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Sunday January 2, 2005 - Have a Happy, sort of...


Somehow the tsunami took the fun out of things, it is hard to celebrate when you are worried about the friends in Asia you cant't get in touch with, and about your ex-wife, who you can't get in touch with and who was vacationing on Ko Phi Phi. Especially galling if you think about spending weeks trying to get her out of going to Thailand, even putting an itinerary to Singapore and Indonesia together for her. No, I am not prescient, at least I don't think so, but you'll have to admit it is... uh, unusual.
Generally, with Iraq going on, and the US economy in the doldrums, there isn't an awful lot to celebrate. I have a sneaking suspicion that the tardiness of this Administration's response to the Asia disaster is something to do with Iraq, and the amount of money we're spending there, money that now is not available to help those in need. Ironic, that, we're spending some five billion dollars a month in a country where we're not wanted, when all those resources, military personnel, money, could be put to good use in Southern Asia, where it would significantly improve our stature in the Muslim world, at the same time. But we won't, we're set on this stupid course of action and won't waver. We're again not making friends..

2004, then, in my book, a year that is best forgotten. Hopefully we can do better in 2005. It is for the first time since I came to live in the United States, in 1989, that I am not positive about this country. I've had a great run here, been able to do things I couldn't have dreamt of doing anywhere else, America has been good to me, what goes on reminds me of the proverb I used to live by "If you fight, be subjective, or you will lose". Perhaps that's what Dubya believes in, too, but I personally think he's a Don Quichote. And in this country that has Freedom of Speech firmly enshrined in its Constitution, I never expected to have to worry about what I post on my website.
The economy is doing better, though, without a shadow of a doubt, but it does not translate into jobs. That is, unless you're in the military or in the defense industry, where money is being spent like there were no tomorrow. My investment accounts are doing much better than they were a couple of years ago, and it looks like I may be able to claw some of the past losses back, this year and next. With the dollar as low as it is, we're exporting, and that's good for us. I can hardly afford to go and visit my relatives in Europe now, but I guess you can't win 'em all..

So, dear reader, I hope you have a splendid year, do good, look after your loved ones, think positive, and take care of your own happiness, you're definitely in charge of that...

(I, umm, appropriated the picture here from a news item somewhere - it is copyright Agence France Presse, I hope they don't mind too much. It shows the main mosque in Bandar Aceh, not much else is left standing in that city.)

Tuesday January 18, 2005 - RIP Oom Wim....


I have been in The Netherlands since Sunday – my maternal Oom (Uncle) Wim passed away, the last of the “old crew”, at 87, we thought he’d live forever, but abdominal surgery followed by a bout with pneumonia felled even this old oak.
Uncle Wim and his family are special to me in that he was based in D.C. some sixteen years, assigned to the World Bank with diplomatic rank, and consequently his children, my cousins, grew up and went to school and attended college in Northern Virginia, where I would eventually live. Cousin Henk still lives here, moved up to the Chesapeake in Maryland a couple of years ago with wife and kids, while I moved down to Spotsylvania County in Virginia.
So there were plenty of memories, stretching across three continents, both my Father’s and my Mother’s families going back to the colonies, the Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia, with the family now dispersed across Europe and the United States (I really should figure out who these relatives in Oregon are..).

Unusually, both my sister and I had forgotten to order flowers for the funeral, so late at the night the day before, I went to the website of De Roos B.V. in Amsterdam, since there really is no late night service in The Netherlands, and did the only thing I could: order a white Biedermeyer arrangement on line. I had used this florist before and always gotten good service, but ordering at 11pm for a next-day-by-1pm service was probably stretching things a bit. There was nothing else I could do, this ain't America, where you can call a florist in the middle of the night..
So the next morning at 8am I called them to expedite the order, and was pleasantly surprised when the gentleman who answered the phone was not only aware of my order, but had already called it in to a local florist in the town where the funeral home is, and a truly beautiful white bouquet with the ribbon as ordered was sitting by Uncle Wim’s casket when we got there. Many thanks, Herman, remarkable service, I can’t thank you and your staff enough. If you ever need flowers in Amsterdam, or need flowers delivered in The Netherlands, De Roos is my recommendation. Tell ‘em I sent you ;-)

Thursday January 20, 2005 - Going Dutch



Too quick I am on board US Airways 43 again, heading back home, bags of old Dutch cheese, aged genever and plenty of frozen maatjes herring in Schiphol Airport’s telltale yellow “See, Buy, Fly” shopping bags. When the family lives in multiple countries funerals end up being family reunions, in a way, and are bitter sweet affairs.

I had a chance to see ex Evelyn, see my sister’s new apartment, it is still being decorated by *her* ex, she only just moved a couple of weeks ago. And last night, I had the opportunity to meet Luna (left in the picture, Evie on the right) – for those who speak Dutch, Luna is one of today’s very popular bloggers, describing her yup Amsterdam life in exquisite and often very funny detail, she has a way with words that paints pictures in my mind. My being a former “Amsterdammer” (not to mention a former yuppie) helps understand, of course, but she is a an unusual and very talented writer - that too is Amsterdam, "loose" talent that where I now live would get snapped up in a heartbeat. We spent a pleasant evening drinking and dining at some of my old haunts in the neighbourhood where Luna and her beau bought a house, a couple of years ago, we share at least one stomping ground.

We started out at Café Bern, a restaurant that used to be owned and run by a dropout Swiss nuclear physicist, Helmuth, a.k.a. “Heli”, where his widow Alex and former barman Koen, who now owns the place, make sure that Helmuth’s legacy is maintained, and that the fondue, steak pistou and Yemeni salad taste exactly like Helmuth used to make them.

And then we aftered across the street at De Waag, the old Amsterdam weighing house, where once convicted felons were executed outside the city ramparts, then quickly hoisted up and in for dissection in the auditorium at the top of the building, where painter Rembrandt van Rijn situated his anatomic lesson (the very same auditorium where I gave a talk on research and development in the United States some three centuries later). De Waag had been in disuse for many years, until it was restored and given a very contemporary function by friend Caroline and her associate Marleen Stikker, who negotiated use rights to the building and located their Society for Old and New Media there in 1996 - an Internet cafe and web developers in a 15th century former guild hall. Yes, Secretary Rumsfeld, this is indeed old Europe, but there are some aspects to that you probably will never understand.


Friday January 21, 2005 - Au$wei$ bitte!



The inventor of the picture ID, the Personalausweis, as it is called in German, was Dutch. He originally offered, somewhere in the 1930's, his invention to the Dutch government, but his proposal was declined. A form of identification that could be carried at all times was not deemed necessary. The German government eventually purchased the concept, and I guess we all know what use it was put to there... As a consequence, most European governments have traditionally been allergic to the concept of a picture ID (although Spain and France have required their citizens to carry some form of ID for many years), but September 11, as well as the influx of new residents of countries where the registration of citizens is somewhat of an afterthought, have significantly changed that picture, for the first time since the second World War.

So, both the British and the Dutch government are introducing identification requirements - in The Netherlands, all citizens must carry a new picture ID as of January 1st, 2005, something that had, at the time of this writing, led to some 3,300 citizens being cited for not complying.

A few weeks ago, I read in the Washington Post that outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Tom Rich visited Schiphol Airport, launching a pilot program for travel identification using the iris recognition system that’s been installed there for well over a year. Presently the only eyescan ID system in commercial use, it is called Privium® by the Dutch authorities. The system allows EU and Swiss citizens to register (currently only in person at Schiphol Airport), have their ID and documentation checked by the Dutch Marechaussee (a sort of paramilitary police that, amongst others, is responsible for border security), and then have both irises scanned and those and their information copied onto a Smart Card.

On the off chance that the system will make it to the US, since I was at Schiphol anyway, I enrolled, which took about half an hour (if you feel tempted, you have to make an appointment in order to enroll, and for now, inconveniently, this can only be done on the "land" side of Schiphol Airport). And 119 Euros. I now possess the Privium card and that allows me to pass through the eyecheck rather than immigration, no lines, and due to my high end subscription I get preferred parking at Schiphol Airport, and can check in at Business Class desks with participating airlines, unlike the U.S. Immigration Service's hand scan project, which only gets you past immigration.

The concept adheres to European privacy laws in that the card is only valid for as long as your passport is valid, and the bearer of the card can be identified without their identification having to be in a centralized database – that is, my personal information is, but not the scan of my eye. And since it isn’t in a database, it can’t be falsified or stolen, eyes are notoriously difficult to remove. It is only on the card I carry with me, and will only work with my eyes.

So that is how I went through border control on the way out (European border patrol agents check passports both entering and leaving), my left eye functioning as both ID and passport, it took five seconds and a security person then escorts you to a baggage check belt that doesn’t have a line.

Why is this concept interesting? Unlike the American plan, which has biometric data embedded in the passport, the Privium card replaces the passport - between one's eyes and the card one carries, all information is there, and the card is conveniently credit card sized. As the passport was intended to be, Privium is the ultimate travel document, and very hard to forge. The Privium folks tell me that, so far, some 15,500 frequent flyers have signed up - umm, some 1.5 million Euros per annum, at the minimum rate. Sheesh.

Sunday February 13, 2005 - CyberYou Too?



In today's Sydney Morning Herald, Sue Ostler writes a somewhat bemused piece about electronic dating - Internet, email, SMS, what have you. The list below comes from her - I was particularly struck by the first item. It is completely true that email creates huge misunderstandings.

Now that email has become an expected communications medium, the topics one discusses become ever more complex, and it turns out that if the normal physical communications aids - body language, facial expression, eyes, speech inflection - are not there during a "conversation" things can be merrily misunderstood, even to the point that somebody can smart over what you said weeks ago, and remembers it, while the comment was meant completely innocuously..

For me, the electronic communications media are a conduit to meeting IRL, In Real Life, as it is known, but more and more entire communities don't, and conduct their friendships completely online, where entire new languages develop that you simply will not understand unless you're part of that particular community. I do not agree with those that criticise these developments, though - mankind has always taken technology developed by one generation, and used it in the next generation in ways nobody had ever thought of.

That is a good thing, it enriches and evolves our culture. I have actually gone so far as to chuck out most of my library of books - you know, those bound paper things you can read - as 95% of my reading is now online. The only time I still touch a book is on airline flights, and, occasionally, a few pages in bed before falling asleep. Me - the guy who would read four or five books every weekend... Especially to parents, my advice is to transplant yourself to the Internet big time, or you will not understand your children any more. I hear so many parents in my age group talking about their chidren "on the Internet" - what they do not realize is that the kids actually live there, as opposed to where we think they live. Virtuality is reality, to them. Hard to grasp? Spend some time "out there", this is not HBO, and you can't see it from your window, you have to "go there"... Take a leaf out of my Uncle Wim's book - that's his Internet setup, in the picture to the left. Active and "out there" until the day he went into hospital, he passed away last month. At 87..

Anyway, here's Sue's list, full of solid advice:

The Dos and Don'ts

(© Sydney Morning Herald, I suppose)

Tuesday February 15, 2005 - Stealing or Using?



