-Masri were true. And if that's the case, exposing secrets is the least of our problems. If the only way we can figure out how to win the "war on terror" is to kidnap and torture every Arab-looking man we can find, then the terrorists really have won.

Because these are not the actions of a rational society. When people can look at actions like these and say, "Well, maybe thats okay, given the heightend circumstances", what they're really saying is that collectively, Americans are just scared shitless.

Stupid Pump and Dump

So, I checked my Yahoo spam-catching account, as I do periodically, and found about 15 emails all telling me how incredibly hot this "Riverbank Invt Corp" (ticker: RRBK) was. The dumb part is, it's not listed on any major exchange -- it's a penny stock. I'm sure that makes it easier to run a scam like this, but anyone stupid enough to fall for a scam like this probably isn't smart enough to be able to figure out how to find a penny stock, much less trade in it.

Oh, and in the interest of fair reporting, the company denies it had any part in the scam.

Patent Grendels meet Beowulf

A recent Supreme Court ruling appears to give large manufacturers a stronger hand against "Patent Trolls" by establishing a higher bar for issuance of a preliminary injunction. A new four-factor test now requires a plaintiff to show that harm to their business outweighs harm to the defendant in order to receive the injunction.

Since most patent-portfolio companies have no business (other than enforcing patents), this makes the likelihood of receiving an injuction much less, meaning corporates now have much more incentive to let it play out and go to trial.

This is good news for big corporates and cross-licensing, but bad news for patent reform.

Computer Security Becoming Pervasive

An interesting article (especially for Keith) on stealing cars shows how computer security as a topic is becoming increasingly pervasive. There is anecdotal evidence that some new cars (BMW X5s are mentioned in the article) that use keyless unlock and start mechanisms can be spoofed by a sufficiently intelligent attacker.

The article mentions laptops being used for this, implying that any off-the-shelf laptop would be capable of this, although this seems unlikely -- the radios in standard laptops are set up to run in the 2.4Ghz range (both Bluetooth and 802.11 operate in this frequency band), and I believe the BMW keys operate at around 300Mhz.

Bad security or urban myth? Hard to say at this point.

Rumsfeld's War

I've been reading more of "Cobra II," covering the time leading up to the invasion of Iraq. The theme from the beginning of the book has been clear and consistent, and the cast is surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly) small. The major player is, of course, Donald Rumsfeld, who has had a personal hand in much of the invasion planning to date (we're in late 2002 now), to a degree probably unprecedented by any civilian save possibly Robert McNamara. The other main player to date is General Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander responsible for the invasion.

Franks comes off as being somewhat cocky and unimaginative in the book. While CENTCOM is the logical command to oversee the invasion, as it is the theatre command, none of the command staff have any experience in occupying and reconstructing a nation and from bottom to top there is a clear lack of appreciation of the tasks involved. The expertise for this does exist in the military, in the European command responsible for peacekeeping efforts in the Balkans, but there is no interest from either the administration or CENTCOM in tapping this knowledge. The Joint Chiefs do try to make several recommendations about force levels, as well as suggestions based on experience from the Balkan conflict, but Rumfeld sidelines the JCS as irrelevant and deals directly with CENTCOM.

The post-war occupation and administration of Iraq is referred to throughout the military as "Phase IV," but almost no effort is put in to it. Word comes down from the administration that Phase IV will be handled by other parts of the government, so Franks assumed it was someone else's problem. The clear warning signal, to those familiar with the dynamics of large organizations, was that no individual was actually tapped to lead the effort. Throughout this entire period, as well, Franks is engaged in a constant struggle with Rumsfeld to get commitment to use the forces the military wants for the invasion. Rumsfeld wants to use as few troops as possible, and constantly questions deployment orders and schedules in an effort to pare down the size of the invasion force.

Phase IV plans are further muddied and hampered by Rumsfeld's ongoing power grab to consolidate as much under the Department of Defense as possible. It is around this time (again, late 2002) that post-war administration will be handled by the DoD instead of the State Department, which traditionally takes on these duties.

The final element confusing all of this is a terrifying lack of intelligence about the situation and events occurring inside of Iraq. The CIA has almost no human assets inside Iraq, let alone ones at the policymaker level, and makes all its assessments based off of inferrence, satellite imagery, and some intercepted communications. This leads to intelligence analysis somewhere in the realm of a wild-ass guess. And, unfortunately, they're completely off base.

The funny part (that's funny boo-hoo, not funny ha-ha) about this is that everyone is convinced that President Bush knows something they don't, and that's the basis for the invasion. And I mean everyone.

'Abd-al-Tawab 'Abdallah al-Mullah Huwaysh, who oversaw Iraq's military industry, had no idea what America was talking about; he was not aware of Iraq's possessing any WMD and he was in a position to know a great deal. But the charges leveled by Washington had been so unqualified and persisten that he started to wonder whether Saddam might not control a secret cache after all. "I knew a lot, but wondered why Bush believed that we had these weapons," he told his interrogators after the war.

The assumption that Iraq possessed WMD was so fundamental that it was never seriously questioned. The unfortunate side-effect of this is that a great amount of planning on the military side was devoted to how to contain and react to the threat of Saddam's non-existent WMD, while little attention was paid to the large caches of small arms created throughout the country to support the activities of the Fedayeen (government-backed militia), or to Phase IV planning.

Reality Distortion Field

I was reading an article this afternoon regarding some performance benchmarks for Mac OS X vs. Linux and Windows (short version, OS X has some problems with its memory manager), when I encounted an amusing reference to the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. It cannot be summarized, it's best to just read the article. When you're done with that, there's another amusing anecdote about how to combat the effects of the field.

OO Takes Advantage of the BSA

On a somewhat-related note to the previous article, OpenOffice has started an ad campaign taking advantage of a recent BSA (Microsoft's jackbooted-thug license-enforcement arm) crackdown on less-than-legal copies of Office. They even have a neat little logo:



According to the article, there's a £20,000 reward for ratting out your friends. Hmmm, maybe we can pirate some software and turn ourselves in?

