Love-Hate and the Fortnightly Status Report - 31 December 2023

'Tis that time of year when we all look back to assess the closing year and give thought to the new year.  Whether it is writing the family holiday letter, drafting the organization's final newsletter, or writing the annual self-assessment for the boss, we jot down all the important stuff that happened.  Well, the stuff that we remember, anyway.  

And therein lies the problem.  I can barely remember what I had yesterday for lunch, much less the cool stuff I was doing in January of this year.  For years and years, I would torture and stress my neurons to remember the major results throughout the year.  After a few years of an annual ceremony of banging my head against the wall, I started keeping notebooks.  I could then scan through the notebooks for the nuggets of note and incorporate them in a summary.  The problem with notebooks is that I wrote everything in my notebook.  Live meeting notes, notes from presentations, musings and drawings, and just all sorts of minor events and details, making it tedious to pull out the actions of import for the summary.  Then I got a boss that mandated a short status summary every two weeks.  This became my lifeboat.  Because he wanted them short, I had to focus on important events and accomplishments in the reports, making it trivial to pull out the significant things for the annual summary.  No meeting minutes, no patent notes, no musings, just hardcore events in summary. 

My method was simple.  Every week, I would copy the old status report to a new file and open it.  I would purge most of the old contents from the prior two weeks and insert the new stuff.  I kept the notes organized by projects and themes (e.g., patents are not projects but generating new IP was a constant theme).  I used projects and themes as section headers and put succinct statements of progress and accomplishments in each section.  As new projects started or completed, new sections were added and deleted.  The themes tended to be constant throughout the year.  

When I came time to do the annual summary, my annual self-assessment for rating purposes, I opened the directory and worked through the status reports.  This was relatively quick because most weeks had preliminary or intermediary results and I only needed to copy over the final or significant results into the annual summary.  I could accurately remember what had been done, so I left nothing out. I kept to the active voice, so the summary was punchy.  Should my boss have questions about any assertions, I pulled the weekly reports as backup documentation, so the annual review was pretty smooth.

I had two special sections in my fortnightly status reports that I kept for myself.  In one section, I kept notes about directives and objectives from my boss.  This proved handy for discussions with my boss about priorities and focus - I could document his directions.  In the other private section, I kept people notes about the people I managed.  Outstanding things they had done or things they had missed.  This helped in conversations with my direct reports.  Keeping the private parts private was something that required extra effort because I did not want to accidentially send out information intended to be kept private.  My main action here was to add the private stuff to the file after I had sent off my status report to my boss, and I was careful to cut-and-paste the intended content into the email rather than to simply attach the whole file.

I do not know why, but I have always hated writing weekly or fortnightly status reports.  It was foolish to resist all those years and I should have started much sooner in my career.

Annular Eclipse - 14 Oct 2023

Swinging across North America today is an annular eclipse.  The path of the shadow enters the US west coast in Oregon and swoops southwest toward Texas.  Seattle is somewhere in the 80-90% range, yeilding a crescent partial eclipse.  If the weather were better, we might have gone southward to see it, but overcast and raining was the forcast, and that is what we got overnight with partial clearing in the morning.  Clearing enough to see some of the eclipse.

The photo shows the peak of the eclipse as projected onto our driveway.  The mechanics of this effect are complex.  The driveway is unusually reflective from the overnight rain.  There is a small maple tree in the copse of woods that produces an array of pinholes.  The same effect is not seen in other areas where only evergreens (trees with needles) or rhododendrons are growing.  Finally, one needs to be standing in just the right place to see the crescents.  When standing off to the side or too far back, one sees just a blur of light and no crescents.

Excel and Big Decisions - 13 October 2023

Friday the Thirteenth is famous for its association with bad luck.  That makes today a fitting day to explore the use of Excel in corporations.

In a recent report, mistakes in Excel programming caused major, embarassing errors in hiring doctors in the UK (reference at the end).  The headline screams "Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'" and the sub-head explains that "Mangled mismatch of formats, macros, and VLOOKUP practice hits wannabe anesthetists".  Although this particular failure is significant to those affected, there is a larger problem that affects us all.  We start from two facts.

One.  Microsoft Excel spreadsheets are nearly impossible to debug, thus they contain numerous errors.

Two.  Microsoft Excel spreadsheets are used to make key decisions in nearly all businesses and institutions.

When we combine these, it is easy to see that key decisions in business and institutions are made based on bad data.  These include billion-dollar decisions as well as smaller decisions in hiring and promotion.  I spent years building budget and planning spreadsheets on behalf of my boss, often working with another, more skilled Excel practitioner and budgetmaster (hi, Nick!).  After many, many errors, we taught each other to put debug checks into our spreadsheets.  Not only did we sum across the matrix, but we summed down the matrix and compared the results.  As one example, we would build large matrices of spending or staffing numbers, and if the result of sum-across did not equal the result of sum-down, a cell in the sheet would turn red with a warning.  We were careful to cut-and-paste links rather then values, so that if the original values changed, the links would update.  (This cut-and-paste is a manual operation, so it was subject to errors, but we tried.)  These sheets would be used to create plans for hiring of staff and interns for the coming year, a critical decision that could cause us to fail to me business objectives if the numbers were wrong.  If our budget was too low, we might lack the staff necessary to do the work; if our budget were too high, we would overspend (and no one ever got Executive sympathy for overspending).  

In this particular report (from The Register), some bad hiring decisions were made for doctors in the UK, but we all know that mergers and acquisitions are decided based on Excel calculations.  M&A can be measured in billions of dollars.

To be fair, Excel, itself, is not the direct cause of the problem.  Excel is merely doing what the programmers are telling it to do.  Excel will happily sum 11 months of costs and report the sum to a reader expecting to see 12 months of costs.  And so on.  The fault is that Excel is not designed to allow programmers to detect and fix errors.  Further, most of the "programmers" are business people, not trained computer programmers, and so they lack many of the programming disciplines required to produce reliable, usable code (Excel macros, in this case).  

