Dispatches from the Hub

with a title like that, I’m assured obscurity.

But that is ok, a lot has changed my friends, so i’m impelled to write – readers be damned!

• WP now automatically updates – yeah, and thanks to the word press people! you guys are awesome.
• my domain expired, was repurchased, and re-established
• we’ve upgraded to mysql 5.something (i can’t be bothered).
• new work laptop – actually this is surprisingly helpful despite being WinXP.
• i purchased a car – should have gone to the junkyard to get a clunker first
• and I’m moving back east!

yes that’s right, after 3 long years away, i’m returning to my mother land, my comfort zone, my raison d’etre. ok, ok, it is not my raison d’etre – but it does feel like one of the least f-ed up places in the lower 48.

the burning question is – can you ever really go home again?

after you install a few applications, the upgrade process is fairly constant.

I had some time this weekend; wordpress 2.7.1 came out – so i fetched it and patched this site.

then I noticed that a new Bazaar was out. and Google Gears, and TortoiseSVN, and Java 1.6 update 12, and Eclipse 3.4.2. patched all of them.

There is a good chance I will get absolutely no value out of all those upgrades. Yet I am driven to do them. Because I know that software is more like bread than wine … it does not improve with age.

thought #1 (there are 2 in this post) – i have been pretty lucky financially.

this turmoil reminds me how lucky i am. consider these observations:

• i was born in the New York 40 odd years ago. NYC and the US generally has been one of the most lucrative places on the planet during this time.
• i have good ability and enjoy doing something that many companies need and most people aren’t particularly good at – organizing information. this makes me a sought after worker.
• through pure chance i bought and sold 3 homes on the east coast during what looks like one of the largest housing bubbles in recent history. i then moved to Iowa at the peak of said bubble.
• currently i have a great job. and i don’t see that changing soon.

i’d say that qualifies as lucky :-)

thought #2 – a question really
I’ve read and discussed finance with people that i feel are knowledgeable. from what i see, many of the people that make a ton of money in finance – for the most part – are not the smartest money managers. what separates them is that they want the money the most. most wealthy investment bankers, brokers and traders aren’t incredibly smart – they haven’t invented ways of working that make them 5 or 10 times more valuable than other knowledge workers. none of them is dumb, i don’t mean that. but they just haven’t come up with a better way of doing things.

what they are is a very aggressive bunch of needy people. so they will do anything to make a deal. in that regard, they seem similar to top managers – sometimes their job is to be a good cheerleader more than any decision making. give anyone a multi-million dollar bonus and they’ll be a pretty good cheerleader too. the problem is cheerleaders are only accurate when their team wins or about 50% of the time – the same as a coin flip.

so the question i am trying figure out is – why we give them so much control? i don’t fault the so called “masters of the universe” – though i think they have little to offer me or humanity generally. many people willingly gave them their money – myself included. maybe we are wired to listen to angry men or suffer from greed when it is least appropriate. i don’t know. so thought #2 is really a question – why did this happen? and the related question – can we change something so it won’t happen again that doesn’t cause more harm?

i see a parallel in the economic crisis with broad environmental problems like global warming – what is good for some individuals may not be best for the group. honestly, i am not sure that there is anything we can do to “fix” this. though the broad view of history is incredibly positive, the missteps are getting bigger too.

It has been 6 weeks – and the genius feature of iTunes finished not too long after I posted. Genius is ok, but not great. I think it peoples associations, not just intrinsic qualities of the music. And it doesn’t know about all the music in my collection. Overall, I find iTunes a bit dissappointing – performance is not great; it hogs resources. I use it for the same reason Internet Explorer dominates the other browsers – because it is there and I’m lazy.

Today I found another good reason not to use iTunes – there is a Winamp plug in to slow down playback without changing tone. This is great for learning a piece that is just out of my reach. I can play along with it slowly to learn, then speed up once I’m comfortable with it. This is both a faster and more gratifying way to learn.

It is called Pacemaker. As a project it has not been touched in several years. I think the sound quality is not that good. But it is hard to judge – What should it sound like? – I thought that for slowing music down, you would be able to smoothly fill in the extra time. It seems to have ticks and pops. Maybe I am missing something. In any event for free, for my purposes, it is excellent.

The free alternatives are Windows Media player has a fast and slow mode. Don’t know if iTunes can do this at all. Please post your suggestions. Anything over $50 I probably will not bother with, but would like to know what is available.

I finished Economics Explained last week. So I started in on Pragmatic Thinking & Learning.  The 2nd is more interesting and dare I say it, much more useful too.  There is a lot in it that I’ve read before, but it is nicely put together and the ideas reinforce each other (so far).

For Christmas I bought myself an electric bass.  When I was younger I used to enjoy playing but kind of stopped practicing.  Not sure why, or even when.  Anyway, it seemed like a good waste of time.  Now I need to find some like minded old foggies in my area to play with.

Turned on the so-called “Genius” in iTunes about an hour ago.  It is less than 1/2 way through my library.  How is this going to be better than last.fm, which I have been using for like 2 years?  Which has an iPhone app?  I’m doubtful, but will let you know.

