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If you came here from a search result and can't find the subject on this page, it is most likely in my 2005 archive. Links to my other archives are at the bottom of this page.
Sunday January 1, 2006
I like the way Regis Philbin closed his New Year's show on Fox: "Let's work for peace, not fight for it". Amen...
Saturday, January 7, 2006 - Beer fight!
I had been watching, from afar, the battle between two Dutch multinationals, Heineken and Philips, both wanting a slice of the home draught beer market. The two companies had set out to develop a kind of beer tap for the home, an electric device in which you insert a 6 litre (1.6 U.S. gallons) mini-keg, it is self contained, chills the beer, and pressurizes it. I guess the idea was that Philips would produce it and Heineken would sell the beer for it. Long story short, the two companies fell out, and now there are two of those devices - one developed by Heineken and German manufacturer Krups, the other by Philips and Belgian brewer Interbrew. One is called Beertender, de other Perfectdraft. The machine itself is expensive, some 200 Euros (US$240), and one will obviously not handle kegs made for the other.
Doing my Christmas shopping, I ended up in BJ's, and there I ran into yet another Heineken keg, this one pressurized, with a 5 litre (1.3 US gallons) content. Non-pressurized 5 litre kegs with Dutch and German beer have long been available on the U.S. market (and others, I picked up a pump fitting American kegs on sale in Munich), but they have to be hand pumped, and that just does not provide sufficient pressure to produce a good head. Considering this is imported Lager beer, the price is quite reasonable - $15, compare this with a case of Yuengling American Lager, 24 bottles, 9 litres (2.4 US gallons) at the same price. I had been wondering why I liked the taste of Yuengling, which I assumed was some kind of fancy San Fran renaming of an American brewery, the same way the French bought defunct Irish breweries so they could produce and market "Irish" ales. But no, it is made by a brewery that was started by a German immigrant named Jüngling in 1829, phonetically perfect, I should think he wouldn't Anglicize his name if he were starting up today. Anyway, to get back to the late Freddie Heineken, brewer and wholesale collector of Ferrari motorcars, I would guess that this one keg, the equivalent of 14 12oz cans of beer, probably costs no more to make than the kegs that go into those machines I mentioned earlier, and the glass of beer it produces is perfect, as you can see. The kegs are recyclable, too (I have to mention this because my sister sometimes reads my weblog).
Mind you, by perfect I mean European-perfect - that head of froth you see must be there - and stay for a while, as well. And therein may lie a problem, Americans (and Brits) are used to their beer being without a head, and they certainly won't know how to pour a beer the Dutch way. The British/American tradition stems from ale beer, which undergoes a warm top fermentation process that stops when the beer is allowed to cool. Lager and pilsener, on the other hand, are cold- and bottom fermented, and so could be served while still fermenting, a process that produces gas, and so the frothy head came about. For the record, rinse the glass until it is cold and the inside wet, hold it a a 45° angle, and pour the beer along the side of the glass in one smooth pour. When the glass is about two thirds full, slowly right it, and continue pouring. Stop about a quarter inch from the top, and you'll have a perfect pilsje, with some of the froth running down the outside of the glass. As you can see from the picture, those kegs pour perfect... Heineken sells special beer spatulas if you like to take the head off your beer. Or you can do like me and suck it off.
Enjoy!
Sunday January 8, 2006 - Marine Moms
The Associated Press reports tonight that Deborah Johns, who heads Northern California Marine Moms, said the president and news media have done a poor job showing the troops' progress. This in response to war protester Cindy Sheehan.
Most of the Armed Forces personnel around the D.C. area is in combat uniform these days, normally you only see Marines in BDUs. Even the Air Force has switched over. The place looks like a giant Army camp.
Which reminds me of the flap about the Florida sixteen year old who decided to go to Iraq and see for himself. Unlike the many who think this was a bad thing, I think that if the young man really wants to get into journalism (he did this because of a journalism assignment), he will make a superb reporter. He is one of the ones that goes and gets the story, which is what journalism is all about.
But part of that flap were the U.S. Embassy and the Baghdad Associated Press Bureau, all of which stated that is was really dumb and really risky to do what he did. They were "surprised he made it".
So you mean to tell me that after years of combat, $280 billion, and losing more than 2,100 American lives, and many many more Iraqi lives, an American 16 year old cannot safely walk the streets of Baghdad and go buy a sandwich? You mean to tell me that this kid has a 100% chance of getting kidnapped or killed there? This is the place where we have won so many hearts and minds, liberating, and bringing democracy, that all Humvee armor and much of the troops' body armor needs to be upgraded. I cringe every time I hear an Administration official say that we are "winning the war on terror" - we have incurred the wrath of some of the more extreme Muslim factions, but those are not in Iraq. They never were, were not allowed there during Saddam's reign, and haven't suddenly sprung up there since our invasion. When I add up where the Jihadis come from, it varies from Morocco in North Africa via Saudi Arabia in the Middle East to Afghanistan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. And England, Australia, The Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey. And they have many deserts, mountain ranges, rainforests and basements to hide in. Iraq we have made their training camp, where they come to kill and learn urban combat.
Saturday January 28, 2006 - Good Lord, is that the Time?
Whoa... 19 days since my last update... I did not realize I was that preoccupied, but the Verizon-MCI merger has kept me very very busy. We were on time and on target, I can't even tell you what with, since it won't be announced to the world until next week. Having experienced two previous mergers and a couple of de- and re-integrations, all I can tell you is that we are getting pretty adept at this stuff. All over and done with, well within three months of the DoJ approval. Amazing. Sparks fly.
To celebrate I treated myself to a set of new wheels for my baby - Italian Moda light alloy rims with BFGoodrich g-Force T/A Y-rated performance tires, now I am wondering why I did not do this sooner. She sits so much tighter on the road with these massive low profile sets - they're far less noisy than the OEM Goodyear Eagles, too. I don't like chrome anyway, there isn't any on the car itself, so.. And with 18x9" rather than 16x8" rims the brakes will cool better. Maybe that will stop the front rotors from warping all the time, I have had to have those replaced for the third time yesterday. Especially in an emergency situation on the highway, those wheels and tires are what makes the difference between a safe escape and flashing lights and hospital bills, or worse.
The other curious thing here in rural Virginia is Mother Nature. I had always assumed the vast majority of birds migrate South for the winter, but a bunch of them clearly do not. I do not recall birds overwintering in New York's Westchester County, but maybe I am now far enough South that here they do. It is the middle of winter, there are some bitterly cold nights (19 degrees this morning, just about 10 below freezing for the Fahrenheit challenged), but "my" woodpecker is occasionally hammering away, and one of the finches that built a nest by the side door last spring is still around, though I have not seen its mate. It is twittering all over the place in the dead leaves, gets lost in the mud room when the garage doors are open, but it is clearly not going anywhere. And I see sparrows foraging fairly fruitlessly in the shrubbery outside my home office window.
The finches are very clever - during the summer months, they catch insects from the surface of my pool, approaching from one end like a sort of dive bomber, so fast the insects don't stand a chance, and never touching the water - woosh, they're gone. First time I saw that, I thought I'd gone crazy, but they really do. And they get most of them, because there are far fewer insects in the skimmer than in previous years - this was the first summer I've had birds nesting at the house since moving here, though there are plenty in the trees, of course.
Sunday January 29, 2006 - Magic Apples
Liking my music more in a surround sound environment, I listen in the car, on 8 speakers, and at home, in Dolby 5.1, but I don't own an iPod. I have plenty of gadgets that can handle MP3s, but I've never even been tempted to try it out. Reading up on how well Apple Computer is doing, the other day, and how the iPod is putting Apple squarely on the map, I got to thinking about how that is supposed to have worked.
It is clever marketing, for sure, but let's see, how did we get here? Apple took existing miniaturized computer hardware en electronics, some computer database management software, digital compression algorithms, a fancy design, and a concept pioneered long ago by Sony: the Walkman. The Ipod is surely a marketing success, but innovation? Does it have a real function? Between the iPod and the announcement, the other day, that Apple will henceforth use Intel microprocessors (Apple owes its original success to Motorola's 68000 processor, which had multitasking capabilities Intel's 8086 and 8088 lacked, reason why both the Macintosh and early UNIX servers used Motorola processors), I wonder if anybody at Apple has read up on what happened to Sony after the Walkman..
And that magical Intel processor in the Apple PCs - Motorola is doing very well, especially now that is has started producing fashion mobiles, and is to all intents and purposes out of the PC business, and my guess is that there just aren't enough Apple PCs being sold to warrant major microprocessor design. What goes around comes around - the Macintosh graphical environment, after all, wasn't invented by Apple, but by Xerox at its Parc labs in Palo Alto, and the core of Apple's original operating system was written a couple of states North of there by... Microsoft....
Sunday February 12, 2006 - 't was a real Nor'easter..
Friday February 17, 2006 - Email? What email?
Newsweek discovers this week that the Katrina hearings have provided evidence that neither Secretary Chertoff nor Secretary Rumsfeld use email. A few years ago that would still have been less than remarkable, but we're now at a point where all major corporations are actually managed and run via electronic means, the combination of database access, web access, email and Instant Messaging has taken over communications, and in our business it is simply much quicker to use computer communications than the phone and voicemail.
It would simply not be possible for me to do the work I do, which involves teams not only all over the United States, but in the Dominican Republic, India and the Philippines. What Newsweek didn't pick up on is that, without a shadow of a doubt, Secretary Cheney and President Bush don't use email, either. Imagine - the central management team of the United States still uses 20th century communications, and is probably not even aware how isolated they are from the day-to-day goings on within their organizations, and the time they waste communicating via staffers. I can guarantee you one thing - if any of these men used email, the spam problem would have long been solved.....
Friday March 3, 2006 - Popups
I noticed that I, too, am being hit by popups caused by the Webstats4U tracker I have been using.. My apologies, I didn't know they had started doing that, and I have changed my stats package to one offered by Statcounter. Hope this is better.. I haven't put the new script on all my pages yet, but will.
Saturday March 4, 2006 - Namasthe
As I am sitting here watching the news from India on MHz, an excellent non profit non PBS cable TV station out of Northern Virginia, I have been preparing for a big adventure trip there. I have had many years of exposure to Indians and Indian culture, beginning in London, while I had many colleagues from India at the lab in New York where I worked. But last year, I found some of the software development and testing teams on my projects to be in Chennai and Hyderabad, and so decided to take that long postponed trip to the Indian subcontinent. Our software development activities in India are there for a very good reason, and this is hardly an outsourcing operation, but a wholly owned Verizon subsidiary. This outsourcing story has long fallen by the wayside - you cannot find programmers to hire in the United States today, with rare exceptions the vast majority of U.S. based development staff (and that includes Vice Presidents) comes from India, Pakistan, China and Taiwan, and it makes very good sense to bring the work over there rather than the people over here. According to Newsweek, some 250 American corporations have Research and Development laboratories in India and China.
When I say R&D, I mean that not only the coding, but much of the design and architecture is done "over there". So, insanely curious person that I am, I am going to see all of this for myself, visit our subsidiary, and, of course, travel some three weeks through this vast, diverse and fascinating country.
