Renovations
My husband Steve and I designed and built our house, into which we moved in 1997. We hadn't intended to build it as owner-builders, but when the builder we had retained went bankrupt (owing us quite a lot of money) we had no choice. Fortunately Steve is in civil construction, and his knowledge and contacts got the house built, though it took longer than planned. On the day we moved in there were no skirting boards, few internal doors and an enormous pile of builder's rubble in the corner of the family room. The main bathroom was a shell, without even lining boards on the walls. The floors were bare concrete, which we sealed with paving paint as soon as we could, to control the dust. At that point in time our only goal was to get moved into the house, as soon as we could get a certificate of occupancy: we were paying rent on the place we were living in, the mortgage on the place we were building, and monthly storage charges because many of our personal effects (read: books) were in a rented storage facility. Our finances were strained, to say the very least.
The local council's criteria for occupancy were that we had a working bathroom and a working kitchen. A working kitchen was defined as having a working cooker and a working sink. Getting the ensuite bathroom fitted was not a problem, because I had bought a bath months before (floor stock from a local supplier), and I had got most of the other fittings at "mate's rates" through contacts at work. However, by the time we got to the kitchen, money was running out.
Now it so happened that I was doing some work for a government agency who would probably prefer not to be named, and while working on the premises of this agency it was forbidden to have a mobile phone switched on - and a junior agency person was detailed to follow me about, and ensure that I complied with this rule. Further more, I couldn't plug my laptop into their network. So I spent a lot of time hanging around their operations room, waiting for computers to load patches or whatever, with nothing to do. I looked around for something to read, and found a copy of "The Trading Post" a local rag dedicated to connecting buyers and sellers, which someone had left lying around. In this paper were adverts from a business selling factory second sinks, and a kitchen manufacturer who was going out of business.
So the next weekend I went out and bought a factory second sink (a returned order, I think, there was nothing wrong with it and it was a good brand), and 1.8 metres of floor stock kitchen cupboards, plus a pantry. The cupboards had no bench top attached, and they had been used to demonstrate different finishes: one cupboard door was blue, one was green, and the other was white. The drawer fronts were cream, with a wood trim. The pantry was white, and I acquired a section of grey laminated benchtop from somewhere else. The overall effect was awful, and the carpenter who installed it all did so on the proviso that we never tell anyone that he was responsible.
I never intended to keep the original kitchen for long, but in the end it stayed until late 2006, when I had it torn out and replaced with the kitchen of my dreams. And this year the original ensuite bathroom, which has seen about 12 years of service, finally had to be renovated.
The trigger was an event in March this year. The shower drain in the ensuite blocked, the shower stall overflowed, the drain in the middle of the bathroom floor failed to cope (an inadequately glue joint between two sections of pipe failed), and water began to pour through the ceiling of the room below. The room below is my study: I was just about to leave the house to go to work, when I heard an odd tap-tap-tap noise coming from the study: I thought that one of my machines was doing something strange, and turned the light on to see what was happening. What was happening was that water, following the path of least resistance, was trickling through the light fitting and onto the side desk where I normally keep my MacBook Pro.
I turned the light off, quickly, shoved the desk out of the way - it's on wheels - and fetched a bucket to put under the drip. Fortunately my laptop was safely in it's carry bag, protected from incontinent light fittings.
The end result of that little episode was a statement from the emergency plumbers that the grout around the shower stall was failing and no longer water tight. They fixed the leaking pipe (by making a large hole in the ceiling of my study to get at the problem joint). They also recommended replacing the light fitting.
Now it is October, and for the last couple of weeks there have been tradesmen around the house most days: since they are here, I'm getting a lot of other things fixed at the same time. The old ensuite has been gutted, re-rendered, re-water-proofed, re-tiled and new taps and other fittings installed (I kept the heated towel rail, the shower screen and the bath). We are now waiting for the vanity unit to be made - about 3 weeks - and installed. The painter should be here on Tuesday, to repaint the bathroom. I'm going to get the kitchen and the front hall repainted, too.
It will be great when it is done, but getting up early every morning is getting seriously tedious. Why do all tradesmen want to start at 7AM?
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Darkness Falls
So I arrived at the office on a Tuesday morning, put my Mac Book Pro on my desk, opened the lid and hit the space bar and nothing happened. It took a few seconds for me to register the nothing, because it was so totally unexpected; I felt the first twinge of alarm as I forced the machine to reboot, and still got a blank, black screen. A few minutes of emergency troubleshooting procedures, including removing and replacing the battery, and I knew I was in trouble. I was pretty sure that the machine was powering up, but the screen was dead. Plugging in my external monitor didn't help: the external monitor announced that it was not getting a signal, and went back to sleep.
And of course it was a busy morning, I was due in meetings, and I really didn't have time for a technology meltdown. Fortunately I had cleared all email requiring an urgent response earlier that morning, while I having my first cup of coffee. I could access email from my iPhone, but many of the documents that I needed were stuck in the corporate document management system, which is built on Interwoven, and can only be accessed via Outlook or Internet Explorer. So I logged a call with our Internal Support people. and got on with the meetings.
A meeting or so later, Internal Support handed me a loan laptop, a revolting piece of junk (I won't name the brand) running Windows XP at the speed of an arthritic snail. I struggled through a few more hours, my stress levels rising every time some absurd piece of Microsoft nonsense got between me and getting things done. Finally I got a break, and called the Apple support line. A pleasant young woman walked me through the inevitable diagnostic procedures, and confirmed what I already suspected: the dreaded nVidia 8600 bug had finally struck down my machine. I had known it was possible, but the reports were so long ago that I hoped I had been spared.
I wrote down my case number, and walked down to the Apple Store. I had already checked, and the Genius Bar was booked out until Friday, but I was due to go to Melbourne for a few days break on Saturday, I had no intention of going without a Mac. The Genius Bar people wait listed me, and happily I ran into an old friend, so I had someone to chat to while I waited. The wait was only about 20 minutes, and the resident genius confirmed the diagnosis: dead nVidia processor. At least 5 days wait for a repair. Arrrggghhh!!
So I did what any DINK with an Amex card does: I left the Genius Bar, went down the retail level, and bought a new 15.4" Mac Book Pro. Fortunately my friend was there to provide input, since I was a bit stressed, and would have overlooked the Mini DP to VGA adapter that I needed.
I then went back to the office, wrapped up the working day, and headed home to start reconstructing my electronic life. I had been planning to buy a new Mac Book, but I had really hoped to wait until Oracle finalises the purchase of Sun, and pays out my shares. I had intended to take the money (whatever there is of it) and put it towards new Mac, which would have given me a nice sense of closure. What I hadn't planned was having to conduct an emergency rebuild. Fortunately I had done a Time Machine backup on the preceding Sunday night, but I didn't just want to restore from that. I really wanted a clean install of Snow Leopard. So I started by booting of the Snow Leopard DVD, and getting the install running while I did some planning.
The first thing I load, always, is Synium's Cleanapp. Then Camino, EagleFiler, 1Password, Vmware Fusion, Curio, Evernote. I recovered bookmarks, restored my essential data from Time Machine, and by the next day I could work. I still have a fair bit of clean up to do, and I need to take a cold, hard look at some of my old data and convince myself that it really needs to be on my laptop, rather than archived on an external disk where I can get it if I really need it. But that can happen over the next few days, while I am on leave, because I getting renovations done and need to be at home. But apart from the unexpected expense, to really wasn't that bad.
So I arrived at the office on a Tuesday morning, put my Mac Book Pro on my desk, opened the lid and hit the space bar and nothing happened. It took a few seconds for me to register the nothing, because it was so totally unexpected; I felt the first twinge of alarm as I forced the machine to reboot, and still got a blank, black screen. A few minutes of emergency troubleshooting procedures, including removing and replacing the battery, and I knew I was in trouble. I was pretty sure that the machine was powering up, but the screen was dead. Plugging in my external monitor didn't help: the external monitor announced that it was not getting a signal, and went back to sleep.
And of course it was a busy morning, I was due in meetings, and I really didn't have time for a technology meltdown. Fortunately I had cleared all email requiring an urgent response earlier that morning, while I having my first cup of coffee. I could access email from my iPhone, but many of the documents that I needed were stuck in the corporate document management system, which is built on Interwoven, and can only be accessed via Outlook or Internet Explorer. So I logged a call with our Internal Support people. and got on with the meetings.
A meeting or so later, Internal Support handed me a loan laptop, a revolting piece of junk (I won't name the brand) running Windows XP at the speed of an arthritic snail. I struggled through a few more hours, my stress levels rising every time some absurd piece of Microsoft nonsense got between me and getting things done. Finally I got a break, and called the Apple support line. A pleasant young woman walked me through the inevitable diagnostic procedures, and confirmed what I already suspected: the dreaded nVidia 8600 bug had finally struck down my machine. I had known it was possible, but the reports were so long ago that I hoped I had been spared.
I wrote down my case number, and walked down to the Apple Store. I had already checked, and the Genius Bar was booked out until Friday, but I was due to go to Melbourne for a few days break on Saturday, I had no intention of going without a Mac. The Genius Bar people wait listed me, and happily I ran into an old friend, so I had someone to chat to while I waited. The wait was only about 20 minutes, and the resident genius confirmed the diagnosis: dead nVidia processor. At least 5 days wait for a repair. Arrrggghhh!!
So I did what any DINK with an Amex card does: I left the Genius Bar, went down the retail level, and bought a new 15.4" Mac Book Pro. Fortunately my friend was there to provide input, since I was a bit stressed, and would have overlooked the Mini DP to VGA adapter that I needed.
I then went back to the office, wrapped up the working day, and headed home to start reconstructing my electronic life. I had been planning to buy a new Mac Book, but I had really hoped to wait until Oracle finalises the purchase of Sun, and pays out my shares. I had intended to take the money (whatever there is of it) and put it towards new Mac, which would have given me a nice sense of closure. What I hadn't planned was having to conduct an emergency rebuild. Fortunately I had done a Time Machine backup on the preceding Sunday night, but I didn't just want to restore from that. I really wanted a clean install of Snow Leopard. So I started by booting of the Snow Leopard DVD, and getting the install running while I did some planning.
The first thing I load, always, is Synium's Cleanapp. Then Camino, EagleFiler, 1Password, Vmware Fusion, Curio, Evernote. I recovered bookmarks, restored my essential data from Time Machine, and by the next day I could work. I still have a fair bit of clean up to do, and I need to take a cold, hard look at some of my old data and convince myself that it really needs to be on my laptop, rather than archived on an external disk where I can get it if I really need it. But that can happen over the next few days, while I am on leave, because I getting renovations done and need to be at home. But apart from the unexpected expense, to really wasn't that bad.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Objects of desire
Unless you live in cave, you are probably at least vaguely aware that speculation is rife that Apple is about to release, or at least announce, some sort of tablet device. Such a device has been rumoured for many years, but this time the rumours appear to have more substance. The wonderful folks at MacLife have gone so far as to do a detailed workup, with quite drool-worth graphics, of what such a device might look like, and what functions it might offer.
Now let me be quite open about this: I don't care if they call it an iTablet, an iPad (seems unlikely, too much like iPod) or an iBiscuit (iLibris, anyone?). I want it. But only if it will do the following:
Allow me to write, squiggle, doodle and otherwise draw upon the screen, and save my scratchings in some convenient format (JPG will do just fine). As someone who constantly jots things down, my life is absolutely littered with note pads of various descriptions: I can see 4 from where I sit, without turning around to check the shelves behind me. My chances of finding the one that contains the notes I need approach zero. Every conference or vendor event seems to give me another block of dead tree slices to write upon, and create notes that I can't find: there must be a better way.
Read newspapers, specifically the Sydney Morning Herald and the Weekend Australian. I do read newspapers online now, but I like to read a newspaper while eating my breakfast. I eat my breakfast in the family room (large room at the south end of the house, with no computers). Eating breakfast in my study is impractical because a). there isn't space on my desk to put down a bowl of muesli; and b). my white cat Percy expects to be able to sit on my lap while I'm in my study, but he knows that he can’t sit on me while I'm sitting at the table in the family room. It's about the only thing that the little idiot has ever managed to learn, and I'd hate to waste it.
Having access to newspapers on a tablet style device would have numerous advantages, for me and for the environment. Right now, when a newspaper arrives in my house, half of it immediately gets tossed into the recycling basket: I do not read the sports section or the real estate section, and I rarely read the enclosed advertising material (Dell, please note: sending me a flyer every day will not make me any more likely to purchase your products).
This is always assuming that my newsagent manages to deliver the paper: my local newsagent is a half wit, and I have the agency on speed dial, because they screw up so often. Any technology that would spare me having to deal with this particular business would be welcomed with open arms.
Then, when I've finished with the paper and my husband has done the suduko, the whole thing gets tossed into the recycling. Kilos of used newprint leave this house every week, much of it unread. We subscribe to the Sydney Morning Herald, so on Sundays the Sun Herald is delivered to us. The SMH is a OK as a newspaper, but the Sun Herald is the type of rag that you wouldn't used to line a hamster cage, for fear of upsetting the hamster. Shoddy journalism, verging on gutter press, it usually goes straight to recycling.
All this could be stopped, which would reduce the burden on the local council's recycling activities, and keep my house tidier.
If the new device would also allow me to read ebooks, and watch the occasional DVD, so much the better. But for me, note taking and newspapers are the big, must have features.
Unless you live in cave, you are probably at least vaguely aware that speculation is rife that Apple is about to release, or at least announce, some sort of tablet device. Such a device has been rumoured for many years, but this time the rumours appear to have more substance. The wonderful folks at MacLife have gone so far as to do a detailed workup, with quite drool-worth graphics, of what such a device might look like, and what functions it might offer.
Now let me be quite open about this: I don't care if they call it an iTablet, an iPad (seems unlikely, too much like iPod) or an iBiscuit (iLibris, anyone?). I want it. But only if it will do the following:
Allow me to write, squiggle, doodle and otherwise draw upon the screen, and save my scratchings in some convenient format (JPG will do just fine). As someone who constantly jots things down, my life is absolutely littered with note pads of various descriptions: I can see 4 from where I sit, without turning around to check the shelves behind me. My chances of finding the one that contains the notes I need approach zero. Every conference or vendor event seems to give me another block of dead tree slices to write upon, and create notes that I can't find: there must be a better way.
Read newspapers, specifically the Sydney Morning Herald and the Weekend Australian. I do read newspapers online now, but I like to read a newspaper while eating my breakfast. I eat my breakfast in the family room (large room at the south end of the house, with no computers). Eating breakfast in my study is impractical because a). there isn't space on my desk to put down a bowl of muesli; and b). my white cat Percy expects to be able to sit on my lap while I'm in my study, but he knows that he can’t sit on me while I'm sitting at the table in the family room. It's about the only thing that the little idiot has ever managed to learn, and I'd hate to waste it.
Having access to newspapers on a tablet style device would have numerous advantages, for me and for the environment. Right now, when a newspaper arrives in my house, half of it immediately gets tossed into the recycling basket: I do not read the sports section or the real estate section, and I rarely read the enclosed advertising material (Dell, please note: sending me a flyer every day will not make me any more likely to purchase your products).
This is always assuming that my newsagent manages to deliver the paper: my local newsagent is a half wit, and I have the agency on speed dial, because they screw up so often. Any technology that would spare me having to deal with this particular business would be welcomed with open arms.
Then, when I've finished with the paper and my husband has done the suduko, the whole thing gets tossed into the recycling. Kilos of used newprint leave this house every week, much of it unread. We subscribe to the Sydney Morning Herald, so on Sundays the Sun Herald is delivered to us. The SMH is a OK as a newspaper, but the Sun Herald is the type of rag that you wouldn't used to line a hamster cage, for fear of upsetting the hamster. Shoddy journalism, verging on gutter press, it usually goes straight to recycling.
