Category: Personal

Forget the plasma TV, this is what I want

How about a flying vehicle that can carry a single person 120+ miles at 70 knots? That’s the promise of the SoloTrek XFV:

The machine can handle a payload of 277 pounds plus fuel, so I best be dieting soon, cause this will surely be the way to avoid those damn 101 traffic jams. It is a vertical take off and landing device, so no runway is needed, and the version that goes on sale will include GPS so pilots won’t get lost and an ejector seat for when things go really wrong. The SoloTrek is still in the early test phase, so far the longest admitted flight is hovering three feet off the ground for 19 seconds and there is no published schedule for reaching production.

Millenium Jet, the company building this marvel, is over in Sunnyvale and I wonder when they’ll need a test pilot.

More on the East Palo Alto politicians

Following up on the previously mentioned stupidity, the City of Palo Alto terminated police seargant Robert Cole yesterday but no explanation of the reasoning behind this decision was made public. So the city has decided to defy a court order to rehire Cole, after already leaving themselves open to further liability for refusing to allow Cole to return to active duty. The city is appealing the court decision, spending more of the limited funds they have available in the Peninsula’s poorest city. Cole’s lawyer estimates his legal fees, which the city is almost certainly going to have to pay, at $250,000 and says the city has likely spent a similar amount for their lawyers. Now add a big chunk to both tabs for the appeal and possible damages and/or fines that will be assessed going forward and the East Palo Alto could easily be out a cool million. Dollars, that is. Bills. Bucks. Benjamins. Like they don’t need the money desperately for schools, roads, hell they have had to cut spending on their police force in recent years.

Today’s movie: Lord of the Rings

Awesome. Amazing. Great movie. Should not be missed by anyone, young or old. One might quibble over things left out or changed from the book but I think Peter Jackson deserves some freedom for the translation. The gorgeous New Zealand countryside makes a superb Middle Earth. Elijah Wood makes the transition from child actor (Radio Flyer, North, The Ice Storm) to adult in playing intrepid hero Frodo Baggins. Ian McKellen is craggy and strong as Gandalf, love the fight scene with Saruman (Christopher Lee is still going strong at 80). Viggo Mortensen breaks out as Aragorn and what can I say about Liv Tyler and Cate Blanchett? I love that the film is tops at the box office too. Can’t wait for The Two Towers next December, will it be the best film of 2002?

Football coaching merrygoround: Dungy out at Tampa Bay

We must just not be able to understand the pressure at this rarified level. Tony Dungy was the most successful coach Tampa Bay ever had, he had the respect of his players, and he took them to the playoffs every season. So what’s his reward? The boot.

Off to see LotR again

Am I ready to review it? Even after calling it the best film of 2001? Stay tuned…

Football coaching merrygoround: Spurrier to Redskins

Wow! Being Daniel Snyder must be great. To be able to write off a coach like Marty Schottenheimer and the $7.5 million he will get on a contract payoff after being fired and then turn around and pay Spurrier $5 million a year for five years. At least with Schottenheimer, the Redskins owner got a coach and general manager; part of Spurrier’s attraction is that he is not interested in controlling that aspect of the club. Is he worthy of being the NFL’s highest paid coach? Opinion, in the first few hours, is mixed. Hey, does Snyder need an official weblogger?

Journalism: Where’s the news?

Having worked and lived out here in Silicon Valley through most of the recent Internet boom and bust, I learned along time ago that there is very little money to be made off cute toys if those toys don’t deliver real solutions. I expect this is an old lesson that people discover over and over again. The Boston Globe, in a naive article titled Financial exchanges try to deal with dark days, is demonstrating this to be so. Okay, they have a few local companies to write about, including one, Debt Exchange, that appears to understand this lesson and so survives. The story quotes one customer: ”I don’t even care if he uses the Internet,” Loeber said. ”I just want the job done quickly and well.” Exactly. But tell me, Beth Healey of the Boston Globe, how exactly is this news? There is a good article in what you’ve written but you ought to ask your editor why he didn’t let it out.

I suppose one could put The Smiths in a list of best rock bands. The Beatles would surely be number one almost any criteria. But to leave out Bruce Springsteen, well, these people have to be morons. Springsteen doesn’t have a history changing sound, he doesn’t raise the roof? What concert have you been at lately? I guess the lesson is not to expect to much from the son of one of America’s least creative pornographers.

Imagination takes many forms

Back in 1978, David Drake published the novel Hammer’s Slammers, a story of a future mercenary unit that travelled from star to star fighting the good fight for a paycheck. Drake followed that one up with about seven more Slammer books and another one should be out in July. Like many a science fiction series, the Slammers have inspired a fan following of their own. These fans, part of a very popular UK hobby, create and paint miniatures of the regiment’s vehicles and other equipment, as well as those of competing regiments, and this website has great photos, information, and instructions for building your own. What do they do with the miniatures after they’ve spent so much time in construction? They fight them against each other according to very strict rules, which are also posted on the website. And they get all this from some very cool books.

