Well, duh.

A bunch of geniuses have given Mr. Obama a list of stuff to do to "securing cyberspace for the 44th presidency." The list is:

• Create a comprehensive national security strategy for cyberspace.
• Lead from the White House.
• Reinvent the public-private partnership.
• Regulate cyberspace.
• Authenticate digital identities.
• Modernize authorities.
• Use acquisitions policy to improve security.
• Build capabilities.
• Do not start over.

I'll let you read the report because quoting the inanity in each of these points would take far too long. The problem is you can't "regulate cyberspace," any more than you can "authenticate digital identities." What the government needs to realize is that it needs to restrict its usage of networking technology to airgapped networks: SIPRNET and others. With a network that restricts access to someone with e.g., a CAC card, and an central authentication authority (which need not be monolithic), suddenly, monitoring traffic becomes a lot easier. NIPRNET is often used as a synonym for "the interwebs." In reality, it's more of a government-used, but visible-to-everyone network. If the government wants civilian organizations, such as US Census and NOAA to be safe(r) from attacks over the network, they need to lock down NIPRNET by, again, restricting access to information technology.

Why does the receptionist need a computer? Well, she needs to take VOIP calls. We can do that with a simple VOIP phone. She needs to know the schedule and set the schedule. So give her access to Exchange, or better yet, through Outlook Web Access, so her computer isn't able to do anything other than connect to port 443 on a server that you run. Sure, it sucks to be her, because she can't use instant messaging, but I think we're starting to see enough personal devices that include mobile IP that said receptionist can have many capabilities that allow her to retain an online presence that does not intermingle with government network assets.

I work in these environments constantly. And, in these environments, we have continual, intentional or accidental, intermingling of data. This leads to situations where we have malware on either privately-owned (as in, a government contractor) or government-owned (or government-furnished) equipment. I cannot reveal the name of the employer, but I will say that I have seen a computer which was infected with software that copied the users to places in Egypt, and that the data onboard the machine was, individually, unclassified. As an aggregate, however, it painted a very real, classified, picture of what several agencies were doing. This happens every. single. day.

It's going to really suck to lock down non-work-related usage of the internet while working for the government, but I guarantee it will suck less than the first time we have a serious attack that either costs us data (on, for example, a classified weapons system; this would effectively toss billions of dollars out the window) or critically injure our infrastructure (by, say, destroying or preventing access to, satellite telemetry, vital routers and network choke points, or by shutting off entire buildings or agencies from the internet and other networks). When that happens (and it will), the effects will be devastating, and we'll be doing everything then that we should be doing now, even though doing it now hurts.

I don't want to have internet access taken away from me at work any more than anyone else does. But, I'll survive.

The other things, like "lead from the white house" and "create a comprehensive strategy for cyberspace" are laughable on their face. I see job postings on dice.com and monster.com, and the usual suspects like clearedjobs.com for people with twenty years in the intelligence community. Folks, the problem is the people doing this stuff are horrible at their jobs. They haven't moved fast enough. They're dinosaurs. Sure, they know how to tie a tie, wear expensive, well-cut suits, wear a Rolex, and are working on their golf handicap (whatever the fuck that means). But these are the same people who don't understand the belief that "once somebody has physical access to a machine, assume they are the superuser." These are the people that say, "well, it's got a firewall, what's the worst that could happen?" These are the people that say, "well, our IT guys all have ten years of experience and are CISSP's."

I want to take them and grab them by the ears and shake them till their Rolexes and jackets fall off and yell HEY IT'S NOT FUCKING WORKING, DO YOU GET THAT? What they've been doing since 31 Dec, 1969, is utterly failing to secure their own assets on the (inter/arpa/sipr/nipr/you-namer-it)net.

Let's make one assumption here. The internet, as a whole, is every bit as bad as Neal Stephenson has described it. There are walking, talking, six-foot penises out there. There are dudes with machine guns in suitcases called "reason." And yeah, I am sure there's a guy out there with his own nuke.

If we make that assumption, we realize, whoa, we really don't want to be there. We also realize that there is absolutely zero way to regulate or authenticate that part of the network. It is self-evolving (can any of these guys in the white house explain what BGP is?) and defies blocks and obstructions, by design. Furthermore, when somebody comes along with a way to disrupt it, new technologies emerge to counter the disruption. Bittorrent and Tor are just two ways of doing this; I've demonstrated that even TDMA, that lowly protocol we discarded a long time ago (unless you're a Viper jock), can be used to seriously hinder listening, and to defy disruption.

