Is this a wedding announcement?

Many, many years ago I worked at a local newspaper and the one type of story I was not trusted to do just right was the wedding announcement. The managing editor, who was a woman and wrote all of them herself, said that these articles were too precious to the people involved and had a very specific style. Now I happened to see the announcement for Amanda Kahn and Mason Kirby in the NY Times and I am scratching my head in wonder. Two key quotes that illuminate:

– “The relationship took off and continued for four years, until Ms. Kahn mentioned marriage. Then, she said, Mr. Kirby ‘freaked,’ and said he wasn’t able to make that commitment, she remembered.”

– Kirby got appendicitis two years later (apparently they stayed together after his freakout) and Kahn “nursed him back to health.” Coming to his senses, Kahn said “The realization of my own mortality added a sense of urgency. I completely realized what I wanted and that what I had with Amanda was more than I could have expected.”

I’m sorry but this just isn’t the level of discretion and decorum one expects in a wedding announcement, especially one in the New York Times.

Turboing, or what happens when the customer is really pissed

Rob Levandowski, a UNIX system administrator and former tech support engineer has written a very enlightening article called The Art of Turboing and a follow up case study analyzing an experience with CompUSA. Turboing “refers to the actions of a customer who goes around the normal technical support process by contacting a senior person in the chain of command.” In other words, a customer for a variety of reasons, sometimes good and sometimes bad, decides the tech/customer support team can’t resolve the issue at hand correctly or quickly enough and calls the CEO or other high ranking executive to try and get the desired result.

I ran into this many times in the 18 months I managed the NetDynamics Tech Support team. The situations played out in one of two ways: a game of hot potato, where the upset customer was handed down the line from CEO to VP to Senior Manager to me, or, less unpleasantly, when the customer asked the support engineer to speak with his manager. There were some customers who thought, since they had met our CEO, that they were always entitled to call on him for the slightest problem. There were others who automatically called me after filing a support ticket to scream in my ear about the cost of downtime to their company. Not pleasant and usually doesn’t help that much in the big picture but it surely happens everyday.

Yesterday’s movie: Return to me

David Duchovny and Minnie Driver star in this movie that could have been a great romantic comedy. Writer/director Bonnie Hunt, who also plays Driver’s best friend even though she looks too old for the role, is to blame for not realizing the potential of Return To Me. Maybe its the influence of marketing focus groups impinging on director’s creativity because there are too many examples when this film attempts to crossover into slapstick.

Maybe it’s because the role of Duchovny’s mirror is split between the David Alan Grier and Jim Belushi characters, Driver’s mirror (Hunt) is not strong enough in that regards, and the script throws in an extra mirror for the two stars as a couple in the characters played by Marianne Muellerleile and William Bronder. A mirror is a supporting character who’s action and dialog are intended to point out important facets of the lead characters. Sometimes the antagonist will be a mirror of the protagonist, as in, say Superman and Lex Luthor, and other times it will be a supporting character as in this movie. But if the director spreads the mirror aspect too widely, as in this movie, the audience isn’t able to appreciate it.

When Hunt keeps the film focused on the romance (and by the way, she takes too long to get there), it’s great. To use a baseball analogy, this film is like a long fly ball that the outfielder has to climb the wall to catch; it almost gets a recommendation but not quite.

Feeling ill

I’m not feeling well today, so I don’t expect to post much. Chicken soup and tea re being consumed in hopes of a fast recovery.

FBI frustrated, looking to cross the line?

Sources are telling The Times of London that the FBI is considering truth serum, torture, and other techniques that go beyond what is legal in the United States to break a wall of silence from four men being held in connection with the Attack on America. One wonders how this report is possibly accurate since the number of decision makers has to be tiny and the odds of any of those people talking to the press is nearly nil. I could see the use of a truth serum, although I’m not clear on the science.

Political Cartoonist gets to the heart of the matter

Thanks to <a href="http://www.oliverwillis.com

“>Oliver Willis we see a cartoon by David Horsey from the Seatlle Post-Intelligencer that with three characters and two sentences captures the essence of the problem I have with pacifists in the current environment. Steven, as usual, has an excellent response to the logically fallacious anti-war faction; essentially logic is a fundamental truth of the universe, not subject to personal interpretation, even though some people would like to believe otherwise.

Tonight’s movie: Bandits

Director Barry Levinson recaptures his comedic touch in Bandits, a story of love, money, and brotherhood. Levinson blew me away with his debut film Diner, which he wroted and directed, following up with a string of majors: The Natural, Tin Men, Good Morning, Vietnam, and Rainman. Then he turned to mostly dramatic movies in the ’90s: Avalon, Bugsy, Disclosure, Sleepers, Sphere (why was Levinson directing an SF flick?) and Liberty Heights, and he was trying, I suppose, to be a serious filmmaker but he’s best at comedy. Even in the ’90s he slipped in Wag the Dog.

