I donated platelets this morning so I'm running a little bit behind. I'm also running out of movies to watch while I'm down there, particularly since we started our Netflix subscription. As a result, I ended up watching "So I Married an Axe Murderer." It wasn't as good as I remember, possibly because all of the really good lines from the movie have been repeated so often that they've lost most, if not all of their impact. Fortunately I had the foresight to take a book with me, so between the two I was adequately occupied. The book was "Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.
I was reading the part of the book about the Civil War and Reconstruction during the movie and I have to say that I have vastly more empathy for the Confederacy than I did before reading it. Which is not to say that I had none previously, just that I have much more now. If you have any Scots-Irish blood in your veins (like me), I would highly recommend the book. I do agree with some of the criticism I read that it's got something of a narrow focus and hits the same point too many times, but I still am enjoying the book immensely. Oh and I'm off on Monday, so I won't be blogging either.
Friday never comes soon enough
Ross
Every Thursday I have a "security meeting." I'd tell you what goes on in the meetings, but if I did, the men in black would instantly arrive to drag me off to a windowless room with bright lights and proceed to smack me around with a sock full of pennies, before killing me to ensure my silence and burying me in the endzone at the local football stadiam a la Jimmy Hoffa. What was I talking about again? Oh yeah, the security meeting.
See, the biggest advantage of being part of the security team is that you're sort of above the law. You're the cop who can speed, the politician who makes the laws, the brutal dictator who can declare himself dictator for life, crushing all opposition in his tiny banana republic and sending all the dissedents to jail where they'll never be seen again. Okay, maybe I don't have quite that level of power, but I am free from some of the onerous regulations that the rest of my co-workers have to deal with.
Above the law
Ross
Last week sometime I promised you a rant on DDT, or more specifically the mis-guided ban of DDT. First, it's important to know how I got on this kick. It was a couple of weeks ago and I was watching "Guns, Germs and Steel" on PBS -- it's a series based on the book of the same name by Jared Diamond. And there was a scene in this particular episode where he visits a hospital for people suffering from malaria. It's a gut-wrenching scene, particularly when they pan over to show the collection of infant-sized body bags. And of course at some point they start reciting the statistics; I forget exactly the number they quoted, but here's one to try on for size: an average of 2,800 children die every day from malaria in Africa.
So, of course, this is where the DDT argument comes in. I had already heard the DDT ban referred to as the "greatest crime of the century," but this scene inspired me to do some more research. One of the best sources I came across was the DDT FAQ at Junkscience.com. I knew DDT was banned in the US, but I wasn't sure what the status of it was in Africa. It turns out that the WHO allows it to be sprayed indoors, but doesn't allow widespread use outside. But of course environmental groups are opposed to even this use. But regardless of what the WHO says, most African countries are too poor to afford any large scale DDT campaign of their own, and with all of the industrial countries firmly in the "DDT is bad" camp, there's no chance of them paying for it.
Of course, DDT does have some harmful side effects. It does take an exceptionally long time to break down, which means it lasts a long time. This seems to be one of the principle things that freaks out the environmentalists, and I admit when they find DDT in breast milk it causes a visceral reaction in me as well, but there is nothing in this world that is wholely without negative consequences. I mean, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a great example of this (I understand that it is also found in breast milk). The point is, fine, DDT has some negative side affects, we'll list those under the "Con" column, but under the "Pro" column you have to list untold human suffering and thousands of deaths every day. So to convince me at least that the DDT ban is a good thing you are going to have to come up with something awfully impressive to put under that "Con" column.
Rachel Carson beware!
Ross
I'm not sure what it is about Mondays. Perhaps it's a self-fulfilling prophecy: you expect Mondays to be bad, so they are. I think I may take off next Monday and try to break the curse. In any case, that's why I didn't post an entry yesterday, not that anyone noticed. :( Getting into the technical nitty-gritty of the problems yesterday would bore the snot out of you, but there is an interesting story in there nonetheless, which I will tell you.