All this could be stopped, which would reduce the burden on the local council's recycling activities, and keep my house tidier.
If the new device would also allow me to read ebooks, and watch the occasional DVD, so much the better. But for me, note taking and newspapers are the big, must have features.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Of books and truffles
My husband Steve and I have a tendency to plan our holidays around food and what might be broadly defined as "cultural pursuits". We've just come back from a trip to Western Australia, which was planned around the Mundaring Truffle Festival (think underground fungus, not chocolate here). The Truffle Gala Dinner at the Loose Box Restaurant was sensational, and definitely something I would attend again, given a chance. The festival itself was a lot of fun, and I'm glad we went early, because a huge number of people turned out for it. And as usual, we ordered wine (which will probably get delivered to my office next week), and as usual we came back with half a suitcase full of books. Neither of us can resist a bookshop.
Next month we are going to Melbourne for a few days, to see the A Day in Pompeii exhibition at the Melbourne Museum and the Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. These two exhibitions are conveniently running in the same city at the same time, and we can combine seeing them with celebrating our twenty third wedding anniversary, which we shall do with dinner at a good restaurant. Steve wants to go to Grossi Florentino, so I've asked Amex to see if they can get us a table; if I didn't have American Express to do the organizing, I don't think we would get holidays.
We have more or less unpacked from the last trip, and the coffee table in the lounge is covered in new books, again. I've got more than 3200 titles loaded into Library Thing - all the new ones we just bought, and I've finished the doing the books in my study. I still have a very long way to go in other rooms, but I've made some interesting discoveries, and some observations. I have some wonderful books, many of which I intended to read long ago; and I've almost stopped reading for pleasure in the last few years: all I seem to read is technical manuals and journals.
So this is going to stop. I'm going to make time to read the books I want to read, and the technical manuals can wait. I joke about buying books to read when I retire, but given the sheer number of volumes in the house, I think I'd better make a start.
My husband Steve and I have a tendency to plan our holidays around food and what might be broadly defined as "cultural pursuits". We've just come back from a trip to Western Australia, which was planned around the Mundaring Truffle Festival (think underground fungus, not chocolate here). The Truffle Gala Dinner at the Loose Box Restaurant was sensational, and definitely something I would attend again, given a chance. The festival itself was a lot of fun, and I'm glad we went early, because a huge number of people turned out for it. And as usual, we ordered wine (which will probably get delivered to my office next week), and as usual we came back with half a suitcase full of books. Neither of us can resist a bookshop.
Next month we are going to Melbourne for a few days, to see the A Day in Pompeii exhibition at the Melbourne Museum and the Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. These two exhibitions are conveniently running in the same city at the same time, and we can combine seeing them with celebrating our twenty third wedding anniversary, which we shall do with dinner at a good restaurant. Steve wants to go to Grossi Florentino, so I've asked Amex to see if they can get us a table; if I didn't have American Express to do the organizing, I don't think we would get holidays.
We have more or less unpacked from the last trip, and the coffee table in the lounge is covered in new books, again. I've got more than 3200 titles loaded into Library Thing - all the new ones we just bought, and I've finished the doing the books in my study. I still have a very long way to go in other rooms, but I've made some interesting discoveries, and some observations. I have some wonderful books, many of which I intended to read long ago; and I've almost stopped reading for pleasure in the last few years: all I seem to read is technical manuals and journals.
So this is going to stop. I'm going to make time to read the books I want to read, and the technical manuals can wait. I joke about buying books to read when I retire, but given the sheer number of volumes in the house, I think I'd better make a start.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
LibraryThing
A couple of weeks ago, I discovered LibraryThing. Now I'm sure most of you have already heard about LibraryThing - it seems to have been written up a quite a few places - but somehow I'd missed out. If you haven't heard of it, LibraryThing is an online service for organising your books. Because I have a lot of books, many rather indifferently organised, this was immediately appealing to me.
I chanced to be Googling about, looking for the name of a bookshop in Brisbane, and Google sent me to a page where a group of Australians were comparing notes on Australian bookshops. They mentioned the name of the one I was looking for (which has slipped my memory, because I haven't had to go to Brisbane since 2005,) so I made a note of it and then decided to check what site I had landed on. Behold, LibraryThing: the page I had been reading was a thread in their Talk area.
So I had a poke about, and registered a free account to try it out. LibraryThing will let you load 200 book records for free, so I extracted a chunk of my nonfiction list, re-organised it to suit LibraryThing's bulk upload system (which is pretty simple), and waited while the file got digested by the loader. It actually created 217 records before it quit, and the quality of the records retrieved was pretty good. LibraryThing searches library and online booksellers all over the world - you can configure which sources you want searched - and retrieves records which you can edit to suit your needs and add to you collection.
However, the stuff in my existing nonfiction records was mostly quite recent (within the last five years). I decided to test a bit more rigorously. So I registered another free account, for testing, and went upstairs to select some books. I settled on Nancy Mitford's "Wigs on the Green", which has been out of print for decades; a four-volume edition of Alexander Pope's "Poetical Works", dated 1853; and a privately printed edition of the Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre, also 19th century. LibraryThing found them all (OK, we had to dig a bit for the correct edition of the Pope, but we got it).
Impressed, I registered a paid account (unlimited books), and ordered one of their "CueCat" barcode scanners. Then I went back upstairs to the room which is labelled "Bedroom 4" on my house plans, but which is, in fact, full of proper steel library shelving, most of it double stacked with books. I got an armful of old Penguins and Everyman editions from the middle aisle, and started loading books into LibraryThing: most of the old books I own don't have a barcode or an ISBN number, so searching for author, title and edition is going to be the only way to load them. Later I uploaded my entire author/title fiction list.
Some observations: LibraryThing works best if you tag your books, at least roughly, at the time of loading. At least tag for fiction or nonfiction. If you are doing bulk uploads, do not chuck a couple of thousand records on the load queue in one lump. First, you will probably cause the queue to hang. Second, you will have no way to easily check what loaded. Split your load into batches of about 50, and tag them by batch number. Then you can easily call up a batch by tag name, and compare it to the file of data you uploaded. This makes it much easier to identify records that don't get a hit, or records that retrieve bad data. I got a couple of very strange books added to my LibraryThing collection, caused by corrupted ISBN numbers in the load file, and it took me a while to track down which records had caused the error. If you can easily spot which entries in your load file have produced a suboptimal result, corrections become much quicker. LibraryThing has a Power Edit mode that enables you to quickly add, remove and replace tags, so it is easy to get rid of your dummy tags when you are done.
If you are tagging books, and working on a Mac (as I do), Typinator is a great help: you can establish abbreviations for frequently used tags, and save many keystrokes (if you are using Windows, this won't help you).
Of course, now that I am loading old books into the system, I'm finding a lot that need cleaning or repairing, so my dining room table is covered in piles of books that need help. And I'm finding so many forgotten gems on the shelves.
The CueCat scanner arrived on Friday, and it works as advertised. I've tried it on my MacBook Pro and my iMac, and it does what it says it does. You do get a dialog box as the Mac recognises what it thinks is a keyboard, but you can just close that and move on. Give the CueCat about 15 seconds to get its act together when you first plug it on. Actual scanning technique seems to be the only issue, and I imagine that that will improve as I scan more books. What is scanned is, as the instructions say, gibberish:
.C3nZC3nZC3n2CNDXDhD7DxnY.cGen.ENr7C3D7DxfZChb2DG.
that's the scanned barcode for Martin Gardner's "Mathematics, magic and mystery". Feed it into LibraryThing, and it returns the book's details, right down to the correct cover art.
You should be able to see a link to my LibraryThing collection on the left hand side of this page: I've loaded 2,798 books so far, and I have a long way to go....
A couple of weeks ago, I discovered LibraryThing. Now I'm sure most of you have already heard about LibraryThing - it seems to have been written up a quite a few places - but somehow I'd missed out. If you haven't heard of it, LibraryThing is an online service for organising your books. Because I have a lot of books, many rather indifferently organised, this was immediately appealing to me.
I chanced to be Googling about, looking for the name of a bookshop in Brisbane, and Google sent me to a page where a group of Australians were comparing notes on Australian bookshops. They mentioned the name of the one I was looking for (which has slipped my memory, because I haven't had to go to Brisbane since 2005,) so I made a note of it and then decided to check what site I had landed on. Behold, LibraryThing: the page I had been reading was a thread in their Talk area.
So I had a poke about, and registered a free account to try it out. LibraryThing will let you load 200 book records for free, so I extracted a chunk of my nonfiction list, re-organised it to suit LibraryThing's bulk upload system (which is pretty simple), and waited while the file got digested by the loader. It actually created 217 records before it quit, and the quality of the records retrieved was pretty good. LibraryThing searches library and online booksellers all over the world - you can configure which sources you want searched - and retrieves records which you can edit to suit your needs and add to you collection.
However, the stuff in my existing nonfiction records was mostly quite recent (within the last five years). I decided to test a bit more rigorously. So I registered another free account, for testing, and went upstairs to select some books. I settled on Nancy Mitford's "Wigs on the Green", which has been out of print for decades; a four-volume edition of Alexander Pope's "Poetical Works", dated 1853; and a privately printed edition of the Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre, also 19th century. LibraryThing found them all (OK, we had to dig a bit for the correct edition of the Pope, but we got it).
Impressed, I registered a paid account (unlimited books), and ordered one of their "CueCat" barcode scanners. Then I went back upstairs to the room which is labelled "Bedroom 4" on my house plans, but which is, in fact, full of proper steel library shelving, most of it double stacked with books. I got an armful of old Penguins and Everyman editions from the middle aisle, and started loading books into LibraryThing: most of the old books I own don't have a barcode or an ISBN number, so searching for author, title and edition is going to be the only way to load them. Later I uploaded my entire author/title fiction list.
Some observations: LibraryThing works best if you tag your books, at least roughly, at the time of loading. At least tag for fiction or nonfiction. If you are doing bulk uploads, do not chuck a couple of thousand records on the load queue in one lump. First, you will probably cause the queue to hang. Second, you will have no way to easily check what loaded. Split your load into batches of about 50, and tag them by batch number. Then you can easily call up a batch by tag name, and compare it to the file of data you uploaded. This makes it much easier to identify records that don't get a hit, or records that retrieve bad data. I got a couple of very strange books added to my LibraryThing collection, caused by corrupted ISBN numbers in the load file, and it took me a while to track down which records had caused the error. If you can easily spot which entries in your load file have produced a suboptimal result, corrections become much quicker. LibraryThing has a Power Edit mode that enables you to quickly add, remove and replace tags, so it is easy to get rid of your dummy tags when you are done.
If you are tagging books, and working on a Mac (as I do), Typinator is a great help: you can establish abbreviations for frequently used tags, and save many keystrokes (if you are using Windows, this won't help you).
Of course, now that I am loading old books into the system, I'm finding a lot that need cleaning or repairing, so my dining room table is covered in piles of books that need help. And I'm finding so many forgotten gems on the shelves.
The CueCat scanner arrived on Friday, and it works as advertised. I've tried it on my MacBook Pro and my iMac, and it does what it says it does. You do get a dialog box as the Mac recognises what it thinks is a keyboard, but you can just close that and move on. Give the CueCat about 15 seconds to get its act together when you first plug it on. Actual scanning technique seems to be the only issue, and I imagine that that will improve as I scan more books. What is scanned is, as the instructions say, gibberish:
.C3nZC3nZC3n2CNDXDhD7DxnY.cGen.ENr7C3D7DxfZChb2DG.
that's the scanned barcode for Martin Gardner's "Mathematics, magic and mystery". Feed it into LibraryThing, and it returns the book's details, right down to the correct cover art.
You should be able to see a link to my LibraryThing collection on the left hand side of this page: I've loaded 2,798 books so far, and I have a long way to go....
Saturday, June 06, 2009
The Joy of Books
Books (well, printed matter in all forms, but let's concentrate on books for a moment) flow into my house in a constant stream. Quite apart from the ones my husband buys (which are mostly about military modeling at the moment, and come from all over the planet), I buy books regularly. And irregularly. I buy books in shopping centres, in dedicated book shops, in air ports. If I land in a new city, the first thing I look for in the hotel room is a yellow pages, so I can see if there are any book shops nearby. And, of course, I watch out for book fairs. The University of New South Wales has a book fair most years, and I always come away with a box of books.
As you might expect, we have a lot of bookshelves (we designed our house to accommodate books, including reinforcing the first floor slab to carry additional vertical load), and they are all over flowing. And still the books come, from Amazon, from the English Good Book Guide, from second hand shops, from Kinokuniya, from Abbeys. Craft books, cookery books, programming, philosophy, almanacs, fiction, history, biography: I have no resistance. My husband claims that, when he married me, he didn't get a dowry, he got a library. I don't actually know how many books are in the house, because I know that some of the older volumes are not on my shelf lists, but I'd guess somewhere around the 4,000 mark. Perhaps more.
When a book enters the house, I try to avoid opening it at once. As far as is possible, all paperbacks and any hardcover with a loose dust jacket gets covered with self adhesive plastic ( I favour a brand called Alkor) before it gets much handling, to preserve its original condition. Once covered, the title is then entered into my shelf lists, which are large Excel spreadsheets for Fiction A-M, Fiction N-Z and Non-fiction; these are exported as CSV files, and uploaded to the CSV Touch application on my iPhone.
But this takes time, and sometimes a lot of books arrive all at once. So unprocessed books gather on the coffee table in the sitting room, to the consternation of my housekeeper, where they may stay for weeks until I can catch up.
I've just been entering a big batch into the shelf list - the catch from a trip to Melbourne, a foray into Borders, the aforementioned UNSW book fair, an order Steves placed on a specialist military bookshop in England and a couple of strays that somehow got into the general community without getting covered. I'm still behind on covering, but at least the shelf list is up to date (after a fashion, I know that most of the non-fiction I bought before about 1990 isn't listed).
I do an abbreviated form of physical cataloguing, sufficient to record author or editor names, title, publisher's name and location, year of publication and ISBN. Modern books are fairly straightforward, one can expect the publisher's details to be either on the verso of the title page, or in a colophon at the end of the book, and most volumes now have one if not two ISBN numbers. But with older books, it can be trickier. For example, one of the volumes I have just processed is a Viking Portable Library edition of Dorothy Parker's short stories and poems. It has no ISBN number - it does have statement that says "This edition is produced in full compliance with all War Production Board conservation orders", which says something about the constraints that World War Two puts on anyone trying to publish a book in 1944. But the publication details are rather scant. The cover is cloth, and there is a little foxing in a few places. The fly leaf has a signature, "Eileen Langdon", and in a different hand, at the bottom of the same page, the words 'from Leo Packer", but the binding is quite firm for a 65 year old book, and I doubt it has ever been read. I wonder who Eileen and Leo were?
Covering the books takes time, and before they can be covered, I need to remove all sticky labels (the adhesive will break down and discolour rapidl), and any grubby marks. Old books may need repairs, torn dust jackets will have to be reassembled and patched carefully. Stray book marks - which may be anything from an old bus ticket to a proper book mark - have to be found and extracted. In one case, long ago, I found myself in possession of a novel with a missing page, and wound up having to borrow the book from the library, type out the missing material, and add it to my book.
But I have the satisfaction of knowing that I can find a book on almost any subject somewhere in this house. If I look for long enough.
Books (well, printed matter in all forms, but let's concentrate on books for a moment) flow into my house in a constant stream. Quite apart from the ones my husband buys (which are mostly about military modeling at the moment, and come from all over the planet), I buy books regularly. And irregularly. I buy books in shopping centres, in dedicated book shops, in air ports. If I land in a new city, the first thing I look for in the hotel room is a yellow pages, so I can see if there are any book shops nearby. And, of course, I watch out for book fairs. The University of New South Wales has a book fair most years, and I always come away with a box of books.
