The New Road

Rental water power

I've had this idea for a while that I tell people about now and again. It requires that you are a renter, have un-metered water and no pesky environment scruples. The idea is to hook up a small water driven electric generator to a sink in the kitchen or bathroom. You could probably run a few things off of it and save some money. At the expense of vast quantities of water, which, because you are a renter, you aren't paying for anyway.

Basically it's a free exploit, anything something is unlimited or free you can probably make or save money because of it, if you abuse it. Of course, if you actually did this (which I do not advocate) you would probably lose your lease after a couple of days.

Anyway, turns out someone made something similar using a shower head.

Pictures from the park

Loved Gore's Speech

I loved Gore's speech from Tuesday. It was dead on everything I wanted to say, but said so much more eloquently then I could ever muster. Of course I checked up on the right wing and the best I found was someone saying that Gore had gone insane. Hey, if that's the best they can come up with, then he must be doing something right. Why try and refute the facts when you can just say the speaker is insane?

The parts about the politics of fear were spot on. Just stand back and listen to what Bush has to say. Most of it is about fear. You have to fear the terrorists. You have to fear the liberals. You have to fear the world. You have to fear people who say that the fear is overblown. If there are two types of governance, fear and trust, I will choose trust.

One of the most telling parts was actually in a speech from a couple of days previous. He talked about how he, and the rest of the country, had placed our trust in George Bush to do the right thing after 9/11. To go after the terrorists. And he has abused that trust by going after people who had nothing to do with 9/11. He mentioned some shocking statistics. Apparently 70% of American still believe that the majority of the hijackers on the 9/11 flights were Iraqis, when there were in fact, no Iraqi hijackers. Not one. Apparently 50% still believe that Saddam was deeply involved with Al Qaeda, when, of course, no substantiating facts have come to the fore, and none will, because the two men were at extreme ideological odds.

If you think I am just repeating what Gore said, you are right, but that's because it's worth repeating. If you think I can't substantiate my opposition to the war, bring it! In an even fight I will burn any Iraq war supporter down to the ground because I have the facts on my side. I've never actually seen a stand-up fight between a real liberal and any of these right wing hosts. They either cut the speaker off, talk over the person, or just yell and scream about patriotism and fear. Those are just bully tactics, and when you have to resort to those that means you don't believe in your argument.

Ripley Comments

Some things people at the office wrote me about Ripley:

"I know show was loved on this team."

"She had such a sweet and loving manner, and it was always such a joy to see her and know she was in the office, hanging out with her dad."

"Meeting Ripley blew away a lot of preconceptions I had about pitbull-mixes."

"We'll all miss her, she was much loved by many at Macromedia."

"We'll miss Ripley's visits."

"she was my favorite office dog"

"Sending my prayer to the sweetest pitbull-mix I've ever met."

"she was easily the coolest dog that came into the office, we'll all miss her."

"I'm not usually a dog person but Ripley won me over."

"She was a happy & cool dog ever. She was my favorite RWS doggy too"

"the walking ottoman who was always up for a good scratch!"

"I was really fond of her, farts and all."

"She was a beautiful dog, so friendly and outgoing. At one point, I walked by your aisle, saw her lying between the cubes and went up to play with her. She just looked up at me with the most lovable eyes and rolled over on her back and let me rub her belly. What a lovely personality."

"Hopefully she's chasing rabbits somewhere new."

"she was a very, very sweet dog."

And this is just a small selection. I think people liked her.

Megan Little Gym Pictures

For something a little less maudlin. Here are some pictures of Megan from Little Gym class today.

Post-Ripley - Day Two

(If it isn't clear by now, I should warn anyone reading this blog that many entries in the coming weeks will be about my dog Ripley.)

I went to Shutterfly and bought a whole bunch of Ripley shots and I'm going to make an album with them. Lori and I are also going to put an apple tree in the back yard. Apples were one of Ripley's favorite foods.

