"What Are They Worried About?"

So today, on my way in I was as usual listening to the radio. I was listing to this guy who says his show is some sort of "no spin" zone - whatever that means. Anyway, the guy was going on and on about how this whole port thing is really over blown and that we will actually be safer with the Arab company than we ever were with the Anglo company.

The logic (is it logic if it isn't logical?), er, the reasoning (is it reasoning if it wasn't reasonable?), er the thinking (is it... never mind, you get the idea), what he was saying was that the President has to know that these new guys will need watching, and so when they take over, there will undoubtedly be people watching their every move at every level. Far more so than there ever was when the old company was running things.

Well, maybe he feels safer. Me all I could think was, in which way will they be watching?

Will they be watching the way they were looking after the running of the prison at Abu Ghraib? There certainly wasn't anything missed there.

Will they be watching the way they watched the aftermath of Katrina? Watching everything that can possibly go wrong do so and then asking if they can come home.

Will they be watching like they were watching at the top of the Iraqi reconstruction? Watching profiteers walk off with all of our money.

Will they be watching like they did with the oversite of operation Able Danger? When they were shown some of the 9/11 hijackers long before the attack and did nothing.

Will they be watching like they were in Iraq prior to our invasion? Watching what is happening and then just making up whatever reasons they need to do what they want.

All in all I think we're better off when this administration isn't watching than when they are.

It Was Worth a Try

Know why your photographer doesn't want to send you the images? Perhaps because of this:


Came out a little pixelated though - even with the good paper. I was trying to come up to 11x17, so a smaller print might work. But then what's the fun of a smaller print? Good enough for the office wall though.

Still it'll be nice to get the actual album. This attempted print is from one of the proofs from the wedding album. If I read the thing right I think the actual size is close to twice this big. A memorial commensurate with the occasion if you ask me.

Want to see the proofs? Check here. You can view as a guest if you don't have AOL (and I mean who still has AOL? I should really get into the '90s already). This is a lot less work than looking through the photo proofs was.

Cable ala Carte

I think cable is too expensive. I believe that they are really in the business of nickel and diming their customers out of more and more money. I also believe that their primary businesses are not providing cable TV but rather expanding their marketshare by signing up new people and also selling advertising. So in the end, once you are signed up, they really don't care much about you as a customer.

So you would think I would be happy that the government is trying to force the cable company to sell their selections one channel at a time - allowing people to only buy what they want. But I'm not.

Mostly, for whatever reasons I might detail below, the overall reason I am opposed to this is that it is providing an otherwise not available chance for the providers to make a gross adjustment to their pricing structure in a way that will undoubtedly get more expensive. I am 100% sure that whatever price reduction politicians are able to claim for an election cycle will be wiped out in less than a year. This entire initiative just has "backfire" written all over it.

How many channels do you think the average household would buy one by one? Everyone will buy their local channels, which even with ala carte pricing will likely remain a package. So we have basic, then how many? 6? 8? 10? If it were me I know I would want CNN, ESPN, Bravo, SciFi, Comedy Central, MTV, VH1, Discovery, & Cartoon Network - and that's not counting HBO type premium channels. So that's nine, although I am real fond of TNT, TBS, A&E, AMC, I like Spike for NewTrek, and also FX from time to time. So say 9 channels.

Don't you think that once they come up with the price for 9 channels it will be what I am paying for the whole thing now? They aren't stupid. In the end, we will just wind up paying more if we want to have a couple of channels we watch infrequently and the "average" buy will look like the "average" price right now.

Also, won't this mean that channels will have to carry their own freight? So lets say that I like SciFi, but nearly nobody else does. Won't that mean that the per channel price for that channel is going to be higher? Once you add in the domino that if less people are watching it then less people will advertise on it couldn't it mean that orphan stations, something that few people watch, will just get dropped from the package all together?

In Pittsburgh, would that mean we would be forced by the market to take Fox News over CNN?

In reality, this engine/freight relationship exists already. Cable providers have to deal with it from programming providers. The way they price now just spreads the cost of high priced stations over all the low priced stations. Plus, the program providers don't even give the cable providers a choice in some situations. As a cable company, if you want to offer one station a programmer has you often have to take the full package. Want Bravo? Then you also have to offer USA, Scifi, MSNBC, NBCShops...

Really it seems like the first step is not to free up the consumer to pick and choose, it is to let the cable operator pick and choose what they offer. At that point the second generation issue might become moot.