So, let's not even try to secure the internet. Let's do something a little easier. Let's take the government out of the internet. Let's break off NIPRNET from the Internet, and let's severely restrict network access to all but those who fundamentally require access. Give them personal terminals in the shape of phones, Origami, and other ultrathin devices (no, not sunrays, sorry) that are their responsibility, that they pay for, that they support, and they do not connect to the network. Epoxy the usb ports shut. Cage the network cable to both ends – the machine and the wall – and make sure there's no goddamn inductive pickup on it. Require multifactor authentication, like RSA tokens, CAC, and biometrics (and yes, some of them are a lot better than others). This, combined with physical access strictures, will prevent the vast majority of government compromises, and will also make finding the breaches far, far easier.

Before you do that, you have to decide who lives on the network and who doesn't. This is pretty easy, actually. Refer to EO 13228, Critical Infrastructure Protection, by, surprisingly, the Bush administration. If your name's in there, or rather, you're implementing it, congratulations, your instant messaging is now gone. That laptop you take home nightly? Gone, too.

People talk about an insecure power grid, insecure nuclear reactors, insecure FAA communications, insecure banking. Well, folks, fucking secure them. Airgap the FAA, government-owned power facilities, and legislate airgapped institutions that fall under 13228 – yep, banking, that means you. yep, telecom, that means you. In other words, if you want to do business on the scale that, say, Wells Fargo does, you've got to prove that you don't have overlap with the internet. Remember. Six foot tall, walking, talking penises, nuclear weapons, and machine guns in suitcases.

The bottom line is thus. There are two problems for this 44th president.

The first is that there is nobody he's thinking about, and nobody (well, I can think of two people, but I won't name them here) in the entire government information infrastructure is even remotely qualified to do the things that need to be done. Those things will be really hard, not because they're difficult, but because it will piss off everyone from your receptionist to the joint chiefs. If you want to treat this seriously (hey, the Chinese are), you will ignore that bitching and moaning and jfdi. That person is going to be real unpopular, and is going to need support from either the executive or judicial branch so they can reorganize, fire, and redefine with impunity. It's unfortunate that the executive and judicial branches are both so out of touch with reality that they couldn't pick such a person if they knew they needed to. (Hey, Obama, if you're reading this, drop me a line, and I'll let you know who those people are.)

The second is you have to realize that today, 2008, almost 2009, is far too fucking late to secure the internet. It's the wild goddamn west, only instead of gold rushes and train tracks and civilization, Wyatt Earp and other good guys, it's going to get worse, and worse, and worse. People are going to continue to lose money because they're stupid, people will get killed, entire networks will go down, and that's the way it is. So, GTFO. You have lost the war, and you think you haven't even started the war. Fire anyone who tells you they can secure your networks. They clearly have no idea what is going on out there.

update

so i have survived two ear infections (left, then right), precipitated by a sinus infection, which also led to bronchitis and eventually pneumonia. i suppose i could be dead, but i'm not at all happy about the time i've spent weathering this. i am still not quite "better," and have lots of lung butter to get out. the good news is, it's moving, rather than preventing me from breathing.

i have finished reading all my fiction, but can't bring myself to write anything at the moment, and can't say i really even have any ideas kicking around my head.

so, to sum up, snotty, irritated, bored, medicated.

Government spending the key to creating and keeping jobs?

short: hey, it's a long rant about Obamanomics!

Sandy and I recently watched Letter to the President in which a group of people I nominally respect, KRS-One, Russel Simmons, Quincy Jones, and a lot of the early luminaries (and present if you're actually following hip hop as a progression rather than a current trend) say that Reaganomics (I admit that I'm not real clear on what exactly this term means, other than people saying that the fiscal policies during the Reagan administration were particularly hard on the lower-middle and lower-classes) harmed black people.

I don't recall whose quote it was, and I probably misquote, but the content is correct. "Reagan's idea of jobs was everybody flipping burgers. Well, there wasn't any money in that. So the enterprising [black; inferred, not stated] guys went out and sold drugs. Those people made money, and it was clear to the youth that to succeed, you needed to sell drugs, and this brought everyone else down." Murder went up four-fold in many cities and broke past 1,000/year in several cities.

To add insult to injury, government agencies began arresting black people (this is directly stated, not inferred) and putting them in prison, to the extent that (not sourced, but stated) 25% of the black population is in prison or has been in prison. This of course is because of cocaine, which was (apparently; this has always been a sort of conspiracy theory and I don't know the facts) provided by some shady three-letter-agency looking dudes to finance covert wars in Nicaragua, Honduras, and other lovely tourist spots.

So there's a strong animosity here. The point of the film is that the American government supplied cocaine (in all its forms) to the black population, and gave them two choices: low paying jobs, or prison [via selling or possessing drugs]. The film doesn't really provide a solution as such, other than to point out that this was Really Fucked Up, and that hip hop had always been a positive influence until the rise of drug-related violence (I am sure anyone who has been listening to some of the more successful rappers will understand most if not all of them claim to have been selling drugs prior to their careers as rappers) — which subsequently turned hip hop into a culture of violence and "beef."

