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First there was yesterday's 6.0 quake near Parkfield, located smack dab on the San Andreas fault line. I was on a phone conference which included a friend from San Jose who grew quite nervous as the building he works in began to sway. He dropped off the call and called back a few minutes later when it was obvious the building was not going to fall down.
This was his first quake experience since moving to the bay area (from Georgia) a couple years ago, but it's still interesting how well a tremor located 135 miles south east of his location was transmitted along the San Andreas fault. Would a magnitude 8 quake in the same location knock buildings down as far north San Jose? I suppose it's possible.
We didn't feel anything here but I've heard reports that it was felt as far south as Palos Verdes.
Today was another story. We felt the 5.0 quake near Bakersfield this afternoon. It was a series of a long waves which caused a gentle rocking motion (the rocking was north/south) for nearly a minute. A couple minutes later the pool table lamp was still slowly swaying in the same direction. I figured this was a major aftershock (or the real thing), but it seems to have been totally unrelated. It's interesting, but after doing the 'did you feel it' report and checking, we're 134 miles (more or less) from the epicenter.
This could get interesting. The San Andreas fault has birthed many geologists fantasies. Something has got to give (excuse the pun) eventually.
The debates start on Thursday (posted mostly as a reminder to myself).
Presidential Debates
Vice Presidential Debate
The ads have already begun and it seemed like a good time to figure out what awaits us on the November ballot. Good lord, there are a bunch of them (sixteen or so it seems). So much for a quick read over and a few days thought.
Sixteen questions that the legislators, who do this as a full time job could not decide? What a waste, with a lot more to come.
Taking a break from diving deep into EAP for a hastily arranged presentation next week I went wandering in search of news of the NFL. I found the following which was just too funny not to pass along.
Art Modell, who moved the Cleveland NFL franchise to Baltimore, has been named chairman of the board of governors for The Johns Hopkins Heart Institute. Browns fans fear he'll help pioneer a procedure where doctors rip out your heart while it's beating and promise you a new one in five years.
It won't seem too funny to Browns fans, but I found it well worth passing along. The rest of Jon Saraceno's Keeping Score mostly talks about Warren Sapp's fading reputation in Oakland.
Paul Zimmerman (a crusty NFL scribe from 'Jersey — how could I not read him?) has a wonderful piece this week recounting a couple Don Shula stories and other coaching craziness in the wake of last weeks Tom Coughlin controversy.
Next night Shula was walking back to his room and what did he see but Alfred Ogelsby taped to a tree. He kept walking.
Football. It's hard to get too serious about this.
Occasionally you find yourself off in the weeds looking for a problem that doesn't appear to have been reported by anyone. Such was the case recently with Sun's JDK 1.4.2 for Solaris 8. It has one quirk which really hurt.
We've got an application that needs to handle a few thousand UDP connections per second (and do something useful with the data). During testing under the conditions above, the application was dropping an unacceptable number of packets. Move the application elsewhere, including a windows laptop (which at least one person is going to enjoy mightily) and it seemed to be able to handle the load as required. Weird stuff. Mucho head scratching all around.
Eventually, the engineer responsible for making this all work tumbled to the fact that the java process was being renice'd to 10 some time after application startup (which is really annoying.. why do it later?) We checked several dual CPU systems running 1.4.2_04 and all the java processes were running at nice value of 10. Renice the application to 0 and our performance characteristics are within spec.
We failed to find anything to explain it this afternoon, but this evening I found this: Solaris 1.4.2 JVM changes its nice level automagically? That leads to two questions.
I can't answer either, but if you are having performance issues with a java based application running under Solaris, check the nice level (prstat -a seems to be the easiest way) of your application.
I meant to point to these a few days ago and just didn't get around to finishing it.
In the first, Juan Cole offers an interesting perspective on the intentions of al-Qaeda in the September 11 attacks with a bit of 20th century history for justification. I was initially interested because it filled in some blanks in a conversation I had last week with some friends.
And then Harold Cole jumped off the original article with a commentary tying together previous missteps. I've always felt that we botched the job badly in Afghanistan. Hell, we're still dealing with issues there and likely will be for many years to come.
Am I right in my antipathy toward our war in Iraq? That's impossible to say today, only history will tell. While we'd squandered our chance to wrap up al-Qaeda, we still had a significant set of problems to deal with in Afghanistan. Even from a military perspective (assuming a significant real threat exists), you don't move forward until you've secured the current location. Of course, modern battle made it possible to relocate the position of the war without actually doing all the hard stuff like advancing and protecting supply lines. Perhaps that along with the modern corporate motto of "do more with less" is what really got us into this mess. In wars, you don't get to sell your stock after an early IPO party onboard an aircraft carrier and walk away. It's a long term proposition, one with long term implications.
For good or bad, it is what it is. We can not unwind the clock nor ask for a mulligan. It's a quagmire, one likely to capture a significant chunk of our political attention and will for the next decade. When asking people (mostly the very young) to serve and die our goals must be continually and clearly articulated (or already so obvious that nearly everyone agrees). Today, no one has any clear or well defined ideas on how to make it all go away. That makes me sad when I think about it.
