Category: Personal

Arrrgggghhhhh!!!!!!

Evan and I decided to kill an afternoon downtown yesterday at the 2003 San Jose International Auto Show. You can see some of what I liked in a new photo gallery. Too bad Evan couldn’t fit into either of his first choices, the Nissan 350Z or the Ford Thunderbird, but that’s one of the drawbacks of being so tall.

Cool cars: Saleen S7, Nissan Murano, and the always hot Acura NSX.

Odd cars: Toyota Scion bbX and ccX.

Overall, not as exciting as one would hope. Lots of nearly identical SUVs. There are no more plain sedans anymore, there are only sport sedans except at the very high end. The timing of the San Jose show has to be questioned since the biggest show of the year, in Detroit, is also being held this week and that means all the good concept cars are unavailable. (The Times has a good write up) What, they couldn’t hold this off for two or three weeks?

The Detroit Lions have hired Bobby Williams (fired as head coach at Michigan State just before the end of their season) to replace Maurice Carthon as running backs coach. Carthon went to the Cowboys as offensive coordinator.

Speaking of the ‘Boys, Sean Payton has come on board as assistant head coach and running backs coach; he was the Giants’ OC but left after Jim Fassel took away his playcalling duties midway through this past season. Parcells may give Payton the playcalling job in Dallas, as the new guy was building quite a rep until the first games went awry.

Dave Campo, Parcell’s predecessor, has joined the Cleveland Browns as defensive coordinator. Which was clearly a need the way the team’s defense collapsed last weekend against the Steelers. Campo worked with Browns head coach Butch Davis at Dallas and the University at Miami. Foge Fazio, a solid oldtimer, took the fall for inexplicably calling a prevent defense on the last two Steeler drives.

Cincinnati and Jacksonville are still looking for new head coaches (and Jax a GM) but at least the Bengals might be getting close. The reportedly are down to a choice between ex-Jag Tom Coughlin and Redskins DC Marvin Lewis. I hope they go with Lewis, though I hate to wish that job on anyone.

eWeek gives the new version of my last product worked on a moderately positive review: Sun Application Server Reborn. I’m happy for my friends still there, still drawing those big Sun paychecks. Good luck, amigos.

I saw a couple of films the last few days and am just writing briefs for completeness. Never did that for Sweet Home Alabama, which I saw at dollar night, but that was just so bad it would be wrong to even bother.

From 1965, The Ipcress File was a quite good example of a small sort of Cold War spy story, though it seems quite dated to me now. Not just because the Cold War ended so long ago but because the film itself, while probably quite out in front of things when made, has been done to death in the 38 years since. Michael Caine stars in the first of five movies as Harry Palmer, based on novels written by Len Deighton. Palmer is an agent for a branch of British Military Intelligence, a trickster working there to avoid jail for swindling German soldiers, and his mission here is to ransom a top scientist whose been kidnapped.

Harry Saltzman produced the movie(s), he also co-produced the then new James Bonds, and I believe he saw this character as a potential franchise as well though the Palmer films never came close to the financial success of 007. In many ways Palmer is the anti-Bond: cheap old car, no special equipment, dingy office shared with a half dozen other agents, always rumpled. Very cool where the Bond films are filled with heat. Though one can’t fault Caine, he was quite good but handicapped by working with a so-so script (the novel was much better) by two guys who never wrote any other films and a mediocre director in Sidney Furie.

Moderately interesting

From 1999, All the Rage is a strange little artsy movie about people who’s lives are ultimately ruined by handguns. Some of the stories are a little more interesting than the others but writer Keith Reddin and director James Stern dilute the effect by having so many subplots and then needing artificial means to connect them together. The actors are all pretty good but they don’t have enough to work with. The IMDB page linked to the title has a good audience summary, so I’ll skip it here. Let’s just say I had a difficult time buying David Schwimmer and Andre Braugher as a gay couple but that may be due to the fact that I cannot unerstand how Schwimmer ever got work as an actor in the first place. Gary Sinise, on the other hand, is terrific playing a Bill Gates gone Howard Hughes weirdo.

