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Spotsylvania, Tuesday January 2, 2007 - Bad HSBC
In his annual review of the, uh, annum, semi-retired Miami Herald (requires registration) columnist Dave Barry writes: "This was the year in which there came to be essentially no difference between the treatment of maximum-security-prison inmates and the treatment of commercial-airline passengers."
I have to take issue with this, Dave. Prison inmates get food.
As a 15+ year HSBC customer, I was incensed enough at their discontinuing support for Quicken's Direct Connect that I have closed my HSBC accounts, and gone elsewhere. Quicken is able to directly retrieve account information from financial institutions, rather than via a complicated, slow and time consuming process that makes you go to the bank's website, go through a cumbersome three step process, then transfer a file from there to your computer. This is supposedly more secure than an encrypted API process. Sure. And the moon is made of cheese - it just lets the banks put advertising in front of your face, has no bearing on the security of your money and account information. None. Nada. Zilch. Nix.
Much to my delight, HSBC had so many complaints, and customers like me walking, that it has worked with Quicken to put some of the functionality back, and is now busy mailing its gone away customers that it has a solution. All the while it is spreading the rumour that this all has to do with the new Federally mandated three step login. That, of course, applies only to account login via a browser, which with Direct Connect you don't have to do. What was particularly amusing is that HSBC said in its original letter that so few people were using Direct Connect, it did not make economic sense for it to be supported any more. So now I am really curious to hear why, within three weeks, HSBC anounces that it has, with Quicken, concocted some sort of new solution that allows account data retrieval directly from Quicken. I mean, if hardly anybody uses it, why would HSBC care? The solution is downloadable from the Quicken website, and I know one thing for sure - Quicken doesn't do anything for nothing.
Citibank, Chase, Wachovia, Fidelity, and others do support Direct Connect, call around, you really want to be with a bank that gives you a choice, not one that dictates to you how you will manage your money. If you do want Direct Connect, you will in many cases have to specifically ask the financial institution if they offer it. There are two reasons for that - first of all, FIs really like you to log in and be forced to scroll through a couple of pages of product offers - for reasons that baffle me corporations think that if they force you to walk past eighteen stores getting from one escalator to the next, that will improve sales - and most consumers don't know any better than that is the norm. Secondarily, for reasons of security many FIs require a special signup - with one bank, Direct Connect required a separate signup, separate logins, and the first access was monitored by an IT specialist with you on the phone. Citibank needs separate forms filled out, and may charge you extra for the service - Quicken charges FIs for the use of their API. But if you call the bank or credit card company and tell them they can have your money only if they provide Direct Connect, those that have the interface available will give it to you.
If you have not tried Quicken (Microsoft Money is its main competition, if it has any) with Direct Connect, you should. Having all of your financial information in one place, being able to get your transactions and balances with one click, not having to ever write another cheque and put it in an envelope, and being able to finish your tax return in Turbotax, made by the same company, in under 40 minutes, gives you financial control like nothing else in the world.
Spotsylvania, Saturday January 6 - Technology
Last year, needing an external DVD burner for one of my laptops, I picked up a Buslink drive capable of writing dual layer DVDs. I couldn't find any dual layer writable DVDs at the time, but it seemed silly not to buy the latest technology, especially since the thing cost $99 at BJ's. I didn't look for the DVD+R DL very fanatically, because the problem with those would have been that none of my other computers could have read dual layer DVDs. Then, recently, I bought a reconditioned Averatec laptop, which, surprise surprise, came with a built-in dual layer burner. And then earlier in the week, I ran into an unboxed Samsung camcorder at Circuit City, a steal at just $300, with tax. That too is capable of writing dual layer DVDs (3 inches in diameter), and again, the dual layer media is nowhere in sight, I understand maybe in June. But now the dual layer media for the regular drives is in the store, so you can store almost 8 gigabytes of data on one of those DVDs.
And this is when you find out that you have a number of applications that will write to a dual layer DVD, but that not even the laptop that came with the drive built in has software to format one of those DVDs. Copying and writing to them, with on the fly format, yes, but preformatting so you can back up to them, forget it. Eventually, I ended up shelling out $70 to Roxio for its Easy Media Creator package, as my existing Easy CD/DVD Creator wouldn't handle the dual layer. To its credit, the Roxio product worked right out of the box, although its format loses you some 500 megabytes (that's half a gig, kids!) of storage space. Still, at 8 gigabytes, I can back up my Thinkpad to three DL discs, as opposed to the 5 single layer DVDs it used to take. Takes four hours, on a 2 Ghz. laptop via USB 2.0, and after that you can of course run incremental backups, something I do every day, when it takes only 5 minutes or so.
But at this point I ran into another problem that has really been staring me in the face for a long time - there is very little information packaged with equipment today - the manual tells you not to insert ham sandwiches into the disk slot, is clear about what cable it is that you need but don't have when you try to install the thing, but that's it, go to the manufacturer's website if you have a problem. But those websites only offer a downloadable version of that same manual, minus the Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Chinese and Swahili pages, while even the software manufacturers have little information about what their software actually does.
Often, you can resolve this by going to a magazine website where a product is reviewed, but even that does not always provide the needed information. In defense of the reviewers, they have to (I used to write product reviews for PCW and Design in the UK) produce a good number of reviews per month, they have to be published quickly, and you can't be an expert at everything, especially an issue if there aren't specific things you are looking for. Nevertheless, I ended up buying the Roxio software "on spec", assuming that it would work, and indeed it does. Something else I have never seen before is that the download of the two Media Creator files took ages - the total download, hold on to your hat, is a full gigabyte! But like I said, it works, and I got $10 off on account of my having CD/DVD Creator already. Then another first - I went to the Roxio website, looked at the pricing, then wanted to surf elsewhere to see if anybody had it cheaper - at which point Roxio put up a popup offering another $10 off if I bought now. Clever, that. I did.
The Samsung camcorder was another excercise in do-it-yourself-ness. I had been meaning to buy a direct-to-DVD digital camcorder for some time, and cheap as I am, I thought that none of the available units had everything I wanted at a low enough price. I simply have too much equipment and not enough use for it to want to shell out upwards of $500 for such a toy - given that I own two S-VHS camcorders, which have DVD resolution, a little better, actually. But the Samsung that was calling my name from a little table near the cashier's had not only the DVD writer feature, with dual layer capability to boot, but something else I totally crave: Digital Dolby. Between the dual layer and the Dolby you can record up to an hour of middling and 40 minutes of good video with superb surround digital audio, so at the price this was kind of a cool gadget.
When I sat down to play with it I found out something else - none of the reviewers had discovered this (they actually barely even mention the dual layer capability, and never talk about the Dolby recording), but the Samsung SC-DC164 can write video both to mini-DVD and mini-DV, where it can use various memory cards, and I have plenty of those for my digital still cameras. On a 2 gigabyte SD card it'll record about an hour of Div-X video (at 768x480, either 480i or 480p, I am not sure yet). And it'll be even more useful once the dual layer mini-DVDs are available, don't you know. It has found a home in one of my camera bags, next to a Nikon D50 with two lenses. You never know when you're in the field and might want to shoot some video as well as high quality stills, and the Samsung is small enough that it will slip into a corner of the bag, where it replaces the little AIPTek PocketDV 3500 I bought in Singapore, that does 640x480 video, mono audio only, and has no optical zoom. It has served me very well, many of the pictures at this site were taken with it.
Owell, back to Dr. Who and Billie Piper, a cracker if ever there was one, the good doctor's companions are getting decidedly more appealin'. If I ever run into her live, at least I can now camcorder her in stereo while I take pictures. Hehe.
Spotsylvania, Monday January 8 - The Buzz Factor
I was mailing with a friend in The Netherlands, the other day, as he was preparing to go to Vegas to attend the Consumer Electronics Show. I used to attend many of these shows, worldwide, CEBIT in Germany, CES in Singapore, and got to wondering why I don't bother any more. Especially since I, since my retirement, have a lot more time on my hands, and could.
The answer is probably the same answer I give when you ask me why I threw out my entire library, a few years ago, when I moved from Arlington to Spotsylvania. Those shows are obsolete, as are books. As a technologist, it behoves me to try and get all of my information using the available technologies, and as I now have high speed Internet access everywhere I go - cable broadband at home, EDGE anywhere else -, there is no reason to read paper pages, nor is there a reason to walk around at a show, listening to keynote speakers, and looking at exhibits.
Part of the reason is a very expensive lesson I learned while developing and implementing network technologies for the phone company. That is, expensive for the corporation, and potentially expensive for my career. Had I taken wrong technology implementation decisions during my lab tenure, as well as in the subsequent years I worked on techology implementation, I would not have sat here today, enjoying a full benefits pension, writing this in what used to be work time.
You see, any new product a manufacturer shows you is not ready. It has not been tested in the real world, it was designed on assumptions made by engineers, and it has as its prime driver making more $$s for the companies involved in it. To achieve that purpose, as much as possible, it will be a one-size-fits-all product, because that is the only way a new product will make money for its designers. Legend has it, for instance, that Apple Computer will introduce a new cellphone at CES, this week. I have some 30 working cellphones sitting around, as I write this, each one of which has particular features I wanted it for, and all I can say is that anything at all you might want to do with a cellphone is possible with a device that is on the market, today. So I can't think of a single reason why I would want an Apple cellphone, given that it is a company that is very good at exploiting niche markets, but not at addressing mass markets. You may say that the iPod is a mass market device, but I would counter that by pointing out that the portable music market is a niche market (a large niche market, I will concede) that was created by Sony, with its Walkman, not by Apple. Apple simply piggybacked on an existing concept, substituting new technology and the Buzz factor for what had only progressed to CD implementation. Almost forgotten, that's how the Macintosh came about, too - its easy to use windows-and-mouse desktop wasn't created by Apple, but by scientists at Xerox' Palo Alto PARC laboratory, and first implemented on the Xerox 820 CP/M PC in 1982. The Buzz factor is to do with marketing, not with technology, and applies to Motorola's Razr as much as it does to the iPod. Neither device does anything that isn't very capably done by myriads of other products.
For instance, with one exception, every single digital camera I have will store and play MP3 music files, as will every cellphone I have bought in the last three years. Even the Samsung camcorder I describe below can record and play MP3 files, both on mini-DVDs and on memory cards. And every cheap laptop I have will rip CDs, using software provided for free by Microsoft in its Windows Media Player. If, to be Buzz competitive, you need an iPod so you can keep up with the Joneses, it is not because it is the easiest way to carry music around with you - it is actually an additional device to carry, additional to the cellphone and laptop every well connected teenager has.
And that is why I am not terribly excited about CES. It is put on by a bunch of old guys like me, who are not well connected to the future. You see, more than ever before the next generation is grabbing the technologies we invented, and doing things with them we old guys had never dreamt of. That never used to be the case. Most technologies you could buy weren't multi-purpose, and reinventing them was something few people ever did, or even aspired to. But computer technology has changed all that, a technology advanced to the point that almost anything electrical can have a programmable computer "embedded". And minituarization of wireless communication makes it possible for those devices to talk to each other, and to you. Bear in mind, though, that both computer and cellular technologies were created, invented if you will, in the 1960s, they're old and are reaching the end of their development cycle. Inventing new uses for old technologies has never made those technologies last much longer - eventually, we'll have a small chipset that does all the computing and communicating we need, and it becomes just another component.