I haven't really decided what I think of this Obama dude other than he has a lot to live up to, with the way he's been talking. He has cut out an enormous responsibility for himself. He wants to create jobs. He wants to create infrastructure (this is kind of nebulous, but everyone seems to be making parallels to the post-WWII industrial boom). He wants to "bridge the digital divide" and get more Americans plugged in to the interwebs (aren't there a lot already?). He wants to get out of Iraq, and hasn't been real clear on what to do in Afghanistan, although I think he'd be happy to catch a certain six foot Saudi.

The Post is quoting Tim Kaine (governor of Virginia) as saying,

"Here in Virginia, we have more than a billion dollars in ready-to-go bridge, highway, rail, transit, port and airport projects that have been through appropriate local, regional and state planning processes and that can be under contract within 180 days," Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) said in a statement.

How much do highway, rail, transit, port, and airport projects actually pay workers? There is no question we are looking at tax increases, as the numbers being bandied about are between $200B and $1T. Yeah, a teradollar. Will that increased infrastructure (such as finally getting inter-city and cross-country maglev 200mph+ trains) increase business and trade? It seems to me that if so, it would increase consumer spending, and widen the gap between business owners and the proletariat, which is exactly what the proletariat is squawking about. The solution to that is of course to tax business owners, or those with exorbitant incomes, and lower taxes on the proletariat or downright poor, but I dare say that smacks of marxism, which is a tragically flawed ideology. At any rate, it might work.

I think the real question is, if you're one of the poor workers now, or non-workers, or you're selling drugs, or you're an aspiring rapper, do you really want to change your current job or state of income (be it social economic support e.g., welfare, legal, or illegal business) for manual labor building a new bridge in Virginia?

Two of the great projects that employed lotsa people, and are shining examples of doing so, are the Bay Bridge in San Francisco and the Hoover Dam. But these people worked in horrid conditions, and yep, they died. Are we going to start hearing the term "Obamanomics"? I find myself chuckling as I consider the irony of the black youth and people like KRS-One lashing out at Obama for not supporting the black community that supported him in getting elected. Not because I don't have respect for the black community or KRS himself, but rather because it's so sadly ironic.

Americans, it seems, have been duped, again. However, were McCain elected, we'd still have been duped. I wonder when people will realize that the current system itself is flawed and the only way to change it is rather like the way you build a Marine. You tear down what you have into a quivering piece of potential, and then build a Rifleman, a kicking-ass and taking-names kind of person. Which, incidentally, is what the Chinese are doing at the moment, if nobody'd noticed.

Why do people like Pelosi and Zell Miller and Jimmy Carter or even Bill Clinton (who seem to all not only hold political sway and behave as a sort of "wild card," but also are willing to speak with great candor about Das Gubbermint) speak up and say, hey, let's take the first steps towards fixing the system here. In theory, having a senate and house, an executive, and a judicial branch is a pretty good idea. I mean, I really do like the idea of the Republic. And, there have been times in history when it worked really well.

But there's always been a downtrodden class, be it the plebs and slaves, the disaffected and imprisoned black youth, or young suburban white hooligans. Why not try to formulate a system that is capable of being flexible enough to change with the times and technology, instead of trying to adapt the times and technology to the Republic? Seriously, you just can't legislate the internet into any form of compliance. And you can't change the moral vicissitudes of people; they ebb and flow with time, and social laws against drugs and nudity (or pornography, prostitution, and so on) have never worked, and never will.

So, maybe Obama will have his way, and we'll be a fancy new nation in twenty years with a rail system approximate to that of Europe or (parts of) Asia. We'll also be spending more than half our income to do it. But maybe we'll have more people employed, and crime will go down.

The bottom line here is I don't see how this improves my life any, and I'm not sure there's any solution within the current political system which is capable of making life better for large swaths of people.

amazing product ideas

why is there no theraflu branded beer product?

And so the day begins

400mg of modafinil, one uber-sized coca cola produced enhanced stimulant beverage (in shiny blue can with lightning bolts! ...or are those flames?), one "horse pill" of mucinex-d, a cepacol lozenge, and a few other unmentionable drugs that make me safe for consumption by coworkers.

This, of course, before I get on the 250 (the 7's clutch is toooooast) and ride out into the gloom of wet and cold.

I heart working for a living. If man had any sense he'd rise up and deny the validity of man governing other men on a planetary scale. But, sniffle, swallow that gobber of snot, and get back in the shower so you at least look presentable, me.