Also, I had an original thought.  This doesn’t happen often, so I’ve got to write it down.

You’ve noticed that twitter is super-cool, right? It is all over the tech press; twitter  addresses given at the end of tech presentation; even Science Friday is using it.  BTW, i don’t have a twitter account.

Well I read about how twitter has similar characteristics to gambling which cause people to stop being able to concentrate/do thoughtful work (thanks to Kathy Sierra for that post).  I think Donald Knuth figured out a similar thing with email and Paul Graham with the web.

Here is my original thought – well the people that we read in the “press” (in blogs, newspapers, magazines, or talking at conferences) are to some extent reporters.  For them following new trends is their job.  So twitter may be useful for them.  But for the people that create technology – people I aspire to be like  – using twitter is unproductive in the extreme.

This is a media bias – what the media likes and reporters might find useful, may not be so great for everyone.

To bring this full circle, in Pragmatic Learning and Thinking he differentiates found knowledge from created knowledge.

What better time than the new year to get some shit together. So it is time for an update.

Yesterday I did something I’ve wanted to do for a while. I set up Quality of Services rules on my little Linksys WRT54G version 6 router. This was put off for a long time, because my router came with software that didn’t do what I wanted.

But I stumbled across someone who had flashed it with a different firmware, which supports a version of an open source router. So now I am running version 23 of DD-WRT. This works great. Now my wifi is open and I don’t care if my neighbors use it. My computers get preferential treatment. BitTorrent and ftp don’t interfere with browsing (and my neighbors don’t interfere with my bit torrents either). All wifi access points should be this way :-)

Today I started version controlling this site. Since I tell all my clients about how to improve their use of version control, it is only fair to do it too.

I chose to use bazaar. Even though I’m not in need of any of the distributed aspects of bazaar (bazaar and git seem to be the leaders in peer-to-peer type distributed version control), I though I would check it out. Maybe when this computer ages I’ll move the stuff over to another dev box using those features. It has features for posting a snapshot to other kinds of repositories, which is pretty awesome – if your company is a subversion shop for instance, you can still use bazaar on the airplane and commit to svn when back at the office. I may use that at work :-)

Used to use Homesite for editing and posting changes to the site. Switched to Eclipse which does the job acceptably. Possibly well, but I would not know, as i am not an advanced web design person.

Once in control and editable, I patched wordpress and the plugins and updated the main page.

Now I am celebrating my accomplishments with a hot chocolate and a post per the WordPress instructions (search for “Consider”).

Still left to do :

• updating to reflect the current reality. outside of the blog, a lot of the stuff up here is 2-3 years old (and very wrong).
• looking into the current standards to see if there is anything interesting in there worth using (xhtml?).
• integrate with other services
• sell ads, make a ton and retire to Spain…

FedEx had across the board paycuts a few days ago.  And management made those cuts higher at the top than at the bottom.

This saves FedEx money, obviously a good thing these days.  But the great thing about this approach is that it takes the sting out of the paycut for the average FedEx employee; it signals that they are all in the same boat and that management cares about worker longevity.  And it shows that FedEx plans for the future – it means they want to maintain their capacity – so management probably sees a future.

I remember hearing about a similar thing at HP many years ago.  I was impressed then and I’m impressed now.  Having spent 18 years observing the behaviour of corporations, I have seen a lot of short sighted cost cutting. It is nice to see some long term thinking.

There could be a lesson in there for GM and Chrysler.  Oh, and they need to make cars that people actually want.

Sitting down for lunch last Sunday I had a pain in my right abdomen, near the lowest rib.  When I took a breath there was a point at which I could not intake more air without causing a serious pain. At first I thought my diaphram muscle had a cramp.  But after eating lunch and the pain not reducing, I went home taking shallow breaths and wondering what was going on.

Reading about the symptom it seems like a gallbladder or liver problem, most likely a gallstone.  Tomorrow I see a doctor.  But I took this opportunity to eat a less fat, which requires bile to digest, which mean gallbladder has to work hard and makes your gut hurt if you have a gallstone.  It seemed to help a lot, I have not had pain like Sunday’s.  But still I have a little discomfort in the same spot.

Since I’m eating less fat, I thought I would check my weight.  Got a scale and printed a chart for me to write my weight on.  The first 2 mornings in a row I clocked in at 79.1 kilograms.  This is too high for someone my height and age (167 cm and 43 years).  The charts I’ve seen indicate that i should be less than 70kg.  This is probably ideal, but it is not going to happen.  My more modest goal is to get under 75kg.  This will still be overweight according to western doctors, but I will be considered thin by the average resident of Chicago :-).

At least if there is a gallstone and it gets removed, i will that much smaller :-)

Last night, seeing the happy crowds outside in Chicago, I was reminded of the end of the Wizard of Oz – when the munchkins are singing “Ding, dong, the witch is dead…”

Where “the witch” could be one of a number of things:

• George Bush;
• the way blacks have been treated;
• voter apathy