Category: observations

If I hadn’t already bought this thing, I’d do it now. I like it a lot. It’s lightweight, has excellent battery life (4 hours: the best my Thinkpad ever got was about 90 minutes and now it’s down to about 20), is totally silent with no fan and a well-insulated hard drive. The screen is clear and bright.

The fit and finish aren’t quite what I found on the Thinkpad, but at about 1/3 the price (unfair, since the ‘pad is three years old), I can deal with it. It just doesn’t feel as solid (of course, it also doesn’t weigh almost 8 pounds). The trackpad seems to go haywire periodically, making the pointer jump to the top of the screen and stay there. On the other hand, I’m sitting 8 feet away from the Thinkpad and it’s amazing how much noise it makes, just accessing the drive periodically. I miss the pointer mouse thingie, but the trackpad is becoming more comfortable when it works (perhaps a visit to the Genius Bar at my local Apple Store on Monday is in order). And of course the additional mouse buttons would be nice.

Trying to find something this full-featured in the Intel world at this price point would be a challenge, I’m sure. I don’t even know if you can get FireWire on Intel laptops, and I have built-in 10/100 Ethernet, a modem, and 2 USB ports as well as the AirPort Extreme card.

The out of the box experience is where these really shine: from unpacking to using the system is a matter of 10 minutes, and the instructions are still sealed in their packing materials.

Network diagram

I have no idea if this is better than Visio but I found it to be quite useful. I diagrammed my home network as it will exist after I make a couple of machine swaps. There is one machine that’s not on the diagram that will be retired: it’s the entirely too slow machine that has been hosting this weblog and sundry other stuff for the past couple of years. It will be replaced by red, as shown in the diagram: this website will go from being hosted by a 233 MHz Pentium II with 64 Mb RAM to a 700 MHz Athlon with 256 Mb, to say nothing of the much faster drives and bus speed.

I have no idea if I chose the right networking symbols/colors, but I think the idea is clear enough.

Hmm, there’s one other system not shown: we do have a WinXP system that’s not powered on. Perhaps I’ll add that later. A steal from Boeing surplus — a 933 MHz Pentium III for $350, still in warranty from Dell.

MT-Blacklist v1.61-beta User Guide

mod_perl
Reports say that mod_perl is completely incompatible with MT-Blacklist due to use of CGI.pm methods. If you test it out, please let me know the results as I am not running mod_perl. This is a priority item to research in the future.

Dammit. I wish I was clueful enough to fix it or understand it well enough to suggest a fix.

Survey: employees overworked, stressed out, fed up – Nov. 11, 2003

More than eight in 10 workers plan to look for a new job when the economy heats up, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Professionals. While there’s a difference between looking for a new gig and actually jumping ship, that kind of number is “very, very high,” says SHRP spokesman Frank Scanlon.

I hope those who have enjoyed the “buyer’s market” of these past few years are prepared . . . .

For example, a national clothing chain must sell 3,000 pairs of $35 khakis to cover the price of replacing a salesperson who quits, including recruiting, training and lost productivity.

The tab to replace a typical white-collar middle manager runs about $100,000.

This is one of the most frustrating aspects of working in a purely academic environment, as I was until this week. The cost of turnover — in lost continuity, in advertising and interviewing, in training and development (such as there was of *that*) — has never been factored into the costs of running the institution at which I worked. Staff were expendable and interchangeable, and the lower the salaries, the better.

You can’t move forward if you keep starting over when people leave.

remembering rebecca: 11.03

Among their jaw-dropping findings: the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic and optical media has roughly doubled in the last three years. Five exabytes of new information — roughly five billion gigabytes — was created in 2002 alone. How big are five exabytes? Imagine half a million libraries as big as the Library of Congress print collections, and you’re on the right track. Each year almost 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person. If stored on paper, that would take about 30 feet of books. But 92% of all that new information is stored on magnetic media, mostly hard disks, rather than on paper, film or optical media.

The cited work is here.

I have a quibble with the use of “information” when I see claims like this. In an old analogy (circa 1996) that I still think holds up, I defined data as oil in the ground and information as gas at the pump. Information informs as a result of having been refined.

And of course the other issue I take with this is with the notion that any of this information is created: I suspect a lot of it is replicated. In the digital age, taking copies of stuff is easy, and I would wager than a lot of the bulging hard drives cited are littered with copies of material created and archived elsewhere.

Perhaps I am misreading this: I don’t know if the study is find that individuals are creating 800 Mb of stuff each year or if stuff is being created on their behalf, on the order of 800 Mb.

It strikes me, from personal experience, that much of the paper usage cited is not for original works but such embarrassments as printed email and copies of presentations that, while created for the screen, are printed in paper.

