Fiat Lux

It's been a dismally grey and chilly weekend. Looks like summer is really over. The days are noticably shorter, and I'm putting the sandals away until next Spring.

Grey is how I'm feeling this chilly October night.

Hope you have an easy fast!

Bear has decided that he likes camping out on my textbooks. As I recall, Gimi was doing the same thing a semester or so ago.
So, I'm heading to campus to get stuff done & attend classes. Still feeling a little grey around the edges but working on it.

The Mess That Greenspan Made has a well-done "guest blogging" spot but Stephen Colbert on America's current housing market.

His conclusion:

So all you schadenfreuders out there, you can wipe that smile off your face because the housing bubble isn't a bubble at all - and if it ain't a bubble, it ain't gonna pop. I know this because I just read Kendra Todd's article at Yahoo! Real Estate where she said that the bubble is a myth and that, "real estate markets in many areas are going through a normal correction cycle."

[It was an ad - look at the URL - it says promo]

I'm expecting a soft landing for housing and there's nothing to worry about.

[Until next year]

I'm also expecting peace to break out all over the world, energy supplies to remain plentiful and cheap forever, the trade and budget deficits to correct quickly and painlessly, Republicans and Democrats to end their bickering, real wages to rise, health care costs to fall, education to improve, and all the world's religions to merge seamlessly into a single unified understanding of God.

Heh. Well done.

The Detroit Tigers pulled off a major upset by knocking the New York Yankees out of the playoffs on Saturday with an 8-3 win that clinched their best-of-five divisional series.

Good thing I'm a Mets fan. Although they may not get past the Dodgers either, we shall see.

This morning I got an e-mail reminder that I need to pay for another 12 months of web hosting at Powweb. In other words, I need to get off my butt and get serious about what I want to do with the site and my hosting.

I wrote this summer about the difficulties I had with Powweb's support team after their site migration broke a key script on my website. At the time, I decided not to move, since I was paid-up until October and didn't want to waste my money by leaving sooner. That's a classic case of using a sunk cost for decision making, which is one of those thing you're really not supposed to do, but I did it anyway.

So the way I see it, I have three choices.

First off, I could call it a day and shutter Fiat Lux. There's a part of me that's thinking, "Why bother? You're not blogging as much as you used to, your posts are getting more banal, and your readership is off -- do you really need to be doing this whole website thing at all?" In which case, I would take the site down, get an email-only hosting plan somewhere (probably Tucows, since that's where I have the domain registered), and that would be that.

Next choice, status quo. Although I'm definitely not blogging like I was six months ago, I don't particularly want to ditch this blog altogether. And although I'm still somewhat irked at Powweb's recent crappy service, I really don't have all that much to complain about when you look at the total scope of the last three years of hosting with them. Especially when you factor in how little the cost is. So perhaps I should suck it up, pay for the next year of service, and continue on as is.

The third path would be to find a new web host. If I did that, I'd probably want to take advantage of the switch to make some other changes to the blog -- like a new template, or an upgrade to MovableType 3.x or maybe even give WordPress a try. After three years, Fiat Lux is overdue for a redesign. However, the problem there is the timing. October is a very busy month for me; I have a product launch at work and accounting midterm next week, plus various other stuff for school going on as well. Also, I really ought to be spending my free time on starting up the post-graduation job hunt, not playing with my personal website.

So, there you have it. Three options. All have pluses and minuses. And I have just 18 days to decide before I have to either put down some cash or shut down the site. Less than that if I go with option three, because I'd have to allocate time for coding and testing before throwing the switch to the new site.

The only option that's not on the table is moving to one of the free blogging services. Why? Two reasons. One, because I'll still have to pay to have my domain e-mail hosted somewhere, so if I decide to keep blogging, I might as well get a full web hosting plan and run my own site. Two, because I can. I'm not much of a geek compared to most of the folks here in Silicon Valley, but I am just enough of one that I'd rather run my own website than use someone else's service.

Oh, and bonus reason three: because as someone whose career has a technology / marketing focus, I find it helpful to stay hands-on with at least some aspects of Internet technology. One of the gripes you hear about marketing people in the tech world is that they can be clueless and unrealistic when it comes to their expectations of technology. Being clued-in to even the basics helps stave that off.

I don't get as many visitors as I used to, but those of you who still stop by here, what do you think? Have you faced a similar choice, and if so, what did you choose?

There will be a reckoning and a price to pay for this. And it all could have been avoided.

"We estimate that as a consequence of the coalition invasion of March 18, 2003, about 655,000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation," said Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the United States.

That means 2.5 percent of the Iraqi population have died because of the invasion and ensuing strife, he said.

The team's study, published online by the medical journal The Lancet, estimated pre-war deaths in Iraq at 143,000 a year, and said Iraq's death rate is now 2-1/2 times that of the pre-war period.