Barton Fink

I'm not sure why I've always been drawn to the Coen Brothers films. I was in love with The Big Lebowski and The Hudsucker Proxy long before I knew who they were. A friend of mine introduced me to Miller's Crossing a while ago and yet again, I found a film that was incredibly compelling, had everything to keep my attention, dialogue, scenery, acting, I mean, it was a complete picture.

Yet, until today I had not yet seen Barton Fink. It's a goddamn masterpiece. To think that this film was "fodder" for Miller's Crossing is absolutely mind-boggling. We should all be so lucky to have such relics in our slush piles.

I am become jealousy, covetous of other writers' works.

A tough decision

short: this doesn't matter to you. it's "inside voice." 

I've been pondering the data in Google Analytics, and I'm not sure what to make of the three top sources of traffic to this site of mine. The most popular page is a rather lengthy article on the ballistics of various high-powered rifle calibers. Following that, a brief missive on futanari (well, I suppose we can expect that), and then two that are kind of surprising to me. About evenly, the third and fourth most popular subjects are broken ribs and suicide. Granted, I've never actually talked about my own suicide, committing or attempted thereof, only its correlation with various other things in life (such as epilepsy, workplace trauma, et cetera). I've talked numerous times about broken ribs because I've had a couple chances to break my own ribs.

The rest if mostly my meandering about software or motorcycles, things like that. They get finite, but not spectacular traffic. And that's mostly a good thing.

It occurs to me, however, that on the suicide pages, I could be using AdWords to display PSAs, and do the same on epilepsy pages. I could also add AdWords to the caliber discussion pages for the NRA-ILA and other similar groups (although I'm not sure how to exclude things like the Brady Campaign from such groupings), and to trauma research nonprofits for the broken-ribs pages.

I don't really want the money, and Moeller once told me he made a few cents here and there from AdWords, but he mostly used it to track traffic. However, if I can turn a small-but-finite number of those views into a small-but-finite number of clicks and thus a small-but-finite number of pennies for said causes, well, isn't that A Good Thing?

However, generally I despise Google. The problem is, they have more ads than I could go out and find on my own (e.g., putting a "click here to donate" img tag at the bottom of a post), and they're better at targeting them (they know the referer[sic], I don't). They also (as I've seen, but not confirmed through their interface) have targeted PSAs.

Patches welcome.

And on a more positive note

What could be more wonderful than friends of yours, both of whom you care deeply for, being in love and getting married? It's such a nice thing to hear after weeks of being sick, a year of ickiness at work and all that other stuff. Congrats, you two. Really.

Ah, the recording industry.

I have the Pulse release on vinyl from Floyd. It's on the list of "cherished stuff." But today when I was checking out their boxed set, Oh By the Way, I notice that there is now a DVD. How, exactly, does one make a DVD from a vinyl box set? If it's a concert, why not call it something different, like they did with Live in Pompeii, or Dave Matthews' Live at Red Rocks?

Bill Hicks once asked an audience, "Are any of you in marketing? Oh? Yeah, okay. Kill yourself."

This sort of thing makes me sad, especially since Gilmour seems to be so passionate about the music, not overly concerned with money, and wanting to leave a legacy for the younger generations (the undertones of death and bodies becoming more fragile are incredibly apparent on On an Island).

One from the list of stuff I thought I'd never have

A raid striped across nine disks, which formatted down to about two terabytes. Half of it's for media (rich or otherwise). The rest, well, nature abhors unused storage. I'll probably start making netboot images, and I know we're certainly going to have virtual machines.

In other news, we're kicking the tires on Leopard Server. Man, this is nice stuff. Last time I used OSX Server was 10.0, and back then it was pretty ... uninspiring. I can't wait to see Snow Leopard. I've even been contemplating putting LS on my Air (silly as that seems, right?) because I like the interface for controlling services so much more. It's like the software understands there's a network out there, and it even wants to be a part of it. And, crucially, it's not anti-Windows.

Oh, and as for cutthroat bitch over there, don't ask. It's a long, long story.

Is breaking a stripe bad luck?

I know you're not supposed to break mirrors, but is it bad luck to break a stripe? I've just finished migrating data from two stripes onto one monolithic (concatenated) volume so I can repartition and restripe across all the volumes from both stripes. Of course, it's terrifying. But wait! Those are my Redundant Arrays!

I hate data migration. Even when we're working with a corporate budget and I have eleventy billion dollars to spend and can spend two weeks with rsync and random file tests and the like, it feels like you always miss something.

Here's hoping.

(for those wondering, I'm building an hfs+j+cs stripe across eight disks for home directories and media storage – we're waiting for snow leopard server to buy Big Storage like one of the LaCie S2S boxes, and hoping that Apple will give us zfs then, and I can do this all over again)

Well, a track suit for less than a thousand dollars.

