Category: Essay

The furor over the movie version of the Da Vinci Code is pretty funny. Calling a book of fiction heresy strikes even religious Catholic friends of mine as funny.

“Oh, yeah, we keep our albino monks under SPF 200, but for a good contribution into the plate I can let you talk with one,” one friend said. [5/21 postscript: There is a monk named Silas @ the NYC office!]

My writing groups are up in arms about the poor quality of the writing as well. There are analytical pages about Dan Brown’ questionable style and grammatical manglings.

I think a good escapist movie is a great thing to see. And no one ever accused Barbara Cartland of amazing writing.

Entertainment should not be confused with reality. No matter how close some morons might believe the resemblance.

I’m off to a business trip tomorrow and wanted to treat myself to dry cleaning and pre-ironed shirts every morning while away, so I took my load on Tuesday to my local dry cleaner. I dumped the pile of shirts and pants on the counter.

The attendant looked at the pile, then mournfully at me. “Sir,” she said, with a Mexican accent, “I can take your clothing, but it won’t be ready for at least four days.”

The sign outside read “same day cleaning,” and the usual turnaround was about 36 hours. I cocked an eyebrow.

“It’s the pressers,” she said. “They left Monday morning and never came back.” She pointed to a “Help Wanted” sign displayed prominently in the window. “No pressers at all. We just got back Saturday’s dry cleaning. Don’t just take my word for it,” she said as I thanked her for my candor and scooped up my clothes, “is everywhere. Everyone running.”

Two other dry cleaners also had help wanted signs, and I stopped by the next day, hoping to avoid expensive hotel cleaners, with my load at a local family chain. They too had a ‘Help Wanted’ sign on the door.

“Any chance of getting this done by Friday?” I asked.

The clean-cut young man behind the counter nodded confidently. “Not a problem,” he said. “After five today if you liked.”

“So you’ve got no problems with pressers?”

“Nope,” he replied. We’re doing just fine.”

I left lighter in arms and full of hope. Came back this afternoon to pick up the clothes.

“You still have the sign up,” I said to the young Hispanic woman behind the counter. “How’s the work in the back?”

She shrugged.

Then another young man, from the same owning family I think, wriggled past her in a vain attempt to catch an incoming phone call. He was sweating, and there were people crawling all around the hanging rails of bagged laundry in the next room.

“I’m glad you were able to keep your workers,” I said to the man. “I had problems at other stores.”

He gave me a tired look. “It’s quiet in the back right now,” he said. “There’s no one working in the back. And the conveyor belt is broken, so we have to pull everything off by hand.” He wiped sweat from his face. “But we’re only down two pressers for tomorrow and,” he pointed at the sign, “maybe some others will come back.”

I assume by “others” he means ‘low-paid, hiding from the INS’ kind of others, and not the unemployed citizen or eager high schooler others.

“Don’ worry,” my cashier said as she handed me the bill. “My sister come back tomorrow.”

“One down,” the man said. “I just have to find one more.”

The rumors around town are rife with planned raids at public schools, illegal immigrant detention camps south of Waco, and general fear.

I wonder if my pre-Holocaust parents felt similarly to the missing pressers. At least I’m pretty sure their end will be less certain than that of my parents.

Q: What do you get when you hire a right-wing commentator and a reporter to the White House?
A: A Common Porter. Someone to shoulder the burden of “Message of the Day” for a debased chief executive.

On this Pesach holiday, let’s remember:

• Holocaust survivors freed from slave labor
• Freedom for women and African-Americans
• Liberation of gays, lesbians and transexuals from the shackles of shame

Still enslaved and yearning for freedom:

• The poor and disadvantaged in Israel and abroad
• Humans suffering under the chains of despotic slavery
• Peaceful Palestinians and Iraqis chafing with the desire to live their lives in dignity and peace

Haredi Jerusalem is aboil over a teenaged father being charged and jailed for admitting killing his infant son, threatening violence in the streets of Jerusalem.

Passover did not spare the Jewish babe killed during the month of Nissan. The Tenth Plague has hit, both the three-month old baby and the nineteen year old father. But the pillar of fire threatened by some extremists would be a new one for our Seder story. A pillar not of heavenly sign and safety, but hatred and fervor unfettered by common sense, Jewish ethics, or the rule of even Noatic law.

I think perhaps this anger is projected from the very community that failed the father, and failed the son. They should be angry! Angry that they allowed a marriage, created by the community, of a boy so damaged, so witless so as to kill his own son. Anger at not being watchful for the real, instead of imagined dangers that lurk in their insular community. Angry at themselves for standing by and being responsible, by proxy, for the death of a boy who drew his first breath given from god only three months previous.

The fire the Haredi speak of is far more lethal to them than to lawful Israel, however they choose to wield it.

I had two interesting conversations this past week. One was with some Intel mid-range folks, who were pushing really hard for my organization to embrace the new Intel Macs. We’re currently freezing all Apple purchases, because some of our key software doesn’t work on the new platforms (and, no, it’s not a ‘Mac Classic mode’ issue).

They were keen to tell me all about the cool features of their dual-core processor, and made appropriately sexy-sounding noises about upcoming ‘multi-core’ boards. This compared to Steve Jobs’ folks, who don’t know themselves when their sales lives are about to change.

They were especially interested in talking with me about their onboard desktop management and enterprise management tools, which, for me, is a major stumbling block in deploying yet more unmanageable machines. (Okay, okay, they _are_ manageable, they just don’t play with any of the same sets of tools we use for our PC-based systems.)