Sure, sure; I can hear you laughing now. As if California has seasonal changes!
Tomorrow morning fall begins (as noted by Susan earlier today).
For starters, it does get darker earlier and that was how I noticed fall was coming. Despite my mole like existence (preferring low light conditions when possible), I do notice it becoming completely dark as it did early this evening in my office.
We're also now into the real fire season. SoCal had a pretty rough spring and early summer but cool temperatures have kept things in control. Pretty soon the Santa Ana winds will begin and anything is possible. By the way, here's an interesting depiction of the Santa Ana's by local artist Steve Greenberg that was used in last years Star coverage and here too.
Finally, the folks at NOAA have announced the return of El Niño for this fall and winter. The last one in 1997-98 wasn't a big deal, but the season previous to that in 1994-95 was a wild winter. It seemed to rain incessantly from late September into early March. The state desperately needs the water so I'll not make a big deal about the traffic problems this is sure to bring.
So welcome to Fall (or Spring for those of you in the other half of the world) and enjoy whatever changes it might bring you.
It's not amazing but it sure is worthy of mention that Mike McKenzie who finally ended his hold out on Wednesday is set to see some playing time tomorrow.
Is he going to get his trade? Unlikely, but he's got a better chance if he's actually on the field.
A memo regarding immediate cuts in the LA Times sports section is making the rounds today. I saw a note about it this morning on LA Observed which has been updated with some external links (neither of which I can get to right now).
The memo from Bill Dwyre (I wish he'd write from time to time) has the highlights, a 14-page weekly reduction (20 pages per week if the hockey season happens) in coverage. Among the items people are most likely to howl about?
There was no mention of staff cuts.
It's been three years since the nation was shocked by our vulnerability. We should have accepted it for what it is and moved on, but that doesn't seem possible. Consider this my little tribute to what was lost.
I lost the most identifiable major structure of my youth. I'd watched the towers go up on trips to the city, and had only begun to see the buildings for what they were a few years later during the bicentennial celebration. As I grew older, I saw the buildings as something else and realized that they'd become international symbols, replacing the Empire State building as the center of New York City. And finally, I'd learned that I could take advantage of their wonders, and had done so only weeks before the end.
In the end, we all lost a well known symbol of this country, well chosen for the impact.
I'd have posted this earlier except that what started out as a simple project to learn how to do masking turned in a major task. If asked to explain how I did what I did, I couldn't. Maybe I could repeat it, no guarantees. I will eventually need to understand how I did it. It was simple programatically, but a giant pain otherwise.
I also got lost outside with Steve sitting under the stars talking about 9-11, freedom, our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, fascism and a number of other subjects. Good stuff. We need to do it more often.
Perhaps influenced by my day off investigations into this years brew of Atlantic hurricanes with emphasis on Ivan, Frances and Charley, I had some pretty wild dreams last night.
If Ivan follows the same general (very common) trajectory that Charley had, the west coast of Florida is going to get swiped again and this time the panhandle (or Alabama) is going to get the worst of it.
Before moving on, I need to make note of one thing that's become abundantly clear to me this summer. The tools produced by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have made orders of magnitude improvements in their efficiency and the monitoring data available to anyone with an interest. The predictive models, based on real world experience are really very good. The work of the scientists, engineers and admins (and even the bureaucratic administration around them) in building the system available today should not be overlooked. Good stuff. And yet, they've been attacked by some for being less than 100 percent accurate. Shame on that kind of response. For those folks who don't think the current hurricane tracking systems are very good might I suggest coming and living in earthquake country for a while?
Anyway, about those dreams...
In one tiny fragment, I was back on the upper bridge of a CGN class cruiser, watching the huge walls of water wash over the lifting and plunging foredeck when a huge wave appeared, the ship dipped into and then hit it, there was water coming over the front of the bridge and I woke with a start. That brought back some memories. It wasn't expressly forbidden to be outside in wild weather, but it was certainly implied. Since most of the crew was seasick to some extent when we were in big storms, no one felt a need to remind us not to be there. I had a friend who also liked to go up on the upper bridge area with me (no one was around) during these times, but I went alone a few times too (ah! to be young and massively dumb again). The weird thing about the dream was the lack of sound (I don't remember any). The real thing was accompanied by a cacophony; the incredible wind, hard rain often running nearly horizontal, the steel ship slamming into water, waves breaking against every vertical surface and the eternal groaning and shuddering of the ship itself as it fought through the seas. While escorting the Nimitz in a big storm, our sister ship USS Mississippi (CGN-40) lost the 500 pound bell that had been hung over the bullnose; in it's departure it damaged the forward launcher or 5" gun mount, although I no longer recall which.
The other dream was also pretty weird. I was suddenly back on my old skinny plastic yellow skateboard (not the fatter, longer boards my kids rode) churning back and forth to keep going in a downpour on some street I didn't recognize. The water in the street kept getting deeper and... suddenly I was in a huge wave riding what had become a banana board, the wave caught up, I was flying... and I woke up. I haven't thought about that skateboard in years, but it was nice of my subconscious to remind me of it.
