BillSaysThis

As I mentioned back in August, I’m the president of the homeowners association in which I live. For the most part this is not a particularly difficult, onerous, or distasteful position. We meet only once every other month and have a few issues to deal with by phone or email in between. And being president generally only means being the main point of contact for outsiders; I don’t (ha-ha) have veto power over the other board members.

One resident, who I obviously am not going to name, is the exception to this generally amiable situation. Call the person Mr. X, though I’m not saying this is a man. Mr. X has lived in his unit for many years, certainly far longer than my five and a half. Apparently at one time there was a pretty good relation with the other residents but then something happened between X and certain HOA board members (none of whom are on the board today), details of which have never been related to me. Ever since then, X has waged a virtual war to essentially get the board to acknowledge his bad treatment.

One of the other board members suggested today that she might try and have a conversation with Mr. X to try and resolve his latest set of complaints. And to get X to pay up, as he’s not paid the monthly association assessment for over six months. She asked me “Is [X] a bit nuts–I mean seriously?”

I said “He’s not dangerous, by any means, but insane depends on your definition of the term. Some would say repeating the same action time after time when there is no positive response would be one definition. Mr. X will talk your ear off though, and never accept that you won’t agree with every single point he raises. Then afterwards he’ll behave as if the conversation never took place.

“I would point out to you that in the last year he’s sent us several lawyer letters and had at least two different mediation services contact us but never followed through with a single one after we responded. And each of these incidents cost the association money because we need to have [our lawyer] respond!

“I think that possibly X is just using the HOA as a release point for the frustrations in his life. So no matter what we do his behavior will continue unchanged. What will change it is that if he doesn’t pay off the back dues and fees soon, we will file and get a lien on his home and at that point the HOA can force a sale. Unless he buys it himself, he will have to leave at that point.”

A good example of the extreme, if not ridiculous, extent to which X takes his complaints is found in the lawyer letter I received today. The is demanding that we investigate who is throwing rotten potatoes and an old sock from the common area over the fence into his patio area. There is no way that investigating such an event is the responsibility of the board! Puh-leeze! Yet we will have to take time and effort, which costs the other 27 unit owners, to respond. As the saying goes, there’s always one bad apple.

There are no words that can truly capture the essence of this hat, are there?

I realize that this amazing news will not thrill all that many people but if Adam can blather about his Python play and hey, it makes me happy…

I wrote some brand new PHP code for idsplaying the movie page for 2004+. Up until now, and still for the 2003 movie page, I kept all the film information in a text file. For a while I wanted to upgrade this to storing the info in a database and a more flexible object-oriented codebase. So since Sunday I’ve been working it out and now the project is at a state where the 2004 page shows the same as the old version. Still have a few more features to add for new display possibilities but it’s cool for now.

My first FPP to SportsFilter, for those keeping track. About soccer and Liverpool, of course. And money, since everything’s about money now.

I’m not surprised that it happened, since we have the best quality tap water here in the Bay Area, but this is still silly and a waste of money: S.F. Tap Water Now Available in Bottles.

Tonight at 10, the Discovery Channel will broadcast a special written and hosted by NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman called Searching for the Roots of 9/11. Description is “Featuring the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist, Tom Friedman, viewers get a broad portrait of the roots of Muslim rage and the mistrust towards America. Friedman provides reports from Indonesia, Qatar, Egypt, Europe and beyond.”

Friedman is an excellent, insightful writer (for example, today’s column Scorecard for the War) and I will guess that he will put the hour on screen tonight to very good use. Try and catch it, live or Tivo’d.

Woody Allen made Bananas back in 1971 but the biting social commentary in it is as relevant today as then. Specifically I’m referring to the political humor and the way he puts his Fielding Melish character on trial for treason, with Miss America testifying that disagreeing with the President is wrong.

I’m a big Woody Allen fan, so take my opinion with a grain of salt if you’re not, but I think this is just a terrific movie. Look at it from one angle and you see a constant barrage of jokes as he barely let seconds go by without either visual, physical, or oral humor. The movie opens with Don Dunphy and Howard Cosell, popular at the time as boxing commentators for ABC’s Wide World of Sports, parodying themselves by doing the setup and play-by-play on the assasination of a banana republic dictator, and ending with the same two going ringside at the consummation of Melish’s wedding to Nancy (Louise Lasser), including post-coital interviews.

