I have spent most of the day involved in intense contract review and negotiation with the Content Management System we're thinking of purchasing. There was a time when I wanted to be a lawyer when I grew up, but days like this make me glad that I'm not. Of course the big problem is that we have to sign the contract today, or the heavily discounted offer we're getting is no longer valid. We were going to try and get it taken care of on Friday, but of course two of the really key people, our lawyer and our CIO, were out of the office. We'll see what happens, but trying to hammer all the disagreements on the day the contract has to be signed is probably not the best way to go about it.
Speaking of legal matters, Bush made another nomination for O'Connor's vacancy on SCOTUS, Samuel A. Alito, Jr. He's well know as being very conservative, so of course the Democrats already have their panties in a bunch. But here's my prediction: he's going to be confirmed. Here's my reasoning. The average joe on the street does barely know that the first nominee didn't work out; they don't know that it was the conservatives rather than the liberals who primary forced her out. All they know is that the President already tried once. So on this second attempt if the Democrats start to fillibuster, to the average joe on the street it's all going to be part of the narrative that people won't let Bush nominate who he wants to.
In other words, the only reason the Democrats wouldn't fillibuster is because of public perception (or the "Nuclear Option") and I think that the public may group the two nominations together and lay more obstruction at the feet of the Democrats than they really deserve, and as a result turn against them sooner than they might expect. In any case, it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
SCOTUS watcher
Ross
Much to my surprise, I heard that Harriet Miers had withdrawn her nomination this morning on the drive in to work. I figured that at a minimum they would see how the hearings went before they took that step. The decision to withdraw appears to have originated with the nominee rather than the president, but you can never tell with these sorts of things. I was unimpressed from the very beginning, but a recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal by Robert Bork really solidified my objections. Of course you may well wonder at this point whom I would like to see as the next nominee: my dream nominee is Janice Rogers Brown, and really when you think about it, what sort of horribly racist misogynist would you have to be to oppose the nomination of a black woman to the high court?
I was going to spend some time talking about Freakonomics, but I think I'm going to wait until tomorrow when I've finished the book. Other than that, things are going reasonably well at least for the moment. We'll see how long that lasts.
Experiencing a temporary lull in Evil
Ross
It's nice to see that my near-death experience with the deer garnered so many comments. My wife found out about it by reading the blog. For some reason I always forget to mention near-death experiences to her, mostly because the "near" part seems to default the story of most of its urgency. She is then (understandably) upset that I don't appear to feel it's important to let her know about these events. I'm trying to do better, but I come close to dying so often that it's hard to keep up with all of the stories.
I don't have a lot of time today because I spent the morning donating platelets. I was suppossed to donate yesterday, but there was a crisis at work involving low quality graphics and I had to put out the fire. Part of the idea was to donate at the same time as one of my friends at work, but he went without me. At some point during the donation process the needle punched through to the other side of the vein and he "infiltrated." This wouldn't have been so bad, except he has a deep phobia of blood (which he is trying to overcome through donation) and the experience left him quite shaken.
Fortunately, my donation went off without a hitch. I watched Shaun of the Dead, which was great. If you don't like lots of gore you should obviously skip it, but if that sort of thing doesn't bother you I unhesitatingly recommend this movie.
Most people are hardly distinguishable from zombies anyway
Ross
A day or two before the book sale I was thinking, "I really need to track down a copy of Parkinson's Law," but in the context of "I should order a copy from Amazon." It never occured to me that I might be able to find a copy at the book sale. But I did, and not even in a location I would have thought of looking for it. For some reason it was shelved in the humor section. I also managed to pick up Churchill's six volume history of World War II in hardback for $15. Overall, it was a pretty good book sale. We ended up being second in line, behind a guy who showed up an hour and a half before us at 4:30. Now that's hardcore.