Not recommended

I’ve been thinking about writing this Crankytorial for a few days now, first thinking I should, then thinking, no, it’s too obvious. But in the end I think I need to get it out.

What the fuck do President Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, or whoever think they’re doing with this so-called economic stimulus plan? The economy is still in the dumper and I am far from the only person who’s been looking for work for more than a year now. And what does the Ruling Trio propose as the centerpiece of a plan to start making things right? $300 billion in tax cuts for the ‘investment class’!

Zimran ‘Winterspeak’ Ahmed wrote in his weblog that he can’t understand why anyone would be opposed to this particular change, using as his launch point what I thought I was a very insightful column by economist Paul Krugman. Krugman focused on the politics while Ahmed, a student in the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago who regularly publishes such economic commentary, takes a more purist economics approach: double taxation of dividends is bad because it distorts corporate behavior by causing executives to choose stock buybacks as a way to return profits to investors. So I had a little exchange with him via email, with my main point being that eliminating taxes on dividends entirely does not remove this distortion, it only changes the bias from favoring buybacks to dividends; unfortunately our discussion got caught up in politics.

I wasn’t the only correspondent Ahmed had, so he followed that original post up with another today. In this post, he seems to agree with my point regarding equalization of taxes on capital gains and dividends but doesn’t go so far as to state that the Bush proposal should be defeated. However, he continues to ignore the political dimension (which is what I meant by ‘purist approach’) and that means he doesn’t go far enough to judge if this is a good way to deprive the federal government of so much money; Ahmed does agree it will not stimulate the economy.

Scott Herhold, writing in yesterday’s Mercury News, looked at Who gains from no tax on dividends?. He pointed out that if the change is implemented, executives like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will be able to take home millions (in his case, perhaps hundreds of millions) of dollars per year tax free. And still retain the 1.4 billion shares of Oracle he owns. Let’s see, I own 400 shares of Microsoft and (from the option package I got from NetDynamics) about 4800 shares of Sun. If each company were to pay the 20 cents/share/year that Herhold mentions, I would start raking in a huge $1,040 a year tax free. Add to that the big $300/year I already get in dividends from 200 shares of Verizon. Ooh baby, that sure makes up for no job! That’s sure to stimulate some spending on my part in, oh, two years when the difference in my taxes shows up in my pocket. Herhold also includes a suggestion from some shmoe he interviewed that actually makes a lot more sense to me if we want to eliminate double taxation of dividends: “allow the corporation to deduct what it pays in dividends on its corporate tax return — thus treating all stock the same.” To be honest, I’m a little surprised Ahmed didn’t include this option in his considerations.

So where do we find some help for the economy in the near term, and not just a political payoff riding the back of this urgent need? Unemployment is harsh, states are running around trying to figure out how to control deficits that are simply unreal (California, for example, is facing a $35 billion shortfall, which is about one third of it’s budget), and the Administration seems to be gearing up to drop an additional $50-200 billion on war with Iraq. Bob Herbert chimes in with a very relevant column in today’s NY Times: Jobless, and Stunned. I love his opening line, shows why he writes for the Times and I write for this website: “Left behind by the great Republican raid on the national Treasury are folks like Karelia Escobar and Joe Bergmann, middle-aged New Yorkers who have worked most of their lives but now find themselves traveling the anxious paths of the long-term unemployed.”

The Bush team is starting to put out some spin on this proposal today, in any case. The elimination of dividends isn’t so simple or pervasive as critics are making it out to be. Dividends will only be tax free to the extent that the corporation paying it was profitable in the year; if Company X makes a $100 million profit and pays $35 million (the top rate) in taxes, then it can pay up to $65 million in dividends but anything over that will be taxable to shareholders. If a company files a tax return claiming it lost money for the year (not including taxes paid to foreign gvernments), any dividends it pays are taxable since this would not be a situation where double taxation comes into play.

