Category: Personal

Johnny 99 and the 99 Percent

Well they closed down the auto plant in Mahwah late that month
Ralph went out lookin’ for a job but he couldn’t find none
He came home too drunk from mixin’ Tanqueray and wine
He got a gun shot a night clerk now they call’m Johnny 99

This classic Springsteen song from the Nebraska album went running through my head this morning. Now it’s true that America has always had some significant number of folks barely scraping by–Bruce wrote this 30+ years ago when we were passing through a nasty time with steel mills and factories shutting down all over the country–but seeing news reports showing that one in two Americans are poor or low income makes me think this country has turned a corner. We’re in a bad place, people.

On one end of the spectrum we get the Occupy movement and on the other the Tea Party. Both are fueled by the disparity in income and outcomes, though I like to think one is backed by love and optimism while the other by hate and fear. When Bruce wrote Johnny 99 the average CEO made 40-50 times what the average worker at the same company earned; today the difference has increased an order of magnitude, to 450-500X and this is simply not sustainable.

Well the city supplied a public defender but the judge was Mean John Brown
He came into the courtroom and stared young Johnny down
Well the evidence is clear gonna let the sentence son fit the crime
Prison for 98 and a year and we’ll call it even Johnny 99

Most Americans, naively as it turns out, thought that this could be dealt with through the political process. The two parties would balance each other and in the end act in the best interests of the majority. The two movements are recognition that we’ve been naive and that the political process has been captured by Wall Street and other massively wealthy families. How else do you explain Barack Obama’s actions in supporting ACTA, SOPA, NDAA and the unconstitutional use of police powers as well as his administration’s unwillingness to hold individuals criminally liable for the many acts of corporate fraud behind huge ‘settlements’ the SEC and DoJ have made?

I’m surprised we aren’t seeing more crime by men and women desperate after losing their jobs, homes and semblance of a normal life. The most likely explanations are that most people:

(a) are good and even when desperate not willing to take from others, and,
(b) have been distracted by the bread and circuses of false crises spread through modern media, Twitter and Facebook.

But there’s a limit to how long these two factors will stand in the way and I think we’ll reach it all too soon.

Now judge judge I had debts no honest man could pay
The bank was holdin’ my mortgage and they was takin’ my house away
Now I ain’t sayin’ that makes me an innocent man
But it was more ‘n all this that put that gun in my hand

The ultra-wealthy are unwilling to be discrete. From apartments selling for $88 million to baseball players getting $250 million dollar contracts to the ridiculous antics of the Kardashian family, well, a father seeing this crap and then looking at a wife and baby he can barely afford to feed all sleeping in a beat up old car isn’t going to be too far from deciding some people have too much money and some not enough.

The Tea Party have taken a smart approach, much smarter than I’d have expected. Copying tactics from a previous generation of Republican activists they worked from the bottom up, getting control of local and regional party organizations before the national leadership noticed it. From there they got the likes of Michelle Bachman into Congress and into the Republican Presidential field as a candidate to be taken seriously. Which strikes me as an amazingly good job considering that Bachman is, after all, a complete nut.

The Occupy movement is eschewing the mainstream political arena entirely, recognizing that beyond having been co-opted by the money and drug-like high afforded national politicians the process itself cannot in any reasonable amount of time deliver the necessary changes. This is demonstrated by the widespread use of riot police to suppress Occupy camps and marches with the police action coordinated at the Federal level. Which is, sadly, another way that Barack Obama has disappointed many of the people who supported and voted for him.

Then throw in the onrushing climate change disaster, the looming nuclear threats from Iran, North Korea and Pakistan and the inability of manymost people to see the 18 wheelers running straight at them.

Where this will all end I can’t say. If any of the Sad Sacks who comprise the current GOP field beat Obama next November I think we’ll find out sooner rather than later but even the re-election of Obama is unlikely to defer for long a violent and sad future for many Americans and our companions on this small globe.

At least I get to listen to Bruce for as long as the power grid lets me keep a charge.

The Race

I’m running a race between a bullet and the carcinoma
Telling ugly truths from the pulpit of a concert stage
Won’t have to face the aftermath of my derision
No time, there’s no time left, no time left to waste.

I hardly believed what I heard from the doctor
Can’t be my time yet to go away
Guess all those years of livin’ hard
Had a price after all to pay, a mighty price to pay.

So let me tell you child, what knowledge I have gleaned
There’s no one worth your pity and no one worth your hate
No one who needs your bullet, no one who needs your fist
Everyone needs your hand, everyone needs your love.

I’m running a race between a bullet and the carcinoma
Telling ugly truths from the pulpit of a concert stage
Won’t have to face the aftermath of my derision
No time, there’s no time left, no time left to waste.