Antitrust in Europe

I got a few chuckles this morning reading an article in the Wall Street Journal on Microsoft's problems with the European Commission on documenting its server protocols. The amusing part is that Microsoft has finally run into an opponent that it cannot coerce, wheedle, smokescreen, bully, blackmail, or bribe, and yet it cannot bring itself to do the one thing which would get it out of the situation -- honestly comply with the EC directive.

To date, Microsoft has created a "manual" that is some 12,000 pages long. That, by itself, would be an unmanageable monster, however, every outside expert that has looked at the document to date has said it's so much unorganized gibberish. This was the opinion of the engineers from Sun, Novell, and RedHat that first looked at the document, and the opinion confirmed by a computer scientest chosen from a Microsoft-provided list.

Then, they tried political pressure (the U.S. government has "warned" the EC not to be "unfair", whatever that means), and doing an end-run through the U.S. court system (all three courts refused, saying it was outside their jurisdiction).

The problem for Microsoft is that the EU has figured out it has no real interest in making Microsoft happy. Europe's native software industry is oriented around Linux, applications, and embedded devices, and an increasingly nationalistic Europe sees little distinction between MS and the U.S. government. Both of them you deal with, because they're too big to ignore, but you don't have to like them.

Motorcycle Crash on Helmetcam

Was browsing through Google video today and found this video with a bike that runs into a car. Not clear why the car suddenly spins, which is probably why it came as such a surprise to the rider, who unfortunately supermans over the car's hood.

More From "Viper II"

I've been continuing to work my way through "Viper II," the history of the invasion of Iraq, and more and more it reads like a treatise on the dangers of New-think ("We're operating under a New Paradigm, none of the old rules apply") and Group-think. Mainly one gets a picture of an administration almost completely disconnected from the thinking and advice of the individuals tasked with the actual problem of conquering and securing Iraq.

It's also interesting to note some parallels between Iraq and the Bay of Pigs invasion -- in particular this recurring, irrational belief that the repressed citizenry of the nation will a) greet an American invasion with open arms and b) rise up in popular support. Get over it, guys. It happened once, due to a unique set of circumstances, and it's never happened since then. It's long past time to stop building it into your war plans.

Scarface

I watched "Scarface" last night, which is the first time I'd seen the film. The message of the film is delivered fairly early on, from Tony's first boss, which is "Don't want too much." Tony, of course, wants everything, which sets the stage for his spectacular rise and fall.

So, now I know the scene behind the "Say hello to my leetle friend" quote, and I also realized that much of GTA: Vice City was, in fact, an homage to Scarface, including the mansion that eventually becomes your home base.

I also wasn't aware of the apparently-famous "Cuban crime wave" that forms the backstory for the movie -- Casto decided to take advantage of the U.S. open-borders policy on Cuban refugees to clean out some of the scum that had been clogging up his jails, and dumped some 25,000 hardened criminals on Miami. Clearly the law of unintended consequences was in effect.

Fun with SketchUp

I've been having fun with Google SketchUp. Spent a few minutes today working through the tutorial, and after that I managed to do a passable re-creation of the monitor that sits on my desk.
It remains to be seen what else Google is going to do with this, but I definately have to say this is the easiest-to-use 3D drawing program I've ever encountered. I've used tools like Blender to do entry and found that the learning curve for getting the tool to do what you want it to was very high.

The French They Are a Funny Race

They fight with their feet, and... they build funny little cars that drive backwards with two steering wheels. Check out this video -- in one part you can see one guy sits facing forward (that would be towards the rear of the car) and has one steering wheel, while the other guy sits backwards and controls the other pair of wheels. The video has some surprised crowd shots as the hacked-up car zips around half-sideways.

Marketing to the Clueless

Spotted the following quote in an article about Intel's vPro technology:

Along with management and security features, Conroe gets Intel back to Basics. It's a very fast chip. Intel officials said Conroe-based desktops will run productivity applications over twice as fast as systems purchased last year based on the company's mainstay Pentium 4.

Hello? When was the last time you heard someone say, "Man, Word is really a dog on my machine. I'd really like for the red squigggly to show up faster when I mis-spell a word." Who cares how fast productivity applications run? And since when did their execution speed become a benchmark?

Two and a Half Percent

Awais and I were discussing Microsoft's annual revenue, which is apparently around $39 billion dollars. And, of course, they don't make physical products, unless you count the paper manuals, so their COGS is probably somewhere well south of $1B, leaving the greater part of that as play money.

We were curious as to how that compared to the Federal budget, so we looked it up. The (estimated) tax revenue from 2004 was $1,365B. Or, in other words, the money MS made was approximately 2.8% of the Federal revenue (not the budget, of course, because the U.S. spent $1,847B that year. Microsoft revenue was a mere 2.1% of that number).

Awais pointed out we would be better off simply levying an additional 2% tax on each citizen and having Microsoft give away their software for free.

Rummy Under Fire

I read the following quote from this article in the Tracy Press :

Yet, three times as many troops should have been deployed to Afghanistan, and later to Iraq, to provide adequate security to these new democracies and to snuff out any remnants of insurgency. This is a textbook strategic blunder that haunts the Bush administration. But is Rumsfeld to blame?

The answer is, in a nutshell, yes. I've been reading the book Cobra II, about the planning for and execution of the invasion of Iraq. It starts off with the back-story of the war, so to speak, and early on, the military had estimated a force of 500,000 troops would be required to secure the country, based on existing doctrine and experience with past conflicts.

Rumsfeld unilaterally stated that that was far too large, and that a force of no more than 125,000 troops should be required.

The book promises to be interesting; I'll probably post more snippets as I work my way through it.

Proud Parents

Went to the hospital over lunch to visit Keith and Katie and young Danger, now roughly six hours old. Parents were doing well, although Mom was still a little rocky from the after-effects of surgery.

Keith mailed out a photo with everyone still in their scrubs this morning; I expect it will show up on Danger's blog soon. After all, they have a laptop in their room, and the hospital provides wireless access... Ahhh, technology.