To fix this problem, Microsoft needs to add checking and debugging features to Excel and the Excel programming community needs to learn to use them.  I do not expect this to happen any time soon.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/12/excel_anesthetist_recruitment_blunder/?td=rt-3a

Trials - 3 October 2023

Trials and court cases seem to be the mark of our times.  Today is the start of Sam Bankman-Fried's trial for the FTX debacle and yesterday was the start of the penalties phase of Donald J. Trump's trial for real estate fraud in New York.  Defendants along with Donald are Don, Jr., and Eric.  No one has explained how Ivanka (or Jared) escaped, but they do not seem to be on the indictments.  

I have long enjoyed a podcast called All the President's Lawyers with Ken White and Josh Barro.  That podcast ended about a year ago and morphed into Serious Trouble, in part because Trump's legal problems had metastasized far beyond Trump himself.  

It is a comment on our founding fathers that they assumed that actors on the political stage would have some sort of values and a sense of decency.  Others have fractured that assumption, but Trump has blown it into dust.  Teapot Dome, Watergate, and other scandals have rocked the United States, but none of them compare to the constant, flagrant scandals of Trump.  The fact that some 40% of the US voting population cannot see his criminality, fraud, and deceipt is something that astounds me.  In any other country, he would be forgotten (e.g., Boris Johnson) or gone (e.g., your favorite revolution).  Somehow, Trump combines deceipt and fraud with deep white nationalism and misogyny, yet retaining his base of supporters.  SMH.

During these trying times (no apologies), the USA has depended on a trustworthy judicial system.  I refer here specifically to courts and judges.  Unfortunately, Trump and the Republicans have spent years - decades - installing incompetent, biased, and corrupt judges throughout the federal judicial system, enough of these such that the judicial system is losing its trustworthyness.  If you have any doubts, look at Thomas and Alito on the US Supreme Court; if doubts remain, look at the rest of the recent appointments such as Kavanaugh and note that Roberts is no shining example of anything, himself. 

My point is that democracy needs to be strengthened against attacks by political, financial, and judicial hacks.

How lost luggage led to living in the moment - 11 September 2023

Recounting great travel experiences with a friend, I was recently reminded of our trip to Patagonia.  We flew a US domestic carrier to Miami, then connected with a South American carrier to Santiago, Chile.  From Santiago, we flew to Punta Arenas, Chile.  Sadly, our checked baggage was not there to meet us.  We enlisted the help of our group's guide to sort out the issues.  He spoke with the airline on the phone and was able to assure us that our luggage had been found and would be forwarded to meet us in two days' time.  This did not happen, but we were promised the luggage had been found and would be sent to us the next day.  The precise details escape me, but we were daily promised that our luggage was being sent to us the next day - for the next two weeks.  Anticipating this as a possibility, we stopped to buy emergency clothing in Punta Arenas and members of our traveling group shared spare clothing with us.  We still have some of that clothing and we remain grateful for the huge show of support within the group.

While packing, I made a few last-minute decisions about which items to put in checked baggage and which to put in carry-on.  Most of the decisions worked out fine, but there was one key decision that I botched.  Innocently assuming that our checked bags would show up, I put my camera in carry-on but I put my spare batteries and charger in the checked bag.  Big mistake.  

You will quickly note that I had but one charged battery for a two-week trip in the wilderness of Patagonia, covering large swathes of Chile and Argentina.  Under normal circumstances (unlimited battery for my camera), I would have taken hundreds of photos, perhaps thousands.  Instead, I perforce measured photo opportunities carefully, working to stretch out battery life to cover as much of the trip as I could.  We spent most nights in small towns with hotels, where I scoured the shops looking for a Nikon battery charger.  You might think such items would be commonplace given the major presence of Nikon in the photo industry and our physical location immersed in photographic opportunities.  Not so.  I found all sorts of chargers for all sorts of cameras, but no chargers for mainline Nikon products until the last day of our wilderness trip.  I found a "universal charger" that worked as needed and was finally able to charge batteries.  Relief washed over me, but we only had a day or two left of the trip.

You could say the lesson I learned was to put the camera AND charger into the carry-on luggage, and you would be right.  But I learned a greater lesson on the trail.

I learned to look around me in the moment rather than through the viewfinder.  This led to greater enjoyment and deeper experience in the wilderness of Patagonia.  I do not regret the lack of a charger nor the shortage of photos.  I did miss some great opportunities as I counted metaphorical electrons, but my experiences were all the greater for the lack of a charger.

Our luggage?  Well, it finally did arrive to meet us in Buenos Aires and it was with us through a week of travels in Neuquen Province (highly recommended).  It seems the luggage had never left Miami, it had been set aside, and when they finally found it, they shipped it directly to Buenos Aires to wait for us.  The charger and all the clothes that we did not need were finally delivered and we carried them for the rest of the trip through Neuquen.  Note that Patagonia is much colder than Buenos Aires and Neuquen, so the winter clothes in our luggage were just dead weight.

So the unhappy accident of stashing the charger and batteries in the misdirected luggage proved to be a happy accident that allowed me to more fully experience Patagonia.

Photos: December 2012 - January 2013, Chile and Argentina

BC is Burning - 19 Aug 2023

Overnight, it started to cheap in. As the sun rose, a Smokey layer formed and consolidated in the mountains above Squamish and started to spread over Howe Sound. Throughout the day, the Smokey layer firmed and lowered to the point that there was a hint of smoke aroma in the air. You would not notice it except that the sweet and salty smell of the sea has been replaced with the inland smells.

The fires are not here. There has been a fire ban for a month and people are careful to honor the ban. This is coming from fires hundreds of miles away near Kelowna in the interior, near Lake Okanagan. There may be contributing fires in Washington and Idaho, but the main fires are interior BC.

The color of the light has an obvious golden tone that has intensified to orange by sunset. The photo shows the morning view.

Twitter shitter - 16 Aug 2023

Absent from Blogger for a while, a couple recent events have forced me back to record the progress of Twitter-X as it swirls ever downward.

Earlier this week, it was announced that Twitter-X had resisted federal supoena efforts to obtain information about Trump's tweets-xeets.  This was evidently an effort by Elon Musk to protect TFG from Jack Smith's investigations.  

Also earlier this week, it was announced that the Twitter-X URL shortener (t.co or something similar) was injecting delays of 5 seconds when redirecting to sites that were not in Elon Musk's good graces, including newspapers that had reported unflatteringly about Elon.  Shortly after this was documented and reported, the delay went away.

