Month: August 2001

Lies, Damn Lies, and Lobbyists

Lobbyists are people who are paid to espouse a point of view and to convince others that their position is the correct one. In Palm Power, Glenn Fleishman writes about the successful work being done by a coal industry organization. Their position is that (a) we need more power generated to support the demand imposed by Palm Pilots [sic] plus other modern devices and (b) the best way to generate that power is by burning coal. This group is using ridiculous arithmatic but even as reputable an outlet as the New York Times is buying into it even when scientists provide contrary evidence. Urggh and a half!

The Sun sets on Bill

After four and a half years, I’m sad to say that I’m no longer codependent on, or employed by, Sun Microsystems. Looking for a product, busdev, or tech support manager? Here’s my resume. I’ve been on a personal leave for the last few months, recovering from the stresses of the previous few years and recharging my batteries, and the economy went in the crapper so that while I was supposed to return from leave earlier this month no job exists to which I can return. I expect my timing could have been better, eh?

But I had a good run and won’t complain. I had fun, met some great people, made a decent salary, and even have some stock that’s still worth money (even if it is far less than a year ago). I signed on at NetDynamics just as the company was reving into high gear–there were only 60 employees when I joined but we added a hundred more in the next year. I had a great manager (Jim, you’re the best!). I had five different jobs in 18 months. I managed a team of a dozen people who went on a death march in the summer of 1999. I helped launch the first certified J2EE application server.

I’m at a good point in my life and while I would have preferred to return to Sun after this break, even though finding a new job will be tough, I’ll be fine. Don’t worry, send me names of good recruiters and companies that are hiring.

So long, Sun, and thanks for all the fish.

Didn’t die before he got old

The Sixties were a long time ago. Pete Townsend is still alive, although no longer rocking. So why do the rockers who were adults then think they should keep on shaking their moneymakers up on stage. Oh, money, yeah, forgot about that. As John Strausbaugh writes in his new book Rock Til You Drop and in this extract on the Guardian, Mick and Keith are surely entitled to keep making music but we’re entitled to recognize that they a “once-great rock band that kept playing years and years after they’d gotten too old, had gone from the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world to the greatest self-parody of a rock’n’roll band.” Of course Strausbaugh pushes my button by citing Springsteen as a millionaire too old to do anything but push memories like a drug on fans.

Still, he has a point. I think there’s great fun to be had listening to music–new and old–from Springsteen, the Stones, and others but I agree that these aren’t the musicians pushing today’s youth culture; certainly not the way they did 25 and 35 years ago. Heck I can’t even listen to most of today’s new music. But I can always throw a Zep in the player!

I am not..a leper!

xreferer is an interesting new reference site that allows users to search over 50 reference titles containing more than 500,000 entries. Looking up ‘lazar’, I foundthat there are several eastern European artistic types with my last name and also a biblical reference–apparently it was used as a generic name for lepers in the Middle Ages but means, in Aramaic, God is my help.

This is why programming is cool!

Thanks and a big shout out to Hannes Dorn for his CDir class that gives me a real smooth way to grab a list of the weblog archive files and then I wrote the code to display them in the dropdown list at the top of webLog archive pages.

Another TaaBSO to Phil Ringnalda for his Blogger archive listing scripts that show how to convert the date-based archive filenames to something useful. I’d tell him but there’s no email address across all his great pages!

All in all, I spent about five hours tonight reprogramming the home page and weblog archive pages plus the Blogger templates and I barely noticed the time passing. This was fun. And I’m really looking forward to the new visuals for the site.

Initial update to the look and structure of BillSaysThis

Tonight I implemented the initial change to this website. You’ll notice that the weblog is now occupying the right half of the main page and some of the links that used to be on this page, particularly the set of daily links, are gone. I’m working with a friend who is an artist (and aspires to one day be an Artist) on a new layout, color scheme, navigation, and so forth and I decided to implement this part of the change tonight. The weblog archive pages look plain for now but I will be updating that soon.

