Trip to New York

Olympia and I headed up to New York Monday and came back Tuesday. We took the train up there, stayed in a hotel in SoHo, went to dinner at our favorite Indian restaurant on 6th Street, and went to a play in the evening. While waiting for the play's showtime to come around, we went into Joe Allen's, another restaurant on Restaurant Row, which is 46th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues.

We had a minor brush with celebrity there as we were seated at the bar, in that Harvey Keitel was seated with a few other people at the table closest to where we were sitting. Olympia started grinning her face off, as she thought about his lines from Pulp Fiction, especially the one where he cautions the other characters not to, well, start congratulating one another quite yet, only put much more graphically. If you've seen the movie, you probably know the line I mean, and if not, that's probably okay.

Tuesday, we stopped at the Toys-R-Us in Times Square, which is utterly huge and has a ferris wheel right in the store, roughly three stories high. Apparently, nowhere on the east coast is there a store with an Xbox for sale between Christmas and New Year's Day, which is just awful, since I was going to buy one. It seems like certain companies (*cough* Microsoft, Sony *cough*) seriously underestimated demand. After Toys-R-Us, we went back to Penn Station and headed south again on the train. There was little point in doing much else, as Olympia was whining horribly in a pitiful and weak way (can I fit the word "petulant" in here, too?) about the cold every second we were outside. What a weather lightweight!

Gotten

It's painful to even entitle a blog entry with the word "gotten." That's a word that I think is just so ugly. It's used in place of the proper verb that the speaker or writer hasn't bothered to learn or use. There's an ad I hear on the radio every once in awhile that uses it, saying, "Thousands of people have gotten great value from these tapes, and you can, too." It would be so much better to use "found" or "received" in place of gotten, or just use an entirely different construction such as, "Thousands of people have benefited from these tapes...."

The real irony of that particular ad is that it is for tapes designed to enhance your vocabulary.

Fellow Travelers

I met a couple in the airport waiting for my much delayed flight from Seattle to D.C. The wife, Mattie, went off to see if the airline people were calling her (they weren't, but with the last name of Smith, you probably end up going to see if it was you calling a lot more than people named, say, Musachakathalazan.) So, I chatted a bit with the husband, Ben. It was clear that he does a lot of traveling and hiking and such, as he had that kind of clothes on, that kind of backpack, and was reading an outdoor adventure magazine. We ended up talking about how people really need to take the time to travel if that's what they like while they are younger. He was telling me that his father, who hiked from tip to tip of New Zealand when he was 70, had said that the worst part about getting older is not that you can't do the traveling, but that your desire to travel goes down.

As we talked about some places we'd each been, it was clear we had the same appreciation for the outdoors and adventure. I've seldom met anyone who was enthusiastic about travel stuff as Ben, and his enthusiasm was infectious. As I headed for my airplane, I was actually sorry to say goodbye to him. I told him we would meet again. In the walkway to get on the plane, I thought about that and of course, it's terribly unlikely I'll just randomly meet the same guy somewhere. I stopped, wrote my email address on a scrap of paper, and went back out to the waiting area. I gave him my email address and told him that this would make it at least a little more likely. I'm really hoping I'll hear from him.

Airline Travel - What is it Now?

It seems like every time I fly, there's something else that goes wrong and keeps my flight from going as scheduled. This time, the plane we were scheduled to be on was, as the pilot called it, "broke." I guess they didn't feel they needed to go into the same detail as last time. I called Olympia to tell her and when she answered, I said, "So..." and her immediate response was, "What part of the plane isn't working this time?"

Two hours later than scheduled, we finally took off.

BodyWorlds

I mentioned BodyWorlds in my last post.  I see that it's coming to the United States at last!  (Maybe it's been here before, but if so, I'm not aware of it.  Last I'd read, nobody over here was willing to host the exhibit.)  It's going to be in Chicago from February through September.  I think I know what I'm going to do for a weekend trip as soon as I can get a chance.

 

Stiff

In about six hours of reading, I started and finished another book.  This one's called "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" and can be found on Amazon for those that are interested.  I just couldn't put it down!  The author, Mary Roach, visited a bunch of places where people deal with other people who happen to be dead to find out what's quietly happening behind such closed doors.  She takes the reader through an embalmer's lab, a crematorium, anatomy labs, a forensic farm where they study decomposition, a vehicle crash-test research facility, and more.

 

Despite what could easily be seen as a truly ghoulish and macabre subject, she adds humor and a sense of lightness to the subject without taking away from the dignity of the subjects.  One theme that she carries through the book is what she would like done with her own body after her death, and one by one she rules each potential post-mortem use out as she finds out the details until she finally settles on plastination.  In that, I have to agree with her.  The BodyWorlds exhibit that's causing such a ruckus in Europe is one I would really like to go see.

 

All-in-all, a great book and a nice break from the more serious material I've been reading of late.

 

My Book on Amazon

Wow!  It's all the way up to 571,833rd best selling book on Amazon!  I should write more books.

 

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1893681017/qid=1103426306/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/104-0669821-9117505

Apparently, Watermelon Contains Watermelon

I was at the supermarket in the fruits and vegetables area getting some salad. There was a display with cut watermelon in halves and quarters. Since they were cut, they were wrapped in plastic and had labels on them. I happened to read one of the labels. It read, "Cut Watermelon Quarter." Under that, it read, "Ingredients: Watermelon". Thank goodness they let me know that.

Of course, since I have a hard time seeing something that funny without sharing, I picked up one of the cut watermelon quarters, turned to a supermarket employee that was nearby, and said, "Excuse me, can you tell me what's in this? Oh, sorry, never mind - it has it right here. Ingredients: Watermelon."

Odd look, nervous laughter. I get that a lot.

24

I don't have cable at the moment, so when I get in front of the TV it's either to play an Xbox game or to watch movies or series that been put on DVD.  I'm trying to do less of that, because it can really suck up a lot of time and I have plenty of other things I could spend that time on, but I've seen some interesting stuff lately.  I watched over a lot of nights the first season of 24, the Kiefer Sutherland series.  It turns out the dev lead for our team at Microsoft is a big fan of the series, too, and he tells me season two is fantastic.  We were talking about how cool it would be to watch it in real time, which is how it's presented in the series and part of what makes it so intriguing.

 

So Tuesday I'm going to Michael's house and we're going to watch all 24 episodes back-to-back, starting at 8am.  Since the commercials are removed and we can skip past open titles, that's about 16 hours of video, but not only will we watch a very cool show, that's something to talk about!  A couch potato fantasy!  Talk about sucking up a lot of time!

 

I can hardly wait...

 

More on Undocumented Expectations

Undocumented expectations, the topic of an earlier post that has been the post that has generated the most subsequent feedback and discussion from readers, has proved to be a great way to describe a common pitfall.  This has not, however, prevented me or people around me from falling into it anyway.

 

Recent stressful situations at work lately have culminated in discussion with management and certain peers.  It's become clear in the discussion that everyone in a room of five people had a different understanding of one of my peer's roles and responsibilities.  In fact, one manager in particular has already taken responsibility for not making expectations clear much earlier, that is, for not documenting expectations and sharing it with everyone involved.

 

Over the next three weeks, our whole department will become a ghost-town with almost everyone out of the office for some or all of the time, so this issue will likely remain open, but then I'll be off for two of those myself, so I'm hoping that awareness of the problem will at least limit the aggravation it can cause.  Then, in the first week of January, I think we'll get clarity around the situation and be able to move forward more effectively.

 

In the meantime, I plan to take my earlier post, remove the more personal aspects of the anecdotes, and expand on the remaining thoughts to create an article for Microsoft's internal Engineering Excellence Center, a group that publishes a whole library of great articles on topics ranging across all the disciplines represented at the company.

 

Let's hope the end result is good enough for them to publish.

Population Density

The other night as I was driving home, I was listening to George Noory's Coast-to-Coast show on KVI.  It's an odd show that talks about aliens, conspiracy theories, ghosts, and all kinds of other stuff that I mostly think is ridiculous but I can't help but listen to when I happen to be in the car at that time.  He had on a guy that was talking about a bunch of things that would happen if the events described in the Biblical Revelations ever happened.  One of the things he said is, "God plans to dry up all the oceans, because that's the only way you could fit everyone that ever lived back on the planet."

