Category Archives: Musings

John’s anniversary gift is extremely cool, but I think Arlene topped it: she got me a Crossbow. It’s like a Bowflex, but about $1400 cheaper. Supposedly it gives you much of the same benefits as free weights, and anything would be an improvement over my current physical condition. Thomas is particularly excited, and David went on at length about how I would look better “just like the real people in the Bowflex commercials”. Oh joy.
Tim and I set it up on Labor Day (actually, Tim did all the work while I yelled at Dell over the phone), but I haven’t been able to use it until today thanks to a combination of residual vasectomy soreness, laziness, and overscheduling. Today, though, I got up at 0515, dashed off a quick workout plan, and hit it. I feel great! The unit is solidly constructed (see why) and gave me good resistance throughout the range of motion. I need to buy the lat bar, because when doing pulldowns or raises with the individual cables it’s hard to keep the cables stable.
I found out that ICON offers a manual with a six-week workout plan; I’m going to order a copy when I order my lat bar. In other news, the running battle between the Bowflex and Crossbow trademark owners continues; the latest is that ICON can continue to use the “Crossbow” name despite the earlier injunction that found it confusingly similar to “Bowflex”.

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Scoble says a Krispy Kreme wedding cake is going too far. I say, where was this bright idea twelve years ago when Arlene & I got married? As a matter of fact, we had to settle for a traditional cake this past December when Julie and Paul tied the knot. Time to plan to renew our vows, I guess. Just remember: one doughnut per guest, please.

So that’s what they call it. From this story in the New York Times:

Because of wiring problems and general aesthetic concerns, the right and left rear speakers in a surround-sound system suffer from what those in the home-electronics business call low spousal acceptance, which means that at least one household decision-maker vetoes their installation.

So, by that criterion, not only do my rear-channel speakers suffer from LSA, but so do the HD TV set (which also suffers from “low Aunt B acceptance”) and the Xbox (partially compensated by high child acceptance). Fortunately, the TiVo has high spousal acceptance, which sort of makes up for the other two– at least until I get an HDTiVo, if and when they ship.

My evil plan to get a Google search rank of #1 for “Stampin’ Up!” has been foiled so far, not least because they maintain their own site for demonstrators: stampinup.net. Unfortuantely, the page throws an error when you load it. They’re apparently offering sites for their demonstrators (example), which I guess makes good business sense. I’ll have to find some other way to achieve world stampin’ domination.

So, I’m generally a big fan of the scientific method. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately because of two, quite different, influences.
First is Michael Lewis’ fascinating Moneyball. Lewis evaluated Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s as they tried to apply sabermetrics to major league baseball. For those of you who aren’t die-hard baseball fans, sabermetrics (which takes its name from SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research) attempts to find objective, statistically rigid metrics for evaluating the skill and success of baseball players and teams. For some reason, sabermetrics has largely been ignored by MLB teams. Lewis frames this interest in provocative terms: what’s the correlation between the amount of money a baseball team spends and the number of games it wins? Beane’s system revolves around using sabermetric analysis to find undervalued players that can be cheaply drafted or signed, building them into the A’s system, and then trading them when their market value increases; Lewis clearly explains how it works and the remarkable result (Oakland won more games than any other team except the Yankees last year, for a fraction of the money: around $500,000/win). Good stuff.
The other thing that’s had the scientific method on my mind is this guy, who is apparently attempting a semi-rigorous study of whether penis enlargement pills really work. I would have thought we all already knew the answer, but I guess it’s best to do things on the up-and-up. He might want to read this article about mold, lead, and E. coli contamination in “enlargement” pills, though.

Gruber asks Google to give us colorizing for their ads, and lo and behold! now they do.

If you’ve ever wondered what Beatles songs would sound like if performed by Metallica, wonder no more.

My original post on bread machine (or breadmaker, if you prefer) parts keeps garnering comments, in two flavors: “I need a part for an XXX bread machine” or “I found a place to get parts for an XXX bread machine”. Herewith a list of the best links submitted in the comments; maybe this will help elevate this entry so that people can find what they’re looking for:

• If you need a manual, go here
• If you need parts for a MagicChef, try calling WalMart at 1-800-925-6278
• If you need parts for a Regal breadmaker (and lots of you seem to), try this
• Other parts sources are listed here

I’m sitting in a large room with about 120 computers and 200 Microsoft field sales and consulting staff, listening to a guy with a Ph.D. in computer science present a bunch of material that I wrote– and drinking an icy-cold diet Barq’s (note to self: find some Barq’s Floatz while I’m here). This sure beats working for a living. How did I get so lucky?