So yesterday was my Grandma's 93rd birthday. It was scheduled for six o'clock in Ogden, about an hour away for those unfamiliar with Utah. Of course, because 5 o'clock is rush hour you have to leave by around 4:30 to be sure of making it to Ogden by 6:00. So as soon as we started having problems yesterday I began to question whether I would be able to leave early enough to make it to the party. I figured that if I left work by 4:30 (which would put me home around ten to five), that it would still make sense for the family to wait for me, otherwise I would send them on without me. At 4:25 (twenty-five minutes after I had planned on leaving) everything was working and it looked like I would make it to the party after all.
I was two minutes away from home when work called and asked me whether I was sure my stuff was working when I left. I told them that it was working when I left, but I would check it from home. Well, as it turns out the network guys, after everything was working, had decided to try one more thing, and of course it once again, as we like to say, "broke the world." So I had to turn around and go back to work while my family went to the birthday party without me. I have managed to extract some revenge. I've managed to evoke a substantial amount of guilt in the network guy primarily responsible for trying "one more thing" by telling him that the birthday may have been my last chance to see grandma alive and if she dies before I can see her again it will be all his fault.
If we didn't laugh at other people, what would we laugh at?
Ross
I felt pretty good about yesterday's entry. The entire thing was cohesive, it flowed well and there was even a little punchline at the end. Bearing my feelings out to a certain extent, it also got a fair number of comments, so of course this leaves me in an ackward position today, because how do you follow something like that? In the past my policy has been that when I hit my high point to retire, but I don't think that's the answer and I don't actually think that yesterday was the high water mark either (speaking of which, have you heard that Rita has already breached the New Orleans levees?) So the weary trudge continues.
I have had some complaints by people getting the blog via the e-mail distribution list, that they miss being able to post in the comments section, so I'm trying something out. Apparently websense does not consider www.direkobold.com to be the same as blog.direkobold.com, so whereas the first is filtered, the second is not. So I went ahead and added blog.direkobold.com as an alias for www.direkobold.com and tried it out. I made it past websense, and was able to read the blog just fine, but the automatically generated comment links still point to www.direkobold.com, so I still haven't quite solved the problem, but I'm getting closer. I just need to track down where in the blog configuration the URL is coded. I've already changed it in the obvious places.
I actually have a huge rant on the DDT ban I've been preparing and a great story about a stinky co-worker, but both of those will have to wait until next week, because I'm out of time. For now I leave you with a link to a graph of all the projected paths of Rita based on the 14 different models they used. Cool stuff.
Ready for the weekend
Ross
The other night I was watching TV and I got the premiere of "My Name is Earl." I have to say that I really enjoyed it, but already I'm uneasy. I've been through this cycle before: I hear about a show and it sounds good, so I start watching it from the beginning. I get hooked. The critics love it, and eventually so do I.
Then there's the glorius honeymoon where the show still enjoys the full support of the network and new episodes are released every week, but before you know it the hard work of making a show last sets in and the first problems begin to appear. You start reading phrases like "it doesn't hold on to enough of its lead-in audience" or it gets bumped for a special "Dancing with the Stars: Disco Madness." Before you know it, critics start calling it "the best show no one watches," which might as well be the signature on the death warrant, but you continue to hope, and then seemingly against the odds it is renewed for a second season.
But of course, because the network has such little faith in the show and reality shows are so cheap, they don't re-run the show at all during the summer (many shows were only discovered by the public during the summer. I think Cheers and Gilligan's Island both fall into this category), so by the time the new season rolls around, no one remembers the show, except me. After two or three episodes its future is so bleak that you're just hoping they'll air all the shows they actually filmed, but most of the time even that doesn't happen, and the show quietly dies. I guess the point of all this is that I'm afraid to love again.
Pining for the warm accepting embrace of my television
Ross
I'm kind of bummed that no one took the time to congratulate me on hitting 600 entries. It's somewhat depleted my desire to continue writing, at least for today. This isn't helped by the fact that I don't have much of any consequence to write about.