 

That got me thinking, since I had once seen a documentary that mentioned roughly 1 in 10 humans that ever lived were still alive.  When Philip Jose Farmer wrote the Riverworld series, he'd apparently heard the same statistic, as Riverworld was populated with everyone who ever lived (plus a few aliens who were on the planet during a final nuclear holocaust) and that came to about 65 billion people.

 

When I think about how I spent about five hours hiking in a canyon alone without seeing anyone else except for in helicopters and on boats, the idea you'd have to dry up the oceans to fit every one seems like an overestimate of how many people there really are.  If you were walking at rush hour in New York, I could see how you might believe it, but the land area's just so little.

 

So, I did some research.

 

I found this article: http://www.prb.org/Content/ContentGroups/PTarticle/0ct-Dec02/How_Many_People_Have_Ever_Lived_on_Earth_.htm  Since I saw this referenced in a few other articles and the article seemed pretty sensible and cautious about how semi-scientific it is, it seems like a reasonable place to take as a baseline for total human population ever.  The author, Carl Haub, puts the total number at a little over 106 billion people, or some 17 times today's population.

 

This article at about.com: http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa012599.htm puts the world's population density, excluding Antarctica from consideration as land space because of it's zero population density, at about 114 people per square mile.

 

That means that putting everyone that ever lived back on earth at once would generate a population density of about 1938 people per square mile.  Turning to the Census Bureau's numbers here: http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027.html we find that this is roughly comparable to the population density in 1990 of Indianapolis, IN (2000 per square mile), more that twice that of Jacksonville, FL (800), but less than a tenth of New York, NY (23,700).

 

While that would mean Indianapolis' population density over the entire planet, including some pretty inhospitable areas, we're talking mostly previously deceased people who have been resurrected and should probably be able to take it, and that's really not that crowded.  Thank God, He won't have to dry up the oceans if He ends the world anytime soon!

 

The Economic Role of Government

Again, referring to Thomas Sowell's book, Basic Economics, I've been able to study his materials to get much greater clarity as to what kinds of activities should be government regulated or managed and which should not.  It's interesting that there are relatively simple economic tests that can be used (and seldom are) to determine this.

 

Sowell uses as an example of where government intervention makes sense the idea of mudflaps on cars.  There's no economic incentive for a person to pay for mudflaps on their car because mudflaps on your own car provide no benefit to you, but rather provide their benefit to the person behind you on the road.  Since it's not practical to gather compensation from everyone that every drives behind you for their share of your mudflaps, and since mudflaps provide greater value to the overall society than they cost, government regulation to require mudflaps on all cars puts in place a benefit both shared and paid for by the entire group of car owners to their collective advantage.  This seems so obvious once the principle is explained.

 

On the other hand, seatbelts (not Sowell's example) represent an area where government intervention is not required because the person that gains benefit, that is, the person that would otherwise be catapulted out a car window to their death in a crash instead of simply walking away unscathed, is the same person that pays for it.  That incentive means that seatbelts availability and usage is inevitable without the government mandate to install them in all cars.  This is borne out by the fact that in the U.S., car manufacturers were already beginning to increase safety features before the government ever got involved in defining the standards.  They were catching on to the idea that people would pay more or would buy more at the same price if cars were safer.

 

With this principle in mind, it becomes clear that at least to some extent, governmentally run postal services, education, and toilet tank capacity requirements are largely unnecessary while governmental regulation on environmental pollution, at least until gains in value fall short of marginal costs, are appropriate.

 

This principle doesn't apply to the military, though, as that's covered by a different principle, that of activities which provide value to more than just those willing to contribute and is beyond the scope of what I want to talk about here.

 

When Yes Means No

Today, I asked a coworker, "So, does this makes sense?" His response was, "No!" But, what he meant by that was, "Yes!" That means he answered in the negative to mean the affirmative. "No" was apparently short for "No Problem!"

Trevor had mentioned this to me weeks ago, but I hadn't seen it happen so clearly until now.

What I Like in Board Games

I like board games a lot and own quite a few now.  Amongst my favorites are Puerto Rico, Power Grid, and Settlers of Catan with the Cities & Knights expansion, but there's a lot of them that I enjoy.  The new ones I've played recently are La Strada, Keythedral, and Pirate's Cove.  Playing Pirate's Cove was enlightening because of what it turned out that I didn't like, which was the highly random nature of fighting between pirate ships that could leave you devastated and take you several turns to recover from.  In a game that only has 12 turns, that's very bad.

 

Not surprisingly, it seems my favorite games and the subject I'm talking about a lot in this blog right now intersect with one another.  I like the economic games.  Puerto Rico, Power Grid, and Cities & Knights are all games about economics with carefully balanced trade-offs regarding what you can do with your scarce resources, which Thomas Sowell would quickly point have alternative uses.

 

For example, in a recent game of Puerto Rico, I had a choice between waiting another round to acquire a couple more doubloons and buying a guild hall that would give me at least eight victory points or buying a university that would give me three victory points and free colonists with buildlings.  Since I picked the university, then was unable to buy more than one relatively useless building that only gave me one more victory point.  So I missed proper evaluation of opportunity costs and lost out on four to six victory points.  Since I only lost the game by four victory points and had made one other mistake of which I'm aware that cost me two victory points with respect to the winner, I basically killed my game in that one move.

 

While that's very sad for me, it was still one of the more exciting games I've played, ever, and it's all because it's about managing your economy.

Journalistic Sensationalism

Of late, every year at Christmastime, we hear stories of this town or that public library or the other school choosing not to hold an event or put up a sign relating to Christmas.  The media often picks it up and the churn begins as the story gets around as an assault on our country's foundations in Judeo-Christian tradition.  While this is very distressing to the large number of Christians in the country and for good reason, it's important to keep in mind that the media benefits more when the story creates more outrage.  An example presented itself today, but because it happened at Lake Washington High School, just across the lake from where I live, I got an opportunity to contrast the media version and the hype with the real story.

 

In short, the Attic Group, a non-profit theater troupe, is putting on an interpretation of A Christmas Carol at the high school.  The principal, Mark Robertson, instructed the matinee performance to be cancelled.  The originating news story reported that he cited the fact that the Attic Group planned to charge the students for a performance during school hours as the issue but that even if that wasn't a problem, there would still be a discussion of the intersection of school and religion.  This story was even picked up by Paul Harvey, making it national news that villified Robertson.

 

However, this morning Robertson came on KVI, a local conservative talk radio station.  Interestingly enough, he wouldn't come on the radio show until his pastor was on the line, too.  He clarified his position, repeating the point about charging students, the point about it taking place during school hours, and adding that the original matinee was never approved by the principal's office but rather by an unauthorized subordinate, which itself would have been enough to warrant cancellation.  The show's host, John Carlson (a one-time Republican gubernatorial candidate) asked him about the religious element.

 

As it turns out, the journalist had asked Robertson several times about whether there was a religious aspect to the decision and was told there was not.  The quote that ended up in the new story was actually in response to a hypothetical situation designed to elicit the quoted response.  Robertson had brought along his pastor to attest to his character.  It was very funny to hear his pastor say something to the effect of, "I'm on the line because Robertson's part of my parish and a good friend.  I attest to his character and he knows that if he lies he has to answer to me!"  (The pastor and the principal are both black and it's an Antioch Bible church.  Imagine that statement spoken in a black dialect by a preacher, and it gets even funnier.)

 

In the end, this simple instance of a cancelled performance because of a failure on the part of the performers to meet some basic beauracratic steps and policies was turned into a sensational, national story by a journalist that chose sensationalism over objective reporting with integrity.  Undoubtedly, this happens all the time and we only hear about it if we happen to be listening to the right local show, if it even gets revealed at all.  This proves the value of the adage, "Don't believe everything you read."  Or see or hear, for that matter.

 

Potential Buyers at my House

This house sale thing has been taking so long that I'm now more happy that someone comes to look at the house, not because it means they might buy it, but because it means I made my bed in the morning for a reason.

