Economy?

It's amusing, in an irritating sort of way, to hear the local news equate "the economy" with "Wall Street." Oops, economy is struggling today because we didn't have an Instawar! Stocks plummeted over 300 points! Brokers are throwing themselves under bulldozers out of despair!


It's just the stock market people. It matters, but it does not equal "the economy."

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Why I Know Bush is not Stupid

I was born with a club foot, which meant being in a series of casts, changed as often as twice weekly, for the first 14 months of my life. Then at the tender age of 17 days old, I developed meningitis. Luckily I had an awesome doctor who actually admitted he didn't know what it was and sent me along to others. Had he been a later doctor I had, he might have said "eh, just a fever, have some aspirin and lots of water." So with no thanks to work being done of the highway, and much thanks to an anonymous cabbie who, instead of simply giving directions, had my parents follow him through a maze of back alleys and obscure streets to get there, I ended up at Children's Floating Hospital in Boston.


I was there for 11 days. Had a 107° temperature. Had spinal fluid too dried up for a spinal tap. I'm told it was scary seeing me with a bunch of needles sticking in my head. There wasn't much they could do for me in 1961. Medical technology notwithstanding, on the night I was expected to die, I recovered for no apparent reason. Just like that. But they thought I would be mentally retarded as a result of the experience. Not even close.


I was left with nerve damage that affected my coordination. Gym was torture, as I simply couldn't do what normal kids could do, and the elementary school gym teacher couldn't stand it. I moved a little differently in general. I couldn't hold a pen or pencil the "correct" way, so I hold a pen "funny." I couldn't throw, catch, build things that needed finer coordination; anything like that. And I talked... in... slow... motion. Or even fumbled words. Up through 6th grade or so, I had trouble taking tests, in that I'd be unable to finish in the allotted time, but everything I finished would be correct.


There was nothing mentally retarded, or stupid, about me. I learned to read so long before I ever started school that I can't remember ever being unable to read. My experience in first grade was funny. There was a placement test, which I apparently did very badly on. They put me in the "slow" class, with a great teacher who was in her very first, green year. The normal kids in the class looked up to me and tried harder. That eventually affected the policy, so they started mixing kids of different levels in the same classes.


I still talked slowly, and was relatively shy. Or introverted anyway. The casual observer could easily think I was indeed "a little slow" mentally. When I was in 6th grade and went for a checkup with a neurologist at New England Medical Center, I was still nerve damaged and uncoordinated enough that after a little testing he ran out of the room excitedly to fetch a colleague; a "you gotta come see this!" kind of thing. That was after it had diminished significantly. The main reason we went, besides that it had been too long and was a good idea, was due to the gym teacher tormenting me. She would pull me out of regular class for special sessions to try to fix me, or whatever she was thinking.


In any event, with puberty came change. In my case it included coordination improving dramatically. I still talked slowly, but it wasn't as pronounced. I didn't magically become able to throw, catch, bat, etc. without looking ridiculous. Nor did I magically become able to fix all things mechanical like my older brother, who completely dismantled a lawn mower at the age of five. I went through my entire youth being told I wasn't "mechanical" or "mechanically inclined." Mistaking a poorly coordinated person who tests high on the mechanical aptitude and spatial relations tests is like mistaking a person who isn't glib, fumbles words or speaks dyslexically for someone lacking in mental ability. After a while I talked more normally, and more gradually I became more coordinated to the point of overt normality. I still couldn't do sports, nor was I interested in them. I wasn't glib. I couldn't easily do something like learn to type.


Glibness was something I decided to practice at when I was in college. I was out of high school for three years before I started college. By the time I finished high school I was so disgusted with the education system, more school was the last thing on my mind. A few factors nudged me along. My friends were in college, which made me eventually think about what I was missing. When I got the GED results, the test administrator planted the seed by taking the time to write a note saying "PS - Very high scores, continue your education." I came to see that I wouldn't advance much beyond where I was at the book bindery where I worked, unless I had a degree. What really pushed me over the edge was reading the book 1984. It gave me nightmares, which were not a normal thing for me, and threw me into a severe depression. That made me question my life. Reading Atlas Shrugged cheered me up and brought me out of the distraught state. By then I'd decided.


I ended up majoring in accounting. Technically management science with a concentration in finance and accounting, but it was all the same material as an accounting degree elsewhere. My socialist accounting and business law professor, whom I had to tolerate for Accounting II, Business Law II, Federal Taxation, Auditing, and Advanced Accounting, loved to use the socratic method no matter how inappropriate to the class. My rival for top, favored accounting student was an impressively glib guy whose goal was to be both a CPA and a lawyer, just like our socialist professor. I was just not good, still, at rapid fire conversion of my thoughts to the requisite spoken words, and certainly not at sounding spontaneously clever. It was that rivalry of sorts that made me actively try to cultivate that. I not only don't speak slowly any more, I also can be relatively quick and spontaneous. People get annoyed with my punning, but that is a related skill.