And just today, it was reported that a podcaster and professor at NYU, Scott Galloway, had been locked out of his Twitter-X account after he released a podcast unflattering to Elon Musk.  Evidently Galloway said something about unsubstantiated (inflated) range quotes from Tesla.

The only conclusion is that Elon Musk is a thin-skinned adolescent-minded twerp.

Photo is of blackberries coming into ripeness.

https://gizmodo.com/scott-galloway-locked-out-twitter-musk-1850743635  

Wormholes, psychadelic drugs, and a dryer - 16 July 2023

 Well, this looks interesting.   

July 17 at 9am ET, a new web-only series by Steven Soderbergh called Command-Z premieres in which Michael Cera leads a team using a wormhole in a washing machine to alter the present by traveling back in time.

https://extension765.com/blogs/soderblog/command-z

Is it time to unretire? - 15 July 2023

Retirement is a gift.  No, really.  If you are healthy and wealthy enough, retirement is a great thing.  I can see there is a definite down-side for those who cannot afford to retire, but my only regret is that I did not try a half-time work schedule before I retired.  

Now we find that the universe might be older than conventionally thought.  Rather than 13.7 billion years of universal evolution, it may be as old as 26.7 billion years.  Fortunately, the age is added to the early years of the universe (to allow galaxies to form).

https://phys.org/news/2023-07-age-universe-billion-years-previously.html

Trouble in AI Land - 13 July 2023

Forgetting.  As I understand the European data rules, one has the right to be forgotten.  At first, this sounds odd.  Although it can be abused, it makes sense when you think of it.  If a mistaken or outrageous screed about you gets injected into the Internet, you should have the right to get it removed - to be forgotten.  Now think about AI engines.  

Similar to search engines, AI engines today will crawl the web looking for input materials.  No single AI company can generate the vast amount of input data needed for AI training, so they pretty much are left with crawling the web.  The information they find is incorporated into the training models and used in the "predictive" part when the AI model generates output.  It is likely that somewhere in the depths of ChatGPT that there is a copy of Moby Dick, Shakespeare, and your master's thesis, all wrapped up in "the model" and existing as a latent copy of your work.  

Now, suppose you wish for your thesis to be forgotten, removed from the Internet, relegated to nothingness.  You can get the data pulled from a search engine, but how does one get data pulled from an AI model?  The developers do not know how information is incorporated into the model (whle they know in vague terms, "the algorithm", they cannot trace any particular data item into the model).  I suppose they would have to retrain using the old input dataset but without your work, and that would be very expensive.  Training is often the most expensive part of developing an AI model.

To emphasize this problem, there is already a lawsuit by someone who claims that their copyrighted material has been included in an AI model without their consent (ref. Sarah Silverman).

So the AI folks are in a pickle.  

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/13/ai_models_forgotten_data/?td=rt-3a

Yevgeny Prigozhin turns away from Moscow - 25 June 2023

Ending his quest to take on Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin has ordered his Wagner Group to stop their advance on Moscow.  Lukashenko of Belarus claims he has negotiated a peace between Prigozhin and Putin such that Prigozhin will go to Belarus and Putin will drop the charges of rebellion.

I am not involved in diplomacy, but I do not think this is the end.  Putin will return to Moscow and restore his reign, but Prigozhin is not to be found.  No one knows where he is and he has not commented on the (supposed) agreement.  I have two predictions, one for Prigozhin and one for Putin.

For Prigozhin, I predict a defenestration.  Wherever he shows up, it will be at the foot of a tall building with many windows.  It may have happened already or it may happen six months from now, but he will show up dead or show up not at all.  Putin will express regrets.

For Putin, I predict replacement.  He has been shown as weak and cowardly (fleeing to one's hideout is not a signal of bravery).  One way or the other, Putin will be deposed, probably by the end of 2023.  Some new gangster will take his place, and although I cannot guess who it will be, it will not be Prigozhin.

Time will tell. The situation is changing rapidly and reports are squirrelly.  

Prigozin's Wagner Division invades Russia - 24 June 2023

Noting the event, the mercenary Wagner Group has left Ukraine to invade Russia.  A column is moving toward Moscow.  Putin has fled to his stronghold.  Senior government ministers are leaving (one has flown to Turkiye).  The Wagner groups in Venezula and Syria are unstable and may be leaving soon for Russia, leaving al-Assad and other dictators with reduced support.

It seems unlikely that Prigozin will unseat Putin, however one of them will not survive this.  Furthermore, it is predicted that this is only the first wave and that Putin will succumb to a second, third, or fourth wave.

Ukraine seems happy.

Just putting this post here as an historical marker so that we can remember how it started.  Or should I say, how it ended?

US Supreme Court faces a legacy of self-redemption or of corruption - 23 June 2023

SCOTUS, the Supreme Court Of The United States, has faced some recent tests.  No, I am not referring to the infamous confirmation shows for the last 2-3 justices, but rather to the recent relevations about Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito.

Clarence Thomas had rambunctious hearings when he was nominated.  Anita Hill came forward with shocking allegations that would have derailed any other nominee, but Clarence Thomas cruised on to confirmation.  I do not remember Sam Alito's confirmation hearings, but I suspect he was better coached and trained such that the hearings went more smoothly.  The most recent three,  Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, and Brett M. Kavanaugh, were a sorry bunch, both through their own antics and with contributions from Senator Mitch McConnell as supported by the Republican members of the Senate.  These are old news.

In the last month or so, journalists have uncovered allegations (being formal here - just allegations) that Thomas has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of "gifts" from a Republican billionaire named (ironicaly) Crow.  Crow took Thomas and his wife on all-expenses-paid junkets around the world and bought the birthplace home of Thomas - and gave Thomas' mother free rent to live there.  Is this bad?  Yes, but Thomas failed to report these gifts even though he is required by law to report such gifts.  More recently, he was given a window to restate and refile his attestation paperwork, and he has blown through the deadline.  

While Thomas is redoing his paperwork, journalists have uncovered similar allegations (being formal here - just allegations) that Alito has accepted thousands and thousands of dollars of gifts, including an infamous salmon fishing trip to Alaska, none of which he reported as required.  Alito claims some wordplay that exempts him from reporting requirements, claiming an trip in a private jet is some sort of infrastructure?  It is hard to explain his position because it is stupid.  