As you might expect, we have a lot of bookshelves (we designed our house to accommodate books, including reinforcing the first floor slab to carry additional vertical load), and they are all over flowing. And still the books come, from Amazon, from the English Good Book Guide, from second hand shops, from Kinokuniya, from Abbeys. Craft books, cookery books, programming, philosophy, almanacs, fiction, history, biography: I have no resistance. My husband claims that, when he married me, he didn't get a dowry, he got a library. I don't actually know how many books are in the house, because I know that some of the older volumes are not on my shelf lists, but I'd guess somewhere around the 4,000 mark. Perhaps more.
When a book enters the house, I try to avoid opening it at once. As far as is possible, all paperbacks and any hardcover with a loose dust jacket gets covered with self adhesive plastic ( I favour a brand called Alkor) before it gets much handling, to preserve its original condition. Once covered, the title is then entered into my shelf lists, which are large Excel spreadsheets for Fiction A-M, Fiction N-Z and Non-fiction; these are exported as CSV files, and uploaded to the CSV Touch application on my iPhone.
But this takes time, and sometimes a lot of books arrive all at once. So unprocessed books gather on the coffee table in the sitting room, to the consternation of my housekeeper, where they may stay for weeks until I can catch up.
I've just been entering a big batch into the shelf list - the catch from a trip to Melbourne, a foray into Borders, the aforementioned UNSW book fair, an order Steves placed on a specialist military bookshop in England and a couple of strays that somehow got into the general community without getting covered. I'm still behind on covering, but at least the shelf list is up to date (after a fashion, I know that most of the non-fiction I bought before about 1990 isn't listed).
I do an abbreviated form of physical cataloguing, sufficient to record author or editor names, title, publisher's name and location, year of publication and ISBN. Modern books are fairly straightforward, one can expect the publisher's details to be either on the verso of the title page, or in a colophon at the end of the book, and most volumes now have one if not two ISBN numbers. But with older books, it can be trickier. For example, one of the volumes I have just processed is a Viking Portable Library edition of Dorothy Parker's short stories and poems. It has no ISBN number - it does have statement that says "This edition is produced in full compliance with all War Production Board conservation orders", which says something about the constraints that World War Two puts on anyone trying to publish a book in 1944. But the publication details are rather scant. The cover is cloth, and there is a little foxing in a few places. The fly leaf has a signature, "Eileen Langdon", and in a different hand, at the bottom of the same page, the words 'from Leo Packer", but the binding is quite firm for a 65 year old book, and I doubt it has ever been read. I wonder who Eileen and Leo were?
Covering the books takes time, and before they can be covered, I need to remove all sticky labels (the adhesive will break down and discolour rapidl), and any grubby marks. Old books may need repairs, torn dust jackets will have to be reassembled and patched carefully. Stray book marks - which may be anything from an old bus ticket to a proper book mark - have to be found and extracted. In one case, long ago, I found myself in possession of a novel with a missing page, and wound up having to borrow the book from the library, type out the missing material, and add it to my book.
But I have the satisfaction of knowing that I can find a book on almost any subject somewhere in this house. If I look for long enough.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Significant Events
Quick as you can, think of some experience or event that changed your life. Some "fork in the road moment" that had a lasting effect on the direction your life took. It's possible (particularly if you are relatively young) that you haven't had such a moment yet, but if you have, did you recognize its significance at the time? And if you haven't had such an experience, how do you think you would recognize one if you did?
I've been thinking about this lately, because over the last few weeks I've been doing the Storage Networking Industry Association's Management and Administration course, and the ITIL version 2 course, and the related exams. I reckon that the two activities have consumed about 10 days in training courses, additional study and the exams themselves (I passed both). However, for all the effort, I don't really expect either one to change my life noticeably.
An event that did change my life happened in about five minutes early in 1981, and at the time I barely noticed it.
In 1981 I was working as a library assistant for the Community and Child Health Services branch of the Public Health Department of Western Australia. One of my duties was to take care of journal circulation, the extremely manual process by which periodical publications were circulated among staff who had asked to see them. This meant dealing with hundreds of people and thousands of individual issues of everything from the British Medical Journal to Nursing Times. There was no Internet, and the only way for the medical staff to stay up to date with current information in their field was to read the printed word. So every day scores of periodicals would cross my desk, and I would try to at least glance at the contents page of the new ones, and if anything looked interesting I might put it aside to read during lunch.
On this particular day, the November 1980 issue of Psychology Today hit my desk, having already made the rounds at head office, and during lunch I skimmed through it. There was an article by an American physician called John Eric Holmes, entitled "Confessions of a Dungeon Master". It was about the fantasy role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, told from the perspective of Dungeon Master of a long running game. It probably took me less than five minutes to read it, and I thought it sounded like fun. I was looking for a new hobby, principally because I wanted to find a way to extend my social circle, most of whom at that time were either other librarians or nursing students (read: very few men). I knew that there was shop in Perth that sold the paraphernalia for D&D, because they also sold military simulation games, which I had tried previously. So, when opportunity permitted, I stopped by the shop and asked the owner if he knew of a group that I could join. He said he did, and gave me the name and phone number of someone who ran a gaming club the the Gooseberry Hill area.
I called the number, and spoke to the club organizer, Stephen Neal. And as Miss Bronte has it in "Jane Eyre", "reader, I married him". Not at once (not until 1986), but my husband and I met because I read an article in a magazine. A chain of events started that otherwise could not have happened. When I was offered work in Canberra, my prospective employer (the National Library) would not pay my relocation costs, but Steve was just graduating from his degree and starting to look for work, so we decided to drive across Australia together. I started work in Canberra, and Steve went on to Sydney and found a job there. I got a transfer to Sydney in 1985, and we married in 1986, just in time for me to get retrenched and accidently join the IT industry.
And I can think of at least two other people whose lives I significantly affected, by helping them get out of poorly paid public service jobs and into better paid (but much more stressful) private sector jobs. All sort of things could not have happened if I had stayed in Perth, and I couldn't get out of Perth without Steve. If we had not met, I would probably still be a librarian, and he would probably work in heavy construction on some mine site. Our directions changed because of a five minute event that I barely noticed at the time. I did work it out later, and while I was still at the National Library, I located that issue of Psychology Today and photocopied the article. I have it beside me now, faded but readable, with a proper citation scrawled on the first page in my hand, giving volume, issue and page number detail.
The important events are not always the obvious ones.
If anyone happens to know Doctor Holmes, say "Hi" for me.
Quick as you can, think of some experience or event that changed your life. Some "fork in the road moment" that had a lasting effect on the direction your life took. It's possible (particularly if you are relatively young) that you haven't had such a moment yet, but if you have, did you recognize its significance at the time? And if you haven't had such an experience, how do you think you would recognize one if you did?
I've been thinking about this lately, because over the last few weeks I've been doing the Storage Networking Industry Association's Management and Administration course, and the ITIL version 2 course, and the related exams. I reckon that the two activities have consumed about 10 days in training courses, additional study and the exams themselves (I passed both). However, for all the effort, I don't really expect either one to change my life noticeably.
An event that did change my life happened in about five minutes early in 1981, and at the time I barely noticed it.
In 1981 I was working as a library assistant for the Community and Child Health Services branch of the Public Health Department of Western Australia. One of my duties was to take care of journal circulation, the extremely manual process by which periodical publications were circulated among staff who had asked to see them. This meant dealing with hundreds of people and thousands of individual issues of everything from the British Medical Journal to Nursing Times. There was no Internet, and the only way for the medical staff to stay up to date with current information in their field was to read the printed word. So every day scores of periodicals would cross my desk, and I would try to at least glance at the contents page of the new ones, and if anything looked interesting I might put it aside to read during lunch.
On this particular day, the November 1980 issue of Psychology Today hit my desk, having already made the rounds at head office, and during lunch I skimmed through it. There was an article by an American physician called John Eric Holmes, entitled "Confessions of a Dungeon Master". It was about the fantasy role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, told from the perspective of Dungeon Master of a long running game. It probably took me less than five minutes to read it, and I thought it sounded like fun. I was looking for a new hobby, principally because I wanted to find a way to extend my social circle, most of whom at that time were either other librarians or nursing students (read: very few men). I knew that there was shop in Perth that sold the paraphernalia for D&D, because they also sold military simulation games, which I had tried previously. So, when opportunity permitted, I stopped by the shop and asked the owner if he knew of a group that I could join. He said he did, and gave me the name and phone number of someone who ran a gaming club the the Gooseberry Hill area.
I called the number, and spoke to the club organizer, Stephen Neal. And as Miss Bronte has it in "Jane Eyre", "reader, I married him". Not at once (not until 1986), but my husband and I met because I read an article in a magazine. A chain of events started that otherwise could not have happened. When I was offered work in Canberra, my prospective employer (the National Library) would not pay my relocation costs, but Steve was just graduating from his degree and starting to look for work, so we decided to drive across Australia together. I started work in Canberra, and Steve went on to Sydney and found a job there. I got a transfer to Sydney in 1985, and we married in 1986, just in time for me to get retrenched and accidently join the IT industry.
And I can think of at least two other people whose lives I significantly affected, by helping them get out of poorly paid public service jobs and into better paid (but much more stressful) private sector jobs. All sort of things could not have happened if I had stayed in Perth, and I couldn't get out of Perth without Steve. If we had not met, I would probably still be a librarian, and he would probably work in heavy construction on some mine site. Our directions changed because of a five minute event that I barely noticed at the time. I did work it out later, and while I was still at the National Library, I located that issue of Psychology Today and photocopied the article. I have it beside me now, faded but readable, with a proper citation scrawled on the first page in my hand, giving volume, issue and page number detail.
The important events are not always the obvious ones.
If anyone happens to know Doctor Holmes, say "Hi" for me.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Noise Pollution
I see that some well meaning but misguided boffins at Lotus are talking about building systems to add sound effects to electric cars. The justification for this is supposed to be two fold: to allow the driver to judge by ear how fast they are going, and to alert pedestrians to the approach of the vehicle, so that they don't step out in front of it. Now I will admit that it took me a couple of weeks to adjust to my Prius, and not being able to judge speed by sound (which I hadn't fully realised that I did, until it stopped working). But I'm adaptable, and I learned, fortunately before I got a speeding ticket.
But I see absolutely no reason to add to the noise pollution of this planet to alert pedestrians to the approach of cars. If a pedestrian is about to step into the street, they should assume that there may be a car approaching and check. Most of the people I have to dodge in the city have the ear pieces of some electronic device in their ears, anyway, and probably wouldn't hear it if my car made a noise like a jet taking off. Bicycles can be silent, so are we going to add noise makers to them, as well?
The average human being does not pay nearly enough attention to what is going on around them as it is. If we could just reintroduce some large carnivore to our communities - I'm thinking a sabre toothed tiger or similar - people would become a damn sight more alert to their surrounding, and less inclined to wander about in a daze, expecting others to avoid them. This might lead to a general improvement in manners and general standards of behaviour.
I can dream.
I see that some well meaning but misguided boffins at Lotus are talking about building systems to add sound effects to electric cars. The justification for this is supposed to be two fold: to allow the driver to judge by ear how fast they are going, and to alert pedestrians to the approach of the vehicle, so that they don't step out in front of it. Now I will admit that it took me a couple of weeks to adjust to my Prius, and not being able to judge speed by sound (which I hadn't fully realised that I did, until it stopped working). But I'm adaptable, and I learned, fortunately before I got a speeding ticket.
But I see absolutely no reason to add to the noise pollution of this planet to alert pedestrians to the approach of cars. If a pedestrian is about to step into the street, they should assume that there may be a car approaching and check. Most of the people I have to dodge in the city have the ear pieces of some electronic device in their ears, anyway, and probably wouldn't hear it if my car made a noise like a jet taking off. Bicycles can be silent, so are we going to add noise makers to them, as well?
The average human being does not pay nearly enough attention to what is going on around them as it is. If we could just reintroduce some large carnivore to our communities - I'm thinking a sabre toothed tiger or similar - people would become a damn sight more alert to their surrounding, and less inclined to wander about in a daze, expecting others to avoid them. This might lead to a general improvement in manners and general standards of behaviour.
I can dream.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
The sky is not falling
I am one of the people for whom the recession (or whatever you choose to call the current financial maelstrom) is something that is happening to other people. I have a secure, well paid job. So does my husband. We have no debt apart from our mortgage, which we are well ahead on, and we are gaining ground as the interest rates fall. I am conscious of how fortunate we are, and I'm being careful resist the urge that seems to have struck a large part of the community to reduce their spending. If your financial position is in any way unsteady, by all means review your discretionary spending and make appropriate cuts. But if you are not in trouble, why panic? I'm deliberately maintaining my normal spending pattern: supporting the same charities and cultural organizations, buying the same magazines, and the same groceries. It wouldn't occur to me to cancel my gardener's contract, or my housekeeper's. Because if I reduce my spending, all the people who rely on my business for part of their cash flow suffer.
I have two principle problems in implementing this approach: stores that decide to "rationalize" their inventory, and stop carrying the products that I want to buy. And the entire fashion and clothing industry, which seems to be stuck in some strange alternate reality.
Several stores have done the inventory rationalization thing to me in the last few weeks, apparently under the delusion that if they stop carrying product A, I will just buy product B from them instead. This is not what happens: if I want product A, I'm going to get product A from someone. All you are achieving is to cause me to shop in other places. Last weekend I conducted my normal grocery shopping at Coles. Coles seems to have stopped carrying several products that I use routinely, so I made a side trip to Woolworths. Woolworths had what I wanted, so I may very well do my whole shop in Woolworths next weekend. Some products I am now sourcing from on-line stores. I will not have my shopping habits dictated by a grocer.
Clothes have been a headache for me for years. I'm fussy about clothes, and I'm not prepared to wear whatever has been declared fashionable just because it's fashionable. I do not read any magazines which feature fashion - in fact the only magazines I read which are principally targeted at a female audience are those dedicated to knitting. And I'm not a standard size (is anyone a standard size?). I have a waist, and I expect to be able to put a belt around it, to support my mobile phone and various sundries. I do not want anything low waisted: this is a look that really only suits girls who have a rather androgynous figure, which a lot of young women have these days. I blame this on BPA leaching from plastic bottles, which I avoid like the plague.
However, the clothing manufacturers seems to think that every woman will be happy to wear whatever tasteless tat they are showing this year. Consequently I normally have to shop in one of the few stores that has worked out that there is a market for clothes for women who can tell the difference between good taste and fashion, or I have to employ a dressmaker or tailor. I happen to be between dressmakers at the moment (my regular lady went off to become a mother), so I am about to start the search for a new one. Using a dressmaker can be a little more time consuming, and doesn't provide the "instant gratification" of shopping in a store, but you do get to choose your own material and buttons, you know your clothes were made by someone paid a decent wage, and as long as your weight is stable and you stick to classic styles, you can wear the same garments for years. And no one ever has the same outfit that you do.
I am one of the people for whom the recession (or whatever you choose to call the current financial maelstrom) is something that is happening to other people. I have a secure, well paid job. So does my husband. We have no debt apart from our mortgage, which we are well ahead on, and we are gaining ground as the interest rates fall. I am conscious of how fortunate we are, and I'm being careful resist the urge that seems to have struck a large part of the community to reduce their spending. If your financial position is in any way unsteady, by all means review your discretionary spending and make appropriate cuts. But if you are not in trouble, why panic? I'm deliberately maintaining my normal spending pattern: supporting the same charities and cultural organizations, buying the same magazines, and the same groceries. It wouldn't occur to me to cancel my gardener's contract, or my housekeeper's. Because if I reduce my spending, all the people who rely on my business for part of their cash flow suffer.
I have two principle problems in implementing this approach: stores that decide to "rationalize" their inventory, and stop carrying the products that I want to buy. And the entire fashion and clothing industry, which seems to be stuck in some strange alternate reality.
