© Menno E Aartsen January, 2012, prior and future years. Disclaimer, Fair Use and Copyright statement at the bottom of this page. Most product links courtesy of Amazon Associates.© Menno E Aartsen January, 2012, prior and future years. Disclaimer, Fair Use and Copyright statement at the bottom of this page. Most product links courtesy of Amazon Associates.
In my last blog entry, below, I accused my Braun Cruzer shaver of having given up the ghost - guess I have to correct that. After replacing it, I sent it binward, and decided before emptying the bin I'd give it one more try, why I don't know. Sure enough, it charged and I am back using it, anybody want a cheap Remington
And an update on the Nokia C7
The latter will work fine over WiFi, the Washington State map took about six minutes to download, and as far as I know Ovi has maps for just about anywhere in the world (you may need a sizable memory card to store multiples). Ovi Suite is more or less a necessity if you want to synchronize the C7 with your laptop, the C7 won't work with Nokia's older PC Suite, but the Suite is free, easily accessible, and does give you access to Nokia's huuuge worldwide support structure. It provides a setup to Ovi's email system as well - again, free, it is actually provided by Yahoo these days. Much to my surprise, I found a fully functional mobile version of Skype pre-installed, as well.
The handset can be set to only data roam over a WiFi connection, something it can do for free thanks to its UMA, so the maps are truly free. I tested the voice guided navigation today - unlike my Nokia 6110, the C7 gives voice instructions even when you're walking. I am under the impression that GPS navigation (which isn't the same as looking something up on Google Maps) eats a lot of battery power - when I use my 6110 in the car I have it powered from the lighter socket, or it dies after four hours, and I think the C7 is not much different. I should emphasize that, while UMA lets you place calls over an internet connection, it is not VOIP. UMA "emulates" GSM and GPRS over a tcp/ip connection, at whatever speed the link is running at. So a UMA connectionj can handle, voice, data, and all of the signaling necessary in mobile telephony.
As most smartphones provide access to social networking, I view Facebook on the Nokia at times. It would be interesting to see how many consumers are not in the reach of those "social networks". I am seeing plenty of people who intensely participate in half a dozen or more "Facebooks", and I have to tell you I am not seeing how busy professionals have time for more than three or maybe four networks. Say (in my case) Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and I have just begun looking at Google+ (where the person who invited me in June hasn't posted since June, and I now don't need an invite any more anyway). LinkedIn I access once a day, except for the career sections, which I access whenever the system emails me, couple times a day or so. I've relegated Twitter mostly to travel - it works well on my Nokia with its fancy touchscreen, but I can for the life of me imagine I would be "following" dozens of people, organizations and companies in this way. Just sorting out what's interesting in Twitter would take an hour or more per day. Most of my Dutch friends and relatives have Facebook, but then most of them maintain a presence on the Dutch Hyves system, as well, effectively doing much stuff twice. I canned Hyves, when an unpleasant niece accused me of not responding to her there, since "you are on Hyves every day". Shows you how little people understand of how these systems work and interact: I had my Twitter feed coming into my Hyves pages, updating automatically, and she thought I posted that by hand. So - goodbye HYves, this is how social networks can play havoc with relationships - she got quite verbally offensive over it, not the first time she did that, so she's off my roster on all systems now.
I have noticed a lot of folks posting Tweets that have some kind of comment, combined with a link, without the comment having any understandable meaning, but once you click on the link, you'll go to the explanation. Or not, as the case may be - as I am writing this, I test one link to tell you where it goes, and it goes to the person's Facebook account with a copy of the same message I just read on Twitter. Twice. It is very sweet, I am sure, but quite pointless. Many folks don't use Facebook and Twitter to communicate, but to broadcast, I guess that is what I use my website for, where I have long since taken away the comment capability. The constant hack attempts and comment spam took too much of my time.
Last but not least, the picture at the top left, coming off my lovely Nikon D90
I am seeing various manufacturers of cellphones add value to their product - the most recent would be RIM, which now lets small business manage groups of Blackberrys via an online system, nullifying the added expense of the Blackberry server system that was necessary for the corporate flavour of Blackberry so far. Nokia earlier bought mapping company Navteq, one of the two "original" mapping companies, but I have not so far seen a real marketing results of that acquisition, and Nokia's subsequent capability to provide free maps and navigation software on their smartphones. I am testing the Nokia product on my new Nokia C7
Of course, most Android phones offer Google's free mapping and navigation too, but I believe that does need a data plan when on the road, as it downloads maps on the fly. The C7 can preload maps, and so works fine on the road without racking up the data bucks. I'll keep you posted... And I am looking at RIM's new server facility, as this would let a neighbourhood association, say, or an apartment building, put together a sort of "closed user group" of Blackberry users, for as long as (I assume) the total number of users does not exceed 100. Interesting, I just wonder if there will be enough interest in the facility to crank up Blackberry sales.
I wish my friends and relatives on the East Coast the best of luck with hurricane Irene - having recently swapped that coast for the other one, I am watching from afar as they go through what I've been through a few times. Godspeed, folks.
My fancy Braun cruZer
Being an oldtimer in journalism, I think photography often conveys things better than video does, and besides, many of my readers come in "on the go" on handphones, and often don't have high speed internet available continuously. I know a lot of my friends use Blackberrys, on whatever kind of network connection they may have, as they go about their daily business. Much more impressive, that, by the way, than what is possible on a laptop or PC on a broadband home connection. I'd almost say that is getting a bit out of date....
Scant hours after I write my previous blog entry, the news breaks that HP has pulled its tablets and smartphones, and may move out of consumer PCs altogether, as IBM did a few years ago. And when you read the American press, this is all to do with Apple's iPhone and iPad.
I honestly don't think so. The vast majority of consumer computing equipment (smartphones are handheld computers) that is sold, worldwide, is made by folks like Asus and Acer, HTC is moving into that arena, so is China's Cisco Huawei, and there are literally hundreds of other brands in China that are all depending on a few massive Chinese/Taiwanese manufacturers. They make good equipment, state of the art, and most importantly, it is cheap. By cheap, I meean that you can get three decent laptops with Windows 7 for the same $$s that will get you one Apple MacBook Pro
And so it goes, as on the TV behind me NBC's Richard Engel
Thinking about it, it is rather puzzling that Apple is attempting to prevent the sale of the Galaxy Tab in a number of markets. You'd think they understand taking on a large multinational like Samsung, especially in markets where Apple isn't "home", is unlikely to be a successful strategy. So is it a move of desperation? Can Apple no longer compete? It has gone from being a computer manufacturer to being a gadget manufacturer, with a customer base it can only tie to itself by tying its customers to iTunes, and those new gadgets that run Google's operating system and aren't tied to a delivery system may well evolve into the future.
That could serve as a warning for Facebook, too. Essentially a "closed shop", like Apple, Facebook operates by trying to keep subscribers within its boundaries, where it can predict their activities and sell that control to advertisers. But I never tire of quoting the example of AOL, which did exactly the same thing, only to get "overturned" when the World Wide Web was invented, an environment anybody could use. Perhaps that is where Google is heading, each of its modules fitted with an API that anybody can hook into. That, after all, was the original principle of the internet.
I am going to give up on applying for jobs at T-Mobile. I am an expert on their service offerings, on UMA, on GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/HSPA+, with a 20 year telecom track record, I even speak fluent Deutsch, but they keep turning me down. I may have done it to myself - I no longer participate in the T-Mobile forums, since I realized that providing a carrier with unpaid support from customer to customer is really not a viable business model. Customer support needs to be provided by paid professionals, not by an eclectic mix of do-gooder professionals and random pretender morons. Being who I am, I voiced that opionion rather loudly, before signing off. Honestly, I like forums, but they're not, as many companies have thankfully discovered, a replacement for paid customer support.
Having said that, I do hope that after they gobble up T-Mobile, AT&T will continue to offer UMA (a.k.a. WiFi Calling). It is a wonderful way of keeping your phone connected, on my new Nokia C7
Plus ça change.. Being "up here", living with friends, in the Pacific Northwest, means wholesale change. I can't remember the last time I have spent significant time in a family with children, for instance. Then, the climate here is very reminiscent of Northwestern Europe, where I grew up, complete with grey skies and cool morning temperatures, although the proximity of the Cascade mountain range makes this a different kind of cool. And there are many other differences, from the friendliness of people - cars stop for pedestrians, even if they could comfortably pass you, unheard of, in my world - to the fact that few folks here seem to bother locking their front door when they're home. The picture top right is the snack stand outside the local Home Depot in Belleville. I've seen a few on th'other coast, but never as elaborate as this, and, of course, there is.... drum roll..... Espresso
Something that confuses the heck out of me is that the NBC Nightly News is broadcast here in the Seattle area at 6pm, not at 7pm. You would think that to be at the same time-of-day, but no. Assuming the basic premise is that one watches the news after coming home from work, does that mean that work hours on the East Coast are supposedly different than they are here? Does NBC keep the same hours in California? Wait - that one we can check. Yes - no - they broadcast the Nightly News at 6:30pm in LA. So it is really different all over. And curiously, since it is originally broadcast from New York at 7pm, why not broadcast it live on one of the abundantly available cable channels when it goes out? This "coastal" stuff dates back from before high speed fiber and satellite TV and cable boxes, right? But I guess, revamping a system for which no technical rationale exists any more will take time, if you can even find folks willing to do the experimenting, because TV is commercial, and the broadcasters are scared they will lose the revenues they (wrongly) associate with "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Broken? How do you know it is not broken unless you try something different? Think about it - you might hit the jackpot, and make three times the revenues you do now, if you change what has been around since 1953. Because the new generations do not watch conventional TV, nor do they watch TV the conventional way, and they never will. Not while they have a laptop or tablet, and a cellphone. The issue here is a lesson I learned in the lab in the 1990's - yes, you can reinvent the wheel, and make a better one. Yes, things can work, and still be broken. Life is shades of grey, not black and white.
The more I watch politicians of all ilk spew rhetoric to attack the Prez, and say nothing else, the more it is clear that those who do know how we're going to fix our financial problems aren't running for office - or, perhaps, there isn't anybody with a real answer. I can see some American companies do well overseas, but none that I know of export, they earn over there. Perhaps they understand there is no political support, anywhere, for doing what is necessary to increase our national revenues. Yes, we need to raise taxes, across the board, so we can pay for what we spend, should have done that beginning in 2002, but beyond that, we need things the world will buy - and right now, we have nothing. High Speed Rail comes from France, Japan, Germany and China. Spacecraft come from Russia. New airplane technology comes from Europe - fancy that somebody other than the US would build a very much larger aircraft than the 747. That would have been unthinkable. I could go on - there isn't anything we do, even medical technology, that the buyer can't get elsewhere, cheaper. We have to begin to understand that Apple is not a significant company, worldwide, it is just one that is very good at public relations, and politicians, too, appear not to read the overseas press. Apple makes stuff "over there" and sells stuff "over there", and even part of its American revenues go "over there". Unless some enlightened souls stand up and tackle these problems, we will keep on going down.
Jobs? Ask the politicians "doing what?". You have to have a product these jobs produce. Or a service. We've festooned the world with McDonalds and Starbucks already, and Americans clearly do not understand that the reason we have no viable high speed train technology is that our government has not pushed public transport. That is a political decision, it is what did it in Europe and China, the governments insisted on finely mazed public transport, and built it, and that made the finances available to develop high speed rail. Same for Japan. In France, the socialist government was the driver between a nationwide X.400 computer network. Including rural villages, where the connections were brought using the national water company's conduits. We? We subsidized airports, and hybrid cars, and now we don't have to label the Chevy Volt as a hybrid car (which is what it is) because of a law change. So: no high speed rail. No jobs that come with high speed rail. No hybrid cars. No space vehicles. No computers. Low energy lighting? Comes from Europe. We're not going to bridge the gap, so now we have to spend even more money buying stuff from others. Or, like Amtrak did, buy high speed rail without the high speed track, playing, as with the Chevy Volt, the game of pretense, and then getting the American public to fall for it by spending vast sums of money on advertising... trouble is, nobody else buys it - in both senses of the word. The Acela is still a mislabeled French train, and the Chevy Volt is still a mislabeled Japanese car. And we must get the politicos to understand this, and scream it from the Capitol.
Although I have not yet found a local job or consulting assignment, there appears to be a good need for people with my expertise, here in the Seattle area. What with a cluster of high technology enterprises around the Microsoft campus, which is itself more or less in the next town over from me, Redmond, there is a lot of demand, and with one exception, so far, none of the jobs have the "U.S. citizen only" restriction.
As I write this, I have in fact already had two interviews - one an exhaustive conversation with my friend's neighbour, who happens to be a Microsoft executive, who came to the house(!), then connected me with hiring managers and his HR folks, and one phone interview with a consulting reruiter. That recruiter, and three others, found me on either Careerbuilder.com or Monster.com. Of the six or seven positions they sent to me, I qualified (fully) for two - I have a habit of not applying for positions for which I don't have all of the qualifications - i.e., if "Intermediate Sharepoint" is specified, a product I have never used, I'll turn it down.
Being in Microsoft land, of course, I had better pay some attention to Sharepoint, and learn to use it, so I am currently trying to install a Microsoft SharePoint
Umm, or so I thought. Sharepoint needs Windows Server and an SQL Server and stuff, none of which I have, so that was a quick death to my experiment, I did not get beyond reading the installation manual. Friend M. offered to let me use his Sandbox, but he has administrator rights, and I ended up in his main Webpart in three keystrokes, thought that was a bit scary, so that, too is a no-go...
One amazing thing that friends M and P, who are putting me up and putting up with me, agree with is that, unlike many other countries, the United States is the land of the second chances. Americans have an unusual type of respect for the underdog, for the person who, for want of a better phrase, "takes a licking and keeps on ticking". We are all of decidedly foreign extraction, and have seen close up how, in other cultures, people who don't manage something are spit out and never looked at again. Not here.
It does not necessarily always work out, but the reason that former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer
It really can't get more Asian than this place. About 50% of the customers in the Starbucks I am writing in are Asian, to my left an Indian man is on the phone, at the next table over three Japanese women, one with a baby, are twittering away in Japanese, and I've never seen as many Asian products in a Safeway, like the one next door. I had not visited Washington State for at least a decade, and a decade before that - while I noticed the Japanese and Chinese signeage at Seatac Airport back then, this is a step or ten up from that. I am not being critical, just amazed at how strong the bond between this coast and Asia Pacific has become. As I said, I am besotted with Asian food, does not get better without actually moving there, I swear. Pretty soon I'll try some of those food court things for lunch. Teehee.
Much of my time has been taken up by changing my address and updating my resume with the various job sites I am already a member of, and adding some new ones. Notably, I have added Microsoft, which in the Washington, D.C., area had just U.S. citizen and Cleared positions. Better still, at the BBQ, the other day, I met a Microsoft executive, and he kindly offered to handwalk my resume into the company. Who knows, eh?.
But a recruiter, a few days ago, suggested I add my job for the period between 2007 and today. I was about to tell him I didn't have a job, when I suddenly (and rather shamefacedly) realized that the business development I had done in this period, mostly concentrating around getting a maintenance organization in Indonesia set up, but exploring, as well, the possibility of setting up a diving resort in the Philippines, really are work too. I am incorporated, I deducted some of the expense (although the Treasury really doesn;t like you doing that if there isn't a result at the end), and the travel, negotiating, and analysis, were real development work. So, I have now added a section detailing the "Sole Proprietor" activities. I guess I am so impressed by my Verizon stint I lost the view of reality. So: thank you, Sunil, if you ever read this, that was a valid comment, and as you can see I take advice...
I am mightily impressed with the people and the quality of life in the suburbs of Seattle. Prices are kept in check, the economy is largely governed by computer industry behemoths like Microsoft, Amazon and many others, a neigbourhood barbeque I attended a few days ago was festooned with Microsoft and Amazon management, and folks are here because of the quality of life. That is less so in the New York and Washington areas, where there is a heavy career emphasis - that obviously works here too, but folks are very happy with the living conditions, and the towns are built on a very human scale - to my standards, at least. Never seen so many trees in an urban neighbourhood, this beats even green and leafy Westchester County, and these being the Cascade foothills, much of it is pine, green and fragrant all year 'round.
Asian influences are pretty much predominant in the Pacific Northwest - at the Crossroads Mall the establishments in the food court are 80% Asian, so I am, as an official lover of Asian food, in heaven. Even Indian foodstalls, which I really have not seen very much on the East Coast outside of Indian neigbourhoods, are represented here, while there is a Japanese chain of supermarkets, Uwajimaya, which caters to all Asian Pacific food cultures, from Filipino and Chinese to Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian. They even stock Dutch stroopwafels
It is unusual for me to be in a household with (teen) kids in summer, during vacation time, it's been a long time. Good fun, I don't mind at all, fascinating to see how two exceptionally bright kids get on. Other than that, I have been lucky three times over, with friends who help, with an unexpected party where I met some local executives who may help in my job hunt, and of course with landing in such a pretty area. For us Dutch (my hosts are Dutch too) the Pacific Northwest, a bit cooler in summer, with fair amounts of rain and lots of grey cloud, reminds us of home, on occasion, back in The Netherlands rain and grey skies are part of the staple weather diet as well. The only thing I find mildly discombobulating is that the NBC Nightly News is on at 6, not at 7, but I guess I'll have to get used to that. At the same time, I got my Washington State driver license, my Virginia license has a large hole punched through it, so I guess I am officially a West Coaster now...
Towards the end of the weekend most everything is done, in terms of my initial move, and some of the enormous piles of paperwork that go with moving. So many rules have changed or intensified - Washington State won't give you a driver license unless you have already changed your address with the Social Security Administration - ostensibly to catch child support escapees, but I think to some extent that will be related to illegal immigrants, as well. Having said that, there appears to still be a way for those without SSN to get a license here - part and parcel, I guess, of the ongoing discussion about how folks without license can't get insurance and are then a hazard on the road. At any rate, on Monday I put in my driver license application, get that on the road so I can retitle my vehicle.
(Umm, maybe not, the Driver Licensing Center is closed on Mondays...!?).
Beyond that are many other changes - health insurance, vehicle insurance, retagging the car, prescription plan, immigration, I could go on for hours. Can't remember ever having to do this much paperwork, not even when I moved from New York State to the Commonwealth of Virginia, in 2001. No matter, although it gets hazardous, as you can unwittingly be breaking laws you didn't even knew existed. Most importantly, I managed to update the first jobs databases on Sunday, before the week started, buoyed a bit by the number of results from a reprogrammed search. I have to do many more, but Careerbuilder, Monster and consulting company Volt were a good start.
Kinda strikes me every time I am here - gorgeous scenery, very well managed living environment, clean air, little did I know (never having driven in) that my friends live barely half an hours' drive from the last (Snoqualmie
Well, time to get my mail, and find the local Korean (I assume) laundry, see y'all later.
By July 28 I am running around the Seattle
By noon on Friday I have rented a storage unit, and finally unloaded the U-Haul truck, except for my whole house generator, which I have donated to my hosts in gratitude for them taking in this stray, and letting me get back on my feet. This comes back to the house, and once friend M. is back from China, later today, we'll drag the 650 lb. monster off the truck and into their garage. Then, Saturday morning, truck and dolly go back to U-Haul. In the picture, you see me waiting anxiously as a mechanic at Bellevue Jeep Dodge reconnects the driveshaft on my Durango (U-Haul in Montana had been happy to disconnect it, but wouldn't reconnect it in Bellevue!!), so I can drive it off the U-Haul dolly - it had been making funny noises, but he gave it a clean bill of health. Note the jacket - 60's in the morning and evening, up here, a nice and refreshing change after this massive heatwave that was everywhere.
By Monday, it was clear the 2003 Durango wasn't going to hack it, so I pulled into yet another motel, grabbed a beer from my cooler, and called U-Haul, where kind folks connected me to a service center in Indiana, where they found me a U-Haul service center in Billings, Montana, where I would be able to swap the trailer for a truck, and have the SUV put on a dolly to tow that to my destination. Manager Brad helped set it all up, and soon enough I was unloading the trailer and packing my stuff into a 17 foot truck, larger than I needed, but the smallest they had.
Four or so hours later, in the searing mid-afternoon heat, I finished and the staff put a dolly behind the truck, put the Durango on that and then disconnected the drivetrain, a necessity to be able to tow a 4WD. By about 6, I turned onto Interstate 90 West, only to get pulled off five miles later, when I discovered the left taillight of the dolly had come off. Two hours later, in a Rest Stop parking lot, the U-Haul emergency service finished bolting the light back on, and I drove until 11, in the dark, when I stopped in Big Timber, Montana, and spent the night at the Lazy J Motel, me 'n a couple dozen skeeters. By 7 in the morning, I hauled (we're on Tuesday July 26 now) ass outta there, to the Montana border, and my next stop, Wallace, Indiana, the last state before Washington. I'll spare you the horror, but you haven't lived until you do some really high mountain passes in a 17 foot U-Haul truck with a trailer with an SUV hanging off it, one you can't even see from the cab....
On the road early in North Dakota, the combination of the heatwave (this far North!), the mountains - Montana soon changed from "hill country" to "mountainous" - made the Durango's temperature gauge creep up alarmlingly, so around noontime I got off the road and into a roadside motel. Doing upslopes at 45 mph in 2nd gear barely managed the temperature, and I kind of assumed the heat and the sun were getting too much for my SUV. So, a rest, the temperatures are supposed to fall to the sixties, and I'll get on the road again around midnight. U-Haul kindly added a couple of days to my contract so I don't have to worry about getting there Tuesday.
I am generally getting used to the weight and heft of the trailer, which is kind of massive, and you tend to overload the thing. U-Haul gives you the load your vehicle can handle, as a proportion of your vehicles allowed total haulage capability, but there really isn't a way to figure how much your gear weighs, not without a weigbridge of some kind. Clear is that the speed restrictions U-Haul puts on these things - 55 mph - is there so the vehicle/trailer combination remains manageable, frustrating your truckers on the highway, none of which do anything close to 55, more like 75. Interesting, to be overtaken by dozens of huge tractor/trailers every hour, I must frustrate the heck out of some of them. I've done my level best to not overload the thing, though, throwing out much of my photographic archive at the last minute, since it weighed a ton. It is amazing how much stuff a human being schlepps around with them for decades, on the basis of what-if. Perhaps that is one lesson for me to come out of all this - how much history does one really need?
Done. Finished packing. I am quite worried the U-Haul trailer is loaded too heavily, but with the Air Springs pressurised I seem to be doing OK driving around the neighbourhood. Sure the thing is heavy, but then the Durango was heavy to begin with, I just got used to that, and this will be all highway driving. I should be on the road by 9 or so - earlier makes no sense due to the HOV hours in the Washington - Baltimore corridor. I only wish I could use my EZ-Pass, but I guess I should have gotten a different transponder for that, never thought of it.
I've made my last trip to the pawn shop today - quite a few, since June 3rd, when I brought my first load of "stuff" over. In between, some things went to Arlington, notably my racong bikes, not much call for that sort of thing in redneck country, and much of my China went to an antique store in Fredericksburg. The "uncluttering", then, is coming along nicely, although I still seem to have much more gear than I had anticipated. Funny how that creeps up on you..
Losses? yes, but then they are paper losses. I put quite a few pieces of China out on Ebay, last year, and surprisingly little of it sold. You measure against an older appraisal, and as everybody keeps reminding me, there is a recession on. Even the guy in Spotsylvania Gold and Pawn was complaining about it, according to him, he is no longer getting the gold in he used to get, and he thought that was very unusual.
I was expecting to write about my impending relocation to the Pacific Northwest sooner, but had to take care of some legal issues so as to be able to do that writing, and that did not actually happen until last Friday, when it kind of all came together. And there was this morning, of course, when I went to pick up the U-Haul
Blogging is all very nice, but unless you take care of the legal issues and get permission to write from those impacted, you can do yourself a mischief. If, like me, you have not had complaints or. G*d forbid, lawsuits, for the 15 or so years you've been writing, you're doing good. So now I am in the middle of packing, and kind of uncluttering my life in ways I did not expect were possible. Then, a trip across the country, 2,800 miles or so, 41 hours, my trusty Nokia Navigator
I worry we're heading the same place where we hit the last recession. We have cars with touch screens - screens that require you to take your eyes off the road, as you can't "feel for the button". Technology that has no place in a car, that will have cost a lot of money to develop, you'll pay for in the price of your car, and technology that will - since you can make phone calls with it - kill people. And then there is Onstar, which in its latest iteration allows you to start your car from your smartphone ten thousand miles away. Technology you will pay for that has absolutely no purpose. Not to mention that fact that if you leave your phone lying around someone else might start your car, and kill your family at home because of the exhaust generated.
Have we truly run out of ways to improve? Ways to make cars cheaper and more efficient, instead of fitted with expensive useless "features"? Isn't this how the car companies went bankrupt, and had to be bailed out? I am honestly staring at this stuff and wondering wheter I've gone crazy, or "them". The mind boggles.
I recently put some things on Ebay for local sale - things too heavy or bulky to ship, and immediately ran into one of those people who won't take "no" for an answer, and seem to think it is OK to try and bully other people into getting what they want. I stipulated that buyers had to pay when they ordered, Paypal offers buyer protection, after all, so this person did not, and began sending me emails with their cellular telephone number instead. Then, when they eventually paid, and I sent them pickup instructions, they did not answer their "cellular number", which had a voicemail spoken by somebody of a different gender. At that point, I did not feel they met my basic security requirements, so I canceled the sale and refunded their money. They then began harassing me via phone and email, since I "did not honour the contract" - I explained there was no contract, since that required them to pay up front, but that logic escaped them. I had to call in Ebay to get them to stop, eventually. I don't think I'll do another "local" sale, I don't like being hassled...
It does show, as I had previously experienced on Amazon, that many folks don't read, and don't work with you to resolve problems. Amazon then expects you to accept a return, even if you bought insurance for the shipment - thankfully, Ebay is a little more discerning.. One buyer I had received a projector, which after receipt showed a magenta background, so he wanted to return for refund, and I agreed to that. Once I had the projector, I discovered that the way he had tested it, the input had to be reset from RGB to VGA - once I did that there no longer was a coloured background. After that, I sold the otherwise pristine unit to someone else, who is really happy with it. I got wise, however, and tacked my losses onto the sale price, so this time came out on top.. You live and learn.
Fascinating. Ruthless news baron Rupert Murdoch
If anything totally amazes me it is the large groups of people that come to demonstrate, and speak out, about Casey Anthony. I have no idea whether she did or did not kill her child, I don't know that anybody else does, it was clear to me there wasn't sufficient evidence, but apparently "most Americans" (I don't know that anybody knows what that means) don't agree, if I am to believe the press. I wonder if this phenomenon is in any way related to the way many Americans seem to treat their government, these days - advertising, opinions and actions based on perceptions, not on facts, for instance the abject refusal to raise taxes when revenues, which would provide income we currently don't have, aren't increasing. The most amazing, to me, is this incessant talk about jobs - jobs you create when you increase production, and that happens when you sell more stuff. We do not sell more stuff, so there aren't any more jobs. They went to Asia, people, and they did not go to Asia yesterday, they began going to Asia in the 1990s, twenty years ago. And it is not a reversible trend, especially since we trained all of the movers and shakers, out there. Read back to the beginning of this piece, touch screens in cars aren't an "invention" anybody is waiting for. Same for the Space Shuttle - in order for us to have a replacement, we'd have had to start work on it in the mid-1980s. We did not, simple as that. And private industry may be able to build new space vehicles to deliver astronauts to the Space Station, that too is not anything we couldn't do before... Here is some wisdom President Clinton imparted on the subject: click.
Here is an interesting, but flawed, Facebook - Google comparison. Flawed, because "The Nielsen survey does not include mobile devices." Flawed, because Facebook is a "closed shop", while Google serves all internet users. A perfect example of not-good journalism: "Go ahead and publish, we'll deal with the flaws in the disclaimers". But the data is statistically meaningless. Ad on another note, the embedded Youtube video at the top of this piece is my first test of Nokia's C7 Symbian 3 smartphone
Driving up to Arlington on Friday to get a shot was a wee bit optimistic - although I was on my way back by 1pm, 4th of July traffic had "burst forth" in all its severity, and by the time I got to Dumfries I had to head over to Rte. 1, 95 was a parking lot. Owell, I should slowly have known better.
It did give me a chance to put the air springs
So please forgive me for being a bit tardy with this update - it is generally a good idea to rest a joint when it has been given hydrocortisone treatment - the shot makes it hard to discern when you overdo the use of the joint, and this can as easily be when you're lifting boxes as when you're at your computer using keyboard and mouse. It is how I first realized I had a shoulder injury - when my "mouse arm" hurt my shoulder joint. It just meant I postponed writing and posting this update for a couple of days.
Besides, I am taking a runout, today, to Virginia's beautiful Shenandoah Valley
By the by, I just discovered that Nokia's "Astound" (the T-Mobile version of the C7
I have been too pre-occupied getting rid of stuff on Ebay and so neglected you, my reader. Well, up to a point. Between an expanded spring cleaning, taking stuff to the county dump or to the pawn shop, and other stuff to the Post Office to send off to buyers, it's been pretty busy. A bit of uncluttering was well in order. I bought a large four bedroom home so I would eventually be able to sell it to a growing family moving from Northern Virginia apartment-land to gentrification, and never realized that I would slowly but surely clutter the place up with things I would be unlikely to ever need again - but why throw it out when you have the space, eh?
So that is what I am doing now, I recall the last time I did this, ten years ago, after I moved here, I got rid of loads of ancient research, helped by a friend, the hard part always being that if you've worked in telecommunications research there is stuff you have to hang on to. Technically, I suppose, Verizon should have facilitated that - actually does, it has huge archives in various places - but I felt more comfortable making sure I could produce whatever was necessary should the need arise. That actually has happened twice, over the years - once when one of my former bosses was audited for revenue tax purposes, and we needed to cough up ten years of computer code, and once when someone took the company to court over a project that I had managed. The court case itself had nothing to do with me, but as the project manager you're actually personally responsible for laws that get broken on your watch, not that they did, but you have to be able to prove that.
Some of that is well and truly obsolete, by now, especially if you consider that the traditional "Bell company" barely exists any more, and besides, I've put much of it on DVD in the interim, and put that somewhere safe, off site. But what I am clearing up is a mix of that, of old electronics that clutter up the place, linen that is old, beds that are "one too many", emptying boxes so I can put other stuff in them, two out of three generators - I guess I fell prey to the "it's nice to have a spare" syndrome somewhere along the line. I even found a spare washing machine.... duh - not to mention wheels and tires for a car I sold...
I wanted to draw your attention again to a survey, this time one that determines what gender child parents would prefer on a "what if" proposition - this time, the poll condicted by Gallup, reported by the journal Live Science.