Both Alito and Thomas offer explanations that the law is complex.  If true, then they are not qualified for their current positions and honorable people would resign.  If we assume that they are smart enough on the law to hold their jobs as the ultimate arbiters of the law in the US, that SCOTUS gig, then they are disengenuous and honorable people would resign, again.  It is quite clear that honor, impartiality, and the appearance of impartiality mean more about theatrics than actual compliance to Alito and Thomas.  Even if the allegations of corruption are merely appearances and not actual corruption, these two men have failed.

Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., has a choice: he can redeem SCOTUS, impose ethics standards, and evict Alito and Thomas based on severe ethical lapses, or the Chief Justice can continue to oversee and overlook corruption on SCOTUS.  It strikes me that this is not a difficult choice, but the fact that Roberts continues to dither suggests that he is willing to tolerate severe ethical failures, making him a co-conspirator of the failings.

God Save SCOTUS,

Deeper and Deeper into Stupidity - 22 June 2023

Money does not make you happier, more attractive, or healthier and now we have a demonstration that money makes you stupider.  Elon Musk (once the richest man in the world) and Mark Zuckerberg (another multibillionaire) lead some of the world's most well-known companies.  In theory, they earned their wealth by the sweat of their brow in an ultracompetitive high-tech marketplace.  (Personally, I do not think they "earned" their wealth and it is not the result of their superior products, but these are topics for another day.)  

According to press reports, Musk and Zuck have agreed to a fight.  Yep, you read that right - the headline reads

Mark Zuckerberg Says He's Down to Fight Elon Musk in a Cage Match

 reference - https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-twitter-meta-cage-match-fight-1850563649

It is hard for me to believe that these two guys could get more stupid.  They are trolling at Trumpian levels of stupidity.  I hope they do not hurt each other, but I hope they learn serious lessons.  Let me correct that: I hope the viewers of this debacle learn serious lessons.  Musk and Zuck are beyond learning.  

#birdbrains

ChatGPT AI replacing workers - 2June 2023

Reports are being published of actual workers being replaced by ChatGPT and other AI bots. Long predicted, this seems to be happening to real people in real jobs. The Washington Post reports that Copywriters and social media writers are the first up against the wall. Although the immediate burden falls upon the frontline workers and writers, this is a gross failure of management. Again, we see the bean counters are running the companies and the consumers and workers pay the price. This is a failure of management because, as we well know, chatbots are routinely wrong, they make up content, and what they produce is of very low quality (in the sense of writing quality). The article even states clearly that the chatbots “hallucinate”, meaning that they lie. In essence, the managers deciding to dump the humans are admitting that marketing, including much of social media, is a liar’s craft.

In Henry VI, Part 2, Shakespeare says, “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers”, but maybe we should look at marketing managers and social media influencers first.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/chatgpt-took-their-jobs-now-they-walk-dogs-and-fix-air-conditioners/ar-AA1c23Tf

I am not even remotely sympathetic - 25 May 2023

The founder of the Oath Keepers extremist group was sentenced [today] to 18 years in prison for orchestrating a weekslong plot that culminated in his followers attacking the U.S. Capitol in a bid to keep President Joe Biden out of the White House after the 2020 election.

It was one of the most consequential cases brought by the Justice Department, which has sought to prove that the riot by right-wing extremists like the Oath Keepers was not a spur-of-the-moment protest but the culmination of weeks of plotting to overturn Biden's election victory.

Reported by ABC News.

Smoke has passed - 21 May 2023

Earlier this week, we had smoke in metro-Seattle that came from the forest fires in British Columbia.  At this writing, winds have blown the smoke to the interior, to central Washington, and cleared the air around Seattle and the Salish Sea.

If you look closely at the photo, there is a golden haze in the air, almost like a tint from an artist's brush.  This should set off alarms as those rhodies should be white, not off-white, and the evergreens should be a richer green and not be that brownish.  Smoke in the air.  This is early in the season for fires to be this big.  And the fires in Alberta are worse than those in BC; the BC fires just happen to be close to the border.  Not a good sign for 2023.

Trouble, right here in River City - 21 May 2023

Far from troubles made up in the mind of a con artist, I have been having technology troubles for the last couple weeks.  About the first of May, there was a Mac OS patch that was distributed.  Now, I need to be clear that I can only claim correlation and I am not asserting causation, but my add-on disk failed at this time.  I use a USB "sidecar" disk because I have far more photo and music data than will fit on the SSD integral to my MacBook Pro.  For a while, I used an outboard 2 Tby drive, then I upgraded to a 4 Tby drive.  After the patch, the outboard drive became unreadable.  I struggled with this for a while and finally decided to rely on Time Machine backups.

I reformatted the outboard drive.  Fortunately, I had just upgraded my Time Machine drive so that I could back up both the integral and the outboard drives.  I thought myself lucky and then I started up Time Machine to recover the contents.  It worked well for a while, then Time Machine complained that the outboard drive was case-insensitive and I was trying to restore Mac Photos files with mixed case. 

I stopped at this point because we had some traveling to do.  When I got back, I tried to restore again and got the same error from Time Machine.  I bit the bullet and re-reformated the drive to be case-sensitive.  OK, should be solved.  Unfortunately, by this time, it had been about two weeks since the original failure, and Time Machine no longer has backups that are pre-failure.  I have tried repeatedly over the last week, and I just cannot get Time Machine to cough up a pre-failure copy of the outboard drive.

I have been in a bit of denial, but cold truth is cold truth.  I was starting to think about how I could restore files from my off-site backup.  You have a three-level backup strategy, right?  A primary, a local backup, and a remote backup, yes?  Well, I do.  I have lost files before and I plan never to do it again.  Then I had a flash of insight.  I had replaced the 2 Tby outboard drive with a 4 Tby outboard drive toward the end of 2022, and I still have the old 2 Tby outboard drive.  It is not a whole backup, but it is better than dragging 2 Tby from my off-site backups.  

I am now in the process of copying over from the 2 Tby outboard drive to the 4 Tby outboard drive.  When that is done, I shall start recovering the last six months of data.  I am very annoyed at Apple, but I have a plan that I think will work.

Photo: we are in the midst of the rhodedendron season.