Criticism is Not Allowed

From an article on CNN:

Retired Gen. Richard Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the retired generals' criticism is "inappropriate, because it's not the military that judges our civilian bosses."

So, let me get this straight -- our president engages in hare-brained military adventurism, and the people most qualified to give feedback on the effectiveness and execution of said adventures shouldn't comment, because it would be inappropriate??? Inappropriate for a retired General (that is, in other words, a civilian) to comment on the operation of a civilian government?

Okay, I give, Richard. What is the list of "appropriate" people that are allowed to comment on how well our government is working?

Sunny Day

It's warm and sunny outside. I'm not sure what's wrong. It's supposed to be raining.

Had lunch with Marcus, an old college buddy of mine. He's moved back to the bay area from San Diego to work for a new start-up. Everybody's working for a start-up. If that isn't an indicator of the next boom cycle, I don't know what is.

Oh, and Keith brought his new Dell laptop into our office and left it on the desk next to my Powerbook... The thing is ginormous -- looks like a Star Destroyer sitting next to my 12". I look at these massive laptops and wonder who really wants to lug one of these monsters around, just to have a little bit more screen when you get there?

Impressions of Americans

Wonder what other people think of us? This video clip of "man on the street" interviews with the question "What are Americans like?"

The answer, overwhelmingly, is that we're loud, self-confident, and friendly. The word "brash" was used by almost a third of the people interviewed. Oh, and as the girl closes with, we're fat.

Lessons

Picked up this interesting article off of Google News. It's an editorial from the heartland, and it sums up much of the discontent Bush is feeling from his own party. He's running into trouble because of the same factor that got him elected:

"The Base" doesn't like politicians.

In particular, they don't like slick-talking big-city shysters that twist words around, say one thing, and do another. Bush's appeal was that he was a straight-talking down-home country boy -- a man of the people. Now he's been outed doing the one thing that, according to the base, set him apart from his predecessor: using his office for personal gain.

(Related article from the Christian Science Monitor)

Debate on Roles in Marriage

Interesting article about a recent study coming out of the University of Virginia. One of the most contentious parts of the study, surely, is the assertion that an egalitarian, feminist marriage does not lead to greater martial satisfaction.

[The study] found that "traditional wives," who have lower expectations of marital equality in the household division of labor, are happier than wives with "gender egalitarian" ideals.

Would be interesting to read the original study. If I wasn't buried eyeball-deep in legal documents, that is.

Goodbye, Tom

Rep. Tom DeLay announced today that he will not be seeking re-election in november, and blaming the entire affair on liberal Democrats out to discredit him. Right, Tom. Your own actions had nothing to do with it. Your aide received illegal contributions from Abramoff without your knowledge, possibly while you were off contemplating how to re-draw the lines for the 22nd district to insure your re-election.

The Economist once reported DeLay as the dirtest man in American politics, based on the amount of contributions he received (Sen. Feinstein was also highly cited in the same article, demonstrating that this definately crosses the aisle. Also it appears times, or reporting, have changed since then, as Feinstein has raised more than twice as much). Apparently he was also famous for knowing where skeletons were buried and using those to keep his party in line.

So it's with a heavy heart that I watch DeLay go, not so gently, into the good night.

First Cloned Organ Transplant?

This article reports that Dr. Anthony Atala successfully created a replacement bladder from tissue samples of the patient's original bladder. The bladder was grown in a laboratory, on top of a biodegradable scaffold, and then surgically implanted in the patients, solving tissue-rejection problems found with transplants, as well as suitability problems found with creating replacements from other body tissues, such as intenstines.

Caveat Geek

Or, "Novel Uses for Network Diagnostic Tools". According to the Register, a column-writing programmer became suspicious that his partner was cheating on him, and used the Ethereal packet sniffer to monitor her online activities. The article is somewhat vague on exactly how, but presumably the tool found evidence of guilt.

The man offered this sage advice to would-be cheaters:

"If you plan to use technology when cheating it's probably best to understand the technology involved better than the person that you're cheating on,"

When Patriotism Isn't Fast Enough

Apparently the French have ditched their native car makers and decided to use Subaru for their high-speed pursuit cars. Apparently they needed a car capable of hitting 149mph, and the locals couldn't make the cut, which is particularly embarassing since both Peugeot and Citroen compete with Subaru in the WRC.

Also noticed that 150mph is a pretty high top speed, something tells me these aren't stock WRXes, since the stock STi has a top speed of 155mph with 70 more horsepower...

Creative Anti-Trust Tactics

Apple has gotten itself out of joint as a result of a proposed French law to legalize circumvention of DRM technology to allow music to be played on competing music players. Apple claims that the French government is encouring piracy just when legalized downloads were starting to take hold, but what they're really upset about is that the gov't is going after Apple's cozy little monopoly on downloaded music and the pricy iPods that are the only devices that can play it.

Microsoft has been relatively quiet on this issue. On one hand, I'm sure they're happy to see their competitor taken down a notch, but at the end of the day, they don't really disagree with Apple's business strategy, only with who gets to control the music revenue.

It's unclear if this will have any significant effect. So far the most likely result is that Apple will shut down the French iTunes music store, rather than comply with demands. Tying cool software and services to overpriced (but stylish) hardware has been Apple's business model for the last decade, and I don't think the French will convince them to give it up.

To Live and Die In Silicon Valley

So, Katie is getting closer and closer to her delivery date, so Keith did what any proud, expecting parent here would do: He set up a blog. Danger Randall hasn't been born yet, and he already has his first blog posting.

Office 2007

A post on Groklaw gave a link to a blog of Office 2007 screenshots, and a lot of interesting discussion followed. A surprising number of Groklaw readers liked the interface, given the reader bias, and the amount of (and extent of) retraining required for the new interface was a hotly debated.

I tend to side with the reports of experienced sysadmins and IT heads here -- users hate change, and frankly, there's nothing new under the sun in the wordprocessing and spreadsheet worlds. Most of what I see in the new Office is change for change's sake. MS is already facing an uphill battle convincing IT departments to upgrade all their machines to a new version of Office when users aren't complaining that current versions can't do what they want, and that would be even harder if the new version looked and felt just like the old version.