This is such useless "science".... if you're asked "What would you do", under completely fictitious circumstances, you'll answer whatever. A question like that has no bearing on anything to do with anybody's reality, it doesn't even provide any information as to people's opinion - since they weren't asked for it. All we know in terms of real data is that the survey has been done before. Well, duh. A survey like this presumes so much - what would you prefer, if you were able to choose - when compared to places like China and India, where this type of choice means killing the unwanted gender baby, illegal but done regardless... A minefield, not science.
I had never done maintenance on an SUV before, and find that the dealership that did this for me really messed up - well, I am assuming they did. When I changed the oil and let the oil pan of the V8 drain for a while, I found gunk bits in the bottom of the receptacle. That is certainly not supposed to be the case in a well maintained engine. Sure enough, I stick six quarts of fresh 5W-30 in, and suddenly the engine is less noisy than before, runs more smoothly. That's not good news... and now that I have rotated the tires the car is more stable? What was I paying the dealership for?
The last picture has a helper air spring
Fascinating. The Republican contenders for the presidency all do non-stop Obama-bashing. I understand full well you're going to tell your voters how bad the current guy is, but I hear nothing else. Not a single politician has any kind of recipe for getting America out of its recession, putting us back on our feet, so to speak. The initiatives, the products that everybody wants, from high tech cars via oil to sophisticated electronics and phones, all come from somewhere else - if you're among those that think Apple is the major winner on all fronts, that's because you read the American press, and/or live in the United States. Apple is unable to make cheap products, which is what most consumers the world over buy.
So I am fine with whichever politico you want for a president. But don't elect one on promises, on claptrap. Pick a president who has proven to be able to turn around an economy. We cannot afford to gamble. And if you can't find one, Obama is doing as well as can be expected, he has even managed to get the industry to push the oil prices down. Don't take chances, we can't afford another disaster - and pleeeeeeeeze remember it was George Bush who messed it up, yes, electing the wrong guy is possible, and we've done it before.
I've been going on about the failure of internet information providers to predict the consumer's behaviour - Ebay (which I happen to think is a great site and a great service) gave me an excellent example of how badly we do. I am in process of selling some stuff, and so log in to see if I have bids or orders, and then notice that Ebay manages to put absolutely nothing - say that again, Sam, NOTHING - on my screen I am interested in.
My screen real estate Ebay uses for the following: there is a Father's Day section - I have no Father alive, and I don't have kids. Then there are a Roomba and a heart rate monitor - I have both. Then there are almost a dozen pictures and links of air conditioners - yesterday, I looked at the pricing for these, as I am selling one, no interest of any kind. Then there is more Father's Day stuff. And that is it. A link to the Oregon State Beavers, whatever that is, and one to Casey Anthony if I scroll down. More drivel. The commemorative Beijing 2008 Olympics set pictured to the left? Ebay really does not know what to do with that, so it is hard to find a reference.
But the bottom line is that Ebay has just managed to put absolutely nothing in front of me that interests me. And that Ebay has spent tens of millions of dollars developing the "intelligence" to read my mind. I truly wish one of these companies would let me take a crack at the computer/human interface, which I have worked on, in the past, in the lab, I've even got some good people to do that with. There has to be a better way of doing this, scoring absolutely zilch ought to be a firing offense, instead of something that gets spreadsheeted away.
Don't get me wrong. I am not griping. I am not saying I know everything better, or even that I have a solution. But when I key up Amazon, what I get is the freakin' Kindle. And a free XBOX, for students. Here, too, nothing of any interest to me. The Kindle does well because of what it is, not because Amazon has pushed everything else off its homepage for years now. At least here there hasn't been a behavioural scientist at work. But honestly, folks, if you can't track your consumers in the insidious way Facebook tries to (and fails), don't track them. Find an effective way to advertise your services, and your products. Once the consumer is at your website, offer them a way to find what they want. Not: a way to find what YOU want them to find. That does not work, never has, never will, and even if you manage to bamboozle people to buy stuff they don't really need, all that will do is piss 'em off. Honest.
I heard a CEO say on the radio in my car that "Telework necessitates The Cloud". Huh? Come again? Apart from my stupid insistence that "cloud" is a buzzword, how does the one have anything to do with the other? Most telework is done using an expanded communications / database package, such as Lotus Domino. That runs in a server park, cloudy or not really makes no difference to the user. The rest is secure networking, which really is the layer around the cloud, not the cloud itself (again: whatever a cloud is). None of this makes my life easier, inclined as I am to sit in an interview and explain to my interviewer that everybody who gives long speeches about their cloud programming should be sent back to school. And to be honest, when I look at the hacker exploits, which seem to be on the rise, they may to some extent be facilitated by the impact of "the cloud" on data security. We're getting more back doors, where we should have fewer....
A recent White Paper that, from what I could understand, was heavily underwritten by Cisco, spent its first few paragraphs outlining how The Cloud necessitates all sorts of new and additional security measures, as the old formula of a physical firewall with the standard router security measures is insufficient, now that the cloud goes where the user goes, and is no longer has a physical boundary. Followed by a long list of new security requirements. Between that, and the number of hacks that have taken place in recent weeks, I have a strong tendency to go back to what we do know how to secure. Having a bunch of marauders running amok in cyberspace, marauders that apparently find it very easy to carry out server attacks, to me simply means we have sacrificed our security to the fancy server-and-database stuff that everybody seems to think is necessary to keep the user and visitor happy. Have to say, folks, if said "stuff" puts us as this much extra risk, forget it. I have always worked on the premise that security is job one, and the rest comes after. All of the above only makes me feel I am right. Draconian? I don't know. I had my site hacked, terminally, once. The hack used a Wordpress exploit. I no longer use Wordpress. Job done. Technology that does not work cannot be fixed.
Told you last week I was trying to scrub a drive I could no longer use, to make sure there wasn't any retrievable data on it - the reformatting process worked, but at least one drive wouldn't take a new file allocation table, so for safety's sake, I did do the sledgehammer treatment after all, the result to your left..
I cannot, for the life of me, understand why so much time and attention is lavished on Senator Weiner's sexting transgressions. Even if he used his office phone to have sex chats, isn't that just a personal call? All you need to do is look at the statistics for chat lines and the like, and the proliferation of interactive porn websites, and you know that millions of men, some of whom are probably married, do this stuff. I honestly couldn't care less, and care even less for the psychologists pressed inot service, and their explanation of how powerful important men are more prone to these transgressions. Pooh. This is not Dominique Strauss-Kahn, consenting adults, willing participants. It is especially the amount of coverage that bothers me - there is, honestly, nobody making CNN spend as much time as it does on the subject, and it makes a complete mockery of responsible journalism.
Interesting statistics out of The Netherlands: 5.4 million workdays a year are lost to migraine, which affects between 1.5 and 2 million Dutch (out of a 16 million population) at a cost of some 1.7 billion Euros. Interesting, as the Dutch with their Universal Healthcare face a lower hurdle taking their legally protected sick time, something we see less in the US, even among those who do have unlimited sick days. Migraine, severe headaches, consitute a very real disease, even for those sufferers who don't have a readily diagnosed physical / neurological pattern.
On that note - do you monitor your employer's and insurer's patient database? You should! I just noticed that WebMD adds each test as a discovered condition - IOW, if a doctor orders an ultrasound of your lymph nodes, the system logs that as "enlarged lymph nodes". Never mind that the test serves to check for a condition that may not exist (the physician does not report back to the insurer unless treatment is required), WebMD sees the test, and therefore registers the condition, even if none exists. That is not the best of news, you may end up getting bitten by this bug when you change employers or insurance plans. IOW, the attempts at creating centralized patient records result in the patient (you) being assigned illnesses you do not have, purely based on the test a doctor ordered. I recall (this happened to me a few years ago) webMD registering diabetes on my record. When I followed this up, it turned out Quest had reported a positive diabetes test where none existed, in fact, my doctor hadn't even ordered one, and neither the lab nor WebMD were willing to follow up. I ended up having to ask my doctor to write a letter, stating the error, which effectively means any hospital or lab can report a test, or test results, and there basically is little you can do about it, all this based on the record provider's (webMD sells their solution to Verizon for all employees) perceived need to communicate with the insurer, in an unchecked, unaudited process. I should really take this to the Fed - I am sure it helps drive up the cost of health care..
I am currently contemplating a change of coasts - since I can't seem to get gainfully employed in the D.C. area, I have to do something. Don't get me wrong, I have complete understanding most employers take no risks and hire only clearable U.S. citizens for any job to do with the Federal government, even if it is not strictly speaking necessary.. that's part and parcel of the American experience. Even TARP jobs, I was told by a Citi banker, have to go to citizens. All of the above does make a mockery of Equal Employment Opportunity - we are, after all, taxpayers too, but what really hobbles me is the fact that the Dutch don't allow dual citizenship. And is it reasonable that civilian contractors - even truck drivers, actually - in Afghanistan have to have Secret Clearance? Probably not, but there it is, not a lot you can do. It does not help (and is a bit silly in terms of doing one's bit for King and Country, if you follow my drift).
So I am contemplating winding up my affairs here, and going to stay with friends there, who have very very kindly offered to give me a place to kip while I try to get "back in circulation", so to speak. In hindsight, but that isn't something I could have predicted, I probably should have returned to New York after finishing my work at the Verizon Long Distance company, which was shortly after 9/11, but the thing was that NYC had lost much of its luster at that point, I really did not fancy going back to looking at that piece of sky where the Towers had been, every day, the air laden with the sweet smell of disinfectant used to mask the odor of decaying Wall Street worker corpses. So I stayed in a place where I really did not have a professional track record, and I guess I should have taken a closer look at how the market was developing. Not an easy place, D.C., at the best of times, and I think I can be forgiven for not realizing that nobody would hire me to do the work I was doing, I couldn't come in from the outside what I was able to do from the inside.
Change is what is required - that is always the case when one gets stuck, clear the cobwebs and do the new perspective. And change, my friends, is something you've got to do, to make happen. Thankfully I have some friends who are pushing me to - thanks guys, you know who you are.
There is, then, a vast amount of work to be done before the internet is accessible to the world's population - read my previous blog entry for the background to this. I know that, apart from Google, eminent scientists at Pitney Bowes and IBM are working on new and different ways of finding information, ways that will open up data access to the billions of people that are barely literate, and barely have access to networks and computers. Slower networks, like GPRS and EDGe, combined with voice interfaces and tactile interfaces, are going to unlock the world for those folks. We're otherwise - a process that is well under way! - dividing the world in haves and have nots, much worse than is the case already. If your kids cannot learn the internet, they're going to form the largest underclass the universe has ever seen. Read Sara's blog for a little background - she is one of those eminent IBM folk working on the problem - for the past year, in India, not at her New York home base.
Aw this is boring. I am reformatting a couple of drives in a RAID enclosure, because I am junking it and it has backups on it. So you do the low level format, but man, this is slow. I think I started it around noon, and it is, at 9pm, 58% done. That is, drive 1. Then we get to drive 2. At this rate, I'll be lucky if I am finished tomorrow evening. And that means I am not doing anything fancy on this laptop, because if I do it might run out of steam or resources, and then I can start all over again. Drat. Originally I thought I was going to have to go the sledgehammer route, because I could not even get it to power up, but then this morning I managed to get it running, and a couple of hours later I managed to separate the drives (they were spanned). So once this is done the data should be well and truly inaccessible, especially since a buyer won't know how it was formatted. No, I am not telling you, neither....
For the first time, earlier in the week, I came across an employment ad that actually stipulated the applicant "had to be employed the previous six months". I had read there were quite a few employers that won't hire the unemployed, this is the first time I've actually seen that. The issue is that in an "up" economy I could imagine employers want to be picky, because there wouldn't be huge numbers of people unemployed, but today, that is very different. There certainly isn't any kind of guarantee, today, that someone who is still employed has that status because they're "better", whatever that is. Or, for that matter, that the person laid off when a company closed isn't the most brilliant person. As I have always told my colleagues, during RIF rounds, people are laid off by corporations based on calculations, funding, departmental issues, not because they are or are not good at what they do. One former colleague would love to take a RIF and move on, but they're just not offering it to him - his department already has been shrunk to beyond reasonable, they simply cannot afford to lose more people.
That does not mean he is the best, although he is good at what he does. In general, more today than ever before, companies use software to assess the value of an applicant, which bothers me a bit, because there is no direct correlation between the software, the hiring manager, and the applicant. It is, after all, the hiring manager who writes the job specification, and in many cases, the hiring manager has no HR training. The guy or gal that does, the HR person, doesn't normally get involved at the stage where the job is defined, and so the disconnect, in my simple thinking, is just about complete. Worse, it has to fit in software whose value, to me, is completely unproven. There is no evidence that I am aware of that any of these software packages would be able to analyze a person - we tested it, many managers that do their jobs perfectly satisfactorily would not be hired if they applied for the jobs they hold. Including me - the job I did would require Secret Clearance today, and being a durn fahreigner that would not be possible to get for me. Something there just does not pass the smell test... No, I was OK doing the actual work, supervised by a Cleared manager, at a secure facility - around Washington, D.C., we don't play around with that, not in the least because the Fed is a Very Important Customer.
The pictures? Top left, a random vehicle during the Fredericksburg Vintage Vehicle rally, last weekend.. pretty... the other pic is just a random shot of my desk that I thought rather nice. Random. Although I do work on a (different) HP. They do nice gear, affordable and reliable. As usual, click on the pic and get a larger version - if the cursor then shows a "+" sign, you can do that again, if you like.
SEO - as in "Search Engine Optimization". The way in which webpage "designers" (and those quotes are very deliberate) try to cram as much information as possible into their sites is getting from crazy to ridiculous. Yes, a huge huge number of menus and submenus is appropriate when you do a news aggregation page - see here for a good example, just look at the number of menu options you have when the page opens up, and at how many menus you get when you click any menu option - but in the absence of standardization, designers take mostly only their bosses into account when they decide how many links and menus to put on a page. The net result is that the average user (somebody who does not get researched much, considering many people are capable of taking a wrong turn at the sign, do you really expect them to take the correct turn when the "sign" has 82 directions, rather than 2?) can't find the information they are looking for very easily.
As you can see, I don't use huge numbers of menus. That isn't because I can't, I have experimented with dropdowns and image maps and the like, but because I can see from tracking software (including the software used on some of the commercial NYNEX/Bell Atlantic/Verizon sites I have managed) that consumers have, for the most part, not a clue where to look for what they are looking for. It begins with the vast number of variants of the English language, where many words can have many different meanings, depending on the region the speaker is from. Even in the Southern United States and in Canada, there are variants of the Queen's English (and its predecessor, the King's English) in use that aren't in other parts of the United States. "This exit" as opposed to "next exit" is one of those gorgeous examples. Then, every website is different in design, and the average consumer only has a limited familiarity with sites they visit all the time. The rest - fuggedaboutit, they say on the Jersey Shore. I am serious. This is ignored by designers, and unknow by the development managers, who don't access the statistics packages they have, like Webtrends. Yes, you need to spend a huge amount of time looking at that, because it is bewildering. But if you don't, the "surveys" and "stats" in front of you have no meaning of any kind. None. Seriously. If your developers say their design "works", have them prove it. Not in clicks, but in sales. Clicks don't mean a thing. I appreciate what Google and Amazon and all those others are trying to do, but: a website cannot read minds. Yes, you can make assumptions about who does what why. But you can't know for sure.
You can't even know for sure when you do a "survey". I recall, just from my main employer, Verizon, that the company had to jump through hoops to make employees do their surveys. What does that mean? They're not interested. Most of 'em. Me either. They have (not just Verizon, I am convinced this is the case with 98% of the corporate world) no stake in answering contextual functioning questions. Some would say - I would say - answering stupid questions. Because the questionnaires are put together by experts who don't know any more than you why many questions are not asked. The average survey-filler sees no tangible result of those surveys - unlike, for instance, the national census, whose results and changes are, over time, well publicized. In order to create questions, you see, you already have to know what answer you are looking for. The big secret behind the surveys is that you have no answers to questions you don't ask, and that you don't know anything about the people who don't do the surveys. A survey would provide valid information if everybody involved would provide input. When they don't, the survey is only valid for those who participate, and in fact, since you can't include information about and from those who don't participate , the survey provides only useless information, as the group whose information is provided is self-selected - not in any way defined. That is the underlying reason why citizens are required by law to complete the census forms, and why so many census takers are paid and sent out to get in the face of people who don't. Some information you cannot do withhout, you can't "sort of approach" the truth.
One of the most amazing aspects of the information age is that commercial enterprise attempts to predict the buyer's behaviour by collecting and "parsing" as much data as possible. We try to - and I am not making this up - predict whether a smartphone user is going to want to get a pizza in the neighbourhood they are in. And we do this on the basis of the fact that this person got pizza on four previous occasions, in different neighbourhoods. Never mind that, on each occasion, the person had visitation with a child from a previous marriage, and that it was this child that wanted pizza, and that as this child is moving to Bulgaria with her mother next week, the pizza episode will never recur, so the phone programmer is going to annoy the phone user with pizza ads four times a week for the next decade. It is similar to the now solidly embedded idea that if you pop an ad over an article somebody wants to read, they're now going to buy your product instead of reading the article. How crazy are these people, really? Because on top of everything else, they can't prove these pop-overs work, they have no way of tracking sales down to the individual ad technology. That does not exist. I regularly see pop-over ads where the maker has made the "close" button hard to find, it just boggles the mind how advertisers think that that will sell anything. You just can't make me believe you can annoy people into buying from you. If somebody is hugely desperate to buy a printer he isn't going to do that from an HP ad in the New York Times, because he is not going to be reading the New York Times, he is going to go to Staples and then on to the internet to see if he can get that cute Epson cheaper in California or Canada. Answer: yes. And then there is a huge proliferation of deceptive advetising, and teaser links - the panel I saw on Yahoo, to the right, is a perfect example - if these are legitimate advertisements, which I assume, you get the additional problem for search engines - there is no such thing as a 1,000% gain, but if the site is paying for Yahoo to display this nonsense, what are you going to do? Similarly, there isn't a home remedy that erases wrinkles, and I know of no plastic surgeon who works for $7.
In many ways, the Google ad banner you always see below the very first posting in this blog is the perfect indicator of how little intelligence is actually available in these algorithms. (I have, today, for the sake of discovery, added a second banner, underneath the second posting, just to see what they manage to parse). I am, again, not singling out Google, they pretty much all work the same. Look at the search terms it presents, read my first two blog entries, and you will see little tying the two together. The algorithm just does not have the intelligence to understand what I am talking about, especially since I usually broach multiple different subjects in one piece. Take into consideration this is the world's most extensive, largest, smartest search engine. No, I don't have the solution, but I do know we're not heading in any direction that makes this tecjhnology better. Check the picture at the top right, and you will see the result, so far this year, of my Amazon links. With that (you'll see it is not making me rich, but it is having some re$ult) you will note there were 601 clicks, up until now. Try as I might, when I check where those clocks went, and what was bought, there is rhyme nor reason. Only rarely do people buy the things I post about, much of the time they go from the link I provide to another product (often similar though) and buy that. Of all the clicks to cellphones I have written about, only one Blackberry Bold 9700 was purchased. All of the other mobile phones people bought after clicking on one of my Amazon links aren't phones I wrote about, or own. Yes, they did buy cellphones, quite a few, actually, but why they bought what they bought, as I said, a web browser cannot read minds. QED.
I am always amazed at the fines levied on corporate and other transgressions, as if that money comes out of the pockets of the perpetrators. It does not - here are hospitals in England being fined over mixed sex wards - am I confused, or is that money that comes from the taxpayer or the consumer? BP was fined some $17 billion - that money has to come from somewhere, and whether that is the consumer or the stockholder, all it does is take money away from those who get paid out of it, and reduce the amount of taxes a company pays. And I doubt it stops anybody from messing up in the future - nobody went to jail, did they? I honestly think we should find better ways of holding those who actually cause a problem, directly or indirectly, responsible. Fines I don't think work, in corporate environments. The Dutch papers just reported energy companies being fined over illegal telemarketing, something they have known for quite a while is illegal. The same things happen here, but many companies seem to do it anyway, as if the fine is the cost of doing business - I mean, you get prohibited telemarketing calls the same way I do, right? From these "charities" that give a massive 2% of their proceeds to charity, etc?
After the LinkedIn IPO, wildly successful, the big question is now whether profitable social networking is only that which has a true purpose, as opposed to just providing a form of entertainment, like Facebook. LinkedIn is a professional tool, clearly one some professionals are willing to pay for, augmented with advertising. Not so with Facebook and other social sites - they run on advertising, per se. That is a model many newspapers - New York Times, Times of London, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal - have clearly stated is not a good profit strategy, so those papers now require a paid subscription for their online presence. From what statistics I've seen, only the Wall Street Journal has managed that subscription model, none of the others have sold vast numbers of online subscriptions, and as I understand it they have lost millions upon millions of readers - folks who no longer can look at the advertising, as they cannot access the papers any more without paying. I have to say I get all the information I need via Google searches, and if the Daily Telegraph or the BBC doesn't have it, German Stern, the Dutch Financieel Dagblad, or Australia's Sydney Morning Herald will. As of yet, I (a former WSJ subscriber) don't see the need.
Henry Kissinger's new book
“The Chinese approach to policy is conceptual while ours is pragmatic. For the Chinese, history is part of current reality. For America, current reality usually begins with the perception of a problem we are trying to solve now.” And I suppose Europe is somewhere in between - because, at least in my memory, Europeans have a solid understanding of their long history. A member of my family traced back my blood line to something like 1634 - and apologized he could not go back further, because the church records were missing (before the invention of the Etat Civil (Registrars Office), church records, baptisms, marriages and deaths, served as such).
What struck me in China, though, is that China did away with almost all of its history, during the cultural revolution. Go to historical monuments that had been discovered before that revolution, and you will find - the Forbidden City comes to mind - that they have mostly been rebuilt and reconstructed, not preserved. Do your homework, and you will find many had been completely destroyed - the Great Wall around Beijing is a perfect example, it has been rebuilt after the authorities recovered the building blocks that had been removed and re-used by the population. I visited 20 or so historical sites around Beijing, including the Forbidden City, and could not help but notice that 90% of them had been rebuilt, sometimes on only a small remaining portion of the original site. So for Kissinger to say what he does, I think may have held long term validity in the past, but I am not at all convinced his view is valid today and tomorrow. The 2008 Olympics, with vast construction projects (seven subway lines!) and astonishing high-tech opening and closing ceremonies had little to do with China's past, and more with China's government and perhaps its people, and their desire to remake themselves in the eyes of the world.
The pictures belie Kissinger's observations - at the left, you can see the old neigbourhoods, the hutongs, have simply been razed - this particular one after the Olympics. They were part of China's rich cultural heritage - like the kampungs
Here is another example of the limited understanding of search engines: - I am not necessarily saying they are wrong in the results, what I am saying is that their level of intelligence is very limited.
How does this search (click on it to run it):
http://www.google.com.hk/search?q=resume%20cv%20system%20engineer%20vas%20-sample&hl=zh-TW&prmd=ivns&tbas=0&source=lnt&sa=X&ei=rybSTZ-6IIfPiALlxuzsCg&ved=0CAkQpwUoAA&biw=1024&bih=660
come up with moi in the results?
The searcher, in Hong Kong, is looking for VAS systems engineers - in telecommunications, VAS stands for "Value Added Services". So, since I am a systems engineer, and in telecommunications, Google thinks that VA (my home state of Virginia) is related to VAS. Which, of course, isn't so. Note how the person puts both the word "resume" and the word "CV" in the query - CV, a.k.a. "curriculum vitae", is the Latin term used in Europe and other places for "resume". Having said that, in The Netherlands "CV" means "central heating" as well - centrale verwarming. Then, the person adds -sample. Why? We shall never know... I'd try for "example", myself, but then, there are many different flavours of English, and one thing you don't know is which one the searcher uses. (S)he may be in Hong Kong, but natively South African. Know what I mean?
The big question is if it is possible to embed my logic, and other bits of logic like it, in the search algorithm, without slowing down the search to the point it becomes unusable. For now, probably not, but you can discern from this we're really in the very initial development stages of search engines. And that is before we look at the other meanings for "VA" and "VAS". Like Veterans Administration. And the Latin word "vas". Etcetera.
And if you want a really weird search - this one from someone in San Diego, I have no idea what the searcher wants or is looking for, and I understand even less how Google brings this to my website - as search result #1! The mind truly boggles (click on it to run, it is perfectly safe):
http://www.google.com/search?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Faartsen.net%2F&rct=j&q=Osama%20shoes%20are%20filled%2C%20his%20introduction%20will%20cause%20fire%2C%20danger%20soon%2C%20north%20eastern%20state%2C%20fire%2C%20fuel....Canada%20trouble%2C%20fuel%20fuel%20fuel%2C%20need%20to%20travel%2C%20need%20large%20amount%20of%20money%20in%20account%20now&ei=BODWTcrDN4e6sAOTx_GwBw&usg=AFQjCNEgN_CZGjvJu1MTG-r5ajlK8FC89g
Keep an eye out for a particularly insidious bit of scareware, reported by Symantec. In general, when you see a system error, browser error, application error, anything weird that makes no sense at all, something pops up unexpectedly, don't try to figure out what it is. Don't close any windows, shut down applications, don't touch anything. If you think it might be a virus, stop what you are doing, hands off keyboard and mouse, push, IMMEDIATELY, your PC's on-off button CONTINUOUSLY, until your PC turns off, then restart via Safe Mode (Windows will offer that as a startup option). This will rebuild your registry if necessary, and stop scareware from running/saving. Then, run a full virus scan before doing anything else. If it is a real attack, all you have to save your system is a second, tops. You call for your friend to come look at it, it is too late already. And back up every day, of course.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand how anybody can continue to use the Sony Playstation
24/7 network operations, you see, require real expertise, not classroom knowledge or lots of back room hacking. It is a bit like flying an airplane - something occurs, you don't push the right button, and it is too late to "fix". You can only mop up. I've been blessed with some incredible staff who knew how to monitor vital network links - and by that I don't mean they knew what monitoring software to run, they knew (and know) what the initial signs of a problem are, and can see the train coming, way before the software knows there is something wrong. One - a part time farmer - sussed out an internal hacker who had set up a porn server in my NOC, just because there was network traffic when there should not be, he ran an analysis, and nailed the guy, without him ever seeing it coming. A programmer, he got cocky and thought he was untouchable. I walked him to his car within the hour, despite warnings from executives: "did I do the due diligence?" - nobody hacks my US-wide network, nobody, that is all the due diligence I need.
I recently read The Sigma Protocol
The picture? Jade ornaments from Beijing and Singapore (the necklace) Pretty, right?. Nikon D50 w/17mm and Polaroid filter. Make me an offer 
, on a research trip in 2007. The original pictures were shot using a Nikon D50, by the way, so their quality is significantly higher than that of the JPEG renditions you see here, they are in full Nikon NEF format. The picture bottom left is one I took last year in Hong Kong harbour, during a stopover in that lovely vibrant city. If you click on it you can download the (rather massive, sorry, but oh so pretty) TIFF version.This is one of those months where you start a blog entry fifteen times, only then to decide that another subject is perhaps more important, there is so much going on. The poor people in the Mississippi watershed are having a terrible time, imagine losing your home for no good reason other than that you built it too close to the river - but then, is there a real map that tells you where you are safe? The Federal Government does have a flood risk database, I recall checking it before I bought this house, to see if I did or did not need flood insurance. Let's see - ah, here it is, FEMA, of course: click. But, of course, the majority of those affected by the floods can't afford flood insurance - that, at least, is what it sounds like on television. Checking the tables, in my low risk area I can get insurance for a few hundred dollars a year, but in a high risk area that soon balloons to $1,500 and can go as high as $6,000. Not hard to imagine people can't afford that. Having said that, why live in a high risk area? A lot of people do - one of my neighbours just rebuilt a home in the Northern Neck, which was basically wiped out in the last hurricane that came up the coast. But then, he lives right on the waterfront...
Now bin Laden was nice, but, Mr. President, I absolutely must compliment you on your handling of the Donald. For him to explain his hairdo on national television, you got to him, Sir, good for you. Keep doing that. On a different note, The picture top left is one I rather like, took it in Hong Kong in 2007, and if I recall lost the trip report I write then, as that was published using Wordpress on a Freeservers facility, which then got hacked. I do have a backup, but after that experience no longer use Wordpress. On a different note, does anybody know why the people standing around in Rockefeller Plaza during the Today Show are always screaming at the top of their lungs? Do/would you? Why?
I activated the email link at the top of the page, so you can talk back to me, if you like, and I will post your responses. That is the other nice thing about not using Wordpress, not having to deal with the endless hack- and spam attacks every day.
If you have watched the analyses of the "home videos" retrieved from the Bin Laden compound, hopefully you will, like me, wonder how the press glean this much information from the few sound-less snippets of video released by the Pentagon. They really don't. There really is not much information there, Bin Laden being "an old man" raises one's eyebrows to begin with - he himself has said he was born in 1957, which would put him in his early fifties, and that is hardly old. I would doubt even that, at 54, he'd have a completely grey beard. So perhaps his beard was not dyed black - perhaps his beard was dyed gray - camo. Ever thought of that? Or perhaps he was not born in 1957 - all I am saying is that the possibilities are endless.
He lived, apparently, in Spartan surroundings. Devout religious men often do, and terrorists in hiding often do, too, they don't travel around with 55 inch LED displays in their backpacks. The idea he was living in a million dollar mansion is entirely a press construct - based on the location, Abbottabad, being "an affluent suburb" full of professional people. At the same time, this is said to be a garrison town, and military salaries are what they are, the world over. This is still Pakistan, a country with a per capita income of around $1,000 a year, people, with a life expectancy of 68 for men and women. It is not a democracy, so can only use the talents of its Muslim citizens in leading capacities. A Pakistani real estate agent said it in the British press, earlier in the week: "This house is not a mansion. It does not even have a pool". And you can see from its construction it may have been built as a factory courtyard or a secure compound - factory courtyards often have elaborate security, as they are prone to being burgled. Look at the picture I took from a Fox News report, at the right - four gas meters with separate gas lines for a family home without a pool? In a country where it gets very hot and not all that cold? Think about it, a walled fortress in a residential neighbourhood may not be the best place to hide if you're trying to hide "in plain sight" - you would build a large Pakistani middle class home, with kids and women and flowers and gates and what-have-you, and then you construct a hiding place inside that compound, invisible from the world, maybe. Not this. Look at this house carefully, and you'll see it was never finished, the rebar for the top floors sticking out of the bearer walls. Here is what Lonely Planet
From what bits of video have been released or leaked out of Pakistan, this was not a hugely affluent home, and some Pakistani sources have been quoted to say that Bin Laden did not have a huge amount of money. Apart from that, it is quite possible he may have needed to support multiple locations, to be able to move among them for security reasons. His captive wife saying he lived there for seven years - I honestly would have no reason of any kind to believe her, and as he wasn't in the phone book, it is not something that can be proven. That's important, because we're assessing Pakistani reliability on the basis of their "allowing" Bin Laden to be in hiding in one place for many years, and there is, at this point, no evidence of any kind that that was, or was not, the case. We simply don't know, all we know is that the CIA came up with this possible location sometime last year. And they were right - so he has lived there since August that we know, the rest is pure guesswork. Similarly, Bin Laden allegedly having lived in Chak Shah Mohammad - a village with 400 inhabitants all from the same Pakistani tribe, when the man is a Saudi Arab - it just makes no sense.