Travel to the Following States is Restricted - 9 May 2023

The headlines get ever worse.  Texas and Florida have been States of Concern for over a year.  Florida recently achieved Do Not Travel status when the legislature - led by the so-called governor - passed an unrestricted-carry law for firearms.  No license required, no safety training required, no background check required.  Texas achieved Do Not Travel with their string of (endless?) mass shootings, including the most recent shootings by a white supremecist in a shopping center.  

Today, Louisiana achieves Do Not Travel status with the shooting of a small girl who was playing hide-and-seek, straying into the neighbor's yard.  The neighbor promptly shot her.  Fortunately, she survived, but rampant firearms are not a joke.

I will not travel to or spend money in Texas, Florida, or Louisana until the state leaders demonstrate that they value life.

Cat photo for soothing purposes.

https://people.com/crime/louisiana-homeowner-accused-shooting-14-year-old-girl-in-the-back-of-head/

Amazon.com Hiring and Recent Revelations - 22 March 2023

According to news reports, internal documents obtained from Amazon show that they hired too many people.  Not as in "planned hiring was too high" but rather "unapproved hiring was too high".  From the article:

Amazon Web Services posted 24,988 job openings in 2022, but the department was only approved to recruit for 7,798 positions. The document addresses Amazon’s lack of governance as an issue that led to the disconnect between job listings and open positions.

When I worked at Amazon (circa 2000), this was generally true:  there were few, if any, business controls in place.  I did not see it at the time (having been raised in corporations that routinely imposed controls and audits for budgets, hiring, travel, and the like), so I did not exploit it, but it was obvious even then that there were really no controls.  I have always been astounded at the success of Amazon given the internal workings of the company.  On the other hand, recent examples like Credit Suisse and Silicon Valley Bank make me wonder if it is more a case of all-companies-all-the-time.

Source: https://gizmodo.com/amazon-layoffs-andy-jassy-amazon-web-services-aws-1850251481 

Another clip from the article:

After Amazon announced another round of layoffs affecting 9,000 employees earlier this week, a leaked document from inside the company revealed that listing too many job openings and subsequently over-hiring in some departments may have been a part of the problem.

A leaked document obtained by Insider reveals that Amazon put hiring power in the hands of managers, and that the company had little oversight on the hiring process until 2022. This apparently led managers to recruit and hire more employees than they were approved to.

New Application of AI Technology - 21 March 2023

Applying AI technology to analyze banks and prevent blow-outs would be a useful application of Silicon Valley technology.  I wonder why the wizards of Silicon Valley overlooked this self-protective opportunity.

Nuclear Waste Production Plants are not needed - 12 March 2023

Some population of the "green" community has been demanding an increase in nuclear energy production in the United States.  While this may make some sort of sense in the short term, it shows a grotesque failure to understand how actions and consequences relate.  Let us get some terminology straight at the start of the conversation.

There is a common misunderstanding that people know how to build and maintain "nuclear power plants".  If we look at these facilities in the short term, the name "nuclear power plant" makes sense, but if we consider the long term, a better name becomes obvious.  The plants will operate and produce electrical power for 20-40 years, the short term.  Once exhausted, they leave behind nuclear waste that will last tens, hundreds, and thousands of years.  In this longer term, it is clear that their primary end-product is nuclear waste, therefore the facilities are more accurately called "nuclear waste production plants" and they have a brief surplus power in their early years.  

By and large, we have no idea how to deal with the legacy of nuclear waste production plants.  Coal-fired and gas-fired plants can be cleaned up, solar plants and wind farms can be recycled, and even dams can be safely breached.  There is a problem with coal mines and gas drilling sites, but we have general technology to deal with most of that residual.  But we have no technology or process that can handle nuclear waste. 

Nuclear waste comes in multiple types, and some will argue that we can process 90-95% of the nuclear waste from the nuclear waste production plants.  This is insufficient in the extreme.  We build large processing plants to remove threats from water so that it can be used near humans, but we have no technology for nuclear waste products.  The 5-10% remaining nuclear waste that cannot be processed can only be waited out while it remains toxic - waiting for thousands of years.  And even the faint technologies that we do have that can partially process this nuclear waste have proven to be very expensive.  So expensive that we have to ship the waste to the processing plant instead of processing the waste on-site.  No one wants to allow the unprocessed waste to travel nearby, so moving the waste to the processing plant is not possible.

As a result, nuclear waste production plants leave pools full of "spent" waste material sitting nearby, waste that will take thousands of years to become safe to handle.  

If it is not obvious by now, nuclear waste production plants do not generate enough surplus energy to justify their construction or operation.  They are so costly and risky that they cannot get private insurance to cover their construction and operation.  

We may develop nuclear fusion in the future.  Until then, we must continue to develop avoidance and convervation technologies, and we can only build using renewable energy production technologies.

Edit:  https://medium.com/predict/nuclear-power-is-the-future-heres-why-1901f8fa68e0

The Angels' Share - 4 March 2023

Cognac is an ancient city.  The city was well established when Francois I was born there in 1494 and his salamander is carved into many buildings.  Although built from a light colored stone, some of the buildings have a grey or even black coloration on the exterior.  This color comes from Baudoinia compniacensi, a fungus that grows where it can be fed by alcohol. The alcohol lost during the aging process goes into the air, from which it is consumed by B. compniacensi.  The quantity of cognac that has evaporated is known as the Angels' Share.  We were told that the buildings with the black coloring are showing that they are active aging houses.  

Cognac is on display everywhere and the largest cognac houses dominate the riverfront.  These include Hennessy, Martell, Camus, and Remy Martin.  Courvoisier is based in a small town about 9 km outside Cognac.

An odd thing about cognac that distinguishes it from many other grape beverages (wine, champagne) is that it has no vintage.  By definition, the cognac houses run a sophisticated process that produces a product that is consistent from year to year.  The process is based on repeated taste tests and blending to produce the particular flavor of each house.  As their marketing has gotten more sophisticated, the houses produce cognac products with distinct flavors, and may even occasionally declare a vintage, but the traditional products are consistent by design.  Thus, an "old bottle of cognac" has no particular significance other than an emotional tie.