Anyway, more about "Parkinson's Law." One of my favorite chapters from the book talks about how the amount of time discussing an expense is inversely proportional to the amount of money being spent. I saw this principle in full force during a meeting of the "Web Advisory Board." One of the items on the agenda was a question as to whether we should renew some domain names that we weren't currently using but might eventually use. The cost of renewal for all of the domain names was around $50, and yet the question of whether to renew them occupied 25 minutes of time in a committee that had two executives, three upper-tier managers and a dozen other people whose average salary was at least $20/hour. As you can probably already deduce, the cost of the discussion was much greater than the $50 we would have to spend on the renewal.
I didn't get a chance to blog yesterday, mostly because I spent most of the day driving to and from the site we've selected for the family reunion I and my sister are suppossed to be in charge of. I had a little bit of a scare on the way back when a deer decided to make his break for the other side of the road just as I was approaching. Fortunately, I'm a much better driver than I once was, and I slammed on the brakes to shed as much speed as possible and then at the last moment let go of the brakes and made a quick, hard turn to the right around the butt of the deer. Of course I wasn't thinking "shed as much speed as possible, okay now release and manuveur," but my instincts were good and I guess that's what matters.
As an important side note, given how low my car is to the road my guess is that on a direct hit of the deer I would end up undercutting its legs and sending the bulk of it's mass straight through the windshield and into my face. This potentially fatal outcome did not occur to me until this morning, which is probably good. Had I been able to visualize this outcome just as the deer emerged from the forest, my guess is that I would have been overcome with terror and ended up doing exactly the thing I feared.
Small cars and deer don't mix
Ross
The weekend is upon us and I for one could not be more grateful. This week seemed particulary taxing for some reason, so I'm glad to be nearing the end. Plus, I'm looking forward to the semiannual used book sale at the city library. It's become quite the tradition to wake up early so that we can be standing at the front of the line when the doors open at seven. My wife will tell you that I haven't read the books from the last sale, but that's really not the point for me. The point for me is to have a library. I feel pretty good about the number of books I have, but you can always have more.
We used to have breakfast before the sale, which meant waking up around 4:30 (or earlier, depending on where we were going for breakfast). To be candid, I have no idea why we did it that way, but a couple of years ago we wised up and started going to breakfast after the sale, which works out much better, though it's still something of a trial to wake up at 5:00 am on a Saturday, but then that's part of what makes the experience unique. In any event, my joy over the coming weekend has overshadowed any desire to continue writing so I'll end here.
Bibliophile
Ross
Yesterday was my wife's birthday, and she was quite upset when I didn't blog, as if it was some sort of negative commentary on the whole affair. I kind of thought that not blogging was the best gift I could give her. It was her 30th birthday, and the effects of her advanced age were immediately obvious. She asked me the same question about a dozen times (she'll claim that it was only twice, but that's how bad the forgetfullness is).
We went out to Ruby River to celebrate. I had been preparing all day so that I could handle the porterhouse, and I'm happy to say that I was up to the task. Though I did have to wimp out on dessert, which I'm obviously not proud of, even more so because this was just a wimpy 24 oz. porter house, not the 48 ouncer that lots of places offer. I'll try and do better next time; still a good time was had by all. My wife even commented on how much she's grown to appreciate good beef since marrying into my family. It is true that we're all massive carnivores.
There have been some things I've wanted to blog about on the political front and the video game industry, not to mention the meterological front. But thus far I haven't had the energy. Maybe tomorrow.
I've been lowered from a category 1 hurricane down to a tropical depression
Ross
You may have heard of Phil Specter's "Wall of Sound." Well, on Friday I had a "Wall of Meetings." Of course, partially that was my own fault for scheduling myself to donate platelets at 7:30 that morning. And then I guess the hubris of trying to take advantage of my brief break to go to lunch would also be my fault, and said hubris resulted in me getting a flat tire. Ordinarily that's not a big deal, but apparently although my $1000 car came with a spare and a jack, it didn't come with a lug wrench. As a result, though I actually wanted to blog on Friday, it didn't end up happening.