The talking heads on your screen sure love their voice
Sayin’ what they will to get attention, all the hard emotions
Crank up the volume on their spittle, the volume on their rage
I cry to see the crowds they gather round.

Look closely at what they’re pitching and find the meat inside
Don’t stop on your first reaction, keep thinking for yourself
Is he asking you out of greed, appealing to your fear
Or is she asking you out of optimism, hope and love?

Tribes don’t matter
Clans don’t matter
States don’t matter
Countries don’t matter
Religions don’t matter

People… people… people matter

Now I’m running a race between a bullet and the carcinoma
Telling ugly truths from the pulpit of a concert stage
Won’t have to face the aftermath of my derision
No time, there’s no time left, no time left to waste.

Remember, you’re what matters and you’ve got no time to waste.

“Jewish Problems”

While I rarely post here about Jewish web things I can’t resist with this.

Two (Jewish) researchers have published a paper titled “Jewish Problems” and while you might expect this to be somewhere in the social sciences, that would not be nearly so interesting.

Instead the paper covers a set of questions used by the Math department at Moscow State University in the Soviet era to limit the number of Jewish students accepted.

The paper spawned a healthy discussion on Hacker News–but not about the specific problems of course.

The reason for my post is one pseudonymous comment, my favorite comment on Hacker News in a long time.

In this post, which he starts with “Answering as someone Jewish. . .”, the commenter goes on for a number of paragraphs calmly and logically explaining the (illogical and sad) reasons for most of the historical discrimination against Jews.

Nothing earth-shatteringly original but the simplicity and completeness as well as lack of emotion really made it memorable for me. In this new year, when so many things are decided by shouting and money, I very much appreciated reading this.

10 Years On

I just reread my posts from Sep. 2001 and a few from friends. Hard to miss today, as it should be; 0/11 was a milestone in history on par with Aug. 14, 1914 and May 14, 1948.

I found out about the horror when my sister called around 7:45 my time that morning. I’d just got up and was eating a bowl of cereal–what mundane things we remember–and Joanne asked if I’d seen. She said turn on the TV, I said what channel and she said it doesn’t matter. I watched as the second Tower fell and cried. I was scared for her, since she was only 50 blocks or so north and she saw with her own eyes.

Later I learned that one person I knew passed when the Towers were destroyed, Ruth Lapin, a wonderful warm, smart woman who was married to one of my mentors, David Chazin. I’ll always remember our last dinner together at a Thai restaurant. When the hostess asked Ruth how spicy to make her dish she said four, which was code for “the chef goes crazy and laughs at how many Scovilles go in the pot.”

So much has happened on the national and world stages since then, very little to my liking. But I don’t feel the need to go on another useless blog rant. I’ll just think about Ruth and David and all the other people who lost their lives that day and since.

SmallCommunities and J2: My New Rails Projects

I’m happy to tell you that we recently launched J2, a new version of JHTC.org, and that I’ve spun the core code off into an open source project called SmallCommunities. SmallCommunities is available on GitHub and I would love to see some other folks join in and help me move it forward.

The purpose of SmallCommunities is to provide a self-hosted subset of Meetup.com’s capabilities that allows complete customization of the site’s visual design while avoiding the, er, difficult to control quantity of emails sent by the Meetup service. Also, the current code expects events to be monthly, plus occasional extras, and membership to be paid while Meetup of course does not, though I think this could be easily altered.

The next version of JHTC.org will be an instance of SmallCommunities. If you think SmallCommunities might be of use to your group I’d be happy to work with your web team to get you up and running!

The code is written in Ruby on Rails 3.0.x and uses Devise for authentication, Compass, Haml and Sass for views and styling, RailsAdmin for managing most content and jQuery for active interfaces; SmallCommunities has a modest test base, mainly rSpec.

There are three key open features:

  • A flexible non-event page templating system
  • Photo uploads for events, members and non-event pages
  • Multi-level navigation menu support

While SmallCommunities isn’t a CMS it does need to support some static-ish pages such as About, Memberships and so on. I plan to adapt the sample code from Jose Valim’s excellent new Rails book, Crafting Rails Applications, so that these pages can easily reuse existing components without the person maintaining the site content to know Rails (and not require the site admin to do this work).

J2 is hosted on Heroku. I really like their service and was very happy to see them acquired by Salesforce.com last year because of the added resources and stability, and our site’s traffic is low enough to fit on the free service tier. However one drawback is that Heroku doesn’t allow apps to upload files to the server; instead one must use an alternative such as S3 and those are paid services and for now we hope to avoid hosting costs to the extent possible.

