I was expecting a relaxing Thanksgiving which revolved around the twin poles of napping and eating. Instead, the minute I showed my face at my parents' house I was put to work painting the deck. I insisted that I was horrible at painting and that it was one of the few things I really hated doing, but if anything that only emboldened my father. My next strategy was to let my natural inclination towards applying way too much paint take over, and consequently perform so poorly that my dad would be forced to dismiss me, but that didn't work either. Actually it wasn't that bad, and being ambushed probably saved me several hours of dread beforehand. Of course, it prompted me to ask myself the question of why I disliked painting so intensely.
I think it started when my mother wanted me to stain a table she was going to use as a TV stand. Well I'd never really stained anything and I put way too much on. My mother declared it to be the worst job she had ever seen. Well as you can imagine, at that point my opinion on my natural aptitude was pretty low after that. I brought this up at dinner and my mother made no attempt to refute my claims, and in fact re-affirmed that it was the worst job she'd ever seen. Only several minutes later did she finally add that maybe she could have given me more instruction...
Well I'm leaving Sunday morning for Boston to go through some intensive training for the CMS we're buying, so I probably won't be posting again until I get back.
Leaving on a jet plane
Ross
Well, it's all but Thanksgiving. We're actually having two this year. The way it works in my family is a strict schedule of alternating between my family and the in-laws. This year it's the in-laws, but they decided to have theirs on Saturday, so we're going to end up going to my family's after all. As holidays go, Thanksgiving is pretty high on this list. In that spirit I came across a great Thanksgiving quote from Ayn Rand:
Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday... The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.
Shortly after all the Thanksgiving festivities wind down I'll be flying to Boston for some training for a week. On the balance, I'm not looking forward to the trip. While I'm sure I'll do some fun things while I'm there, most of my time will be spent in day-long meetings. With the precision of Old Faithful I develop a headache 1 hour and 55 minutes into any meeting; I can only imagine that by the afternoon of day four that my head will explode in some dramatic fashion leaving the training room unusable for quite some time.
I guess that's not the best image to kick off the Thanksgiving vacation with, but it's the only one I've got.
On the precipice of gluttony
Ross
Every school has its arch-rival, and every area has its big rivalry games. Here in Utah, it's the University of Utah vs. BYU in football. Being an Utah alum, that's who I generally root for, though this year it was looking kind of grim. A BYU booster, who's a co-worker of mine, came by to talk to me about the game before I left on my vacation. He confidently predicted that BYU would win by more than two touchdowns. I told him that given that it was a rivalry game I thought it would be very close; I also predicted that the backup quarterback would do really well, and I offered to back up all of these predictions by placing a bet.
He told me that I didn't know what the hell I was talking about and that in fact, I didn't know dick about football but declined to put his money where his mouth was by sactimonously (one of the traits of a true BYU fan) declaring that he "doesn't bet." For any who missed the game, that's pretty much exactly what happened: the backup quarterback played great and the game went into overtime, where in the icing on the cake, the Utes won. Well as you can well imagine, I looked forward to rubbing my co-worker's face into things, but his spirit was broken, and all he would say was, "I was wrong" while maintaining an aspect similar to what you might expect to see if his puppy had died. I took a couple of jabs at him, but he wouldn't make it sporting.
I'd post about the vacation, but it involves a certain amount of vomiting (normal, not projectile) and I know how everyone hates it when I write about that, so I'll wrap it up here.
Chained to my many commitments
Ross
After I had finished my blog I found a speech that Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CA) had given on the floor which expressed what I was trying to say far more eloquently.
Nice to see some really good comments on my last blog (better than the blog itself, actually). As far as the commentary article, my basic point would be that there are plenty of things about Bush's conduct of the war to take issue with. I personally feel that he could have done a better job preserving the international goodwill the U.S. had after 9/11. I am also of the opinion that he did rush the start of the war. Adding these together, I think we would have had a better chance of getting Turkey to allow the 3rd Army to come in from the north, which I think would have made a bigger difference than most people think. Other objections may include the administration's soft stance on torture and its casual regard for the rights of detainees. Of course, the opposition has chosen to focus on the idea that Bush lied.
