Zorts Lives

Where did the jobs go?

2012-01-22T10:15:00.000-05:00

Today's New York Times has a long article (How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work) that offers a discouraging picture for job growth in the U.S. The problem isn't labor costs per se; rather, it's that the entire manufacturing supply chain has shifted from the U.S. to Asia. - a change initially caused by labor costs, but now self-perpetuating.

One former high-ranking Apple executive said that the focus on Asia “came down to two things.” Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point.”

The glass used in the iPhone's display provides a great example, As Corning's CFO observed:

“Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China. We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”

This isn't a change that can be undone overnight.

But besides the supply chain issue, there's labor flexibility. That innocent-looking comment that factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” really means that workers can be hired - and fired - on short notice. The jobs may pay well, by local standards, but there is no job security. Large portions of business risk are outsourced to employees.

Job security is an issue labor unions fought hard for in the first half of the 20th century, with considerable success. It's hard to argue that job insecurity is a good thing for workers and the communities they live in, but this is exactly what U.S. manufacturers - and Republican politicians - are asking for when they want an easing of labor regulations and oppose unionization.

So what's the solution? Over time, I have to believe that Asia's workers will insist on better conditions, there will be greater balance between regions in terms of labor rules, and manufacturing will gradually redistribute closer to the point of consumption. But that will take decades.

I don't know how to solve this problem. But I do know that any politician - Left or Right - who promises a short-term solution is pedaling snake oil.

Rick Santorum is Google-bombed...

2012-01-15T19:57:00.002-05:00

...and it made this week's issue of The New Yorker. The short article Bombs Away is a cautionary tale regarding importance of managing search results (to the extent that that's possible...). Warning: the top Google hit for Santorum is Not Suitable for Work.

My mother is gone

2011-12-06T22:28:00.001-05:00

Dancing with Mom in early 2009

Mom died just shy of three weeks ago. I can't really write about this yet, but here is a link to the obituary we placed in the Lancaster paper.

Halloween

2011-11-15T22:21:00.001-05:00

I like Halloween. It's a low-pressure, high-fun holiday. This year it wound up being spread out over several days, which made it even nicer.

RuthAnne dressed up for work on Saturday as a contruction worker...

...and again on Monday as a (pretty urban-looking) cowhand.

As usual, we carved pumpkins. The three really nice ones are Katy's handywork; the moon and stars is mine.

We had a lot of trick-or-treaters (as usual), including our dancing buddies Melissa and Robert, and their son, Ethan, who came in for for a chat.

Sailing Vineyard Sound

2011-10-11T19:37:00.001-04:00

Katy and I spent last Wednesday through Saturday sailing her father's 30' Morgan sailboat from its home in Waquoit Bay to Cuttyhunk, Oak Bluffs and Edgartown. It was my first real sailing trip (I'd done one small overnight many years earlier) and, it turns out, the first time Katy has done a multi-day cruise as the "responsible adult" onboard. We had generally excellent weather; it was sunny all four days. Wednesday had extremely high winds that were, frankly, a little scary, but in general the sailing was great.

Pictures are available in this Picasa album.

Sailing, October 2011

I managed to break the 5th metatarsal bone in my right foot on the first day, as we set out to explore Cuttyhunk. I found I could stand and walk a little with the foot bandaged and shoved into a hiking boot (ouch...), so we decided not to abort the trip and, in fact, extended by a night. When we got to Oak Bluffs and Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard I was able to get around on rented bicycles, so even our sightseeing was only slightly curtailed. I did, however, have to spend most of my sailing time at the wheel; moving around on the boat, especially on rocking seas, was not practical.

We used a mixture of paper charts and GPS for navigation. The charts were good for trip planning and "the big picture", while the GPS excelled at helping us stay on course and navigate through the often-narrow channels (surrounded by shoals and, in many cases, submerged rocks...) of the Elizabeth Islands. It would be very easy to become GPS-dependent.

I had more fun that I actually expected to; I thought that much of the sailing would be boring, and it was anything but that. I'm eager to do more - next spring, once the weather warms up and my foot has healed.

"We can barely defend ourselves."

2011-08-02T17:06:00.000-04:00

Today's New York Times has several articles regarding the apparent debt ceiling deal, and this one contains this quote from Republican representative Bobby Schilling, member of the Armed Services Committee. He was expressing concern over the "automatic cuts" that would engage if certain legislative milestones are not met.

Mr. Schilling whipped out a little chart that showed a reduction in bombers and other weapons programs over recent years. He said the proposed cuts to the military if a new Congressional committee should fail to come up with a deficit reduction plan that passes muster with Congress “really scares me,” he said. “We’re on the fringe right now. We can barely defend ourselves.” (emphasis added)

Really??? We can barely defend ourselves???

OMG. What is this bozo doing on the House Armed Services Committee?

The Last Reentry

2011-08-01T09:32:00.000-04:00

The crew of the International Space Station took these pictures of the final reentry of a space shuttle. For the original images, visit NASA's archive of images from ISS Expedition 28. I learned of these images from the August 1, 2011 edition of Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD).

Latest Juxtacomm case stayed

2011-07-28T10:30:00.000-04:00

In the continuing saga of the Juxtacomm patent tale, the case against Lanier Parking Systems has been stayed, pending the outcome of the reexamination of the patent. From Pacer:

Case 3:11-cv-00299-JRS Document 74 Filed 07/21/11

Civil Action No. 3:11BCVB299

United States District Court
Eastern District of Virginia
Richmond Division
JUXTACOMM-TEXAS SOFTWARE, LLC, Plaintiff,
v.
LANIER PARKING SYSTEMS OF VIRGINIA, INC. et al., Defendants.

ORDER

THIS MATTER is before the Court on a Motion to Stay Case Pending Reexamination filed by Defendant Lanier Parking Systems of Virginia, Inc. (ECF No. 39). Defendants Dominion Tower Financial Associates LLC, First Tower Associates LLC, First States Investors 3500 LLC, James Center Property LLC, and Hines Riverfront Plaza, LP have joined the motion (ECF Nos. 55, 57, 65, 71), which Plaintiff JuxtaComm-Texas Software, LLC, opposes. The Court held a hearing on this matter on July 20, 2011.

Courts deciding motions to stay patent litigation pending reexamination consider the following factors:

(1) whether discovery is complete and a trial date is scheduled;
(2) whether a stay would simplify the matters at issue; and
(3) whether a stay would unduly prejudice or clearly disadvantage the non-moving party.

NTP, Inc. v. T-Mobile, USA, Inc., No. 3:07–CV–548, 2007 WL 3254796, at *2 (E.D.Va. Nov. 2, 2007).

Each of these considerations favors granting a stay. First, the status of the reexamination is advanced when juxtaposed with the stage of litigation—that is, while the reexamination has reached the Final Office Action stage, this litigation is in its infancy. Furthermore, JuxtaComm served the Defendants after receiving a Final Office Action that rejected virtually all the claims at issue in this litigation. Next, it appears likely that final resolution of the reexamination would simplify matters in this case by indicating whether JuxtaComm has grounds to proceed in this patent infringement matter. Finally, any harms that JuxtaComm experiences as a result of a stay would be recoverable through monetary damages.

For these reasons, which will be discussed in greater detail in the forthcoming Memorandum Opinion, the Court finds that the Defendants’ request is not a dilatory litigation tactic but a reasonable request designed to prevent this litigation from proceeding under a “cloud of invalidity.” Accordingly, the Court GRANTS the motion to stay and DIRECTS the Plaintiff to file reexamination status reports every 120 days.
Let the Clerk send a copy of this Order to all counsel of record.

It is SO ORDERED.

ENTERED this 21st day of July 2011.
/s/
James R. Spencer
Chief United States District Judge

Noanet Woodlands

2011-07-17T17:28:00.000-04:00

This morning I drove out to Dover to visit Noanet Woodlands, yet another Trustees of Reservations site. It turns out to be a bit tricky to find. It's not marked with the usual, large "Trustees of Reservations" sign; it's actually accessed thru Caryl Park. If you look closely at the entrance to the eastern parking lot for the park there's a small mention of the Trustees site, but you'll never see it from the road.

I only covered a small portion of the available trails; this is a very large reservation.

View Larger Map

I suggest staying on the side trails as much as possible; the ~~wealthy~~ good people of Dover use this heavily for dog-walking and mountain-biking. The dogs kinda got to me; they were generally off-leash and roaming freely. You won't see a lot of wildlife for that reason.

Nature Walks in the Western burbs

2011-07-16T23:24:00.000-04:00

I spent today riding my scooter around the western suburbs of Boston, in search of nature walks. Before leaving I picked out a few places to visit, based on our family memberships in the Mass Audubon Society and Trustees of Reservations; I would definitely visit Drumlin Farm in Lincoln and the Broadmoor sanctuary in Natick. As it turned out, I did more than that, and just missed a place I really want to go back and pick up. I also stopped in for a visit with Dan, one of my former colleagues at IBM.

View Larger Map

We used to take the kids out to Drumlin Farm pretty regularly, but I haven't been there in probably at least 10 years. It is bigger than I remembered, and it now has this cool, solar-powered bird mobile.

From 2011-07-16

I wandered around for about an hour, and then rode down to Dan's house in Wayland. He suggested I visit nearby Garden in the Woods, so when I left his house, I did.

The New England Wild Flower Society runs the Garden, and it's a lovely spot. Here are some of the pictures I took as I walked around.

From 2011-07-16

From there I made my way, not especially directly, to the Broadmoor sanctuary in Natick. Because of our connection with Drumlin Farm, we've been Mass Audubon members for probably 20 years, but this was the first time I've visited Broadmoor. It's enormous, with a large trail system.

From 2011-07-16

I want to go back to Broadmoor again; they open a portion of the trails in the winter for cross-country skiing.

My last two stops were accidental; I passed the Trustees of Reservations sites Chase Woodlands and Powisset Farm. I was unfortunately unaware that, while at Powisset Farm, I was literally across the street from Noanet Highlands, a truly gigantic preserve with views of downtown Boston. Ah, well - something for another day.

...and yet...

2011-07-13T08:33:00.003-04:00

Today's APOD has a picture of Atlantis making its last docking approach to the International Space Station.

I've long felt that the Shuttle was a terrible mistake for NASA - fragile, expensive, limited in usefulness. I can't help but think that we could, instead, have gone to Mars, pursued a much more robust robotic planetary exploration program, and in general gotten a lot more for our money.

And yet - the images, the hardware, the teamwork required to fly these monsters are inspiring.

I'm glad the program is ending - and I will miss it.

The Bottle Bill

2011-07-11T20:43:00.002-04:00

Tonight I walked over to my local beer outlet in Davis Square, Downtown Wine and Spirits, to return empties and buy more beer. I really like the selection at Downtown, but they are a pain to deal with regarding empties. Like many liquor stores, they have gone to the freakin' redemption machines that turn what should be a really quick transaction into a drawn-out process of shoving in bottles one...at...a...time. Downtown is also slow to update the machines when they add new brands, with the result that you have to return some bottles outside and then get on line to return the rest inside - where they take them rather grudgingly.

Tonight, the machine was just flat-out down, and when I took the bottles inside, the guy behind the counter tried to tell me that I'd have to come back once the machine was repaired. I got pushy and got him to take my bottles - but the confrontation sucked.

SO - when I got home, I checked on the law. Here's a part of what the Massachusetts state government site has to say about the bottle bill (I've added some emphasis at places):

Where can I return empty beverage containers?

Residents can return empty containers to any redemption center that agrees to accept the containers, or any retail outlet that sells or sold within the past sixty days the same brand, type and size of container. Retail outlets must redeem containers for their full redemption value.

What obligations do retailers have in accepting containers?

Retailers must redeem empty containers during all of their business hours. There is no similar restriction on redemption centers. Restaurants charging a deposit on containers for off- or on-premise consumption must redeem empty containers. Restaurants do not have to redeem empty containers if they sell beverages for on-premise consumption and do not charge a deposit. Vending machine operators must redeem containers at the location of the vending machine, or post a conspicuous notice on the machine stating where and from whom a refund may be obtained. The notice does not have to specify how close the refund location is to the vending machine. If you encounter a business that is not complying with any of these requirements, you may register a complaint by calling the MassDEP Bottle Bill Hotline at 617-556-1054.

Is there a limit on the number of containers that can be returned at one time?

A retailer is only required to accept 120 containers in one day from any one person, but may choose to accept more. There is no similar restriction on redemption centers.

Hiking Monadnock with Anil

2011-07-09T22:38:00.000-04:00

Today Anil and I hiked to the summit of Mt. Monadnock. This was Anil's first hike ever.

This GPS track shows where we went, and contains placemarks with pictures.

View Larger Map

The Juxtacomm patent may soon be invalidated

2011-07-01T11:49:00.002-04:00

I learned yesterday (via Vincent McBurney's blog) that the infamous "ETL patent" (technically, patent 6,195,662 - System for transforming and exchanging data between distributed heterogeneous computer systems) is being re-examined by the U.S. Patent Office. The examiner intends to withdraw essentially all of the claims.

It's a bit tricky to get information about this from the USPTO web site, and it's not possible to link to much of its content. If you want to look, here are the necessary steps:

Go to the Public PAIR start page, type in the captcha, and click "continue".
In the "search for application" panel, make sure the top radio button is selected ("Application number"), enter 90/011267 in the box, and click "search".
Click on the "Image File Wrapper" tab. You'll then see a list of documents associated with the application. You may want to look at Reexam proceeding - Advisory Action, dated 06-07-2011, 9 pages. It states the intent to withdraw claims 1-11 and 14-19.

The patent is held by Teilhard Technologies, a privately-held Canadian firm, also known as Juxtacomm. They successfully used this patent to reach settlements with a large number of companies (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Informatica, and many more) worth millions of dollars.

In 2009, while working for IBM, I was deposed in the matter and got to see, up close and personal, how this kind of legal action works. I can't discuss my involvement in any detail, but I will say that it was my impression that there was adequate prior art to have prevented this patent from issuing. This was a stupendous waste of resources; the defendants in the case seem to have paid out nearly $100 million in settlements, to say nothing of the money spent on legal fees. The supposed purpose of the patent system - to encourage innovation - was not served in any way by this affair.

I don't know how to fix our patent system, but this case is a clear demonstration that it's broken.

Update: This American Life has done a show on patent trolls.

If you want to feel tiny...

2011-06-29T09:56:00.001-04:00

...just take a look at today's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). It's a picture of Abell 2744, also known as Pandora's cluster.

That's a lot of galaxies!

Utha Graduates

2011-06-28T00:23:00.001-04:00

About a month ago RuthAnne was awarded her Associate of Arts from Harvard Extension School; I've finally tracked down my SD flash card reader so I can upload the pictures. I expect complaints about this from RuthAnne...

Owen testing out the cap

See, they can smile!

The cap on its rightful dome

The Goods

So - tell me how...

...you really feel.

A final update: the "official" picture.

From RuthAnne 2011-06-29

Henna, again

2011-06-25T22:43:00.001-04:00

Last weekend RuthAnne re-dyed my hair with henna. I've been using henna from hennaforhair.com, which is quite expensive; this time I use henna from a local store in Central Square.

It was $3.00 for a 5 and a half ounce bag (of which I used about half a bag, with a lot of what I mixed left over). It's excellent henna; there was a very strong dye release, and I like the resulting color.

So much for the high-priced spread. But The Henna Page (same people as hennaforhair.com) is still a great information source for henna, both for use as a hair dye and for mehandi.

...and the sins of the father shall be visited upon the sons to the third and fourth generation...

2011-06-25T14:44:00.006-04:00

Jose Antonio Vargas is a former reporter for The Washington Post and shared a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. He was sent by his family to the US. from the Philippines when he was 12. Four years later, he discovered that he is an illegal immigrant.

some of Vargas' papers, from the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Vargas went to college and, as noted earlier, became a successful journalist. He has a Social Security number (obtained illegally) and pays state and federal income tax. He did not choose to enter the U.S. illegally. But here he is. What should we do about it?

He has decided he can no longer live this lie and tells his story in this week's New York Times Sunday Magazine (and also at defineamerican.com). If we can't provide a legal, reasonable path to citizenship for someone like Vargas, then what are we?

Update: Vargas is not alone.Recently the government agreed to an unusual deal in the case of an Iraq veteran who was brought to the U.S illegally as a baby. According to the New York Times, the government offered to drop a passport violation charge against the Navy petty officer if he completed a term of probation.

Rant, rant, rant

2011-06-24T09:22:00.000-04:00

I can't stand it. I have to vent.

Yesterday the Republicans walked out of negotiations on raising the federal debt limit - because they absolutely refuse to consider any tax increases - not even simply revoking the Bush tax cuts on households earning over $250,000/year.

This is absurd.

I can't bring myself to provide calm, reasoned argument about this. These guys are nuts! The plutocracy owns Washington, and the rest of us are doomed.

Then and Now

2011-05-05T10:43:00.000-04:00

Today is the 50th anniversary of Alan Shepard's 15 minute suborbital Mercury flight, which initiated the U.S. manned space program. According to the NASA press kit for the MR-3 launch, the combined height of the launch vehicle and spacecraft was 83 feet, with a liftoff weight of about 66,000 pounds.

Compare this to the lift-off of the space shuttle Atlantis on the nearly 12 day STS-132 mission. The NASA press kit for STS-132 lists combined weight of the shuttle system at launch as 4,519,769 pounds, with a height of 184 feet.