Another reason to love the Internet: Informed debate

Steven began the conversation with a post on the US dollar, the money supply, and the dollar’s status as global currency in respect to this Washington Post article on the Argentinian situation in which he (Steven) points out some scary future possibilities if certain trends continue. Russell Leslie, an informed Australian phycisist, started a discussion M3 and other monetary aggregates which was just great, going from monetary statistics to the benefits of a gold-based currency to delineation of the difference between the Keynesian and Austrian schools of economics. (Which comes down to a difference in goals, apparently.) Not mention the possibility of other to put commentary into their own blogs. Sort of what I’m doing here.

More on the Enron/Andersen stupidity

Time Magazine, in the article Who’s Accountable?, reveals that the shredding of documents by Enron auditors Arthur Andersen was done under instructions delivered in a memo from one of the company’s lawyers. Expect criminal charges to come in the not-too-distant future from the Dept. of Justice task force but because of Enron’s extensive political contributions, the entire Houston U.S. Attorneys office as well as Attorney General/Emporer-wannabe John Ashcroft had to recuse themselves from the investigation.

Another blaring example of the need for campaign finance reform, too. Look at the huge numbers of congresscritters who got donations from Enron and the number of Bush administration officials who were shareholders. Although corporations certainly have an interest in a large percentage of the business before governments, one has to think that a democracy is about the people and, legal fictions aside, corporations are not people. The people who comprise a corporation’s stakeholders should surely be allowed to donate to politicians with whom they agree but not the corporations themselves. By the way, the same ought to hold true for labor unions although in that case I might make an exception that allows unions to collect and aggregate donations from members. Still, the likelihood of reform is about the same as my odds of winning the next three Lottos.

Price Harry smokes pot, do we care?

Celebrities often say that the biggest downside to such status is the fishbowl within which they are fored to live. For the English royal family, that intense spotlight appears to be even worse. This morning, for example, papers all over are running some variants of Reuter’s story: Prince’s Drinking, Drug Use Give Press a Field Day. Similarly, the (unlinkable) SJ Mercury News ran a story in today’s paper discussing the difficulties SJ Mayor Ron Gonzalez is having settling the spousal support amount with his former wife, down to the details of amount sought by each and monthly spending habits.

My question to you all is do you really care? Do you want to read about some 17 year old’s experimenting with getting high? About the dispute of a few dollars between two relatively unimportant people? Is that how you get your thrills? Would you seek celebrity or notoriety and willingly subject yourself to the spotlight?

Car PC: Looks cool

Did you ever want a complete PC in your car? Check out Action Computer!

Auditors: why do they do these things?

Already, the knives are out and coming after Big 5 accounting firm Andersen, saying the firm’s future is at stake after the debacle with Enron. Pundits are claiming that Andersen will be forced to go under or be acquired due to the loss of credibility and the money they will lose in the tidal wave of litigation that has already begun. This isn’t the first big problem for them either, as Andersen just paid the largest civil fine ever assessed by the SEC. Another great American company taken down by greed, I suppose.

Football coaching merrygoround still spinning

Hmm, George O’Leary had a cup of coffee at Notre Dame and now is assistant head coach of the Vikings, thanks to having coached the Vikes’ head coach in high school. O’Leary will also be the defensive line coach, reporting to defensive coordinator Willie Shaw, which sounds odd. Another oddity: Shaw used to be the Raider’s defensive coordinator and a few years ago was mentioned as the best potential head coach out of all the NFL assistants, but he wasn’t even able to get interviews due to CWB (coaching while black); I don’t know what happened between then and now but his name was not mentioned with any job so far this year.

Stanford went in an interesting way with University of Florida offensive coordinator Buddy Teevens. Teevens previous major college head coaching experience was with Tulane where he was fired after going 10-45 in five seasons. However, a big factor seems to be that he’s an FOT–a friend of Ted Leland, the Stanford athletic director. Also, since the Tulane gig he’s spent time working under two highly regarded head coaches, Steve Spurrier and University of Illinois’ Ron Turner. The word on Teevens now is look for a high output offense, something that will work very well against the mostly porous defenses in the Pac-10.

Florida, after being turned down left and right, plucked Ron Zook of the New Orleans Saints staff. Zook, like Teevens, apparently also had the good fortune to be friends with the athletic director who hired him. He’s not an unknown to the Gators after serving as Spurrier’s defensive coordinator from ’91-93 though there is the weirdness of Zook having been demoted to special teams coach for ’94-95.. I have to like his choice of Ed Zaunbrecher for offensive coordinator after Zaunbrecher’s stint in the same job at high scoring Marshall. Some people who count must like the choice: Rex Grossman is going to return and pass up a shot at the NFL this year, though backup QB is transferring to Miami (don’t ask me, doesn’t make a lot of sense here either).