Economics in Brief

I'm nearing the end of Thomas Sowell's book, Basic Economics.  I will write a (glowing) book review as soon as I'm done and I'm looking forward to moving on to his Applied Economics, the companion book that takes the reader beyond the basics.  There are lots of important lessons in this book, but I think the most important points can be summed up in a few "first principles" from which the rest can be derived.  Of course, I'm glad Sowell did a lot of the derivation for me!  Here are the basics as I got them:

• Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources that have alternative uses.
• Trade is not a zero-sum game - in general, both parties to any transaction end up better off.
• Prices automatically adjust to apply resources to the best possible gain when artifical constraints are avoided.

With these three concepts in mind, economic principles prove to be remarkably logical.  I'm finding this personal study of economics absolutely fascinating.

 

Blogging More Frequently

I've always been amazed that there are people that have a new blog entry every day, but are not writing for a living, but rather have some other job.  For example, Raymond Chen's blog has a new, interesting (although for me, sometimes indecipherable) post every day.  Trevor recently pointed me at a post where he describes how he does it.  It's so simple, it ought to be obvious.

 

When he sits down to write an entry, he writes two.  The extra goes into a library of posts he can send later, although I'm sure that as a highly skilled developer he's written himself some kind of tool to do the posting automatically without further intervention.  Apparently, he has enough that he could not write again until the middle of next year and still have a post every day.

 

I don't have a tool to do it, but I've starting writing a few.  As I write this, I have four extras waiting in the wings on a variety of topics, simply saved in a separate drafts folder in Outlook called Upcoming Blogs.  I'm going to look into seeing if I can simply schedule delivery, since I'm using Microsoft's Exchange Server, such that it sends the mail at a given future time without my needing to be in Outlook at the time of sending.  I guess then I'd have a tool!

 

So, if you find I've become remarkably prolific and consistent with new blog entries daily, you'll know how that's happened.

 

Long Hours

I haven't posted for a bit, mostly because I've been really busy at work for long hours, then going home and working on some stuff I need to do there, too. It feels like a truly artificial date we've presented with at work, and the work defined that needed to be done will only be about half complete by that date anyway, but at least we will have managed to build momentum.

What will be interesting to see is if the momentum is kept up after the holidays where most people will be out of the office for two to three weeks. I myself will leave work on the evening of 12/17 and not return to the office until the morning of 1/4. I think that's the longest consecutive number of days I'll have every been off from work while still being paid since I started working full time sixteen years ago.

POLITICS: Florida 2000, Washington 2004

The election for governor is incredibly close in Washington state, and it's looking like the Democrats are going to try much the same tactics as were used in Florida during the 2000 presidential election.

Dino Rossi, the Republican, won the initial count by 261 votes out of some 2.6 million cast. That triggered an automatic recount, which also resulted in a Rossi win, although by 42 votes. Now, the Democratic candidate, Christine Gregoire, has the option of requesting yet another recount, although at this time at her expense, in the hopes of finding more votes somehow. The bad part is that it appears she'll only ask for a recount in King County, which voted some 60% in her favor and is therefore more likely to end up with a few extra votes for her. She'll undoubtedly not ask for statewide recount and will prefer to exclude those counties that had increases in Rossi's vote during the recount.

This is exactly what was going on in Florida in 2000. Gore was asking not for statewide recounts (after the first) but rather, for recounts in only the three southern counties where he had already won. Part of what the Supreme Court told Florida at the time was that recounting only some of the ballots, not the entire state's ballots, violated the Constitution's Equal Protection clause. They were also told that the law that specified certification must be completed in seven days could not be interpreted as meaning it's okay to hold off certification for nineteen days.

Let's hope this doesn't drag on and on. There may be 1.3 million voters that will be happy if Gregoire somehow finds 43 or more votes that make her governor, but there will be 1.3 million voters that will be very unhappy that after two counts of the ballots that have their candidate winning, recounts can just keep happening until Gregoire's happy with the results. This is where the instant runoff voting system I mentioned a couple weeks ago would be very helpful, since Rossi's numbers are undoubtedly much lower with 2% of the vote going to a Libertarian candidate, whose supporters would likely have put Rossi as their second choice by a wide margin.

Is there any question any more that an individual's vote matters, when elections are decided by such small margins?

How I'll Buy My Next House

After looking at how my friend Ben has expanded his house, I can see that the next time that I buy a house, I'll have to find a smaller, single-level house and add a modular addition on top. Ben's got his expansion down to something like $50/square foot. My current house, which is cheap space, is priced at about $121/square foot, and in Bethesda, Maryland, pricing for new construction has passed the $300/square foot price. New knowledge to save me money on real estate!

International Trade, Jr.

Elizabeth was showing me some things she's bought recently over the Internet. What's amazing, is that she got them from her online friends from around the world. Four dollars for a metal box with miniature scissors and a bunch of cutouts, all decorated with some kind of little Japanese cartoon characters. She got that from a friend in Hong Kong. She had another little plastic pillbox with stickers from a friend in Singapore. Then there were sticker sheets from much closer, but still more than just a walk down the street, from a friend in Michigan. She has a few things she sells, too, with her Paypal and Ebay accounts.

So Elizabeth is twelve and involved in low volume international trade.

Businesses can make money in unexpected ways

I continue to read Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics, and it's extremely interesting.  I do find that I already know much of what's in the book, but how he says it is so clear and his examples so illustrative, it really solidifies what I know about economics.  There are still areas that I'm learning, and I don't doubt that the bigger knowledge payout will come when I read Sowell's follow-up book to this, Applied Economics.

 

The book review, however, will come later when I'm done.  In the meantime, an almost off-hand fact I learned from the book already is worth mentioning.  It seems that in the early days of credit cards, there were millions in New York City who had them before the large department stores would accept them.  Obviously, that's changed and the department stores have even gotten in to the act with their own credit cards.  What I hadn't realized was how a large enough chain of stores supporting it's own credit card business can mean they are making money from the interest they earn off those loans as well or even better than their main line of business.

 

The examples Sowell uses is that in 2003 Sears made half its money from credit cards, while Circuit City made all its profit from its credit cards while losing $17 million in consumer electronics sales.  It seems that it should be a basic business tenet to think about new ways for the business to make money that might be less than obvious.

Airline Problem - Again

Now at the Seattle airport, attempting to fly to DC, my flight has just been scheduled to take a different airplane. Our originally scheduled airplane has a problem with an aileron (sp?), which is apparently a non-vital, unused system that is required to be working before you can fly. I don't quite understand how it can be both unnecessary and part of the plane, or unnecessary and required for that matter, but that's the story. We're about to switch to another airplane that has this unnecessary but vital piece of equipment working.

In the last six months, I've flown quite a lot, and I'm amazed at how some half of the flights I've been on have had some problem like this that has caused delays, rerouting to other destinations, and so on. Is this some kind of message? I sure hope not, as I have no intention of ceasing travel.

Ann Coulter's Latest Book

How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) : The World According to Ann Coulter by Ann Coulter amazon

I've finished reading this one, and I think it's a pretty good book, although with a couple flaws. First off, before getting into the book itself, I don't understand why people get so up in arms over Ann Coulter. Sure, she has strong opinions on the subjects of liberals and liberalism in general and she doesn't pull any punches when she talks about particular liberal politicians (most notably Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton.) But I don't see people on the other side of the aisle pulling their punches or getting critically hammered in the same way. Is Al Franken somehow more friendly to conservatives? I think not.

The biggest downside to the book is that some 80% of the content is available on the web in the form of Coulter's articles published in places like Townhall.com over the last three or four years. For regular readers of Coulter's work, the most likely people to buy one of her books, that means there's far less new material to read than you would expect. I'd probably already read some 80% of the articles available online prior to buying the book. Coulter mentions that some of the articles as printed here are longer versions of what was previously published, but I only found two or three times where I realized that I'd read the shorter version previously.

With that downside out of the way, let's look at some of the strengths. Unlike the last book of Coulter's I read, Slander, this one is clearly organized topically. Slander read more like a stream of conciousness that simply opens the spigot on page one and closes the spigot on the final page. If you want to pick and choose amongst topics, How to Talk... let's you jump to the parts that are interesting to you. A great example is the chapter on the Elian Gonzalez incident. I ended up with a better understanding of what went on through that whole series of events from a factual basis than I ever got from main stream media reports.