But let me make one very important point: keeping Pakistan as an ally because of the war on terror is somewhere between a joke and serious self-deception. A country or regime is an ally because they're friends, because you have stuff in common, all sorts of "soft" reasons. Having somebody for a friend because he is convenient to your struggle is not an effective long term strategy, and that will come back to bite us. Having an Islamic Republic for a "friend", with about as divergent a philosophy of life as you can get it, would be a nice skit for SNL, but not for the US of A. Honest.
On Foreign Oil
You've no doubt seen some of the many commercials about our "energy security", our dependence on foreign oil, and sundry other scaremongering discussions. Most countries in the world buy their oil on the open market, so from that perspective we're not doing worse or better than anybody else, and we do have a fair amount of oil we can exploit in-country - if only we built more refining capacity, and invest in oil fields and oil platforms. But ExxonMobil's advertising really takes the cake - oil sands will solve all our problems. Those oil sands - the exploitation of which is currently raising questions with regard to pollution and distruction of habitat - are "in North America". Sure they are - they're in Canada, and last time I looked, Canada is another country. How is that more secure? They can be invaded more cheaply? There is plenty of oil in Middle and South America, and we can pipeline there, too - don't kid yourselves, the oil sands are not, according to some, a panacea, with the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil needed to produce three barrels of heavy oil sand crude. Having said that, oil production uses energy and costs money, and as we continue to increase our oil consumption we're going to have to jump through bigger hoops. Criticizing oil companies trying to keep up with the world's demand is probably not the smartest thing.
So we do have a pretty tough Prez - you can push him, but beyond some point he comes out swinging. Look at the way he dealt with The Trump - releasing his birth certificate when the publicity got out of hand, then ripping him completely to shreds at the White House Correspondent's Dinner... Then sending a SEAL team into Pakistan, which is a sovereign country, and an ally, with an order to kill. No BS, no waffling, done. I think few will want to mess with this man any more, and I haven't heard anybody criticise his performance, other than the customary dumb comment from Mrs. Palin - is she related to Dan Quayle?
The level of conjecture around the execution of Osama bin Laden is truly amazing - there is no evidence he lived in that compound for six years, nobody conveniently mentions the man was very rich, likely a billionaire, and it is not at all uncommon, in countries like Pakistan, for rich men to hide in secure compounds, off the radar, and doing it in the vicinity of a military academy isn't any more amazing than a rich criminal living on 150 secluded acres where I am, in between Fort A.P. Hills, the Quantico Marine Base, and a few other secure areas. It isn't unusual, and not every rich man or hidden criminal is Osama bin Laden. Pakistan isn't a country with a well functioning registrar's office - remember Muslim countries, until recently, allowed each other's citizens to cross without a passport on the strength of being a Muslim - and there are lots of other reasons why he could go undetected. I am not saying he didn't have collusion, but that collusion is more likely to be based on religion or bribery than on anti-American terrorism.
For anchors on TV to keep hammering away at "it is impossible they did not know" is disingenuous at best, possibly dangerous. These are, for the most part, anchors who report overseas from Hilton Hotels using stringers and translators, who have never lived abroad, don't have a first hand experience of these types of cultures, never even have to bribe anybody when they travel, because we employ locals to do that. Ask questions, don't jump to conclusions, hire some of the Pakistani reporters that work for BBC or ITV in England, and have them do proper reporting. Pushing at conjectures on the air without even a smattering of evidence what you're saying is grounded in reality is not journalism, it is Monopoly. Sorry to have to gripe, but broadcasting wild assumptions about the Pakistani intelligence service interspersed with Mother's Day gifts may sell advertising minutes, but it doesn't educate the public, which used to be y'all's job.
Here are a couple of good examples of how we're being fed sensationalized information that has little bearing on most people's reality: the mother who (says the Today Show) suffers from prosopagnosia, a condition also known as “face blindness". Except she does not - when you read the article, and her background, this woman had severe epilepsy, bad enough to require brain surgery to remove some of her brain, in surgery suffered a stroke, and that is how she ended up with this condition. In other words, this is a condition very few people will have or ever attract, and certainly not something the average person needs to watch out for. Why present it as a medical condition? Aren't there more relevant illnesses that the citizen needs to know about? Sure, "a new study found that as many as 2.5 percent of the population may have problems recognizing faces". I don't think 2.5 percent of the american population had epilepsy, brain surgery, and a stroke. Pleeze. Get real. Similarly, the woman who has a British accent after oral surgery - she doesn't. That's not British English of any kind - and that is a language I speak, I used to live there. She clearly has a speech impediment, and one wonders whether she had a stroke while she was under anaesthesia. It is ridiculous to present this as a special medical case, even Today's own doctor didn't believe in it.
Tucked in the middle of nowhere, news that is infinitely more important: asthma tablets can be as beneficial for long term asthma sufferers, of which the United States alone has some 20 million, as steroid inhalers. But: CNN will do a Sanjay Gupta special on the recovery of Representative Giffords, who has been shot in the head, providing "new" information we already have in vast abundance - recent stuff from the Iraq and Afghanistan battlefields, where plenty of soldiers suffer a variety of traumatic brain injuries. Go figure. This is not intended as a slight on Ms. Gifford's predicament, but not that many people get shot in the head, as the statistics stand, and even fewer are married to Space Shuttle pilots. We used to refer to this as "tabloid", or "Rupert Murdoch" journalism, but it seems to be a creepy weed.
Good for you, Mr. President. This was textbook, it'll go down in the annals of the intelligence community and those of the Armed Forces as the one that worked. If you spend ten years chasing a guy, then get him, in a place that is harder to get to than the tribal lands, in a town that is closer to China and India than to anywhere else, I can't help but be very very impressed. America is often this great, big, slow and lumbering elephant, which has a really really long memory, and once it catches up with you, as the Germans and the Japanese found out in the last century, you are toast. For many of us that were "there", 9/11 was very close up and personal, and while I am under no illusion that many are ready to step into Bin Laden's shoes, they will know, once more, that we'll get them, however long it takes, however hard it is, however many dollars it costs. Good show.
Here, once more, are the names of the Verizon colleagues - one was in my organization - who perished that day, in the line of duty, as they say. Nothing can bring them back, but kill one, two three, or three thousand, we will all come after you, until the job is done.
But it isn't that important to predict the future, that is not something one can do. When I stepped off the US Air Shuttle at Washington National Airport, the morning of September 11, 2001, and saw what was happening, I knew what was wrong, as I come from Europe, and we'd had Islamic militants kill our citizens and blow up our infrastructure since sometime in the 1960s, and remembered the 1993 attack. It was all I could think: "They finally did it", before heading home to try and find out what had happened to my downtown New York office, and my colleagues. I guess that was kind of unavoidable, our consumerism, Home Box Office, CNN, four wheel drive Audis, MacDonalds and Starbucks, condoms and bikinis, to many on the face of the Earth is blasphemy, an affront to their religious values. And religion, if left unchecked, often leads to extremism. We must be vigilant, engage and support, help those in need of help, and support the efforts to get rid of dictators and potentates - Osama Bin Laden, after all, was a very rich Saudi who decided he'd use his resources to change the world, and did, until, a day or so ago, we stopped him.
There will be another, and another, that much we know, so please be vigilant, we are going to have to do this all over again.
Kind of unusual to get a large daily dose of England in the news - I did live there for many years, after all, living and working in Central London, then eventually in suburbia and the stockbroker belt, before heading for Miami and New York. But: my best wishes to Kate and Wills, Diana's is not an easy legacy to bear, but they seem to have the strong shoulders required for that endeavour. As I've said, I think the crown should go to William, rather than Charles, but then he won't have the "grounded" chopper pilot life they enjoy today. Hard decision to take, and best of luck working that out.. again, congrats.
I have seen a lot of speculation about the reasons the Royal Wedding is such a hugely important subject in the United States, but I have not actually seen any proof that the general public is hugely interested beyond the customary "matters British", as evidenced by the BBC's American cable channel, PBS's incessant reruns of ancient British TV
So to me it is just another huge blob of American media marketing - having said that, I am not suggesting folks should not enjoy the Pomp and Circumstance - I famously do not watch the X-Factor, Dancing With the Stars, Housewives, or any of this other "reality television" - odd, perhaps, if you consider the genre
Much of me reminds me of the initial introduction of the VCR in the United Kingdom. This happened smack in the middle of a recession, and we in the press had a hard time understanding why you would introduce expensive entertainment equipment when half the bloody country was unemployed. It was explained very simply, and along the same lines that the introduction of cable television happened, when the decision was made to bring the main feeds to blue collar areas with huge unemployment: the unemployed would spend money on entertainment, more so than the rest of the population, as they had little else to do, and nothing else to take their minds off their plight, which they were powerless to do much about anyway.
Sadly, astonishingly, amazingly, they were right. So you will see the greatest pomp and circumstance surrounding this Royal Wedding, because of the recession. The Romans figured it out first: Panem et Circenses, Bread and Games....
I wanted to share with you why search engines are often ineffective, and why so much more research needs to be done into how consumers find information... Here are two unclear searches that ended up at my website (for no reason I can see!) - the first from Australia, the second from the Fiji Islands. In both cases, a parser should have probably intercepted the query, and helped refine it, but we're not even close to that technology... (unless you want to buy a movie at Amazon or Netflix, but not, as they say, IRL):
Cannot add Lenovo N500 on domain gives timely fashion error
I can't really comment on what happens for these queries to yield my website, but just wanted to comment that what most consumers can't do is use search engines - they have not been trained. I assume that kids and adolescents, who have grown up with computers and search engines, do better, and of course those of us, like yours truly, who have been trained on database engines do well too. But the majority of the great unwashed public has not been trained on formulating queries, and unlike other hu-mans, search engines don't talk back, and do not, by and large, understand most local iterations of the English language, nor can a search engine read minds - what does "sound goes robotic" mean?. That, as you can see above, is a problem. If you are interested, you can click on the two queries above, and see what results they yield in Google. Note, for instance, that a searcher expects the search engine to understand that "skype 5.1 4 ram" means "I am using Skype version 5.1 with 4 megabytes of memory", and - umm, what the heck does "timely fashion error" mean? And I have to say that the number of typos I see in search queries is horrendous, truly.
I have the gravest concerns for what I hear emanating from the White House, I really do. "President Barack Obama says one answer to high gasoline prices is to spend money developing renewable energy sources." is one quote I don't like, and the talk about "job creation" is another. There is not, I am sorry to say, any way in which "renewable energy" is going to provide an alternative to fossil fuel in vehicles, for a very long time - even if there actually was a form of energy you could "renew", which is not the case, once you use a form of energy, it is gone, history, badabing. We've been working on new fuels for something like fourty years, and so far, there are no alternative fuels for the ordinary motor car - ethanol
The Nissan Leaf
We should not give a damn where the oil comes from. Oil is a commodity - it costs a certain amount of money, wherever it comes from, and you need to make sure your supplier is reliable, pay your bills on time, and honour your contract. We can build some really big new refineries, import crude and export gasoline, make some money that way, without scaring the bejesus out of other governments. We can go help the Indonesians, who don't like the Chinese much, make their oil production more efficient, they could produce twice what they do now, and then we can buy the surplus from them at market prices. That's how WWII started in that part of the world, with the Japanese securing the Indonesian oil fields by invading.
But most importantly, Mr. Obama - the price of gasoline is out of hand for no good reason, "oil prices spooked" is not a business argument, and I heard you say on TV "there is no quick fix". Whoa - you have very much misunderstood what your job is all about, Mr. President. I am not saying it would be easy, or even that I know how to achieve it, but if you do not have a magic Presidential wand to cure this problem, forthwith, there isn't going to be a recovery. Let me put it this way, Mr. Obama: you are the Magician-in-Chief, this is when we need you to fix the problem, that is why we put you where you are. Get on with it, now, or forget your second term, simple as that.
On a completely different note, you may recall new rules outlawing phosphates in dishwashing detergents coming into force, last year, there was a spate of TV news items on what to do to tackle the white film that many consumers reported on their glassware and china. I encountered the same problem - not just white film, cleaning of coffee mugs was less than stellar, deposit on teaspoons, what have you. Then, see my December 2010 blog entry, I replaced my old Maytag dishwasher, which had been in the house when I bought it, this after replacing my hot water tank, hot water heating element, and completely revamping my well water treatment system. I had discovered that the previous owners of my house had bypassed the PH treatment tank on my well, and there was some other stuff wrong.
The picture top left shows you two glasses - same age, one that had not been in the new dishwasher, one that has been, they looked exactly the same until I ran the right glass through a couple of cycles in the new dishwasher, connected to the new water treatment plant and hot water tank, which went in between August 12 and September 18 of last year, if you want to read up on what I did. As you can see, it is not necessarily a matter of buying some kind of chemical, or running your dishwasher with vinegar or citrus juice. Manufacturers (detergent makers and those that do dishwashers) have redeveloped their equipment and detergent to work perfectly without phosphates, as you can see. I should add that the manufacturers state the water temperature should be 120° Fahrenheit (that's about 50° centigrade) or above. You may have noticed the green folk stating you can lower your hot water tank temperature to 120°, to save the environment and your gas or electric bill - what the above means is that you cannot. If your dishwasher needs 120° Fahrenheit water for the detergent to function correctly, you will want to set that hot water higher than that. If your thermostat is set at 120, the heating elements will not kick in until the temperature in the tank drops to 105 or 110 degrees, which means your applicances will not get 120 degree water most of the time. Especially if your tank is older, its anode has not been replaced, there will be crud in that tank that dissolves into the water, and ends up on your dishes. Put some filters in line, crank up your heater (I use a heat pump, which is vastly cheaper to run than the conventional water heating elements, which in my new clean tank are disconnected) to 140 or so degrees, and you can see the result in the picture to the left. I use Cascade
The stuff you don't learn when you research and experiment.... the other picture is the perfect PH level of my home water, as I understand it this is of major importance in the correct functioning of all those chemicals that are used in various detergents, and in avoiding lead, copper and mineral leaching, which is what happens if your water supply is too acidic (low PH, typically 7.0 or lower). At a guess, that PH is much more important than it was, now that we do not have those lovely phosphates... You don't need an expensive drinking water test kit to check this, pop into Wal-Mart and you can pick up this test kit
A blogger friend in The Netherlands bemoaned how much the response volume on her blog has gone down, over the past few years, blaming it on the advent of Facebook, Twitter, and the other usual suspects. Much though I sympathize with her, I am not sure those are the actual culprits. I think it is just that we've been blogging more or less since the idea came along, she in 2001, I around 1998, in the days when you needed a PC and an internet connection and some clever software, while today you can do "social networking" on a cellphone in a third world country. There is just much more out there, and the folks who used to visit us every day now have a hundred places they must visit every week. It's all changed tremendously - were the early days the province of the literati, I see a lot of folks with marginal language sills no longer inhibited by those, which I believe is a very good thing. In the olden days, they'd never have expressed themselves, today, they do so regardless. Technology as the big equalizer? I have managed to pretty much keep my blogging output steady, but that is mostly because I have not added huge amounts of other media - I Tweet a bit, mostly when I travel, or when something special is going on, but I have not adopted Flickr or any of the other instant-on communications media.
It is not that I don't want to, but I can see from what others do that the time it takes to maintain all of these social sites is huge. Many of my friends in Asia, where laptops and broadband internet outsiode of the office aren't ubiquitous, use a Blackberry or iPhone and Facebook to keep in touch with each other. There, the social media replace phone calls, to some extent meets, email and SMS, i.e., it is not necessarily a net task addition. This side of the globe, the investment required in maintaining all of this, and the endless wading through retweeting and reposting of links, requires major time. Yes, I would love to spend every evening in the pub with my friends, I suppose is an equivalent... Maybe it is me, but I just read a blog in which there is an embedded tweet linking to 4square... Apart from anything else, I took the embedded Facebook and Twitter links out of this page you're on, because there are quite a few countries where I have friends where Facebook, Twitter or both are blocked, and that really messes up the way people access your blog. In a worst case scenario, just one of those "politiwalls" can completely hang your site, as well, and that really isn't too functional, is it?
Speaking of life's myths, it occurs to me, the more I read research, that changing products does not change habits. Perhaps, actually, to the contrary, changing the products has an adverse effect. It is, for instance, becoming clearer that low energy lighting - CFL and LED - causes the consumer to worry less about "leaving the light on". And having all of these low calory and no-calory products will lead to your consuming more of those products - you have, I am sure, seen those huge soda buckets people carry around the office, buckets that did not exist in the day when diet drinks did not. Soda bottles have gotten larger, too, over time, I don't know when the 2 litre bottle was introduced, but I'll bet it was after diet soda was invented - yes, there you go, Diet Coke (there was Tab before that), 1983.
So I have decided to tackle at least some of that, consciously - although to some extent it is a generational thing, applies more to those who made the switch from "conventional" to "low", whereas current generations grew up with the stuff, so have a different relationship to it. The CFL came along around the same time Diet Coke did, Philips introduced the CFL in Europe in 1980. The issue is that, as is the case with hybrid vehicles, CFL bulbs do not reduce energy consumption, any more than that sweeteners reduce obesity. We are using technologies to try and bring about change, when in fact we need to find ways to change people's habits - if we don't need sugar in our coffee, let's train ourselves away from the sweet tooth, rather than fake our taste buds into thinking we've eaten sugar. We need to get commuters out of their cars, we need to get consumers to eat less, we can't keep making television sets larger, and we can't keep deceiving ourselves that we're using LED light fixtures, and that this means lower energy bills. All of the LEDs, for example, that I have in the house, are used in perimeter and security lighting, and replace regular bulbs that were running during dark hours anyway. For that purpose, they are ideal - but replacing bulbs that only run an hour a day with low energy bulbs does nothing for your pocketbook, it only helps their manufacturers, and the power companies, and the Federal folks that need to show lower consumption. Like expensive "hybrid" hot water tanks, they don't do anything for you.
I guess what I am saying is that the way all of these "solutions" are handled is to manipulate the statistics. Those then benefit politicians, power companies, the EPA, what have you. There just isn't any way that ceasing production of the 10 cent light bulb, and replacing a number of $10,000 gasoline powered cars with $40,000 gasoline powered cars the supposedly use less gas actually reduces anybody's carbon footprint. Toyota nor Honda have replaced some of their car models with hybrids - they've added models. Similarly, production of Tungsten lightbulbs has been moved to other countries, in large part to Asia and Africa. The idea that you can convict poor people to buy more expensive lightbulbs has got to be the joke of the century...
I strongly feel we should have the new Trump series, "Dictator Apprentice", taped in Tripoli, Lybia, with Colonel Khadafi being a frequent guest.
Where are we, Thursday, as I write this. If anything is infuriating it is a foot injury that gets bad enough that you don't even want to stand on it to cook or do bathroom ablutions. It isn't a huge deal, and I have the medication and treatment regime to combat an inflammation effectively, but I still wasn't comfortable working out until today, that is when it becomes kind of clear how addicted one gets to the "daily workout". I am not one of those who pushes himself right up to the injury, but it does sometimes get close. It has always fascinated me how many peope do not adjust to aging - in the case of injury, it takes a lot longer to heal when you're my age than when you are 23, and one simply has to make allowance for that, but I noticed it the other day when showing something to an acquaintance.
Said acquaintance had to scramble for a set of reading glasses to read what I was showing him on my Blackberry, and I realized that, driving around, he could not read emails on his own cellphone without the glasses. Nearsightedness and reading glasses and bi-focals
You know it is time to change channels when Kathie Lee and Hoda come on at 10am and proceed to take their shoes off for the apparent benefit of the audience. Maybe it is a woman thing - are we seriously paying these women millions of dollars to take their expen$ive shoes off on national TV? Seriously? Chef Daniel Holzman (on the Today show) doing pasta sauce: "Canned tomatoes are delicious. They are awesome". The conversation moves on to the herbs - oregano. Ann Curry: "Yah, yah, yum". Whatever. Owell, let's switch to CNN, where a woman with an overdone English accent is... reading international newspaper headlines to the viewer, on live television. English language headlines only, that stands to reason. I guess that's handy if you don't have internet or a smartphone.
While I appreciate this entire budget-and-deficit debacle, I don't know that we spent enough time analyzing how we got here. Did having a technophobe president for eight years have anything to do with it? His predecessors, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, and even Ronald Reagan, were well acquainted users of technology - Reagan used to media technology as an actor, the elder Bush as a pilot and as CIA director, and the Clinton team was really the first true internet team. But Dubya thought Blackberry was a fruit... Just something to think about, people, when you try to work out how we lost our edge to the Chinese
The picture to the right? A frog that lives in my front yard hunting a moth, they ended up on my window, and seemed frozen there for a while.
I have to grudgingly compliment Charlie Sheen
So Mr. Bagbo has been arrested (which is what happens when the French send in the Foreign Legion) and Mr. Khadafi has duped another bunch of do-gooders (which is what happens when you send in the South African President) and continues killing. In Japan, we are learning how to deal with a real natural disaster affecting an advanced Western civilization - let us be clear, the Earth's population will continue to grow, and a 9.0 earthquake followed by a tsunami will cause major long term issues wherever it hits, even if there had not been a nuclear power plant in its path. In many ways, this plant survived the initial disaster rather well, we need to learn who should have done what, and what, if anything, could have been done differently, but, and I can't say this often enough, a 9.0 earthquake is a 9.0 earthquake. One thing you do not want to do is listen to the Greens and to FreakPeace - we need all power sources we have invented, from ethanol and deep mined coal to shale oil and nukular, unless we can stop everybody from having children, cooking food and lighting their homes. Simple as that.
I am wondering if Glenn Beck's demise, and Donald Trump's birther antics, signal an end to the craziness that has been pervading American socity. Does it mean we're heading back to more reasonable ways of arguing, and less vitriolic ways of dealing with things we don't like? Or did they always do this, and I just wasn't paying attention? I honestly don't know.. I do know that I find the large group of tea-partyers that are going to "reform Washington" scary, don't take me wrong though, Washington could certainly do with reform, I just don't know that newbies are the folks to do it. That's quite an organization to tackle if you have no experience of changing, say, all of Boeing Corporation. And when I see how other countries are tackling this economic downturn - in both the United Kingdom and The Netherlands, the Armed Forces are being gutted, that is what they start with. We could do that too, if we stopped sticking our noses in other people's business, and leave that to their neighbours. And then the Icelanders vetoed a resolution of the debt incurred by collapsed Icelandic banks, in terms of losing investments from Dutch and UK consumers and institutions, investments the Dutch and UK governments reimbursed under their bank guarantee programs. Does not bode well for Iceland's accession to the European Union... All I am saying is that the recession continues to reverberate through the Western world, and it does not look like there are a lot of solutions out there.
In many ways, it is perhaps to an extent comparable with the exodus of expatriate residents from Tokyo and Japan, because of the natural disasters there. I have experienced what living in the "ring of fire" is like, in that I have experienced several earthquakes while working in Indonesia, and it surprises me that, apparently, so many people who had been living in Japan for a long time have left. These are largely people who should be used to earthquakes, and their dangers, even tsunamis aren't exactly new either. Were they living with their head in the sand? Had they planned to get out of there if it ever happened to them? Typically, the rebuilding period after a disaster is when new money is pumped into the economy, because that is how we make money. I don't mind telling you that if somebody had offered me a job in Japan, in the past couple months, I'd have been there already - unfortunately, nobody (so far, hint hint) has..
Still, spring is just about here... Yesterday, I still cranked up the woodstove, in the evening, but judging from the mid-70's today, and a forecast into the 80's, I probably won't have to bother with that again. No quick heat with my high-efficiency woodstove - it warms up its chimney surround, and once warm and fully loaded (which by itself takes four to five hours) has another 8 hours of whole house heat and fire left in it. The picture top left shows you how "springy" my part of Virginia has gotten, green bits wherever I look... hurray!
If you use CVS for walk-in or drive-by prescriptions, be aware they have implemented an automated system to remind you when it is time to refill, and once they unleash that on your phone, they won't turn it off. More annoyingly, it does not leave messages until after it has called you on a particular prescription a number of times. And yet more annoyingly, eventually it will leave you a message that will have a tollfree number should you wish to turn off the reminders - in my case, I get my refills from a prescriptions-by-mail service, so normally don't refill with CVS - but that turning off does not work. It does not matter whether you tell a store clerk you do not want calls, or if you use their automated "no calls" system, their automation will keep calling you. I know there is a recession on, but this falls in the category "agressive marketing", i.e., annoying you into ordering as early as possible. Medco Pharmacy I have managed to stop calling (they do send emails, which is fine with me), but their specialty arm, Accredo, still does, and always tries to get you to order way early, and now tries to collect marketing data before it will ship your order.
I suppose the simple truth is that if they give you a choice, you may not watch the advertising - it is the basic, and in my mind stupid, equation of how to make the web pay. I can't say this often enough, but there is no way in hell you are, over time, going to generate revenues by FORCING consumers to watch / read / view advertisements - and that is where the industy is headed, making you watch advertising. That may have worked in the United States when commercial television was invented, but popping an ad over an article you are fixin to read or watch is completely counter-productive, and, to me, counter-intuitive.
How crazy it gets is very clear from the way Comcast Cable superimposes local TV advertising over the advertising sold by the broadcasters and cable channels, something that makes me wonder what the point of broadcasters selling ad time is - if I were General Motors, and I paid CBS for ad minutes, and Comcast then puts an ad for an insurance company where my GM ad was, I'd be pretty upset. Unless GM, or whoever, gets reimbursed, but I very much doubt that happens. And it is not that different from the company that tells you on TV that "if your mail takes more than 3 minutes to download" you have a virus, and the government that tells you there is such a thing as "renewable energy" - tell me, show me the math and physics, how you're going to speed the air back up without using energy after you extract energy using wind turbines, and I will believe all of the above.
I can see how it works right here in my own website, with the Amazon links I put into my blog entries. They are not conventional advertising, I make sure they always relate to whatever it is I am writing about, and my guess is that that is the primary reason why they generate revenues for me. Not huge amounts of money, but they are unobtrusive, don't interfere with anything, and some people use them to buy stuff I write about. Not necessarily the exact items, but I've seen a couple of people go to Amazon and buy a cellphone right from an article I wrote. Different cellphones from the ones I describe, but still, a cellphone, not a case of Gatorade - although that happens too.
So - yes, you can have online advertising that functions, but you have to work for it - you can't automate the delivery process, and there is no clever software that can predict whither the human brain will go, no algorithm that can understand you just clicked on orange juice because you took medication and are getting dehydrated.
"When you're doing user experience testing, you're looking for patterns," Google researcher Lidia Oshlyansky says - read the excellent BBC News article on this search for the Holy Grail here. Pattern recognition is the name of the game, without anybody ever, in my opinion, having proven conclusively that human beings consistently operate in single patterns. We may have done, way back in our hunter gatherer days, but these days, our Wal-Mart days, we select a cereal for breakfast
The problem with patterns is that when you start looking for one, you'll find one. That is why people have believed in astrology for hundreds of years, even though it is complete hogwash. That is (sorry to all those I am offending) why religion "works". I could go on - humans are clearly programmed to look for patterns, which they then use as guides to adjust their behaviour. Whether or not they work seems to be less important than the fact that it makes life more predictable, or at least one's behaviour. I have done years of this type of research during my tenure at the NYNEX R&D laboratories, and I would be very happy to tell Google, or whoever, what it is they are doing wrong, and how to fix it. Seriously, it is what I do.
Like Facebook has its "Like" button, Google now has a "1+" button, which supposedly links your search results with those of your friends - which begs the question who your Google friends are, as their process is not as transparent as the one Facebook uses, where you have to approve and add friends by hand. I can't say I "like" either facility, and in fact go to some length avoiding the use of the Facebook button, as the whole idea behind the "Like" button is that Facebook can follow you and your friends anywhere on the internet, since you have to be logged in to Facebook to be able to use said button. Any website that sports the Facebook "Like" button allows Facebook to run its own code, and to query your browser, knowing who you are. That, to me, is far too invasive, I don't need Facebook following me around and telling all the world what I have looked at, and using that information to do targeted advertising. The same, I think, applies to Google, and there, too, I log out manually every time I leave a Google page.
It is Sunday as I write this, another, rather late, snowstorm decided to come through, so the woodstove, which had been on-and-off all week, is cranking again, one of the important aspects of keeping the woodstove operational is that you have to run the thing as hot as you can, two or three times a week. At least I garner from the internet that that, in combination with cupric chloride, is a reasonably effective way of preventing the chimney from clogging too much. Ever since I installed the Barometric Damper
I am not usually stuck for words, but I can make heads nor tails of the goings-on in the Middle East. Middle East and North Africa, I suppose, one does not generally think of countries like Tunisia and Morocco as Middle Eastern countries. Having said that, the Midde East and the Arab countries are often confused. However that may be, it is astonishing to see populist movements arise in the majority of those countries, with a seemingly genuine desire to move the dictators out, and a form of democracy moved in. I don't like using the word "democracy", as it is so often misused by Europen and American officials. Yes, perhaps we did invent democracy - although you could say a kingdom, with a non-elected Head of State, can never be a true democracy - but that does not mean we have a right to define what it is, or force it upon others. I've watched, from relatively close up, how Indonesia transitioned into democracy, generally doing a good job, but severely hampered by Islamists whose Sharia belief often precludes what we would think democratic government is, as some of their rules are written in stone and can't be changed by anyone. Yet this is where the turmoil is, in predominantly Islamic countries - are Muslims tired of being governed by potentates, whether they are dictators or imams? Because the dictators and the imams appear to be holding back their folk, the way I look at it. Nevertheless, the "Reverend" Terry Jones has unmasked himself - having committed to not burn the Qu'ran, he went ahead and did just that. The man needs psychiatric treatment. Yes, we have a law (and this goes for Dutch politician Geert Wilders too, who has just announced he is doing "Fitna 2") that says it is OK to insult someone else's religion, if you are convinced that is what you need to do. It is permitted. It is not required.