"Although such death rates might be common in times of war, the combination of a long duration and tens of millions of people affected has made this the deadliest international conflict of the 21st century," Burnham said.

As I walked in the door from school tonight, my phone rang. One of my classmates was calling; another classmate had been hit by a car (not fatally, thank god), and did I know the name of her boyfriend so the boyfriend could be called?

I didn't. In fact, I didn't even know she had a boyfriend, and I feel really lousy about that right now. We're in two classes together and even in a working group for one of the classes; you'd think I'd have learned something as basic as her relationship status halfway into the semester. What kind of self-involved person does that make me?

The other thing that really makes me feel bad is I drove right by the accident scene tonight, and I didn't know it was her. As I drove past campus heading home, I noticed that there was a fire truck, an ambulance, and a police car all clustered round a car in the street, plus a lot of students standing around. But I didn't stop to ask what had happened. I just wanted to get home after a long day.

I really wish now that I had stopped.

Bleh.

I've never been a big fan of "holier than thou" doctrinaire types, whether they call themselves Greens, vegans, or feminists.

Shakes summed up the subject very well:

The measure of feminism’s tolerance should not be how well one conforms to any particular aesthetic, but how willing one is to embrace a myriad of aesthetics. A woman who wants nothing more than to be a beautiful bride with 2.5 kids and a suburban estate worthy of Better Homes & Gardens, but also totally digs my personal groove, isn’t my problem. A woman who thinks there’s only one definition of womanhood and one correct way to express it, whether she calls herself a Concerned Woman for America or a feminist, is.

This isn't a new issue; in my long-ago college days we were dealing with the same thing -- not being a lesbian meant I was locked out of the campus women's magazine -- only back then people weren't able to excoriate each other all over the blogosphere about it.

Oooh. A less expensive Treo. Me want.

At DigitalLife 2006 in New York City Thursday, Palm introduced a new Treo smartphone aimed at average consumers rather than just business customers. The Treo 680 is a quad-band GSM handset that runs Palm OS and comes in a number of different colors.

Palm says it has designed the Treo 680 to reach a wide range of users around the world, and has simplified the device's software to make that goal a reality. "Really what we focused on in the past is the mobile professionals," Palm CEO Ed Colligan said in a press conference.

Although it comes with largely the same feature set as the Treo 650, Palm has updated the 680's phone application to version 3.0, which offers a completely new user interface. Favorites have been simplified and contacts are now integrated directly into the dial software.

In addition, Palm has included a wired car kit, a "My Treo" user guide and knowledge base support system, as well as a new version of the Treo's e-mail software known as VersaMail 3.5. Multimedia, blogging and mapping utilities come with the 680 as well. Google finally released a version of its Maps software for Palm on Thursday.

I'm still reasonably happy with my Razr, though, so I doubt I'll be buying one of these the day the come out. The Razr won't last forever though......

The Grameen Bank was one of the primary cases we studied in my Social Entrepreneurship class this summer. I'm totally stoked that Mohammed Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize today.

Yunus, 66, set up a new kind of bank in 1976 to lend to the neediest, particularly women, in Bangladesh, enabling them to start up small businesses without collateral.

In doing so, he pioneered microcredit, a system copied in more than 100 nations from the United States to Uganda.

[snip]

In awarding a prize more traditionally given to those who sign treaties to end wars or fight for human rights, the secretive five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee said eliminating poverty was a path to peace and democracy.

"Lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Microcredit is one such means. Development from below also serves to advance democracy and human rights," the committee added.

"Eradication of poverty can give you real peace," said Yunus.

I honestly do not understand why some people are pissed off about the new ban on online gaming. Online casinos are a profit machine that do their customers no favors.

I would never trust an online casino to not rig the game somehow. Given how relatively easy it is to put in "streakbreaker" code or something that skews probability more in favor of the house, combined with the fact that these online casinos are virtually unregulated -- there's just no reason to NOT do it.

So when I see comments like this about the online ban:

"We're going to have Prohibition, and what happened then?" said champion poker player Annie Duke, a former University of Pennsylvania doctoral candidate who began playing professionally in 1994. "We had people running around with tommy guns and drinking moonshine because they weren't given a safe product."

My response is, give me a freaking break! There is a perfectly safe product out there already. It's called a brick-and-mortar casino. A quick Google turned up this fact: There are 47 states in United States which have 1492 legal gambling facilities available. That's plenty of product. Don't live close enough to one of those casinos? There's always poker night at your buddy's house.

As my statistics teachers were fond of reminding us, even in an honest game, every casino game is set up so that the odds are in the house's favor. That's why casinos make so much money. But at least in a US casino, you can be reasonably sure that it's a clean game.

