Thursday, April 27, 2006
American Theocracy revisited ...
Following on from my post of a couple of days ago about reading American Theocracy, I just noticed the PvP Online had a comic about it a couple of days ago. Current affairs and computer geekiness together. I love it :)
If you have no idea what its means, you probably weren't around when the PC/XT first came out and tried to eek us away from our Apple IIe's ... A more primitive age indeed.
If you have no idea what its means, you probably weren't around when the PC/XT first came out and tried to eek us away from our Apple IIe's ... A more primitive age indeed.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
There's an alert on CNN today that reads "President Bush to temporarily halt deposits to strategic petroleum reserve to make more oil available for consumers ..." ...
That doesn't sound good. Am I the only one for whom this brings back memories of 1973, where gas stations ran out of gas, and the ones that still had it had queues a mile long.
Of course the thing back then was OPEC refused to ship oil to us because we didn't denounce Israel after the Yom Kippur War. Once it all got smoothed out, the spigot got turned back on, and life returned to normal.
The big difference now is that OPEC is pulling out of the ground as fast as it can. And oil is still over $70 a barrel!
Yesterday CNN reported that two thirds of Americans are saying the high cost of gas has caused them hardship, with 23% of those calling it "severe". I suspect at this stage that a lot of folks would be giving up their SUVs if they didn't owe more than they're worth (thank GM and Ford's financing incentives for that one).
The real irony is that gas in the US is still a fraction of its cost in Europe and Japan where people already drive more fuel efficient cars. In the UK its threating to top £1 a litre, which is $6.75 per gallon. And trust me, folks in the UK aren't earning much if any more than folks in the States.
Now if only the US Government would be more aggressive in demanding higher fuel efficiencies, then perhaps we wouldn't be in this crunch in the first place.
That doesn't sound good. Am I the only one for whom this brings back memories of 1973, where gas stations ran out of gas, and the ones that still had it had queues a mile long.Of course the thing back then was OPEC refused to ship oil to us because we didn't denounce Israel after the Yom Kippur War. Once it all got smoothed out, the spigot got turned back on, and life returned to normal.
The big difference now is that OPEC is pulling out of the ground as fast as it can. And oil is still over $70 a barrel!
Yesterday CNN reported that two thirds of Americans are saying the high cost of gas has caused them hardship, with 23% of those calling it "severe". I suspect at this stage that a lot of folks would be giving up their SUVs if they didn't owe more than they're worth (thank GM and Ford's financing incentives for that one).
The real irony is that gas in the US is still a fraction of its cost in Europe and Japan where people already drive more fuel efficient cars. In the UK its threating to top £1 a litre, which is $6.75 per gallon. And trust me, folks in the UK aren't earning much if any more than folks in the States.
Now if only the US Government would be more aggressive in demanding higher fuel efficiencies, then perhaps we wouldn't be in this crunch in the first place.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Desert Code Camp is coming to the Phoenix area on Saturday May 6th. There are lots of great talks already on the roster.
I am giving two of the talks:
Modularize your applications using ObjectBuilder
Writing loosely couple WinForms apps using Composite UI Application Block (CAB)
If you're interested in Object Builder (part of Enterprise Library 2.0) or in the Composite UI Application Block, and you are in the Phoenix area, here's a chance to hang out with some like minded folks. The topics really are a lot more fun than they sound :)
Learn more about the other Desert Code Camp sessions at:
http://www.desertcodecamp.com/
I am giving two of the talks:
If you're interested in Object Builder (part of Enterprise Library 2.0) or in the Composite UI Application Block, and you are in the Phoenix area, here's a chance to hang out with some like minded folks. The topics really are a lot more fun than they sound :)
Learn more about the other Desert Code Camp sessions at:
http://www.desertcodecamp.com/
I can see the end of the tunnel!
Sorry for the sporadic nature of my posts. Its been a hectic month, between projects for work and looking for a house. Still a number of things are coming together:
We found a house. It is in Ahwatukee, which is on the south side of Phoenix, sandwiched between South Mountain and the Gila River Indian Community. We managed to find a place with 5 bedrooms on 3 levels, with a nice pool and even a basketball court. Best of all, it has almost unobstructed south-sky views with little to the south but mountains and scrub, so it should be nice and dark if I ever get that telescope I've been hankering after.