Then, in the NFL, there’s Tampa Bay. Highly regarded and fairly successful Tony Dungy reportedly must win at Philadelphia tomorrow or be replaced by Bill “The Big Tuna” Parcells. I love Parcells for what he did with the Giants but Dungy has done a terrific job even though he’s never had a Super Bowl-caliber quarterback and shouldn’t be on the hot spot.

Another coach looking over his shoulder is Marty Schottenheimer of the Washington Redskins as team officials are reportedly in Gainesville to talk to Steve Spurrier. The ex-Florida coach is also bein wooed by the Carolina Panthers but at least that team had the graciousness to get rid of their previous coach first. Schottenheimer apparently is not interested in resigning and losing out on at least $7 million owed for the rest of his contract. Ol’ Joe Theismann thinks Schottenheimer is the better coach for the Redskins.

Still open: San Diego, Indianapolis, and Carolina. Indy ownership apparently wanted to Jim Mora to stay one more season so they could go after the Raiders’s Jon Gruden. Rumors, though, have Gruden on the outs with Al Davis due to his flirtation with Notre Dame and Florida so perhaps the Irsays will get their wish a little sooner.

This is an update of a previous entry, if you’re tuning in late. More as news develops…

New tools can be as fun as toys

I was asked this morning if I’d like to try the new Radio Userland 8 release candidate and decided to give it a whirl. You can see the results at billsaysthis on ru8. RU is a content management system, about to be available for $39.95 a year, from Userland Software, which also sells Manila. Not too clear on the differences between the products. Userland is the company Dave Winer founded. garret has a more comprehensive writeup of RU8. Seems like a good idea but I wonder if I can import my Blogger archives.

AIDS Ride lawsuit petition

Last month, I wrote about the lawsuit filed by Pallotta Teamworks against the SF AIDS Foundation and the LA Gay and Lesbian Center regarding their dispute over the annual AIDS Ride fundraising event. The non-profit SFAF and LAGLC, after contracting with Pallotta Teamworks to manage the previous bicycle rides between SF and LA, have decided that Pallotta has mismanaged the events and spent too much on overhead and are therefore going to hold their own events without Pallotta involvement. Pallotta is suing, claiming the contract it has with the non-profit orgs prevents the orgs from organizing their own bikeathons.

Former riders and crew volunteers are very upset about this and feel Pallotta should withdraw it. They’ve set up an online petition asking Pallotta to drop the lawsuit. They registered the domain RidePetition.org and hopefully that will work soon too but there is little time–the suit goes to court this Monday (Jan. 14). So if you or anyone you know has ridden in or volunteered for the event, please send them to this URL ASAP. Thanks!

A side note: I actually did the authoring of this little website. Felt really cool to help out on a good mission and to stretch my skills in a small way.

Must read Safire: Iran must be an anti-terror target

William Safire has been a political pundit/NY Times columnist for nearly 30 years and my frequency of agreement with him varies from extremely low on domestic social issues to fairly high on foriegn policy. In his column in today’s Times, Arafat’s Implausible Denials, I find that what he says is completely plausible and extremely important. The recent capture by Israel of a shipload of arms sold/provided by Iran to the Palestinians shows that the ayatollahs in Iran are still sponsors of terrorism and must be dealt with, eventually, the same as the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

Politicians: why do they do these things?

I have been following the spate of news coming out of East Palo Alto politics recently and just don’t understand most of it. To give some context for this, remember that EPA is probably the poorest municipality in the Bay Area and surely the poorest on the Peninsula. In general, these politicians are pouring dollars down some drain for no apparent reason than to keep themselves in power. Or worse.

Topping the list is the court battle the EPA police and city council are fighting and losing against Robert Cole, who apparently was dismissed from the police force for being a whistle blower but has gotten a court to reinstate him. Compounding the thousands of dollars the city has spent already, they have reinstated him and immediately put Cole on paid administrative leave even though this will mean further big legal fees as Cole is insistent on going back on active duty. Neither the city council, before which Cole appeared last night, nor the police department will comment on why he cannot be on active duty. They already have to send him a backpay check of $70,000 plus about $22/hour for doing nothing on leave.

The next news from East Palo Alto is the ongoing battle of it’s Ravenswood school district and the district’s superintendent to (a) hold on to power and (b) somehow escape blame for submitting a fraudulent petition in the related court case. Parents and the state have been suing the district over their programs for handicapped children, of which there are a suprisingly–to me–high percentage. The case has been going around for a long time but the school district seems to be almost out of time as the next (last?) deadline is in March.

And then former mayor R.B. Jones went to jail last week for taking a bribe.

XML Tower of Babel

eWeek has the article XML: Plugging into ‘Standard’ Hybrids today which brings up the very important point that far from being a saviour, so far XML is just another IT silver bullet wannabe. Almost every industry has come up with their own XML ‘dialect’. Emerging vehicles like ebXML and Universal Business Language may provide an answer but they are very slow in coming to a usable state. Of course this is completely in line with the history of software in the enterprise.