Several stores have done the inventory rationalization thing to me in the last few weeks, apparently under the delusion that if they stop carrying product A, I will just buy product B from them instead. This is not what happens: if I want product A, I'm going to get product A from someone. All you are achieving is to cause me to shop in other places. Last weekend I conducted my normal grocery shopping at Coles. Coles seems to have stopped carrying several products that I use routinely, so I made a side trip to Woolworths. Woolworths had what I wanted, so I may very well do my whole shop in Woolworths next weekend. Some products I am now sourcing from on-line stores. I will not have my shopping habits dictated by a grocer.
Clothes have been a headache for me for years. I'm fussy about clothes, and I'm not prepared to wear whatever has been declared fashionable just because it's fashionable. I do not read any magazines which feature fashion - in fact the only magazines I read which are principally targeted at a female audience are those dedicated to knitting. And I'm not a standard size (is anyone a standard size?). I have a waist, and I expect to be able to put a belt around it, to support my mobile phone and various sundries. I do not want anything low waisted: this is a look that really only suits girls who have a rather androgynous figure, which a lot of young women have these days. I blame this on BPA leaching from plastic bottles, which I avoid like the plague.
However, the clothing manufacturers seems to think that every woman will be happy to wear whatever tasteless tat they are showing this year. Consequently I normally have to shop in one of the few stores that has worked out that there is a market for clothes for women who can tell the difference between good taste and fashion, or I have to employ a dressmaker or tailor. I happen to be between dressmakers at the moment (my regular lady went off to become a mother), so I am about to start the search for a new one. Using a dressmaker can be a little more time consuming, and doesn't provide the "instant gratification" of shopping in a store, but you do get to choose your own material and buttons, you know your clothes were made by someone paid a decent wage, and as long as your weight is stable and you stick to classic styles, you can wear the same garments for years. And no one ever has the same outfit that you do.
Friday, April 10, 2009
I do not believe it is April. What happened to December, January, February and March? I am certain that time goes faster as you get older, or perhaps I'm just getting busier. Certainly the last few months have been extremely busy for me, hence the lack of regular blogging. I was promoted to Team Leader a little while ago, and am now coming to grips with the extra duties required of a "people manager". And I am now properly engaged in my job, which means that I always have plenty to do, and then some. However, today is a public holiday, and I have some free time.
At the beginning of this week, the local Sun office started its current round of local redundancies. Monday and Tuesday I got a lot of calls, SMSs and emails from former colleagues to tell me either that they had survived, or that they were now ex-Sun employees. Everyone knew that this was coming, and I was deeply grateful last weekend that I no longer worked for Sun, and I didn't have to worry personally. When I quit in July 2005, I calculated that Sun would survive for between 3 and 5 years, based on observed performance, and that I probably had no more than 3 years to broaden my skill set to something beyond just Sun if I wanted to remain employable. Of course that was before the entire world caught the financial flu, and I would no longer bet on Sun to survive until July 2010: if the Sun management team have not figured out to make the company consistently profitable in the last 4 years, they are unlikely to suddenly work it out now. While I still believe that Sun has wonderful products, and some of the most brilliant technical people I have ever worked with, all the technical excellence in the world will not generate a profit if badly managed.
I feel deeply sorry for those who have been laid off (in Sun jargon, RIFed. RIF stands for Reduction in Force). Being made redundant is seldom a nice experience - I do know one or two people who deliberately went after redundancy - but if it is unexpected it is a horrible shock. I was made redundant by the Australian Public Service in 1986, and I can still remember the sense of disbelief and of shame. In 1986 I was still working as a librarian. The government of the day (Labour, left wing) announced an across the board cut in public service staff numbers. I don't think I paid much attention: I had mountains of work to get through, and I was just about to be married.
I returned from a brief honeymoon (all we could afford, since neither of us earned much in those days), and on the first day back in the office, I was told that I was being made redundant. I was horrified: Steve and I were saving stringently to get a deposit on a house, and now I had lost my job. I couldn't believe that my work was so unimportant that it could just be stopped (as it turned out, it couldn't: services had to be cut). Where I came from in those days, you only lost your job if you had done it badly. I was shattered.
I was lucky: I found another job within days, and in fact left my old job much sooner that the Public Service had planned - they had some scheme whereby they could make someone redundant, place them on the unattached list, but still keep employing them for some months while they looked for another position within the Service. This satisfied the politicians, while not immediately disrupting anything. The department that made me redundant expected me to be there for at least another six months; in fact, I was out in a matter of weeks, and starting in a new career in IT. But that is another story.
In the ensuing years I have lived through many, many rounds of cost cutting and redundancies a various places. Perhaps the most terrifying was the place that brought in a new manager just to handle the lay offs. You would come into the office in the morning, and desks would be suddenly empty, as if something had come in the night and expunged the existence of the previous occupant. Nothing was said: people just vanished. Morale, predictably, plummeted. I got out as soon as I found another place: I do not like working under such circumstances.
The first round of lay offs at Sun were targeted at allegedly low performing staff members, though I would question how the rating was done, since some very good people were made redundant, and some complete idiots were retained. Subsequent lay offs seems to have been variable - some targeting senior staff, who were paid more, some targeting particular areas of the business. None really effective, because they caused the company to lose talent and experience, while reducing the proportion of people who generated revenue and increasing the proportion of people who performed non-revenue generating duties. When I joined Sun in 1998, the organizational structure was relatively flat: there were people in the Sydney office who were only one or two "steps" from Scott McNealy. Year on year we got more layers of management, and it got worse after I left.
So if you have been laid off, my sympathies. Remember that it is unlikely that you could have done anything to prevent this happening, because it is not about you, or your performance. It is about someone who probably doesn’t understand what you do trying to save money. If you got a pay out of some sort, use it carefully, because in this climate it may have to last a while. Some companies are still hiring (my employer is, see here), but many are not, and many are conducting stupid lay offs, because they think they should because everyone else is. This will hurt them later, but doesn't help you.
If you have time on your hands, study something new, and consider doing a few hours volunteer work each week, to keep yourself engaged and remind yourself that you are useful. A lot of people have major problems when they lose their jobs simply because the structure of their days disappears. They wind up sitting in front of the television while the days drift by. Don't do that: set up a schedule and stick to it. If you have spent the last 10 years in front of a computer, take the opportunity to get some exercise. If you haven't had your hair restyled in the last decade, get that fixed before you hit the interview circuit - an old hairstyle dates you instantly.
And please spell check your resume.
At the beginning of this week, the local Sun office started its current round of local redundancies. Monday and Tuesday I got a lot of calls, SMSs and emails from former colleagues to tell me either that they had survived, or that they were now ex-Sun employees. Everyone knew that this was coming, and I was deeply grateful last weekend that I no longer worked for Sun, and I didn't have to worry personally. When I quit in July 2005, I calculated that Sun would survive for between 3 and 5 years, based on observed performance, and that I probably had no more than 3 years to broaden my skill set to something beyond just Sun if I wanted to remain employable. Of course that was before the entire world caught the financial flu, and I would no longer bet on Sun to survive until July 2010: if the Sun management team have not figured out to make the company consistently profitable in the last 4 years, they are unlikely to suddenly work it out now. While I still believe that Sun has wonderful products, and some of the most brilliant technical people I have ever worked with, all the technical excellence in the world will not generate a profit if badly managed.
I feel deeply sorry for those who have been laid off (in Sun jargon, RIFed. RIF stands for Reduction in Force). Being made redundant is seldom a nice experience - I do know one or two people who deliberately went after redundancy - but if it is unexpected it is a horrible shock. I was made redundant by the Australian Public Service in 1986, and I can still remember the sense of disbelief and of shame. In 1986 I was still working as a librarian. The government of the day (Labour, left wing) announced an across the board cut in public service staff numbers. I don't think I paid much attention: I had mountains of work to get through, and I was just about to be married.
I returned from a brief honeymoon (all we could afford, since neither of us earned much in those days), and on the first day back in the office, I was told that I was being made redundant. I was horrified: Steve and I were saving stringently to get a deposit on a house, and now I had lost my job. I couldn't believe that my work was so unimportant that it could just be stopped (as it turned out, it couldn't: services had to be cut). Where I came from in those days, you only lost your job if you had done it badly. I was shattered.
I was lucky: I found another job within days, and in fact left my old job much sooner that the Public Service had planned - they had some scheme whereby they could make someone redundant, place them on the unattached list, but still keep employing them for some months while they looked for another position within the Service. This satisfied the politicians, while not immediately disrupting anything. The department that made me redundant expected me to be there for at least another six months; in fact, I was out in a matter of weeks, and starting in a new career in IT. But that is another story.
In the ensuing years I have lived through many, many rounds of cost cutting and redundancies a various places. Perhaps the most terrifying was the place that brought in a new manager just to handle the lay offs. You would come into the office in the morning, and desks would be suddenly empty, as if something had come in the night and expunged the existence of the previous occupant. Nothing was said: people just vanished. Morale, predictably, plummeted. I got out as soon as I found another place: I do not like working under such circumstances.
The first round of lay offs at Sun were targeted at allegedly low performing staff members, though I would question how the rating was done, since some very good people were made redundant, and some complete idiots were retained. Subsequent lay offs seems to have been variable - some targeting senior staff, who were paid more, some targeting particular areas of the business. None really effective, because they caused the company to lose talent and experience, while reducing the proportion of people who generated revenue and increasing the proportion of people who performed non-revenue generating duties. When I joined Sun in 1998, the organizational structure was relatively flat: there were people in the Sydney office who were only one or two "steps" from Scott McNealy. Year on year we got more layers of management, and it got worse after I left.
So if you have been laid off, my sympathies. Remember that it is unlikely that you could have done anything to prevent this happening, because it is not about you, or your performance. It is about someone who probably doesn’t understand what you do trying to save money. If you got a pay out of some sort, use it carefully, because in this climate it may have to last a while. Some companies are still hiring (my employer is, see here), but many are not, and many are conducting stupid lay offs, because they think they should because everyone else is. This will hurt them later, but doesn't help you.
If you have time on your hands, study something new, and consider doing a few hours volunteer work each week, to keep yourself engaged and remind yourself that you are useful. A lot of people have major problems when they lose their jobs simply because the structure of their days disappears. They wind up sitting in front of the television while the days drift by. Don't do that: set up a schedule and stick to it. If you have spent the last 10 years in front of a computer, take the opportunity to get some exercise. If you haven't had your hair restyled in the last decade, get that fixed before you hit the interview circuit - an old hairstyle dates you instantly.
And please spell check your resume.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
The Coming of the iPhone
I finally got an iPhone 3G in August, and after some initial difficulties getting rid of my previous Blackberry service (entirely procedural, nothing technical) I have connectivity with my employer's mail system and all is good. I'm finding the phone much better than the Blackberry (it was a Pearl): the call quality is better and the screen easier to read. And of course the applications available for the iPhone make it so much more than just a phone.
When I got it, the first thing I wanted to sort out was my old "Portable databases" problem. How to move three simple databases (Fiction, Non-fictions and DVDs) off my Palm Pilot and onto the iPhone. Answer: CSV Touch, from Ozymandias Software. This app takes a comma delimited file, and presents it as a database. I had some initial problems, mostly to do with cleaning up the data files. Exporting out of my old HanDbase application produced a CSV file, but it had some blank lines, no end of file marker and all the line endings were CTRL-M (sure sign of something with a nasty DOS heritage). However, one of the many joys of Mac OS X is a terminal window, and access to the vi and sed editors. A few minutes of work to sort out the file formats, and the data imported cleanly. The databases work fine, and I have been able to ditch HanDbase.
Next, portable passwords. I've used the old Cryptinfo Palm application from NormSoft for many years, but I've been moving to 1Password on my Mac, and behold, the lovely people from Agile Web Solutions have released an iPhone app of their product. Again, some tooing and froing to get data off the Palm and into the new repository, but no real dramas.
What else is on the Palm Pilot? Well, a lot of word processing documents that I use for reference and various notes and aides memoir. Answer: DataCase from Veiosoft. DataCase has taken all my old Word docs, and PDFs of things like the Handbook for Justices of the Peace in New South Wales (which I need rapid access to routinely), and works like a charm.
By the time I had moved that lot, the Palm Pilot was almost unnecessary. A subnet calculator and a Checklist app were really all I lacked, and there are lots of those in the App Store. OK, I have a copy Bejewelled on the Palm Pilot, and the game is available in the App store, but I'm afraid I refused to shell out $12.99 for another copy of an application that I already have licensed on Palm and Mac.
I've also loaded Stanza, the ebook reader, which is fantastic, and some wonderful person has created an app to allow you to view the Roads and Traffic Authority's web cams on the iPhone. The is a jewel beyond price, as anyone who has to navigate Sydney's all too easily gridlocked roads will tell you. Measures, a unit conversion app, helps me convert imperial measurements to metric (essential when all American equipment is specified in inches and everything local is specified in centimeters).
The Palm Pilot has been relegated to running Solitaire and Bejewelled, which is just as well, because I think its screen is beginning to fail.
So I no longer have to carry the Palm Pilot, which has allowed me to reorganize my handbag. The Palm Lifedrive is a chunky object, and I don't miss its added bulk one bit. I'm not a small-handbag person at the best of times: my notion of the bare essentials takes up quite a lot of space, and I'm always looking for ways to rationalize, minimize and organize my handbag. I hate not being able to lay my hand instantly on whatever I want - keys, purse, glasses, whatever - and I hate bags that are nothing more than a sack on a strap. Everything gets tangled up at the bottom, and there is nothing more pathetic than a woman removing articles from her bag one after the other in the search for the one thing she can't find.
And then there is the "changing handbags" issue: if you are not very careful, you miss transferring something from bag A to bag B, and trouble follows. If you have bags with a lot of pockets, it's easy to miss something. Like your house keys. Or your security pass.
Enter the Borne Naked handbag liner, answer to a maiden's prayer. A clear plastic liner with multiple pockets, it keeps the contents of my bag clean, organized and accessible. I can change bags in seconds, and be sure I haven't missed anything. The liner is very well made, all edges bound neatly, with a good quality zip. Guys note: it doesn't look girly, and would work well in a brief case, too.
I finally got an iPhone 3G in August, and after some initial difficulties getting rid of my previous Blackberry service (entirely procedural, nothing technical) I have connectivity with my employer's mail system and all is good. I'm finding the phone much better than the Blackberry (it was a Pearl): the call quality is better and the screen easier to read. And of course the applications available for the iPhone make it so much more than just a phone.
When I got it, the first thing I wanted to sort out was my old "Portable databases" problem. How to move three simple databases (Fiction, Non-fictions and DVDs) off my Palm Pilot and onto the iPhone. Answer: CSV Touch, from Ozymandias Software. This app takes a comma delimited file, and presents it as a database. I had some initial problems, mostly to do with cleaning up the data files. Exporting out of my old HanDbase application produced a CSV file, but it had some blank lines, no end of file marker and all the line endings were CTRL-M (sure sign of something with a nasty DOS heritage). However, one of the many joys of Mac OS X is a terminal window, and access to the vi and sed editors. A few minutes of work to sort out the file formats, and the data imported cleanly. The databases work fine, and I have been able to ditch HanDbase.
Next, portable passwords. I've used the old Cryptinfo Palm application from NormSoft for many years, but I've been moving to 1Password on my Mac, and behold, the lovely people from Agile Web Solutions have released an iPhone app of their product. Again, some tooing and froing to get data off the Palm and into the new repository, but no real dramas.
What else is on the Palm Pilot? Well, a lot of word processing documents that I use for reference and various notes and aides memoir. Answer: DataCase from Veiosoft. DataCase has taken all my old Word docs, and PDFs of things like the Handbook for Justices of the Peace in New South Wales (which I need rapid access to routinely), and works like a charm.