In various places, like Amazon.com, you can buy recording equipment that will let you put TV programming on DVD. This is the Panasonic® DMRE50S, a player/recorder that will let you play DVDs, CDs and the like, and can record analog video with Dolby® Surround ProLogic® encoding onto either DVD-RAM (which is a rewritable data DVD in a cartridge) or a write-once DVD-R, in the latter case the device will save the recording as a video DVD which can be played in a normal DVD player.

You will appreciate the studios don't particularly relish the idea of the citizen ripping off copyrighted material, and I guess that is why cable and satellite companies are pushing their DVRs so hard - the link provided here goes to my satellite provider, Dish Network, but all satellite and cable companies now offer DVRs, and those that were offering Tivo® devices now no longer do.


I think it is a good bet to assume the broadcasters and studios, the owners of the copyright of most broadcast material, have "prevailed" upon the carriers to not make devices available that will let the consumer record copyrighted material and share it - the Tivo is capable of doing that, the DVR is not. Years ago, I bought JVCs digital cassette recorder, which was able to record the digital signal right off the satellite, onto D-VHS tape, and so I have a capability to watch recorded satellite material at DVD quality, complete with Dolby Digital® Surround, if that was in the broadcast.

I agree with the studios that the copyright thing is a huge issue. Many consumers think it is OK to rip off someone else's work - as I spent many years in systems development, and hold some patents, I am all too aware that it is reasonable that people who created, invented, worked on, and financed a particular work should be paid for that. For very many people, it is acceptable that if they cannot or will not pay for a movie on DVD, they can ask a friend to make a copy for them. It is easy enough, and on the Panasonic box I just mentioned, it'll cost all of the 35¢ the recordable DVD will cost you. Add a DVD burner to any computer you buy, today, for around $100, and you, too, can start your own production company. I just don't think controlling the technology is the way to solve this. Apart from anything else, there is no copy protection that cannot be broken or circumvented, and people do, day in day out.

But: if you want to be able to put TV programs, movies, the news, on DVD, so you can watch at some other time, or in another place, or simply archive something, the combination of a DVR and a DVD recorder is hard to beat. The DVR will record a program without loss of quality (including Dolby Digital if that's there), and you can then play back the program and record it to the DVD recorder. After all, the DVR has only somewhere between 30 and 100 hours of recording time, and that will fill up. You will lose some of the digital quality, and Dolby 5.1 will be reduced to Dolby 2.1, but unless you have the latest greatest $25,000 home theatre, you won't notice much difference.

Bear one thing in mind, though. The installers, by and large, have no clue how to install home theatre equipment. One of my neighbours has the latest, greatest, digital and projection equipment, but when DirecTV®'s installers set it up, they did not use any of the digital connections available on their satellite decoder or the video equipment they were connecting to, so my neighbour had VHS quality reception and no surround sound when they were done. Not to be outdone, the Dish Network® installer who came to give me local D.C. channels on my installation made me take down three rather large oak trees "because they're blocking the new dish", only to find that the transponder in question could not be seen from the location on my roof he was installing the dish at with or without the trees. It took another, more savvy, installer to finally figure out where the second dish had to be placed to have reception.

When DirecTV came to install an entire multi room satellite system at the house of a friend of mine, they brought only older model decoders without digital outputs. My friend had to get a DVR to get equipment that had digital output, and guess what - the DVR will not install unless it is hooked up to a telephone line, and then the satellite provider gets to retrieve your viewing information from the DVR without your getting paid for providing that. It is questionable from a privacy perspective as well, but since it is not illegal your only option would be not to have the equipment. Mind you, you can buy almost any program or movie on DVD now, so maybe...

Friday February 25, 2005 - Blue or World Domination?



Assessing technological products isn't something I took up when I joined Verizon's forerunner NYNEX, some fifteen years ago - before I came to the United States I was a technology writer in the Dutch and British press. And even though these days I dedicate my working hours to the Fortune 500 and various government institutions, I still like to keep my hand in at the development of consumer technology. With the advent of the Internet, the dividing line between consumer and enterprise technology has blurred significantly - when a decade ago a router was a big rack mounted device in a wire center or wiring closet, today Jane Schmoe has a router no larger than an alarm clock, which connects her home PC to the cable or DSL provided Internet. And your average $700 laptop has enough USB ports to connect anything from a $100 digital camera that doubles as a video camera to your cellphone / PDA.

Like many, I went through several Palmpilots, eventually added a fax unit to that, then progressed to a Handspring PDA that had a plug-in GSM cellphone module, and eventually ended up with RIM's Blackberry cult device. It is a cult device - I once got a date in Manhattan just on the strength of lending a very with it young lady my Blackberry 6230 to make an overseas call - she kept repeating how she wanted a Blackberry, too. Yah... never on the first date, dear.

But while the Blackberry is a clever and very powerful tool, it has its drawbacks. Its shape is so slick that it will just slip out of your hand all the way down to Earth, and due to its size the belt holders will go through so much torsion when you sit down and get up, that the clamp eventually pops off - happened to two of mine, so far. One thing that has always bothered me is that my 6230 will talk to the high speed GPRS data network, but it won't connect my laptop to that network, even though it has the modem and network stack built in natively, and a USB connection to my laptop.

The other day I was looking at available PDAs when I came across Nokia's N-Gage QD game device. Aimed squarely at the teen market (even the price is - T-Mobile charges $99 for it), it has a games module, GSM cellphone with all the bells and whistles, and Bluetooth wireless inter-device connectivity, so up to four kids can sit in their dorm rooms and play each other, wirelessly.

Looking further at its specification sheet at Nokia's website, though, I realized that this toy is quite powerful - more powerful, in fact, than my fancy $250 Blackberry (a colleague of mine jokingly refers to it as a Blueberry "since they're all blue"). Guess what - the N-Gage QD has a speakerphone built in, its downloadable free software lets you synchronize its address book and scheduler with every version ever invented of Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, and any Palm PIM software.

Now either I've gotten out of touch with the teen market to the point that I didn't know they'd gone to Lotus Notes - Lotus Notes is the most used email system in the world, predominantly by Enterprise and Government, but kids don't generally have access to it. Not only that, the N-Gage syncs up with all those information managers and email systems using wireless Bluetooth, if your laptop is so equipped (and only Bluetooth, it doesn't speak anything else)! And yes, believe it or not, it comes with the software to turn itself into a wireless router that can connect your laptop via Bluetooth to the GPRS network - a data network that is supported by every GSM carrier in the USA, T-Mobile, AT&T Wireless and its adoptive mother Cingular, and probably Nextel too.

What I don't know is whether the N-Gage was designed on the basis of human factors knowledge, or simply a clever Nokia piece of marketing. I am leaning towards thinking it being a little bit of both - the QD is the second N-Gage model, the first being larger, and with more gadgetry, like an MP3 player and FM radio. My guess is that this may have made battery life an issue - even on the new QD battery life is clearly impacted by the device having to communicate with both GPRS and Bluetooth at the same time, effectively giving it two transmitter/receiver sets.

All that for a measly $99, and $9.99 a month on top of my normal mobile charges. You wil understand I could not help getting one, adding a Bluetooth USB dongle for my laptops for $25, and, what the heck, a tiny Bluetooth over-the-ear wireless earpiece for 50 bucks. With it, I don't even have to take the phone (because it is that too) out of my pocket to make or answer a call - just touch the tiny button on the earpiece and you're talking (after you program the voice recognition for outgoing calls). The N-Gage misses the huge battery life the Blackberry has, I can go for four or five days without recharging, despite using the phone normally, and of course the Blackberry has that teensy but very usable QWERTY keyboard, although using it as a phone means you're constantly looking for keys to use for that, on a keyboard with three shift modes. The Blackberry's screen is larger and provides more information, the N-Gage wins in the legibility department.

I am still figuring this wonderful toy out, but if it really does all that I think my Blackberry will shortly be on its way to the knacker's yard (my growing collection of once top-of-the-heap cellular phones - which reminds me, my first cellphone, a black brick bought from Radio Shack, early 'eighties, that was made by Nokia too...). Clever guys, those Finns.

Thursday March 10, 2005 - Where? On West 45th?



My boss being on the other coast, I had delegation this week, and this caused me to attend some meetings in Manhattan. While I love traveling, the hotel rates we often get to pay bother me - staying at expensive luxury hotels, which I have been doing for many years, gets you, in Boston or New York, a hotel room that may well cost between $300 and $400, and all you really do there is fall asleep, shower and go to work.

So I am always looking out for better deals, when I access our travel reservation system, although I have sometimes been punished in doing so. I remember very vividly my stay at an uptown Manhattan hotel, where upon arrival I found three large rats frolicking in the gutter directly outside the entrance, then kept awake much of the night by the lovemaking of two men, down the corridor, who employed a significant whip in their activities.

But this time I found what turned out top be a brand new boutique hotel on 125 West 45th Street, the hotel QT, a new venture of hotelier Andre Balasz, where I found at very (for midtown Manhattan) reasonable prices interesting rooms with what I consider upscale utilitarianism - no seating areas, coffee makers, or room service, but a large very comfortable platform mounted king bed with sumptuous duvet, HDTV, a cute fridge with a glass door which you're supposed to stock up yourself from the counter downstairs, and free 802.11g wireless Internet.

QT is so new that the concierge (stylishly attired in jeans and a turtleneck) apologized when he could not find room 703, with a novel excuse: "We only opened up this floor today", and the cutesy front desk staff broke out in giggles when I eventually decided to have a couple of mini bottles of Grey Goose with my diet Coke. If I had not been dog tired I would have probably chatted the giggliest one up, tall, blonde, well, you know the drill. I, in turn, broke out in spots when I noticed that the corridor signs did not have Braille subtitles, but the sign for the electrical closet did - I really would draw the line at sight impaired electricians..

Downstairs, between the front desk and the bar, is the pool, raised, glassed in and very visible, which probably explained why none of us aging business types were in it, but on the whole (my room, at $165, was mid-range) very pleasant, and I just loved the Seinfeld rerun on the flat-panel-LCD-digital-Dolby-TV-with-DVD-player.

The place being a three block walk from our headquarters helped, of course - QT is in fact so new that my Italian Deli friends just the other side of 6th Avenue (I used to have an office in the building across from them) didn't even know about it. But that is Manhattan, too, each block is its own neighbourhood and you may never cross 6th if it is not on your way in. Anyway, if you want to impress your boyfriend and splurge a little, try and book the QT Penthouse - it's only $400 per night!

Sunday March 13, 2005 - almost Spring in Virginia






Saturday March 19, 2005 - Kids & Immigrants



Last week, I received an email from a Dutch-Moroccan gentleman who had read a posting of mine at the site of the Dutch daily Trouw. Trouw is a renowned Christian newspaper, for me, reading it provides me an idea of "how the other half lives" - a Christian I am not.