Stick with me here - I purposely bought equipment to record and post this trip as I go along, digital cameras, specially configured laptop, GPRS service (that is the GSM European standard digital service available almost everywhere in the world now) using Bluetooth and a Motorola Razr quadband phone with T-Mobile service (while we have roaming capabilities with our British wireless partner Vodafone in GSM territories we don't currently offer a GPRS capable phone). So I will this time do my travelogue as I travel, hopefully on a day-to-day basis. Better start taking my malaria tablets - you're supposed to start the course a week or so prior to departure. Before I forget, let me thank Rao, Sundar and Prashanth here in the US, and Joseph and Anand in Chennai (the former Madras) for all of their suggestions, and for helping set my visits and travel up. I am looking forward to this!
Saturday March 11, 2006 - Origami is a puzzle
With Microsoft announcing its Origami handheld computer concept at the main European technology showcase, CebIT in Germany, I can only sit here and scratch my head. If you read my India piece, below, you can see I am readying equipment to take with me. Equipment that will let me connect to the worldwide voice and data networks, as well as the Internet, from just about anywhere - GSM does not work in South Korea and Japan, but apart from that I can hook up my Thinkpad via Bluetooth or a wire to my GSM cellphone and connect to the Internet - here at home in Virginia, at London Heathrow while I change planes, and at the Verizon offices in Chennai, India.
I will grant you WiFi is faster, Bluetooth is too, and DSL is out there, but none of these media are available everywhere, or even most places. To me, true portability means that you can connect your handheld or laptop or even PDA to a network pretty much wherever you are. If you can't, the point of a handheld computer is lost - you might as well stay with your PC at home and your DSL connection. You want that mobile, you can always buy an RV with a satellite dish.
I think the Origami has been tried before, it is no more than a niche product, and so are most of the PDAs available today. For everyday use I have a Compaq EVO laptop that is very light and small. A fully functional PC with an 12" screen and weighing 3.5 lbs, it is barely larger than the Origami and can do everything that unit can, especially when paired with the docking stations available for it. In my private life, I use either a very fast but noisy HP laptop, or a slightly slower but silent IBM Thinkpad, both of which have everything a PC needs in a package that is about twice the size of the EVO. I have of course lots of other goodies, PDAs, data phones, but I don't have the experience there is a single PDA that comes even remotely close to what a good laptop can do. I have retired my Blackberry - almost any cellular phone today can do the remote store-and-forward email feature that made the Blackberry famous, and I really don't believe you can write intellegible well thought through email with your thumbs in a moving train. What I do like about my Blackberry 6230 with its monochrome screen is that its battery will last 10(!) days on standby, and so I use it when I travel, loaded with my backup GSM telephone number - based in Indonesia, it can sometimes roam where T-Mobile doesn't.
Not everybody is a communications freak like I am (I bought my first communicating laptop in 1984), but then again if you have an Internet PC and a telephone at home, why shouldn't you have those things all the time? Everywhere? And with the absence of the GSM chipset in the Origami I think the thing is mostly a missed opportunity. I have a sneaking suspicion none of the mobile telephone companies wanted anything to do with it, they already sell a vast lineup of PDAs and handheld PCs, I can't at least figure any other reason for the Origami not to have GSM built in. Especially since the GSM codec has been native to every flavour of Microsoft Windows since 98SE...
March 15 to April 5, 2006 - India
I have moved my India travelogue here.
Irving, TX, Monday April 10, 2006 - On the road again
This picture has of course absolutely nothing to do with the Candlewood Suites I find myself at tonight, just down the street from our Irving, TX, offices, where we are having our annual product strategy meeting over the next few days. I shot this in Pondicherry a week or so ago, while walking around looking for an espresso bar that was listed in the Lonely Planet guide but no longer exists.
I never managed to sit down and write some more India stuff over the weekend, there was too much to do, unpacking, sorting out which gifts go to whom, filling up the fridge (which I empty whenever I leave for a longer trip), and generally making sure my house is still in working order. While I was overseas my alarm system went haywire and kept calling neighbour Dave, who looks after the house when I am not there, in the middle of the night. After I talked him through resetting it there were no more false alarms, but I had to try and figure out what caused it to malfunction. I mean, it is clearly working, but overdoing it a bit. I have a backup system using different technology, but always like to know what exactly is causing the problem.
I have spent quite a bit of time remotely helping my sister reinstall Windows XP on her PC at home, which had been malfunctioning for quite a while, but because I was only in Amsterdam for a day I couldn't do my usual diagnostic. This was problematical as Windows would no longer update itself from the Windows Update website, a major issue as without the security fixes that Microsoft issues every week now you really are at significant virus risk. There are even some viruses that disable that update capability, I wasn't able to figure out whether that was what hit her, too long ago, Windows was clearly missing files.
At any rate, she managed to run the entire setup, install Service Pack 2, and is back working, I think with a better setup than she had before. It is a good excercise, Windows is a very complicated operating system, and having run through that basic setup helps you understand how it all hangs together. I am doing the same thing for a friend, setting up a reconditioned IBM Thinkpad for his daughter to take to college. Overstock.com has these brilliant Thinkpads that have been completely refurbished, have fast Mobile processors, and all you have to do is upgrade the memory and stick in a large harddisk, then reinstall the operating system, and install an upgrade to XP Professional, and these things fly. All of the above together will set you back maybe $1,000, and for that money you just can't buy a new laptop with the same features. Additionally, IBM's version of Windows includes a utility that will let you create a customized set of setup CD-Rs - once you have the system the way you want it you run a backup, which is placed on a separate partition of the hard disk, and you have the ability to reinstall your Windows image right from the initial boot. You can use that image to create a bootable set of CDs, which will let you reinstall the entire system from CD if your hard disk is blown or you are replacing it. Total magic. I am especially impressed that the bootable image will format and partition a new hard disk completely automatically, nothing to set, regardless of the size of the disk. A separate partition for the disk image is created on the fly, after the initial install is done. It takes a bit of work, but I am almost done.
Kinda nice, this suites hotel, I had never stayed in one, small apartment with fridge, cooking area, dishwasher, a minimarket downstairs where you can buy groceries - while I am on expense account, I have spent so many years in upmarket hotels with room service and expensive dinners and so on, I find this a lot more relaxed. A lot of the people attending my meeting have flown in from all over, so we'll likely have dinner together somewhere anyway. National Car Rental gave me a huge SUV for our normal corporate rate. I find that very convenient because when you're trying to find somewhere in an unfamiliar area late at night it is pleasant if you drive a large vehicle that is hard to overlook, and somehow something this size makes it easier to drive, be on the phone and read instructions all at the same time. Car manufacturers like it when rental companies make the latest fully kitted cars available to corporate renters, it is to them a marketing excercise - as it happens, I am planning to buy an SUV this summer, don't want to put too many more miles on the Camaro, which after all is no longer made.
Irving, TX, Tuesday April 11, 2006 - Big Sky Country
Another picture from Pondicherry - one of those Ambassador cars, based on a 1950s British Morris design, is being rebuilt here, from the ground up. Most taxis (that is, the car variety) and limousines in India are Ambassadors, fitted with a four cylinder diesel engine they are virtually indestructible, mostly kept immaculately by their owners, and as you can see labour cost in India is low enough that it pays to strip and rebuild an Ambassador.
Back on Earth, we tend to think of Texas as another State in the Union, but every time I am here in Irving, where GTE used to have its headquarters, the sheer size of this state is palpably visible. Just looking from my hotel room window the next cluster of buildings is the other side of the highway, several miles away, Texas is, after all, slightly larger than France. It does have a country feel to it, a very clear identity, tidy, clean, organized, and at the same time laid back and relaxed, as befits a southern state. In its affluence, Texas reminds me of Southern Germany, where most everything is new and modern, even the reconstructed antiques, and there are no old cars and delapidated buildings.
We have become so completely electronicized, in corporate America, that a group of some fourty people in a conference room will have laptops and a network connection, and most of us continue to do our daily work while discussing and attending this two day meeting - this is no longer unusual, it is actually more or less expected. All one needs is a laptop and a cellphone, we are to all intents and purposes paperless, and work in a truly distributed work environment. This has taken a long time to achieve - even a few years ago you'd have needed very expensive equipment and specialized software and network devices to truly work this way, but today all it takes is a relatively simple laptop, say $800 worth, and a desktop environment that is largely Lotus Notes and browser based. And as I have established in India, you can now do this using two cellular telephones, one used for data, one for voice, and it is so completely seamless that you don't have to change network settings or look for networks, wherever you are, turn on your equipment and you can go online and read the paper and do your work. Affordably. True remote working is finally here, and it will change the world, it is no longer even the province of large multinational corporations, you can do it too.
In The Netherlands, the Dutch PTT and T-Mobile have decided to make their WiFi networks available to each other's customers, which to me is another indication that WiFi is dead, a networking system that tethers you to particular locations is not what the consumer wants. HP has just introduced a laptop that has the chipset for access to our wireless data network built in, all you need to do is be a Verizon Wireless subscriber and take the data option, and you're online wherever we offer cellular coverage. Cool stuff, kids....
Irving, TX, Wednesday April 12, 2006 - Mongering
One of the best ilustrations I could find of the two millenia India finds itself living in is this picture, taken at a state-of-the-art 24 hour coffeeshop on the higway from Bangalore to Mysore, right across from a native village where the residents, I am sure, never cross the highway to get an espresso or cappucino. Everything is available, from roasted bean coffee to insulated commuter mugs, and I found that Indians treat their coffee the way it should be treated, it is strong, rich and delicious, and they know how to handle espresso machines.
The Public Library of Science Medical Journal publishes on disease mongering this week - a hobby horse of mine, I have a rant somewhere in my archives about this. "Acid Reflux Disease", "Stubborn Belly Fat", watch television for a couple of hours and you will see an easy dozen commercials providing very limited information about an illness you have likely never heard of, very rudimentary information about some carefully selected symptoms, followed by an exhortation that this-and-that medication can cure this "illness". Most of these illnesses aren't illnesses, but symptoms of other, real, conditions - take acid reflux, which can be caused by a number of stomach disorders, hiatal hernia, etc. Whatever acid reflux is, it is not a standalone illness, and there is no point in treating it if you don't treat the underlying condition. This, of course, applies to Maalox and Tums and all those other "heartburn" medications - which present in their advertising that heartburn is to be expected when you eat rich food.
All I am saying is that the pharmaceutical industry is engaging in what I think are marginal practices to sell more product. Companies are building databases of patients - drug marketing used to be aimed at physicians and hospitals, now it is aimed directly at the, often ill informed, patient, just to try and get the patient to go to their doctor and get treatment for a condition they may not have.
I recall Immunex, the maker of Enbrel, obliging all patients taking this medication to register directly with the manufacturer, to obtain a card without which the pharmacist could not dispense Enbrel. The information the manufacturer requested was extremely detailed, much more detailed than was necessary for this purpose. What is more, information to assist Immunex with production planning was freely available to the company from its wholesalers, and from the pharmacies dispensing the product. So in my mind the only purpose Immunex had was to build a database of arthritis sufferers, and databases you only build for targeted marketing.
I believe we're overdue for some government regulation of these activities, along the same lines Europeans have regulated medical advertising, because I take a dim view of patients being told they potentially have illnesses they are actually not suffering from, in the process at the very minimum causing an unnecessary increase in the cost of healthcare. This advertising, of course, is aimed exclusively at those of us with good health plans - Enbrel, one of the new miracle drugs that treat arthritis and psoriasis, is medication you take for life, at a cost of hundreds of dollars a month. It isn't covered by all medical plans, and certainly not affordable for many of the elderly arthritis sufferers that would really benefit from it. Incongruous is also that there are many over-the-counter drugs that are advertised for "mild arthritis pain" - another example of deception. Arthritis hurts like hell, there is no such thing as "mild arthritis pain". And there is no point in treating the pain, either - left untreated, arthritis only gets worse, destroying joints in the process, pain does have a signal function, after all.