It looks like Alpinestars makes a 1-piece track suit that should fit me just fine (I have the measuring tape here, and if newenough and kneedraggers have their sizing charts correct, I'll even have room for a kidney belt and better back protector). This is good because I've wanted to track the bike, but all the trackday organizations require that you wear not just leather, but a racing suit with appropriate armor. I suppose that's not unreasonable, but the cost of admission then becomes the bike (depending on where you start; a friend of ours started on a 250 because it's cheaper, but I might want to race my own bike, the ZX7-R, and now you're out more than a few thousand dollars) and the leathers. Add to that tires, brakes, the inevitable new set of fairings, and so on.

But where else are you going to learn how to contain the fury in that sub-one-litre mill? Certainly not on the street. How about tire adhesion? Or how far you can push the brakes before it locks up? With cars, it's pretty easy to take an HPDE. You buy a helmet, maybe a harness, and get a car capable of doing it (well, this last part is optional, but it's a lot more fun in an STI than it is in, say, a Fiesta). That car can and usually is your daily driver. But nobody's asking you to wear a full nomex suit or anything.

At any rate, I'm pleased to see A* has a suit I can wear. Now to get a set of those Pirelli Diablos on the bike, some galfer pads, lines, and rotors, and go to town. I've got all winter to work on the bike, hopefully by the time Summer comes around Summit or VIR will have track days.

Admittedly, I'll look as funny in a track suit as I do in a full wetsuit, but when you're tucked on to the bike, it's pretty hard to tell who "that guy" is.

gonna be nice tomorrow

you've been living in the mid atlantic too long when you look at the weather, see that it's going to be 39°F at 0700 and that there's 0% precip during the day, which will reach about 47°F, and you remark, "hey, cool, it's gonna be nice tomorrow."

so on the bike we go at 0700, across the death trap that is 110, at just-barely-above-freezing weather, to toil in the salt mines, only to do it again at 1700. (hey, wait, isn't that more than eight hours??)

snot

It appears the snot is clearing, after four days of being unable to speak. Lots of soup and theraflu.

On Bikes and IRAs

After checking in on Fidelity this morning, I'm not especially surprised, but the number is significant. At this point, I could have pulled all that money out when it was over a hundred percent ahead (about two years ago), and paid the early-withdrawal and income taxes on it and still be ahead of where I am now. At the moment, I'm torn between pouring a bunch of money back into it, with the hopes that it will recover, pulling it out (it's now worth almost nothing, but would let me buy that nicer bike I want), or just letting it wither to nothing. I suppose losing that entire sum of money is not going to hurt me too much either, and weighing the possibility that it's going to evaporate entirely vs recover to something resembling what it used to be has me leaning on the "probably will recover" side.

But if I ever wanted to pull out all my savings and buy a motorcycle with it, this would be the time, given motorcycles are not going down in value (and indeed will be going up in value in the next few months), and I'm not going to lose any money pulling this out – I'm taking a loss.

heat, use thereof

I metered out about 30ml of the fluid from my pulped habaneros yesterday into 16floz (2c) of vegetable soup. Yes, it was tasty. Yes, it was incredibly spicy. My original thought was, but I like vegetable soup to be spicy. However, this was not really "heroic" or "in the interest of science," any more than laika or the various other test animals throughout history have been either scientists or heroic. It was spicy like crazy. I may step back to 10ml next time I want to add "that habanero flavor" to something.

I've never actually had enough peppers to subtract out the liquid from the flesh before. This year we were "blessed" with something between thirty and fifty peppers (I think some over-enthusiastic bees found our plant, but she continues to bloom and fruit! now that she's been brought inside, so I'm not sure what is going on), so we've been trying to come up with ways to make use of them all. We've also never had the luxury of "pure essence of evilhabanero" distilled into so much water [and bourbon].

The first thought was pizza. Usually that takes 3-4 peppers. And then chili. That takes another 4-5 peppers. Then mac-n-cheese. Another 4 peppers. But between the pizza, chili, and mac-n-cheese, that's like three weeks' worth of food. What do you do with the other twenty peppers on the plant?

I've had to come up with some way to preserve them. Strangely, perhaps fittingly, adding Jack Daniels has proved a pretty good way of doing it until they're needed.



In other news, you know how sometimes you feel better when you eat a bunch of spicy food and you have a cold? Well, sure, even with this "scary goddamn hot" food, I felt better for an hour or two and woke up still feeling awful. So today I shall spend the day rearranging the raids on my mac and moving my iTunes library around. Because if there's anything that accompanies minimal brain functioning, it's complex tasks.



edit: 5ml in a cup-o-noodles is about as much as i can stand, and is indeed pretty decent. ahhh, it burns, but in a good way.