There are some very good reasons for doing this: "lied" rhymes with "died," it's easy to say and remember, it's got a mantra-like quality. Basically, it works very well with the great mass of people who have no time or inclination to spend on a subtle examination of the details and just want something simple to hang their ideological hat on. But the point is that it's just incorrect -- lying would assume that they knew or at least suspected that there were no WMD. This is very, very, very difficult for me to believe for two reasons. The first, which everyone mentions, is that everyone thought he had WMD, every intelligence agency, every senator, everyone, and second, a point which I haven't heard anyone mention is that he based the entire justification for the war on the presence of WMD because they thought that was their surest footing. If the White House ever doubted that they would find great big steaming mounds of WMD's they wouldn't have made that the cornerstone of their justifcation strategy.
The moral is that there are plenty of accurate bad things to say about Bush without resorting to inaccuracies solely because they are easy to understand and appeal to the ignorant masses. Moving on, I'll be in Park City with the in-laws for the rest of this week, so the earliest I'll be blogging again will be Monday. I have high hopes for this little trip. It's the ideal vacation: nothing actually planned, just a really nice condo where I can kick back, read, watch movies, play games and sleep late.
Already on vacation
Ross
My old blogging standard was an new entry every weekday. A while ago that was relaxed to "I'll blog whenever I feel like it and you'll be happy about it!" But my unstated commitment was to not miss two days in a row (excluding weekends, of course), so I was somewhat chagrined when I didn't post anything on Thursday or Friday. Mostly it came about because, having abandoned the apolotical character of the blog, I wanted to engage in some political commentary, but because of the divisive nature of that sort of activity, I wanted to really have my ducks in a row, which I didn't have either the time or the energy for. I still don't have the energy for it, but I guess I'll proceed anyway.
First off, there are a couple of articles which everyone should read; which I won't offer any opinion on (though the very nature of the pieces gives you some idea as to my opinions). The first was originally published in Commentary Magazine but has since been picked up by the WSJ and goes into the idea of whether Bush lied. The second is titled Five questions non-Muslims would like answered and ran in the LA Times. Both are at the very least thought provoking, but mostly I think they cut through quit a bit of FUD.
Finally, I want to mention a BYU professor who believes that the WTC collapsed due to pre-positioned explosives, rather than being hit by a 767 (his actual paper). Having looked at the paper, it seems that much of it hinges on the collapse of WTC7 (a building which was not hit by a plane). As a University of Utah graduate I'm under contract to speak derisively about anything coming out of BYU, but as you can imagine, that hardly matters -- this would be a stupid idea regardless of where it originated.
I will survive
Ross
I've been following the riots in France with a great deal of interest. For those just joining us, about two weeks ago two "youngsters" were fleeing from the police and took refuge in a power substation and ended up getting electrocuted and dying, which proved to the match which ignited the conflagration. We'll get to what the rioters are upset about in a second. What's more interesting to me is the fight in the media over whether the term "muslim" should be used to describe the rioters.
The Reuters article I linked to did not contain the word, and in fact took pains to note that the riots were being conducted "by white youngsters as well as youths of African and Arab origin." So that's one side of the coin, and certainly I can see the point there: the riots are ostensibly about police treatment, poor job prospects, and in my opinion the emasculation imposed on people by the French welfare system. Obviously I would be upset if there were riots in Utah over, say, not getting the Winter Olympics, and the media chose to characterize it as Mormon rioting because there's so many Mormons in Utah, but on the other hand...
I have seen videos of the riots where those participating in them can be heard to shout "Allah Akbar" as they pillage and burn, you combine this with all of the other violence radical muslims are involved in and you can see why the idea that muslims are a big part of the rioting has a lot of traction. So that's the other side of the coin. To answer that would require a deeper look into the reasons for the rioting, which I thought I was going to get to, but it looks like I'm out of space, so maybe tomorrow.