Mercury Redstone 3 and Atlantis are perhaps the bookends for the NASA manned spaced program; the last flight of Atlantis (STS-135) may well be the last time U.S. astronauts fly aboard spacecraft designed and built by NASA.

Alive Enough

2011-04-26T22:57:00.003-04:00

On Being has once again come through with a fascinating interview, this one with Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. I haven't listened to the produced version of the interview, just the unedited version; after discovering these raw interviews with the Scott Atran episode, I often don't bother with the produced version at all.

I found the show interesting enough that I inflicted a portion of it (from 26:53 to 37:00) on my kids as we ate dinner together a few nights ago (thereby allowing technology to invade the sanctity of the dinner table...) so we could discuss it. There was a description of someone walking the dunes on Cape Code listening to an iPod and texting, a discussion of a child texting in the car (and therefor not engaging with the parent), and a family where the father texted through fantastic family dinners prepared by his gourmet chef spouse, ignoring his family. The segment included a couple of wonderful quotes:

An uncredited psychology bromide: "If you don't teach your children to be alone, they'll only always know how to be lonely."
From Jill Ker Conway, former president of Smith College: "A child has to live in her generation."

In the ensuing discussion, my kids really took issue with the notion that simply having a soundtrack going in their earbuds inherently cuts them off from their surroundings. Several years ago the kids took a summer-long road trip out west together; they would often stop and walk through the stunning scenery with the iPod going and each with an earbud, so they were sharing the scenery to the same music. They did feel that the dinnertime texting was pretty terrible, and in-the-car texting had to be judged on the basis of the situation. I can't say that we agreed on all points, but their positions were at least comprehensible to me. As noted: they have to live in their generation, and since they've grown up with technology in a way that even their geeky dad did not, we're bound to have differing outlooks. We did get a good solid hour of discussion out of the segment.

Later on in the interview, Turkle worries about the replacement of physical artifacts - books, printed photographs, paper letters - with intangible, potentially ephemeral and less readily accessed digital artifacts. I worry about this, too, and I have a background project cooking away to produce printed picture books from some of my vast digital photo collection.

At the same time, I'm embracing digital media as an alternative approach to preserving my memories. This blog is a case in point. As I noted two years ago, "I want touchstones to help me recall who I am." This blog has become, at least in part, the journal I never seemed to be able to keep on paper. I'm sure not writing for my vast audience; according to Google Analytics, I've had not a single hit in the past month.

I've downloaded samples of some of Turkle's books to my Kindle; if anything really grabs me, I'll update this entry.

Getting the Subversion server version

2011-04-21T10:26:00.004-04:00

I recently needed to know what version of Subversion we are running, and this turned out to be harder to determine than I would have guessed.

Getting the version of the client is easy:

bash-4.1$ svn --version
svn, version 1.6.15 (r1038135)
compiled Nov 29 2010, 14:09:28
[... other stuff ...]
bash-4.1$

But the client doesn't provide an option for getting the server version. Using The Google, I found a Python script at Apache that does the trick:

bash-4.1$ python server-version.py https://svnserver/repos/root_of_repository
1.6.11
bash-4.1$

Gmail account hijacking

2011-03-19T12:44:00.004-04:00

I've just spent the morning helping a friend recover from having her Gmail account hijacked. I still haven't discovered a root cause, but the initial symptom was when I received this email from her:

My apologies for any troubles this might cause you. This is quite strange and funny.Actually I came down here to England in the UK for a brief Trip and unfortunately I was mugged at the park on my way to the hotel where I lodged, with all my cash, credit card and cell phone stolen from me but luckily for me I still have my passports.

I've been to the embassy and the Police here haven't been quite helpful enough. My flight leaves shortly from now but I'm having problems paying the hotel bills and the hotel manager here won't let me leave until I pay up the bills. I was hoping if you could loan me some quick cash that I can pay back as soon as I get back.I really need your help from here on out.

Since I knew my friend wasn't in England, there was clearly a problem. Looking at the mail headers, I noticed that the reply-to address was friendsID@ymail.com. Clearly a phishing attempt.

Shortly thereafter I was contacted by said friend for help regaining access to her gmail account.

This turned out to be a bit tricky. The first think I needed was an email account to be used for recovery purposes. Setting one up at gmail is possible, but non-obvious, since the normal account creation links at gmail all require an existing email address. Eventually I discovered this link to create a gmail account without an existing email account.

Once this was set up, we could then work through the gmail procedure for regaining access to your account if you think its been compromised.

A crucial piece of this involved email forwarding - something it would not have occurred to me to check if it hadn't been on Google's list of issues. Gmail allows you to forward mail to other addresses; my friend's account had been configured to forward mail to a yahoo account and had POP access enabled. As soon as she regained access to the account we immediately disabled both.

The account was also configured with a reply-to address of friendsID@ymail.com. Pretty sneaky.

Unfortunately, it appears that her inbox is GONE; I don't know if gmail has any sort of recovery option. Luckily her contacts survived, but this highlights the value of periodically exporting your contact information out of gmail.

Update: I notified Yahoo (via their abuse reporting page) that an account is being used to conduct fraud. I got back a canned response, and it was obvious that my detailed description hadn't been read. Thanks, Yahoo.

How People Work

2011-02-20T21:15:00.002-05:00

I just finished listening to the February 10th broadcast of ~~Speaking of Faith~~ Krista Tippett on Being, an interview with anthropologist Scott Atran. It's a phenomenal show! Here's the blurb:

We make deeper sense of the human dynamics unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa. Anthropologist Scott Atran offers bracing context on the promise of this moment and the response it asks from the watching world.

Atran's understanding of the Middle East, and human nature in general, is just astounding. I urge you to give it a listen. It's worth listening to the unedited version of the show; there's a lot of very interesting background on how Atran became an anthropologist that didn't make it into the edited, broadcast version.

Chapters from a Broken Novel

2011-02-19T22:51:00.001-05:00

Last night RuthAnne and I went to see Doug Varone and Dancers at the nifty performance space at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The performance of Chapters from a Broken Novel was so moving that I asked Katy to go see it with me tonight, so I got to experience it twice. What a show!

Excerpts from the show, with commentary, such as this one, are available on the company's web site. Enjoy!

The Evolution of "Tile Riot" from Doug Varone on Vimeo.

Stop the self-check-out madness!

2011-02-19T13:15:00.004-05:00

This morning I walked into my local CVS to buy tissues. As I approached the check-out area, my heart sank; there was one register open (with 4 people already in line), and a nice young woman was directing customers to use the shiny new self-service check-out machines instead.

An older woman in front of me was convinced to try the machines, and then got more and more frustrated as the machine clearly had trouble dealing with her cash purchase. She eventually asked the attendant, "Isn't there something you can do about this?" When the response came -- "No, I'm sorry, ma'am, there isn't." -- I loudly observed, "Yes there is. You can hire more cashiers."

It was like lancing a boil -- the whole check-out area erupted in cheers! I continued, stating that these machines take away entry-level jobs and essentially outsource the company's labor costs to its customers. The people around me were nodding and muttering support, and eventually the store supervisor opened another register, to another round of cheers.

Note to retailers making customers take over cashier positions: We don't like it!

If you don't like it, take action:

Refuse to use self-service check-out machines.
If you have to wait in line because there aren't enough cashiers, complain! Doing it loudly, in the store as I did, is good (because it lets other people vent along with you), but you should also complain to the highest management person on-site (typically a shift supervisor) and lodge a complaint at the company's web site. Be specific: be prepared to provide the time of day, a rough idea of line length (a number, not just "long"), and the store location.

Here are links to customer feedback pages for some of the stores aggressively pushing self-checkout:

Shaws
CVS - This astonished me, but CVS doesn't seem to have any sort of web-based feedback page. You have to call or write a letter:

CVS Corporation
One CVS Drive
Woonsocket, RI 02895
1-800-746-7287
Publix
Kroger

I'm not the only person unhappy about this:

Consumer Reports
The Consumerist
Self Check Out Lanes Kill Jobs Facebook group

Another time waster from Microsoft

2011-02-16T11:58:00.003-05:00

I'm trying to get a new laptop at work up and running, using Windows 7 (gulp). After the initial system install, Windows Update downloaded over 60 updates; I told it to go ahead and install them. Everything seemed to be cooking along fine; the updates installed, the system rebooted - and then I got a screen saying "Step 3 of 3 - Preparing To Configure Windows. Please Do Not Turn Off Your Computer". And waited. And waited.

Over an hour later, with no evident disk activity or anything else, I decided something was actually wrong, and started Googling. I found this thread at Microsoft with many users complaining of the same thing. Microsoft never provided a useful response.

Luckily, though, some valiant soul tried Ye Olde three finger salute - Ctrl-Alt-Del - and, voile! The system put up a login prompt and everything was fine. This worked for me,too.

Wake up, Microsoft! Things like this really upset people! Would it be so hard to at least put a sticky comment at the top of the forum providing the workaround, so we don't have to wade through thousands of lines of rants to get to the solution?

Is this the best the New York Times can do?

2011-01-08T20:55:00.004-05:00

The lead in this week's Sunday New York Times travel section is The 41 Places to Go in 2011, and my beloved Hyderabad made the list (number 19). Sadly, the meager two paragraphs (about 200 words) by travel writer Gisela Williams focus only on modern and commercial interests, and say almost nothing about the real reasons to visit Hyderabad. It's next to impossible to excerpt passages from such a short piece, so I'll risk the wrath of the copyright gods and include it verbatim:

Even in the 16th century, Hyderabad, in southern India, famous for its diamond trade and sultans’ palaces, was a city with serious bling. In the last decade, a new sort of wealth has arrived — the outsourcing of international companies, which has inspired a boom of sleek cafes and restaurants such as Fusion 9.

The latest buzz is the debut of two five-star hotels, both connected to the Nizam family, rulers of Hyderabad for the two centuries before India’s independence. The first, Park Hyderabad, is a futuristic structure designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with an aluminum and glass facade inspired by the settings and metalwork found in the Nizams’ jewelry collection. The new Taj Falaknuma Palace, on the other hand, is a window into the past. It’s a wedding cake of a building that still belongs to the Nizam family, and it took the Taj Hotels group 10 years to renovate the European-style castle. “The Falaknuma Palace will complete the Indian palace tour for the south,” said Shanti Kohli, of New Delhi-based Amber Tours. “It makes a trip to Hyderabad worthwhile just on its own.”

Diamond trade, not pearls? Nothing about Golkonda, the Qutb Shahi and Paigah tombs, Charminar, Mecca Masjid, Birla Mandir, or the Salar Jung Museum? A little more research might be in order - such as reading this 1990 article from, er, the New York times travel section.

Here, let me take a stab at this:

Nowhere are India's contrasts more vivid than in the southern city of Hyderabad, where high-tech modernity meets a thousand years of history. Brightly painted Hindu temples share its narrow streets with the minarets of Muslim mosques, the arches and domes of Sikh gurudwaras and the more recent spires of Christian churches. From the marble decks of the beautiful Birla Mandir temple you can see a 55 foot statue of Buddha on an island in Hussain Sagar, Hyderabad's central lake.

Just a few miles from the gleaming new towers of India's software outsourcing giants you'll find the 16th century walls of Golkonda Fort and the Qutb Shahi tombs. Visit the old city center at Charminar (literally "four towers") and shop in the ever-busy Laad Bazaar. Splurge and stay in the newly renovated Falaknuma Palace, build by one of the last ruling Nizams and now a magnificent Taj hotel. Ramoji Film City, a sprawling 2000 acre studio complex and home to India's Telegu-language film industry (aka "Tollywood") lies nearby. Excellent restaurants abound, from the eclectic fare of Ohri's in Banjara Hills to the homey vegetarian delights of Chutneys at Nagarjuna Circle. What you won't find is a lot of western tourists; Hyderabad is one of India's best-kept secrets.

But, since this is a blog, I can do even better and provide some pictures and links.

Golkonda Fort, the Qutb Shahi tombs

Charminar, Mecca Masjid, the bangle merchants of Laad Bazaar

The Buddha Statue, Temples and Idols

Chutneys

Untangled

2010-12-28T20:12:00.000-05:00

Katy and I decided to go out and see a movie this evening, and settled on the 7PM showing of Tangled at Fresh Pond Entertainment Cinemas. This movie theater is never my first choice; the theaters are small, the sound insulation between them is poor, and they're expensive. Usually I try to go to one of these:

the Somerville Theater (walking distance, relatively cheap tickets)
the Capitol Theater in Arlington (same owners a the Somerville; cheap tickets, not far away)
the Kendall Square Cinema in (duh!) Kendall Square ("art" films, close to Flat Top Johnny's for pre-movie pool and darts)

But Fresh Pond was the closest place we could find with Tangled, so off we went - only to return home without seeing the movie. The sound level was extremely low (as opposed to the usual ear-splitting over volume...) and the image jittery. As soon as the previews started and the problem became apparent I went out the lobby and notified a theater employee; nothing happened. Eventually the actual movies started, and we walked out.

The manager was very polite, and refunded our money without any hassle, but it just seemed so pathetic. Evidently there is so much automation that the one "projectionist" they have was unable to actually do any troubleshooting.

The price of two adult tickets is $18.50; that's about the price of most Blu-Ray movies on Amazon (plain old DVDs are even cheaper). With this kind of experience, how long do the movie theaters think they can stay in business?

Now it can be told...

2010-12-22T14:41:00.005-05:00

Today we released expressor Studio 3.0. We've worked really hard over the past year for this moment.

We also had a great Yankee swap and Chinese take-out lunch. I got a cool Lava Lamp out of the deal!

Lord of the Dance

2010-12-20T09:20:00.000-05:00

I'm a member of of the Pinewoods Morris Men; we dance every year in the Christmas Revels at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge. The traditional ending of the first act is always a performance of the Lord of the Dance, which ends with the Morris dancers leading the audience into the lobby for intermission. Here's a video clip of my teammates Steve and Joe (along with cast member David Coffin) at a recent Revels (not this year):

Well, last night Owen and I had the privilege of performing the dance together, one of the few father/son pairs to do so.

Merry Christmas!

More about Torrent

2010-12-08T01:14:00.001-05:00

I found a brochure from 1997.

Pretty cool/scary looking, eh?

symbolic links on Windows

2010-11-24T15:40:00.000-05:00

Windows "shortcuts" are not the same thing as Unix symbolic links. In fact, Windows (at least, pre-Vista Windows) doesn't have symbolic links. Bummer.

BUT - it turns out that Windows 2000 and later do have a feature called junction points.These can be used to produce the moral equivalent of a symbolic link for directories only, not individual files. Since I mostly use directory symlinks anyway, this is useful for me. Thank you, Mike Nordell, for your little makelink command line tool!

Hey - it worked!

2010-11-22T22:25:00.003-05:00

Nearly 16 years ago, I got call more-or-less out of the blue from a fellow named Rob Utzschneider, who wanted to interview me for a parallel processing start-up named Applied Parallel Technologies. Rob and his co-founder, Ed Zyszkowski, had just received funding under the Advanced Technology Program, a program run by NIST, an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department. The intent of ATP was, "...to spur the development of path-breaking new technologies by providing cost-shared funding for potentially valuable but high-risk R&D projects." Over a two year period, ATP put about $1.1million into Applied Parallel Technologies (APT - confusingly similar to ATP...), which paid our salaries, bought us workstations, gave us an Internet connection and who knows what else.

Over time, APT morphed into Torrent Systems, acquired VC funding, and was eventually acquired by Ascential Software and, ultimately, IBM. The system we developed - Orchestrate - is still at the heart of IBM's Information Server software. Given its continued survival, we must have done something right.

Evidently NIST thought so, too. I just stumbled over an ATP report describing the performance of the first 50 completed ATP projects. Our work earned 4 stars - the highest possible rating - and was among the 8 top-ranked projects. The project summary brought back a lot of memories.

So - I guess that, at least in our case, a government program actually did just what it was supposed to do. The ATP grant got Torrent off the ground, and we were successful enough that venture capital followed. We built a working system that helped bring parallel processing into the mainstream. The MapReduce software used by Google is a variation on the flow-based, data parallel concepts embodied in Orchestrate.

Cool.

Doesn't anyone care?

2010-11-20T13:03:00.005-05:00

This morning I was out in the lawn raking leaves at about 10:30 when I spotted delivery truck preparing to turn the wrong way up our one-way street (from Miller to Orchard). I yelled to him that it was a one way street, but he kept coming - and in the process tore down the phone lines that cross the street at that corner. He stopped the truck, and I yelled to him that he had taken down wires, but he ignored me, backed his truck down Orchard, paused, and then turned down Blake and left.

I went inside, discovered that among the lines he took out were our phone lines, and called the Cambridge police to report the incident. The Cambridge Fire Department promptly sent a truck out to inspect the downed lines and get them off the street.

I then called Verizon to report the downed lines, a real exercise in frustration. They force you to listen to ads for FIOS before giving you a chance to enter any options, and you're then forced through a voice response system that never offers you a chance to talk to a human. I tried contacting them on the web; that was just as fruitless. I wonder if Verizon has any clue how infuriating their customer support is.

Finally, I called back the Cambridge police department to see if they wanted any of the information I had, so they could follow up with the driver and/or trucking company. There was no interest at all.