Sometimes, conformity is a good thing, and user interface is definately one of those areas. There are 11 applications running on my Mac, ranging from Mozilla to Skype, and all of them save one have "File" and "Edit" menus.

There was a split on Groklaw between "power users" that thought that it was new and interesting, and wouldn't have any problems picking up a new interface, and "normal users" (or those who support and deal with normal users) who just saw it was different, and therefore a pain in the ass. Having had to coax Katie through the process of learning OpenOffice, which is far more similar to Office 2003 than the new version is, I predict hearing from lots of normal users repeating the old mantra:

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

ODF Becomes Big-Time Politics

Apparently one of the gubernatorial candidates for the governor of Massachusetts has made ODF (OpenDocument Format) one of the central issues of his campaign. Governor Mitt Romney has announced that he will not run for re-election, making it a wide-open race, and John Bonifaz is the one making ODF campaign statements.

I'm not surprised that ODF has made it to politics -- Office is big money, and big money and politics go hand in hand -- but I am surprised that a politician was willing to make a fairly nuanced, technical issue part of his campaign.

Morning Ritual

Woke up this morning to a nice, steady drizzle outside. Experience suggests this is the type of rain that just keeps on going all day, so I dressed accordingly in a windbreaker and waterproof boots and walked out to the garage for my new morning ritual.

I discovered last week that my car has been pulling left under acceleration, and when I checked the tire pressure, it was really low -- about 10 lbs. I filled it back up to spec (36 lbs), then checked it the next day, and it had dropped down to about 32. Meaning I have a slow leak.

The tires have a fair amount of wear on them, so it's probably a good time to just replace the tires, but that costs money, so instead I have a new morning ritual -- I open the garage, start the car, turn on the air compressor, put on some work gloves (the wheels are covered in brake dust), check the pressure and pump the tire back up. It's nice having tools.

Living In the Media Age

Or, alternately, "How Not to do a High-Risk Car Stop". I was reading this article on CNN, and was interested in watching the video of the shooting. In their infinite wisdom, however, CNN has provided a site where only Windows machines can watch video, even though my Mac is capable of playing Windows Media files.

So, I zipped over to Google Video and found the video on my first search.

The audio portion is tough to make out, because they bleeped almost the entire thing. Personally, I think if you get shot three times, you should be allowed to swear on national TV. I think you're having a sufficiently bad day that it's justified.

Even though most of the audio is missing, you can clearly tell that it's either a case of prejudice or enormously bad judgement. Early in the video the airman is talking to the cop, probably trying to calm him down, and he gets shot as he's slowly standing up (following orders to do so). The CNN article references his physical therapy, but frankly, the man is lucky to be alive after getting shot at point-blank range.

All Marketers are Liars

A good talk by Seth Godin about Google and what they've done right so far (on purpose or by accident) marketing-wise, and how they (and others) can keep doing so. Has some good examples about launching early vs. launching good, and marketing efforts spent to launch an average product vs. a good product.

Reasonably long (about an hour long talk) but worth watching.

All Hail Silicon Valley

So it's a typical winter day outside in Silicon Valley. Temperature in 50s, bright and sunny... Except that it's hailing.

Hard.

It hailed for about ten minutes and then stopped, and the view from our office door showed clear, sunny skies the whole time.

Understatement of the Year

``It is generally not a good idea to not pay the salaries of armed people,'' Alvaro De Soto, top UN envoy to the Middle East

The Palestinian Authority is facing financial collapse because Israel and the U.S. are refusing to give it futher tax revenues (in Israel's case) and financial aid (U.S.). To me, this appears to be an incredibly short-sighted political move.

The problem Israel is facing, at this point, is a popular uprising, and has previously dealt with an unpopular, underfunded government, which would be no more able to enforce peace on a restless populace than the Israeli security forces could. Now, the P.A. has a government with a popular mandate -- probably the only organized entity in the last 5-10 years with a chance of actually negotiating and enforcing a lasting peace settlement.

Does Hamas have connections to terrorism? Absolutely. Does it mean we shouldn't negotiate with them? Absolutely not. It's not a line in the sand. After all, Yassir Arafat was a world-renowned terrorist in his time, yet he was invited to the White House and received the Nobel peace prize. If we can swallow that, we can certainly suck it up and talk to Hamas.

At some point, you need to forgive the sins of the past to move forwards.

Radical Backlash

I have noticed an eerie symmetry between the recent factional fighting in Iraq and the recent Dubai ports uproar in the U.S. The message to leaders from these two should be clear: if you build support by promoting fear and fanning the flames of intolerance, eventually you will create a beast you cannot control.

The Iraqis have done it, as clerics like al-Sadr found that his violent, anti-American rhetoric has been turned into anti-Sunni violence. And Bush has found that promoting fear and distrust of the Arab world makes it hard for your people (and your Congress) to distinguish been friends and enemies.

Like the dark side of the force, fear as a tool of policy is quicker, easier, and more seductive, but ultimately has its own price to pay.

Peripheral Vision

A neat peripheral vision trick -- let your eyes defocus a little, and all of a sudden there's a rotating green dot in the circle of pink dots. Stare at the cross for a while, and the pink dots start dissapearing, until you look away -- then they're all back.

So much for trusting your eyes.

Dishonoring the Dead

I was reading this article on CNN, and the actions of the Rev. Fred Phelps made me very, very angry. Phelps organizes protests at the funerals of American military service members. His group's official stance:

Phelps believes American deaths in Iraq are divine punishment for a country that he says harbors homosexuals. His protesters carry signs thanking God for so-called IEDs -- explosives that are a major killer of soldiers in Iraq.

I can think of nothing more disgraceful than to use someone else's funeral as a political statement. The fact that their theory is so far off in right field just makes it that more insulting.

I'm normally wary of anyone who uses the term "Patriot" in political discourse, but I'm entirely in favor of the work of the Patriot Guard in counter-demonstrating and protecting the families of the fallen.