I thought a lot about Ripley last night. Especially when I was giving Megan a bath. One of the things I miss most, and there are lots of them, are the way that Ripley and I comforted each other. A case in point was the first night when Megan came home from the Hospital. It was about 2AM and Megan was crying, crying, and Ripley gave me this look like, "What have you brought home?" I gave a look back that said, "I don't know, but we will get through it together." Then I gave her a big spooning squeeze and in that way she let me know that she and I would get through things together.

That's what great dogs do. They reassure you through the tough times. And I know that Lori probably has her own stories about how Ripley supported her when we were fighting or when I was away. (Actually, during a fight Ripley came down on whichever side meant sleep.)

A female acquaintance of mine who was in an abusive marriage once hid in her closet with her two dogs and they helped her get through it. Not that I have ever lived through anything near that bad, in fact I've lived a pretty blessed life, but I always knew that Ripley was there for me no matter what. I love Sadie, but she is not the kind of dog who would allow you to give her a big long hug. After about three seconds she would be hyperventilating and after five she would be wildly thrashing to get away.

Life goes on, of course, but there is no reason why I shouldn't spend some time thinking about all of the good times I had with Ripley and mourning her passing too early.

Post-Ripley - Day One

I broke up on the way to work this morning, then a little bit a couple of times during the day as something would remind me of her. The way she would lay at my feet in the office. Or roll over to show her belly when anyone came by.

Lori and I agreed that what made Ripley so special was the fact that she was a reject. Nobody wanted her. She was too skinny, or too fat, too wired or whatever. She had been in the bottom of the barrel, known what it was like to not be wanted, and then she became our number one dog, the centerpiece of our home and our life. And while she was always nervous about that, she also had this way of passing her gratitude and love on.

Once in a while we would have friends over who would bring their dogs and the house would be filled with dogs, but Ripley would always stand out. She was never the prettiest or the most energized, but she wasn't a dog so much as she was a human stuck in a dog suit.

I sent a message around the office letting people know what happened. The response I got back was tremendous. So many people said that she was the best of the office dogs, that they looked forward to her coming in. She just had that effect on people. A couple of folks even said that they were not dog people, or were scared of pitbulls, but that Ripley was different.

She taught two things, love and devotion. And she taught them all the time, and very well. I'm a far better person from having known her.

Ripley

Ripley "Silly Face" Herrington
1997-2004

Ripley was the best dog I have ever had the pleasure of sharing a part of my life with. We adopted Ripley after she had spent a year on the streets of the Peninsula. She was listed as a greyhound mix. We fed her and she quickly became a pitbull mix. Around that time we were scared of her, but we loved her all the same.

Slowly she mellowed out and fit into everything about our life. She was our baby. She is what held the family together.

Here are just some random thoughts of things that I loved about her:

• I loved the way she would stretch out and point her toes in all directions. Then just fall back to sleep again.
• I loved how she would get up to follow me around when I got up, then if I dallied too long she would lie back down again.
• I liked how I could use hand signals with her, even though I had never trained her, and even though I hardly knew what they meant myself.
• How she was comfortable laying on my side for hours at a time just lazily watching TV.
• How she would follow me on a hike no matter where, or when or how tough.
• How she would sit in the front seat of the car whenever I left her in the car (with the windows rolled down.)
• How she would scratch her face with the side of her paw.
• How she would moan and grumble if you came to bed late and had to move her around because she had stolen your spot.
• How she seemed to understand which days she would be going to work, and what days we would get bagels.
• How she would assume any named thing was a reference to her.

I could keep on with this list forever. I loved her. I still love her. I miss her so very very much. This is all too quick and too unreal.

I don't want to write this. I want her to be back. I want her to be here. I want to spoon her and smell the back of her neck. I want to give her kisses on the nose, and let Megan draw crayon over the white streak on her face. This was too soon and she was too good.

My Shrek 2 Review

My problems with Shrek 2 are more about where I saw it than the film itself. The first time a character appeared on screen and said a line a kid in back of me said at speaking level, "I like that guy." And just went on from there. The parents made a futile effort to get him to quiet down. I moved to the side seats, which were empty a couple of minutes later. I made a conscious effort to go to a late show to avoid rug rats and ankle biters, but to no avail.

