Fozzolog

Politics Fozzolog: Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 05:58:54 +0000

This last Saturday was 28 August, 8/28, the day of Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor event in Washington D.C.

I didn’t attend the event in person, but I did donate some money to the Special Operations Warriors Foundation which was the beneficiary of the event. It’s not the same as actually sacrificing to be there, but I hope it’s something.

The rally was carried live on C-SPAN Saturday morning, so I recorded it on my DVR and watched it later. The actual rally was about three and a half hours long.

True to Glenn’s word, the rally was not political. Sure, there were a couple comments made during the rally that could have been perceived as political, but by and large, it was not political. Instead, it was religious, spiritual, and pious. It was also patriotic and reverent. There was lots of tribute during the first hour or so to those who serve, and who have served, in the branches of the U.S. military. That portion of the program could have been held in late May as part of a Memorial Day program.

If you’ve listened or watched Glenn Beck much over the last, say, three or four years, you may have caught him talking to, or about, Jon Huntsman Sr., a prominent businessman from Salt Lake City, Utah. I remember hearing about the Huntsmans when I was growing up and my dad was in the state legislature. I also remember the Christmas cards we’d get from the Huntsman family. There was always a picture of a HUGE family that always seemed so much bigger than it was the year before.

To say Glenn Beck admires Jon Huntsman would be a terrible understatement. I would say Glenn is in awe of Jon’s philanthropic work, his integrity, and his character. So, it was no surprise that Huntsman received the first Badge of Merit for Charity at the Restoring Honor rally. Unfortunately, he was unable to attend to receive the award (He was attending the marriage of one of his grandchildren- something he probably does a couple times a week these days… Remember the family photo? Yeah.)

The last half of the rally was about turning to God.

It’s been quite a journey for those of us who have followed Glenn Beck over the years. Since 2007 and especially since the 2008 election, Glenn has been spending most of his time presenting to his listeners, viewers, and readers the threats of Progressive, Marxist, and socialist movements to the republic our Founding Fathers designed.

He has demonstrated. over and over, how we have allowed our country to be taken over by progressives, from both major parties, He also introduced a long lost revolutionary idea to the masses, that voting for a candidate because they have an “R” or a “D” next to their name was stupid; We should be voting the candidates that share our values and principles, that have character and integrity.

Is it any surprise we have seen candidates like Doug Hoffman in New York’s 23rd congressional district come out of nowhere and make a spectacular showing in a race. People are waking up and looking at elected officials in a way they haven’t in a long, long time.

Glenn’s also reminded us and taught us how religion played such an important role in the early days of this country. Our founders never meant for our government to be free of all religious influence.

The first amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that the federal government and the states shall not ESTABLISH any official state religion or interfere with the free practice of religious worship. Somehow, over the years, the Progressives and other well-meaning interpreters of the Constitution, have misconstrued the intent of this law to mean that religious observance has no place in the public sphere. But, in fact, our founders insisted, on several occasions, that our public officials, and the people at large, should be a “moral and religious people” in order for the American experiment to survive.

The first sessions of congress after the new federal government was instituted under the U.S. Constitution included hours of prayer and bible study. These men elected to represent their constituents believed the best way they could possibly serve was to be sure they were in prayer with God.

Benjamin Franklin believed it was only through God and through the various representatives to the Constitutional Congress humbling themselves and turning their hearts to God that agreements could be made to bring about the U.S. Constitution.

So, in the end, Glenn was surrounded by 240 religious leaders, each pledging that their organizations would be teaching their congregations it is time to turn to God, to rally behind God, and to recognize the importance of equal justice and individual liberty.

By doing this, Glenn has reinstituted the “black-robed regiment” to fight for the soul of the country. Pretty heavy stuff.

Now, I understand many people these days are bound to feel uncomfortable about what Glenn Beck is doing. Even if you do not believe in God or are not that religious, this is a good thing. Glenn made it very clear on his radio show today that when he approached these religious leaders about including them in his rally that he wasn’t creating a political force like the Christian Coalition or the Moral Majority. He told them, if this is political, it won’t last. It seems like most of them agreed with him.

I listened to Glenn’s radio program today. I don’t usually have time to do that, but today I had some driving to do and had time to listen. I wasn’t sure what to expect the first day back on the air after the rally. There was some time spent talking about the number of people that came and re-iterating some of the messages that were delivered, but what really struck me… What really stood out were the callers that called into Glenn’s show today. Did they call and say, “Oh man, Glenn, you were the most awesome guy on Saturday!?” Did they call and tell him he was right, that they felt in their heart he did the right thing? No, not exactly.

Most of the callers that had been to the rally called to tell stories of exceptional, extraordinary experiences they had while attending the rally. One caller, a disabled black woman from the northeast, spoke about how she and her daughter decided to rent an electric scooter so she could be mobile enough to attend the rally. When they had difficulty using the subway and navigating through the crowds going to and from the rally, a man and his family befriended them and treated them as one of his own family and helped them for the entire event.

Another caller spoke of her husband losing his wallet containing the money they had to live on while they were visiting Washington D.C. A man nearby heard their distress and handed over four $100 bills.

Another woman spoke of pushing a stroller and pulling a cooler through the National Mall to meet up with her husband who was saving them a spot to listen to/watch the rally. She said the crowd was more than helpful in helping her and her children move through the sea of people to her husband, even cheering when they finally made it.

These stories of people helping people are incredibly uplifting and, in a way, demonstrate exactly what the rally was about.

If you want to read a political message into it all, it’s probably this: Looking to government for guidance out of darkness is hopeless. The best path out of the mess our country is in right now is for us to serve each other; Find ways to help one another. The best place to start is in supporting our churches.

General Fozzolog: Book Review: "Ghost Rider" by Neil Peart

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 01:59:25 +0000

Well, I finished “Ghost Rider” by Neil Peart.

In retrospect, I’m not sure why it took me six years to finally get around to reading it. But, it did. Thom, one of my best friends, was reading “Ghost Rider” while we were traveling through Oregon and Washington many years back. He enjoyed Neil’s commentary on Oregon’s ridiculous laws that mandate that you do not pump your own gasoline. Instead, you must allow a minimum-wage worker to do it for you.

Thom and I share a common heritage of sorts. We both became hardcore fans of the band Rush when we were teenagers. Neil Peart is probably best known for being the amazing drummer for Rush. I venture to guess that a large proportion of the sales of “Ghost Rider” and Peart’s three or four other books come from loyal Rush fans that can’t find enough ways to support their favorite band.

I finally came around to ordering the book from Amazon after I attended a screening of the documentary “Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage” when it was in limited theatrical release. There was a short segment in the documentary about Neil’s hiatus from the music business, his motorcycle journeys across North America and down into Central America, and the resulting book he wrote about it. I decided it was time to finally read the dang thing.

Why would Neil Peart walk away from the successful role as drummer of one of the world’s most successful rock bands? Well, it was a tragedy. Two tragedies, actually. First, his 19 year-old daughter, Neil’s only child, died in a freak car accident on her way back to college from home. Then, his wife was diagnosed with cancer and died ten months after the car accident.

Neil was left with no family. Neil’s wife Jackie took it especially hard when their daughter died. Neil had a rough time caring for Jackie as she grieved inconsoleably after their daughter’s accident. Then, he had to deal with her descent and surrender to cancer.

Following his wife’s death, Neil described himself as being nearly soulless, to the point of feeling like a ghost. He felt it was torture to sit around home where he had nothing but memories and things that reminded him of his wife and daughter. So, he mounted his “trusty steed,” a BMW R1100GS motorcycle, and headed to The Yukon and Alaska, beginning a journey that attempted to heal a wounded heart, soothe a grieving soul, and patch a broken man.

For those not in the know, in addition to being the band’s drummer, Neil has been the predominant lyricist for Rush since he joined the band in 1974. His influence on the band’s music is heard not only in the complex rhythms and ever-shifting time signatures, but in the reflective and obviously literate lyrics.

Peart’s book is littered with verses he wrote for various Rush songs that, more or less, fit that part of the book. I found it interesting, ironic perhaps, that for a man who seems obviously so inexperienced dealing with real human suffering, he sure had written anecdotally about it a lot over the years.

The writing is an unusual mix of straight-ahead storytelling mixed with copies of letters Neil wrote to friends and family along with transcribed excerpts from his personal journal writings. Sometimes, his letters also include journal excerpts.

Neil’s letters went to different acquaintances, some closer to him than others, but most of the letters included in the book are correspondence sent by Neil to his friend, and riding partner, Brutus. Brutus was supposed to join Neil a month or so into the ride but got himself thrown in jail after being caught with a “‘truckful’ of a controlled substance of a leafy green nature.”

While Neil doesn’t come right out and acknowledge it, it does seem that he finds some rehabilitative help in writing… and writing… and writing… to Brutus. He tells Brutus everything he’s doing, seeing, and thinking while he’s on his road trip. Neil does this both to engage his own need for an outlet, but it also seems clear he wants to make things easier for his friend while he’s in jail. I found that endearing and sweet. I’ve never had someone write to me that much, but then, I’ve never been in jail and I don’t think any of my friends write anywhere close to as much as Neil Peart apparently does.

In addition to writing about his feelings as he’s going through the motions of processing his unbearable grief, the highlights and notable sights of the country he’s riding through, the hotels, motels, and lodges he stays at, the food he eats at the various restaurants and other dining facilities along the way, and the relative merits of BMW Motorcycle dealerships and service centers he deals with, Neil also provides a running list of the books and authors he’s reading when he’s not in the saddle.

As a result, I learned a lot about authors such as Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Copote, Jack Kerouac, Cormac McCarthy, Edward Abbey, and Hunter S. Thompson.

I think anybody who has been through any kind of significant suffering can empathize, to some extent, with what Neil describes having gone through in “Ghost Rider.” I also think this book could be useful, therapeutically, for someone who is going through a difficult time dealing with some kind of loss.

I’m not in any way suggesting I “completely understand” how Neil Peart felt when he hopped on his motorcycle, hit the road, and repeatedly said he’d never return to playing the drums because he “wasn’t that guy anymore.” But, I do understand the desire to flee from your “old life,” to run away on some mind-numbing distraction involving simply the road and nature.

I remember when I was young — only 22-years-old — I had been dumped, somewhat abruptly, by a girl that I thought the universe of. I had really thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with her and had grown quite attached to her company. It didn’t help that I still had to see her around the college campus we both attended. I’m sure any of my friends at the time can attest, accompanied by sighs of recollection and plentiful amounts of eye-rolling, how grieved and confused I was; How I always wanted to ask the same questions (usually starting with the word “Why”) over and over; How it didn’t matter what the answers were, they never seemed to bring me any closer to moving on; How I neglected my schoolwork, participated in some self-destructive behavior, and spent quite a bit of time driving around on backroads through various rural and mountain areas listening to loud music.

Neil’s detailed and carefully architected expositions about the landscapes he visits are amazing. The way he describes the deserts of the southwest, complete with flora and wildlife, precipitation cycles, and history makes it nearly effortless to imagine what he was describing. The same thing goes for the forests (and the high, barren areas) of the great north Canadian Yukon areas and Alaska, not to mention the cold, icy, muddy road conditions on the Dempster Highway to the Arctic Circle.

Neil employs the same degree of detail in describing the accommodations he finds at each lodging facility he stops at along the way. The same goes for the nearby restaurants.

In a nutshell, reading “Ghost Rider” kind of made me want to go out and buy a nice, big touring bike and hit the road visiting some of the wonders Neil describes.

The caveat, however, is that along with these picturesque word-paintings luring you to various destinations, Neil also injects the would-be traveler with a diatribe of hateful anti-tourist insults. It’s like he’s saying, “These are some amazing, wonderful places to visit, but all the people visiting them are ugly, fat, and stupid.”

I think some that stems from the down mood he was in at the time.

One place he describes visiting that stood out for me was Telegraph Creek, a small settlement in the forests of the Yukon. Neil’s description really gave me a vivid picture of it in my mind’s eye.

The destination I had in mind was Telegraph Creek, because… well, because I liked the name. I first heard of it in Equinox (“The Magazine of Canadian Discovery,” now defunct, unfortunately) in which the writer had pointed out that map-makers seemed to like Telegraph Creek because it gave them a name to put on an otherwise empty region, where northern British Columbia met the Alaskan Panhandle.

The settlement had flourished briefly twice, first during the Klondike gold rush when it was the head of navigation for steamboats carrying prospectors up the Stikine River. From there, they could travel overland to the Yukon goldfields on what came to be known as “The Bughouse Trail,” its history replete with Jack London-style tales of starvation, scurvy, frostbite, and madness. The town’s second life, and the source of its name, came from an American scheme to run a telegraph cable overland through Alaska, under the Bering Strait, and across Russia to connect with Europe, but shortly after the surveying was completed, the project was rendered pointless by the laying of the transatlantic cable. Telegraph Creek once again lapsed into a virtual ghost town, and the only present-day visitors seemed to be attracted by boat, raft, and kayaking expeditions on the Stikine River. Or by the name.

Another siren-call for me was the romantic lure of an isolated, storied destination which lay “at the end of the road.” Telegraph Creek was a dot on the map at the end of a long unpaved road, far from anywhere, the kind of place Brutus and I used to dream about exploding (in fact, it was Brutus, in a recent telephone conversation, who had urged me go there). The guidebooks disagreed on whether I would have to navigate 74 miles or 74 kilometers of that road, but they agreed that it was “rough” and “often treacherous.” In fact it turned out to be 112 kilometers (near enough 74 miles) of dirt and gravel winding through deep forest and steep switchbacks up and down the walls of “The Grand Canyon of the Stikine.” In some places, the sheer cliffs of eroded, multi-layered rock did resemble a modest version of that famed stretch of the Colorado River, and sometime the road was a mere ledge perched on those vertical walls, dropping off into a frightening abyss.

My journal described it as a “scary, scary road,” and I was fairly rattled when I pulled up in front of the Stikine Riverson café, general store, lodge, and boat-tour headquarters. All this was housed in one large white frame building facing the swift-moving river, and I learned later that it had been the original Hudson Bay Company trading post, situated just downriver, and had been moved piece by piece to Telegraph Creek. A few other abandoned-looking houses and a small church clustered on the river bank, but only the Riverson showed any signs of life.

The guidebooks said that a few rooms were available there, but if they happened to be filled it would be a long way back to any other lodgings. The cold, gloomy weather made the idea of camping uninviting, but once again I was glad to be carrying my little tent and sleeping bag, especially when the owner told me he was closing up for the weekend and taking the staff upriver in his tour boat to celebrate the end of their season. Then, after a moment’s thought, he said that I was welcome to rent one of the rooms and stay there on my own. That was thoughtful, hospitable, and trusting of him, and I only asked what I might do for food. He told me there was a kitchen upstairs where I could prepare my own meals, so I bought a few provisions in the general store in the back of the building, including some fresh salmon from the river, and carried my bags to a small bedroom upstairs.

I watched through the café window as the owner and his three employees loaded their camping gear into the motor boat and my only regret was missing the opportunity for a tour of the river myself. I stood on the riverbank and watched the boat speed away upriver against the strong current, and felt a little excited, and a little fearful.

…

I slept soundly with my window open to the cool, fresh air and the murmuring of the river, and took a walk before breakfast on another chilly, overcast morning. Past ruined cabins and abandoned, moss-covered cars and pickups from the 1950s, a narrow path led up a high lava-rock cliff above a steep scree to an old graveyard overlooking the town. As I walked among the stones reading the inscriptions, the bare facts of names and dates had a whole new resonance for me, for I felt them as part of a story like mine, a story of love and loss. I thought about “Honey Joe,” who had died at the age of 105 and was buried beside “Mrs. Joe,” who he had outlived by about 40 years. Then there were all the babies, children, teenagers, and young men and women, and I found myself weeping for all the lost ones, theirs and mine. Ghost town indeed.

After I started reading “Ghost Rider,” I told a friend that I had picked up the book. He said he remembered hearing or reading a little about it and that it struck him as being quite vain or that other reviews had painted Neil as being vain.

I don’t think he’s vain, I think he’s just… odd. Neil Peart is better-read and better-schooled than probably 99% of people in the civilized world. He’s likely afflicted with Aspergers Syndrome because it’s clear he has serious social phobias and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. In his writing, he tends to be blunt, even if his prose is beautiful and intricate. He doesn’t stop until he’s faithfully described what he’s thinking, what he’s seen or what he’s experienced. I can see how some people would find his writing style as vain, but I don’t, really.

One personal observation I made to myself as I read this book was that Neil would have probably dealt much better with his tragic circumstances if he had not depleted himself of religion. Several times in the book he describes himself as a rational-scientific-skeptic. It made me think of a common religious perspective that an atheist is not someone who believes in nothing, but rather someone who can be persuaded to believe anything. There was a moment in the book where Neil takes a chance on a fortune teller who uses Tarot cards or similar to tell Neil exactly what’s going in his life, leaving him stunned. It’s no surprise that Neil has acquired a deck of the cards for himself before long.

But, yeah, it’s sad to read Neil’s constant bellyaching about how confused he is and how unfair his life has been to him and his family. Several times during the book I reflected on how fortunate I felt I was to have a belief system that give me a structure to sustain me if I were to go through such trying times.

Another surprising observation I had as I read the book was just how much of a liberal environmentalist Neil is. For someone who dedicated a record to Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” I guess I just thought he’d still have more of an Objectivist outlook toward nature, capitalism, and industry. I guess any of that he once had has been stolen away by his success and now he’s, for a lack of a better description, a snobby left-winger who thinks we need to save the planet from ourselves.

Overall, I liked the book. I have some degree of interest in reading another Neil Peart book, but now I have so many other books on my reading lists thanks to what Neal said in this one.

Politics Fozzolog: The oil "spill"

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 22:03:57 +0000

I recently read Obama’s Oil Spill To-Do List by Heritage Foundation Director of Strategic Communication, Rory Cooper and found it to be a sensible task list that identifies and enumerates things I think most on the right side of the political spectrum wish the administration were doing to address the oil “spill” in the Gulf Of Mexico.

The very first item mentioned in this list is to “waive the Jones Act,” which, as Cooper explains, “requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried in U.S.-flagged ships, constructed in the United States, owned by U.S. citizens, and crewed by U.S. citizens.”

This law obviously restricts what ocean-bound vessels can be used in the cleanup efforts. But, the restriction can be lifted, as it was by DHS secretary Chertoff during the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. Doing so would allow a much greater diversity of equipment to be used in the cleanup effort.

In recent news, BP and the U.S. Coast Guard are apparently testing a giant Taiwanese oil skimmer. I assume using this ship, owned by a Taiwanese shipping company, will require a Jones Act waiver or exclusion. If that’s the case and they get the legal right to use this skimmer, that’s good news for everyone.

A lot of the talk about the Gulf oil “spill” has been about enormous amounts of money. It is apparently going to cost a lot of money to clean up the oil out of the water. It will apparently cost various Gulf Coast industries (fishing, tourism, etc.) lots of money in lost business. It will apparently cost the oil industry a ridiculous amount of money if the administration gets their way with these ridiculous moratoriums.

One area which I wonder if the money might be spent in vain is the cleanup efforts. I’ve read many sources that indicate that oil in water is pretty well handled by nature. We can maybe add a little fertilizer to speed up the growth of natural bacteria that break down the oil particles, but other than that, nature handles it.

The outlook becomes more muddied — no pun intended — when oil reaches land. Nature will take care of it, but it will take longer… years longer. So, it’s shocking to learn that the administration is seemingly blocking many attempts to do sand-berm dredging along the coast that would catch oil before it reaches coastal beaches and wetlands.

Finally, I completely agree with Cooper that the administration should stop using the oil “spill” as a wedge or lever issue to promote climate change (i.e. “Cap and Trade”) legislation.

General Fozzolog: Book Review: "The Overton Window" by Glenn Beck

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 03:47:58 +0000

If you know me, you know I’m a pretty big fan of Glenn Beck. I’ve been listening to his radio show for about five years now and have followed his forays into television, live stage performances, and books. It may be no surprise, then, that I liked “The Overton Window,” Glenn’s latest book, a fiction thriller.

Now that I’ve said that, let me qualify it.

“The Overton Window” is a simple story, really. It has its plots and twists like a good thriller should, but its overall story arc is pretty straightforward. The protagonist is an unlikely good-guy, just an average Joe named Noah Gardner. He’s a young, single public relations guy at a big firm in New York City.

The bad guy? Barack Obama.

