$38 Million, plus or minus

Damn, that’s a lot of money the NY Rangers are giving Eric Lindros. And I guess it answers my question How much is your brain worth?. Lindros says that the lengthy time off–he hasn’t played since May of last year–gave him enough time to recover from the series of concussions he’s suffered over an eight year NHL career. Research is very unclear about whether time heals in this situation but they are very clear that concussions do cumulative damage to the brain. One of the holdups to this deal was the Rangers’ ability to find insurance for the contract; I doubt it came cheap.

Tonight’s movie: Rush Hour 2

Chan and Tucker team up again, this time in Hong Kong and Las Vegas, and deliver a bucketfull of belly laughs. Rush Hour 2 reuses most of the pieces that worked the first time around but intensified them or transformed them for the new setting or villain. Oh yeah, the villain is (mainly) Zhang Ziyi, the young hottie from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And Roselyn Sanchez, one time Miss America Petite, plays good girl (maybe) Secret Service agent Isabella Molina. Alan King has a nothing part as the American baddie and Don Cheadle a good cameo as Tucker’s Chinese speaking, kung fu fighting cousin.

Yesterday’s Book: Tell No One

Ha! Should be more like Tell Everyone One. The latest mystery novel from Edgar award winner Harlan Coben is a taut thriller unlike his previous novels, which were all great but funny mysteries. This one picks you up by the collar, shakes you around, punches you in the gut a few times. But you live. Here’s a good recent interview with the author himself. A book absolutely worth buying and reading.

Note: the author is another graduate of Livingston High School, like yours truly.

OLGA, she’s a sweet girl

Now, now, she’s not my new special friend! OLGA is The On-Line Guitar Archive, a collection of user-supplied chords or tablature files for songs. The songs cover pretty much all styles of music, from JS Bach to Springsteen to Linkin Park. Since the site depends on submissions, not all the files are complete or completely accurate but I’ve found pretty good material here over the years.

OLGA long ago ran into Napster-like opposition from music publishers and, in fact, lost it’s original academically-hosted home after threats of a lawsuit from EMI. Indeed, for some time in the late ’90s OLGA was completely offline. Recently, the organizers incorporated to better meet any future legal threats. I’m really surprised the EFF isn’t helping them out but I have pointed out the possibility to them.

Is dumping supposed to give you an ego boost?

Watching the season finale of Six Feet Under on HBO tonight, one of the main characters (the mom) was dumped by her boyfriend after he took her out for a nice meal. The woman, surprising him and herself, didn’t really react too much, taking the man’s decision (he met someone else) without any significantly negative emotion. The man was flabbergasted by this, expecting her to cry or beg him to change his mind, and when she didn’t he had second thoughts. She had none, moving right on with her emotional life.

I thought about this for awhile and wonder if the man was so upset be the lack of reaction because it was a blow to his ego. Was he expecting, even if subconciously, to get a power boost from the little drama? How have you felt when you broke up a relationship? When someone broke up with you and you didn’t take it too hard?

Yet another test post: Project Allison

Phil Ulrich has posted Project Allison, another tool to utilize the Blogger API. This one’s written in PHP, which I like, and he’s also planning a Visual Basic front end to it, which I really like as I’m in favor of a non-browser based tool to work with my weblog.

[After using] I think the code may have a bug in that I selected post & publish, but this entry was only posted…

Inside Scientology

L. Ron Hubbard was a mediocre science fiction writer back (he wrote the novel on which last year’s bomb Battlefield Earth is based) in the ’50s when he realized that he could wrap his SF concepts into a nearly coherent hole and start a lucrative new religion. Somehow it worked. Hubbard is long gone but the folks running the Church Of Scientology are still pulling in the dough. Operation Clambake is a major effort by Andreas Heldal-Lund to make plain the problems with this so-called Church. Be careful if you cross them!

Lies, Damn Lies, and Lobbyists

Lobbyists are people who are paid to espouse a point of view and to convince others that their position is the correct one. In Palm Power, Glenn Fleishman writes about the successful work being done by a coal industry organization. Their position is that (a) we need more power generated to support the demand imposed by Palm Pilots [sic] plus other modern devices and (b) the best way to generate that power is by burning coal. This group is using ridiculous arithmatic but even as reputable an outlet as the New York Times is buying into it even when scientists provide contrary evidence. Urggh and a half!

The Sun sets on Bill

After four and a half years, I’m sad to say that I’m no longer codependent on, or employed by, Sun Microsystems. Looking for a product, busdev, or tech support manager? Here’s my resume. I’ve been on a personal leave for the last few months, recovering from the stresses of the previous few years and recharging my batteries, and the economy went in the crapper so that while I was supposed to return from leave earlier this month no job exists to which I can return. I expect my timing could have been better, eh?

But I had a good run and won’t complain. I had fun, met some great people, made a decent salary, and even have some stock that’s still worth money (even if it is far less than a year ago). I signed on at NetDynamics just as the company was reving into high gear–there were only 60 employees when I joined but we added a hundred more in the next year. I had a great manager (Jim, you’re the best!). I had five different jobs in 18 months. I managed a team of a dozen people who went on a death march in the summer of 1999. I helped launch the first certified J2EE application server.