SO - since it seems there will be no official action, I can at least publish what I have. First, the raw information:

License plate: MA 248 0924
DOT 949278
MC 640842
The truck was labeled DB Schenker and QTX, Salem, NH, and was a white box truck.

The U.S. Department of Transportation provides a lookup page for DOT/MC numbers, which provided these details on the trucking company:

Legal Name	QUATIERI TRUCKING INC
DBA Name	QTX TRANSPORTATION
Physical and Mailing Address	ONE LISETTE DR SALEM, NH 03079
Phone	(617) 201-0897
USDOT Number	949278
MC Number	MC-640842

I got a good look at the driver, since he got out of the truck before driving off and asked me, "Is there a problem here?" in a threatening tone. He's a bit shorter than me (maybe 5'6"), mid 20's to mid 30's, black mustache, a little heavy. This was one time I regret not having a cell phone camera.

I'm still trying to figure out who, if anyone, I can report this incident to. It doesn't seem right that a guy can deliberately turn the wrong way on a one-way street, tear down phone lines, and just drive off.

Update: I filed a complaint (ID 100045255) with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Admnistration.

Update, early January 2011: I got a response from the DOT, stating that they have opened an investigation.

Update, March 2011: I got another letter from the DOT; they are preparing an "enforcement action." Who knows what that means, but it should at least get the attention of the trucking company. Sometimes the system does work!

C++ exceptions and dynamic loading

2010-11-11T17:16:00.000-05:00

[Note: non-geeks can click away right now...]

I just spent a chunk of my afternoon trying to figure out why my C++ exception handlers were not being invoked on Linux, using g++. I could see the exception being thrown in the debugger, but the catch block that caught the exception was the "catch(...)" block, rather than my type-specific block.

It looks like it's a problem with the g++ exception mechanism. What appears to be happening is that the selection of the catch block uses the addresses of type_info blocks, rather than string comparisons on the exception names (which, I've been led to believe, is what Visual Studio C++ does - where my code works fine). If you are using a dynamically loaded module, and there are multiple copies of the RTTI information (easy to do if you are statically linking some libraries, which I am...), and you throw across the loaded module boundary, SPLAT!

This mailing list thread helped me figure this out. I learned a few other useful factoids in the process:

gdb's catch command makes it easy to break on exceptions being thrown and caught:
- catch throw
- catch catch
It's possible to dig around in the g++ runtime system within the body of a catch(...) block and get to the type_info for the exception, which will give you a (platform-dependent) type name - handy for a debug message.

Thank you, web denizens...

Algorithm 199

2010-11-09T17:13:00.000-05:00

I'm blogging this just so I don't lose this useful reference to CACM Algorithm 199, a magic set of routines for converting between Gregorian (calendar) and Julian dates. Someday I'd love to read the original article and find out where all the magic numbers come from.

Decisions, Decisions

2010-10-17T23:31:00.002-04:00

On Tuesday, November 2 (about 2 weeks away as I write), Massachusetts voters will deciding the fate of three statewide initiatives. Questions 1 and 3 would roll back various state taxes, and are no-brainers as far as I'm concerned; we simply can't afford to cut the sales tax right now (Question 3), and I fail to see why alcoholic beverages deserve an exemption from the sales tax (Question 1). Question 2, though, is less straightforward; it's a bid to overturn the so-called "anti-snob zoning statute", Chapter 40B. The statute basically enables developers to override local zoning and environmental protection laws in return for making 20% of the units in the project "affordable".

The definition of "affordable" means, roughly, "can be afforded by someone earning 70% of the median town income." Hence, the level varies from town to town. The units are not affordable in perpetuity; rather, they revert to market rate units once the initial unit financing is paid off.

I've read the arguments for and against the initiative, and I'm pretty sure now that I'll be voting yes (to overturn 40B). The statute seems to be a very blunt instrument for creating affordable housing, and it's not at all clear to me that it really works.

While doing my research on this topic, I had a hard time finding out which communities are subject to 40B (towns with less than 10% affordable housing). I finally found the Subsidized Housing Inventory, but it's a PDF, which makes it difficult to pull into a spreadsheet and sort. Well, I ground my way through the exercise (thank you, emacs!), and here's the information in a more digestible form. Have fun!

Chapter 40B Subsidized Housing Inventory (SHI)
Department of Housing and Community Development
as of September 28, 2010*

Community|2000 Census Year Round Housing Units|Total Development Units|SHI Units|% 
Abington|5,332|504|471|8.8
Acton|7,645|897|519|6.8
Acushnet|3,879|127|97|2.5
Adams|4,352|324|324|7.4
Agawam|11,588|504|472|4.1
Alford|173|0|0|0.0
Amesbury|6,570|859|495|7.5
Amherst|9,020|1,125|1,023|11.3
Andover|11,513|1,326|1,043|9.1
Aquinnah|155|41|41|26.5
Arlington|19,358|1,307|1,102|5.7
Ashburnham|1,997|147|32|1.6
Ashby|1,000|0|0|0.0
Ashfield|770|2|2|0.3
Ashland|5,781|348|243|4.2
Athol|4,775|255|255|5.3
Attleboro|16,519|1,198|1,198|7.3
Auburn|6,551|212|212|3.2
Avon|1,737|74|74|4.3
Ayer|3,141|463|293|9.3
Barnstable|20,266|1,858|1,369|6.8
Barre|1,981|82|82|4.1
Becket|739|0|0|0.0
Bedford|4,692|979|857|18.3
Belchertown|5,002|396|370|7.4
Bellingham|5,632|582|532|9.4
Belmont|9,936|328|328|3.3
Berkley|1,870|130|15|0.8
Berlin|891|182|60|6.7
Bernardston|862|24|24|2.8
Beverly|16,150|1,935|1,859|11.5
Billerica|13,055|1,432|1,186|9.1
Blackstone|3,321|165|123|3.7
Blandford|472|2|2|0.4
Bolton|1,472|192|63|4.3
Boston|250,367|50,116|48,503|19.4
Bourne|7,787|1,189|568|7.3
Boxborough|1,900|324|24|1.3
Boxford|2,602|64|23|0.9
Boylston|1,602|26|26|1.6
Braintree|12,924|1,646|1,125|8.7
Brewster|4,379|299|252|5.8
Bridgewater|7,639|222|214|2.8
Brimfield|1,287|89|89|6.9
Brockton|34,794|4,486|4,486|12.9
Brookfield|1,259|46|40|3.2
Brookline|26,224|2,554|2,122|8.1
Buckland|812|5|5|0.6
Burlington|8,395|1,383|981|11.7
Cambridge|44,138|7,207|7,117|16.1
Canton|8,129|965|860|10.6
Carlisle|1,647|26|20|1.2
Carver|4,063|126|126|3.1
Charlemont|576|6|6|1.0
Charlton|3,868|52|52|1.3
Chatham|3,596|174|174|4.8
Chelmsford|12,981|1,293|966|7.4
Chelsea|12,317|2,192|2,187|17.8
Cheshire|1,458|0|0|0.0
Chester|528|50|50|9.5
Chesterfield|462|27|27|5.8
Chicopee|24,337|2,598|2,561|10.5
Chilmark|406|3|3|0.7
Clarksburg|683|8|8|1.2
Clinton|5,817|560|560|9.6
Cohasset|2,752|89|89|3.2
Colrain|749|4|4|0.5
Concord|6,095|738|363|6.0
Conway|716|0|0|0.0
Cummington|401|16|16|4.0
Dalton|2,831|160|160|5.7
Danvers|9,712|1,362|999|10.3
Dartmouth|10,839|975|934|8.6
Dedham|8,893|1,142|1,097|12.3
Deerfield|2,045|32|32|1.6
Dennis|8,079|351|337|4.2
Dighton|2,261|408|150|6.6
Douglas|2,510|183|140|5.6
Dover|1,874|69|18|1.0
Dracut|10,597|928|588|5.5
Dudley|3,877|99|99|2.6
Dunstable|933|30|0|0.0
Duxbury|5,103|224|189|3.7
East Bridgewater|4,423|229|167|3.8
East Brookfield|797|0|0|0.0
East Longmeadow|5,350|499|431|8.1
Eastham|2,642|58|49|1.9
Easthampton|7,058|531|475|6.7
Easton|7,596|351|248|3.3
Edgartown|1,718|84|84|4.9
Egremont|624|0|0|0.0
Erving|625|2|2|0.3
Essex|1,357|40|40|2.9
Everett|15,886|1,304|1,304|8.2
Fairhaven|6,853|495|495|7.2
Fall River|41,757|4,858|4,762|11.4
Falmouth|14,440|1,224|960|6.6
Fitchburg|15,963|1,667|1,666|10.4
Florida|279|0|0|0.0
Foxborough|6,260|595|555|8.9
Framingham|26,588|2,901|2,901|10.9
Franklin|10,296|1,567|1,069|10.4
Freetown|2,991|106|88|2.9
Gardner|8,804|1,243|1,243|14.1
Georgetown|2,601|374|362|13.9
Gill|550|25|25|4.5
Gloucester|12,997|907|899|6.9
Goshen|380|8|8|2.1
Gosnold|49|0|0|0.0
Grafton|5,820|531|318|5.5
Granby|2,288|68|68|3.0
Granville|578|10|10|1.7
Great Barrington|3,116|291|219|7.0
Greenfield|8,274|1,175|1,165|14.1
Groton|3,339|269|197|5.9
Groveland|2,090|132|75|3.6
Hadley|1,943|259|259|13.3
Halifax|2,804|28|28|1.0
Hamilton|2,717|124|84|3.1
Hampden|1,843|60|60|3.3
Hancock|341|0|0|0.0
Hanover|4,440|438|438|9.9
Hanson|3,167|265|143|4.5
Hardwick|1,054|33|33|3.1
Harvard|2,156|237|62|2.9
Harwich|5,862|292|292|5.0
Hatfield|1,420|47|47|3.3
Haverhill|23,675|2,306|2,084|8.8
Hawley|165|0|0|0.0
Heath|416|2|2|0.5
Hingham|7,307|2,283|522|7.1
Hinsdale|775|0|0|0.0
Holbrook|4,145|439|439|10.6
Holden|5,806|541|193|3.3
Holland|947|29|29|3.1
Holliston|4,861|316|200|4.1
Holyoke|16,180|3,570|3,515|21.7
Hopedale|2,284|111|111|4.9
Hopkinton|4,521|299|150|3.3
Hubbardston|1,348|53|53|3.9
Hudson|7,144|904|733|10.3
Hull|4,679|100|100|2.1
Huntington|847|62|62|7.3
Ipswich|5,414|517|445|8.2
Kingston|4,370|347|170|3.9
Lakeville|3,385|701|150|4.4
Lancaster|2,103|192|104|4.9
Lanesborough|1,299|20|20|1.5
Lawrence|25,540|3,807|3,788|14.8
Lee|2,542|173|176|6.9
Leicester|3,790|148|148|3.9
Lenox|2,354|179|179|7.6
Leominster|16,937|1,455|1,418|8.4
Leverett|642|0|0|0.0
Lexington|11,274|1,441|1,326|11.8
Leyden|288|2|2|0.7
Lincoln|2,076|299|227|10.9
Littleton|3,018|396|245|8.1
Longmeadow|5,832|267|267|4.6
Lowell|39,381|5,247|5,212|13.2
Ludlow|7,815|182|182|2.3
Lunenburg|3,605|132|132|3.7
Lynn|34,569|4,424|4,423|12.8
Lynnfield|4,249|626|313|7.4
Malden|23,561|2,706|2,638|11.2
Manchester|2,219|122|110|5.0
Mansfield|8,083|980|934|11.6
Marblehead|8,746|399|332|3.8
Marion|2,095|101|90|4.3
Marlborough|14,846|1,656|1,592|10.7
Marshfield|9,117|743|536|5.9
Mashpee|5,578|240|224|4.0
Mattapoisett|2,634|70|70|2.7
Maynard|4,398|365|365|8.3
Medfield|4,038|203|185|4.6
Medford|22,631|1,666|1,640|7.2
Medway|4,243|279|227|5.3
Melrose|11,200|969|894|8.0
Mendon|1,870|106|49|2.6
Merrimac|2,281|402|146|6.4
Methuen|16,848|1,925|1,636|9.7
Middleborough|7,195|768|413|5.7
Middlefield|229|18|18|7.9
Middleton|2,337|94|94|4.0
Milford|10,682|997|724|6.8
Millbury|5,086|244|221|4.3
Millis|3,060|164|113|3.7
Millville|956|20|20|2.1
Milton|9,142|567|435|4.8
Monroe|66|0|0|0.0
Monson|3,184|169|169|5.3
Montague|3,826|427|395|10.3
Monterey|417|0|0|0.0
Montgomery|254|0|0|0.0
Mount Washington|69|0|0|0.0
Nahant|1,676|48|48|2.9
Nantucket|4,040|180|122|3.0
Natick|13,337|1,620|1,361|10.2
Needham|10,793|850|834|7.7
New Ashford|107|0|0|0.0
New Bedford|41,403|5,195|5,164|12.5
New Braintree|325|0|0|0.0
New Marlborough|630|0|0|0.0
New Salem|399|1|1|0.3
Newbury|2,614|94|94|3.6
Newburyport|7,717|722|629|8.2
Newton|31,857|2,537|2,444|7.7
Norfolk|2,851|144|111|3.9
North Adams|7,061|885|873|12.4
North Andover|9,896|1,193|694|7.0
North Attleborough|10,600|293|293|2.8
North Brookfield|1,889|142|142|7.5
North Reading|4,839|607|536|11.1
Northampton|12,282|1,515|1,452|11.8
Northborough|4,983|711|598|12.0
Northbridge|4,930|393|378|7.7
Northfield|1,194|30|30|2.5
Norton|5,942|723|413|7.0
Norwell|3,299|294|139|4.2
Norwood|11,911|731|719|6.0
Oak Bluffs|1,677|155|146|8.7
Oakham|583|0|0|0.0
Orange|3,236|441|377|11.7
Orleans|3,317|324|294|8.9
Otis|600|0|0|0.0
Oxford|5,209|402|402|7.7
Palmer|5,371|436|378|7.0
Paxton|1,455|12|12|0.8
Peabody|18,838|2,111|1,996|10.6
Pelham|551|3|3|0.5
Pembroke|5,834|778|630|10.8
Pepperell|3,905|137|122|3.1
Peru|334|0|0|0.0
Petersham|453|0|0|0.0
Phillipston|598|6|6|1.0
Pittsfield|21,000|2,076|2,022|9.6
Plainfield|262|15|15|5.7
Plainville|3,088|223|189|6.1
Plymouth|19,008|901|861|4.5
Plympton|865|43|43|5.0
Princeton|1,185|20|20|1.7
Provincetown|2,062|168|127|6.2
Quincy|39,912|4,093|4,093|10.3
Randolph|11,497|1,265|1,265|11.0
Raynham|4,197|602|487|11.6
Reading|8,811|883|684|7.8
Rehoboth|3,588|108|36|1.0
Revere|20,102|2,121|2,121|10.6
Richmond|718|0|0|0.0
Rochester|1,619|8|8|0.5
Rockland|6,632|454|408|6.2
Rockport|3,652|136|136|3.7
Rowe|183|0|0|0.0
Rowley|1,985|118|88|4.4
Royalston|470|3|3|0.6
Russell|634|18|18|2.8
Rutland|2,316|93|93|4.0
Salem|18,103|2,549|2,350|13.0
Salisbury|3,456|514|298|8.6
Sandisfield|351|0|0|0.0
Sandwich|7,574|545|309|4.1
Saugus|10,111|831|742|7.3
Savoy|313|14|14|4.5
Scituate|6,869|359|314|4.6
Seekonk|4,927|86|83|1.7
Sharon|6,006|386|386|6.4
Sheffield|1,422|30|30|2.1
Shelburne|873|51|51|5.8
Sherborn|1,449|41|34|2.3
Shirley|2,140|60|60|2.8
Shrewsbury|12,606|856|856|6.8
Shutesbury|680|2|2|0.3
Somerset|7,124|277|258|3.6
Somerville|32,389|3,226|3,118|9.6
South Hadley|6,757|379|379|5.6
Southampton|2,003|44|44|2.2
Southborough|2,988|441|117|3.9
Southbridge|7,486|496|496|6.6
Southwick|3,488|221|195|5.6
Spencer|4,816|276|240|5.0
Springfield|61,001|10,375|10,098|16.6
Sterling|2,611|270|163|6.2
Stockbridge|1,066|117|117|11.0
Stoneham|9,231|508|502|5.4
Stoughton|10,429|1,746|1,249|12.0
Stow|2,108|301|143|6.8
Sturbridge|3,141|262|211|6.7
Sudbury|5,582|419|280|5.0
Sunderland|1,658|6|6|0.4
Sutton|2,869|127|45|1.6
Swampscott|5,804|217|211|3.6
Swansea|6,032|256|245|4.1
Taunton|22,874|1,883|1,771|7.7
Templeton|2,492|483|205|8.2
Tewksbury|10,125|1,264|666|6.6
Tisbury|1,755|122|110|6.3
Tolland|183|0|0|0.0
Topsfield|2,126|142|124|5.8
Townsend|3,162|166|126|4.0
Truro|999|10|10|1.0
Tyngsborough|3,784|521|194|5.1
Tyringham|146|0|0|0.0
Upton|2,083|223|178|8.5
Uxbridge|4,080|372|245|6.0
Wakefield|9,914|936|602|6.1
Wales|690|61|61|8.8
Walpole|8,202|475|475|5.8
Waltham|23,749|1,773|1,764|7.4
Ware|4,285|446|446|10.4
Wareham|8,650|884|754|8.7
Warren|2,004|112|112|5.6
Warwick|314|0|0|0.0
Washington|210|0|0|0.0
Watertown|14,959|1,161|998|6.7
Wayland|4,703|280|216|4.6
Webster|7,343|733|692|9.4
Wellesley|8,789|514|482|5.5
Wellfleet|1,430|37|37|2.6
Wendell|405|2|2|0.5
Wenham|1,310|169|116|8.9
West Boylston|2,454|288|189|7.7
West Bridgewater|2,507|125|63|2.5
West Brookfield|1,436|62|62|4.3
West Newbury|1,414|82|28|2.0
West Springfield|12,196|442|442|3.6
West Stockbridge|632|0|0|0.0
West Tisbury|1,081|38|23|2.1
Westborough|6,729|721|671|10.0
Westfield|15,362|1,095|1,095|7.1
Westford|6,877|643|347|5.0
Westhampton|557|0|0|0.0
Westminster|2,609|273|86|3.3
Weston|3,796|250|138|3.6
Westport|5,545|458|224|4.0
Westwood|5,218|615|497|9.5
Weymouth|22,471|1,857|1,833|8.2
Whately|647|2|2|0.3
Whitman|5,100|218|218|4.3
Wilbraham|5,021|256|255|5.1
Williamsburg|1,057|76|76|7.2
Williamstown|2,926|147|147|5.0
Wilmington|7,141|939|711|10.0
Winchendon|3,563|345|345|9.7
Winchester|7,860|150|148|1.9
Windsor|378|0|0|0.0
Winthrop|8,009|642|642|8.0
Woburn|15,312|1,305|1,137|7.4
Worcester|70,408|9,603|9,591|13.6
Worthington|522|22|22|4.2
Wrentham|3,477|268|164|4.7
Yarmouth|12,056|514|407|3.4

Totals|2,526,963|271,397|243,630|9.6

Falling Leaves

2010-10-14T23:04:00.001-04:00

It's mid-October and the leaves around Boston are finally turning - a little late this year, it seems to me. Each day my drive into work gives me more glorious, multi-colored trees. I'll need to start the raking this weekend.