I’m kidding, but that answer is not that far from the truth. The antagonists in this story is a group of rich, powerful socialists, one of which happens to be Noah’s father. Having declared the old ways of the constitution and freedom-loving America to be a failed experiment, they’re ready to transform the country into what it should be: controlled by a knows-better big-government.

Noah meets Molly Ross, a smart, beautiful seemingly easy-going girl who is has an odd quirk: she’s heavily involved in a movement to get America back to its founding roots.

Intent on getting to know Molly better, Noah attends a meeting at a club in New York, his first Tea Party as it were. While the speakers tell story after story about how the government and those in power are intent on destroying the Constitution and eliminating people’s individual liberties, Noah’s cycnicism and realism boils over. When he utters something loud enough for those around him to overhear, he is asked to explain himself with a microphone so that everyone can hear.

“The United States was built to run on individual freedom, that’s true, but because you’ve let these control freaks have their way with it for about a hundred years, your country now runs on debt. Today Goldman Sachs is the engine, and in case you haven’t realized it yet, the American people are nothing but the fuel.”

Noah goes on to explain all the conspiracy theories bantied about like the Bildeberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, etc. are all true and they’re wealthy beyond believe and they’re globalists.

Noah knows all this because these powerful organizations have long been using PR firms like his father’s to push their transformative ideas on the people of the world.

“There’s no respect for you in Washington. They laugh at you. You say you want a revolution? That Constitution the lady was holding up a while ago? It gives you the power to revolt at every single election. Do you realize in a couple of weeks every last seat in the U.S. House of Representatives will be up for grabs? And the presidency? And one-third of the Senate seats?

“The approval rating for Congress is somewhere around fifteen percent. You could turn the tables and put them all out of a job on that one day. But do you know what’s going to happen instead? I do. The presidency is going to change hands, but the corruption will accelerate. Over ninety percent of those people in Congress— people who are deeper into the pockets of the lobbyists every day they spend in Washington— over ninety percent of them are going to get reelected.”

The story puts Noah on a collision course with destiny. What he learns both from his new friends in the freedom movement and via his ties to the powerful forces through the PR business helps him shed his cynicism and start to believe in the cause.

Now, this book is a very easy read. It’s 321 pages but it goes by fast. My only real complaint about the writing is that much of dialogue between characters doesn’t read like believable dialogue. It reads like it’s written, not spoken. You could easily say the same thing about any fiction written by Ayn Rand, but Beck’s dialogue is a lot easier to comprehend.

The Afterword, the last chapter in the book, contains a surprising amount of information about items in the story that are actually based in truth.

Tech Fozzolog: Online porn: Will .xxx make a difference?

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:26:41 +0000

Pornographic website owners will soon have a new top-level domain (TLD) to populate, .xxx, but the TLD comes with a boatload of controversy.

Back in the Iodynamics daze, we wrote about this in one of our quarterly newsletters that was distributed to our clients and posted on our website. In the article, Is .xxx good for the Internet?, we explained that neither a majority of online pornography peddlers or anti-pornography factions were at the root of the push for a separate sexually-oriented TLD. Who was it? “A British Internet domain registry based in Florida.”

ICM is the domain name registrar that will have exclusive management rights of the new .xxx TLD. According to one report, ICM is looking at making $30 million per year on this business.

Why are pornography peddlers against a differentiation for their sites from normal “dot-com” sites? They feel this differentiation will lead immediately to discrimination- making it easier for implementation of blanket blocks on all porn sites. Essentially, they want to maintain the status quo that currently allows them to collect visits from people going to porn sites by accident. This is a lame excuse, in my opinion.

Anti-pornography activism groups are against the new TLD because they feel it will legitimize online pornography. This is a lame argument as well as online pornography has already reached a well-established legitimacy.

The creation of the new TLD won’t force current pornographic website operators to migrate to new .xxx domain names and abandon their current domain names. As a result, most operators will probably operate their sites with domain names under the new TLD… and with any other TLD they can get their hands on.

Many concerned may feel this is justification to get the government more involved in regulating the Internet. After all, government regulations make it impossible or very difficult for minors to purchase pornographic magazines or pornographic movies.

The most obvious obstacle to this approach is that the Internet still consists of vague jurisdiction issues. If a pornographic website is hosted on servers located in the Bahamas or in Asia, could the US government have any say in who can view the content on that website?

In my opinion, pushing for more government control over what people can and can’t view on the Internet is asking for China-esque national firewalls and that would threaten to limit free speech in the United States.

As much as I don’t want my children to view pornographic or indecent material while using a computer connected to the Internet, I recognize that it’s my responsibility as a parent, not the government’s, to determine what material is appropriate and inappropriate.

In our house, we have a content-filtering proxy powered by open source software called Dan’s Guardian. This, in combination with a good network firewall, functions well for us.

My conclusion on .xxx: It’s not going to change much of anything, except make the registrar TCM rich.

General Fozzolog: Pittsburgh, Day Five

Fri, 14 May 2010 20:58:18 +0000

Day Five was a short day because I had to leave to catch my flight back home around 3 in the afternoon.

Last night, I watched a couple more training videos in my hotel room. This morning, I watched one more and was all caught up on what I was supposed to watch this week. I talked to one of the business ananlysts with some questions I had come up with from watching the videos. I got all my questions answered.

I spent some time with my team leader going over some more development practices. I’m glad he’s patient with me. :)

Last night, I looked up a few coworkers on Facebook and added them as friends. One of them, a functional architect, accepted my friend invite almost immediately. She admitted to me today that she looks up every new hire on Facebook. It was a little shocking to discover I had been “stalked” before I had “stalked.”

Today, I went to lunch with two of the functional architects, one being my new Facebook friend, to a little “hole in the wall Indian place.” The food was super-tasty.

Now I’m on my way home. It’s been a great week.

Now, our development manager talked to me about my blog posts. He’d heard from the functional architect I went to lunch today that I had written about my previous lunches on my blog and that gave her a good idea of where we were going to go to lunch today.

He expressed concern that I had information about the company in my posts. He acknowledged that I hadn’t published any secrets but that I had discussed names and what could be construed as business practices.

I was devastated. For all my efforts to be a good new employee, I had “caused concern” with what I was doing outside of business hours. My lack, perhaps, of tact, respect for the company, consideration of possible consequences of revealing what I did reveal, was causing friction with at least one person of decision-making capital at the company.

Crap!

I went back and edited each of my blog posts for the week, removing any names, any names of any software, hardware, or services that I may have mentioned by name. The only thing I thing I left was my Apple MacBook Pro. I hope that’s not a problem.

In retrospect, I made a serious miscalculation, which isn’t surprising considering I seem to have a history of miscalculating things of a social nature. Chalk it up, maybe, to my maybe being afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Now that I’ve thought about it, I can see that if I had been an employee with the company for some time, to the point everyone, especially those in decision-making positions, knew who I was, what kind of person I was… Basically, if they knew me well enough to trust me, it probably wouldn’t have been a problem, or as much of a problem. But with me being the new kid on the block, coming in and blogging names and crap, even if I was being careful not to divulge anything that might be a company secret, I understand now why they’d be nervous.

These corporate social dynamics are a real challenge for me. It’s almost like I never know when I’m being appropriate and when I’m not. I guess I should be more careful and just ask more questions about everything.

General Fozzolog: Pittsburgh, Day One

Fri, 14 May 2010 20:30:02 +0000

My first day at Grant Street Group was a nice mix of gentle easing me into the water and tossing me into the deep end.

I got the expected set of papers to fill out as a new contractor and a guided tour around the office to be introduced to everyone who works there (the ratio of onsite to remote employees is swinging, but there are still a majority of onsite workers.)

I also got my new MacBook Pro and had some time to play with it, learn some ropes.

I watched most of a training video (had trouble playing it on my Mac because it was in some obscure WMV format, but finally got it to play in my Windows XP VMWare guest), got a username and password set up on most all of the systems I’ll be working with, and met (virtually) with my team leader on working with the codebase.

Before day one was over, I had a handful of issues assigned to me to address.

At lunchtime the manager over all development and another telecommuter that was in town took me to Mexico City for dinner. I was excited to have some mexican food as it is one of my favorite food genres. I was a little unsure of what to expect because my experience eating mexican in New York City a few years ago was so bad (“I ordered an enchilada.” “That is your enchilada right there.” “No, this is a quesadilla!”)

Mexico City wasn’t bad, but it definitely represents a far-from-the-border interpretation.

After work, I grabbed some dinner at Subway and took a cab to Millvale, a few miles outside of downtown Pittsburgh for the Porcupine Tree concert I had a ticket to. More on that in another posting.

General Fozzolog: Pittsburgh, Day Two

Fri, 14 May 2010 20:26:32 +0000

I was tired on Day Two because I only got about six hours of sleep between getting home from the Porcupine Tree show and getting up for work. It rained most of the day in Pittsburgh. I didn’t have an umbrella, so I wore my new Porcupine Tree hoodie as I walked to the office. It worked nicely.

At the office, I finished watching a training video I started watching the day before. I also met with another telecommuter via an online screen sharing solution and a phone call to get some training on the internal issue tracking system.

I set up MacFUSE and sshfs on my Mac laptop so that I could remotely access, via SSH, files from the main development server from my laptop. This way, I could use a graphical text editor like MacVim (gvim for OS X) to do my code edits. My officemate — the manager of all software development — suggested I blog about it on the internal developer blog. I did and that stirred up some conversation in the developer chat room.

I went to lunch with one of my co-developers and a business analyst today at a place called Storms. It was alright. The developer asked me what life was like in “semi-rural Utah,” using the words I had included in my introduction e-mail message sent to everyone yesterday. I told him about Herriman- how the population has just exploded over the last decade or so, and how there’s very little sales tax revenue because it’s mostly homes, but that’s changing, and how there are still a few farms and planted fields.

This afternoon, I attended a training meeting with several others and found it to be very educational. Also this afternoon, I committed my first changeset and submitted it to my team leader for code review.

General Fozzolog: Pittsburgh, Day Three

Fri, 14 May 2010 20:21:49 +0000

Day Three was more of the same. More hacking on fairly simple and straightforward problems. More watching training videos. More training on coding practices and standards. More training on time tracking. Another lunch with a couple other people — a business analyst and one of the developers who I interviewed with a couple weeks ago. They took me to Euro Cafe which was decent food and the dining room was refreshingly quiet compared to most places during the lunch hour.

Tomorrow morning, I’m providing a urine specimen to fulfill the mandatory drug test requirement. They were going to work with the drug testing offices in Utah to get this done before I came out, but the offices in Utah apparently don’t use any of the barcodes or identification numbers that the offices in Pennsylvania do.

I’ve been warned that the drug testing facility is very strict and, to prevent fraud, they have removed sinks from the rooms and a nurse must be present while you… provide you specimen. That has a lot of potential to be embarrassing, don’t you think? Perhaps I’ll ask the nurse if he or she would mind if I took a picture of them while I was providing my specimen? Hah hah.

Google Maps told me there was a Barnes and Noble near my hotel, so I walked to the address given and found no bookstore. Stupid Google Maps.

Lots of stuff downtown closes in the late afternoon. It’s odd, but I guess the bulk of their business is the white-collar crowd that evacuate the city at 5pm.

General Fozzolog: Pittsburgh, Day Four

Fri, 14 May 2010 20:19:01 +0000

Day Four. I will be going home tomorrow and will be home for approximately 28-30 hours before hopping on a plane again and heading back to Pittsburgh for the second week of training.

Today was my first development team meeting. As many of our developers work remotely, the meeting was held via a conference call and an online screen-sharing solution . I liked that it was short (about an hour) and to the point.

I closed three issues today. Now, I wouldn’t be so proud of that except that these were all supposed to be very simple issues, like “change the spelling” types of issues. One of them, however, ended up being more complex than anyone thought. I found the problem extended into the database schema data. As a result, what my team leader thought was going to involve minor editing of one, two, maybe a handful of files, ended up being something like 14 files and a new schema change. To fix this issue, I had to go through the process of testing schema changes and writing detailed instructions for testing.

It felt good to get that one done.

The other two were pretty simple. One was just changing the text of a link inside the application. The other was formatting a date from a string that looked like this “YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS” into this “MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS”. Pretty simple stuff, but it still gives me good experience working with the source code management tools, issue management system, and the applications themselves.

Because of all the actual work I’ve been doing, I’m behind a day or so on watching training videos. I’m going to try to catch up on those tonight.

I went out looking for a bookstore last night. Google Maps erroneously told me there was a Barnes and Noble near 6th Street and Wood Avenue. Of course, I didn’t figure that out until I walked over there. A security guard in the building at the address just laughed at me and told me the nearest one was clear out of town.

Bummer.

I went to lunch with two of the system administrators for the company. We had a lot to talk about because of my background doing systems administration.

General Fozzolog: Porcupine Tree @ Mr. Smalls Theater

Wed, 12 May 2010 01:48:15 +0000

It’s been three and a half years since I was privileged to see Porcupine Tree play at The Fillmore in San Francisco (See my blog post about it. They’ve never played anywhere in Utah and may never play anywhere in Utah, so my only option is to travel to see them. I was very lucky to be in Pittsburgh on business at the same time PT was playing a show!

First, the venue. Mr. Smalls Theater is much smaller than the Fillmore, and quite a different place. The building itself is a renovated 18th century catholic church. The inside has a cathedral-like shape with a tall, 40-foot arched ceiling. A small stage elevated three feet off the rest of the floor is at one end. A couple bars for food and drink line the exterior walls in the rear of the room. The stated capacity of the room is 650 people and I’m pretty sure it was close to full. Standing room only.

Porcupine Tree was preceded by Bigelf, a band I’d never heard of. I was impressed with lead-man Damon Fox’s showmanship and his ability to multitask between four or five ancient keyboarding instruments and singing, but I didn’t find the music itself very interesting.

Bigelf looked like they either walked in through a time portal from a midwest heavy metal show circa 1971 or from the set of a Geico “caveman” TV commercial. The long, unkempt hair and the beards were… too much.

The music itself was not terribly complex. It was, if nothing else and especially compared to Porcupine Tree, analog. That’s one word that can, in my opinion, summarize Bigelf. The guitarist and the bassist both played through a tube stack. According to the Bigelf website, Fox’s rig consists of some of the following: Hammond C3 & Leslie 122, Mellotron MKII & M400, EMS Synthi AKS, Chamberlin M-1D, Moog 3C & 2P Modulars, Minimoog, Memorymoog, Korg MS-20 & MS-50, Arp 2600, Freeman String Machine, Baldwin Electric Harpsichord, and Hohner Pianet. Basically, old, analog stuff… amplified and sometimes distorted.

It was so loud that many in the audience were plugging their ears when Bigelf started playing. Fox said, “Oh, is it too loud? (Expletive) you! It’s a rock show!” and started another song.

The following photo, not from this show, is a good representation of what Fox was doing for most of their performance (and is a good look at his rig.)

And then, Porcupine Tree. They started the show by playing the entire album The Incident, taking a 10 minute break, and then coming back to play older pieces.

I’ve listened to The Incident a lot, but I still enjoy just about every album before it more. After this concert, however, I have a lot more appreciation for The Incident. One thing that won me over was the harmonies sung by John Wesley and Steven Wilson. They were perfect and beautiful.

I just ran a half-marathon a couple of weeks ago and I listened to songs by Porcupine Tree the whole 13.1 miles. I wondered how many of those songs I would hear live. They played “The Sound Of Muzak,” “Blackest Eyes,” and “Trains” in the second set, all of which I had in my running playlist. Unfortunately, they didn’t play anything from the Deadwing album. That was a bit of a dissapointment to me.

The second set went like this:

Hatesong
Russia On Ice - Anesthetize
Stars Die
Way Out Of Here
Blackest Eyes

Then, the encore:

The Sound of Muzak
Trains

The band started playing Hatesong without John Wesley on stage. He walked out in the middle to sing harmonies with Steven and then walked offstage again. When a part for a second guitar was needed, a pre-recorded track was used.

I was a little bummed that they didn’t finish playing Russia On Ice. Instead, after the second chorus, they went into Anesthetize after the guitar solo performed on the album by Alex Lifeson. Steven Wilson noodled on the keyboard at the front of the stage for a bit before going back to playing guitar and then singing “The dust in my soul…”

Stars Die was an interesting move. There were definitely some hardcore fans there as they erupted with cheers as soon as John Wesley played the opening bit for it.

When the video for Way Out Of Here started, I became very emotional, probably because I’ve been repeatedly watching the video on YouTube of the song that’s appearing on the Anesthetize DVD coming out in the next month and because I learned of the band dedicating the song to Arielle Daniel, a young fan who was killed by a train in 2005 (read about it here). It was an awesome performance of an awesome song. John Wesley and Gavin Harrison (drums) are simply fantastic during the song.

At one point during the show, Steven Wilson surprisingly remarked that he could see lots of “chicks” in the audience. It’s true, there were a lot more women in the audience than you’d expect at a Porcupine Tree show. That being said, the audience was 90% guys in their 20s to 50s. A lot of us seemed out of the mainstream, socially, which also wasn’t surprising.

All in all, great show, as always. I picked up almost $100 in merchandise while I was there too.

General Fozzolog: From Pittsburgh, day zero

Sun, 09 May 2010 19:52:09 +0000

I have arrived in Pittsburgh for my first of two weeks of training for my new job at Grant Street Group.

When I flew out here a couple of weeks ago for my interviews with the company, I flew on US Airways on a connecting flight through Phoenix. What was nice about that was that I got to lunch with my good friend Dave during my two-hour layover. What was not nice about that was that it was US Airways. The onboard service was just lacking all around.

I asked if I could fly on a direct flight or a different airline for this trip. Grant Street was very accomodating. In the end, I gave them the flight numbers of the Delta Airlines flights I wanted to take (I researched and found inexpensive flights that resulted in a minimum amount of travel time).

There were no direct flights available, that I could find, but one of the shorter flights went through Detroit. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about laying over in Detroit, but now that I’ve been there, I must say the Detroit Metro Airport is actually pretty nice. I expected portions of the airport to be on fire and people gathered for warmth around 55-gallon drums with burning debris in them, but it wasn’t like that at all.

I didn’t leave the airport, so I have no idea how the environment outside the airport is, but the environment inside the airport was pretty nice.

I grabbed some lunch at one of the restaurants in the airport and was a little taken back by how ambivalent and disinterested the young lady was that took my order. I mean, I’m used to that to an extent from service people at airports, but this ambivalence was cranked up (or down, as the case may be) a couple notches.

A short flight (35 minutes) from Detroit and I’m in Pittsburgh. It’s a little windy, but there’s a baseball game going on across the river from my hotel.

More to come as my stay here unfolds.

General Fozzolog: Running the Thanksgiving Point half-marathon

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 01:58:37 +0000

Thanksgiving Point in Lehi held their first annual Thanksgiving Point Half Marathon today and I participated as a runner. This was my first long-distance race ever and I’m pleased to say that I finished and not only did I finish, I ran pretty much the entire course. I crossed the finish line at 2:27:40. Not bad for a first half-marathon!

Thanksgiving Point is using the marathon to raise money for a new children’s museum: The Museum Of Natural Curiousity. They plan to raise $500,000 over the next five years and started by raising over $30,000 with this first marathon.

I have very little knowledge of running dos and don’ts, but I tried to incorporate what I’ve picked up into my preparation for this race. I dialed down my training regimen over the last week, only running twice and for much shorter durations. I ate well the day before the race and had a bowl of cold cereal before heading to the race this morning.

About twenty minutes before the race started, I walked around for about five minutes to warm up my legs. Then I went inside, found a place to sit down, and tightened and stretched my shins so that I wouldn’t get shin splints during the first part of my run. Then I did some wall push-ups to make sure the backs of my calves were loosened up.

It was about 35 degrees (Fahrenheit) when the race started at 7 a.m. I had a long-sleeved shirt on under my technical race shirt. I pulled the sleeves down over my hands during the first part of the race because my hands were cold, but it wasn’t long before the sun was out and my hands weren’t cold anymore.

The course for the race started at the Thanksgiving Point water tower and followed trails around the Thanksgiving Point golf course, their tulip gardens, and then along a trail next to the Jordan River up to a park called Willow Park in Lehi. Then the race followed some surface roads back to Thanksgiving Point’s “Electric Park” where the finish line was.

The organizers had a nice number of volunteers along the course route to provide drinks, other aid, and direct traffic. There were 7 aid stations which featured water and sports drinks. Some also featured energy gels, energy bars, and fruit.