Both my rival and I got sideswiped when we were in the same Accounting Theory class, with three other students. That was the final required accounting course, and was taught by my superb but tough Cost Accounting professor. She had been amazing at teaching Cost, but I never had to work so hard for a class. On the other hand, I had a 96 average for my trouble; best among the half of us who got through without dropping or flunking the class. Anyhow, she also taught Theory, which had one female student. I helped the female classmate get through the semester, helping her understand things, briefing her before class on what she ought have studied (it was always freaky when she'd repeat my words verbatim in answer to a question in class), even looking at her cheesy paper to see if it was okay. The paper was a big part of the grade for the semester. Mine was on the theory of "value" and money, and it was great except for being more of an economics treatise that didn't get related enough to accounting. I may as well have not bothered to help, since she was clearly favored by the professor for being female. The cumulative effect of subjective parts of grading, including an A on the girl's paper, which I had read and knew was modest, was to give fellow student I helped an A- for the semester, while my rival and I each got a B+, and the other two were something like B- and C. I lost most of my respect for my formerly favorite professor. And learned some kind of lesson about helping others. As for the rival, I believe he didn't think much of me prior to that class, and it may have been the deliberateness making me appear less than I am. While we were never buddies, his perception changed. That class was good practice at being faster on my proverbial feet.


To cut to the chase, many people seemed to decide early that George W. Bush had to be stupid because he was not always glib, and often mangled what he was trying to say. Anyone who thinks that is indicative of a lack of intelligence is the worst kind of prejudiced moron. By now it's a belief by rote, ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Furthermore, you do not get through college and then obtain an MBA without something there backing it up. Whatever foibles he may have, he is not stupid. He is not a puppet of his advisors. Perhaps he's not an avid reader. Perhaps he's not curious about absolutely everything like some of us. Perhaps a moral compass, focus, diligence, and knowing how to pick the right staff are useful in making the difference between being merely intelligent and hyperintelligent. But jeez, he is not stupid. No way. And every time I see someone starting from that assumption, I automatically tune them out, as nothing else they might say from that basis can be valid.

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This Post Brought to You by the Letter D

After Howard Dean had announced for President, before much of anyone else had yet, my father told me to tell everyone how bad he was. Since this is a great forum for doing so, I have asked my father to e-mail me specifics that I can post here. He lives in the real world part of Vermont, as opposed to the socialist Burlington area that skews things in the state. Many people like him are horrified by the idea of Dean being promoted. Kind of the way more of us than you might expect were horrified by Dukakis here in Massachusetts. I'm still not sure whether to think of Dukakis more as evil, or merely preposterous, and I still can't believe he ever got the nomination. I think my father considers Dean worse.


Here's a little Dukakis story. Once upon a time, when he was governor and wanted to tell us all what to do so we wouldn't hurt our helpwess wittle selves, he was on a radio talk show taking calls. The big issue of the time was the initial attempt at imposing a mandatory seatbelt law. Even my socialist accounting and business law professor disagreed with the government doing that. My stepmother called the show, and ended up talking with the governor, but not on the air. It at the end of the show or during ads or whatever. She went after him vociferously, in her inimitable way, as to what made him think he could do this. Finally he snapped "because I'm the governor!" and hung up on her. That was his reason; because he could. It's all about power in the end.

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Voyage

I've finished reading the book Voyage by Stephen Baxter, originally mentioned here. I have to say it was superlative to say the least.


As I described, it's an alternate history SF novel depicting an alternate space program following the 1969 moon landing. Rather than losing all momentum for true, manned exploration, going with low earth orbit shuttles, the right people and politics happen to put into place a Mars landing program. This book gives a look at what it might have taken to accomplish it both politically and technically. It culminates in a Mars landing in 1986. It gets there with alternating, convergent storylines. One covers snippets of the actual voyage, culminating in the landing. The other covers what it took to achieve the voyage, culminating in the launch.


In a way that feels real, as if you'd lived it, the book goes into how the decisions are arrived at, the problems along the way, the personal and professional sacrifices people make, and what might have been sacrificed from the space program as we knew it by going that way instead. Particularly poignant to me was the investigation of accidents along the way, so much like the current investigation and recent accident.


Highly recommended reading. Not, mind you, the recommended way of doing things (as depicted in the book), but that wouldn't be possible now except in a general sense anyway. To me a more sensible approach was the one used in the books by Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. Yet Baxter's book is more readable, and goes into some of the type of details Robinson's do not.

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Quality Depression Revisited

I think Joshua Zader of Mudita Journal may have addressed the "quality depression" theory better than I did here.