The screen you see to the right is "organically" an HDTV, but I now have it hanging
As I am watching a completely riveting 
report on a dog in Washington State that has an 18 puppy litter, the news from Fukushima continues to be worrisome. I have to commend the workers that try to deal with the almost-out-of-control disaster, there isn't enough information to commend anybody else, while everybody around the world, including governments, are asking questions about their own nuclear plants.
Importantly, nobody should ever say "that can't happen here", because whether your plant sits on a fault line or not, it is always possible something catastrophic happens you had not planned for. The idea that we know exactly where ALL fault lines are, and can predict the movement of the earth's crust and the tectonic plates is completely ludicrous. I don't know that I had ever heard of a tsunami striking a modern, heavily populated area, until the Indonesian tsunami. And from the reporting I understand that when the Fukushima plant was built, in 1970, the population of North Eastern Japan was much smaller than it is today, and I doubt that urban planners took the plant into account when they allowed the area to grow. From the tsunami perspective alone, both in the Indonesia and Japan tsunamis countless people lost their lives because their homes and businesses were too close to the shore. At this point in the history of the planet, nobody is going to move entire populations inland - think about a tsunami hitting the West Coast, and think about the number of lives and the cost of the infrastructure that would be lost - one estimate has it that Hurricane Katrina, hitting New Orleans in 2005, cost some $150 billion, while it took 1,836 lives. That dollar number, interestingly, is less than half what the Japanese government currently estimates rebuilding North Eastern Japan will cost.
So when an American power plant in Browns Ferry, Ala, invites the media for a tour to show off their safety and security, what does that mean? Does it make you feel safer?
What that means is that they are really good at PR, nothing more, or less. The media are not experts at anything. They most certainly do not have the required expertise to do risk assessment, which requires large teams of experts, and very specialized software. What is very important for you, as a consumer, to understand, is that you can simulate and lab test and computer model disasters all you want, you can't test the real thing happening. I've always told my staff this, test, model, but do not rely on this alone. CNN just broadcast one of the plant managers saying how it has been engineered to withstand a 6.0 quake, and there could never be a 42 foot wall of water in the middle of Alabamy... I have news for you, people - 6.0 is the statistical maximum for that area. There is absolutely no reason why there could not be a 7.0 quake - "unlikely" does not mean it can't happen, it actually means it can. And to be honest (but you will have to pay for this), after Fukushima all power plants (nuclear and conventional) as well as oil refineries should be engineered to withstand a 9.0 quake, and a tsunami after the quake. No exceptions. That is completely my personal opinion, but I do need to remind you I have more experience of risk mitigation and disaster recovery than most. Real, boots-on-the-ground, front line, sleepless nights, being-picked-up-on-the-tarmac, kind of experience. You answer all my questions, I will tell you what you need, and you decide if it is worth it to you. And your kids. And your neighbours. And your shareholders.
Speaking of risk mitigation, my doctor, who watches over my health like a Yiddishe hawk, keeps wanting me to lose a little more weight. Now I am not exactly obese or fat, but like many do have a tendency to put on an extra pound or two, mostly because I snack, and when I hit 180 he started to whine at me. Recently, he berated me for not eating breakfast, as he says that is a habit that causes people to overeat later in the day, when they run out of fuel, and that is part of the reason one puts on extra pounds. He also said a disproportionate number of obese folks do not eat breakfast. I checked, and that is statistically true. Problem is, if I do eat breakfast I have to change my entire morning routine, and to be honest, if I start eating in the morning I tend to keep eating all day. So I am trying something simple: tea
As I see former colleagues on Facebook and LinkedIn use all sorts of sideways confuscations to look for a job without saying they need to get back to work after "retirement", it is kind of the big thing, where what is different today is that all of those myriads of consulting positions that used to be there simply are not, any more. Unless you have Secret Clearance, I suppose, and even then, I wonder how many of those are real, and how many are posted by companies chasing Federal contracts. There simply aren't that many cleared people in the entire United States, and "able to be cleared" isn't something that exists - you're cleared or you're not, it is not something the Fed will let you "turn on" five years later. And, you know, if you have not been employed for five years, say so up front, that isn't stuff you can bamboozle your way past. I am a firm believer that, when all is said and done, honesty is what gets you furthest, considering anybody who is hiring is, first and foremost, on the lookout for lies and omissions. Right?
It has been hell week, anyway - I cleaned and sterilized my contact lenses, when you wear extended wear contacts, you need to periodically give your eyes a chance to breathe unimpeded, but when I put them back in my vision clouded. Turns out the neutralization tablets (the process uses hydrogen peroxide, you know what that does to hair) had "gone off", and so I had a chemical burn to both corneas. It's all fixed now, thanks to my eye doctor, but it was not fun. And then I cut a chicken with one of my really sharp kitchen knives, and my finger with it - again, nothing lasting, but I have to take it easy on that finger until the cut heals, it is just annoying, and I keep having to stop myself doing stuff - I wanted to cut wood, yesterday, but thought wielding a chainsaw or otherwise working out probably was not the right thing to do, it was still oozing a bit of the good red stuff this morning. Tip: if it bleeds, let it bleed for a bit, that cleans and sterilizes the wound. It is what the stuff and the mechanism are for...
One reason why I rarely watch the Today Show any more is that they have so much tearjerker journalism and so many New York centric recipes, which really is not what I am looking for, in the morning. The clip above right is a really good example - does Ann Curry really have to talk to people as if they are demented geriatric patients? Is "I know you do not understand this" the right thing to say to a 5 year old, after you've gone to some length discussing how the poor black mother lost her job? Can we not have normal conversations and a normal tone of voice? Play the clip and judge for yourself - hopefully you will think I am off my rocker, if not, write to the Today Show and tell 'em you want real TV. The unrelated pic to the left is a shot of Times Square, taken last month, I somehow got the feeling Times Square shrunk, can't quite figure why... It is a place I am very well familiar with, my office used to be one block over East, and before that, when I lived in Manhattan, I crossed it every day on my way to my 49th St. place of work. As always, click on the pic to see it in its own window, then click on that to get it full size. It is a verry nice picture, if I say so meself.
The way the Today Show do stuff has had me flee to Fox5DC, which actually provides an excellent, mature, news product in Washington, not the "working class wonk" stuff I see Fox do in other markets. I guess in Washington even Republican outlets feel they have to "get it right". I am excepting Lester Holt from the NBC equation, by the way, I think he is one of the finest journalists out there, and I watch the Today show at weekends, when he anchors it, with pleasure. If you've followed Lester from Egypt and Bahrain back to NYC and then to Tokyo, recently, you will know what I mean. He does not skip a beat. And they don't even put him in the anchor lineup for the Today show, at the top of the web page. In general, can we please get rid of the "I am sure this has shaken the residents of Jerusalem to the core" and "As an Israeli, how does this make you feel?" type of journalism? What is this, the "Dumbing Down Househusbands" squad? We have Sixty Minutes and other background reporting to deal with the indirect consequences, but as a journalist, I have always belonged in the "report facts" school of thought. Not that how someone feels is not important, but you do not "feel" on TV. Just a tear on a face, on camera, is much more significant than these "anchors", who, to some extent, probably have never been in the field. Just read this gem: "They realized the jet was in distress when they saw it crash". No shit.
You will have read about the "supermoon", the unusually close distance between Earth and Moon, this week. Last night cloud cover prevented me from taking a few pictures using my telescope, perhaps tonight is better, at least there is no cloud and the wind has died down. Having checked where the darn thing is, I found it was still well below the treeline at 9pm, so it is going to be a late night. I know I shot some reasonably spectacular pics with my Nikon D50, so perhaps the D90 will do even better. By the time you read this, there should be at least one pic posted here, although that will be a compressed reduced version of the 12 MB NEF raw original, which, even if I did post it, your browser would not be able to display. You can click on the picture, then click again to see it full size, look at the visible mountain range on the top right hand edge of the moon, I had not seen that before in one of my own shots. Or, you can click here to download a 10MB TIFF version from my server.
I am all for blaming the Japanese government and GE for everything to do with the nuclear disaster, but let us please not forget this was a 9.0 earthquake, followed by a tsunami - by comparison, the earthquake that set off the Sumatra tsunami is generally viewed as having a 9.1 magnitude - and that killed around 230,000 people. This was, then, a massive earthquake, and the Japanese did comparatively well, considering the epicentre was only 109 miles from Fukushima. Today, I saw some assessments that had the reactor's tsunami walls designed for a 5 foot wave, while the actual tsunami was six feet high, and some of the electrical components for the pumping system being outside, unprotected.
All will be reviewed, I am sure, but the most important assessment you always make in these situations has to do with the cost of the level of protection, and the statistical chances of something going wrong. If you anchor your protections in the earth, and the entire earth moves, as was the case here, what can you do to protect yourself? You can - purely as an example - ask yourself if electricity is the right power source for backup cooling pumps - can you create one backup system that relies on different energy sources? But then, if you use LPG or propane or gasoline or diesel fuel, how much danger is there of that catching fire, in a calamity? Or using steam, how much of an explosion can that cause - a not uncommon occurrence in the municipal steam heat system in Manhattan. That is what happened with Rudi Giuliani's emergency generator at 7 WTC, which suffered a ruptured diesel tank, and the diesel fuel (unsurprisingly) caught fire. Ours, next door, was better protected, did not catch fire, but simply ran out, without any way of replenishing it after the Towers collapsed all over our switching center and the entire neighourhood had a massive underground fire, caused by the burning fuel from the jetliners used in the attack. I hate to say this, but you can't make that stuff up.
Clearly, the French have the lead in cleaning up the Libyan mess - understandable, considering Libya is France's backyard, and Khadaffi has been a pain in many governments' backsides for a long time. For the French, the British and the Canadians to be actively involved, the main Arab countries would have given their tacit permission, all three countries have large Arab populations. The big question now is what happens if Khadaffi does go away, something that technically (and legally, since he is a head of state) can only be accomplished by the Libyans themselves. The rebels have proved to be useless, militarily, already, so that leaves only Khadaffi's own military to do the job. It'll get interesting before anything happens - right now, I would rather deal with a runaway nuclear reactor than with Libyan politics. I mean it.
If anyone is looking for SME expat staffers to replace those that left Japan, or is expanding operations to assist in the recovery there, I am available and happy to go. I am not an ambulance chaser, but actual 9/11 recovery experience is not something you learn in school. Even radioactive exposure I am familiar with, and I am not worried about my thyroid - I don't have one any more, never thought I'd mention that as an asset *smile*. Check my resume and mail me via the resume link above.
Even more so than in previous uprisings and disasters, I am completely bowled over by the media access and the quality of coverage of the Japan "multi-disaster". I appreciate there are a few generations who have never watched the moon landings on a grainy little black-and-white TV set, but getting this whole thing thrown into your living room large enough to touch and smell, and for a large part in High Definition, is - well, I won't say "awesome", lest anybody thinks Gilbert Godfrey was funny, but who needs horror movies any more. A news junkie anyway, I am glued to the box.
Watching mostly CNN during the day, or, I suppose, having it as background radiation, I can't help but be annoyed at the amount of speculation the anchors try to get out of the experts they bring on. Experts, I suppose, but just because you're a nukular perfesser at MIT does not mean you can complain the Japanese government isn't providing "us" with enough information. I am, for now, assuming the U.S. Navy lies offshore from the stricken reactors, and has a pretty good bead on what goes on, and I honestly doubt that publicizing "what if" scenarios will in any way help those on the ground, the emergency coordinators, or the Japanese government. Apart from that, with 150 miles of coastline obliterated, 10,000 bodies to be looked for, and half a million mouths to feed when you don't even know where all of them are, must be a pretty tall order. That the reactor situation is dire was clear to me - those were real explosions, not a lot of explainng to do, and if the radiation level increases the 7th Fleet will tell us if the Japanese won't.
The AirTap
Judging from the numbers I hear from Japan, their earthquake preparedness probably saved huge numbers of lives, if you consider how big this quake was - although I don't for a second think that the toll will be limited to the 1,300 number we are hearing - it went up to 1,800 as I am writing this. The tsunami in particular will have taken a lot of lives - as in the previous tsunami, many will never be found, and only be identified via the registrar's and tax offices, which, in Japan, have at least very complete records. When I traveled the Chennai coastline in India, after the Sumatra tsunami, I encountered vast empty spaces where towns had been, with signs here and there commemorating the thousands, if not tend of thousands, who had perished here. With most of these folks not being in any kind of registry, nobody will ever know how many perished.
By comparison with death tolls from comparable earthquake disasters worldwide, the Japanese probably saved a lot of lives, even if that will cost hugely with respect to the rebuilding. But it is awful, absolutely awful. I will, with considerable interest, follow what happens with the nuclear plant that took a hit, just out of scientific interest. Beyond a certain point of managable damage, how do you make these plants safe? It is a risk the Japanese took knowingly, I am sure, if you have been involved with risk management you know you have to find a cutoff point beyond which you can only "retrench and retreat". I remember being laughed at when I suggested that if you put a network facility near an airport, smack underneath the standard flight path, you have to plan for a plane falling on your building. That wasn't, they felt, reasonable. Much to my amusement, they changed their minds after 9/11, even though that was an attack, and not an obvious target in terms of risk management (other than, of course, WTC and Pentagon being major landmarks).
My guess is that Martin Sheen does not do much in the way of change management. Change management has been mentioned so often in the job applications I see on the various boards, that I began to pay more attention to it. It is used extensively in the software development environments in Verizon I have been part of, and is, in many ways, an intrinsic part of project management. Not only that, change management should really be part and parcel of any corporate environment, not necessarily only areas that have something to do with IT.
I often hear the advertisements commissioned on WTOP by a company called "americaneagle.com". It is a web design and -hosting company, I drive past it on my way into D.C., whose defining feature - I think - is that its name has nothing to do with its product.
It is, of course, not unusual for companies to play the "patriotic" card, this close to the Pentagon and the White House. Nothing wrong with that. But at the same time, I do wonder how much money the Americaneagle folks spend on just making sure potential customers are aware they don't make hunting gear, which is what you would think of when you hear the name. There actually is an "American Eagle Outfitters", which from the name makes more sense to me. At any rate, that is how I get to think of change management. Had I been responsible for CM in this company, I'd have set up a separate subsidiary, with a different name and internet moniker, for the web stuff. That is not necessarily always right - but then again, how many people think of NBC Broadcasting when they think of General Electric - GE, for short? Or of train locomotives? Of course, if you are big enough you can afford to to brand advertising, which is then not necessarily an enormous expense, proportionally. But generally, you would probably not want to call your new company that makes electric bicycles "The Chopped Liver Firma". Right?
So, try to think of change management from Day Zero. Try to incorporate even that you may not be doing what you started out doing - Americaneagle.com began in software and hardware, GE as an electric product company, and I am sure you can think of 1,000 other examples. It isn't, as one says, a "dealbreaker", but I would guess that Americaneagle.com is spending huge amounts of money on the branding issue that could have gone to other acquisition efforts.
What is more, it provides these smart services only to people with smart meters and smart applicances - typically, those aren't the poor people, and if they are not in the industrialized world, those aren't the poor countries and poor cities. Yes, I use more energy than do the poor - I can afford air conditioning, and my own network and storage server at home, up 24/7. I can afford multiple refrigerators, multiple freezers, security lighting, rechargeable tools. But it is the low income folks who are relegated to the inefficient light bulbs, the old wasteful refrigerator, the 15 year old microwave, older TV sets, etc. One of those two way smart meters can't control appliances that don't have the smart innards, and very few do. And again: as I look at the "smarts" the net effect is that the smarts can throttle down or turn off your air condititioner, switch your hybrid water heater to heat pump cycle only, and none of that has anything to do with your comfort. Technically, it won't even lower your electricity bill, because what hasn't been cooled now will be cooled later, when the units are turned back to "normal" mode.
Let me take a simpler example. Had we gone to the light bulb manufacturers, and said: "We'd like you to make bulbs that consume 40% less power, generate 40% less heat for the same electrical consumption, can be plugged into any A/C current source (110 or 220V, regardless), they can cost 20% more than the ones you make today, your existing factories must be used, and all industrialized countries, will ban sale and importation of old style bulbs - what would have happened? We might not have ended up with high tech stuff like CFLs (miniaturized fluorescents after all) and LEDs, which essentially fall in the categories "expensive" and "more expensive" and "fashionable", but with regular lightbulbs that would have been affordable for folks with low incomes, bulbs that would have reduced power consumption worldwide. We may have stopped making Tungsten bulbs in the United States, but I am sure there are quite a few factories in places like Asia that have not, there are, after all, plenty of people all over the world who simply cannot afford to by fancy light bulbs. So, all we have achieved is to reduce our revenues.
So no, smart isn't smart. The smartness reduces some of my energy consumption, and it does so as a stopgap measure, because we barely produce enough electric energy for the peak consumption periods, typically midsummer, air conditioning time, and the only reason we talk about this is that electricity is not the only source of heat, and therefore we have no accumulated view of how much energy is really used during the heating season. It comes from multiple sources - "smart" would be if we bought "energy", as therms or sumtin', not electricity, gasoline, oil, town gas, propane, what have you. Just energy units. Bear in mind, as well, that there is still no such thing as "renewable energy" - if you convert solar or wind or water energy to electrical energy, you divert energy from the Earth's ecology, and we have no idea what that will do to the planet, and us, over the long term. Every kilowatt you use is gone, you can't put it back, you can't recycle it
I am not at all puzzled that MI5 and the CIA had no idea the Middle East was about to explode. It is on thing to identify social unrest, quite another to predict the future. But the proceedings do puzzle one - what is it that gave rise to an upheaval that ignited a series of societies, rather than just one or two? Did we miss how unhappy the Middle Eastern populace truly is? Is there a relationship? Is it the ongoing problems with Islam? Has perhaps the recession had unseen and uncalculated effects in the Middle East, effects we failed to see because we were concentrated on jobs and mortgages and our own failing businesses and governments? Did we discriminate, concentrating on the industrialized West, at the expense of some ill defined Third-World populace? What happens now - these folks in Egypt, Tunisia, Lybia, Iran, still do not have jobs and prospperity, even though two of those countries, Lybia and Iran, are rich in oil, or should be? What has happened is pretty amazing, but I must be honest and tell you it scares me a bit. There are too many unanswered questions - why put up with 30 or 40 years of repression, then revolt? With all of our intelligence, we simply have no clue why it happened.
I cannot tell you how "delighted" I am Charlie Sheen has broken all Twitter records (as an aside, records for new "things" are forever being broken, if they don't die in childbirth, you can do that once a week). I have to admit I am not quite sure how Sheen is that important, but then I have never watched "Two and a Half Men
", those kinds of comedy series just aren't meant for me. I kind of turned off from most comedy series when a laugh track was added to their sound, although I suppose it was a logical followup from the guy with the "laugh" sign that was used when such shows were still taped with a live audience. I do watch Seinfeld, but that may simply be because I used to live in Manhattan.
I just do not like mass marketing, although I must admit I see the majority of consumers do, and we have to be fair and accept that - I just don't believe in the "all things to all people concept", other than as a good way to make money. As long as we are all in agreement that Sheen needs a shrink - not rehab, a shrink - and we should accept that somebody with a very high publicity profile, making more money per week than most people make in their lifetime, probably ends up getting a very skewed view of life and the world, that isn't something he can help. Seriously, that isn't tongue in cheek, look at Sheen, Spears, Lohan, Galliano - some folks just don't have the fuses that can handle that kind of load. It is easy to laugh, but once you are on that road there really isn't a convenient way back, and there are only two licensed plumbers, Dr. Phil and Dr. Drew, and even there who exactly licensed Dr. Phil is not clear, I think it was probably Oprah
While I very well understand the various rationales behind not putting your picture or a video out in or with your online resume, don't you think that concept is beginning to get a little bit outdated? Apart from anything else, since many have lots of information out on the internet, those pictures and video rants should be easy to find for a determined searcher, for another, I am not sure that I personally always want to conform to "the wisdom". We tend to present ourselves in the "grey blob" framework, in the United States, but in a time period where gazillions of people are looking for a job or a position, perhaps it isn't that bad to show a bit of skin - umm, pardon, a bit of personality.
I have always been relatively rebellious, and especially today, even though I fanatically keep my Facebook private, I should imagine it won't take you very long to find me ranting about something or other. So, I've put a picture on my resume, one that shows not only moi, but J, a now retired former staffer in Indonesia, one of those people I could not have done without, and who I keep in touch with. I have no compunction at all making clear I believe we are made by our staff, not the other way around. XL, his company, now boasts a little over 10 million customers, and that is not because of him, not because of me - but because of us. I think the pic says more about me than the one in the natty suit I made a few days ago. Honest. It was, after all, Sir Harold Evans
I have told myself to work out - important especially since I stopped smoking, cold turkey, now some 9 months ago, managed not to lapse into overeating, but I just have to make sure I work out several times a week, especially since my doctor is hounding me about losing weight - but I guess he does that with every reformed smoker, not so they lose weight, but so they don't put it on. I am good, so far..
My five acres of woods are a godsend, in that respect, I can keep working on the woodpile all year round, I actually don't even mind doing that in freezing weather or in the rain, and it is very good exercise. Wood is heavy, and you can cut your trees so the individual logs are close to the limit of what you can lift, which will give you better exercise (say Clinical Exercise Specialists) than does running or biking. Lifting weights, especially if you can combine that with moving and carrying heavy weights over short distances, adding some climbing and turning to the fray, lets you strengthen your muscles, joints, tendons, skeleton and bones, without the jarring impact effects that running and biking have. The effects you are concerned with are the ones that develop over the years, decades even, and to me "natural" strength training - involving, in my case, chain saws, axes, and tons and tons of wood - is the best there is, especially if you can do it outside. I've messed up a few joints, turning while carrying, though, you do have to be careful and controlled.
I tend to arrange my home days around outside work, however, and that sometimes finds me sitting here behind the laptop when I should be outside playing macho man. Or sharpening saw chains, one of the chores I am not fond of. And the only reason I am writing this up is that I have been double procrastinating - I should have worked on job applications, and instead, went and got a vacuum cleaner I really do not imminently need. The discontinued Dirt Devil Cyclone canister vac I have been using for many years is running out of bags, and they don't make those any more, so as it comes with a wet cleaning kit, I decided to relegate it to that task, and buy a cheapie upright bagless vacuum for normal use. That means, of course, unpacking and assembling the new Eureka
At times, I am an oaf. For the longest time, I had a Perl script running on my server, one that let folks mail me via a secure form, one that could not be used for spam and viruses and hack attacks. Then I dumped the ISP, Freeservers, for a gross lack of security - my Wordpress was hacked, and they then reinitialized my database, wiping my website. I had a backup, but was so discombobulated with Wordpress that I decided not to go there again. That's an issue - if your entire site runs in Wordpress, that's just about the only way to recover it.So, I went back to manual HTML, and dumped Freeservers (where I was a paying customer!). Fast forward to several years later - I thought to myself that my current ISP must have scripts hidden somewhere - I have a fully professional hosting account, and that comes with the works, a full UNIX webhosting environment, and U**X I know, I spent years being a lab rat developing in and under various flavours of *IX and *UX and *X and X*. Sure enough, there is a scripting engine, and so I finally put a response form on my resume page, so that anybody who wants to employ me can access me even more easily than via Skype and LinkedIn. I am a security freak, and so won't put email addresses and telephone numbers online, ever. I put the mail link on the page at 10am, and by 4:30pm I had someone mailing me about my writings. Sheesh. Sometimes I can be moronic. Although I do tend to fix my things....
Along the same lines, I can't quite figure out why I have not expanded my online resume with subpages. Sounds stupid, but I never thought of it. I've concerntrated on keeping my resume short and sweet, and the online version a mirror image of the MS Word master file. I don't know about you, but I hate the twelve page resumes that provide gory detail on what the applicant has used, to achieve their aims, down to Crosstalk in 1981, that they took a month off when their daughter was born, I find the information meaningless, and the invitation to talk to the applicant about their experience with Pseudo-Pascal rather a distraction from the subject. I even believe that programmers don't make good programmer's bosses - I have seen too many (that worked for me) have convictions about tools and methodologies that stopped their underlings from shining in their own right. That is counter-productive. If you're a real C++ guru, why would we make you a supervisor? I can make you a SME, pay you the same, and have you train your colleagues, but I don't know that being a good manager has anything to do with being a good programmer. Yet that is how it is normally done.
At any rate, now that I thought of this I need to expand my resume - I'll leave the thing as is, but replace the various activities with links to where I explain what I did, to whom, and why not. Hope this is not just busywork - I can't think why I did not do this before. I looked at a resume writing article where this suggestion was made. The writer felt one should have one's email address and telephone number on each page, too - sure, who is stupid? C'mon...
As I am sitting here doing a screen test to see what I would look like if I shot a narrative in HD to go with my online resume, the runup to the Oscars (I am writing this on February 27) is all over my plasma screen, and I suddenly wonder what would have happened if I had made it to the West Coast. By that I don't mean that I did not make it, I simply never tried, save for one abortive attempt, after I had been invited to join Cisco in Palo Alto, the weekend before their stock dropped out of the sky, and with it my job offer. I am referring more to my decade or so in the media, back in The Netherlands, where, in between my IBM career and my moving to London, I was a theatre manager (Shaffy Theater), movie production assistant (Max Havelaar
I wasn't a nobody, exactly. I worked with the likes of (if you are international) Rutger Hauer
Ah, my Youtube upload finished. Let's take a look - will the output of my Nikon D90 with a 17mm lens impress the professional viewer? Back in a bit. Or two bits. I want to do this for real at the airport with D.C. as the backdrop, but with today's storm, that's not going to happen, blah. Can you believe I bought this suit and never wore it? Or its tan twin. Sheesh.
No, I made it home from New York
and access their page over GPRS or EDGE, or understand that if you have menus on four sides of your page, and the viewer comes in at 1920x2560, that viewer most likely cannot read any of the menus, or maybe just the top tabs. More menus and more menu choices, four menus with some with ten dropdowns each, to me just means you have no clue how a human being thinks and searches. Yet, you're providing information to that human, you can't simply say "it's out there somewhere", as if it is the customer's responsibility to bring a translator so they can understand you and give you their money. Don't work that way. Part of the problem is that the managers that manage the web designers have, more often than not, never made a webpage themselves.
I used to use Wordpress, see here what that looks like, but after I got hacked really badly and my domain partially hijacked, then not getting support from my then ISP, Freeservers, whose services I paid for, I even discontinued that, otherwise brilliant, tool. It gave me an archiving method that worked very well, but then I asked myself: "Who is going to visit Menno's blog to find out what Menno did on April 9, 2002?". Right, nobody. Or maybe just a divorce attourney. So I stopped worrying about that - I know how to use Wordpress to set up a fully professional communications site, and that is, for now, all that matters, you can read my words, I am not a graphics artist. A website is not necessarily a graphics showcase, if that isn't your profession or major hobby horse. Most people, to this day, don't know how to tell if they can click on a picture to pop up a larger version, it is as simple as that. And I would love to put up my Nikon's raw files full size for you to view, but guess what - most browsers do not know what to do with a NEF file - in fact, many ISPs do not allow that as a MIME file type. What's MIME? Never mind.... *smile* One thing you lose when you stop using a blogging tool is the capability for people to respond to your posts, but then again, there is Facebook, there is LinkedIn, there is Twitter, and I don't have to spend an hour or two a week cleaning up comment spam. It honestly is not worth it, as far as I am concerned.
Even NBC's national newscast paid attention to the demise of the "standard" light bulb
That is not the whole story, though, but here I have to "draw in" other factors that play a role in human habitation. I am assuming that fire avoidance and injury are important to you too, not just energy savings and environmental advantages.
First of all, I've said it many times, the amount of energy that is used by a human being is dependent on that human being, not on the devices, implements and services that human being uses. Not for nothing do governments now run ads to remind people to turn off their high efficiency lights - when you switch to more efficient lighting, you do so to, in many cases, not have to worry about leaving that bulb on an extra twenty minutes. I know I do, I know many other folks do, I know I have more security lights in and around my home, fully converted to CFLs and LED bulbs, because they give the place that "lived in" look, without it costing me an electric fortune.
But if you have ever taken apart an old light fixture, you'll know that the fitting, the mount, often some of the wiring, are scorched. The temperature of the Tungsten bulb is high enough to create a fire hazard, is what that means. You'll note it in other types of lighting, too - halogen runs hot, and even (they like to tell you otherwise) the new LED bulbs do. Their light is cold, the current conversion process generates heat.
For LEDs, that means we're back where we were with Tungsten - they generate a lot of heat as well as light, I had a 7 watt LED bulb in my corridor, on 24/7, and the outside was too hot to touch. The reason these things are shaped the way they are, and have this intricate design
So I am not converting my light fixtures to LED. I bought a few, basically to get an idea of how well they do, and how they work, but the only ones I really replaced are the awning lights, as having LED spotlights there means nobody need to get up there for at least a decade to replace the bulbs, this combined with the power savings. But for the rest of the house, it is CFLs, which are now available in many more different wattages, which generate very little heat, and, if bought in bulk
I've found a small motel in Mahwah, in the far northern reaches of New Jersey - just off 287, part of the Wyndham chain - an ideal base for trips into New York - not only Manhattan, some of my friends and colleagues are based in New Jersey itself, and in Westchester and Rockland counties, just north of NYC, and conveniently close to north Joisey. My GPS found an A&P supermarket close by, just the other side of Route 17, a couple of restaurants, one issue with New York trips has always been the expense. Tomorrow (I am not publishing this is real time) I am going to check out the ferry across the Hudson River, serviced by NY Waterway, the first thing I am needing to do is figure out which landing has a convenient and affordable parking.
You may have read about Verizon Wireless' iPhone being unable to surf the web and making telephone whoopee at the same time, and dismissed it, as it isn't a hugely important feature for most people, but it is important for me. I am writing this on an internet connected laptop, which uses my T-Mobile Blackberry to connect, but that Blackberry is able to do a whole bunch of stuff simultaneously with hosting my laptop. It can make and receive calls, using Bluetooth if I so desire, even though said Bluetooth is connected to the laptop, as well, and it can do email and text messages at the same time. This is all pretty much standard for the Blackberry, and mine, being a T-Mobile Blackberry, is capable of making calls over a WiFi connection, as well, so even if I am out of reach of the cellular system I can still use the phone. Not only that, that capability, called UMA, is encrypted, like all Blackberry communications, so I can put my laptop on the internet via the Blackberry and have a secure connection even though I am using an open and public WiFi system. It is hard to explain to the average cellphone users, and even harder to market, but I find it soooooooo cool... To the best of my knowledge, the reason why CDMA phones don't multi-task well is simply due to the way their voice and data paths interact - GSM was developed as a digital service, CDMA (AMPS) was not. It should slowly become moot, as backwards compatibility with the analog system, which is how all that started, is no longer required by the FCC.