We're selecting a content management system. We started with three candidates and then we pruned it to two. Well, the one we pruned didn't want to go away. Since our primary objection was technical, they decided after several fruitless attempts that they needed a technical guy to tell the vendor to bugger off, so one of my meetings was a half hour conference call with one of their technical guys and a salesperson. The whole process reminded me strongly of high school debate and breaking up with someone. The former, because we were having an actual argument as to the relative technical qualifications of the different products and the latter because of the audible sadness and disappointment in their voice when I told them we were removing them from consideration.
Finally in news of the weird, a scientist is proposing including MP3 players as part of a breast implant. As an example of some of the humorous quotes in the article "Quite how playback is achieved we're not quite sure, but it may well involve the listener burying his or her head in the cleavage for a full stereo effect."
Drunk with power
Ross
We had a farewell party for my one of my many (4) sisters. She's leaving this weekend for a long stint in Australia. She works for a big mining company and they want her to spearhead a project to strip-mine the Outback, or something like that, I wasn't really paying attention, but I know that she's now a very important person in the organization. I may be going out on a limb here, but if we were still in feudal times I think she would be a countess and I would have to address her as "Your Excellency."
In all, I have six brothers and sisters (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how many of each), which is, by today's standards, large, if not enormous. But for me it's very comforting -- every single one of my brothers and sisters is awesome (the duchess herself being only one example) which leads to the feeling of not belonging to a family so much as a small, powerful nation.
Happy to have a Pater Familias
Ross
I gotta tell you, I was really hoping that no one would comment on yesterday's blog, then I would have had free reign to walk off in an indignant huff and never write another word. But apparently the consensus is that if nothing else, it's a useful indicator as to whether I'm still alive. That fact by itself is pretty depressing, essentially meaning that I could open up the "New Entry" page and mash my keyboard every day and achieve basically the same affect.
Actually, my inclination is to continue blogging but perhaps be a little less anal about doing it every day. It's always amazing to me how tough it is to do something every day, even if it only takes 15-20 minutes. Plus, once the smoke clears I'll have to regale you with the tale of what's happening right now. I could probably tell it now, but I'm trying to be extra careful.
seikyjm uhwak,easzk,edzsk,lWk,ilsezjmkudxsjmn.
Ross
Recently, on my wife's side of the family, everyone has started blogging. Okay saying "everyone" is certainly an exaggeration, but quite a few of them have. On top of that, one of my co-workers has an excellent blog as well. Frankly, the competition is starting to get to me. Also, I've never been one to enjoy doing something once everyone is doing it. As a result, I seriously considered ending my blog -- I mean, let's face it, two and a half years and 600+ entries is not a bad run. Perhaps it's just a phase I'm going through, or it could be because I'm going through a fairly chaotic period at the moment and it's just one more source of stress.
In any case, feel free to let me know what you think.
Too much on my plate
Ross
The horrible earthquake that hit Pakistan on Friday should hopefully provide a little perspective on Katrina. Not to say that Katrina was not a great tragedy, but as natural disasters go, ~1000 people dying is not even going to get you in the top 25 of the last century (and might not even get you in the top 100, depending on how you break things down). Of course, the financial cost of Katrina is mind-boggling, but mostly because of the morons we have passing for politicians these days.
There is some speculation that Bin Laden may have been killed in the earthquake. The current party line is that there is no evidence he died. But when you consider how little evidence he generally gives as to whether he's alive, it's hard to imagine that you would be able to know with any certainty whether the earthquake did him in for many, many months. I do think that there would be a certain delicious irony to the whole situation, if after all of the resources we've spent hunting him, an earthquake, or as I prefer to think of it, if an "Act of God," did him in.