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Quality Depression

This article by Shane McChesney, describing our current economic situation as a "quality depression," reminded me of similar thoughts I have had. We're in a glut of "good enough" computers, with less urgency about upgrading. Cars leave older ones in the quality dust. Software that's at least good enough can either be had free, or bought once and never upgraded because there's no compelling reason.


That last item is a big problem for Microsoft. They worked up to a magnum opus with Office 97, achieved almost total market penatration, made it the standard, gave it decently functional versions of most of the features any of us could ever want. And then they wanted everyone to upgrade to Office 2000. Office XP. Keep the gravy ladling into Redmond! Now as they take measures to make upgrading harder to avoid, as they try to move to a paradigm of predictable cashflow through software rental or something close, as they raise prices in a down economy, there's more opportunity for alternatives to Office, in particular, than there has been in years.


My first car was a 1969 Nova, which I got in late 1978. My mother had driven it before me, and before her the car had belonged to my aunt for all or most of its previous life. At that age it was already a piece of crap, falling apart, barely alive. If my father hadn't owned a body shop, and done most of the work and/or spending to keep the car going, I'd not have had it long. It seems like I had it forever, but in fact it was replaced in 1981. All my earlier cars weren't much better, or were worse. I grew used to knowing that when a car reached 130,000 miles, it was about to die.


Five years ago I bought a 1988 Nisaan Sentra with 51,400 miles on it for $2000. It had been totaled, partially repaired, sat for a couple years, then been finished. In that time I have had to spend about $2000 in work on it, of which $500 was the year I bought it and $600 was a few months ago. It is starting to look ratty and has foibles, but it purrs and is absolutely reliable. At 146,000 miles and counting. It still freaks me out a little to see that I am driving a car with that many miles, but it's fine. The year I bought it, I drove 3000 miles in one trip to and around P.E.I. and Nova Scotia. I might like to fix a few foibles like the dead radio first, but yeah, I'd trust it to do that trip again. I figure the car is good for a couple more years of part time driving.


By comparison to the Sentra, I bought a 1993 Plymouth Voyager two years ago with 88,000 miles on it for $2500. It has required more than $2000 spent on maintenance in those two years, and it needs more that can be put off for a while. I am more nervous about it letting me down than the Sentra. Yet even the van beats the old Nova at the same age in years. As one of my friends observed on seeing it for the first time, it looks almost new.


All that said, are these things causing the economy to fail? I don't think we can really go that far. They are definitely a factor somewhere along the line, but is it to the bad? Should we go back to making crappy quality cars, slow computers, feature poor software? Must we have market growth through planned obsolescence?


If a company can buy a batch of computers and use them for seven years instead of three, don't they now have extra money to spend or invest in other ways on average over that time? Is this not something like the typical "piece of the pie" image of the economy and distribution? You can't assume a fixed pie size.


It's an interesting discussion in any event.

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Anonymity

When I conceived of this blog, I didn't necessarily plan to be anonymous about it. I chose Jay Solo as the name for it because it's a long time alias of sorts, and I wanted something that wouldn't already have been used. It's a name given me by a friend I have known since 1975, whose alias was "Fishwalker." When he moved away, he initiated an exchange of letters under the theme of "Letter Wars." Thus the alias is based on my middle name, which is used by my family due to my father and grandfather sharing my first name and living in the same house when I was a kid, and Han Solo of course. I in turn dubbed a friend I've known since 1973 "Adam-Wan." My second e-mail address ever was was jay.solo at vader.com (initially jay.solo at tangent.shore.net before my friend with a BBS got a domain).

Anyway, there's the source of and reason for the Jay Solo name. I happen to like it.

What I wonder is how much I should mention real names, and not just mine. Most people reading this so far know who I am, because I've advertised in my .sig or told them to read it. I think some of the first ones I pointed it out to visited once, said "that's nice," and never thought to return. If the people I know are aware who is writing, and aware from context who I am talking about when I express mean opinions, then why worry about strangers? I have e-mailed a few fellow bloggers under my real name, so some of the most prominent bloggers know who I really am and could easily refer to me that way if they linked to me (but I think that would require the right combination of posting something truly clever and different, and having them aware of it in a timely manner; that's how one gets instalanched).

Ehh, we'll see. It's going to get awkward to talk about some things without using names, if I insist on mentioning friends and family. Thoughts?

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Speaking of Family...

(Or, all about me, part one...)