So what I want to see is a 13 year old keynote speaker, next CES. A lad. One that is an everyday user of our aging technologies, and one who will tell us what he wants to do with technology, but can't, today, and who will tell us what he is going to invent to make that work. Next CES would have been Bill Gates' last performance, anyway, now that he is moving on to infectious diseases, but I vote that this is his last, and we roll out the next generation. A job well done, Bill, but done nevertheless. To paraphrase the most well known New Yorker after Rudy Giuliani, "combover" Donald Trump: "Bill, you're Fired!"
With honours, of course..
Spotsylvania, Tuesday January 9 - Do you know where your face is?
Before I start today's Rant, I guess we must congratulate shock jock Howard Stern on his multi-million dollar bonus. I thought he'd disappear forever when he left broadcast radio, but this proves that I, too, can be wrong. I just can't get over how he built such a large and loyal following showing naked girls - on radio.
I come from a very much "stiff upper lip" culture, growing up in The Hague, comparable to Washington in that it is the seat of government, but it also has the International Courts of Justice, was the center of Dutch world power in the colonial era, surrounded by university towns that once were an important part of the European Ivy League. An Anglophile town, too, so much stiff upper lip that when I eventually moved to the United Kingdom life there fit me like a glove.
And I had really no reason to expect otherwise in the United States - another Anglophile country, where many British values, not to mention Magna Carta and British civil law, became the foundation for a New Republic. I was reminded of my original expectations of America and Americans when reading Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen's article about contrition, or the lack thereof, in American leading circles.
You see, what I discovered, over time, is that Americans are a much more emotional people than I would have expected. I was brought home to me by one of my ex-wives, a Frenchwoman, Meditteranean enough that I sometimes thought I was having an argument with the entire population of Marseille, who actually had an easier time fitting into her American work environment than I did, and generally came to learn that this pervades, in America. No stiff upper lips - well, with the exception of my best man, but then he, like I, came here from London. And then I noticed something else, and I believe that that really is what Ms. Quindlen means when she writes about contrition: loss of face is a major issue, not only in faraway lands, but among Americans.
I had always known that loss of face is important in Asia and the Middle East, we learned, traders that we are, how to work around that, how to let someone back down without loss of face, after a mistake, learned that "yes" is contextual and can mean lots of things including "no", and learned that "it will be ready next week" meant that you could come and check on progress next week, provided you did so cautiously, and made sure you never got upset or told the person what they'd said the week before, and that every week, after all, is a next week.
What I didn't know is that Americans, insofar as one can generalize, function pretty much the same way. And that, as a consequence, George W. President could never in a million years turn around and say "I got it wrong", and put the wheels in motion to fix it. It is something that we, in "old Europe", were taught from day one - if you mess up, and you can't turn the situation in the right direction, you have to back off, admit defeat, and thereby create the room necessary to correct the situation. It is the old adage of never throwing good money after bad. How pervasive and important this is former Somali/Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali found out the hard way - she f***** up, really bigtime, and then thought she could take the American style high road - well in the saddle, shout down her opponents, manouver around the problem, and politic happily ever after. Well, here, maybe, but not in Old Europe - she won the fight, but lost the battle, and was run out of Dodge.
And this isn't just the usual rant about how bad Dubya is, and how we are going to fix it. It is the actual American voter that I worry about - the Iraq debacle has been a debacle more or less from the week after, and the vast majority of well informed Americans could have known then it was going to be a bloody mess. And now it gets worse - we could have whisked Sadam Hussein away, like so many other defrocked potentates, but after all that, and after over 3,000 American dead, we had to let him be executed by a bunch of Iraqi hooligans with the latest model camera phone, and a broadband connection. In so doing, we made absolutely sure his demise became reality TV, Iraq style, on CNN and YouTube, you just cannot make this stuff up. By the way, folks, those were not ski masks the executioners were wearing. There's no snowy slopes in Iraq, only slippery ones. Those head coverings are called balaclavas.
You see, America had one chance to put a stop to all this, in the 2004 presidential election. But no such luck, the President got put back in the White House, as if the previous four years had been really good for America. And now I am wondering whether perhaps the majority of the American voting population was suffering from the same syndrome: please, no loss of face. Because voting him out would have been a clear statement that we didn't like what he did in his first term, that he was all wet. And by not doing that, he got a clear mandate that said that we thought he was doing just fine, Carry On George. It took another two years for the nation to turn around and recognize that this really is a disaster, that is has always been a disaster, that it is growing like the boil on your bum, and that the only politicians who can lance the boil are the Democrats, because: they cannot lose face over something they didn't cause. But now, of course, President Bush does not face another election, so he has nothing to lose, and we're now getting the solution, tomorrow, the solution that in six years of trying generals we couldn't find - plenty of those around, the joke around the Army is that colonels get promoted to the Pentagon so generals have someone to fetch their coffee. I am not so much worried about the money - much of what we spend on the Iraq activities actually is spent inside the United States. But are we really going to send more troops out there, so we can get even more body bags and limbless soldiers back? For what?
Look at Northern Island, look at Basque Spain, look at Chechnya - insurgencies cannot be won by military might, it's been tried, and it has always failed, they last for 30 years or more - and those are without "foreign fighters". When I am in Munich I always stop by a World War Two memorial, just outside of the city, near a former Nazi airfield that is now used by the Border Police. It is well hidden, hardly even visible from the service road that runs past it, and isn't on any map. In the grounds, there is a wall with soil from all of the former German territories that were lost to Germany, after the war. Territories in what is now Poland, Russia, Namibia. Glass bricks contain soil from the farms and the towns that were once German, faded photographs of Bauernhöfe, of long dead Nazi officers proudly wearing the Iron Cross with Clover Leaves. The last ferry boat to leave Danzig is sitting in the middle of that memorial, a dull gray steel casket memorizing some 300,000 ethnic Germans it had to leave behind, that day in 1945, to face the advancing hordes of the Red Army, shock troops from Mongolia who had never seen a faucet or a water closet, and weren't taking prisoners. Every time I visit there are always fresh flowers there, although I have never seen a visitor during any of my brief visits.
That is to me the perfect example of the end of a war you cannot win. Everybody loses, and eventually nobody wants to remember any more. Because: they lost face, they did not fix it when they could, and then it was too late.
Spotsylvania, Saturday January 13 - Brain? What brain?
To those of us born overseas, being bilingual is second nature enough that one doesn't think about it - only occasionally, when I am speaking Dutch or German to somebody on the phone, and get funny looks from colleagues. Unlike some, I don't necessarily think it is a shortcoming of Americans not to speak multiple languages - growing up, I had my choice of different languages a couple of hours drive from my home, and you sort of had to learn those of the countries you'd travel to or through. Americans don't have that necessity - a fair amount do speak Spanish - I was amused to hear Italian-American friends in Manhattan speak Spanish with their staff, but then that is not a stretch, if you speak Italian, and more surprisingly, many Korean merchants have learned Spanish as well, for the same reason.
But researchers at York University in Toronto have now discovered the onset of dementia in elderly people is delayed for those who lead bilingual lives (as opposed to being able to speak multiple languages), leading one to suspect that mental excercise is excercise, and has excercise effects - the brain is just another muscle.
As I said, being multilingual (I am at least tri-lingual, discounting French, which I do speak but am not fluent in) is something one doesn't much think about, but over the years it has become a sometimes disconcerting phenomenon. When I was young and living in Europe, I spoke a bunch of languages (more than I do today, actually), and I was able to translate between them, as well. But after living in Anglo-Saxon territories for over thirty years, and concentrating on fluency in English (which for me comprises of two distinct languages, British English and American English), I find that I can still speak all these other languages, and understand a few more, but really cannot translate between them - they are no longer really "live" for me. And I find that I think in English 99% of the time - I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but the reason why someone may not speak a language well is often that they think in their native language.
More often than not, this is caused by the desire to maintain one's original culture, something that many immigrants (erroneously) connect to their native language. So many immigrants will switch back to their native language when they are home, in their own communities, or with their family. Usually, it serves little purpose - the kids hate it, they usually have little connection to a culture they have never experienced, and it prevents the older immigrant from becoming fluent in English, which can be a career or even job impediment. With the discussions about integration that go on in Europe it is clear that they're discovering what we in America have known for a long time - immigrants, at least the first generation, do not integrate well. It isn't until the kids grow up, go to school, then go to college and out into the world, that integration happens, because they mostly end up not living in their ethnic communities, and paying lip service to maintaining a culture they never knew in the first place. To some extent I am personally familiar with this - my father grew up in the colonies, and even those Dutch who returned from the East Indies after independence maintained a distinct cultural identity of their own, although they had enough sense to make sure we children had a fully European upbringing.
As the Irish and the Polish and the Germans did before them, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Indians and the Russians all maintain their cultural identity for a generation or so, and then water it down to the religious holidays and ethnic food. So perhaps the Europeans should be less concerned about the way Islamists want to build their own segregated societies in Western Europe. They'll lock up their daughters, pray four times a day, have their Islamic mortgages and halal food, and they will do that for a generation, and then the kids will, fed up with the restrictive lifestyle, take over and participate in a society they feel they have a right to.
There was a fire alarm in my building, a few weeks ago, and after the all clear, when we all filed back in, I noticed one of my colleagues in the throng ahead of me. He was barefoot on sandals (this is mid winter) and holding his prayer mat. Nobody gave him a second look, and I guess he went back to his prayers, having been interrupted by the fire alarm. I had assumed him to be from Pakistan, but had never wondered about his religion - that's something one doesn't discuss, or overtly display, in one's work environment.
That, to me, is integration. The other stuff is just noise.
Spotsylvania, Sunday January 14 - 67° @ 11am - what's with the weather?
I am kind of hoping that by the close of business on Monday, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs Charles Stimson will be looking for a job. The White House needs to understand there are a lot of good dyed-in-the-wool Americans out there, and that by now many of us think that disagreeing with the Administration makes them even better Americans. We cannot be reminded often enough that there were seven years between the two World Trade Center attacks, and that there is nothing we are doing in Iraq or Guantanamo that will prevent the next attack from happening.
My sister is planning to scan her slides (she has been an avid 35mm photographer for many years) into her PC, and so I have been looking at ways she could do that. For now she has chosen to use her new Nikon D50, and that set me looking on the Internet how much a decent 35mm slide scanner goes for, these days. There actually is one that is just under $100, and has an 1800 dpi (dots per inch) resolution - that would equate to about 25 megapixels. Not bad, at the price, not quite enough for professional use, meaning that a professional scanner should be able to produce a scan good enough for a magazine center spread, which can run up to 4 pages, but good enough for just about anything else.
And that brought me back to my own scanner, a ten year old Microtek Scanmaker 35t Plus, it uses the just about obsolete SCSI interface. Microtek does not support that for Windows XP, and after trying to get it set up on one of my newer laptops I had to come to the conclusion I needed to think about getting another scanner, or load Windows NT on one of my computers. A lot of manufacturers do that, discontinue support for older equipment, not realizing that their customers are much more likely to buy their equipment if they know they'll be able to use it 'till kingdom come.