Linux Virus Scanners

Occasionally I talk to Windows users who believe the lack of worms and viruses on Linux is simply a result of low market share, and that if the market share of Linux approaches Windows, then they will start to appear. While I think that the number of worms and viruses available for Linux will increase, I have my doubts as to whether a market for anti-virus scanners will follow it.

My reasoning works like this: why do you need an anti-virus scanner? A scanner is something that catches malicious code before it can take advantage of an unpatched hole in an application or in the operating system. In other words, the size of the scanner market is, approximately, the delta between average time it takes for a vendor to release an OS/application patch and the average time it takes a virus vendor to release a signature. If vendors could release a patch in 24 hours, there would be no anti-virus market, since that's about how long it takes to come up with a signature.

I was reading this article about a recent Linux worm. Like most Linux worms seen to date, it's very specific to a particular configuration, and not a common one, at that. And, importantly, a patch already exists to fix the hole.

Is there still a market for antivirus software? Yes, AV still does a number of things much better -- signatures are easier to collect and distribute than automated patch/update software. Redhat and Suse both have automated patch systems, but experienced admins avoid them because constant updates break systems. But Linux lacks to major items which have created the large Windows anti-virus market: a large body of homogenous code (Windows+Office), and a long delta between vulnerability announcements and patch releases.

Fun with Google Video

So, I was digging around for this Apple parody I saw on Google Video the other day. And I couldn't find it, which doesn't say much for the search capability (or maybe they just didn't write a good description). But I did find an entertaining GoDaddy commercial. It doesn't have anything to do with internet hosting. It doesn't even pretend. It just goes on the age-old principle that boobs can sell pretty much anything.

Another fun one (may have linked it already, memory's the first thing to go) with a very quick station wagon.

Aha! No, wait! I found it! Mac haters will love it. Mac lovers will understand it.

Oh, and I'm coming to hate the Google "most popular videos" tool. See, I would assume it used some sort of ranking system, and then farmed out the top 15 videos on the list, and the next top 15, and so on, and so on. But no. It has a pool of the most popular videos, and when you ask for the list, it grabs 15 videos at random and displays them to you. So if you're looking for one in particular, and you can't find it, because the keywords are nonexistent/borked/whatever, you have to just keep clicking on "next 15 videos" until it turns up...

Condition: Sore

Had a fun weekend, but it's now Monday morning and I'm feeling the effects.

My original plan was to go dirt biking on saturday at Hollister with a couple guys from my hockey team, but they called me up on friday and said they weren't going until sunday, because it was raining, and it was cold, so the snow line was down at 1500 feet, and both Metcalf and Hollister had snow. Then Julia called and wanted to go riding, so I suggested we go in the late morning on Saturday, which would give us time a) to figure out if we wanted to go, if it was raining, and b) for the sun to dry out some of the mud, if it wasn't.

Saturday rolls around, and of course it's a bright, beautiful, sunny day. Of course. It's february, what sort of weather were you expecting? So Julia calls in the morning, and we decide to pack the bikes and go.

This was Julia's second time on her new dirt bike, so she's still feeling her way around this whole "dirt" thing, but she was up for some incremental challenges. When the TT track started getting crowded, I convinced her to try some of the blue trails in the back of the park (no traffic), and she tackled her first hill climb, which is pretty good progress for day 2. Had one minor fall in the afternoon, broke a clutch lever. Welcome to dirt biking.

I ran a few laps solo after she was done, on a couple of the easier black diamond runs Adam and I had scouted out earlier. Felt pretty comfortable on those, which was a good feeling of progress on my part.

Saturday night, Nate and Marissa had a birthday party at the Saddle Rack. I'd never been, and of course I had nothing appropriate, although it turned out not to be a big deal; jeans and a t-shirt of any sort were appropriate. I picked up Danielle at her place, grabbed a quick dinner at the Goose, and zipped over to Fremont to meet everyone. Embarassingly, Nate, Ken, and Marisa had all showed up before us. Can't even count on people to be late.

Had a good time at the Saddle Rack. I rode the bull, because, well, Marisa and Nate were going to, and I can't turn down something that requires you to sign a disclaimer beforehand. I have an image to uphold, after all. The bull ride is probably the main contributor to my being sore today -- that was hard work.

Hung out until closing time afterwards, danced with Sonia for a while, caught up with Jimmy and Ken, chatted with Nate, drove Danielle home, crashed into bed at 3 AM. Got up on Sunday and played hockey in the afternoon -- good game, pretty clean on both sides, and we won 3-2. We had more than the 8 players we had last time, which helped quite a bit.

But man, I'm sore today.

Metcalf Mishap

I hooked up a helmet cam to my helmet a couple weeks ago and recorded some footage of Adam and I at Metcalf. I've uploaded it to Google video, check it out.

The Life of a Gamer Girlfriend

Which, of course, is not my girlfriend because, well, I don't have one. But if, theoretically speaking, I did have a girlfriend, then I'm sure she'd really appreciate this song.

Watch it. Trust me. Would I lie to you?



If I do, can I get elected?

Why Repubicans will Stay In Charge

Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb. -- Dark Helmet, Spaceballs

Now is the time when the Democratic Party should be well-poised to make a comeback and reverse the gains the Republicans have made in the house and senate. And it ain't gonna happen. Why? Because, quite simply, the Democrats are stupid.

There hasn't been a better time in the last 6 years to make a comeback. The administration's credibility is getting pummeled, after failing to find any WMDs, failing to find Osama, getting publicly mocked by al-Zwahiri, racking up a huge body count in Iraq with no end in sight, taking dirty money from Abramoff, and, most recently, with Cheney shooting his hunting partner in the face and not bothering to tell anybody about it.

You couldn't ask for a better situation. And yet, the Dems seem determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. What Washington really needs is some fresh blood, some reasonable, fiscally-responsible moderates to rein in the don't-tax-just-spend Republicans running amok. And when the Democrats finally find one -- in the form of Paul Hackett, a popular Iraq vet -- they force him out of politics because they were afraid he'd make their preferred candidate look bad.

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Is This English?