I am the middle of five children. I have a brother seven years older, a sister four years older, and brother six and ten years younger. I also have two stepsisters, one and four years younger. I have two step-cousins, ten first cousins living or dead on my father's side, and eleven on my mother's side that I know of. That includes no first cousins once removed* or second cousins. My mother had a sister and four brothers, two of whom drowned while lobstering in 1975. My father had two sisters, fraternal twins, and a brother, who died less than two years ago. I have one living grandparent; my maternal grandmother, who will soon be 87. My maternal grandfather died just short of 90. On my father's side, my grandmother died of a heart attack when she was just over 65, in 1976 as I recall, and my grandfather made it so about 84 before everything kind of gave way to smoking damage at once. At least three of my great-grandparents were alive during my lifetime, and they are a story unto themselves. Since I got into ages, the best we've done to my knowledge is a great-aunt of my mother's who nearly made it to 105. Not the Howard Trust, but not bad.

I am the only single sibling. Never married. Not even a date in years. No kids. My older brother tells me I am the one who'd be the better father and should have had kids. Since there's no sign it'll happen any time soon, and I'm old enough that it's starting to seem like a silly idea, chances are it'll never happen. Darn! I was looking forward to passing along my genetic defects.

My siblings have totally made up for my procreative deficiencies. In order of age they have five, two, five, and four kids, which means sixteen nieces and nephews for me. The oldest nephew has two girls of his own, so I have the two most adorable grandnieces in the world. I live to see that my nieces and nephews get any help I can give them, as much as possible, going to college when the time comes, having computers, that sort of thing. It's two late for the oldest two, born in 1973 and 1974, but for the rest, born starting in 1988, my goal is to be financially successful enough in time to make getting through college as feasible as possible. It might end up being that I can only help a little, but if I could foot the entire tuitionbill for every one of them, I would gladly.

In my generation you just didn't do college. I was three years out of high school when I made the decision to go. Had to deal with plenty of guff about taking a "four year vacation." Some were supportive, others weren't, and it felt like swimming againt the tide. A slightly younger cousin went to Zoo Mass. Amherst overlapping my college career, and actually graduated first. To my knowledge, we are the only two who both started and finished a four year college. And yet it had been done before! My great grandmother went to the same college I did, I learned later, and was a teacher when she met my great grandfather and moved to PEI, Canada to marry him. As I said, the great grandparents are stories all their own.

Argh, fading now. Sleep...

* Oh right, I made a footnote. The difference between first and second and once, twice, etc. removed always confuses people, but it's as simple as whether the people in question are in the same generation as measured with respect to a reference generation. So my grandmother's sibling's children are my mother's first cousin. They are not of my generation; we are once removed. My mother's first cousin's children are my generation and we share a great grandmother. We are second cousins. And so forth. Now, sleep, really...

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Tech Support Management Stuff Again

In this post I didn't mention anything about the implications of outsourced tech support to the way tech support ought to be managed. Nor did I mention the increasingly common practice of outsourcing globally.

I do not believe either of those practices are things that should never be done. They should be done thoughtfully, carefully, and with all the same considerations in mind. Some of those things simply become harder. For instance, developers are even more likely to see lowly tech support as just that, lowly. People in the company hiring the outsourcer are even less likely to see the tech support staff as part of the same team. Ironically, outsourced staff can end up knowing the product (and customers) better than internal staff; another potential risk.

Foreign support staff who are hired to interact with North American customers should speak easily understandable English, as minimally accented as possible. Even that is sometimes not enough. I worked with people from many backgrounds; Pakistani, Indian, Chinese, Palestinian (from the West Bank originally, at an rate), Kenyan, Irish, Cape Verdean, and even Rhode Islanders. My Chinese friend, from Sezchuan province originally, sounds like she was born in America. I worked with two great people originally from Kenya, both of whom had the coolest, hard to place accents. Not French, not British... different. One of them is one of the most natively brilliant, talented people I have ever met. His accent is pretty mild.

One time when he was on another team, a customer hung up on him. She called back and got his cubemate, who then told her "he speaks better English than I do" and made the customer apologize to our Kenyan friend before he'd help at all. Heh. The other Kenyan on our team was a little shy, but she was amazingly pleasant and more than skilled enough to help the customers. Once in a while someone would object to talking with her because of her accent, which was a shame. And yet I understand a little. Some people I just have trouble understanding, even though I became good at it working in a retail environment way back in the stone age. I became able to tell that "buh ah mahbuhwahs" meant "box of Marlboros," and that carried over to listening carefully and discerning what people were saying on the phones in support. It helps if customers and support techs both make that effort. By outsourcing to a heavily accented location, management invites more grief in that department, but even within the United States we don't all speak clear, broadcast standard Midwestern.

Basically management in a company that requires technical support to be delivered to customers (or even internal "customers") needs to think very carefully about how they implement and treat it. It is not simply a short-term, bottom line decision on how to give short shrift to this thing we're doing because we gotta. It will affect the end user's experience and the company's reputation, which in the longer run means affecting sales.

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Tech Support Madness

South Knox Bubba has a software support rant of possible interest.