By the time I had moved that lot, the Palm Pilot was almost unnecessary. A subnet calculator and a Checklist app were really all I lacked, and there are lots of those in the App Store. OK, I have a copy Bejewelled on the Palm Pilot, and the game is available in the App store, but I'm afraid I refused to shell out $12.99 for another copy of an application that I already have licensed on Palm and Mac.
I've also loaded Stanza, the ebook reader, which is fantastic, and some wonderful person has created an app to allow you to view the Roads and Traffic Authority's web cams on the iPhone. The is a jewel beyond price, as anyone who has to navigate Sydney's all too easily gridlocked roads will tell you. Measures, a unit conversion app, helps me convert imperial measurements to metric (essential when all American equipment is specified in inches and everything local is specified in centimeters).
The Palm Pilot has been relegated to running Solitaire and Bejewelled, which is just as well, because I think its screen is beginning to fail.
So I no longer have to carry the Palm Pilot, which has allowed me to reorganize my handbag. The Palm Lifedrive is a chunky object, and I don't miss its added bulk one bit. I'm not a small-handbag person at the best of times: my notion of the bare essentials takes up quite a lot of space, and I'm always looking for ways to rationalize, minimize and organize my handbag. I hate not being able to lay my hand instantly on whatever I want - keys, purse, glasses, whatever - and I hate bags that are nothing more than a sack on a strap. Everything gets tangled up at the bottom, and there is nothing more pathetic than a woman removing articles from her bag one after the other in the search for the one thing she can't find.
And then there is the "changing handbags" issue: if you are not very careful, you miss transferring something from bag A to bag B, and trouble follows. If you have bags with a lot of pockets, it's easy to miss something. Like your house keys. Or your security pass.
Enter the Borne Naked handbag liner, answer to a maiden's prayer. A clear plastic liner with multiple pockets, it keeps the contents of my bag clean, organized and accessible. I can change bags in seconds, and be sure I haven't missed anything. The liner is very well made, all edges bound neatly, with a good quality zip. Guys note: it doesn't look girly, and would work well in a brief case, too.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Dear America - what did you just do?
Before I begin, I should probably declare my personal position: I was raised a Baptist, and was baptized into my church as an adult, by my own conviction and choice. While the ensuing years have soured me on organized religion in almost any form, I am still indelibly marked by those formative experiences. I have read the bible in its entirety (King James version), and I used to be a Sunday School teacher. Politically, I lean right, and normally vote the straight conservative ticket.
However, I tend to the view that most people would do well to mind their own business, that abortion is a matter of personal choice (anyone who doubts this has never had to work in a clinical environment that cared for babies who had drawn the very shortest of genetic straws), and that as long as the gay community pays their taxes and doesn't trouble their neighbours, they should enjoy the same rights and liberties as the rest of us. Please don't bother me with "but the Bible says" arguments. The Bible, while a remarkable book, was not written in English. While large sections of it are translated in very similar ways by all denominations, many areas are distinctly vague. If you want to explore this, go get a copy of the Bible as used by the Catholic church (I would suggest the Knox translation), and compare it to the King James translation, or the New English Bible. All translations were made by people who sincerely believed that they were doing an accurate job. But still the subtle shading and variations are marked. Therefore, anyone who uses "the Bible says" as an excuse to turn off their brain is an idiot in my book. There's nothing in any version of the Bible that says "you are absolved of responsibility for the outcome of your choices if you just sign here".
Unfortunately, some people seem to have read such a statement, and to have failed to read the injunction about removing the beam from one's own eye before trying to help one's brother. Most of these people seem to be on the extreme far right of the political spectrum, and many of them are of limited education. The two almost go hand in hand. The result seems to be a person who thinks that if they make enough fuss about other people's perceived sins, their own will be less noticeable to God. In consequence they spend an inordinate amount of time and effort trying trying to regulate other people's behaviour.
Back in June, I blogged a rather grumpy item about the Presidential election. At the time I wrote that piece, the situation to my eye looked dire. I assumed that Hilary Clinton would get the Democratic nomination, and that the electoral process would then devolve into an ugly gutter fight, with innuendo, insult and accusation the ammunition of choice. This is not meant as a criticism of Hilary Clinton or John McCain, but it is a criticism of their respective supporters: that is the way they appeared to be heading to me. Hilary Clinton's supporters seemed illogically partisan in many ways, determined to support her either because she was female, or because they felt that she was in some odd way entitled to the presidency, because it was "her turn". John McCain's supporters have, regrettably, demonstrated their sound grasp of the ancient legal advice "when you have no case, abuse the plaintiff". Faced with an electorate rightly dissatisfied with the performance of the Republicans in government, the best they could come up with was feeble attempts to link their opposition with anti-American activists.
But, to my astonishment, Barack Obama got the Democratic nomination. There was a good deal of silly nittering from people who "loved Hilary". Please: the electoral process is not about fair goes, anyone's turn, or affection for someone you have not met personally. Hilary Clinton gave it her best shot, and lost. She then got herself sorted out, and weighed back in for the good of her country and her party. Certainly an element of self interest may have inspired that position, but she has done her job in a thoroughly professional manner (and a sight better than her husband in some cases).
Meanwhile, the McCain camp was completely losing the plot. Sarah Palin appeared on the stage, and I couldn't help feeling that I knew her. My hackles rose. I've never met the woman, but I know the type. It took me while to work it out, but I recognized her in the end: she's the girl in school who never did any work, because she was focused on being popular. Blessed with a good brain, good looks, and personal charm, she skated through school with the least possible study, and the help of more diligent "friends" who let her copy their work.
I've met a couple of women like this, and they drive me to distraction: they've taken the short cuts wherever they can, trading on their looks and charm to substitute for knowledge and hard work. Few of them make it through tertiary education, because that is a much tougher playing field than high school. But they tend to bob up in low level clerical and "people skills" roles if given a chance: they bring nothing to their positions but enough math to make change, a tendency to take reality TV seriously, and an approach to life based on scheming and manipulation, because it is all they have. My question here has to be not so much "how did Sarah Palin get onto the Republican ticket?" as "how did this ignoramus get elected governor of anywhere?". Good heavens, she's never even completed a college education. If the Republican party seriously expects her to stand in 2012, they should hire a couple of remedial tutors now, and try to fill in the vast gaps in her education. There's a long way to go, people, better start soon.
Sarah Palin seems to have had a negative effect on most voters: for every one who was comforted by the notion that she was "one of us", there were at least two who didn't want "one of us" running the store in an emergency. I think most people have the wits to realize that running a country is difficult, complicated work, and that the people who are entrusted with the task should have appropriate skills and knowledge. We want our leaders to be better than we are: this is why we are so unforgiving when they prove to be merely human after all. The choice of Sarah Palin was utterly disastrous for John McCain's campaign, not only because it called his personal judgement into question, but because Mrs Palin acted like a magnet for every extreme right wing nut job in the Republican movement. She drew them together, in large and noisy blobs, and gave the rest of the electorate a good look at the really unattractive face of intolerance, ignorance and vulgarity found in people who want the calendar reset to about 1910, if not earlier. Sensible, educated, moderate Republicans probably out number these loons by at least 5 to 1, but the people who made the most noise at various events where Sarah Palin was speaking seemed to be the type who represent everything the electorate and the world in general has had more than enough of in the last eight years.
Unfortunately, these people seem to have a disproportionate influence in the Republican Party. Thought and logic seem to have been overwhelmed by a cabal which is more interested in ideology than in outcomes. Any deviation from the "correct" ideology is seen as evil, even when adherence to the ideology is producing unwanted results. The ideology that demands that children be taught abstinence only sex education is a case in point: it does not work. Places where this ideology is implemented have a higher rate of unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases than places where proper birth control is taught. But still the proponents of abstinence based sex education insist that their way is right. I believe that this is known as the "Tinkerbell Fallacy" in some circles: you know, the bit in Disney's 'Peter Pan' where the audience is asked to clap if they really believe in fairies, and bring Tinkerbell back to life? There seems to be tendency in some people (regardless of politics) to think that if they believe in an ideology hard enough, it will work. In the last few years, the American government seems to have been less and less interested in outcomes, and more and more interested in ideology. They have disconnected cause and effect in their minds. The results speak for themselves.
I have to say, I did not initially think that Barack Obama stood a snow flake's chance in hell of winning the presidency. It just seemed too improbable that America would elect a leftward leaning, conspicuously educated and literate person who was not of strictly Anglo Saxon heritage in preference to a conservative, white, ex-military type. Surely an electorate that returned George W. Bush for a second term would not contemplate any candidate so radically different.
I missed the point: the Obama campaign team was working, and had been working for months, to change the electorate. They were working on motivating people to register as voters, and getting them sufficiently engaged that they would turn out and vote. I haven't seen any detailed reporting, but I would bet that if you did an analysis of the people who voted in the last election and the people who voted at this one, you would find that this year's voters were overall younger and better educated. They were more likely to relate to a man aged 47 than to a man who has already clocked up his "three score years and ten". They were less likely to consider a man's racial origins to be relevant to his ability to govern. And they were more likely to get their news from the Internet than from the conventional media.
The Obama campaign used technology, and used it brilliantly, to reach and engage a very wide audience. There is an interesting post about this over at oreilly.com, an interview with Silona Bonewald. She makes some interesting observations: "I think the thing that's most significant actually about Barack is that it's not so much the always knowing the newest on the technology, but he's smart enough to let a lot of us do our thing, you know, get out of the way kind of thing. That's what speaks really well about him. I watch him doing that not just in the technical arena but in a lot of others -- like how all of the issues were done. I know that he has a troop of experts that basically helped write each one of those sections on the website.
The election was called just after 3PM Sydney time. I had gone up to the Optus campus in North Ryde for a meeting. I arrived early, sat down in reception which was busy as always, and caught up with the email that I had received in the half our it took to get there from the city. Optus' reception has a couple a large TV screens tuned to Sky News, and the count was Obama 207. Never having watched the count before, I had no idea how long it was going to take, so I went to the reception person to locate the person I was meeting. When I turned back to the screen it said "President-elect Barack Obama". People were standing around, gazing at the screens, and we all tried to decide what, if anything, this meant to us.
The next day I heard the counter staff in the post office talking about Barack Obama's election. I don't believe that the world at large has ever been so interested and engaged in an American election. I think this stems from two sources: first, we are all heartily sick of the way America (the country, as expressed by its government) has been behaving in the last few years (Guantanamo Bay, warrantless wire tapping, TSA goons at airports, etc, etc, etc); second, the Obama machine has done its work so well that we can't help but be engaged. The Obama campaign has reached us all - I've even seen Obama '08 stickers on local vehicles.
So what happens now? Will Barack Obama make a good president? Only time will tell: he may get to the Oval Office and be crushed by the load. He may do something really dumb, and shatter people's trust in him with one stroke. He may turn out to be merely mediocre in the long run. Or he may be able to harness the talents that made his campaign so effective, and turn them to the service of the country. If the ability to recruit good people and let them get on with their jobs can be carried into government, great things become possible.
But whatever happens, Barack Obama has changed America in very significant ways already: the next electoral campaign will probably make even more use of technology than the last one. And the electorate is likely to remain engaged in a way they have never been before: it will be harder, may be impossible, for government to conceal its doings from the voters.
If we are lucky, the Republican Party will take a look at how it got to where it is, and find its way back to a more central position. Every country needs a viable opposition party.
America now has the opportunity to hang out the "Under New Management" sign, and wash its collective hands of some of the mistakes of the last few years. There will inevitably be people who want to see America fail, or who want to see Barack Obama fail. There will always be bigots, people who hate any sort of change, and common or garden sore losers. Hopefully those people can read the words of Mike Huckabee, and at least give the new government a chance before they condemn it.
Before I begin, I should probably declare my personal position: I was raised a Baptist, and was baptized into my church as an adult, by my own conviction and choice. While the ensuing years have soured me on organized religion in almost any form, I am still indelibly marked by those formative experiences. I have read the bible in its entirety (King James version), and I used to be a Sunday School teacher. Politically, I lean right, and normally vote the straight conservative ticket.
However, I tend to the view that most people would do well to mind their own business, that abortion is a matter of personal choice (anyone who doubts this has never had to work in a clinical environment that cared for babies who had drawn the very shortest of genetic straws), and that as long as the gay community pays their taxes and doesn't trouble their neighbours, they should enjoy the same rights and liberties as the rest of us. Please don't bother me with "but the Bible says" arguments. The Bible, while a remarkable book, was not written in English. While large sections of it are translated in very similar ways by all denominations, many areas are distinctly vague. If you want to explore this, go get a copy of the Bible as used by the Catholic church (I would suggest the Knox translation), and compare it to the King James translation, or the New English Bible. All translations were made by people who sincerely believed that they were doing an accurate job. But still the subtle shading and variations are marked. Therefore, anyone who uses "the Bible says" as an excuse to turn off their brain is an idiot in my book. There's nothing in any version of the Bible that says "you are absolved of responsibility for the outcome of your choices if you just sign here".
Unfortunately, some people seem to have read such a statement, and to have failed to read the injunction about removing the beam from one's own eye before trying to help one's brother. Most of these people seem to be on the extreme far right of the political spectrum, and many of them are of limited education. The two almost go hand in hand. The result seems to be a person who thinks that if they make enough fuss about other people's perceived sins, their own will be less noticeable to God. In consequence they spend an inordinate amount of time and effort trying trying to regulate other people's behaviour.
Back in June, I blogged a rather grumpy item about the Presidential election. At the time I wrote that piece, the situation to my eye looked dire. I assumed that Hilary Clinton would get the Democratic nomination, and that the electoral process would then devolve into an ugly gutter fight, with innuendo, insult and accusation the ammunition of choice. This is not meant as a criticism of Hilary Clinton or John McCain, but it is a criticism of their respective supporters: that is the way they appeared to be heading to me. Hilary Clinton's supporters seemed illogically partisan in many ways, determined to support her either because she was female, or because they felt that she was in some odd way entitled to the presidency, because it was "her turn". John McCain's supporters have, regrettably, demonstrated their sound grasp of the ancient legal advice "when you have no case, abuse the plaintiff". Faced with an electorate rightly dissatisfied with the performance of the Republicans in government, the best they could come up with was feeble attempts to link their opposition with anti-American activists.
But, to my astonishment, Barack Obama got the Democratic nomination. There was a good deal of silly nittering from people who "loved Hilary". Please: the electoral process is not about fair goes, anyone's turn, or affection for someone you have not met personally. Hilary Clinton gave it her best shot, and lost. She then got herself sorted out, and weighed back in for the good of her country and her party. Certainly an element of self interest may have inspired that position, but she has done her job in a thoroughly professional manner (and a sight better than her husband in some cases).
Meanwhile, the McCain camp was completely losing the plot. Sarah Palin appeared on the stage, and I couldn't help feeling that I knew her. My hackles rose. I've never met the woman, but I know the type. It took me while to work it out, but I recognized her in the end: she's the girl in school who never did any work, because she was focused on being popular. Blessed with a good brain, good looks, and personal charm, she skated through school with the least possible study, and the help of more diligent "friends" who let her copy their work.
I've met a couple of women like this, and they drive me to distraction: they've taken the short cuts wherever they can, trading on their looks and charm to substitute for knowledge and hard work. Few of them make it through tertiary education, because that is a much tougher playing field than high school. But they tend to bob up in low level clerical and "people skills" roles if given a chance: they bring nothing to their positions but enough math to make change, a tendency to take reality TV seriously, and an approach to life based on scheming and manipulation, because it is all they have. My question here has to be not so much "how did Sarah Palin get onto the Republican ticket?" as "how did this ignoramus get elected governor of anywhere?". Good heavens, she's never even completed a college education. If the Republican party seriously expects her to stand in 2012, they should hire a couple of remedial tutors now, and try to fill in the vast gaps in her education. There's a long way to go, people, better start soon.