I spent Thursday and Friday flying to and from Pittsburgh, PA for a job interview. On Friday, I walked about 20 minutes in downtown Pitttsburgh in my dress shoes, and then in the Pittsburgh, Phoenix, and Salt Lake airports on my way home. When I got home Friday night, I had a nice blister on the ball of my left foot. I was worried about how that was going to affect my race. I didn’t know if I should “pop” it or what. I soaked it in some warm water before I went to bed and it felt a little better in the morning, but it was still there. I ran the race on it and while it was a little uncomfortable, it didn’t cause any serious problems. I had some aching in my left knee and groin muscles, maybe because I was favoring the foot that didn’t have a blister.

At the finish line, there was plenty more food to eat and even some massage therapists available for post-race massages.

After the race, awards were given out (I didn’t get one) and then they had some raffle prizes which included running socks, energy bars, Timex Ironman running watches, and two Garmin 405 GPS training watches. The Garmins were the last items to be given out and the last number they read off was mine!

So, it was an awesome experience. I got to say I completed my first half-marathon and got a Garmin 405 as well.

I don’t know when I’ll be doing another one of these races. Right now I’m just happy it’s done, but maybe in a couple weeks I’ll start thinking about doing it again.

Thanks to my family (including my parents and in-laws) that came out to support me as I crossed the finish line. I’ll have to get some pictures posted as well.

Politics Fozzolog: The deal with Net Neutrality

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 06:56:01 +0000

A whole lot of talk has taken place recently about Net Neutrality. The histrionics and grandiose claims on both sides of the issue are quite disappointing. And that seems to be biggest problem.

In his recent FOX News program, Glenn Beck highlighted the group Free Press and their support of Net Neutrality legislation and regulation. Beck makes some points and observations about the leftist agenda of Free Press and its co-founder founder, Robert W. McChesney. There’s no doubt that McChesney is out of step with mainstream America with regard to his views on media, government control, etc. His comments do seem like those of a socialist or, dare I say, a Marxist.

But, stop! Net Neutrality wasn’t created by Marxists! No, it’s just being co-opted by them… and probably lots of other groups that see government control over Internet service providers as a means to an end for them.

The problem with Net Neutrality right now is that many groups are trying to claim it as their poster-child issue. Libertarian conservatives are saying Net Neutrality is an example of government overbearance or even tears at the fabric of the Constitution.

On the flip-side, we have leftists who apparently have incredible amounts of disdain, distrust, and suspicion toward corporations who might alter, affect, control, or in any way or form touch content from the Internet as it’s being delivered to their computers.

I’m opposed to Net Neutrality. Not because it’s a conspiracy to usher in totalitarian government control over the Internet and not because I don’t care about freedom of speech or freedom of the press.

Let’s look at some history.

In 2007, some customers of Comcast’s Internet service complained they were having problems downloading files using the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol. BitTorrent is a common method for sharing and distributing large files such as Linux distribution installation images that can grow to several gigabytes in size. To be frank, however, most BitTorrent traffic is largely downloads of music, movies, and TV show content. I think it’s fair to say most of this data is for entertainment purposes.

Apparently, Comcast was experiencing some problems with BitTorrent users creating congestion on their networks. Comcast chose a highly unorthodox means of dealing with the congestion and basically tricked the users’ BitTorrent clients into thinking their connections had been closed, thereby killing the BitTorrent downloads.

As word got out about the experiences of the Comcast users who had been affected by Comcast’s tactics, Comcast denied doing anything. When users showed proof of what was going on, Comcast confessed. Eventually, Comcast said they would adopt a “protocol-neutral stance” on managing traffic on their networks.

I think Comcast was out of line doing what they did. I think someone should have been fired, if they weren’t, for doing what they did. I’m surprised, really, that Comcast didn’t have more integral methods for dealing with “bandwidth hogs.”

Internet protocol networking has long supported the notion of Quality of Service (QoS) measures of traffic control for prioritizing certain kinds of traffic over others. For example, voice-over-IP (VOIP) traffic might be deemed high-priority because it’s a service people depend on and can’t tolerate congestion affecting the service.

I’m surprised, to say the least, that Comcast didn’t have priority-based queuing in place for their networks.

But some free-speech advocates are crying foul saying any attempt to regulate the flow of data by an Internet service provider essentially equates to censorship or stifling speech. Bull crap!

That’s almost like crying censorship because a newspaper didn’t quote everything you said, verbatim, at that pro-spotted owl rally. No, they had limited space and had to prioritize.

Now, I’m not a fan of Comcast… or Qwest (both are the major providers of broadband Internet service in my area), but I do believe they should not be regulated, controlled, or otherwise overseen by the federal government in how they carry Internet traffic.

Any Internet service provider’s business model is built around giving its customers the best Internet experience possible. I firmly believe that, within reason, any ISP is going to do as much as they can do accomplish that goal. However, if certain users abuse the freedom they’ve been given by the provider and that threatens to affect the experience of other users, the provider has every right to do something to protect the overall network performance. I contend that the business objective of Internet service providers already promotes the best service possible for the bulk of customers.

Net Neutrality, on the other hand, could force less-than-ideal performance on everyone in the name of equality. It could force providers into charging tiered rates like Time Warner explored doing in 2008, much to the disapproval of their customer base.

The federal government was responsible for creating the Internet through Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) projects in the 1960s that created the ARPANet, the great-granddaddy of the Internet. In 1998, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released its last talons from the backbones of the Internet and allowed complete privatization of the burgeoning network. It’s arguable, based on what happened from 1998 until today, that allowing the Internet to thrive completely out of the government’s control was the best thing that could have happened. I don’t see any benefit of returning any aspect of the Internet back into the government’s hands.

Politics Fozzolog: Glenn Beck: The ever-widening gap

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 05:06:25 +0000

I caught the tail-end of Glenn Beck’s radio program today and was impressed to write about it. Here is my transcript:

May I read this to you?

“What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap… between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with… And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to have a civilian defense force, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with [a leader], their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.”

That is from a chapter “Then It Was Too Late” from the book “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45” ( See here ).

That could have been written today!

That doesn’t mean we are headed for that… Let me rephrase that. Let me be more clear.

It doesn’t mean that this president or this congress will take us there, but it does mean that the more power we give this government, the more we allow them to become more and more remote to us, indifferent to us; The more power we give them to decide our fate and decide who should be listened to and who shouldn’t be, who should live and who should die, who is politically correct and who is not, who should succeed and who should fail; The more we let them decide those things… It may not be this president. It may not be this congress. But will be in our future because all we have to do is elect the wrong person… once… and they have all the structure they need. Let’s not finish the job Germany started in 1898.

We’re headed down the same pathways and both parties have been involved.

I’ve had a few conversations recently with people who think Glenn is a “nutjob,” a “kook,” and a “loon.” Or… perhaps the most amusing characterization is that he’s a shill for the Republican party and an apologist for George W. Bush.

It’s obvious to me that these people have never really listened to the man.

General Fozzolog: Playing tricks in the past

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 08:58:07 +0000

I told this story in the network security class I’ve been teaching this semester. They enjoyed it and figured I might as well type it up for the blog… you know, so everyone else can consume, ingest, etc. the story.

It was in 1994, about sixteen years ago, my wife and I started dating. We had met online, long before eharmony.com or other online dating services appeared on the Internet. It wasn’t via an online dating service, we had both been invited into a kind of virtual party line application on the VMS computer system at Utah State University. A program called PHONE separated the screen into regions, one for each person on the “call.” Each participating user could see what they and everyone else was typing in real time. What happened with Christine and I was that we were both involved in a call with about six people or so and then everyone left except us. The rest is, as they say, history.

But that’s not what this story is about.

Anyway, as Christine and I started hanging out, she explained that one of her best friends had accepted a scholarship to study math at a small private college in the northwest. This school had a student body of around 2,000 students. Where USU had a cluster of DEC Alpha systems running OpenVMS to serve as a central computing system for around 20,000 students, faculty, and staff, this small college had a Sun Solaris Unix system that students logged into to send and receive e-mail and perform other central computing tasks.

At the time, my future wife and her friend had figured out a way to communicate electronically with each other in a manner more interactive than electronic mail. Christine knew her friend’s password on the Solaris system. Christine would telnet into her friend’s account at a prescribed time and they would chat using a program called ‘talk,’ similar to PHONE on the VMS system.

I knew Unix pretty well then. I taught Unix system administration courses for a private training company in Salt Lake City in 1992, had worked as a systems administrator for a couple of companies, and spent a lot of time working in Unix labs on campus. When I found out Christine knew her friend’s password and had gotten to know her friend a little bit, I started forming an idea for an incredibly funny, albeit cruel, geeky prank to pull.

To understand the impact of this practical joke, you have to understand how these computer systems were used back then. The World Wide Web was only barely in use then. The venerable Netscape Navigator Web browser wasn’t to be released for several months. E-mail users at USU and at Christine’s friend’s school used text-based e-mail applications. To access and run these applications, users would use a telnet application to connect to the system and then type in the name of the e-mail application (pine, elm, VMS Mail, etc. Even Mutt — now a favorite among text-based mail applications — wouldn’t be released until the next year.

Christine’s friend, like many at Utah State as well, would go into an on-campus computer lab, boot up a computer, probably running Microsoft Windows 3.1 or Mac OS, and then run a telnet client (most at USU used MS-DOS Kermit because its principal author worked as a professor at USU) to connect to the system where the e-mail application ran.

Telnet has long since been replaced with SSH as the preferred way to log into a remote computer system. Telnet sends all data over the network unencrypted including all login credentials like username and password. Anyone who could intercept (or listen to) traffic between one computer and another could get everything, usernames, passwords, entire e-mail messages, conversations, you name it.

When you telnetted to a remote system, you would generally be prompted for your username and then your password. If you entered the right information, you’d usually then see a command prompt. That’s where you’d type in ‘pine’ or whatever program you wanted to run.

Sometimes, there would be system scripts that ran before you saw the command prompt. The most common would be one that required you to change your password at certain intervals.

Now, back to the joke. I worked for a couple of hours on a shell script that we could upload to Christine’s friend’s account that would get run automatically the next time she logged in. The script would display something like this:

Your password has expired. Please choose a new one.
New Password:

Now, this is where things started to get a little tricky. A real password changing application would not echo the characters typed back when the user typed in a password. My script had to turn off the behavior that normally echoed characters back. This wasn’t that hard. I just had to use the ‘stty’ command in the script to turn the echo mode on and off.

The script notified Christine’s friend that her password had expired and asked that she choose a new one. If I wanted to be really, really evil, I could have captured her password as she typed it and filed it away somewhere, but this was just about fun. After she typed in the password, like any good password changing program, the script asked her to type the password again.

Then, the script said her password wasn’t long enough and prompted her to enter a longer password.

Then, it said her password didn’t contain the necessary assortment of characters, numbers, and special characters.

Then, it called Christine’s friend by name and said, “Oh come on, you can do better than THAT!” and gave her another chance.

I don’t remember how many iterations it went through, but it was at least 4 or so. Then, when it was all done, it removed the directive that made it run when she logged in and deleted itself.

A few hours later, we caught up with Christine’s friend and confessed. She was still frustrated, but began to see the humor in the prank we had pulled on her. She explained that others in the computer lab were puzzled as to why she was yelling so much profanity at her computer screen.

Good times. Good times.

Tech Fozzolog: Tricks to getting Fedora 12 and RPMFusion kmod-nvidia playing nice

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 23:14:51 +0000

There have been a couple things about Fedora 12 that haven’t been as nice as I would have liked. I finally solved one of them tonight.

My laptop, a Dell Latitude D830(N), has an NVidia Quadro NVS 140M video chipset in it. Fedora 12 worked out of the box with the open source nouveau driver which is an experimental reverse-engineered driver for NVidia chipsets. It works pretty well and I probably would have kept using it if I could get my laptop to hibernate properly. Instead, I could never get the laptop to come back to life after it went into hibernation.

Meanwhile, the RPMFusion folks (a popular third-party repository) usually have the kmod-nvidia package available to install which gives you everything you need to run the proprietary NVidia drivers (Fedora doesn’t include this because they adhere to an all-open, non-patent-encumbered package policy). However, the kmod-nvidia package wasn’t available for Fedora 12.

When it did show up on rpmfusion, there were some caveats. Fedora had done some work to make the nouveau driver work as seamlessly as possible and, as a result, made it a little more difficult to install the proprietary driver. The RPMFusion folks have some errata info on how to get the proprietary driver working. I’ll summarize the process here since it’s a little tricky to execute and understand.

Before you do anything the RPMFusion information says to do, you should obviously install the kmod-nvidia package. Then, run:

nvidia-system-config enable

(I usually do this with sudo.)

Then, reboot into runlevel 3 and proceed with the commands RPMFusion’s page recommends.

The first commands the RPMFusion info indicates should be run are these:

mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r)-nouveau.img
dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

The initramfs-blahblah.img file is a replacement for the old initrd-blahblah.img file. So, we’re making a backup of the original initiam ramdisk image file for the running kernel and adding nouveau to its name so we know this is the initial ramdisk image that contains the nouveau driver (Fedora added the driver to the initial ramdisk so the graphical bootloader can take advantage of the NVidia chipset’s capabilities).

Then, running the dracut command creates a new initial ramdisk image for the running kernel. The dracut command replaces the mkinitrd that has been used traditionally. For more information about dracut check out the Fedora Project’s wiki page on dracut.

Finally, run the setsebool command RPMFusion’s page mentions:

setsebool -P allow_execstack on

If you’re like me, however, you probably have SELinux set to permissive because RPMFusion’s nonfree codec packages have already broken some SELinux stuff. Hopefully that will be fixed soon.

Then, reboot again into runlevel 5 and enjoy.

UPDATE: Read below!

Soon after getting kmod-nvidia installed, I noticed some weird issues in KDE. Whenever I would press ALT-F2 to run a command, the UI would freeze for about 10 seconds. I did some searching and found this was a reported bug. I’m guessing a forthcoming xorg-x11-server-* package update will include this, but in the meantime, I installed new xorg-x11-server-Xorg and xorg-x11-server-common packages from this 1.7.1-12 Koji build. Pressing ALT+F2 does not freeze the system anymore.

Politics Fozzolog: Ezra Taft Benson on free market philosophy

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:28:07 +0000

Another excerpt from This Nation Shall Endure by the late Ezra Taft Benson, former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and President of the Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

The principles behind our American free market philosophy can be reduced to a rather simple formula. Here it is:

Economic security for all is impossible without widespread abundance.

Abundance is impossible without industrious and efficient production.

Such production is impossible without energetic, willing, and eager labor.

Such labor is not possible without incentive.

Of all forms of incentive, the freedom to attain a reward for one’s labors if the most sustaining for most people. Sometimes called the profit motive, it is simply the rights to plan and to earn and to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor.

This profit motive diminishes as government controls, regulations, and taxes increase to deny the fruits of success to those who produce.

Therefore, any attempt through government intervention to redistribute the material rewards of labor can only result in the eventual destruction of the productive base of society, without which real abundance and security for more than the ruling elite are quite impossible.

Politics Fozzolog: Ezra Taft Benson quote

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:28:05 +0000

I’m reading this book right now and ran across this great quote tonight.

“If reference is made continually to weaknesses of the private enterprise system without any effort to point out its virtues and the comparative fruits of this and other systems, the tendency in this country will be to demand that the government take over more and more of the economic and social responsibilities and make more of the decisions for the people. This can result in but one thing: slavery of the individual to the state. This seems to be the trend in the world today. The issue is whether the individual exists for the state or the state for the individual.”

— Ezra Taft Benson, This Nation Shall Endure, 1977

Politics Fozzolog: Thomas Jefferson quote

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:14:19 +0000

“… with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow citizens—a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits or industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”

— Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, 1801

Politics Fozzolog: Thoughts: Government healthcare for the uninsurable?

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 09:09:51 +0000

There has been a whole lot of discussion both online and offline about healthcare. Specifically, about government’s role in healthcare and whether that role should be enlarged, redefined, etc.

Personally, I’d like to see the federal government get out of healthcare altogether. If things were done my way, there would no longer be any Medicare or Medicaid.

“But, Doran, what about all those people who depend on these programs for their healthcare?! Do you just want them to wither away and die?!”

No, but I have something I think many who are pushing for more government involvement in citizens’ healthcare do not have: Faith. I have faith in the people of America to provide help to those who really need it. I have faith in the free market to find healthcare solutions.

The U.S. is, by far, the most giving population of any country on Earth. In the absence of government run, mandated, etc. healthcare, I believe the people will step forward.

I have a friend who recently received a kidney transplant and has since relied on a regular dose of anti-rejection medications and regular doctor visits. He also recently was laid off from his job and is now paying for C.O.B.R.A. coverage to maintain the health insurance benefits he had when he was employed.

My friend can not go out and buy individual or family health insurance coverage outside of an employer group because his condition places him in a precarious position called “uninsurable.” Because I am an insulin-dependent diabetic, I am also in a similar position. To my knowledge, no health insurance company will provide coverage for me outside of an employer group either, regardless of how well I control my diabetes and lifestyle.

That’s frustrating, but I know any program provided by the bureaucracy of the federal government will have the following attributes:

Plan will provide a minimum baseline of coverage with few options
Plan will result in my treatment being a paperwork nightmare
Plan will restrict what medications and/or treatments are available to me regardless of doctor recommendations
Plan may restrict what doctors I may consult
Play may require ridiculous amounts of my time to see a medical professional and/or fulfill my obligations in seeing that bills are paid
Plan will suffer from corruption, mismanagement and fraud

I know these things because this is par for the course for any kind of service provided by the federal government.

Now, imagine I am in a situation like my friend could be in if he does not soon find employment with a company that offers health insurance benefits. Imagine, also, that our government offers no assistance to people who find themselves in this position. Who would I turn to?

I would probably first turn to my church. My church has proven itself invaluable to many people in need for food, financial assistance, and other needs. Historically, this is one of the things churches have done in the past. I’m not familiar with people going to their church leaders to help with healthcare needs, but that could be because the government, in one form or another, has become the de facto first place people turn.

I am confident that assistance provided by my church through a church leader familiar with my specific issues and background would provide more than a minimum baseline of coverage and would provide more options that would benefit me. It certainly would not be a “Cadillac plan,” but I’m confident that if my doctor recommended a procedure or a medication, I would not be told, “We’re sorry, that is not covered.”

I am also confident there would be a common sense amount of paperwork and I would definitely not be restricted in what doctor, hospital, etc. I see. And, most of all, I have an order of magnitude more confidence in my church’s ability to run an assistance program that isn’t plagued with corruption, mismanagement, or fraud.

If churches were not sufficient to fill the void, I believe other non-profit and charity organizations would appear to fulfill the need.

One such organization — Volunteers in Medicine — was mentioned in a recent General Conference talk by Thomas S. Monson, the president of the church I belong to. In this talk, President Monson describes the organization as follows:

[Volunteers in Medicine] gives retired medical personnel a chance to volunteer at free clinics serving the working uninsured. Dr. McConnell said his leisure time since he retired has “evaporated into 60-hour weeks of unpaid work, but [his] energy level has increased and there is a satisfaction in [his] life that wasn’t there before.” He made this statement: “In one of those paradoxes of life, I have benefited more from Volunteers in Medicine than my patients have.” There are now over 70 such clinics across the United States.

Prior to the “Progressive Invasion” of the early 20th century, the people of the United States of America never thought of looking to the federal government to aid them in their individual or community concerns. Churches and other organizations ran all kinds of programs for people that would later be handled by government programs. There was a time when churches ran hospitals, schools, and more.

Some people have traced the first progressive shift in federal policy to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 when then commerce secretary Herbert Hoover convinced others in the Coolidge administration that the federal government needed to step in and provide on-the-ground assistance to those displaced and otherwise affected by the flood. Even then, Hoover wasn’t spending federal money as much as he was directing the relief effort at a federal level — telling people how things should be done.

This action got Hoover elected as the 31st president of the United States and under his administration, the country experienced the great stock market crash of late October 1929 that began an economic recession that grew to become the Great Depression and endured through Hoover’s presidency and two terms of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency.

Hoover and Roosevelt both implemented federal programs to spend taxpayer money to provide assistance to those afflicted by the lackluster economy. The merits, effectiveness, and end result of these programs is still debated today, but some believe — and I do — that these programs only lengthened and amplified the recession that began with the crash of 1929 and made it “Great” while other countries’ economies participating in the global marketplace at that time recovered within a couple of years.

Healthcare dictated, provided by, or otherwise governed by the government is perversion of the law as dictated by Frederick Bastiat, an early 19th century French political economist whose essay “The Law” explains.