News Analysis: Attacks in Saudi Arabia Aim to Rattle a Dynasty

“I think they are after the royal family,” said Wyche Fowler Jr., a former senator who was ambassador to Saudi Arabia from October 1997 to February 2001. “There is a determined fight to rattle the government if not bring it down.”

A prominent Saudi who advises the royal household agreed. “This is an effort to destabilize the regime,” he said. “It’s against the monarchy and it is against the government.”

With domestic rumblings to reduce US dependence on oil imports — read: Saudi Arabia — and increased opposition, even violence, against the regime, what will it take to force a hard look at this relationship? Regime change at home seems like a prerequisite, since the incumbent never met a resource extraction industry he didn’t like. But what then?

It could be argued that the US has common cause with Osama bin Laden and Al Queda, in wanting the House of Saud to use its considerable wealth for good, rather than evil, but for different definitions of good and evil.

I got an email from the Subordinate Professor today, and I had to delete it after one reading: it was too painful. Not so much for me but there was hurt evident in the message. I got the impression she had read some of the postings chronicling this situation, and was unhappy at her portrayal.

Perhaps I could been more positive and offered suggestions for the future, rather than just venting spleen, but I don’t know, even now, if anything I suggest would be taken in the intended spirit.

To her, then, I offer this advice: Speak the truth, even though your voice shakes. Sitting idly by when you sense an injustice is wrong, no matter the reason, be it apathy, fear, whatever. Apologizing to others that “you have to go along with it” undermines you even further by acknowledging the wrong and admitting your cowardice.

I wanted the whole thing to end sooner — much sooner, like June — and if it became unbearably painful as a result of being extended many months past that, I can only hope there’s a lesson there.

Someong with a thicker skin or who wasn’t seeing the stress showing up in their kids’ behavior might have stuck it out longer. I have the former, but couldn’t tolerate the latter.

What’s next? I don’t quite know.

Blocking of Email From Some Domains

Between January and September of 2003, more than 65 million of more than 155 million messages [42%] were classified as spam. These numbers are only for the primary University mail relays, and do not include virus-infected messages. While the domain blocks will only affect a fraction of this load, they should significantly reduce the burden on both the email relays and the email hosts to which the messages are ultimately delivered.

We realize that this is an imperfect solution, however, resources are finite and spam apparently isn’t.

aaack. Those are amazing numbers ….

My last day. Anticlimactic in some ways. Some suggested I just call in sick, but I had taken some sick days earlier when I was having some foot trouble. Once that was less of a problem, I was OK with trying to finish up as best I could.

The Subordinate Professor was nowhere to be seen. I had heard she was having her dog euthanized and with a baby on the way (4 months or so along) I can only imagine how that felt. The Superior Professor was in and about as clueful as one would expect. She even brought me some work to do: I had to take some course evaluations from a continuing ed program and average the scores for each presenter over four criteria and overall, for 10 presenters. Call it half an hour’s work in Excel, but only if you know how to use such arcane features as AVERAGE(). <sigh> The Superior and Subordinate Professors both want to take a class so they can learn these valuable skills. I can’t recall *not* knowing how to do these things . . . . . Complicated financial models and “what-if” scenarios — the kind of thing that multi-million dollar investments hinge on — these aren’t.

It occurs to me that some people’s idea of “point and click” is to point at a task and click/snap their fingers in impatience while someone else does the work . . . .

I finished that task, cleared off my desk, trashed all my email, put a vacation reply on my that email address, removed my account from my computer, changed the admin password, and called it a day at noon:45. Fielded some email from folks who were responding to my farewell address or were catching up on the last few weeks of weblog entries.

No goodbyes, no “thanks for all your hard work”, no “sorry it didn’t work out,” no nothing.

I’m just glad it’s over.

The following is what I sent to the “all-hands” mailing list at my workplace: farewell addresses are not uncommon, but too many of them are thinly-veiled gripes. I decided not to follow that model. Of course, it helped that several of the folks I have worked with over these past few months took it upon themselves to take me to lunch and shower me with gifts and affection: it’s to them and the other folks who work hard in trying circumstances that I dedicate these sentiments.

As some of you may know, this is my last week at the University of
Washington School of Law.

This institution is fortunate to have so many capable and dedicated
people, both staff and faculty. The move to this bright new building
and the benefits of having everyone under one roof will, I hope, lead
to an even stronger, more cohesive community.

It’s been said that the secret to luck is hard work: when I look around
this building at the place and more important, the people who make it
what it is, I have to agree with that.

So my wish of good luck is really just a reminder to keep up the good
work, and I know you will.

Thanks for the privilege of working with you.