Enervated by apathy
Ross
I set a new personal record yesterday for simultaneous bad things happening. In three separate unrelated events, I lost two servers and corrupted over half of the website. Fortunately, the tools to recover from all of these catastrophes were easily available (though I was not always sure of that which created a whole seperate level of stress and anxiety), and though I had to stay a couple hours late, by the time I went home everything was operating normally. I was going to use all this as an excuse for why I forgot to mention that it was my 600th entry yesterday, but then I realized that I posted my blog yesterday before the (excuse my French) "shit hit the fan."
One of the things which has gotten worse and worse the longer I've been posting is the spam comments. What I really should do is update my software and include one of those, are-you-a-human tests, but last I checked, Moveable Type wanted money to upgrade, and it's always been pretty low on my list of priorities in any event. Besides, it's simple enough to just mass delete any comment with a URL attached, which is how I generally seperate the spammers from the legitimate posters. Of course, occasionally, as they say in the business, you get a "false positive."
Yesterday I posted a huge story about a piece of art being censored. My brother-in-law (one of many) posted an excellent response, but apparently he included a URL (presumably to his blog), and as a result my crude methodolgy for deleting spam removed that comment. I'm sure that the irony of deleting a post about censorship has not escaped you, and I actually feel a certain amount of shame about it, even though it was completely unintentional and entirely without any sort of malice.
I haven't talk a lot about Katrina, mostly because I feel that it's very well covered territory. One of the issues that comes up over and over again is whether Katrina was caused by global warming. I would be in the camp that would say that that's such a horribly complicated question that saying "Katrina was caused by global warming" with any degree of certainty is impossible. However, there have been some studies on the subject and that at least is interesting.
Brimming with skepticism
Ross
Where I work they recently took a corner and designated it as an "Art Space." The idea is that anyone can sign-up to display their art there for two months. A good friend of mine here at work was the first to sign up and has been displaying his photos for the last month and a half. A week ago he swapped out the photos. One of the new photos showed two men (one of them shirtless) in an obvious display of affection. At this point I don't think anyone would have batted an eyelid, but maybe I'm wrong, but then he went ahead and added a caption, "Until all of us are free, none of us are free."
By the time I heard about it on Tuesday afternoon, the legal department had become involved and my friend the artist had been exchanging e-mails the whole day with the head of Human Resources. I bumped into him on my way home and we spent about a half an hour discussing it in the parking lot. I told him that it was that caption that put it over the line, that it took what was a reasonably tame artistic statement and made it into a fairly confrontational political statement -- which most companies are going to want to avoid. The counter-example I gave him is what if someone wanted to put up a picture of an aborted fetus and caption it, "The power of choice," then what grounds would the company have, after allowing his picture, to reject this one?
Anyway we went back and forth for a while before going our separate ways. That night I guess he thought about it quite a bit, with my words still ringing in his ears (okay, maybe I'm taking too much credit) and finally decided to take the picture down. Well, when he went in Wednesday morning to do just that he found that someone had taken a big piece of cardboard, tucked it behind the top frame and then folded it over so that it covered the picture. Well, he took it down and told the person in charge of the art space that he had done so and then mentioned the cardboard. Well, then the director went on the war path and posted a letter in the vacant space addressed to the person who had taken it upon himself to censor the piece. In the letter she mentioned that the piece had been "defaced" which wasn't technically true, so then my friend decided to put up his own letter, mentioning that no damage had been done to the piece. Overall, quite the exciting week.
In other news, North Korea has agreed to give up its nukes. Yeah, right...
Buried in cynicism
Ross
My wife is leaving me. It's time for the annual trip to Park City with all the women-folk. They start off with a nice dinner tonight and then return to their condo for an evening of relating the faults of their husbands before retiring early so that they can be prepared for a big day of non-stop shopping at all the factory stores. Of course, you would expect that they would take the kids, all those women together would have no trouble with them, but apparently leaving the kids is part of the appeal. I'm not quite as apprehensive as I have been in years past. The kids are older and less clingly though there have been some signs of illness; hopefully it will turn out to be nothing.