I'm not sure what possessed me, but I was reading some coverage of the winter olympics, and ran across coverage of the women's snowboarding event.

About halfway through I was trying to decipher is this was written in English or some offshoot tongue I was previously unaware of. For reference:

One day after the U.S. guys went one-two, the Bettys did the same. They were absolutely mocking the pipe. Surfing the frozen chute, they soared to huge airs and nailed phat tricks. It was, like, the coolest day ever!

I feel like I should be reading through the article with a phrasebook in hand. Can someone send me a link to the subtitled version for us old-timers?

Ready, Fire, Aim!

I was reading a blog on Cheney's activities and they had a link to a Time article about Bush '43 meeting one of the leaders of the Indian tribes, a meeting set up by Abramoff.

The article reports that:

Told about the photograph in January, the White House said it had no record that Abramoff was present at the meeting. Shown the photograph today, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said the White House had still found no record of Abramoff's presence but confirmed that it is Abramoff in the picture.

So apparently this is the Enron-esqe "we're not lying, we're just stupid" defense. So let me get this straight -- you're requesting billions of dollars and vastly expanded powers to identify, track, and keep records on millions of potential terrorists, but you can't manage to identify, track, and keep records on the hundreds of people who meet the President on a regular basis?

Do you think we're stupid?

Blaming the Symptom

An article about a class action lawsuit in California had me shaking my head. The lawsuit states that the plaintiffs were unfairly discriminated against, as evidenced by the fact that they didn't pass the test. As compensation, they are asking for:

The suit seeks a court order allowing students in this year's graduating class to earn their diploma regardless of whether they passed the math and English portions of the exam.

So, basically, they're saying if that you fail the test, you should get your diploma anyways.

There is a basic clash here between an "entitlement culture" and what I would call an "achievement culture". This clash is, unfortunately, obscuring some legitimate complaints about the quality of education the plaintiffs received, and which the standard exit exam has highlighted.

The fundamental assumption of the lawsuit (flawed, in my opinion) is that anyone who has attended a full measure of high school is entitled to receive a high school diploma. You don't have to take that very far to get to a point where your high school diploma is simply a worthless piece of paper. If you're guarenteed to get one, it doesn't mean anything. In attempting to force the state to grant diplomas to all those individuals who fail the exit exam, the bringers of this lawsuit are devaluing the worth of that diploma to zero.

Server Ressurection

Took some time today to try and figure what went wrong with my home server, and if any of the files on it are recoverable. I'm hoping the picture files can be saved, since I don't have any backups of many of them.

I moved the server from my garage to my room, where I have a keyboard and mouse handy. The first problem was figuring out what the terrible grinding noise when I started up the machine was. I knew it wasn't the hard drives, since I pulled both the old drives and put a new one in. It turned out that it was the CPU fan, which I fixed (at Adam's suggestion) by shooting a little bit of chain wax into the fan. Probably not the best solution in the long run, but this is a disposable box at this point. If it can limp along for another six months or so I can replace it with something better. Something with RAID, that can survive a disk crash.

Tried installing the version of Suse I had CDs for (9.2), however the installer simply crashed when I tried to install it. I downloaded a newer version of the OS off the net (10.0), and the installer for that version was more helpful about why it wouldn't install -- it informed me that I didn't have enough memory to run the installer, and would I activate some swap space, please. This is a little difficult when you're trying to install on a new disk, and the disk doesn't have a swap partition, because you can't run the installer.

So, I pulled out an old Knoppix CD and fired up Knoppix to partition the drive. Luckily it's an old version of Knoppix, so it didn't have any problems booting on my old machine (the server only has 128M of RAM, which is causing the problem). With the added swap the installer was able to start up, and is currently downloaded the OS over the internet (according to the estimat-o-meter, this will take about an hour).

(2PM) The estimat-o-meter is not to be trusted. At least, it only estimated part of the problem... I have now watched all the episodes of "The Daily Show" queued up on my Tivo, including the hilarious "Freedom Tickle", which probably deserves its own post.

The installer has finally finished the install process and booted the machine, just in time for me to pack my hockey gear and leave. So I still have no idea if I'll be able to recover my data.

Strange Editing at the NY Times

A friend pointed out that the NY Time's coverage of the cartoons of the prophet Mohammad have collected a curious slant in recent days. The original article contained the following two paragraphs:

Many European commentators concede that the cartoons were provocative, even insensitive, but argue that the conservative Muslim world must learn to accept Western standards of free speech and pluralism.

Many Muslims complain that the cartoons reinforce a dangerous confusion between Islam and the Islamist terrorism that the vast majority of Muslims abhor. Dalil Boubakeur, head of France's Muslim Council, called the cartoons a new sign of Europe's growing "Islamophobia."

One day later, substantially the same article was posted. In the second article, however, a new paragraph appeared:

Most European commentators concede that the cartoons were in poor taste but argue that conservative Muslims must learn to accept Western standards of free speech and the pluralism that those standards protect.

Several accused Muslims of a double standard, noting that media in several Arab countries continue to broadcast or publish references to "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a notorious early 20th-century anti-Semitic hoax that presented itself as the Jews' master plan to rule the world.

Many Muslims say the Danish cartoons reinforce a dangerous confusion between Islam and the Islamist terrorism that nearly all Muslims abhor. Dalil Boubakeur, head of France's Muslim Council, called the caricatures a new sign of Europe's growing "Islamophobia."

Hello, what's this? Where did this new paragraph come from? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the paragraphs immediately before or after it, except in the most tenuous sense. Yet someone saw the need to go add this to the article.

Why is the Times trying to shoehorn anti-Semitism into this incident?

Clarification

A poster pointed out that E85 is in fact widely used and adopted in the state of Minnesota, so I thought I'd point out a few things: The first is that, although it is widely used in MN (6% is a pretty good adoption rate, that's probably more than the number of diesel cars in CA), outside Minnesota and a few other corn-belt states, E85 is so rare as to be practically non-existent. Much of my posting was talking to fellow Californians who have never heard of E85 or know that cars are currently made that can run on it -- if people don't know about it, they can't change their habits.