Washington, D.C., Thursday April 13, 2006 - Bumper Sticker seen on I-95
Frodo Failed: George Bush Has The Ring
Spotsylvania, VA, Friday April 14, 2006 - What's in your wallet?
I have, or rather had, a Bank of America credit card. When I first set it up I found out it did not allow me to download transactions directly from Quicken, the financial management software I use. This was annoying enough - they use a facility called "Webconnect" which requires you to log into their website, where you can then download a file that triggers a Quicken update. Then, a couple of months ago, they added an extra security step to their login process, where they query your computer so they can identify this, and you have to go through an extra login step "for security reasons". That was it for me, and I decided to switch to Capital One, where someone told me they do allow direct account downloads.
So I received their card yesterday, asked again while activating it whether they had direct download, and tonight proceeded to set up the new account. I love Quicken - if gives me a complete overview of my finances, lets me check my charges and bank account on a daily basis, even my 401K lets me download and transfer funds directly. But I found that the Capital One reps had lied to me - they too now use Webconnect, and force you to first log into their website, where you then have to sit and wait until all of their marketing drivel has loaded before you can get to your account statement, then to the download page, etc.
This is a waste of my time, people - and it is a waste of my time on my dime. They know full well that canceling a just opened account messes up your credit rating, so they go on the assumption you will bite the bullet. Kiss my, umm, hindquarters, folks, I will stick with Citibank, which goes out of its way to make their service as user friendly as possible. They are today even advertising that with a Citibank account you don't have to deal with a machine interface, but you can talk to a live person in customer service. That was bound to happen - dealing with all of these speech recognition systems gets totally annoying, especially since they often do not have the choices you're looking for. I know a bit about this stuff, having built speech recognition systems myself, for use in the telephone network. One thing we did right is that we ensured we'd get the customer to a human being, if the system couldn't understand them. Doing anything else just alienates your customer, and you'll eventually lose them.
So thumbs down for both Capital One and Bank of America, neither of which understand that if you force feed advertising to your customers you will eventually lose them to financial institutions that do not, the ones that simply provide the services we pay them for.
What's in my wallet? Duh... Citibank. They will even let you generate unique one-time-use account numbers for online purchases. Now that is what I call smart money.
Waidaminute... did I just see a Dalek on the Doctor Who trailer on SciFi? Jeez... what year is this???
Spotsylvania, VA, Sunday April 16, 2006 - Summery
Just one of the dozens of pictures I shot from one of the hotel cars in India. It took the hotel travel desks a little getting used to, not to mention the drivers, I only wanted to drive around with the A/C off and the windows open. That way I could get some nice pictures here and there.
It is just about summer here, I have been amazed by the seasons ever since I moved to the USA, spring here (and in New York) lasts a couple of weeks, if you're lucky, and then it gets hot. Earlier in the week it got up to 85, today only 70, but it was plenty hot in the sun. I missed almost a month of maintenance due to my vacation, so have a lot of catching up to do, and stuff has started growing like wildfire, the trees are budding, and the finches are rebuilding their nest above the electricity meter by the side door. Never had birds nesting, until last year, they have gotten used to me to the point they now only fly into the nearest tree when I come out, loudly protesting my intrusion.
I won't bore you with my spring maintenance, starting up all of my motorized contraptions, changing the oil in the tractor and the mower and the generator, I am just so pleased I moved here and have my own outdoors, so to speak, I really don't much care what needs doing, as long as I can do it in the great outdoors. And somehow five acres is more outdoors than a lawn in suburbia. Lot more work, too, but then that beats working out at the Y.
There must have been a storm here while I was in India, there are several trees down, that means plenty of firewood for next winter, and I have to take down another few trees that are too close to the house. I will need help with several of these, they're leaning and so need to be pulled away from the house before I can cut them, trees have a nasty habit of not falling where you want them to go. All it needs is the tiniest breeze when the tree starts falling, and it'll go where Mother Nature decides. It is hard to see which way it is falling when you're right at the bottom of it with your chainsaw, so a helper is more often than not a necessity. But today is Easter and so I leave my troops to their families.
Spotsylvania, VA, Thursday April 20, 2006 - Telly-vision
A mountain above Mysore gives a stunning view of the town, with its many temples and palaces, and the surrounding countryside. The mountaintop itself, a half hour's drive from downtown, is a conservation area with plenty of monkeys - and three temples, no less, within yards from each other. Halfway down the mountain a sacred bull statue watches over the town of Mysore. Worth a visit just to see the small neighbourhood that has grown around the mountaintop, with lovely houses built helter-skelter down the promontory.
Back on Earth, I found a 30" LCD television set at PC Connection, for just $699. There is a $100 mail-in rebate, but then the shipping costs around $100, so you end up $700 out of pocket.
That's significantly, like $300 or more, cheaper than I have seen 30" LCD TVs anywhere in the stores here. Remember that a 30" LCD, being rectangular, actually gives you more viewing area than does a 30" regular TV, as most programs and movies are produced in letterbox format today. But this unit has a couple of other interesting features. It has a VGA port for PC, with a native resolution of 1280x768 pixels, it'll handle up to 1280x1024, with good quality, perfect for small audience presentations and meetings. The LCD is not quite as crisp as that of more expensive well known brand name models, but for the price it does a good job. It has everything up to and including PIP, S-video and component input.
What is very important, though, to me at least, is that this German made VideoSeven product is fully multistandard. It will handle NTSC, PAL, PAL60 and SECAM, and will do so at both 50 and 60 Hz mains power. Its power supply autoswitches between 100 and 240 VAC, meaning you can use the unit anywhere, even in third world countries with unreliable and irregular fluctuating power. I don't have this just from the documentation, I connected the multistandard DVD player I bought in India a few weeks ago, and threw all of its various settings at it, and DVDs and VCDs from three different regions, and ran it on a 220VAC transformer I have. It handled everything, fully automatically, without complaint. So if you're from somewhere else and want to eventually take your TV when you go back to your home country, this is the set for you. And if you're planning to spend some time overseas, for whatever reason, or to retire in the Bahamas, it's an equally smart buy.
I am watching the visit of Chinese president Hu, and the reporting surrounding it, with some bemusement, hopefully he is not locking up all of the traffic in and around D.C. tomorrow. America and China are indeed locked in a dance, the dance of capitalism - China could no longer finance its expansion without U.S. trade, and if their stuff stopped coming into Walmart and Sears we'd be out of cups, saucers, screwdrivers, cellphones, coffeemakers, barbequeues and lightbulbs, next week. Not to mention the LEDs in our cars, and my 12 ga. Remington knockoff shotgun. That, as the man said, wouldn't do at all.....
Spotsylvania, VA, Saturday April 22, 2006 - Loyalty
I am digging through the pictures I shot in India, and came across this, I am sure you will agree a rather whimsical sign, found somewhere in Chennai. Curiously, this street has many health clinics, and it is right at the back of a main shopping street where couples come to buy wedding sarees, and rings and other jewellery, dowry for the wedding. There is an ongoing problem in India with female children being less desired, even though it is illegal, many women will have an ultrasound when they are pregnant, and often female foetuses are then aborted, so the couple can try again for a male offspring. Curiously, the ancient reason for this, having another breadwinner in the family, and a child that doesn't need to bring a dowry (only the bride does), is hardly applicable to the segment of the population that can afford ultrasound and abortion - and stock ownership, car ownership, and overseas education. The birth rate in India is still askew because of this, there are large numbers of men for whom there are no wives. I would assume that means that the problem will eventually sort itself out, it has come to a head because of the new technologies now available.
You have perhaps seen the news about the CIA officer who was fired for leaking the prison story to the Washington Post - the situation where the CIA allegedly operates out-of-view jails in Europe where terrorism suspects are interrogated, away from the American legal system.
While I personally feel that whowever leaked the story did the United States a favour, you have to ask yourself if this is the right way to bite the hand that feeds you. There is almost an "above the law" feeling to it - there are, after all, many ways in which you can report misdeeds committed by your employer, be that the CIA or Dunkin Donuts. I cannot help but wonder whether someone who goes to the press doesn't have a real axe to grind. Many companies and agencies have whistleblower statutes in place, where there is an internal committee the employee can go to to report activities that may be illegal. I have to add I don't know where the boundary is - a case can be made where it is good for the employer to be exposed publicly, when they are shown to be considering themselves above the law. It would be interesting to know if this whistleblower ever attempted to get this report actioned within the agency. We may never know - the New York Times has it the agency may not prosecute, which I personally think would give the CIA a massive headache in terms of employee relations - if you leak you don't necessarily go to jail.
Rising gas prices are visible in my pocketbook too - it now costs me about $16 to drive to work and back, or to Washington National Airport and back, about a 140 mile round trip, while my electricity is up 2.23% over the month - but they also increased the "delivery charge". I am relatively lucky in that I drive a vastly overpowered muscle car - streamlined and rarely even hitting 1600 rpm on the highway in sixth gear, the Camaro gets about 26 miles to the gallon, better than many mid sized sedans. I am thinking about whether to buy a hybrid this summer though, and reduce the cost. That will also let me pick up "slugs", guest commuters whose presence let you use the HOV lanes during the rush hour - the I-95 HOV from Quantico to D.C. requires three occupants. Although a hybrid will let me use the HOV by myself, I can be even "greener" picking up slugs. The back seat of the Camaro is there just for insurance purposes, nothing but small children or ham sandwiches will fit...
Fredericksburg, VA, Sunday April 23, 2006 - Got gas?
Food Shoppers in Fredericksburg has an amazing assortment of ethnic foods - not just Hispanic, but food from many South American regions, and all over everywhere else - Salvadoran cookies, German Spätzle, Indian, African, Chinese, Vietnamese, you name it, they have it, the original imported stuff, too. I never expected to be able to find Devon Double Cream next to the pig's trotters and scrapple. Never knew the Mexicans made this delicious lemon flavoured mayonaise, for instance. And why exactly Canadians make instant soup for Jamaican consumption and sell it in Virginia..
So do you think that if George W. President tells the nation we're headed for a "tough summer", referring to the rising cost of gasoline, he knows something we don't? Is the market spooked permanently by the Iranian nuclear aspirations? Did they shut the delivery valve already? Are we running out of oil? The earth's population is growing fast, and buying motor vehicles as if there were no tomorrow. And those clever Europeans went green and switched to efficient and fuel-frugal vehicles, and then they all went and bought two of everything. And I've just looked at two cities in India, each with over three million inhabitants, you should see the lines of autoricks at the gas stations in the morning, around the block and then some. In Chennai and Bangalore, the traffic lights have timers on them so you can see how long you have until the green, and drivers actually switch their engines off. I am seriously thinking about getting a hybrid this summer...
I should slowly take my India travel log, below, and transfer it to my travel section, but I have an unruly pool pump as well as an unruly lawn tractor, both of which need repair, and that will probably take much of today. Love doing that hands-on stuff though, what with my work being all virtual and remote, these days..