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Management Madness

Following up to this post on tech support, I have to say that management can make all the difference in the end user's tech support experience.

First, it is helpful if management treats the support techs with a modicum of respect. These are, if you hired well, intelligent, dedicated, skilled people who will help make or break the image of your company and its products. They are part of your overall marketing strategy and product development/feedback loop, not just a pesky addition to overhead to be done as cheaply and thoughtlessly as possible.

Pay appropriately, and if you can't, don't pretend you are; try to make up for it by being a great place to work.

Don't starve support people for training and resources. Nobody can know everything, and tech support is as much about finding out as knowing answers offhand. However the more you know and grasp in the first place, and the better your resources, the quicker and easier it is to find out.

Don't be a sweatshop. People will accept "all hands on deck" more graciously if it's not a way of life.

Hire qualified people, and don't hire people who can't learn.

If you do hire unqualified people, cut your losses or watch morale suffer. And don't treat people like children.

Don't fall for fluff over substance. Meaning, standard greetings and "thank you for calling My Company" closings, and all the customer service mushiness in the book are no substitute for customers calling and having problems solved in a skilled, effective manner. No rudeness, but people aren't fooled by know-nothing support techs shiny with customer service platitudes.

Try to find ways to keep people interested. Support can become boring. If it's possible, try to have available career paths, even if it's just moving to different or more advanced products.

Have a sense of humor. Allow support staff to be the geeks that they, if you hired well, are.

Tech support is the front line for bugs, usability problems, documentation problems, and enhancement requests by your customers. You know, the customers you'd like to keep for the long term rather than just this one product or accounting cycle. Yeah, those people! So give the support techs some credit and some leeway for creativity, an open channel of communication to your product development and other staff, and heck, supportive management that grasps how the pieces fit together.

Don't let HR have too much control over technical hiring or derail the hiring of superlative candidates.

I am sure I must be forgetting something here, so if I think of more I'll append to the post, or mention it in a future post. I do want to give an example of that last item above, regarding HR. When I was a tech lead, I did tech screenings of applicants, and the department managers did management interviews. Several people had been screened for a prospective new class (the first five weeks at that point was training, so it was a class). One was particularly marginal, only getting a reference check in case we needed all the warm bodies. Of course, "warm bodies" is never the proper approach, but it was what often had to be done as a matter of company culture as it devolved over time. So one of the managers asked HR to do reference checks. Custom was that they would provide him the results, then he would tell them which ones to make offers.

We had a job fair day and interviewed additional prospects. One of the managers and I handled that, and in the process found one of the most ideal candidates who had ever applied. He would have undoubtedly been up there with our best, most internally revered techs. He was also a nice, personable guy, originally from Indonesia if I recall correctly. We wanted him to be hired. Now. There was an opening in the new class, because Mr. Marginal was not going to be offered a warm body job when we had Mr. Ideal to hire instead.

As it turned out, HR had broken with traditional procedure and as soon as the references checked out, had offered jobs to all of the previously interviewed candidates, good and marginal. Further, they insisted to the manager that this was the way it had always been done and were supremely irritated that he questioned them on it. We were absolutely, hands down, no second chances not allowed to hire Mr. Ideal. HR, in effect, made the decision to hire Mr. Marginal instead. He proved to be worse than he had appeared in the interviews, being hard to train and not that bright, yet arrogant and secure in his knowledge that he already knew more and was better than anyone else.

Mothers, don't let your children grow up to be HR weasels.

Respect people. Respect. Support techs are not serving up fries with that.

I also want to talk about what I look for when screening candidates, but this is enough for now. More down the line if I missed anything.

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Hi, My Name Is Jimmy Carter and I'm Rotten As President

Rachel has a fun little Carter rant. In my case, I was 15 when he became president, and I thought he was a joke.

Indeed, I remember a couple of us were excited about Reagan's challenge to Ford, though I always liked Ford. I was shocked at the gullibility of the public when Carter won, and his tenure was worse than I could have imagined.

Addendum:
Little Tiny Lies has this worthy, longer rant about Carter. Heh.

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Peanut Butter Rocks

Acidman has a spot on post about the glories of peanut butter, and provides us with this cool link to boot. I always feel bad for people who are allergic, or who twistedly can't stand the smell without getting sick. Sad for them. More for us.

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Wild Turkeys

I just added a comment here regarding wild turkeys, and Turkey Swamp where I grew up.

For giggles I just Googled Turkey Swamp and found that Massachusetts is not the only state with one of those.

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Real Estate Bubble?

Megan McArdle has a good post on the housing market and current prices. This is something I've been concerned about. Things can't keep going up forever, and someone will get caught holding the bag. Then again, I don't expect the bubble to burst as spectacularly as it did in the past.