A common attack on Coulter is that she plays fast and loose with the facts. I really just don't see it. The references to LexisNexis, the constant poring over everything she says by a whole troupe of aggressive, anti-Coulter "fact-checkers", and her strong convictions on moral issues really don't add up to someone making stuff up. I don't think she needs to make stuff up, as there are plenty of crazy people in the world who provide all the material an author needs.

The best parts of the book are the tribute article to John F. Kennedy, Jr. and the last chapter of articles never previously published. The JFK, Jr. tribute is touching and shows that Coulter doesn't automatically despise liberals. He was from about as liberal and famous a family as we've ever had in America, and yet she speaks very highly of him. The reason is that they could discuss topics from opposite viewpoints and agree to disagree while letting each other express themselves. That Coulter had articles printed in George magazine is explained by that relationship.

Similarly, the last chapter has articles that were never printed elsewhere, plus both the rejecting publisher's and Coulter's deconstruction as to why. An article on feminist legal theory was, in my opinion, well done but rightly rejected by National Review as it didn't fit the style of that magazine. An article about what a particular proverb means to Coulter that was rejected by Good Housekeeping and the deconstruction after it were deeply insightful into Coulter's character as a strongly moral and conservative woman unafraid to speak her mind and practice what she preaches. In the end, she's more human and more likeable to me after reading this book.

I would give this book 3.5 out of 5, and would have gone to 4 out of 5 had there been more new content. Good job, Ann!

Homebuyers are Irrational

I guess I'll never understand. People out buying houses are almost entirely irrational, at least as far as I can tell. Otherwise, why would I need to stage my house with furniture I don't even like? Why would having the lights on when they walk in the house matter? Why would it matter if I left a book I was reading out on the counter or not? Why would I have to hide the dishrack in a cabinet?

I'm not like that, but apparently most people are. So, I'm doing all those crazy things in the hopes my house will someday sell. Fortunately, I don't have to like it, I just have to do it.

POLITICS: Instant Runoff Voting

Adam asked me today what I thought of http://www.irvwa.org. What I think seems worthy of a blog entry.

I've heard of this, the Instant Runoff Voting system, and it always sounded good to me. (For details read about it at the website above.) It breaks the two-party system, so the Republican and Democratic parties aren't all that happy with it. But it's very favorable for people who really want to vote for a third-party candidate, but also don't want their vote to be wasted or to hurt the chances of the major party candidate closest to their views.

Washington's gubernatorial election is currently very close as they count absentee ballots. Gregoire (D) is leading over Rossi (R) by a slim margin that's getting smaller and smaller as they count the absentee ballots, probably because most of the King County absentee ballots are already counted (King county votes heavily Democrat) and the outlying eastern counties, while significantly smaller in population, have not yet been counted and trend heavily Republican.

The problem is that the Libertarian candidate has garnered more votes than the difference between the two and if there was no Libertarian candidate, Libertarians would vote almost entirely Republican, just as Greens would otherwise vote Democrat. The Libertarian party, which I think has a very good platform, better than the Republican platform in many ways, will never know how many people would REALLY vote for them because plenty of people are afraid to vote Libertarian only to end up with a Democrat because they spoiled the Republican's chances. I'm in that category.

The IRV system would allow me to say, "I'm voting Libertarian, but if they don't win, I'm voting Republican." That's very powerful and very cool and I would vote for such a system.

Voting Day!

I voted this morning. Did you?

Recent Reading

I thought it might be interesting to mention what I've been reading lately. I read a fair amount while on my trip to Hawaii, so the list of recently completed books is longer than usual for under a month, but I've really had some good ones that have kept me engaged. Lately, I haven't really read a lot of fiction, at least not a lot that I've been able to finish. I actually find I get a little bored with the fiction and find myself thinking, "Hey, what's the point?" I did read a couple novels during the Hawaii trip, though. So, here's the list of what I've read this last month, including links to their listings on Amazon:

Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton
amazon
This one was a pretty good book. I like the way it was written in the first person, narrated by Ibn Fadlon. I would have been happy to read more in the same vein. It's apparently a "true story" style telling of the story of Beowulf. Unfortunately, since I haven't read the poem, I had no idea and therefore didn't get the references. I may pick up a copy of the poem sometime so I can understand where he got his inspiration. Incidentally, I really like the movie based on this book, The Thirteenth Warrior, and the difference between book and movie in no way detract from either.

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
amazon
I was less interested by this one, and if it had been much longer, I might have just dropped it. It's probably because the story was written in the late sixties and so the high-tech elements seems so dated now. That probably takes some of the polish off the story. I've never seen the movie made off this book, so can't comment.

Sam Walton: Made in America by Sam Walton
amazon
I was really entertained by this book right from the start. The book reads just as if Walton was there talking to you directly, and his story is really an amazing one. If you don't know, he was the founder of Walmart, built totally from the ground up. The values he held and instilled in the company make not just his own success truly admirable, but the culture of that company totally outstanding. Anyone that thinks that capitalism lacks compassion, generosity, and looking out for employees is looking at the wrong examples. I especially recommend this book as a valuable counterpoint to, say, present-day liberal arts college coursework?

If You Don't Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails: And Other Lessons I Learned from My Mom by Barbara Corcoran
amazon
Yet another book written about an entreprenuer's success, this time Barbara Corcoran, who founded The Corcoran Group as her real estate startup in New York City and over twenty years later sold it to Cendant for about $70 million. This one is also a story of hard work, inspired leadership, and a person who combined success in capitalism with a real concern for her employees, as well as her customers.

We Shall Not Fail: The Inspiring Leadership of Winston Churchill by Celia Sandys & Jonathan Littman
amazon
Celia Sandys is Winston Churchill's grand-daughter, and has compiled the lessons of his leadership in Great Britain as an education in leadership, not just of a country, but as it applies to business as well. The similarities between Churchill's attention to strategy yet compassion and connection for the frontline soldier and the citizen's enduring the German Blitz and the business endeavors of Sam Walton are striking.

Striking enough that I sent email feedback to the middle management that runs my group at Microsoft laying out lessons they could take from these two men. Sam Walton would talk to associates in the stores all the time, even when the company surpassed $50 billion in sales each year. Churchill would travel to the front lines to visit with soldiers and bring them inspiration and comfort, often at great risk to himself. It made me wonder why someone only a couple steps up the organization chart from me only noticed the rug I have in my office some nine months after I put it there. I sent that message a couple days ago after making sure it was welcome ("Is it okay for me to give you guys some feedback?") and unfortunately, so far all I have is silence. I guess we'll see.

And then, here's a list of what I have "on deck" waiting to be read next:

Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy, Revised and Expanded by Thomas Sowell
amazon

Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One by Thomas Sowell
amazon

The Ten-Day MBA: A Step-By-step Guide To Mastering The Skills Taught In America's Top Business Schools by Steven A. Silbiger
amazon

Fantastic Voyage : Live Long Enough to Live Forever by Ray Kurzweil & Terry Grossman
amazon

How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) : The World According to Ann Coulter by Ann Coulter
amazon

Meeting Locations in Outlook

I had a meeting today with someone I'd never met before, and as I headed to the meeting, I checked my Treo to find I didn't know where it was really taking place. That's because the meeting location read, "My Office". Aagh!

If I created the appointment, then that means my office, 43/4311. I don't do that, though, after the first time I couldn't find a meeting because the location was given as "My Office." So that meant it was the office of the person I was meeting. Thank goodness it was only two of us, as the options would have been expanding rapidly. It was also fortunate that I had brought my laptop so I could look up the person's office and find the meeting.

It may seem a little thing, but a location for a meeting that doesn't assume a bunch of knowledge on the part of the other person seems like an important thing to do.

Hiatus

In point of fact, I did not abandon my blog. Rather, I went on vacation to Hawaii, and I was gone for some time without any consistent access to the Internet. I'm back, though, so I have a new post for you momentarily. I did notice, though, that Raymond Chen's blog includes posts from while he's on vacation, with a note at the end of each post that is was "prerecorded." What an overachiever!

Starbucks reprised

I anticipated, and received right on cue, an anti-corporation blog-comment response where one man's huge success is diminished as merely selfish and harmful to others, no matter how much wealth and well-being he has brought to the many, many people who jumped on that bandwagon toward greater financial security.