Surplus heat

I have about 200ml of just the fluid from habanero (red savina) peppers. I harvested the crop sitting on the tree at the moment, and blended it, strained it through cheese cloth, and added a couple tablespoons of Jack Daniels' to thwart bugs (I figure whatever is going to be done with it will involve cooking, so the EtOH content is probably negligible; at any rate, it's Gentleman Jack, so it's not so bad). This is wicked, wicked stuff. It's being stored in a corrosion-resistant container – it will destroy standard plastics – but can be easily poured / metered into whatever insane concoction you choose. I am thinking buffalo sauce.

But wait a minute before you get interested.

I also have about eight floz (1 cup) of the actual pulp of 25-30 fully grown peppers. Since they were strained, this is puree, mostly, not minced or diced, and can be added to pico de gallo or whatever. I had about 1/4 teaspoonful just to verify that it wasn't, you know, insane, but that it had indeed retained its spiciness and habanero character. This last bit was kind of a mistake. Yes, it's spicy. There's absolutely nothing I could have done to prepare myself for how spicy it was. I've eaten habaneros – whole – but never have I pureed them and added a solvent (EtOH) to pull the good stuff out, and eaten that. It took a while to get the fury of that stuff out of my mouth/nose/sinuses.

So, anyone who'd like some of either is welcome to them, as I certainly can't use both (we generally use 1-4 chilies per dish, and I've got about thirty here). They'll keep, but don't hold on too long. You know how to reach me.

Well, I guess that answers that...

Apparently, the mujahedeen already hate Obama. This clears up at least one important question. It seems that I'll still have a job in the killing business, despite our new, less-kill-friendly administration.

It should be noticed that the big-eared-one seems to idolize Kennedy, who was, shall we say, a huge fan of ISR. Not the best consumer of it, to be sure, but when you change ISR to C4ISR (&T), you don't really have to send in a quarter of a million troops when PGMs and force teams can get very specific goals accomplished. Maybe we won't have a "bay of pigs" style attack or anything so silly. One can only hope (in this industry, that is), that we see an explosion of spending on intelligence and surveillance to prevent us from getting into nation-sized wars to begin with. Maybe, even, that will be more appealing to the liberal weenies. Can you not see the rationale?

Before, we used to drop bombs indiscriminately[1] on entire cities [ed: presumably, like Fallujah, although forgetting entirely Dresden and Tokyo], and now we send in small groups of men to remove people committing atrocities against freedom [ed: or substitute here, women, minorities, any other group that gets weepy-eyed support from the left-wing] without endangering civilian lives unnecessarily.
– Peacefrond Earth Muffinfart, Berkeley, CA
[1] ask anyone about the difference between a single F-16 using four 250lb SDB's versus an entire strategic bomb wing dropping "sticks" of 500lb bombs and incendiary/HE mixes during all previous conflicts, and they won't understand that this has been the most precise, most bloodless large-scale conflict in history.

Add to this and his promises to make a "green energy economy," the man has the opportunity to create not just the five million jobs he promises for American industry for reforming our energy infrastructure, but by creating new sensors (such as ONIR and higher fidelity OTH and SAR), and by creating jobs for people to analyze and collate that data into strike packages that effectively quell such problems before they become into wars. Have we had a president yet who was not involved in some war or another?

Could this man's legacy be that he did not actually deploy more than 5,000 troops during his entire sixteeneight year presidency? And that he created 10 million jobs in industries that were going to collapse (defense contracting, aerospace, "the big three," energy corporations, and so on)?

Certainly those are the low-hanging fruit. I have a hard time believing he's against reducing the size of the military, although I'd like to see him scrap plans for future CVN's and CVBG's in favor of smaller, more agile, faster-deployable vehicles like the DDX and LCX. And, my favorite, space-based deterrence. You don't gotta bust open a can of Rods From God on a bad guy if you can send their embassies pictures of troops outside their uranium enrichment facilities tying their shoelaces.

And, wait, why is it we're not doing this already? I'm frankly not sure why Bush has not already shown the world the vast superiority of our sensory capability. Maybe because he's worried they'll find new ways to hide. But, if we cut back on spending on the super-warships and ultra-long-range stealth bombers, and focused instead on global rapid precision strikes and global intelligence, I have a hard time seeing even the most recalcitrant former kidnapper prime minister saying "oh these must be doctored. That man has grey hair. We will continue our peaceful uranium enrichment program."

And, lastly, wouldn't this give us what everyone (especially Doug) what they've wanted? That big tall guy in a turban? Yeah, you can see that fucker from space. It's kind of like that movie, Blue Thunder where the silent helicopter is watching chicks getting nekkid outside their apartment, only the silent helicopter is actually a silent space asset and it's 300+ miles above them, seeing through walls, but still seeing nipples and cameltoe. Really.