Further, if the company decides to retain some of the earnings to invest in itself, the unpaid amount can be declared as ‘deemed dividends’ and shareholders can add the amount to their cost basis, reducing the capital gains when the stock is finally sold. So shareholders in companies that have a loss (in a given year) but still pay dividends will still be taxed on those payouts at ordinary income levels. Preferred stocks have become very complex in recent years and the treatment of their dividends is even more twisted.

The AP reported that Bush made a staged appearance today at a flag company to defend his plan (more spin. The President claimed that attacks on his plan were class warfare, which is a nice soundbite but not very meaty; he never actually denied that most of the direct benefits to individuals will go to the very well off. In fact, his comments seem to suggest that giving the money to these people will cause them to expand their business (adding jobs) and increase personal spending (adding jobs). I think we saw this kind of thing before, 23 years ago. Ronald Reagan rode his Supply Side Economics to the White House but our current president’s own father called this what it is, Voodoo Economics (before swallowing his pride to become VP).

Didn’t work then, doubt it will work now. I don’t see how this proposal helps the economy in a significant way. Thanks GWB.

As reported by the Washington Post in House GOP Softens Its Ethics Rules, the Republicans in Congress aren’t even waiting or bothering to disguise their avariciousness! Only eight years ago, when the party rode it’s laughable Contract with America into legislative power, the House passed rules minimizing certain types of open bribery. Now, seizing the moment, they’ve voted (on a pretty straight party line basis) to remove these rules. Just like so many of the same politicians who were so hot for term limits in the ’90s–when they were on the outside–are now saying that experience counts and so they should continue to run. How typical!

Arizona owner Bill Bidwell decided that Dave McGinnis was still his man as head coach even after a two and a half year mark of 13-28 but that general manager Bob Ferguson, offensive coordinator Rich Olson, and defensive backs coach Kevin Ramsey are no longer useful. Bidwell elevated Ferguson’s right hand man Rod Graves to vice president of football operations (i.e., GM with a fancier title) which figures into the key question down in the land of the Sun: Will the team will offer quarterback Jake the Snake Plummer, an unrestricted free agent, a new contract.

And over in Dallas, Bill Parcells made his first hire by hiring Maurice Carthon as offensive coordinator and retaining Mike Zimmer as defensive coordinator. Carthon, of course, was the star fullback on Parcell’s two Giants Super Bowl squads and was running backs coach for him at the Patriots and Jets. Zimmer was defensive coordinator this past year for dethroned coach Dave Campo and has been a Cowboys coach since 1994.

p.s. A little late reporting this change but last week Seattle owner Paul Allen gave Mike Holmgren a choice–give up the general manager job or resign altogether. Holmgren looked at that $4 million per year contract, looked around at the possible landing slots, and wisely chose to keep his coaching office. Reportedly, the Jaguars are going to replace Tom Coughlin by separating the two jobs. Which means that I was spot on when I said the era of one man being both GM and head coach is probably coming to an end. Smart move.

While there was some superlative news on the football front over the weekend (all four NFL games ended as I desired, plus the USC Orange Bowl demolition), other news has been less than overwhelming. This morning, therefore, has not been as cheery as one could hope. Then along comes this article in DP Review [via garret] to give a laugh. One of those small world things.

IBM has been pushing its (reasonably well earned) business expertise in an ad campaign over the past few weeks. Those UBA (Universal Business Adapter) ads and the like. In which their competitors are accused of using magic business beans to give customers the illusion of tech success, but only the illusion (for example, the last line of dialog in one of the current TV ads is along the lines of “You have to put in another quarter.”).

So IBM, looking to focus more closely on service-oriented lines of business, made a deal to sell of most of its disk drive business to Hitachi. That deal just closed and Hitachi announced a cool new product (discussed in that DP Review article), a 4GB version of the MicroDrive. The MicroDrive is about one inch on a side and fits inside Compact Flash Type II slots, useful for very mobile devices like PDAs, digital cameras, and the like. And these drives use Pixie Dust, known technically as antiferromagnetically coupled (AFC) media, which adds a thin layer of ruthenium to the platters inside a drive and allows more data to be packed onto each platter. IBM even got a patent for the pixie dust tech!