Each of us has a natural right — from God — to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? If every person has the right to defend even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.

In the above excerpt, Bastiat defines the fundamental purpose of government. It is to defend and uphold our rights as individuals. It is to act on our behalf where we can not. It is not to interfere in our rights, something our current system of government increasingly does!

Bastiat continues:

Under such an administration, everyone would understand that he possessed all the privileges as well as all the responsibilities of his existence. No one would have any argument with government, provided that his person was respected, his labor was free, and the fruits of his labor were protected against all unjust attack. When successful, we would not have to thank the state for our success. And, conversely, when unsuccessful, we would no more think of blaming the state for our misfortune than would the farmers blame the state because of hail or frost. The state would be felt only by the invaluable blessings of safety provided by this concept of government.

Bastiat later writes about the difficulty of reconciling this definition of the proper role of government with one that does things to help its citizens.

Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philanthropic. Nor is it sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual, and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation.

But the government’s participation in this socialism, Bastiat explains, is “legal plunder” and infringes on the citizens’ ability to be FREE!

This is the seductive lure of socialism. And I repeat again: These two uses of the law are in direct contradiction to each other. We must choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free.

Patrick Krey, an attorney in New York, wrote a piece titled “Bastiat, Barack and Bail-Outs” for the John Birch Society site this last April talking about this very concept as it relates to our current administration.

How about some relevant quotes from founding fathers? Here are a couple from Thomas Jefferson:

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

John Adams:

Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.

And don’t get me started with Benjamin Franklin!

Tech Fozzolog: Book Review: Masterminds of Programming

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:37:10 +0000

Masterminds of Programming by Federico Bioancuzzi and Shane Warden and published by O’Reilly and Associates is a large (480 pages), dense book packed full of exposition about language design, software engineering practices, software development lifecycle methodologies, Computer Science curricula, and unique insights into computer and computation history.

The format of the book is straightforward. Each chapter is dedicated to a programming language and contains a series of questions by the authors and responses from designers and creators of the language being highlighted.

I expected the chapters on languages I was familiar with to be the most interesting and those I was not familiar with to be the least interesting but my experience was the opposite. Chapters highlighting languages that I have had no exposure to such as Forth, APL, ML, and Lua were full of intriguing information, especially languages that were designed in the 1960s or 1950s. It’s fascinating learning about how these languages came to be given the relatively restrictive hardware they were developed with.

Other languages highlighted in the book include:

Python
Perl
Java
C++
C#
Objective-C
UML
AWK
Postscript
Eifel
Haskel
BASIC

The book is just overflowing with powerful quotes that carry substantial meaning to developers, language designers, and managers. Here are a few that stood out to me.

“Whenever I hear people boasting of millions of lines of code, I know they have grieviously midunderstood their problem. There are no contemporary problems requiring millions of lines of code. Instead, there are careless programmers, bad managers, or impossible requirements for compatibility.” —Chuck Moore in the Forth chapter

“As processors continue to get faster and memory capacities rise, it’s easier to do quick experiments and even write production code in interpreted languages (like AWK) that would not have been feasible a few decades ago. All of this is a great win.

“At the same time, the ready availability of resources often leads to very bloated designs and implementations, systems that could be faster and easier to use if a bit more restraint had gone into their design. Modern operating systems certainly have this problem; it seems to take longer and longer for my machines to boot, even though, thanks to Moore’s Law, they are noticeably faster than the previous ones. All that software is slowing me down.” —Brian Kernighan in the AWK chapter.

“Software engineering is in many ways a very pathetic field, because so much of it is anecdotal and based on people’s judgements or even people’s aesthetic judgements.” — Peter Weinberger in the AWK chapter

“The software business is one of the few places we teach people to write before we teach them to read. That’s really a mistake.” — Tom Love in the Objective-C chapter

“What do you think the chances are that Microsoft applications get slower and slower because they haven’t managed memory properly? Have you ever met a three-year-old Microsoft operating system that you wanted to use? I actually operate with a laptop that has a Microsoft-free zone. It’s amazing how much more productive I am than other people sitting in the same room with Microsoft computers. My computer is on, and I’ve done my work, and I’ve closed it down before they’ve gotten to their first Excel spreadsheet.” — Tom Love in the Objective-C chapter.

“If you study gold or lead from day to day, you can measure the properties and employ scientific methods to study them. With software, there is none of that.” — Brad Cox in the Objective-C chapter.

“C# basically took everything, although they oddly decided to take away the security and reliability stuff by adding all these sorts of unsafe pointers, which strikes me at grotesquely stupid, but people have used most of the features of Java somewhere.” — James Gosling in the Java chapter responding to the question related to C# being inspired by Java.

“I think architecture is very important, but I am cautious about labeling individuals as architects, for many reasons. Many times I have seen companies with a team of architects that they send to other organizations to work on projects. That may be fine if they work inside a particular project, but companies such as big banks usually have a group of enterprise architects that sit and draw representations of the architecture. Then they throw this over the wall to the developers. The developers just ask themselves: ‘What is this? It’s useless.’ In many companies, enterprise architects sit in an ivory tower without doing anything useful.” — Ivar Jacobson in the UML chapter

“Developing software is not rocket science. Look at the 5-10 million people who call themselves software developers. Very few of them really do anything creative of fundamentally new. Unfortunately, the outside world thinks that programmers are creative and brilliant people, and that’s far from reality.” — Ivar Jacobson in the UML chapter.

“I rarely have met a programmer who understands the principles of computational complexity and puts them into practice. Instead they fuss with all kinds of pointless suboptimizations that are ‘pennywise and pound foolish… I think the most important skill in computing (as in physics and other creative fields) is the ability for abstraction.” —James Rumbaugh in the UML chapter.

“I have found over my career, whether it be researchers or engineers, that in addition to the sort of intellectual skills that they manifest, if they are people who finish what they set out to do, they tend to be much more productive and have a much larger impact.” — Charles Geschke in the Postscript chapter.

These quotes are just scratching the surface.

Many of the interviews discuss history of computer science and computation theory. For example, Charles Geschke and John Warnock gave answers in the Postscript chapter detailing how Xerox PARC came into existence out of ARPA’s emphasis on digital communications which was the result of thinking within the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations.

Because of the simple, straightforward format of this book, there is definitely room for improvement. For example, readers unfamiliar with certain languages would find it immensely useful to see examples of the language in use. One thought is that each chapter could start with a code excerpt showing how a programmer might use the highlighted language to solve a generic problem. Readers could then see, in code, how each language differs in their approach to the same problem.

Each chapter is preceded by one paragraph description of the language which may contain brief history of the language’s history. This could definitely be expanded upon. This book is big already and I don’t think O’Reilly’s goal is to make it a computer language text book, but it would be useful if each chapter started with 2-4 pages of introductory abstract about the language.

The authors have placed biographical information about each of the contributing interviewees in a Contributors appendix near the end of the book, but it would be more helpful to the reader if this information appeared at the beginning of each chapter instead.

Masterminds of Programming is available at a suggested price of $39.99. I rate it at four and a half stars.

Tech Fozzolog: The search for a good Linux e-mail client for a typical user

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:23:34 +0000

I’m almost a text-based e-mail purist. I used to use Mutt as my primary e-mail client application, but decided to go with a graphical client such as Mozilla Thunderbird or KMail so that I could at least effectively read HTML-formatted messages.

I’ve been happy with KMail. I’ve had it configured to prefer text-based e-mail and aside from the fact I don’t use my preferred text editor (vim) inside it, it’s been a good e-mail client. Now, my dad is a more typical e-mail user. While he probably doesn’t care that much about composing original HTML messages, he does receive a lot of them that he wants to forward onto other people that he feels may be interested. He’s on lots of political and family mailing lists that swap HTML messages complete with embedded images, etc.

He has been using Thunderbird at his home and KMail (an old version running on a Fedora Core 6 desktop) at his office. He mentioned to me that KMail runs noticeably faster on his work system than Thunderbird does on his home system. I suggested that we could standardize him on KMail and upgrade his office desktop to a more recent version of Fedora Linux.

Things got more interesting when Thunderbird recently got updated on his home system in a package update to version 3.0b4. The Smart Folders “feature” threw both of us for a loop. It combines multiple Inbox, Sent, and other IMAP folders into single virtual folders containing an aggregate of messages from each corresponding folder. I really have no idea who would want this feature. My parents each have their own e-mail accounts and I had Thunderbird configured so they could check mail for both accounts. The new version of Thunderbird combines both inboxes into one virtual “Smart” folder and subsequently confused the heck out of my father.

I figured out how to disable the “smart folder” behavior (View->Folders->All), but Thunderbird was still hiding other IMAP folders like Sent and Trash that my parents often need to access messages in.

So, KMail. KMail works great for almost all things, but my father noticed right away when he tried to forward an HTML message with embedded images that KMail wasn’t letting do what he was used to doing: Editing the forwarded message to remove the annoying gazillions of e-mail addresses the original message(s) were addressed to.

KMail has two methods of forwarding a message: First, you can forward a message as an attachment. This preserves everything about the original message, but KMail doesn’t let you edit anything within the attached message. Alternatively, you may forward a message “inline”. This lets you edit the message, but it only gives you the text portion of the message to edit and completely omits the HTML attachment altogether.

I did some research online to see if there was a way to get the desired functionality out of KMail, but it doesn’t look like it’s possible. If it does ever happen, it’s a couple versions out at least. It may never happen because it seems there are voices within the KMail community that feel KMail should never take on these types of features because it risks KMail becoming “another Outlook/Thundebird clone.”

Has anyone found other solutions to this problem for a Linux user?

Politics Fozzolog: Abraham Lincoln quote

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:11:44 +0000

“We have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessing were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that makes us.”

— Abraham Lincoln, Proclamation for A National Fast Day, March 30, 1863

Hear, hear.

Tech Fozzolog: Fix for mobile broadband (aircard) connection problem in Fedora 12

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:04:06 +0000

I recently encountered a problem when I plugged in my Sprint USB aircard (A Sierra Wireless USB 598) into my laptop running Fedora 12. When I clicked on the NetworkManager applet running in my system tray and selected the mobile broadband (CDMA) device to connect to, it appeared to connect and, then shortly after, disconnect.

I watched the messages sent to the /var/log/messages file to see what was going on and sure enough, NetworkManager was successfully making a PPP connection to Sprint’s service and then PPP was terminated and the connection was closed.

I did some quick searching online but didn’t find anything definite about this. There were lots of links to the Fedora 12 release notes which claimed Fedora 12 had better support for mobile broadband cards than previous releases. That made me wonder if their improvements were actually breaking things for me.

I decided to explore the options dialogs. I right-clicked on the NetworkManager applet and chose Edit connections..., selected the Mobile Broadband tab, selected my adapter and clicked Edit.

Under the PPP Settings tab there is a button labeled Configure methods in the Authentication section. This lets you choose which authentication methods PPP should try. A list of checkboxes next to possible methods appears with EAP, PAP, CHAP, MSCHAP, and MSCHAP v2 as possible selections.

I knew Sprint doesn’t use anything fancy. In fact, you don’t even need to provide a user or password. It authenticates using the device ID or virtual phone number of your device. So, I wondered if disabling some things might work. I figured if it was using anything it was probably CHAP or PAP. I disabled everything else.

Lo and behold, the next time I tried to connect, it connected and stayed connected!

I hope this is useful to someone else.

Tech Fozzolog: Recompiling ffmpeg for Fedora 12 to add faac support

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:24:31 +0000

The ffmpeg package that is available for Fedora 12 via the rpmfusion.org respository does not include faac support. This can be a problem when you want to create H.264 video content that incorporates the AAC (Advanced Audio Codec).

The most straightforward way I’ve found to rectify this situation is to build a new package from the source RPM.

First, download the source RPM using yumdownloader.

yumdownloader --source ffmpeg

This will download the .src.rpm file to the current directory. Install it using the rpm command. (This assumes you have a person RPM build environment set up. This blog post provides some good information on that.)

rpm -ivh ffmpeg-0.5-5.20091026svn.fc12.src.rpm

You probably want to indicate some sort of difference in the version numbering since this version is a modification of the upstream. Edit ~/rpm/SPECS/ffmpeg.spec and modify the Release: line by adding something to the end of it.

Release: 5.%{svn}svn%{?dist}_fozz

Now, you can try building the package with rpmbuild. Unless you’ve already installed all the development libraries and other dependencies ffmpeg relies on, you’ll get some dependency messages. Use yum to install those dependencies and then try building again.

rpmbuild -ba ~/rpm/SPEC/ffmpeg.spec --with faac

This will create RPM packages for you under ~/rpm/RPMS/. Use rpm to install the ffmpeg and ffmpeg-libs packages.

rpm -Uvh ~/rpm/RPMS/x86_64 ffmpeg-{libs-,}0.5-5.20091026svn.fc12_fozz.x86_64.rpm

Tech Fozzolog: Patch to FFmpeg::Command to support multiple input files

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:55:38 +0000

The FFmpeg::Command Perl module is a convenient way to drive the ffmpeg command-line utility for converting multimedia files.

For work, I have developed some scripts that make heavy use of FFmpeg::Command. Yesterday, one of the other developers told me they need a conversion script to be able to merge separate video and audio streams into one file that contains both audio and video. The ffmpeg command-line utility can do this by accepting more than one input file. For example:

$ ffmpeg -i video.avi -i audio.wav -acodec copy -vcodec copy merged.avi

The FFmpeg::Command Perl module, however, assumed there can only be one input file. I made the necessary changes to the module code so that it would accept multiple input files, created a patch file, and sent it to the Module owner Gosuke Miyashita. This morning, I received e-mail from Gosuke thanking me for the patch and informing me that he has uploaded a new version (v0.12) of FFmpeg::Command to CPAN.

I love Perl and open source software!

General Fozzolog: Home-buying travails and endurance

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:17:52 +0000

Anyone who’s been through some sort of big deal in their life is familiar with the annoyance that comes from dozens of family, friends, and other people asking for the latest on whatever it is you’re going through. I’m sure anyone who’s been divorced, had a loved one in the hospital, going through divorce, had a family member or close friend be involved in a big court battle, etc. knows what I’m talking about.

Our family has been going through a frustrating situation, but I haven’t really talked about it much, but those who do know about it have been calling me, e-mailing me, etc. to get frequent updates on the status, so I’m blogging about it so I can just say, “Go look at the blog.”

For the last year or so, Christine and I have been thinking about buying a larger house. We bought our most recent house in 2003 when the housing market was experiencing a low period. The house was a HUD repossession and had been trashed — or never taken care of — by the previous owner. We recarpeted, repainted, and repaired damage throughout. Over the years we finished a couple of bedrooms and an office in the basement and put in a yard with a watering system.

That house has served us well, but Christine and I had been looking at some of the houses in the newer developments near our house and wondering if we should upgrade. In fact, we made an offer on a home last year which was accepted. After the offer was accepted, we got cold feet and withdrew the offer because we realized we just were not prepared to commit to short sale moving into a newer, larger house yet. We hadn’t done anything to sell our house so we’d have to pay two house payments until our prior home was sold and who knew how long that would take.

After backing out of that, we finished our family room in the basement and made other minor improvements to the house. We still weren’t complete sure we wanted to sell the house because the family room was a nice addition and gave us a lot more breathing room.

Come Summer, we started seeing a larger home as a wise investment decision. Many of the larger homes near us were being listed at steep discounts by owners that simply could not afford them anymore. We began looking around at what was available and walked through many homes. Christine saw a nice house that caught her eye listed, but when we talked to our agent about it, it had been pulled off the market. Our agent said it hadn’t been sold so it might be relisted. Christine kept an eye out.

Finally, a couple of weeks later, Christine found the house again. It had been relisted a couple of days before. We talked to our agent, got a showing, and decided to make an offer on the house. Our offer was accepted. That was in August.

During the time we were looking at homes and making the offer on the nice house, we put our house up for sale. We had an offer in about three weeks and a closing scheduled for late September.

The closing for the house we were buying was scheduled for mid-October. Christine and I had a vacation scheduled at that time and had it moved to the 22nd of October. As the date approached, the messages we were getting from the selling agent was that they weren’t ready to close.

A little background: As we dealt with the selling agent, the house really started sounding like a short sale because there was talk about them having to get banks to sign off on the sale. But, they never represented the sale as being a short sale. If it was, there would have been additional paperwork, specifically a short sale addendum, involved in the contract.

Well, as 22 October approached, the selling agent indicated they would not be able to close. He blamed it on the bank (or banks). We had arranged to rent our older home from the new owners for the month of October so that we would have a place to live until we closed on the new house. If we didn’t close on the newer home, we’d have to make new living arrangements because we had to be out of our previous home by the end of October.

Nothing happened on 22 October. We gave them a few more days to surprise us with a closing and then proceeded to move everything into storage units. One of Christine’s coworkers said his in-laws would let us live in their basement while we waited for things to come together. We were hoping it wouldn’t come to that, but in the end it did.

We’ve been living in a basement, out of suitcases, since 31 October. We extended the closing until 13 November, but as of today, the selling agent has said they will not be able to close then.

The good news, if there is any, is that the selling agent said today they have written approval on at least one of the banks involved in the selling (apparently there’s stuff between a first and second mortgage that has to be resolved).

So, we’re extending one more time, to 25 November. The selling agent expressed confidence to our agent we’ll be able to close before Thanksgiving.

Our theory is this: The sellers we’re dealing with is a third party to a short sale. They’re working directly with the bank to buy the house in a short sale at a price lower than what we’re offering. As a result, when the sale is completed, they’ll make a few thousand (or a few tens of thousands) in profit. So, technically, we’re not involved in a short sale, but the people we’re buying the house from are.

Should this be legal? Maybe, but I think they should be required to provide full disclosure. It’s a little unethical to paint the sale as not being a short sale when in fact it is. Short sales are historically difficult because the banks involved generally take a long time to move.

We’re very grateful to the Hancocks (the older couple whose basement we’re living in) for their benevolence and hospitality. We’d be in a much worse mess if we didn’t have their basement to call a temporary home.

We’ve been looking at other houses on the market, but nothing really compares to the house we’re set to buy.

We’ve considering renting an apartment in the interim so that we’re not taking too much advantage of the generosity of our hosts upstairs. If this looks like it will go beyond November, we may do exactly that.

In the meantime, we’re crossing our fingers (once again) for a closing sometime before 25 November.

General Fozzolog: Book review: Superfreakonomics

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:37:10 +0000

Superfreakonomics is the new sequel to the best-selling book Freakonomics by Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

This book roughly follows the same formula its predescessor established, although the original book seems rough and a bit disorganized compared to Superfreakonomics, which flows smooth and is even easier to read.

The pattern, of course, is to start each chapter with a shocking or strange statement that, at first glance, appears to make no sense. The rest of the chapter leads up to a point where that statement makes perfect sense once you’ve been exposed to the underlying statistical data the authors enthusiastically present. Each chapter contains an assortment of short stories about related events or historical analysis for perspective on each of the studies discussed.

The most memorable parts of the original Freakonomics, for me, were the chapters on Chicago drug dealers and the chapter that suggested that the falling urban crime rates in urban areas like New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago during the 1990s was due less to bureaucrat policies and more to do with the fact that the landmark Roe v. Wade case had occurred roughly 20 years earlier, thereby allowing legalized abortion. This allegedly decreased the number of children born into poor, single-parent homes that would have basically been bred into a life of crime. The conclusion was that crime rates fell in these urban areas because the would-be criminals were never born.

If you read the first book, you’ll remember the stories and conclusions about inner city gangs and drug dealers. The researchers had to employ some unorthodox methods of data collection because of the closed nature of gang society. THat is, members of inner citty gangs are not going to welcome some college professor into their inner circle with open arms. Even if they did speak to a stereotypical economics researcher, it’s unlikely they would provide entirely truthful or reliable data to the researchers. As a result, these studies required much more effort on the part of the researchers to blend in and become a trusted individual. It was, essentially, an undercover operation that revealed some surprising facts about how gangs and drug dealing worked (and didn’t work).

So, what about this new book? This time they’ve brought us economic analyses of current and past practices of prostitution. How is “the worlds’ oldest profession” enduring? Well, it depends. It apparently depends on who the prostitute’s target customer base is. Prostitutes who “work the street” pretty much all make the same hourly rates and have to deal with some pretty serious side effects of their work including violence, disease, and the (relatively low) possibility of being caught and arrested by the police.