A Shining Example of Bitcoin, Not - 3 March 2023

SBF, or Sam Bankman-Fried, was the head of the FTX exchange for bitcoin and other digital coinage.  He has been in the news for quite a while, starting as a wonder-boy who could do no wrong and morphing into a financial criminal of grand proportions (as alleged by the US Department of Justice).  It was revealed today that $9 Billion of customer funds is missing.  Sam is going to give Bernie Madoff a run for his money as they compete to be the masterminds of their respective "largest financial fraud ever".

https://gizmodo.com/ftx-sbf-sam-bankman-fried-crypto-1850183784

Gizmodo reports that "FTX Confirms $9 Billion in Customer Funds Vanished" via FTX and Alameda Research (Sam's other company).

Photo: deeper and deeper: measuring snow in Redmond WA on 26 Feb 2023.

Florida governor Ron deSantis - 2 March 2023

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is an idiot. Large chunks of the Florida legislature are, too, if they support this legislation.

https://www.wfla.com/news/politics/florida-bill-would-require-bloggers-who-write-about-governor-to-register-with-the-state/

Restoring honor to politics - 16 February 2023

I am so old that I remember when an affair, a lie, or a bribe could bring a politician's career to a shattering end.  There were always exceptions, but by and large, corruption or malfeasance would mark the end of a career in politics.  A recent report in NPR asserts (correctly) that shame is no longer a motivator.  

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1157049312/george-santos-politics-of-shame

"There was a time when shame was a powerful force in American politics. That time is not now." [NPR]

George Santos (he of many names) is flagged in the article as the poster child of the moment, but there are so many recent examples (McCarthy, Scott, Cruz, Gingrich, Nixon, and more) and new ones continue to arise (Luna).  However, I think the positioning of the assertion is wrong and I want to flip it around because I think a different perspective sheds more light on the consequences.

Honor was once a force in politics, but honor is now dead in American politics. [me]

Where once people would serve in government from a sense of honor, when once their behavior was guided by a sense of honor, that was a time when government was a productive factor in life.  Remember Eisenhower who built the Interstate Highway System?  Remember Kennedy who inspired the lunar landings?  Remember Johnson who brought voting rights to oppressed peoples?  Even Nixon brought us clean air and water through the EPA (although he failed in so many other ways).  

Then came Nixon and Gingrich who discarded honor for self-advancement, who left shame on the sidelines to achieve dubious ends.  Their descendents - from Trump to McCarthy, Gree, Gaetz, Cruz, Rubio, Scott, and others - these people seem to have embraced shame and willful stupidity as badges of honor (irony just died.  Again.)  

When honor is restored to government, then shall we have the government we deserve.

Greenland paddle from a tree, Step 1 - 19 January 2023

Birch trees, particularly silver birch, seem to be popular for landscaping in our area.   Unfortunately, they seem to have a short lifetime as trees go, something around 40-50 years in our area.  To be honest, I am not sure the particular trees I am talking about are silver birch, but that is my best guess.  About 40 years ago, the builder of our neighborhood put three birch trees in our back yard as specimen trees.  They formed a nice contrast against the dominant evergreens (cedar, fir, and a redwood or two - I think the redwood is a specimen tree, too, by the way), but the birches never really liked out winters.  At least, they were constantly shedding smaller branches, but the snowloads would bring down major parts of the tree. 

In a winter storm about five years ago (c. 2018), the two larger trees were snapped off.  One was badly damaged and I removed it, while the other was severly damaged and I was hoping it would recover.  Well, after four years, I decided it was not going to recover, that it was worsening to the point that it was threatening to fall on the house, so I took it down.

Most of the 40-foot-plus tree became bark mulch or firewood, but I kept a 12-foot section from the base of the tree.  My plan is to make a Greenland paddle from it.  With luck, I might even be able to get two paddles from it.  I hope to be able to get an 8-10-foot 8x8 out of the trunk that I can use for the paddles.

I started by leaving the trunk on sawhorses outside the garage.  While this was convenient and gave me free space in the garage (workshop), I think it greatly slowed the drying of the wood that is required to work it.  I used a small chainsaw to remove one side (hidden on the bottom in the photo) in a crude styling of an Alaskan sawmill, but that did not work well.  I finally decided my only option was to bring the log inside the protected space of the house - the unheated garage will keep the log out of the rain.

The log has been sitting in the garage for about two weeks, and it is already looking drier.  This could be wishful thinking; likely is wishful thinking.  As an experiment last night, I took an electric planer and started trying to remove the bark as a poor-man's jointer.  The chainsaw was faster but I think the planer produces much better results.  The resulting wood is prettier than I expected.  All the talk of Baltic birch brings plain grain to my mind, and this looks to be more interesting.  The interesting bit may be planed off in the end.  We shall see.

Unofficially, my moisture meter shows 34%.  I suspect this is optimistic as most of the readings are "off the charts" - too moist to measure.  I hope a few more weeks in the garage will show the needle moving in the right direction.

Speaker of the House 2023, part deux - 15 January 2023

Mr. McCarthy has won his Speakership on the fifteenth (15th) voting round.  This is a 100-year-old record, that is, more voting rounds required than any Speaker in 100 years.  In fact, it has taken one (1) voting round in each opportunity in the last 100 years.  The final holdout seems to have been Matt Gaetz, R-FL.  The House immediately adjourned and then took up foolish votes on the Monday when they returned to the chambers.  We now face a vote on the debt ceiling and the Republicans are again threatening a default.  Yes, there are a few playing games that border on default (e.g., "pay debt interest, military, Social Security, and Medicare bills first" and some are proposing to postpone paying foreign debt holders), but none of these proposals are taken seriously.  In particular, the US payment obligations are so complex and intermingled that it is not clear how to separate out these types ("interest, military, ...") of payments from other types of payments.  Mayhem.  

There have also been a handful of Secret documents found in old offices that were used by President Biden after he left the VP position.  Biden has promptly searched for additional documents and handed them all over.  This is in sharp contrast with Trump's troubles wherein he keeps documents that he is supposed to turn over, and he does not seem to look for documents when asked (he says he looked for documents, but then a search under subpoena finds more documents).  Anyway, Trump obstructs, Biden complies, and the press seems to think the two are somehow equivalent.