This Microtek has a resolution of 1950 x 1950 dpi, some 56 megapixels in interpolated mode, and that really is all I will ever need, especially now that the printed press is making way for the online press, where the required resolution is much lower. Besides, at 1950 dpi I can see the grain in most film. So as a last test, I decided to dive into my software archive, and load one of Microtek's older drivers, one that is no longer at Microtek's website. And guess what - that driver, a generic Windows 32 bit driver, works just fine under Windows XP. Problem solved, and I don't have to buy a new scanner (which would not have been a Microtek anyway, Pacific Image has some really good scanners at very nice prices). As it turns out it is quite a bit faster, under Windows XP, than I ever remember it running. The scan itself only takes 45 to 60 seconds, but older systems took their sweet time transferring and then displaying a picture that big. My 2 Ghz Thinkpad does it all in a flash.
The picture above is one I tested with, last night. 1978, if I recall, I had just come off the Concorde from New York at Paris Le Bourget, where we had ended up because the weather prevented us from landing at Charles de Gaulle. After circling for a while we had little fuel left and so had no choice but to put in at Le Bourget.
Spotsylvania, Tuesday January 16 - Retirement
Apart from my being totally discombobulated that I was able to take early retirement, with vested pension, benefits and a paid up Social Security pension (my ex-wives will all tell you I spend money faster than I make it, but living in America must have changed me), I sometimes think about what I am going to do when I get older. Here in the US, 59 is kind of a middle age, in contrast to much of Europe, where at 50 you're more or less written off, on your way to the retirement home. My guess is that that came about because at least the Northern Europeans worked, for decades, on lowering the retirement age, only to find that in the 21st century the economy cannot sustain the cost. So in the Netherlands, today, the worker over 50 is basically too expensive and unemployable, while at the bottom end employers can't find enough young cheap workers.
Here in the United States, when you hit your fifties and you've done time with the Fortune 100 or a civil service, you can in many cases take early retirement, and then go back to work as a contractor or entrepreneur. Many of my former colleagues with NYNEX in New York are back working for Verizon, bringing their expertise and experience where it is needed, while being paid out of a different kitty, and not needing benefits. My phone started ringing before I even left the company, and although I cannot come back for six months, due to Federal regulations, it is comforting to know I won't have any problems finding work once I feel the need to do that. Half (really!) the delis and coffee shops in my local area are owned by retired blue collar New Yorkers, who took their savings and bought or opened a coffee-and-sandwich shop, and are doing very well. I can at least today get a decent cappucino, locally, which wasn't always the case in rural Virginia.
But beyond that is the question of what to do when one gets older. I got to thinking about this when I talked to a neighbour who is buying into a local retirement community. He told me how that works, and I had of course seen the notices by a local building company, teamed up with a large developer, that is building a gated retirement community some 10 miles from where I live, on former farmland along State Route 3.
What these companies do is hire locally embedded advisors, who have contacts within the community, lodges, churches, and so find out what the older locals are looking for, then designing a made-to-measure elder community, where they ostensibly get all they're used to while living in their own community. Clever? Maybe for the developer, I am not so sure it is a good deal for the old folks buying into the concept.
From what I hear the price of an average home in the development equates closely to what a home in the community costs - and that means that if my neighbour buys in all of the equity he has will disappear straight into the developer's pockets. Not only that - when you sign up for the deal, they require you to put your home on the market within a week. And while there is a backout clause in case you don't sell your home, of course the old folk (he is in his seventies) are under pressure to make this deal happen, because many of the people from his local church are considering it, there are only so many homes available, and the care provided should see him and his wife through to the end of their lives, and that's not easy to come by, if you like to go on living and shopping where you always did. You can of course add to this that the real estate market isn't on the up and up, right now - three houses on my street are for sale, and have been, for over six months - a year ago, they'd have been snapped up inside of two weeks.
What I see as drawbacks are some to me very obvious things: he'll be living in a geriatric community, surrounded by other old folk - no young people, no kids, nobody going to work in the morning, little community interface. As one gets older, and less inclined to drive all the way to WalMart, everything one needs will be available locally, but at a significant markup. And while the house will be paid up, the equity cushion is gone, and only one's pension (in his case, that's less than $30,000 a year) and one's savings are now available to live on (and pay maintenance charges with). Add to that that you can't sell the house easily - there are many restrictions, and only elderly folk will want to live in an elder community - and you can see why I think these people aren't afforded a comfortable retirement, but basically boxed into a situation where most of their remaining $$s will be going into the developer's deep pockets, although, admittedly, their basic needs will be taken care of.
On top of that, he and his wife will be marooned in a development that will, within the next three years, be surrounded by commercial developments and shopping malls, on one side a mall is being built as we speak. From the location of the development, there will be nowhere to go without a car, and once one can no longer drive one is completely dependent on the community shuttles that will, at prearranged times, go to the nearest mall. Anything else will either have to go through the development office, or their children. The amount of property, number of cars, etc, they can take is limited, so woodworking in one's shed out back is out of the question, because there won't be a shed out back. That, to me, is one of the perks of old age, do what you want to do.
One thing I can tell you now is that when the time comes I would rather buy an apartment in New York City, or perhaps in a city in the deep South, where I will be able to live within the community, and walk to the shops. Where I can interact with young people, and have the benefits of the elder care available within the city. Where there are perhaps a doorman, a super, and neighbours to talk to, and where I can perhaps teach at a local school, or do other community oriented things. Because while I understand what drives my neighbour, I don't necessarily think this is as good a deal as it is made out to be. Because: you want to be happy, and I would think they'd feel locked up, after a while, with their money largely irretrievable, and contracts making it impossible to change their mind. I guess time will tell, and I may be all wet, I have no idea what it feels like to be 74, looking at your remaining years...
Spotsylvania, Thursday January 18 - Joke? What joke?
The Christian Science Monitor has an article today about the Muslim sitcom that has just begun broadcasting in Canada. I hope it gets picked up here - perhaps PBS can make an effort to get this culturally significant program, which I do think is in the public interest.
But at the end of the article a spokesman for the Muslim Canadian Congress is quoted as saying "It was a tremendous lost opportunity, I can imagine non-Muslims watching this and saying, 'my God, these people are bizarre.' "
Well, sport, you hit the nail right on the head. The first time I had my driver in Jakarta put me and my car by the side of the road, next to a mosque, and ran off to go say prayers, I thought this was, at the very minimum, unusual. And I am hardly a non-com, I had been briefed and was very familiar with Islam, due to my Dutch education, and to having a couple of Sufi friends I grew up with, back in The Netherlands. Then there was the Arab gentleman at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, who slapped my face because I, a non-believer, was looking him straight in the eye after I physically stopped him jumping the queue - "Ne me regarde pas!". Then when I figured out I really should be sleeping on the other side of the hotel I was staying at, as they'd given me a room facing the local mosque, and that would call for prayers at 5 in the morning, some of their oversize loudspeakers pointing right at my bedroom, I knew everyday Islam was - well, let's be PC, different.
It isn't that I don't understand the religion - but I wonder why mainstream Islam has so many attributes that require its followers to be so different, require their lives to be controlled 24/7 by their religion (belief is something entirely different). A continual interruption of one's day by mandatory prayers, dress that can make one stand way out from everybody else, prohibitions and regulations governing the interaction between the sexes, rules and behavioural patterns that govern one's interaction with people who are not religious Islamists - what is that all about? I lived and worked in an orthodox Jewish community in North London for many years, embedded enough that after I moved to New York, Jewish friends came to sit shivah when my father passed away, and while the rules in Judaism are generally as strict as they are in Islam, Jews outside of Israel have generally found and accepted a way of practicing their religion that doesn't interfere with society around them. New Yorkers in particular are used to Jewish businesses shutting down on the Saturday, some staying open with non-Jewish staff, but that's about as far as it goes. Ortodox Jewish women cover their head too, but do so using a wig, and that's an effective way of complying with your religious requirements without offending or alienating anybody.
Perhaps it is that Jews have always been traders and tradesmen, and have found that one can't be successful in business without integrating into the society one serves. At the dawn of Western civilization, the Arab world had well developed science, science that helped form the basis for Western language, mathematics, and engineering. But from the trading perspective, Arab traders brought a religion that supplanted local religions in many places - look at Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, none of which started out as Islamic countries. I am not suggesting here that Muslims are intolerant, but it may well be that Islam is.
Judaism can be too - in London, I would normally join my partner's family on Friday evening to say Kiddush, and I recall well that visiting relatives from Eilath were so abhorred by my presence at the breaking of the bread that they went to another room to pray, and would not join. And don't think it is all in the Middle East - I have friends who were excommunicated from their Dutch orthodox protestant church - for moving to the United States.
Spotsylvania, Wednesday January 17 - Retirement II
Hard on the heels of my "retirement" rant, below, comes an article in USA Today about programs that let seniors age in their homes, in what are called "naturally occurring retirement communities", or NORC, for short. These are state funded programs, although Congress has approved inclusion of NORC programs in the Older Americans Act. Unlike the commercial venture I describe below, a NORC program then is a way of reusing existing resources (homes mostly paid up and largely already adapted for elder use) with funding by taxpayers and charitable organizations. By comparison, when my sister moved back to The Netherlands from France, she qualified for elder housing in Amsterdam from the day she hit 50 (as I explain below, for some reason 50 is a writeoff age in The Netherlands - I read about it in the Dutch papers, but have a hard time understanding why). And that elder housing is, in rental happy Holland, a ground floor apartment with the amenities one would need once disabled (which she isn't, but this is standard), a sit down shower, no doorsills, and even a small garden. The major advantage of doing this is that the older person lives in an otherwise normal community, can walk to the shops and interact with the neighbour's kids, isn't taken out of the community. Especially the walk-and-talk aspects are very important for a senior's mental and physical health.
Anyway, this is just a footnote to the rant below. The reason why I ranted at all is that much of what a senior has saved, in the below example, goes into the deep pockets of a developer, when in the case of a NORC development much of life's spoil eventually flows through to the kids or other heirs, and benefits, in many cases, the community directly. Having older folk being able to keep an eye on the children as they play outside is something that used to come natural, in village societies, and the idea that this is maintained in suburban communities I think is more than appealing, it prevents communities from turning into bedroom communities. So I would suggest that as part of age planning, one might look for NORC programs, and eventually move to somewhere such a program is available. Or perhaps get with the local council and the AARP, and start one of your own. Gives you something to do, too, while many charitable organizations have funding for just those kinds of activities.
Spotsylvania, Friday January 19 - Barking at the Han
As research goes, this is an incentive to better define research grants: German researchers report that Viagra at higher dosages may cause impaired olfactory function, a.k.a., the ability to smell. Earlier research reported a drop in nasal airflow, as a consequence of taking Viagra, while I have also noted that Viagra may affect sight, in some cases. Hoe does a urologist get to the patient's nose? Did the Viagra make 'em stand up straight? Did they start at the wrong end?
So, concluding, I guess what we're looking at here is that if you take Viagra you're going to have to get around the bedroom by touch, as you may neither be able to smell, nor to see where you're going. You may, drat the thought, even have to remember his name...
Umm, OK. The Chinese have the ability to take a ballistic missile, and hit a geostationary satellite with it. Until proven otherwise, that classifies, in my book, as a self defense weapon. No arms race in space that I can see, they haven't put anything up there that would qualify as "arms". And all this talk about debris.. I haven't seen any evidence of debris - there was a report that the hit was physical, no explosive device involved, and we really do not know how they did it, but I would suggest that anybody who talks about debris provides some evidence.
Perhaps it is because I come from a small country, where we're brought up to always assess our opponent's strengths and capabilities, but it is anathema to me why anybody would want to piss of the Chinese. These are not people we can intimidate, these aren't people that need us, and these are people that could really hurt us, if they wanted to. Think about it.