And by the way, I'm not an anti-gambling crusader. Scott and I don't gamble often, but when we have the cash, we've been known to hit a few blackjack tables and while away some hours. Well, actually, Scott plays blackjack and I either kibitz or wander off to lose some money in the slot machines.

At any rate, I want to be clear that I am not against gambling per se. I just think that anyone who's upset about the Internet gambling ban needs to get over it.

Shelley Powers decided to do something fun with Google Code Search and post the results on her blog: Search the developers' comments for amusing tidbits. No surprise, "Stupid users" is all over the place.

Her favorite is the search for "piece of shit". If you're geeky, it's very funny reading. Lots of bashing on IE and much much more.

Yay.

He's not a kitten anymore.

There have been times when I've wondered whether I was doing the right thing by not hiding behind anonymity or pseudonymity on the Internet. Each time I've thought about it, though, I've ultimately decided that if someone were to get so offended by what I put on this blog that they would not want to hire me or allow me to keep a job that I have, then I wouldn't want to work there anyway. My politics are almost boringly mainstream Democratic. Someone who found that objectionable would likely be a serious wingnut, or, since it's no secret that I'm Jewish, an anti-Semite.

And after seeing the latest feminist blog-drama going on regarding threats of "outing" and anonymous blogging, I regret my decisions even less.

I have no beef with people who choose to not reveal their identities online. There are a lot of good reasons for blogging in anonymity. Ultimately, what matters more (at least to me) is the quality of your blogging. However, the trade-off is that anonymous bloggers with a higher degree of visibility -- like Zuzu -- can be subject to pressures that those of us who are less hidden don't have. I have the luxury of not having to deal with those pressures, and I'm glad.

Despite the fact that it's open to anybody, I was always too intimidated to actually do anything to Wikipedia.

Recently, however, we created a wiki for a project at work and I was put in charge of managing it. It's a technical documentation wiki, so my primary task is to try to bring some structure to what the tech staff puts in there, plus trying to figure out how our users will eventually want to use the site and adding a bit of marketing spin to the front page. At any rate, now that I've actually been using a wiki, I finally felt comfortable enough to actually touch Wikipedia.

To start out, I removed a factually inaccurate statement from one article, and then corrected a spelling error in another. Not very thrilling contributions, to be sure, but at least I'm not intimidated anymore.

Actually, if I ever get the time at work, I think it would abe a good idea to rewrite Wikipedia's entry on my employer. That, however, presents an intersting question. Is it considered appropriate for a company to substantially re-write their own entry? If you remained consistant to the Wikipedia standards of accuracy and neutrality I don't see why it would be so bad, but then, I'm still pretty new to wikiland.

According to Ram Shriram, there's not enough middle managers out there. I also heard this meme from three sales executives in a speaker panel organized by one of my professors the other week.

Memories must be short around the Valley. Remember what happened a few years ago? The big tech bubble bust. Companies cut headcount and went out of business in droves. That cut the guts out of a lot of people's careers. An awful lot of the folks who should have spent 2001-2006 working their way up into those middle-management roles instead struggled to find work, got out of the business altogether, hunkered down in survival jobs, moved out of the area, or stagnated in roles they were overqualified for. Others went into their own startups or have made the leap to the executive level. At any rate, now that things are better, there's a great big hole in a lot of people's careers where the last 5 years should have been.

The real question is, why are any of these executives surprised by this?

Although to be fair, Shriram is not quoted as being surprised, so it might be incorrect to suggest that.

Maybe someone should rewrite that old folk song 'Where have all the flowers gone' and turn it into a YouTube video to help raise awareness of this critical business issue. What do you think?

Haven't done this in a while. Here's the first 10 in my random shuffle today:

Come Around - Marc Broussard
O Marie - Daniel Lanois
Bombay Awakes - Bombay Dreams (London Cast)
Hand Me Down - Matchbox 20
Whoomp! (There It Is) - Tag Team
Higher Love - Steve Winwood
Money Changes Everything - Cyndi Lauper
Boadicea - Enya
Color and Light - Sunday in the Park with George
Sky Blue - Peter Gabriel

And now, off to campus for a long day of slogging through Managerial Accounting problems.

U.S. says Iraq agrees on a timeline to peace. 2 weeks before the elections. Funny how that happens:

Iraqi leaders have assured the United States they will stick to a timetable of measures over the next year to curb violence and allow U.S. troops to go home, Washington's top officials in Iraq said on Tuesday.

Two weeks ahead of U.S. congressional elections that have put
President George W. Bush's Republicans on the defensive over their Iraq strategy, the U.S. ambassador and military commander in Baghdad told voters directly via a rare joint news conference that success was still possible, and on a "realistic timetable."