(For email readers, here's a link to post and comment: http://darktortoise.blogspot.com/2004/10/starbucks-ceo-to-retire.html#comments)

Six thousand new shops means some 25,000 new jobs for baristas, that is more employment for people who could otherwise be on welfare. On top of that, it's sucked endless money out of the "rich" people who have become addicted and funnelled much of it to those same newly employed individuals and middle class investors around the world - and those rich people have liked it. Why would anyone rooting for the little guy have a problem with that?

Also, while a press release, consider the following, a single example of corporate outreach to "the little guy." Perhaps a snap judgement to find Starbucks and Orin Smith objectionable, applying knee-jerk labels to them, reducing them to mere symbols, then discarding them out of hand is perhaps exactly what others find unacceptable when it's done the other way?

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, D.C., NEW YORK and BOSTON; July 29, 2002 -
Starbucks Coffee Company (Nasdaq:
SBUX), the Ford Foundation, Oxfam America and CEPCO (Oaxacan State Coffee
Producers Network), announced today their collaboration in a unique pilot
project to help small-scale Mexican coffee producers expand their access to the
global marketplace and increase the availability of high quality Fair Trade
certified coffee. This collaboration aims to enhance the livelihood and
capabilities of small-scale coffee farmers and simultaneously improve the
experience of coffee drinkers. "Producing high quality coffee, consistently and
in sufficient quantity to meet the requirements of the specialty coffee industry
is key to the survival of small farmer organizations in Central America and
Mexico," said Orin Smith, president and CEO of Starbucks.

Don't get me wrong, Ian has a right to his opinion, but I don't think the criticism holds up under scrutiny.

Starbucks CEO to Retire

Orin Smith has been CEO of Starbucks for four years. He's announced he's retiring next March 31. I've read that in those four years, Starbucks has gone from 2500 to 8500 locations. That's 4.5 new locations every day! Mr. Smith is apparently incredibly effective and his retirement is undoubtedly well-deserved. Congratulations to him.

The X Prize

http://www.wtnxprize.org/

The link above is to the WTN X Prize site, dominated by a form where you can suggest what X Prizes should be awarded. This is one of the coolest endeavors ever! An X Prize was just won by a group that made a second successful launch of SpaceShipOne, a totally privately funded spaceflight. The idea was that by offering a prize for achieving a truly innovative result in a given area, there would be greater incentive for individuals to pursue that result - enough incentive to make that result truly happen at all or at least happen earlier.

This is how innovation should be encouraged, rather than the current standard of government research grants. If the money that was being offered for grants today was instead offered as a prize for success, there would be people that would find the motivation to do it. I don't think government necessarily needs to be the source of the funding of the prizes, but I'd sure feel better about the expenditure if it was how it was done. That's about accountability.

As an example, there was a court decision recently (today?) by the 9th Circuit Court that the Army Corps of Engineers is already doing everything it can to keep water temperatures down in order to lessen impact of dams on the Snake River with regard to endangered salmon runs. Environmentalists were not happy. But what if there had a been an award for coming up with a dam engineering design that would have a zero-degree impact on water temperatures? Wouldn't that be much more effective than simply fighting in court?

As one last thought on this topic, isn't Google Answers (http://answers.google.com/answers/), itself another very cool idea, a fine example of this on a smaller scale?

[Politics] No Draft Here

It's amazing to me the agitation over the idea that Republicans are pushing for a new military draft, under the circumstances. Is there no fact-checking at all any more?

The draft bill in the House was put forth by Democrat Charlie Rangel and defeated 402-2. What's truly remarkable is that not only did every Republican vote against it (the only two votes for it were from Democrats) but that Rangel didn't even vote for his own bill. You have to wonder, did Rangel get the bill up for a vote in the House just to have a topic Democrats could attack Republicans about, counting on the lack of fact checking (and lack of proper mainstream reporting) to hide the source?

One would hope that this is now a dead issue after the clear defeat of the bill that was likely never expected to pass in the first place. Who needs another red herring?

Correction: Cat Stevens

I'd mentioned Cat Stevens as the stage name of Steve Adams, which is not entirely correct. Olympia had pointed out to me that she was sure he was Greek and had a Greek name, and she is correct. His birth name was Steven Georgiou, but his earliest performances were under the more marketable name of Steve Adams. Only later did he take up the name Cat Stevens.

So the progression is Steven Georgiou performed first as Steve Adams, then as Cat Stevens, then took up Islam, rejecting his past music, and took the name Yusuf Islam, then eventually put out more (this time Islamic) music under the Yusuf Islam name.

His story has a good synopsis here:
http://www.yusufislam.org.uk/article3awwcat.shtml

It's also good to read his (brief) condemnation of the 9/11 attacks, although there still seem to be quite a few questions about his activities with various groups of dubious agenda.

[Politics] Good Reporting on CNS

Look at this article:
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewSpecialReports.asp?Page=\SpecialReports\archive\200410\SPE20041004a.html

While I doubt that this article is going to change anyone's mind about it's topic (WMDs in Iraq and Iraqi connections to terrorism), I think the reporting is quite good and an interesting contrast to the recent brouhaha about Dan Rather and CBS News. I don't think it's going to change anyone's mind because even if we suddenly found a secret stash of WMDs in downtown Baghdad, there'd be plenty of people prepared to say, "Put there by whom?"

Note though, that this article, while not revealing by name the source of the documents they've been given, goes to great lengths right up front to discuss the experts that have been consulted on authenticity and what those experts said. Reading it, I found myself thinking, "Wow, I guess even if CBS didn't learn much from their recent experiences, it appears that either this guy did or he already knew how to demonstrate credibility."

I think I'll have to pay more attention to CNSNews.com now. I'm impressed.

Defining Scenarios

It's been a few days since I posted, mostly because I've done an enormous amount of writing this week between writing specs on our software project and a couple of long, heavy-thinking emails to my youngest brother, Ian. I've got a few things to post about, but I'll probably spread them out over the weekend.

This week has included a lot of writing down scenarios for how users will use the website we're developing. I'll just use the code name, Taranna, to refer to it from now on, since "the website we're developing" is so cumbersome. So a scenario is a way we describe a typical situation in which software is going to be used. By having a complete set of scenarios, you can capture all the action that'll be going on in the software and make sure you develop components to the software such that all those scenarios are covered.

In essence, scenarios are a step between raw requirements and functional specifications that make the requirements more readily understandable in human terms. I've never seen them used anywhere else I've worked, so Microsoft was my first exposure to the concept, but I think it's a pretty good one.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of people get badly hung up on scenarios and try to make them too detailed. For example, you might see something like this:

Bob is a systems administrator and wants to update his database server's settings to optimize the disk caching. He opens the Microsoft Awesome Console and performs a search to find the appropriate management setting tree. Finding the tree, he checks his watch and sees he has only five minutes before his leftover turkey, brought in to work in a plastic container he got at Walmart, will be done in the microwave down the hall. He initiates the settings wizard that analyzes the disk and determines optimal caching configuration. (etc.)

Seriously, I've seen scenarios that include stuff like the turkey thing. It can be entertaining, and I'm all for that, but the level of detail means that a lot of people never get finished with the scenarios and on to the next step of the work. Not everyone is cut out for the kind of near-fiction writing that seems to be desired by many.

Since I've had to write quite a few scenarios this week, I've taken to writing much shorter ones. For example,

A program administrator changes the address for a user that sent them an email with the correction.

Stuff like that will sometimes get feedback from others asking, for example, "What about other contact information?" While I think that it's effectively the same scenario, just another chunk of data that needs updating, I might change the above to:

A program administrator changes the address (or other PII) for a user that sent them an email with the correction.

(PII is "Personally Identifiable Information" and is very carefully protected at Microsoft, although that would be best discussed in a separate post.) So far, this seems to be working well, and I'm hoping my coworkers will start to follow suit and get less hung up on the scenario writing phase, thereby becoming more efficient and productive.

Shaun of the Dead

This last weekend, I was going to go see either "Cellular" or "Resident Evil: Apocolypse", but at the last minute, I invited Adam. It turns out he was already planning to go see "Shaun of the Dead" with Bob, so I went with them instead. Although it cost me some measure of my alpha male status to bend to their will this way, I had a great time. What a good movie!

