The Underground Man

Civilian deaths in Iraq

I am watching Condi Rice on Meet the Press as I write this and wishing that Tim was still running the show. The new guy is just soft-balling questions at her and not busting her on simple out-and-out lies.

I was thinking about the Lancet article on civilian deaths in Iraq which set the figure at around 600,000 dead. A recent New England Journal of Medicine article put it at 156,000 dead.

Contrast that to Sadaam’s death toll (since 1968) of between 150 and 200k deaths.

How has the war bettered the lives of Iraqis? Yes, we removed a nasty dictator (put into power by us) but we’ve killed as many Iraqis in five years as he did in thirty-plus years.

Shocking.

(also found a figure suggesting that we have better than 100k American wounded. Why is this not a major press story??)

Wunderbar..

Just started using the Genius feature on iTunes. Wow!

Feel like an idiot for it taking so long for me to start using it, but life has been pretty full of late, what with looking for work, building a new rifle, taking care of horses and planning for a Christmas vacation.

In any event, I’m on it now. I’m a huge Massive Attack fan, and tried out the feature tonight. With 19-odd Gb of music on my laptop (as much as I can jam on the weenie 100Gb disk) it found a really good track by Everything But the Girl that I didn’t know I had.

So I go to iTunes to do a little research and find that they had a collaboration with Massive on the album Protection (the lead singer Tracey Thorne did the vocals). I’m very good with voices and knew that I had heard her voice before.

In principle, doing something like Genius is not too difficult. Just build a very large database and have some good algorithms for scoring tracks. But jeez, in execution? It would seem like it would take a hell of a lot of work to make it work as well as it does.

I’m consistently amazed that Apple makes cool technology with such ease. They have got a bunch of smart, driven people down there in Cupertino.

Microsoft Surface

I had an opportunity to be a product tester (guinea pig) yesterday for Microsoft Surface. I originally thought little of the product when I saw the announcement but then I realized that the underlying technology is important, not the medium. (“The map is not the territory..”)

I cannot write about what I saw or did, but I did find that the technology was just as promising as I had imagined. I’ve applied to the Surface team for a full-time position but I think there are slim odds at getting in because of the academic requirements (I believe I would need a Ph. D.).

Very sad because I came up with a whole host of ideas that seemed new to the researcher about how to use the interface. If I were the GM of the unit, I would hire a science fiction writer or two to help with the interface design - I think conventional UI folks would probably be too unimaginative to make the serious strides the technology requires.

Well, I can dream.

Scrivener

Found a great new tool to help me with my fiction writing.

I found that now I’m seriously engaged with the writing process that I’m collecting an alarming amount of research material with no real cataloging system. Given how quickly I type, I don’t consider it practical to write in a notebook (other than to scribble down ideas until I get back to my laptop), so most of my research is found online or in hard-cover books I’m reading.

It’s only the first morning but this tool is very promising as I work through the tutorial. Just wish it had a timeline function so that I could datestamp scenes and rearrange their order visually. Something to suggest to the creator I suppose.

I’m trying it out over the holidays and I hope I decide it’s worth paying for.

surfing

Caught this little forum tidbit while surfing on Amazon this morning:


"I feel something large moving within my intestines and I’m starting to wonder if its a living creature. When I sleep at night I can feel poking and prodding within my stomach. If I listen closely I even feel I can hearing a tiny scream. Your thoughts?"



One wonders what to advise this person? Seek psychiatric help? Lay off the halucinogens? Get thee to a physician? Jeez..

Sometimes, life is stranger than fiction.

Doing the Madison

For some reason, the brilliant Jean-Luc Godard film, “Bande à part” came to mind this morning. Here’s one of the best scenes in that film:



Anna Karina was discovered by Coco Chanel and had a brief career as a top model before becoming a French film star (and Godard’s wife). She has since gone on to become a major film star in France (although she is Danish).