With autumn as background, today I received the sad news that Deborah Goessling, the wife of my former colleague and friend Dan Goesssling, died unexpectedly this past Monday night. I didn't know Deb well, but I was close to Dan during my 5 year stint at IBM, and we've stayed in touch.

I only just discovered that Deb has been blogging for the past two years, with the focus of her blog being her lived experience with ALS. Her most recent entry was two weeks ago. I wish I'd known about her blog earlier; it offered a vivid and upbeat window into her life.

The New (3rd gen) Kindle

2010-08-31T22:14:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I received my new 3rd generation, Wifi-only Kindle in the mail. So far it's been a bit of a mixed bag, relative to my 2-year-old original Kindle.

Good things:

it is, of course, smaller and lighter .
The contrast is noticeably better, and the quality of images is dramatically better.
Page turns are a lot faster.
The software offers some nice new features (notably, collections).
The wifi connectivity was easy to set up, including multiple networks.
The wifi-only version is finally reasonably priced (call it $140).

Bad things:

I can't find a way to set the sleep timeout; it seems like it's pretty short, and since I have a password set, that means I have to retype the password too often.
The first time I tried to download new (as opposed to previously purchased content from my old Kindle), the items got stuck in a "pending - 0%" state. I called CS, and they had me restart the Kindle (which takes about a minute; it's shockingly slow, for a dedicated device...). That unclogged it, but I won't be happy if I have to do this very often. I got the distinct impression from the CS guy that "pending first downloads" is a common problem.
To my surprise, I don't like the "arrow quad" for navigation as well as I did the old "roller strip". The roller was very fast, and since it used a display other than the main display (with a different technology), it was very responsive. Feedback from the new arrow quad is on the main (e-ink) display, which means it can't be very fast; and it feels glitchy; the quad is small enough that I find myself pressing the center "select" button inadvertently.
Related to the quad vs. roller - the dictionary lookup is different, too. On the old Kindle, you scrolled to the line containing the word to be looked up, depressed the roller, and selected "lookup" on the menu that appeared. All the words on that line were searched for. On the new Kindle, you actually have to select a specific word, which requires more careful navigation with the arrow quad.

It may be that some of the negatives (like the use of the quad) go away as I become more adept with the device - but it distinctly feels like a more complicated gadget. I fear that Amazon has fallen prey to feeping creaturism. The real beauty of the first generation device was that it was dead-up simple to use as a book. This new Kindle has more features, but may not be as good a book reader - and if it tries to go head-to-head with the iPad, it's sure to lose.

The main reason I got a new Kindle was for sharing; I've been really annoyed that, unlike a book, I've had no way to lend out books on the Kindle to friends. Now that I have a second gadget, I can loan out the old one.

Given that up to six Kindles can share an account, I can imagine a group of friends, or even a book group, getting together to share books. I bet Amazon - and the publishing cabal - would hate that.

Looking at Wheels

2010-08-01T18:48:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I looked at wheels of various sorts. Last weekend RuthAnne and I took the Basic Rider Course from Training Wheels in Plympton and passed the exam to get our motorcycle licenses. I've wanted to know how to ride - and be able to do so legally - since my long trip to India in 2007, when it became clear that a 2-wheeler would have been the ideal way for me to get around. More recently, my daily commute to Burlington by bus has been getting me down; it takes an extra hour out of my day to go by bus than by car, yet I don't want to do all that driving, so I've been thinking a high-MPG 2-wheeler would be a good choice.

So - I stopped first at Boston Motor Sports in Arlington and looked at scooters. They carry scooters from (among others) Kymco and Suzuki. I was especially interested in the new Kymco Downtown 300i, but it's unfortunately not going to be available until the fall. It looks like a sweet vehicle; 60MPG, top speed of about 80MPH, large wheels (for a scooter), lightweight, FUN. While there, I looked at the Kymco People S 250, a similar scooter; it looked pretty good. I also checked out a used 2008 Aprilia 250 with 3000 miles, for $3200, including rear box.

I unfortunately couldn't ride anything; Boston Motor Sports (not unreasonably) requires a full license for test drives, not just a permit, and I'm still waiting for mine to come in the mail. After leering at metal for a while, I wandered upstairs to their gear department and checked out, helmets, gloves, jackets and such. One of the sales guys was particularly helpful, and I tried on a lot of stuff.

A helmet is a completely indispensible piece of safety gear, and I tried on helmets from Shoei and Arai. The Arai Vector medium fit me particularly well; it's about $450. I checked on the Internet (of course), and that's a very reasonably price for that helmet. I did price checks on everything I looked at at Boston Motor Sports, and they alway came in just a little over the best Internet prices. So I'll be buying locally!

For gloves, the Power Trip Grand National medium fit well and felt comfortable; $45/pair. For jackets, there were several that seemed pretty reasonable, costing between $250 and $450 for a complete system (outer shell with protective inserts, removable inner insulation layers). Chaps or other overpants seem like a wise idea, and boots wouldn't hurt, either. So I could be looking at about $1000 worth of protective gear before I even get a machine...

I left Arlington and went out to Framingham to look at a Sym Citycom 300 at Metrowest Scooters. They were a bit more laid back about the license requirement, and I got to take the citycom out for a spin. I was a bit disappointed with the acceleration; there's clearly a big performance difference between motorcycles and scooters with similar engine sizes. But the scoot handled bumps smoothly and was, of course, insanely easy to operate.

Finally, for something completely different, I stopped at Ace Wheelworks ( a few blocks from home) and took out a Trek Allant for a test ride. It was really fun being back on a bicycle, and this one is even pretty affordable. The 20" frame was right for me, and I had no trouble (aside from my terrible out-of-shapedness) gtting it up hills and stopped on the way down.

I'm sure I won't be making any purchase real soon, but it was fun to look.

Senator Robert Byrd is gone

2010-06-30T22:41:00.007-04:00

Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia died on Monday, at the age of 92. I'll leave the obituaries to more capable hands, but I have one particularly powerful memory of Byrd I'd like to relate.

In early October of 2002, the Senate debated - and ultimately passed - what became known as the Iraq War resolution. This pre-dated my blog, but I wrote about it on an earlier incarnation of my web site:

I headed up I-95 toward Pete's house in Casco, Maine on Friday afternoon, October 4th. The weather forecast had been changing all week, going from fair to bad to fair; on Thursday night we decided to just go for it, and hope the weather gods would take pity on us. I drove north through grey skies and occasional drizzle, which matched my rather somber mood. The Senate had taken up Bush's request for a free hand with Iraq. The debate between Senators Robert Byrd and John Warner was a rare display of passionate, yet civil debate. Byrd said at one point:
  The Framers were very wise when they determined that these two
  matters--the decision to go to war and the making of war--should
  be in two different places. The decision, the determination to
  declare war, should flow from this branch, the people's branch,
  and the matter of making war should be in the hands of a unified
  commander, the Commander in Chief.

  What are we doing? In my view, if we accept this resolution as it
  is written, we are saying both of these vital functions would be 
  placed in the hands of one man. And what did Madison say? He 
  said: The trust and the temptation are too great for any one man.
Pretty heady stuff, considering the usual tone of Washington politics.

You can find the full text of the debate on Thomas, the the official home of the Congressional Record. It's a little tricky to link to a specific page on Thomas, but if you follow this link and then find the link to page S9955, you'll be able to find it. The transcript is well worth reading.

Byrd was one of only 23 senators who ultimately voted against the war. Among those who voted for the authorization to go to war:

John Kerry
Hillary Clinton
Harry Reid
Christopher Dodd
Dianne Feinstein
Charles Schumer

Imagine how different the world would be if Byrd's eloquence had won over more of his colleagues.

Links of the day

2010-06-27T14:13:00.001-04:00

Weekends are, for me, highly variable in their effectiveness in unplugging me from the pressures of the work week. This weekend, though, is turning out nicely. Yesterday was a "getting things done" day - bill paying, grocery shopping, laundry, all that stuff I either can't or won't do on weekday evenings. Today is a "recharge" day. It opened with a few hours of reading (the New Yorker, the Sunday New York Times, the comics), followed by food prep for this evening and the upcoming week while listening to the radio.

From the The New Yorker came A Man of Letters, a fascinating look at the neurology of reading and writing. In the summer of 2001, the novelist Howard Engel suffered a stroke that destroyed his ability to read - but left him otherwise essentially unimpaired. Curiously, his ability to write was not affected - though he was incapable of reading what he had just written!

Then, as I puttered around the kitchen cooking, I listened to Speaking of Faith. SoF is variable in quality, but this week it's outstanding. Krista Tippets' guest is physicist and professor Arthur Zajonc, and the explore the relationship between science and meditation. Zajonc points to meditation as a powerful tool for focussing attention - a crucual skill for a scientist. He also muses about the increasingly large gap between the complexity and inner working of everyday objects (such as cell phones and computers) and the understanding most people of them.

Checking out the web page for the broadcast too me to this great little (3 minute) TEDtalk about our increasing online availability, and its effect on our face-to-face relationships.

An Imperfect Novel...

2010-05-05T20:11:00.000-04:00

...but only because it's a delightful collection of short stories. I'm reading Tom Rachman's first novel The Imperfectionists, after reading a glowing review in the Sunday NYTimes Book Review. As I finished the devastating chapter "U.S. General Optimistic on War", it struck me that this book is much like two of my other favorite collections of linked short stories: Tillie Olson's Tell Me a Riddle and Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place.

I'm enjoying this so much that I'll probably polish it off (very late...) this evening - the curse of a good book.

May Day 2010

2010-05-02T17:33:00.002-04:00

My Morris team danced out on May Day, along with Clownfish Rapper and Commonwealth Morris. We started in Davis Square, a few blocks from my home, then danced for the Revels May Day celebration, Verrill Farm in Concord, and finally concluded the day with a feast at Tom's home in Sudbury. A fine time was had by all.

Sean Smith caught this nice moment of Dan and me in mid-leap. Thanks, Sean!

Ah, the Old Same Place

2010-04-04T22:12:00.000-04:00

My buddy Dave spent some time yesterday walking our alma mater (stretching the term, in my case...) and sent me pictures. Thanks, Dave.

2010 FTU, er, UCF virtual tour

XKCD's April Fool hack

2010-04-01T09:34:00.002-04:00

Go visit xkcd now, because I suspect it will be back to, ah, "normal" tomorrow.

Some cheats in the comments.

Update: The 2010 April Fools' Day xkcd hack will live on.

The Gamble and Stones Into Schools

2010-03-27T16:46:00.001-04:00

My two most recent reads have been The Gamble, by Thomas Ricks (the atuhor of Fiasco, which I read several years ago), and Stones into Schools, Greg Mortenson's follow-up to Three Cups of Tea. They were both impulse purchases from Porter Square Books; I should know better than to wander in there with my wallet.

The Gamble continues Ricks' description and analysis of the war in Iraq. It's a good follow-up to The Fourth Star, as it deals with many of the same people and issues. Ricks does a great job explaining how "the surge" became U.S. policy, why it succeeded - and why the war so far has been only a prelude to what promises to be a long saga. The successful revolution in U.S. military thinking brought about by General David Petraeus and his like-minded colleagues is extraordinary, but it can't make up for the preceding years of mismanagement and woefully misguided civilian leadership. Ultimately, the surge succeeded in its goal of providing "breathing space" for Iraqi politicians, but the politicians failed to use it. General Ray Odierno, who succeeded Petraeus as the top military commander in Iraq, said, "As Iraq has become more secure, they've [Iraqi politicians] moved backwards, in some cases, to their hardline positions..." Ricks believes that,like it or not, the U.S. is going to be in Iraq for a long time, and closes the book with the words, "...the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened."

Stones into Schools is similarly a good foil to Sarah Chayes'The Punishment of Virtue. Chayes' experience in in southwestern Afghanistan, while Mortenson has focused on the northeastern areas (as well as Pakistan), so their perspectives are very different. Where they agree is on the increasing competence of the U.S. military in Afghanistan over the past decade of war. They disagree somewhat on their outlook for the future. Mortenson is relentlessly optimistic; Chayes is much more guarded. For the sake of the people of Afghanistan, I hope Mortenson is right.

Regrets

2010-03-09T15:33:00.000-05:00

One of my coworkers just said this, and I just had to pass it on:

In my entire career, I've never written a line of code that I didn't live to regret.

Sigh. Welcome to the world of programming.

SkypePhishing

2010-03-05T14:09:00.005-05:00

I use Skype as an intant messaging and VOIP service. Periodically I receive spam and phishing attempts - a more-or-less inevitable consequence of allowing anyone to contact me. Today's was cute; talk about high speed!

This scary-looking message from Update Registry popped up just as I got back from lunch:

[1:40:17 PM] Update Registry: WINDOWS REQUIRES IMMEDIATE ATTENTION
URGENT SYSTEM SCAN NOTIFICATION ! PLEASE READ CAREFULLY !!

http://www.onlinemt.org/

For the link to become active, please click on 'Add to contacts' skype button or type it in manually into your web browser !

FULL DETAILS OF SCAN RESULT BELOW
****************************************

WINDOWS REQUIRES IMMEDIATE ATTENTION

ATTENTION ! Security Center has detected
malware on your computer !

Affected Software:

Microsoft Windows Vista
Microsoft Windows XP
Microsoft Windows 2000
Microsoft Windows Server 2003

Impact of Vulnerability: Remote Code Execution / Virus Infection /
Unexpected shutdowns

Recommendation: Users running vulnerable version should install a repair utility immediately

Your system IS affected, download the patch from the address below !
Failure to do so may result in severe computer malfunction.

http://www.onlinemt.org/

For the link to become active, please click on 'Add to contacts' skype button or type it in manually into your web browser!

I immediately clicked "block this user" button. Then, curious, I looked up the domain registration for onlinemt.org at whois.net:

Domain ID:D158521179-LROR
Domain Name:ONLINEMT.ORG
Created On:05-Mar-2010 13:05:57 UTC
Last Updated On:05-Mar-2010 13:05:59 UTC
Expiration Date:05-Mar-2011 13:05:57 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:eNom, Inc. (R39-LROR)
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:ADDPERIOD
Registrant ID:2d91db7f97e279f8
Registrant Name:Andrej  Marsol
Registrant Organization:-
Registrant Street1:Najikal 21
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Prague
Registrant State/Province:CZ
Registrant Postal Code:21800
Registrant Country:CZ
Registrant Phone:+420.2319981
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:+420.2319981
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:andrejmars912@gmail.com

So the registration was all of about 5 hours old when I received this phishing attempt. Pretty zippy!

Update, in response to the comment from my buddy, Philip:

I browsed to www.sarahchayes.net with Chrome and was rewarded with this:

Thanks for the heads-up! I've emailed a warning to Ms. Chayes and (for now) removed the link.

MapReduce Patented? Bullshit!