Feedback is welcome!

A fresh light on the Invisible Hand

Writing 225 years ago, Adam Smith created an enduring work of economic analysis that still provides meaningful insights for today’s events. Alan Krueger’s NY Times column Rediscovering ‘The Wealth of Nations’ points out that although conservative politicians are quick to use him as bolstering their positions on issues such as taxation, but Krueger quotes Smith as saying “It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

While Krueger’s column (he’s been writing for the Times regularly) is interesting and worth reading before it disappears into the Times “premium” archives (that is, pay to read), the main reason for this entry is that he is an old Livingston (NJ) High School friend of mine. Currently a professor at Princeton University, he is the Thoman and Bendheim Professor of of Economics and Public Policy and Director of the Survey Research Center at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. In the mid-90s he also served all of us as chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor.

Tonight’s movie: Bait

Jamie Foxx is stupid but he can run fast and, just when he needs it, he pulls some brains out of his back pocket in Bait. David Morse is a hardass Treasury cop looking for Doug Hutchinson and using Foxx as, wow, a surprise, bait to get him. This is a sharp looking film and the plot almost holds together but inconsistencies like Foxx’s varying level of intelligence make it hard to take.

This is a test post

Richard Caetano is developing bloggerCom, which I am using to create this log entry. As this is my first test and this is really early in the development of the whole project, I’m not sure it will work. But let’s see…

[After initial post from bloggerCom] It worked! Cool. The past eight days have seen an amazing and impressive flurry of activity after Bloggermeister Evan Williams published the first Blogger XML-RPC API, of which bloggerCom is a part. I’ve been subscribed to the mailing list from the start and the level of involvement is one of those great things no one expects. Dave Winer, author of the web’s original weblog, has been deeply involved all along–way to go Dave–even adding support for the API to his company’s products. Even though they run a competing weblog service or two. I’ve even offered to help someone working on a PHP implementation.

What I want, and seems like this will be available in days or less, is a Windows-based client that has at least the functionality of the online Blogger editor. The online tool’s biggest weakness, I think, is dealing with templates and I’m hoping somebody brings a better solution to the table.

Good judgement or supply chain management and are the banks next?

Nicholas von Hoffman, writing in the New York Observer, looks at the $2 TRILLION lost by holders of telecom stocks (JDSU, Nortel, Lucent, and so on) which wasn’t supposed to happen because everyone’s using the latest in supply chain management software. He moves on to the risk in the dollar, which is causing big losses for American companies selling overseas (which is every single one of consequence). von Hoffman finishes by looking into whether we’ll have another rash of bank and financial institution failures. Are we really headed for a quick turnaround in the economy? Another datapoint can be found in this week’s Back of the Envelope column on nearly-defunct hip web consulting firm Razorfish.

Tonight’s movie: Osmosis Jones

It’s gross! It’s funny! It’s inside Bill Murray! It’s Osmosis Jones, the latest movie from Peter and Bobby Farrelly (the brothers gave us Me, Myself & Irene, There’s Something About Mary, and Dumb & Dumber). We go for a wild animated ride inside Bill Murray’s insides, led by Chris Rock and David Hyde-Pierce as coppers chasing Lawrence Fishburne’s deadly virus, not to mention William Shatner’s weasly mayor of the City of Frank. Cool but not for the really young.

SciFi Weekly weighs in with their review–only a C+. I’d give it a B+.

It’s a Microsoft world

And we’re just living in it. The Register has a disheartening interview with MS SQL Server VP Gordon Mangione, who points out that (a) Sun and Oracle live and die by each other (which has been pretty true for at least ten years) and (b) SQL Server is beginning to eat up Oracle as Windows gets (arguably) better and Intel-based servers get more powerful. Urggh!