The real problem is  Representative George Santos, R-NY.  He appears to be a serial liar, have some real money problems, and running from Brazilian authorities for fraud there.  So Santos hogs headlines that should be about Trump's problems.  Santos is also important because he was a critical vote for McCarthy (in the opening paragraph), and it is not clear McCarthy would be Speaker today were it not for Santos and his vote.  As a result, McCarthy and his team are just ignoring the Santos problem.  The Santos Problem?  Yeah, a demonstrated liar was seated as a Republican Representative in Congress.  The seating of Santos should have been postponed until the legal troubles were sorted out, but this would likely require a replacement and the replacement would likely be a Democrat and so McCarthy et al are just ignoring the problem.  with Republicans, it is always projection.  Today, fraud, tomorrow voting fraud, and so on.

Speaker of the House 2023 - 5 January 2023

Nine votes and Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif) has yet to meet the required majority for a win as Speaker of the House 2023-2024.  The BBC has a balanced summary of possible outcomes, McCarthy wins (eventually), McCarthy withdraws, or Dems join up with "centrist" Republicans to select a compromise candidate (Republican). Finally, many commentators are saying that a McCarthy loss (either the second or third BBC conclusions) would lead to the end of McCarthy's political career.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64170729

Although I respect the BBC and generally agree with their analysis, many commentators are falling into the trap that the current crop of Republicans in Congress are old-style politicians, willing to be pragmatic and compromise.  The last few years, indeed, the last few decades since Gingrich, have demonstrated that the old-style Republican no longer exists in Congress and the Tea Party Republicans (including QANON) have taken over.  As a result, we can not use reasoning or pragmatism to predict their behavior.  The current Republican party is dominated by burn-it-all-down members.  Rather like the dog that catches the car after chasing it, they do not know what to do nor how to govern.

McCarthy wins.  I have to see this as the most likely end game.  McCarthy (and his MAGA/Tea Party opponents) have never recognized a loss.  McCarthy will keep pounding until he wins.  The others will finally succumb to loss of honor and give in.  This is the only real way that the Republican House can get to the desired games of investigations, impeachments, and other foolery that they want to pursue.  Eventually, they will give in at this round and advance to the next round.  Advance to the next round?  Well, move to the next round.

McCarthy withdraws.  Although this might make sense with an old-style Republican operating on pragmatism, that does not describe McCarthy.  After two years, Trump still refuses to acknowledge that he lost, and there is no reason that McCarthy should.  Like Trump, he should simply call his fellow Republicans corrupt and object to the cheating voters!  Oh, wait.  Nevermind.

Democratic-Republican compromise candidate.  Again, this makes sense in an old-style Republican pragmatism, but the MAGA and Tea Party wedge of the Republican party would never let the resulting leadership function.  The Democrats might get some committee chairs, some rules changes, and other benefits, but the MAGATs and Qanoners would burn down the Congress.  The "moderate" Republicans that might join this D-R group might argue for compromise to advance their agenda, but there are three problems with this compromise.  First, there are no more moderate Republicans; they are extinct.  I think McCain may have been the last.  Second, the MAGATs and Qanon wedge would stop all progress.  And third, who would want the job?  No Democrat would accept and there are no Republicans that could handle it (no credible alternatives to McCarthy).  Boehner and Ryan were the last two to try, they gave up, and neither of them was a shining example of anything in the first place.  Trump has shown that he is toast, has no weight anymore in the Republican party.  Any Democrat that tried would suffer worse than McCarthy from Boebert, Goetz, and Goser.  

Not considered by the BBC, but there is discussion that an outsider might be selected as a compromise candidate.  Perhaps a now-retired Republican congressmember or Trump himself might be put into nomination.  I really cannot see that.

Somehow, this will all get sorted out and a Speaker will be elected.  Then we descend into the madness that is today's MAGA-Tea Party.  There will be an endless display of regressive investigations, unsubstantiated impeachments, and pointless government shut-downs.  Good times to come.

Photo: Spencer Ridge (view from), Eugene OR, December 2022

Server Consolidation and Virtualization with IBM CDAT - 4 January 2023

In times gone by, I worked for IBM and managed a development group writing system software for Windows running on IBM x-series systems.  This was about 2001-2005, give or take.  We started to do a lot of systems work with VMware and Microsoft on virtualization.  VMware was independent (a start-up) and Microsoft bought "the other" virtualization start-up for x86.  The Microsoft product is now Azure, basically.  

IBM had a lot of customers totally immersed in virtualization, but on mainframes.  Because IBM more or less created virtualization (as a product), their monitor software was called "VM".  You can do that with names when you are first into the market.  But virtualization was a strange, new beast in the x86 world.  (Remember that x86 was still almost pure 32-bit, and AMD64 had only recently been announced; Intel had Itanium as their 64-bit architecture.  But that is a conversation for another day.)  

In working with customers to understand requirements for virtualization on x86, it became clear that customers did not really understand it.  The customers were used to a business model in which every Windows server application got its own (physical) machine.  It was said that "Windows apps do not play well together."  Server-class PCs were consider cheap, about $10K (USD) or so, cheap compared to mainframes based on purchase price, so a new app or new capacity on an existing app meant that the business would buy a new server.  Thus, there were file servers, mail servers, web servers, and business app servers, and each of these was a physical server in a rack.  As capacity demands rose, buying a new physical server became more expensive, so some organizations started looking at virtualization as a solution.

The first problem they faced was estimating capacity.  Since every PC server ran its own app, there was always plenty of performance headroom - well, until there was not.  Capacity was usually easily solved by buying a new, bigger server.  With the march of Moore's Law, this was usually a no-brainer.  As the old server ran out of capacity and warranty, then buying a new server got one all sorts of benefits - faster CPU clock, more memory, faster disks, bigger disks, and a new warranty.  This worked pretty well on a server-by-server basis, but it became clear that replacing all the servers every 2-3 years was expensive across the server-room.  Virtualization came as the answer - buy fewer new servers.  Pretty good, but how many to buy?  Nobody bothered to collect performance data on PC servers.  Until a server started running out of capacity, no one cared becasue each app was on its own server.  No competition between apps means no problems.

Back to my software development group.  There was a delay in the hardware schedule that caused a couple of software engineers to have nothing to do for a couple of months.  I kicked around some ideas for short projects with two colleagues, Jim and Ted (I cannot recall Ted's real name, so let us just run with Ted).  I do not recall which of us actually invented the idea, but our conversation converged on a Windows-based tool that would reach out to Windows servers and collect performance and capacity snapshots, collect the data into a database, then analyze the database to recommend virtualizationo consolitation plans.  This became the Analysis part of the tool.