There are a couple billion of them, they have more resources than anybody else, they produce some 70 to 80% of everybody's consumer products, they have rivers of money, they have very advanced technology, engineers and scientists (many of whom we trained), and they live in a part of the world where it is not unusual for a shuttle aircraft to be a 747-400. Their politicians don't have to worry about the next election, but can plan and fund 20 year projects, and they have fellow countrymen running restaurants in every residential neighbourhood in the entire freakin' world. Here in the US, Chinese restaurant staff speak Spanish as well as English and Chinese, and they maintain and fund their own neighbourhoods in cities all over the world. They run 24 hour English language satellite channels that can be received all over the world, with English, American and Australian anchors resident in China, and fluent in Chinese. They build Formula 1 racetracks and Maglev railways to-get-to-the-airport just because they feel like it. They believe in socialism, and their main religion is not based on a divinity, but on an enlightened human being.
Maybe I am too simplistic, but why would you want to antagonize these folks? Do you think that criticizing them, and asking for the Chinese to publicly justify themselves, is something they would even for three seconds worry about? I read these stupid comments about how the Chinese did this missile test "in secret". Well, kids, I have news for you, you can't launch a missile and hit a satellite "in secret". There is too much detection hardware looking at everything going up, and coming down. You can certainly refrain from doing a press release, but that is not the same thing as "secret". So - no boasting, no noise, a simple missile test. And apparently they hit the bugger square on the nose. Hole in one, too.
So, kids, there is a new superpower. It's called China. It's populated by largely friendly people, busy improving their lives, and furthering their economy. They work hard, don't mess around, and deliver value for money. And if I ever got tempted to yell at them, or be nasty to them, I'd remember: not a good idea. They're bigger 'n us. They've already proven that if they sacrifice half their army the remainder is still larger than all of ours together. And remember that the troops that took Berlin, house by bloody house, the troops that ocupied Vienna, weren't Russian - they were Mongolian. I don't know that we want to deal with Genghis Khan a third time. Be nice. Find out what they want, keep 'em happy. Let them plink As long as they shoot straight up, the worst that can happen is, they hit the moon. Which is pretty much unoccupied these days.
Spotsylvania, Sunday January 21 - Retirement III
Friends and family ask me how I am enjoying my retirement - I have to tell you this is big time procrastination rather than anything else. I have a tremendous amount of things to do around the house, and with regard to my finances, although the latter I can only truly commence when Verizon gets around to giving me my money. This has generally been a disappointment, from the perspective of the treatment one gets as an employee - I am told it takes an entire month to deposit severance pay, while the way Verizon's outsourced Human Resources vendor Hewitt Associates handles the employee business is fairly outrageous. After initiating my retirement process, completely guided by one of their specialists, at the beginning of October(!) they have managed to get every single aspect of the process wrong, down to the date that my payment will be made. It is understandable that they protect their client, but at the same time Hewitt actually breaks laws to build its databases - their system and their staff, for instance, insist on collecting social security numbers for beneficiaries, even those outside the USA. For EU citizens, that is a breach of the European privacy directive - I really can't give them other people's social security numbers, nor do they need those. The tax number isn't needed until payments are made, and they really then ought to contact the recipient and ask them to provide it. In this day and age of identity theft, for anyone to maintain large databases with addresses and social security numbers is asking for trouble, and if you think about it, they do this on behalf of their client, Verizon Communications, thereby potentially exposing them to a huge lawsuit. Within Verizon, the databases that have sensitive information are only accessible from the Intranet - Hewitt's I can log into directly from anywhere on the global Internet.
Having reinstalled my 35mm scanner (see "What's with the weather", below) I have found that my Thinkpad does better with the XnView graphics application (freeware from the maker, a French software developer who has written a truly professional package) than with any of the paid-for software I have. XnView is one of the very few graphics packages that will read Nikon's professional uncompressed NEF digital picture format - that is unique in that there are few camera manufacturers that give you access to the uncompressed picture data from the camera, but their D-series of cameras have that ability. You will eventually normally use a compression format to do anything with the picture, but having the ability to decide what to compress, and how much, and process the raw data, is a boon for any photographer.
Anyway, I found the above picture of her Britannic Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in my files, and thought I'd show it to you. Shot during the Royal Tournament at London's Earl's Court exhibition halls sometime in the early 1980s, I don't recall ever using this picture, in which a couple of girls from the Dutch Dairy Bureau in London are presenting her (and Prince Charles, not seen in this picture) with a basket of Dutch cheeses. The girls lived close to me, I was living on the Mortlake Road, part of the North Circular, at the time, and they were just across the river Thames from me, a ten minute walk, a flat full of pretty Dutch chicks in Kew. As I was the closest Dutch anything, in the days before Internets and cheap international calls, I spent a lot of time there, and they would stop by my house on their bicycles. Ah, life was good....
Umm, no, you can't just sneak up on the Queen to shoot a picture - I was an official correspondent in England, at the time, for my Dutch publishers, VNU, who do most of their business in the US now, and have finally renamed themselves "The Nielsen Company".
And yes, installing a slide scanner you don't imminently need, then scanning 25 year old slides, that's "procrastinating".
Spotsylvania, Tuesday January 23 - Sustainable
I recently read an article in the Philadelphia Enquirer about using logging debris to generate electricity, something that is in the Pacific Northwest done on a small scale, but was never attractive enough due to the low cost of energy. It brought me to think about my own use of wood to heat my house - of course I had to pay for the land on which the trees grow, but I do heat for free, every winter, and wood is a renewable resource.
So, to bore especially you city slickers immensely, I thought I would, over the winter, look at the actual energy efficiency of my heating. You see, I used to be a city slicker too, and I never thought that what folks out in the country do was recycling, but now that I am out there, I have found it actually is. Many of us burn our own wood, we bring our recyclables to the county dump, where there is far more product recycling done than you'd have in the city (I'll get back to that), and we take our water from a well and clean and return it using a septic tank. There is a minimum standard for permitted land use, in the Commonwealth of Virginia - if you are not connected to a communal or city water and sewer installation, you must have a minimum of three acres (1.2 hectares) per family home.
This isn't a rant just about septic systems - think about how many people live on five acres in a city, or in suburbia, it just puts a different spin on sustainability. Pollution isn't just about the amount of waste per person, one would need to look at the amont of waste per person per square foot, or perhaps even per person per cubic foot. Look at it this way - my trees absorb carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere - while burning wood does release carbon dioxide back into the environment, it is a form of recycling, I don't just produce carbon dioxide, for as long as I maintain growth on the property. The same goes for waste water - using the septic toilet system and the waste disposal system under my sink, organic waste I produce is recycled back into the soil. Due to the size of our urban environments, we have long since lost the capability to recycle waste from cities, the best we can do is to get rid of the waste, despite efforts to recycle some of the urban waste.
I don't really know how much I can burn without running at a net loss. It isn't as simple as growing a new tree for each tree you harvest - that would mean, in the case of this oak tree, waiting for 60 years until the next one grows. But in the woods, each tree you cut frees up nutrition, water as well as light for the surrounding trees to grow - the only reason they grow as tall as they do is that they compete with surrounding trees for light. Each tree is surrounded by four or five other mature trees, and perhaps twenty or thirty young trees in various stages of growth. And they grow at quite a clip - I've had to cut down four or five trees, in the past three years, that grew into the line of sight of one of my satellite dishes. Left to its own devices, a tree will grow vertically until it has direct light on all sides, and then start spreading out to cover a larger surface, and add girth to support itself. And as I have noticed in my bit of America, once a tree grows beyond a certain height, dictated by its competing with its neighbours, it'll eventually fall over. Many don't make it, as ants and beetles invade trees from below, and over the years hollow it out as they build larger and larger nests, while there are insects that actually feed on wood.
The wood in the picture above, which I sawed and brought in yesterday, is good for about a week's worth of heating my entire home (two floors, 3000 square feet). It constitutes approximately one third of a mature, 60 year old, oak tree. The logs are 12 inches in diameter, 10 inches long, and weigh about 40 lbs each (oak is dense and heavy), so the total load of 16 logs weighs some 600 lbs (280 kgs) and is 14 feet (4 metres) long. The old adage is that wood heats you twice, once when you harvest it, and again when you burn it, and that is completely true. I put myself in the picture so you have an idea of size and volume - the diameter of the log I am pointing at is 12 inches, 30 centimetres. Why logs? Up to a point, dictated by the size of the firebox, the larger the piece of wood, the longer it will burn. A woodstove like mine is much more efficient with split logs than with conventional firewood. Once my stove is hot (temperature at the top of the firebox some 650° Fahrenheit, or 350° Centigrade, that is a smokeless "clean burn" temperature where the wood gasifies, rather than burns), I feed it these logs split in two, and I don't split them until they're completely dried out, when it is much easier to do so.
What I will do is dig up energy bills from my former home in Arlington, where I used a gas insert in the A/C for heating, and convert the values so we can compare, both in terms of caloric yield, and cost. It is hard to convert this to the common measure for wood, the cord, because you don't really have control over the origin of the firewood, in a purchased cord, which is measured by volume and not by weight - I estimate from practice that you would need three times the amount of ash or white oak to generate the same amount of heat than you get from a given amount of red oak (the wood you're looking at).
Although this particular tree I took down because it grew into the sight path of one of my satellite dishes, most of what I burn is wood from trees that fell spontaneously, normally as a consequence of a winter storm. After six months on the ground, they're well "seasoned" (I discovered that that is a euphemism for "dead"), and then all I have to do is bring them to the room my stove is in, where they dry for an additional week before they're ready to burn. I discovered that drying out the logs outside takes months, drying them in an airconditioned house takes a week. Before you emulate me, do not do this unless you're prepared to give them a good spray with insecticide, you're otherwise carrying termites, carpeter ants, beetles and roaches (not the city type, but the type that lives outdoors) into your home.
Ah, yes, I do of course mean heating using a closed woodstove, not a fireplace. Fireplaces are nice, but unless you have a fireplace insert with forced air circulation, it'll heat the outdoors more than it'll heat you - inserts are safer too, being fully enclosed, with heat resistant glass doors. Those inserts aren't all that expensive, by the way, if you don't want to go to the expense of a full blown stove, it depends on how much heating you will want to do. My guess is that two inserts equal one woodstove, and one high efficiency woodstove with a heat output of 70,000 BTUs is enough to heat an entire three bedroom family home. This presumes that the house is fitted with ducting that will let the heat circulate upstairs, and I do not mean A/C ducting. The flipside of using this type of stove the way I do is that it is useless when the outside temperature is 35 degrees or higher. It simply produces too much heat. But it's been down to 10 degrees outside, and it'll keep the house toasty even then. Above 35, I use my heat pumps, which at that temperature provide ample heat at reasonable cost.
On a closing note, Jonathan Alter comments as follows on Senator Webb, who gave the Democratic response to George W. President's State of the Union address: "Could this help land Webb on the 2008 ticket? Maybe, though he was a stiff and unsmiling candidate in Virginia and he's been married three times."
He doesn't list that my fashionably left wing ex-wife in New York gave to the Webb campaign, but other than that, I can only say that that means Senator Webb is like the rest of us. His current wife is a Vietnamese immigrant. Way to go, Jim. I mean that - son in Iraq, dad on the Berlin airlift, Vietnam veteran himself. I bet his dress code for the White House would be "dedicated". Good pick, Zab.