Prostitutes that work as high-class escorts, are well educated, and can carry on conversations with wealthy customers can earn hundreds of dollars per hour. In fact, it seems the more they can charge, the longer their engagements are. Their patrons are less interested in engaging in a single act and more interested in living out a fantasy of living with an “ideal” mate.

What else is in this new book? An interesting study on infant and child carseats. My state just made it a law that children under the age of eight must use car seats or booster seats in a car. The studies done by the authors of this book suggest car seats and booster seats may offer no real added protection to children over the age of two compared to plain old seat belts.

In this new book, the authors take on global warming. I found this interesting because I’m what you might call a “skeptic” or a “denier.” I don’t believe man has much at all to do with what some call “global warming” (or, more recently, “climate change,” because there hasn’t been any warming for a while.)

I was a bit disappointed that Dubner and Leavitt didn’t take on the plethora of data that suggest historic warming has actually been caused more by solar cycles rather than emissions of greenhouse gases. While acknowledging there is no real concensus (sorry Al Gore), they went with the assumption that global warming/climate change is a real problem we must solve and concentrated their investigation on the proposed strategies to solve it.

Most governments want to “solve” our climate woes by capping emissions, taxing production, and thereby stiffling economic growth across the board. This will, of course, impact humanity globally, probably much more than any changes in the climate will. The costs for these measures are estimated in the trillions of dollars, most of which will come from developed nations. Dubner and Leavitt suggest that in many, if not most, cases, the best solutions to problems are often the simple and least expensive solutions.

They outline some solutions proposed by a small group in the northwestern US called Intellectual Ventures. One of their global warming proposals, for example, involves putting supposedly harmfull emissions into a higher layer of the atmosphere. Doing this would be uber-cheap and would effectively stop warming (assuming there is warming). They know it will work because volcanoes do it when they erupt and it cools the planet for a short period of time by blocking the amount of solar radiation that reaches the surface.

I applaud the authors for taking on so many issues and showing that the way we typically approach problems is often the wrong way.

Freakonomics is available now in hardcover for a suggested price of $29.99. I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Tech Fozzolog: Hulu Desktop on Fedora 11 x86_64

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:39:29 +0000

I installed Hulu Desktop for Linux recently, but could not get it to work. When I ran huludesktop, a dialog box would display saying that the Flash plugin could not be found and that I should edit ~/.huludesktop.

The ~/.huludesktop file has a INI-style syntax and has a section for Flash settings:

[flash]
flash_location = (null)

It’s not obvious whether the flash_location variable needs to be set to a directory or a full path. I tried both /usr/lib/flash-plugin/ and /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplugin.so. Neither of these worked. I didn’t find much help via Google, but kept experimenting until I found a solution that worked:

flash_location = /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so

When the 64-bit Flash plugin is officially released, this will probably become unnecessary. In the meantime, Hulu Desktop works!

Politics Fozzolog: Book Review: "Free To Choose" by Milton and Rose Friedman

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 06:19:02 +0000

Milton Friedman was a highly visible economist, statistician, and policy commentator during the Twentieth Century. Before he died in 2006, he wrote and co-wrote several books relating economic theory, policy studies, and statistics. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976.

I just finished reading “Free To Choose: A Personal Statement,” written by Thomas Friedman and his wife, Rose Friedman. The book is dense and full of well thought-out arguments for free markets, smaller government, and how policies that adhere to these principles will result in greater liberty and freedom for the people that live under them.

This book is almost thirty years old and it shows. Many of the numbers the Friedmans use in the book are laughable today, especially those they use as salaries for the common man or the cost of an average home.

It’s fascinating, however, they write at the end of the Carter administration that “the tide is turning.”

The failure of Western governments to achieve their proclaimed objectives has produced a widespread reaction against big government. In Britain the reaction swept Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979 on a platform pledging her Conservative government to reverse the socialist policies that had been followed by both Labour and earlier Conservative governments ever since the end of World War II.

“Free To Choose” is organized in chapters that each spend a liberal amount of print on a specific category of policy thinking. The first chapter, “The Power Of The Market” spends nearly 30 pages covering the ideals of a free market, the dangers of price controls, and the role of government with respect to markets. The second chapter is devoted to governments’ role in free trade and overall liberty and economic growth. Hint: Friedman isn’t a fan of tariffs or any other kind of government meddling with trade between nations. He offers a compelling historical argument for free trade by examining the governance and trade policies of Japan during the latter half of the 19th century and India during the latter half of the 20th century.

The third chapter, “The Anatomy of Crisis,” is perhaps the most relevant to readers today. It examines the modern banking system in the United States from the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the depression nobody remembers from 1920-21, and the Great Depression of the 1930s. For those who believe we are currently at risk of suffering from the same mistakes or making greater ones today in our vulnerable financial status, this chapter offers some brilliant insights.

In the conclusion of this chapter, the Friedmans write:

In one respect the (Federal Reserve) System has remained completely consistent throughout. It blames all problems on external influences beyond its control and takes credit for any and all favorable occurrences. It thereby continues to promote the myth that the private economy is unstable, while its behavior continues to document the reality that government is today the major source of economic instability.

The fourth chapter, “Cradle to Grave,” examines the development of the welfare state beginning in Europe in the late 1800s and then in the U.S. in the 1920s. Friedman spotlights health, education, and welfare in this chapter because at the time the book was written, they fell under a single department within the federal government.

The waste is distressing, but it the least of the evils of the paternalistic programs that have grown to such massive size. Their major evil is their effect on the fabric of our society. They weaken the family; reduce the incentive to work, save, and innovate; reduce the accumulation of capital; and limit our freedom. These are the fundamental standards by which they should be judged.

The following chapter challenges the popular notions of what “equality” means. The Friedmans distinguish between the following:

Equality of outcome
Equality of opportunity
Equality before God

Concerning equality of outcome, they write:

Life is not fair. It is tempting to believe that government can rectify what nature has spawned. But it is also important to recognize how much we benefit from the very unfairness we deplore.

This chapter goes on to examine the effects of egalitarian policies as practiced in the US and in other modern societies.

… a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with greater freedom and greater equality. Though a by-product of freedom, greater equality is not an accident. A free society releases the energies and abilities of people to pursue their own objectives. It prevents some people from arbitrarily suppressing others. It does not prevent some people from achieving positions of privilege, but so long as freedom is maintained, it prevents those positions of privilege from being institutionalized; they are subject to continued attack by other able, ambitious people. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today’s disadvantaged to become tomorrow’s privileged and, in the process, enabled almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life.

Next, the Friedmans attach “What’s Wrong with Our Schools?”

It’s no surprise their position is that centralized planning is a substantial culprit of the problem with schools. Again, freedom is the answer, they say. Vouchers, for example, tied with freedom to choose public schools, are an ideal way to encourage competition between private and public schools and drive education quality up.

I found this passage about public subsidies of higher education shocking considering what we have observed in 2009:

When we first started writing about higher education, we had a good deal of sympathy for the (justification that public subsidies was an investment in future productivity and economic growth of society). We no longer do. In the interim we have tried to induce the people who make this argument to be specific about the alleged social benefits. The answer is almost always simply bad economics. We are told that the nation benefits by having more highly trained people, that investment in providing such skills is essential for economic growth, that more trained people raise the productivity for the rest of us. These statements are correct. But none is a valid reason for subsidizing higher education. Each statement would be equally correct if made about physical capital (i.e., machines, factory buildings, etc.), yet hardly anyone would conclude that tax money should be used to subsidize the capital investment of General Motors or General Electric.

Milton Friedman is undoubtedly spinning in his grave today.

Following education is the question of “Who Protects the Consumer?” This chapter discusses the development of the Interstate Commerce Commission, The Food and Drug Administration, The Consumer Products Safety Commission, The Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency. The Friedmans raise some very valid questions about the government’s role in establishing these authorities and whether they are effective in their stated objectives.

For example, many are familiar with Ralph Nader’s book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” in which he supposedly documents the safety risk the Chevrolet Corvair was to its occupants. This book ignited a firestorm that eventually crushed the Corvair out of production and resulted in new government regulations pertaining to the manufacture of automobiles. It’s difficult to argue that the outcome was a bad thing, but what about the original premise? Was the Corvair that bad? My dad was a Corvair collector and had two that he tinkered with, restored, and drove around on occasion. I always thought they were odd cars because the engine was in the back. The Friedmans point out that ten years after Nader’s book landed, “one of the agencies that was set up in response to the subsequent public outcry finally got around to testing the Corvair that started the whole thing. They spent a year and a half comparing the performance of the Corvair with the performance of other comparable vehicles and they concluded, ‘The 1960-63 Corvair compared favorably with the other contemporary vehicles used in the tests.’”

Next is “Who Protects the Worker?” Here labor unions land square in the crosshairs. Also addressed are government interventions into work such as regulations against child labor, minimum wage laws, OSHA oversight, workers compensation, and more.

Chapter 9 is about inflation. This isn’t very relevant right now, but likely will deserve a re-read in a year or so.

Here, Friedman puts his statistician muscles to work and establishes through numbers a strong correlation between monetary control and consumer prices. When the the Treasury and the Federal Reserve flood the market with money, prices respond by going up.

The final chapter is a nice capstone on the book and discusses how the U.S. Constitution relates to many of the policies discussed and how it is eroded by some.

Appendix A is an interesting inclusion. It is the party platform from the Socialist party during the 1928 presidential campaign. The Friedmans go through each of the 14 items in the platform and demonstrate that despite the Socialist Party not having a chance in Hell of ever having a candidate elected, since 1928, just about each and every one of these ideas put forth by the Socialist Party has been enacted.

That’s something to think about.

“Free To Choose” is available in paperback at a MSRP of $15.00. It’s not a quick read, but definitely an informative and educational one.

Tech Fozzolog: Book Review: Palm Pre - The Missing Manual

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 04:33:07 +0000

Palm Pre: The Missing Manual by Ed Baig

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'll start by saying that this book-- Palm Pre The Missing Manual-- is a must-have for any new Palm Pre owner. Sure, the pamphlet that comes with the Palm Pre is adequate for getting you started and on your way, but there are so many figurative nooks and crannies in the operation of the Palm Pre that you won't even know about unless you've happened across them by accident or you've read this book.

I've owned a Palm Pre since the first week it was available. A long-time user of older Palm smartphones such as the Treo line and Centro, I enthusiastically and anxiously followed the the technology news about the forthcoming Pre. The concept of Synergy -- the Pre's software mechanism for collecting data from various online sources such as GMail and Facebook into centralized databases on the phone -- was incredibly appealing and frightening at the same time. I often wondered if Palm really could pull it off or if the Pre was going to be Palm's dying gasp and I would be left to the mediocrity of Windows Mobile or Blackberry or the cult of conformation using Apple's iPhone.

Thankfully, my experience with the Pre has given me hope. Being an early adopter, I've had my shares of bumps along the way, but generally, the Pre is an awesome device. Now that the Palm App Catalog is filling up with new, exciting applications and there's talk of more operating system updates on the horizon, I'm really enjoying myself with the Pre.

Let's get back to the book. Ed Baig's book seems fairly typical for a "Missing Manual" book. It is fairly short, witty, funny, and packed full of valuable information interspersed with plenty of callouts to "tips" and "notes" along the way.

The book is extremely easy to read and shouldn't intimidate those who are nowhere nearly as geeky as me. My daughter was easily digesting the book before I started reading it she's nine years old.

Had I had this book the first week I owned a Pre, it would have saved me some frustration figuring out the best way to get my contacts and calendar data onto the Pre.

Palm Pre, The Missing Manual is available directly from O'Reilly and Associates and probably from any of your favorite online booksellers. The MSRP is $24.99. $24.99 seems a bit much for this book, even if you're probably never going to pay full price. For what you get, I would think $10 less would be more reasonable.

Politics Fozzolog: I.O.U.S.A., a must-watch film

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 05:10:56 +0000

I finally got around to watching the documentary film I.O.U.S.A., which I rented from NetFlix. Wow. I recommend anybody and everybody in the U.S.A. watch this film. If you’re not up to renting it or buying it, watch the 30-minute byte-size version available on YouTube.

David Walker, former Comptroller General of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), now President of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, takes on the seemingly insurmountable task of explaining our national debt and does so successfully with finesse.

I learned a lot from this film. I mean, because I’ve been pretty well plugged-in, politically, I knew our national debt was a huge problem, that the federal government’s budget deficits were only making things worse and federal programs like Social Security and Medicare only exacerbate the problem. What I didn’t know was that our trade deficit is so huge, the largest in the world, in fact.

Before watching I.O.U.S.A., President George W. Bush was not my favorite president. While he did a good job responding to the terror attacks in 2001 and going after terrorists where they operate in the Middle East, he and his administration seemed to ignore problems here at home, like the growing problem of illegal immigration and adding more liabilities to Medicare with the Part D prescription drug coverage. Overall, I think he was a mediocre president.

After watching I.O.U.S.A., I’m beginning to wonder if George W. Bush didn’t commit some kind of treason against this country by letting all things economic get so out of hand under his watch!

After watching I.O.U.S.A., I’ve developed an increased respect for the Clinton administration for how they handled economic matters by getting the federal budget under control for a couple of years. Granted, things were easier then with no War On Terror to fund and what-not.

So, what about our present president? Well, he sucks too! Maybe worse than Bush!

Walker is dead on by identifying the four big economic problems facing America:

Federal budget deficit
Savings deficit
Trade deficit

And finally,

Leadership deficit

For example, the Democrats’ healthcare reform proposal does not help our debt situation. The government’s own policy analysts show that it too will only add an increasingly large liability to an already fast-growing balance we owe. Yes, we need reform, but this ain’t what the proverbial doctor ordered.

One big chunk of our trade deficit is our dependence on foreign oil. Our president’s solution is to pull new, alternative energy solutions out of his butt to replace all energy infrastructure. You know, that might be a fine solution if we were already in a good economic situation, where we had economic surpluses to rely on as we went through the painful process of converting to a scientifically, environmentally superior form of energy generation, but in the state we’re in right now, it simply does not make sense.

What does make sense is for the U.S. to start getting more energy production from its own resources. We have lots of it. Oil. Coal. Natural gas. We’ve got gazillions of tons of it, literally, but we’re staying away from it, on principle, I guess.

Leadership deficit! We need leaders that will do what’s right regardless of what’s popular or what their party, platform, or agenda might be. President Obama wants to usher the U.S. into a new era of green-ness, environmentalism, ecological awareness, etc. etc. He needs to realize we’re never going to be able to do that unless we address our vast economic imbalance represented by our debt and unfunded liabilities.

What our government aims to do now is a classic example of cart before horse.

Here’s another tough pill I had to swallow watching I.O.U.S.A.: We probably will need to raise taxes to get out of this mess. But our legislators need to reduce the overall size of government at the same time. We’ll need to raise taxes and reduce spending.

That trade deficit thing just keeps bothering me. I want to know more about why the United States doesn’t produce much anymore. Common sense tells me it’s because other nations can produce cheaper than we can. Why? Is it high labor costs? Is it restrictive regulation?

Politics Fozzolog: Why your senator is out of touch

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 04:40:45 +0000

At the state capitol rally on Saturday 9/12, a young woman (Nicole Condie, I think her name was) was an unscheduled speaker. She said she had interned for Orrin Hatch and, as an intern, was responsible for handling incoming mail. She said she would prepare responses to letters from concerned constituents and sign them with an autopen. She said she assumed the senator’s staff would at least collect statistics on what issues his constituents were writing in about and how they felt. However, she said, no statistics were being collected at all. She said there were always protests happening near the senate offices, but the senators never heard or saw them and had private entrances to the building that allowed them to come and go without any exposure to these protests.

Is it really any wonder why our senators seem to be off in their own little world?

Politics Fozzolog: My, oh my, how times have changed.

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:57:43 +0000

I’ve been reading Free To Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman. This book was written in 1979-1980 and it talks about many of the important political and economic issues of that time. Friedman explains things so well and his points are still very relevant. However, as I was reading the chapter “What’s Wrong with Our Schools?” something jumped out at me. See if you can pick it out. I’ll add emphasis it to give you a hint.

When we first started writing about higher education, we had a good deal of sympathy for the [justification that public tax subsidies for state schools was an investment in the future productivity of members of society]. We no longer do. In the interim, we have tried to induce the people who make this argument to be specific about the alleged social benefits. The answer is almost always simply bad economics. We are told that the nation benefits by having more highly skilled and trained people, that investment in providing such skills is essential for economic growth, that more trained people raise the productivity of the rest of us. These statements are correct. But none is a valid reason for subsidizing higher education. Each statement would be equally correct if made about physical capital (i.e. machines, factory buildings, etc.) yet hardly anyone would conclude that tax money should be used to subsidize the capital investment of General Motors or General Electric. If higher education improves the economic productivity of individuals, they can capture that improvement through higher earnings, so they have a private incentive to get the training. Adam Smith’s invisible hand makes their private interest serve the social interest. It is against the social interest to change their private interest by subsidizing schooling. The extra students — the ones who will only go to college if it is subsidized — are precisely the ones who judge that the benefits they receive are less than the costs. Otherwise they would be willing to pay the costs themselves.

Wow. Hardly anyone, indeed. Yet, it has happened in the last year and some would argue it was unavoidable because no one in any administrative position (i.e. George W. Bush, John McCain, or Barack Obama) has/had the courage and wisdom to hold back and not “save” failing companies.

General Fozzolog: Book Review: Your Body

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:29:30 +0000

Your Body: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald

My rating: 4 of 5 stars I was hanging out on Facebook one day and O'Reilly Media sent out a status message saying they needed a few people to review a new book Your Body The Missing Manual (go here for O'Reilly's catalog page for the book). I responded and was contacted by an O'Reilly representative who got my shipping information.

Within a couple of days, I received a box. Inside was a stinky (stinky because of the ink and paper they used) book with a green cover.

I didn't really know what to expect. I had planned to compare this to some of the larger encyclopedia-like books that my kids had that were packed with fancy color pictures and diagrams for various aspects of the body. This book isn't like those at all. It is more exposition and less illustration, although there are some very good illustrations in the book. They're just relatively simple compared to other books.

The writing style is very interesting. It is not clinical at all and is littered with sarcastic and sardonic quips. The first chapter -- about your skin -- starts off, in the very first paragraph, talking about robbing a bank wearing a ski mask. When the author wrote about techniques for removing fingerprints to avoid leaving evidence of your involvement at a crime scene, I was beginning to wonder if there was an underlying, hidden agenda in the book.

The text is packed with fascinating callouts that fit in contextually throughout the book. This lets the author pack each chapter with numerous bits of tangential information.

All in all, however, the book is somewhat light on the coverage. This isn't a tell-all, but it is a tell-a-lot. And what it does tell, it tells well. There is a lot of information about latest research and findings. For example, I learned that stretching (in the chapter on muscles) isn't the recommended activity before an aerobic/cardiovascular workout, but that 5-10 minutes of light warm up activity is better.

I learned a lot from this book I didn't know before so I definitely feel more knowledgeable as a result of reading it.

While the other body atlas-type books I've seen seem to be targeted at pretty much all ages, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone under the age of 16. The reason I would not recommend this book to younger readers is because Chapter 10, the chapter on sex and reproduction, ventured a bit too far out of my comfort zone into sociological and cultural aspects of sexuality than I would ever feel comfortable letting younger kids read. I'm pretty sure my 10-year old does not needs to learn about "Arousal and the Art of Foreplay," "Reaching The Big O," or how to "Engage in mutual exploration."

So, all in all, a good book. It's light, not-very-clinical reading that's bound to teach you several things you didn't already know. You can buy it direct from O'Reilly or from everyone's favorite online bookseller: Amazon.com for $25 or less.

View all my reviews >>

Tech Fozzolog: YoManSports.com: What I'm doing these days

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:22:37 +0000

I think I have finally, really arrived.

I’ve been doing contract work for a company in Provo that is launching a new website called YoManSports.com, which is in beta right now. At first glance, the site may appear to be a “YouTube for sports,” but it so much more than that. The concept is centered around video sharing, but includes familiar social networking elements you’d find on sites like Facebook or MySpace. In addition, there are several applications within the site that are sports-related — things like competition bracketing, scorecards, and groups. Perhaps the coolest feature that rounds out the list is the broadcast feature. This lets a person go to a sporting event with a video camera, even something as simple as a USB webcam, and set up a live web broadcast that anyone with a web browser can watch. The person managing the broadcast can mix prerecorded video, pictures, and even live video from other users into the broadcast. There’s even a news ticker for embedding clickable URL links into the broadcast. It’s pretty cool stuff.