I wrote at the Trouw site that I found it worrisome to see the paper referring to the immigrant population in The Netherlands as "first generation immigrants", second generation immigrants", etc. Compared with the United States, I said, where I am an "immigrant", my children would be "first generation American", and theirs "second generation American" - I think there is a fair amount of discrimination in the way the paper expresses itself.

Worse, this is not just that newspaper. Schools where the majority of pupils are of foreign extraction, are officially referred to as "black schools", and there are many other examples of discriminatory use of language in my home country. Perhaps the way in which we, here in the United States, frantically use Politically Correct language is not so crazy after all. It is the children that grow up with values that are, to some extent, imbued by the use of linguistic references. If the child of an immigrant is an immigrant, you automatically enforce the view that that child "is not one of us". Same with the "black schools" - that implies there is such a thing as a "white school", a very stark contrast. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusion, but my correspondent was very clear - he felt that not only he, but his children were subject to discrimination. Maybe, as an immigrant, I can't "become American", but my children would be born American, and apparently you can be born in The Netherlands but not be wholly Dutch, still today. Granted, The Netherlands had no immigration to speak of until the 1970's, but we're thirty years on and I see that what was coincidental is now systemic.

The sad futility of bias is so clear when you follow the Terry Schiavo debacle - hardly any news source mentions that Terry got where she is today because of Bulimia Nervosa, a psychological illness that strikes predominantly young women in their teens. Bulimia is an illness that, if diagnosed in time and treated, can be managed and controlled. If unchecked, it can lead to the sufferer self-destructing, depriving their body of essential nutrition. It would, in my view, be the responsibility of parents, educators, in general, adults in daily contact with the sufferer, to notice and investigate, then to help the patient get treatment and get better. Women suffering from Bulimia and Anorexia learn to hide their affliction, teaching themselves deception, but the symptoms can be noticed, physicially as well as behaviorally. One would assume that in the case of Terry Schiavo, nobody noticed, and all this would have transpired way before she ever met and married her husband. And so nobody asks the much more relevant questions: Was she diagnosed? Did she receive treatment? Because, only treatment could have saved her life, whatever is going on now will not, whether she dies tomorrow or ten years from now.

Sunday March 20, 2005 - 1st day of Spring in Virginia





Saturday March 26, 2005 - QT or not QT...



I am getting a lot of hits from people looking for the new hotel QT in Manhattan (see "On West 45th?", below), from all over the globe. Interesting. If all these folks go stay there, it'll be booked solid for the next couple of years. The Google search you want to do to find both the hotel and the reviews, my friends, is

"hotel QT" review

make sure you include the quotation marks. I booked it using our internal corporate travel system, which is run by American Express, I think the consumer version is here, but Expedia and other online travel agencies may also provide bookings. Not all travel agencies may show QT in their roster, it depends on what agency or agencies the chain has contracts with.

Checking out what search strings people use to get to my site, by the way, show very clearly how little intelligence there is in search engines, Google's IPO notwithstanding. The majority of search engines are English language based, have absolutely no feel for the types of English in use outside North America, and in general search engines will just look for all of the words a person has just keyed in, and if they're all on a webpage within a couple of paragraphs of each other - bingo, a hit.

The following search strings end up on my homepage, and I tell you, that makes little or no sense:



So: "what countries border Spotsylvania" is someone who mistyped "counties" - a search engine should be able to figure that one out easily, as Spotsylvania doesn't border any countries. Then "hotel QT telephone" should provide a Yellow or White pages listing, or some such, I don't list their telephone number at my site, and "gsm toy" shouldn't point at me, because, while I discuss a Nokia telephone that I refer to as a toy, I don't anywhere say this is a "gsm toy". Last but not least, while I may refer to nightlife in Amsterdam, I don't anywhere provide generic information about that subject, while plenty of other sites do. These differences are not as subtle as they may seem - each "misfind" results in hundreds, or thousands, of "hits", and the user has wade through lots of irrelevant entries.

"hotel QT telephone" is an interesting example of linguistic differences. In many languages, a telephone number is commonly referred to as a, well, yes, telephone number. You would think Google understands this - but when you search that way, the primary results are to do with the number of rooms the hotel has. Equally, "hotel QT listing" and "hotel QT directory" don't get you there. What does? "hotel QT phone". Is this logical? What search engines and parsers don't take into account is that non native English speakers (the majority of the worl'd population) looking for information don't translate, they transliterate. They're looking for a page in English, but think in their own language. They wouldn't do that while having a conversation or writing an email, but they will when they think they're talking to a piece of software. You really cannot expect them to understand that they are in fact picking the brains of the people who put the algorithms and recognition tables together, and if those aren't pure multi-disciplinary linguists the above stuff will happen. Just from the logic perspective, if "hotel QT telephone" and "hotel QT phone" return different values, there isn't even a little bit of intelligence in Google.

A human operator would, in most or all of these cases, understand what the searcher meant - but despite decades of development, the best search engines on Earth can't make these simple distinctions. I know, because I have been professionally involved with several, that there are a number of research projects dealing with intelligent data gathering, and I also know they can do significantly better than what I am looking at in my trackers. So I wonder why this research isn't being used - and honestly, when I look at just the above search results, all inside of one week, if you had to pay for this you'd (hopefully) unsubscribe. Lots of work to be done, people.

It is laundry day, so let me get back to what I need to do around my house. If you are a corporate type and want to develop a better parser, come talk to me. I guarantee you that the first outfit to get that right will be laughing all the way to the bank, and I know a slew of human interface developers that would make a superb team. We did this work with speech recognition in the 'nineties, and it'll translate directly to search engines.

Umm, QT is on (+1) 212-354-2323, if you're still looking... ;-)

Sunday March 27, 2005 - Cleaning up





Friday April 1, 2005 - Il Papa



How multi-cultural and multi-racial America has become, was demonstrated to me, today, in my own driveway. I live in a decidely redneck part of the United States - in Virginia, despite Northern Virginia being a very populous suburb of Washington, D.C., it is legal to carry a gun in public, anywhere, provided it holstered in plain sight, and not concealed (for that you gotta go get a permit from the local Court). There is even a provision in State law that prohibits counties and localities from issuing ordinances that override this Civil Right.

So my postman, too, was a white Southerner, complete with Jimmy Carter accent and ruddy complexion. I would not have expected otherwise - this ain't Newark, N.J. But my postman retired in the summer. So, we got a new postman, and despite this very much being the South, he is Korean, our Mr. Pak. And this day he pulled up in my driveway to deliver a registered parcel, in the new silver Jeep that he bought to replace the ramshackle right hand drive (so he can put mail in the mailbox from the car) Subaru he used to drive. Both all wheel drive, so he can get around in the snow and inclement weather (my old mailman had some kind of small rear wheel drive van). But unlike usual, Mr. Pak did not step out of his Jeep today, to hand me my mail and get me to sign the delivery slip. As I stepped up to his opened door, I heard his car radio, he normally doesn't have that going. Mr. Pak smiled at me apologetically, as he handed me my parcel and my mail. "You know, the Pope is very sick" he said. My very foreign born mailman from a Buddhist culture apparently is a devout Catholic. Kind of curious, especially if you consider I am a Westerner and a Buddhist....

Saturday April 2, 2005 - CityNo



The booby prize of the week goes to Citibank, for sending me the ridiculous rejection below.


Being disgruntled with the way HSBC, where I have banked these past 20 years, had handled a tax issue, I decided I'd vote with my $$s, and applied for a Citibank account - I've had one of their credit cards for well over a decade, their customer service is superb and they know like no other financial institution how to handle the Internet. If you're ever in New York City, there is a tall green Citibank tower in Brooklyn, just across the river from Manhattan, and that is where they have a huge and impressive Internet banking development facility. I am especially impressed with their fraud control, which, in my expert opinion, is second to none.

So I am really pi$$ed off at this rejection. Not because they won't give me a bank account, though, with my income, they should be begging me on their knees to "come to Citi", but because there is absolutely no useful information in this letter. Did I get a call from them? No, banks don't do that any more, "for privacy reasons". Email? No, not secure (generally true). So am I going to go to a CitiFinancial Center to open an account? You gotta be kidding me! After this sort of treatment? My credit is well established, there is nothing there that is not verifiable, no other financial institutions have ever given me such a ludicrous non-explanation, and now there is probably a rejection on my credit record that is based on absolutely nothing other than some information Citibank couldn't check, and I would have gladly helped them out had they contacted me. This is all the more ridiculous if you consider I have held one of their credit cards forever. People, when you send a letter, explain enough so the consumer can work with the information. This was useless, and I also find it insulting.

The cause of al this is of course well known to me - financial institutions, insurance companies, and others, profile consumers, they establish acceptance parameters and will only do business with you if your total score is whatever. I agree this is a good methodology to weed out the bad apples, but there are now many companies that have "drawn the noose tight" to the point that even business the institution would love to have is rejected by their computer algorithm. How stupid is that, in a contracting economy?

So they can kiss me goodbye, once I can apply again - months, the way the American credit reporting system works, because of their rejection - somebody else is going to get my business. All of it.

Sunday April 3, 2005 - Dead



A couple of weeks ago, a Dutch friend went on vacation - as the custom is, there, to the sun. It is almost an addiction in Northern Europe - whenever most folks can, they head South, to some place where they can oil up and bake 'till brown. Of course, for the fair skinned the path to brown is via sunburn - I personally have never understood why there is such a preoccupation with something that is clearly unhealthy, but then it is easy for me to talk - I have a tinted skin, probably a gene that I got from my colonial forefathers, who got plenty of sun on the equator for centuries, and I tan just sitting in the car behind glass.

I know it is largely futile to write what I am about to, but then again, if I can save even one life, it is worth taking the time. You see, I have lost two close friends to malignant melanoma - skin cancer. It is completely horrible - the last, my old friend Dik, had a tiny spot on his back, and as he boarded a plane to fly to tropical Sumatra for a long holiday thought to himself he'd take that to the doctor when he got back.

He did, and from there on in, the melanoma was no longer treatable. You don't die from the melanoma, but from the brain tumour it triggers. They took out the first, the size of an orange, and so he lived for another six months, when it grew back. When I finally heard something was wrong, I flew into Amsterdam and found him in the University Hospital, half paralyzed, a bulge to the side of his head, sensitized to the point that just wearing clothes hurt, and in full knowledge and acceptance of his impending death.

I spent a week by his side, flew home to the US then, and a couple of weeks later my sister called me in the middle of the night from the hospice he had been moved to, and told me Dik had just passed away, helped mercifully by the attending physician, who added that little bit of extra morfine when Dik eventually stopped communicating.

So please, kids and assorted idiots, please please do not do this to yourself. Skin cancer mortality is highest in the sunny climes, especially among caucasians, Australia leading the way, I believe, the sun can kill you. Here in Virginia, where it can get toasty in summer, we don't go out in the sun to tan, we know the sun for what it is, a dangerous attraction. Sure, I mow the lawn, wash the car, but I do not lie in the sun on a chaise longue like a steak under the grill - steaks are dead when you buy them.