Spotsylvania, VA, Tuesday April 25, 2006 - Buy it off
I told you a few days ago about the VideoSeven 30" LCD TV/monitor I found at PC Connection - it is down another $50, by the way, to $549 after rebate - and just wanted to share that I think this is a major improvement over a regular television set. For one thing, the LCD surface is treated so it does not reflect like glass does, and between that and the significant brightness its performance in sunlight is pretty impressive - I took this picture using flash, a regular TV tube would have washed out completely! I went to BJ's over the weekend to compare its image with that of the LCD sets there, and I have to say there is little difference between this decidedly cheap unit, and brand name sets that cost almost twice as much - apart from which, this set is both multi-voltage and multi-standard, which is normally hard to get in the USA, and very expensive. One problem is making these comparisons is that almost everywhere the demo TVs are wired up using analog coax connections, instead of the S-video and composite video inputs most of these sets have. It is beyond me to understand how the marketing folks in these stores get so stupid. If you hook an advanced TV set up to a DVD deck using the high resolution ports, you get an amazing quality picture, and it would seem to me that would sell better than the mediocre image the antenna input provides. I have noticed before that installers, whether they come from Circuit City or a DirecTV contractor, have absolutely no clue how to hook up high resolution video or digital Dolby audio. And there really is a difference of night and day..
The New York Times DriveTimes supplement has a nice report about what you can do to offset the pollutants your use of energy create. A number of organizations subsidize "green energy" projects - wind farms, methane recycling, and at their sites you can figure out how much CO2, carbon dioxide, you generate, and subsidize an equivalent amount of "clean" energy. Kind of a nice idea - I have subscribed to one of them, TerraPass, for the amount their CO2 calculator suggests offsets the exhaust of my Camaro, which isn't even that expensive, $50 for some 12,000 lbs per annum of CO2. Insofar as their efforts will replace "dirty" with "green" energy, this can actually reduce pollution. A TerraPass makes a neat gift for environmentally conscious friends and relatives, as well, and you get window- and bumper stickers so you can show how engaged you are... TerraPass is a commercial enterprise, and so your contribution isn't deductible, but there are other, non-profit, outfits mentioned in the New York Times article. I chose the for-profit organization because I think that sustainable green energy needs to be commercially viable to make a real impact, but that of course is my capitali$t thinking.
Spotsylvania, VA, Thursday April 27, 2006 - Learning India
Look at this roadside advertisement, if memory serves me somewhere near the Spencer Plaza mall in Chennai, and you can begin to build an understanding of how the Indians do "it". These government sponsored study loans enable the Indian undergraduate to go study in England or the United States, where he or she will then have to work for a number of years to pay back the loan (15 lakhs is some US$ 34,000, more than you'd be able to pay back in a reasonable timeframe on an Indian domestic salary), and then have an option to either stay or return. So the IT industry as well as the medical field in India are headed by Western educated specialists who have experience working in the West as well, they've learned business practice, regulatory principles, and more. Not for nothing do they offer elective medical procedures performed to Western standards in modern clinics at maybe a third of the price you'd pay here. The British National Health Service sends patients abroad for transplant surgery - less waiting time and they're saving money to boot. I can tell you I was impressed when I saw all these billboards - not because they are there, but the place is littered with them. It shows India is looking well beyond the next election, there is long term planning in evidence, something we in the USA aren't particularly good at.
So I disagree with those who say India is divided in two societies, one poor, one rich. While there is a transitional phase, no doubt, India is generating significant revenues, and investing in the future. You have to have piles of money in the kitty before you can even begin to think about elevating the rest of your society, at which point you get to the problem that affluence may make you price yourself right out of the market. You need not only that educated workforce, but you need professionals who have experience and expertise, and if they come back with all of that and a bit of money you're even better off. Now you have a ready made self financed middle class. And the first thing this middle class provides is employment, followed closely by training.
For the entire period I have owned my Camaro I have had problems with the front rotors warping. Within 1,000 miles of a service and having them resurfaced or replaced, they'd warp again, and the car would shimmy when braking. Annoying and dangerous.
But since I replaced the stock rims and tires with larger rims and low profile tires, the problem seems to have gone away. It is beginning to look like the stock 8x16" rims enclose the brakes too closely for them to get adequate cooling - the new rims are 9x18", and so allow a lot more airflow. If what looks likely is actually true, that's pretty scary, that means the design was never endurance tested on the stock rims. I generally have to say these replacement BF Goodrich tires are much, much better than the Goodyear Eagles that came with the car. They're glued to the road, kind of important when the car weighs a couple of tons and is propelled by a big Corvette LT-1 V-8....
Spotsylvania, VA, Sunday April 30, 2006 - Risk? What risk?
On my way home from Chennai I stopped over in Amsterdam, to pay my sister a quick visit. Connecting through London's Heathrow Airport anyway, British Airways only wanted $200 extra for the flight and stopover, we don't get to see each other that often, although we talk on the phone regularly. Having lived in Amsterdam for many years, I always enjoy visiting some of my old haunts, many of which still exist today. One of those is Americain (colloquially pronounced "ajmeireekein"), which is how we referred to the Café Americain, the restaurant that was part of the American Hotel on the Leidseplein. Built in 1902, the Café was one of those particularly Amsterdam restaurants, where you could get the traditional Dutch luncheon, uitsmijter, fried eggs sunny side up, with ham and a pickle, on white bread, and other local staples. In the mornings, we'd go and read the papers at the "leestafel", the reading table, where'd you'd sit for a couple of hours going through the world's news (no Internet yet) over a cup of coffee. You would be likely to share the space with a celebrity or two, a well known author, actor or actress, you'd never have to tell the waiters whether or not some hair of the dog needed adding to the coffee, they knew their regulars.
As you can see from the picture, the Café's interior has been maintained in its original design, down to the original 1902 Tiffany lamps and Tiffany stained glass windows. To my left sits the original reading table, unchanged except for maintenance since 1902, and still in use for its original purpose. The only thing I noticed is new is that the hotel provides printouts with the latest world news, neatly stacked by region, a concession to the Internet era. Normally all for progress, I am kind of glad they withstood the tempation to put Internet terminals in the table.
Elsewhere in Amsterdam, a friend of mine took the Reading Table concept and produced an Internet version, installed in the restaurant De Waag, located in a 15th century tollhouse that was once part of the city ramparts. Last time I was in De Waag it was still there, and still in use, even though in a café setting customer will not pay for Internet access. Since then, of course, real Internet cafés have proliferated, with more modern equipment and printing capabilities and the like. Because dialup as well as DSL Internet in The Netherlands are very expensive, the Internet café remains popular.
Once a week, I ride school bus patrol here in my neighbourhood. A number of years ago, two little girls were abducted coming home from school, from their driveway, and subsequently raped and killed. Since then, the local Neighbourhood Watch in my county escorts all school buses in the afternoon, in marked cars, drivers screened and registered by the Sheriff's Department. Our driveways can be half a mile long, and treelined, and the very visible patrols help make sure the kids are safe.
As a consequence I know most of the kids in my neighbourhood, they mostly use the school bus system until they are old enough to drive, and their parents get them their first car. Much is published about the danger of having young adolescents on the road without much experience, and yesterday's accident brought that fact home to us in my street. One of the neighbour's kids had gotten his car, last year, and was doing some repairs on it. He had apparently not propped up and secured the vehicle properly, I guess these aren't things you worry about when you're seventeen, and so it came off its stand, came down and crushed his skull. He died.
It set me thinking about how I will not take risks, today, that I was perfectly happy to take when I was twenty or thirty - I went to India to discover the country, but stayed in an American chain hotel, and used mostly limousine service to get around. The rationale to do things that way was simply that I could get to see a much as possible in the three weeks I had, but also that getting robbed somewhere in the bush, or contracting some nasty tropical disease, would not only have put me personally at risk, but could have jeopardized my job, if I would have returned later than scheduled. Take risks you have to, climbing mountains just because they are there is certainly fun, but you have a better than average chance of getting hurt in some way.
Years ago, I worked on a new subsidiary, and part of my responsibilities was assessing risk management for the IT environment. In our $$ conscious environment, few companies set up a fully duplicated environment. The build itself is financially manageable, but duplicating the data input in real time, and building the secondary network you need to have in order to do that duplication, to a remote site, gets to be very expensive in recurring expense. The picture on the left is of a fully redundant high availability speech recognition system my team designed and built for the telephone network - high availability, necessary in this particular instance, made the system cost four times what a non-redundant system would have cost, and then I am not even talking about the cost of the software development - application software normally does not support high availability.
For completeness' sake, I built a scenario where our main center would get hit by an airplane, knowing full well that nobody would ever take that seriously, and certainly my management would not be able to get our finance people to come up with the enormous amount of money involved. When you build such a scenario, you're not just building the systems and networks, you see, you also have to figure out how to move your staff to the backup location, which can involve chartering aircraft and buses and providing replacement staff for those that perished.
Long story short, many of my recommendations weren't implemented, and I should add I fully supported that decision, as the subsidiary at the time didn't even have revenues yet, nor did we know how successful it would be. We put something in place that provided a different recovery method, perfectly adequate, and remember, those types of calamities will normally never happen in your lifetime.
But then, on September 11, 2001, somebody flew an airplane into the Pentagon, only a few miles from our center... I was told recently many of my recommendations have now been implemented, as the subsidiary is very profitable - just an anecdote to show you how priorities can change. From a strictly mathematical perspective, of course, the chances that our center will be hit are as small as they were at the time, as we're not a target like the Pentagon is. At the same time, if you're proximate to a target you are in an elevated danger zone, it is a good idea to have backup facilities somewhere less exposed.
So we grieve for the kid, his siblings and his parents. You can't watch them all, all of the time, and his death will teach his friends and fellow students to be more careful - it is just a high price to pay. Local members of the Knights of Columbus have organized support in the neighbourhood, folks are going over to pay their respects. Neighbours are bringing food and groceries and cutting the grass, so the family does not have to cook, shop or do chores, and can grieve in peace. We have started a fund to help pay for the funeral, as the parents are not particularly affluent and have no insurance.
March 15 to April 5, 2006 - India
I have moved my India travelogue here.
Spotsylvania, VA, Tuesday May 2, 2006 - TwoBush or not TwoBush..
I don't know how much you have seen of the skit President Bush and comedian Steve Bridges performed for the White House Correspondents Association, but the thing in its entirety is posted at the ABC News website. Funny funny. I'd seen Bridges' Bush impersonations before, but kudos to Mr. Bush, this is the best ever. Watch here.
In Turkey, a number of writers and journalists have been hauled into court over publications that criticize the Turkish state, something apparently enshrined in Turkish law as "insulting Turkishness". Mostly, these lawsuits are related to Turkish history, such as the way ethnic Turks have dealth with ethnic Kurds or ethnic Armenians living in Turkey, in the past. With Turkey's expressed desire to join the European Union, EU officials and politicians are having second thoughts about the agreements with the Turkish government, as freedom of speech, a basic tenet of Western style democracies, still does not seem guaranteed in Turkey. There were severe jail sentences threatening those that were charged - and is by no means over yet.
Just a quick word, can't help myself, about the "Day without Immigrants" that was held in the United States yesterday. An immigrant is a foreign someone, like myself, who resides in this country permanently, and legally, someone who pays taxes and generally is a law abiding member of his or her community. Someone who snuck into the United States in defiance of immigration law (and yes, immigration law is a pain, and should be changed) is not an immigrant, that person is a migrant, an illegal alien.