As for rents versus house prices, if real estate goes up, rents will tend to follow, if not uniformly or elastically. (Is that a word?) If the two get far out of sync it should trigger readjustment in the form of rent changes and slowdown of real estate increases.

But I am not an economist. I considered minoring in economics, and aced the two economics courses I was required to take (after flunking a half-year economics class in high school with a teacher who hated me and vice-versa, go figure), but I have no special qualifications to evaluate these things. My advice is best served salted.

The first of the college economics courses required a paper instead of a final exam. This was in the fall of 1984 if I recall correctly. My paper was on privatization, which I was amused to learn my professor had never heard of. He learned what it was from me. As usual, I did the paper at the absolute last minute, starting a couple days before it was due. That frustrated the hell out of Bob Poole and someone else I spoke with at the Reason Foundation, as they weren't able to send me any information. I also spoke with someone at a private fire company, and quoted people I spoke with in the paper, which made up for a lack of written sources.

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Tech Support Madness

Dealing with tech support: I couldn't have put it better than Dean Esmay.

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Geeks Are Cool

Excellent article on geekdom, via Glenn Reynolds.

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Weaselnomics

Herr Schroeder, tear down those regulations.


Did people learn nothing from Reagan, Thatcher, Hayek and others? It might cause even more pain in the short term, but Germany needs to do something to stop the self-imposed stagnation discussed at http://www.msnbc.com/news/881021.asp?0cv=CB20. Ditch or trim the semi-socialist policies, regulations, and constraints on economic bloom, and bloom the economy will.


On a related note, I don't understand why someone would want to be a dictator, not a traditionally brutal one. If I were somehow in that position somewhere, I'd take advantage of it to impose economic sanity and freedom on the place, do my best to ensure it could not easily be revoked, then step aside. What better way to be revered by your people in the long term.


On another related note, I actually have a first cousin in Germany. We've never met, spoken, or corresponded. Had I known he existed when I was taking German, I might have made more effort to really learn it. My mother keeps somewhat in touch with him. He and his sister were quite a surprise to us when she called my grandmother one night, looking for her father. Turns out when my late uncle was stationed in Germany, he married without permission of the army. When the army found out, they objected because he hadn't had permission, and poof, no more marriage. These two kids we never knew about were a result. One stayed in Germany with his mother, and as an adult remained after she moved to the U.S., and the other was adopted by an army chaplin and wound up in Minnesota, more recently moving to Georgia.

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Dreams

I had the most bizarre dream. Rory Gilmore, or Alexis Bledel as the case may be, was happily pregnant with puppies. But not just any puppies; puppies with an experimental mix of human DNA. Beyond that I remember none of the details. It was probably inspired by a combination of something I read in Science News, my devoted viewing of Gilmore Girls, and the fact that Rory Gilmore reminds me increasingly of my stepsister, who has a bunch of Golden Retrievers. Or it was the tacos talking.

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The Case For Liberation

I don't believe I have ever seen it put better than in this James Taranto speech.

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Cookies

Well, it appears the duplicate went away as soon as my post complaining about it went through. Naturally.

As for Girl Scout Cookies, which apparently is a hot topic, I must confess:
I bought 14 boxes of them this year.

But I am not a total glutton. Five boxes remain, and I haven't touched them in weeks. Once I get through the initial throes of impulsive cookie demolition, I have fine self-control. Plus I did share.

Who knows what might have happened if I had known one of my nieces was also selling them, in addition to the daughters of a client and a partner. I might have exploded under the strain of too much cookie goodness.

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Argh!

Blogger is weird. The problems w.bloggar has with it when I use it at work are weird.

I wrote the parody on Girl Scout Cookies in w.bloggar and got an error posting it as usual, but it got through no matter what it implied. Oops, forgot to give Gnome-Girl credit for inspiring me. Added that.

So now there are two posts, one corrected and one not. I go to the Blogger interface, delete the extra post, and on Blogger it is gone. Only the correct one remains. Yet when I bring up the page, nothing changes. No matter how many refreshes. No matter what computer I go to. Despite the passage of time.

Worse, the archive links for both the correct and deleted posts go to... the deleted post! That is so clever. I can only hope that it fixes itself with the passage of a bit more time.

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Ashcroft Urges New Crackdown On Pushers

Today Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a new crackdown in the government's war on addictive substances. "Temptation will not be tolerated," he said at a press conference. "Substances that are addictive or stimulating in nature must be kept from the hands of the braying masses for their own safety. It is in that spirit that we announce that sales of Girl Scout Cookies will no longer be tolerated. This applies not only to eliminating hardcore thin mints, but even entry level cookies such as shortbread and lemon pastry. These are clearly gateway substances that lead people to hard core cookie consumption."


As a result of this crackdown, Girl Scout Cookie prices are expected to skyrocket even beyond their currently excessive levels. An ACLU spokesperson expressed outrage over the decision, stating "what's next, criminalization of chocolate?"