Accordingly any images must be included in the application when deployed to the server and uploaded separately to, say, Picasa (Google Images). I expect there’s a suitable free service, at least for the less that 2GB worth of images we might need, just need to do some research and then loop in the appropriate Ruby gem or jQuery plugin.

There are a number of good multi-level menu solutions available, this isn’t a new requirement by any means, but the first couple I’ve tried ran into issue with some of the existing Sass/Compass CSS and I’ve just not had a need to solve it.

Note: PayPal is the only payment mechanism currently supported, to avoid the need for–and substantial hosting costs of–SSL, though I’m open to patches that add, say, ActiveMerchant, and the database schema is mostly prepared for such a change.

Three Months at Glam

First, I want to thank my friend Joel for making this opportunity possible and for his support over the last decade-plus. He is an awesomely creative developer and if you need consulting you’ll be happy I made this recommendation.

Overall, I am just really happy these days. Being a Rails developer and being at Glam Media are both very rewarding and fulfilling. Over the last decade I’ve done a lot of coding but always as a small part of my responsibilities or for my own edification but I think DHH was right when he put fun as a priority for Rails. Ruby and this framework are strong matches for my mental model; I’ve looked at most of the major programming languages over the course of the last two decades and not since Clipper, way back in the prehistoric (well, pre-Windows) days have I had such a strong fit. I can see how others get the same from, say, Python or Scala–this kind of fit is a combination of emotions, personal experience and context, not science.

Another big positive about Rails for me is the community. The number of people involved who do things to benefit the community is outstanding, and by things I mean writing blog articles and (often free) books, publishing FOSS libraries (so many great ones but a couple of current faves include Compass, Devise and MetaWhere) and tools (rvm, Git), and simply being helpful on IRC, Twitter and other fora (Elad, I’m looking at you).

Glam as a place to work really suits me. The company is big enough–strong products, revenues and market presence–but still operates nimbly and with staff given freedom to for the most part choose how their work gets done. Of course they started off on the right foot with me just by having a fresh MacBook Pro and oversized, arm-mounted monitor waiting for me my first morning. Also, the team I’m on, which builds GlamAdapt Automate, has mostly developers who are stronger than me and willing to share their expertise and a leader who spends most of his time coding (at least for now).

I tend to like organization. Whether we’re talking about code or my desk I’m always more comfortable when its neat, clean and simple. In code this often leads me to writing components or modules and twice now I’ve done that in our app. Last week, for example, I wrote a Rails plugin because the one we had been using was no longer maintained or compatible and I couldn’t find a good replacement on Github. The plugin is not too complex but it enables us to have the options of one select box on a form change in response to changing the value of another and does it without the server roundtrip of an AJAX implementation. Functionally it meets our requirements though there are some enhancements we can see clearly for a next rev.

The key point, though, is that I was allowed to do this. I’ve never even tried to write a Rails plugin before but that was never even a question; I’m simply trusted to deliver the required functionality in the allotted time.

I’ve worked with smart people on products I was proud of before, Kachingle being the most recent example. But I’m truly happy today as a Rails dev at Glam.

Of Fantasists and a Nation

Once upon a time there was a nation whose people struggled together for a common good. Not always in harmony, not always in the same direction, and sometimes they got drunk on the champagne of their own success and crashed back to Earth.

Over time the peaks and valleys got higher. The people of the nation were proud of their successes and held themselves up as a light to the future, against the darkness.

One time they reached up to dizzying heights, claiming to have broken through to entirely new lands but like the emperor of children’s tales this was only self-delusion and soon crashed back. Much to the amusement of those outside the glittering circle.

A few years of recovery, aided by unexpected distractions, and the fever seemed broken. It was only in remission, though, and some denizens appeared to us as driven to madness building castles in the air. Then throwing up towers even higher into the stratosphere and bulwarks and aeries atop them.

Crash! Bang! All fell down, not just the fantasists and their sycophants but the good people who labored in the fields and offices of the Real were laid low.

The architects of the dashed dreamscapes were not willing to suffer the consequences and sent forth armies of false fronts and mouthpieces to twist the minds of the masses. We are too mighty to be wrong, we are the true engineers of Right. Serve us, you must, because only then will you be secure and happy, was their message.

At first the citizens of this once brilliant land were hur and angry and skeptical. Sweep them out, bring them low; teach them we are not rugs beneath their feet!

But with relentless and persistent drumming the Architects of the Unreal sent their scree out every wire and avenue. And this time the crash had been so hard, and the people barely restored from the previous disaster that their defenses were too easily breached.

Give them whatever they want, the whisper on the streets turned into a roar on the highways. Other voices were shouted or beaten down.