I have strong feelings on the matter, especially when folks from South of the border tell us that these hard working carpenters and plumbers and cleaners and other workers "support the economy" and should "get citizenship". Citizenship, amigos, is for people who have lived in the United States as legal permanent residents for a minimum of five continuous years, we can apply for U.S. citizenship provided we have no felony convictions and we have paid our taxes for all of the time we have worked in this country and we were in the USA legally, i.e., no expired visas or illegal border crossings. Here are illegal migrants who now think they have rights because they do menial work. To be honest with you, I think we are perfectly capable of finding "legal" people in the United States to do menial work, perhaps we have been a bit complacent - the influx of illegal aliens that make their own way to where the work is has prevented us from going into our economically depressed areas, and offering work and transportation to the labour pool there. And if for whatever reason a work permit isn't good enough for you (you all already have citizenship of whatever country you come from, and you're not refugees, right?), you can apply for a green card, just like the rest of us have, and pay your taxes.
Capice? And then you can ask, nicely, and we'll think about it. In the meantime, get the hell back to work, I didn't get the day off either. And go to an Internal Revenue Service office and apply for an ITIN, so you can pay tax, and pay your back taxes. An explanation of the ITIN, and what you use it for if you don't have a Social Security Number, is here (this leaflet is in English and Espańol, and in Adobe format so it can be printed for those who don't have Internet).
Sunny Virginia, Saturday May 6, 2006 - Finished India
I spent some time tonight finalizing my India trip report, putting the entries in the right order and creating a separate page that I can link into my travel section. It reads easier this way, the chronology is correct and I hope you'll enjoy. In the meantime, of course, things keep happening here in Virginia, hopefully I can do another update later this weekend. I have to go do home stuff, the pool pump is definitely dead and I need to replace that, and there is my bi-weekly trip to the dump, these days I take my garbage there and do the recyclables, something the county trash pickup does not provide. And I have so much paperwork to do my dining room table is covered with it, spillover from my office.
I am also trying to figure out where to put the second flat panel TV I bought - a while ago, I figured out it is actually a good idea to buy spares of "good deal" capital items. If you can afford to, of course, and I certainly wouldn't buy two cars, I am not that rich. Buying an extra rim for the Camaro because the ones I bought were on an end-of-cycle sale, and buying a second flat panel display because the one I found is multi-standard and only $599 after rebate made sense, however, and saves in the long run. I would never be able to find another 30" flat panel multistandard HDTV ready display at that price, and since it can double as a PC XGA monitor as well, and only weighs 40 lbs, I can stick it in my car and take it to give a presentation somewhere, or take one overseas if I decide to buy retirement property in another country. I sometimes toy with that idea - a friend of mine bought an apartment in Madras some 10 years ago (way before anybody thought of renaming it Bangalore, outsourcing, IT booms and call centres), it doesn't now look like he is going to retire there, but it has quadrupled in value, so it was a smart move just from an investment perspective. Talk about the benefit of "buying two of everything"...
Anyway, my house is still a pigsty from when I packed and left for India, can't possibly entertain like this, so I'd have plenty of chores even if I didn't have to do all this new stuff at work. I was transferred from the division that merged with the former MCI to a department we refer to as "Verizon Partner Solutions", and I have my work cut out learning all about this division, and my role in it. So, umm, see you later. First some chores and some work outside, enjoying my piece of the Commonwealth while the sun is out.
Spotsylvania, VA, Wednesday May 3, 2006 - żQue?
I may sound a bit harsh about this immigration thing, but I have lived and worked all over the globe. When I moved from the Netherlands to the U.K., in the days before the European Union, I had to find a job, like everyone else, and apply for a work permit, and later a residence permit. While I was waiting for my papers to come through I tended bar, and slept on a friend's floor. Well, allright, OK, in her bed.
I am sorry, but I have a real problem with people who decide they don't have to follow the rules, and then say they have rights, and they say that is OK because they're needed. Apparently without the "immigrants" we wouldn't have lettuce in the vegetable section, or strawberries, and our houses wouldn't be built. You know, that will just not sit with me, it is blatant nonsense, it is a solution desperately looking for a problem to solve. In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, we were shown all these poor Americans in and around New Orleans - perhaps we should make an effort and take care of them before we do the rest of the world.
I did everything by the book, always, I had to learn the language, like every immigrant from a non-English speaking country, I had a hard time renting apartments and opening bank accounts without a credit rating, like every immigrant, I had to work my ass off to prove myself and establish myself in this, my chosen country of residence - like every immigrant. My then wife, another immigrant, had to go back to school in New York for two years to get her U.S. certification, learn English, yadda yadda yadda.
And now a few million people who broke all the rules and in many cases haven't even tried to learn the language, pay their dues, learn the rules, have rights? Like, how? As far as I am concerned you all have one right: you can get in the queue behind me. I paid my dues and played by the rules, that is how I was brought up, that is how I choose to live. You want to cut corners, go home and do it there, and see how far you get. As far as I am concerned you can stay if you have a job, if you pay back taxes to the first day you worked in this country, pass an English test just like I had to do when I went for my Green Card interview, and do all that other stuff you have to do to be legal. The rules either apply to all of us, or they don't. Simple as that.
Rainy Virginia, Monday May 8, 2006 - Pools & Moroccans
I managed to get most of my outdoor activities out of the way, over the weekend, before the rain arrived. Rain is a nuisance in Amsterdam or London, but here in Virginia in the spring the rain takes the pollen out of the air, the hayfever season is particularly bad, this year, while we always worry about our wells. A couple of years ago, we had a drought bad enough that some people's wells ran dry, so Mother Nature giving us a good soak is certainly welcome.
While opening the pool, last weekend (should the well run dry that always has 20,000 gallons of clean water in it...), I discovered that my pool pump was leaking, so I hurriedly ordered a replacement. I ordered from Online Pool Supply, an outfit that quoted very competitive prices and, as it turned out, keeps good stock and ships quickly. As many merchants have figured out, "UPS Ground" is much faster today than it used to be, it usually takes three, perhaps four days for a shipment to arrive - in the past, it could be as many weeks.
Anyway, the pool had sat there the whole week, without filtration but with the cover off, and so by the time I had the new pump installed, on Saturday, it was pretty much green - it is going to take me all week to get it clean and stabilized. The soup you see in the picture is what resulted after I installed the pump, vacuumed the bottom, and put a good amount of shock in. Washing the sand filter every day will eventually get it to the point that I can start algae treatment.
Driving home tonight I heard on my car radio that convicted terrorist Zacharias Moussaoui now is recanting his guilty plea, and wants a retrial. He is saying he had nothing to do with the 911 attacks, and only pleaded guilty because he thought we'd give him the needle anyway.
I never for a moment believed that this misguided soul had much if any part in September 11, he seemed too inadequate and too full of hot air to be able to be a "sleeper" and focus on such an undertaking. Besides, as I have said before, you don't learn to fly large automated commercial fly-by-wire jetliners and override flight management systems at small flying schools in the hinterland. All of his confessions and testimony were based on things he could have read in the paper, there was no terrorism of any sort in his past, at least none that Justice were able to put into evidence. It does bother me that there seem to be so many, shall we say, amateur terrorists coming from Marocco - in The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Canada, Germany, the US and other countries, many would-be terrorists either are Moroccan born, or of Moroccan descent. The man who killed Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam is Dutch of Moroccan parents - and while he had vowed to not be taken alive, he let himself be captured despite having a loaded pistol with him. Had he used it while the police were trying to catch him, he might well have been shot to death, but he didn't. And, like Moussaoui, Mr. Bouyeri used the court as a forum to advertise his brand of truth and religion, angrily denying that the state of The Netherlands even had jurisdiction over a Muslim. And like Moussaoui, he is now incarcerated, has lost his forum and missed, botched, his chance to be a martyr.
I am not sure what it all means, but it does seem to me there are a heck of a lot of misguided "second fiddles" out there, that aren't part of the terrorist mainstream and simply use the religious background of today's "troubles" as a way to make a public statement. It seems their ramblings and their interpretation of Islam are having an adverse effect, with true believers beginning to identify these people, and expelling them from their mainstream environment. They contaminate religion, we must remember this is the 21st century, not the 16th.
Spotsylvania, Friday May 12, 2006 - Keep it simple
When I first moved down here from suburban Washington my friends ran a bet how long I would stick it out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by pickup trucks and neighbours whose idea of fun is target shooting in their backyard on Saturday - I was, at the time, expected to head back to New York, our Long Distance company having been turned up. But there is a lot more to rural America than pickups, and in many ways I find the way people cope here more "real" than what happens in urban America. That's heavily tainted by my experience, of course, having spent all of my life in cities, one bigger than the other (New York and London do qualify as big), everything, but everything, here is different. And I quite enjoy being just about self sustained - other than the electricity that is delivered to my house, all the other amenities, water, sewer, drainage, wiring, phones, trash, heating, everything I get to take care of myself. After a major storm, that can mean brewing your own power, on occasion for days, because once the power is out you're left with nothing. No water, no heat, refrigeration, light, and if the power outage is major, as has happened on a couple of occasions, you also have to have sufficient generator gasoline as the gas stations will be out. On one occasion most roads were blocked by fallen trees so you couldn't even go for food, and with the nearest convenience store eleven miles away you're not going to walk. So I can now live fairly "wild" - enough emergency rations to last me a month, 20,000 gallons of water in the pool, water you can turn into drinking water with a filtration unit or water purification tablets, both of which I have.
Don't get me wrong, I am not preparing for World War III, but it is a nice excercise, with lots of things you'd have never thought of. Cellular Internet for when the phones are out lets you stay in touch with the world, and guns help ward off opportunists that power outages and darkness seem to attract - although, living in an area where just about everybody keeps guns it is less of an issue than in suburbia, and we do check on each other. Oil lamps and safe no tip-over candles, and being able to find them and the matches to light them in the pitch dark, and citronella oil to ward off the bugs when the HVAC doesn't run. A radio/TV set that can run off a car battery, and walkie-talkies with weather radio built in so you can connect with the next door neighbours and get weather alerts during a storm, but then you have to all agree on which frequency to use and when to turn them on. The well pump runs on 240 VAC, as do heating and cooling, so my dandy 110 VAC generator was of no use the first time I had an outage here - everywhere I lived before, water came from the water mains, and heating gas was available whether there was power or not. I never realized that when the phones and cable TV are out you can still get satellite TV, provided you have some way of powering the decoder and the TV set. And the knowledge list goes on, a 10 kilowatt generator is dandy, but uses almost four times as much gasoline as does a 4 kilowatt generator, mine will run 16 hours on a full tank, where the 10 kilowatt unit will only do 6.5 hours...
All this is fun, because it is new, because it is unknown, a learning curve, I am happiest when I am learning and doing new things. Keeps the mind in gear and lubricated, so to speak. The Internet is a great help, of course, just about everything from pool maintenance to programming water treatment equipment is dealt with somewhere on the 'net. And as you can see from the picture above, once I turn right off I-95, in the direction of Culpeper, VA, and pass the five or so miles of shopping area, at the end of which I fill up the car at the Wawa gas station, I enter into the lush green rolling hills environment where I live.