2010-02-15T23:12:00.000-05:00

I just learned (somewhat ironically, via a Google Alert...) that Google has just received a patent on MapReduce! I haven't yet waded through the actual patent, but I have looked at a nicely formatted copy of the first claim.

It's a patent on partitioned parallel processing.

This is bullshit! I notice that they don't reference either of these two patents:

I'm an inventor on the first of these (filed when I was at Torrent Systems), and I know the inventors on the second (filed by our, ah, colleagues at Ab Initio). Both of these are directly relevant to Google's patent, and I would argue that the Google patent either overlaps these two or is obvious to a skilled practitioner.

Maybe Google plans to release this patent for unrestricted use. I don't care. Patents like this are an abuse of the patent system.

The Punishment of Virtue and The Fourth Star

2010-02-13T13:07:00.004-05:00

I'm currently reading The Punishment of Virtue, by Sarah Chayes, and enjoying it immensely. Chayes covered the fall of the Taliban as an NPR correspondent in and around Kandahar. She left Kandahar in mid January, 2002, and returned a few months later, not as a journalist, but as a field director for Afghans for Civil Society. She has lived in Afghanistan episodically since then and has a unique perspective on Afghan society and politics.

Chayes has done three interviews with Terry Gross on the NPR program Fresh Air. All of them are riveting, but I really urge you to listen to the most recent, from February 2009. Chayes argued (just at the outset of the Obama administration) that the U.S. should drastically increase its military presence in Afghanistan, as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for bringing stability to Afghanistan.

Chayes clearly loves living in Afghanistan, and her words resonate with my own experiences of living in India. Rather than residing in the "journalist colony" in Kandahar, she lived just outside of town with an Afghan family, enabling her to largely escape the kind of western bubble I found so stifling during my first trip to Hyderabad. She also shares my dismay with the state of U.S. and western society. As she was about to leave Quetta in January 2002, she was asked by Hamid Karzai's uncle, Aziz Khan, to return to help rebuild Afghanistan. She relates her feelings at this request:

...this was, unwittingly, what I was waiting for. Well before 9/11, a part of me had been casting about for such a sense of potential as I was feeling now. I could no longer bear to watch our Atlantic democracies go through the motions, in a business of democracy, while half our people didn't even vote. That couldn't be right. Through my reporting, I had gained the conviction that somewhere out there, from one of these post-conflict disaster areas, a phoenix was going to rise. Someone from some other place - not America or Western Europe - was going to winch us up out of this rut.

I have one stylistic complaint about the book: the references are relegated to the back of the book, rather than footnoted the bottom of the referencing page. Chayes' footnotes are very much worth reading, and I wish they more easily accessible.

The evolution in U.S. military thinking that leads Chayes to call for in increase in troop levels in Afghanistan is skillfully chronicled in The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army, by Greg Jaffe and David Cloud. This is an interwoven account of the careers, through early 2009, of John Abizaid, George Casey Jr., Peter Chiarelli and David Petraeus, four key officers in the U.S. response to 9/11. For someone like me who has never served in the U.S. military, this book provides a terrific description of how the system operates, and especially how West Point culture and the "up or out" career path affect military policy, for both good and bad. We're very fortunate to have a system that produces leaders like these, especially Petraeus and Abizaid. It's tragic that the civilian leadership of the Bush era fell so far short of their quality.

Update: I removed the link to Chayes' web site, www.sarahchayes.net, because it seems to contain malware. Thank you, paz, for pointing this out.

The Reading List

2010-01-23T15:39:00.002-05:00

I like to read. I start most days with at least a cursory reading of the New York Times (which we have delivered) and usually spend at least a few minutes reading before popping off to sleep at night. I like to think my taste in prose is pretty eclectic, but in reality, it's not. My favorite categories are:

news and periodicals (the NYTimes, The New Yorker, National Geographic, AMC Outdoors, sometimes The Economist)
science fiction (Neal Stephenson, William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson are exemplars of the kind of writers I favor)
mountaineering and orther outdoor adventure writing
politics and history (leftward leaning...)
novels, especially if they relate in some way to current life events (such as The Namesake, which I read on my way to India for the first time in April 2005)

I've decided I'm going to start blogging what I read, in part so that I can simply remember what I read. I'm often reading several books concurrently, and while I usually recall what I like and don't like, titles and authors don't necessarily stick. This has gotten worse since I've started doing much of my reading on a Kindle; I no longer see book covers very often (an interesting side effect of the Kindle...).

I'll tag these entries with "reading". I'll start by listing a few of the books I've read "recently" (for large and selective values of "recently"...).

Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie. I borrowed this from my friends Dan & Sue; it's a novel about a man born into a Muslim family at midnight on August 15, 1947 - the date of India's independence. It's nearly impossible to summarize, but because it's set in Srinagar, Bombay, Delhi, Karachi, Bangladesh and contains characters that ring very true to my experience of India, I really enjoyed it. I found it hard to start, but once I finished "Book 1" (of 3), I was into it.

Forever on the Mountain, James Tabor. My coworker Bill loaned me this tale of the summer, 1967 ascent of Denali that left 7 of the 12 climbers dead. Reading this motivated the next book:

Minus 148 Degrees, Art Davidson. This is the story of the first winter ascent (in early 1967) of Denali (aka Mt. McKinley), written by the climber who conceived of the expedition. Only fair - the story is compelling, but the writing is only so-so.

The Last War, Ana Menendez. This novel is a veiled autobiographical account of a portion of the author's life as a war correspondent and photographer in "the war on terror." The setting for most of the book is Istanbul, with forays to Afghanistan and elsewhere. Her partner, "Brando", is Dexter Filkins. I loved this book. If you read it, I encourage you to first read...

The Forever War, Dexter Filkins. Filkins is a highly-published foreign correspondent, whose articles have appeared regularly in the New York Times and elsewhere. This book is a deeply personal account of what it was like to be that correspondent.

More to come.

Hercules

2010-01-11T00:03:00.005-05:00

I need some sample IBM mainframe COBOL data at work for some testing, so I decided to have a go at installing the latest version of Hercules, an IBM mainframe simulator. It was remarkably easy, although having been an MVS systems programmer in a prior lifetime no doubt helped.

The key pieces are:

The Hercules simulator itself, which simulates the hardware.
The Turnkey MVS 3.8 system, which contains a full, ready-to-run MVS operating system, including compilers for COBOL, PL/I, FORTRAN and Algol 60 from the last release of MVT.
A slick little Windows program that provides a nice front panel GUI. It also includes a utility for submitting jobs to MVS.
x3270, a Windows tn3270 client; you need such a client for the MVS console and to log in to TSO.

It took perhaps two hours to get all this stuff downloaded and running.

It's striking just how small system software used to be. The entire MVS 3.8 download, including the pregenerated MVS disk volumes, source for much of the operating system, compilers, utilities, etc. is under 500MB.

Update: My buddy Dave has installed Hercules on his "high-zoot cell phone", with this scary result:

On the cusp of locking

2009-11-09T00:04:00.001-05:00

Kurt Vonnegut has written that there are actually 6 seasons, not 4. Between fall and winter comes locking, after the leaves have fallen and as the snows begin to bring on the winter quiet; then, between winter and spring we find unlocking, as the snows melt, the ice thaws, and the ground begins to soften for the first shoots of spring. I like this notion, and I've always found locking to be one the most difficult seasons emotionally. Fall has color, and the pleasure of the occasional warm day. Winter brings quiet and, of course, skiing. But locking - it seems to make me think hard thoughts and feel raw edges.

Today Katy and I attended the memorial service for Pat Field, who lived across the street from our first home in Cambridge. The service was in the beautiful Bigelow Chapel at Mt. Auburn Cemetery; after the service itself, we followed a sax player to the family plot, where Pat's ashes will be interred. A reception followed at Pat's home, and for the first time I got to see the interior of the house. It's stunning, full of incredibly elaborate woodwork and fine hand-knotted carpets. It's sad to think of this home, containing over a hundred years of furnishings from Pat's family, being broken up and scattered.

Pat died at home, attended by a great-niece, just weeks after the death of the last of her brothers. I gather the family has its depths; tensions in the family were hinted at in the memorial service. Much food for thought.

I walked home from Pat's and went outside to rake leaves. I've done a lot of raking over the past few weeks. I like raking; it's physical, but not really difficult, it gets me outside, and it has a tangible end point - even if it is a sure sign of the arrival of locking. This afternoon, as the sun was approaching the horizon of the surrounding houses, it lit up the red Japanese maple tree in our front yard, which stubbornly clutches its leaves long after most of the surrounding trees have dropped theirs. I had to take pictures; even these mediocre cell-phone images provide hints of just how lovely this tree is right now.

Here's a view from the other side, looking toward the sun.

Most of the trees, though, are bare by now, like this maple in our back yard.

So this afternoon I declared victory for the season; no more raking, I hope, until spring.

Farewell, Chemisa

2009-09-29T17:45:00.005-04:00

We've known this was coming for a while, but that doesn't make it any easier.

This afternoon we had a vet come by the house and put down Chemisa.

Chemisa (we never really decided on a spelling for her name...), like all of our cats, was a foundling; Katy and the kids brought her home from Santa Fe some 15 years ago. She was never an especially friendly cat, but she mellowed a bit in her old age, and has slept with Katy and me for years.

She was initially an indoor-outdoor cat; our attempts to keep her in would cause her to start peeing outside the cat box. As she got older, she stopped going out in the winter, and after a run-in with another critter that resulted in a nasty, infected bite, she finally relented and stayed inside. After a period of stand-off-ishness she eventually accepted Willin and Ditz, and the three of them would sometimes curl up together.

Back in August Chemisa began to lose her appetite, and for the past few weeks she's been losing weight. Having seen what Willin went through to get to his diabetes diagnosis, we we decided we just couldn't do that with Chemisa and elected instead to put her down. Katy found a vet who would make a house call, and this afternoon, at about 1:30PM, Chemisa died, peacefully and quietly, in my lap, with Willin, Katy and RuthAnne next to her.

She's buried in the garden beneath a new tree. I'll update this next spring when it blooms.

Thank you, Chemisa, for being part of our family.

Emacs and Windows

2009-09-14T17:47:00.004-04:00

My new job is forcing me, at long last, to embrace Windows as my primary development environment. As a result, I'm finally putting some real effort into getting emacs, complete with shell buffers, working well on Windows.

Here, as far as I can reconstruct it, is what I've done.

Download md5sums for Windows, so I can verify the MD5 checksums on other software I download.
Download and install keytweak, so I can remap the $#@ Caps Lock key to be a control key.
Add a HOME environment variable to the Windows environment. I've set this to C:\Documents and Settings\mylogin\My Documents, in an effort to be as natively Windows-ish as possible. Note that this will affect the location of things like the emacs initialization directory (.emacs.d) and bash initialization files (.bashrc).
Download and install emacs for Windows. Now I have an editor; I plunked a bare-bones init.el into $HOME/.emacs.d to get me going. It looks like this:

;; electric buffers
(global-set-key "\C-x\C-b"    'electric-buffer-list)

;; completion
(dynamic-completion-mode)

;; start the server 
(server-start)

;; font lock
(global-font-lock-mode t)

;; Don't store tabs. 
(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)

Download and install Cygwin/X. My reasoning here is that I'm bound to need an X11 server at some point, and this gives me enough of the entire Cygwin system (including bash, grep, find, etc.) to get started. I also added RCS (for super-easy source control for init files, etc.).

Now the main pieces are installed, but there's a lot of customization left to do. In particular, emacs shell buffers are lame; they run the Windows shell, not bash, and directory tracking doesn't work.

The next steps I acquired from Henry Kautz, specifically his page Using Emacs and Bash or Csh under MS Windows. I confess, this is essentially a black box for me, but it works like a charm. I added this to $HOME/.bashrc:

# directory tracking (from http://henrykautz.org/Computers/using_the_gnu_development_enviro.htm)

alias cd=cdpwd
function cdpwd {
'cd' "$1"
echo "Working directory is $(cygpath -wa .)"
} 
alias pushd=pushdpwd
function pushdpwd {
'pushd' "$1"
echo "Working directory is $(cygpath -wa .)"
} 
alias popd=popdpwd
function popdpwd {
'popd'
echo "Working directory is $(cygpath -wa .)"
}

I preceded these lines with a bit of path setup; this will no doubt vary based on your needs:

# Set up a vaguely useful path, in the context of an emacs shell. Thils will NOT have
# a bunch of standard Windows stuff on it.

cygdirs=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin
tcldirs=/cygdrive/c/Tcl/bin
windirs=/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/Wbem
cmakedirs=/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/CMake\ 2.6/bin
emacsdirs=/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/GNUmacs/emacs-23.1/bin/

export PATH=$cygdirs:$tcldirs:$cmakedirs:$emacsdirs:$windirs

Then I added this to $HOME/.emacs.d/init.el:

(defun my-shell-setup ()
"For bash (cygwin 18) under Emacs 20"
(setq comint-scroll-show-maximum-output 'this)
(setq comint-completion-addsuffix t)
(setq comint-eol-on-send t)
(setq comint-file-name-quote-list '(?\  ?\"))
(setq w32-quote-process-args ?\")
(make-variable-buffer-local 'comint-completion-addsuffix)
(setq shell-dirstack-query "cygpath -w `dirs`")
(add-hook 'comint-output-filter-functions 'perfect-track-directory nil t)
(add-hook 'comint-output-filter-functions 'comint-strip-ctrl-m nil t)
)

(defun perfect-track-directory (text)
(if (string-match "\\w*Working directory is ||\\([^|]+\\)||" text)
(cd (substring text (match-beginning 1) (match-end 1)))))

(setq shell-mode-hook 'my-shell-setup)
(setq process-coding-system-alist (cons '("bash" . undecided-unix)
process-coding-system-alist))
(setq exec-path (cons "C:/cygwin/bin" 
(cons "C:/cygwin/usr/bin" (cons "C:/cygwin/usr/local/bin" exec-path))))
(setenv "PATH" (concat "C:\\cygwin\\bin;C:\\cygwin\\usr\\bin;C:\\cygwin\\usr\\local\\bin" 
(getenv "PATH")))
(setq shell-file-name "bash")
(setenv "SHELL" shell-file-name) 
(setq explicit-shell-file-name shell-file-name)
(cd "~")

Now M-x shell creates a fully-functional bash shell, with directory tracking enabled. Sweet!

While customizing .bashrc I ran into a little problem with line endings; I configured Cygwin to use Unix-style line endings (LF, or \n), but emacs by default creates files with DOS line endings (CR LF, or \r\n). Bash doesn't like this. Saving a text file in emacs on Windows to have Unix line endings is done via C-x <enter> f unix <enter>.

"Give yourself to the Dark Side."

Oh, and speaking of the dark side: Those ugly white-on-black command windows can be customised to be a bit less depressing. There's a "colors" tab in the properties menu of the command window, and you can save the preferences for subsequent sessions.

Paranoid Nation

2009-09-13T11:50:00.005-04:00

Today's New York Times has an article about kids walking to school by themselves. My kids, being homeschooled, didn't face this specific conundrum, but we did allow them to start taking the T and walking places unescorted at pretty young ages - and we definitely faced disapproval from other parents about this. Fear of abduction is one of the most oft-cited reasons for not allowing children to walk places.

This little pair of facts is embedded in the story; I wish it had been a bit more prominent.

Critics say fears that children will be abducted by strangers are at a level unjustified by reality. About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, according to federal statistics; 250,000 are injured in auto accidents.

The Federal Highway Administration has a program to encourage walking and biking to school, with suggestions on how to improve safety for pedestrians and bikers, and ways to allay parental fears. For the sake of our children, I hope it succeeds.

Killer Micros

2009-08-19T11:35:00.002-04:00

I recently wondered about the origins of the phrase, "attack of the killer micros." A little time on Google revealed many attributions of the phrase to Eugene D. Brooks III, who evidently presented a talk with that title at one of the annual Supercomputing conferences around 1989 or 1990 (there are conflicting references, but nothing I can substantiate). Brooks was profiled in the New York Times in May 1990, and the phrase is used as the headline of a May 1991 NY Times article. But I was really after the first, definitive use of the phrase.

Well, this may or may not be it, but Brooks' words appeared this way in the Usenet newsgroup comp.arch on October 15, 1989:


[...] Micros now dominate
the performance game for scalar code and are moving on to vectorizable code.
After all, these little critters mutate and become more voracious every
6 months and vectorizable code is the only thing left for them to conquer.
No NEW technology needs to be developed, all the micro-chip and memory-chip
makers need to do is to decide to take over the supercomputer market.

              They will do this with their commodity parts.

Supercomputers of the future will be scalable multiprocessors made of many
hundreds to thousands of commodity microprocessors.  They will be commodity
parts because these parts will be the fastest around and they will be cheap.
These scalable machines will have hundreds of commodity disk drives ganged up
for parallel access.  Commodity parts will again be used because of the
cost advantage leveraged into a scalable system using commodity parts.
The only custom logic will be the interconnect which glues the system together,
and error correcting logic which glues many disk drives together into a
reliable high performance system.  The CM data vault is a very good model here.

          NOTHING WILL WITHSTAND THE ATTACK OF THE KILLER MICROS!

This was in a thread, not started by Brooks, entitled "Attack of the Killer Micros." So clearly the phrase had been kicking around before then.