Now, I said at the beginning of this post that I have arrived because we’ve been asked by management to blog regularly about the site and what we’re doing with it as part of our marketing plan. So, yeah, it’s cool to be able to do this and not be wasting my time at work.

My job has been designing and building the server architecture that sits behind the scenes and makes it all work. I was brought in late 2008 when the site was pretty much in a prototype stage. All the code was running on a single server and it really wasn’t designed to scale beyond that one server. So, one of the first things I did was figured out what we’d need to do split things like streaming video, web services, and database services onto their own dedicated servers.

After that, I went through and figured out how we were going to accomodate loads higher than we could with individual servers. In a nutshell: load balancing. That has now been implemented.

Another thing I’ve had a big hand in is offloaded encoding and conversion. The developers had created routines to do all the video encoding in PHP on the frontend of the website. Of course, doing video encoding on the same server Apache is running on can be detrimental to the experience of other website users. I developed a distributed encoding system that handles all the video conversion and encoding on a separate set of servers. I did it with Perl, of course.

I’m pleased with the technology being used on the site. I’m not a fan of PHP, but it’s doing the job well for frontend development. We’re making use of a lot of open source technology in dealing with videos. For example, all our transcoding is being done with the formidable FFMPEG software along with libraries like x264 and FAAC.

We’re leveraging Flash pretty heavily pretty heavily to make the site work so it’s fortunate that Flash support has nearly ceased being a problem for cross-platform compatibility. YoManSports.com works almost seamlessly across Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

Watch this space for more info to come.

Politics Fozzolog: Book Review: Glenn Beck's "Common Sense"

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 23:05:52 +0000

Glenn Beck's Common Sense: The Evolution of Thomas Paine's Revolution by Glenn Beck

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Anyone who knows me or has read some of my previous reviews probably knows that I'm one of Glenn Beck's biggest fans, so it will come as little surprise that I now have 4 copies of this book and plan to distribute it to family and friends.

As with his previous non-fiction work, An Inconvenient Book Real Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems, this book is, for the most part, a repackaging of things Glenn says every day on his television and radio shows. It discusses the corruption in government, the loyalty to special interests among those in congress, the amassing of power by the executive branch, and the cancer that is the Progressive movement.

That being said, this is definitely a book you can give to your friends who aren't necessarily one of Glenn's biggest fans. And, encourage them to pass it on when they're done. Sign your name on the inside cover and include the date your read it and encourage others to do the same. This book is a rallying cry to all those who feel their voice is held in contempt or just plain ignored by the political class in America.

I would like to share one of my favorite parts of this book. It is very near to the end of the book (before the Thomas Paine section starts) and addresses religion in a democracy.

So why is religion so important to the proper functioning of a democracy? Well, once again, our Founding Fathers had the answer. In a letter to the president of Yale University, Benjamin Franklin once wrote:

Here is my creed: I believe in one God, the Creator of the universe. That he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is in doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion.

It wasn't about any one particular creed, dogma, or church, but rather about all religions that inspired men to selflessness, virtue. and godliness. Our Founders understood the thing that we try so hard to forget today: there is far more than unites us than divides us. Virtue, honesty, and character aren't the purview of any particular congregation; they can be found in any church that has God as its foundation. We have forgotten this lesson and instead of using religion as our anchor, we use it to shame or blame. To many in this country, those who attend church regularly aren't pillars of their community, they're freaks or extremists.

But that mind-set can be changed by setting an example of tolerance and unparalleled acceptance toward each other. Let's stop using our religious symbols to score political points. Are we that insecure in our own faith that the religious symbols or public prayers of a different religion cannot be welcomed with open arms? As Thomas Jefferson once said:

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homeage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear... Do not be frightened from this inquiry from any fear of its consequences. If it ends in the belief there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise...

Religions and their followers must stop turning on each other. We are a land founded through divine Providence, a land where, as James Madison said, the "spirit of liberty and patriotism animates all degrees and denominations of men."

Very well said, Glenn.

View all my reviews.

Tech Fozzolog: Life with my Palm Pre (Part 1)

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:28:32 +0000

I’ve had my Palm Pre for about five days now and I’m really starting to like it. That’s not to say the last five days haven’t been frustrating and disappointing, but I’ve managed to find acceptable solutions for most of my problems. The experience has turned out a lot better than the last time I tried switching platforms.

The Pre is definitely a 1.0 release so if you’re a techy user like me, you’ll find lots of things to gripe about, but there’s still a lot of promise in the platform. The operating system itself is at version 1.0.2 so it’s really pretty new.

Issues

I’ll start with some of the issues I’ve run into.

PIM data

If you’re a PalmOS user migrating to the Palm Pre, you’re likely to run into some of the same issues I did. First off, when I asked the Sprint sales dude (who owned a Pre and had owned a Centro prior to that) if he could transfer my data to the Pre, he said, “Sure!” and then proceeded to try to get the data off my Centro. A few minutes later, he told me he could not because he just couldn’t get any of the data to transfer over the IR port.

That’s okay, a little reading on Palm’s site told me what I needed to know. I had to sync the Centro “one last time” using the latest and greatest Palm Desktop for Windows (which I installed specifically for this task) and then download and run Palm’s Data Transfer Assistant program for Windows (which is a free download from the support area of Palm’s website.)

This allegedly transferred my address book, calendar, tasks, and notes/memos to my online Palm Profile where the Pre would automatically find them and install them. Within a few minutes, the address book on the Pre was populated with names and contact information that were on my Centro. Yay. The notes seemed to transfer okay too. But when I went into the Calendar application on the Pre, my day was blank. None of the events I had scheduled for the day were visible.

Retracing my steps, I wondered if maybe I hadn’t selected the calendar data to be transferred. In retrospect, Palm doesn’t let you choose which data you want transferred, but the DTA application has icons for each of the types of data (Calendar, Contacts, etc.) and when you click on those icons, they illuminate as if they’re selected. As a result, a user (me) might think clicking the icons somehow activates that stream of data to be transferred to the Palm Profile. So, I went back into the DTA and “selected” only the Calendar data and transferred it again.

Nothing ever showed up in my view of my day’s events on the Pre. Fiddling, I changed to the Week View. That’s when I saw confirmation that the data I had transferred using the DTA did get transferred… twice. In the Week View, I saw colored bars indicating appointments and events (in duplicate). But when I switched to the Day View, I saw nothing. Bleh.

It would be super neat if the Palm Profile was tied to Google Calendar-like web application so you could have a Palm Desktop type app on the Web, but, no, Palm doesn’t do that. There is a web-based portal that let’s you log into your Palm Profile, but it doesn’t let you do much at all except remotely delete all the data on your phone (very handy if your Pre gets stolen and you want to keep your personal information out of the hands of the thief).

So, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Looking at the Palm support forums, it was clear this wasn’t a unique problem to me. Lots of people were having this problem. The seemed to be that people should use Google’s Calendar app as the online storage location of Calendar data. So, I figured out how to export my PalmOS Calendar data and then import it into my Google Calendar. That worked. Now I had THREE copies of every event showing up as colored rectangles in my Week View, but at least now I had actual events in the Day View.

I tried remotely deleting the Pre’s data from the Palm Profile page, but when it booted back up, it asked me for my Palm Profile username and password and then proceeded to load up the duplicate calendar entries again. Buried in the forums, I found information that described how to erase the data in the Palm Profile (Disable backups on the Pre and then reset it.). Then I proceeded to set up the freshly reset Pre to use only Google as my online repository of Calendar data. That worked well.

In the course of all this, of course, I deleted my address book as my contacts data was stored in my Palm Profile. The Pre grabbed my contacts from Facebook and the handful I had stored already in Google Mail’s address book, but I have hundreds of contacts from my Centro that I needed to figure out how to get into Google, I guess. Google appears to only let you import from an CSV file generated from Microsoft Outlook (bleh). I can generate a CSV file, but I don’t know what one generated from Microsoft Outlook looks like, so I’ll need to do some research on that before I do it. So, for now, I’m doing without a fully-stocked address book.

E-mail

The Pre has a pretty decent e-mail client built-in, but I had problems. Again, if you’re using Google Mail as your only e-mail account, the Pre should work with no problems at all. I set up Google Mail, but I have four other generic IMAP mailboxes I wanted to check with the Pre as well.

My first problem was with encryption.

One of the IMAP sites I wanted to check mail with has CA-signed certificates in place for its encrypted IMAP traffic. This means they have purchased a authenticated certificate from a company like Verisign or Comodo. That seemed to work okay.

The other two sites I wanted to check mail with have self-signed certificates. I trust them because I set up the self-signed certificates myself. Where most modern desktop e-mail applications would raise an alert like, “Hey, we can’t vouch for the authenticity of this encryption certificate. Do you want to trust it or what?” the Pre just says, “SSL error Check your time and date.”

I hope this is something they fix in the next update of the OS because the way it works now is just bone-headed.

I discovered, yesterday, there is a manual workaround. You can grab the public certificate file off the server and copy it to the Pre via USB. Then, go into Device Info and make your way to a menu item labeled “Certificate Manager”. There, you can add a certificate, select the certificate file you added to the Pre via USB, and specify that you want to trust this certificate.

I am still having trouble sending e-mail through the two sites I manage. What’s really frustrating about this is that once you try to send e-mail, and it can’t go through, the Pre just keeps telling you there was an error sending that message. Deleting the offending message from the Outbox doesn’t stop the repeating alerts. The only way I’ve been able to stop it from notifying me about the problem is to remove the e-mail account and add it again. Stupid!

More to come. Sleep calls me.

Politics Fozzolog: Best. Glenn Beck. Ever.

Thu, 28 May 2009 07:59:37 +0000

I just watched Wednesday’s (5/27) Glenn Beck TV show on Fox News that was recorded on my DVR and I have to say it was spectacular! Part of the reason it was so great was because he had Thomas Sowell on and Wayne Allen Root who both had really profound things to say.

Checking YouTube, it looks like Glenn has plenty of friends willing to encode and upload. Here’s a smattering of online clips to choose from:

The One Thing - Great analysis on the auto industry
Thomas Sowell
The One Thing - “Failure is good for the soul”
Wayne Allen Root and Joshua Cooper Ramo Part 1
Wayne Allen Root and Joshua Cooper Ramo Part 2
Joshua Cooper Ramo - Is China in a position now that the US was after WW1?

Tech Fozzolog: Wanted: a wireless digital photo frame with a few bells and whistles

Mon, 25 May 2009 08:34:19 +0000

When digital photo frames first became available, I bought one for my parents. It still sits in their living room and when you turn it on, it displays a slideshow of the same pictures I originally loaded onto the CompactFlash card that is plugged into the frame.

Now that wireless digital photo frames are becoming the “next big thing,” I’m interested in getting one for myself, but I’m not sure any of the models available satisfy my (modest) requirements.

It seems these wireless frames mostly work by having some kind of stupid e-mail address assigned to the frame. You send an e-mail message with a picture file attached and, within a few minutes, more or less, the picture shows up on your digital photo frame.

This seems lame to me. Here’s what I want:

The digital photo frame should be able to connect to a local file server via SMB/CIFS, HTTP or FTP and display all images hosted at a specific location. For example: ftp://myfileserver/pictures/.
The digital photo frame should run an HTTP server so I don’t have to use the on-board buttons or the soon-to-be-lost miniature infrared remote control to set it up. Every VoIP telephone, print server, and a gazillion other network devices seem to all have an HTTP configuration interface, so why not a wireless digital photo frame?

Am I asking too much?

General Fozzolog: Book Review: Lone Survivor

Sun, 10 May 2009 01:15:20 +0000

Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 by Marcus Luttrell

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I'd heard Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell's story in bits and pieces on the radio and on Glenn Beck's TV shows, but I still had no idea how good it would be. This is yet-another book penned with the help of a professional author, but they really managed to leave the book feeling like it was straight out of Marcus's mouth.

The basic premise of this book is that Marcus Luttrell was a member of a Navy SEAL team -- an elite military force -- stationed in Afghanistan in 2005 and sent on a mission to spy on a remote village looking for a high-value military target and, if seen, take him out. The mission was compromised and, after a prolonged firefight with Taliban fighters, Marcus was the only one of his small 4-man team left alive. A helicopter full of SEALs sent to rescue Marcus and his fellow SEALs was attacked by the Taliban as well making this battle the single most-deadly fight in Navy SEAL history.

Marcus was listed as Missing In Action for several days as his family in Texas impatiently waited for news from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Marcus ran, fell, and crawled seven miles while being tracked by Taliban fighters and made his way to a small village where, surprisingly, he was cared for.

There's an immense amount of backstory about the preparation the typical Navy SEAL has to go through to get to be a SEAL. At first, I wasn't sure why this was necessary, but it makes sense later in the story when you consider what kind of people these soldiers were, what they had to endure in their training, and what their experiences had been prior to fighting America's enemies.

Not only did I learn a heck of a lot about Navy SEALs, I also learned a lot about the terrain, culture, and politics in rural Afghanistan. Marcus spends a good amount of time writing about ROE (Rules Of Engagement), the news media, and other issues soldiers have to take into consideration when dealing with enemies (and potential enemies) in battle. It was very eye-opening.

View all my reviews.

Politics Fozzolog: Tax Day Tea Parties

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 06:56:32 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything to the Fozzolog and there are some good reasons for that: I’ve pretty much withdrawn from most of my online habits and extracurricular activities to focus on much needed areas of my life, notably my marriage, my family, my health, and my spirituality. My hope is that once I get these all tuned up, I can consider returning to some of my favorite pastimes.

With that being said, I don’t think I can let April 15 pass without at least showing up at a Tax Day Tea Party to show my support for the cause. So, if you’re at the party in downtown Salt Lake City beginning at noon, you may see me there.

Now, let me do my part to dispel some myths about these tea parties.

These tea parties are not about President Obama

While President Obama’s administration is doing almost everything wrong with regards to the economy, it would be wrong to say that people are protesting because of Obama. The problem is much larger than Barack Obama. It is the state of the federal government in general.

These tea parties are not about taxes

They’re not specifically about taxes. While the Obama administration will undoubtedly raise taxes on all of us one way or another to fund all their spending, the Tax Day Tea Parties are more about the federal government’s out of control spending, saddling the country with ridiculous amounts of debt, not allowing poorly managed companies to fail (and subsequently file for bankruptcy), and other issues.

It’s really about not listening to the people and not using common sense

Both major political parties have been actively engaged in anything and everything to gain political power at the expense of any sensible governing principles. You know, the kind espoused by the founders of our great country like “the government should not go into debt more than can be paid off in one generation.” These Tax Day Tea Parties on April 15 are the official shot across the federal government’s bow to send a message that “you work for us, remember?!” and “It’s time to get back to basics!”

Politics Fozzolog: Book Review: "Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One" by Thomas Sowell

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 06:15:40 +0000

Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One by Thomas Sowell

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
While on vacation in southern California, I hit a Barnes & Noble in Costa Mesa to look for something to read and something for my wife's birthday. I was looking for a book I'd read about like New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, but the store I was at seemed chock-full of books about President Barack Obama, Global Warming, what was wrong with the Republican Party, and not much of anything that would interest a conservative like me. I did find, however, this book: Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One.

There was one small problem. My B&N discount card membership had expired one month prior. I'd only used it make one book purchase in that entire year and, coincidentally, it was at that same store in Costa Mesa. I wasn't about to blow more money on their stupid discount plan and I wasn't going to spend $35 on "Applied Economics". I bought a different book instead and got something for my wife's birthday and went on my way.

When I returned home, I ordered Applied Economics Thinking Beyond Stage One from Amazon along with some other books, all at much more reasonable prices. I decided to read this one first.

Thomas Sowell is a very interesting guy. He's scholar in residence at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and has taught economics at Cornell, UCLA, Amherst and other schools. He's written several books on economics. This book is the revised (and enlarged) edition and aims to help members of the general public understand complex economic systems.

Shooting for the general public is a lofty goal. I don't think Sowell quite made it. It was hard for me to absorb some of this material and I think I've been exposed to more economics material than the average member of the general public. I think this is a testament to how difficult of a task Sowell had taken on rather than his inability to achieve his goal.

The book is divided into eight chapters, each tackling an issue from the standpoint of pure economics. The first chapter, "Politics versus Economics," serves as a primer for the rest of the book and explains the "stage one" concept in the subtitle. Sowell states that most politicians (and many regular people, for that matter) fail to consider (or admit knowledge of) the long-term effects of economic policies (or any policies, for that matter.) This is, as Sowell puts it, "stage one thinking."

Sowell's intention in this book is to help the reader understand the longer-term effects of legislation and policy decisions.

In the first chapter, Sowell explains:

Laws and policies that will produce politically beneficial effects before the next election are usually preferred to policies that will produce even better results some time after the next election. Indeed, policies that will produce good results before the next election may be preferred even if they can be expected to produce bad results afterward.

As an example, a few paragraphs later:

... it is an open question whether drug prevention programs actually prevent or even reduce drug usage, whether public interest law firms actually benefit the public, or whether gun control laws actually control guns.

Later, he examines the consequences of a series of wage and price controls instituted in the 1970s by the Nixon administration and upheld or carried further by the Ford and Carter administrations. What seemed like a good idea at the time resulted in terrible economic consequences in the long run.

Sowell points out that many politicians just feel an overwhelming need to "do something" whenever there is a crisis at hand.

Doing something almost always seems like such a good idea, to those who do not look beyond stage one, that they see no need to look back at history or to apply economics. The alternative to a "do something" approach is not to have the government always do absolutely nothing but,rather, to recognize that governments can only do something specific-- and that these specifics must be assessed in terms of their specific erffects, both immediate and long-term, as well as the general effects of extended experimentation.

The second chapter, "Free and unfree labor" begins by talking about the history of slavery. It was interesting reading a book by one of the handful of famous black people in the field of economics discussing the pros and cons of various types of slavery. Sowell actually points out that slaves in the southern United States prior to the U.S. Civil War were treated very well compared to other forced labor situations throughout history.

This chapter also touches on crime as an occuptation, and indentured servitude.

The third chapter dives into the economics of medical care. It's no surprise that Sowell makes a strong case against government-subsidized healthcare (i.e. "Universal health care"). His most pronounced argument is simply that government healthcare is another way for saying "price controls" and he already discussed the disastrous effects such controls have on a market in the first chapter. He shows these effects are obvious when you look at government health care systems in Great Britain, Canada, and other countries that offer such programs.

He also discusses the economics of malpractice insurance, pharmaceutical drugs, drug advertising, and finally an extremely enlightening treatment on organ transplants and how much sense it makes to allow a legal market for organs for organ transplantation. That was really eye opening.

Chapter Four discusses the economics of housing and illustrates how government action and regulation affects pricing. He also discusses rent control, creative financing programs, segregation in housing, and other housing issues.

Chapter Five is titled "Risky Business" and is generally about the economics of insurance, but it goes beyond just the business of insurance. Most people, and certainly some politicians, don't consider risk issues when considering an issue.

One of my favorite sections of this chapter discusses how the family was traditionally the main risk reduction instutition in people's lives. This makes perfect sense when you consider how important family honor was, say, 2-300 years ago.

...the family-- the oldest insurer of all -- cautions its members, both when they are growing up and one specific occasions afterward, against various kinds of risky behavior. When families had the burden of taking care of an unwed daughter's baby, there was more chaperoning, screening of her associates, and moral stigma attached to unwed motherhood. All these things declined or disappeared after mean of these costs were shifted to government agencies.

Sowell attacks the issues of risk and insurance from a number of surprising and enlightening angles.

In Chapter Six, Sowell takes on immigration. Expecting him to jump right into the overwhelming costs to the system the illegal immigrant issue burdens our government, I was a little taken back when I a rather comprehensive look at immigration across history. He discusses cultural implications, income implications, health implications, legal and illegal immigration, economic benefits and costs to immigrants and the society they are immigrating to. It is, perhaps, the most unbiased and clearly focused treatment on immigration I've ever read.

In his conclusions, he does touch on some points specific to the hot issues in the US illegal immigration debate. For example, in comparing import of products versus import of labor:

When Americans buy a Toyota from Japan, the Toyota does not demand that the United States accomodate the Japanese language or that Americans adjust themselves to Japanese customs in their own country, much less introduce diseases into the American population. Moreover, Toyotas do not give birth to little Toyotas that can grow up with the problematic attitudes of some second generation immigrants.