It helped that my expectations were low. C'mon, it was a zombie movie and there's been plenty of those. This one, though, was really well done. Shaun is kind of loser who hangs out with his slovenly friend, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend's friends at a local pub at night and works in a consumer appliance store during the day. It takes him quite some time to even wake up from his humdrum life to realize that there are man-eating zombies all around him.

The movie had some clear inspiration from the Evil Dead series with the rapid-fire close-up sequences that show a relatively mundane series of actions on the part of the character in a striking way without taking up precious minutes of movie time. Also, Shaun's only at-work scene starts with him telling all his co-workers that, "Ash is out today, so I'm in charge." For those that don't know, "Ash" is the name of Bruce Campbell's lead character in the Evil Dead series and in those movies, Ash works in an S-Mart (think K-Mart). "Shop smart, shop S-Mart!"

These references don't detract from the movie at all, but rather add to it. This is one I would go see again, even in the theater, just because it was so much fun. If you like campy, comedic horror, go see it. If you go see it in the Seattle area, let me know and I'll join you.

OK, No Separate Politics Blog

The bad news is that I didn't understand my readership enough to know in advance that splitting off the politics to a separate blog was considered by most to be a bad idea. The good news is that I have a readership, and even better, a readership that cares enough to give feedback on such a decision.

I've killed the separate blog, so be ready!

About Politics in this Blog

I had a comment from a reader suggesting that splitting off the politics from the rest of what I write is a bad idea. Perhaps I just jumped at it too fast. I responded with my main reason. Of course, this is all in the comments section, so many people won't necessarily see there's a conversation going on there unless they visit that post directly. Since I would like to hear from other readers on this, here's the link to the specific post:

http://darktortoise.blogspot.com/2004/09/last-political-post-here-at-least.html

Please, weigh in on how you feel after reading the two comments already there.

(Recinded) Last Political Post, Here at Least

I'm going to stop posting about politics on this blog, but not about politics at all.

I've started a second blog at http://dtpol.blogspot.com because I've had two kinds of readers for this, my personal blog. Some seem to enjoy reading my political viewpoints and even comment on them. Some really would prefer to read only the other stuff and not have to wade through the half or so of my posts there that are on politics.

After all, politics is one of those touchy topics, like religion, where people are unlikely to change their views and are much more likely to get offended or angry when they hear or read views unlike their own. Out of respect for those readers that don't want their reading of my thoughts and feelings on everything else rudely interrupted by my political viewpoints, I'm spinning those viewpoints off to the new blog instead.

Unless I get around to moving older posts from this blog to the other, my posts on politics prior to September 22, 2004 are still here. I will soon set up some of the other features for the new blog, like an email subscription option, that I set up for this one and I'll announce that in both places. Those readers that are on the email list, please just hit Reply and tell me you want to be on the other one and I'll subscribe you right at the time that list gets set up.

For anyone using a blog aggregator like BlogLines, the XML feed is http://dtpol.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

Tuxedo

I'm going this evening to get measured for a tuxedo for the first time in a very long time. I think the last time was for my own wedding, so that would mean about fifteen years ago. This time, it's for Trevor's wedding to the multi-talented Suzanne, who holds an MBA and a job in an ad agency (I think) and also just participated in a comedy contest for Black Entertainment Television. I don't know if being Korean and sending in a tape to BET was the first joke or not, but apparently it worked well enough she'll be on TV after hundreds of comedy club appearances. Way to go, Suzanne!

The first tuxedo I was measured for was for my junior prom. When I went to pick it up, the legs were way too long. I brought it to their attention, and while they were able to fix it, I asked how they got it so wrong. It turns out that an inseam of 27 inches sounded so ridiculous to them, they figured it was a typo and so they hemmed the pants to 37 inches instead. Of course, 27 inches was correct and not that far off from where I still am today.

The nice way to put it is how my grandmother described it to me once, "Overtons sit high in the saddle." Abraham Lincoln said something on topic once, too, when asked about his long legs. He said something like, They are precisely long enough to reach the ground. People always laugh when I steal his line.

Cat Stevens Booted From US

http://rdu.news14.com/content/headlines/?ArID=55611&SecID=2

Cat Stevens, for those that don't know, was the name under which 70's folk-pop singer Steven Georgiou performed. In my teens, I really liked his music and used to listen to it a lot. Later, it was less my style although to this day I have a couple of his songs on my computer and listen to them here and there.

He had disappeared and was presumed dead way back when, but later resurfaced with a new name, Yusuf Islam, after his conversion to Islam. Now, his ties to radical Islam are high enough that he's being deported today by the US' Department of Homeland Security and has been added to the no-fly list.

I must say, I'm very disappointed.

[Politics] I Helped Kerry Today

It was in a very small way and probably ineffective, which is okay with me because I don't want to see him become president. But I helped because it was the right thing to do.

The Federalist Patriot publishes a newsletter I read. They mentioned a site they also produce dedicated to defeating the Kerry/Edwards ticket. On that site, they have a photo section, which includes this photo:

http://kerry-04.org/photos/view.php?photo=fonda.jpg

I realized I'd seen that photo before on snopes.com where it was debunked as a fake. In keeping with my principles, I emailed The Federalist Patriot and passed them this link:

http://snopes.com/photos/politics/kerry2.asp

I further encouraged them to remove the photo. I drew comparison to CBS' current (in my opinion, repugnant) stance on the Bush National Guard memos as "fake but accurate" and suggested their credibility was at stake.

I plan to check back periodically and see if they have removed the photo. I will be very disappointed in them if they don't, because they should do the right thing, even though it's not politically expedient. In fact, that phrase, "politically expedient," calls to mind that the Federalist Patriot newsletter offered a pertinent quote of the week on September 17th (Constitution Day, the anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, although it was another 18 months before it was fully ratified and took effect.) That quote was from George W. Bush's speech to the National Guard Association (emphasis mine):

What's critical is that the president of the United States speak clearly and consistently at this time of great threat in our world, and not change positions because of expediency or pressure. Our troops, our friends and allies, and our enemies must know where America stands and that America will stand firm. We cannot waver, we cannot waver because our enemies will not waver.

Again, I hope The Federalist Patriot will walk the walk, since they talk the talk.

Where's the Pause Button?

My skip-level manager dropped by my office to say something to me yesterday. When he walked in, his first question, though, was, "Why the white shirt?" I was wearing a white, button down, collared shirt with the sleeves rolled down and buttoned at the wrist. Basically the exact kind of white shirt men wear with suits, although this one happens to be heavier weight that a typical dress shirt, as I bought it at Old Navy instead of a store selling more formal attire. This is not a completely unreasonable question at Microsoft where standard attire is usually very casual if not downright sloppy.

My immmediate response was, "I haven't done laundry lately, so I couldn't wear my favorites." Later, though, I wished I had a pause button for just such circumstances. When someone asks a question like that, I want to hit pause and come up with a witty, clever response. Once ready, I could hit play again and delivery my "line."

I thought of other responses that might have been better. Just to play, I could have said, "Oh, it's for the interview." There isn't one, but it would have been amusing to joke around a little with him. I also thought of, "The flourescent yellow one hurts the eyes," and "I'm keeping a record of what I eat today," and "It's after Labor Day and I'm a rebel," and "It goes well with my eyes, at least the white part. I'm not bloodshot am I?"

Maybe naturally funny people have pause buttons they aren't telling the rest of us about?

Insight into Flight Attendant Mindset

My flight from Maryland to Washington today stopped in St. Louis, Missouri.  Few passengers were continuing on and of those I was the only one that elected to remain on the plane during the layover, which was a bit over an hour.  The reason I didn't get off the plane is that security regulations no longer allow you to leave any of your belongings on the plane, but rather, you have to take everything off with you.  Since on this flight I decided to bring my second bag (the one without the laptop) on the plane as carry-on instead of checking it like I did the other way, I further decided it was too much trouble to load up and carry off my carry-on.

 

Anyway, I got to overhear some conversations between flight attendants.  Very informative.  The most interesting took place in the aisle not four feet from where I was sitting.  "So, is this one the only one on during the layover?"  I felt distinctly like cattle or some kind of inanimate object, not worthy of even the anthropomorphism accorded to say, a small cell phone.  ("Oh, look it's so cute and adorable!")  They continued talking in much this way until I looked up at them and caught the eye of the one female of the group.  Without a word, they moved down the aisle about eight rows and continued their conversation in low tones from there.