That never fails to put a smile on my face, with the windows down or the T-tops off all you smell is nature, freshly mowed meadows where hay is produced, and granddad ambling along at 30 mph in his ancient pickup. I guess it won't be like this for very much longer, the developers are fighting over who gets to do what with which part of John Mullens' farm, while the county board is putting limitations on the size of housing lots, predominantly because a well and septic tank for one family need a minimum of three acres to be sustainable, i.e. a hundred families need 300 acres if there is no water mains and centralized sewage handling. Beyond where I live are a number of subdivisions that started out as seasonal holiday homes, only occupied part of the year, but folks there eventually moved in for keeps, and they had to change the rules to accomodate them. Keep going, and you'll hit Lake Ana, still a resort area where folks from Baltimore and metropolitan Washington come to camp in the summer. I had never lived anywhere where communities were being built from farmland, the process is very interesting and I learn a lot about what "sustainable" actually means, what with the influx of city escapees like me into rural areas, a relatively new phenomenon.
You will probably expect me to chime in on the NSA telephone number database debacle, surprised as I am that so many Americans think that is an OK activity. We shall see if they still hold that opinion when the FBI comes knocking because their calls fit some perceived pattern or other. What worries me more than anything else is that we have people in the intelligence community that think this is a worthwhile excercise. It is another attempt at profiling, at identifying through pattern matches who needs to be kept an eye on.
It won't work. We have no known patterns to use as a template. If we had followed patterns of many known terrorists for a number of years we might perhaps have recognized some commonalities among them, but that is information we simply don't have enough of to make it statistically significant - science 101. Americans more than anybody else have this notion that you can automate intelligence gathering, even though we have to this day no systems that are capable of understanding human speech in English, let alone in Russian, Arabic, whale or babyspeak. By understanding I mean sophistication, the portent of a conversation, correlating, intelligent topic recognition. So if that is still the province of humans, if we still need a person to explain the difference between "I am sick" and "that makes me sick", and can contextually derive the many meanings of those utterances, this is another one of those excercises that will come to nothing. If any miscreant will ever get caught because of this data crunching, it will be because of what some human made of the data selected by the machine, not because of a conclusion the machine arrived at. If we had that type of intelligence in computing today, you wouldn't have to drive your car manually.
Trust me on that.
March 15 to April 5, 2006 - India
I have moved my India travelogue here.
Spotsylvania, Sunday May 14, 2006 - Co-opetition
So exactly how is anyone going to compete? This 19 inch analog/digital LCD flat panel monitor, coming with connection cords for all of its ports (you usually have to run out for some of those), compatible with A/C power and video standards worldwide, and fitted with an additional DVI port, which makes it compatible with high end video equipment, fully compliant with European recycling standards, is being sold by PC Connection for $129.95 after rebate. This at a time when you can buy a brand name 19" monitor/display at Office Depot for a high street price of just under $300. So who is making a profit, at those prices? The product is Chinese, imported via California for the US, so manufacturer, software developer, exporter, shipper, importer, more shipper, retailer, and more shipper, all make some profit on this unit, one assumes. The display is very bright, has excellent quality, fast response time, runs at a good resolution, 1280x1024 (the only compromise, 1900x1600 would have been nice), and its software drivers auto-detect whatever you connect to it, nothing to do, nothing to set. Woof.
For a long period of time, until the wealth trickles down, China will be able to outcompete just about anyone. China now has maybe 99% of the high technology capabilities the West has, owns the overseas companies doing the importing and specifying, this monitor even came in fully recyclable packaging and with multilingual manuals, so is fully compliant with just about everybody's import regulations. There was an article in Saturday's New York Times about how traditional Italian mom-and-pop manufacturing companies can no longer compete with, specifically, the Chinese, seeing this product I completely understand that, don't even try, guys. The Italians, of course, would have messed themselves up anyway, by adopting the Euro, EU countries that did are now, after Japan, the most expensive countries in the world to manufacture and do business in. But even if Italy had stayed with the Lira, which made it a cheap manufacturer, the sheer size and financial capabilities of the Chinese behemoth can crush your industry, too. Just wait until the Chinese have their car manufacturing up to speed, which is the next big export thing to start happening there. They're already exporting SUVs to the European market, based on a European design that they simply bought not only the rights and the plans for, but the entire factory with all its machinery as well..
As you can see, the pool is now clean, very clean, after a week of filtering, vacuuming, adding chemicals, and more filtering and vacuuming. Replacing the leaking pool pump I discovered that the installed 0.5 HP pump was really intended for an in-ground pool, and so wasn't running very efficiently as it was wasting energy on drawing a vacuum it didn't need. The replacement, another Hayward product, is a purpose built 1 HP pump for above-ground pools, which is cheaper than the original (like $200 rather than $300), but also has much more capacity, and so while doing the initial post-winter pool clean keeps clogging the sand filter. That just meant backwashing the filter once a day, until the crud was gone, but it shows you that if you don't do your homework a pool installer may well rip you off by selling you the wrong expensive unit. At least I can fix the original pump, which has a leak in the impeller housing, so I will have a maintenance spare. The new pump will also do a better job of keeping the pool clean, although I will have to adjust run times as the larger flowthrough will cause more chlorine to be dissolved, which can be injurious to the swimmer's health.
Arlington, VA, Monday May 15, 2006 - For Denizens of The District...
Washington, D.C., Thursday May 18, 2006 - From Somalia to The World
While here in the US the immigration debate rages, a refugee from Somalia who in a meteoric career acquired Dutch citizenship and was elected to Parliament, a vocal advocate for women's rights and against Islam, was found to have falsified her asylum application for the Netherlands, as well as her citizenship application, and has consequentially had to resign her parliamentary post while her citizenship status is reviewed. As she had given a false name as well as a fictitious date of birth, Dutch law deems her citizenship never to have been issued. As she additionally had been given refugee status in Kenya, and hid the fact that she had entered The Netherlands from Germany, rather than Somalia, she would not have been given asylum had the facts been known.
Immediately after she had been told her citizenship was in dispute, Ayaan Hirsi Magan (known as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, her assumed "alias"), announced that she would accelerate taking up a post with the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C. This respected think tank, which counts Mrs. Cheney and Newt Gingrich among its members, had been in process of offering her a position. AEI president Christopher Demuth writes her publicly on May 16 that "I have been deeply angered by the unfair and partisan attacks that have been leveled against you and have admired your courage and forthrightness in the face of this hounding" and confirms in the same letter her appointment as Resident Fellow.
Let me get this straight. A Somali refugee with access to Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Germany, Canada and The Netherlands chooses The Netherlands to settle, lies about her past, circumstances, travel, name and date of birth - being brilliant, outspoken and controversial she manages a meteoric rise ending up a full member of Parliament, with undoubtedly a very bright future, and it is then discovered that she abused asylum legislation to be able to settle where she, presumably, likes things best. If this is what she achieves by age 36, admittedly (due to her very public attacks on Islam and the Prophet Mohammed) under death threat by militant Muslims, I am not seeing a heck of a lot of Mr. DeMuth's "unfair attacks and hounding". Hirsi Magan has a lot to be very grateful to The Netherlands for, she has done very very well, or had done very well until she managed to run her mouth on Dutch national television way beyond the point where it could be ignored. Climbing tall ladders is a skill.
She has now announced she will take legal steps to try and regain her Dutch citizenship, and there is significant pressure on Dutch Alien Affairs Minister Verdonk to review and perhaps rescind her (legally correct) decision. What will happen next, I wonder? Ms. Hirsi Ali, or Hirsi Magan, will then take her regained Dutch passport, move to D.C. to take up the post of Resident (not visiting!) Fellow, will then presumably eventually apply for a Green Card and in due course become an American citizen - at which time she will have to give up her Dutch citizenship, as the Netherlands constitution does not permit dual citizenship.
I think that is what we in the USA have recently spent some time bickering about, what to do with immigrants who came here by ignoring the rules and breaking the law - technically, she applied for the AEI position using a false identity too... Reading responses from Dutch citizens in the major online newspapers, and noting that Ms. Hirsi Magan's rise to prominence in The Netherlands is devoid of any hardships other than those she invited by harshly criticizing Islam and Muslims, I have to ask myself how both Dutch and American politicians are falling all over themselves to refer to her as "persecuted", "hounded" and "courageous" (Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Robert Zoellick quoted in the Dutch daily Volkskrant today). Hirsi Magan is without a shadow of a doubt very intelligent, persistent, and agressive, but is it possible that she is also needlessly controversial, power hungry, and manipulative?
She had planned to make her move to Washington, D.C., in 2007, after completing her four years as an elected Member of Parliament in The Netherlands. Curiously, I find The Hague, the city I went to school and spent my childhood in, very similar to Washington, D.C., where I have worked for almost five years now. They are both the seat of national government, cities with many itinerants, attracted by fast track political careers, and their entourage, and at the same time environments where many people have no past, where few people spend the weekend, and even fewer retire. A joke in the U.S. military goes that majors get themselves promoted to the Pentagon so they can fetch coffee for the colonels, who in turn get coffee for the generals. Politicians, of course, head for what we refer to as The Hill, in what we refer to as The District (Capitol Hill, in the District of Columbia, for my overseas readers).
Both cities attract the power hungry, and the power brokers, and I really have to ask myself if that is not what Hirsi Magan is, a power hungry mover and shaker who cares not that she leaves bodies in her wake. Apart from the traditional female circumcision she suffered in childhood, I see no evidence of hardship anywhere, no persecution, yet she has politicians both sides of the big pond bending over backwards to support the poor badly maligned refugee-who-wasn't... I mean, if you end up in The Netherlands because you choose to get off the plane that is taking you to your arranged marriage in Canada, how do you claim asylum? I am under the impression the vast majority of Somali refugees arrive on leaking overloaded ships in the Mediterranean, not on transatlantic jetliners... She must have had a valid passport with a valid Canadian visa in it, or she would not have been able to board that aircraft, or am I missing something here?
Spotsylvania, Friday June 2, 2006 - General Tso's Caviar
So here you are - a state-of-the-art airconditioner, high efficiency rating - 10.7 EER, which is above the highest rating the US Government has for these things, it's manufactured under ISO9001 standards, it has an Energystar rating, complies with recycling rules from California to Germany, it is well styled, has fully electronic controls as well as an infrared remote - Haier, 's gotta be German, right?
Then there is the spiffy black 19" LCD monitor, high resolution, multi-current, multi-standard, DVI interface, fancy automated sofware built in, and all of the same manufacturing accolades the airconditioner has, in a recycled-cardboard box - Hanns-G, German, right?
Hold up - manufactured in PRC - Puerto Rico? American?
Nah. PRC = People's Republic of China. No longer do we get the slightly messy clunky electronic products with Changlish manuals, 1970's design and gaudy multicolored boxes, it is all state of the art, contemporary design, and actually outdoes Western manufacture in that this equipment fully complies with all international standards in one multi-market package, is reliable, and has very advanced and reliable software built in. Not only that, the airconditioner (delivering 6,000 BTUs for a consumption of only 560 watts, half of what it used to take, and using a supposedly inefficient recyclable refrigerant) costs all of $139, the monitor $129.
10 years ago, a comparable 5,850 BTU window air conditioner made by General Electric had an EER of 7.6, and a power consumption of 785 watts, 40% more for slightly less capacity and 29% less efficiency. More importantly, there are few A/C units available today that have an Energystar rating and are cheap - this was in the Haier range the third model up, two cheaper less efficient models were $89 and $110. IOW, they're competing on both price and features, and staying competitive by not catering to individual markets, figuring that what sales they lose for lack of customization is made up for by bargain shoppers. If it means anything to you, I have never been a bargain shopper, to the chagrin of my partners - I buy brand names with exactly the features I want, have done for many years, except now I can get 98% of the features at half the price, pleasingly packaged, no visitor to my home will look at this equiment and conclude I buy cheap Chinese crap.
