Month: January 2006

01/12/2006

I just read an interesting article about the oil economy on Kiro5hin. One of the insightful commentators said:

One in seven barrels of oil globally, almost 50% of America’s oil consumption, are used by American passenger vehicles, which travel 2.5 trillion miles per year. Today, the average passenger vehicle gets 23.9 mpg. If that number were 1984’s peak figure of 27.5 mpg, almost 350 million barrels of oil per year would be saved without a scrap of inconvenience. By driving more sensibly, and purchasing more responsible transportation instead of SUVs, muscle cars, and other ridiculously wasteful vehicles, Americans can save at least a billion barrels per year or more with minimal change in lifestyle.

That’s impressive. Although the writer doesn’t offer any evidence to back up these statements, I see no reason to doubt them. It jives with what I see when I drive along the highway and look at the gas-guzzling vehicles surrounding my little plastic Saturn.

It continues:

You can take these actions as individuals. Americans are victims not of governments and oil companies, but of their own addiction to the product. To make change, you don’t need the cooperation of corporations, you don’t need government regulation, and you don’t need new types of cars and energy sources to be designed. They are already available, and the more you buy, the greater the demand, and the more options that will appear. It’s an easy and fun cop-out to debate what others should do and speculate about big problems with big solutions that require retooling the nation. Skip it. Just do something yourself.

Amen! People often discuss alternative fuels (solar power, wind energy, biodiesel, nuclear plants) but all of them have an array of problems. Most notable is the fact that– like it or not– our society is powered by petroleum. It’s not something that’s going to change overnight, and it’s sure easy to say, “Well, when they come out with a hydrogen-powered car I’ll think about buying one after my current Ford Explursion loses its resale value.” It’s harder to look at our own consumer habits and determine how we can make a difference right now.

Go on, get yourself a nice plastic Saturn, work in your basement, and bike everywhere around town like me. You’ll feel better.

01/07/2006

When I worked at Hughes and then Raytheon, one aspect of my job that I really enjoyed was the opportunity I had to work on many different projects. Since I was a systems engineer (read “analysis guru”), I was asked to support a lot of initiatives– whether they were new business ventures in need of flashy graphics, or established projects with some questions about coverage or availability.

I saw others (Laralee included) who were tasked with a single project for a long time– often years. On a few occasions I was asked to work on such projects, and I did whatever I could to avoid them. I would quickly become bored and uninterested doing the same thing day after day.

Now, all these years later, it’s clear that the joy in my job continues to follow the same lines. The fact that I can work on a myriad of projects keeps me interested and excited. Yes, there is the occasional project that’s just plain dull… but more often than not, when I get tired of working on something I can simply switch gears and tackle another project with a different challenge.

Thus, when I enter my hours for the week into the timekeeping system (so I know how much to bill everyone), it’s always interesting to see how many different projects I worked on that week. I just finished this week’s timekeeping, and it looks like I was involved with twenty-one different projects. Wow. Talk about keeping things interesting!

01/06/2006

A little over two years ago I wrote about the “felonification” of America– how minor crimes are increasingly being classified as felonies, generally at the whim of the corporations who want to protect their profits.

As we continue down this slippery slope, another splendid example of this trend has appeared. It would be comical if it weren’t so tragic.

In Canton, Ohio, a high-school senior had an idea for a little prank, and wrote it in his online blog: he suggested a bunch of friends all go to their high school web page and repeatedly refresh the page. This would, in theory, cause the web server to begin choking on requests– and thus become slower.

So they did it. And sure enough, the web site was slow. Ha, great joke!

But it didn’t end there. City prosecutors, aided by the school district, are charging the teen with a felony because he affected a public computer system. The city prosecutor said:

Michael said it was a joke. We showed him how we deal with this kind of joke.

Wow. Here’s a guy who has no grasp of reality, much less high school pranks. It’s hard to tell whether he’s trying to make a name for himself as “tough on crime”, or whether he’s really that unbelievably dense.