If you have to get a tan because it looks "healthy" (what a stupid notion!), grab one of the self tanning products that are safe, and provide even SPF15 protection from the sun. Not only that - if you absolutely cannot live without tanning, shower, lather yourself with self tan, then go out in the sun. Between the lotion and the sun you will tan twice as fast, and thereby halve your solar exposure. Trust me, the combination of self tanning lotion and sunbathing gives a completely natural tan that will make you look like you live in Southern Spain all year round (substitute the Florida Keys if you're this side of the Pond). And if you have to be in the sun, this Lacrosse watch with UV meter might help save you from yourself. And no, sun beds and tanning salons are not safe - they can kill you as easily as the sun can. It takes one cell to flip and go cancerous, and that is it. As Dik sat there in his hospital bed he looked at me and said "You know, Menno, there is only one thing I am sorry about". "What's that, Dik?" I answered, and he said "Everything I didn't do, didn't experience, that will now never happen. There was always next month, next year - and now there isn't".

You can, of course, do everything now, to make sure you don't miss anything before you die. But you can also avoid the stupid stuff, so you have a better chance of being around next year. And yes, guys, frying yourself in the sun, it is stupid stuff. Don't. If Dik had been more careful, he'd likely be around, today, for me to talk to, and while his funeral was fun, I would have preferred it not to have happened so soon.

Thursday April 14, 2005 - A Room With A View



Usually, especially in Manhattan, my hotel room has an exquisite view of the wall, or the vents on the roof, of the building next door, or the sculptures halfway up the Chrysler building, but sometimes I get lucky, and this trip, I have a gorgeous view down Broadway, towards Times Square.

I was right about the Hotel QT, by the way - the only rooms available this week are $300 and up, I'll hazard a guess they've gone to summer prices (which most hotels here do) and that they're largely booked until Christmas or thereabouts. When I look at the launch Mr. Balasz certainly has the methodology down, whether or not his ventures are profitable only time will tell. The boutique hotel isn't dead yet, the others in the area around my former office, 6th Ave. and 45th St., like the Algonquin, seem to continue to be doing well.

Tonight's party is Netherlands related - a few years ago, an enterprising Dutchman in New Jersey began setting up regular get-togethers of Dutch expat professionals in New York City, and that has grown to a bit of an enterprise. Like most of my fellow expatriate countrymen and -women, I don't hang out in any Dutch expatriate community, but it is fun to now and again spend an evening in an interesting melting pot - from Wall Street lawyers and midtown hotel managers (the manager of the French Novotel I am coming to you from is actually Dutch) to Columbia professors, we run the gamut. So as soon as Captain Archer of the good ship Enterprise is finished doing battle with a bunch of green critters whose men are the slaves and whose women have significant chests and pheromones, on UPN, I shall head for the Heineken and bitterballen. I personally think Archer should stick with Sub Commander T'Pol. She wears more clothes than the Orions do, but has totally luscious lips. Subs rock.

Saturday April 16, 2005 - Screens & Things



For the past month or so, every time I was at my local K-Mart, a small (17") Philips LCD TV was staring at me from a shelf at the back of the store. It had my name on it, not least because it had been marked down some $300, as a demonstration model. So last week, I finally melted and bought it.

This wasn't because I needed a new television set - I don't - but looking at it I realized that this was no ordinary LCD TV, it was HDTV ready (it is actually a smaller version of the wall mounted set I found in my room at the Hotel QT, below), fitted with a Dolby decoder (more about that below, too, where I talk about the Panasonic DVD recorders), and, from the look of the connections panel, it had a PC interface.

That means two things. It is usable as a PC monitor, and if that is the case it also has better than normal TV resolution, even in HDTV. And so I took it home, which is sort of the best way of testing, and indeed, it is magically versatile. I am using it as a monitor on one of my laptops, where it runs at its highest resolution, 1280x1024, and can not only switch it to any one of several TV modes, it will accept anything from component video and S-video down to coaxial composite, but it will provide Picture-in-Picture, so you can hook it up to your PC and your cable or satellite feed and keep an eye on CNN while you're working. It is also an FM/Dolby receiver.

Many European and Japanese techno-products have this built-in versatility, trying to be all things to all people. As a concept, that is not too popular in the Unites States, as setup and figuring out how it all works can take hours, if not days. Americans also aren't much into DIY, outside of home improvement, products here sell well if they are plug-and-play, which is why when you get into an American car it is often hard to tell what brand it is, everything is in the same place and works the same, regardless.

But if you need a monitor for your PC, and, like me, spend part of your time doing photography and video (I spent part of my life as a professional photographer and film and theatre producer, and like to keep my hand in), this thing is hard to beat, and available in sizes from 10" to huuuuuge. Compared with an LCD PC monitor, it has richer, deeper colours, although that goes at the expense of display refresh speed, in my case a worthwhile price to pay. Make sure your laptop has enough memory, though, if you plan on running a high res monitor from it, it'll grab extra memory from your machine, which then isn't available to your software any more. For safety's sake, I upgraded my laptop to 1 gigabyte of RAM, which, today, takes only a couple of $100 memory chips - and as an unintended benefit, that makes Windows run a lot faster, too.

Owell. Time to check out of the Novotel, get a nice fashionable Manhattan haircut, and back on the US Airways Shuttle to Arlington, where I have to move my office because of yet another reorganization. Not complaining, I am getting a window view of the monument, down to the Pentagon. Dawn and dusk over D.C. are always stunning, that is what it looks like, around 6am in late winter. Not too shabby, eh?

Sunday April 17, 2005 - A Manhattan Saturday morning







I love New York

Friday April 22, 2005 - Nashville, TN



Attending a conference in Nashville, TN, this week, I took much of a day off to look around the town - the conference took place in the truly massive Gaylord Opryland Resort and Conference Center, a huge facility with some 3,000 hotel rooms and three glass covered atriums, one of which is four-and-a-half acres large; it harbours several three story buildings and an indoor river complete with tour boats, stocked with catfish. It would take me some 12 minutes to walk from our conference rooms to my sleeping quarters.

While the Gaylord Opryland is impressive, Nashville I found less so. There are some older parts here and there that seem human sized, but much of it is a large cubist blob that was put together by an urban planner with a concrete-and-glass addiction. Walking towards the Tennessee State House, rounding a corner you are greeted by the vista to the right - they could have designed an accessible area something like the Mall in Washington, or Pall Mall in London, but instead there is a huge raised concrete square called "Legislative Plaza" with walkways that... well, see for yourself. Whoever conceived of this "view" ought to be taken out back and shot, don't you think?

It isn't just Elvis you can run into in Nashville; doing one of the walking tours outlined on the map, I found the Acme shop where Wiley E. Coyote gets his equipment and armament. Broadway is one of the most preserved streets, full of stores, bars and music clubs. Nashville, of course, is the home of cable channels CMT, Country Music Television, and TNN, The Nashville Network (now Spike), which today mostly broadcasts wrestling games interspersed with older (Jean-Luc Picard) Star Trek episodes, supposedly male entertainment. The town is fairly crowded with very well designed-and-executed Southern Belles, but for some reason that decidedly male entertainment mostly does not make it to Spike...

I had kind of expected some remnants of the Wilder West, with the Opry sitting in the middle of an old town, but no such thing, there ain't nuttin' Ole about the Opry - the Grand Ole Opry (owned by the Gaylord Group) is a modern building on the outskirts of town, fronted by the Opry Mills, a shopping mall (owned by the Gaylord Group), itself fronted by the banks of the Tennessee river, where you can take a dinner-and-entertainment cruise (offered by the Gaylord Group) on a fake paddle steamer (owned by the Gaylord Group). You get 3 hours for drinks, dinner, and an excellent stage show, at some $70 per person. Well, at least I have seen Elvis - actually, I saw two Elvises (owned by the Gaylord Group), on the stage in the entertainment boat, the General Jackson. I did see, in the local press, that the locals don't refer to the "Midwest" or "Heartland" when they mention their area - the local paper calls Tennessee "one of the flyover states". Yup. And they have very good Bluegrass CDs at the airport.

(Umm, lessee. 1,000 diners per sailing. $70 a plate. Two sailings a day. Seven days a week. That's, uh, fifty million dollars a year. Git 'er done......)

Saturday April 23, 2005 - New Amsterdam



We Dutch tend to brag about "starting the USA" - always at odds with the British, who say the same thing. Good thing we're neighbours - we have to get along. I came across an interesting book, the other day (can't remember at which airport) that makes the case that the real beginning of America could be considered the founding of what is now New York City, begun as a trading post managed by the United West India Company, based in Amsterdam, at the Southern tip of Manhattan. Author Russell Shorto dispenses with quite few common incorrect notions - the island of Manhattan wasn't bought from the Manahattans for 60 guilders in trinkets, it was leased from them, and payment was effected in beads and polished shells because those were, at the time, what the Indians and European traders used as common currency. That is why the manager of the Manhattan facility, later to be known as "New Amsterdam", reported back to HQ that he paid the Manahattans 60 guilders for the lease - that was the actual trading value of the "trinkets". I guess Manhattan became sort of the first coop in America - you know, five bucks for the house, $4,500 monthly maintenance, you have to get approved by the Board and you never get to own the walls.

Anyway, for those among you interested in American history, "The Island at the Center of the World" (Russell Shorto, Random House, 2004, ISBN # 1-4000-7867-9) makes fascinating reading, not least because Mr. Shorto took the trouble of delving into the Dutch archives on both sides of the Big Water, helped by Dutch and American researchers able to read 16th and 17th century Dutch (now only spoken by a few politically incorrect South Africans - seriously, I can't understand a word when Afrikaans is spoken at normal conversational speed. Similarly, Francophone Canadians largely speak an archaic form of French). While I disagree with Mr. Shorto that "wilden" translates to "natives" - I think the accepted meaning, at least, is "savages", the Dutch word "wild" means "untamed" or "not civilized", and can today mean "game" as in hunting - the book is very well researched. Mr. Shorto sticks plenty of dry wit in his narrative, lives in the Hudson Valley so knows his back yard, and for those of us of the Dutch persuasion he provides a good view of how our forefathers, from our small European nation, became one of the major colonial powers. Like the British, we have turned that attitude and expertise into a money machine, over the centuries, trading extensively with the former colonies we knew so well. My kinda tiny home country is, after Britain, the second largest investor in the United States, keeping a low profile so the Japanese, who are fourteen or so on the list, get to catch the flak.


Along a similar vein, I recently finished reading "Guns, Germs and Steel", an interesting and scholarly book written by Jared Diamond (Professor of Physiology at UCLA Medical School), in which he demystifies much of the history of humans, from the earliest beginnings (Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond, Random House/Vintage U.K., ISBN # 0-09-930278-0). I like the way he unravels what we are and how we came to be this way, looking in fully unconventional ways for simple explanations, rather than the established convoluted research that has entire populations move halfway across the globe in three weeks using ox drawn carts, or meteorites that singlehandedly demolish entire species just by parking themselves in the Atlantic Ocean. Professor Diamond's theories and rationales are, for the most part, simple, elegant, and what is most important, they make a lot of sense. Like Mr. Shorto, above, Professor Diamond excels at seeing the trees as well as the wood. The book sucks you in and holds you, but it is hell on wheels for speedreaders - the information density is high enough that I, unusually, found myself having to reread entire chapters. That makes me glad I am not one of Professor Diamond's students. Or maybe not - maybe you go places after you're taught by such a brilliant mind when your brain is in the sponge phase.