Times Square now looks like an overdone cacophony of video screens, the state of the art appears to be that the sides of the screens are screens themselves, and some wrap around buildings. The poor big screen (once the only one) overlooking Times Square is now distinguished by Rupert Murdoch ownership, and by being one of the smaller screens - it is dwarfed by most of the others in the square. Somehow Times Square seems smaller to me than it used to "feel", can't quite figure out why, it certainly is the most "advertising" place I've ever seen, you couldn't squeeze another screen in if you wanted to. Whether there is a real purpose to these technology showcases remains to be seen - my guess is that the screens are updated or replaced every year, and they really have impressive quality, even in direct sunlight, but they do not yet translate into an ability to transform entire walls into information bearing devices that don't require a huge amount of power to operate. We're nowhere near that point, being able to alter reflectivity, as is done in some E-readers, so that daylight can provide its own image, rather than necessitating ever brighter pixels.
The first picture, top left, is one of a British Airways Concorde sitting alongside the now revamped aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Intrepid - sailing alongside on a New York Waterway ferry, I could not help but wonder what it was doing there, it would have been better located alongside Saarinen's Pan American terminal at JFK. But who am I.. Concorde always strikes a "corde" with me, as I was flown to New York City from Paris on one of Air France's promotional Concorde flights, way back when, being a card carryying member of the Very Important (Dutch) Press, at the time.. the flight came complete with a one week stay at the Waldorf Astoria, courtesy of Agfa Gevaert. On the way back, the thing did not have enough fuel reserve to go into a holding pattern, and had to divert to Orly Airport from Air France's primary Paris hub, Charles de Gaulle. So no, there is no chance I ever flew on the aircraft you're looking at, as it is a British Airways version. This may be one of the Concordes that kept setting off my burglar alarm in Kew, as I lived right underneath Concorde's flight path. It would, in its early days, come into Heathrow with the afterburners wide open, and the tail down.
I've recently tried to help several people effectively use Social Networks to market their wares and skills, and find that many folks simply don't want to listen. That is fine with me, but marketing via social networks needs a business plan, a good view of what you are trying to achieve, and oodles of time. If you're not on Facebook every day, if you don't brush up on your communications skills, it is not a tool you're going to be able to use. You're going to end up wasting time - the internet - even a blog - is a place you can only get anything out of if you invest a significant effort. It is unfortunate so many media articles talk about these young web entrepreneurs who strike it rich, without ever mentioning how many nights and weekends it took them to build their dream. And then, for each success story there are likely 1,000 failures.
I am not trying to discourage anybody - but if you work up some text on a webpage and you call that a blog, you're not quite ready for the big time. Admittedly, nobody really has a full definition of "blog", but I think we generally think of blogs as kind of web diaries, even I call my website a blog these days. I will admit we have to be cautious with the definition - Ariana Huffington, now owned by AOL, started her online presence as a blogger, but as it turns out was a published author and accomplished writer before she started that, and she has always, umm, beeen married to celebrities. It is not a prerequisite, but reading her bio I think she might have got there in any of a number of ways.. Just saying, it is, in my opinion, not the internet that does it for people - it is a dream they have, a conviction, a belief, a circumstance, and the way in which they approach what will become their career.
(Scooba, Roomba) does this, and so does Analox, which makes Nitrox
breathing gear for divers. It is the one thing that does not get discussed in the "data mining" conversation - nobody knows how to figure out from someone's surfing behaviour what they are interested in, and so we'll just use the 50 caliber. Who knows, you might hit something, and we're very good with the statistics... It is the big problem of internet sales, one that even Facebook can't legally solve: how do you figure out who your potential buyer is? So vendors attempt to flood you with as much advertising as they can, in as many ways as possible. When you open up a website, say, the New York Times', and begin reading the headlines, an advertisement moves down the entire page. When you open up a website, say, the Economist's, and begin reading the headlines, an advertisement covers over the entire page. Some others use "mouseover" techniques - you open a page, accidentally position your cursor over an ad, and that immediately pops over the article you were planning to read. I could go on for hours. Do the people who commission these ads really not understand these are very good ways to alienate customers? It reminds me of my Tivo - I push the button, intending to go to Channel 4 at 4pm to watch the news, and the Tivo thinks I would prefer to watch a Honda advertisement - instead of the news. Are these people besotted?
Here is what Intuit, of Quicken and Turbotax fame, thinks is marketing:
Intuit sent this update to its existing customers, scaring the bejesus out of those of us who use its online payment system, something I have been doing for decades. Imagine losing your ability to download credit card transactions and making electronic payments! All the package has, on the front and the back, is that your existing paid-for registered version of Quicken will stop working: "On April 27, 2011, Quicken online services will be discontinued." Only when you open up the package and examine its insides does it become apparent that Intuit is pulling online support for an older version, Quicken 2008. I personally think that's asinine, I am sure there are plenty of people who use the current version of Quicken who will be scared into buying the upgrade - even though they don't have to. Is Quicken in trouble? Or are they just more obnoxious in their marketing than ususal? They still use a registration method for online updates that forces you to provide your address and other personal information - you can turn that off, but it is hard to find out how.
On the subject of cheating, one cannot help but wonder why geriatric strongmen like Egypt's Mubarak (82) and Zimbabwe's Mugabe (86) cling to power, even though your average 80 year old is physically normally well beyond running a country, which is a tough seven-day-a-week job, if you want to do it well. As with Mugabe, there has to be a power structure around Hosni Mubarak that uses him and his "powers" as a front and protective shield, so they can run their control apparatus, and enrich themselves, while the "president" takes the heat. There are some indications that Ronald Reagan, who won his first term when he turned 70, suffered from some of the effects of old age, and possibly an onset of dementia or Alzheimer's, in his second term in office. Note (and this isn't a lighhearted comment) how both Mubarak and Mugabe dye their hair, Berlusconi too, probably, even though there is no need for them to do so, their ages are well known, but curiously, it isn't something that anybody ever talks about. If you think about it, someone of their age and stature no longer has any personal need to climb career ladders, and one must really wonder when in their lives their control goes to their cronies, essentially, likely, without their noticing it.
I am, in my core, a very private person - "so what's with the blog?" you'll ask... I started blogging in 1997, I was an early adopter - and by that time I was a developer in an R&D laboratory in New York, we took to this new interface to the internet like a duck to water. In 1997, of course, there weren't vast numbers of people on the internet, which had been around for quite some time - I actually got my first internet account while living in England, 1984 I think it was. I had to fly to the United States to find a portable computer that had telecommunications capability, the ones Radio Shack sold in Europe had no modems, since the telephone companies deemed those illegal, at the time. My first use of these tools was professional, anyway, I realized very quickly I could get stories filed with my publisher (VNU, now The Nielsen Company) much faster, we had gone to electronic page makeup for our glossy magazines a couple of years before, and the layouts were actually uploaded to the printer's via acoustic couplers, kindly invented by the Australians, which used them for their Flying Doctor Service over two way radio. 75 (seven bit) characters per second, if you were lucky, but they worked.
At any rate, I tend to put a limited amount of private information "out there". It isn't that I am unwilling to share it, I am just too aware of who all are reading over one's shoulder. Being one of the core developers and managers of the internet backbone facilities, I know all too well how much information is out there, and how easy it is, relatively speaking, to find it, if you have basic network skills. Reminds me a bit of my friend, who works for the State Department, who got awards signed by Colin Powell, that didn't say anything about what the award was for (including not mentioning the department or activity). Makes sense, except if you stick that on your wall everybody is going to ask. We know better than to do that.
All I am saying is that it is a weird world, especially if you're looking for a job and there is so much you can't put on your resume, or tell prospective employers about. I am going on about this because it can be a royal pain - I don't think I have posted an overseas trip report when it happened for over 20 years - I do write it, but it does not go on the blog until I am back at home base. And I'll never mention who I bank with, lest somebody figure out where my safety deposit box is... Paranoid? No, not especially, there is just no point in taking even small risks, because, if nothing else, if somebody walks off with your data files and you then have to tell your boss as well as the FBI, your career is well and truly done.
How seriously I take this was brought home to me when I was having lunch with one of my former Washington staffers, the other day, hadn't seen him for years, LinkedIn is great. He walked into the Washington suburban restaurant where we had agreed to meet, slapped me on the shoulder, I cracked a joke about his "Federal hair" (he now works for a government department), he sat down, smiled, and said "So you are human, after all!"....
It can be finicky - your low energy light bulbs, CFLs, dont save you anything during the heating season, because the old style incandescent lightbulb is a very efficient heater, it is almost as if that is what you're using it for, and the light gets thrown in for free. They're a lot cheaper than CFLs, as well, so you can actually save yourself money in winter by taking your CFLs out, and putting regular cheapo lightbulbs in.
But I discovered when putting in a new kitchen faucet
It is important not to waste money, though. Replacing faucets that are used once a day for ten minutes is only going to cost money. Light bulbs that are rarely used can comfortably be left "old style". Those fancy LED lamps are expensive to the point that security lighting, especially in inaccessible places, are among the few rational applications I can find for them - I have one 4 watt LED spot in my hallway, one that is on 24/7, and the spotlights under the second floor awning now have 11 watt LED bulbs, see the pic to the left. They supposedly can stay up there for a minimum of ten years, and crank all night for a pittance. Having those $60 fancy spots indoors, not so much, sorry, I am too cheap for that, I'll stick with the $9 CFL floodlights.... A low flow shower head is of little use if you have no womenfolk in the house - women bathe and shower much longer and with much hotter water than do men. Yes, you'll save, even if you are a man, but I don't know that a few pennies a month are going to do it. Convert all men in the United States to low flow heads, and the power companies will save millions - but not you, and nobody ever talks about how that generates a reduction in tax income.
Heating I am not going to tell you much about, as I heat using a woodstove, although I must emphasize that using a woodstove 24/7, using wood you harvest in the woods yourself, gives you very very good physical exercise. Cut a deal with a farmer - you harvest their wood, you get to keep half, and build their winter wood pile for them.
Another important factor, as I describe below to some extent, is that existing and older technologies are not all bad, and they should be considered wherever you want trouble free operations. So there is room for simple heat pumps, old style light bulbs, and cheap simple compressor refrigerators. Your primary refrigerator, the one that sits in the kitchen and opens and closes all the time, should be a new, high tech "green" unit, but the one in the garage you use to store soda in, and that you freeze food in after cooking, can easily be an older model that got demoted from the kitchen or your dorm room. I have one old little "beer fridge" that's been around the world three times with the U.S. Marines, and now sits in a corner refrigerating medication. It gets opened maybe once a month, if that, and can run from a battery pack during a power failure. 30¢ a month - and it is "recycled", the Marine gave it to me.
What it boils down to is one's capability to analyze, and work out what solutions work best under which circumstances. The probably reads like a cheap shot, but we have, especially in the United States, a propensity to favour the "advanced" solution over the "established" solution. We will buy a hybrid vehicle, thinking it saves us money and is good for the environment, when the old and well established diesel technology not only delivers similar economies. On top of that, it is vastly simpler in construction than a drivetrain with a gas engine, electric motors, charge citcuits and batteries, there is much less that can break or go wrong, and has a lot of mechanical advantages, like more pulling power (kinda relevant in a country where you can't even drive at 65 miles an hour most of the time, due to congestion). We invent, we then get somebody in government all excited, they then do a tax break type of thing, and everybody except for you will be laughing all the way to the bank. I repeat: not you. Read this article about the latest Volkswagen hybrid experimental vehicle, compare it to the original Honda Insight, and see what you think about "true" hybrids - two seaters that attempt to fully reduce their energy consumption, rather than compromise vehicles.
A recent article about United States Navy Captain, and NASA Shuttle Commander, Mark Kelly has it he has that ability to compartmentalize his thinking, enabling him to concentrate on the task at hand without being unduly distracted by things going wrong in his life, like his wife, U.S. Representative Giffords, having been shot in the head. I have, through the years, pretty much learned how to do this - not always successfully, but you simply do not survive my type of career unless you can deliver, regardless of what your personal circumstances might be. It does mean you have to ensure you deal with your personal circumstances at some point, something you have to schedule, and only experience can tell you when you need to schedule what for you to have a good chance to deal completely with what you must deal with. From that perspective, officer trained folks like Kelly are good to have on space shuttles, as they can - in my book - avoid the pitfalls of multi-tasking. In the computer industry, we have a word - and a technology - for this: multi-threading, rather than multi-tasking. It means you keep track of the status if everything that goes on, but only work on one task at a time, in a defined "compartment", you know when to stop that task and move on to the next open activity. It sounds like word play, but is not: a mother, dealing with life, work, and the children, will multi-task, a pilot will (hopefully) multi-thread (that is why there are two or three crew members on the flight deck of a large aircraft - together, they do multi-task)..
The world's favourite Ozzie, Wikileaks' Julian Assange
Very very strange watching the reporting from Egypt - a revolution in HD. I was a little surprised when I saw all of NBC Nightly News coming from Cairo - in most cases, you don't have the facilities available to do that type of broadcast from a country that is being "overturned", but Eqypt is apparently different. Shows you, too, that one should not think of Egypt as a backward country - you can't get your gear in, and your signal out, without the locals providing a sophisticated infrastructure. I haven't checked the other networks, but a good move on NBC's part, I just hope it does not backfire on them. It is curious to watch, and yes, we live in a different world, the internet has changed the universe forever, if you needed more proof, you have it now. If you want my opinion, BTW, the Mubarak-ousters have lost the momentum, and they have therefore lost their war. Egypt, as I said, is not Tunis, and it will take a lot more to dislodge Mubarak, his ffriends, and their $ecret police. Sorry. You've seen the Egyptian Army make sure nothing irreversible happened... When you see a tank commander checking his Facebook on his Blackberry sitting on top of his tank (no mobile reception inside a hunkasteel) you'll know change is imminent. You watched it live with me, did you see any? I didn't think so...Otherwise, welcome to jinx week. Everything that can go wrong, is going wrong - well, maybe that's overstating it a little bit, but a lot of stuff either broke or doesn't work. I ended up selling one of my cars to reduce my outgoings - not in itself earth shattering, you have to have one you can sell, and I am long past where that would have caused loss of face. There is an economic downturn in force, after all. But then..... my coffee maker broke (but I have a spare), the dryer part of my washer/dryer broke (but I have a spare) and my log splitter malfunctioned (but I have a spare). What's with the spares? When I need something I try to find it on sale, and then I buy two - one of the really bad things that can happen with something you need is that you buy it cheaply, but then when it breaks you have to go out and get the first you can find, and that gets expensive. Like this, I can grab the spare, start using that, and then buy another spare, when I can find one dirt cheap. So this might have been a bad bad week if it had not been for that bit of foresight, a kind of planning I actually only started doing in 2005.
So I am good, I suppose, now all I need to do is cajole the log splitter back into life, I can get lucky, maybe, this evening, and try to resurrect the backup drive, which currently consistently hangs up the cheapo Everex PC I am using with it.. even though I replaced the main backup drive with a NAS device
Let's see - I owe you the diet story I promised you, and I guess it is just about time to update the Airtap experience, the heat pump driven water heater contractor Dan and I installed on August 12 of last year. Almost 6 months ago. On the diet front, I started out at 188.5 lbs, and am now at 177 - in 37 days. Working out I did already, so this is just a change in feeding habits. I'll come back to that.
Why update the Airtap story (See my blog entries for Tuesday, October 19 - Saturday, September 18, 2010 - Spotsy, August 12, 2010)? It works, right? Well, yes, but what you do when you install an Airtap, which is replacing the simple two wire heating elements or gas or oil burner in your hot water tank with a relatively complicated heat pump assembly, which has a compressor, and a fan driven heat exchanger. This electro-mechanical unit, depending on the size of your household, will run anywhere from four to ten hours a day, and so I wanted to try and make sure that technology, design and build quality are up to the task. When we built a High Availability platform in the phone company, we needed to take care of all contingencies, including who will get the spare parts where, in in middle of a snowstorm at 2am on Christmas Day...
All I found in the adverse is that you need to level and re-level it very carefully, since it is heavy, settles, and you want the condensation to drain down the provided drain tube, not onto your floor. There are several other modifications and installation tricks that can make the Airtap both more efficient, faster in recovery and more controllable, but I really don't want to give away my research. If the Airgenerate folks would like to hear about them, they should feel free to contact me and negotiate a price for the significant amount of research and engineering I have done on their product. One thing I can tell them for free: selling a new product that is essentially the same as the Rheem and GE "hybrids" is not going to make them rich, even if they did have GE's resources. You can find my Airtap A7 review at Amazon here
Heat pumps use a tried and tested technology, which is essentially unchanged since 1902, when the first Carrier unit went into operation. The Airtap people have (for this unit) not jumped through hoops, and included no bells and whistles that might make the unit more prone to failure. So, the thing doesn't interface with the heating elements or the thermostat, there is no computer and other sophisticated switchover equipment, as others, notably GE, have done their implementation - you stick it on the tank, plug it into the regular (not 240) mains, set the thermostat, and four hours later you have a tank full of piping hot water for about 4¢. Done. Heaven. Good show.
But let's go back to what the big companies want you to buy - like the RHEEM 50G Heat Pump Water Heater
While you can likely program the units to only use their heat pump (but, according to "This Old House", the GE can be remotely controlled by your power company!!), there are other ways of dealing with this "deficiency" - if the purpose of this exercise is to save money, or protect the environment, or do both, perhaps a little compromise is in order - apart from anything else, at a price between $1,900 and $2,500, installed, this is a very expensive way to save money - I spent $900.. and because it incorporates conventional technology, the GE tank is not, cannot be, mathematically, "The most energy efficient 50-gallon electric water heater you can buy", as their website states.
The Airtap mounted on a 40 gallon tank gives me plenty of hot water for my morning shower, but then needs a two hour recovery for another full shower. That's an issue for a family, of course, but the solution to this isn't what Rheem and GE want it to be - have a computer kick in some 9 kilowatts of backup heating elements. Savings? What savings? That makes no sense. The correct solution is to get a larger tank. We are simply so used to buying 40 or 50 gallon hot water tanks we generally do not realize the only reason those are "good" is that they come with this massive 240 volt heating assembly. Of course the water is always hot!
How do I figure all this? Simple: the Airtap's heat pump makes noise, and I installed it where the hot water tank was before, under the stairs. So I know now when it kicks in, and how long it runs. This is enlightening - most folks don't or can't hear their tank, and so don't get that "direct connect". There isn't a little light to tell you when you're pushing greenbacks into the electric company's maw, either. And normally the consumer doesn't get the hot water broken out on the gas or electricity bill, so you really don't get exposed to the cost. Well, I can tell you, it is a lot, electric elements or propane gas are very expensive ways of heating your water, but if you want to remedy that with a heat pump you've got to get a larger tank. My calculation, then, is simple: one person, 40 gallons, a couple, 80 gallons, a couple with kids 120 or 150 gallons. Do that, and you will save yourself a lot of money, over the years, see my October 19 blog entry, the savings, just for me by myself, are some $373 a year. If you replace your older washer/dryer and dishwasher, both of which use a lot of hot water, with new high efficiency models, you'll save even more. Replace your washer/dryer with a washer/dryer combo with condensing dryer
As I am getting ready to set off for New York (the pictures here are from the trip, the New Jersey Turnpike and Rockland County, NY, it is very winter up there) and a reunion dinner to celebrate a former colleague, who is on a brief visit from her New Delhi assignment, the job search grind is wearing on me. A few days ago I had the unplasant experience that when somebody called me to ask me to resend my resume, I could not remember having applied to them. At that point you're in a mess - it wasn't that I did not think the employer was unimportant, or had just applied for the heck of it, the online application process entails your sitting behind your computer going through hundreds and sometimes over a thousand (I kid you not!) job listings per day. Dozens of websites, and just the Commonwealth of Virginia, Careerbuilder and Monster websites by themselves have some 300 to 500 new listings each, every day. If you are multi-disciplinary, like I am, you have to wade through category after category after category. And then, often, you have to go to the employer's own website, and create a new application account there - they sometimes make you traverse two different job listing sites before you get to the application site, I kid you not.
I am not complaining - we've never had it so good, never had so much access to so many employers, jobs and companies. Phew. But after you've done this for a few weeks, let alone a few months, you have absolutely no idea whose job you've applied for when (yes, I do maintain a database, of course, I can look things up). I know I have seen a number of very interesting (professionally interesting) positions with, for instance, Ebay and Paypal (both part of the same company) - what will the HR people think if I apply for all of them? And that is the other problem - there is no feedback - in most cases, you don't even get a reject notice, and if you do, it is boilerplate. I understand that very well, having been an employer for many years, but it is still a bit soul destroying. I guess that's where the hardy drift to the top - after all, Harry Potter
Having said that, we are bombarded, in the media, by the most spectacular miracle tales. This person survived bunches of cancer and then got a new voice box. That person won the lottery twice in two years. Another person won millions of dollars playing a penny machine. Lots of cancer patients are "in remission". And it goes on. What the tall tales don't give us is all those folks that lead normal lives, work hard, don't hit jackpots, have cancer treatment and continue with their lives, have cancer treatment but then cannot afford the medication they should be on, in short, normal, everyday life. Don't get me wrong, I am delighted some folks have all the luck, but for most, that isn't how life works - nor does it need to. I cringe when I channel surf by one of those lifestyle gurus on midnight television, because the way these folks wear the $1,000 suits is because you watch their show and then order their $29.95 book
But back to my job hunt, for a moment - after so many years not having to look for jobs, the changes in the way this works are significant. Most interesting is Skype, and the need to make sure you are presentable whenever someone might want to do a face-to-face interview. I am an old schooler, and over the years when I was a freelance journalist, you work from home a lot, you develop a habit to not worry about shaving for a few days, not look at your haircut, at least when you don't have a meeting or interview planned, and don't have to go into the office. Now, no frayed Tees! For my generation, it is all new and different, every other day. Which is a good thing.
Video conferencing is hardly new, of course, but the fact that you can use Skype even from cellphones and wireless connections is relatively new, at least from the perspective that wireless broadband is just about everywhere, these days. I Skyped with my friend in South Africa on her smartphone, the other day, Skyped with relatives in Europe while having lunch in a restaurant, using my Blackberry
Not (so far) as bad as last year, winter is still a bit disruptive. I need to make sure my heat exchangers don't get snowed under, run the truck up and down the driveway every few hours to make sure the snow does not accumulate to the point that I can't get out if I need to, once VDOT starts plowing I need to dig out the driveway entrance.... Although, that activity is not as bad as it was in Westchester County, where I had to shovel the driveway coming home from work, or I'd have nowhere to park, you can't leave a car in the street in New York State in winter.So I'll take a second run around midnight, then do that again in the morning, when (hopefully) the plows will appear. They do the through roads first, some overnight, and mine isn't one...
While I am certainly right behind President Obama in that we must "get competitive", my questions remain: How? What with? I am not seeing any of the amazing stuff we used to invent wholesale, in a garage somewhere, I see cars being advertised with how many phrases they can recognize, there are cellphones you apparently can only get when you're on Medicare, the Scooter Store is spending more money on advertising than it can possibly make selling invalid vehicles through insurance companies, and it goes on. We no longer even have a space vehicle to deliver stuff to the ISS with - the very minimum one would have expected would have at least been a sort of backup vehicle for the Shuttle, we do have the people that could have made that happen - even a second generation Shuttle, with, umm, skin that functions as a heat shield, maybe slingshot launching, stuff. Did we not use to build and try things? What happened with that?
I did find a use for the iPhone. I have a friend, overseas, who I have not been able to really entice onto the internet in a meaningful way - like using Skype and Facebook and the like. Guess what - she's got herself an iPhone 4
Something I've been meaning to rail about is that everybody has the same news, these days. Whether you check the Reuters pages, CNN's cable feed, the NRC Handelsblad, or Kompas, they all have the same stuff going on. It is just a matter of who gets it first, and the others pick up whatever they have two seconds later. The internet has completely obliterated the old concept of "news", to the point that a scoop may last all of 30 seconds. Worse, in many cases the first report may have a couple of pieces of news, and three "conjectures", and the others then manufacture more conjectures, just so they're not copying the first report verbatim. Just now, CNN reported gunshots in Cairo, while we and the anchor could clearly see some young men banging pipes or poles on metal trash cans. This is not reporting, people. I understand the need for competition, but if all you can show is the view from your office window in Cairo, for hours on end, with a 10 second shot of armoured cars driving by endlessly repeated - "there are tanks in the streets" - your journalism is going to the dogs.
So what else is there? Egypt? What bugs me is what or who will replace Mubarak. Egypt is an important country in the Middle East. Nobody will "miss Tunisia", so to speak, but Egypt is a different matter. Not a lot of refugee Egyptians on my watch, so while it is maybe not the nicest country, the population isn't running away in hordes, either. So I don't know. Who will run the place, that has support from the entire population? Anybody? Didn't think so. And shutting down the entire Egyptian internet... waddamistakatomaka.
The recent announcement that Facebook is making an app available for "feature phones" - who the heck invented that name?? - throws up one of the more important lesson of the high technology era - why do we develop for niche markets first?. I know the answer, but from the perspective of making money, it makes no sense over the longer term.
As I have mentioned before, over time the distinction between different "types" of phones, different "types" of computers, will to some extent disappear. Much of the marketing is done towards the "haves", the folks that can afford to buy multiple computers and multiple phones - smartphones, of course, aren't phones at all, they are handheld computers, something that should be painfully clear to their owners, computers crash fairly frequently, simple brand name cellphones - pardon, feature phones - do not. The same thing applies to computers - there is completely no purpose to buying an iPhone, iPad and one of the Mac portables if you're going to go out there and work in one of those really populous countries on projects that involve the population, menial workers, teaching, interworking with others, because in India and in China and in Indonesia these folks, 99% of them, don't use smart anything or expensive anything. And a $400 Acer laptop
All I am saying is that for somebody to need a certain functionality, then be required to use, say, a Blackberry on Verizon Wireless
It is blisteringly cold again this morning, 8 degrees Fahrenheit, -13 Celsius. My revamped heating system (see my January 13 blog entry, below) keeps it nice and warm, which is pleasing, I just hope my woodpile lasts another two months, which is how long it took last year for winter to be over - I have another oak tree down, but not cut up yet, so a disaster it won't be. Having been used to snowy New York winters, I really had not expected Virginia winters to be as cold as they are, less snow, more arctic air. I will not mind if I am living in the tropics by this time next year, I swear...
One thing I am doing differently is clearing the ashes from my woodstove. In years past, I would let it crank for three or four days, then leave the fire to die, and clear out the bottom of the stove (which needs a one inch layer of hot ashes and charcoal on the bottom firebrick to function really well). Now, I have discovered that running it 24/7 is more easily achieved (with less assistance needed from the heat pumps when the stove is turned down) when I stop feeding the stove around 10pm each day, throttle the air supply, and clear out the day's ashes first thing in the morning (when plenty of hot charcoal remains in the stove to rekindle the fire). After that, the stove will be back at operating temperature (400° Fahrenheit, a little over 200° Celsius, measured on the outside of the stove heat exchanger) in an hour or so after I clean the ashes out, and I don't lose the heat built up in the charcoal and the firebrick and the chimney surround.
Why do I try all this stuff out, rather than ask someone? I am a researcher, I like figuring out why things were designed the way they are. You would not believe the things workmen, contractors, builders and other "menial folk" figure out that nobody ever documents or commercializes. So I work on understanding all of this, same as I do with 3.5G, Blackberrys, laptops and contact lenses, in the hope that at some point I'll come across something "why didn't I think of that" I can put out there as a commercial service or product, and make a bundle on. Hasn't happened so far, I'll let you know, promise..
And for all those folks setting their house on fire with their woodburning fireplace or stove every year, 10,000 or so every single winter, when they dispose of hot ashes too close to their home - American homes are built in woodframe, for the most part, and plastic siding doesn't stop fire much, either - I use a large galvanized trash can
Awright, back to the grindstone. Anybody wants to offer me a job in the sun, say Miami? That would be funny, kind of full circle, that is (well, South Dade) where I lived when I first moved to the United States...
Nice series, on the Discovery Science Channel, with Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking, of course, brings me to the British television onslaught - Hugh Laurie
But then there is Craig Ferguson
Ricky Gervais
If you are puzzled why a Dutchman pays so much attention to matters Brit, I lived and worked in the UK from 1979 until I moved to the United States, and growing up in The Hague, had a somewhat Anglophile upbringing anyway. My Dad worked for the holding company for Shell Oil, one of those Anglo-Dutch conglomerates, so I read Shell annual reports before I could even walk, and it went from there. England, where I moved because of Kubrick's 2001, The Beatles and a Russian girl in Pimlico, was a great country, and if it had not been for Maggie Thatcher and the brain drain I'd probably still live in Blighty. She did a good job on the Falklands, though. Being Dutch, it became apparent to me that if I wanted to get out there and do anything of significance, I'd have to learn fluent English, and that began in London, tending bar in a pub by the name of The King's Head in Earls Court. There was a kind of English spoken there I had no knowledge of at all, and had a hard time understanding, in the beginning (these being the days before 150+ television channels and internet). I definitely learned some of my English from the BEA drivers that came in for a light 'n bitter before taking their buses out to Heathrow Airport from the Cromwell Road Air Terminal. And from Bruce, the Rhodesian owner of the King's Head. Even learned pounds, shillings and pence, and then England went decimal.
I don't know what you do when communications with someone break down, but I tend to take a look at their behaviour and my (mostly instinctive) responses, just to make sure I am not over-reacting, or taking things more heavily than I should. In one case, I got yelled at when I answered someone's questions line-by-line - it is what I always do, but this person is not the world's best communicator, and I was never sure what exactly they wanted me to do in response to their exquisitely brief emails. And then there is the other person, who couldn't keep 98% of all their appointments in a seven month timespan, and then when I sent (since he had not turned up when expected) him a note he owed me money got somewhat incensed, hung up on me, never called again, although he did send a cheque. It wasn't a rude note or anything, I don't do that, but it did express I could not give it to him when he did not stop by. Five times in a row, actually, over a two week period. And when you hang up on me, it is your turn to call, after that.
In the past, I have often thought I am too easygoing, for a long time, I tend to let people do their thing, and then eventually come down on them when things do not improve, after talking to them about the issues. That seems to confuse some folks, who expect I will pounce at the very first transgression. I don't know, that's just not my thing. One time it did backfire on me, though, when I extended a person who I felt had been treated unfairly, certainly not in accordance with the rules, and he thought I extended him to punish him. I had not seen that one coming, it was weird. Punishing is something I do not do, I think it would be rather immature.