This, BTW, was a bit of a Golden Age for Usenet news groups; The signal/noise ratio was very high, and some very smart, articulate people posted regulary: Brooks, John Mashey, Henry Spencer, Bob Colwell, Eric Raymond, many more. It was also an exciting time in the computer industry, with a lot of architectural experimentation and implementation. Fun browsing for old coots like me. :-)

Emacs for the Mac

2009-07-31T09:34:00.003-04:00

Recently I've been making more use of my iMac for programming at home, and I've been struggling to get a comfortable, reliable emacs setup. Today I came across Tim Bray's blog entry on giving Aquamacs a personality transplant, and it really helped. In summary, I put these into my ~/.emacs file:


;;;========================================================
;;; AquaMacs tweaks
(setq mac-command-modifier 'meta)
(setq x-select-enable-clipboard 't)
(setq mac-option-modifier nil)

These turn the command key into a meta key, cause the emacs kill buffer to participate fully in the OSX clipboard and, ah, do something to the option key (which, now that I have command as meta, I don't use). Thanks, Tim!

7,565,349...

2009-07-21T22:16:00.004-04:00

...is the number of my newly-issued patent for the frequency distribution operators.

I think of this as my first "real" patent; the prior patents for which I'm an inventor are the Torrent patents, where we all played a role but it's hard to point to anything specific and say, "That's MY idea." This one is really my baby; Mike Beckerle was a very helpful sounding board, but the main ideas and the implementation are mine. IBM, of course, handled the logistics of the filing process - all four and a half years of it.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about so-called software patents, but this one at least meets the "non-obvious to a skilled practitioner" bar; so far, no one I've described the problem to has come up with this solution.

So - it's a funny milestone, but a milestone nonetheless.

Henna!

2009-07-09T22:25:00.007-04:00

One of the things I enjoyed during my trip to India is the creative uses the Hyderabadis have for henna. It's used to make elaborate patterns on hands, called mehendi, and to color grey hair, for both women and men.

a young girl having a mehendi applied

From fabianfoo.com

From "10 Incredible Indian Beards and Moustaches" at sessionmagazine.com

I've been thinking of trying henna on my hair and beard since returning from Hyderabad. I recently found henna in the Little Market in Acton and tried it on a portion of my beard. I liked it, but the henna didn't seem very intense, so I ordered some henna from mehandi.com. It came last week while I was visiting my mother; last night I mixed it up, and this morning RuthAnne applied it.

Henna is basically ground up leaves from the henna plant, and it has an odd, funky, slightly-wet-dog odor to it. It looks remarkably like baby poo. RuthAnne wore gloves to avoid winding up with orange hands and slathered it on.

From HennaHead

I let it sit in my hair for about three hours; then Katy rinsed it out (a bit of a trick where the henna had dried out), I showered and washed my hair, and - voila!

Independence Day, 2009

2009-07-04T13:59:00.006-04:00

It's still July 4th, but I have a few moments while Mom naps to start my 4th of July entry. Mom and I were up late last night (11PM) working on a puzzle, and we both slept late this morning - me until about 7:45, Mom until about 8:30. After breakfast and some packing for tomorrow we took the shuttle to Buchanan for the picnic.

The weather is lovely; blue sky with a few puffy clouds, warn without being hot, and a bit breezy. We checked in at the dining hall and then headed outside for lunch. We sat at a table with some of Mom's neighbors, as well as a couple who have one of the duplexes at Buchanan. (Her name is Arlene; I can't recall her husband's name.) They do a lot of traveling and had very interesting stories. Here's the husband with Mom.

And here's a picture Dan (who lives two doors down from Mom) took:

After a nap we went over to Jeannie and Bob's for another picnic. We had a beautiful sunset; the fireflies came out in force, and we set off sparklers.

From Sparklers

The next three links are to video clips.

Jeannie Marie will be going to church with us in the morning; then we'll be back here for lunch and final packing.

This has been an interesting visit - certainly grist for another posting.

Meeting Tony

2009-07-02T19:20:00.002-04:00

I'm visiting my Mom in Elizabethtown, and this morning Karen and I took her to her physical therapy appointment with Tony. This is for her rotator cuff repair; Mom has been working with Tony since her surgery, and he's really helped her regain strength and motion. Here they are, going through the exercises.

before getting started

pumping iron, like Aahnold.

cranking away at full tilt

Before heading over to Lancaster for the appointment, we took a short walk to the top of the hill near Mom's apartment.

Mom and me

Mom and Karen

Pinewoods Morris Men 2009 AGM

2009-06-21T13:31:00.004-04:00

My Morris team held its annual general meeting yesterday at The Point, as customary. Much was discussed and little accomplished, also as customary, aside from the consumption of crisps, beer and some delicious snacks brought by Jan. We did, however, confirm the current squire and bagman for another year (or portion thereof), and the foreman was reappointed.

Business concluded, we piled into cars and drove to the Heritage Museums in Sandwich for some dancing. The hot and humid weather caused us to wrap things up after fewer than a dozen dances, and we capped the trip with rides on the carousel and some portraits in the Art Museum.

As usual, we opened with Highland Mary.

From 2009 PMM AGM

We danced at several places around the grounds and wound up at the carousel for a ride.

After one last stand outside the carousel we went back into the museum for some portraits.

"It's almost like being a Morris Team."

2009-06-08T02:11:00.006-04:00

That's how Tom, the concertina player extraordinaire for the Pinewoods Morris Men, once described having Pinewoods dance out on three consecutive weekends. We repeated that rare event this spring, dancing at the Marlboro Morris Ale, the Marlboro Morris Men's Portland gig, and the Bouwerie Boys' annual Suds. I took a few pictures:

2009 Marlboro Morris Ale

2009 Portland Tour

2009 Suds

Spring in E-town

2009-05-21T23:51:00.004-04:00

Kathy, one of my mom's helpers, sent me these pictures of Mom out and about near her apartment.

Mom, May 2009

Grrr - consumer-grade ISPs

2009-05-16T19:39:00.003-04:00

I've just wasted over an hour trying to figure out why Katy was not able to access her email via POP at our Google-hosted domain. Sending mail worked fine; receiving, though, just hung.

It turned out to be the firewall settings on the Verizon-provided DSL router at Katy's parent's home in Falmouth. It was blocking outbound access to port 995, used by gmail's POP server. I switched the firewall setting on the router to "minimum" (from "typical") and the port was unblocked.

I have to believe that Verizon changed this setting recently, because email from here has worked before. Grrrr. Maybe this blog posting will save someone else a little fruitless searching...

Obamanomics and The Matrix

2009-05-02T10:57:00.008-04:00

This week's New York Times Magazine lead article is After the Great Recession, an interview with President Obama by David Leonhardt. It provides a great window into Obama's thinking on the ecomony and other issues, including health care. Here's an excerpt from the health care discussion:

LEONHARDT: And right now we’re footing the bill for a lot of things that don’t make people healthier.

THE PRESIDENT: That don’t make people healthier. So when Peter Orszag and I talk about the importance of using comparative-effectiveness studies as a way of reining in costs, that’s not an attempt to micromanage the doctor-patient relationship. It is an attempt to say to patients, you know what, we’ve looked at some objective studies out here, people who know about this stuff, concluding that the blue pill, which costs half as much as the red pill, is just as effective, and you might want to go ahead and get the blue one. And if a provider is pushing the red one on you, then you should at least ask some important questions.

LEONHARDT: Won’t that be hard, because of the trust that people put in their doctors, just as you said? Won’t people say, Wait a second, my doctor is telling me to take the red pill, and the government is saving money by saying take the blue —

This cracked me up, as Obama was evoking Morpheus, from The Matrix:

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

This kind of red-pill / blue-pill symbolism can't be what Obama intended, and I'm sure I'm not the only person who will notice this. Ooops...

A follow-up note: I pointed out this amusing little slip on the NYT's moderated article comment section; they declined to publish it. I guess levity has no place at the Times.

Spring on the North Shore

2009-04-19T21:02:00.005-04:00

On Saturday Katy and I went for a series of walks at some of the parks and woodlands of Massachusett's north shore. This was Plan B; we had intended to hike up Mt. Monadnock, but threatening weather convinced us to stay closer to home. While we ended up with a much more modest day of walking, it was nonetheless quite lovely.

We began by driving north from Cambridge to Manchester and then toward Gloucester on Massachusetts route 127, looking for Ravenswood Park, a 600 acre preserve of the the Trustees of Reservations. Before we got to it, though, we stumbled across a different Trustees' parcel at Coolidge Point. This small park contains a large pond and the lovely Ocean Lawn, an expanse of grass punctuated by some magnificent trees. The coastline here is very different from the sandy Cape Cod beaches I know know visiting Katy's parents in Falmouth; the shore is much more rugged.

From 2009-04-18

From Coolidge Point it's a very short trip to Ravenswood Park. This large park has many small ponds and vernal pools, some nice views of the ocean, and lots of rocks covered with this interesting growth.

On our way out, we observed that a young visitor had made a presumably unintended contribution...

Our last walk was at Halibut Point, a park we've visited several times before. Just north of Rockport, this preserve offers a rather unusual tower, an inactive quarry, some stupendous rock piles, and interesting tidal pools.

We capped the trip with a visit to Passports restaurant in Gloucester. The food was superb.

Feroz comes through

2009-04-15T21:02:00.002-04:00

Yesterday when I arrived home from work I found a delivery attempt notice from TNT hanging from our back doorknob. I called the number on the card and discovered that they were trying to deliver a package from India. Their depot in Woburn would be open for another hour, so RuthAnne and I hopped in the car and picked up the parcel.

When we got it home, the cats immediately claimed ownership; they seemed to find the smell enormously exciting.

Katy was on her way home from my mother's house, and I decided to wait for her to arrive before opening the package. I knew what it had to be.

Over a year and a half ago, at the very end of my assignment in Hyderabad, I ordered - and mostly pre-paid for - a silk-on-silk, hand-knotted 5x7 carpet from Kashmir, through my friend, Feroz. This was an interesting exercise in trust. I'd gotten to know Feroz by playing backgammon with him at the shops he worked at as a salesman. We'd become friends and discussed carpet designs often; I occasionally brought him pictures of carpets from other shops that were close to the design I was looking for, but not quite it. Feroz persuaded me to order a unique carpet through him, sight unseen, to be made to order and delivered in about a year.

On the face of it, this was crazy. The amount of money at risk was enough that this would be a painful lesson on human nature if the carpet never materialized. But - I'd known Feroz for 6 months, and we'd spent a lot of time together. I liked and trusted him.

Over the course of the past year I've received occasional updates on the carpet's progress from Feroz, and when I was back in Hyderabad last fall I paid the remainder of the amount due on the carpet. Finally, last week Feroz advised me to be on the lookout for the carpet's arrival - and here it is.

Thank you, Feroz.

Blogging as memory

2009-04-11T11:49:00.007-04:00

Well - it's been an intense week or so. This posting will be different from most of my blog entries in that it contains a lot of personal content - not one of my usual breezy travelogues or predictable political postings.

It's inspired in part by a note I got this morning from my cousin, Michael. Two weeks ago, while in Florida with my mother, Katy and I had a truly wonderful overnight visit with Michael and his wife, Lucy. I haven't been very close to most of my extended family over the decades, but somehow Michael and I seem to be "like kind" in a number of ways, and we really clicked. Since I got back we've been trading email, and his most recent note contained a link to a Speaking of Faith program about Alzheimer's disease. The show's host, Krista Tippit, wrote a blog entry relating her inspiration for the program . Early in her career Krista worked as a chaplain at an Alzheimer's ward, and of this experience she wrote:

Here is the great gift I could give to the men and women I met on Wooster II: unlike those who had known them long and intimately, I had no former self with which to compare them — no sense of unfolding grief, of death in slow motion. I could come to know and love them as they were, right there. And here is the greater gift they gave me: they showed me that the structure of my life — the identity and credentials by which I present myself, and a verbal intelligence with an ability to impress — were not the core of my human presence. They would never remember my name or consider my education or accomplishments. But they would know if I was a kind human being — a good listener, patient, and attentive at every level of human presence — not just by way of words, but through eye contact, compassionate silence, touch.

Katy has been trying to get this same message across to my siblings and me regarding my mother. None of us are static beings. We accept change in people when it is seen as "growth", but somehow accepting change brought on by illness is more difficult. My sisters and I have a tendency to want Mom to be the person she was for most of our lives, and we try to push her into that mold. Well, that's not who she is now, and if we want to be good companions for her, we need to let her be who she is, pay attention to that, and respond in a way that Mom will find pleasing. We need to let her find pleasure in the things she is capable of doing, and not just push her to do the things we want her to be able to do.

This doesn't mean just letting her have her way about everything. For instance, she'll be happier, and retain her relative independence longer, if she exercises her body and mind. She doesn't always want to; hell, I often don't want to exercise, either. So she has to be pushed on some things. But it's important to make sure she feels some success at these activities.

Michael's note also mentioned a recent NPR story about how pets are becoming more like members of our families. I'd heard the same story, and it had obvious resonance for me given the struggle we're having with Willin and diabetes. Medical emergencies, be they human or animal, demand rapid decisions with only limited knowledge, and I'm looking back on the events of this week with regrets. Had I known on Monday morning that I was looking at spending over $1000 on Willin's care, I might well have opted for at-home euthanasia instead of treatment. Now that the money is spent, and it appear that ongoing maintenance of Willin's diabetes will be fairly inexpensive, I'm willing to give it a try for a while - but I'm going to be asking a lot more questions about cost from here on out, and we're going to have to have a family discussion about how this affects our lives before too much longer.

Whither this blog?

When I started blogging a few years ago, at the beginning of my long trip to India, I had two goals:

give my family and friends back home a window into the new and exotic world I was visiting, and
scratch my long-standing itch to write.

Now, though, I have another, entirely selfish goal, inspired by Alan Dienstag's essay regarding a writing program for early stage Alzheimer's patients. He wrote:

The members of the Lifelines Writing Group have taught us about the power of writing and the nature of memory and memory loss. Their lifelines have also served as a means of closing the psychological distance between the Alzheimer's and non-Alzheimer's world. Perhaps most importantly, they have demonstrated that there is a way to give meaning to the precarious station in life in which they find themselves, and they suggest a path for others in the early stages of Alzheimer's to follow; to live with memories; to give them to others; and to preserve in some form a record of who you are, who you were, and who you wanted to be in this world before it slips away.

If I reach a point in my life where I can feel my self slipping away, I want touchstones to help me recall who I am. I've had only very limited success in my attempts to keep paper journals, but blogging I can do.

Update: I received an anonymous comment on this blog entry that I have chosen not to publish. I am in general opposed to anonymity on the Web; if you aren't willing to speak your mind under your own name, I feel no obligation to publish your comments.

So, how much is a cat's life worth?

2009-04-10T21:36:00.003-04:00

So far, about $1130, just in direct vet bills. I have about $50 worth of blood glucose measurement stuff on order, too.

From Willin's illness

I know, life throws you curveballs, but - damn! I can sure think of other uses for that much money.

One Sick Kitty

2009-04-08T19:06:00.006-04:00

Willin, back home in the kitchen

Over the past couple of months our wonderful cat Willin seemed to become an incredibly fussy eater. We tried changing food many times, as recommended by our vet, but nothing kept his interest for long and he started losing weight.

Last week it became clear that this had to be more than just a fussy eater, and we took him back to the vet - who took some X-rays and bloodwork and sent us home with an appetite stimulant. A few hours later Willin's situation seemed desperate, and we took him to the MSPCA's Angell Animal Medical Center in Boston. The vet there (Ryan Gershenson, DVM) took more bloodwork and ran through a list of possible diagnoses - including diabetes. We brought Willin back home for the night, and in the morning returned to our local vet in desperation.

We talked through possible diagnoses, and I brought up diabetes. For some reason this seemingly hadn't occurred to our vet as a possibility, even though Willin's blood sugar was somewhat elevated. We left Willin with the vet for a night of hydration, insulin and monitoring.

This morning he was much better, and this afternoon I left work early and picked up Willin and brought him home - along with a box of syringes, a bottle of insulin and the newly-acquired skill of injecting insulin into a cat. He seems a lot happier than he was a few days ago; notably, he's eating. He also seems a little annoyed at the poodle trim on his right leg (where an IV line was attached overnight).

We'll see how he does over the next few days, but hopefully we're out of the woods - at least for now.

Willin's X-rays were emailed to me; they're pretty interesting.

New York on business

2009-03-18T22:58:00.007-04:00

I'm in New York City for a few days to provide a deposition in a patent infringement lawsuit. IBM is putting me up at the Club Quarters hotel on 51st Street, at Rockefeller Center (for $237/night...). I came down by train this afternoon; Katy drove down and joined me. (She's driving directly to my mom's home from here, hence the need for a car in New York City.)

We had a quiet, but pleasant, first evening. The weather is gorgeous, so we walked from the hotel to Greenwich Village for supper, enjoying the sites as we strolled south on Broadway. At 14th Street, at Union Square, we encountered this bit of street theater in progress.

From NYC, March 2009

It turned out they were handing out flyers, so Katy walked up and took one.

It was an ad for the home opener of the Red Bulls (vs. the New England Revolution).

I got a little confused as we got close to Washington Square Park, and we wound up much further east than I intended. We came across this parking lot; it makes sense, but it's funny (to my eyes) nonetheless.