Both books made it to my bedside - the vast majority I buy end up in a trash bin at an airport somewhere (yes, I know, Sis, I should recycle, recycle, recycle).

Sunday April 24, 2005 - More Virginia Spring





Whenever I wonder why I left suburbia and moved to the country, I take a walk out back..

Saturday May 7, 2005 - The Blair Project



Many, like me, were surprised when George W. Bush was re-elected. The "people" economy - jobs, income, health insurance, savings - wasn't doing that well, and we're in Iraq seemingly providing target practice for malcontents. Tony Blair's re-election, therefore, would prove interesting - I was more or less expecting that the same thing that happened to the Spanish Prime Minister, who lost his job over Iraq, might also happen to Mr. Blair.

Britain isn't necessarily comparable to the United States, much though we like to think it is a vassal state. The Prime Minister gets to call the election, so he can pick an opportune moment, and Britain very much considers itself the stepping stone between Continental Europe (the British used to refer to that as "Europe" when I came to live in England, where I spent almost a decade before coming to these shores) and North America. There is some truth to the joke that "England and the United States are two countries divided by the same language". Admittedly, the USA and the UK share the two party political system - anathema to us Continental Europeans, long since cured of the notion that on can divide the world up in Left and Right, Black and White, Democrat and Republican, Conservative and Labour. You've gotta have shades of grey, we think, even if that means reaching a consensus takes a lot longer.

But today I can't avoid drawing that election parallel. Both Dubya and Tony Blair took their country on a military adventure, spending freely on that without the home economy benefiting much, both are busily trying to privatise government services. Before I am accused of overlooking the finances, I should caveat the spending statement. As a resident of the Washington Metropolitan Area, where much of the economy is driven by the Government and the military, I know that a very large proportion of the money we spend on "Iraq" actually benefits our own economy. I would estimate that more than 80% of all that money stays in the US, and eventually flows back into the economy. Many more military jobs (civilian as well as contract work) have been created, huge amounts of new hardware have been bought, a number of corporations are providing services in Iraq to the United States military - we in WashMet can tell just by the sheer number of military personnel relocated to our area, now renting houses here.

But back to the elections, I can only assume that there are, today, more voters than we like to think that prefer a "get it done" leader over what they think is a wuss. Even if that leader is getting something done that didn't need doing, he is still preferred over a leader without a firm conviction. It is OK, apparently, to make mistakes, for as long as you believe in what you're doing. It does scare me that there are still so many people today who believe Sadam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, I think we would have found some by now. I certainly like the joke that circulated here as the war started, stating that the only WMD we've been able to find is George W. Bush.

Both leaders have important things to fix - by some estimates, here, 40% of the working population has no health insurance, while in Britain, the National Health Service provides each hospital patient with 2000 reportedly inedible calories per day at a cost of 65 pence.. Perhaps this is so you won't stay in the hospital a day longer than necessary? But: those of us who do have health insurance have access to some of the best medical care in the world - the latest newest miracle drugs, the latest newest elective medical procedures without any waiting for treatment, all things that are severely limited in countries with socialized medicine.

Curiouser still is that Blair is Labour, Bush Republican, their Left and our Right espousing the same policies. One thing that is clear is that there is, today, a large silent majority that likes leaders with gumption, and those of us who think you need to think it over before you act are clearly in the minority. I do find in my own career that if you see something that isn't right, and you go and do something about it, that brings about more eventually beneficial change than waiting and planning. So perhaps there is a lesson in this for all of us.

Friday May 13, 2005 - Fishy



The BBC reports that researchers looking into human migratory patterns using DNA sampling have established that mankind did not migrate North from Africa, as had always been thought, but initially moved South, island hopping from Africa via the Indian Ocean to the Indonesian archipelago and further, to New Guinea and Australasia. The Middle East and Eurasia would have been settled later, by migrants moving northwards from the coastal areas. This is apparently related to a switch in diet that happened among early modern humans, from a diet based on meat to a diet based on seafood.

I reported earlier about the research done by Jared Diamond ("New Amsterdam", below) - he makes a case, in his book, that the original settlers in Asia Pacific came from what is now the Chinese mainland. That ties in well with this (much more recent) research. If early humans "followed the fish", so to speak, they'd have colonized coastlines and islands from Africa and Mauritius westward, and eventually reached what is now Indonesia via the Malaysian peninsula, and island hopped from there.

An evolutionary progression from meat eating primates and hominids is logical. Meat contains siginificantly more energy and proteins than vegetation, and once the early humans reached coastal areas from the plains where they evolved, they'd have tried fish and shellfish, much easier to catch than animals, and as rich in nutrition. From there they'd have gotten used to being in and on the water, from there they'd have constructed rafts and later boats to go look at islands they could see from the beach, and they'd have gone West and North, since due South is a dead end, in Africa.

This poses some interesting questions about human evolution. Did the coastal dwellers develop differently as a consequence of not having to hunt for food? Even as far North as Japan, the primary food source is fish and shellfish protein, not only easier to come by, but fish don't need maintenance, or feeding, and if you eat fish shortly after it has been caught there is no spoilage, your food is guaranteed fresh (and mostly meal size). Fish also probably do not harbour microbes and bacteria harmful to humans, which mammals and poultry, evolutionary much closer to humans, do. Perhaps the meat eaters, those who migrated inland, away from the sea, became the more inventive and agressive human "breed". Professor Diamond has some interesting observations about the reasons why these coastal dwellers and seafarers did not develop technologies and urbanization as they had no need for them.

While traveling around Indonesia, last year, I hired a fishing boat to look at investment property on the island of Sulawesi from seaward. That type of outrigger longboat has basically not changed for thousands of years - nor have any of the other technologies, the fishing village you see in the picture would have looked the same 500 years ago, minus the tyre I am standing next to. Available construction materials, bamboo, palm tree and coconut shells, plant fiber rope, fish and shellfish you can essentially scoop from the sea. You can see how narrow the boat is from how my driver sits in it - while this is wood construction, the size is indicative that it evolved from a hollowed out palm tree. That can be done without tools, using just fire. That takes time, but these folks weren't in a great hurry to go anywhere. And they did not need big boats, fish does not keep in the tropics, so you would only bring back one or two days worth of food.

As we sailed out into the Sea of Sulawesi, suddenly, a man stood up from the water, hundreds of yards offshore. My boatman and he greeted each other amicably, as if they ran into each other out on the reefs every morning. And perhaps they do - it was explained to me this gentleman was a local village inhabitant getting his family's dinner. A far cry from raising poultry or cattle, or hunting wild boar, indeed. Fishing, to me, is a big iron boat setting off from the port of Scheveningen, near where I grew up and went to school, in the Netherlands. Going way out into the North Sea and bringing back tons of herring. But it is not, of course, that's the type of fishing you only do when you have an urbanized population to feed. If you just populate coastlines, your communities are small, food is on one side and construction materials on the other. Professor Diamond makes a case that in that area, technologies developed by certain populations were lost by segments of those populations that moved on. I understand a little more now what he means - when you look at a simple fishing village like the one I visited, Basa'an in Northern Sulawesi, technologies that aren't used will not be remembered two generations hence, especially if there is only rudimentary writing and no publishing.

Tuesday May 17, 2005 - More Fishy



As if they read my mind, researchers at Johns Hopkins have published clear evidence that viruses routinely jump species in mammals (see "Fishy", below) - in this case, retroviruses (the family that includes HIV) jumping from primates to humans, the recipients being people who handle and eat "bushmeat", meat of chimpanzees and other monkey species routinely hunted in the African bush.

The emphasis is on "routinely" - multiple viruses were found, and they were spread widely, indicating that species jumping isn't an unusual occurrence at all. From there, I think it is safe to assume that less closely related mammals may be subject to similar events - obviously, primates and humans are most closely related, so the occurrence would be higher. And in less closely related species (say, reptiles and fish) there would be appreciably less risk.

Sunday May 15, 2005 - Guantanamo Bay



The Newsweek controversy surrounding a Qu'ran, the Islamic Holy Book, having been used to degrade prisoners by interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, appears to have been a red herring, according to today's news reports. It is a shame it caused so much violence, it is even a shame it made it into print - the opening in a regulation U.S. Army toilet isn't big enough to flush even a small Qu'ran through. I find it hard to believe Newsweek fell for the story.

Saturday June 4, 2005 - Nothing To Report



When I don't provide an update for a while (in this case, not for several weeks) that does not mean, of course, that nothing goes on in my life. There is plenty of stuff. I received an email from a former coworker in Indonesia telling me that the new headstone for my Grandmother's grave there has been put on - her grave had been robbed in recent years (Grandma passed away in 1927) and as my cousin was relocated back to The Netherlands from Singapore and I hadn't been to Indonesia for years there wasn't anybody to take care of that. When I visited the grave, last year in March, I found that grandmother is still in the grave (it is decidedly unnerving to look into a buryal vault and suddenly stand eye to eye with a relative you had never known), decided to leave her where she had been home (she was born in The Netherlands), and my wonderful friends in Jakarta and Surabaia took care of copying the original plaque and having it mounted. I shall probably go and pay homage later this year - taking care of one's ancestors is an extremely important thing in Asia, definitely impoves your Karma, and because of all of the efforts made by so many wonderful people on behalf of myself and my family, it is only fitting that I should visit. Nathi, Susi, I don't know how to thank you, but rest assured that I and my family, both here in the USA and in The Netherlands, are deeply in your debt. And we are pleased as well that the Surabaya city government has maintained this cemetery, Kembang Kuning, and that it has not been turned into a parking lot, which happened with many cemeteries from the colonial era, and not just in Indonesia, either.

I often don't post these things because I don't know how much my readers are interested in what to them may be dumb personal stuff. One doesn't get a lot of feedback, from one's readers, something I remember is an issue for many journalists - when I was still actively publishing in the Press we were forever trying to find out how our readers liked the magazine, or the paper, or the TV program, and the individual topics and articles. You could generally tell by sales numbers, of course, and today by the page hit ratio, but that still isn't a lot of nuance.

And as you know I don't talk about my work much, perhaps regale you with some travel tales but that is generally it. So when I am not posting updates you can paradoxically conclude that is because a lot is happening but I can't talk about it. This isn't so much because I am afraid I will get fired if I talk out of school, but there isn't any reason for me to talk out of school, and I am not a disgruntled employee. Even if I were, there are all sorts of ways to take care of that, without plastering your personal problems all over the Internet. That to me is more related to vindictiveness on the person's part, than to anything else. And I guess I have a better appreciation than most for what in my life is owned by my employers. I began my phone company career at a research lab as a developer, and so signed the contents of my brain pan away right up front, and was trained about what Intellectual Property is and does, both in terms of which bits are mine, and which theirs. And as I hold several Patents and have given a fair number of talks, over the years, I also know what kind of permissions to get, and who from, in order to be able to place company information in the public domain. You really do not "own" any information related to your employer and your employment, beyond what is legally known as "a reasonable expectation of privacy".