It being January, I thought I would update you on the hardware and equipment I added or replaced last year, just to tell you what works, and how well (I tend to not waste time on things that don't work). Let's see - I actually don't even have all of 2010 in the current website, some of it got archived already. The archives are here
The Philips 47PFL7403D/27 47-inch 1080p 120Hz LCD HDTV
Then the BlackBerry 9700 Bold
In May, there was the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software
Gosh - have to run, things to do, wheels on Camaros to change, chains to sharpen, more in my next musing. Promise. I'd rather do half an update than none at all. Pretty amazing, I've been writing this since '97. Shows stamina, dunnit?
If there is anything that provides a workout equal to none, it is a woodstove, provided you use it as your sole source of 24/7 heat in winter. This is really the first heating season I have the thing running perfectly, the latest change was that I moved the Vogelzang heat exchanger back into the flue, with the Barometric Damper now installed behind it, since the damper cools down the flue gases and so won't let the thermostat kick in. This meant I had to (with my builder's help) move the entire stove another foot out of the wall. That in itself gave me more flue before hitting the chimney, so there is now a total of 60 inches of flue between the stove and the chimney. Add to that the thermostatic heat exchanger, and the damper, which reduces the draft so the flue gases have more time to cool down, and the stove runs surprisingly well. Well seasoned firewood is vital to all this, but the fact that last storage stage for the firewood is near the stove (which sits in a room that is otherwise not used in winter) helps here too. Last but not least, the massive brick structure that incorporates the chimney stores large amounts of heat, during the day, and keeps the house warm very effectively overnight, once the stove is turned down when I go to bed, you do not want to take risks with fire in woodframe houses.Between te work done by myself, and by builder Dan, I've finally managed to fix all remaining plumbing problems, both on the supply side and on the sewage side, and save for one small crack all leaks have been fixed, any copper pipes affected by the high PH of my well water replaced, and the water itself is now perfectly filtered and conditioned, without losing too much of the flowthrough capacity - you do want to be able to take comfortably "wet" showers. There is plenty of piping hot water, too, although due to the energy saving heat pump water heater it takes two hours after a full shower before the hot water is 90% replenished. But the savings is significant, and that's good for the wallet, and for the environment, if not for the power company. The picture to the right shows how Lowe's saved the day - they actually have a doohicky that let me remove the shaft of a plug I broke on my PH treatment tank - and the replacement plug. Phew!
These are, of course, not hugely important things at a time when my friends in Australia are possibly under water, Rep. Giffords has been shot in the head by some deranged person, and Verizon is finally getting an old model iPhone, but it is all I can do to hang on to "normal life". Especially watching what went on in Tucson is harrowing - and no, it has nothing to do with gun laws. These assassinations seem to happen all over, including in countries where people can't go to the store and buy a gun, and in countries that have universal health care, where folks should be able to take their kids to the shrink. So, one wonders, do they? Or is this another instance of "it'll sort itself out"? Why is it so hard to identify people that are going off the rails, and why is it so hard to then do something about them? We test for infectious diseases, but not for mental diseases? I am assuming you will agree with me this man is a loonie - I know not everybody, and maybe not the courts, either, will second that, though - and here again, I am sure he knew right from wrong. But since that knowledge does not stop everybody from doing wrong, is that a valid, or even useful, assessment? I dunno.
Well, back to the soul-destroying job hunt. I say "soul destroying", because the way in which we now handle this, fully online, is certainly efficient and a good way to guarantee equal opportunity treatment, but it does leave the applicant working in a vacuum. No feedback, rarely anybody to talk to, I personally think we could come up with a better way to help people look for employment. And I am not at all sure that everybody has the level of computer- and webskill they need - the search engines are horrendous, especially as they use whatever programmer's jargon was approved by a company or agency, something I doubt ever gets checked with the great unwashed. And it is the great unwashed you need to reach, people who don't get to an understanding of the system simply drop off the radar, they have nowhere to go any more. All it takes is a typo for an application to get rejected or end up in the wrong bucket, and nobody will ever know. It is to some extent the same as I see with these surveys - since you don't get any kind of feedback from people who do not complete surveys, the results are completely meaningless. Apart from which, many of these surveys sit in front of what they are supposed to be surveying, you just can't collect data this way, you really can't.
What else - ah yes, diet. I discovered something this fall while on a mandatory medical diet I wanted to share with you all. But that's for my next blog entry. Keep on comin' back.....
I tried a netbook
, last year, and found it wanting in terms of its processing power - not that I loaded it beyond its capabilities, it was not really able to run Skype over a fast network link without hiccups. So that put paid to that for me, and I reverted to a notebook. While I haven't tried a "Pad" style computer, I am wondering whether that, too, is going to be of limited use - just the statistics about the number of people that own both a Kindle and an iPad seem to indicate it is a niche market thing. I am not seeing how you could do everything you need to do, computering-wise, without a keyboard.
Lenovo introduced two netbooks
Says the New York Times "Obama Promises Full Recovery for Employment" - but then goes on to say "...suggests that Mr. Obama is likely to face relatively high unemployment rates for the rest of his term". Well, yes. But that can mean the recovery from the recession will be slow, or it can mean the New World Order means the lower employment rates are structural, as they have been in Europe for many years. And the Times doesn't address that question - I personally, with the Financial Times and a host of others, think the latter. Employment and earnings do not go hand in hand, especially not in "the world today". They don't have to, but you do have to have a mechanism to spread the wealth - something most Republicans apparently do not believe in. Seriously - the Telegraph writes that the job rate is "disappointing investors who in recent weeks have seen signs that the recovery is strengthening" - I would hope this is where our expensive Treasury experts step in and go "that's not how you measure recovery". This is not China, people.
In somewhat the same vein, the Wall Street Journal declares the PC and the laptop all but dead - read here. Well, maybe. I think this all revolves around the Computer- Human Interface, and I think the computer is still very limited in taking input. Whatever the device is, there still is nothing you can control by voice - that is, a device that can distinguish what you want from the ambient noise and other people. It does not matter whether it is a touch screen, speech recognition, motion or facial recognition, there is no interface that is smart enough to figure out what you wwant or intend without your interacting with it. You cannot take a smartphone out of your holster and look at it and it knows that you would like to read emails from Heather, and then pop an attached spreadsheet automagically onto a larger nearby screen so you can read it. And exactly that is what is needed for a phone to be truly smart and useful. And that is a long way off. Quite a long way off. We go right back to artificial intelligence, and why it failed. It is not that we lack the computing power or programming logic, there are simply at this point no real ways for a human brain to interact with a computer in any "smart" manner. My apologies to the WSJ, but by the time we have all this sorted out we will no longer speak of a "smartphone", "netbook", "laptop", "tablet" or "PC". Perhaps we need a contest to figure out what we'll call the device that combines all these functions - which may not be one device, but a pluggable / unwireable communications standard that will let you talk to Mom, and look at her pictures, using your fridge, if that is where you happen to be.
There are, for me, significant limits to what I do with and on a smartphone. This isn't because I don't have the gear (although I refuse to spend money on making Apple richer than it already is), but because I am not seeing why I should move so many of my activities to a screen the size of a coaster using a proprietary operating system. Don't get me wrong, I think it is absolutely brilliant you can keep track of your bloodsugar levels on your iPhone, but if you can only do it on your iPhone you have a huge problem. Most people only have one, and if it breaks, or if you want to switch to a Blackberry, or a new Sony Vaio, you're toast. So I have made a point of running very few applications, ones I really need, and I make sure I can run these if I switch to another make smartphone. Apart from anything else, this prevents memory problems, crashes, stuff, and it prevents Facebook from collecting personal information from me. That I hate with a passion, I really do.Read the interview published in the Financial Times with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, and you'll come across the following gem: “We want to go on growing globally and make Twitter widely available on SMS,” Stone says, “There are 5bn phones in the world that can handle SMS, many of them in places that do not have the internet.”. It is, to me, a very significant comment when everybody and their great-grandfather is attempting to find growth markets, and in so doing rolls out product after smart product that aims predominantly at what is effectively a niche market. Nokia's folks said it too, a while ago: the majority of the potential users of cellphones neither need nor can afford a smartphone. But they do need some of the functionality we associate with the fancy interfaces our phones and "pads" have. It reminds me of the early Windows computers, which replaced the text terminal, only to provide windows with text in them. I worked on an early brokerage workstation in Manhattan, which replaced four terminals, connected to the markets in New York, London, Tokyo and Chicago, with a single PC running Windows 286, which showed four windows, connected to the markets in New York, London, Tokyo and Chicago. Duh. Technologically certainly an advance, but not really altering any of the information or data conduits.
Most importantly, my phone is primarily a communications device - voice, text and I receive all of my email on it, pre-sort them, and reply to what is truly urgent. Ah, Twitter and Twitpic, I suppose, are the exceptions, as a former photographer I find those very creative, although I have not found a way to incorporate Twitter in my blog (likely my own fault for abandoning Wordpress after a bad hack). And I am certainly not following any commercial Twitter accounts, from the Redskins to T-Mobile, I am not seeing how their Tweets are time sensitive, what exactly I would gain by getting a thousand Tweets a day. Niece Flore retweeting every freaking Amber Alert in The Netherlands, where I don't live, is bad enough. Some family, yes, but here goes what I describe below: most people open a Twitter account and then do not have the perseverance to keep it going for a few months, to see how it works and what it adds to their lives. "instant gratification" does not denote a generation, after all, it describes more or less "most everybody"..
The most important issue is, I think, that if an app runs on the iPhone and the iPad, but not on a Blackberry, a Symbian and an Android phone, as well as Windows 7, it is useless to me. So the brokerage application I occasionally use, and the Amazon Kindle application I recommend, because their makers try to ensure they can get their product to you regardless of the platform you use. Then there is Twitter, which will run on most platforms, and Skype..
There is, at any rate, a huge problem arising between the old and the new media - you can see this on television every day. Fox just showed new iPhone apps, including one that lets you order a cab in Washington, D.C., while CNN reviews "trending" Tweets every day. Neither of this constitutes "news" in my book - whatever happens on Twitter is completely irrelevant for those who don't use it, and even for many that do, like myself, I have better things to do than stare at my screen five times a minute to see what is "trending". If it is "trending" in the cafeteria at Fort Drum, is it news? Same for the cab application - iPhone users probably already know, and there are apps for every smartphone to do just about anything, it is not news. More importantly, these types of reports don't provide the impetus to the viewing population to adopt newer technologies, to use new media technologies to do what they couldn't do before, which doesn't include hailing a cab, if you never do that, or paying the cab using the app with your credit card, which you don't have. We're not "empowering", people, we're dumbing down. Once more, with feeling: We are -again- preaching to the converted. Think beyond your box, and help others to. We must understand that the news media aren't a sales conduit for Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Blackberry, they are - well, news organs. They must provide those who don't necessarily use all this fancy stuff with information too - the folks who do use Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Blackberry are increasingly abandoning traditional media, and a Twitter "reporter" reading Twitters on CNN is not going to make CNN more relevant, nor is Rupert Murdoch's insistence on our paying News Corp. for things we can get elsewhere for free. The Wall Street Journal is an exception, not a model - Facebook is the model, and we must now work on opening up that "closed shop". We have been there before - remember AOL, when everybody published their "AOL keyword" before their internet address, domain name and URL became ubquitous, and killed the closed shop that was AOL? Something similar happened to Minitel/Viditel/Videotext in Europe, where that even relied on special terminals, brilliant in its day, but quickly outmoded when the internet came to the PC.
Perhaps my view is U.S.-centric more than is reasonable, but 2010 was not a great year, as years go. Hopefully, now that the euphoria is long gone, Obama has the tools in place to propel the economy forward while keeping the right wingers with lots of "no's" and few "eureka's" in some sort of check. Because we need something to do, and something to sell, and it seems to me we are not working on getting that together, on getting our innovative streak back in swing. 
The iPad is a nice toy, but it isn't something that can sustain an economy, nor can a "privately enhanced $2 bill". I must plead guilty to being affected - I, the great innovator, am not seeing what we have, today, that is home grown and can be expanded into a new kinda of universe. I'll let you know if I think of something, but I have to be honest and tell you that for as long as we are concentrating on cars that take voice commands, and can't even get high speed rail together ten years after everybody else has, my view is dim. I am very tired of the "let's take back the country" rhetoric - sometime in January, I am going to have to go out and do my "where's the beef?" thing. I swear.
Nevertheless, people, let's keep at it, because it only happens when you keep pushing, keep trying, and keep believing in yourself. Have a good, nay, better 2011!
The highlight of 2010, for me, was the gratifying experience to be able to reconnect with cousin Teddy, see the pic to the right, Teddy, who I had not seen and completely lost sight of for over 40 years. Thanks to his son T, who got in touch with my sister. Teddy had a stroke in the summer, in Indonesia, his country of birth in Dutch colonial times, where he had moved from The Netherlands after his wife died, in 2005. He survived, and I was able to route myself into Indonesia from a China trip, and visit him in June. Soon after, he was discharged home, and we spent some quality time together, and I brought a laptop from Beijing that I put on 3G with the invaluable help from friends and former XL colleagues J. and N., who had the cellular stuff all ready by the time I got to Jakarta. Teddy was able to connect and Skype with his friends and relatives in Europe from that day on, I last spoke to him on November 10, and then on November 13 his home aide found him passed out in the bathroom. He died soon after, at 85. A navy pilot who fought the Japanese
The moral of my story? Reconnect, if you can, I said this after 9/11, you never know....
I recently sat with a former colleague who is working on a web company - in his case, putting professionals who need the help on social networks and in the blogosphere. Looking at this more closely, though, including some others I spent some time advising, earlier in the year, it is ever more clear to me that many folks really do not have a clue what kind of activities social networking and blogging really are, and how much of an effort you really need to make to participate. It is interesting how some people approach Facebook and the blogosphere the same way they approached the internet - buy a computer, get a broadband connection, and it will take care of itself.We active participants probably forget that most of those we don't "see" actually do not participate - something that can have a lot of unintended consequences, from simple disappointment to an increase in loneliness, a bit like sitting in a room full of people with nobody talking to you. What amazed me most is that folks are setting up businesses based on these technologies without the slightest idea of what it takes and what they do. Writing advertising texts and putting them on a website and then calling the result a blog may work with one or two clients, but my guess is that you would soon run out of people who don't know the difference between a blog and advertising copy. What I found most interesting is that the person pulled out a laptop, then to proceed to show me a presentation, without ever going online to show me the product. It was a bit like somebody showing me a video of a car being driven, and expecting me to buy the vehicle.
First and foremost: if you aren't an active blogger and Facebooker, don't even think about making that your business. For one thing, you have no idea how labour intensive this stuff is. If you've never made the calculation how many hours a week you spend on this stuff "just to keep up", and been surprised, you do not know what it is.
On a different note: builder Dan (see December 25, below) has finished the other repairs and maintenance that were due around the house and so I can now start cleaning all over again. I don't mean he made a mess - rather, I made a mess by ripping the sink area and one of the toilets apart so it would be easier for him to do the repairs, I like putting things back the way I want them. I am especially happy with the spiffy new white pull-out kitchen faucet
Actually, the way back (see my piece on driving up to New York, below) was even quicker - I did Mahwah to Baltimore in about four hours. Leaving Mahwah at 7, there was little traffic on the NJ Turnpike, although it was littered with State Troopers. That did not much matter, since I had forgotten to take a radar detector. The picture shows you the Turnpike around Camden/Phila, there literally was no traffic to speak of. Much to my surprise, the Durango, which usually delivers something dismal, like 13 mpg, gave me 18 miles for a gallon, which is not bad, considering. And it is very comfortable to drive, used as I am to driving muscle cars...There is not otherwise a huge amount of news. I am to a large extent still working on the house, even without the repairs Dan just did (see December 25, below) and he'll be back on Tuesday to help me do some of the stuff we had planned, that was pre-empted by the drain leak. Thankfully, though the joists and floor paneling were soaked, the leak did not last long enough for rot to set in, and with new insulation, fibreboard, and drying out the crawlspace using a heat pump I think I am pretty much OK. I do need to split some more wood, but looking at the radar map (I am at the white cross on the map) the snow has left us on its way to New York and I'll be able to go cut wood outside in the afternoon.
There is of course not a lot going on on the jobs front, although I was really pleased to get an email from ex E., whose company may need my skillset. But for the rest everybody is enjoying their Xmas holidays, and especially the folks in Europe really don't get back to work and things until the New Year. It is not an issue, but I am just very eager to get something on the road. For one, should I find a project or position outside of the Washington area I will need to make my house ready to close up, or even rent, that is part of the reason I am having Dan over. This, after all, is the worst time to sell a house, so I am much better off maintaining this residence - I need a U.S. residence for legal reasons, anyway.
One reason I so much liked watching Law & Order
My best wishes to all for the festive season and beyond, I hope you are able to spend some time with friends and family this Christmas season, with enough time off to recharge your batteries and have a prodigious 2011. Take care of the friendships and loved ones around you, often charity begins at home, although Lord Knows there are plenty of folks out there that can do with a bit of help, or a leg up, or some gentle lovin'.
My Christmas cheer, to a large extent, came from builder Dan McGuire - the one in the picture on the left - who came out on a freezing Christmas Eve and spent his entire day fixing a leak I had discovered at the back of my kitchen. The original builder had not done a very good job of installing the joint drain from the dishwasher and the kitchen sinks, and with the installation of a new water heater and a dishwasher, resulting in more and probably hotter waste water, the old drain line ruptured, and I discovered a flood at the back of the house, coming from underneath the siding, right by the heat pumps. Dan figured out what it was, though it was impossible to get at, fixed it, and managed to do that in time for me to get out to friend D's family Christmas party. Good show. There is much more for me to be thankful for, this year, and I will, unusually, private person that I am, write some of it up in my next posting.
Watching all this Christmas advertising going on, I can't help but wonder why anybody would add a Lexus to their shopping. Isn't Christmas, with its expenses, gifts, travel and other stuff expensive enough without having to go out to get a Honda whatchamacallit in an oversize box with ditto ribbon?
Here is a good example of a "hype" report: China is reported to be ready to buy portions of Portugal's national debt. Yah. There is nothing official to substantiate it - it hasn't happened yet, and the Chinese and Portuguese are not commenting - so if this report influences the value of the Euro it is pure gambling. I am not at all cefrtain why this phenomenon is as pronounced as it seems to be. My guess is that it is the proliferation of news - there are hundreds of cable and satellite channels, tens of thousands of internet sites, whereas in the past there was a much smaller number of news outlets. And they did not compete as much as is the case today. The danger in that is that news gets over-reported, and to some extent inflated or even invented. I think some of the regulatory authorities should begin to step in, and start doing research on these reports, in terms of whether what they prognosticate ever happens. Apart from anything else, in this example, you really would not determine its economic effects until the terms are know, it is a kind of a loan, after all. It is not a good trend. This being Reuters, it is "trusted", and probably should not be.
I am somewhere between confused and incredulous at the moment, since I just drove up to New York much faster than I recall doing it before. I used to drive the stretch between Manhattan and Arlington, VA on a fairly regular basis, and I recall that it would take me about five hours to get from Baltimore to a Manhattan entry point, like the Midtown Tunnel. But a few days ago, I drove from my home, which is about 70 miles south of Washington DC, to Mahwah, New Jersey, which is well north of New York City, and it took me only the sum total of six hours door-to-door, including bathroom and gasoline stops. I was not doing anything special, and I had taken my SUV - a Dodge Durango, comfortable to drive by comparison with the Camaro, although the gas bill will probably be horrendous - because of the chance of snow. As I said, I did not do anything special, didn't speed very much, although it is very close to Christmas so that probably has less traffic on the interstates in the lull before the storm. My Nokia/Route 66 GPS has the drive time at 9 hours and 17 minutes, Google Maps says 7 hours and 10 minutes "in traffic". OTOH, when I mentioned all this to friend R. he said "six hours", so maybe I just never checked with anybody. We will see tomorrow, when I drive back.
Induction cooking is known to most Americans as being available in kitchen cooktops, less well known is that there are small portable cookers using the same technology. I found this out at WalMart in Beijing, where practically all small cookers are induction models. I brought one back, and can tell you it is a very pleasant and efficient way to cook. For one thing, there is no heat involved (other than in the pot), which makes this very safe, for another, the electronics measure and dose the amount of energy delivered into the food, so no burned pots and pans (which must be made of iron, aluminium does not work), and no overcooked food - obviously, provided your settings aren't too high. But used with a cast iron Dutch oven, stews, chicken, roasts, come out beautifully. Green, too, the induction cooker uses maybe half to a third of what a conventional cooker does.
I don't know in how far you've been following the Julian Assange
So I like the principle of Wikileaks, but the way this is turning out is amateur night at the Apollo. I do have to say - again - that by the time we figure out how this information got out there, some heads must roll - in the intelligence community, at State, at Homeland Security. Assange has done us a great service in exposing our incompetence. The problem in D.C. is that security is always an afterthought, there isn't enough money for it, it never gets updated, and when something goes wrong the attention only lasts three months. The "no thumbdrives" directive is a joke - there isn't any way that can be enforced. Publishing that directive only achieves to pinpoint the incompentent. The fact that these directives are both useless and likely ignored is best illustrated by referring to the last "no thumbdrives" directive - dated 1998....
And I am certain that when you read through the "intelligence" you'll find plenty information that has in no way been substantiated, on which policy decisions were based nevertheless. That brings me right back to my hobby horse, the survey and the "what if" algorithms used in business and finance. Even the surveys that web companies present you with - you know, the ones that pop up when you first access a site, when they ask you questions about your experiences. That's right, the experiences you haven't had yet, you're going to answer questions about. And even if the survey gets presented upon exit - if you don't know who answered it, and why, and who didn't, and why, all you have is garbage, white noise. Me too - I see it every time I look at my own site statistics - even if you know what search parameters people used to get to you, the only valid observation can be that most internet users can't spell...
It is a lot of work, heating 24/7 using a woodstove - not that I am complaining, it is, as I have said, brilliant exercise, but if you're wondering why you are getting high bills in the heating season - it is labour intensive whichever way you do it. For this morning, I crank up the woodstove, which has been turned down overnight, as leaving it cranking is a huge risk. There are hundreds of house fires every year, two students in Maryland died a couple of weeks ago when the woodstove flue from the pizza shop underneath their apartment caught fire.
This afternoon, when the house has kind of regained its comfy temperature, I need to bring another load of firewood in from my stash outside - I am nowhere near running out inside, but you want to keep a good supply so you don't have to go outside to "replenish the fuel" in a snowstorm, or the middle of the night. Once 3000 square feet cool down, it is hard to impossible to get the temperature back up. So I'll carry probably 600 to 700 lbs. of seasoned firewood inside, where it can sit in the heat in the family room for a few days, to get up to room temperature, and shed the last of its moisture. Then, gallons of bug spray are of importance - one thing you need to understand about firewood is that is is dead, and therefore liable to harbour insects, from beetles to carpenter ants, and without a liberal application of poison you're likely to put your woodframe house at risk. Because that is where they nest and what they eat - wood. So think about whether you have pets, kids or pregnant persons you can expose to this. If you should not, forget about storing firewood indoors.
On top of all that, I just discovered another patent on the work we did at the NYNEX Science & Technology R&D lab on operator services automation was approved late last year, one I did not know about. It is the third, the one I am most proud of, as it is a telephone network based forerunner of GPS, we had to (try that today!) invent everything to do it, from the way an operator services database is handled to the way the operator terminal fetches information from the network, and then sends calls to other operator positions. I had not expected this to ever make it into, let alone out of, the United States Patent Office, and even then I felt it might be contentious. But here it is - I spent months researching and writing up the engineering underpinnings for this particular patent, after we had turned up and rolled out the Automated Functions Node. It did everything, including the billing record, and went in with union support!Technology soon overtook what we did, but for it to finally get a patent award, ten or so years later, really makes me verrrry happy. It was pretty brilliant stuff - if you like to get bored you can get the detail directly from the United States Patent Office - go here and look for patent number 7,606,359. Links to all of them are here. Craig is building an airplane now - you can follow him here.
If you have looked for a job last year or so, you probably have already come across this, but job searching and requires a fair amount of Internet savvy. Finding the URLs of corporations and institutions is not always easy, when I was looking for Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C.
It is freaking cold. That is not why I have not updated this page in a timely fashion, I've just been busy with all sorts of things and couldn't concentrate on getting some sensible information out. To the left my woodpile, which has kept me quite busy - normally I don't push tons of wood through the woodstove, it is normally in the 40's or even 50's during the day in December, but this year is beginning to be a mess. Last January we had this horrendous snowstorm, now December is freezing, I think I will put in the geothermal heat pumps I've been thinking about in the Spring of 2012. It is not that I don't have enough firewood (unlike last winter...) but it is kind of nice to be able to just turn the switch, now and again. I mean, my older style heat pumps work fine, but by the time it gets this cold their nassty little red light comes on, which I think connects directly to my bank account.
I now have an RFID credit "sticky" that attaches to the back of my cellphone, that is new. I'd had one of those Paypass things for my keyring for a few years now, but I like this better - for one thing, I am less likely to misplace my Blackberry than my keys, thanks to the Blackberry's belt pouch. Check with your bank if they are providing them yet, and no, I can't tell you my bank, there are too many folks looking over our shoulders here. But a quick Google should do it for you - try looking for "payment tag".
I'll try and get a bit more creative in the next few days, I promise. I have some travel coming up, and I am just about done putting my resume and cover letters out at the career websites run by some corporations I'd like to work for. It being all online, creating one's profile, and fine tuning one's resume (which essentially is a duplicate of what you have just typed into the jobs site) is a lot of work. Although - I am not one of those who endlessly refines his resume - I mean, all it wants to do is get a recruiter or hiring manager to talk to me. I've never believed in 12 or 20 page resumes, and long lists of skills, I don't believe anybody goes through them with a fine toothcomb. Life does not work that way.
I hope.
That has all gone by the wayside. How profitable a particular product is for a company is information that is very hard to come by, if at all, and the company's share price is to a large extent based completely on perception and conjecture. That doesn't mean that the analysts always get it wrong, but there are plenty of examples of corporations that were able to shore up their stock price for years by hiding losses and bloated investments. Apple, of course, is doing very well, and that is easily explained as the company maintains very healthy profit margins for all of its products. But that is an exception, rather than the rule.
While the media have been telling us that the "cloudy glasses" are a result of phosphates being withdrawn from dishwasher detergent, and a bit of vinegar will solve the problem, the contention that there is no point in replacing your dishwasher
It made no sense to me - machines are designed to produce an optimal result with a particular formulation, and if you change that formulation, and take something essential like phosphates out, you're going to have to change the way the machine works. Phosphates were in detergent for a reason, right? So if you have an older dishwasher, give the filters a good clean, check the acidity (PH) of your water, which should be around 7.2 to 7.4, and start using one higher cycle than you used to. If that does not work, buy a new dishwasher, that will be designed to clean perfectly using the phosphate free detergent. Doesn't have to cost a fortune, mine was under $300 (but I got the employer discount..), installed in half an hour, and everything is squeaky clean again. Sorry, NBC-Liz, but that was very incomplete advice.
What is so stupid is that even though there are a lot of companies that make millions by capturing and selling this data, there is actually abolutely nothing useful anybody has ever done with it. The principle is that all of this tracking is supposed to enable vendors to put information in front of you that will influence your buying decisions, but nobody has ever come up with a piece of software that is actually able to predict that you have concerns about your heart health, that you're heading for a supermarket, and that you are going to buy probiotic foods. Sure, they can see what information you retrieve, they may even be able to see which supermarket you head for, but that you're buying yoghurt for Auntie Jeannie is not something anybody knows or can know. If the companies that do this type of research spent their billions of dollars simply getting their message out in as many places as possible, they would have a far greater sales success than when they attempt to manipulate people's buying behaviour.
There is so much that needs doing - I am currently buying some diving gear
Not much else to report, life is a bit dreary at the moment. I can't find work, me and the rest of the nation, it is freezing cold, but I suppose we are lucky we're not getting the snow avalanches the Other Coast and Western Europe have been having, and generally, though I have nothing substantial to complain about, it is December again. It was never my favourite month, too many holidays and birthdays in the family - Santa Claus, December 5, is celebrated in Holland as well - from when I was a child it always was a hyped and over-pressurized month. Even today, this nonsens about Black Friday, and about "getting the holiday shopping done early" - I shop for the holidays and birthdays year 'round, whenever I run into nice gifts, wherever I am, so at the end of the year all I have to do is open the closet.
I noticed the other day that the Dragon NaturallySpeaking
I cannot find a decent picture to go with today's blog entry, usually I take the picture specifically for whatever it is I'm writing, occasionally I'll go back in my own archives and find something appropriate, but I can't come up with anything today, so I am leaving you without, just giving you a couple of Amazon products that I have discussed here. Better luck next time!
Will somebody explain to me why South Korean civilians are protesting South Korean police in protest against the North Korean shelling? Granted, I don't have a clear idea of what it is to live in a country that is, to some extent, an armed camp - South Korea, North Korea, Israel, the Germanys used to be like that - but this type of demonstration is entirely futile, and if the civilians have a beef with their government they need to take that to parliament. Don't you think? Mind you, we seem to have a lot of citizens in America who think they can improve matters in lots of counter-productive ways, from insulting one another on the airwaves and the internet to coming to Washington with guns, and then there is Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the Somali teen who was going to blow up a treelighting ceremony on Oregon, the other day. What gets into these people? Who has taught them that violence can solve problematical situations? Why do some people think President Obama is somehow to blame for the current recession? Why does this Palin woman have her own reality TV show? Those fishermen are interesting, for a couple of hours, but Palin? Or Jessica Simpson? Is something wrong with me that I find most of these people and most of these "demonstrations" utterly stupid?On that note, I keep reading the Chinese are keeping their currency, the yuan, artificially cheap so as to be able to continue their sales heavy economy. Not so, says I. I think a major reason why the yuan is "reasonably priced" is to ensure prices in the Chinese countryside and remote areas do not rise. We tend to forget that the majority of Chinese live at a subsistence minimum, and raising their prices could cause a massacre. The world is not as simple as the State Department wants it to be.
Yah. 40% of shoppers plan to shop online. Suuuure. And 16% will do so using their mobile devices. Yah. Where does this nonsensical information come from? Who creates these "forecasts"? You do a survey, and of the people that answer the survey, or answer the phone, you pass the prewritten answers on to the industry and the media.. This is commerce? Don't make me laugh, this is a joke, there is nothing in this information that in any way indicates what the reality is going be.