The round shape of the theatre also had the strange effect of putting the voice of one of the kids who was sitting far away right in my left ear through the entire show.

All that being said, I really enjoyed the movie. It took me about 30 minutes to warm up to the characters again, but after that I thought the jokes were excellent and the plot was great. I think they could have lost Puss in Boots, but hey, every franchise needs lots of characters to sell as plush toys.

Shrek 2

Lori saw Shrek 2 last night. She said that the plot was great, but that the animation didn't seem to be as good as the original. In particular the mouth movements didn't sync up with the voices.

One of our good friends, Barbara Crabtree, was a production assistant on the film. Lori says her name is listed about 3/4 of the way through the credits. Good going Barbara!

Screen names

Why is it that engineers still go by stupid screen names? A classic example is this fine article on software development which is written by Mr Ed. In conjunction with Tedious Soporific, Sparky and WillaWonga. I lost interest in referring to myself (or anyone else) by their login or screen name about ten years ago.

I think these names sound silly, and what's worse, I think it diminishes our profession to use them. Imagine going to the hospital for a serious ailment and your first doctor is named SpoBot2000. He recommends that you see SphincterGuy3, who is a specialist. You would laugh and cringe, and then get the hell out.

24

I tried watching 24 on my office TV tonight. It's awful. The acting is miserable and the plot is a mess. Who watches this stuff?

Poisoning dogs & cats

From this petition it looks as if the Greek government is considering poisoning cats and dogs in preparation for the Olympics. Though probably the easiest way to prevent this is to do nothing, given the level of attention the Greek government has so far given to the summer games.

Not good for my health

Even though KQED is still on a fund-raising drive I think I will stop listening to right wing radio. I've learned what I need to know and I found the experience very disquieting.

Thursday and Friday were perhaps the most disturbing days. On Thursday our local Brian Sussman DJ talked at length about his plan to daisy cutter bomb the insurgent cities in Iraq. I spent the rest of my drive home thinking about asking him whether he would personally like to drop the bombs. I often wonder if the people who advocate bombing and killing thousands would feel the same way if the killing had to be done hand to hand.

The capper was on Friday when Sean Hannity and his two guests decided that the best term for the terrorists that murdered beheaded Christopher Berg was sub-human. The actions of the terrorists were truly inhuman and an atrocity, but to call someone sub-human is to invite association with that terms long history.

I have a fondness for how the term sub-human sounds in German, Untermenschen. Heinrich Himmler used Untermenschen to describe the millions of Juden lives he helped extinguish.

More recently there are associations with the use of the radio in conjunction with the term sub-human as Tutsi radio personalities described Hutus as sub-human vermin. When the machetes came out the Tutsi radio jocks would tell the death squads what houses to go visit. The year, 1994. The body count, 800,000.

We have a tradition of using the term in America, where we have used similar terms to describe Native Americans in the 1800s, and Japanese in the 1900s. The red man. The yellow scourge. Slaughtering people without mercy, firebombing their cities and interning them in camps is so much easier when you can think of people as less than human.

Can we say we haven't committed genocide? When the B-29 crews flying at 35,000 feet over Tokyo dropping incendiary bombs created nightly firestorms that would kill up to 100,000 people in a single night? When we firebombed Dresden the same way and killed another hundred thousand in one night? In the Fog Of War McNamara tells us that he and Lemay, who orchestrated the fire bombings, were convinced that they would have been tried as war criminals had we lost the war.

I'm a proud American. Proud of who we are. What we have accomplished and what we have done for the world. But one has to understand history clearly and the nature of people, and moreover, what moral certitude taken to it's logical extreme can produce. And from it I have learned one true constant:

There is not one human on this Earth who is sub-human. What people do can be inhuman.

When we start talking about people as sub-humans and speak of daisy cutting their cities we invite the cyclone of genocide which leaves no answers, only victims and bodies.

There are many paths to successfully exiting Iraq. None of them start with genocide.