Chapter seven is about discrimination. It begins by educating the reader on the distinct differences between bias, prejudice, and discrimination. Sowell points out that bias, prejudice, and discrimination are not "bad" by themselves. There are circumstances, history, and more criteria to consider before we can judge that they are bad.

From there, Sowell discusses anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action regulations and legislation, and the pros and cons (mostly cons) of each. One statement from the summary section reads:

...those who fail to qualify for particular benefits are often said to be denied "access" or "opportunity," when in fact they may have had as much access or opportunity as anyone else, but simply did not have the developed capabilities required...
...a mental test may be characterized as "culturally biased" if one group scores higher than another, as if it is impossible for different groups to have different interest, experience, upbringing, education, or other factors that would lead to a real difference being registered, rather than a biased assessment being made.

Chapter eight discusses the economic development of nations. This chapter discusses the misnomers of "developing nations," the effects of foreign aid, the importance of formal property rights, the geographic issues related to economies as well as bunch of other implications.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, Sowell's book is pretty heady content, but I found it refreshing as it is so clear cut. All of his statements came down on the side of common sense. Isn't that what we all wish our policy makers employed more of?

View all my reviews.

Politics Fozzolog: The cause of depressions - an echo from 46 years ago

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:50:37 +0000

I am reading “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” by Ayn Rand. It is a collection of essays by Rand and other academics from the school of Objectism. One essay, “Common Fallacies About Capitalsm,” written in 1963 by Nathaniel Branden, grabbed my attention in a particularly intense manner.

After typing for quite some time, I would like to present an excerpt from this essay: a section titled “Depression”. Boldface emphasis has been added by me.

Question: Are periodic depressions inevitable in a system of Laissez-Faire Capitalism?

It is characteristic of the enemies of capitalism that they denounce it for evils which are, in fact, the result not of capitalism but of statism: evils which result from and are made possible only by government intervention into the economy.

I have discussed a flagrant example of this policy: the charge that capitalism leads to the establishment of coercive monopolies. The most notorious instance of this policy is the claim that capitalism, by its nature, inevitably leads to periodic depressions.

Statists repeatedly assert that depressions (the phenomenon of the so-called business cycle of “boom and bust”) are inherent in laissez-faire, and that the great rash of 1929 was the final proof of the failure of an unregulated, free-market economy. What is the truth of the matter?

A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade; it is characterized by a sharp drop in productive output, in investment, and in the value of capital assets (plants, machinery, etc.). Normal business fluctuations, or a temporary decline in the rate of industrial expansion, do not constitute a depression. A depression is a nation-wide contraction of business activity—and a general decline in the value of capital assets—of major proportions.

There is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event. The popular explanations of depression as caused by “over-production,” “under-consumption,” monopolies, labor-saving decides, maldistribution, excessive accumulations of wealth, etc., have been exploded as fallacies many times.

Readjustments of economic activity, shifts of capital and labor from one industry to another, due to changing conditions, occur constantly under capitalism. This is entailed in the process of motion, growth, and progress that characterizes capitalism. But there always exists the possibility of profitable endeavor in one field or another, there is always the need and demand for goods, and all that can change is the kind of goods it becomes most profitable to produce.

In any one industry, it is possible for supply to exceed demand, in the context of all the other existing demands. In such a case, there is a drop in prices, in profitableness, in investment, and in employment in that particular industry; capital and labor tend to flow elsewhere, seeking more rewarding uses. Such an industry undergoes a period of stagnation as a result of unjustified, that is, uneconomic, unprofitable, unproductive investment.

In a free economy that functions on a gold standard, such unproductive investment is severely limited; unjustified speculation does not rise, unchecked, until it engulfs an entire nation. In a free economy, the supply of money and credit needed to finance business ventures is determined by objective economic factors. it is the banking system that acts as the guardian of economic stability. The principles governing money supply operate to forbid large-scale unjustified investment.

Most businesses finance their undertakings, at least in part, by means of bank loans. Banks function as an investment clearing house, investing the savings of their customers in those enterprises which promise to be most successful. Banks do not have unlimited funds to loan; they are limited in the credit they can extend by the amount of their gold reserves. In order to remain successful, to make profits and thus attract the savings of investors, banks much make their loans judiciously: they must seek out those ventures which they judge to be most sound and potentially profitable.

If, in a period of increasing speculation, banks are confronted with an inordinate number of requests for loans, then, in response to the shrinking availability of money, they (a) raise their interest rates, and (b) scrutinize more severely the ventures for which loans are requested setting more exacting standards of what constitutes a justifiable investment. As a consequence, funds are more difficult to obtain, and there is a temporary curtailment and contraction of business investment. Businessmen are often unable to borrow the funds they desire and have to reduce plans for expansion. The purchase of common stocks, which reflects the investors’ estimates of the future earnings of companies is similarly curtailed; overvalued stocks fall in price. businesses engaged in credit, are obliged to close their doors; a further waste of productive factors is stopped and economic errors are liquidated.

At worst, the economy may experience a mild recession, i.e. a slight general decline in investment and production. In an unregulated economy, readjustments occur quite swiftly, and then production and investment begin to rise again. The temporary recession is not harmful but beneficial; it represents an economic system in the process of correcting its errors, of curtailing disease and returning to health.

The impact of such a recession may be significantly felt in a few industries, but it does not wreck an entire economy. A nation-wide depression, such as occurred in the United States in the thirties, would not have been possible in a fully free society. It was made possible only by government intervention in the economy—more specifically, by government manipulation of the money supply.

The government’s policy consisted, in essence, of anesthetizing the regulators, inherent in a free banking system, that prevent runaway speculation and consequent economic collapse.

All government intervention in the economy is based on the belief that economic laws need not operate, that principles of cause and effect can be suspended, that everything in existence is “flexible” and “malleable,” except a bureaucrat’s whim, which is omnipotent; reality, logic, and economics much not be allowed to get in the way.

This was the implicit premise that led to the establishment, in 1913, of the Federal Reserve System—an institution with control (through complex and often indirect means) over the individual banks throughout the country. The Federal Reserve undertook to free individual banks from the “limitations” imposed on them by the amount of their own individual reserves, to free them from laws of the market—and to arrogate to government officials the right to decide how much credit they wished to make available at what times.

A “cheap money” policy was the guiding idea and goal of these officials. Banks were no longer to be limited in making loans by the amount of their gold reserves. Interest rates were no longer to rise in response to increasing speculation and increasing demands for funds. Credit was to remain readily available—until and unless the Federal Reserve decided otherwise.

The government argued that by taking control of money and credit out of the hands of private bankers, and by contracting or expanding credit at will, guided by considerations other than those influencing the “selfish” bankers, it could—in conjunction with the other interventionist policies—so control investment as to guarantee a state of virtually constant prosperity. Many bureaucrats believed that the government could keep the economy in a state of unending boom.

To borrow an invaluable metaphor from Alan Greenspan: if, under laissez-faire, the banking system and the principles controlling the availability of funds act as a fuse that prevents a blowout in the economy—then the government, through the Federal Reserve System, put a penny in the fuse-box. The result was the explosion known as the Crash of 1929.

Throughout most of the 1920’s, the government compelled banks to keep interest rates artificially and uneconomically low. As a consequence, money was poured into every sort of speculative venture. By 1928, the warning signals of danger were deeply apparent: unjustified investment was rampant and stocks were increasingly overvalued. The government chose to ignore these danger signals.

A free banking system would have been compelled, by economic necessity, to put the brakes on this process of runaway speculation. credit and investment, in such a case, would be drastically curtailed; the banks which made unprofitable investments, the enterprises which proved unproductive, and those who dealt with them, would suffer—but that would be all; the country as a whole would not be dragged own. However, the “anarchy” of a free banking system had been abandoned—in favor of “enlightened” government planning.

The boom and the wild speculation—which had preceded every major depression—were allowed to rise unchecked, involving, in a widening network of malinvestments and miscalculations, the entire economic structure of the nation. People were investing in virtually everything and making fortunes overnight—on paper. Profits were calculated on hysterically exaggerated appraisals of the future earnings of companies. Credit was extended with promiscuous abandon, on the premise that somehow the goods would be there to back it up. It was like the policy of a man who passes out rubber checks, counting on the hope that he will somehow find a ay to obtain the necessary money and to deposit it in the bank before anyone presents his checks for collection.

But A is A—and reality is not infinitely elastic. In 1929, the country’s economic and financial structure had become impossibly precarious. By the time the government finally and frantically raised the interest rates, it was too late. It is doubtful whether anyone can state with certainty what events first set off the panic—and it does not matter: the crash had become inevitable; any number of events could have pulled the trigger. But when the news of the first bank and commercial failures began to spread, uncertainty spread across the country in widening waves of terror. People began to sell their stocks, hoping to get out of the market with their gains, or to obtain the money they suddenly needed to pay bank loans that were being called in—and other people, seeing this, apprehensively began to sell their stocks—and, virtually overnight, an avalanche hurled the stock market downward, prices collapsed, securities became worthless, loans were called in, many of which could not be paid, the value of capital assets plummeted sickeningly, fortunes were wiped out, and, by 1932, business activity had come almost to a halt. the law of causality had avenged itself.

Such, in essence, was the nature and cause of the 1929 depression.

It provides one of the most eloquent illustrations of the disastrous consequences of a “planned” economy. In a free economy, when an individual businessman makes an error of economic judgment, he (and perhaps those who immediately deal with him) suffers the consequences; in a controlled economy, when a central planner makes an error of economic judgment, the whole country suffers the consequences.

But it was not the Federal Reserve, it was not the government intervention that took the blame for the 1929 depression—it was capitalism. Freedom—cried statists of every breed and sect—had had its chance and had failed. The voices of the few thinkers who pointed to the real cause of the evil were drowned out in the denunciation of businessmen, of the profit motive, of capitalism.

Had men chosen to understand the cause of the crash, the country would have been spared much of the agony that followed. The depression was prolonged for tragically unnecessary years by the same evil that caused it: government controls and regulations.

Contrary to popular misconception, controls and regulation began long before the New Deal; in the 1920’s, the mixed economy was already an established fact of American life. But the trend toward statism began to move faster under the Hoover Administration—and, with the advent of Roosevelt’s New Deal, it accelerated at an unprecedented rate. The economic adjustments needed to bring the depression to an end were prevented from taking place—by the imposition of strangling controls, increased taxes, and labor legislation. This last had the effect of forcing wage rates to unjustifiably high levels, thus raising the businessman’s costs at precisely the time when costs needed to be lowered, if investment and production were to revive.

The National Industrial Recovery Act, the Wagner Act, and the abandonment of the gold standard (with the government’s subsequent plunge into inflation and an orgy of deficit spending) were only three of the many disastrous measures enacted by the New Deal for the avowed purpose of pulling the country out of the depression; all had the opposite effect.

As Alan Greenspan points out in “Stock Prices and Capital Evaluation,” the obstacle to business recovery did not consist exclusively of the specific New Deal legislation passed; more harmful still was the general atmosphere of uncertainty engendered by the Administration. Men had no way to know what law or regulation would descend on their heads at any moment; they had no way to know what sudden shifts of direction government policy might take; they had no way to plan long-range.

To act and produce, businessmen require knowledge, the possibility of rational calculation, not “faith” and “hope”—above all, not “faith” and “hope” concerning the unpredictable twistings within a bureaucrat’s head.

Such advances as business was able to achieve under the New Deal collapsed in 1937—as a result of intensification of uncertainty regarding what the government might choose to do next. Unemployment rose to more than ten million and business activity fell almost to the low point of 1932, the worst year of the depression.

It is part of the official New Deal mythology that Roosevelt “got us out of the depression.” How was the problem of the depression finally “solved”? By the favorite expedient of all statists in times of emergency: a war.

The depression precipitated by the stock market crash of 1929 was not the first in American history—though it was incomparably more severe than anything that had preceded it. If one studies the earlier depressions, the same basic cause and common denominator will be found: in one form or another, government manipulation of the money supply. It is typical the manner in which interventionism grows that the Federal Reserve System was instituted as a proposed antidote against those earlier depressions—which were themselves products of monetary manipulation by the government.

The financial mechanism of an economy is the sensitive center, the living heart, of business activity. In no other area can government intervention produce quite such disastrous consequences. For a general discussion of the business cycle and its relation to government manipulation of the money supply, see Ludwig von Mises, Human Action.

One of the most striking facts of history is men’s failure to learn from it.

Politics Fozzolog: Basic questions about the solution

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:56:14 +0000

Wow.

That’s about all I can think of. Wow.

John Stossel’s latest 20/20 piece on the so-called economic stimulus features lawmakers, economists, lots of media darlings, and simple, simple questions. After watching this, how can you not wonder what the hell our elected “leaders” are thinking?

(Note: After I posted this, I discovered the video I original watched was only one of six parts, so here you go!)

Part 1 of 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiUy5n8gkJs

Part 2 of 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZl9AMnwio0

Part 3 of 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPTjO3MjdiM

Part 4 of 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOAzvWB7mHo

Part 5 of 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA1Y61xdCX4

Part 6 of 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y4Y9(dWMQzE

General Fozzolog: Back in time via audio cassettes - Digital Village

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 07:55:35 +0000

I recently decided to embark on a journey of digitizing a box full of audio cassettes. Those who knew me growing up—especially when I was in junior high and earlier—know I was always goofing off with a microphone and a tape recorder. I operated a pirate radio station at AM 1630 for a while too. It’s broadcast radius covered most of the town of Granger, UT, where I lived.

One of the nuggets I found was actually much later than that. In 1995, I had just published (self-published) a book about the World Wide Web titled Fozziliny George Moo’s Guide To The World Wide Web and was asked by a friend to appear on his radio program.

Now, about this friend: His name is Doran Barons. Freaky, right?! My name is Doran Barton! His name is Doran Barons!

He saw a letter I had written to the editors of Wired magazine a few months before (which was subsequently published in Wired) and sent me e-mail to introduce himself. This triggered a series of e-mail exchanged between us which led to him inviting me on his radio program, Digital Village a weekly radio program on KFPK, 90.7FM in Los Angeles, CA.

Digital Village has an online MP3 archive of their radio program going back to 2000 and they’ve hosted some impressive guests on their radio program like Neal Stephenson (one of my favorite authors), Bruce Sterling (another of my favorite authors), Steve Wozniak (who started Apple with Steve Jobs), Bruce Schneier, and Lawrence “Larry” Lessig. It’s cool that I preceded such giants. :-)

After I did the telephone interview with the radio program, Doran sent me a cassette tape of the program and I’ve digitized it (with Doran’s permission). So, if anyone’s interested in taking a peek back in time to 1995 to hear about the World Wide Web in its relative infancy, here it is:

http://www.xmission.com/~fozz/podcast/19950917-digital_village.mp3

It’s clear I was fresh from doing lots of research for my book. It’s fun listening to me advise one of the show’s callers to contact the “site” he was getting his dialup access through to see if they offered anything like PPP, SLIP, or TIA so he could “extend the Internet to his home computer over his dialup line” or he could use lynx at the shell prompt on the Unix system he was dialing into.

Politics Fozzolog: More Sowell: Social Insurance

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:42:55 +0000

This book— Applied Economics by Thomas Sowell— is just chock full of gems. A lot of this stuff I already was aware of, but Sowell frames it exceptionally well.

Here is another blurb from the chapter on insurance which addresses social insurance (e.g. social security), which isn’t a real insurance at all:

Government-run social insurance programs seldom have enough assets to cover their liabilities, but rely instead of making current payments out of current receipts. These are called pay-as-you-go programs— and sometimes they are called pyramid schemes. Pyramid schemes are privately run pay-as-you-go plans— and they are illegal because of their high risk of default and the opportunities for those who run them to take part of the money for themselves. The most famous pyramid scheme was run by a man named Charles Ponzi, who went to jail back in 1920. He used the same principles behind the pension plans of many Western governments today.

Ponzi had promised, within 90 days, to double the investments of those who paid into his program. The first investors who were not deterred by warnings from skeptics were in fact rewarded by having their investments pay off double in 90 days. Ponzi simply paid the first wave of investors with money from the second wave of investors, and the second wave from the even larger number of those in the third wave, as enthusiasm for his plan spread. So long as the number of people attracted to this plan formed an expanding pyramid, both the earlier investors and Ponzi profited handsomely. But, once the pyramid stopped growing, there was no way to continue to pay off those who sent Ponzi their money, since his scheme created no new wealth.

The American Social Security pension system and similar government pension systems in the countries of the European Union likewise take in payments from people who are working and use that money to pay the pensions of people who have retired— paying the first generation who paid into these pension plans with money received from the second generation, and so on.

…

Those who warned that these government pension plans were essentially Ponzi schemes without enough assets to cover their liabilities— that they were “actuarially unsound” in the financial jargon— were either not believed or were brushed aside for having made objections that were theoretically correct by in practice irrelevant. One of those who brushed these objections aside was Professor Paul Samuelson of MIT, the first American winner of the Nobel Prize in economics:

The beauty of social insurance is that it is actuarially unsound. Everyone who reaches retirement age is given benefit privileges that far exceed anything he has paid in… Always there are more youths than old folks in a growing population. More important, with real incomes growing at some 3% a year, the taxable base upon which benefits rest in any period are much greater than the taxes paid historically by the generations now retired… A growing nation is the greatest Ponzi game ever contrived.

By the end of the twentieth century, however, the day of reckoning began to loom on the horizon for these government pension programs, as it had for the original Ponzi scheme. Contrary to Professor Samuelson’s assertion, there are not always “more youths than old folks.” As birth rates declined in the Western world and life expectancy increased, vastly increasing the number of years in which pensions would have to paid to growing numbers of people, it became painfully clear that either tax rates were going to have to rise by very large amounts or the benefits would have to be reduced in one way or another — or both— or the system would simply run out of money.

Politics Fozzolog: Sowell on The Great Depression

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 02:00:20 +0000

Continuing with more excellent excerpts from Applied Economics by Thomas Sowell.

This one is on Government intervention in depressions and comes from the chapter titled Politics versus Economics:

Prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s, there was no tradition of federal government intervention to get the United States out of depressions. Roosevelt’s predecessor, President Herbert Hoover, was the first President to take on that responsibility, and many of his interventions were later simply carrier much further by FDR, despite a political myth that persisted for years that Hoover was a “do nothing” President. In much later years, even prominent former advisers of the Roosevelt administration admitted that FDR’s New Deal was a further extension of what Hoover had been doing. Herbert Hoover was in fact the first President to decide to “do something” on a national scale to try to extricate the country from a depression, though there is no evidence that what he did made things any better and there is considerable reason to believe that they made things worse.

Earlier in the 1920s, a sharp decline in the economy had been largely ignored by President Calvin Coolidge— and the economy pulled out of its decline in relatively short time, as it had pulled out of other such declines in the past. There was nothing inevitable about a stock market crash leading to a decade-long depression. Moreover, as Professor Peter Temin or M.I.T. has noted, the 1929 stock market crash was not unique:

The stock market has gone up and down many times since then without producing a similar movement in income. The most obvious parallel was in the fall of 1987. The isomorphism was uncanny. The stock market fell almost exactly the same amount on almost exactly the same dates.

Another study referred to the October 19, 19878 decline as “by far the worst precentage decline day in the stock market’s history.” In 1987, however, President Ronald Reagan did not react as Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt had in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash. Instead, like Coolidge before him (whom he admired,) Reagan let the economy recover on its own. Far from leading to a Great Depression, the recovery began one of the longest periods of sustained high employment, low inflation, and general prosperity in American history. At the time, however, President Reagan was sharply criticized in the Washington Post for a “do-nothing, let-the-problems-accumulate, Calvin Coolidge act of the 1980s” and was denounced in the New York Times for having “squandered the opportunity” to take action.

Politics Fozzolog: Notable excerpts from "Applied Economics"

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:56:02 +0000

I am currently reading Applied Economics by Thomas Sowell and have found it full of awesome quotes and data. For example, this from the chapter section on insurance and risk:

As a matter of financial self-protection, both families and insurance companies must seek to discourage risky behavior in one way or another. For a government agency, however, financed by taxpayers’ money, there is no such urgency about discouraging the increased risks that people may take when those risks are covered by others. Moreover, the agency gets its biggest political support from helping those suffering the consequences of the risks they have taken, however unwisely, not by criticizing them.

Stay tuned for more great nuggets.

General Fozzolog: Book Review: The Survivors Club

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 07:00:08 +0000

The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life by Ben Sherwood

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked up this book at the John Wayne Airport after hearing Ben Sherwood on Glenn Beck's radio show and seeing him on Glenn's TV show.