Spotsylvania, Monday January 29 - Sustainable II
It is highly amusing to read about the President's recommendations, and the comments that run through the press - because, of course, the problems with energy consumption and pollution cannot be solved at the back end, which is what "green" is mostly about.
The true problems are the spread of urbanization, and the population migration - the latter from the third world, where millions are on the move to more affluence, and an increased consumption of energy. They then (and we are seeing this happen today in India and China) take their affluence and consumption standards back home, and create more consumption there. I can see the effect in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area - on my side alone, the HOV lanes will be pulled through another 30 or so miles, from Quantico to Fredericksburg, while the military are actually moving offices into D.C., rather than out into the hinterland. As if the largest office building in the world, the Pentagon, weren't enough, the Air Force and the Marines have built memorials, one outside the Navy Annex, the other at Quantico Base, that are both taller than a 10 storey building. The one at Quantico sits right under a Washington National Airport approach path, shining tens of thousands of watts of light straight up.
Virginia Governor Kaine is making efforts to improve traffic around Washington, and the President wants to reduce our energy consumption by some 20%. But at the same time we're building and buying more cars, and moving more businesses and workers into urban areas. Rather than taking the CIA and the Marines and an Air Force base and moving them to Wisconsin, where they would provide employment and income and reduce the load on the overburdened East Coast infrastructure, new office buildings and government department expansions are rocketing up all over the Washington Metropolitan area, where the subway ran out of capacity years ago. This at the same time that Shanghai announces they're building two new long distance high speed trains, to support their growing infrastructure. And despite our ability to work remotely, to have video conferencing over the Internet, and share large files and presentations that way, there is a jet that lands at National every 45 seconds, all day, from 6am to 10pm, jets that are now less noisy so that they are permitted to land later. And that is just one of the three local airports, in one city on one coast.
Much of our oil comes from Canada, so worrying about reliance on foreign oil is ridiculous. For one thing, once we increase our efficiency so we use 20% less energy, the population will have grown another 30% - in the 20+ years I have lived in the United States, we've somehow put on an additional 50 million people, that is about three times the population of my home country, The Netherlands. It is not just a percentage excercise, that's three entire countries' worth of people. In 2006, more than a billion cellphones were manufactured and sold - almost 50% of the planet's population has a telephone. I don't even want to begin to think about the amount of electricity it takes to charge a billion mobile phones.
The Europeans are not exempt, either. In The Netherlands, the foreign born population is approaching 20%. Even though a lot of Dutch emigrate, mostly inside of the European Union (and I don't think of that as emigration, any more than that I emigrated from New York to Virginia), there is a net immigration quota - i.e., people from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Caribbean come to Holland to take part in its affluence, while indigenous Dutchpeople emigrate to places where they require new and energy intensive infrastructure, like the new retiree enclaves around the Mediterranean.
All I am saying is that we are doing it to ourselves. It's not going to get solved by growing ethanol, or buying hybrid SUVs. My 350 hp V-8 engine was once spectacular - today, you can buy a 500 hp BMW sedan. A car that requires all sorts of limiters and controllers and special software, because to handle 500 horses requires a fair amount of special training, training only racing and rallye drivers have. And bigger tires, with more and stickier rubber, and..... but I am sure you get my drift, yes? Green - it is just a colour, not an effective policy.
Spotsylvania, Sunday January 28 - Windoze
I spent a fair amount of time, the past couple of days, talking my sister through reinstalling Windows XP on her desktop computer. She has been hit by viruses on a number of occasions, usually the kind that are distributed using spam. For many people, the simple act of deleting a spam email means that they open it, even if they don't intend to, because they simply select the email in Outlook Express, then hit delete, but in doing so they have actually inadvertently opened it.
I am not singling my sister out for treatment, I've tried to explain the concept to half a dozen people in the past couple of months alone, because by and large the difference between "selecting" and "opening" is anathema to them. And that is completely logical - something as simple as deleting an email without opening it should be simple and self-explanatory, and it is not. In some implementations of Windows the simple act of positioning a cursor over an icon or list entry, and keeping it there for a second, generates a mouse click - a "mouse event", as it is called in X-Windows, the grandaddy of 'em all.
You may have read about the $100 laptop that, championed by MIT's excellent Media Lab, in the "One Laptop per Child" project, is supposed to cure all computer ills, in the long term. Realizing how more than 90% of all computer users are exposed to Microsoft Windows on a daily basis, either at home, at school, or in the office, or in a combination of the three, I really have a problem with the MIT product, though not with the project.
A laptop whose operating system has no relationship with the one OS that all of these children will have to use, once they go to school, and later, when they go to work, seems like an odd thing to want to put "out there". As a product it is academically very interesting, in that an operating system is being developed specifically for children, and to some extent by children. But I say "academically" - it is brilliant research, has significant scientific value, will perhaps even help develop a better widget, but what it is supposed to do, help the underclasses of the world by giving them affordable computerization and networking, it will not achieve. Because what we all have to use, when we grow up, is Microsoft Windows.
Think about the last operating system to come out of academia, UNIX. It's still out there, it is used in academia, it is used by network managers and engineers, it forms the core of most networking devices, routers, modems, what have you - but it never made it into the consumer world, or the world of business, even though it is a much better operating system than Windows is. You may not realize it, but the primary network components in Windows - Ethernet, tcp/ip, udp, ftp, http, tty, lpr, etc., all come from the UNIX world, and have had to be bolted into Windows after multiple abortive attempts by Microsoft to put its own network stacks into their operating system. But the interface with you, is all Microsoft.
So, one laptop per child isn't going to go anywhere. It will introduce a different method of computing into the world, which does have value, but it won't teach children and under-educated adults, using cheap computers, what awaits them in the real world. And the sisters of this world will continue to not know why selecting an item is the same as opening it. It's not their fault, but we should have figured out how to remedy that, by now, don't you think? Especially since the Media Lab isn't doing that, either.
Spotsylvania, Sunday February 4 - Have You Seen The Light?
You may have seen some of the news items in recent weeks - legislators in California want to ban the incandescent light bulb, environmentalists advocate replacing just one bulb in your home with a compact fluorescent, or CFL, bulb, Fairfax County is handing out free CFLs to its citizens..
All this has me scratching my head, because it is not as simple as all that. When I first came to live in the USA, in the late 1980s, CFLs had already been available in Western Europe for quite a few years. These were mostly the fitting-plus-bulb models you see on the left, but soon after, the single unit models hit the market. While they were being sold here, there was little marketing, although for instance New York power company ConEd offered the bulbs mail order at discounted prices - downstate New York, of course, has had an energy "problem" for many decades.
Pricing for these bulbs now has come down to the point that the blister packs you see in the picture cost around $5, and they do save money, and have other advantages. They burn cool to the touch, so are much safer for children and the elderly, and generally pose less of a fire hazard than do incandescent bulbs. They last a lot longer, and of course will in summer save money on your airconditioning bill. But European research is beginning to show that the CFL bulb makes the consumer less energy conscious - i.e., the user doesn't worry as much about turning off lights, as "they're so cheap to run". And fluorescent bulbs contain toxic metals - although the manufacturers are working on the technology, used CFLs should be recycled, and they're not, here in the US - the same applies to batteries.
But the main problem is that the people who should be using these bulbs are not. People on a low or fixed income, the poor, people on public assistance, all could benefit from having cheaper less dangerous light bulbs. And those are exactly the people who aren't going to spend a dime more on a light bulb than they have to - let alone on five packs of expensive bulbs. Because the savings occur over time, and if you're on public assistance you're not going to "invest in savings".
They are the best things since sliced bread - I have used CFLs throughout my house for over 20 years, more so as the price comes down. My security lighting, indoors as well as out, is CFL too, and they make CFL bug lights these days. The last gap that was closed (I think at the insistence of WalMart) was the 5 watt CFL - the refrigerator bulb. They're now widely available, and I can tell you if you have light fixtures that take multiple bulbs these are ideal. I changed my kitchen ceiling fixture from three 13 watt (60 watt equivalent) to three 5 watt (25 watt equivalent) bulbs, and the difference is not very noticeable. That's one of those lights that stay on all the time, and thus one where using smaller bulbs benefits your wallet most. I can tell you from experience that if you change all your bulbs to CFL, or at least the ones that run more than an hour a day, and then check your energy usage at the end of the year, you'll see a marked drop.
Spotsylvania, Saturday February 3 - Playing Catchup
I have to apologize for not updating this log as often as I had planned - my Thinkpad laptop got a bad respiratory ailment earlier in the week, and as I did not have a master of my site on my backup/travel machine, nor the tools to manage the server with, I couldn't update. It has been a busy week anyway - winter hit with a vengeance, albeit without snow, and I spent a fair amount of time outside, chopping firewood. And then some cheques from my now former employer arrived, and I had to start putting my money where it'll do me most good, setting up brokerage accounts, figuring out how to do wire transfers with my new bank (with HSBC, I would just pick up the phone and call Buffalo, NY), and that was just for starters.
The cooling fan in my Thinkpad started to malfunction, and that is something I can't easily remedy without putting my data at risk. I intend to open the thing up and see if I can replace it, but that would entail getting onto Lenovo's diagnostic system, which figures out interactively exactly what system you have, and gives part numbers for your specific build model. And that would take too long, and the laptop might overheat, and I might "lose my hard disk", jargon for damage that might make it impossible to access the data. So the next best thing was to order a replacement Thinkpad. No, I am not a millionaire, I buy these things reconditioned from overstock.com, where I normally pay somewhere between $400 and $500 for an IBM remanufactured Thinkpad that's as good as new. And as they all run essentially the same OS and the same interface, all I will have to do is pop the hard drive out of the failing machine, pop it into the new one, and then I can repair the former.
So it took me some time to get the software and files from the bad laptop - it just won't run long enough to update the existing backup, so I had to restart half a dozen times, email myself the files I needed, making sure it never got to red-hot stage, and install some software on this Averatec that I hadn't put on it. Now that that's done, I can update my website, update my finances, and wait for the "new" Thinkpad to arrive. And then I will have one more spare than I need, but I suppose there are worse things in the world.
Lots of other stuff to do - doctor and dentist, I waited with that until I had my new insurance cards, and the first insurance bill, now that I have to pay my portion of the premium directly. The unnerving thing about this retirement stuff is that there is so much paperwork involved, some of which is pro forma and therefore can be ignored, that for lack of experience you never know whether you've done everything correctly and on time. Verizon's Human Resources outsourcer, Hewitt Associates, does not make things easier - you get different stories depending on who you talk to. One person calls to say my payment will be in my investment account on February 1st, and then you talk to someone else who says, no, since I changed the retirement date (I started the process early and then took the voluntary redundancy) I should have refiled the paperwork. As I had informed them at the beginning of December that the date would change, I of course wondered out loud why that had not been sent to me at that time, and this was met with the usual disclaimer. I then had to explain to the gentleman I had done the entire thing completely by the book - their book - beginning in September of 2006, and so if something had gone wrong because one of their staffers didn't do their job, that wasn't going to be my problem. They do try to make it your problem - one legal document is 74 pages long!
Anyway, it all got sorted, and the way in which these things are done is kinda cool, at least for me, as I know my way around the stock market - didn't spend four years physically on Wall Street, and in the financial industry, for nothing. You can have your funds put straight into an investment account, put it into a variety of funds, and then roll it into an IRA. What I did not know is that IRAs with major financial institutions really are brokerage accounts - you can trade in just about any funds and stocks available on the NYSE. So provided the stock market doesn't do a bellyflop (and this does happen from time to time) you can do well in terms of making profits with untaxed funds.