What bloggers also generally do not understand is that when they talk about their work they're actually giving information away to competitors. That information may not mean a lot to the blogger, but competitors can actually learn a lot about what goes on when you post product information, talk about company operations, staffing, even location information can have value. So this is all about not biting the hand that feeds you, and I also firmly believe that if you have a gripe, the Internet is a "cheap shot" - not trying to sort it out with those you have a gripe with is basically poor performance. I mean, look at it this way: it is a heck of a lot easier finding a new job if you haven't been fired... right?

Saturday June 25, 2005 - Clearing up, and moving on

 

The only reason I can live this far (70 miles) from my office is that there is a 3 person-per-car HOV that runs from just North of the Quantico Marine Corps base to the Pentagon, right by my office. That, and the fact that my employer and Arlington County actively support telecommuting. As my responsibilities are nationwide and not tied to a regionalized workgroup (local services are always provided by a local subsidiary) I really don't have to be physically in the corporate office every day.



Something that has become pretty annoying is the number of drive-alone people that jump on the HOV partway up (or down) and try to make it through without getting ticketed. That was often possible because there are only so many cops on a given stretch of road, and they can't see everybody. But the Virginia State Police has, after many years of complaints, figured out they don't need to drive patrols on the HOV. Accidents are immediately reported by dozens of people on cellphones, many of us report dangerous and drunk drivers, and so the cops are now simply positioning half a dozen or more officers at either an entrance ramp or at the HOV exit, and that allows them to position one "spotter", while the others write the tickets. The fines for illegal HOV use have been increased as well - a repeat offender can now pay as much as $1,000, and the cops are there every single day. Good show - we take pains putting together carpools or pick up slugs (commuters who go to collection points where single occupants pick them up so they can use the HOV), and scofflaws should pay for the privilege. Word is that "pay" will become the norm - Virginia is considering converting the HOVs to paylanes, something already in operation in California, where you have to pay to get on the fast lane. While that is expensive, we'll be able to mitigate the cost by sharing with the riders, I hope.

During my last visit to Amsterdam I asked my sister why she still has all of her books. I used to do that too, build a library, that pretty much was our generation, you'd keep the books you amassed over the years, and would occasionally reread them. But I work from the computer all day now (and perhaps have been tainted by being an early Internet adopter - I got my first Internet account in 1979, my first laptop with modem in 1984, and opened my website in 1996) and while I do read the occasional book, that's usually for a plane ride or other travel. So I have in earnest cleared up hundreds of pounds of crap, boxes and boxes full of books and ancient computer parts, none of which have a function in my life any more. Building your own PC is an obsolete art, as far as I am concerned, a new laptop costs less than $600, and the idea (just as with phones) that your computer would be tethered to a wall is slowly anathema. The next generation is PC-less anyway, you can no longer turn up in college with a desktop, as colleges require you to have a computer you can take into class with you - some colleges now make the laptop available as part of the curriculum.

So now you have your laptop, it hooks up to some high speed data network somewhere, and if there is none, you dial in to your Internet Provider, your ISP. Sometimes, you'll be able to use an available WiFi or similar network - some, at hotels and in public parks, are free, others you have to subscribe to - usually to one or the other main cellular wireless telephone providers, like Verizon or AT&T. But those providers also have interface cards for your laptop that let you connect to their wireless data network, at speeds varying from 56kb to close to a Gigabit. Verizon (my employer, for completeness' sake) is rolling out a wireless broadband network in major conurbations that'll give you speeds between 400 and 700 kilobits per second, with burst speeds much higher than that. If you're a city dweller, you may want to ask yourself why you're sitting at a PC connected to DSL, when you can have a laptop with a slightly slower but mobile connection, you can read your email while you're having breakfast on the corner.

One thing Verizon does not have is overseas service. Our service is based on the American CDMA standard, which is only ubiquitous in North America and the Caribbean. Practically everywhere else, the European GSM standard is the norm, a standard that has been adopted by Cingular, Nextel and T-Mobile in this country. In fact, if you have a tri-band or quad-band GSM phone, there are only two countries in the world where you cannot roam: Japan and South Korea. Japan has its own unique systems, not compatible with anyone else, and South Korea adopted the U.S. system. Verizon does have a couple of hybrid phones that will let you roam in GSM territory, or you can rent a GSM phone for travel abroad, we even have one for Japan.

So since I am a real globetrotter, my personal cellular service I get from T-Mobile, which means that I can turn off the phone when my plane leaves Dulles or JFK, and when I land in London, Amsterdam or Singapore, I can turn it back on and I have local service. But up until recently, there wasn't a cellular data card that I could use in my laptop, internationally. The GSM world has had data phones for a decade, I still have my Ericsson T-28 that has an infra-red modem that allows your laptop to dial into the GSM datanetwork, but that is slow, and my newer Nokia N-Gage NQ is able to do that at somewhat higher speeds, connecting to the laptop via Bluetooth (Nokia does not have a multiband version, BTW, so it'll work here, or there, but not both). The Blackberry too would have that capability, but to the best of my knowledge all carriers only sell a Blackberry that has the data modem function disabled - reason for me to retire mine.

Enter what T-Mobile has dubbed its "Aircard" (I think that name is trademarked by someone else, leute!) - the Sony Ericsson GC79 datacard. Compatible with the GSM data standard, GPRS, it is a WiFi (802.11b, for the cognoscenti) card at the same time, so you can now use Hotspots where they are available, your office 802.11xx network, as well as GPRS where that can be found. I am in hog heaven, as we say here below the Mason-Dixon line. At home my laptop uses my home 802.11g network, and when I am driving to work in the morning I actually get a whole hour of email in on the T-Mobile GPRS network strung along I-95 (I usually commute in a carpool, driven by a co-worker) - in the office, I can hop onto our secure 802.11b network, and when having lunch at the Hyatt or coffee at Starbucks I can use a T-Mobile "hotspot". Necessary? Reading email over lunch certainly not, but on the other hand some 20% of restaurants in Arlington, VA, now offer free WiFi, so why not keep an eye on urgent stuff while eating? And making productive use of my commuting time is brilliant, methinks, it is as yet still slow, but works - the whole way from Fredericksburg to Arlington, a clever algorithm masking network glitches so your laptop doesn't go offline. Major kewl, people, and what is most important - it is affordable and it is here now, it isn't something only usable by the early adopter. And it will natively work in London, Frankfurt and Beijing as well as Nashville, TN....

Monday July 4, 2005 - The Law, Always The Law

 

The disappearance (and probably murder) of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway on the Netherlands Antilles island of Aruba continues to make the headlines. There is frustration with the slow pace of the investigation, and with the release of suspects from jail.

I understand, from my vantage point of being a U.S. resident and a citizen of The Netherlands, that frustration well. The Dutch legal system is very different from Anglo-Saxon and American law. In fact, most of Europe's legal systems are much more circumspect than what we are used to here. For one, suspects cannot legally be held in custody without evidence. Such a thing as suspicion isn't a valid reason to hold (or charge) anyone, under Dutch law, unless that suspicion has some significant hard evidence to go with it. And clearly, that hard evidence is nowhere to be found. I have to tell you that, however frustrating this may be for Natalee's parents and family, I personally don't have a problem with our legal system. We do not, as a rule, charge or convict anyone on circumstantial evidence, and we like that just fine. Between that and European privacy restrictions Dutch prosecutors certainly have fewer tools to work with than their American counterparts, but we like that too. The principle has served us well for much longer than the United States has been in existence.

The case will be solved, but the way the Dutch do things it may take a lot longer than American commentators are used to seeing. We are kinda slow, methodical, and very very thorough, but we do get to the bottom of things, even if it takes a while.

Both Alabama Governor Bob Riley and Alabama Senator Richard Shelby have gotten involved in requesting the Aruban government "to do more". Like what, exactly? Currently, the Aruban police force, a contingent of Dutch Marines stationed in the Caribbean (and while that hasn't been published, Marines have naval vessels with them, and significant intelligence resources - the Marines are permanently stationed in the Caribbean for drug interdiction), and investigators and judicial officials from both Aruba and Curacao are fully engaged in trying to solve the case. The Dutch government has even sent 3 Netherlands Air Force F-16 reconnaisance jets with 40 support personnel all the way across from Europe to help look for Natalee's body. I don't know that more can be done without someone coming clean and telling investigators what happened.

That little information is made available is due to Dutch privacy laws, the kinds of press conferences that American cops and prosecutors give about suspects and investigations are against the law there.

There is something the Governor and the Senator and the FBI and Natalee's folks can do, though. They can find out how come that an American teen traveling in a group with chaperones gets to take off on her own with three men she doesn't know. Without telling anyone. Without a cellphone - yes, American cellphones work on Aruba. And they can try and find out from the girls Natalee was with what exactly she thought she was up to. Because girls talk, don't they, and there isn't any way you can make me believe one of her group wasn't aware of what was going on.

And while you're at it, where were these chaperones? Weren't there a couple sitting outside the club, or in the lobby, to make sure nothing funny went on with "their kids"? And if, as reported, these 17 and 18 year olds were drinking alcohol in Aruba, where I think the legal drinking age is 16, how come these chaperones aren't being prosecuted? Because it is illegal for an American adult to allow an American kid under 21 to drink alcohol, it doesn't matter where they are. If the chaperones were there, they have a lot of explaining to do. And if they were not there, they have even more explaining to do.

Last but not least, I think the Governor and the Senator and these noisy talk show folks need to take a look at the Alabama missing children database.

I wouldn't worry about Aruba too much, folks. You need the FBI allright - but I think you should probably use the Bureau closer to home than Aruba.

Friday July 8, 2005 - An Euch die Macht

 

It hit me in the stomach, tonight, seeing the people posting flyers, pounding the pavement, on the BBC News, looking for the missing. I walked past endless walls of flyers for - I guess it was weeks, but it feels like months, after 9/11, in New York City. You couldn't get away from them, they were everywhere, and I wanted to scream that these people were all dead, stop looking for them, for heaven's sake. There is hope, and then there is desperation. Then it happened to me, when I turned on the television and I watched the tsunami swallow Ko Phi Phi - where my ex-wife was vacationing. I knew this because I had spent quite a bit of time trying to talk her out of it, helping her book an impromptu vacation. I decided, remembering 9/11, not to go and look for her, because there was a large Dutch recovery team already on the way, and if she wasn't dead she would turn up.

But you cannot take people's hope away. I do not quite understand why some people have this hope - Natalee Holloway has to be dead, if she'd left the island somebody would have talked by now. It all seems so simple and logical to me - no grey areas.