There's been this interesting story play out at work over the past week, but as I look at the clock it doesn't look like I'll have time to relate it, so I guess it will have to wait until Monday. I have my last of the big meetings this afternoon and then after that a meeting to discuss the meetings, plus I have to be home a little bit early so that my wife can leave town. Overall, it's going to be a busy afternoon. In news, we have yet another group of scientists telling us that global warming is past the point of no return. Which if you think about it, is actually good news. If we're past the point we can do anything about it, then what's the point of trying to do anything about it. Scrape all the emission standards, tear up Kyoto, emit as much CO2 as you want, we're past the point of no return...
Alone in the dark
Ross
I had a doctor's appointment this morning, and we're tracking my cholesterol. So far it's still high, but it has come down since we last looked, so for now we've decided to not go on any expensive drugs, which is probably a good thing. I also got my ears washed out while I was there. Man, was that painful. I guess it's my fault for complaining that my ears hurt. It's probably from listening to loud music on my headphones...
In the world of science it appears that Ceres, the largest asteroid, is getting a fresh look. A recent article in Nature suggests that Ceres may have a significant amount of water on it. I imagine that this theory will take quite a while to be confirmed, but of more immediate concern is that it once again throws open the question of what a planet is. I think I'm in the camp of people who thinks that things that Pluto should not be considered a planet.
This just in! Early reports suggest that Britney Spears is considering naming her boy Preston. This is my number one son's name and it pains me to see it appropriated by a celebrity. Why can't she stick to names no one wants, like Apple (Gwyneth Paltrow) or name them all George (like George Foreman)?
Searching for the promised land
Ross
Just about every afternoon this week I have a three hour meeting with a different CMS (Content Management Software) vendor. I'm not precisely sure exactly what it is about meetings that saps my will to live, but the effect is undeniable. My current theory is that it's boredom. I'm reasonably sure that if I could bring a book to read that the meeting would be just fine, but mostly people expect me to pay attention and take notes. The latter activity does provide some respite, since I can pretty much write down anything in my notebook and no one will care, though in the past I have gotten in trouble for some of my more ambitious doodles, particularly the ones that required borrowing the notebook of the guy next to me to use as a straight edge.
These meetings, combined with the interviews I've been attending for a new position in our group, has left me with very little time to handle the flood of minor content changes which have been piling up on my desk since the lady who is normally in charge left for Germany. Many of the changes I found in a huge pile on my keyboard Monday morning, presumably tossed there as she ran through the building on her way to the airport. Fortunately the new spam filter we put in at work over the weekend has been a godsend. I went from 500 spam messages a day to about a half dozen. And so far we haven't had a single complaint of a false positive.
Well, those two paragraphs were pretty boring and I don't know that I really have anything better in store for the last paragraph. As my wife has long warned me about, too much loud music on the headphones can be bad for your hearing. Apparently many people are concerned that the hearing loss we're seeing at the moment is just the tip of the iceberg. That's all for now, folks.
What did you say again?
Ross
Sometimes I post something and I think that it will generate some comments, and I get nothing (yesterday would be an example of that) and sometimes I post something which I think won't get any comments (there was a short entry a few weeks ago that was an example of that) and it gets quite a few. I guess the point is that, much like Mark Twain (or so I hear), I'm stylisticly tone-deaf. I can't tell which of my stuff is good and which is bad, but rather like the monkey at the zoo, I hurl crap at passersby and hope that I occasionally hit someone.
I took the family to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory last night. I liked it quite a bit, especially the Oompa Loompa songs. I've heard lots of unfavorable comparisons between this version and the older version with Gene Wilder. I've only seen the older version once, and I can't really remember that much of it, but the impression I got was that it was a mediocore movie. As my wife and I discussed it, she concurred and mentioned that for her it stemmed from reading the book first. That was the case with me and I wonder if people who like the Gene Wilder version better than this version are people who've never read the book?
