The New Road

9/11 Report

I finished reading the 9/11 report on today's trip. I watched a little Fox as well and the pundidiot was slamming Kerry for saying that if he were President he would fully implement the recommendations. I can't see why that would be a problem. They are all common sense and they have built-in protections for privacy.

What I particularly liked was the call for updating the information systems in the intelligence agencies. This not only makes sense, it also creates a lot of U.S. only information technology jobs for people who can get clearance. Rock!

JFK

JFK is much improved since when Lori and I were here last. We were in this crummy little circular terminal when we went to Pam and Yvonne's wedding after 9/11. Now the terminal has complete Wi-Fi coverage, for free, and power points are scattered all over. JetBlue really understands their customers.

Portland

Portland was really pretty, though I didn't see much of it. What I did see was the airport:

Which was gorgeous. Really light and airy. Very friendly peoeple and it was easy to get around.

I also saw the conference room at the Marriott:

Which was not as pretty.

And since my return flight was delayed for two hours I saw a nice sunset through the airport glass:

To be fair I did have a little time to walk around the area of the convention with some other folks. What struck me was that the city had a lot of glass. The airport had lots of glass. The restaurant had lots of glass. Everything was very airy and open. Which I like a lot.

Plus you have to love an airport where the parking lot has hanging gardens on the sides.

Pakistanis Deliver!

Woo hoo! The Pakistani's delivered a high value Al Qaeda member on the same day as Kerry's speech! Rock. Too bad nobody noticed. Though I don't watch FOX news. It could be that they gave this vital story hours of coverage. Well, just checked the FOX site. No such luck. Guess even Rove couldn't make this story interesting.

What is FOX News going to do with Bush out of office? 24 HR Kerry bashing?

Wow, that sucked

My presentation sucked. The slides weren't organized well. I hadn't practiced. And I got a serious case of stage fright. Really bad, really really bad.

The good news is that the person next to me on the plane had a lot of presentation experience and helped me work through some of the issues in the presentation. I'll be back, and I know it will be great!

Tim O'Reilly

I just met Tim O'Reilly on the elevator to the speakers lounge at the conference. We were in another conversation with the other folks in the elevator. He then stopped to introduce himself to me and vice versa. He then started to say, "I have to say that..." directly to me, when he got cut off by the crowd of people waiting at the door to talk with him. Damn. I think he was going to say something cool.

I'm a horrible fan boy for O'Reilly. I've loved the spirit of O'Reilly since the days of the brown sixty page, staple bound, nutshell books.

Ah well, perhaps I'll mail him and set up a lunch or something.

Macs at OSCON

I'm at OSCON because I'm presenting, in about two hours. What's amazing is the number of Macs. Everyone has Macs. On the table where I am sitting there are four Macs and one PC. And the one PC is the one that I brought along to do my Macromedia work.

Hannity promise

Sean Hannity goes on an on about how unpatriotic it is to criticize a sitting President during a time of war. Of course he did this himself with Clinton during Kosovo, but that is beside the point. What I would like to see is a promise from Hannity to not criticize Kerry, should he win in November, during this time of war. I think it's only fair and right. I think I'll shop it around and see how far I get.

Miami-Dade, at it again

I used to live in Miami-Dade, so I know how screwed up it is, but damn, this is bad even for Dade county.

Lonely

Man am I lonely. I just noticed this morning after having a really crappy night trying to sleep. The first two nights I was back I just completely crashed exhausted. Last night was the first night I was back on California time and I was tossing and turning all night. Lori and Megan have been gone before but I always had Ripley to keep me company and we would pal around and do all of the boy and his dog stuff. But Ripley is gone and Sadie is no Ripley. Which just leaves me in a big empty house.

Barack Obama

I hadn't watched any of the convention until last night when I wanted to see Barack Obama speak. I was completely blown away. His oratory style was excellent and the speech was enthusiastic, positive and uplifting. Given that he is so young I think he has the potential to be the first black President of the United States.

Update: Here is a part of Obama's speech.