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Keyboards

Backspace keys should be wide. I know I am not alone when I express that opinion. Hitting backspace four times should not result in the offending four unwanted characters plus \\\\. It should result in the demise of the typographical detritus. Let's start with that assertion fact.


Most keyboards have piddly little backspace keys, so I find myself keeping an eye out for ones lacking that flaw. Otherwise we may as well go back to ^H for backspacing. One of my suppliers has just such keyboards. Woohoo! So I ordered a couple of them, in USB because they lacked PS/2 style at the time.


Some people love a traditional, large Enter key. It's nice, but I don't really care. This keyboard has one of those, which takes up three standard key spots on two rows. Below Enter and to the right of the right shift key is the pipe and backslash key (| and \). The right shift is a little narrow, but no biggie as I use the left almost exclusively. I believe that's not uncommon.


So far so good. I won't even go into the way the designer of the keyboard felt the need to put a power, sleep and wake up button where print screen, scroll lock, and pause/break belong, moving down the insert, delete, home, end, page up, and page down keys, and causing minor havoc there. Oh wait, I just did.


Why, oh why, except through unchecked design insanity and neglected usability testing, would there be any reason to put a second pipe/backslash key, to the right of the left shift key, shrinking left shift down nearly to standard key size to make room for the anomaly. Duplicate a key seldom used? Shrink a key constantly used except by SHOUTERS and e.e. cummings wannabes?


So now instead of typing things like "spellign\\ng errosr\\rs" I type things like "\i live in \massachusetts." Caps lock, which was foolishly located in the first place in lemming-like designicide, is even easier to hit unintentionally.


Or perhaps my fingers are just plain too large and clumsy. I know I never imagined I'd be able to type on the order or 40 WPM, with good reasons too extensive to go into in this post. In any event, I won't be buying any more of these keyboards.

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We Have A Secular Constitution

I received one of those e-mails that fly around in righteous indignation to one thing or another. In this case it's the court ruling that affirms "separation of church and state" in the form of the government not being able to require the words "under God" to be uttered as part of the Pledge of Allegiance.


The e-mail shows a picture of two children praying to a flag, and reads beneath it as follows:


"It is said that 86% of Americans believe in God. Therefore I have a very hard time understanding why there is such a mess about having 'In God We Trust' on our money and having God in the Pledge of Allegiance. Why don't we just tell the 14% to shut up and sit down????

If you agree, pass this on, if not delete.."


So people who agree with the first amendment should shut up and sit down? Who do these people think they are; Chirac? Hussein? Bin Laden? Do people who fling these things around the internet stop to think about what they are saying or promulgating?


Frankly, I think there's no real harm in having the phrase in the pledge, but nobody should be required to say it should they prefer not for any reason. It does, otherwise, get into tricky territory with respect to "...no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...." Just because a ruling, or a result of interpreting the constitution correctly, is unpopular does not make it wrong.


Ultimately, if the Supremes uphold this, the real recourse would be for the offended parties to propose an amendment repealing, more explicitly defining, or otherwise obviating that element of the first amendment as currently written and logically interpretable. Perhaps Nehemiah Scudder can be spokesperson for the cause.

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Comments

Oh man, I visited HaloScan and they are not accepting newbies either. Sheesh.

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Comments

Not that anyone is actually reading this yet, but I have begun thinking about adding a comments feature; you know, like most of the other blogs have. I just looked at YACCS, but they say they are accepting no new accounts. I kind of liked their style, too. Darn.

We'll see what I can come up with, but for now e-mail me if you care to comment. For instance, with suggestions of which comment system I'd be best off choosing.

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Spellign

Please bear with me if I make any spelling errors or goofy typos in my posts. I almost never run spell checking in e-mail, which this reminds me of, because there are few errors. Usually I notice a word doesn't look right as soon as I type it, and if I am uncertain, I'll check that word. There are certain words this always happens with, none of which come to mind offhand. I've been called a walking dictionary many times. Such confidence can lead to sloppiness. Sloppiness leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to... oh wait, this isn't a movie. Sloppiness leads errors that I was too confident to notice. But it's only words, and words are all I have, to write this blog today.

Given the above, it might sound strange that I love having good dictionaries around, and dictionary.com is a favorite site of mine. Old dictionaries are also cool. I have a couple of them from early in the last century. (It still seems strange to me to say the last century and not mean the 1800s.) Words, meanings, flow, and shifts in sounds and meanings are fascinating.

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Blogiversary

Well, it's not exactly a blogiversary as others have been celebrating lately, after a year of blogging, but I'm coming up on my first week tonight. I really had no idea how it'd go, what or how much I would post, and whether I'd find too little time or take too much time at it. So far it seems fairly balanced. There are things I thought I'd already have written about that are commentaries yet to come. Stay tuned...