One of the simplest customer problems was that they lacked actual inventory data - they had no list of servers or applications that they were running.  Well, running through lists or ranges of IP addresses and poking ports for responses would quickly and easily find and identify the Windows Servers.  This became the Discovery part of the tool.  

Consolidation using virtualization was the objective, so the tool took on the working name of CDAT, for (server) Consolidation Discovery and Analysis Tool.  I regret that we did not get clever and call it something like "BlueScope", "BlueWindow", or some other IBM blue-colored name, but we were engineers and we missed the opportunity.  Seriously, I regret missing this obvious hook.

Customers loved it.  IBM could walk in with a laptop, plug into the customer's network, and run silently and unobtrusively to collect the data required.  The customer needed to enter some network passwords, but that was about it.  The tool did all the data collection automagically.

IBM sales folks love it.   In the x86 Server space, IBMwas an also-ran.  HP, Dell, and Compaq ran the x86 Server world.  IBM got a chance when HP bought Dell.  Customers usually sought three competing bids, so when Compaq "disappeared" into HP, IBM became the their option, even if HP and Dell were the only "real" players.  To exploit the new foot-in-the-door to become the third bid, the technical support engineer could collect data for a day or a week, spend a little time with spreadsheet and make a highly tailored proposal for the customer.  In contrast, HP and Dell salespeople came in with generic, one-size-fits-all proposals (e.g., 4:1 consolidation for everything).  In contrast, IBM could propose that certain apps remain on dedicated servers, that a middle class of apps could be consilidated at various ratios from 2:1 to 8:1, and a third class of apps could be consolidated at 20:1 or higher.  

The customers were consistently stunned with the IBM proposal.  The proposal named systems that the customer recognized.  It gave supporting statistics for consolidation ratios.  The data could even be sorted the customer's servers into convenient groups according to their resource demands:  memory consumption, CPU consumption, and network consumption.  

As a special deal, I could look at the data and give them the names of apps that were memory leakers and CPU runaways.  I was using a bit of probability, but any Windows app that consumed all 4Gby of memory was either a database server or had a memory leak.  If the admin checked memory usage after the next schedule reboot, they could tell quickly (low memory after boot on a high memory consuming server meant memory leak).  The CPU looper was more speculative, but very few x86 servers actually needed their CPU capacity - most apps were (literally) 1% utilization or less.

As a result, the IBM salespeople presented the customer with highly detailed recommendations that could ben supported with data.  Recommendations that were tailored to the customer's actual needs.  Far better than one-size-fits-all from the other vendors.

Customers loved CDAT.  They would often quickly agree to a prototype - buy 5-10 servers from IBM xSeries and apply part of the consolidation plan using virtualization.  If this worked, the customer was positioned to buy more servers from IBM, ultimately replacing their server hardware.  

In the first year of CDAT use, IBM xSeries used it to secure about $10M in business.  The second year, $20M, and the third year, $40M.  Pretty good.  So good, that CDAT was eventually expanded to cover pSeries AIX systems for server consolidation.  the 

I have two regrets coming out of the experience.  I mentioned my poor choice of names above, and that is big.  Names like "Watson" or "BlueSphere" resonate with people.  The other regret is that I did not push and advocate CDAT as much as I should have.  My attidude was, "yeah, theis is cool, but it was pretty easy."  Bad answer.  The customers loved it, and I should have pushed hard to increase the exposure (within IBM) and add features.  My team could have been seen as the core of a $50M/year business.  Instead, we were neglected.  In retrospect, a missed opportunity on a large scale.  Not smart.

So that is the story of CDAT.

Here is a Computerworld article from 2007 that describes CDAT for public consumption.  As I left in 2005, CDAT outlived me by years.

https://www2.computerworld.co.nz/article/497013/ibm_takes_server_consolidation_tool_smbs/ 

Dated November 2007, the article reports in part:

IBM takes server consolidation tool to SMBs

IBM has just launched an analysis tool that it believes will help businesses find under-utilised x86 servers that could profitably be consolidated.

The vendor believes that server consolidation using virtualisation technology can save up to 60% in IT costs while quadrupling computing utilisation.

Big Blue has expanded its Consolidation Discovery and Analysis Tool (CDAT) to allow IBM resellers and integrators to evaluate smaller environments of 50 servers or fewer. IBM says it is also providing an additional end-user service, Server Consolidation Factory, at US$500 (NZ$655) per 50 servers, which it claims is "up to five times less expensive than competitive services".

As an example, IBM integrator Mainline Information Systems performed a successful CDAT evaluation for a 575-employee client, Frankenmuth Mutual Insurance Company, a US-based property and casualty insurer, which has since virtualised its server farm.

A Quiet Week - 1 January 2023

Tradition dictates that the last week of the calendar year is a quiet one, and 2022 has been no exception.  We spent some holiday time in Eugene, OR (source of the photo is Spencer Butte) after a delay due to an ice storm (freezing rain).  It was a quiet drive home and some quiet days since.  We did get miscellaneous wind storms that required clean up and a snowstorm that required a bit of shovel work, but nothing serious.

Along with the clean up from the windstorms, I have continued pruning.  Yesterday, I pruned Grandma's climbing rose by our back deck.  We took some cuttings from the original Grandma's rose at Keats Island, rooted them, and planted them by the back deck.  I say "planted" - it was barely more than sticking them in the ground.  The cuttings have happily taken to their new location and provide color in the spring.  I plan to build a rose arbor this year to allow them to better flaunt their colors.  The original rose at the cabin continues, having survived the trauma of construction and the repeated attacks of local deer.  It is now on an ad-hoc trellis that keeps the bulk of the plants above the reach of deer, so it is also quite happy.  The Keats trellis was very much a spur-of-the-moment design from lumber on-hand, so I am now in the mode of continuous repairs.  Last summer, I had to realign a couple timbers and re-screw them together.  I tried to find a recent photo of the trellis but I seem to have focused my photographic energies on other interests.  I will have to get out the large ladder to accomplish anything in 2023.

To anyone reading - Happy New Year!  May 2023 bring successes and peace.