One more thought: This morning I was listening to NPR. They played the Obama segments and talked about it. I was on the edge of my seat, happy and entertained. Then they played Cheney who was campaigning in front of the troops (illegal) and every time he lied or distorted the truth (which was everything he said) I just got angry. I don't think I can take another four years of the lies and the distortions.

Speaking of which, it's pretty obvious now that Rove and the pundits are starting to spin on Iran and that Iran is the probable October surprise. I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. First, I don't think it's feasible. And second, I think that the Bush administration is so out of touch with reality that they don't understand that there is no public support at all for another Iraq-style debacle.

USA Today Snubs Ann Coulter

Apparently even USA Today can feel the winds of change coming. They no longer feel the need to print the likes of Ann Coulter. A person with all of the rhetorical flair of the unfortunately mentally disabled person you might find shambling down the street muttering endlessly about conspiracy theories. Example:

"My pretty-girl allies stick out like a sore thumb amongst the corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons they call "women" at the Democratic National Convention."

The real question is, why would we listen to her in the first place? What she says makes no sense. There are no facts. And she isn't funny.

Come to think of it, Rush Limbaugh calls his personal brand of nastiness (e.g. "They were just blowing off some steam.") humor. He's not funny either. I've listened for several hours now and he isn't funny in the slightest. The only time there is any laughter on the show is when he lets a liberal caller through only to verbally abuse them while laughing at them.

So, go USA Today! Let's keep it up. Let's leave newspaper column space for stories about facts and analysis, and not partisan mental meltdowns.

Stargate SG-1 Horror Story

According to this the editor of the Stargate SG-1 Archive site had most of his computers destroyed by the FBI at the behest of MGM over copyright violations.

Should have listened

I should have listened to Lori. You see, for a couple of days now I have been struggling with how to get the high quality images out to the relatives from the South Carolina trip. And Lori has been saying, "make a DVD". And I kept thinking to myself that the images would be crap on the DVD. Which is true.

The only problem was that I tried to fit all of the images on a CD and it took two CDs because it's about 1100 MB.

So I played around with iDVD and found, lo and behold, there is an option for making copies of all of the images on the DVD slideshow to the DVD-ROM portion of the disk at full resolution. And since a DVD disk is 4GB of space, there should be no problem. So now I can send out DVDs that will give you a slide show in your DVD player, and, if you have a computer, give you all of the full resolution files. Woo hoo!

Should have listened to Lori sooner.

Bumper crop

We have had a great produce crop in our garden this year:

I put the spoon next to the cucumber so that you can get a sense for the size. The thing is massive, and there is another even larger one on that way.

South Carolina

Lori was right, it was South Carolina, not North Carolina. Though I'll be damned if I know the difference.

Anyway, it was a great trip. Probably the best I have ever had to North, er, South Carolina to spend time with Mom and Carlos. Seeing Scott, Joni and their kids was amazing. Those kids are awesome, full of life, and really well balanced for teens and pre-teens. It was also great to see Thom and Jen, though Thom and I didn't get a chance to geek out on our 17" PowerBooks as I had hoped. But you can't have everything. Seeing the other families there was great as well. I wouldn't mind spending more time with Sarah and Tom, they are fun and their kids are really cool. I think Martha would make a great baby sitter for Megan.

On the downside, being the picture boy was draining. The first day I took over a thousand pictures and just sifting through it and processing all of it was a lengthy process. The first day was a bit much, after than I reeled it back to about 500 a day on average. Still, it's an awful lot to go through. Uncle David, who is a professional, came in for a couple of days and I think he took a couple hundred or so in all with his Nikon D70, and had about 50 good ones. I reckon that in all I took about 2500 shots and came away with about 250 keepers. So his ratio of one in four is much better than my one in ten.

I wouldn't mind doing the picture thing at the next family reunion thing (which is coming up really soon now), but I think it would be better if people gave me their memory cards in addition to my own. I'll always be the guy who takes the most shots in a room, but I almost never take the best shots in the room. So I could probably reel back my trigger finger a little more if I knew that other people in the room were taking pictures and that they would let me copy them. Plus, I think I need to be more assertive about posing folks. David did really well mainly because he could get people to stand up, move to a nice spot, and pose for a picture. Where as I usually operate on the sly, trying to get the candid shot here or there. That works, but sometimes posing is good too.