Project work is getting done. At one point I was working one two to three projects at once, but thankfully thats backed down some now and I have more of them behind me than in front.
I got my new notebook. The company got me a shiny new Alienware Aurora m7700, with the AMD 4800+ dual core proc, 2GB of memory and dual 80GB 7200RPM SATA drives in RAID 0 (striped) configuration. It is soooo fast compared to the Dell Inspiron I had before. Drive performance is off the hook. Only problem is the video card seems to overheat, causing the screen to go black while the machine blue-screens and reboots. Hopefully backing down the hardware acceleration and helping the ventilation will do the trick - I'd hate to have to send it back at this point :(
The wife and kids just went to Japan. Our annual ritual of them going to Japan for two months started with us waking up at 4am yesterday and stumbling over to the airport. The good news is I'll be able to get lots done at the weekend. The bad news is that I'll be moving all the stuff into the new house by myself. Oh, and I won't get to see the wife and kids for two months. Last couple of years my 3 year old daughter would forget how to speak English in that time, but would become fluent in Japanese. This year should be interesting.
Buying a new house in a much more expensive (than Austin) area is also leading me to consider trading in my car for something cheaper and more fuel efficient. I'm only a year into the two year least on my Infiniti M45, but between the monthly payment and the cost of gas, I'm highly tempted to go totally the other way, on cost, fuel efficiency (and sadly performance) and get a Scion xB. I love those boxy little guys. I don't have to decide quite yet. Once we get in the house, I can see how the finances hold out, and where gas gets to in the traditionally high summer months.
On a related note, I just got done reading (or more accurately, listening to the audiobook of) American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips. Phillips was an advisor to Nixon and is very thorough and broad in his perspectives rather than just toeing one line or the other. Phillips is also credited with having sowed the seeds that got the Republican party where it is today (which I don't think he is too happy about - he's no big fan of either Bush). The book is actually quite scary, in that it makes the case that a lot of what is going on in the broad sense in the US today in terms of religiosity, indebtedness, resource dependency and getting into wars they couldn't afford are all boilerplate symptoms of the ultimate downfalls of the previous major hegemonies - the Spanish, Dutch and British empires. While some may argue that the US has this or that capability that China doesn't have (say, inventiveness) that doesn't change the fact that the US is horribly in debt and China holds a lot of the debt paper. Once their own consumer market gets to a size where they don't feel the need to support our economy anymore, things could turn nasty real fast. One other interesting observation in the book was that while Spain, Holland and England all were super religous towards the end ("Onward Christian Soldiers" was written in England for WW1), none of them could be called religous nations today, so the US is probably as religious now as it is likely to get.
We found a house. It is in Ahwatukee, which is on the south side of Phoenix, sandwiched between South Mountain and the Gila River Indian Community. We managed to find a place with 5 bedrooms on 3 levels, with a nice pool and even a basketball court. Best of all, it has almost unobstructed south-sky views with little to the south but mountains and scrub, so it should be nice and dark if I ever get that telescope I've been hankering after.
Project work is getting done. At one point I was working one two to three projects at once, but thankfully thats backed down some now and I have more of them behind me than in front.
I got my new notebook. The company got me a shiny new Alienware Aurora m7700, with the AMD 4800+ dual core proc, 2GB of memory and dual 80GB 7200RPM SATA drives in RAID 0 (striped) configuration. It is soooo fast compared to the Dell Inspiron I had before. Drive performance is off the hook. Only problem is the video card seems to overheat, causing the screen to go black while the machine blue-screens and reboots. Hopefully backing down the hardware acceleration and helping the ventilation will do the trick - I'd hate to have to send it back at this point :(
The wife and kids just went to Japan. Our annual ritual of them going to Japan for two months started with us waking up at 4am yesterday and stumbling over to the airport. The good news is I'll be able to get lots done at the weekend. The bad news is that I'll be moving all the stuff into the new house by myself. Oh, and I won't get to see the wife and kids for two months. Last couple of years my 3 year old daughter would forget how to speak English in that time, but would become fluent in Japanese. This year should be interesting.