From the other side, Bananas is a movie with a really funny plot, that hangs together from start to finish with no obvious gaps in logic or motivation. One can see his thematic and visual styles begin to emerge in what is, after all, only the second film he made. He had a co-writer, Mickey Rose, and I’d be interested in knowing who put what into the shooting script, but overall the movie cannot be mistaken as anyone else’s work.

One interesting aspect is that this is the last time that an Allen film does not have at its core a relationship between him and a woman. His character, Melish, is essentially no different than all the others he’s written over the years, just younger, awkward, shy, hypersexual, goofy, bumbling but, in the end, the winner. Though there is Lasser’s character and the film does end with them together, it just isn’t about them as a couple. Compare this to, say, Annie Hall or Manhattan and you’ll understand what I mean.

Recommended for laughter

I haven’t made any comments in the month since Vaxgen released the results of their AIDSVAX study. To some degree, the silence came out of sadness, for the people’s lives this vaccine would have changed and for my own financial results. I sold out my shares at $5.10, waiting for a short cover bounce that never came, but fortunately above the $2.70 low.

Predictably, the lawyers are out in force and looking for any blood they can suck. If you check the Yahoo! Finance news page for VXGN, the last eight listings are all about announcing lawsuits against the company. Not to worry, all the big names are included. Inevitably they’ll get consolidated into one action but I suppose the firms are just jockeying now to ensure as much of the fees as can be had.

I haven’t really decided yet, or looked into it, but I may yet find it necessary, if distasteful, to sign on to one of these suits. One question that all the plaintiffs need to consider is how much pie there is to be had in the event of a victory. According to company statements, Vaxgen had about $18 million cash (and equivalents) on hand on 12/31/02–but they’ve been burning around $8-10 million per quarter and even with the end of the initial vaccine trials and new revenue from Smallpox and Anthrax work, I doubt they’ll turn profitable anytime soon. Wonder what other deep pockets the lawyers hope to tap.

For 1/10 the cost of fighting and rebuilding Iraq: How space could liberate us from Mideast oil.

Does anyone really like the new eWeek front page design?

I’ve been interested in Linux for some time now, even looked into switching this Sony VAIO that’s my main machine to it a year ago, but until now I never had the hardware or sufficient motivation. With the Sweet One getting her new toy Twiggy last month, though, I had the hardware in the form of her old box DeepPurple and the motivation came from, well, from somewhere unknown. But it was there.

So the three of us (me, DeepPurple, and the Sony) packed up yesterday afternoon and headed for the CABAL meeting in Menlo Park. The group, which yesterday consisted of our host Rick and the geek archetype Ross, turned out to be extremely generous, intelligent, and friendly. Reminded me a lot of the core members of the Clipper Club of NJ who I blame as much as anyone for my success in the software biz. Blame in a good way, as that’s where I met David Chazin, my first mentor.

My goals with Linux are pretty simple: become a competent user of the system. I don’t want to devolve into a rabid religious fanatic or develop a craving to compile my own custom kernel/personal distribution. Being able to know my way around the OS at the application and general configuration level seems good enough. Run a test server for my web application development work with PHP and MySQL instead of testing live on billsaysthis.com as I do now. Explore Open Office, Mozilla, KDE, and find an UltraEdit-like text editor–no vi for this guy!

Rick, Ross, and I spent a little while discussing this to consider which distro would be the best choice. Rick pulled out a CD album that was amazingly thick with a couple of dozen different choices! garrett had recommended Mandrake, so that was a strong possibility. Red Hat was also considered because it seems to have the biggest penetration in corporations. In the end, though, we decided on Knoppix, a very interesting variant out of Germany.

We chose Knoppix for two main reasons plus one consideration. First, it’s based on Debian–that’s Rick’s general choice and he’ll be one of my primary sources of support–which has a lot of developers and therefore strong application coverage plus probably the best install and update mechanism in apt-get. Second, Knoppix builds on top of Debian extensive hardware detection and hardware driver support plus the ability to run a really complete desktop right off the CD (by complete desktop I mean a large selection of applications, development tools, and utilities). The consideration was that installing a different distro next week or next month, to try it out, is very easy now that the machine is set up with a Linux.

Initially we used the run from CD capability to test the machine. DeepPurple passed the test easily and I could see, as it booted Knoppix, the various bits of hardware being detected. The OS has a utility to install itself to a machine while running, so that was step two, and Knoppix does this with just a few configuration questions. Creating a filesystem (we went with ext3, a journaliing type) was next, wiping out the Windows partitions–no looking back now! A few checks to ensure things were in order and we rebooted, bringing the box up under it’s own power. Sort of felt like watching a baby take her first few tentative stabs at standing without support.