Some tips about taking tons of pictures over multiple days:

• Download often. This will keep the count of images you have to preen lower.
• Preen after you download. By which I mean; remove out of focus shots, and then try to reduce it to just the best shots and move those off to a best of the day (or however you are organizing) folder.
• Come up with an organizational system in advance. I did it by days. I would recommend against doing it by subject (person, etc.) though I advise that if there are multiple discreet events during the day that you sub-categorize by that.
• Get a processing workflow going that takes the images all the way from raw to publication, or almost publication. For me, I download the shots and clean the card. Then I rank all of the photos just on a first pass with one star, meaning keep or throw away. In focus and reasonably well composed, I keep, otherwise, toss. Then I export the panoramic pictures for external processing and delete them. Then I take the remaining pictures and rank them from 1 to 5 in a slide show. Above three will make it into Shutterfly. Then depending on how many pictures I have I will pick a number that means 'web publish'. Then I crop and adjust anything that will go out for prints or on the web, which is usually three stars or above. I then take those pictures and drop them into the daily folders that I use to publish. And that's it. With all that out of the way I can go back to taking more pictures.
• Share your memory cards, or preferably, just get access to other people's memory cards. This way you can take less pictures and enjoy the event.
• Pass the camera around. Easily the best shot from the whole trip was a shot that Thom took of Megan with my camera.
• If the point of the photo isn't abundantly clear then use the comment feature in your software to add a notation about what the picture is about. You will make it a lot easier on yourself if you download more often as well. If you don't do this you are likely to throw away pictures that were meaningful but aren't obvious or well composed.

Hope those help. I also recommend Digital Photography Hacks. I met the author in person. Great guy and he knows how to make the best of even the simplest digital camera.

9/11 Commission conversation

I was sitting next to a lovely couple coming back from their Jamaican vacation on the plane back from South Carolina. They noticed the commission report I was reading, and at the end of the trip one of them asked me if the hijackers had guns. I said, "No. They just had boxcutters.". She asked me why we didn't rush them. I told them that we did on flight 93, but that on the other flights they were convinced it was a standard hijacking for demands deal. The people on 93 knew better because they were on the phones dialing out and the plane had been delayed.

I was then a little curious about what they knew and followed up with, "You know that none of the hijackers came from Iraq. Right?" They both looked shocked and the man asked, "Then why are we there?" I shook my head and said, "Weapons of Mass Destruction?"

South Carolina Pictures

More pictures from South Carolina

9/11 Report

I had a much easier flight than Lori. I picked up a hard copy of the 9/11 report on the way out. It only cost $10, so I think it was worth it. The writing is excellent and the report is constructed like a solid historical account. The first chapter sucks you in with a retelling from the perspective of the individual flights. The book then goes into the back story in the chapters that follow, both from the Government perspective and from the al Qaida perspective. I'm about 1/3 of the way through it and, at this point, I strongly recommend it, particularly for the cheap price.

North Carolina Poker

One of the best parts of the North Carolina trip has been playing Poker with my brother's family and Thom. Thom has been the big winner up to now but last night my luck finally changed. I also decided to change my strategy a little and to lay off the early hands because the my brother's kids tend to burn themselves out on the early rounds pretty quickly. In fact I was joking with them that they were going all in on hands like a '6-3 off suit'.

So last night we were playing tournament style and at one point we were all all-in. Thom won that hand and took everyone except me out. He had 40,000 units, I had about 10,000. I then doubled up three times to take the lead back, which was really exciting. I got a little conservative then and got dealt a 6-3 off suit. I limped in and got the flop which had a six and a three. I checked, Thom raised and I raised again. Fourth street came with a King, again I checked, Thom raised and I raised again. On fifth street Thom went all in and I called. He had the King and I had two pair and finally won a tournament on the exact hand I had been telling the kids not to play all week.

Salling Clicker

Salling Clicker is the bomb. These guys are using their cell phone to control their Dobsonian telescope through Salling Clicker. Rock.