Bandits gives us Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton as escaped convicts who go on a bank robbery spree and pick up neglected but housewife Cate Blanchett, who falls in love with both of them, along the way. There’s a surprising ending. But the film was just hilarious. Willis is great at these adult comedies (as in The Whole Nine Yards), Thornton is swell as the smart hypochondriac, and Blanchett is funny and totally radiant, bringing nice depth to her character as the relationship between the three evolves. The first shot of her, as she screws in a blue light bulb, is gorgeous, amazingly well-suited to her coloring.

Bobby Slayton, one of the funnier standups around today, does a nice supporting turn as the host of a true crime TV show, which Levinson uses as a framing device for the movie.

U.S. foriegn policy: inconsistent over the years

I ran into a friend this morning at the coffee shop, which was great, and we had an interesting conversation. He is a native of India, here working for several years on an H1-B visa, and naturally has a different perspective on what’s happening in Afghanistan just now. He has not problems with the U.S. military actions there although like myself and many others he might have changed some of the details had he been in charge. But the interesting part of our conversation to me is that he pointed out some inconsistencies in American foriegn policy over the years, all of which I’ve come across before but this put the whole together in a different light.

The big one that everyone points to is of course that we supported bin Laden’s side in the ’80s against the Soviets. Of course anything to mess up the Soviets during the Cold War was good. Now we’re fighting them. Second big one: we supported Saddam Hussein and Iraq in the ’80s when they fought Iran. Of course, Iran was sponsoring terrorism, threatening our allies, and had held our people hostage. We’ve been fighting him for ten years.

We claim to be all about democracy and freedom. Yet we back the House of Saud and have since the family founded the country even though they are corrupt and anti-democratic and their regime has so dissafected Saudi citizens that they flock to bin Laden’s cause or fund it. We ally ourselves with Pakistan even though that country has been ruled by the military for most of its existence (and even the politicians have been mainly corrupt) and even though they have supported terrorists in both Afghanistan and Kashmir. There are plenty (dozens?) of examples from the past century where our government backed dictatorships and other repressive, undemocratic regimes around the globe and in the long run had terrible results just from a policy perspective (not accounting for the harm to the citizens of said countries).

I really wonder if we (and by we I mean the American government) will ever learn to look at the big picture and act more rationally. Don’t get me wrong, when America is attacked as it has been now, we must repond with appropriate force. But instead of looking for ways to manipulate other governments, we need to focus on our real goals: promoting a better life for as many people as possible through freedom (including democracy), health, and prosperity. Taking shortcuts just puts us further from these goals.

New photos posted

The more observant of you may have noticed a new gallery on the navigation bar at left, Odds and Ends. Included are photos that don’t really fit elsewhere, like one of Joel Henderson, Mitch Scaff, and myself at the Jan. 1998 NetDynamics Holiday Party at the New Coconut Grove in San Francisco and this one of two ‘naughty’ antelopes. I also found a picture of my sister at the Blarney Stone (the real one in Ireland) and added it to the Family and Friends gallery.

Psst, they’re on to us!

The tech press is usually pretty friendly towards tech vendors. After all, tech vendors buy the advertising, buy lots of the subscriptions, and sponsor and exhibit at the conferences. But CIO Magazine has published a customer rant on software quality, saying Let’s Stop Wasting $78 Billion a Year. They quote high level IT managers at major American companies who are just fed up with the perpetual beta-quality upgrades for which they pay more and more each year. Important article spotted via WinterSpeak.

Is a third front opened?

This is scary. Workers found enough C4 to blow up the Philadelphia Greyhound Terminal. All they found was a block the size of a bar of soap, one third of a pound, and this would have been enough to destroy the bus terminal and, I expect, kill everyone inside. There was about 1,000 feet of detonation cord in the luggage but no detonators. I tried to find a good link for C4 but mostly turned up sites explaining how it’s used as the explosive inside landmines all over the world.

Fortunately the explosive was not rigged up as a bomb and in fact was found by terminal maintenance workers who clear out expired storage lockers. The luggage the C4 was in was apparently taken out of a locker two weeks ago and left in a closet until today. This link goes to a local Philadelphia TV station and the page includes the video clip with their story as well.

Studying emotional response to the Attack on America

The Stanford University School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences Center on Stress and Health is conducting a survey on Coping with the Stress of the Terrorist Attacks. The survey took me less than 20 minutes to complete and is easy to complete–other than identifying information, all the answers are checkboxes and radio buttons. I think this research should be supported, scientists rarely have such timely, large scale opportunities to collect data.

Happy Birthday Chuck!

Would rock and roll be rock and roll without Chuck Berry? I don’t THINK SO! So let’s all do a duckwalk and sing a song to celebrate the man’s 75th birthday. And the man is still going strong, with four concerts in the next 10 days. Back in the USA should be playing on all the rock radio stations these days, just an amazing celebration of Americana with the classic Berry solo guitar riff. Jam, man, jam! Go, Johnny B. Goode!