Seriously. Now more than ever, it is getting harder and harder to predict outcomes. Harry Potter is a good example - it was rejected by twelve publishers. 9/11 is another - we were going to go into Afghanistan and get rid of the terrorists there. That means we thought we could.
The list goes on. The Chevy Volt (the "then" vehicle, not the one coming up) was going to bring us into the alternative energy age. Blockbuster and Enron were going to bring internet movies to the consumer - in 2000. People get cancer or walk under a bus. I am most amazed by all these surveys and questionnaires proliferating on the internet, as if their data has any meaning. Think about it - these surveys are only filled out by people that feel they have a need to do so, people one knows absolutely nothing about, other than that they are willing to fill out a form. We think we sell things by superimposing advertisements over the picture, video or text the consumer wanted to access. I mean, have you ever bought a Hewlett Packard product because of an advertisement that made it impossible to read the Washington Post article you wanted to read? Have you taken Comcast service because Cal Ripken is making strange gestures on your TV?
On another note, B&H Photo have quickly replaced the Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 storage device
Why the NAS drive now? The thing costs a little over $400, provides two mirrored terabytes, and I cannot put together a server with 4 terabytes of disk space for that kind of money. Hardware, maybe, but not the operating system. Now that EMC owns Iomega - EMC is very well known to me as a provider of fault tolerant storage systems in my telco world - it appears they have gone to great pains making these devices as compatible as possible - this drive array will do Windows Media sharing, it can function as a standalone webserver, lots of stuff I have not yet experimented with, the restore is running but kind of slow. And I am not at all in favour of putting one's file system on the internet, although I want to see this work badly enough that I will try it. I've got a rather elaborate firewall assembly facing the ISP, so let's see what gives - watch this space. In the meantime, if you're looking for 2 or 4 terabytes of storage for a paltry $400 so you don't have to keep stuff on your laptop, this looks like it is a good device.
The picture? That's just me getting creative with a dead chicken - something I don't do often enough any more. I think from a diet perspective my doctors want me to do more chicken and steak, whose calories you can control and which provides packed nutrition. Yeeh.
So - sure, you can make woodstoves cleaner burning. You just have to redesign them so they burn hotter, so they can burn cleaner, which of course means they burn more wood. Is there real evidence this has worked, nationwide? I don't know. I do find that some other energy advances actually work - the GE dishwasher I just bought, top right, is more frugal with water, energy, and detergent, I notice. It cleans better, as well, this despite the United States (just now!) having outlawed the use of phosphates in dishwasher detergent. And there are now a significant number of low energy light bulbs that do better than the ubiquitous 14 watt bulb that was more or less staple - smaller CFLs that are intended for the multi-bulb light fixtures we have all over. I've replaced the 14 watt bulbs with smaller 9 watt bulbs, that give the equivalent of 40 watts "regular" light, so for the light fixtures that take two bulbs, those are ideal. Is there savings involved? Technically, sure, but considering you have to shell out money to save money (my old Maytag dishwasher was broken, and I decided a new one was better for the environment than a repair), the savings are marginal. There is some carbon advantage, I am sure, but only if you add up all of those people who "step up". Having said that, the manufacturers are manufacturing regardless of actual need, so I am not certain whether there actually is a net gain in terms of energy savings or energy efficiency.
And we tend to do this every time. I watch lovely HD stuff on the Discovery Channel, or "Sherlock" on PBS, much of it in the background as I sit here and do email or maintain my sites, on a 50 inch plasma TV. Granted, the newer ones are reasonably frugal with energy, but having said that, it is still a 50 inch plasma display, rated at 350 watts. Before that, I used a TV projector that gave me about a 40 inch image, which used around 200 watts. Before that, a 30 inch LCD TV, rated at 180 watts. Sure enough, the fuel consumption per square inch of viewing surface is less. But you get my drift - it doesn't matter how much more efficient we make these things, there is a bottom line, and we always make these things bigger. If I calculate the amount of time I have this plasma set on, it probably consumes about the same amount of energy my hot water heat pump does, around $8 per month. Mostly providing background noise and motion.
Long story short: "green" starts in the classroom, and in the way you bring up your children. And it will not work if you're going to teach your kids to be energy efficient, and then commute to work yourself in a hybrid vehicle. Commuting is not green, and cannot be made to be green. Having the Pentagon in Northern Virginia is not green. A hybrid vehicle is a vehicle that uses less energy than its regular combustion counterpart, but the real problem is that you still use energy for transportation - whether that energy is gasoline, diesel, electricity, or any combination thereof, you're still using carbons, and you're using those probably without a real need to be where you are going. We have technologies that can help you be anywhere you need to be, without any kind of travel.
Below is a quote from the Sydney Morning Herald (click on the quote to get to the article) about the new Honda Insight Hybrid - note how unfavourably it compares with the original Insight, which is what you would expect it to better. Instead, it is faster, bigger, everything you don't really need, and note how it has a continuously variable transmission - part of the increased efficiency is actually due to the CVT, which Honda used to offer in its original Civic. If you stick CVTs in conventional cars, they get more frugal too!
I recently bought a couple of 6VDC lead acid batteries, $10 a piece, free shipping, but because those can't be air shipped they sent them surface. They actually came on a tractor trailer, the guy dropped the trailer in the street and backed the tractor up to the house. I don't think they made much of a profit. The truck (picture top left) came from ... Richmond, 75 miles away.
As if life weren't complicated enough, now William wants to marry Kate - I suppose Gramma musta told Dad it had gone on for long enough, and if he was going to do a commoner he might as well get on with it. So he is. Good luck to him. I am not seeing Charles ever getting crowned, either, so we're looking at King William and Princess Kate. I just don't like the ring, though they may not have had a choice, that ring did not bring anybody luck or happiness, look at the giver - he spends his life talking to his plants. And then there is Den Watts back from the dead on a 2003 East Enders rerun, the UK gives me the creeps. I don't know, I can't get excited about Kate. I was living in London for the Charles & Di mashup, it was different, I think. Heck of a party, London at a standstill for days... Maybe I am just older, or just a tosser, let's hope it's that...The holidays are coming at us rather swiftly, I suppose I have partly lost sight because of the maintenance I am doing, and the work on the woodpile, which got kind of intense. I inadvertently got some kudos from a friend, today, who noticed how toasty the house was, despite the fact that I had last added wood to the stove at 7 in the morning, before I left for Northern Virgina - by the time I got back it was 3pm. So the work I did - baffle, heat exchanger, new insulation in the upstairs landing, chimney cleaning - seems to be paying off. My builder is coming in to help me with some additional stuff I haven't finished, plumbing, electrical, an attic ladder, all sorts of bits I never got around to over the summer.
So - there are a lot of disasters whose victims need help. Pakistan had its floods, something the country apparently does not have the capability to deal with. Haiti had an earthquake, and now is falling victim to cholera - it is a disease that spreads through a lack of hygiene, BTW, not through Peacekeepers, and the lack of hygiene is not caused by the earthquake, but by a lack of infrastucture, and the inability to repair the infrastructure. I compare this with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, where the countries involved needed huge amounts of aid - with one exception: India. I visited the tsunami hit area in India, up and down the East Coast from Chennai, not much was said about it, at the time, but the area got5 hit as badly as parts of Indonesia and Thailand, lost thousands of people, the coastline was wiped out, people, villages, everything, for hundreds of miles, and the Indian government sent in whatever was needed to recover and rebuild. India has the resources and the organization - like China, India has an infrastructure and the tools to deal with natural and other disasters.
We're not helping anyone by going into Haiti and Pakistan with our flying doctor services. These folks need to be able to take care of themselves - they have the money, but, seemingly, not the political wherewithall to put a supporting infrastructure in. Pakistan is a joke, even - they can do nuclear science and build missiles and reactors, but not take care of floods? Come again? One is reminded of New Orleans, still not rebuilt, five years after being hit by hurricane Katrina, a.k.a. "the worst engineering disaster in the history of the United States".
Owell. I am rambling a bit, I think. But the core of this is the way we're trying to crank up "the economy", whatever that is, without taking care of the bottom line. I am still not seeing how we're going to put America back on its feet without creating new products, concepts, inventions. I mean, look at it: we created two major money making world changing technologies, cellular telephony, and the internet, and they are out there, we, and a lot of other people, made tons of money on those technologies, "we" don't any more, but "they" do. But there isn't any followup, we have nothing waiting in the wings. No new fast food chain, no new coffee chain, no new distribution technology (which is what those are), UPS and FedEx already took over the world, Facebook would be the new McDonalds if it had the wherewithall to negotiate with the Chinese and the Iranians - this, by the way, is how we keep losing ground to the Europeans, All American kids like Zuckerberg are not able to look beyond the next election, they can sell in Wisconsin and Edinburgh, they're happy, they neither understand nor aspire to Fangxian, Hubei Province. This is how we lost cellular telephony - we invented it, rolled out CDMA, and then the Europeans created GSM, which was all digital from inception, and took over, literally, the entire world.
The Chevy Volt? It is not an electric vehicle, it is a hybrid, it has been put back in the lineup using your tax dollars, the "recovery funding", and the first hybrid was built and marketed by Toyota in... 1997. But people, we can't get out of this one using marketing gimmicks, not with the Chinese buying our technologies, and improving on them, since they can take financial decisions without having to consult their entire population. This week's Heartland America catalog has more lies than I have ever seen before in one place: a 1500 watt quartz heater using $1 a day, a 400 watt panel heater that heats an entire room, a gold half dollar that is gold plated, a handheld cellulite "vacuum", an alkaline battery recharger, a power conditioner that makes appliances use less electricity, a detoxifier patch, a waistband stretcher, a salt crystal air purifying stress relieving lamp, a 20% fuel efficiency improver for cars you plug into the lighter socket, all products that don't work and should be illegal to sell. We got into the realm of fiction - that started with the "refinance and get rich" mortgage dream, which, by the way, is still going strong, except now they are flogging governments bailouts they cannot deliver, in very many cases - and if you look at your catalogs and TV advertising, that is all we do now, wse take old obsolete technologies, give them a fancy name, and then deceive consumkers into thinking this is the latest greatest, using taxpayer money. Sorry to be negative, but "new" is my profession, my religion, and I can see where it is at, and that is not here.
Earlier this year, I found out my cousin Ted had moved to Indonesia from the Netherlands, and he had had a stroke and was in the hospital. Moved back, I should say, it was where he was born, and where he fought the Japanese as a Royal Navy pilot. I changed my travel arrangements for Beijing, and American Airlines managed to put me into Jakarta on my way back to the US. And so we met again, almost fifty years after we had last seen each other, when he was still serving with the Air Force, and I was in school in nearby The Hague."Opa Ted", as he was known locally, passed away yesterday, apparently went out like a light while tending to his morning ablutions, did not suffer. I am just so very happy I managed to visit and spend a few days with him, and put him on Skype so he was able to keep in touch with friends and family worldwide, in his remaining months - we last spoke less than a week ago. He had a good innings, I suppose, and ended up where he wanted to be.
Back in April, before I went to China, I sent my 2 TB Micronet drive for repair, since it had been failing. I reinstalled it sometime in May, after they had fixed it. but soon enough, it started acting up again. I had already bought another drive to have a backup, because I use these drives on a network device to back up my computers and information to, so at least my data was safe, but I've now had two spend more money than I really had intended. So I am expecting a brand new network drive to arrive via UPS today. It is one of those Iomega devices, with 4 TB of RAID data space, and all sorts of goodies I will tell you about once I haven't unpacked and running. I intend to use this device not as the primary backup unit, but as a RAID 1 formatted "backup to the backup", which means the only traffic it will ever see is the daily backup from the primary device.
I suppose this is a perfect example of the issues facing us in the computer industry. My new 4 terabyte Iomega StorCenter ix2-200
When I go into the "Network" section in Windows 7 on my laptop, the drive is there, it has shown up as a Windows media device, and as an "Other" device, with an IP address. It shows up with a "go to device webpage" link, so I click on that, and sure enough, my browser goes to the device's IP address, and its built in webserver gives me the configuration pages the software was supposed to provide. Pretty comprehensive too - I did not know EMC had bought Iomega, but it shows - you name a network or file sharing technology, and the Storcenter supports it. This provided you know how to configure everything, which I do, but the majority of users won't, they won't even kn ow the difference between a Windows domain controller and an NFS server. Nevertheless - a SCSI network device is available too, and I am now waiting for that to finish setting up - it's done 13%, after 2 hours, but it shows in the Windows drive arrays already, cool. For 400 buck$, impressive, at 2x2 terabytes.
Or so I thought. The error message I kept getting, even after re-initializing the unit, meant that one of the two drives was not functioning, unfortunately very cryptic error messaging. Hopefully B&H will send me an RMA number on Sunday (they are closed on the sabbath, not even taking electronic orders, which means they're not hypocrite), and a replacement unit real quick.
I expect I'll have to resort to getting some mandrake juice, I understand the best cure for things petrified. And somebody better tell Macy's Veteran's Day was last week.
More and more, I have seen electrically activated kitchen implements at BJs, which is where I bulk shop. I've bought some of them, and you will say "You're lazy", but that is truly not the reason. The real reason, like my use of kitchen paper, is: hygiene- simple as that.It sounds a little silly, but look at any of the tests and surveys that have been done, and you see that the "germ load" is pretty bad in the home, especially in the kitchen, where the entire family, warts and all, tends to congregate, whether or not they have washed their hands. So anything you would touch you can "electrify" is good news, and faucets, garbage pails, door handles, and soap and paper dispensers certainly make the grade. Some of these things are getting more affordable, I purchased an electric soap dispenser for $30 a while ago, and yesterday came across the garbage pail with automatic lid, for $35. Not bad, and that helps not "overstuffing" the bin, as well. No, I don't have an electric door yet, nor do I have an electric faucet or towel dispenser, but I will keep an eye out. I suppose from the hygiene perspective, automated bathroom and kitchen doors, faucets, refrigerator and cupboard doors and the like would be best. Having said that, that would be a lot of money, especially as the lower income folk would not be able to afford any of it.
Hygiene is a big issue at the best of times, I have my doubts the correlation between well being and hygiene is really clear to most people. What the public refers to as a "tummy bug", or "stomach flu" is really food poisoning, and it is easy to get - a piece of cheese with a piece of mold you can easily cut off will do it - the rest is covered in mold too, but you can't see that. The flatmate who cleans the bath by filling it with water and bleach? He will spread germs wherever he goes, work, pub, school, family, wherever. I suppose it is relatively easy to become a Howard Hughes, if you just think about the biochemical assaults on the body for long enough. Read this, about the risks we are exposing ourselves to by reusing grocery bags, as supermarkets want us to do. It is interesting how bad that is for your health, we know that now that somebody is doing research - isn't that how we set out to improve public heallth, by using disposable things? Would you wash out and reuse your toilet paper? Are you aware the majority of the population in China, India, Indonesia, and Africa, has never used toilet paper, barely knows it exists?
Watching Obama address Indian Parliament, I am forever astonished at the difference between India and China. Amazed that a country the size of India manages to continue to be a democracy, while outsprinted and outsmarted by the PRC, which is not. Indonesia, another new democracy, has done incredibly well out of its new freedoms, with its economy firmly in the lift, although the foundations for all this were laid in the Suharto era. Muslim demonstrators have been protesting Obama's visit - before his arrival, I think if they tried that during his visit, they'd be in a pile of trouble. Obama, after all, is a son of Indonesia, he partly grew up in Jakarta.
And so it goes on. China is now everybody's manufacturer, with its neigbours eating from the same trough, provided they pay with their natural resources. Other than that, China has begun the process of alienating the rest of the world, as China needs nobody, and therefore need not negotiate. That, too, is the hallmark of the non-democrat - democracy is government by consensus, by negotation, and that is not something the Chinese know how to do. Marxism, it is probably good to remember, eventually failed in most places it was "enacted". Maybe that will be our salvation, the fact that the Chinese can't sit with a customer, listen to them, and ask them what they need. That's not in the program. We are learning their language, after all, not the other way around. And that may yet save India, a country that gave itself two official primary languages, one of which is the language of their former oppressor, now spoken the world over: English.
Ah well. Back to Sherlock Holmes, 2010 - or rather, a 21st century BBC rendition of Sherlock Holmes, look for just "Sherlock" on your local PBS station. Worth watching, especially if you used to live in London... I'll leave you with a picture of a German Stolle I found at Aldi, which seems to bring over a few items from its native German stores now and again. Can't say I ever saw Mozartkugeln from Salsburg in Austria before, or Pfeffernüsse, don't even know the translation for that, in a local supermarket in Virginia. I don't know if the death of one of the founders of Aldi has anything to do with it, but Aldi is advertising, and expanding. Pretty recession proof, I would say.
Long story short, I don't know if you have the patience and "anality" to spend the time it takes to figure this out - I've been trying to get the stove to work better for five or so years, admittedly from "zero", the last time I had ever seen a solid fuel stove before I bought this house was in my childhood, we had a coal stove at my first house in The Hague, swiftly replaced by the WWII rebuilding efforts (and Shell Oil, my Dad's employer) to modern centrally heated flats sometime in the 1950s. My home area, the Bezuidenhout neigbourhood in The Hague, had been bombed to bits anyway, by British and American bombers that missed their target, German barracks, by about five miles, although when they did that my parents were still in Japanese internment camps in the Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia."It" is heating an entire 3000 square foot two level home, in the woods, using wood from those woods, using a 75,000 BTU - Quadra-Fire EPA approved woodstove. I use wood from the woods since I own some and am thus responsible for their husbandry, as of yet unregulated in this part of the United States, an interesting exercise then, to see whether or not five acres provides enough new growth to offset my use of firewood to heat.
As the first nights with low temperatures have happened already, it was time to clean woodstove and chimney, and do any other heating maintenance that needs doing before winter sets in. I have been working on the woodpile for a couple of months now, that is coming along nicely, and after removing a pile of creosote from the flue, I am, after an overnight burn, now burning a creosote log to turn the rest into ashes. Then I can start bringing seasoned wood into my family room, where the woodstove sits, and splitting more bits of tree to season outside. With a bit of luck (if we don't have a winter like the last) I should have a couple of years' worth of firewood in storage.
Since I have had a few almost-chimney fires, over the years, I decided I should take a look at ways of installing a damper on my stove, something you really are not supposed to do on an EPA woodstove. An "EPA woodstove" - as opposed to an EPA exempt woodstove - conforms to Environmental regulations for the output of particulate matter and poisonous gases, a standard usually achieved by building a sort of "afterburner" into the appliance, or by installing a catalytic converter, much like those installed in cars. My Quadra-Fire is an "afterburner" stove - once at working temperature, preheated air is sucked into the top of the firebox, where, at around 1200° Fahrenheit, a secondary combustion re-fires the exhaust gases from the primary burn.
That works really well, but it shows, at the same time, what the limitations are when you unleash scientific principles on the great unwashed. You see, an EPA stove only burns clean at the proper working temperature. That temperature is pretty high, and the stoves are therefore designed in such a way that you really can't "turn them down" or "fire them up". Firing up an EPA stove you only do, briefly, when you add wood, while EPA stoves lack baffles, which means you can't run them at temperatures too low for a clean burn. In principle, even at its lowest setting, an EPA stove will maintain that 1200° temperature in the firebox. And that is not what the average consumer wants, a stove that is "good" for the environment, but whose temperature you can barely regulate. At outside temperatures above freezing, my stove will overheat my 3000 square foot home regardless of its setting. That is how the EPA designed it....
Technically, then, you shouldn't use a baffle or a secondary heat exchanger with an EPA stove, because both can bring down the temperature of the exhaust gases so they will cause deposits and creosote. On the other hand, a baffle can prevent, or at least, slow down the heat buildup that gives rise to chimney fires, while a heat exchanger does a brilliant job of recovering waste heat from hot flue gases - and in so doing, can help prevent chimney fires as well. So, what do we need to be able to uses these contraptions on an EPA stove without polluting the world?
Having purchased a barometric damper
Between the baffle and the Heat Reclaimer
This health report is interesting - walking six to nine miles a week protects the brain from shrinking in old age? I find that fascinating, because there is nothing to suggest what the mechanism is - it it the exercise? The amount of cognition involved with walking? One could imagine that if you walk the same route every day, the brain gets to do a lot of work in verification and recognition of change - after all, when you look at something on a regular basis you begin to change your view of it, notice texture, maybe, or colour changes as the angle of the light changes, that sort of thing. I noticed an aricle, recently, which discussed how memory retention is negatively impacted when someone stops working, as through retirement, but I can't help but wonder if that is true, or if it is the simple change in requirement of brain function makes it appear that way. The way we retain information may not be a natural process, but simply something that occurs out of need, and turns itself off when the need is not there.In other words, the brain, presumably the center of intellect, not merely the cause of it, may well determine depending on circumstances what type of information processing is called for. Note, for instance, that as much as we know, none of the miners in Chile went bonkers - I would have put money on one or two of them going crazy, simply from knowing they are locked in the mine, without water, food or power, with no way of getting out. Yet that seems to not have happened, and that has to have something to do with the brain. So if the brain shrinks less in elderly people who walk 32 blocks - curious how this is translated to miles, even though it would seem these folks are city dwellers - we must try and figure out what meachanism is at work here - commentators stating this is to do with exercise may be completely wrong, there is no reason I can see why exercise has anything to do with this phenomenon. Yes, it may well be that the brain is a muscle that can atrophy - but there is no evidence for this, and there are a million other possible reasons for this behaviour, and probably half a million impossible reasons to add to that.
It is probably important to analyze what the brain is used for, or perhaps I should say: how the use of the brain changes, during its lifetime.
After all, the brain has a vastly different function during infancy and childhood, compared with middle age, and compared with old age. Learning and storage of new information gradually becomes less important, as we age, but this does not mean the brain loses these capabilities. What probably happens is that the brain interface becomes more adept at finding and correlating information, as we age, when originally the brain probably has more of a "sponge" function, soaking up as much information as it can, to deal with the vast areas of unknown a human (or, indeed, a mammal) has to deal with. For example, it is really easy for a child to lean a foreign language, as it is learning language anyway, during childhood. The question (which, in my mind, isn't really unanswered) is whether or not the brain is programmed for "a language", or whether in fact there isn't any distinction between languages until adults get involved. As a child I learned Austrian dialect words before I knew what the formal German words were, but as far as I recall my young brain did not make a distinction between Bavarian/Austrian and "high German", or Hochdeutsch. I related, initially, pronunciations to the farmers in Fuschl am See, then to relatives in Karlsruhe, and there was no distinction between the two except for the fact that they were different people in different places, who spoke German. I do remember being astonished that our landlord's budgerigar in Vienna spoke German - IOW, I thought it was perfectly normal that the people spoke German, but not that the animals did. The only difference is that (I assume) I had been told the Viennese people would speak German, but hadn't been told about the animals. Think about it - a child's correlation with language may not be what you think it is!
So what where the Pakistanis trying to prove? Without their "support" the Taleban would torch all NATO supplies, not just a few tankers? That they have little or no control in their "tribal areas"? That they are right behind our alliance, and that this alliance benefits us more than we are willing to admit? You can go a hundred ways with what just happened at the Torkham border. The solution would be for everybody to pull out of Afghanistan and let them mess each other up as much as they like. I mean, I was wholly behind President Bush when he decided to go in, but we should have simply nuked the place to smithereens and gone home. What we are doing now only serves to confirm we're about as vulnerable as it gets, between the Taleban and the anti-American tribes and the German Islamists training there, c'mon, let's go home, there is absolutely nothing generals with Ph. D.'s can achieve in this theatre, beyond spending more of my hard earned greenbacks. Let's get out there and keep the Chinese happy, that will work better for our future, and they don't bomb things, either.
So there is the question: is Pakistan a U.S. ally or not? Or, perhaps, this is the question: does the United States have allies, and friends? At all?
You can see, from a political perspective, that we have not developed sufficient skills to deal with those that won't negotiate. They're out there. Cuba is probably the best example, but China, now economically and in terms of size more important than the United States, does a fine job as well, as does Pakistan, politically incompatible with the United States as it is a wholly and officially islamic country, created as such by the British when India gained its independence. Similarly, Iran, another islamic republic which thanks its existence to pro-American rulers who sparked an islamic revolt, does not negotiate, at least not in any way recognizable to Westerners. For the United States, which, unlike the European Union, has no borders with any diverging cultures, this is especially hard, since America itself does not negotiate very well, and as traders can get what they need from other countries now, puts itself in the margin. After all.... the guys to the left? Staffers at the local karaoke bar near my Beijing hotel, during roll call. Umm, did I mention Turkey? Bullies, or bulls? Today, BBC America's news broadcast shows some of the flood devastation in Pakistan's Sindh. The American broadcasters do not. But then, they only have half an hour, and so have to show reports on things that are really important.
What really surprised me on Saturday was the size and scope of the USA Technology and Engineering Festival in Washington - I was glad I got in the car and drove up there to take a look. It was packed - kids, families, and lots of random folk, tens of thousands. I took the picture on the left standing on Pennsylvania Avenue, right where Les Halles used to be - my favourite restaurant in D.C., it closed in 2008, when the building owner upped the lease. Fast forward to October 2010, nobody else seems to want to lay out that kind of money for an arguably ideal restaurant location, complete with outside seating, within walking distance of the J.W. Marriott, the Willard, and the White House, there is no new tenant. Go figure.There is a new. modern, incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, with British Army doctor John Watson freshly returned from - where else? - the Khyber Pass, a.k.a. Afghanistan, what goes around, comes around, I suppose. More at WETA, or your local PBS station. I personally don't think Benedict Cumberbatch is a good name for an a actor, but then again, neither is Minnie Driver (she is not in it, but he is). Give it a shufti, you won't regret it. I never thought I'd say this in earnest, but if you like Dr. Who, you'll like "Holmes", and I think the Beeb has done a very good job of transplanting this story into the present.
If you talk about "socialism", France, in the news with its widespread civil disobedience, is a very good example of what "Western socialism" is. France has one of the most advanced nationwide consumer data networks, begun by a socialist government when we were all futzing with 300 baud dialup terminals, some 78% of all of France's electrical power is generated using nuclear power plants (18% of the output is exported), giving the French consumer the cheapest power in the Western world, France has truly universal health insurance, among the lowest drug prices in the Western world, and, as advertised a lot these days, France's official retirement age is 60 - unheard of, right? All in a very Western, very capitalist, country, where it is customary for businesses to close during the lunch hour, no 20 minute break for an unhealthy-burger in France. And McDo' serves beer with your burger...
So the flipside is the sense of entitlement that gives rise to the civil disobedience in France. Yes, it is a very nice country to live in. No, I don't think having to carry ID 24/7, and being required to register your every move and partner and change in jobs with the central government is a particularly good thing. I recall my French wife (we married in New York) being really upset when I told her not to register me at the French embassy as her spouse - at the time, the French still required all French citizens to carry a French ID card, even though such is illegal in the United States. But if you register every citizen, it becomes posssible to have universal health care, it is part of what makes that possible, in France, Germany, Spain, Scandinavia, The Netherlands, Belgium. And why it is hard to very difficult in the United States, where the Personalausweis does not exist.
Somehow I am almost ahead of myself in terms of preparing for winter. You know how you tend to procrastinate, especially when the preparations are related to unpleasant things like colder weather? This year, it does not seem to bother me, and I am pretty much on target where cold weather prep is concerned. The pool is done, sand filter, particle filters and pump housing cleaned and drained, it will all be bone dry by the time the first frost rolls around. I've got enough wood for the winter, although I have to yet split much of it, and I have at least one more entire large oak tree down, but uncut, and plenty of other dead wood that still needs cutting and collecting. I am doing all that in such a way that I get daily exercise out of it, rather than a couple of weeks of hard work, then nothing for months. Like this, I have moved from my daily swim to fetching, carrying and processing wood, from there will progress to splitting and cutting, and that will get me right through the heating season, in terms of working out. All one needs to do is make sure there is some heavy physical work every day, and as one is inclined to "do that little bit extra", the discipline to stop and leave work for the next day. That is harder than it sounds, even if it does sound like a bad excuse for doing nothing - I have neighbours staring at me like I am crazy when they offer me a hand and I turn them down, then leave my full (2,000 lbs) cart of wood for collection and stacking the next day. Yet that is what the pros recommend - daily exercise, every day, does not have to be the heart pumping major exercise schema that gives rise to injuries and stuff.
You may have read the announcement where eminent UCAL physics professor Hal Lewis declares the science underpinning the global warming initiative a fraud - I equally believe global warming is real, but its causes are not the ones you read about, and we're not going to get control of our "carbons" by watching Al Gore movies and buying Toyota Prius vehicles - or, as is the trend today, the Nissan Leaf. That is the first all electric vehicle to go into mass production and mass sales, now that we know the all electric Chevy Volt is actually a gasoline/electric hybrid, they have done it again, the idiots, selling old technology under false pretenses - last time that happened the mortgage market collapsed. "Wind farms" are not going to do it either - wind is not at all a renewable resource. And there is no such thing as a "zero emissions" vehicle - electricity gets generated using mostly fossil fuel, we do not have the required excess peak capacity to shift the automotive world to electricity, and electricity is a really expensive fuel, for unexplained reasons.
I've more accurately measured performance and recovery rate of the AirTap
Hot water tank used: General Electric GE40M06AAG 40 gallon / heating elements disconnected
Water temperature setting (measured): 150° Fahrenheit (64° centigrade)
Well water temperature (constant): 50° Fahrenheit (10° centigrade)
40 gallon tank temperature after 1 shower: 105° Fahrenheit (40° centigrade)
40 gallon tank temperature after 1 hour recovery: 125° Fahrenheit (50° centigrade)
40 gallon tank temperature after 2 hour recovery: 135° Fahrenheit (60° centigrade)
full recovery under 3 hours.
Average fuel consumption equates to 1,269 Kwh/annum (by comparison: the Federal guideline for the same 40 gallon tank, using conventional electric heat, is 4,773 Kwh/annum, or 3.8 times as much). Using the same cost base, 10.65¢/kw, the annual cost to run the Airtap would be $135, a savings of $373. That means your payback on the Airtap is two years, and the cost of the Airtap and its installation may be tax deductible for you, which would reduce the payback to about one year. Mind, though, that if you do what I did - involve a contractor ($200) and replace the existing hot water tank ($300) - it is less rewarding. Ditto if you follow my advice and get a 70 or 90 gallon tank, which can set you back $800 to $1,000.