Kasia reminisced about how she got started in computing, and that got me to thinking. Back in 1978 or so, when I was 10, my dad owned a construction company, and he got a contract to build a new store for a local company. Through some magic involving upgrades to the appliance dealer’s office, Dad ended up with a spiffy top-loading RCA VCR and an attached camera. (I could go into lots of old-school technical detail, but I won’t). That in turn got transmuted into a TRS-80 Model I, with the Level II BASIC interpreter and the coveted expansion interface that gave me a whopping 48KB of RAM. Dad & I quickly got in the habit of swilling root beer and computing; we more or less learned BASIC programming at the same time. I quickly got bored with the simple examples that we were getting from Radio Shack’s line of private-label books, but a subscription to 80 Micro soon helped me start brushing up on my Z80 assembler. (I remember being terribly disappointed one Christmas when I got Visicalc instead of the macro assembler I’d really, really wanted).

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That wacky Rummy is at it again. This time, he wants to reform the services to increase joint-ness between the services. The article is long on unnamed sources, who mostly claim that more jointness will cure what ails us. There’s no doubt that much of the alleged joint cooperation between the services is bogus, and that much of the work that some parts of the services do could be consolidated.
A lot of this work has been done; for example, there’s already a uniform military pay system administered by the Defense Financial and Accounting Service. The article claims that part of the new plan is to get more jointness in procurement:

Rumsfeld has also targeted the way the Pentagon develops and buys weapons as a function that needs to be done more jointly too. He tapped Edward Aldridge, the recently departed under secretary of defense for acquisition, to help form a central body with greater power to determine the military’s equipment needs – a function the services now do individually.
“What we need to do is … say ‘What [are] the needs of the Department of Defense in a joint sense?’ So that when programs are developed by the services they are by definition born joint,” Mr. Aldridge says.
Joint development of weapon systems is supposed to save money by ensuring the weapons can operate with all the services’ existing technology from the outset instead of requiring costly retrofitting later.

For common gear like ground radios, this seems like a no-brainer, but it has the serious problem of ignoring the basic concept that the services have different mission requirements. Some multi-service/multi-role projects have turned out well and provided economies of scale (e.g. all of the services now use the same basic personal weapons, the M9 pistol and the M16A2 rifle, with SOCOM units getting different issue to meet their needs). Other projects, like the ill-starred TFX/F-111 and SINGCARS, haven’t worked out so well; for still others, like the JSF, the jury’s still out.
My worry is that in the name of jointness, we’ll see more one-size-fits-none solutions that argue away the specific requirements of individual services; the biggest areas where this seems likely to me are theater missile defense (where the Army/Marines and the Navy have vastly different reach and mobility requirements), aircraft of all sizes (hey, where’d my close-air support go?), and ground combat systems. I’m all for commonizing radios, BDUs, helmets, machine guns, and so on, but I doubt it will stop there.
The other interesting part of the article is this:

But by pressing for greater civilian control over what the services buy and how they train, Rumsfeld could nudge them toward greater back-office cooperation… The Pentagon requested $1.8 billion over the next six years in its FY 2004 budget to create a new joint-training capability. As part of Rumsfeld’s strategy, a mix of current and retired officers are developing joint strategies at Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va. JFCOM also serves as a voice for regional combat commanders in how the Pentagon develops forces and new weapons.

It’s impossible to tell if this means “let’s train everyone the same” (bad) or “let’s train them to work together beter” (good). As I said some time ago, I don’t want to see mixed-gender training inflicted on the Marines, and I’d hate to see Army or Marine training dumbed down. Note that I am not disparaging the Air Force or Navy, merely pointing out that the Basic School, the School of Infantry, and other service-specific training can’t easily be replaced by a generic all-service training program. Take a look at the list of Marine schools and you’ll already see a bunch of them that are joint– anything with “naval”, “detachment”, “joint”, or “element” in the name is a dead giveaway.

I love it: an editorial in the Wall Street Journal titled “The Oracle Borg”. The conclusion:

With the bid for PeopleSoft, Mr. Ellison’s blithe disregard for the rules or what others might think of him was again on display. He can brandish outrageous proposals because he’s fashioned a powerful, successful company that gives him a platform on which to perform. But he can’t compel trust. That is what could doom this deal.
It’s time for Mr. Ellison to get back to the qualities that built Oracle — intuitive technical vision and mighty determination. Can the company no longer win on those? If Oracle means to dominate business applications the way it did the database, it must do it on technological superiority. Mr. Ellison, show us you’ve still got it.

The author has a new book out called Everyone Else Must Fail: The Unvarnished Truth About Oracle and Larry Ellison. I can’t wait to read it.