Sarah Palin seems to have had a negative effect on most voters: for every one who was comforted by the notion that she was "one of us", there were at least two who didn't want "one of us" running the store in an emergency. I think most people have the wits to realize that running a country is difficult, complicated work, and that the people who are entrusted with the task should have appropriate skills and knowledge. We want our leaders to be better than we are: this is why we are so unforgiving when they prove to be merely human after all. The choice of Sarah Palin was utterly disastrous for John McCain's campaign, not only because it called his personal judgement into question, but because Mrs Palin acted like a magnet for every extreme right wing nut job in the Republican movement. She drew them together, in large and noisy blobs, and gave the rest of the electorate a good look at the really unattractive face of intolerance, ignorance and vulgarity found in people who want the calendar reset to about 1910, if not earlier. Sensible, educated, moderate Republicans probably out number these loons by at least 5 to 1, but the people who made the most noise at various events where Sarah Palin was speaking seemed to be the type who represent everything the electorate and the world in general has had more than enough of in the last eight years.
Unfortunately, these people seem to have a disproportionate influence in the Republican Party. Thought and logic seem to have been overwhelmed by a cabal which is more interested in ideology than in outcomes. Any deviation from the "correct" ideology is seen as evil, even when adherence to the ideology is producing unwanted results. The ideology that demands that children be taught abstinence only sex education is a case in point: it does not work. Places where this ideology is implemented have a higher rate of unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases than places where proper birth control is taught. But still the proponents of abstinence based sex education insist that their way is right. I believe that this is known as the "Tinkerbell Fallacy" in some circles: you know, the bit in Disney's 'Peter Pan' where the audience is asked to clap if they really believe in fairies, and bring Tinkerbell back to life? There seems to be tendency in some people (regardless of politics) to think that if they believe in an ideology hard enough, it will work. In the last few years, the American government seems to have been less and less interested in outcomes, and more and more interested in ideology. They have disconnected cause and effect in their minds. The results speak for themselves.
I have to say, I did not initially think that Barack Obama stood a snow flake's chance in hell of winning the presidency. It just seemed too improbable that America would elect a leftward leaning, conspicuously educated and literate person who was not of strictly Anglo Saxon heritage in preference to a conservative, white, ex-military type. Surely an electorate that returned George W. Bush for a second term would not contemplate any candidate so radically different.
I missed the point: the Obama campaign team was working, and had been working for months, to change the electorate. They were working on motivating people to register as voters, and getting them sufficiently engaged that they would turn out and vote. I haven't seen any detailed reporting, but I would bet that if you did an analysis of the people who voted in the last election and the people who voted at this one, you would find that this year's voters were overall younger and better educated. They were more likely to relate to a man aged 47 than to a man who has already clocked up his "three score years and ten". They were less likely to consider a man's racial origins to be relevant to his ability to govern. And they were more likely to get their news from the Internet than from the conventional media.
The Obama campaign used technology, and used it brilliantly, to reach and engage a very wide audience. There is an interesting post about this over at oreilly.com, an interview with Silona Bonewald. She makes some interesting observations: "I think the thing that's most significant actually about Barack is that it's not so much the always knowing the newest on the technology, but he's smart enough to let a lot of us do our thing, you know, get out of the way kind of thing. That's what speaks really well about him. I watch him doing that not just in the technical arena but in a lot of others -- like how all of the issues were done. I know that he has a troop of experts that basically helped write each one of those sections on the website.
There's a lot of input that he gets in from a lot of different groups. He's definitely got this huge mass of experts that he taps into on a regular basis, not just technical, which impresses me highly."
I seem to recall that some of the generally accepted qualities of a good leader are the ability to inspire others, to recruit talented people to their team, and to delegate effectively. Anecdotal evidence indicates that Barack Obama can do this. I think that is what the world at large finds so inspiring: not just the man, but the team work. There is this amazing sense of a nation pulling together, in a way that we have not seen America do convincingly in a very long time.The election was called just after 3PM Sydney time. I had gone up to the Optus campus in North Ryde for a meeting. I arrived early, sat down in reception which was busy as always, and caught up with the email that I had received in the half our it took to get there from the city. Optus' reception has a couple a large TV screens tuned to Sky News, and the count was Obama 207. Never having watched the count before, I had no idea how long it was going to take, so I went to the reception person to locate the person I was meeting. When I turned back to the screen it said "President-elect Barack Obama". People were standing around, gazing at the screens, and we all tried to decide what, if anything, this meant to us.
The next day I heard the counter staff in the post office talking about Barack Obama's election. I don't believe that the world at large has ever been so interested and engaged in an American election. I think this stems from two sources: first, we are all heartily sick of the way America (the country, as expressed by its government) has been behaving in the last few years (Guantanamo Bay, warrantless wire tapping, TSA goons at airports, etc, etc, etc); second, the Obama machine has done its work so well that we can't help but be engaged. The Obama campaign has reached us all - I've even seen Obama '08 stickers on local vehicles.
So what happens now? Will Barack Obama make a good president? Only time will tell: he may get to the Oval Office and be crushed by the load. He may do something really dumb, and shatter people's trust in him with one stroke. He may turn out to be merely mediocre in the long run. Or he may be able to harness the talents that made his campaign so effective, and turn them to the service of the country. If the ability to recruit good people and let them get on with their jobs can be carried into government, great things become possible.
But whatever happens, Barack Obama has changed America in very significant ways already: the next electoral campaign will probably make even more use of technology than the last one. And the electorate is likely to remain engaged in a way they have never been before: it will be harder, may be impossible, for government to conceal its doings from the voters.
If we are lucky, the Republican Party will take a look at how it got to where it is, and find its way back to a more central position. Every country needs a viable opposition party.
America now has the opportunity to hang out the "Under New Management" sign, and wash its collective hands of some of the mistakes of the last few years. There will inevitably be people who want to see America fail, or who want to see Barack Obama fail. There will always be bigots, people who hate any sort of change, and common or garden sore losers. Hopefully those people can read the words of Mike Huckabee, and at least give the new government a chance before they condemn it.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Restoration of Service
And that absurdly long break was caused by me taking on too many things, both in serial and parallel, and getting so busy that only essential commitments got met. I have seen several comments come in, and apologize for not responding sooner. I have one more project to get off my list, and then things should settle back to normal. I'm in the throes of getting my garage fitted out: an electrician has been here half the day, doing prep work with the wiring. The installation team should arrive on Monday, to put in new wall panelling, ceilings, and storage fittings. Right now the contents of my garage are stacked in my family room and dining room. My cats wander among the piles sniffing at things, puzzled by the disorder. But soon all will be neat and tidy, and I shall be able to focus on other things. My new iPhone, the apps I am using, improvements in the desktop apps I have written about before. The Wii Fit. Many things to blog about.
Back soon
rgds
Melodie
And that absurdly long break was caused by me taking on too many things, both in serial and parallel, and getting so busy that only essential commitments got met. I have seen several comments come in, and apologize for not responding sooner. I have one more project to get off my list, and then things should settle back to normal. I'm in the throes of getting my garage fitted out: an electrician has been here half the day, doing prep work with the wiring. The installation team should arrive on Monday, to put in new wall panelling, ceilings, and storage fittings. Right now the contents of my garage are stacked in my family room and dining room. My cats wander among the piles sniffing at things, puzzled by the disorder. But soon all will be neat and tidy, and I shall be able to focus on other things. My new iPhone, the apps I am using, improvements in the desktop apps I have written about before. The Wii Fit. Many things to blog about.
Back soon
rgds
Melodie
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Tuesday in Melbourne
Morning: Melbourne Aquarium
Lunch: Southbank, Bistro Vite
Afternoon: Fitzroy Gardens
Dinner: Vue de Monde for a stupendous 10 course degustation menu:
And matched wines. I need to walk a lot for the next few days.
Morning: Melbourne Aquarium
Lunch: Southbank, Bistro Vite
Afternoon: Fitzroy Gardens
Dinner: Vue de Monde for a stupendous 10 course degustation menu:
- Bisque with tartare of jamon and poached quail's egg in lettuce leaf
- Mushroom risotto with shaved West Australian truffles
- Salmon, presented smoked, mousse and as "salmon jerky", with German caviar
- Soup (prepared at the table as an infusion done in a 1950's style coffee maker, using stock, herbs and mirepoix), poured over tartare of King Fish covered in a veil of buffalo mozzarella cheese
- Carpaccio of fois gras with baby pear and fennel
- Slow cooked pork belly with a pork rillette pancake and stuffed baby apple, dried green apple strip and apple puree
- Medallion of New Zealand venison with a mille feuille of saffron mousseline and leg meat
- Goat's cheese served a curd and ice cream, with rose petal and rose jelly
- Frozen golden kiwi fruit "lollipops" dipped in mint jelly and served with raspberry jelly (we think)
- Smoked Valrhona chocolate cigar
And matched wines. I need to walk a lot for the next few days.
Monday, July 14, 2008
The Doll's House, Web 2.0
When I was a little girl, I had a doll's house. This was a long time ago, the late 1960's I suppose, so the doll's house was not the sort of plastic arrangement that 21st century little girls have. It was made of wood, probably by someone with a turn for woodwork, rather coming from a factory. The walls were covered with pieces of wall paper, and I had a collection of pieces of furniture for it (some of which I still have in a storage box somewhere). Around the same time my brother and I had a big box of Lego blocks and menageries of plastic animals. There weren't many human figures, and I was never really a doll-positive child, but we enjoyed constructing complex buildings and getting everything "just so" (I'm going somewhere with this, trust me).
Roll forward to the mid-1980's, and I was living in Canberra and working for the National Library of Australia (as a librarian). Canberra, the capital city of Australia is a rather odd artificial city, laid out by the American architect Walter Burley Griffin. Canberra is an interesting place to navigate: the shortest distance between two points is very seldom a straight line by road. Anyway, the years I was there, Canberra had (apart from a lot of politicians) a miniature village village called Cockington Green, which still appears to thrive.
Whence springs the human desire to model the real world in toys and miniatures? The precise, to-scale construction of objects, buildings and people seems to be a recurring human activity. It's even made it to the Internet.
Back in late May, one of my colleagues had the happy notion that my employer should develop a presence on Second Life. He secured the approval of the marketing department (the money to do this had to come from somewhere), and then made his way to my area of the company offices, where the hands-on technical types reside, seeking someone to do the work necessary to realize his plan. The first person he tried declined the opportunity firmly, and I wandered into the vicinity just in time to catch the end of the rejection, and to say something like "what is it that you want done?" And in short, I agreed to do it. At this point I had no interest in Second Life - I was aware of it, I had looked at it over the shoulder of someone who already participated. I knew that IBM, Cisco, Sun and various other vendor organisations had "presence" in the virtual world. I figured that I was as well placed as anyone to get the thing going - I've played Dungeons and Dragon and similar FRPs for more that 2 decades, and I've designed everything from exhibitions for the National Library to pieces of needlework, jewelry and a significant part of the house my husband and I built. And Second Life has been implemented by a business which wants to make a profit from a user community many of whom do not have a strong technical background: I was prepared to bet that it would be s straight forward exercise, from a technical perspective.
Second Life has occupied a good deal of my spare time over the last couple of months (my manager agreed to me taking on the project on the condition that it did not delay billing work), hence the sudden cessation in blogging activities. However, I am on leave now, in Melbourne for a few days, with only my little Asus Eee PC and a Huawei modem to connect to the Internet. I haven't even attempted to install Second Life, though I believe it will work on this platform. I am supposed to be on leave, and my husband is likely to become grumpy if I appear to be working.
So, a few observations about the experience. The initial brief was to purchase a piece of virtual land, and "erect" a building, and get to the point where a few simple things could be demonstrated to the person providing the funding, so that she could decide if she wanted to proceed.
My first mistake was in not registering for a premium account for my first avatar immediately: I delayed a few days, while I experimented with the system and did background reading. Because I have been doing this on behalf of my employer, and I need to be able to put the costs through with my expenses, it was necessary to acquire land outright, rather than by rental (the last thing I need is a recurring cost on my Amex card). My initial intention was to purchase land through the Second Life Linden dollar auction site. However, to do this, an avatar has to be 14 days old (I imagine that this is to cut down on the number of users who dabble, and then never log on again, and also to cut down on fraud and money laundering). I did not notice that stricture (it's buried in the Auction FAQs), and consequently it was about three weeks before I could really get started. And in the end a suitable piece of land came up on the in-world land sales, and I bought that, 1024 square meters of PG rated land in Yucca, with a water view. I wanted PG land, to avoid the possibility of exposing project sponsors or other management types to some of things one can encounter in Mature rated areas, which might get the project killed stone dead on the spot.
So I got my piece of land, leveled it, got hold of a pre-built low prim beach house (which I think I picked up on Orientation Island), modified some of its textures, so it looked more like an office building, added some signage with my employer's logo, and installed a mock up of a plasma TV that could play one of our parent company's commercials. A reception desk, a couple of chairs and tables, and it was fit to demonstrate. And the demo was well received, but the project sponsor wanted to see some more interactivity.
Now as anyone who has built anything in Second Life knows, on small parcels of land, you run out of prims really fast. Every object requires at last one prim, complex objects require a lot, and you never seem to have enough to do all that you want.
So I deleted the office building, and started again (I'd learned a fair amount about building by now), and I constructed something a bit more fanciful, but prim-efficient. Then I set out to demonstrate the bells and whistles that you can build into Second Life: a waving Australian flag, revolving sign, sliding doors (with sound effects), email to and from the real world, automated Notecard distribution, and so on, and so forth. I installed scripted teleportation stands, for moving between the levels of my new building. I tinkered with the textures, so that I could put vertical blinds on some windows.
And just when I thought I had it all done, someone bought up all the land around my parcel, altered the land levels and deleted some of the features that I had been relying on for background, so I had to shuffle things around. I finally got it to the point where I could make a little movie of it just before I went on leave, and I have left the movie with the person who started all this. I'll see what he wants to do next when I get back.
Now I have to say that I don't intend to stay in Second Life. I have a very busy first life, and my second life is currently as a first level ranger in a newish D&D campaign. So Second Life is really my third life. But I have found the experience interesting - I have spent almost no time interacting with other avatars - but it is possible to spend hours trying to get a door handle to look just right, to get the fabric on a chair to look believable, or to get the walls of a garden properly aligned. The more time I spend on it, the more it reminds me of the old doll's house.
When I was a little girl, I had a doll's house. This was a long time ago, the late 1960's I suppose, so the doll's house was not the sort of plastic arrangement that 21st century little girls have. It was made of wood, probably by someone with a turn for woodwork, rather coming from a factory. The walls were covered with pieces of wall paper, and I had a collection of pieces of furniture for it (some of which I still have in a storage box somewhere). Around the same time my brother and I had a big box of Lego blocks and menageries of plastic animals. There weren't many human figures, and I was never really a doll-positive child, but we enjoyed constructing complex buildings and getting everything "just so" (I'm going somewhere with this, trust me).
Roll forward to the mid-1980's, and I was living in Canberra and working for the National Library of Australia (as a librarian). Canberra, the capital city of Australia is a rather odd artificial city, laid out by the American architect Walter Burley Griffin. Canberra is an interesting place to navigate: the shortest distance between two points is very seldom a straight line by road. Anyway, the years I was there, Canberra had (apart from a lot of politicians) a miniature village village called Cockington Green, which still appears to thrive.
Whence springs the human desire to model the real world in toys and miniatures? The precise, to-scale construction of objects, buildings and people seems to be a recurring human activity. It's even made it to the Internet.