And the Fantasists got the power they craved. And some of us wondered if the pain could ever end.

My 2010 Thanks List

  • So many good years with my own Special One
  • Sydney Roo! for giving us nachus
  • Mom, Dad, Joanne, Larry, Jakey and all the Rentzes for all the love and generousity
  • Evan, who almost always knows the answer
  • Joel and Rodrigo, for Glam
  • Fred, Cynthia and the crew for Kachingle–still see great things for you guys!
  • Tim, Brian, Ari, Gordon, Brian and the Dojo, kept me sane for most of this year
  • My online pals, Garret, Karl, Rob, Rogers and the SpoFites
  • Charlie Stross, Peter Hamilton, David Webber and the folks at Analog for some great science fiction reading
  • Stevie G, Fernando, Pepe, Dirk and the rest of the Reds, you’ll never walk alone
  • The Rails community for software that is fun to program, easy to get into and has a gem for nearly everything

Tiffany Shlain’s The Tribe

A grade school buddy of mine now living in Shanghai passed along a link to this terrific short film, The Tribe, made a few years ago by Tiffany Shlain (thanks, Les!). You can watch the trailer at the end of my post, order it from her website, or see it online, unofficially.

What can the most successful doll on the planet show us about being Jewish today? Narrated by Peter Coyote, the film mixes old school narration with a new school visual style. The Tribe weaves together archival footage, graphics, animation, Barbie dioramas, and slam poetry to take audiences on an electric ride through the complex history of both the Barbie doll and the Jewish people- from Biblical times to present day. By tracing Barbie’s history, the film sheds light on the questions: What does it mean to be an American Jew today? What does it mean to be a member of any tribe in the 21st Century?

When people ask how I identify myself I usually answer Jewish. Not in the religious sense but culturally and as my ethnicity. People who think of themselves as Italian, Australian or Chinese may not understand my answer for me it’s as reasonable as what they say.

Nota bene: I wanted to write more but time is just getting away from me so this short entry will have to suffice.

Zoo Station rocked Mountain View Arts & Wine

Mountain View is home to the Shoreline Amphitheater and so hosts many, many concerts. Living just the other side of 101 from it we can often stand in the yard and listen to washed-out, blurry music. Going to a show with 20,000 or so folks, though, is something I’m rarely interested in doing and so I’ve never gone there. If Springsteen or U2 ever changed their location strategy away from arenas and stadiums, that’d be another story.

Mountain View also hosts an annual Arts & Wine Festival on Castro St. and we went to this year’s over the weekend. The Festival has three or four bands on the ‘main’ stage by City Hall each day and this year we went to see Zoo Station, a U2 tribute band–TS1 is a huge U2 fan.

Zoo Station at Mountain View Arts and Wine Festival 2010

These guys were great! The lead singer, Bonalmost, has charisma to spare and, arguably, the hardest task in singing like Bono. The Sledge has his original’s enigmatic presence down pat.

Zoo Station's guitarist, singer and drummer

This year was definitely a comeback year for the Festival overall. The booth count was way up from the last couple of years, stretching all the way from El Camino Real to Evelyn, and while I don’t have an attendance number for sure the crowds were much thicker (we actually went both days). Had some tasty fried calamari for lunch Saturday and a wonderful sweet, light southern style pulled pork sandwich Sunday.

The Summer I was almost 50: Time won’t let me

Which is this Summer, which is almost over, and lately I’ve thought about the passage of time. 50, what I number! I’ll hit it next Spring, not quite there yet. This morning Stevie Wonder’s great Reggae Woman came on the radio as I was driving TS1 to work and I realized that came out 36 years ago. Born to Run turned 35 last week.

Born to Run
35, 36 years, those are long chunks of time. But what does it mean? Or rather, is a long passage of time something our puny human minds can truly comprehend? I can put two similar colors next to each other and see the difference. I can listen to different bunches of white guys doing the same song, say KISS or Bruce and hear the difference. Those links go to versions of The Crystal’s Then She Kissed Me, by the way, since I love rock and roll covers of pop tunes.

Time is (qualitatively) different and to answer my own question I don’t think we’re set up to grok it. The reason may lie in the very deep cosmological theories, some of which appear to say that time is actually an illusion or at least a second order phenomena emerging from the way our limited senses interact with reality. On the other hand the problem might be simpler, that unlike most everything else we experience we cannot directly see, hear, touch, smell or feel time. The real answer would be interesting to me but isn’t needed here.

Think back to some experience you had ten years ago. Summer of 2000, before the reality of the dotcom implosion hit. I went to Italy with my Dad for two weeks, we had a terrific time and I still enjoy recalling visits to Agrigento and Pompeii.