Burdened by conscience
Ross
I was up until 2 am last night working on releasing a new web application at work. That's one of the downsides of IT -- that occasionally you have to make some big change which is going to impact a lot of people so you have to schedule it where it will have the least impact, like Sunday night between 8 pm and 2 am. And so this morning I was almost late for work, but not because I was up so late. Rather, I stumbled across an article and more importantly a slide show (link in article) about Calvin and Hobbes. Obviously, once I found it I had to finish it.
I consider myself quite lucky to have been around for what I consider the golden age of comic strips: the triumvirate of "Calvin and Hobbes," "Bloom County" and "The Far Side" ruled the funny pages like gods from ancient mythology, and it's rumored that even "Cathy" was occasionally funny (though until someone can actually produce an example I'm inclined to view such stories as apocryphal). Of course part of the reason why they were funny is that the cartoonists had no illusions that they could be funny forever, and as a result all of them eventually retired to a greater or lesser degree, one of the great tragedies of the last century.
You'll have to forgive me, I have a hard time talking about Calvin and Hobbes without crying, or maybe it's sleep deprivation, or maybe it's my empathy for my wife's pain (she twisted her ankle quite badly on Saturday and had to be taken to the emergency room). Yeah that's it, it's my enormous empathy that's making me tear up, or at least that's the story I'm sticking to.
Pining for a stuffed tiger
Ross
I'm once again trying to get more organized. I think it was brought on when I was deluged by the CMS project at work. My bible for this excercise has been "Getting Things Done" by David Allen. Apparently I'm not alone: many people have noted the book's amazing popularity with geeks. This is not the first time I've tried the system described in the book, but it's not surprising that it might take a few tries to get it right. So far I've noticed some positives and negatives to the system.
On the positive side, I do feel a lot more in control and a lot more productive. Obviously these two things are very important. Of course, you would hope that there would be some positive benefits to the system; it's the negatives that worry me more. One negative is it seems that the system ends up pushing you to get more little things done, and I find that I sometimes end up focusing on staying on top of little things as they come up that you never really get a block of time for the big things. This comes from two things. First, his rule that you track everything that still needs to be done, and that if it's going to take less than 2 minutes to do you should do it immediately. So this ends up creating a strong prejudice towards doing lots of little things all the time. I think what I need to do is not check my e-mail so often, but then people e-mail you and then 10 minutes later call you and ask you if you got their e-mail...
The other big weakness I see with the system is how it handles multiple step projects. The big key of the system is determing the "Next Action" of anything you're working on, the very next physical step you should take. So let's say I have some big programming project I'm working on, I add it to the list, and for the "Next Action" I put, "Open up text editor and start coding." As I write that down, it occurs to me that I need to make sure that at the end of the project I need to configure the caching file. If I don't it will still run -- just not as well. If you're using his system, there doesn't seem to be a logical place to put that step. I guess you could make it into its own project, but that seems at best counterintuitive and at worst a horrible kludge. Most of the things he recommends are really useful, but these two things still bug me.
Until the weekend saves me
Ross
So I ended up playing quite a few games over the weekend. Friday was family game night. We played a ton of Fooie (also known as Nerts, I think) and we also played a little Apples to Apples. For those unfamiliar with the game there are red apples and green apples. The green apples generally have adjectives on them like fast, hot, soft, evil, etc. The red apples are generally nouns: Las Vegas, my mind, Martha Stewart, penguins, etc. Players take turns playing green apples and then everyone else chooses one of the seven red apples in their hand which most closely matches the green apple. The player that laid down the green apple then judges which of the red apples he likes best. As such when you lay down a red apple you're playing to the judge (in fact, when you play a card like "my body," it refers to the judge's body), thus the story...
So I'm the judge and the word I laid down was "hot." The other five people lay their cards face down on the table and I collect them, flip them over and start reading them. There's "fire," "smoke," a couple of others like desert, and then I get to "babysitters." I'm not sure who played it, I think it was my sister-in-law, but whoever it was and whatever they were trying to say I knew that I didn't want to get anywhere near that... idea or... concept. So I immediately eliminated it from contention. Still I have to wonder what it says about me that that card was played at all. Perhaps that I have finally made the transition from virginal nerd/geek to lecherous old man. I guess I'll have to cross that goal off my list.
Progressively more organized
Ross