Champions League draw

Hmm.. after yesterday’s final group games, the eight 2nd place teams are:


Chelsea*

Arsenal*

Internazionale

Sporting Lisbon

Atletico Madrid

Real Madrid

Villareal

Lyon



Liverpool cannot face Arsenal or Chelsea because of “country protection” - which ensures some diversity in representation until one gets to the round of eight - so they’ll face one of the other six teams in a home and home series, winner take all. It’s aggregate across both legs, with away goals counting more, so Liverpool has a slight edge because of the crowd at Anfield (though Real Madrid would probably argue that).

Real Madrid would definitely be the marquee matchup. Not, by any means, a sure thing, even with internal dissension and a new coach. On the other hand, the next round won’t take place until March so there is little to speculate on now given everyone’s form will be history by then.

We get to find out December 19th.

cream rises to the top

No, I’m not writing of myself. I’m talking about the group stage of the world’s second greatest football competition, which has just concluded: the Champions’ League. These are the teams that advance to the knock-out rounds, including my beloved Liverpool:


Arsenal

Atletico Madrid

Barcelona

Bayern Munich

Chelsea

Inter Milan

Juventus

Liverpool

Lyon

Manchester United

Panathinaikos

Porto

Roma

Real Madrid

Sporting Lisbon

Villarreal



Once again, there appears to be serious competition between the Spanish and English sides as to who will dominate the competition. Last year, that resulted in 3 English teams in the semis, and 2 in the Final. This year, I’m betting that Barca will make it all the way, against either Man Utd or Liverpool. There is “country protection” in this next round, so we shan’t see English team vs. English team in the forthcoming draw. However, given the number of Spanish and English sides, I expect to see Liverpool vs. either a Spanish or Italian side in the draw.

It should be another marvellous couple of European nights.

The best football until the World Cup will return in March.

President Obama

Given Bush 43’s absence in office these last few months, I call him President Obama.

Very happy to hear him on Meet the Press this morning. Absolutely terrific. I was quite inspired by his discussion of how he and the first lady were going to open up the White House to the arts and sciences again.

What an engaging idea. Makes me wish I lived in the D.C. area so that I might be inspired on weekends. Let’s hope some of these events are televised.

We live in portentous times. This almost seemed like the first fireside chat of the new millennium.

Bailout of auto makers

I’m one for just saying “no”. Unless they agree to either bankruptcy and court-ordered supervision of their business plans or a complete change of the upper tiers of management, why should our tax dollars go to support such an inept, even incompetent business?

Watching Rick Wagoner (GM CEO) this evening speak with PBS, I was struck at how many facial twitches the guy has. Made me nervous - because already I don’t trust someone who isn’t willing to stand up and take responsibility for his industry’s and his company’s failure to re-engineer their offerings. They were extremely short-sighted in concentrating on producing behemoths like the Hummer and the Escalade rather than concentrating efforts on high-mileage vehicles. Cadillacs are crap (I know, my sister has a recent one that is just terrible).

They cannot seem to build a good car with current management. Fault doesn’t lie, I think, with the workers, but rather with management. Why should we reward someone like Wagoner (who has a $9M/yr salary) for failure? His head should roll if we taxpayers have to subsidize his firm.

Somalian piracy

As a student of military history, I would say the solution to the Somalian piracy problem isn’t too difficult.

I would do this:

- get some old supertanker hulls and anchor them every two-three hundred miles along the affected sealanes.
- equip them with helicopters, and healthy crews of ocean-borne commandos (SEAL, SAS, Legion Etrangere)

- place a squad aboard every tanker/ship heading through the affected region - you would likely only need 6-12 men per ship, for probably 100-200 ships at a time

- rotate them one week on, one week off and move them from hulls to ships via helicopters

If you’re short on manpower, consider these live-fire training exercises and use special forces personnel in the last stages of their training.

It takes too long to respond to a hijacking after it has happened. It’s too costly in lives and response time and potential environmental damage. You have to be onboard already when the hijackers arrive.