Although I doubt it, because they are all crap-weasels and they will not be happy until they have all of our video, audio, phone, internet and every discretionary dollar in our budgets plus a few.

Too Connected?

I sit in a lot of meetings. If you count classes as meetings then I am in A LOT of meetings. Today I posted an article on the NewsBeat page about running good meetings and one of their rules was: "No electronic grazing." No laptops, no cell phones, and no Blackberry.

It made me start to think, are these things tools, toys, or security blankets?

As someone without a laptop, but with a fairly sophisticated cell phone, I think I can say based on my own behavior and the behavior I have observed that in nearly all circumstances these things are toys.

Really, unless you are running a presentation or taking notes you simply just don't need the thing. Once, in a blue moon someone will need some piece of information that can be retrieved electronically, but in that case its just the one copy on the screen in front of the one person - not much use to the group. Even when someone just needs a particular fact it is rarely the person with the machine, and if it is you often hear as much cursing at not being able to find something as any kind of exclamation at having found the needle in the haystack.

More often you see: email, solitaire, instant messaging, web surfing...

As the person running the meeting (or teaching a class) when I notice someone using a computer for one of these things I feel like that person simply ought not to have come, that they certainly don't value their participation - why are they wasting my time? Here, I think, is a good rule of thumb: if you wouldn't do whatever it is that you are doing with your computer without the computer, then you shouldn't be doing it with the computer.

Can you see someone in a meeting going through their bills, spreading out a deck of cards on the table, talking to people while other people are speaking, talking on the phone, reading the paper? No, that would be rude? That little flip up screen doesn't make it not rude. Rude to the speaker and to everyone else in the meeting (at least the ones that aren't plunking on their computers).

Also, I think the laptop thing has made us a little lazy and complacent. Need the laptop to look up documents? Not if you are prepared for the meeting. Being able to bring one's office into the room I think is making for lousy meeting prep and therefore lousy meetings. Have to check your mail? No, really you don't. Need to be playing cards? Um, no, need to be participating in the meeting. It has become status quo for people to be surfing and working and whatever when they are gathered for a meeting. The whole point of the meeting was to get those people together to synch their processes and to inform and hear from the whole group. You can't do that while you are shopping on itunes.

You are in fact wasting your own time right along with everyone else's. Do yourself and the rest of us a favor, shut down your machine, and pay attention.

Presidents Day

Is it Presidents Day or President's Day? I am thinking without the apostrophe. Lately it seems like every day is President's day, although I am uncertain that is what The Framers had envisioned. What do you think The Framers would have thought of George W. Bush. Being that they were such fans of checks and balances, and he seems to be just fine without them, I think they would have not been all that fond of him.

It seems on this day it would be useful to take a look at the state of the presidency, as well as celebrate the memory of Washington & Lincoln. It seems to me that overall we're in a little bit of a decline. Presidents in my lifetime: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, & Bush.

I find it unlikely those faces will turn up on a mountain anytime soon. I guess Nixon opened China, Carter began the road to Middle East Peace, and Reagan buried Communism. Personally I am a big Clinton fan, but like the Bushes that bracket him, I don't think history will be kind. I'm not sure Ford will get much of a mention either except in a trivia sort of way. Really I guess that most Presidents wind up being trivia. Am I a bad American because I would likely be guessing on most Presidential trivia?

There was a group that was talking about putting Reagan on the 20 dollar bill. Somehow I think the current face has more stature. But I guess things do change from time to time and perhaps if we can get a real fight going about whether or not the Reagan $20 is appropriate we can keep the legislators from doing something that would really hurt us.

I keep mulling the Carlin idea in my mind, that in the end we can't complain about who is elected. Like it or not, these guys are apparently the best we can do. Seems like anyone who really would want to be President we can find a fairly good reason why they ought not be allowed to be. Who do you think will be next? No incumbent, no VP running for the top spot, no Democratic standouts? Wouldn't it be weird if the time can and nobody ran? I wonder if the constitution has a way of dealing with that? There's one they didn't cover in my high school US History class.

Do you think that in the near history of the past that people thought the same ho-hum thoughts about their presidents that we often do now? Were people talking about how really Washington or Lincoln were all spin and that really they weren't significant? Somehow I get the feeling that under either of those administrations you knew that you were being well looked out for, and that their legacies are deserved. But nobody here now was there then, and certainly historians do have a role in the memory of a Presidential legacy.

Isn't this the period when George W. is supposed to be thinking about his legacy? I wonder how they will spin that one on future Presidents Days?