North Carolina

Good DSL. Solid Wi-fi. Best Buy is close by. Only 80 degrees in the shade. Gotta say, North Carolina is pretty nice. ;-) Pictures on the way probably later in the week. There are hundreds. I took 600 on the first day. So sifting down, cropping them and getting them web ready has been a challenge.

Can't be real

This story about Prime Minister Allawi can't be real. He shot six people in the head at point blank range? Unfortunately it's been picked up by three other papers. And I know the Melbourne Age where this story is from. It's a high quality paper.

This is some scary stuff.

World Series Of Poker

I'm an addict for the World Series of Poker. It's definitely the best poker show on TV. The banter is very funny. The commentators don't feel the need to explain each and every hand down to the nitty gritty. The table chatter is fantastic. They leave the good stuff in and they mic it up so that you can hear it.

The "Rabbit Hole cam" is a fantastic idea that brings a lot of resolution to the hand.

I'm a massive drooling fan-boy for this show. Every time the twang of the steel guitar goes and there is the flaming word 'Poker' on the screen I start salivating like Pavlov's dog.

OutFoxed

A new documentary has come out that provides some insight into the fair and balanced world of Fox News.

New Comments System

I've upgraded this blog to Moveable Type 3.0. This supports the TypeKey system which is a free registry that makes it easier for comment posters to be approved to comment on blog entries. I have to say, the editing interface is much improved as well. Much cleaner with better control.

More 9/11 odds

Here is a small statistics primer. Let's say you order a pizza with half pepperoni and half pickles. The pizza arrives, you pay. Then you put on a blindfold, spin the pizza, and pick a slice. There are two sides, you have to pick from one. The odds are 1 in 2, or 1/2, or 50%. So there is a 50% chance you will get pickles.

Now let's say you go to the dealer to get your car fixed. It's going to take a couple of days so they offer you a courtesy car. You get to choose blindly from nine cars. Three are clunkers, and six are nice. Thats three 3 in 9, or 3/9, or simplified to 1/3. So there is a 1 in 3 chance of picking a clunker.

I got a lot of heat for my posting on 9/11 odds, but I assure you these are just numbers. They in no way are meant to discount or downplay the tragedy of that day, which was horrific. My intention was to provide some context for understanding the true risk that this type of terrorism poses to us each and every day.

Let's start with some numbers. There were 3,000 people killed at the World Trade Center in 9/11. Of course this number would have been a lot higher were it not for the heroic acts of brave firefighting men and women. According to the government of New York the population of New York in 2000 was 8,008,278. The odds of being killed in New York city on 9/11 were 3000 in 8,008,278 or 1 in 2669. I overstated the risk in my original post by saying 1 in 2,000.

The second number I gave was the odds of being killed if you were in the complex. Once again I overstated the risk. I was under the impression that the number of people working in the WTC complex was around 25,000, turns out it's 50,000 with an additional 200,000 in tourists. Forgoing the tourists, 3,000 in 50,000 is 1 in 16. Once again, I acknowledge that the number would have been much higher were it not for the firefighters, many of whom lost their lives, and for people being smart and resourceful and getting out.

To put this in practical perspective simply ask a friend or coworker to pick a number between one and sixteen (inclusive) and then try to guess the number. If you guess the number exactly then, in our simulation, you would have died on September 11th had you been in the World Trade Center complex. If you pick any other number you would have lived.

One reader pointed out; "Terrorists want every man, woman and child in the United Stated to be killed. This is no over-estimation; this comes directly from their literature/propaganda." Let's talk numbers again. On 9/11 there were three thousand people killed and there were twenty hijackers. Roughly speaking this means that one terrorist was responsible for killing 150 people (20*150=3000). If there are 1,000,000 terrorists in the world, and there are 293,718,982 Americans, each terrorist would have to kill 293 Americans, in order to kill "every man, woman and child in the United Stated". So they would have to find a way to kill almost twice as many people per terrorist as on 9/11.

Practically speaking the extermination of very large groups of people (and 293 million is very very large) is impossible. Hitler tried this with his horrific Final Solution and killed 6.1 million people over five years.