So I’m sitting here this morning thinking pixie dust, magic business beans, hey it’s all good. Who cares if you can’t tell the difference between maketing bullshit and marketing bullshit?

OH YEAH! NINERS! NINERS! NINERS! For once we were not on the losing end of a huge fourth quarter comeback. Garcia was the man, with Owens putting things over the top. Giants defensive back was also key to our victory with two consecutive incredibly stupid penalties at the end of the game. Finally, the the Giants could not keep things together for a simple field goal to win the game, second bad snap of the game for Trey Junkins. To make it all the sweeter, I got to call my Giants fan dad and taunt him afterwards.

I just had one of those excruciating episodes that every programmer comes up against every so often. Particularly those of us with less than perfect vision. When one character somewhere in a long file (or possibly worse, a set of files) is missing, incorrect, or just a smidge out of place and because of how perfectly computers adhere to what is in the source file, all the billsaysthis.com pages were not displaying correctly. Finally, just before tearing my hair out, I was going over the styles using a very helpful piece of software called IE Booster and I noticed that all my styles were not listed (IEB has a function called Show Stylesheets). A closer examination of my stylesheet showed me that one style had a closing parenthesis “)” instead of a closing curly brace “}”; that was enough to make Internet Explorer stop reading in the stylesheet and therefore it never got to the styles that were needed for proper display. Argggghhhhh!!!!

By the way, there’s a new version of IEB out that’s even more useful than the version that solved my problem. If you work with web pages, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Thanks Dirk.

Just finished watching the Fiesta Bowl with Ohio State needing two overtime drives to beat Miami 31-24. What a game! On any given day, the Trojans might be able to beat either of these teams but you have to give the Buckeyes and the Hurricanes credit. A big disapointment as I was rooting for a very large Hurricane margin of victory but Ohio State made plays on defense–interceptions, forced fumbles, and, finally, a goal line stand that ended the year in college football. USC, regardless of the ass kicking they gave Iowa last night, cannot and will not move ahead of either team in the final rankings. Congratulations to the Buckeyes for the win and to Miami for an awesome season.

Or maybe sooner, since these things seem to be fairly fluid. I wonder if Costco, the best source of discounted harcovers I know about, will be carrying it. Oh yeah, the novel is called Pattern Recognition and the page linked to the title has a short description plus an excerpt (from Gibson’s own website). [via Slashdot]

Gibson is a generally amazing author and this book includes, at least in some small way, his reaction to 9/11. He’s most famous for Neuromancer–he coined the term cyberspace in the book, published in 1984 long before that which we currently call the Internet existed–which was his first novel and won all the major awards for which the book was eligible except the Pulitzer. Should have won the Pulitzer too but the judges are doofii. This book, along with the works of Phillip K. Dick, were probably most directly responsible for the cyberpunk movement in science fiction from about 1988 forward.

He also co-wrote a novel called The Difference Engine (with Bruce Sterling) that spawned the steampunk movement; steampunk combined alternate history and cyberpunk into a new strain. A great novel which asked the question how different life would have been if Charles Babbage and Lady Ada had been able to implement their computer plans in the 19th century.

Not to leave out the most American of modern media, Gibson also wrote the short story, and then the screenplay, for Keanu Reeve’s underrated movie Johnny Mnemonic. Most of Reeve’s films are less well appreciated by most people than I would have it, though.

I saw Gibson make an appearance at a local bookstore a few years back. He read a short excerpt from Idoru but the bulk of the session was devoted to Q&A. What I found interesting is that he doesn’t really consider himself a science fiction author but rather an author who happens to use elements of scientific and social speculation to draw out truths of human nature. You’d never know Gibson was an MFA working on his professorship when Neuromancer hit like a sledgehammer. Wink wink.

I expect this will be a novel I give a solid recommended or better rating. Gibson just has… a way with words. A way I surely envy.