The second is that my critique was largely about the language of Bush's address. To me it sounded like the language of someone who doesn't really want to solve a problem. In the corporate world, if someone speaks out in a meeting and says "Hey, X is a really big problem, we need to do something about it." the way to shut them up is to pick a senior staffer, tell him to "research" the problem and create a report.

In short, research is something you do when you don't know the answer to the problem. We don't need to pour money into research and hope that some scientest discovers portable cold fusion. We have a solution. But implementing that solution requires a lot of hard work, long term commitment, and a willingness to upset some large, entrenched special interests.

My problem was that Bush knows about the problem, pointed it out to the American public, and then refused to step up to the plate and fix it.

State of the Union

So I've been reading the synopsis of Bush's state of the union address on the net. I didn't actually watch it, since I have better things to do than listen to Bush spout a prepared speech for a couple hours in his favorite environment (i.e. one entirely free of criticism).

No surprises in most of what he said -- yep, we're winning the war in Iraq, pay no attention to those news reports about IEDs and body counts -- but the one that really yanked my chain was this quote:

"America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world."

Really? And you just figured this out today? Or is it, perhaps, that you're just figuring out that sending in the troops and taking control of the oil supply isn't quite as easy as Cheney and Rummy told you it would be?

His solution? A little bit of spending, a lot of hand-waving, and some prayer (the duct-tape of this administration, it would appear):

"The best way to break this addiction is through technology," he said, adding that technological advances will help achieve a "great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025."

The sad thing is, we don't need any technology to solve our oil crisis. We have the solution in hand -- it's call ethanol. The government currently has regulations for a fuel type known as "E85", which is 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline. Almost any modern engine will run on E85 after a minor refit (ethanol eats some rubber and plastic, so vulnerable parts of the engine need to be replaced), and a number of vehicles come from the factory equipped to run on either gasoline or E85.

Research? We don't need no stinkin' research. What we need is a little public policy.

Fear of Girls

This video is a humorous look into the life of a hard-core role-player...

If you weren't going to listen...

... then why did you bother to commision the report?

Two recent reports on the state of the U.S. military have both stated that the stress of high levels of activity have strained the military to the breaking point. The troops need more time between tours of duty, and the only way to get that is either to hire more troops (difficult, the army is already having significant difficult meeting its recruitment targets) or reduce the number of troops deployed.

According to Rumsfeld, this is hogwash:

But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the findings of both reports, telling Pentagon reporters, "those comments do not reflect the current situation. They are either out of date or just misdirected."

Clearly this is all part of a propaganda campaign being promoted by the commie left-wing liberal media. In fact, one of these reports came out of that group of tree-huggers, the Pentagon.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

eDissonance

I went to Keith's retirement party last weekend, and at the party, Bill (and a couple others) mentioned -- in response to my general dissatisfaction with online dating services -- that I should check out eHarmony. I was skeptical, but I do try to keep an open mind about these things.

I created an account during some slack time, and began filling out their monstrous questionnaire -- many pages, somewhere on the order of 300 questions. Most were of the "rate this trait on a scale of 1-5" variety.

After an hour and a half of clicking on little dots, my profile was sufficiently complete that I was now allowed to conduct a search. The site spent a full minute doing an extensive search of all available single women that (it calculates) are a good match for my personality. And it came up with... five women.

Five.

In the whole bay area.

Since I was not a subscriber, I was not allowed to see photos of any of my potential mates. According to Adam, even if you do subscribe, you're not allowed to see photos until fairly late in the "guided matching process" (eHarmony starts you on a structured question/answer session, and after four phases you graduate to open communication). So I started perusing the information it did give me.

Of my five matches, three were older than me -- not exactly ideal. Of the remaining two, one lived in Half Moon Bay, and the other in San Francisco. Several hours after joining, the one in Half Moon Bay "closed" me (ended communication) with a "too far away" message.

And then there was one.

So, apparently, I'm in the same group as Mark, in that eHarmony thinks we're both a lost cause. Since Mark has subsequently gotten engaged (congratulations, Mark!), I'm thinking that's a failure on their part.

America's Funniest Home Videos

So, back when I was racing, but before the Wall, I bought a helmet camera so I could make videos of my races. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but I never used it before I stopped racing, so it sat in the garage since then.

Took it out today dirt riding, which, as Keith pointed out, made it a virtual certainty that I was going to crash. We were supposed to meet Ash at Metcalf at 9AM, but my bike had a bit of "deferred maintenence" so we didn't show up until 9:30. We caught Ash on the way down; apparently he had done one lap, decided it was too slippery, and packed up his bike.

Adam and I started up the bikes (and the camera), did a few laps around the TT track, then headed over to the GP track. The road up to the GP track was a bit slippery, but nothing too bad. Most of the track itself was OK, but there was one spot with a deep mud puddle, and two or three tire-width tracks through it. I got through the mud fine the first time, but the second time round my tire went off slightly, and the front wheel washed out and dumped me off the bike. It happens pretty quick on the video, one second I'm riding along, happy as a clam, then there's a quick shot of the sky and the camera is staring at my boots. Whee.

I'm going to try and upload our clips to Google Video (with soundtrack, no sound on the video) after I manage to find the correct connectors and cables to pull it off the camera.

Signs of Progress

I was reading this article on coverage the Arab media has been giving to recent statements by al-Quaeda's top leadership. The part of the article that caught my eye was a quote from an Iraqi journalist:

But the credit for that goes to the sacrifice of the Iraqi people... It will never go to al-Qaeda under the leadership of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who appeared in his televised message to be thirsty, like a leech, for the blood of Iraqis, as well as haughty, stupid and lacking any connection to reality, just like George Bush junior.

So, in the minds of the Iraqis, our leader is, at least, no worse than one of the world's most renowned terrorists. Sigh.

Server Crash

Shana pointed out earlier today that my website wasn't up and running, so I dropped by my house to check it out over lunch. Rebooting the server failed to clear the problem, so I hooked up a monitor to the machine to see the console messages, and saw the dreaded message:

DISK BOOT FAILURE

This almost certainly means a disk crash and loss of unknown amounts of data; disk crashes on modern drives are depressingly fatal. The server had two disks in it, so it's not clear what was on the failed disk; recovery efforts will start some time this weekend.