I am not boring you, am I? This is just about the only thing I am doing, at the moment. As I said, it is a modicum of scary - one mistake and you lose a whole lot of greenbacks, so I am studying and making sure I understand the way all this works, this really is where the rubber meets the road. Next I need to decide how much of an active stock trader I want to be - curious, anybody can do this now, all you need is an account and a laptop, completely bypassing the traditional broker on the floor of the Stock Exchange. So that really is a decision as to how much risk is worth it and fun, thankfully I don't have six mouths to feed...
Spotsylvania, Thursday February 8 - Loss? No loss!
I have always loved IBM Thinkpads, in fact once outfitted an entire subsidiary, secretaries included, with them. The primary reason is the amount of clever technology IBM used to include with them - I say used as IBM sold all of its PC operations to Lenovo, and I don't know their products. So when the fan failed on my R40, I ordered a replacement machine, an R51 - Overstock.com sells off-lease IBM Thinkpads that have been factory reconditioned.
No, it is not that I have too much money - Overstock charges somewhere between $400 and $500 for them, which means I can buy two laptops for the price of one new one. My primary reason, and for many years my hobby horse, is that you have to be able to protect yourself from losing your data. I am a compulsive backer-upper, but I also tend to think that saving your data should entail no more than taking the hard disk out of your defective computer, and sliding it into another. And IBM's Thinkpads (within reason) let you do exactly that. I received the R51, ran the installation process on its disk, let the battery charge, then powered it down, and put the disk from the R40 in, and the extra gigabyte of memory I had put in there. Both fit, and the R51 came up without a hitch.
After putting it onto my home network, I did need to run an IBM driver upgrade program, as some of the built-in peripherals in the R51 are different, and this software, part of the Thinkvantage suite of utilities, went and found out what drivers it needed, retrieved them from the IBM/Lenovo website, and installed them. All told, it took me five hours to have the R5 in full production, without any loss of data. And in the interim IBM sent me a new fan assembly for the R40, ordered through the same website. This website (and that it why I love IBM, and its T.J. Watson labs in Hawthorne and Somers, NY) is capable of querying your laptop, finding out what version you have, and then will tell you the part numbers for its components - finding out what to get, and ordering it, took all of 20 minutes. IBM, similar to Lucent Technologies, uses its lab scientists to support its products, and it shows.
Being a former lab rat myself, then, I have no problem using their very clever services, but I am all too aware that the advanced tools they offer are lost on the vast majority of consumers. They simply do not expect the interactive website to be able to find out which model of cooling fan an R40 uses. Your R40 - if there were several model changes, it will know which model went in which revision.
An hour or so later Pham emailed me to confirm that the part had been retrieved from inventory (IBM maintains 24/7 support), that the price was just under $60 including tax and shipping, and a DHL guy dropped it off the next morning at 11. So I can now fix the R40, and I guess I'll use it as a spare.
I needn't have bothered. The fan in the R40 is suddenly working normally again, after some cleaning with compressed air. This proves that us rocket scientists are really truly brilliant at providing solutions for problems that may not exist. The key here is that if you're going to do any repairing that involves electrical things, cracking the case, or replacing parts, you have to have your original data live, on another computer. If you don't do that, you have a very real chance of losing your hard drive. I have seen so many people lose all of their data, because they do not back up, and suffer a catastrophic equipment failure, and it is, as you can see above, by and large unnecessary. It is not even expensive, and should be part of normal everyday corporate routine.
So that is why I prefer spending $1,200 on two refurbished laptops, instead of on one new laptop with-all-the-bells-and-whistles. There is nothing a 2007 laptop does that a 2004 laptop can't, and I won't touch Windows Vista unless it's been in general use for at least a year. That's lesson number 2: never never touch "version 1.0". There isn't a backup for it.
On a different note, researchers at UCal Berkeley have discovered that male sweat contains a chemical that turns women on. I think this is riveting science, especially for those who have never heard of pheromones. Particularly interesting I find the use of baker's yeast as a control - what happened here? They were sitting around a table discussing statistically valid proof and someone suggested baker's yeast? And they then took a vote and determined that yes, indeed, if women sniffed baker's yeast as well, and that didn't get them sexually aroused, they were ready for publication? Proof of what? Nobody even thought of chocolate?
Spotsylvania, Friday February 9 - Spare Time
The significance of this picture isn't so much the presence of a deities from two religions - in the back, the Hindu deity Ganesh, the god of prosperity and wellbeing, while the front statuette is a Buddha I found in Singapore. Hinduism and Buddhism are closely related religions, coming from the same part of the world, and so the picture isn't incongruous. But the reason it is here is that I tested a pair of professional studio flash heads in taking this picture. I have a number of items that I really need to put on Ebay, and that I realized that the pictures I had, taken with a camera mounted flash, weren't all that "hot", and that very good quality digital pictures would probably improve the auction status of the items. Part of my inheritance, they've been sitting in boxes at my home ever since I came back from a Europe assignment, as I am not a display kind of person.
So I bought a professional two head flash kit, which arrived earlier in the week, it was quite a treat as I had not set foot in a studio for over 20 years (I used to be a professional photographer, both in The Netherlands and the U.K., and had my own studio in Amsterdam for a while). I can actually afford this kit (which is a low end kit that can be used to travel with, as well) as a standby, which didn't used to be the case in Europe, as professional markets in individual European countries are so small that professional equipment is marked up significantly. Here in the United States, prices of things that aren't sold in great volumes, like professional flash equipment, but sports cars, too, are competitive because the North American market is large enough that the manufacturer / wholesaler still needs to compete to sell enough volume, and so I am pretty much in heaven in that I can afford things here I probably wouldn't buy in Europe unless I really needed them.
Why am I telling you all this? There was a recent article about what people do, in retirement, and what their emotional response is to the loss of their careers, this referring to people who have had a long(ish) professional career and then decide to take a buyout and stop doing what they're doing. For my readers in Europe, who are used to retirement being the same as "pensioned", it is normal in the U.S. for a worker to have multiple retirements throughout their life - I have worked with many retired military types who did their 20 years, starting at a young age, then retiring from, say, the Marine Corps, at age 40, with a pension and benefits, and going on to a job or career in civilian life. A number of years ago, I hired the webmaster to the Chiefs of Staff, a sergeant who retired out of the Pentagon and came to work for my new division as the web and mail systems administrator.
So just because I took early retirement does not mean that my career is done. In many ways, the American retirement system (and I have to add, for those of us lucky enough that we can partake of it) allows expertise to flow between businesses and industries - my sixteen years working on advanced technologies in a traditional telephone company have given me a unique experience and expertise level that I can put to work for other companies tomorrow. But I have a plethora of other skills that date back to the days before I came to live in the United States - I was a reporter, photographer, editor, film producer, and so I can spend some time looking if I can find some way to combine that with my engineering background and management skills and do something new and fun.
This has, a month into my "retirement", not led to much, although my house is now filled end-to-end with new projects that I have not finished working on - it is so bad that the new furniture I bought a couple of weeks ago is sitting in the garage, and my car is out in the driveway. So I will not get bored, one of the problems that new retirees sometimes face, not having the infrastructure that gives them projects any more. Like a retiree I ran into said to me, the other day: "After I had dug a pond and put a new roof on the house, I needed to find something else to do". The projects, and intellectual exploits, I have, and as I never thought of myself as "Mr. Big", I won't miss having people to order around. It is not that I am particularly humble, but I never aspired to be a vice president, even though I have been responsible for budgets as big as $58 million, in the recent past. That may be quite an experience, but it doesn't necessarily make you a more important person, if you don't let your head swell beyond its design parameters.
And then I still have that Germany round trip I didn't use last year - but I'll wait until my retirement gift of a telescope arrives, put on a camera adapter, and then do a photojournalism trip around the former DDR, East Germany, something I have been meaning to do for a long time. I just need to decide, now that I have the time, whether I will post that here on my site, or sell it to a publication.
Ah, choices.... 
Spotsylvania, Saturday February 10 - Gotcha!
Dutch police announced on Friday to have caught three groups of Nigerian scammers, in the act of "doing their thing", sending out scam emails and mining data from phishing sites, in Internet cafes in Amsterdam. Full scale raids were carried out by arrest teams that arrested not only all of the team members, but seized the active hard drives of the PCs they were using. At the same time, the Dutch Department of Justice announced that a U.S. extradition request for four Nigerians caught in a similar raid late last year has been approved, and these gentlemen will shortly be on their way to a U.S. Federal Court, and from there to 20 or more years in a Federal Penitentiary.
Excellent news. The amount of spam, scam and phishing mail I see pass by is enormous, and I know there are plenty of people who continue to open and read these emails. One thing that I think we need to do better is combating the way these criminals get their victim's email addresses. It is commonly assumed that that is done using automated means, but that is a myth - in order to be able to target individuals, the criminals need live addresses. And they get those my manually trawling the Internet - you see one example of a search above - I know for a fact this is a scammer. And these searches are done manually, mostly in West Africa, the above example in Ivory Coast. While in the past many of these searches were done from Internet cafes in West African countries, I believe that today the culprits are often employees of local ISPs. These are often hard to trace - this particular ISP gets it Internet pipe from Mauritius, and I have seen other service provided from places like Dubai. The perpetrators will manually trawl websites and guestbooks for active email addresses, and I will assume they're paid by scammers such as the Nigerians caught in Amsterdam. They'll also send thousands of emails to "assumed" addresses, and can then tell from any responses whether or not those addresses are live, that is something that has to be done by hand.
Another fertile hunting ground is sex dating sites, where these folks set up free accounts with stolen pictures, usually of large breasted blondes, and then when they get responses reply with their email address - which is solely intended to receive not only the email address of the person responding to them, but in most cases their ISP, as well - most email systems, but also Hotmail and Yahoo, pass the IP address of the computer you're using on to your recipient. Now the perpetrator has not only your email, but your ISP, and thus more or less the place you live and/or work. This information can be used to send you all sorts of things, and if you're on an unprotected system it lets the miscreants access your computer - you would not believe the number of people that do not set a login on their PCs, or leave Windows' guest account active.
You'll see even thousands of "women" from Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, South Africa, to name a few, looking for dates from the West - so many women that there cannot be any other purpose to these postings than identity theft. The operators of these dating sites do little to prevent this - they in fact facilitate it by allowing these postings, they have a choice as to what countries they allow postings from.
Many of the scam emails have telephone numbers in them - from the Netherlands, the UK, France, and South Africa, mostly. Yet only the British have a centralized reporting email address, with the London Metropolitan Police, where these emails are consistently followed up. None of the other countries do - or, if they have one, it is hard to find. Yet these criminals are a major problem - they make the Internet an unsafe place, cost the victims billions of dollars, and would be relatively easy to apprehend of the various governments enlisted Internet specialists to track them down. We also should enforce that companies, organizations and educational institutions must monitor their abuse email addresses - in France, Spain and Italy, for whatever reason, ISPs often don't even list their abuse address for WHOIS, while in many other countries the ISPs do, but don't follow up on reports. I see IP addresses owned by major telecoms and universities used for spam redirects (the server throws up an innocuous web page that hides the illegal activities), and the organizations concerned do absolutely zilch about their spam reports.