 

Later, I asked one of the flight attendants a couple questions about flight times and number of passengers expected on the next flight, and got the distinct impression that such questions were entirely unwelcome while not in the air.  Suitable cowed by this exchange (ha, ha, cowed, cattle!) I returned to my seat and took my revenge.  They have been pwn3d!  (By my blog.)

 

[For those not versed sufficiently in 733+, the language of hackers and other online denizens, pwn3d is pronounced "poned" and was a partially mistyped and partially alternate version of "owned" meaning "beat you in competition."  That would be, "In that game, I owned you!" or "I won without you really getting to even compete to a level I consider significant!"  But of course, "pwn3d!", especially when said loudly while pointing is just really way too much more funny.  I will henceforth use pwn3d without explanation whenever the situation warrants, such as when people act in ways I find less than desireable.]

[Politics] Life Imitates a Clancy Novel

I have been reading a lot about the latest liberal attempt to bring George Bush's National Guard service into question in attempt to deflect attention away from the hard questions being posed to their own candidate that they don't seem to want to answer, and it's fascinating.  Frankly, I think it's fascinating totally independently of my own views on which candidate will make a better president.  The latest go-around reminds me of the various Tom Clancy novels I've read.

 

Look at it - CBS runs a report about some newly discovered memos that are supposed to somehow impugn Bush's service record despite his honorable discharge.  The high-tech internet crowd starts digging into the facts and the memos turn out to be pretty badly forged.  CBS stands by their story, but the idea that the Democratic National Committee and the Kerry campaign put this stuff in their hands to make them do the heavy-lifting around making such a story stick and damage their opponents.  Now CBS feels duped.  But the DNC doesn't want to fess up to it, so they start talking about how they had doubts.  But then, others in the DNC and the Kerry campaign starts floating this idea that somebody put the forgeries in their hands on purpose to get them to raise a stink and look bad when the forgery was discovered.  Who?  Why, the diabolical Karl Rove!  That's right, it's all an idea hatched and carried out by the Republicans to ultimately discredit the Democrats, the Kerry campaign, and the partisan media!

 

Personally, I think that anyone that could come up with that kind of coolness to discredit opponents is probably actually demonstrating the kind of thinking I want focused on enemies that want to kill us, so if Karl Rove and the Republicans started this, then they are more awesome than I thought.  But setting that aside, what a cool storyline that would make in a work of fiction.  I don't remember the title of the specific Clancy book (Executive Orders?), but in one of them there's a subplot where the vice president is trying to get the courts to declare Jack Ryan's presidency as illegitimate, and it involves documents that are destroyed (ooh, a Sandy Berger connection!), forgeries, lawsuits, and more.

 

That was a huge book and I read in very little time because it was exciting, detailed, interesting, and you could really see such things happening.  Now, I say we don't even have to imagine, it's going on right in front of us.  How cool is that?

 

Before I ever used to listen to politics, my friend Bobby used to tell me that he'd keep stuff like C-SPAN on in the office all the time because it was far more interesting to hear what was going on, who was doing what to whom, and listen to all the posturing as politicians try to get the upper hand and hide their real agendas.  At the time, I was unconvinced.  It seemed boring.  No more.

 

I just thought of another parallel - Roger Zelazney's Chronicles of Amber.  The main characters are a family of powerful immortals.  During the series, a given character will first seem like a bad guy, then later a good guy, then later a bad guy again.  All because the characters are complex and have motivations they hide from one another.  Truly intriguing stories.  That's what American politics is like, and probably the politics of many countries.

 

Maybe I should run for office, 'cause I'd love my job?

 

Flying on September 11

As I write this, I'm on a plane. I'm spending most of today on planes. I got up at 5am just to get to the plane on time, although due to a leak in the plane's hydraulic system, I'm not getting to Dallas until mid-afternoon and won't see National Airport in DC until around 9pm local time. Flying on September 11 is an interesting exercise. It's clearly something most people think twice about. A woman getting off the plane because the delay made her decide to just go home again instead of flying to wherever she was going even commented something to that effect to other passengers as she was getting off. That seemed pretty tacky, especially when the people you are saying it to are going to go ahead and fly on a plane you're currently abandoning. I wouldn't doubt we were all thinking about it anyway, but you just don't say it, right

Flying off on a complete tangent for a moment (ha, an airplane metaphor to launch my segue!) not saying stuff like that reminds me of a short story I have only read vicariously through Trevor. He was telling me about a story he read in an Asimov science fiction magazine where one guy is telling another guy that they have to be watchful for time travellers, but that they should be reasonably easy to spot because of all the unspoken, unwritten rules we have in our society. The time traveller would have no way of knowing them, because they aren't truly obvious, they aren't important enough for anyone to ever talk about, but when violated stand out like a sore thumb. His companion laughs at the idea, takes out a cigarette, and taps it on its case before lighting it. The first guy tells him he's now caught him, because people don't tap cigarettes because of how they are processed... and kills him. There was some context there as to why the time traveller would need to be killed that I didn't know, since I hadn't read the story, and still don't know because Trevor never explained that part and I still haven't read the story, so the killing came as kind of an extra shock in Trevor's rendition that made me laugh in surprise. So I have to wonder - did the woman getting off the plane come from another time where she'd been briefed on what 9/11 was, but had not internalization of what it would really mean to be an air traveller only three years later who actually lived through that day? I don't know, but I wasn't taking any chances, so after some explanation, I got the flight attendants to dump the body.

(For those of you far too serious minded, no, of course I didn't kill anyone. That you would even hesitate long enough to wonder, for shame

Getting back, though, to what I really set out to write about in this entry, it was interesting that I was able to get the cheapest round-trip ticket for a coast-to-coast trip I've ever purchased, $202, to make this trip. There were lots of black-out dates on which you couldn't fly at that fare, but September 11 was the only Saturday I recall being available and that made it possible for me to take a long weekend and not use up an extraordinary amount of my vacation time. That's important if I want to be able to take off the entire weeks around Thanksgiving and Christmas, which I do

I've never hesitated about flying on September 11 the last couple years, although this is the first year since 2001 that I've had any occasion to actually do so. Apparently, plenty of people agree with me, at least at these prices, as when the flight attendant was telling passengers about their options during the plane's repair delay, she mentioned that every American flight out of Seattle today was fully booked. The reason I don't hesitate and think the modestly improved security is all that's necessary if it's even necessary at all, is that I really think the kind of hijacking that took place on September 11, 2001 can't happen again. In fact, I think the opportunity to do such a hijacking was over even before that day was out

Why? Because the other passengers now understand that the stakes have been raised and are no longer likely to sit by complacently and allow something like that to happen. In the world pre-9/11, a hijacked airplane in the United States would have most passengers feeling resigned to the fact that they were now taking a side trip to someplace like Cuba where the plane would land and there'd be a pretty good chance of negotiation or daring rescue or something that would mean they'd eventually get home safely. As soon as the Jihadistan terrorists proved they were willing to kill themselves as well as everyone on board by slamming a plane into a building, as soon as they showed they weren't going to even try to survive, everyone else knew their own survival wasn't very likely at all around those kind of people

That the fourth plane of that day crashed in rural Pennsylvania is the first piece of evidence I have that such a change had happened. The people on that plane were communicating via cell phones with their families on the ground and once they understood what was going on, they stopped whatever they were doing that had them relatively contained at the back of the plane, and they surged forward to struggle with the terrorists. The plane still crashed, but not where the bad guys intended

Looking forward to the shoe bomber guy that we can all thank for needing to remove our shoes every time we go through security, he was subdued as soon as people around him caught on that he was up to something nefarious. We didn't even need armed air marshals to stop him (although I have no problem with the idea of armed air marshals on flights) because nobody was going to sit back and let him kill them all and nobody needed convincing that this was a potential or even likely outcome if they allowed themselves to be held at bay by threats. The stories a couple months back about the odd group of Middle Eastern men that kept getting up and using the restroom one after another and seemed so odd to the passengers, including a woman who very publicly wrote about the incident (Amy something? On plane, no Internet, very bad!) further showed that there wasn't going to be any hesitation about keeping a close eye on anything remotely out of the ordinary. So we've all been told they are some kind of musical band and that their odd behavior was just seeming odd because they were Middle Eastern? I have no problem with that. What's the opportunity cost of not reacting to your suspicions in this kind of case?