So I think I will stop listening to Sean Hannity. I understand the the long history of the evil he invokes (in ignorance) a little too well to enjoy it's reference as radio infotainment.

There are many places to find medical info online so make sure you reference many of them before you trust the first medical info you find.

Cool pictures

Poker night

I blew 2,000 units on poker last night. My first all-in for 1,000 units was on a nut-flush hand. I got the final spade on the river and I had an ace of spades. I lost to the straight flush.

The second all-in was my two nines against an Ace-5. I hit the third nine but my opponent hit the A-2-3-4-5 straight.

When your luck stinks that badly you can't really blame yourself too much.

It was fun though, and that's really the point.

Crossing the streams

But, I thought we weren't supposed to cross the streams! Definitely the best of the amateur movie stuff up on EBay.

New article

I have a new article out today. In classic form I was contracted for 1,500 words and delivered 4,000. Thankfully they were able to split the article up into two pieces.

Iraqi Torture Bear

KQED is on a fundrasing drive. So I have been listening to some right wing radio in the mornings on the way into work. Specifically I wanted to hear the coverage of the torture scandal. This morning I was dumbstruck when one of the announcers read an email which proposed an 'Iraqi torture' bear for the Christmas season. It would have a hood and chains. The morning crew laughed and suggested that it also should have wires attached to the testicals.

This is beyond low. I have to wonder, whatever happens with the election, will the level of American political discourse ever improve? What used to be the far right wing has become mainstream conservative and the left is now very moderate. The problem with this shift is that the mainstream conservative shows (Hannity, Limbaugh, etc.) are very aggressive in tone. No actual dialogue or alternative opinions are allowed. Hannity will cut off your mic and call you a traitor or a communist if he doesn't like what you are saying. Is this what we should accept from the media?

Star Trek Apartment

I wonder what his condo association would think.

Fandango Ads

The trouble with working at a dot-com is that even if you do a great job building the web application you can still get killed by marketing. Take Fandango. Great service but the ads suck. Strangely, Fandango's contractual ad space at the beginning of every movies is probably their best asset. What they should do is sell a portion of that to the usual suspects, pay off their VC debt and then buy some real advertising instead of the paper bag stuff.

I would love to see one of the paper bag ads just cut in half. The screen goes black and then in white text with a voice over. "This crappy Fandango ad was cut short by the following global conglomerates. Marbolo - You need us. Now... Budwieser - The most effective way to say "I love you."... Best Buy - Congrats. This movie will be our half price special in six months... And the Las Vegas Tourism Board. We are all about the blue hairs. But you can dream."

Fire Rumsfeld?

Yeah. Let's fire Rumsfeld. That way Bush can install Ashcroft as the Secretary of Defense. He would know which J to put in Jihad. Then the people in the Middle East would be right in believing that we are have implemented the next Crusades.

Lying Liars

I finished Al Franken's Lying Liars last night. The first half of the book was excellent. Lots of great facts and rebuttal in an easy and fun read form. The second half had longer-winded sections that weren't as tight or interesting. It's still worth the money, if only for the first half.

Right Wing Torture Reaction

I was curious how Limbaugh, Hannity and the local right wing radio personalities would handle the Iraq prison torture story. The party line appears to be:

• The detainees, whoever they were, probably deserved it. They were in jail after all!
• The photos were probably doctored. It's easy to do that with today's computers.
• These were just kids blowing off a little steam. It's nothing systemic.
• Anyone who believes the torture stories is a left wing nut, communist, Iraqi sympathizer.
• The Iraqis are doing far worse things to us.
• Nothing can compare this to the devastation of 9/11.

I found the first one the most disturbing. The last one was curious because it showed that people were still trying to link Iraq to al Qaeda.

Is the idea that CNN is liberal media because it does not present these ideas?

I'd put good money on Rummy (Bush's nickname for Donald Rumsfield) taking the fall for this.

Cute Megan Pictures

Cute Megan pictures from the last couple of days.