You are probably wondering (if you're not bored to bits already) why I am paying so much attention to the various uses of heat pumps, but I am, relatively speaking, new to heat pumps, my first real exposure came when I bought this house, which came with two, one for each floor. Since then, I've been wondering whether we are doing ourselves any favours by using four or five different technologies to heat and cool our food and living space. Seriously - some folks use heat pumps to heat, some use various types of gas, some use oil, some use electricity, and then there are the different ways of cooking food. My trips to China have demonstrated to me how efficient induction cooking is, and I just cannot help but wonder why we don't standardize on a few of these technologies. Standardize, as in, government mandate. I know that's heresy, probably "socialism", but I really don't see why we can't subsidize induction cooking, and geothermal heating and cooling, and make those technologies "preferred" - I mean, aren't we supposed to do something about the environment? Standardizing on electricity (which we seem to prefer for motor vehicles now) would be a smart move, and would mean a huge cost reduction in terms of the standardized volumes produced. No?
Typically, if you standardize on one particular type of generation, then throw all of your resources at it, you can come up with some pretty amazing technology, and some pretty impressive savings. To some extent, we're killing ourselves by using and developing too many technologies side-by-side, just look at the cellular marketplace, the Europeans spent the better part of a decade developing something that became GSM, then built it, and the whole world now uses GSM and its 3G/3.5G successor. Not rocket science, except when you look at it from the American battlefront, develop CDMA and then WiMax, and end up with multiple incompatible technologies that can't talk to each other. I know, I have said this 100 times, it is boring, but it remains true. And we remain unable to solve the problem, which only wastes money and resources, and has done for many years. If we really seriously believe that we must improve our efficiency, that global warming is caused by overconsumption of resources and inefficiency, we have no option but to begin to curb competition at the production level. Having ten vehicle manufacturers each use a different hybrid technology means you do the research and the development and the production ten times, when in fact you should be doing all that maybe once or twice. Sure, you can, as a manufacturer, invent what you like, but then your technology should be sold to somebody, maybe the government, and employed in all products that can use the technology. Think about it - the only reason the Chinese have been rendered rich is that we have them manufacture everything fifteen times, under fifteen diferent brand names, for fifteen different retail chains. Right?
T-Mobile offers something called WiFi calling , known technically as UMA, which allows a GSM mobile phone to make calls over wireless internet as if it was connected to the regular wireless GSM network. Great if you are in a dead zone, or underground, or in a hotel or office overseas that offers WiFi service (where your T-Mobile phone will behave as though it is in the United States!). UMA used to be offered on some cheap Samsung and Nokia phones, but today it is only offered on business style smartphones, like the Blackberry Bold 9700, which incur a monthly smartphone charge of $30 over and above the regular subscription.
I have managed to find some of these discontinued T-Mobile UMA handsets, the Samsung SGH-T739, new and unused, tested them, and am putting them on Amazon, find them here
Can't tell you how much I enjoy the maintenance chores that come with living out in the country. The picture on the left is my growing woodpile, I went through this much last winter, which was severe to the point I used twice as much wood as I had expected, but it is great exercise. And the picture on the right is the final backwash of the pool filter, the white stuff are the algae killed by the chlorine shock treatment I am giving the pool while closing it. Where in previous years I would simply put shock in the water, then close the pool and drain the filters, this time I am doing a chlorine pump cycle that lasts ten days. You can see the result, whatever was alive in the pool has died and been caught in the sand filter, one more cycle and I'll be done for the year. Teehee.
When I switched from DirecTV to Comcast cable, I gained quite a bit of HD, but lost BBC America. Only recently did I realize that moving my account one tier up would only cost me some $13 per month more, and give me back my Beeb, as well as some other nice stations, so I did. One programm(me ;) I particularly enjoy is the one hour news broadcast the BBC does specifically for the United States - I've always been very frustrated by the half hour of "World News" the main broadcasters here provide, but the BBC, which has the largest news organization in the world, really provides better news and more information, including U.S. centric stuff. when you have a chance, do watch or Tivo the BBC America news, it is worth it. They should webcast it for a couple of months, give everybody a taste.
On that note, you may have noticed the death of a British aid worker in Afghanistan, Linda Norgrove, who as it now turns out may have been killed by an American grenade during the firefight between the rescuers and her captors. Sad, but shit happens, thanks, Marines, for trying, but this leads me to ask why these "aid workers", who are killed and kidnapped on a regular basis, are even there? This is a war zone, where NATO troops are fighting battles with the locals, and Brits and Americans and Dutch and Germans go there to "do good", and in the process make themselves convenient targets for terrorists? Targets whose liberation or recovery we then have to pay millions of dollars for? Are these people insane? Whitefaces are not popular fror as long as we have the military occupying their countries. The military have medical and engineering boots on the ground, at least they can shoot back, but the concept that as a civilian you can go into a war zone, unarmed, unprotected, and "help", is asenine. It is crazy. We should have the military round all these people up, and ship them home, and give aid in the ghettos of Berlin and Newark, NJ. Do you have children or relatives who are aid workers in war zones? Would you please explain to them I really do not think they are at liberty to waste my tax dollars? Tell them war zones are off limits to do-gooders? Thanks.
I have to say that the reconstruction of my well water system has given me extraordinarily clean water. The last piece of the puzzle was the amount of calcite in the acid control tank - where I previously had the tank about half full (which required some 90 lbs of calcite, which sets you back around $170, partly because the stuff is heavy and incurs high shipping charges), adding another 45 lbs brought the tank to 70% full, at which point it began filtering much better. I guess you need a certain depth of calcite for the filter function to be optimal, this in combination with the 50 micron pre-filter, and the 5 micron post-filter, as well as a larger pressure tank, which helps give the well itself time to recover between pump cycles. As I said to my builder, Dan: "I can really do a good job on these installations now - unfortunately, the amount of work involved kind of precludes me from ever making a profit on this type of work". It is true - and one really wonders how many folks' health is affected by the bad quality of well water, and by the unnecessary chemicals unscrupulous contractors foist on their customers. One thing I did, experimentally, is move the pressure tank behind the pre-filter, so much of the crud the pump brings up from the well never gets to the tank. I found that the membrane in the original pressure tank was rotted through, and that tank had been installed directly behind the pump.
My well water repairs, and my hot water heat pump experiments, aren't so much domestic interests - they're scientific more than anything else. In the West, we tend to take hygiene and clean potable water for granted - go to the Unesco website, and to many others, and you find there are more places on Earth with "bad" water than there are clean water supplies. Most solutions tend to not work in the Third World, because the money is not there, nor is the basic understanding of hygiene. So one wonders how refrigeration of food and cleansing of water can be brought to what we think of as "backward" countries. Reading about the stomach problems athletes at the Commonwealth Games have - we travelers refer to it as "Delhi belly" or "Bali belly", it is simply cause by a lack of sufficient hygiene, improving in China and Indonesia, not improving in India, where national pride gets in the way - walk into the Bangalore railway station in the morning, smell the excrement of the people "living" there, and you know two things: India, as a country, is nowhere near "civilized" status, and the Indian government is ignoring even the basic tenets of national health.
Similarly, drive up the coast of the Philippine island of Cebu, and soon enough you pass a mountainside where thousands of migrants live in squalor, without running water or sewage systems, open your car window and the stench of excrement makes you retch. I can't say it any other way. Friends from New York ended up in hospital in India within a week of landing in their expat destination, and nobody there told them all they had was Delhi belly, something the medical staff at the hospital certainly knew.... but you get the idea, it would pass and their organism would adjust. That's stupid, and irresponsible, and not in the national interest of India, the Philippines, and other up-and-coming countries. These issues are not a matter of lack of resources, they signal an unwillingness to allocate funds and police what is, effectively, a risk to national health as well as international health, diseases can only be stopped at the source.
I haven't followed Fareed Zakaria
Thinking about J. K. Rowling
Anyway, watching, with much pleasure, the Harry Potter movies (I even have them on HD-DVD, a lot cheaper than Blu-Ray) I find that wonderful mix of Tolkien
This is generically the hard part when you're trying something in life - how long do you go on, when do you change course, I've always told my students and interns to be single minded, bloody minded even, if you have a dream, go after it and don't for a moment deviate from your path, don't get insecure, put blinders on and see just that one goal. It is easy to say, of course, because you hear about the J.K. Rowlings that make it, not about the ones that don't, and you don't necessarily know that the story that remains isn't a bit embellished (I didn't watch Oprah, either, never have).
If you need cheering up, here is People Magazine about J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books: 'Turned down by 12 publishers before one finally agreed to print the first book, Rowling was informed by an agent: "You'll never make money selling children's books."' Believe in yourself, and alles sal reg kom.
On that note, I was rather taken aback to hear that former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez felt he had to go off on Jon Stewart, with a clear reference to Stewart's Jewishness, I didn't know Stewart is Jewish, nor did I know Sanchez is Cuban. But to start complaining about discrimination when you've made it to CNN prime time anchor... the mind boggles. You get made fun of when you have a high profile, Rick. It is an accolade, it means you got somewhere.... Poquito chip on his shoulder, methinks.
I fumigate my house a couple of times a year, ever since I discovered there are dry foggers
It is very - unusual, I suppose is the word, my strong emotional pull towards Beijing and China. I walked into my local Chinese restaurant, today, and the Chinese music that was playing reminded me almost painfully of Beijing, as though I had a pang of homesickness. As one can't very well be homesick for a place one's never lived in, that does not make an awful lot of sense. And it is not the first time, either, I wonder if I should make a concerted effort to find a job in China after all. Strange. Nay, weird.
I wonder about my China
So no, I really do not have a clear idea why it is so attractive to me. If I think about it rationally, I should be able to find something nice right here in Washington, where my recent work history, home and my insurance and stuff are. I am getting a little old for this "haring around the world" stuff, or am I? Or is one never too old, which is what I would like to think? I like the excitement and the risk involved, I like to do things where it is not necessarily known whether "it's going to work" or not. That may sound strange, but it takes a particular type of personality to trigger a project and work to grow it, while adjusting to the myriad unknowns that go with a project. Some of us are better at that than others, it is a talent. And I am pretty good at this, proven, too, I've helped built two completely new telecommunications companies, and there was 9/11, of course, the best proof one could have of versatility-under-pressure - I saw quite a few people buckle around me, not for nothing did the company and the government send the counselors in, inside of a week. I guess the only way I would have to figure this one out is go there and do it, and analyze myself.
Strange though, how, with all of its might and prowess, and its demonstrable advances, China still behaves like an insecure bully, just look at the spat between Japan and China. While the Chinese hate the Japanese with a passion, they demonstrate this type of behaviour with others, as well, when in fact China is big and important enough to play the role of the wise old uncle, if it wants to. It is puzzling, this dichotomy - note how I observed, during my last trip (see xxxx), that the Chinese government really puts no effort in ensuring even its professional population learns to speak English, something we Dutch know you have to do, as a trading nation - you can't haggle with people whose language you do not speak. Curiously, Chinese computer technicians and engineers, at the mid-level, don't even speak English, something I have not encountered anywhere in the world.
If you watch the news intently, you'll see an amount of doom and gloom that is unparallelled, at least in my memory. I am not suggesting that anything is wrong with the reporting, but we need to urgently cheer up the population, and I don't think the long faces will do that. One wonders if our preoccupation with the economy - I don't mean now in particular, in America we always talk about money - is perhaps to blame. When the news is good, it is very good, etc. I seem to note that in other parts of the world folks are more laid back, and make more time for play, levity, and R&R, even with limited means.
Important? Sure. A large percentage of the reporting deals with people, like those that make up the Tea Party, who predict the future without any kind of proof that their predictions have any relationship to reality. Predicting is hard at the best of times, but marrying future occurrences to political developments makes no sense at all. There is no individual political party which has been consistently successful, or unsuccessful. My main worry is that we will not retain this president, and that a political sea change will bring a new president who will spend a large part of his or her administration undoing the Obama era changes, rather than progress with the tools in place. Four years is not enough - and there is ample proof of that - for major changes to have full effect, or even to gather enough data about their effect to adjust their functioning.
I mentioned the New York Philharmonic's 2010 opening concert on WETA, on September 25, below, it features a new symphony by Wynton Marsalis
Apart from putting some of my clutter on Ebay and Amazon, something I had not done before, going through my "assets" I discover a series of domain names
A quick update on the "fuel consumption" of my new AirTap
To complete the stats: at a drain of about 600 watts @ 115 VAC, the AirTap
Not much to report - I am job hunting in earnest now, I am putting some things on Ebay I didn't think of before, still working on the house, running back and forth between home and Washington, D.C. to do some medical tests and treatment, and it is time I started on the woodpile so I have the winter covered - last winter, if you recall, was so "winter" I went through what I had hoped would be two years' worth of firewood. Enough to get on with - I have plenty out there, but it needs cutting and splitting, my fall exercise when it gets too cold to swim.
Listening to/watching the New York Philharmonic's 2010 opening concert on WETA, focusing on jazz and Wynton Marsalis
Seriously shopping around for a position, I find I am ill prepared. I have no references - that is, I haven't asked anyone to be - I have no really up to date resume, and it goes on. After talking to some friends, A. made me write a sort of mission statement - problem is, how do you do that if you are as multi-disciplinary as I am? I build things, but during my career I have built servers as well as entire telephone companies - how do you represent that without sounding too much as if you think of yourself as Superman? Not that I am not super, but I have learned humility as my career went along, and I am no longer as noisy as I was 25 years ago. Was fun though ;) and not untrue.
At any rate, I managed to do all that, and I have managed to whittle down my "hardcopy" resume to something I think is manageable and readable. I see so many resumes from people with my kind of work history that are ten pages long, and that just does not work, you can't expect a recruiter or hiring manager to wade through a freaking book. What I have also done is file one online job application - I promised myself I would do that, first time I have applied for any job since sometime in the 1980s, getting hobbled a couple of times when I was asked to provide information I just did not have to hand. So, now I do, and I was able to complete one end-to-end today. Teehee. There was no question: "Have you ever fired someone face-to-face and escorted them off the premise?"... I have, I believe that if people in your department need to be let go, you have to do that yourself, and not run it off on one of your managers. It is part of one's responsibility, I think. Managing people is not always easy, and sometimes it is a downright bitch, and you have to do it all, to do the learning curve. Right?
The more I look at the press, Wall Street, business reporting, and even politics, the more I see an inclination to base trends and decisions on forecasts. By forecasts, I mean: hogwash. Varying from forecasts based on historical data that shows little commonality with today's society, to commentators and "analysts" who use conveniently available data without doing adequate research.
General Motors has announced it is going to Facebook-enable Onstar - I don't know if you've read the press release, but this is the amazing new technology we are rolling out, and the market actually responded. Never mind that Onstar is not available in 95% of world markets, and never mind Facebook serves no purpose of any kind in a motor vehicle - isn't the idea that we solve some of the energy problems the world is facing by getting people out of their cars? Isn't Facebook something you'd make available for long commutes? So the Germans provide electronics that can steer your car around obstacles and traffic jams, and the Americans provide electronics that let you update your AOL - oops, sorry, Facebook - page?
So we find ourselves in the peculiar circumstance that stock value is based on predictions and preconceptions - neither of which have to have anything to do with reality. As an example, if you had predicted Sony Corp. would make a huge killing with the Walkman, beginning in 1979, to be followed by Apple, Inc., which copied the Walkman concept and translated it into a fully electronic device, you'd have been laughed out of the boardroom - twice in a row.
What it boils down to? For me, simply that you cannot predict the future. Not on the basis of "what the CEO says", not on the basis of what the gifted analyst (yours truly) says, and now that we have ultimate communications, not even on the basis of reality. It is, today, perfectly acceptable to have a blogger post a rumour, have that picked up and reported as a rumour by some mainstream media, and be completely accepted as a possible future truth on the internet, driving stocks up or down at will. I have seen dozens of articles essentially stating RIM (Blackberry) is finished, only to end up this week seeing a gain of $1.46 a share, and an increase in handset sales (as indeed I have observed overseas). To me it just means that you really can't have it both ways, and that we need to start figuring out how to get reality in our reporting. I've seen this day in, day out, on the T-Mobile forums, which I no longer participate in - people come in posting complete fiction tales, and the moderators let them. Depressing, and completely useless.
Are you impressed by the hundreds of BP commercials that provide absolutely no information? Is that my money they are spending? Did we appropriately blame BP for a drilling accident, or will accidents happen, occcasionally? Is "arthritis pain" you can treat with over-the-counter "painkillers" a real condition? Is beating someone as hard as you can using padded leather gloves a real sport?
How do I get institutionally grumpy? The picture on the left shows you some of the filters in my well water plant, something I blissfully had no knowledge of until I looked into the plumbing in my house. Being a city slicker, water comes out of the tap, not the ground, and is fit to drink as delivered. Yah.
Then I find that the pressure tank in the house I bought has a ruptured bladder, and the owners bypassed the acid control tank, most likely to save money on calcite. So I start looking into what's supposed to be there. I find the stains in my toilet tanks, and the green stuff in sinks, are due to, respectively, crap that gets pumped up from the well, and copper being leached out of my pipes by the acidic water that comes up. And I find there are lots of different water treatment and filter options that you can buy and install, and that builders often cut corners, and "water treatment specialists" install acid control that makes water so hard they need to sell you a water softener installation. And I find that the taps for the garage and the garden hose use treated water, as opposed to "raw" water from the well, depleting your expensive chemicals and filters every time you wash the car or water the roses, neither of which care a lot about PH.
So, I now have plastic rather than copper where the well comes up, I have a 50 micron filter that takes the worst crud out of the water before it gets to my (new, big, vertical) pressure tank, I have a nice acid control tank with a lot of expensive calcite in it (which, as it turns out, is crushed marble, that is how acid is controlled, it slowly dissolves the marble...), and a 5 micron filter behind that to catch anything that comes through the other filter and the tank, as well as any half dissolved calcite that gets into the house water system. My PH is a nice steady 7.2 (rather than the 4.4 water I measured coming out of the ground, which had actually eaten right through the 10 year old copper!), and I do not need a water softener, as there is little "hardness" (which would be the dissolved calcite) in the water, as I have not put any corosite in, which is what they experts want you to add to your calcite if your PH is low - and I don't find that I need the corosite, I did buy some but haven't used it. Part of the problem? My older hot water tank had a lot of deposit in it, there had been no effective filtration, and that slowly got dissolved and pushed into the water system. The new hot water tank sits behind all of the filters, and as it does not have electric heating elements, it doesn't solidify and clump particles that are in the water. Teehee. But just guess how much you pay for things that don't work, and how little expertise many of these "specialists" really have.
If, like me, you are on well water, you and yours don't get fluoride in your drinking water, an essential ingredient to help prevent tooth decay. A while ago I noticed a new type of Listerine, Listerine Total Care, in the shops, and when looking at the label, I found it to contain fluoride (as well as other goodies, most mouthwashes don't). I think it is a brilliant way to supplement your fluoride intake, especially since, unlike water, you don't have to drink it, and you don't have to get the very expensive prescription only topical fluoride solution you rinse with once a month (I never do, and don't like its strength). So you might want to give this a try, especially if you're a Listerine addict anyway. You do have to avoid food and drink after rinsing with it, for half an hour. If it is not in stock locally, you can bulk order it from Amazon
Power consumption of my new AirTap
So in order to still have the comfort of abundant hot water, the ability to "process" a few people through the shower quickly, early in the morning, and a bit later do some quick laundry (American washing machines take hot water from your home supply, after all), you ought to replace your old 40 or 50 gallon tank with one that is much larger - 70, maybe even 90 gallons. If you do that, you do not need to have a tank with ancillary (electrical or gas) heating, as you'll have enough hot water for the entire family without fast recovery. As a guideline, the Airtap heats my 40 gallon tank to 140 degrees (Fahrenheit), from cold, in four hours. That won't cover even a two person household during the rush hour, let alone one with more "consumers" - and please take into consideration that women bathe using much hotter water than men do. You need to take into account the Airtap is noisy, as well, something that can be an issue if the hot water tank is installed in a closet on the main living floor of your house, something I have seen in several houses, recently. Additionally, it generates cold air and plenty of condensate, both of which you need to syphon off somewhere.
From an engineering perspective, energy savings using a heat pump to cool or heat anything are really easy to explain. Conventional heating elements and the type of flame you get when you burn gas or oil are only capable of creating relatively small amounts of very high heat, in the region of 1,000 and more degrees Fahrenheit. When you use that kind of heat to warm something up to 100 degrees, you can only do that by moving large amounts of cold substances past the medium you are using to transfer the heat, usually copper or brass or some other kind of metal. If you don't cool the medium effectively, it will melt or catch fire or do something else unpleasant. Basically, you have to "turn off the heat" way before the heating process has reached an efficient stage. The heat is high, the volume low.
Not so with the heat pump. One side of the heat pump uses decompression of a previously compressed gas or fluid to absorb heat from the environment, heat that is released again when the gas or fluid is allowed to cool down in a heat exchanger. There isn't a huge amount of heat involved here, but, depending on the size of the compressor, the heat pump can move large volumes of heat from one place to the other. And that means you're in heat ranges that are compatible with what humans need, fluids or gases that are warm (rather than converted to steam), or cool (rather than cold or frozen). The volume is high, the heat is low. And this process is far more efficient (a.k.a. cheaper) than the other one. You can visualize it by remembering that an electric heating element or gas or oil burner ususally is only four or six inches in length, while the heating element of the Airtap heat pump is some 12 feet (3.6 metres) long. It requires a much larger surface area to produce the same amount of heat, and partly because it is distributed throughout the medium you're heating (water in a tank) it can heat much more efficiently.
Boarding a train at Leeuwarden, I discover my U.S. T-Mobile Blackberry has logged onto a Dutch T-Mobile WiFi network that turns out to be part of the train, rather than the station. I am not supposed to have access to the overseas TMO networks without paying extra, so I am not sure whether the rules have changed or whether the combination of my international Blackberry email account with the Hotspot subscription maybe caused this, at any rate, it is convenient, since this is 2+ hour train ride.
Having spent some time acquainting my nephew with some of the new technologies, both in the realm of photography and computing (he is a photographic artist), there is the forever discrepancy between the way the more "socialist" cultures introduce and manage new technologies, and the way in which "we capitalists" do it. If it helps: the socialists win every time. They have larger networks, their networks inter-operate, they introduce new technologies faster than we do, and their operators make more money. It doesn't matter whether you look at Western Europe or China, they do stuff we can't even ask our carriers about. Unless you can point me to Vermont or Alabama commuter trains that have 3G networks, I don't know that we have a prayer on these people, and we can't even use the "these are small countries" argument any more, what I see here in The Netherlands they do Europe wide.
Back in Amsterdam, it is a gorgeous balmy autumn afternoon, my sister and I walk her dog so I can test my new telephoto zoom lens
I have kind of taken a break, and spent a few days with relatives in the Northern Netherlands, in the picture I am snarfing a raw herring at a market stall. I understand eating raw herring is something that horrifies most Americans - especially those who don't realize oysters on the shell are more than raw, they are actually alive when you eat them, and sushi contains raw fish, at least if it is good sushi - but it is totally delicious, albeit a bit high in fat and cholesterol. It is especially a treat for me since the premium herring they sell here is no longer exported, and really does not keep or freeze well, so this is the place.
Almost September, August in The Netherlands is chilly and wet, if I needed anything to remind me why I don't live here any more, but Leeuwarden is friendly and villagey, in ways I am no longer used to (and I never lived in smaller towns to begin with), it is fun and relaxing. I mostly relax people watching and realizing the enormous difference between small town Europe and anywhere else, ancient city centers - the weighing house in the marketplace here was built in 1590, after the one built in 1483 burnt down, and is still the core of the city center - around which the city grew for hundreds of years, layer by layer, like a thousand year onion. This kind of thing is probably special for your average American, but if you, like me, grew up among all this centuries old stuff, it isn't that special if you don't think about it.
This is a curious aspect of cultural understanding - Europeans, Asians, and Africans, have a homegrown realization they have been on their land for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, our ancestors are buried (more or less) where we live, it is all connected. It is all connected, the latest 3G service offering with the wooden ships that carried my ancestors to both the East Indies and to the Americas. Even when in the United States, living in Manhattan especially, I am all too aware it is a town my ancestors began (so to speak), and some of them may well be buried in the 17th century cemetery at the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow
Again, this isn't rampant anti-Americanism, but please don't tell me you're going to work on high speed trains, and then make $18 billion available nationwide - that won't even build one line, the 19 mile state of the art maglev line that connects Shanghai with its international airport cost some $1.8 billion to construct, and that train is based on existing German technology. More importantly, the two main profitable high speed rail networks - the Japanese Shinkanzen, and the French TGV - have been running since 1964 and 1981, respectively, they are profitable, and - most importantly - they come from countries that have a train manufacturing industry. Not only do we not have such an industry, I am seeling American "experts" opining high speed rail is "too expensive". I guess you've not been to the new Beijing and Shanghai stations and railway lines, built by - guess - French and German engineers. I guess they know how to do this, and we don't?
It was a strong realization I had when I first came to this country - in Europe, we spend years researching, planning, preparing and writing plans before we even build a prototype, in the United States we like to "build a 747 during takeoff" as a CEO I worked for put it, talking about a phone company we built. And he was right, and we do do that, successfully.
But that picture has changed. Europe has developed, through the European Union, additional ways of financing ventures, and there are plenty of examples of successful European products in use the world over. The predominant mobile telephpony technology, GSM, is European, somewhere between 80 and 90% of all mobile telephony systems worldwide are based on GSM, one of the two leading high speed train technologies, that of the TGV, is French - even Amtrak's Acela is based on this technology, although for some unfathomable reason the enabling aspect of the TGV, dedicated track, the United States did not buy, so the Acela is unable - dig that, unable - to run at high speeds (defined as the maximum achievable speed of the scheduled TGV trains in Europe, 250 mph, where the Acela can handle no more than 150 mph on Amtrak's existing track). In Europe, the train competes successfully with the plane - in the USA, it does not.
What bothers me most is that we in the United States don't seem to learn from "getting it wrong". Our last technological sucess story, that of Microsoft Windows, is likely to remain our only one. Yes, Android is doing well, but the majority of the world's phones, and the majority of the world's smartphones, are made by Nokia and RIM, neither is an American company, neither uses Android, and both have their own operating systems, finely integrated with their own hardware. Yes, Apple makes nice products. No, Apple does not have a commanding presence in the international marketplace - it does not compete on price.
And herein lies the secret - Apple satisfies its stockholders, its followers, it manages all of its operations in ways that maximize returns. From, a business perspective, that is completely wonderful - but if you need to ensure that governments and enterprises have secure, reliable communications, it is not so good. Then, you really only have the one choice - Blackberry, a company at least as singleminded as Apple is, with one difference - like BMW, it is driven and run by engineers, who do what they do best, innovate and create.
I hope you don't find this too much of a weird jump, but I am taking you from the just discussed hot water supply heat pump to the Russian space capsule. Why? Because they are both very good examples of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" technologies. Think about it - our vaunted high technology Space Shuttle is going the way of the Dodo and the Concorde, while the Soyuz is ferrying American "astronauts" to the International Space Station. Not because it is cheaper, no, we do this because the United States, today, does not have anything capable of flying into Earth orbit and back. Nothing. Nada. Not even a freakin' Ford Focus on steroids. Nothing. And nobody has gotten fired over this small oversight.
The thermal water heater I just installed (see my August 12 entry, below) is based on the air conditioner, first commercialized in 1902. That Soyuz capsule first flew in 1968. The very efficient clean burning EPA Wood Stove
I am saying is that in many cases, mature technologies offer reliable longer-term solutions and should not be ignored when we are looking for problem solutions. I have been amazed, recently, by the level of ignorance in the American mobile telephony forums, having had a close look at several of them with T-Mobile, the company whose cellular service I use. In particular with the advanced "smart" phones using the Google Android operating system, the level of misunderstanding and misinformation by its users beggars belief. The vast majority of people posting in these forums have absolutely no clue of what they are talking about, no expertise, no real understanding of the device they're using, and what is even more amazing, they have absolutely no desire to learn about that device, simply copy misunderstandings from one website to another, spearheaded by people that post on purportedly "expert" websites, whose experience generally ranges from little to none - unless you accept that using a handphone you've never seen before for 24 hours entitles you to "expertise". A handheld computing device running a crimped version of Linux designed by a database management company shouldn't really be that hard to understand, should it? Unless, of course, you know nothing about search engines, UNIX, spread spectrum radio or analog/digital conversion.
How far off base these folks really are you can see in this New York Times article, note the comments from Deborah Hopkins, Citigroup's "innovation officer", whatever that is. She moved from Citigroup's traditional base, New York City, where their development labs were packed in a tall green building in Brooklyn for many years, to Silicon Valley, the one place on Earth where innovation isn't done any more. Innovation, today, is done in China, India, Hong Kong, and Singapore. It is done by people in the remaining growth markets, which are for now all in Asia, Africa bringing up the next phase. Apart from anything else, Americans aren't particularly adoptive of new technologies, and apparently Ms. Hopkins is unaware that most manufacturers (American ones too!) introduce new products outside of the United States first - some never even make it here, as they're not always well suited for the American consumer.
So not only do we not have a spaceship that replaces the Shuttle, we haven't resurrected the manned capsules we used to send astronauts to the moon in, the only difference being that the Soviets kept them in service, and we put them in the Smithsonian (the Soviets did too, apparently they decided one does not exclude the other). I don't mean to create a long list of "American negatives", but these are things we used to be able to do, right? How is it that the Russians, who went through a recession much worse than we did, when they lost Communism, still are able to launch major booster rockets and put manned capsules in orbit - no, better, they have fully automated capsules, a technology spun off to deliver cargo to the space station, as well as a rescue capsule for the researchers that are on board of the ISS. The Chinese Shenzou capsule? Based on Soyuz, not on Apollo. Then I look at this AirTap
Why am I griping? I personally came to this country with a purpose, a goal, moving here from the UK in 1985, part of the British brain drain, when thousands of British entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists fled Thatcherite Britain for the United States. I came to a country where anything was possible, where "we make boyhood dreams come true", where there were endless possibilities and rivers of money to make "it" happen. And I participated, built, helped make some of that magic happen, helped dream. But now I am on the other side of that particular run (not my first run, not my last) and I find that America seems to have lost its way. It's bogged down in partisan bullshit, mudslinging, the worst racism I have seen in decades, multinationals losing rivers of money attempting to consolidate their positions - remember the '80s, the '90s, when we went "out there" to start new enterprises and spread our technologies? Guess what - we sold the enterprises, others are reaping the benefits, and we wasted the money back home expanding markets that had been stagnant for years, markets that would implode. Now, the latest technologies aren't introduced here any more, and the latest Buick is designed and built in Germany and sells very well - in China, while IBM is moving some of its American developers to work in its labs in ... India. Note my BlackBerry Bold 9700
Don't get me wrong - I appreciate what President Obama is trying to do, in boosting the economy. But in order to have an economy, you've got to have something to sell. So we sold education. Now, the students have all gone home, and they don't need us any more. They are rolling their own America.
As I mentioned recently, I ordered the AirTap