Granted, like in any war of technology, the technology keeps getting better on both sides. So the terrorists figured out a technology (get five guys with boxcutters on a flight, take over the plane, and fly it into a big building) and the passengers figured out a countering technology (keep an eye on your fellow passengers for weird behavior and err on the side of caution by subduing anyone that seems to get out of hand.) There's nothing that says terrorists won't come up with something more effective - thus the ongoing discussions by people thinking about these things, like whether terrorists could build a bomb out of a bunch of innocuous parts brought on by several of them. But I think we, the people that don't want to die at the hands of Jihadis, took a bigger technological leap the very same day they brought out their latest creation. My government may struggle with when it's okay to racially profile, but I sure as hell don't have such constraints. I start racially profiling the second I get near a plane

My only other thought is about why it's probably safer to fly on September 11 than any other day of the year is that we're all thinking in these ways far more on September 11 than any other day - passengers, security, flight attendents, everyone. Pulling something crazy off on this day is undoubtedly way harder than it would be on any other. It's kind of a "lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place" kind of view. And if you've read this, you've both devoted some pretty good time and I was right about at least my own plane.

No Place for the Personal in Business Email?

I had a distressing email exchange today, although it ended up working out okay. My skip level manager (meaning my manager's manager for those that don't understand Microspeak) returned this week from sabbatical and saw an email from me I'd sent around a month ago. The last paragraph told him I'd be happy to talk about the contents of the email in 2008 or so and that I hope he had a great sabbatical.

He was horribly offended. He assumed this was sarcasm and disrespectful. Thank goodness he told me how offended he was, though, as I was able to explain to him that, no, really, I really did hope he had a great sabbatical and I had only said 2008 because I was imagining the amount of email and higher priority tasks he must have after being out of the office for over two months. More fortunately, he did end up apologizing for taking it so wrong and retracted his sense of having taken offense.

I guess he's one of those guys I'll just never be able to communicate with smoothly, especially if I try to communicate with any attempt to be personable. He's consistently taken things I've said the wrong way. He's not alone, either. Other people I've dealt with here and elsewhere take things all the wrong way. I'm usually taken completely by surprise at the twists and turns that must have been imagined to get to the offensive interpretation.

Coincidentally, when I'd been frustrated with this particular guy in the past, I had talked to one of our HR people that I really respect and asked her how I should deal with the ongoing gulf in my interpersonal communication with him. She suggested that with him (and really anyone) I should think about things he said or did and ask myself if I thought his intentions were good or malicious. Since I don't think he's malicious, that has helped, and not just with him. It was good advice. But for some people, it often just doesn't help. Ack!

[Politics] John Kerry on Iraq

The ongoing accusations of the Swift Vets against John Kerry have a serious downside, in that that it continues to focus huge amounts of attention on the Vietnam War, a war that ended over forty years ago. Knowing what Kerry thinks about the current war is more important. This is a war which is not just Afghanistan or Iraq but rather against the kind of fundamentalist Islam that sees beheadings and child-killing as somehow acceptable and justifiable. The term "Jihadstan" seems to work well.

This video (yes, put out by the RNC and the Bush campaign) captures Kerry rather nicely, I think. Most illuminating is the hawkish talk Kerry puts forward right up until he actually started running for president. I really don't get how anyone could vote for this guy. I also have to wonder if Kerry is single-handedly responsible for the vast increase in the number of times people say "this administration," but I guess that's a different topic.

So here's the video: http://www.kerryoniraq.com/

The Political Machine

I think I absolutely have to get this game:

http://store.ubi.com/item.jsp?item=68213

You play as a campaign manager guiding your presidential candidate to victory or defeat. As a way to better understand the electoral college process and why candidates campaign in certain states rather than others, it sounds intriguing and educational.

David Robbins has done a review of the game on OpinionJournal, although it may require subscription to read:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110005566

Travel to Alaska

My parents live in Fairbanks, Alaska, and this weekend I'm up visiting them.  The flight up was relatively uncomfortable, as many full flights are.  The guy next to me was already seated when I arrived at my seat, and he had claimed the armrest.  He didn't give it up for the entire flight.  While I worked on a couple things on my laptop during the flight, I spent almost the entire time kind of leaning over to my right in response to my neighbor taking up some my space without even asking.  My dad pointed out there's a highly appropriate political metaphor there.

 

Most interesting was that as we were coming into Fairbanks, the smell of burning wood was suddenly noticeable on the plane.  For those that don't specifically follow what's going on in Alaska, there's been raging forest fires that have already consumed roughly five-and-a-half million acres that has blanketed the area with smoke.  (Just to throw in a little gripe about environmentalists with a size comparison, the area potentially affected by the rejected Arctic National Wildlife Reserve access to Alaskan oil would have been about 1000 acres.)

 

I've often read that smells provide the most potent memories.  It certainly seems the case because I was immediately flooded with memories from my teenage years as a Boy Scout in Alaska.  The smell of a campfire and the way that smell was left on my clothes and camping gear was always very pleasant while I was growing up, mostly because some of my happiest times were while on camping, hiking, canoeing and boating trips with my Scout troop, but also because it's just a very nice smell.  There's definitely a haze over the area in and around Fairbanks, although I'm told it isn't the worst it has been.

 

Coming here is always a bit odd, anyway, as it's been so long and I've spent so much more time in big cities or pretty busy suburbs since moving out of town.  Even as the town progresses and grows and adds new streets and buildings, it's still so... small town.  Alaskans also have a fierce kind of state patriotism and pride in their state you don't see everywhere.  I don't see people go on about Washington state most of the time, certainly not like here.  Even many of the business names push being Alaskan - the Anchorage airport had the Mosquito Bookstore and Sourdough Traders right by the gates, and I saw a shirt for sale in one of them with a design I recall from childhood.  It has crossed salmons and a skull with the slogan, "Spawn 'til You Die."  Classic Alaskan humor.

 

Undocumented Expectations

A significant problem for a relative newcomer to a large organization (as I am still after under two years at Microsoft) is when you run into undocumented expectations. In my first annual review, my manager at the time wrote, "Aaron met expectations during this review period." That was a surprise to me at the time, as I had no idea what the expectations were or how to meet them, much less exceed them. In fact, my opinion was that if I met expectations without knowing what they were, that should be revised to be "exceeding all reasonable expectations."

I've run afoul of the undocumented expectation many times since coming to Microsoft. Another smaller example is not using the format for status meetings that an attending executive expects. In an attempt to have non-intrusive, efficient, and valuable status meetings, I would send out the status in advance, keep the meeting short, and not merely read aloud the status report to attendees. That reading aloud format is painful to sit through, encourages ridicule by others after the fact, and lets people basically disregard any preparation for the meeting. However, it turns out there is an undocumented expectation to spend at least part of every status meeting doing exactly that.

Another undocumented expectation I've run into multiple times is when presenting a report or slide deck or whatever that turns out to not be in the expected format, layout style, or presentation order. That format is rarely explained ahead of time, even when you ask about it. At best, you may be able to find it out by the tenth time you present to someone, unless they change it, of course, which happens all too often. You can also spend a lot of extra time running around consulting with others to try to figure out what's expected, but I don't consider that documented.

What's even more exciting, and this has happened to me as well, is when the actual content of your presentation in an area where you are supposed to be the expert who has done the research and planning and is going to set forward strategy or policy is not what the recipient expected and it's your fault. There's been a time or two where I realize partway through a presentation that it's going south because it's not what the audience expected and they aren't happy about that. What I want to do is stop, shake them, and demand to know why they didn't just let me know what they wanted to hear in advance and save me a lot of work and them a lot of anguish.

I mentioned strategy, which brings up a related thought. I've had two annual reviews now, and in the first, my manager at the time brought up a criticism that said I was thinking too tactically and needed to think strategically if I wanted to succeed. In my second, my manager brought up a criticism that I was thinking too strategically and not paying enough attention to the tactics. Since my second review resulted in a better score and better accompanying compensation awards, more strategy and less tactics is better, but I still need to adjust. Apparently, the proper mix is another undocumented expectation.