The Londoner is thankfully more used to this sort of thing than your average American. London had some 30(!) years of IRA attacks - a Wimpy burger joint would be bombed one day, the bomb disposal officer blowing his own head off trying to defuse the device, a British Airways office a few days later - in the decade I lived there I learned to scan my surroundings, evacuate a tube train when an abandoned package was noticed, I stood over abandoned luggage at Terminal 4, giving handsigns to a desk clerk to call the Bomb Squad, she and her colleagues and I white as sheets. A friend of mine, a Colonel in the British Army, drove off in his Volvo, his wife waving, to have his legs blown off by an explosive taped underneath the driver seat. I learned to fly British Airways the day after an attack, because I and the one other intrepid soul would have the plane, four cute flight attendants, and rivers of booze and all the food in First Class, all to ourselves.

The good and bad thing here in the US is that most people lack that experience, good because there has been little terrorism, bad because when a terrorist strikes you have only half a second to do the right thing, and if you don't you're hamburger. And nobody here would know what to do if they saw an abandoned bag - wait until the train stops at the next station (never pull the cord in a tunnel - you don't want the train in the confined space of a tunnel when the explosive goes off, more people will die from the blast, and the tunnel may cave in), then pull the alarm, which immobilizes the train, then evacuate the train and the platform. You do that, right there, there is no time to wait for the cops to arrive. If you tried this in D.C. or New York, tomorrow, you would be arrested. And yet that is the only way. All over television you could today see the lack of competence - after 9/11, the Guardsmen and -women manning the airport checkpoints were carrying their M-16 rifles across their backs, where anyone could just take them from them, as they were only watching what came into the terminal, not what came out. And today, D.C. cops with submachine guns patrol the Metro. Great - if one of them encountered a suicide bomber, the cop, the bomber and the passengers would go up in a cloud of smoke, just like London, yesterday.

Those cops need to be outside, people - you have to prevent a terrorist from entering public transportation - even an uneducated Israeli security guard knows that. Inside public transportation you only have undercover cops, nothing in uniform, except for a few beat cops. Just like we do in airplanes.

That the carnage in London was nothing like Madrid is a feather in the cap of public security officials in London, and of the Londoner - yesterday was a shining example of how population and authority can together contain and control a potential disaster. There was quiet resolve in the coppers and emergency workers as they went about their business - everybody knew what to do, where to go, little confusion, no hesitation. The terrorists would have if they could have, but they needed to make their statement and could only do it this way. And yes, they'll do it on an island they can't get off, and yes, they'll do it in a country at heightened state of security because of the G8 conference, and yes, they'll do London because they want us to understand they can do this a few hundred miles from where the world's leaders are assembled. It does not matter, they will do it just to show us there is nothing we can do to stop them.

Back in Muslim Indonesia, after 9/11, only the predominantly Christian islands in the archipelago flew flags at half staff. At least that is what I am told by the folks there. By my friends, Muslim and Christian alike. This was before Afghanistan and Iraq. Before there was any Al Qaeda rhetoric, polarization, Guantanamo Bay.

What is clear is that only Muslims can stop their fellow Muslims. The terrorists are people who live in Muslim communities, who attend the same mosques, butcher shops, people who are hidden in plain sight. For the most part Muslims that aren't even Arab. And it is only our Muslim brethren, fellow citizens, my Muslim colleagues, who can root them out and hand them over to the authorities. And they're not doing it, it is not happening. They are arriving at their targets every day, renting rooms, eating in the local cafe, buying a second hand car from a fellow Muslim, patiently preparing for the day that they, too, will kill some infidels. So what I would like is for our leaders to stop spouting useless rhetoric, and then come up with a plan to bring these different cultures together in such a way that they have common ground, common ethics, common goals, respect and understanding. So that Muslims begin to feel the need to police their communities.

Because here in Northern Virginia, where I can see George's house and the Pentagon from my office window, we only know one thing for sure, as we did in New York, after that first attack on the World Trade Center. They'll be back. It is just a matter of when. And nobody can stop them, however much democracy we donate to the remaining Iraqis. That is what an anarchist wrote on an Amro Bank wall in Amsterdam, I saw it when I walked past the morning after the riots: "An Euch die Macht, an Uns die Nacht" - You have the power, we have the night. You cannot see shadows in the dark.

Friday July 29, 2005 - Hotter than hot

 

One problematical thing with buying a house is that the legally required house inspection doesn't provide a complete picture of what is wrong. My realtor noted some things that she had the previous owners repair, and I found the upstairs heatpump non-functional, and the folks from whom I bought the house had that replaced. Only later did I find out that one of the two heat functions of the unit didn't work, and when I called the vendor in they flatly refused to correct their installation mistake. The repairman said that the unit was out of warranty - while I accept that to be the case, I think an installer has to rectify their errors regardless of warranty validity. Warranties deal with defects and malfunctioning, and errors made by installers should be rectified at all times. So I really cannot recommend Bakers Appliance Heating & Air Conditioning of Fredericksburg, VA, their installer misidentified the problem I was having - "umm, probably the thermostat" - made no effort to talk to his office to see if they were willing to correct the problem their original install caused, and was generally not the user friendly sort. Particularly egregious I find that they charged the buyer of the replacement unit, the elderly lady who I bought the house from, full whack for the replacement unit, without ever properly testing if they had wired it in correctly. This typically is what happens when a corporate office doesn't monitor what their installers, often subcontractors, do - Sears has a much better way of doing this, see below. Bakers also gives you no breakdown of their quote - in Sears' case, I was quoted for each individual part they needed for the compressor replacement, labour was quoted separatedly, and I was even told what the markup was on the compressor.

So I paid this contractor the inspection fee and won't use them again, especially since a friend locally had an equally traumatic experience with them (and so Bakers lost two customers to Sears). I was pleasantly surprised to find Sears competitive, their technician skilled and thorough, and what was really impressive is that he was able to provide me with a full quotation, appointment and order confirmation right in my driveway. The Sears repair trucks and vans have a direct satellite connection with their data center, and the technician can sit in his cab with a WiFi equipped customized laptop and take care of all the paperwork right there, online. It was kinda cool when I, sitting in my home office, saw a WiFi network other than my own pop up in the selection window - this was weird, if you consider I live on five acres, way more than normal WiFi range. Then I realized there was a fully functional WiFi network installed in the Sears van sitting on my lawn. And, kudos to them, it was properly secured, no way for a hacker to get in and get on their nationwide satellite network. Not only that, the technician ordered the necessary parts on Monday and by Wednesday afternoon I had a new compressor installed and the system working - just in time for the heatwave that hit us last week, as you can see here the temperature hit almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit, even for a hot and humid Virginia summer somewhat of a record.

Interestingly, I noticed that during the month of June, with only the upstairs heatpump functioning, I used some 40% more electricity than during July, when the thermometer almost hit 100, with both heatpumps going (the median high temperature in July was 7% above the June median high). More capacity, then, does help to save money (each heatpump is capable of heating or cooling the entire house) and in fact this averaged 43% lower energy consumption translates directly into less pollution (there is, of course, always the calculation I haven't made here - how much pollution is caused by the manufacture and delivery of a heat pump). If you are considering heatpumps in the continental United States, make sure you have a secondary source of heat in winter. The size of this is dependent on your latitude - where I am, a 40,000 BTU woodstove keeps the house toasty when the temperature drops below 28 degrees Fahrenheit, when heat pumps no longer function. That's affordable since I own 4.5 acres of trees, Mother Nature essentially provides my fossil fuel (and my excercise). Before you think I am ecologically challenged, no, my cutting trees does not reduce nature's production of oxygen - soil nutrition and sunlight freed up when a tree is cut benefits the surrounding trees and vegetation, which grow faster once you cut a tree it had to compete for energy with. And tree stumps that aren't diseased actually immediately start sprouting after you cut, so you've not even killed the tree. It is wonderful how much you learn when you actually get to manage woods, instead of just talking about it...

Saturday August 6, 2005 - The District, or Home away from Home

 

I grew up in The Hague, the seat of government for The Netherlands for many centuries, not quite a mile from Huis ten Bosch, the mansion that would eventually become the official residence of the Royal Family, after Queen Juliana abdicated. When I first visited Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, visiting with my old school friend Kieke, who I had discovered became a diplomat based there, Washington gave me the same feeling The Hague had always done - a town of itinerants, public servants doing their tour of duty, then to leave again, governments and political appointees moving in and out as their election fortunes changed. And like The Hague, Washington too is ringed by military establishments, although the American ones are a lot larger than their Dutch counterparts. The Pentagon is large enough to have its own Motor Vehicles department, and shops, restaurants and professional services of almost any kind - including my dentist, going there is a pain (pun not intentional) since September 11, as it is no longer possible to park near the Pentagon, and I now have to be escorted to go have my teeth cleaned.

Washington itself isn't all that big, but its surrounding area, comprised of Northern Virginia - "Norva" for short - and Southern Maryland forms an integral part of what we refer to as "WashMet" - the Washington Metropolitan Area. If you take Washington to run all the way up to Baltimore, and West out to Dulles Airport, WashMet has some six million inhabitants, yet a town or city it is not, it is, much like London, an aggregation of villages and towns, most without a real core, character, just a bunch of residences with shops that grew out of hand. Where in New York the villages have town centers, pedestrian areas with shops and restaurants, in Virginia there is little of that, criss-crossed with highways Wal-Mart and Sears have long become the village green.

What I liked about Arlington when Verizon first sent me down to work on the startup of our Long Distance company, not accidentally right across the Potomac river from the Federal Communications Commission, was that it was (to me) a Southern town, a little more laid back than New York, better service, reasonable prices, and still very much a human environment despite the huge impact of the Federal Government, which has most of its offices in Northern Virginia and the Maryland suburbs, not in Washington itself. From the hills along the Potomac River, the Confederate general staff could look down on what would become Washington, and even today the National Rifle Association, with its overwhelmingly Republican membership one of the most powerful political organizations in the United States, has its headquarters not far from "D.C.", or "The District", as we call it. This is probably why it is legal in the Commonwealth of Virginia to carry a loaded handgun when one is, with one's guns, on its way to a firing range, like the members-only range underneath the NRA headquarters. So is this the South, or not? It is an ongoing discussion, but let me just point out to you that until I came to Arlington I had never, in my entire life, had an office across from the County Jail, nor had I ever, anywhere, walking back to my office from lunch encountered a chain gang on its way to street cleaning duty....

Sunday August 7, 2005 - Another one bites the dust

 


© ABC News

 

Thursday August 11, 2005 - Let us not be weak

 

President Bush said it very clearly, today, on national television: withdrawing the troops from Iraq prematurely would be interpreted by the insurgents as a sign of weakness. He had earlier mentioned that setting a timetable for withdrawal would play into the hands of those insurgents, who would then have the ability to plan for when they would be able to assault Iraq in an unfettered manner.