Finally, powerful and arrogant as we are, we ought to let the governments of especially some West African countries know that they either shut down access to the Internet for their criminals, and police this, or we will, say three months from now, shut down their entire Internet. Provided, of course, that we have the will to actually do that - I promise you that if we shut down all Internet access from Ivory Coast, including that of embassies, foreign companies, the government, everything, and tell them we we will not turn it back on until they actively police it, and hand over their Internet criminals to us, it'll get sorted in no time. And while we are at it, we should arrest and convict both owners and staff of every Internet cafe that is used by criminals, I am sure we can find a reason in law where providing criminals with electronic burglary tools is a prosecutable offence.
I mean it. They're easy to find, and if we can "do Iraq", some Internet criminals shouldn't be hard to get. But the Dutch handing over those four Nigerians to the Feds is a good start, just keep going, guys.
Spotsylvania, Sunday February 11 - Bad Ozzie
Australian Prime Minister Howard's unprovoked attack on a United States Senator, Barack Obama, is ill advised, ill timed, and ill informed. Public opinion in the United States has shifted to be in line with public opinion in much of the rest of the Western world: the Iraq invasion was an ill advised adventure, its stated aim, the removal of weapons of mass destruction, a mirage, the occupation a disaster. It is likely that a Democratic President of the United States will remember this unprovoked attack, and with that, will remember that there were only two true supporters of the invasion: Mr. Howard and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Mr. Howard has done Australia a disservice in expressing such a negative opinion of the stated aim of many in the United States: getting out of Iraq in any way we can, as no purpose is served by American troops being there - it has in fact done American reputation in the world great harm. Perhaps Mr. Howard does not read the international section too closely - this is not the will of Senator Obama, or of Senator Clinton, but by the results of the recent election here, the will of the People. It behooves Mr. Howard, as the leader of a great nation, to understand that the world has changed, and that he should change with it.
On another sad note, it appears tributes to Anna Nicole Smith are all over the Internet. I believe, truly, that the only fitting tribute would be that parents and educators now have a perfect example they can use to teach girls how not to self destruct. I wrote previously about my own experiences, particularly in New York, with people who climb too high, too fast. Anna Nicole is a textbook case of crash-and-burn, nothing more, nothing less. She paid the ultimate price, and it was all on live televison, from the sordid start in a small town in Texas, to the ignominious end in a casino in Florida.
Spotsylvania, Monday February 12 - How about dem Chicks
I rarely watch the Grammys, too long of a sit, I am the impatient sort, but then I forget I now have a 60" screen.. and between that and my Dolby 5.1 it gets kind of captivating. The Dixie Chicks had to wait until the next election, but in true American style they got it all back, and more, and they were gracious enough not to say a word out of place. I am beginning to realize, too, that Al Gore is achieving the kind of rock star status that Bill Clinton has in the black community - I was startled to hear an African American say he'd vote not for Barack Obama, who is black, but for Hilary Clinton, because he thinks she'll do best for African Americans, with Bill by her side. Between an Oscar nomination, and presenting a Grammy award, Al Gore has the left coast pretty much sewn up. I guess that's where you go after you invent the Internet, Hollywood *grin*
The world can be a surprising place, sometimes. Watching the Grammys reminded me why I came to this country in the first place - wall to wall talent, and the possibility to take it places. It is very curious that so many ordinary Americans think all immigrants are here to make money - for some of us, though we'd like to get paid for what we do, money is not at all the goal. We're here to make our careers, do intellectually challenging things, perhaps even see our name up in lights. Where I come from, in the '80s, talking about money was uncivilized, and chasing it was not politically correct.
Maybe I should spend some time on the other coast, I've been there on business, and visited, my friend Thea even took me to the Hotel California, but never spent any serious time. Cisco was at one point in the process of offering me a job in Palo Alto, but that was in the same week their stock price tanked... Three of my colleagues from New York now live and work there, though, so going for a visit is perhaps not a bad idea.
And then those Dixie Chicks... I think they took back Texas. Good on you, girls. A lesson to all of us, both from them, and from Vice President Gore - be yourself, be honest, use your assets, do only what you believe in, and what you are good at. Perhaps it was not just the Muslims that got hijacked, but we too.
I found this on the Internet, not attributed, shortened and rewrote it a bit:
20 SIGNS YOU'VE GROWN UP
1. Smokes are cigarettes, not house plants.
2. Falling asleep together after sex in a twin bed is impossible.
3. You don't know where the nearest 7-11 is.
4. 5 A.M. is when you get up.
5. You find yourself humming along to your favorite song - in the supermarket.
6. Your best friend comes to get your advice, not about your sister, but about custody.
7. You count vacation days.
8. You're the one calling the police because those damn kids next door won't turn down the music.
9. Older relatives are comfortable talking about their sex lives with you in the room.
10. Beer is in the fridge in the garage - that's how come you don't know where the nearest 7-11 is.
11. The insurance rate for your Mustang Cobra is the same as the rate for your Subaru.
12. You have no idea who hosts the Late Late Show these days.
13. Sleeping on the couch makes your back hurt.
14. Dinner and a movie is the entire date.
15. Buffalo wings give you indigestion.
17. You can't be popular and show up with a $10 gallon of wine any more.
18. "Hair of the dog" is now coffee.
19. You IM mostly with your boss.
20. The condoms are, umm - you have to call your ex to ask her where she put them, last time she was over. That's the other reason you don't know where the nearest 7-11 is.
Spotsylvania, Tuesday February 13 - Baader who?
I am not seeing a lot of non-Germans up in arms about the impending release of Brigitte Mohnhaupt, the former leader of the German terrorist Baader Meinhof group, but I do have some real concerns about this. Baader Meinhof was without a shadow of a doubt one of the most murderous groups of people Germany has ever seen, on an ideological basis wantonly kidnapping, killing and bombing politicians, captains of industry and innocent civilians for some 22 years, beginning in the 1970s. The German penal system now deems Ms. Monhaupt no longer a danger to society, and will release her on parole March 27.
The problem I have with this is the terrorism bit. Mohnhaupt isn't an ordinary criminal, she is an admitted and avowed terrorist, who has killed, murdered, caused and planned terrorist attacks. As she is released, at age 57, I assume she is eligible for a German pension and public assistance, not having a job or an income. So the way I look at it, you can, as a terrorist with an ideological purpose, say as a member of Al Quaida, come to Germany, murder and cause mayhem, ambush people, blow up supermarkets, fire RPGs at American military staff cars, execute people you have taken captive, as you please, for years on end. Then, captured and convicted, once you reach early retirement age, if you've behaved yourself, you can leave prison at 57, and live the rest of your life in peace and comfort - and freedom.
I don't know folks - am I missing something here? I thought we were all busy establishing special rules for terrorists, for people who deliberately place themselves outside of society with the stated purpose of destroying it. We're not talking about planning and organizing here - Mohnhaupt took over leadership of Baader Meinhof, after its leaders were caught, and she personally put three slugs in the president of Dresdner Bank when he resisted during a kidnap attempt, killing him. Ms. Mohnhaupt was given five life sentences + fifteen years, and I have no doubt the court had no intention whatsoever of providing her with retirement in freedom.
I hope some of our more noisy news programs will pick up on this, and ask Chancellor Merkel what kind of message this sends to terrorist organisations today - remember that many of the 9/11 hijackers had lived in Germany for years, and were partly financed from there.
Das gibt's doch nicht, Frau Merkel. Bitte noch mal 'n bischen überlegen... You don't remember because you were the other side of the Wall, at the time, but I very vividly remember randomly being stopped by BGS Border Police at Frankfurt Airport, frisked by one soldier, while another pointed an Uzi with a round up the spout at my head. They had no idea where to look, who to look for, where the next attack would come from, these were really really really bad days.
Spotsylvania, Thursday February 15 - Learning lessons - not
An avalanche of data breaches continues, mostly related to theft of laptop computers, and the blame continues to go to either the person who carried the laptop, the organization that owned the laptop, in my view, lots of people whose fault it isn't.
Technology to provide secure access to sensitive data from a laptop has been available for some fifteen years (just to give you an idea of timing - I got my first Internet account in 1979, and my first true laptop in 1984). Today, using a SecurID and any kind of network connection, including WiFi at MacDonalds, you can establish a secure V(irtual) P(rivate) N(etwork) encrypted link into a secure database, do the work you want to do, log off and your data will not be on the laptop you were just using. But as this article shows, this laptop wasn't even pasword protected, despite there being a special password protection for hard disk access on every laptop made in the past decade. That password function not only makes it impossible to boot the laptop if you don't enter it right, it protects the hard disk all by itself - if you take the disk and stick it in another laptop, you'll still need the password to access the data.
So why do we not universally use these cheap and ubiquitous facilities? Why, on September 11, didn't we have the airport security precautions that had been in force in all of Europe for over 15 years?
The answer is simply that we're not organized, in the USA, and we have no basic understanding of security concepts. Let me give you an example.
Not long ago, I was at Washington Dulles Airport, on my way to Europe. I went for a smoke in one of the smoking lounges in the international terminal, and noticed that somebody had left a bag underneath a chair. I knew that a tourist had come in with it, but of course I had no way of knowing whether the tourist was a tourist. So I went to the nearest check-in desk, United Airlines, and asked an agent to call security. Then I went back into the lounge to keep an eye on the bag. When after ten minutes no cavalry had appeared, I went back to the agent, to check. She hadn't even called security, and only did so reluctantly this time, saying "that's just a forgotten bag, they came through security with it, so it's safe".
That is how security conscious we are - and this is after September 11. At London's Heathrow Airport, at Munich Airport, if you call an emergency, a small army will descend within two or three minutes. I know this, I've done it. Like this, we will never be safe. Security needs to always be Job One, and when you take care of security you'll find that at the same time many other necessary tasks are done - safety, risk management, recordkeeping, etc. Until we start teaching everybody security concepts, centralize that, turn the civilians into Marshals, and start firing people, it's just not going to happen. People who breach rules often don't get fired because that would make their supervisor look bad, so they're reprimanded and that's it. I don't know what it is in American corporate culture that makes supervisors and managers untouchable - only when they're found out by the authorities, or make it to the front page of the Wall Street Journal, will they get their backsides kicked. Otherwise, shhh, it'll take care of itself.
It won't, people. You have to take care of it. I will never forget being reprimanded by a director when I pulled the plug on a piece of software with a huge security hole in it - in order to minimize the risk you need to disable it before you advertise the problem and talk about it. But no, this director felt he should have been consulted, actually told me in a telephone conversation with my supervisor on the line what I said was "bullshit". That was his only concern, his embarassment, and that is the state of security on the United States today - it depends on egos, not on need. The vast majority of managers in this country, when confronted with a security breach, will attempt to sweep it under the rug. Because, you see, that is what their supervisors want them to do. Had it been any other way, I would have had a congratulatory call from a Vice President the next day, and a nice bonus cheque. Don't you think?
Spotsylvania, Sunday February 18 - Wheels within wheels
Google engineers have statistically confirmed that hard disks are not negatively affected by heavy use or by running at warm operating temperatures. I can only assume they ran the numbers because of something we hardware engineers have known for years - the knowledge that the hard disks that last longest are the ones that are in machines powered continuously, 24/7, and that are in use on a regular basis.