Now think about something that happened to you 30 years ago, Summer 1980. I was between freshman and sophomore years of college, home in New Jersey before transferring to USC, working for Harry M. Stevens at Giants Stadium a few nights a week and for Murjani weekdays.

Bill at Segesta Dad at Pompeii
For me both these experiences are a long time ago but honestly I cannot qualitatively separate them. Intellectually I know 20 years passed between them and I can think of the things that happened during that span but unlike the Springsteen and Kiss versions of the song I cannot really feel any difference along the time axis.

50 years is a nice round number and I hope to experience many more years, no doubt, but I don’t expect this to change even if I make it to 100.

Does time feel the same to you?

A Seven of Sevens

“There has been a strong favour for the number Seven, from a remote period in the world’s history. But a sort of mystical goodness or power has attached itself to the number in many other ways. Seven wise men, seven champions of Christendom, seven sleepers, seven-league boots, seven churches, seven ages of man, seven hills, seven senses, seven planets, seven metals, seven sisters, seven stars, seven wonders of the world,—all have had their day of favour.” From The Book of Days

Today is the seventh squared anniversary of my entrance on the stage of life. Not typically a major milestone but perhaps all the remarks about the big one coming next year have had me a bit thoughtful the last few days.

I’m luckier than most, no doubt, so don’t think I’m crying in my beer or anything. I have a beautiful, loving wife, terrific parents and sister, an affectionate little puppy and some good friends. We have a fine house in a quite neighborhood in a town we enjoy.

Still… I look at my Twitter feed and see a school friend, whose current novel debuted at #1 on the NY Times Bestseller list, in a picture with Jack Nicholson and the governor of New Jersey (who was a year or so behind me at high school). Another classmate is now the chief economist at the Treasury Department and a tenured professor at Princeton. Another has moved even further from our hometown than me, living in Shanghai the last eight years.

I haven’t written that great thriller screenplay or science fiction novel that’s been my ambition since I can remember. The time for my SaaS software idea has come and gone, it seems. Never bought the winning ticket for a $100 million lottery prize.

But hey, I’m not 50 yet. I’ve got plenty of time to do all of them and since I’m a lucky guy you know one of these days I will!

Gone to WordPress

For more than nine years, beginning with Stones to be rolled into Sopranos and continuing for over 4,000 more posts, I’ve been an active user and frequent evangelist for Google’s Blogger. Heck, my use predates Google’s acquisition of Blogger by quite a margin. But today I cut over the new version of BillSaysThis and it uses WordPress.

I wasn’t looking to make this switch and I’m not happy at having to do it. But Google has forced my hand. The company has never put all that much in the way of resources to the Blogger team, as best I can tell from the outside, but as they’ll be removing a key feature, one on which I’ve always depended, on May 1 I have no choice.

The feature is Publish via FTP. That means after you click the Publish button on the Blogger post writing page, any new or changed pages are generated and transferred to a remote host. This feature allowed us to use Blogger but host the blog on our own sites. The published reasoning for the change is that the feature takes too much effort given how few blogs use it but this seems to be putting the best face they could think of on it rather than the real reason.

Fortunately for me, WordPress 3.0 is out as a beta and works well enough to use already. WordPress has a decent import tool so, with a bit help from my friend/inside connection Beau, I was able to get all the posts into the new system. Color advice from Garret helped too.

One of the best new features in 3.0 that made this a much easier choice and solution is support for multiple blogs from one install of WordPress. Previously you had to install separate copies for each blog and do maintenance, plugin installs, design and so on separately for each. I already had two WP 2.x blogs, bill:politics and Bill’s Movie Reviews, so I created new blogs for each in the 3.0 install and with a few clicks imported the old content.

Some of my old pages depend on custom PHP code and so either will take a bit more time to port or stay in the old format. C’est la vie.

Looking forward to nine years (at least) with WordPress.

And, oh yeah, one last thing: Comments are open, at least for newer posts.

Oscars 2010 Predictions

‘Cuz why not?

  • Picture: Hurt Locker (why fight it?)
  • Actor: Colin Firth (about time)
  • Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz (such a good bad guy)
  • Actress: Meryl Streep (doesn’t she always win?)
  • Supporting Actress: Anna Kendrick (plucky twist on type who caused the current financial ruin)
  • Animated: Up (Avatar not eligible?)
  • Director: Hurt Locker (see #1)
  • Adapted Screenplay: An Education (voters love sexy smart)
  • Original Screenplay: Inglorious Bastards (Tarantino goes crazy in such a terrific manner)
What are your predictions? Send them to me at @billsaysthis.