You probably cannot cover all the ships but those that you have squads on will stop any pirates from successfully taking the ship. And you’ll have a couple of boats less of pirates after every attempt.

Surely this would be less costly than if you had to clean up after a supertanker going down or being hulled while full of fuel. Any there must be many Western militaries who need to either train or re-train their commandos.

Of wishlists and ceramics

Two things I’ve wanted for a while. A ceramic paring knife and a universal wish list.

So I thought I would test out the functionality by marrying the two. Very cool functionality. A little less functionality than I would have wanted but a very elegant solution for the problem on incorporating another site’s contents without use of an API.

Fisher & Paykel

It’s a brand you may not have heard of. Yet. Manufactured in New Zealand, they produce home appliances (dishwashers, clothes washers, ovens, refrigerators).

My folks, being European, tend to value some things more than money/economy. So they bought a matched pair of DishDrawers, the smaller dishwashers designed by Fisher & Paykel (available from Lowe’s in the Pacific Northwest). I’ve always marveled at how much quieter they are than American products. One can actually sit only a few feet way during a wash cycle and hold a conversation in a normal tone of voice without straining to hear over the “whir whir” of the dishwasher.

Anyway, we had a problem with one the other day, where it wasn’t exhausting all the used dishwater. So being the mechanical one, and being home for a visit, I was asked to look into the problem.

About an hour later, after I had figured out the design - I think it’s revolutionary compared to most dishwashers - I thought I had figured out the problem. Only I had one barrier to addressing it. A smoked plastic shield covered some of the motor parts I need to get to and it wasn’t obvious how to remove it.

So I called their 800 number. And was connected to a delightful Australian lady in one of their call centers. Well educated, well-spoken, and knowledgeable about the product. She led me in the right direction and I ended up ordering a new “motor rotor”. Brilliant design, really. The commutator brushes are insulated from the internal chamber of the dishwasher and spin the rotor to exhaust the waste water from the dishwasher. No mechanical connection between the two. Easy to service and the water cools both the commutator and the rotor.

I was thinking about what it said that Fisher & Paykel hadn’t outsourced their call centers. Why do we outsource ours? In pursuit of the almighty dollar I suppose? But it sort of gives the lie to it being “necessary”, doesn’t it.

The average wage in India of a call center employee is about $7.50/hr. The average minimum wage in Australia is about $10/hr. So maybe their call center people make $15. Big difference. But Fisher & Paykel still manages to make a profit and hasn’t seen a need to offshore their support (I asked).

Armistice Day

Here in America it’s Veteran’s Day. In the rest of the world, Armistice Day. It just doesn’t seem to mean as much here as it does in the UK or north of the border. I’m not sure why but it’s a pity.

This is the day (on the 11th day of the 11th month at the 11th hour) that WWI officially ended. For America, not a huge thing. For the European powers, and for the Commonwealth nations, it was the end of the biggest war man had ever seen.

A whole generation of young French, British, and German men was lost in the trenches. Nothing since has really come close to the scale and tragedy of the loss on those battlefields. We forget because, to a certain extent, the impact has been diluted by both time and the smaller impact on American society.

But the loss of so many young men, in what was really a pointless conflict with no real good or bad side, definitely set the stage for the second world war, as those who would have grown into roles of leadership in their societies were dead and tired old men allowed Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini to rise to positions of prominence and engaged in appeasement.

Analysis of the Big Four matches

Love this analysis of the matches of the Big Four (Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, Chelsea) in the Premier League over the last eight years.

My uncle and I were speculating on this a few days ago. This was occasioned by Liverpool beating both Man Utd (my uncle’s favorite team) and Chelsea in recent weeks. My lightweight analysis showed that if you had more than 6 draws in a season, and more than four losses, you had no practical chance of winning the League.

We wondered whether the matches against the other Big Four were critical. I think this analysis shows that it does have some relevance. At the very least, one has to win or draw most of the six matches against their closest rivals. Interesting that in only one case would Liverpool have one the League had it topped the table against its closest rivals.