Buying a new house in a much more expensive (than Austin) area is also leading me to consider trading in my car for something cheaper and more fuel efficient. I'm only a year into the two year least on my Infiniti M45, but between the monthly payment and the cost of gas, I'm highly tempted to go totally the other way, on cost, fuel efficiency (and sadly performance) and get a Scion xB. I love those boxy little guys. I don't have to decide quite yet. Once we get in the house, I can see how the finances hold out, and where gas gets to in the traditionally high summer months.
On a related note, I just got done reading (or more accurately, listening to the audiobook of) American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips. Phillips was an advisor to Nixon and is very thorough and broad in his perspectives rather than just toeing one line or the other. Phillips is also credited with having sowed the seeds that got the Republican party where it is today (which I don't think he is too happy about - he's no big fan of either Bush). The book is actually quite scary, in that it makes the case that a lot of what is going on in the broad sense in the US today in terms of religiosity, indebtedness, resource dependency and getting into wars they couldn't afford are all boilerplate symptoms of the ultimate downfalls of the previous major hegemonies - the Spanish, Dutch and British empires. While some may argue that the US has this or that capability that China doesn't have (say, inventiveness) that doesn't change the fact that the US is horribly in debt and China holds a lot of the debt paper. Once their own consumer market gets to a size where they don't feel the need to support our economy anymore, things could turn nasty real fast. One other interesting observation in the book was that while Spain, Holland and England all were super religous towards the end ("Onward Christian Soldiers" was written in England for WW1), none of them could be called religous nations today, so the US is probably as religious now as it is likely to get.
This one is a couple of weeks old, but it takes a few weeks for this stuff to trickle down to Arizona...
Just got the third album by The Streets, the nom-de-verse UK's rap empresario Mike Skinner. "The hardest way to make an easy leaving" its too bad, but it didn't grab me on the first listen like the first two albums did.
One thing thats pretty funny ... One track "When you wasn't famous" is about Mikey Streets having sex with an unnamed pop star who did crazy amounts of crack cocaine and still "looked great on CD:UK" (kid-friendly pop show) the next day, then Mike was still wasted. The funny part was all the speculation in the UK tabloid press (seems like Mike has them figured out at least) about who the mystery girl was.
Then, when he did the song on Top of the Pops (yet-another-pop-show) he dedicated the song to Cheryl Tweedy, of the girl-pop group Girls Aloud (pictured below). This was a joke apparently, and caused a quick rebuttal from Cheryl's agent. Just as well, as she is about to get married to Arsenal's Ashley Cole.
The bit that struck me as odd was that if Cheryl really is the girl in the song, wouldn't Ashley realize? After all, you'd think he would know if his fiancee liked to toot mad amounts of rock!
Side note: "Its a fair crack" is Irish slang meaning "Its pretty good". Sorry - I couldn't help it.
Just got the third album by The Streets, the nom-de-verse UK's rap empresario Mike Skinner. "The hardest way to make an easy leaving" its too bad, but it didn't grab me on the first listen like the first two albums did.
One thing thats pretty funny ... One track "When you wasn't famous" is about Mikey Streets having sex with an unnamed pop star who did crazy amounts of crack cocaine and still "looked great on CD:UK" (kid-friendly pop show) the next day, then Mike was still wasted. The funny part was all the speculation in the UK tabloid press (seems like Mike has them figured out at least) about who the mystery girl was.
Then, when he did the song on Top of the Pops (yet-another-pop-show) he dedicated the song to Cheryl Tweedy, of the girl-pop group Girls Aloud (pictured below). This was a joke apparently, and caused a quick rebuttal from Cheryl's agent. Just as well, as she is about to get married to Arsenal's Ashley Cole.
The bit that struck me as odd was that if Cheryl really is the girl in the song, wouldn't Ashley realize? After all, you'd think he would know if his fiancee liked to toot mad amounts of rock!
Side note: "Its a fair crack" is Irish slang meaning "Its pretty good". Sorry - I couldn't help it.