The weekend was pretty low-key. Though I did have some car trouble to add a little bit of excitement to things. I was over at my sister's house getting ready to head home when I discovered that the car wouldn't start. It was obvious that I had battery power and all that good stuff, but the starter motor wasn't turning over at all. So I flagged my dad down just as he was pulling away, and seeing the commotion my brother-in-law came out (yet another brother-in-law whom I don't believe I've ever previously mentioned in my blog). Fortunately, he not only had a floor jack but some cover-alls (we were all in suits) and he was able to get under the car and tighten the wire leading into the starter motor and fix the problem. As my wife pointed out, that's one of the advantages of having a big family: someone is going to be able to help you with just about any problem you're having.
Starting up the climb at the beginning of the roller coaster
Ross
I was in quite the funk yesterday, and so I didn't post. The reasons for my funk are not something I can go into right at the moment, because things are still up in the air, but hopefully I'll be able to post in more detail soon. I know that I personally hate it when people say stuff like that, but there it goes. I thought I needed to offer some explanation for yesterday's absence, but it has to be, of necessity, fairly sparse. Anyway, that's enough obfuscation for now. Moving on...
The hot topic before Bush's lackluster nomination of Harriet Miers was some comments Bill Bennett made. He said:
I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could - if that were your sole purpose - you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.
Well, predictably quite a few people have said he was a racist, just as predictable, but far less defensible, others have accussed him of advocating the murder of black babies, which even a casual reading of what he said does not support, but what some people have remarked on is how some liberals who are clearly firmly in the pro-choice camp have suddenly started referring to aborted fetuses as babies or even people. The writer I linked to above opines that it's a matter of "utilitarianism." I would have to say it's because on some level everyone knows that they're babies and people particularly when we're speaking of them in the aggregate. Suddenly it's not one person deciding whether one pregnancy will be allowed to come to term: it's genocide.
Somewhat less funky than yesterday
Ross
A while ago, one of my favorite commentators, Neal Boortz was out of town for a week, so one of his lackeys took over his blog. This particular lackey had a passion for cover songs, something I also really enjoy, and she posted some really great links. The best was to a podcast called Coverville. I've been listening to that recently and it is really quite good. I especially enjoy it when the cover is better than the original. (An example of that, in my opinion, would be the second song in this podcast. It's a cover of Sting's "Fields of Gold".)
Before IP laws became so draconian, most music was a cover. This isn't the best example, but compare the percentage of time you go to the symphony and hear something composed recently vs. how often they're playing Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. And the reason is that the number of great musicians vastly exceeds the number of great composers. Because of this, you end up with bands that do a cover and it's awesome, but then you listen to the rest of their stuff (the stuff they wrote) and it's dreck.
In any case, that's all I have to say for the moment on covers, but I would highly recommend checking out Coverville.com if you're into podcasts at all. In other news, there has long been a phenomenon known as "milky seas" during which the entire ocean glows for miles in every direction. Well, they finally have satellite imagery of the event with accompaning article.
Filled with an entrepreneurial ache
Ross
Yesterday I took the day off in an effort to break the "Monday Curse." I was only partially successful. The firewall went down right around 6 pm. The partial part is that the firewall is not my system, so other people are responsible for fixing it, but I still ended up coming into work on my day off, because the firewall heavily impacts systems, which are my responsibility. It wasn't too bad, and fortunately unlike the other two guys who got called in, I only live 15 minutes away.
I have to confess to mostly goofing off while I wasn't at work (though I did make one fairly important business call) . After taking several months off from playing World of Warcraft over the summer, I returned with vengence last weekend. So I spent quite a bit of yesterday playing my Undead Shadow Priest Ashtaroth, but I also managed to watch the four hour epic Lawrence of Arabia. I can only imagine the controversy a film with not a single female speaking role might engender today, but it was a magnificent movie.
Beyond that, nothing much is going on. I can tell you that I'm underwhelmed by Bush's new judicial nominee. I haven't heard much so far, but nothing that I have heard leads me to believe that this is anything better than a punt on Bush's part. Of course, there is a theory going around that he choose someone who wouldn't be confirmed so that when he has to choose again he has a greater latitude. I'm not sure what to think of that theory, but it would be quite the political maneuveur if it turned out to be true.
Avoiding reality
Ross