Back in late May, one of my colleagues had the happy notion that my employer should develop a presence on Second Life. He secured the approval of the marketing department (the money to do this had to come from somewhere), and then made his way to my area of the company offices, where the hands-on technical types reside, seeking someone to do the work necessary to realize his plan. The first person he tried declined the opportunity firmly, and I wandered into the vicinity just in time to catch the end of the rejection, and to say something like "what is it that you want done?" And in short, I agreed to do it. At this point I had no interest in Second Life - I was aware of it, I had looked at it over the shoulder of someone who already participated. I knew that IBM, Cisco, Sun and various other vendor organisations had "presence" in the virtual world. I figured that I was as well placed as anyone to get the thing going - I've played Dungeons and Dragon and similar FRPs for more that 2 decades, and I've designed everything from exhibitions for the National Library to pieces of needlework, jewelry and a significant part of the house my husband and I built. And Second Life has been implemented by a business which wants to make a profit from a user community many of whom do not have a strong technical background: I was prepared to bet that it would be s straight forward exercise, from a technical perspective.
Second Life has occupied a good deal of my spare time over the last couple of months (my manager agreed to me taking on the project on the condition that it did not delay billing work), hence the sudden cessation in blogging activities. However, I am on leave now, in Melbourne for a few days, with only my little Asus Eee PC and a Huawei modem to connect to the Internet. I haven't even attempted to install Second Life, though I believe it will work on this platform. I am supposed to be on leave, and my husband is likely to become grumpy if I appear to be working.
So, a few observations about the experience. The initial brief was to purchase a piece of virtual land, and "erect" a building, and get to the point where a few simple things could be demonstrated to the person providing the funding, so that she could decide if she wanted to proceed.
My first mistake was in not registering for a premium account for my first avatar immediately: I delayed a few days, while I experimented with the system and did background reading. Because I have been doing this on behalf of my employer, and I need to be able to put the costs through with my expenses, it was necessary to acquire land outright, rather than by rental (the last thing I need is a recurring cost on my Amex card). My initial intention was to purchase land through the Second Life Linden dollar auction site. However, to do this, an avatar has to be 14 days old (I imagine that this is to cut down on the number of users who dabble, and then never log on again, and also to cut down on fraud and money laundering). I did not notice that stricture (it's buried in the Auction FAQs), and consequently it was about three weeks before I could really get started. And in the end a suitable piece of land came up on the in-world land sales, and I bought that, 1024 square meters of PG rated land in Yucca, with a water view. I wanted PG land, to avoid the possibility of exposing project sponsors or other management types to some of things one can encounter in Mature rated areas, which might get the project killed stone dead on the spot.
So I got my piece of land, leveled it, got hold of a pre-built low prim beach house (which I think I picked up on Orientation Island), modified some of its textures, so it looked more like an office building, added some signage with my employer's logo, and installed a mock up of a plasma TV that could play one of our parent company's commercials. A reception desk, a couple of chairs and tables, and it was fit to demonstrate. And the demo was well received, but the project sponsor wanted to see some more interactivity.
Now as anyone who has built anything in Second Life knows, on small parcels of land, you run out of prims really fast. Every object requires at last one prim, complex objects require a lot, and you never seem to have enough to do all that you want.
So I deleted the office building, and started again (I'd learned a fair amount about building by now), and I constructed something a bit more fanciful, but prim-efficient. Then I set out to demonstrate the bells and whistles that you can build into Second Life: a waving Australian flag, revolving sign, sliding doors (with sound effects), email to and from the real world, automated Notecard distribution, and so on, and so forth. I installed scripted teleportation stands, for moving between the levels of my new building. I tinkered with the textures, so that I could put vertical blinds on some windows.
And just when I thought I had it all done, someone bought up all the land around my parcel, altered the land levels and deleted some of the features that I had been relying on for background, so I had to shuffle things around. I finally got it to the point where I could make a little movie of it just before I went on leave, and I have left the movie with the person who started all this. I'll see what he wants to do next when I get back.
Now I have to say that I don't intend to stay in Second Life. I have a very busy first life, and my second life is currently as a first level ranger in a newish D&D campaign. So Second Life is really my third life. But I have found the experience interesting - I have spent almost no time interacting with other avatars - but it is possible to spend hours trying to get a door handle to look just right, to get the fabric on a chair to look believable, or to get the walls of a garden properly aligned. The more time I spend on it, the more it reminds me of the old doll's house.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Dear America
For the first time in my life I am paying attention to your electoral antics (I'm sorry, there is no better word). In years past you have done what ever it is you have done, and I have taken note at the end of the procedure, when you have vomited onto the world stage a creature that no lady in her right mind would admit into her living room, and declared the thing President. Your last few excursions have been so uniformly catastrophic in their outcome that one rather dreads what may come next.
I have spoken to American educated people, in the hope of understanding what it is that you are trying to achieve, but to no avail. Some years ago, in California, I asked someone to explained to me what "GOP" meant, and got a blank look (Google, fortunately, explained). You people have been blessed with democracy, but I do not think that you understand it. You certainly do not understand the intent of the men who framed your constitution and laws, and perhaps that is just as well. I have had it explained to me that what your current system is intended to provide is a system of "check and balances" (this sounded like a lecture in basic high school political theory). So let us look at your system....
You conduct an enormously expensive circus, which occupies people and resources for months. The candidates in this farce attempt to demonstrate their patriotism (whatever that means), religious conviction (for whatever value that may have), purity, honour and general all-round worthiness. At the end of this disgusting freak show, you appoint the most convincing freak to the highest office that your country recognizes. And the rest of us are lumbered with your choice. This is becoming less important as you flush your culture and all its achievements into the cloaca of ignorance and isolationism that your popular press portrays as "news", but it is still annoying.
What you seem to have failed to understand is the underlying purpose of the democratic process: change. It does not matter whether the current encumbent overlord is liberal, labour, tory, new labour, democrat or republican, or any of the other flavours espoused by the political machines that battle in the electoral arena. What matters is change: that no idea become the only idea, because most people can't encompass complex enough ideas to be useful in the real world.
In most cases the people who put themselves forward for election mean well. They genuinely believe that they have something to offer the electorate, and that they are better suited to hold authority than their rivals. And most of them are genuine and honest in their beliefs: very few human beings are capable of doing something that they know to be wrong in the face of that wrongness. They will try to rationalize their actions and positions as "right", and in the best interests of the electorate. Some of them may have to lie to themselves and their advisors to achieve this intellectual flexibility, but they can do it, and feel entirely worthy and justified in their actions.
So it is that all the candidates for your next election firmly believe that they, and they alone, can safely guide America into the future. And if this is the case, then by logical corollary, all of their opponents must be evil.
People, wake up and smell the tribal warfare: the world is now much more confusing than it was when we had to deal with a few thousand people and their needs. You now have to deal with millions, and their needs and wants are a widespread, contradictory minefield: you cannot please them all, So just because you and your candidate do not get your own way, it does not mean that you have been sabotaged, or that you have been treated unfairly: you are dealing with a large enough statistical sample that the math of "the wisdom of crowds", and the ebb and flow of rumour and innuendo come into play. Individuals are predictable, but the response of crowds varies with the weather, air pressure, and what they saw last on the news. Forget logic.
The critcal thing, the only thing that democracy achieves consistently (if properly practiced, such as not in Zimbabwe) is change. No set of ideas can hold sway for too long, which is good. Most professional politicians have ideas formed by study groups and committees and theory: they lack the perspective of the human being trying to buy a loaf of bread. Democracy cranks them through fast enough that any idea gets a chance, and the really stupid ones get aborted promptly. It takes any newly elected functionary at least 6 months to figure out the functional structure (which is never what it appears to be on paper), and another 6 months to learn to play it usefully. If you are too thick to acknowledge the structure in the first place, you will never be a player: the machinery will encase you up in a bubble, and keep you harmlessly occupied until you are flushed out with the trash at the end of your term. I used to be a public servant, I've seen this done.
Much of what I have read in your popular press recently is down right silly, and would certainly result in defamation proceedings under normal circumstances. Mrs Clinton is prepared to destroy the Democratic Party to get her own way. Mr Obama is accused of everything from being a Muslim to committing murder (the accusers seem uncertain which troubles them more). Mr McCain is at death's door.
For pity's sake people, stop and think. Unless you know the candidates personally, how can you claim to know what is in their hearts or minds? And why do you assume the best about your preferred candidate and the worst about everyone else? Have you never heard of positive confirmation bias? Scientific American had a nice article on that a while back, you should read it. And think about why you believe what you believe.
Try and look at the candidates as human beings: flawed, capable of error, perhaps no better than you or me. But look at their commitment: what a strain these last months must have been, and how tired they all must be. Certainly ambition must be one of the things that drives them, but I doubt it can be the only thing. They all believe that they can make America, and by extension, the world a better place.
So try to separate yourself from tribal loyalties, and look at the big picture. No angels, no demons, just people. Which one is strong enough to stand four years of one of the toughest jobs imaginable, and which can do the most good. Given where 8 years of the Bush administration has taken you, you could elect a stray dog and get a better result.
For the first time in my life I am paying attention to your electoral antics (I'm sorry, there is no better word). In years past you have done what ever it is you have done, and I have taken note at the end of the procedure, when you have vomited onto the world stage a creature that no lady in her right mind would admit into her living room, and declared the thing President. Your last few excursions have been so uniformly catastrophic in their outcome that one rather dreads what may come next.
I have spoken to American educated people, in the hope of understanding what it is that you are trying to achieve, but to no avail. Some years ago, in California, I asked someone to explained to me what "GOP" meant, and got a blank look (Google, fortunately, explained). You people have been blessed with democracy, but I do not think that you understand it. You certainly do not understand the intent of the men who framed your constitution and laws, and perhaps that is just as well. I have had it explained to me that what your current system is intended to provide is a system of "check and balances" (this sounded like a lecture in basic high school political theory). So let us look at your system....
You conduct an enormously expensive circus, which occupies people and resources for months. The candidates in this farce attempt to demonstrate their patriotism (whatever that means), religious conviction (for whatever value that may have), purity, honour and general all-round worthiness. At the end of this disgusting freak show, you appoint the most convincing freak to the highest office that your country recognizes. And the rest of us are lumbered with your choice. This is becoming less important as you flush your culture and all its achievements into the cloaca of ignorance and isolationism that your popular press portrays as "news", but it is still annoying.
What you seem to have failed to understand is the underlying purpose of the democratic process: change. It does not matter whether the current encumbent overlord is liberal, labour, tory, new labour, democrat or republican, or any of the other flavours espoused by the political machines that battle in the electoral arena. What matters is change: that no idea become the only idea, because most people can't encompass complex enough ideas to be useful in the real world.
In most cases the people who put themselves forward for election mean well. They genuinely believe that they have something to offer the electorate, and that they are better suited to hold authority than their rivals. And most of them are genuine and honest in their beliefs: very few human beings are capable of doing something that they know to be wrong in the face of that wrongness. They will try to rationalize their actions and positions as "right", and in the best interests of the electorate. Some of them may have to lie to themselves and their advisors to achieve this intellectual flexibility, but they can do it, and feel entirely worthy and justified in their actions.
So it is that all the candidates for your next election firmly believe that they, and they alone, can safely guide America into the future. And if this is the case, then by logical corollary, all of their opponents must be evil.
People, wake up and smell the tribal warfare: the world is now much more confusing than it was when we had to deal with a few thousand people and their needs. You now have to deal with millions, and their needs and wants are a widespread, contradictory minefield: you cannot please them all, So just because you and your candidate do not get your own way, it does not mean that you have been sabotaged, or that you have been treated unfairly: you are dealing with a large enough statistical sample that the math of "the wisdom of crowds", and the ebb and flow of rumour and innuendo come into play. Individuals are predictable, but the response of crowds varies with the weather, air pressure, and what they saw last on the news. Forget logic.
The critcal thing, the only thing that democracy achieves consistently (if properly practiced, such as not in Zimbabwe) is change. No set of ideas can hold sway for too long, which is good. Most professional politicians have ideas formed by study groups and committees and theory: they lack the perspective of the human being trying to buy a loaf of bread. Democracy cranks them through fast enough that any idea gets a chance, and the really stupid ones get aborted promptly. It takes any newly elected functionary at least 6 months to figure out the functional structure (which is never what it appears to be on paper), and another 6 months to learn to play it usefully. If you are too thick to acknowledge the structure in the first place, you will never be a player: the machinery will encase you up in a bubble, and keep you harmlessly occupied until you are flushed out with the trash at the end of your term. I used to be a public servant, I've seen this done.
Much of what I have read in your popular press recently is down right silly, and would certainly result in defamation proceedings under normal circumstances. Mrs Clinton is prepared to destroy the Democratic Party to get her own way. Mr Obama is accused of everything from being a Muslim to committing murder (the accusers seem uncertain which troubles them more). Mr McCain is at death's door.
For pity's sake people, stop and think. Unless you know the candidates personally, how can you claim to know what is in their hearts or minds? And why do you assume the best about your preferred candidate and the worst about everyone else? Have you never heard of positive confirmation bias? Scientific American had a nice article on that a while back, you should read it. And think about why you believe what you believe.
Try and look at the candidates as human beings: flawed, capable of error, perhaps no better than you or me. But look at their commitment: what a strain these last months must have been, and how tired they all must be. Certainly ambition must be one of the things that drives them, but I doubt it can be the only thing. They all believe that they can make America, and by extension, the world a better place.
So try to separate yourself from tribal loyalties, and look at the big picture. No angels, no demons, just people. Which one is strong enough to stand four years of one of the toughest jobs imaginable, and which can do the most good. Given where 8 years of the Bush administration has taken you, you could elect a stray dog and get a better result.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Back on track
OK, so my disease wasn't whooping cough (yay!), I have what the medical profession is pleased to call post-virus asthma. My doctor has prescribed Ventolin, which seems to help. I've been frantically busy for the last few weeks, working on a long report on two factor authentication for a bank. However, the backlog fog is now clearing, and normal service will resume.
OK, so my disease wasn't whooping cough (yay!), I have what the medical profession is pleased to call post-virus asthma. My doctor has prescribed Ventolin, which seems to help. I've been frantically busy for the last few weeks, working on a long report on two factor authentication for a bank. However, the backlog fog is now clearing, and normal service will resume.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Dreadful Lurgy
I've been as sick as the proverbial dog since the beginning of April. I started with the usual sore throat that presages a cold or flu, but it didn't seem to be severe, so I ignored it (well, I got some Strepsils and some Codral), and went on with my normal activities. I tried to work from home for a few days, to minimize the chances that I would contaminate my co-workers. And then I flew down to Melbourne, for a vendor conference (where the hotel air conditioning didn't help my respiratory system one bit), and generally tried to pretend that I wasn't ill. I'm really not good with sickness, it annoys me, it bores me. I don't want to be involved and, despite a good working background in medicine, I subconsciously believe that if I ignore it, it will go away. This has put me in hospital before now, but fortunately I now have a husband, who takes care of me. His position - which can only be described as enlightened self-interest - was articulated as "if anything happens to you, I'm screwed. Go see the doctor." Steve works 70-80 hours most weeks, sometimes more. I run the house, mostly by subcontracting the work I can't deal with, and things function pretty well. Steve is never bothered with laundry, gardening or "handy man" duties. He very rarely needs to assist with house cleaning (he may have to change a litter tray for the boys on occasion, or empty the dishwasher), he is not obliged to help with the grocery shopping, and he cooks when he feels like it (he likes to cook, but it is his call). I should note here that he makes me a cup of coffee every morning, before he goes to work, and he packs his own lunch every day: few men do as much.
But if I fall off my twig, he doesn't know how things work. I think he has met our housekeeper, but he probably couldn't name the agency that supplies her. He has no idea how the gardening and general maintenance get done. He doesn't know how to contact the cat nanny, who cares for the boys when we are away. I have explained Internet Banking to him, but that was about four years ago, and he may not remember. So he really needs me, to keep things going. I've lived with "staff" all my life, so organizing the little army doesn't bother me: my mother taught me how, long ago. I have a housekeeper, a landscape gardener, a cat nanny, a cabinet maker, a plumber, an electrician and a general handy man, all regular suppliers of services that I need. They know me, they know the house, they know I pay their bills promptly, everybody's happy.