There is no real hard science, but we know that hard drives fail at two distinct points in their existence - either during, or shortly after, they are powered up, or else when they reach an advanced age (not in terms of hours of use, but years of use). The latter part of that equation is hard to determine, as few disks run longer than five years - generally, within two or three years, disk development produces so much larger disks that the older ones are replaced long before they fail. My first ever "Winchester drive", as they used to be called, was an external add-on for my Apricot portable computer, and, in 1984, had a massive 10 megabyte capacity. The IBM Thinkpad I am writing this on came with a 40 gigabyte hard disk in 2004, since replaced with a 100 gigabyte 2.5 inch disk (which has the same size and form factor the 40 gig drive has, it is a plugin replacement, and only cost $100).
They're really basic engineering tenets that I have paid particular attention to, as I used to design and build NEBS compliant equipment - standardized according to a rulebook that determines the survivability of telephone company central office equipment. That is equipment that is built to run 24/7, in a controlled environment. In a telephone exchange, when equipment fails, telephone calls in progress cannot be "lost", but must stay connected. There is therefore a lot of redundancy in telephony systems, but more importantly, there are systems that ensure, both through hardware and software, that necessary operating functions are maintained and transferred "on the fly" and that repairs can be effected later.
At the core of almost any computing device, today, are, apart from the electronics, the archaic but tried and tested electro-mechanical harddisks, which by now is a pretty sophisticated piece of gear - the one in my laptop is running at 7200 revolutions per minute - every minute of the day, except when I travel. That's 10,368,000 revolutions per day. We once calculated (I wrote a paper on it, can't remember what I did with it though) that on the basis of MTBF (the Mean Time Between Failure design factor of electronic equipment) an average RAID-5 multi-disk storage unit would have to have a drive replaced once a week. Yet this is not the practice - I have lost maybe two or three hard disks in the past decade (bear in mind few arrays last more than five years, they're replaced sooner than that) due to failure. And it is easy enough to tell - if you run a disk cleanup routine on your PC or laptop or array once a week, all you need to do is look for hardware errors. When a surface error is found, the operating system will lock out the bad sector, but in fact, when you get a single hardware error, your disk is going to fail within 60 days, or so the Google engineers have it - and I agree. They actually put a percentage against it, but the problem in my world is that percentages are statistical only - they can't predict when something will actually break.
So they found out what many of us already knew - keep an eye on a new disk for a week or so, and reboot the machine frequently. If it is going to fail, it'll start failing then. And if it doesn't, replace it on the first error, which will occur years later. I had one box in the lab that collected data from a remote location, and served that data to our Human Factors people for analysis. That box, an ordinary PC, running UNIX, with a single 400 megabyte 5.25 inch hard disk in it, ran for six years, every day all day, including Thanksgiving, until the project shut down.
Pretty amazing things, hard disks. Be nice to them, and they'll be nice to you. Ignore them, and you'll lose your data - and if you're one of those who always has something more important to do than maintain your file system, you probably don't back up, either. It is the fourth thing I do, in the morning - make coffee, check email, download my financial data, and then I actually have the coffee while I back up both laptops. On the new double layer DVD writable disks, which can take an amazing 8.5 gigabytes of data on one side, it takes 20 minutes or so. OK, two cups of joe. And peace of mind.
Spotsylvania, Wednesday February 21 - A Bronx Tale
As the first grumblings of discontent about Broward County Judge Larry Seidlin begin to sound, I am reminded of the vast army of New York expatriates living in Florida. A former colleague from Queens recently moved to Tampa, and while I was living in Florida myself, in the 1980's, I found that everybody I hired or dealt with while starting up my company was from New York, and most often Jewish from New York (which is different than being Jewish from anywhere else - and I remind you that I used to live in Jewish North London). My accountant, bank manager, even many South Dade police officers were from New York and Long Island. If you're looking for an explanation - there is a huge influx of people into greater New York, which is at any rate a very populous city, and so as the place gets ever more crowded many native New Yorkers eventually retire outside of the City, which is an expensive place to live. New York is so crowded they use the air above the buildings to build more buildings. And as we can see on Long Island, which is so full of NYC expats it's like you never left, New York City residents will move to where other New York City residents are, where they drive up the real estate prices so nobody else can afford to move there, unless they're Donald Trump, whose flagpole can be seen from the Bahamas. Or, they move to where Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry lives, who is Jewish and from New York.
So it is hardly surprising that a former Bronx cab driver (I am assuming he is Jewish from his last name) ends up adjudicating Anna Nicole's last resting place. While unseemly, the whole thing reads like a Bronx comedy - Anna Nicole drops dead in a casino on an Indian reservation in Florida, and a retired (pronounce that the Seinfeld way, retaawed) cabbie judge gets to decide who gets to take the body home - either her lawyer, who is Jewish and from Los Angeles, or her ex-cop mother, who is a blond Maalox moment from Hick Town, Texas. If Seinfeld (who is Jewish and from New York) were still shooting, the writers would have a field day - five episodes, at least.
It would have taken me all of fifteen minutes to decide this case, and while due process is important, I do not see how Judge Seidlin would need more than an afternoon - Judge Judy, who lives in Florida, is Jewish and comes from New York, would take five. (They're not related, her last name is Sheindlin. Besides, she's not from the Bronx, she's from Brooklyn. To a New York Jew, those are different countries with the same area code)
Here are the facts:
Anna Nicole Smith was not a resident of Broward County or the State of Florida or the United States of America,
Anna Nicole Smith was a resident of the Bahamas, a foreign country just left of Dave Barry's office, that gets most of its television service from Fort Lauderdale, Fla.,
Anna Nicole Smith's daughter was born and is resident in the Bahamas, a foreign country,
Anna Nicole Smith's son is buried in the Bahamas, a foreign country,
Broward County judges have no jurisdiction in the Bahamas, a foreign country,
Anna Nicole Smith daughter's paternity has no bearing on anything to do with Anna Nicole's final resting place,
Anna Nicole Smith daughter's custody can only be determined in the Bahamas, as the child was born there, has always lived there, and has never been to America,
Keeping Anna Nicole above ground for this length of time, to facilitate completely irrelevant procedures, is a miscarriage of justice,
Judge Seidlin should be sanctioned, this especially as it is he who has caused the deterioration of Anna Nicole's body. It is beyond reasonable viewing now. But most importantly, how long does it take a judge to determine that a deceased person should be returned home? If I died in that Casino in the Seminole Nation, would judge Seidlin hear all of my ex-wives for weeks to see where I might want to be buried? Or just ship me home to Virginia?
We're a bit obessed with celebrities, in this country, but sometimes I think we go too far, even if it is Florida. Don't dose Texans keep causing aggravation?
Spotsylvania, Thursday February 22 - Your Security Pal
In what in my view is a stunning move, Paypal has begun to issue electronic security IDs to its users - for someone with a personal account, the cost is $5, for those with a commercial account (for which you need a tax ID) they're free. I have in an earlier piece referred to this as a SecurID, which is what RSA calls its product. The security key generates a code every 30 seconds, and this code synchronizes with a code in a secure server within Paypal's own network. If the codes don't match, you can't log in.
SecurID normally goes hand in hand with VPN technology, which helps establish an encrypted connection between the terminal and the server, but this requires special software that is not available in Paypal's implementation. Nor is it necessary, as you log in to Paypal in order to carry out a transaction, not to do prolonged work. I just received mine, as you see in this picture - it is serial numbered, and you can only activate it from your own login, and with its serial number.
There may be financial institutions that offer this type of technology to their non-commercial customers in the USA, but I am not aware of them - I know some European banks offer it, and make their customers pay out the nose. I have to tell you I am very impressed. Rather than using a three step process, silly pictures you have to view, or IP address verification, the security key makes it impossible to log into an account unless you're in physical possession of the key. Not only that, they have implemented a feature I had not seen before - and remember please that I have carried a SecurID for the past fifteen years. You see, the Paypal key's display blanks out 30 seconds after you press the button, so unless the button is pressed it cannot be read. While the button is an added vulnerability, because it can break, powering down the LCD will make the battery last longer - if it works like the RSA SecurID, it will alert you when the battery runs down, when the key needs to be replaced (the battery cannot be replaced). And of course nobody can read the code off your key - a common problem as so many SecurID users carry theirs on their keyring or around the neck. You're in real deep s**t, you see, if you've just driven 100 miles to go enjoy your long weekend, and you find out you forgot your SecurID in the office. Putting the price point at the low end, Paypal should have its investment back in a couple of years, out of the reduction in fraudulent transactions.
No, I am not going to tell you how the synchronization works. But please trust me, I have used, owned, and managed RSA equipped networks for over a decade, the technology is safe and foolproof, and I am not aware of any current technology RSA server ever being hacked successfully - although without the associated client side login, the key code will not get you anywhere. As implemented, once you activate your key you cannot log in without it.
As I said, I am impressed. Paypal has implemented the only currently generally available network security device that is foolproof, a technology that is mature, has been in use by millions of users for over fifteen years, in the corporate world, and is even usable with auto-login, although that has not been implemented by Paypal. Now if we could only convince all banks to use this technology, so we can use one security key, I'd be in heaven. It is easy enough, RSA has a way of cross-certifying keys. It would be simple enough, or banks could contract with Paypal to provide the secure login, so the customer would never even get to the bank's website until Paypal had verified their identity.
Yah, Menno, dream on....
Spotsylvania, Saturday February 24 - A Bronx Tale - III
And it goes on. The Associated Press has it that Richard C. Milstein is the court appointed attorney for Anna Nicole's daughter. He is not. You would think the press would do its homework, but this case is particularly bad. Mr. Milstein is the Guardian at Litem for Dannielynn. In Florida, a Guardian at Litem is a civilian volunteer who monitors a juveline by court order, and reports back to the court on his or her condition and circumstances (under English law, a court appointed guardian is more or less a surrogate parent). No more, no less. The fact that Mr. Milstein is an attorney has nothing to do with anything - anybody can be a Guardian at Litem as long as they are "in good standing". An a guardian at litem, to the best of my knowledge, has no legal standing with regard to taking decisions about anybody or anything, he or she just monitors and writes a report. The juvenile must be under court supervision, and I don't see how Dannielynn, a resident of another country altogether, can be under the supervision of a Florida court. If she were, Florida courts could assume jurisdiction over anyone, anywhere, and I kind of don't think that is possible. So how Judge Seidlin could appoint a guardian for Anna Nicole's daughter, and then charge that guardian with making funeral arrangements for her mother, is completely beyond me.
Spotsylvania, Friday February 23 - A Bronx Tale - II
The verdict is in! Broward County Judge Seidlin's clerk is calling Britney's ex-husbands, to find out whether he should attend the Malibu rehab, or the one in Antigua.
To stay on Judge Seidlin's home turf, you may have seen the news that a beaver has been spotted in the Bronx River, building a dam - beavers disappeared from the New York cityscape some 200 years ago. And it is only a few months ago that a beaver was seen near the Hamptons, at the East end of Long Island. While the Bronx beaver could relatively easily get down the Bronx river, which runs North from the Bronx into Westchester County and beyond, a beaver on the Eastern end of Long Island is harder to explain, none had been seen in there since before WWII, and the only likely route for that beaver to take was across the Long Island Sound.
Wildlife scientists have explained that the beavers may be expanding their territory due to their population growth in rural areas, combined with the cleaning up of urban resources, but I would suggest there has to be more to it than that. Beavers were hunted out of the areas close to New York City, but they also tend to move away from human populations. Even dow