Sherwood's book approaches survival from multiple angles and I appreciated that. Whatever you might think this book is, it probably is just a bit and a whole lot of what you didn't expect. I found most of it to be anecdotal and a bit fluffy, which made it a very easy read, but Sherwood does shower some dense statistics throughout the book for you to dig through that make the subject matter more appealing to the left brain.

Much of the book is the result of interviews with and stories about people who have encounter dramatic and traumatic events in their lives whether it be an airplane crash, a lion attack, captivity inside a Nazi concentration camp, or miraculously escaping one of the NY World Trade Center towers after the airplane has hit the building.

Combining advice from survival experts, doctors, the survivors themselves, and others, Sherwood comes up with a variety of intriguing possibilities for why certain people survive. In addition, he includes recommendations for people wanting to boost their potential survivability. He addresses the issues of good luck vs. bad luck and how strategic thinking and doing some simple preparatory planning for the worst can save you from freezing or "becoming a statue" when the unexpected happens.

So, in conclusion, a very easy read partly because it's well written and partly because the subject matter is a little superfluous and fluffy. It's less dense than Freakonomics, but just as interesting to read.

View all my reviews.

Tech Fozzolog: Engadget editor shows off Palm Pre on Jimmy Falon show

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:02:07 +0000

I’m very stoked about the Palm Pre. Last night on Jimmy Falon’s talk show, Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky and “Jim” shared love for the forthcoming smartphone. See the video here.

Politics Fozzolog: Anti-GOP? Anti-Dem? It's really about PRINCIPLES!

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:49:02 +0000

Mona Charen wrote an article titled “American Dependence - Where is the responsibility?” that I saw at National Review Online which addresses the issue of which political party to blame for soaring government deficits.

For eight years, the Democrats have entertained us with a great song and dance about deficits. It is now evident that they were, not to put too fine a point on it, insincere.

On the other hand, some of us have been calling out Republicans, in good times and bad, for abandoning principle. In 2003, for example, I wrote: “When it comes to spending, alas, the Republicans are hardly Eagle Scouts either. The ideal of smaller government is in eclipse at the moment. The terror attacks have been seized as an opportunity to lard on new spending for favored constituencies. Citizens Against Government Waste estimates that the federal government will spend $22.5 billion on 9,362 pork-barrel projects in 2003.” And in a 2005 column titled “Who Are These Republicans,” I wrote “And now President Bush, whose greatest sin in his first term was failure to wield the veto pen, has joined enthusiastically in the legalized looting of the taxpayer.”

She opens the article with some mighty embarrassing quotes from Speaker Pelosi in 2006:

“While President Bush continues to trumpet his so-called ‘economic achievements,’ the Bush administration confirmed today that the budget deficit for 2006 will be one of the largest in our nation’s history. President Bush’s failed economic policies have resulted in budgets that are drastically out of balance and skyrocketing debt. Budget deficits translate into higher interest rates, which means that mortgages cost more, credit-card debt grows, and student loans cost more… . Democrats know how to restore fiscal discipline with tough policies of pay-as-you-go budgeting, no new deficit spending … .”

Ahhh. It would be hilarious if it weren’t… you know… our money.

I think every elected official in the federal government needs one of those fancy reset buttons Hillary’s been giving out in Europe.

Politics Fozzolog: Thoughts on socialism

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 05:37:37 +0000

Beginning in 2007 during the beginning of the 2008 presidential election, many on the right began predicting that the election of one of the viable democratic contenders for president — Clinton and Obama — would result in a significant move toward a socialist state in the US. Some of the more… dramatic ones on the left, including my idol Glenn Beck, have succeeded in bluring the lines between socialism and communism.

Now, I’m sure many pundits and commentators, including the amazing, wonderful and entertaining Beck, really do know the difference between the two, but their flippant banter only confuses people.

This article Cathy Young over at Reason magazine explains the rhetoric pretty well and makes the observation that while Obama’s administration is certainly friendly to larger government chock full of social programs, this isn’t a course change by any means.

A headline in The Weekly Standard warns of “The Return of Big Government”; but big government never left, and certainly not under Bush. Obama may be seeking to reverse Ronald Reagan’s legacy; but, as conservative economist Bruce Bartlett argued persuasively in his 2006 book, Impostor, that legacy was already betrayed by Bush. Many people will tell you we officially became “the U.S.S.A.” with the bank bailout in October 2008.

Since the 2008 presidential election cycle was in full swing, Glenn Beck has been saying that both Republican and Democrat parties were both in favor of “taking us to the same place, only one is taking us in a steam train and the other is taking us in a jet plane.”

It seems any time philosophical labels are brought up on the Internet, bad things tend to happen. I think part of the reason there has been so much back and forth discussion about these labels is due to Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. People have ridiculed Jonah, but I think he’s dead-on.

Many people believe Hitler was the epitome of fascism and that fascism is an extreme form of right-wing thinking — that had George W. Bush been able to go full-bore and do whatever he wanted as much as he wanted, we would have seen the second coming of Hitler. (Note: Bush is a poor analogy since he is, by far, a moderate Republican and not the poster-boy for the far-right.) Jonah Goldberg sets the record straight and I have to wonder why we ever wondered in the first place. After all, the Nazis stood for the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party”. “Socialist” and “Workers” should be the key words there. That’s something to think about.

Politics Fozzolog: A nugget of truth about bailouts and unions

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 19:06:44 +0000

As President Obama and the US Congress continue to, in my opinion, destroy wealth-production in our country and severely handicap our ability to recover from the economic advertsity we’ve gotten into, I’m encouraged by leaders of business, like Gregory Knox, who obviously get it.

The new administration seems set on continuing to bail out failing businesses and providing support to labor unions — big reasons these businesses are failing!

Here’s a letter from a president of General Motors to his employees in 2008:

Dear Employee,

Next week, Congress and the current Administration will determine whether to provide immediate support to the domestic auto industry to help it through one of the most difficult economic times in our nation’s history. Your elected officials must hear from all of us now on why this support is critical to our continuing the progress we began prior to the global financial crisis… As an employee, you have a lot at stake and continue to be one of our most effective and passionate voices. I know GM can count on you to have your voice heard.

Thank you for your urgent action and ongoing support.

Troy Clarke
President
General Motors North America

Mr. Knox wrote a letter back to Mr. Clarke in December 2008:

In response to your request to call legislators and ask for a bailout for the United States automakers please consider the following, and please also pass this onto Troy Clark, the president of General Motors North America for me.

You are both infected with the same entitlement mentality that has bred like cancerous germs in UAW halls for the last countless decades, and whose plague is now sweeping the nation, awaiting our new “messiah” to wave his magical wand and make all our problems go away, while at the same time allowing our once great nation to keep “living the dream”.

The dream is over!

The dream that we can ignore the consumer for years while management myopically focuses on its personal rewards packages at the same time that our factories have been filled with the worlds most overpaid, arrogant, ignorant and laziest entitlement minded “laborers” without paying the price for these atrocities and that still the masses will line up to buy our products

Don’t tell me I’m wrong. Don’t accuse me of not knowing of what I speak. I have called on Ford, GM, Chrysler, TRW, Delphi, Kelsey Hayes, American Axle and countless other automotive OEM’s and Tier ones for 3 decades now throughout the Midwest and what I’ve seen over the years in these union shops can only be described as disgusting.

Mr Clark, the president of General Motors, states:

“There is widespread sentiment in this country, our government and especially in the media that the current crisis is completely the result of bad management. It is not.”

You’re right, it’s not JUST management, how about the electricians who walk around the plants like lords in feudal times, making people wait on them for countless hours while they drag ass so they can come in on the weekend and make double and triple time for a job they easily could have done within their normal 40 hour week

How about the line workers who threaten newbies with all kinds of scare tactics for putting out too many parts on a shift and for being too productive (mustn’t expose the lazy bums who have been getting overpaid for decades for their horrific underproduction, must we?!?) Do you really not know about this stuff?!?

How about this great sentiment abridged from Mr. Clarke’s sad plea:

“Over the last few years we have closed the quality and efficiency gaps with our competitors.”

What the hell has Detroit been doing for the last 40 years?!?

Did we really JUST wake up to the gaps in quality and efficiency between us and them?

The K car vs. the Accord?

The Pinto vs. the Civic?!?

Do I need to go on?

We are living through the inevitable outcome of the actions of the United States auto industry for decades.

Time to pay for your sins, Detroit .

I attended an economic summit last week where a brilliant economist, Alan Beaulieu surprised the crowd when he said he would not have given the banks a penny of “bailout money”. Yes, he said, this would cause short term problems, but despite what people like George Bush and Troy Clark would have us believe, the sun would in fact rise the next day and something else would happen. Where there had been greedy and sloppy banks, new efficient ones would pop up. That is how a free market system works. It does work if we would let it work!

But for some reason we are now deciding that the rest of the world is right and that capitalism doesn’t work; that we need the government to step in and “save us”. Save us, hell we’re nationalizing and unfortunately too many of this once fine nation’s citizens don’t even have a clue that this is what’s really happening but they sure can tell you the stats on their favorite sports teams yeah THAT’S important.

Does it occur to ANYONE that the “competition” has been producing vehicles, EXTREMELY PROFITABLY, for decades now in this country?…

How can that be???

Let’s see - -

Fuel efficient -

Listening to customers -

Investing in the proper tooling and automation for the long haul -

Not being too complacent or arrogant to listen to Dr W Edwards Deming 4 decades ago -

Ever increased productivity through quality, lean and six sigma plans -

Treating vendors like strategic partners, rather than like “the enemy” -

Efficient front and back offices -

Non union environment

Again, I could go on and on, but I really wouldn’t be telling anyone anything they really don’t already know in their hearts

I have six children, so I am not unfamiliar with the concept of wanting someone to bail you out of a mess that you have gotten yourself into. My children do this on a weekly, if not daily basis, as I did at their age. I do for them what my parents did for me (one of their greatest gifts, by the way). I make them stand on their own two feet and accept the consequences of their actions and work them through.

Radical concept, huh?

Am I there for them in the wings? Of course but only until such time as they need to be fully on their own as adults

I don’t want to oversimplify a complex situation, but there certainly are unmistakable parallels here between the proper role of parenting and government.

Detroit and the United States need to pay for their sins.

Bad news people, it’s coming whether we like it or not.

The newly elected Messiah really doesn’t have a magic wand big enough to “make it all go away” I laughed as I heard Obama “reeling it back in” almost immediately after the vote count was tallied “we might not do it in a year or in four”! Where was that kind of talk when he was RUNNING for the office

Stop trying to put off the inevitable!

That house in Florida really isn’t worth $750,000!

People who jump across a border really don’t deserve free health care benefits!

That job driving that forklift for the big 3 really isn’t worth $85,000 a year!

That couple whose combined income is less than $50,000 really shouldn’t be living in that $485,000 home!

Let the market correct itself people, it will. Yes it will be painful, but it’s gonna be painful either way, and the bright side of my proposal is that on the other side of it is a nation that appreciates what is has and doesn’t live beyond its means and gets back to basics and redevelops the work ethic that made it the greatest nation in the history of the world and probably turns back to God.

Sorry, don’t cut my head off. I’m just the messenger sharing with you the “bad news”

Gregory J Knox
President
Knox Machinery, Inc.
Franklin, Ohio 45005

Tech Fozzolog: Learning Perl basics in the Fedora Classroom ... by me!

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 05:15:46 +0000

Hey y’all, I’ve volunteered to teach in the Fedora Classroom this Saturday (7 Mar 2009). The Fedora Classroom is an IRC-based classroom environment.

So, at 3pm MST (22:00 UTC), anyone can participate by logging in to #fedora-classroom on irc.freenode.net and I, fozzmoo, will be doing a 1-hour presentation on Perl basics.

I’ve been digging through old presentations and workshops notes from when I used to do all day Perl workshops at USU for the USU Free Software and Linux Club to see what I can distill down into a 1-hour presentation. If there’s enough interest and response, we’ll see about turning this into a regular thing.

Tech Fozzolog: A response to the "wiz bang" question

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:25:11 +0000

(Ryan Byrd)[http://www.ryanbyrd.net/techramble/] blogged recently with a (programming interview question)[http://www.ryanbyrd.net/techramble/2009/03/03/programming-interview-question-of-the-day/] that I thought I’d take a stab at in Perl.

The question is as follows:

when passed in a number that is evenly divisible by 3, return “wiz”
when passed in a number that is evenly divisible by 5, return “bang”
when passed in a number that is evenly divisible by both 3 and 5, return “wiz bang”
otherwise, return the number passed in

My solution exploits Perl’s list type to store potential output as a queue of sorts.

sub function {
    my $num = shift;
    my @output = ();
    unless($num % 3) {    push @output, "wiz"; }
    unless($num % 5 ) {    push @output, "bang"; }
    if(@output) {   return join ' ', @output; }
    return $num; 
}

Politics Fozzolog: More on 'Cap and Trade' nonsense

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 06:01:15 +0000

I just returned from vacationing with my family in California, a state that is hurting terribly right now economically and is also a “leader” among states in the fight against global warming. While vacationing, we spoke with a few locals and just about all had personal stories to tell about the economic perils of the state. One older couple described how one of their sons had been laid off from his job and wasn’t enjoying being “Mr. Mom.” Another couple told us a story of gettign IOUs from the state in place of a state tax refund.

In a previous post, I presented the notion that “cap and trade” legislation was, in reality, a tax on businesses. Proponents of cap and trade have argued it is not a tax because the revenue from the purchases of carbon credits (the permits required to emit the restricted materials) does not go to the government. But, it’s just the same to the business- a penalty they must pay which is calculated more or less as a portion of their overall production.

Politicians like to say things like “This isn’t a tax on the individual. This is a tax on corporations.” A lot of people buy into that, but people who understand how business works realize a tax on business results in a burden on individuals because businesses aren’t going to eat the cost of those taxes — they’re going to pass it on to the consumer. Cap and trade is no different.

Over the last couple of years, there has been talk about a carbon tax instead of cap and trade. This would be a literal tax and would provide revenue to the government from companies that emit over the prescribed capped levels. Either way, it’s still an additional cost on production for companies that are already struggling in today’s tough economy and operating in a country with some of the highest corporate tax rates in the the world.

What do large companies do when the cost of operations in a region is high? They do what many “evil” American companies do: they move operations to a region where operations can be done under more friendly terms. Case in point: California. Increasing regulations, taxes, and red tape have prompted California employers to relocate to other more business-friendly regions over the last decade. The result: A recent headline indicates unemployment numbers in California around ten percent!

Finally, here’s some food for thought: American companies, whether out of principle or because of the intimidation of the Environmental Protection Agency, generally conduct the cleanest operations in their industry, worldwide. This doesn’t surprise me after I see automotive manufacturers repeatedly include verbiage in their marketing about how little energy they use, how much recycled material they use, or how much they do to offset their impact on the environment.

If you buy into the idea of global warming gradually destroying our planet, you should realize that almost all regulatory schemes like cap and trade are based on older, flawed models like Kyoto. If these regulation schemes force companies to move operations to regions with less cost/regulation or force manufacturers to purchase their raw goods from producers in other countries, the overall impact to the planet probably isn’t going to change. Countries with inexpensive labor costs like China, India, Russia and others have practically no incentive to regulate their impact on the environment whatsoever.

The best policy, both for our economy and for the good of the planet (if you’re an alarmist) is to promote production in the United States where we do things clean, efficiently, and under a watchful eye.

Politics Fozzolog: It's coming, folks. Cap and Trade for everyone.

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:59:17 +0000

I was skimming articles on Real Clear Politics and saw a couple talking about the monster issue conservative talk radio was sounding the alarms about during the 2008 election: Cap And Trade.

What is “Cap and Trade,” exactly? Well, at it’s most basic level, it’s a tax on companies that produce carbon dioxide emissions. At a closer level, it is a system by which companies, industries, and even states and countries purchase and carbon credits on an open market. But, in the end, it’s a tax, because when everything is said and done, the revenue generated by cap and trade transactions goes to… well, nobody really talks about where it goes, but it goes to some government account.

There’s an obvious similarity between cap and trade and the SCHIP legislation recently signed by President Obama: the government maneuvers itself into a situation where it is actually encouraging the bad behavior it was supposedly trying to discourage.

In the case of SCHIP, the legislation signed calls for a large tax increase on cigarette and other tobacco product purchases. The rationale here is that the increased fee will create a burden on those in society that purchase these unhealthy products and, therefore, will encourage them to stop engaging in behavior like smoking. The money collected from these taxes is funnelled into programs to guarantee health insurance for children.

If you haven’t figured it out already, while legislators called this tax increase a penalty on smokers that should decrease the number of smokers, they actually want more smokers in order to fund SCHIP!

It’s will be just the same with cap and trade legislation. Replace a person smoking cigarettes with a company that produces carbon dioxide emissions as part of their operations and you’ve got the same thing. The money collected from this scheme will be funnelled to some program or group of programs that are then dependent upon companies doing something government really does not want them to do.

The conflict of interest here is interesting, but to muddy the waters more, it seems apparent, to me anyway, that the urgency of addressing carbon dioxide emissions is still far from settled.

In one article I read, 10 Ways To Trade Up by Kevin Drum with Mother Jones, Drum compares cap and trade ideas to the 1970 Clean Air Act and uses it as a proof of cap and trade’s inevitable success.

We found out in 1990, when the Clean Air Act was modified to address acid rain pollution caused by sulfur dioxide from coal-fired power plants. Instead of requiring every plant to install a specific cleanup technology or meet a specific emission rate, the epa simply set a nationwide cap on the total volume of SO² emissions and required power plants to own a permit for each ton of SO² they emitted. Each plant was allocated a certain number of permits, and if a plant reduced its emissions to the point where it didn’t need all its permits, it could sell them to the highest bidder.

The problem I have with this comparison is the “well, duh!” assumption that there’s nothing wrong with comparing carbon dioxide to sulfur dioxide. They’re both bad for the environment, one might say.

The problem is that sulfur dioxide is a poisonous gas that can be used to produce sulfuric acid in the atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide has been well documented to cause a wide variety of health issues in humans and animals. Carbon dioxide, not so much. In fact, carbon dioxide has been shown, time and time again, to improve the production of plant life and has little or no effect on humans.

It should also be mentioned here that carbon dioxide accounts for anywhere from one tenth of a percent to one percent of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (the evil, nasty water vapor being the largest constituent of these insidious chemicals bent on destroying life on earth.)

The global warming alarmists claim rising carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere are to blame for seemingly corresponding rising global temperatures. This is intriguing until you match up temperature fluctuations on Earth with temperatures on other planets in our solar system and match that to solar energy output from our sun.

As silly as it may seem to create an ellaborate trading market (to veil a taxation scheme) to plunder companies for generating a mostly harmless gas into the atmosphere, it’s very likely it will happen. President Obama has been consistent in statements about environmental policy and the “rightful place” of science.

Drum writes, “The backbone of (President Obama’s) climate policy is actually an ambitious program (Cap and Trade) that, if done right, will reduce greenhouse gases and raise desperately needed revenue—and, most important of all, has a fighting chance of making it through the congressional sausage factory in one piece.”

The country and the world seem to be slowly waking up, however. Most of the online comments to the Mother Jones article seem to be indicative of this as most of them decry global warming alarmism and question the logistics of cap and trade legislation.

General Fozzolog: Thoughts on diabetes in a disaster

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 10:19:15 +0000

This last Friday, Glenn Beck’s TV show on FOX News involved wargaming worst-case scenarios five years into the future. There was a lot of talk about hyperinflation, world-wide jumps in unemployment, and increasing disenfranchisement and distrust of the government.

Being a Mormon, I’ve heard all my life about how we should prepare for tough times by building up food storage for your family and having tools and supplies that can help you weather tough times.

But what about diabetics like myself or other people whose lives depend on regular doses of medication? In a major disaster, it’s possible your neighborhood pharmacy is not going to be able to get resupplied and it might not even be open or accessible.

I’m fairly certain my health insurance plan won’t cover my purchasing extra insulin and other supplies to stock-up in case of a disaster. I’d probably have to pay out-of-pocket to stockpile these items and then rotate through them with supplies my insurance company will cover so I always have a couple weeks or a couple months extra.

Another problem diabetics and others may have to consider is how to keep medicines like insulin stored at recommended temperatures. If a disaster results in loss of power and/or heating fuel, keeping stored insulin cold (and not frozen) can be a challenge.

I also should make sure I have a good supply of hearing aid batteries so people can talk to me when we’re all living off wheat stores and stale water. :-)