Speaking of, I have heard no mention of nipples on either side of this debate, or in the first weeks of Bush's lameduckcy or Obama's president-electedness. Where are the boobies? My god man, where are the nipples?

More sick time

I'm pretty sure I've exhausted my "sick time" at this point, although unfortunately, most of this has been to my breaking my knee and doesn't have much to do with my actually being "sick." I've been trying to kick the bug for about a week now, losing time on Monday, and a week from today. I really hate to not be getting the stuff I need done at work, but getting the extra sleep, fluids, theraflu, etc., are helpful.

Lots of soup and juice. That, and another ten hours of sleep have made me feel a little better, and just sucking down theraflu.

As a consequence, we caught up on our Rozen Maiden episodes and UND pilot training (and Anthony Bourdain).

I really wish somebody made a suitable side-stick + throttle + rudder configuration for less than, say, $5,000. All the planes I'm interested in flying are non-yoke, and side-stick just seems like the way things are moving in avionics. But to have to invest $5k plus another $1k for monitors and another video card, plus another $2k in ram to get the Mac (8 procs, but only useful with 16+gb of ram and 2x 512mb video cards and 4 displays) into a sort of "useful" configuration, without really knowing whether it would be worthwhile is kind of a bit steep.

I wonder if there are people in DC with x-plane caves they'd be willing to show off.

a thought on the safety of motor vehicles

I managed to dislocate my shoulder while driving the Subaru home last night. I spun the car on an onramp due to inadvertently thumping the wheel left. This was very dangerous, of course, and risked not only the lives and car of myself and Sandy, but of the other people on the road, one of whom I know and have been talking to about the event. It's a good thing he understands what happens when good joints go bad.

I have long wondered about the safety and practicality of the motorcycles versus the Subaru. I am very hard pressed to find the Subaru actually safer than the motorcycles at this point. When I think about how the same situation would have played out on the bikes, I realize that it would never have happened. Lately, I've been kind of wondering aloud about how easy it was to get back on the motorcycle after my knee broke earlier this year, and how I still have trouble with the car. The answer is that the bike has much less freedom of movement, and while it requires more concentration and more precise (or faster) judgment, it does so without requiring I contort myself into various differing shapes.

I will probably work all these thoughts into something approaching a rant comparing the two (three, four, whatever) vehicles, including why I have this gnarly green bruise on my left leg, but right now the very idea that the bikes are safer than the cars is still kind of torquing my noggin.

amazing

To cope with the added complexity of a system primarily designed to make someone else's life simpler, I am keeping my tps reports in subversion, and managing their "deployment" with software. This is getting ridiculous. I'm now taking more than 5% of my total time at work just writing about working. We have single-handedly reduced the effectiveness of the entire department by 5%; I wonder if we actually gained a finite increase in effectiveness from the new overhead. Frankly, I wonder if the latter is measurable, whereas I know the former is (take forty pennies, put them in a jar, then take out three. how many are left in the jar?).

A sad comment on history.

I used to privately scorn people who said that dilbert resembled their office. Especially when I worked in these offices. Nonsense, I thought. It's funny, but really, dilbert is hyperbole from end to end. And yet, Charlie has the nerve to bust that notion up by mentioning that I was wrong all along.

overwhelmingly:

dont work, just write your fucking

tps reports!

 

You had me at "operator"

Actually, I would have said "omg yes" if you'd just used the word "kwajalein" in a job description. Unfortunately, my RSO experience is not as a range officer for "resident space objects," and even though I have experience with "US military weapons ranges," I suspect Quantico WTBN is not what they had in mind.

Holy crap, it's cold.

It's about 35-37°F today in Northern Virginia, and on the way to work this morning the pen I normally carry with me froze in my pants. When the neck warmer thingie I have shifted slightly, it felt like somebody had poured ice water down my back. It's cold, man.

Doom

It's always been amusing to see people insist that there be better morale among their ranks. Don't be so negative! and Not a team player!, all with the threat of discipline or firing. Yet, hapless managers get stuck in this all the time.

I was just talking to someone who was telling me about the culture in her company, where people are being called in to “talk” about their attitudes. They’re being warned that if morale doesn’t increase, and if their griping doesn’t end, there will be repercussions. I couldn’t make this up.

What is it that I'm reading that these people are not?

exhaustipation

Between working Too Damn Much and having spent several hours on the bike in the rain/cold on Thursday, I've managed to either contract a bug from a friend (who told me he was sick; it's not one of those why-did-you-even-come-in-to-work things) or develop my own strain of ick. I think the combination of sheer exhaustion from work with the addition of unfriendly weather conditions have collided to produce an overwhelming tide of the usual mucosal suspects.