This is not culturally adjusted equipment - the kind of industrial design that Western manufacturers spend millions of dollars to make. Philips builds shavers that are designed for individual markets - smaller ones for the Japanese, not only because Asians are smaller than Westerners, but also because the Japanese like to shave in the car on their way to work, which is easeir with a smaller shaver using only one hand. Similarly, the shaver's power can be less, as beard growth in Asia is generally less than in the West. What it looks like the Chinese have now done is ignore that, deliberately, because building a one-size-fits-all product can be done more efficiently and cheaper. Given the choice, the consumer will buy the cheaper product for as long as its quality is comparable, and what is now very clear is that the price differential is, given the availability of cheap labour, significant - we probably had kind of lost sight of that.
And yes, I do have central air, but there is so much electronic equipment in my home office it gets hot regardless, and summer is hitting with a vengeance, it was 100 degrees down here earlier in the week.
Spotsylvania, Friday May 26, 2006 - Playing catchup
Sorry sorry sorry, I spent all week playing with new toys, basically. Put in a broadband connection, then had to make my VPN connection to our corporate network function over WiFi, replaced a landline with a Voice-over-IP (VOIP) phone, made that work with my cordless two line phone system, and tried to (unsuccessfully) put in a DVR so I can send my digital satellite VCR to JVC for some long overdue maintenance. The broadband and VOIP stuff was interesting. You can see the equipment it in the picture - from the left the broadband modem, an unrelated lighting controller, then the VOIP modem, and last but not least my wonderful 802.11g+e WiFi router. We have come a long way - installation of the broadband modem and the voice modem took maybe ten minutes each.
You see, this stuff pretty much works right out of the box - leave it at factory defaults, hook it up, turn it on, and you're in business. The VOIP modem comes with four Ethernet ports as well as two voice ports, so if you had a wired network at your house you can just jack in. But if your network is wireless, and you want to continue using the existing equipment, you have some choices to make.
VOIP by itself is able to prioritize its traffic using a technology called QOS, Quality of Service. This allows VOIP packets to take priority over data packets, so you don't get this choppy voice quality you know from cellphones. Using QOS, however, the VOIP modem must be directly connected (as the primary device) to the broadband modem, and that means your wireless router funnels all of its traffic trough the voice modem. So what you gain by using QOS you lose by loading the modem with traffic it really does not have to handle. Between traffic from two PCs, one VPN PC, and the phone line, you have a pretty solid data stream. What you start doing once you have broadband is watching video streams, now widely available from most news sources, and that is a lot of load in Near Real Time (set your video application to buffer 60, or better, 120, seconds, and it can drop packets and catch up without "hiccuping").
So, after many hours of figuring out how all this works, and endlessly downloading software updates for all these boxes, I eventually managed to set up the WiFi router as the primary device, with the VOIP router connected to it, but managed in the DMZ, the DeMilitiarized Zone. That is a network technology that lets you put a device (usually a web- or other server) outside of the firewall, where it is directly accessible from the Internet - it is what we refer to as a logical architecture, it physically still is daisychained to the primary WiFi router. But what this equipment lets you do is slave DHCP for the VOIP (secondary) router off off the primary router, and then put the secondary on a static IP address in the DMZ. That makes the VOIP thing behave to the VOIP network as if it were the primary, while it is not running any of its own network management and will pass its bits through the primary without the primary managing its traffic. And no, that is not in the manual.
Yoohoo! You still awake? *grin*
What is neat about all this, and that is why I am going on about it, is that these two pieces of equipment, using the factory installed software, are actually capable of doing all of that. Obviously, you have to figure out how to set it all up, and unless you have some good knowledge of IP networking (which I have some 15 years of experience with) I wouldn't recommend that. That is to say, by all means do if you want to learn networking, but be prepared to spend hours and days, and have the whole network go down on you, reset everything back to scratch, try again, you know the drill. Like I said, this stuff works right out of the box, so if you're not anal like me there is no real need. But it is way cool if you get it to work like I describe here, because then it is, like the man said, smooth as a gravy sandwich.
So that is why I ignored y'all for days on end. Am I forgiven?
So what with the VOIP router outside the firewall, on a static IP, am I worried about being hacked? Well, that is hard to answer. I always worry about being hacked, I have every security device I can think of installed and working, and the VOIP router has no equipment attached to it, so there really isn't anything there to hack. Umm, by the way, static IP addresses are a bad idea, they really make you vulnerable to hackers, who can take their sweet time breaking into your network. Use DHCP, the Dynamic Host Control Protocol, and reboot your computers every day or so, to give them a different IP address. VPN, Virtual Private Networking, an encrypted embedded data stream, is a much safer way of getting across a firewall than a static IP address on an open port, even if it does slow you down a bit. Secondarily, there may well be hack attacks on the VOIP router - I have the logs turned on so I can see what happens to it - I don't really see what a hacker could do if they do manage to break into it. Running logging on a router slows the router down, by the way - use logging for troubleshooting and initial install, but it should be off for normal running if you aren't experiencing any problems.
Without password and login they're unlikely to be able to change its settings, it has no access to the primary firewall or the primary router (since it is not running DHCP, not serving any IP devices), and to use its telephone dialing capability you'd still have to have access to the voice port on the router. That you could only gain by breaking into my house, which is well alarmed, and besides, like most people in rural America, I pack plenty of heat, and know how to use it.
Arlington, VA, Wednesday June 7, 2006 - He's at it again
The Associated Press reports from Omaha, NE, today, that according to the President "New arrivals to this country must adopt American values and learn English."
Now of course I agree entirely with the English speaking part. Prospective immigrants used to be tested on their English skills, at the consulate where they had their Green Card interview. Once you have been awarded residency, in the USA, you have to return to your country of origin (i.e., where you were resident when you applied), and go through an intake process at the United States consulate. This consisted, in 1983, when I got mine, of a medical, a test on veneral diseases and tuberculosis, of handing over your passport so your existing visa or visas can be invalidated, you are fingerprinted, swear an oath to uphold the constitution, and there is a brief conversation with a consular officer to establish you have basic mastery of the English language.
I seem to recall that sometime after that, the English speaking requirement was dropped, as it was considered discriminatory. You see, not being able to speak English could lead to being refused entry, and that was all well and good for regular immigrants, but if a refugee or asylum seeker couldn't speak English, where would you send them? Back to Cuba or, at the time, the Soviet Union? That problem was never solved, and I don't exactly hear it addressed today.
The "American values" comment I think is more heinous. I came from England, am a Dutch citizen, and I personally think my European values are just fine and I really do not think I need to adopt anybody else's values unless I see merit in them. Some of our values I far prefer, to be honest - where I come from it is illegal to publicly name a suspect of a crime, or make any information about the case available to the press for as long as nobody has been charged. We charge and convict people only on material evidence, circumstantial evidence is very rarely admitted in court, and it leading to a conviction is extremely unusual. And then there is the privacy issue - for commercial companies to maintain databases containing private information on citizens is a breach of privacy law in most of Europe, it is illegal. Newly arrived immigrants, for instance, cannot be denied credit for lack of a credit history, something that is the norm here in the United States, and not particularly helpful. New immigrants that buy their first home generally pay outrageous interest rates, the standard penalty for having no credit rating.
So I hope you don't mind me sticking to some of those values, Mr. Bush - they are tested by time, they've served us well for some 800 years, and there are frankly some values Mr. Bush excudes that I can do without. Like changing the Constitution to prevent same-sex partners from marrying - I think you can make a good case that allowing this is a true test of democracy.
Curious as well that in this entire debate I haven't heard anyone suggest that we could allow illegals to become permanent residents, but not citizens - that way they can stay, pay taxes, and be productive members of society, but anyone planning to come here will know that if they want U.S. citizenship they'd better not break the law. A green card, you see, is valid for life, for as long as you are resident here - if you leave the country for a year or more, the green card becomes invalid. Maybe something for Mr. Bush to think about? Or is all this about the creation of 11 million more Republican voters? Two things you can't do with a green card - you can't vote, and you can't own broadcast stations. Which, by the way, is why Rupert Murdoch became a U.S. citizen, which rather upset the citizens of Australia, where he comes from.
Arlington, VA, Monday June 5, 2006 - Jes' playing around
3˝ inches (9 cm) this bug measures - one thing I like about living as far South as I do is Mother Nature, I have everything coming through my yard, from weird insects, deer (of course), turtles, possums, and snakes to the odd black bear (haven't actually seen one up close, which is fine by me, but their output is unmistakeable, unless somebody is walking their elephant on my property when I am not looking). I have no idea what type of bug this is - looks mostly like a moth, and as you'll agree invisible among the trees. I do occasionally find their wings, by themselves, so their camouflage isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Neighbour Dave is busily setting up the fireworks tent along Route 3 - this is how the local Knights of Columbus raise funds for their charitable works. He came to me for help working out phone line access for their credit card machine, so as of last Saturday we've been testing a hookup using a cellphione and an interface box that lets you connect a regular phone to a cellphone, and get normal dialtone behaviour. I have plenty of cellular lines, so will let them use one, it is tax deductible anyway. So far no liftoff though - I bought the unit that connects to the cellphone using Bluetooth, and I think the credit card modem does not like Bluetooth. We were able to put a couple of charges through, but that took ten or so attempts, I have now ordered a cable to do the connection, Bluetooth was probably overly ambitious. But hey, that is how you learn...
Arlington, VA, Thursday June 8, 2006 - They're not getting it
So the Internet must remain within the current model - cobbled together by volunteers, on leaky servers, with the largest user group being spammers and thieves of service that you and I, apparently willingly, pay for. We can't have set up a "Tier 1" Internet that is charged to service providers and information providers at commercial rates, therefore policed, with its entire bandwidth available to you, the consumer, because providers and purveyors who won't pay for it can't use it. Access points tightly controlled, service and information providers get secure policed physical entry points that we control, without which they cannot deliver anything to that new 'Net.
No? I hear everybody wants to stick with the extant model, where you and I and everybody all pay for someone else to send millions of spam mails whose bandwidth requirement ensures you can't watch real time video on your broadband Internet, and pay for crooks to set up websites on other people's leaky servers in the Gobi Desert or Queens so they can steal your identity and credit card numbers and social security numbers and invade your PC and..
Hey, kids, I am all for democracy, but don't say I didn't warn you: You get what you pay for.
Spotsylvania, Saturday June 10, 2006 - Talk
I need to write you a much more in depth assessment of Voice over IP, or VOIP, now that I have seriously started experimenting with it. I was never very interested as you needed all sorts of special phones, headsets, etc., but that has now changed - the latest VOIP modems will let you wire themselves directly into your home phone wiring, and even for Skype, which can only be used in conjunction with its desktop software for your PC, D-Link now has a voice router that lets you use it with regular phones. I've just wired that in series with my "regular" VOIP line, and that works too! Both will work wherever you go that has a high speed data connection - here, Skype has the advantage in that you don't need to take the voice router, where regular VOIP won't work without. This assuming you, like, me, carry a laptop wherever you go.. More about this later - your legend: from the left, cable modem, the D-Link Skype adapter on top, then my VOIP modem (which has four Ethernet ports on the back just in case you don't have a router), and my US Robotics WiFi router.