Surprise! Being in the Army may mean going into battle

Steven points out that if you enlist in the armed forces, there may come a time you have to fight. Some people clearly do not understand this simple concept, or do but have low ethical standards, and so the number of Active Duty ‘Conscientious Objectors’ [is] On The Rise. American military personnel have been sent to many different parts of the world, even since the end of the Vietnam War, so to say they never expected this possibility is either foolish or disingenuous. There is no way any of them should be given an honorable discharge; most of them should be required to stay in but in non-combat assignments and if allowed to leave, given a dishonorable discharge (no pension or other veteran’s benefits) and forced to repay any college tuition paid on their behalf to date.

Legislating political correctness

These are sad and painful times, no doubt. But politicians will be politicians, in the U.S. and in England as well. Tony Blair, who is doing so much good as GWB’s junior partner, has allowed his government to introduce legislation that could outlaw comedy. Rowan Atkinson, one of the funnier men in Britain today (although he’s done some terrible American movies), has responded with quite correct outrage to a proposed anti-terrorist bill could lead to the imprisonment of those who satirised religion.

A vacation story

When I was 19, my family went on vacation in December to a little island in the Caribbean called Bonaire, which is part of the Netherlands Antilles. This is a very small, very friendly island, only a couple of hotels on it at the time, and it’s shaped like a banana. They have some of the best scuba diving and snorkeling in the Western Hemisphere, though. On the side of Bonaire that curves in was our hotel and about a half mile off the coast is an even smaller island called Kleine Bonaire (Little Bonaire), which is uninhabited. Every afternoon at this time of year, around 4:00 in the afternoon, a very quick but intense rainstorm comes through for about 15 minutes. One other piece of setup information: when I was 11 and 12, I went to sleep away camps for the summers and had a few lessons on how to sail a very small (one person) boat called a Sailfish.

One afternoon in Bonaire, I decided I would like to rent a Sailfish and take it for a ride. The boatman offered to give me a lesson but of course I did not need that! So I took off and boy did I need that lesson. I could not keep the boat upright and kept capsizing it. Finally, after about 40 minutes, I tried to turn around and head back to the hotel’s beach but I got myself farther away from the shore when I did this. And still the boat kept turning over. Then out of nowhere the afternoon storm came in and I couldn’t see the beach, the rain was too hard, but I could see that I was over half the way to Klein Bonaire. I gave up trying to keep the boat right side up and just sat on it. I was not too afraid of drowning but I was afraid of the boat’s centerboard or my glasses (I forgot to pack a spare pair and without them I’m nearly blind).

Back on shore my parents where having a great big laugh watching all this, up until the time the storm came. When my mother realized she couldn’t see me, she went looking for the boatman. He was in the beach bar, out of the rain. She asked him to go get me but he said not until the rain ended. She was insistent but he just kept saying no. Then the rain ended and he got in a little motorboat and came out for me. I was just totally worn out by this point so when the boatman got out to me and took hold of the centerboard, I slipped off the boat and grabbed on to his boat.

But the boatman would not let me in! He said I had to flip the Sailfish back over first. I told him to do it himself but he said no and literally kept me from climbing into the motorboat. I went back and flipped the Sailfish over, and climbed into the motorboat with the last of my energy. I was crying, I was so exhausted. This guy was laughing! Of course, it was my own fault for not taking the lesson he had offered me in the first place. I have never tried to sail a boat myself ever since.

The Mirror Project

The web is spawning some interesting group projects. Quite a few revolve around photography, including the Mirror Project, which “is a growing community of like-minded individuals who have photographed their likenesses in a variety of reflective surfaces.” I was amused by the concept and had a photo available, so I decided to participate. There are quite a few interesting shots and at least one to avoid (just kidding, Marc).

American Record Industry: Fascists at heart

I feel really strange calling an entire industry, particularly one I wanted to work in when I was younger, fascist. However, as an old friend points out on O’ReillyNet (RIAA Threatened By Anti-Terrorist Law), the Recording Industry Association of America is really pathetic. Not to mention stupid and fascist. They want to send out a virus that erases files on our computers, whether they’re there legally or not, and they want Congress to pass a law that says this is okay. As Dave says, let’s cut off their air supply by just not buying their product. Bruce, I love you baby, but I can’t stand the company you keep.

Morality is in the eye of the beholder

To some people, drawing a line between good and bad behavior is very simple. Sometimes it is intuitive but wrong. Some behaviors are so wrong, in the eyes of certain groups, it justifies any action to prevent these bad behaviors from happening. Since protests, letter writing campaigns, and even murder have not gotten anti-abortionists to their goal, one cannot be too surprised that they would attempt to piggyback on current terrorism (since what else can these extemists be termed?) to achieve them. Of course once more they will fail.