Tried to get out of the house today to see the new Macbooks (I don't know why they haven't been using the word "billet" to describe the new cases), and realized upon getting there – I couldn't breathe – it was just a really bad idea. Also learned that, despite now being able to manage stairs, I can't do "sitting" for  very long. I need to be able to keep my foot up or move my knee around or the knee starts to ache. The bike mostly keeps it in a static, but loaded, position, and I move around a lot more than you'd think on the bike. Maybe not, you know, feet in either direction, but the ups and downs and shifting of weight is enough to make the difference between a sustained ache and the joint actually working sufficiently and without pain. It's a strange sort of injury, that requires the joint to actually be moving and working or it will get inflamed and be painful. Normally, I'm accustomed to the other way around.

And now what?

Will the mujahedeen claim that Obama is propped up by AIPAC and "the jews" in their continued violence on the US and the West At Large? I suppose it's possible they will stop. Obama has said, of course, that he wants us out of Iraq RFN, but will that actually reduce the attacks on the West? Will there be some new cause brought up, like "centuries of oppression," or "hedonistic lifestyles," to fight against?

It seems unlikely that even "regime change" here, and in the UK (both of which are underway, of course) is going to result in the sea change we seem to be attempting to effect elsewhere with regime change.

I am simply curious which cause people will rally behind for hatred now that we have a "minoritally enhanced" executive, a liberal majority in the congress, and we're, apparently, trying to change.

It's also kind of funny that Obama had his own little beerhall putsch with its incrementally small donations to an ambiguous movement of change.

Two kinds of management

Management A:

We're not really having any problems or missing any deadlines. You see, we have some shitty employees working for us, and as soon as we get rid of those lazy bastards, and get some real bright people in here, we'll turn this sinking ship around.

Yes, that was marvelous work done over the weekend. It required seventy man-hours of the people who work for me, and if I hadn't provided that excellent leadership on Friday night before going home, we wouldn't be having this discussion today.

Management B:

We're struggling with a number of issues right now. Primarily, we don't have enough employees, and the employees we have aren't paid enough. Increasing the budget for salary will allow us to hire new employees who are more skilled to begin with, as well as to train and retain the employees we have on board. Secondarily, decisions which have been made without our guidance or against our advice are costing us time, and the company money.

Over the weekend, we had a substantial outage, during which employees A, B, and C came in to the office and worked substantial hours through the night and away from their families to restore functionality. It is only through their hard work that we were able to return to business on Monday morning unaffected.

Who would you rather work for? Young, incompetent managers are terrified of people seeing them for being the incompetent buffoons they are, and rather than prop up their employees to improve their own image, they point the finger away from themselves, and blame their employees for their own failings. Unfortunately, this is a vicious cycle, as by blaming his employees, the manager never learns or admits to their own failings.

Better managers, although not always older (I've met at least one very good, young manager), understand that their job is to manage and without their employees, they are nothing. It is always in the interest of a manager to help their employee, even when they are beholden to their own managers. To do otherwise is cowardice and unproductive.

If you are a manager, and there's a bad employee on your team, you don't need to be the one telling the world about it. The chances are very good that people will come to you and say, "manager, why are employees A, B, and C so terrible?" However, if somebody comes to you and says, "manager, why are you not getting your job done?" The answer is never "because my employees suck."

The human optimist in me wants to say that this dichotomy arises from a lack of training in management, and not because of flaws in human character. However, I have met enough of these cancers to know that they do get together and metastasize and choke the life out of organizations, of entire departments, and of individuals. They are terrified that people may see the flaws they have, and do not believe they are redeemable – or they would be trying to improve, rather than shift blame – and so will throw anyone under the bus to prevent others from seeing what they see in themselves.

Sick, people. Sick. Why you folks get into management is beyond me.

passive aggression

I find it amazing how hard people will try to go out of their way to not get in touch with you when they're "supposed to be." For example, you've called your sister about her part in your wedding, and she is pretty vexed about the whole thing. So she'll wait a day or two (which is reasonable) and then send you a brief email that says "hey, let me get right back to you on that." Then, when you're clearly asleep or away from your phone or otherwise indisposed, leave a voicemail that genuinely appears to care about the whole situation. Of course, this is followed by a testy email that says, "well, I called you, but you weren't there." This can go on for weeks. It's amazing to watch just how far they'll go, what methods they'll employ, to reach you when they know you cannot be reached. Like leaving a note in your mailbox. Or not answering when it's them on caller ID.

I have no idea what to do with these people. That's the whole point of passive aggression. I just wish I didn't have so many of these people in my life.