Lemming

The next step is to ask several of your friends and colleagues to say which words they associate with you. You can do this by directing them to the following URL:-

http://kevan.org/johari?name=dboevers

ok, lets see...

Over the Edge

Is it something to worry about when you find yourself doing research to post a comment on someone else's blog?

There must be some work I could be doing.

All Things To All People

The curricular revisions continue at work. We've got a couple of fairly interesting conundrums to solve. Mostly decisions about who should take what when, and what should be included within courses that everyone takes. Students and faculty all have different goals and priorities and yet we are charged with coming up with something coherent.

It's gotten difficult to describe the issues in uncharged terms. Its real hard to talk about what should be included without making one population or another feel like they aren't important. The other day, while trying to find a benign way to represent some of the issues I scribbled this on a notepad:

Sometimes I feel like this revision ought to be getting all of us a PhD in Education. What I am trying to depict here graphically, and hopefully apolitically, is the relative usefulness of a course in a specific discipline to varied populations within the student body based on how complicated the material is that is being presented.

One of the interesting things theorized here is that a course doesn't really even become interesting to the group invested in the specific information until just about it becomes too much for the population out of their element. Of everything on the chart, this is the phenomenon I have seen played out in classrooms.

I'm fairly confident about the shape of the curves on the increasing side of the maximum. It would be interesting to know more about the size of the plateau and the slope of the decline.

Basically this is a graphical way to say that a course can't be all things to all people. I hope to use this type of reasoning to help determine what level course content ought to be aimed, and then once we have that level to understand who will, and who will not benefit from the class. Ideally this will help to lead into some compromises regarding common content and total individual curricular depth.

Or maybe its just a picture with pretty colors.

Link of the Day

It's been far too long since we've had a link of the day. Truth be told I have a whole bookmark folder full of things to post, but the muse just never seems to arrive. This was just too funny to ignore.

Who Got Shot By Dick Cheney

This was just too much fun. Knock yourself out.

Really I Shouldn't Watch the News

Probably since that last election, my commentary on the blog has really dropped off. I think part of it was that I was really actually hoping that by talking about issues I might help to inspire someone to vote, and that after the election that motivation was gone. I also think it was because I used to read the paper and I used to listen to the news. Now, so much less so. Maintaining the NewsBeat page takes up most of the time I used to give to McNews, and iTunes has replaced the AirAmerica stream in my office, and what I listen to in the car really can't be called news - although I guess they are discussing local issues.

And I have to tell you, I think I am the better for it.

One really ought not celebrate being monumentally out of the loop, but it sure is nice to be there. Sometimes I turn to CNN in the morning, but most days I luck out and its something about Brad Pitt, or five useful ways to something that are - one - totally obvious, and - two - probably not nearly as useful as they are being made out to be.

Today, not so lucky, and I don't know how you hear stuff like this and don't get, don't get something. I swear, if someone doesn't lose their job. The US Government is getting like summer stock. In stock, when people screw up, you threaten them with a long term contract. In the current administration, it seems the bigger the cock up the bigger the reward - right up to the medal of freedom. My guess is that somewhere there's a tailor fitting Mr. Brown and Mr. Chertoff for their medals.

FEMA has 11,000 mobile homes sinking into the mud in a field in Arkansas.

$300 million spent on mobile homes and the 11,000 that are sinking into the mud "may have to be disposed of." The quote is from a congressional hearing I unfortunately ran across while getting dressed this morning.

The population of the US, according to the census page, is 298,110,801 people. That means each of us had just about $1 of our money spent on these homes. If they get wrecked and are unable to be used, the people responsible ought to be made to go door to door and give each of us a $1 refund in cash. They can use the remaining $1,889,199.00 to pay for the gas for the trip.

I know that there are good reasons they didn't deploy these things the way we will be squawking at them to have done. Certainly if they send 11,000 mobile homes to New Orleans and they all blow away in a Hurricane three months from now we would be the first ones to jump up and say "What kinda of MORON sends mobile homes into a hurricane zone?" But still, this waste in the face of so much need is just plain sad. Next to this, the poorly allocated money, or the pure graft is simply insignificant.

Are these people really the best we can do? If the people that made movies were this organized we would all have live theatre subscriptions. If the people that did theatre were this organized, I think the publishing industry would sell quite a few more books. Someone needs to step up and take responbsibility. Preferably by firing everyone and then resigning. That someone could be as high up in the administration as it goes frankly.

From now on I am sticking to E!