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Surreal Spam

I'm still getting regular spam selling Symantec products and Russian women, as well as the usual enlargements, enhancements, etc. Today I received a new one. Two copies at once, of course, from admin@info200.com so it's easy to block further instances (of which there was one as I typed; great timing).


Why is it surreal? It is for a "keyword search from the toolbar" program. Here's why it's so surreal:


Once upon a time, a bunch of us who did VB support said "hey, we can do better than most of the 'developers' who call for support" and decided to start a business. With total lack of planning and agreement, no capital, and too many of us, it was initially more like a club. Nonetheless, we started creating a cool utility program we knew certain people, developers and otherwise, could use. I had in mind to approach Microsoft to package it with MSDN and Access.


Another company approached us about subcontracting on a project, which sounded exciting though we were skeptical. It was to be a search engine/redirector that would act as an add-in to do keyword searches from the address bar of Internet Explorer and, ultimately, Netscape Navigator. The guy behind it was hot for the idea, and was supposedly backed by major industry players. The concept was that a URL was too alien and unwieldy for most people. Companies would buy keywords and promote them during commercials, for info or special offers. Typing in the right keyword(s) would do a quick search and redirect the user to a page on the advertiser's site.


We were skeptical, and absolutely reluctant to do it for too little or for air castle promises. Yet we got sucked into creating a proof of concept DLL, which we were able to demonstrate for the people contracting us and the end customer to show it could in principle be done, but without actually giving them the DLL or the code involved. They handed over a server with a gigabyte of RAM, when that much RAM was almost unheard of, fo some preliminary testing. We were able to emulate what the program might do and hit a SQL Server on that prospective web server at an insane rate with no measurable drag to performance. The idea was that a commercial running during the Superbowl and making a special offer to the first N people who hit the site the keyword would reach would generate hundreds of thousands of hits in minutes.


Anyway, it worked just fine in preliminary form, and we were ready to consumate an official agreement when the customer's money ran out, so nothing ever came of it. I always wondered if Real Names and the customer were one and the same, but that was not the case, and apparently Real Names was already close to prime time at that point. The whole episode seriously derailed our efforts on the program we'd originally set out to create, arguably causing it never to be released, and was a divisive dstraction.


Be that as it may, to this day I associate search from the address bar, which Microsoft defaults to themselves in IE of course, with that little adventure. And that is why the spam is so surreal, apart from it's promoting a concept whose time in my perception has come and gone.

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Those Silly Quizzes

Late last night I stumbled upon an entirely different "how evil are you" test. I am 31% evil; borderline, which I guess fits nicely with the neutral rating from the other one.
http://www.hilowitz.com/john/test/evil.html

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Alarming!

It's distressing when you wake up a half hour after the time for which the alarm was set, and it is emitting no sound. Bad enough I am a heavy morning sleeper who often sleeps all the way through the alarm. Perversely, I often wake up at the instant the alarm stops, after it's yelled at me to get up for an hour, because of the abrupt change in what I am not hearing.

Did I fail to push the button? Nope, it's down. What's the deal!?

Oh, that again! I am on PM and the alarm is on AM. Duh! Must have managed that last time the power went out. Since it's indicated by an obscure LED dot and I can never remember which state means AM and which PM, easy mistake. If the power would blip off a little less frequently...

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Blogroll

Okay, I've added all my first links to the blogroll and removed the original links from the blog template. Now to start adding the vast array I have accumulated in the course of being a blog-reading addict.

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Blogroll

I added several links when I started out, but have now decided to try creating a blogroll, which is a more automated list of links. This is courtesy of blogrolling.com, and this post is partially a test post to force my template to update. Then I'll have to do it again when I delete the original links and do any tweaking I find is required.

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Libertarians

Mrs. du Toit has a topic going on libertarianism. One of these days I'll post about my thoughts and experiences with respect to that.

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Cold War Timeline

This Cold War Timeline is kind of cool.

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"Bad Luck Band"

http://members.aol.com/TomDaBombb/Tommentary.htm is an interesting look at the Rhode Island fire. Via Access Radio.

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My How Times Have Changed

News of my Alma Mater:
http://www.nicedoggie.net/archives/001463.html#001463


My sister had mentioned this shortly after it happened. She hears about things like this, and local opinions on same, courtesy of working in a local coffee shop. I'd forgotten all about it until I saw Misha's mention of it. Guess I didn't think it was that big a deal, but I can't imagine it happening back in my day. Not on the bus anyway.

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Condi for President

I agree with Acidman. Condi Rice would be a fine president. Rather than a deviation from that possibility, I suspect exploring the idea of the California governorship is calculated at making the presidency a more likely eventuality.

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