So what these insurgents do today, with their incessant attacks and bombings, is constrained by the American presence? How exactly? Hundreds of dead and injured every week is somehow not as bad as it could be? And can I ask, Mr. President, what exactly then constitutes American strength? Leaving our men and women in Iraq for a longer term, so more can be killed? Exactly how is that strength? Exactly how do the killing fields of Iraq bring stability to the Middle East? All I see every day is more coffins, and our daily dose of explosions. And suddenly submachine guns all over our public transportation systems. Wow. Man, do I feel safe.

 

Friday August 12, 2005 - But let us be rich

 

When I decided to not move back up to New York, three years ago, I contemplated buying a house in Arlington, VA. My cousin was moving up to Maryland at the time, and we talked about my buying his home, in the same area as mine, and more or less the same size and construction. $400K, if I recall, we settled on. My neighbour's house, to the left in the picture, was sold at the same time, when after his wife's passing he went to live with his son in Florida, needing more care (at 94) than was possible to get him at home. Originally Swiss, he had served in the US Army during the war, and became head chef at the Willard in Washington, D.C. That made around the same, $410K, I think.

My satellite dish brings me local Washington TV programming (which actually originates in Arlington), where the news, today, had it that the median house price in Arlington is now $560K. Median - that was around $350K three years ago. While down here in Spotsylvania, 60 miles South, the papers now think we're the "remote suburbs", houses in my neighbourhood that were doing $300K three years ago now fetch well over half a million, and new homes being built in the area begin at $700,000. One wonders when (or even if?) the bubble will burst... I guess I moved the remnants of my dotcom-eaten 401K into real estate in time..

 

Saturday August 20, 2005 - Were the kids watching?

I understand Madonna fell off her horse this week, at the English mansion she calls home. She broke some bones, I think, but the horse is in a stable condition.

 

Saturday August 27, 2005 - The cops can't win

Last week, the Virginia State Police attempted a new tactic in the ongoing war against the HOV scofflaws (see "Clearing up, and moving on", below) and put cones down on a stretch of northbound I-295, lining the HOV on both sides with officers, patrol cars and motorcycle "chasers", and began checking every single car that was headed for the Springfield Interchange, at a point where nobody could escape. That resulted, at 6:30am, in a 40 minute traffic jam that didn't make the Troopers very popular, and they abandoned the project around 7am, when the State Police phones were jammed with complaints. Even so, I hope they will do this again - there are significant numbers of single riders that try to use the HOV every day, between them and the single occupant hybrid drivers, who unfortunately are allowed on the HOV at all times, the express lanes get pretty non-express. I am hoping they'll ban the single occupant hybrids too, maybe they can find a compromise and allow them on with two instead of three occupants, something has to be done. Of course, I am one of the causes - we're moving away from the city in quite large numbers.

Sunday August 28, 2005 - A Four Letter Town

Even in a family friendly forum, one should be able to geographically refer to Fucking, a hamlet with around 100 inhabitants in the Upper Austria area. With a spelling difference, the place has been around since circa 1070, and no, the verb has nothing to do with the locale. So now the Austrians have two things to remember them by - the other being Red Bull, the power drink, from a small village near Salzburg, Fuschl am See, made famous in The Sound of Music, I am reminded of Fuschl as it isn't far from Fucking. I can attest it is incongruously small to have spawned a drinks empire - my Dad retired there and ended up doing the Mayor's accounts as there was no accountant in the village and he was an economist. The Mayor was an Alpine farmer and ran a bed-and-breakfast, as well. There was one church, one gas station, one tobacconist's, one hotel and one castle. After The Sound of Music was filmed there, the castle became the second hotel in town, Schloß Fuschl, off limits to mere mortals on a normal income, of course. Nobody ever made a movie in Fucking, although British tourists are famous for their nightly raids on the town signs, nor is there a Fucking See. The signs are now mounted on sturday concrete pillars, and secured with really large, umm, screws. This indicates that the inhabitants of Fucking aren't really that wel traveled, because I can tell you from living in the UK for a decade there aren't any concrete structures that can withstand a group of drunk British yobs determined to take a souvenir or two. On the contrary, make it hard for them to take the f*****g road signs and they might take the entire f*****g village.

 

Thursday September 1, 2005 - Lost for words

I am rarely lost for words, not used to even losing arguments. I had a long and erudite commentary ready for you, explaining what is happening in America, why it is happening, how we were complacent and didn't really think the big one would hit this Summer.. much like California, where the big earthquake never quite hits, or so we hope.

 

This time the big one did hit, and we weren't ready, and after thousands of people have died, talking government heads are telling us on national television that relief is on the way. We are even treated to live pictures of rescues - rescues of those who did not die. Listening to Senator Trent Lott on CNN, I sincerely hope they'll replay this interview once the good people of Missisippi have power to watch television again. I did not get the impression he was in his home state. And then the Rev. Al Sharpton is interviewed, won't answer any questions about the evacuation of New Orleans, but rambles on, tring to score political points - all well and good, Senator, but I am appalled you would be doing this on the backs of thousands of dead people. This is not the time.

 

And we are all delighted, of course, very much delighted, that President Bush managed to come down from Washington to see the carnage for himself - after flying up to Washington from his ranch in Crawford, TX, next door to New Orleans.

 

To those overseas who aren't particularly fond of the American government - many of us aren't either, especially today. But there are people who need help, PEOPLE, there are a million or so homeless people in America, people who have lost everything they had, including their families, in many cases. People who will be in refugee camps for a long time - I guess the American Dream is the American Nightmare, this week. And while there is much talk about the more than 100,000 New Orleans residents who have been evacuated, nobody is talking about the more than half a million folks who left before Katrina hit and now have no home to come back to.

 

So please help, give to the Red Cross, ours, or your national or regional Red Cross wil get your aid to the people who need it.

 

Friday September 2, 2005 - Help

A spokesman for the Dutch Deltaworks, the hydraulic sea barrier that protects The Netherlands from disasters such as the one that has befallen the Gulf coast, has expressed surprise that a disaster of this magnitude is possible, in a modern Western country. While I sympathize with his comments (the Deltaworks was built after the 1953 storm, wich inundated large parts of the Netherlands, and drowned 1,835 people), the gentleman clearly has never experienced a hurricane, nor does he have a good idea of the length of the American coastline. The region affected by Katrina is the size of the United Kingdom, about four to five times the size of the Netherlands. It is not possible to build a barrier across the Gulf of Mexico - you can drop the Netherlands into the Gulf and have plenty of room left over, the scale is not quite the same.

 

What CNN did miss is that the Dutch government ordered the M-class frigate H. Ms. Van Amstel to the Gulf of Mexico, laden with a desalinization plant, medical rescue helicopters, inflatable boats, emergency rations, disaster relief supplies and a complement of Royal Marines. The ship as well as the Marines are normally stationed in the Caribbean, where together with the U.S. Coast Guard and the British and French navies it runs drug interdiction - only last week the Van Amstel stopped a South American freighter which, after boarding by U.S. Marines, turned out to be carrying 4,000 lbs of cocaine. The ship will steam up to the Gulf coast, but remain outside U.S. territorial waters unless its assistance is requested.

 

I will do tomorrow what Secretary Condoleezza Rice will be doing - heading for Mobile, Alabama, to see my relatives. Or rather, find them. We have not heard from my aunt and cousin since Katrina hit.

 

Saturday September 3, 2005 - More help

For those of you who have Verizon Wireless phones, you can text up to five $5 aid contributions to the American Red Cross - instructions are here. Easy, especially if you don't have that much money to give but do want to help - every little bit helps. There is a link from there to the Red Cross pages. All Verizon retirees (those that worked for Verizon as well as its predecessors, New York Telephone, New England Telephone, NYNEX, New Jersey Bell, Bell Atlantic, GTE, Chesapeake and Potomac, Contel, etc) can give the same way we employees do - each dollar we donate through the Verizon Foundation is tripled by the company, turning every dollar into three. Go here for the English Katrina page, y aqui por Español. It isn't that I am trying to advertise how "good" we are, there are plenty of retirees who don't know this, perhaps you're one or you know somebody who is. There is enough help for the immediate support of the victims, but the Red Cross will be looking after the long term needs of the displaced - remember, there are probably more than a million people homeless, many of which will not have a home to go back to at all, when all this is over. New Orleans alone has lost 350,000 housing units, and most of those aren't repairable.

 

There is, understandably, a lot of criticism about the way the authorities (all of them) have handled this disaster, but I think we should realize that there are some things that are very hard to plan for. Katrina was one of those - even the United States simply does not have the logistical infrastructure to move a million people out of the path of a storm, because those storms happen three or four times a year, and there is no way of knowing where, or even if, they will hit. I mean, this Astrodome thing is nice, but those refugees cannot live there, you will agree - where do you find housing for those 12,000 people, let alone for the other 90,000 that have been evacuated? The first refugees, from a New Orleans retirement home, have been bused into Washington, D.C., and more are on the way.

 

Sunday September 4, 2005 - Dikes and Disasters

The Federal Government is, of course, taking a lot of heat over this disaster. Some of it is not reasonable - you cannot adequately prepare for a disaster of this magnitude. Disaster recovery is always a tradeoff between what you ought to do, and what is affordable. Unfortunately, the cost of anything that does not create a monetary profit is assessed against the cost of potential losses, a simple equation that dictates the value of what you might lose, and the cost of recovering it. Human life is part of that equation, like it or not, it has a monetary value. If it did not, sick people's insurances would not run out.

 

But to create an extra layer of bureaucracy, Homeland Security, on top of all the other layers, has to be the stupidity of the century. Agencies that were autonomous, know how to do their specialized work, and were nimble on their feet, are now no longer independent, decapitated, if you will. Any first year MBA student knows that you make an organization more flexible by reduction, not expansion. The reason the September 11 aftermath was dealt with so quickly, professionally, and expediently, was that we all knew what to do - we are the best trained specialists in the world, working in the largest infrastructure in the world, and those who came to New York for career reasons but can't handle the pressure or bring the right solutions to the job have always left New York fairly quickly. In New York, in a crisis, managers take the decisions, individual technicians and engineers, on their feet, there is no time to get anyone's approval, by the time you finish that call you've already lost half your infrastructure. The signatures, we do afterwards.

 

Listening to Secretary Chertoff talking about New Orleans, Katrina, and the levees, though, I have to say the man is spectacularly misinformed. The levees did not breach a day after the storm, as the Secretary says.

 

I come from The Netherlands, a country the size of New Hampshire that is largely below sea level. It is kept dry by a drainage system consisting of pumps and dikes - those pretty windmills you know from those cute pictures are the remaining old pumps, dating back to the 15th century, when the Dutch began reclaiming land from the water. There was't any other way to grow the country, to the East of us live the Germans and to the South the French, and they, for some reason, have a problem with us helping ourselves to extra land, not that we haven't tried. So - we have been getting land from the sea and waterways, river deltas - land, of course that is, or was, below the sea. It is all managed by an organization that has no political reporting structure, as the maintenance of the water management system is a long term (in our case, over eight hundred years) process, and so what we call Realm Water State consists to all intents and purposes of a separate governmental structure - a State within the State. We