Today I met the Apple SE, a breath of fresh air when dealing with vendors. Call’s ’em as he sees ’em. I asked him whether Apple was going to do anything with all the neat, new tools their platform now affords. Being a Jobbite, of course, he had no roadmap. But, he pointed out, it would sure be funny to see how this played out with the PC makers. After all, he said, Intel didn’t dedicate over a thousand folks to get Apple, a tiny market player, retooled for their chipset; there had to be more to it.

Imagine the scramble if Intel popped Microsoft out of the desktop management business, just like popping a CPU out of a board. What’s better, hardware-level management regardless of operating system, or hoping that booting and loading all those gajillions of layers of drivers succeeds before updating a computer?

I think Microsoft has a lot of changes in store. Not counting, of course, getting Vista out the door and into the market. I’m still not seeing the value of bloated operating systems.

In my last post I went over the vote count. In that analysis, Kadima had a 61-seat majority among its solid allies: Labor, Meretz and the Pensioners’ Party. That majority, with the decision today to move one seat from Labor to Ram-Ta’al, one of the Arab parties, reinforces my comments regarding the demographic shift. It also shows just how truly democratic the Israeli democratic process functions.

The problem was with ballots that had been tallied but entered for the wrong party. Even with the fate of Kadima’s plan in possible balance, the reassignment of a critical seat went without much of any comment. True, the 20th Labor Party seat went from one Arab MK to another, but it’s the party that lost 5% of its power, and Kadima must now face the more serious choice of how to create and maintain a government with only a 50% share of assumed support in parliment.

Of course, full disclosure is necessary here. The party list system is seriously flawed. Lists are a function of what each party believes is important: don’t look to find the voting demographic, or women, given any kind of fair representation.

[A technical primer: The Israeli Knesset has one hundred twenty seats, doled out proportionally to parties according to their percentage wins at the election poles (which are for parties, not people). Parties create their parlimentary seating lists (usually) before the elections, and the list is used to seat members of parliment in the order of their seating priority. Parties that get less than a certain percentage of the vote get no seats (the votes are lost). Parties may agree to ‘pool’ votes, so that there are no seats lost when both parties have extra votes insufficient to deserve an additional seat in parliment. See here and here for more information.]

Journalists are wimps.

Iran, the country that doesn’t have the spare parts to keep its thirty year old aircraft in the air, has superweapons! Missiles that can’t be tracked, can avoid radar, yet are MIRVed. Torpedoes that fly underwater at over 200MPH, also sonar-evading. Read about it in any major media outlet!

While Teheran has ‘created’ its own fighters, tanks, missiles and other weaponry, the reality is that they have adapted (read repainted for the most part) North Korean technology. Guns for oil… just like Kuwait, Saudia Arabia and now Iraq.

Just a few weeks ago the papers broke the story about how Saddam Hussein had kept the fiction of weapons of mass destruction alive not for the ears of warmongering Bush klansmen, but for his own people, to keep them in fear of what he’d done to the Kurds.

And now the mass media is doing it again, with silence, with acceptance, instead of with jeers. The country that can’t support keep its own planes in the air, the country where millions of its citizens in mud brick houses, a country that hasn’t had an original thought since the corrupt Shah was ousted, a country that looks to North Korea for even slight technological achievement, is assumed to have leapfrogged all the advanced technology research centers of the world?

Reporting this idiotic pap, in this way, plays right into Bush administration hands that would rather ratchet up the fear, for internal political purposes, than portray Iran as the pathetic hotbed for suicidal radicals that is really is.

So what if this is a real threat? Where’ the news media analysis to support that? How do we assess such developments? From Karen Hughes’ situation room? From Rumsfeld’s office? From unnamed sources in the Bush administration? Me, I’d rather hear an analysis by a report who has spoken to real rocket scientists, or to non-factional experts in the field. Instead we hear translated half-quotes from Iranian television and their military press office releases.

Journalism isn’t just about the scoop interview or the ‘first to the presses.’ It is about analysis of the data, the credibility of the source and the ‘big picture.’ Even if embedded reporting is sexier. Try harder, folks, try harder!

[A side note: In preparing this blog entry I researched over one hundred separate articles. The vast majority, as you can read through these links, all hark back to the same AP piece written by Ali Akbar Dareini, their Iranian reporter. They were retouched or lightly edited for the end news outlet. Perhaps there aren’t anywhere near as many journalists as we think…]

I can’t run the only organization that has this problem. On one hand, our plant management folks are talking about the millions of dollars we can save each year in deploying power management software on our computers. With over one hundred sites, all those humming computers between 5PM and 8AM, a lot of heat is getting cooled for no particular reason.

At the same time, the rise in grid computing (in which I have more than a passing interest), demands CPU cycles to be used to help create cures for cancer, new peptide polymers to create the latest designer drug to fight the dreaded liver spots, or seaching for Alf’s home planet.

There’s no confluence of interests in the cube farm. Sure, monitors can be powered down. With flat screen monitors, the heat difference is hugely lowered anyway. But that CPU, twiddling its digital thumbs for of most it’s glacial interaction with humans, can’t both effectively race for the cure while simultaneously give the HVAC systems — and our environment — a break.

The solution is to move grid computing away from the desktop, where the erg ROI is shaky and the grid software becomes an additional load on the desktop TCO, and back to the server. With their ability to manage larger jobs better, and with concomitantly faster payoffs, grid computing can be better accomodated. This is the logical direction: the grid community’s ROI is better and the incremental cooling costs are better managed in a more efficient and better controlled environment.

And we’ll let our faithful desktop servants sleep when we leave them at the end of the day.