I’m at a good point in my life and while I would have preferred to return to Sun after this break, even though finding a new job will be tough, I’ll be fine. Don’t worry, send me names of good recruiters and companies that are hiring.

So long, Sun, and thanks for all the fish.

Didn’t die before he got old

The Sixties were a long time ago. Pete Townsend is still alive, although no longer rocking. So why do the rockers who were adults then think they should keep on shaking their moneymakers up on stage. Oh, money, yeah, forgot about that. As John Strausbaugh writes in his new book Rock Til You Drop and in this extract on the Guardian, Mick and Keith are surely entitled to keep making music but we’re entitled to recognize that they a “once-great rock band that kept playing years and years after they’d gotten too old, had gone from the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world to the greatest self-parody of a rock’n’roll band.” Of course Strausbaugh pushes my button by citing Springsteen as a millionaire too old to do anything but push memories like a drug on fans.

Still, he has a point. I think there’s great fun to be had listening to music–new and old–from Springsteen, the Stones, and others but I agree that these aren’t the musicians pushing today’s youth culture; certainly not the way they did 25 and 35 years ago. Heck I can’t even listen to most of today’s new music. But I can always throw a Zep in the player!

I am not..a leper!

xreferer is an interesting new reference site that allows users to search over 50 reference titles containing more than 500,000 entries. Looking up ‘lazar’, I foundthat there are several eastern European artistic types with my last name and also a biblical reference–apparently it was used as a generic name for lepers in the Middle Ages but means, in Aramaic, God is my help.

This is why programming is cool!

Thanks and a big shout out to Hannes Dorn for his CDir class that gives me a real smooth way to grab a list of the weblog archive files and then I wrote the code to display them in the dropdown list at the top of webLog archive pages.

Another TaaBSO to Phil Ringnalda for his Blogger archive listing scripts that show how to convert the date-based archive filenames to something useful. I’d tell him but there’s no email address across all his great pages!

All in all, I spent about five hours tonight reprogramming the home page and weblog archive pages plus the Blogger templates and I barely noticed the time passing. This was fun. And I’m really looking forward to the new visuals for the site.

Initial update to the look and structure of BillSaysThis

Tonight I implemented the initial change to this website. You’ll notice that the weblog is now occupying the right half of the main page and some of the links that used to be on this page, particularly the set of daily links, are gone. I’m working with a friend who is an artist (and aspires to one day be an Artist) on a new layout, color scheme, navigation, and so forth and I decided to implement this part of the change tonight. The weblog archive pages look plain for now but I will be updating that soon.

Feedback is welcome!

A fresh light on the Invisible Hand

Writing 225 years ago, Adam Smith created an enduring work of economic analysis that still provides meaningful insights for today’s events. Alan Krueger’s NY Times column Rediscovering ‘The Wealth of Nations’ points out that although conservative politicians are quick to use him as bolstering their positions on issues such as taxation, but Krueger quotes Smith as saying “It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

While Krueger’s column (he’s been writing for the Times regularly) is interesting and worth reading before it disappears into the Times “premium” archives (that is, pay to read), the main reason for this entry is that he is an old Livingston (NJ) High School friend of mine. Currently a professor at Princeton University, he is the Thoman and Bendheim Professor of of Economics and Public Policy and Director of the Survey Research Center at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. In the mid-90s he also served all of us as chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor.

Tonight’s movie: Bait

Jamie Foxx is stupid but he can run fast and, just when he needs it, he pulls some brains out of his back pocket in Bait. David Morse is a hardass Treasury cop looking for Doug Hutchinson and using Foxx as, wow, a surprise, bait to get him. This is a sharp looking film and the plot almost holds together but inconsistencies like Foxx’s varying level of intelligence make it hard to take.

This is a test post

Richard Caetano is developing bloggerCom, which I am using to create this log entry. As this is my first test and this is really early in the development of the whole project, I’m not sure it will work. But let’s see…

[After initial post from bloggerCom] It worked! Cool. The past eight days have seen an amazing and impressive flurry of activity after Bloggermeister Evan Williams published the first Blogger XML-RPC API, of which bloggerCom is a part. I’ve been subscribed to the mailing list from the start and the level of involvement is one of those great things no one expects. Dave Winer, author of the web’s original weblog, has been deeply involved all along–way to go Dave–even adding support for the API to his company’s products. Even though they run a competing weblog service or two. I’ve even offered to help someone working on a PHP implementation.

What I want, and seems like this will be available in days or less, is a Windows-based client that has at least the functionality of the online Blogger editor. The online tool’s biggest weakness, I think, is dealing with templates and I’m hoping somebody brings a better solution to the table.

Good judgement or supply chain management and are the banks next?

Nicholas von Hoffman, writing in the New York Observer, looks at the $2 TRILLION lost by holders of telecom stocks (JDSU, Nortel, Lucent, and so on) which wasn’t supposed to happen because everyone’s using the latest in supply chain management software. He moves on to the risk in the dollar, which is causing big losses for American companies selling overseas (which is every single one of consequence). von Hoffman finishes by looking into whether we’ll have another rash of bank and financial institution failures. Are we really headed for a quick turnaround in the economy? Another datapoint can be found in this week’s Back of the Envelope column on nearly-defunct hip web consulting firm Razorfish.