So how would one go about killing all of us? Surely nuclear bombs would be the most effective way. But if you do the math it would take a lot of them. Let's take a super large bomb, ten megatons, it's blast radius is 15 kilometers. Squared it's 15 * 15 or 225. The United States land mass is 9,161,923 square kilometers. So to carpet bomb the country and kill us all would take 40,719 ten megaton bombs. That number is low because the yield on that bomb is very high. More practical bombs would have a lower yield, and thus it would take more. You could argue that you don't need to carpet bomb the country, but you do if you want absolutely everyone gone.

How about chemical weapons? These, like Sarin, work best in enclosed spaces (subways). So getting a large yield in a public space would be difficult and many people would survive. To be really effective, like Saddam on the Kurds, you need air and ground supremacy so that you can attack civilians directly unhindered. Air and ground supremacy would be hard to come by within the continental United States.

How about bioterror? The most virulent and deadly virus known to man is Ebola Zaire which is 90% deadly. This means that there would be 29 million of us still left if the terrorists somehow weaponized Ebola and were some how able to keep it from running so hot that it runs itself out (like it does today.)

All of these doomsday scenarios are extremely unlikely. They all posit an absolutely evil enemy with unlimited resources, access and manpower. The terrorist resources, manpower and access is very limited. And while they may be absolutely evil the mainstream Islamic world would not support them in genocide and would rally around us just as they did after 9/11.

The Al Qaida terrorists are kooks. It doesn't matter what they say in their literature/propaganda about killing every American since it simply isn't feasible. The only thing that will kill us all is an environment calamity like an asteroid strike or another ice age, and that would take everyone else out too.

Yes, we need to stop Al Qaida. Yes, we need to fight terror. Yes, we need to stop terrorists plots before they occur. Yes, the loss on 9/11 was terrible and horrific. But living in fear of terrorists, and giving up our civil liberties and freedoms in an effort to fight them is wrong.

Your odds of getting killed during the Revolutionary War, with British armies trooping across the countryside, were far higher then your odds of getting killed in a terrorist incident today. Yet somehow or forefathers saw their way to building a country of unprecedented personal freedoms in the aftermath of that war. Now, two hundred years later, a bunch of kooks hijack planes and kill three thousand innocent people, and we are supposed to give up our civil rights and rational government for and by the people. I don't think so.

Reagan and Bush

It occurs to me now that the era of Bush is much like the era of Reagan in that both are times of fear and dread. In the era of Reagan we lived in constant fear of the red menace and total nuclear war. Movies like War Games and Red Dawn pounded into us the pressing menace of war with the Russians. And yet, it's clear now that that we were never in any great danger of invasion, and that the cold war, at that time, was no where near as hot as it had been in the days of Kennedy and Johnson.

And here we are, living in fear again. If you listen to the right wing pundits we are fighting World War III, and terror is looming at any local mall or cinema, and god help you if you vote, because they will surely attack that. Tom Ridge has gone so far as to plan for suspension of elections due to terrorist attack.

Seems a bit odd to me since, statistically speaking, if you had been in New York City on September 11th your odds of dying were one in two thounsand. Your odds of dying if you were in the World Trade Center complex were one in eight.

Falling on a sword

If there was ever a more clear cut case of an agency falling on it's sword for a President I can't think of one. At this point, I think we are all supposed to believe that our naive, but good hearted and godly President, was lead astray by the evil doings of the CIA. Are we supposed to take comfort in that? I really can't see how finding the blame in the CIA will help the President get re-elected. It just looks bad from every angle.

Plus, this still doesn't account for the post-invasion stuff, like Abu Gharaib, the unilateral approach to the war, Halliburton's no-bid contract, Rumsfield's seven month prisoner detention, and on and on. Are there enough agencies to take the heat for all of this stuff?

Ripley Article

The Ripley letter got into the San Mateo Independent:

Radioactive Asshole

According to one Pakistani general if they don't catch Osama by election time he will end up with a radioactive rear end.

""If we don't find these guys by the election, they are going to stick this whole nuclear mess up our asshole.""

Better get on that I suppose.