We continued south on Lafayette, and eventually reached 339, home of the Peace Pentagon. When I lived in NYC 30 years ago, I spent a number of afternoons doing office work for the War Resisters League (still alive) and Mobilization for Survival (defunct, I believe).

My connection with these groups was through the SHAD Alliance, an anti-nuclear group I belonged to in the early 1980s. Here's the plate by the entrance.

With my nostalgia itch scratched, we walked west on Bleeker Street, taking in shop windows, like this one:

We had dinner at Panchitos, a Mexican restaurant on McDougal Street that I frequented back in the day. Thirty years later, the vegetarian salad was pretty much unchanged (and still a delicious meal all by itself), the quacamole was fresh and tasty, and atmosphere funky and relaxed.

AFter dinner we walked across McDougal for coffee and then took the subway back to Rockefeller Center. By this time the ice skating rink was almost deserted.

Tomorrow - work.

Woodward Mountain

2009-03-07T12:22:00.005-05:00

Katy and I spent three days skiing with our friends Dan and Sue in mid-February. On the second day we skied the Woodward Mountain tour, a 6-mile backcountry trip from the summit of the Bolton Valley ski area to the Waterbury Reservoir. Conditions were excellent (maybe a foot of light, fresh snow over a sound base), and we had a great time.

This trail is described in David Goodman's Backcountry Skiing Adventures: Vermont and New York. The Maple Ridge Mansfield Region Nordic Skiing & Snowshoe Trail Map covers this area in detail; you can pick up a copy at the Bolton Valley Nordic Center, where you can also check conditions and get the single-ride ticket you need to start the tour. It starts near the top of the Vista Quad lift, winds over Woodward Mountain and down to a parking area near the Waterbury Reservoir.

Dan, a short way into the trip. The snow was great.

From Woodward Mountain tour, Feb 2009

We had beautiful weather for the trip; it was cool enough to keep the snow fresh, but not too cold.

There's a lot of up and down on this trip; here's Alex enjoying some down.

The deep, fluffy snow made for great skiing, but it was challenging if you fell.

There are plenty of nice views on this trail. Here's look south toward Camel's Hump.

Skiing, of course, is what it's all about.

There are more pictures in the online album.

Woodward Mountain tour, Feb 2009

Dancing with Mom

2009-03-07T11:39:00.003-05:00

Katy and I visited my mother in Elizabethtown in early February. There was a dance at the Masonic Village the night we arrived, and we got some pictures at the dance.

Warming up in the hallway

From Dancing with Mom,Feb 2009

There are a few more pictures in the full online album.

Bye Bye, Birdman

2009-03-07T10:25:00.003-05:00

The de-serverization of my life continued this week with the demise of birdman, the BSD virtual private server that I've shared with Dave for the past two years, at JohnCompanies.com. The folks at JohnCompanies provided us with, boring, unexciting and entirely competent service, and I recommend them to anyone looking for a relatively inexpensive, but industrial quality, collocation provider.

Google now well and truly owns me.

A tombstone for Tombstone

2009-03-01T23:12:00.003-05:00

RIP, Tombstone.

Tonight I powered down Tombstone, the Dell Poweredge 1400SC in the basement, for perhaps the last time. I bought Tombstone in 2002 to replace the no-name PC whose motherboard fried when the CPU cooling fan failed. I ran FreeBSD on this system and used it to provide external services (HTTP via Apache, SMTP via Postfix, ssh) for narsil.com and narsil.org, as well as internal services for our home PCs: DHCP, NTP, Samba, DNS caching, outbound email and other odds and ends.

Hosting my own domains in the basement gave me a lot of flexibility and largely freed me from limitations of ISPs, but it also meant that I had to be the on-call system administrator for my own family. If Tombstone went down, so did all of our email and network connectivity. Over the years, this trade-off has come to look less attractive. A couple years ago (before my 6-month stint in India) I went in with a buddy on a BSD VPS at johncompanies.com that took over for email. I also dropped the local DNS cache, NTP and DHCP servers, relying on our ISP's name servers (Speakeasy) and the DCHP daemon in our little Linksys BEFSX41 router. All that was left externally was the web server, and internally the file server.

The advent of Google Apps finally seduced me away from all this roll-your-own stuff. Email and web services for my domains are all with Google now, pretty much completing the process of Google owning me (I've been a gmail/picasa/blogspot junkie for years). We never really used the file server very much anyway, so it was time to stop burning those kilowatt-hours. But I'm still a bit saddened by this.

Tombstone was a fine example of an on-the-cheap server. I think I paid about $700 (brand new) for Tombstone, with a mighty 1.2GHz Celeron processor, 128MB of ECC memory and a huge 36GB SCSI drive (in addition to the 4GB ATA primary drive). This modest hardware easily handled all of our services: NTP, DHCP, DNS (both caching and separate internal/external name servers, using dbjdns), Samba, Apache, Postfix, a CUPS printer queue, ssh. Granted, our internal machines didn't exactly constitute a huge load, but I did a fair amount of web and email traffic. FreeBSD never crashed; all my outages were due to power failures (I had a UPS for a while, but when it died a few years ago I never replaced it). Auto-reboot always brought everything back without intervention.

Good-bye, Tombstone. I'll miss you.

Where did you say we are?

2009-02-17T22:49:00.001-05:00

My visit to Deepak's Home

2009-02-13T14:33:00.001-05:00

On my last trip to Hyderabad, my coworker Deepak invited Andy and me to lunch. We had a delightful time, and I got a few pictures of Deepak and his family.

From Deepak's Home and Family

Eeek! No notice for driver's license renewals!

2009-01-20T17:24:00.002-05:00

A friend of mine just broadcast a warning that the Massachusett's Registry of Motor Vehicles no longer sends out letters reminding people to renew their license. YOWZA!

I've confirmed this. If you live in Massachusetts, pull out your license and CHECK IT! Then set up an automatic reminder (Google Calendar, anyone?), and renew online if necessary (and possible...).

Blog Spam

2009-01-08T16:15:00.003-05:00

This is why I moderate the comments on my blog. The marketing scumpuppies at Fortune Park Hotels attempted to leave this comment on a recent blog entry. The original contains links to their web site for phrases like "hotels in Hyderabad" - a phrase they also repeat many times in an obvious attempt to influence search engine results. Grr.

It won’t be wrong to term Hyderabad as one of the most culturally rich places in India. Be it the legacy of the very famous Nawabs, the colorful streets, the exhilarating monuments or the mouthwatering and delicious Hyderabadi food, especially Hyderabadi Biriyani, this south Indian city has always been a hot shot tourist destination. The industrial and infrastructural development in this city in the recent years has only been the icing on the cake. Today the hotels in Hyderabad not only cater to the tourists but also to the business and corporate traveler. There are many business hotels in Hyderabad that are being dished out by the leading names of the Indian hospitality industry. Apart from the budget hotels in Hyderabad, luxury hotels are also abundant in the city. In short be it for work or an existing vacation, hotels catering to each class can be found in the city. With so much happening in this future metro, Hyderabad is actually the place to be!

New Year, 2009

2009-01-04T23:40:00.000-05:00

My mother and sister came to visit for a few days after the New Year started. RuthAnne was off visiting friends, but here's a picture of the rest of us.

From Christmas 2008

Thanksgiving, and leaving Hyderabad

2008-11-28T17:27:00.004-05:00

I've been back in the U.S. since November 16th and insanely busy. Today, though, is the Friday after Thanksgiving, and I'm sitting at the desk in the Kurtz house at the Cape, looking out at Waquoit Bay and finally able to catch my breath a bit.

the view from the desk

First, a few pictures from my next-to-last week-end in Hyderabad. (There are more than just these few in the Picasa album.) Srinivas took us to a temple in Jubilee Hills on Friday night after work. I would have liked to have gotten back to get daylight pictures, but these will have to do. The entrance is flanked by these imposing gentlemen, who look to me like carnival strongmen.

The temple itself was lit like a Christmas tree.

The interior was lovely.

On Saturday I took my final bike ride. The bike continued to give me trouble, with the left pedal crank and splash guards loosening, requiring frequent stops. As I climbed the last hill near the guest house my right pedal broke (it turns out it's plastic, not metal...), and I was able to limp the last half mile home only thanks to a heavy application of duct tape from my water bottle. I've certainly learned a lot about what to look for in a bicycle on this trip.

Anyway, I rode through Jubilee Hills towards Durgam Cheruvu, and up to the "Grand View" water tower I visited last year. This let me get a second take on a view I photographed last year in July.

last year

this year

I used a dirt path to cut across the scrub and into the back of BNR Hills, a gated community I was never able to explore on my previous trips. This brought me to a hill overlooking this:

Is Cinderella home?

They have a nice view out the back, though.

Here's the back of the entrance to BNR Hills.

The southern end of Durgam Cheruvu

My sister Jeannie asked me to bring her a rock from Hyderabad. I did (although she doen't know it yet...), and here's where I collected it.

My last week in India was complicated by a somewhat unexpected wrinkle: my colleague Andy and I were asked to make a two-day trip to Delhi to visit some customers. This meant we had to check out of our guest house and drive to the airport at 5AM Tuesday morning to fly to Delhi.

We had no time whatsoever to do any siteseeing in Dehli, so I took essentially no pictures. The one shot I have is of the entrance signage for the IBM office we worked out of.

From The Final Days

We returned to Hyderabad late Wednesday night. Thursday night the folks at work took Andy and me out to dinner.

Andy and I spent the last few nights at the IBM guest house in Kondapur. It's a pretty decent place: close to the office, nice staff, clean rooms. The view out the dining room window nicely captures modern India:

Note the satellite TV antenna on the roof. This is right next door:

Yes, it's a rice paddy.

Andy left on Friday night. My flight out was Saturday night, so I had Saturday to tie up loose ends. I took Srinivas to an Internet cafe and helped him set up a gmail account. Receiving mail from him is part of what triggered this blog entry. I'm so pleased that I could help him with that. We also went shopping for, of all things, those little plastic buckets that every Indian bathroom has; Katy has expressed a desire to have a particular style for our home. I'd been looking for them since my arrival, without success; we finally found them in a shop in Ameerpet. (I'll post a picture later.) The shop was near this Gurudwara.

After shopping we stopped at a nearby restaurant for tea. I sipped that lovely Indian masala tea and wrote in my journal, and on the way out took these pictures.

From Ameerpet Srinivas and I drove to Nagarjuna Circle to meet with Feroz for dinner. Here are some pictures I took out the car window on the way. I've spent so much time in Hyderabad that I almost don't notice this stuff anymore.

I spent my final dinner in Hyderabad at Feroz's flat in Khairatabad. Srinivas and I picked up food at Chutney's and followed Feroz (who was on scooter) to his place. I finally got to meet Feroz's wife (whose name, sadly, I did NOT retain...). She's very cheerful, but for some reason she looks so somber in all these pictures.

After dinner Srinivas drove me out to the airport, on a newly-opened segment of the Outer Ring Road. (It literally opened the day I left.) I said my goodbye and then entered the in-between space that is modern air travel. I managed to get a business class upgrade for the Hyderabad to Frankfurt leg, making sleep possible. Waiting in the usiness class lounge I had the usual mixture of anticipation and depression that I feel when I leave India. Life in the U.S. just doesn't seem real any more.

Anyway. Here I am in Falmouth, spending Thanksgiving weekend, as ever, with Katy's family. The sailboat was still in the water, and this morning's activity was to sail the boat to Falmouth inner harbour to be pulled for the winter. Here's the boat leaving, and Katy returning to the dock after dropping off the sailing crew.

Happy Thanksgiving, all.

Hyderabad south of the Musi

2008-11-09T12:46:00.004-05:00

Yesterday a bunch of us from IBM's India Software Lab visited some of Hyderabad's lesser-known landmarks, all south of the Musi River: Chowmahalla Palace, Raymond's Tomb, and the Paigah Tombs. A fine time was had by all. I'll try to expand this later, but for now, you can see the pictures from the day in this album.

Nov 8 Group Trip

This is where I work

2008-11-09T01:00:00.002-05:00

My IBM colleague on this trip likes to have a picture of the sign marking each IBM facility he visits. Andy, here are the pictures for Hyderabad. Enjoy!

How could I NOT say something?

2008-11-04T23:55:00.004-05:00

President Obama. Wow.

It's strange watching this unfold from Hyderabad. I watched a bit of TV this morning before going downstairs for breakfast. Seeing U.S. election results interleaved with Indian TV ads was a bit surreal.

One of my colleagues from California arrived Monday. She's originally from Minnesota (which went for Obama) and now lives in California (which is going for Obama). It's great to have at least one other American to share this with.

President Obama. I like it.

Diwali

2008-11-01T00:30:00.005-04:00

Just a very short post to say that Diwali was unbelievable.

The little shrine in the guest house was set with oil lamps and offerings.

From Diwali

Anil picked up Andy and me around 7PM; we went off and got chaat at Ohri's, picked up a few bottles of Fosters and then sat on the guest house roof until 10:30 watching the show. I shot some video to try to provide some sense of it, but it's really impossible to capture. Continuous fireworks in all directions, for 3 hours. Wow.

From Diwali

Soon, Diwali

2008-10-25T10:44:00.002-04:00

This morning I took my bike back to the bike shop to get the problems fixed (loose pedal, flat tires, loosened brake cables). The guest house arranged an autorickshaw for me (the bike doesn't fit in the trunk of Srinivas's car...) and off I went to Secunderbad.

The ride over took about a half hour. By the map, the way I took the driver is about the same as going through Punjagutta and Begumpet, but it has a lot less traffic. I dropped my bike off and was told it would take 2-3 hours, so I went exploring.

The bike shop is in an area labeled "General Bazaar" on my Guide Map of Greater Hyderabad. I got pretty lost in here once on my last trip; it's a complete maze of winding alleys. This time I did better, as I was starting from a known location and could easily backtrack, and I had a huge amount of fun exploring.

My trusty guide map

These alleys are where life happens in Indian cities. I was early enough (10:30AM) that quite a few shops were still closed or just opening, but you can still get an idea what these places are like.

From Soon, Diwali

Here are some interior shots of shops catering to Indian women. Wow!

Bindis. Lots and lots of bindis

Bangles. Lots and lots of bangles.

I also came across some great signs.

The Infant Jesus Education Consultants?!?

Eventually I wound up at "Paradise", a collection of related restaurants, from take-out to high-end, cloth napkin. I had my brunch at "Paradise Rooftop", which looks out over, uh, well, a busy street. But it was high enough up to be pleasant. The food was fabulous. I had navaratan korma, which was completely different from other versions of the same dish I've had before. The sauce was mild yet very flavorful, and chock full of things like pineapple, pomegranate seeds, peas, grapes; it was really wonderful. The side dishes were just as good. The cucumber raita was cold, and the cucumber crisp; the rice was fluffy and had a great flavor. Even the fresh lime soda was special; I think there was a tiny bit of cayenne pepper added.

After my meal I wandered slowly back to the bike shop, stopping to pick up a new Nokia 1200 cell phone. Phones have been a continuing problem on the trip; I can't get a charger that works consistently with my old 1100. I'm giving it, and the flawed chargers, to Srinivas.

The bike was ready when I got there, and I headed back to Banjara Hills. My route went around the top of Hussein Sagar, Hyderabad's central lake; it really stank in the midday sun, and I was happy to get away from it in Khairatabad.

As I hit Street #7 I got a call from Srinivas. He and Andy spent the morning exploring Golconda, and were calling to see about lunch. We met at Ohri's for chaat. After eating we split up again, with Srinivas taking Andy back to the guest house while I peddled home. As I passed Hampi, near Lotus Pond, I came upon these designs on the sidewalk in from of a business ("Zeta" - I have no idea what they do...).

These have a name, but I can't recall what it is. (Maybe one of my readers knows and will comment...). I wound up talking to a fellow who works in the building; there was a competition among 4 groups in the office. Sounds like fun.

Back at the guest house I washed off the road dirt and settled in to do a little reading. At some point I realized it was getting difficult to see the page; when I looked up, I discovered that Hyderabad was giving me another lovely sunset.

Monday and Tuesday are Diwali, which is celebrated with fireworks. Many people are getting a jump on things; I caught this just before I started to write this entry. Happy Diwali!

From Soon, Diwali

Catching Up - last Sunday

2008-10-23T12:55:00.003-04:00

Last Sunday I attended two social events, courtesy of coworkers. In the morning, Harini had a housewarming for a new flat near Indira Park; In the evening, Shivani got married. I don't have time for a real write-up, but hear are some pictures. There are more in the online album:

Oct19

Harini and her son

Kalyani and various kids

Preethi's family

Prashant, Shivani and Preethi

Shilparamam

2008-10-16T13:21:00.005-04:00

Today Preethi, Madhu and I played hooky for a few hours in the afternoon and went to visit Shilparamam, a seasonal bazaar new Cyber Tower. I was blown away. My notes will be few; mostly I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. For larger images, visit the web album.

Just inside the entrance was a Kashmir goods vendor, with lovely scarves, ponchos and other woven pieces. Here's a sample of his Pashmina scarves.

Madhu bought this lovely poncho for herself.

These embroidered pieces are from the stall next door.

I'm still looking for nice metal bangles for Katy. Hopefully she'll tell me if any of these catch her fancy.

These earrings are from the same vendor.

I wandered along, browsing in various stalls, until I rounded a corner and came upon this amazing scene.