And you are probably wondering what I am doing with a Vonage modem, rather than our own Voicewing VOIP product - truth is, I live in an area where we do not offer 911 service, and under FCC rules, we must provide local emergency service where we provide voice service. The non-conventional companies have more leeway, and besides, it is actually interesting to see how they do things, and how well their service performs.
As far as Skype is concerned, that falls in the category "cool toys" for me. As Skype requires connection from or through a PC or laptop (it's either a wired or Bluetooth headset or the above mentioned D-Link adapter, which connects and gets managed by your computer via a USB port), there is no management of the IP traffic that carries your voice. That gets lumped in with everything else coming out of your computer, and so there is no guarantee of your call or voice getting to its destination, or of the quality of the voice connection being bearable. There are network-technical reasons for this, it isn't anything Skype is or isn't doing, don't get me wrong. It is pretty much like the rest of Ebay, which bought Skype a while back - you get what you pay for - most of the time. But: I now have a London, England telephone number, which is major cute. Useless, but cute.
Spotsylvania, VA, Sunday June 11, 2006 - More talk
An article in today's Washington Post extolls the virtues and the important voice of bloggers, concentrating on a blogger's convention visited by Democratic politicians. Calling it the "a source of innovation, energy and ideas" the Post clearly feels blogging is forging a change in the political environment. I am not so sure.
Blogging certainly allows citizens to express their views and gather supporters and create new political winds, but whether that is so different from what was before I don't know. Individuals with strong feelings about their pet peeves have always been able to find their way to radio, television and the printed media, and the fact that they can now set up their own space in the new media doesn't change that much. Setting up an electronic publication, maintaining it, and building your mass of loyal followers, is a lot of work, this isn't just about expressing one's opinion, but equally about having the savy and the funds to start your own publication. The major difference is that you can do that from the laptop on your dining table, not having to worry about distribution, printing, typefaces, etc. By this I mean not that those facets have gone away, but they're more easily controllable and manageable.
What really would impress me would be when America moved to be a multi-party democracy, rather than the pigeonholing two-party environment we operate in today. All it does, for the time being, is getting to be on the "winning side", the majority view. For this European, democracy doesn't truly come into its own until there are many parties, where, without a coalition, there would be no majority. This is why the American use of the word "coalition" in Afghanistan and Iraq is so nonsensical - it is often referred to as "U.S. led coalition", because Americans to a large extent do not understand, and aren't willing to accept, that a coalition isn't led by one of its participants - it is led by consensus.
Spotsylvania, VA, Thursday June 15 - Just chuck it
A Reuters article I read on Tuesday mentions that the film-based camera isn't as "out the door" as we like to think - the disposable camera market is expanding rather than contracting. Reading it, I remembered I had recently seen a disposable digital camera, looking over the package and wondering what that was all about. So, after racking my brain about what store I had seen it in, I went to my local CVS in Arlington yesterday, and there they were - digital disposables. And then a colleague mentioned her niece had picked one up at WalMart, the other day.
With the average disposable camera costing under $10 (I have them everywhere I might ever have to document something for law enforcement or insurance, like in my cars and in my gun case), CVS' price point is high - $19.99, although this camera has some interesting extras, like the display you can see on what you're doing, and the software, which lets you wipe the last picture you have taken, and reshoot it. But when I went to buy one they were on sale, for $9.99. For that, you get the camera, you shoot the 24 shots it stores - I'll let you know and see later how well or badly it does - and, according to the sales girl, you get your pictures on CD-ROM at no extra charge. The box says that processing is not included, and that you get the CD-ROM free when you order prints, so we shall see what's true and who is right. CVS also offers a 20 minute one time use digital camcorder for $19.99, presumably that all works the same way.
My readers overseas probably think we buy our ammunition, like our guns, in the store, here in the USA, so I thought I'd show you that we can actually mail order ammunition just like we mail order everything else. There are some restrictions on shipping, and factually only UPS handles firearms and ammo these days. They can only be shipped ground, for obvious reasons, but my 500 rounds of 9mm Luger hollowpoint sit on the porch when I come home just like other purchases UPS delivers. I've actually come to find online shopping very convenient, you can compare prices between stores much more easily, and even ground shipping is very fast these days, like a couple of days. Many stores have discovered that if they ship you your toys and stuff quick without extra charge, you keep coming back. And we develop the same kind of relationship with the UPS delivery person that we used to have with the postman - the postman I see rarely any more (I have a long driveway and the mailbox is by the street), while the UPS man comes up to the house and so I can see him from my office when I am working from home. He even pulled me over in my car, the other day, to give me a package - ah, I love rural America.
Spotsylvania, VA, Friday June 16 - ET phone home
When neighbour Dave came to me for a solution on how to process credit card charges in the middle of the parking lot in front of Gander Mountain on State Route 3, I was a bit stumped. No phone in sight, no power point, and they'd already decided where to put the tent and the containers with fireworks, county and fire permits applied for, etc.
Fourth of July fireworks sales started a few weeks ago, and the local Knights of Columbus have a permit to sell fireworks for charity. They didn't use to accept credit cards, but had wisely concluded that money is money, and people impulse buy with credit cards, not with the finite amount of money they have in their pockets.
Scouring the Internet, I really only found two or three suitable units that permit wireless connection of a modem device. One, from Nextel, couples to a Nextel phone, and lets you swipe the card right on the phone, but the Knights already had a credit card machine, and I don't have a Nextel account - besides, while you can take a charge on the Nextel phone, how are you going to print the result and have the customer sign the slip?. Looking further, I came across the Doc-N-Talk, a unit intended to let you connect a regular telephone or phone system to a cellular phone, and use it as if it were a landline. You need to buy an interface cable for the particular phone you have, and they also have a Bluetooth adapter for it.
Now a credit card machine for dialup has a built in modem, and modems convert digital to analog, and what a modern cellphone provides is that conversion the other way around, analog to digital, and back to analog the other end. It doesn't say anywhere the Doc-n-Talk will handle modem traffic, so there was only one way to find out: try it. Bluetooth, the easiest way to connect, was a dud. I tried it with two Bluetooth phones, and only one in ten or so transactions completed. So I ordered a cable for one of my older phones, an Ericsson T28 World, which is multiband and has been extremely reliable, "seeing" signal where other phones don't.
And that works. Not perfectly, sometimes a transaction needs to be redone, but the machine does this automatically, and the second try usually goes through - generally, a charge will take up to 20 seconds to process, which is quite fast. The Doc-N-Talk even powers the phone. I dragged a little standby generator out to the Gander Mountain parking lot and hooked that up through a UPS (worried about the erratic sine wave power that generators generate, not well suited for electronic equipment), and the Knights are doing their thing. I had barely hooked the kit up and gotten it working (with a lot of help, I know nothing about credit card machines - well, knew, I do now, of course) or a family walked in and bought $108 worth of fireworks, on a bank card. Guess I've done my technocool deductible mitzve for the week. Much more fun than writing a cheque to the United Way.
Spotsylvania, VA, Sunday June 18 - June graduation month
Chinatown, 7:30am, Tuesday June 20
Spotsylvania, Saturday June 24 - Security, or the lack thereof
With all the stuff going on about laptops missing and stolen, neither in the press nor in the affected organizations' press releases do I find the truly relevant aspects of laptop security. For over a decade now, the ATA specification for harddisk interfaces has had a security level built in - ATA, by the way, stands for Advanced Technology (that part comes from the old IBM PC-AT) Attachment. This is up to revision 7, I believe, but if you look in the BIOS setup (that's the part of the computer startup you see before Windows starts) of any laptop you'll find three levels of password protection: Master, User, and Disk. They're separate settings - important is here that if you set the harddisk protection up without the others, the disk becomes inaccessible when the password is not entered correctly. That applies not only for the laptop the disk is in, but for any other device you might mount the disk in.
The password is resident in the harddisk's firmware, but the ATA security function causes a flag to be set in the disk boot record that makes it impossible to access the data until the firmware writes the correct code to the boot record. In some laptops the password actually encrypts all of the harddisk, in others a section of the disk can be encrypted.
I have some first hand experience of the efficacy of the disk password - one of my contractors, in leaving my employ, set the disk password, then gave one of my staffers a wrong password (probably deliberately), and in most laptops the disk is locked out when three wrong tries are entered. That is what happened in this case, and once that happens, the only way to regain access to the disk is by executing a low level initialization, which wipes all data. In order to try and retrieve the data, I sent the entire laptop to a specialist disk recovery outfit in Buffalo, NY. While they managed to make the disk accessible, they were unable to restore the directory structure, and no meaningful data was retrieved.
So had the gentlemen who lost the laptops even used the modicum security expedient of a disk password, much of this ballyhoo would have been completely unneccessary. Booting from a floppy or from a CD-ROM wouldn't have helped - the harddisk requires a password on first access regardless of which way the laptop is started up. This isn't to say that a committed e-burglar couldn't bypass this level of security, there are ways around everything, but it requires significant expertise and the right equipment to do so. And those who have that expertise by and large have well paying jobs and no need to steal computers or data to make a comfortable living.
My point is simply that data security is a matter of personnel training and enforceable standards. Unfortunately, in most of these cases the standards are written but not enforced, and there are few if any companies or institutions that train their staff in computer use and security - train them before they're issued their systems, that is. This despite that fact that many people use "administrator" for a login, and "admin" or their wife's name for a password (or nothing at all), and despite the fact that once a laptop has been set up to access a network it (and you) can do so once you've logged into it, Windows is set up that way.
The neat fingerprint reader above has an advantage in that it forces the user to set passwords, it won't work otherwise. I knew there are some systems with built in fingerprint readers, but these external readers work quite well and plug into an available USB port. Apart from the initial Windows login, this device can be used to enter website passwords - the major advantage is that nobody can copy you typing your passwords, because you don't need to. I found mine at Overstock.com for all of $30. From a public relations perspective, these devices at least make you look like you care about the security of your customer's data...
Spotsylvania, Sunday June 25 - Television Myth # 2,456
Boniva is advertised on television as giving osteoporosis patients "strong healthy bones". If you have osteoporosis, you do not have "strong healthy bones" - osteoporosis, bone deterioration, can be caused by hormonal changes in aging women, and is also a known side effect of chemotherapy and long term steroid treatment. This medication, and others like it, can, provided you adhere to a diet rich in calcium, and provided you get plenty of physical excercise, stop and may even reverse bone loss due to osteoporosis, but that is as far as it goes. Of late, there are reported to be patients who have suffered bone necrosis in the jaw due to the use of another bisphosphonate, Fosamax, and some other, injectable, medications. Medical causal evidence for this is not conclusive as of yet, and estimates of sufferers vary wildly. I think it is safe to say, however, that neither Boniva nor any other bisphosphonates give "strong healthy bones", given that these drugs do not cure the underlying condition. I am surprised to see the FDA even allowing such a statement. Apart from any other considerations, while the various treatments for osteoporosis do lead to an increase in bone mass, there is so far no statistical evidence that this leads to a reduction in the number of osteoporosis related fractures. Such a reduction, I think, would be the very minimum necessary to be able to advertise "strong healthy bones".
On another note, more and more media websites offer streaming video, accessible for some time in the traditional news sites like those operated by