As a finale, I was going to link to an article on Slashdot about some students who had managed to recover 96% of the keystrokes in a 10 minutes typing session using only a recording. (Rhere is a link to their research paper available.) This method of cracking passwords does require a certain level of access, but it goes to show how so much of our security is weakened because of the human element.
Chief cook and bottle-washer
Ross
Today I had my blog all but done and the browser crashed, hard. It wouldn't even let me back in, it kept telling me my profile was already in use, and this is even after I rebooted... weird. In any case, let's see how much I can put out there in the 5 minutes I have before my interview.
I gave a talk on obedience yesterday in church, and for some reason I decided to tell them about the famous experiment Stanley Milgram did on obedience to authority back in the 60's. I'm not sure how well it went over, but my oldest daughter was intrigued and asked me several questions. I explained as best I could and then showed her a video I had found on the subject. It was probably more information then she wanted.
I heard about the Milgram experiment, along with a couple of others in a psych class I took in college. One of the other very interesting experiments involved peer pressure. The subject was taken into a room, ostensibly to review a video. On his way back into the room he would pass a man working on a high ladder. About ten minutes into the movie he would hear the man fall. In half the cases he was alone and in that situation the subject would go check on the man 80% of the time. The other half of the time he would be paired with an actor who would look up, briefly, at the sound of the fall, but then go back to work. In this case the subject would go check on the man only 20% of the time.
Research like this into what has become known as the Bystander Effect was prompted by the murder of Kitty Genovese. Well that's it, I'm out of time. Till tomorrow...
Full of psychological zeal
Ross
I had my blog mostly typed up and it just wasn't going where I wanted it to, so I started over. Of course, now I have nothing to say. I did come across a very interesting column today in the Straight Dope. The article might be too much for the squeamish but the pursuit of science has always required a strong stomach.
Swinging into action against evil
Ross
The second Thursday of the month is always a pain for me. See, that's the day when we have our monthly IT staff meeting. Directly after that (and held every Thursday) is the Security meeting. Add in the daily meeting I have at 8:10, and you quickly arrive at a situation where I barely have time to clean the spam out of my inbox before 11:30. For awhile Thursday was my day to donate platelets, so as you can imagine on those Thursdays I didn't get anything done. I guess the upshot of all this is that I don't have a lot of time to post. I suppose that's good news for all my readers.
I did read an interesting article about XBOX Live, over on Slate. I can definitely say it convinced me to keep my kids away from it for awhile. Course, at the moment my kids are still limping along on an original Nintendo. At the current rate of upgrades they should be getting an XBOX about the time they leave for college. Though I think if I play up the "I could play games with them" angle of the console, my wife might conceivably relent earlier than that.
All meetinged out
Ross
The big news is that I finally heard back on the WoTC Novel Open Call. It was a rejection letter. I can't say I'm surprised, but I can't say that I'm not disappointed either. As I cast about for a reason why it was rejected (other than just poor writing and a bad plot), I can see where it may have been too close to the D&D based novels they already publish. Also, the fact that it was only the first of a very long series couldn't have worked in its favor either. I've often thought that what I really need to do if I'm serious about being a writer is write a stand-alone novel, sell that and then pitch a series. I really think it's unlikely that any publisher (regardless of what they say) is going to commit to a series from a first-time author.
There are plenty of positives to be found in the experience. I'm a lot closer to having a finished novel than I was one year ago, I have more experience in submitting stuff, I have another rejection letter to add to my collection, and my inflated ego is now a little closer to matching reality. The biggest positive has more to do with my laziness than anything actually positive: that would be that I don't have to spend 10 frantic days wrapping everything up and furiously polishing out all the imperfections. The negatives to the rejection are legion, but somewhat paradoxically not getting to spend 10 frantic days writing has to be high on that list too.