Moonset

I was lucky enough to catch the moonset at 5AM this morning. It was a full moon and it set right down between the lines of the end of our street. Very cool:

Plan of Attack

I finished Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward's new book on Bush's Iraq planning last night. It was very thorough and well researched, but it was also very dry. Like last weeks fudge type dry. Overall he was even-handed in his coverage, in fact I would say that he was kind to Bush and his administration. The book painted a picture of Bush was an involved president, who is interested in what is going on, makes decisions and take the blame for his actions.

This picture is greatly at odds with other recent works (Against All Enemies, Worse than Watergate, Price of Loyalty) which argue that Cheney is the real President, that Bush is disconnected from both his job (spending most of his time in Crawford) and reality (not connecting with the reality of the situation in Iraq), that his administration is overly secretive and that his political administration is continuously in spin-mode and will never accept responsibility or blame.

Yes, the book does cite a $700M diversion from Afghanistan to Iraq to aid in war planning and provisioning. But it also argues that there was extensive planning for a post war Iraq. Very little bias, with perhaps a leaning to the right, or at least to giving the President the benefit of the doubt.

Sunday Suaret

I decided to throw a little get together on Sunday. It started with a hike up Flag Hill at 2PM. Two mistakes right there; first, Flag Hill is way too much hike to be fun, and second, it was unbelievably hot. My third mistake was not of planning but of provisioning. I brought along only two small bottles of water which were quickly drained between Ripley, Landon and myself.

The view at the top was nice but it was just too much. When Ripley got back to the car she just collapsed. She couldn't even be bothered to crawl up into the back seat. She gave me that look that say, "Leave me. Save yourself."

After starting food prep at 7AM and going through the hike, which damn near killed me, I was pretty loopy when I got home at 7PM to start the dinner and entertainment phase. Somehow I was able to manage, though I screwed up the foccacia (rolled it too thin) and everything tasted kind of bland.

Strangely Ripley found a second wind and mooched with a vengeance. She has learned one bad habit. It appears that she thinks that any plastic cup containing water is fair game because of her tub water drinking. So she came over next to me, plopped down and started drinking my water. Needless to say, after the first gulp, it was hers to finish.

Overall it was a good party. Though next time I need to keep it shorter.

Mission Accomplished

The Fallen

I watched a little of the beginning, and all of the end of Nightline's The Fallen. It was well done and it was not at all as partisan as some suggest. Certainly only a few minutes doubled my appreciation of the gravity of the war and the sacrifices our citizens, and others, are making there.

It makes me think of two things that need to change.

First, CSPAN should dedicate one whole channel to covering the war, whatever war or wars we are fighting, twenty-four hours a day. I'm not sure the coverage would be fair or balanced, but it would be a constant reminder that we have people in the field. I hate the fact that I get a mail from CNN telling me ten more soldiers were killed and turn on the radio only to hear more about the latest Hollywood scandal. The government wages war, lets let them tell us about it every hour of every day.

Second, it should be the decision of more than one person to go to war. Yes, Bush did go to the Congress to get approval, but he actually didn't have to for the first 30-60 days of the war. It's a cold war policy that the Commander and Chief can go to war on his own volition for a brief period and then go to Congress for consent later. I think there should be a council of four, one each from the executive, the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court. Who would all decide on the President's plan to go to war. They could meet in private and in secret, but records would be taken and published later. After we are at war it would be exclusively the responsibility of the Commander and Chief to conduct the war. In this world, one man having the ability to wage war anywhere for any reason, is too much power.

Yes, the Congress approved the war, but I believe they were misled by bad intelligence. Intelligence that they did not genuine complete access to. For example, one draft of the resolution specifically sited the uranium deal in Africa. Which we now know was completely discredited. I believe if there were a small group of four people upon whose shoulders the ultimate responsibility of the war fell, it would be very hard to convince them. Much harder than the political herd of the Congress.

Back to The Fallen. It was an excellent show. But I'm sure the folks in St. Louis were just as happy with their episode of Dharma and Greg. Mmmm, chewy pabulum. Moo.