What’s more, there was a separate incident last year where several students broke into the school’s computer system (yes, the same school) and changed some grades. They were caught and charged with a misdemeanor. That’s right– a misdemeanor. But it’s a felony to simply look at a web page many times. What gives?

In a rousing analysis of the incident on Slashdot, there was a very insightful comment that perfectly echoes my sentiments of two years ago. I’ll quote it here:

There was a time when we made an important distinction between types of crimes. Misdemeanors were “minor crimes” annoyances that can be cleared up easily enough and are a) not worth making permanent and b) best forgotten once the problems is solved. A classic example is littering, or spraypainting something on a park bench. The former is solved by making the litterbug pick up their garbage (and maybe some other peoples’) and the latter by having the offender repaint the bench brown. In both cases the offense can be “fixed” and the individual can learn form a simple dressing down. In most jurisdictions misdemeanors are not even recorded (or didn’t used to be) and never ever became part of someone’s permanent criminal record (especially a minor). Moreover misdemeanors aren’t liable for jail time above and beyond “time served” (in the drunk tank).

Felonies are major or “permanent” crimes such as theft, maim, and murder. They connotate crimes that cannot be simply “cleaned up”, crimes that cannot be undone in any meaningful sense and crimes that may signal permanent problems for the individual in question. Felonies attach much stiffer penalties (for both juveniles and adults) as well as “permanence”. In some states felons lose the right to vote permanently. This is politely known as “Civil Disenfranchisement”. In Midevil times it was associated with the term “Civil Death”. Felons are also forbidden from obtaining some jobs (in government), and have to tell all other employers of their status. They are also often forbidden from obtaining some scholarships and grants. While not all of these attach automatically to juvenile felons many of them do. Increasing numbers of states are making no distinction between juvenile felonies and adult felonies. Unlike misdemeanor crimes felons are truly marked for life.

The basic upshot of this is that this kid could be harmed for life for what is, in essence, a nothing crime. He encouraged people to visit a website and thereby caused a server to run slow, not stop, not crash, not burst into flames, just run slow. This is a temporary problem, a fixable problem, and one that doesn’t even require two coats of paint.

This is a dangerous, vicious overreaction on the part of the city prosecutor, and the school officials. They are abusing their power and risk punishing a kid for life for something that should be handled by a stern talking to and no dessert.

Hear, hear. I hope this case goes up in flames, the prosecutor gets a stern beating with the cluebat, and people begin to wake up and realize that our justice system is slowly but undeniably being made to serve the corporations and those who would take away our freedoms in exchange for temporary safety. And we all know how Benjamin Franklin felt about them.

01/05/2006

Check out this awesome shirt Craig and Phoebe gave me for Christmas.

It’s Yoda’s famous phrase “Do, or do not. There is no try.” I love that– it’s a mantra for me.

01/04/2006

This morning I had my Comcast cable modem upgraded to a business-class line. For kicks, I checked to see what my download bandwidth is. I can get a fairly consistent speed of 4+ Mbps, and a few tests peaked out above 7 Mbps. Wow. I remember when T-1 lines were “da bomb” becaues they were screaming fast… and they’re only 1.5 Mbps.

Isn’t technology wonderful?

01/02/2006

Another interesting 2005 statistic for me is the amount of time I spent working. Since I have a timekeeping system I use to track every hour I’m at work (so I can bill clients appropriately), it’s easy to run the full year and see how things went. This year?

2,520 hours

That averages to about 48 hours per week– definitely more than I’d like to be working, but probably not unreasonable in today’s workplace. Considering the fact that I’m running four businesses, I suppose this isn’t bad at all. But hopefully 2006 will see a drop…

01/02/2006

Well, the New Year is here and today happened to be my day of organizing stuff around the office. As such, I filed away the last of the 2005 e-mail messages and saw the total.

13,681 messages

Holy cow, I’m averaging 37 messages per day. That number continues to rise year after year, too. I suppose in a few years that’s pretty much all I’ll be doing: writing e-mail all day.