Drinking deep from my cocktail of emotions
Ross
I went on my long bike ride yesterday; it was pretty brutal. I definitely could have benefitted from having some more miles in my legs. I'm pretty good at pacing myself to the top of the hill, but I'm used to not having to save anything and just coast all the way back. Yesterday there was quite a bit of riding after we got off the hill, including a horribly steep hill right at the very end. I'm ashamed to admit that I walked part of the way up that final hill, which wasn't that much better, because by that time even walking was pretty painful.
I really wanted to take today off, both to recover from my ride and also to give myself an actual sit on my ass and relax vacation, which I haven't had in probably three years. I vascillated back and forth for quite a while but I finally decided to go to work. Thinking back, I can't remember why I made that decision. I guess it was to keep the number of days off in the "bank" from getting too low. Right now I'm down to four, but at this point the idea of being at home and taking a nap is making me wonder what I was thinking.
Part of the problem is that everyone else at work is taking a vacation. One of my friends leaves for Maui tomorrow, another is already in Bermuda, still another just got back from a motorcycle tour of the Pacific coast, and this doesn't even cover the "Burning Man" contingent. The last thing I want to touch on is a recent report which seems to be saying that the unreasonable panic surrounding Chernobyl was more harmful than the actual disaster. The report concluded that 56 deaths could be attributed directly to radiation. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: nuclear power is not anywhere near as dangerous as people make it out to be.
Walking funny
Ross
There were two HR people in the meeting yesterday, the guy in charge of the whole shebang and the lady who actually is in charge of the benefits. I ran into her while walking in to work from my car and she told the person she was with that I was her hero. Since she was just there to gather feedback, she couldn't offer her own opinion, but in explaining why I was the hero she said that I had said all the things that she wanted to say. I guess that goes a long way to validate my behavior, and it's nice to know that I wasn't the only one thinking that the gals sitting in front of me were crazy.
Other than that, I fear I have become addicted to Space Rangers 2. I am in something of lull between projects, so it's not a horrible time to become fixated on a game, but if I were really responsible I would not play computer games at all and would read Shakespeare and write novels... Oh well, I still do those things, just not as frequently as I might if I wasn't distracted by the succubus of an alternate reality where I'm not a geek possessed with middling ambition and bad hair.
The movie Sound of Thunder comes out today. I only heard about it today and was intriqued because so many people have immediately declared it a real contender for worst movie of the year. Also, it's based on a Ray Bradbury short story (the Simpson's Halloween parody of the story about Homer and a time-traveling toaster is far better known these days). In connection with the story, a writer from Slate wrote an excellent article about Bradbury which comes very close to my feelings. I neither idolize nor despise the man and I think the Slate article sums that up pretty well.
Three day weekend!!!
Ross
Okay, so through some accident of fate I'm a member of my company's benefits vetting committee. In other words, once a quarter (or there abouts) they gather me and a number of other people from all over the company together and tell us what they're thinking of changing about the benefits and we tell them what we think. The latest thing they're thinking of doing is adding a third option to the benefits package. We currently have Blue Cross and Blue Cross ValueCare; they want to add a $0 premium high deductable option, just as an option. But it was at this point that all Hell broke loose.
When they say that in a normal group benefit plan that the healthy subside the unhealthy, they are talking about the lady who was sitting in front of me. This person probably has about 10-20 times the medical bills of the average employee, and this is not my assumption -- she frequently regales us with tales of her expensive operations. Well, when the HR director announced this third option she when through the roof. Her rant started by talking about people too stupid to make their own health care decisions and after five minutes of wild-eyed madness it ended by accusing the company of being in the pockets of the Heritage Foundation and neo-con fascists.
Then another lady joined in and proceeded to monopolize the conversation for the next fifteen minutes. Finally after multiple unsuccessful attempts to interrupt, I told them to shut up (not in those exact words), that the two of them had had their say and it was the rest of the committee's turn. After I voiced my support, it turned out that basically everyone else supported the idea as well. It's amazing how even in that small of a setting how a vocal minority can dominate the thinking of the decision makers... There are a whole bunch of other morals to this story as well, but they're all even more overtly political, so I'll avoid them.
Much cheerier with a full night's sleep
Ross