Slashdot has a raging debate on open source databases that may, as with Linux/Apache/etc…, provide an alternative. The debate was prompted by this Interactive Week article.

We will remember

We must remember the millions who died at the hands of the Nazis before and during World War II. The Nizkor Holocaust Educational Resource has extensive resources to help ensure this continues to be so. Amazingly, there are people who’ve gone to great lengths to deny this terrible fact; why do the deny it? “The real purpose of holocaust revisionism is to make National Socialism an acceptable political alternative again.” And that, for sure, can never be allowed!

The right not to be a parent

The New Jersey Supreme Court, in a ruling today, granted a women the right to dispose of frozen embryos that were prepared while she was still married to the man whose sperm is involved. The man involved is a devout Roman Catholic and such a disposition violates his religious beliefs. What I really find most intriguing about the court’s decision is that “the fundamental right of [the woman] not to procreate outweighs [the man’s] right to procreate.” What if the situation were a little different: a couple separate, the woman finds out she is pregnant, and the man does not want to be a father? Can he go to court and force the woman, citing this precedent, to have an abortion? After all, to again quote the ruling, “the woman [would presumably be] capable of having other children, [her] right to procreate is not lost if [she] is denied the opportunity…; whereas if the [baby is bought to term, the man] will be forced to become a biological parent.” Is this another slippery slope?

If this guy shows up at the office, be very worried

C|Net interviewed James F. O’Brien Jr., CEO of Promethean Asset Management. Seems like an interestin guy, except that each of the companies the article mentions as a Promethean investment has made major layoffs or gone out of business. Critics call him a purveyor of toxic loans although he claims to be misunderstood. Either way, I wouldn’t really want to be working at a company that takes money from this outfit.

How much is your brain worth?

Most people are probably cautious when it comes to protecting the muscle inside their skull. Eric Lindros, unquestionably a great hockey player, missed the past season after suffering the sixth concussion of his career. Another one and he could lose, literally, some of his mind. But ESPN is reporting that he still wants to make a comeback and the Flyers (who own his rights) are talking with the Rangers about a trade. I realize Lindros will likely make more than $9 million per year for four to six years with a new contract but is the money really worth the risk?

Other star players have made the other, more difficult choice to retire. Steve Young and Troy Aikman, both of whom would probably have made Lindros-class money, decided to retire rather than risk further damage. Making their decisions a little easier was that both knew they would make the move directly into well-paying TV gigs but I have to wonder if Lindros is prepared to take the consequences.

Need a Sopranos fix?

Yeah, I know HBO began showing the first 39 episodes last night. But I’ve seen all of them at least three times (except for the third season) and I can’t believe we’ll be waiting another 13 months for new shows. Our good friends at Democratic Underground are trying to help fill the void with The Supremos, by The Shifties. Tony’s family is replaced by the US Supreme Court, with Antonin ‘Nino’ Supremo (i.e., Antonin Scalia) as head of the family and Chief Justice Rehquist as the proxy for Uncle Junior. Nino also consults with his attractive brunette psychiatrist Dr. Phlemmi, of course. Good for some laughs.

What is the Democratic Underground? It “was founded on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2001, to protest the illegitimate presidency of George W. Bush and to provide a resource for the exchange and dissemination of liberal and progressive ideas. Since then, DU has become one of the premier left-wing websites on the Internet, publishing original content six days a week, and hosting one of the Web’s most active left-wing discussion boards.”

Another amusing feature on the site is The Top Ten Conservative Idiots, a list that is posted weekly.

Hornby on the Billboard Top Ten

Nick Hornby, author of favs About a Boy and High Fidelity, looked at the gap between aging rock critics and popular taste and cast a critical eye on the Billboard Top Ten (from July 28, 201) for The New Yorker magazine. One might get the impression that Hornby didn’t care for much of the music or the lyrics of Staind, P. Diddy, D12 featuring Eminem, or even Melissa Etheridge but he certainly gives them a fair hearing.