Voila! After logging in, the KDE desktop came up and at first, everything seemed to work just fine. Ross and I brought up Konquerer and a few utilities. Then I opened Mozilla and tried to load this site. Oops, the machine couldn’t find it! Rick to the rescue–for some reason Knoppix had not detected the Ethernet card and didn’t install the DHCP client. A little investigation and some comparisons with his wife Deirdre’s iBook, though, and we found the necessary 8139too driver. An apt-get and some judicious conf editing was all the effort needed to fix that.

It was getting a little late by this point and my stomach was beginning to growl, so I said my goodbyes, packed up, and headed home to TS1 and a delicious steak dinner. Tomorrow I’ll get DeepPurple hooked into the network here and see what fun I can have. Big shout out to Rick and Ross for all their help!

I’m hearing too many Americans who support the war effort calling anti-war protestors unpatriotic. Which makes me think back to Vietnam and its protests–how in the aftermath almost everyone realized that dissent and disagreement are an important part of what makes our country different. That the insults, invective, and hard feelings hurled back and forth were wrong. So why is it happening over again?

At least we seem to have learned the lesson that our troops are not a target for hatred and insults.

31 years ago today the Equal Rights Amendment is Approved by Congress but cannot muster the 39 states required for enactment.

Blistering light races down on a rough and cracked ground

Heat pushes back against the hairs on his freckled arm

Johnny swivels his head while his APC moves through the desert

His ears alert to the unheard sounds of enemy fire.

Just now a nearby tank launched two rounds

Against a target over the horizon, further than Johnny

Can see but from the cheers he understands that the

Target was hit and destroyed.

A reporter sitting near him outs down a few hasty notes

Looks up and around for a few beats, puts his pen back to paper

Johnny doesn’t worry about what the man writes,

Only that he gets home with all his arms and legs intact.

Home, that faraway place where a pretty girl waits for him

Home, where he played basketball in the winter, soccer in summer

Home, with his nice warm bed and eggs for breakfast that

Don’t get cooked by adding boiling water.

Johnny has yet to see an enemy combatant though he did meet

Two guys from Liverpool, UK Marines, while standing and waiting

In Camp New Jersey, amid the nasty dust storms, and found

They too were Knicks fans and LFC supporters.

Bouncing along at 40 or 50 klicks an hour, Johnny’s division

Is eating up the dust so fast and sooner than anyone expects

They will arrive outside of Baghdad, dismount and assault

Johnny only hopes his camo and gun will protect him.

The LT taps him on the shoulder and points out into the distance

Where a flock of birds is flying past the end of the line of trucks,

Tanks, and helicopters of Johnny’s group force, barely visible

Past this force that stretches off into infinity, flapping their wings.

Eighteen months go by and what happened on 9/11 still has the power to bring tears to my eyes. I only found out this afternoon that a very sweet woman with whom I worked closely in the early ’90s, Ruth Lapin, perished when the WTC collapsed. We worked together at a regional consulting firm called Automated Concepts and I was recruited to the firm by her husband, David Chazin.

I remember Ruth most enjoyed, other than being with her family, going to Broadway shows. She went to see Les Miserables at least once a month–even driving me a little bit nutty by playing the soundtrack tape every time it was her turn to drive to lunch–and was thrilled to volunteer as a sitter at the Tony Awards. Sitters are the people who get all dressed up and run in to take the place of celebrities while they go onstage, run to the bathroom or whatever; TV demands that no empty seats be seen no matter what.

Ruth had a great, biting sense of humor. We worked on Foxpro and Clipper projects for large corporations (Merck, Sandoz, ATT, Johnson & Johnson among others) and she was a really strong programmer. Dedicated to her work but not someone who put up with a lot of office politics. A good match for David, no doubt, they obviously had the chemistry a truly loving couple needs.

Ruth loved really spicy food. I mean really spicy! The last time I saw Ruth was a farewell dinner with her and David and me and my ex-wife at a Thai restaurant in Somerville (NJ) just before I moved out here to California. After taking our food orders, the waitress asked how spicy we’d like the dishes on a scale of one to four. One is where the cook waves the spice bottle over the dish, two is about as much as an American-trained palate can handle, three is standard for Thai natives, and four is where the chef laughs and laughs as he cooks. Ruth, without hesitating, took her’s at four and then totally enjoyed the meal.

RIP, Ruth.