Insisting sectarian bloodshed had not caused Washington to water down its goal of a stable, democratic Iraq, envoy Zalmay Khalilzad said he expected Iraqi leaders to make "significant progress in the coming 12 months" in meeting "benchmarks."

Gimi doesn't usually hang out on my desk, nor is he much into cuddling with the other kitties. So catching both him & Bear together on my desk is worth a shot.

California's autumns are extremely gentle, but wven out here, there's signs that the rainly winter season will be around soon ehough:

1) My cuticles are shot to hell (thank you, super-low humidity)
2) Daylight Savings Time is coming to an end this weekend

Today was one of the last commutes I'll have in daylight for the next several months. One of the things I hate most about winter is the short days. Especially since the auto accident a couple of years ago, driving at night is not high on my list of things I enjoy.

On the plus side, I have a baby shower and a Halloween party to go to this weekend. The gift ias already bought, and I have a costume all set for the party. Yay me!

I've been a little sinus-y and headache-y today, and am hoping that a cold is not on its way. Depite feeling draggy, Scott and I went out to do a couple of errands to complete the winterization of his bike today.

While we were out, we stopped by the local Tower Records, which was festooned with "going out of business" signs. CDs were all 25% off and DVDs 20% off -- not the greatest of discounts, but what the heck. We walked out with 4 DVDs and 4 CDs. I probably would have bought more if it weren't for the sticker shock. Last time I was buying CDs they were generally $16. Just about everything I looked at in the bins was $21.

Tower Records was a big part of my CD buying life before we moved to San Francisco. Living within walking distance of a branch will do that to you. Once we got to SF, I tended to do my buying via Amazon. And by and large that was just fine,. But the thing you lose by not going to a store to do your buying is the serendipity of discovery. Online stores try very hard to come up with good algorythms for "you may also be interested in..." sections on a web page, but it's not the same by a long shot. Those things are good for reminding you to buy batteries and a travel charger after you pick out a piece of electronics, but not so good for the more random connections that result in your walking out with 3 Star Wars DVDs as well as a copy of "Good Night and Good Luck".

With Tower going down for the count, there's even less chance I'll be doing much of that random browsing in the future. And that's a shame.

Local music critic Jim Harrington has a similar response to Tower's immanent demise.

I took some cold meds before I sat down to write this and they seem to be starting to kick in. With any luck I'll be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the AM.

I took this shot Saturday night, shortly before 7:00PM.

Right now, it's 5:26 PM and fully dark out.

This sucks.

Whether any of this is true or not, Mark Cuban doesn't know (nor do I) but it does pass the smell test and is an interesting 'behind the scenes' take on the Google-YouTube acquisition:

In the months preceding the sale of YouTube the complaints from copyright owners began to mount at a ferocious pace. Small content owners and big were lodging official takedown notices only to see their works almost immediately reappear. These issues had to be disclosed to the suitors who were sniffing around like Google but Yahoo was deep in the process as well. (News Corp inquired but since Myspace knew they were a big source of Youtube's traffic they quickly choked on the 9 digit price tag.) While the search giants had serious interest, the suitors kept stumbling over the potential enormous copyright infringement claims that were mounting.

[snip]

So the parties (including venture capital firm Sequoia Capital) agreed to earmark a portion of the purchase price to pay for settlements and/or hire attorneys to fight claims. Nearly 500 million of the 1.65 billion purchase price is not being disbursed to shareholders but instead held in escrow.

Thios passes my sanity check because it would be utterly irresponsible to not make some kind of provision for future copyright infringement claims against YouTube. Actually, 500 million might even be a low number, depending on how many lawsuits get filed.

The letter Cuban cites, however, goes on to explain how the whole game will be rigged so that the actual artists whose content has beeen reposted will not see any of the revenue the media companies collect from YouTube. That seems a bit more farfeteched to me, but I don't know the entertainment biz at all, perhaps that is SOP for them.

Who knows, the whole thing could just be sour grapes on Cuban's part, but it's still interesting reading.

Via Ezra's linkblog, some excellent observations from Larry Summers:

The twin arguments that globalisation is inevitable and protectionism is counterproductive have the great virtue of being correct, but do not provide much consolation for the losers. Nor can they rally support for policies that maintain, let alone promote, international integration.

Economists rightly emphasise that trade, like other forms of progress, makes everyone richer by enabling them to buy goods at lower prices. But this offers small solace to those who fear their jobs will vanish.

Education is central to any economic strategy, but there is a limit to what it can do for workers in their 40s and beyond. Nor can education be a complete answer at a time when skilled computer programmers in India are paid less than $2,000 a month.

John Kenneth Galbraith was right when he observed: “All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.” Meeting the needs of the anxious global middle is the economic challenge of our time.

He may be a sexist pig but he's right about this.