TV Rots your Brain

In case there was any doubt as to the effect TV has on people, recently a mummified corpse was found watching TV in Ohio.

I would normally take this opportunity to make a crack at the quality of TV programming, but, frankly, TV these days seems to be much better written and directed than most of the movies that hit the theaters. In particular, SciFi's Battlestar Galactica has been taking a hard look at the choices people make when you're playing for all the marbles.

Bleh

Felt pretty bleh all sunday long (for those not aware, "Bleh" is a technical term representing a point somewhere between healthy and sick), and as a result, basically hung around the house all day and read. I begged off on dirt bike riding, and was planning on skipping my hockey game until the last minute.

I think playing the game was the right move -- my headache cleared up immediately after I started playing. Ended up being a decent game -- we won 6-4 -- but I felt like I was running on about 50% power. There was one goal I should have gone back for, but didn't, because I was tired, and because I thought it was going to be icing.

After that, got home and had some carrot cake, which was the most substantial meal I'd eaten all day.

The Best Laid Plans

Apparently Chicago is covered in ice, and that makes it somewhat difficult for planes to land. At least, that's what Shana told me when she called me from the airport and said that her flight would not be leaving today.

So, I drove back to the airport and picked her up, and she got to watch me lose our hockey game last night (3-2, we at least managed to put on a good showing).

I'm supposed to put her on another plane tonight at 11PM in SFO; hopefully that one will actually reach its destination.

Airport Design

I was at San Jose International today dropping off Shana for her flight, and as I was wading (almost literally) through the airport mess, I noticed a new sign: "Cell Phone Waiting Area"

I was stunned by the implications of this. The first was the concept that a civil engineer had actually come up with something both intelligent and innovative, the second that the port commission had actually allowed said engineer to implement it without charging money for it.

So waiting for people at the airport may not be any less painful after this -- after all, I have been parking on the fringes of the airport and waiting for a phone call for years -- but it does take the additional risk of getting a parking ticket out of the equation.

A White New Year’s

Went up to Jeff’s cabin for New Year’s, along with Shana, Kitt, and Ryan. We were worried that there wouldn’t be any snow, because it was too warm – we drove up Friday night through four hours of rain, and it was raining all the way at the summit, which did not bode well for snow conditions.

We woke up late on Saturday and decided to go get some breakfast, since we wouldn’t be snowboarding. Apparently we had the same bright idea as about half the population of Tahoe, because every breakfast place we tried was completely packed. We spent about an hour trying to find a breakfast place, by which point it was noon, so we had pizza instead.

After lunch we went back to the cabin. Or at least, Jeff, Somala and I went back to the cabin; I unwisely left Kitt, Ryan, and Shana to navigate themselves back, and we didn’t see them for another three hours. In the meantime we broke out the Monopoly set and had ourselves a “quick” game. Jeff eventually managed to bankrupt Somala when she was unlucky enough to land on Boardwalk, and with Jeff having three-quarters of the property after that, the outcome was predictable.

Saturday night we went to the casinos for New Year’s Eve, did a little gambling, and got on main street for the unorganized countdown. The roads were very icy as a result of the recent rainfall and drop in temperature, and I fell victim to a patch of black ice. Apparently Jeff warned me about it prior, but with a street full of shouting people, I didn’t hear him. Fortunately nothing wounded except my pride. We zipped back to the house immediately after midnight and went to bed.

Jeff had to leave the cabin early on Sunday, so we all got up at around 7am, packed our stuff, and headed to Sierra-at-Tahoe. The rain from Friday night and Saturday morning started turning into snow around noon on Saturday, so by Sunday we had a decent covering of snow.

Both Ryan and Shana were learning to ‘board, so Kitt and I spent the morning giving lessons. In the afternoon we left them together on the bunny slope and put in a few quick runs. The wind started picking up around noon, and it was very windy by 3pm when we left the resort. On our last run, Kitt and I were headed down the slope, and the wind started blowing so hard it knocked Kitt over and brought me to a complete halt. Nonetheless, we got some good riding in, and we’re currently crammed into the car, fighting our way back down highway 50 to get back to the bay area.

Merry Christmas!

I'm sitting around my grandparents' house, having finished the morning unwrapping-of-the-presents, and the family has now broken down into familiar routines -- some cooking the turkey for dinner, some calling other relatives not present, but most sitting around and reading. Art and Leanne gave all of our family gift certificates to Borders. They know us so well.

Heading back to our motel room shortly. My sister flew in last night, but unfortunately her luggage did not arrive with her, so one of her presents this morning was a delivery from the airline, which she was most excited to receive.

Shannon got a PSP from her parents, and we haven't seen her since. May need to borrow that for a bit to see just how cool those things are. My dad got a GPS unit, and my sister got a Creative Zen MP3 player. It's tiny, about twice the size of the AAA battery which powers it. Greg and my dad exchanged bottles of port, as is their tradition.

Oh, and chocolate. Lots of it. It will be months before I can look a truffle the same way again...

Massachusetts Debates the future of Documents

Andrew Updegrove has been covering much of the debate in Mass about it's decision to use the OpenDocument format as a standard instead of the Microsoft Office format. For those of you that haven't followed the drama, shortly after that decision, MS stirred up a lynch mob to go after Peter Quinn, the state CIO.

The comment that caught my eye, and really put the whole debate in a nutshell, was this one:

It is vital that our national records are not saved in a format owned by any single company. Ask yourself the question: what would we do if we needed vital documents created on a Wang processor 20 years ago.

Most people reading this will never have heard of Wang (that's the point), but 20 years ago they were where Microsoft is today -- Wang sold desktop computers and word-processing software, and they owned the majority of the word-processing market. Five years later their computers weren't worth their weight in scrap metal, leaving users with a bunch of Wang-format documents that needed to be converted to the format of the new market-leading word processor.

WordPerfect.