Just finished watching the Orange Bowl and saw my alma mater USC just destroy the allegedly superior Iowa Hawkeyes 38-17. The game started off looking bad–Iowa ran the opening kickoff back for a touchdown–but USC marched right back for an answering score. After trading field goals the rest of the first half, the Trojans took charge right from the start of the third quarter, scoring 28 unanswered points before giving up a garbage touchdown with 34 seconds left in the game. Carson Palmer versus Brad Banks? Palmer went 21 of 31 for 304 yards and a touchdown versus 15 of 36 for 206 yards and one touchdown and one interception for Banks, not even close considering that 80 of Banks’ yards came on that last drive.

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones will probably admit to being a fisherman, when he can take a break from roaming the sidelines at Texas Stadium, and today he landed a world class catch in his boat: Bill Parcells signed a four year, $17.1 million contract to coach the Cowboys. Reportedly, the key points were not money (Parcells asked for and got the average of the top five coaching salaries) but control. The Tuna wanted to make sure he could get the system in place he believes is necessary to control his own fate and so he will hire and fire assistants and have a strong voice in player decisions, two things Jones has not given any coach. In any case, America’s Team is still a financial dream, even after three 5-11 seasons, making money hand over fist; the team even printed a few hundred t-shirts celebrating the new arrival.

Fact: Returning to the grind means Parcells has been removed from the current NFL Hall of Fame ballot. Prediction: Parcells will fail to turn things around much after two seasons (6-10, 8-8/9-7 but no playoffs), then ride back out of town with a flush bank account and renewed health issues. He should still make it to Canton in, say, 2006.

Lots of good smaller stuff coming around this year too. Check out the preview at Box Office Prophets.

And now that we’ve put up the new wall calendar, I split the Big Movies listings into two pages: 2003 and 2004+.

New Year’s Day – together we mark a new birth

that may well bring much that is good to so many.

Though the cynic in me says life is, ha!, not so easy.

Yesterday we worried what the dropping ball might bring

and sighed with relief that our fears were overblown.

Next week, next month, next moon, tears may yet flow

once again and today’s good cheer be forgotten.

But I will not lay back in my chair and take these

pains to heart before they come to life, I will stay my course.

Ride on, though there be cares aside me.

The house, this street, all is quiet on New Year’s Day.

I called around to ask family and friends for what words

of wisdom they could share, so much love in their voices,

good cheer, makes me sit up tall and proud and yet…

Yet there are dark clouds inside these wintry skies

That still may bring pain and punishment, tearing,

to me and these voices filled with so much love.

No matter, I ride on to find the good that always will out.

Inspired by garret’s posting of a Mark Twain letter for today. Did this last year too, maybe a new tradition for me.

Byron called mid-afternoon and asked if we were interested in seeing the much talked-about Nicholson flick. Sure, what the heck, it was either this or the Tennessee-Maryland matchup in the Peach Bowl. And as I walk in the door, the score is 27-3 Terps, so who cares about missing that. Thursday, with my Trojans up against Iowa, that will not be missed.

About Schmidt is a terrific movie and if Jack Nicholson doesn’t win the Oscar, some people made a big mistake. Using the Golden Globe nominees as a proxy, one is hardpressed to see him lose to this competition. His decision to take this role follows a recent trend for big name actors to play against type (Robin Williams, Tom Hanks) and, as with those two, Schmidt shows just how good an actor Nicholson truly is. As my buddy point, a very layered acting job where much of the communication comes through subtle body language.

I would also give kudos to writer/director Alexander Payne (Election, Citizen Ruth) for an outstanding job; this movie is very real, so very un-Hollywood, and most filmmakers wouldn’t be able to make a gripping movie about real life. Plus, the trailer for the film doesn’t give away all the best lines or really give away the point like so many others do. Very deliberate choices in shot selection and visual composition, very calm and deliberate pacing. And one aspect which I took to be just a plot device to enable exposition turned out to be crucial to the final twist and resolution.

A Must See

Just stupid. A Montana man who was legally Bob Craft until, in late 1997, he changed his name to Jack Ass is now suing Viacom (parent of MTV) for defamation and wants $10 million in damages. He’s concerned that people will confuse the MTV show and movie of the same name with him and his good works. As if anyone stupid enough to call himself Jack Ass, whatever the reasons, could be defamed.