So I went to the doctor, at about the three week mark, and she told me to go home and rest for a couple of days (which I sort of did, you can't ignore phone calls and email). But things were not much improved by last Thursday, so I went again, and this time got the new, keen, young GP, who has recently joined the practice that I use. She is testing me for Whooping Cough! I said "but I was vaccinated years ago", and she said "Oh, that wears off after about 12 years". Nobody ever told me that adults could contract Whooping Cough! I get the results Monday.
I've been as sick as the proverbial dog since the beginning of April. I started with the usual sore throat that presages a cold or flu, but it didn't seem to be severe, so I ignored it (well, I got some Strepsils and some Codral), and went on with my normal activities. I tried to work from home for a few days, to minimize the chances that I would contaminate my co-workers. And then I flew down to Melbourne, for a vendor conference (where the hotel air conditioning didn't help my respiratory system one bit), and generally tried to pretend that I wasn't ill. I'm really not good with sickness, it annoys me, it bores me. I don't want to be involved and, despite a good working background in medicine, I subconsciously believe that if I ignore it, it will go away. This has put me in hospital before now, but fortunately I now have a husband, who takes care of me. His position - which can only be described as enlightened self-interest - was articulated as "if anything happens to you, I'm screwed. Go see the doctor." Steve works 70-80 hours most weeks, sometimes more. I run the house, mostly by subcontracting the work I can't deal with, and things function pretty well. Steve is never bothered with laundry, gardening or "handy man" duties. He very rarely needs to assist with house cleaning (he may have to change a litter tray for the boys on occasion, or empty the dishwasher), he is not obliged to help with the grocery shopping, and he cooks when he feels like it (he likes to cook, but it is his call). I should note here that he makes me a cup of coffee every morning, before he goes to work, and he packs his own lunch every day: few men do as much.
But if I fall off my twig, he doesn't know how things work. I think he has met our housekeeper, but he probably couldn't name the agency that supplies her. He has no idea how the gardening and general maintenance get done. He doesn't know how to contact the cat nanny, who cares for the boys when we are away. I have explained Internet Banking to him, but that was about four years ago, and he may not remember. So he really needs me, to keep things going. I've lived with "staff" all my life, so organizing the little army doesn't bother me: my mother taught me how, long ago. I have a housekeeper, a landscape gardener, a cat nanny, a cabinet maker, a plumber, an electrician and a general handy man, all regular suppliers of services that I need. They know me, they know the house, they know I pay their bills promptly, everybody's happy.
So I went to the doctor, at about the three week mark, and she told me to go home and rest for a couple of days (which I sort of did, you can't ignore phone calls and email). But things were not much improved by last Thursday, so I went again, and this time got the new, keen, young GP, who has recently joined the practice that I use. She is testing me for Whooping Cough! I said "but I was vaccinated years ago", and she said "Oh, that wears off after about 12 years". Nobody ever told me that adults could contract Whooping Cough! I get the results Monday.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
What to do when you can't actually help
Many of you will have seen the news that the author Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's disease. The news was posted on the Discworld News site last December, in Terry's inimitable style. If you have never read one of Terry's books, I urge you go to your nearest bookstore, and rectify the situation. I'd suggest that you start with "The Colour of Magic", but they are all hilarious. With the state of the world today, anything that generates a genuine laugh should be cherished: I've read most of Terry Pratchett's books, and they have given me hours of enjoyment, cheered me up when I was down, and reminded me that there are many intelligent, useful people in the world (there are days when I have doubts).
However, good things can come from bad: Terry has made a large donation to the Alzheimer's Trust, and they have gained a vocal advocate. Research into Alzheimer's disease is not well funded, and it is a condition that many of us will have to deal with in the future, either because we contract it ourselves, or because someone we know contracts it: the incidence of the condition is rising. Increased funding for research will give us all a better chance in the future, and with that in mind, I've decided to make a donation to Alzheimer's Australia. If you've ever read and enjoyed a Terry Pratchett book (or even if you just dislike the thought of losing your mind) I'd like to ask you to make a donation to your local Alzheimer's support organisation or trust.
I decided to count the number of Terry Pratchett books in the house (39, and I know I am behind on his newer works, so say 40) and I'm going to donate one dollar per book per month. I can afford it, and I'm going to feel like a complete idiot if I get this thing in 10 years time (I'm about 10 years younger than Terry), and I have to look back and know that I didn't do something when I had the chance. It may take decades to find a cure, and research has to be funded, so let's all do what we can. If you can afford it, please donate: every little helps.
I'm also adding a social bookmarking button to this page. I don't normally do this, because I figure that people will submit links to Reddit/Digg/Furl/delicious or whatever as the mood takes them, and it's not my business to push. However, this is a special case: PLEASE Link, Bookmark or Share this post: the Add This button is on the left.
Many of you will have seen the news that the author Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's disease. The news was posted on the Discworld News site last December, in Terry's inimitable style. If you have never read one of Terry's books, I urge you go to your nearest bookstore, and rectify the situation. I'd suggest that you start with "The Colour of Magic", but they are all hilarious. With the state of the world today, anything that generates a genuine laugh should be cherished: I've read most of Terry Pratchett's books, and they have given me hours of enjoyment, cheered me up when I was down, and reminded me that there are many intelligent, useful people in the world (there are days when I have doubts).
However, good things can come from bad: Terry has made a large donation to the Alzheimer's Trust, and they have gained a vocal advocate. Research into Alzheimer's disease is not well funded, and it is a condition that many of us will have to deal with in the future, either because we contract it ourselves, or because someone we know contracts it: the incidence of the condition is rising. Increased funding for research will give us all a better chance in the future, and with that in mind, I've decided to make a donation to Alzheimer's Australia. If you've ever read and enjoyed a Terry Pratchett book (or even if you just dislike the thought of losing your mind) I'd like to ask you to make a donation to your local Alzheimer's support organisation or trust.
I decided to count the number of Terry Pratchett books in the house (39, and I know I am behind on his newer works, so say 40) and I'm going to donate one dollar per book per month. I can afford it, and I'm going to feel like a complete idiot if I get this thing in 10 years time (I'm about 10 years younger than Terry), and I have to look back and know that I didn't do something when I had the chance. It may take decades to find a cure, and research has to be funded, so let's all do what we can. If you can afford it, please donate: every little helps.
I'm also adding a social bookmarking button to this page. I don't normally do this, because I figure that people will submit links to Reddit/Digg/Furl/delicious or whatever as the mood takes them, and it's not my business to push. However, this is a special case: PLEASE Link, Bookmark or Share this post: the Add This button is on the left.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Small, but perfectly formed....
Sorry for the long silence, I've been in a training course, which has another week to run. Back to normal (such as that ever is) in about 10 days, assuming I pass the exam.
A couple of weeks back I picked up an Asus Eee laptop on the way home from work. If you haven't seen this nice little gadget yet, I urge you to check it out at your first opportunity. I've bought the 4G model, which has a 7 inch (diagonal measurement) screen, 512MB of RAM and a 4GB solid state hard drive. Plus 3 USB ports, and SD card slot, modem port, ethernet port, built in wireless networking, a webcam and built in speakers. All of that, and it weighs 920 grams. The power supply is quite small, like the plug on a phone charger (I was expecting a big power brick, to compensate for the small form factor of the machine, so I was pleasantly surprised). The machine comes with a black nylon slip case, and I got a thin lens cleaning cloth from my optometrist, to use as a screen protector when the machine is closed. I've bought a Pacsafe Metrosafe 200 bag, which I can use when I only want to carry the Eee: it will fit in the same bag as my MacBook Pro, but it tends to rattle around if it's in there on it own. And my whole purpose for buying such a small machine was to minimize the amount of stuff that I carry around with me.
The Eee ships with Xandros, a fork of the Debian linux distro, and out of the box is configured in "Easy Mode", which presents a set of brightly coloured icons for basic tasks. This is probably good if the machine is going to be handed to an end user, but not much use for anyone technically literate, who wants to add more software or get at a command line, so the first thing to do is to reconfigure the machine into "Advanced Mode". The instructions are on the eeeuser wiki and the result is a full desktop (KDE).
I plugged in my Huawei E220 modem, and got it working in seconds (much easier than it was on my Mac!). I've installed the Opera web browser - Firefox comes pre-installed, but I've been meaning to try Opera seriously, and it's supposed to be a better choice for small screens.
But left in "Easy Mode", this computer would be perfectly usable by anyone with basic keyboard skills and the ability to drive a browser. It's Linux, without the hard parts. Linux for your grandmother. And this appears to be worrying some people, such as Mike Abary from Sony, who told cNet "If (the Eee PC from) Asus starts to do well, we are all in trouble. That's just a race to the bottom". I think he's right to be worried: you can load Windows XP onto an Eee (this seems a daft idea to me, but it can be done), but Microsoft seems hell-bent on terminating XP on June 30th, in the face gross customer dissatisfaction with Vista, a petition for the continued availability of XP and against the advice of the analysts. The game is changing as they watch, and Microsoft isn't ready for it.
All big companies tend to get blinded by their own success, and they forget that the purpose of their marketing department is to convince the consumers, not to act as some sort of reality distortion field for their management. Someone from Microsoft really should review the history of Novell, which in about 1994-95 was the undisputed king of the hill, with a huge install base. Novell fell from power effectively in a matter of months, because their management (among many other stupid mistakes) assumed that a huge install base made them invincible. I was still working in technical support at the time: when I joined that team, there were about 30 people on the tech support team, 4 of whom could support Unix, while everyone did Netware support. I can remember being told by one of the Netware engineers that there was no point in working with Unix, because it was doomed: Netware was too big to be beaten. Within a year, Netware was no longer cool, and I was teaching Unix skills to my colleagues. Nothing, I repeat nothing, is forever in IT. When the life expectancy of a mobile phone is under a year (how many in your bottom drawer), when desktop machines are written off after about 3 years (less, if you're a gamer), change can come very quickly.
As more apps become available over the web, the need to have a big powerful machine on the desk diminishes. Have you seen these?
SlideRocket presentation software
Aviary image editing
GetDropBox storage and synchronization
Clarizen project management
and of course Google apps, Google docs, etc, etc. OK, the idea of trusting someone I've never met with my data, with no SLA's and no notion of what their security posture might be is worrying. But these things will mature: my employer sells customers access to a big shared HDS SAN to store their data, and many commercial vendors have some sort of "by the gigabyte" storage offering, run on who-knows-what hardware. SLAs and commercial arrangements are in place, and everyone is happy.
As applications move onto the web, and virtualization drags traditional desktops back into the data centre, the age of the "thin client" may well be upon us - Wyse, Sun, HP, IBM and many others all have offerings in that space, and they are well received at corporate level, by CIOs and CEOs tired of constant hardware upgrade costs and software licensing agreements with a price tag the size of the national debt of a small country. More and more gamers are moving to dedicated consoles, instead of PCs, and the demands of computer games have driven the direction of the PC hardware industry for many years. If you no longer run games on your PC, what do you still use it for, and how much hardware do you really need to complete those tasks? If you can do everything you want to using a web browser and services delivered over the Internet, you probably don't need much at all. Perhaps just enough to fit in your handbag?
I think "the race to the bottom" has already started.
Sorry for the long silence, I've been in a training course, which has another week to run. Back to normal (such as that ever is) in about 10 days, assuming I pass the exam.
A couple of weeks back I picked up an Asus Eee laptop on the way home from work. If you haven't seen this nice little gadget yet, I urge you to check it out at your first opportunity. I've bought the 4G model, which has a 7 inch (diagonal measurement) screen, 512MB of RAM and a 4GB solid state hard drive. Plus 3 USB ports, and SD card slot, modem port, ethernet port, built in wireless networking, a webcam and built in speakers. All of that, and it weighs 920 grams. The power supply is quite small, like the plug on a phone charger (I was expecting a big power brick, to compensate for the small form factor of the machine, so I was pleasantly surprised). The machine comes with a black nylon slip case, and I got a thin lens cleaning cloth from my optometrist, to use as a screen protector when the machine is closed. I've bought a Pacsafe Metrosafe 200 bag, which I can use when I only want to carry the Eee: it will fit in the same bag as my MacBook Pro, but it tends to rattle around if it's in there on it own. And my whole purpose for buying such a small machine was to minimize the amount of stuff that I carry around with me.
The Eee ships with Xandros, a fork of the Debian linux distro, and out of the box is configured in "Easy Mode", which presents a set of brightly coloured icons for basic tasks. This is probably good if the machine is going to be handed to an end user, but not much use for anyone technically literate, who wants to add more software or get at a command line, so the first thing to do is to reconfigure the machine into "Advanced Mode". The instructions are on the eeeuser wiki and the result is a full desktop (KDE).
I plugged in my Huawei E220 modem, and got it working in seconds (much easier than it was on my Mac!). I've installed the Opera web browser - Firefox comes pre-installed, but I've been meaning to try Opera seriously, and it's supposed to be a better choice for small screens.
But left in "Easy Mode", this computer would be perfectly usable by anyone with basic keyboard skills and the ability to drive a browser. It's Linux, without the hard parts. Linux for your grandmother. And this appears to be worrying some people, such as Mike Abary from Sony, who told cNet "If (the Eee PC from) Asus starts to do well, we are all in trouble. That's just a race to the bottom". I think he's right to be worried: you can load Windows XP onto an Eee (this seems a daft idea to me, but it can be done), but Microsoft seems hell-bent on terminating XP on June 30th, in the face gross customer dissatisfaction with Vista, a petition for the continued availability of XP and against the advice of the analysts. The game is changing as they watch, and Microsoft isn't ready for it.
All big companies tend to get blinded by their own success, and they forget that the purpose of their marketing department is to convince the consumers, not to act as some sort of reality distortion field for their management. Someone from Microsoft really should review the history of Novell, which in about 1994-95 was the undisputed king of the hill, with a huge install base. Novell fell from power effectively in a matter of months, because their management (among many other stupid mistakes) assumed that a huge install base made them invincible. I was still working in technical support at the time: when I joined that team, there were about 30 people on the tech support team, 4 of whom could support Unix, while everyone did Netware support. I can remember being told by one of the Netware engineers that there was no point in working with Unix, because it was doomed: Netware was too big to be beaten. Within a year, Netware was no longer cool, and I was teaching Unix skills to my colleagues. Nothing, I repeat nothing, is forever in IT. When the life expectancy of a mobile phone is under a year (how many in your bottom drawer), when desktop machines are written off after about 3 years (less, if you're a gamer), change can come very quickly.
As more apps become available over the web, the need to have a big powerful machine on the desk diminishes. Have you seen these?
SlideRocket presentation software
Aviary image editing
GetDropBox storage and synchronization
Clarizen project management
and of course Google apps, Google docs, etc, etc. OK, the idea of trusting someone I've never met with my data, with no SLA's and no notion of what their security posture might be is worrying. But these things will mature: my employer sells customers access to a big shared HDS SAN to store their data, and many commercial vendors have some sort of "by the gigabyte" storage offering, run on who-knows-what hardware. SLAs and commercial arrangements are in place, and everyone is happy.
As applications move onto the web, and virtualization drags traditional desktops back into the data centre, the age of the "thin client" may well be upon us - Wyse, Sun, HP, IBM and many others all have offerings in that space, and they are well received at corporate level, by CIOs and CEOs tired of constant hardware upgrade costs and software licensing agreements with a price tag the size of the national debt of a small country. More and more gamers are moving to dedicated consoles, instead of PCs, and the demands of computer games have driven the direction of the PC hardware industry for many years. If you no longer run games on your PC, what do you still use it for, and how much hardware do you really need to complete those tasks? If you can do everything you want to using a web browser and services delivered over the Internet, you probably don't need much at all. Perhaps just enough to fit in your handbag?
I think "the race to the bottom" has already started.
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