Bad Bruckhiemer Screeplay

Is it just me or does this sound like it's from a bad action movie screenplay:

"...bin Laden and Zawahiri continue to direct the planning of attacks from their remote hideouts somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border"

It's from an article on CNN today.

Nice comment

This comment was so nice I thought I would share it with the rest of the group:

"This is what happens when everyone is a faggot liberal like you Jack Off. "

It was attached to the pictures of my daughter in her PJs from last night. That's probably a mistake though. It was probably intended to go on 'Scary Night'. Either way, it hardly merits much thought. The poster was so proud of his pearl of wisdom that he used a fake name and email address.

Scary Night

Lori went out with a friend tonight, so to make it a little easier on Megan I took her and Sadie for a walk around the block as Lori left. A couple of minutes into our walk I spotted a 60lb Yellow Labrador off leash with no collar just walking around the area. Sadie spotted him and started barking and he came at us. I had no idea what his intentions were so I tried yelling at him to go away. He kept coming. Sadie kept barking and Megan wanted to run towards him to play with him.

I picked up a small stone and threw it at his feet. He jumped back a little and then came towards us again. So I picked up Megan, some more stones and tightened up on Sadie's lead and retreated to the house. At times he was really close. He may have been a great dog, but without a lead, or a collar there was no way of knowing and Sadie really didn't like him.

As I was crossing the street some people were in front of a house on the corner that notoriously has a dog that runs loose without a collar. I asked the couple (who had a kid in a stroller) if it was there dog. The main said no, and then followed it up with the dumbest remark I have heard in a while, "He's just a puppy." Riiiight. Big dumb lab, dog fight, me and Megan in the middle. No good. Duh.

This neighborhood is really bad for strays. Stray pits. Stray collies. Now stray labs. And what kills me is that this guy just didn't seem to care, at all. No inclination to help. No inclination that there may have been any problem at all.

Megan in her new PJs

Wiki Spam

So the spammer creeps have finally gotten wise to the fact that most Wikis are open. Three of my pages this morning on MuttMansion were defaced with Casino spam. So I put a password on the Wiki to avoid tampering.

Baseball

Megan saw her first baseball game today. It was the Giants versus the Rockies. We went primarily because it was a free perk from Macromedia. What's even better is that the seats were in the corporate luxury suite:

The view of the park was pretty good:

And the view of the field was pretty good too:

Plus there was free Wi-Fi to every seat in the place. Which got Chris pretty excited:

Megan really enjoyed herself. It was her first game and though I don't think she had any clue what was going on I think she enjoyed the noise and the excitement of the crowd. Given that the Giants lost, of course.

The next time she will go to a game I am sure it will be in the regular seats. Not sure I would like that as much though.

More pictures here.

Disease Trading Cards

We had a strange talk around the office a couple of weeks back about the effect of a virus or a left behind-style event that would decimate a large percentage of the population. Thankfully the CDC has come up with handy reference cards for some of the various diseases we were discussing.

Happy July Fourth

I spent a great July 4th with Megan and Lori, and our good friends Pam, Yvonne and Josephine. Lots of pictures of that to come soon. We had a nice day hanging out and watching Yvonne BBQ on her new grill while I fended off the second day of bad allergies.

Another thing I did was to watch this excellent reading of the Declaration of Independence.

Update: Many pictures available here.

Buckaroo Banzai

I'm a big fan of Buckaroo Banzai. It was a funky and fun movie from the 80s that all of my high school buddies and I rallied around. But I was left wondering how the movie ever got made. It was so odd.

Turns out that it was sold as an action film but during the filming the producers obviously saw that they had been duped and basically gave up on it. To make sure that was the case the director inserted a watermelon prominently in one scene that was never supposed to be there. The dailies went out and not a peep from the production company. So from then on they just did what they wanted to do.

Spider Man 2

I saw Spider Man 2 with Mel on Friday. It was far better than the original and I liked it a lot. It was more like an opera than a movie. Each act was a complete story in itself and contained lots of action and character development. I hope Hollywood looks at the success of this movie as an indicator that we can handle more complex plots with a blend of action and real character development.

Cassini Pictures

The pictures coming back from the Cassini probe are awesome.