Diesel Locomotives

A modern diesel-electric locomotive can move one ton of freight 202 miles on a single gallon of diesel. An 18-wheeler can move the same load only 59 miles.

Tell me again why we dismantled the train system in this country?

Why are we not building fast passenger lines and moving more freight by rail given the shortage of fuels?

Blame the soon-to-be-defunct automotive firms I suppose.

backing up the iPhone

So, having left Microsoft, I find myself having to backup my iPhone to my TiBook rather than my Dell laptop. Of course, for some bizarre reason, Apple has made this difficult. I fail to understand why I cannot have music I OWN on more than one machine. Anti-deluvian thinking, surely put in place by Apple to salve the concerns of the record companies.

So I’ve had to engage in a search for software that will allow me to “backup” the contents of my iPhone to my Mac desktop. Failing to do that, some of the content I’ve loaded into my iPhone would be deleted by syncing my iPhone with my Mac. I’ve got some videos I’ve converted for viewing on the iPhone that I don’t want to lose, hence my spending a couple of hours find appropriate software to accomplish this.

Along the way, I’ve found this cool app (TinkerTool) written by Mark Bresink, allowing me much greater control over some system features.

I’m currently trying out iLinkPhone, which seems to backup the contents of the iPhone fine, albeit with cryptic names. However, launching a file seems to play it (properly labelled) in iTunes. So, I’ll try importing the content post backup completion.

battling the printer

I’m trying to get three or four prints readied for submission to the juried photo exhibition at our county fair.

I’m planning on going big this year (13×19) as that is as big as my printer (an Epson 1270) will go.

Unfortunately, the printhead definitely gums up through lack of use and I haven’t used it for six months. I’ve resolved to try and do something with it weekly to avoid all the cleaning and testing hassles I seem to go through every time I use it.

Went out last night and bought new cartridges, and am trying to find a place locally that sells the paper (may have to order it). I’m under severe time pressure because I need to submit my entry by next Tuesday. So many phone calls are in my future.

Unfortunately, only the best paper (Epson Premium Luster) will do as it is a dye-sub printer. After printing, I need to have them mounted and then framed.

Past competitions have suggested that even though they are matted, framing is essential to get the blue riband. Sad, but true. Got to learn to play the game.

At least I have time to do this while I’m looking for work.

arggh..

Arrghgh.. The only thought I have to describe my morning interview process with Microsoft Dublin. It was a position I thought I was very well qualified for and very motivated for. Unfortunately, it’s been a long time since I’ve been a programmer and I was unable to answer a hash table question. (Actually, I chose not to try since I would have just been blowing smoke..)

But I suspect, as with most phone screens, anything you cannot answer will generally rule you out of consideration. I think I did well on the thought problem, solved both halves, but I rather think it was pointless after my failure on the hash table question.

One might argue that a senior PM or GPM shouldn’t need to worry too much about technical implementation details but the reality is that the PM roles at Microsoft frequently require some serious technical chops and in this instance, I imagine that a good answer to the question was very necessary.

Frustrating, as the Careers site at MS is just hopeless as an avenue to getting a job - it’s a channel for fodder. This interview came through LinkedIn (as most of my best ones have) and I’ll continue to pursue that.

Time for me to go back and review basic programming concepts so I don’t have the issue arise again.

Mon Reve

Seen on the Vs. TV coverage of the Tour de France (my second favorite sports event to watch): “Mon Reve - Un Tour Propre”. Which translates as “My Dream - A Proper Tour”. In the sense the French mean, that means a Tour without doping, a real competition.

Definitely my dream as well.

Watching the Stage de Reine (Queen Stage - toughest stage in the Tour) today. Looks simply punishing. Nothing I would want to do, but Lance made me an avid watcher of the Tour. Just wish it was on a major network so more people could catch it and come to appreciate the drama of a 3-week competition.