Finally, I snapped this scene on the way out.

Jubilee Hills at Night

2008-10-15T14:46:00.004-04:00

I left work relatively early tonight (7PM) to meet Rahul and his wife for dinner. Rahul is the son of Vijaya, who was my landlady the last time I visited Hyderabad. Rahul works for Microsoft; he went to the Chennai IIT and did (I believe) graduate work in the U.S. He got married last year, not long after I returned to Cambridge. Sadly, I can't recall his wife's name; she is a writer at an advertising agency in Banjara Hills, and is from Chennai; she and Rahul met while he was in school.

From Jubilee Hills at Night

They are an interesting couple, and very much what I expect is the face of the India in the 21st century - or, at least, urban, professional India.

I stopped on the way to Chutney's at FabIndia and bought four new kurtas:

a long, plain cotton for use as pajamas
a long, pretty print cotton
a short, short-sleeve cotton "work shirt"
a long, brownish-red, lightweight silk-cotton blend for Shivani's wedding on Sunday

After dinner I stopped briefly to see Rahul's apartment in Banjara Hills (it's in a fabulous location, just northwest of Southern Spice, near Stone Valley) and then went home to Jubilee Hills and took the following pictures.

From my room's balconey I can look down and across the street and see this house.

From Jubilee Hills at Night

For the past few days something has been going on (a wedding, I suspect): lots of lights, music (drumming and horns), and many, many guests. I walked out and got these pictures.

The front gate, flash lit

The front gate, by the more interesting available light

Peering through an opening in the fence

Returning to my room, I took these pictures.

The lights of Jubilee Hills

This one is just plain weird; I was trying to get a picture of the full moon, fiddling around with exposures, and ended up making it look like the midday sun.

Finally, this critter was on the wall when I went back inside.

From Jubilee Hills at Night

Too tired...

2008-10-14T13:19:00.003-04:00

Man, oh man, what a day. I've been going since 7:45, and I'm just going to knock out a few words and then hit the sack.

Supper last night was exceptionally weird. I tried to find the 6pack in Film Nagar, but traffic was intense, and it was dark, so I gave up and asked my driver (Ramreddy; Srinivas is in Tirupati this week) to take me to Little Italy (just around the corner). As usual, the food was good, but expensive; garlic bread, spagetti puttanesca, fresh lime soda, ice cream and cappuccino set me (well, IBM) back over Rs. 800. But the music was dreadful - bad covers of pop tunes of the 70s - such hits as "I can see Clearly Now", "El Condor Pasa", "Silence is Golden", "Stand by your Man" - you get the idea. It was brutal.

Got home, FINALLY got moved into my upstairs room (it's really nice), set up the laptop and called Katy. Network problems all night; I think one of the other guests has a flakey, manually-configured wifi setup. Anyway, my call was a bit short.

Also got news that IBM has put a serious clamp on travel. It's a good thing I'm already here, because otherwise I think this trip would have been canned. We still don't know if Andy's will proceed. I had to convert my business class return ticket to coach; I'm trying to wrangle an upgrade for at least the Hyderabad to Frankfurt leg.

Flailing at work today. As last trip, I'm being deluged from all sides. Ah, network flakeys again. enought for now.

Back on my wheels again (sort of)

2008-10-12T12:17:00.006-04:00

Yesterday (Saturday) was a long day.

I slept very poorly Friday night, unable to get to sleep until after 3AM. It may have been jet lag, anxiety, the chaat I had for supper (Srinivas' theory...) or all of the above, but I just tossed and turned and read and tossed some more. In any case, this left me only a few hours of sleep before Srinivas arrived, as requested, at 9AM to take me out to run errands.

This was a crazy time to start; I forget that most shops in Hyderabad don't even open before 11. After driving around to a number of stores, and finding them all closed, I gave up and had breakfast at Chutneys, killing time until 11. Then we stopped at Himalaya Book World, where I picked up my preferred office supplies, and headed off to Pedaler's Point to look at bikes.

The selection there was disappointing. The manager remembered me from the previous year and offered discounts, but I just couldn't find a bike at any price that really "fit." I told him I'd have to think about it, and we went to look at bike shops near Park Lane in Secunderbad.

I wound up at Jai Ganesh Cycle Stores, and bought an 18-speed mountain bike, with decent brakes (the most serious flaw in my old bike...) and a good size for Rs. 5500. Call it $125. At the end of the trip I can either return it to the store and get maybe 25% back, or the shop will pack it to bring home (a possibility I never considered). More than likely I'll just give it away; Srinivas might like it.

See the Picasa album Bike, Anil and guest houses for the photos in this blog entry, and more.

I forget a few things, notably a bell and a lock. I got a bell on the way home at a shop at the intersection of Street #7 and Road #1 in Banjara Hills; I got a lock (just the lock, no cable) at another nearby store. I'm not sure what I'll do about a cable.

As I passed through the bustee below Mithla Nagar (Syed Nagar?), things started to go wrong. The screws holding the front fenders on loosed up; I stopped and tightened them. Then I felt the left pedal crank start to wobble. It eventually came off as I neared the top of the bustee. I smacked it back on as best I could and walked the bike to to a repair shop nearby. This was not a success; the shop was really a motorcycle shop, and the guy who helped me didn't have the right tool to tighten the recessed nut in the crank. He did the best he could (5 minutes work, maybe), which wasn't great. As I left I gave him Rs. 10; he tried to ask for 20, but I told him I could get a flat fixed for 10, so no way. Grumble.

I limped back to the guest house (the crank seemed OK as long as I didn't push too hard), got out my tools and went over things. The crank I think is going to require a bike shop; I just don't have the tool I need to tighten that nut, and it's going to just keep coming loose. I tightened up a lot of other loose fittings, and I'll have to see if I can get to a shop this week.

Here's my path home (about 9.6 miles):

View Larger Map

It was about 5PM by this time; I took a much needed shower and then dressed for dinner with Anil and Anu. Srinivas arrived at 6; we spent some time looking at pictures on my computer. Srinivas wants to get an email account; I'll help him get set up with gmail at some point. At 6:30 we left for Anil's house. We arrived around 6:50; I went up to Anil's flat and waited while Anu did whatever it is women do. She appeared, fully dressed and looking ready to go, around 7:15, then disappeared and did something with the baby (Tricia) until maybe 8:20. FINALLY we headed downstairs and off to dinner.

Based on a thread on IndiaMike we had decided to try a new chain called 6pack. There is one near Anil's house; when we got there, we discovered it's a take-out place. Oh, well. I think Anu then suggested Angeethi, across the street from Fusion 9. The ambience was nice, the food was good, and the prices moderate (although Rs. 60 for a bottle of water kinds smokes my shorts...).

Anil, Anu and Tricia

I finally got home, and to bed, by about 11:30PM, completely exhausted. As a result, I slept until 10AM this morning; maybe this will let me kick my jet lag once and for all.

I putzed around on the computer for a while, then went out for a walk. I got a good picture of the front of the guest house, as well as other pictures.

The Hillview Guest House, my home for the next 6 weeks

Golconda Fort and the Qutb Shahi tombs from the roof, off in the haze to the south

The amazing castle-like house on the next hill over, to the north

The guest house has a little shrine. The gods pictured are (left to right) Ganesh, Durga, Sai Baba (not technically a god) and Krishna.

And, of course, the ubiquitous housing for the poor, not 50 yards from my door.

About a block away from Hillview is the Lotus Inn guest house. It looks pretty nice, too; I stopped and got a tour. Similar nice views, even nicer game/exercise room, and about the same rates. I was quoted Rs. 1500/day for 30 days, Rs. 1800/day for 5 days. No web site; call 040-2354 1105 or George, at 98499-26610.

Lotus Inn guest house

Continuing my walk, I came across a typical Indian construction site.

I also passed this shining example of the prototypical Indian government service car: the Ambassador Classic.

My brother-in-law John may find this interesting.

Rooftop solar - both electricity and domestic hot water.

These flowers are for Katy.

Finally, this made me think of Jonathan Coulton.

Watch and listen here.

After my walk I at an early supper at Jalsa, a restaurant at the end of the street, came back and blogged. And now I'm at least slightly caught up.

If you EVER use an ATM, read this!

2008-10-12T02:28:00.004-04:00

An IBM security expert recently posted this tutorial on ATM skimmers on IBM's internal blog site. I had no idea that this kind of hi-tech theft was even happening, let along that it's quite common. Here's a picture from the presentation:

You should really download and read the presentation (it's short), but here are some key recommendations:

When using an ATM:

Cover the keypad while you enter the number.
Don't give the PIN number out to anyone.
If you do not feel safe, refrain from using the bank machine.
Know where the security cameras are located. While many ATMs have cameras, they won't be positioned to record the keypad.
Be wary of any offers of 'help' with your ATM transaction.
If you feel you are being watched, ask the person to step back.
Conduct ATM transactions during the day. Most ATM crime occurs in the evening.
Be suspicious of a machine that has signage indicating you should use a specific machine.
Use a different machine if you feel uncomfortable about the ATM instructions.
Be on the lookout for fraudulent withdrawals on your monthly statement.
Report anything that seems suspicious or strange about the ATM machine to your financial institution. This could include anyone who offers to help you, tries to look over your shoulder, or is taking pictures in the area.
Call your bank right away if your card is held by the machine.

BTW, this tutorial tickles one of my pet peeves: redundancy in acronym usage.

ATM stands for Automated Teller Machine, so "ATM Machine" is redundant.
Likewise with PIN: Personal Identification Number. "Enter your PIN number" is redundant redundant.

Social Butterfly

2008-10-10T13:57:00.001-04:00

I've been in Hyderabad for less than a week and already I'm booked for next weekend. Shivani has invited me to her wedding Sunday night, and Harini has invited me to her housewarming Sunday morning.

I've moved out of the IBM guest house in My Home Navadweepa and into Hillview guest house in Jubilee Hills. I'll post pictures tomorrow; I got home this evening after dark.

Fall in Hyderabad

2008-10-09T13:02:00.003-04:00

I'm back in India for what's become an annual trip to Hyderabad. From now until November 16, I'll be working with the PX engineering team at IBM's India Software Lab, showing them where the bodies are buried in the Orchestrate source code.

This trip began with the customary 21 hour plane trip: Boston to Frankfurt, a long layover, and then Frankfurt to Hyderabad. I managed to catch a few hours of sleep on the first leg, which made the layover a little less difficult. After stashing my carry-on in the Lufthansa business lounge I wandered around the terminal for a few hours, picking up some gifts in the duty-free shops and stretching my legs.

Duty-free shopping seems to be mostly about sin of various stripes: booze, tobacco, perfume (sex), and candy (gluttony) are the featured items. At least one of them comes with some degree of truth in advertising.

From India arrival 2008

After a while I returned to the lounge and dozed, then climbed aboard another Airbus for the second, longer leg to Hyderabad. The mostly sunny skies served up some very attractive views of the rugged terrain of Turkey, northern Iraq and Iran. I've often flown this route in early spring, when the mountains are covered with snow; in early October, they were mostly brown. Pictures through the plane window are always a disappointment, but hopefully these will offer some idea as to what I was seeing.

From India arrival 2008

The plane landed at the new airport at the new Rajiv Gandhi International Airport at Shamshabad, some 23 kilometers south-southwest of the old airport in Begumpet. As usual, I cleared customs very quickly (the new airport has many more immigration control lanes, and they were all staffed), and my baggage arrived much more quickly than usual. BUT - the ride into the city is much longer. I finally settled into bed at the IBM guest house at My Home Navadweepa at 3AM local time.

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Tuesday, my first day at work, was a short one. I collected a temporary badge, and Rajesh showed me to my desk. I got a list of potential serviced apartments from Lakshmi and headed out with Srinivas to hunt.

Our first stop was the Airtel store. Before I left Hyderabad on my previous trip I converted my "postpaid" Airtel account to "prepaid" and got a "lifetime recharge" that was supposed to keep the phone number active. Well, the number was indeed retained, but I had to buy additional minutes for it, and it turns out that "lifetime" meant "one year." I purchased additional time, and when I leave India this time I'm going to leave my phone with someone who can periodically make an outgoing call with it to keep the frakkin' account active. Aside: it drives me crazy that IBM isn't willing to provide prepaid cell phones to visitors.

We then began the apartment search in earnest. I intend to provide a detailed report at a later date; for now, I'll just say that nothing was perfect, but I'm probably going to take a place in Jubilee Hills.

On Wednesday I tried, with only limited success, to actually get some work done at work. People stopped by all day to greet, though, and I made little progress on the stack of chores I had planned. Late in the afternoon Nagesh took me to Srinagar Colony to search for more possibilities. In the process we wound up stopping at Anil's flat, and I met his new daughter. Anil has gotten an H1B visa and is leaving IBM, bound for San Francisco, at the end of October. I hope to spend some time with him - and get pictures - on Saturday.

Today is Dasara. For the second year in a row, Srinivas graciously invited me to his home for dinner. I met his brother's new son and was treated to his wife's wonderful cooking. Here's most of the route to Srinivas' house.

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Srinivas have me the customary missed call when he arrived to pick me up, and when I got downstairs he was cleaning the car from the previous night's drive; it poured rain as we were leaving Anil's, and we drove through a muddy flood.

We stopped on the way to his house at the All Saints' Church in Tirimala Giri (or Tirmulgherry; spelling is always dicey...). Srinivas had never been inside a Christian church; the caretaker allowed us to enter, and for few minutes Srinivas and I switched out usual roles as I explained the inside of the church. I liked the sign at the main doorway.

From India arrival 2008

Our next stop was at Venkateshwara Temple. It's a busy place on Dasara.

From India arrival 2008

Finally, we arrived at his home, and I met his new newphew.

From India arrival 2008

There are more pictures in the album.

After eating, Srinivas brought me back to the IBM guest house; I crashed for a few hours (I still haven't entirely shaken my jet lag) and I posted this. And so starts another season of my Hyderabad blogging.

Visitors and an Anniversary

2008-09-27T22:25:00.007-04:00

It's been a busy week. My buddy Dave and his wife Bernice arrived in Boston Harbor on a cruise ship last Saturday, followed soon after by Oki and Clothilde from Germany (via NYC). We stopped by RiverSing on Sunday evening, and on Wednesday night Katy and I drove to New Hampshire to hike Mt. Chocorua as our anniversay celebration. I got a new camera last week, so all these goings on provided an excuse to give it a try.

Dave and I are friends from college; I met him a few weeks after arriving at FTU in the fall of '72, hanging out in the computer room late at night. He got me two of my early jobs (computer operator at Orange Memorial Hospital, and super-junior programmer at Orange County Public Schools), and we've somehow stayed in touch ever since. He and Bernice were passing through Boston on Saturday at the end of a ten day trans-Atlantic cruise, and we had the privilege of putting them up for the night. Here's Dave on our living room rug, noodling around with his fancy cell phone.

From Visitors and an anniversary

It was all too short a visit.

Later on Saturday Oki and Clothilde arrived by car from NYC. I won't go into all the details, but Katy knows Oki (and the rest of his family) from generations of cross-family extended visitations. Oki's brother, Toby, visited us earlier in the summer. Here are Clothilde and Oki at RiverSing on Sunday evening.

From Visitors and an anniversary

RiverSing was a big party in celebration of the autumn equinox on the north bank of the Charles River. It featured many singers (including Bill Staines, one of my favorites), big puppets and general frivolity. We were also treated to a lovely sunset.

From Visitors and an anniversary

Today is our anniversary; because my Morris team (the Pinewoods Morris Men) had a tour planned for today, Katy and I decided to celebrate our anniversary early by hiking Mt. Chocorua in New Hampshire. We originally planned to drive up on Thursday evening, but the threatening weather forecast led us to move the trip up a day. This monkey-wrenched our overnight plans; Katy had to find us a new inn for Wednesday night on short notice, and we weren't able to cancel the Thursday night reservation. This turned out to be just fine; once we finished the hike, we decided to spend Thursday in New Hampshire and drive home very early Friday morning.

Chorcorua has an incredibly exposed summit cone.

From Visitors and an anniversary

We decided to try a different route than our "usual" route up Chocorua (the Piper trail to the Carter Ridge trail and down the Hammond and Weetamoo trails) and instead did a loop up the Brooks trail and down the Liberty trail.

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From Visitors and an anniversary

This blowdown looked like a critter of some sort - a dragon? a moose?

From Visitors and an anniversary

The views from the top of the mountain were, as ever, spectacular, although the day was a bit hazy.

From Visitors and an anniversary

We took this self-portrait after finishing lunch at the summit.

From Visitors and an anniversary

We clowned around a bit at the Jim Liberty Cabin.

From Visitors and an anniversary

The trip down was fast, but it always seems longer that the trip up. We (especially our feet...) were happy to get back to the car.

From Visitors and an anniversary

The Gilman Tavern Inn in Tamworth was a great place to stay. The room was nice, and it's right across the street from a very funky little store (the "other" store, next door.)

From Visitors and an anniversary

Addendum: Katy has been uploading pictures to Picasa, including some from Mom's visit to Boston in August.

Yet Another Hyderabad Map

2008-09-23T10:14:00.002-04:00

Someone on IndiaMike just posted a link to a PDF map of the Outer Ring Road, which I've cached a copy of. The original is from the web site of the Hyderabad Growth Corridor Limited.