Tech companies are fighting a losing battle to prevent FASB, the body which sets corporate accounting rules, from requiring them to expense employee stock options. In order to show support that this change should not be made, the board at Apple yesterday got caught in his renown Reality Distortion Field and gave Steve Jobs five million shares of restricted stock in exchange for a boatload of underwater options he already held.

Let’s be very clear: the options, which Jobs would have had to put up some money to actually purchase were they ever to move into positive territory, are totally worthless; the restricted shares will cost him nothing and will be worth whatever Apple’s stock price is at in three years when the vesting period completes. Since the person in Jobs’ position is generally held responsible for the stock price, the board is essentially rewarding Jobs even though he didn’t get his job done.

One of the primary arguments tech companies use is that in their plans, options are distributed much more widely through their ranks than a typical corporation. We’ve all heard the stories of secretaries at Microsoft or Cisco who became millionaires from their options–assuming they cashed in before the current crash. So how does Apple balance reworking all the underwater options held by employees? Jobs, as noted, got free stock but all other staff get to turn in their current worthless options in exchange for new grants whose price will be set six months plus one day later. And they will still have to pay to exercise the new options.

This six months plus a day tactic is being used by quite a few tech companies whose stocks have tanked recently, although Apple’s exemption of its top exec is unusual. The period is the minimum necessary under the current tax and securities law to have the new options considered as different from the originals. Oddly, the rationale for option grants is that they align the interests of the employees with shareholders more directly than just salary and keep the focus on the long term, since grants generally take four or five years to fully vest.

But with this cancel and switch tactic, corporations are completely disconnecting that alignment. For half a year, employees will be best served by getting the stock price as low as possible to minimize the strike price of the new grant. After that, of course, they’ll want to drive the price up. One wonders, though, just how easy it is to make such sweeping changes in momentum and what the effect will be on staff morale.

Why does Steve Jobs deserve different treatment? Last I looked he was an extremely wealthy man and already received substantial compensation for his effort. Remember, Apple isn’t even his fulltime job, he still holds down the chairman slot at runs Pixar Studios. Does this plan really serve the needs of Apple’s stakeholders?

If you think American sports teams are tough on their head coaches/managers, check out English soccer: Leeds fired Terry Venables, a man with a proven track record, after less than one season–even though the men above him sold off the half dozen best players he had!

You’re 50 years old give or take, have a beautiful wife you’ve been married to for 25 years, two reasonably sane children, a job with your buddies building large farm vehicles and live in the Midwest. So what do you do for a change of pace? If you’re Roy in the HBO original film Normal, you announce to the world that you’ve known all your life you’re a woman in a man’s body. And no matter what, you’re finally going to fix that. Tom Wilkinson, so terrific in last year’s In the Bedroom, absolutely submerges himself in the struggle.

Jane Anderson has written and directed a compelling movie about a most unusual sequence of events. How should the people around Roy really react, especially given that this is taking place in a small rural community and not some urbane metropolis? His boss likes him and works to understand and keep him on the job. The pastor of their church attempts to be understanding and provide helpful counseling, though in the end the pastor is unable to reconcile himself to it. The daughter (played by Hayden Panettiere), uncomfortable with her own burgeoning femininity, is curious and accepting.

Jessica Lange plays Roy’s wife Irma and this is a role that could lead a lesser actress to simply chew up the scenery. Lange is far too good for that, though, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see her get an Emmy nomination later this year. Doesn’t hurt at all that at age 53 Lange is just as beautiful as she was 20 years ago in Tootsie. She takes Irma through the entire emotional cycle, finally realizing that she loves Roy too deeply to give that up when Roy becomes Ruth.

I thought Wilkinson was overlooked in all the praise given to Sissy Spacek over In the Bedroom and he turns in an even better performance in a much meatier role. His transformation over the course of the film is so subtle from moment to moment that you watch the last few scenes, particularly where he says goodbye to his dying father and then when he fights with his disbelieving son, and wonder when he became a woman. Just outstanding.

Definitely recommended, another winner for HBO Films.

I realize everybody is seeing the same stuff, writing about it, talking about it but I find it amazing that CNN is broadcasting live images from a crew embedded with one of the American infantry units, the 7th Cavalry, racing north through the Iraqi desert. Followed by live images from Baghdad, where we can hear the noise of anti-aircraft fire. Just mindblowing, once again.

Waiting for the other side to make the next move after a good interview is like having a cat crawl up your arm with her claws extended. When you’re allergic to cats.