Another season of professional football has kicked off and my yearly obsession now kicks into high gear. It's hard to believe in many ways, but we're here. I need to lay down my prediction before things get underway for the Packers.
This year? 9 and 7, and if things break right, a playoff berth. It's pretty safe to say that they better not count on another last minute Phoenix win to advance (this year we'll have to hope Washington takes care of business if it comes down to that).
As a Packer fan in good standing (entering my thirty sixth season) [1], I wish I could say that it'll be better. Anything else is wishful thinking (and I wish I could think it). There was only one year (1996) where I felt like everything was in place for Green Bay to take it all, and they did (that was when I began to hate TJ Simers who downplayed every positive, all season long). The following year, Simers was oblivious to the negatives when it was obvious that they'd fallen off a bit (and he kept it up, all season long). Of course, Green Bay lost to Denver in the Super Bowl and Simers got sucked onto page two where I've been trying to dodge him ever since.
This year just feels like treading water.
While many remember last years wild finish, I still have the playoff game against Philly on an external drive. As I see it, 4th and 26 should never have happened. Before that, with 2:30 left and a 17 - 14 lead, the Packer offense had to make that first down on a 4th and 1 at the Eagle 40. Everyone knew the defense was a little shaky, the offense had to protect the lead by holding onto the ball. They'd gone for it in the first half and failed (a bad move perhaps, but this fan won't judge that one), but that was then and this was the time. After playing games trying to draw the Eagles offside, they punted from the Philly 40, and Josh Bidwell punted into the end zone. Oops, back to the 20.
From there, the defense gave up a big running play for a first down. Then they had a nice sack on a blitz, got away with some contact an a call that seemed proper and then on 4th and 26 they allowed a soft coverage completion over the middle to Freddie Mitchell for the first down. For those who might be inclined to disagree, I think the spot was pretty good.
And then they really fell apart (Mike McKenzie had a shot at the interception on the first attempt to put it into the end zone) the iggles scored and we move to overtime. And that was that in the big picture, even if it doesn't cover a good stand by the defense to get the ball back and a major mistake by Favre on the first play after the Pack got the ball back in OT. Blame it on 4th and 26.
You have to play to your strength when the chips are on the line. Mike Sherman and Tom Rossley elected to punt and hope the defense would hold. Defensive coordinator Ed Donatell paid the price with his job.
That's so yesterday... what about today?
The offense should be just about the same. A great quarterback, offensive line (likely the last year that crew stays together), great primary back, a good and improving set improving set of wideouts and tight ends. If Brett can learn to trust Javon Walker, he seems to have the downfield separation capability we haven't seen since Robert Brooks was Favre's favorite target. The play calling is still being done Rossley, and he's still conservative and predictable.
On the other side of the ball, the younger starters have another year under their belt, Nick Barnett included and should be improved. Ahmad Carroll will be asked to replace holdout Mike McKenzie (who's playing the mo' money game). Otherwise, last years shaky defense looks just as shaky. While it remains possible that they'll gel into a solid unit under new defensive coordinator Bob Slowik, we'll believe it when we see it. Any improvement here will translate to more wins and less losses.
Lest we forget, B.J. Sander was drafted in the 3rd round to replace Bidwell. That experiment hasn't gone too well. To compensate, they're also holding onto Bryan Barker (after punting for the Redskins last year, he's had a lot of recent practice but he's also getting up into George Blanda type years).
1 — I joined this roller coaster as a kid when they were at the top and learned many lessons while the team floundered for most of twenty years (I lost a running yearly bet with a friend on the Dallas game for a long darned time). The last decade has been the most fun as a fan.
It's been decided. All thought in this country is ripe for spin (PR, propaganda, etceteras).
Sure, I'm way overfilled with the spin of both parties (as I'm sure many others are), but when I saw the link below presented in a large middle of the page ad I had to see where it might lead despite the fact that I almost never follow ads.
According to these folks: What did the 9-11 Commission say about Saudi Arabia?, there was nothing worth thinking about. In summary:
There is no evidence of Saudi government funding of Al-Qaeda.
Saudi flights were investigated and handled professionally.
The Saudi government was pursuing bin Laden prior to the attacks on the U.S.
A wonderful spin job! All true and yet masking other important truths (IMO):
True.
And yet, there is growing unrest within many classes regarding the United States (the use of the term America is reserved for foreign born governors and those who have no clue about geography — simply put, we're not America until we annex a whole bunch of problems we don't really want. Does Cuba ring a bell? Do we really want to own all the problems of South America? Of course not).
A fundamentalist religion movement has taken hold (hey, that sounds familiar!), and the only thing they desire more than the downfall of the US is the overthrow of royal family rule.
True.
Despite the involvement of Saudi trained pilots, no working Saudi pilot was part of the plot.
Probably true.
I'm sure that the upper levels of the royal family were alerted to let everyone know if Osama stumbled into whichever international hotspot they were partying in. You can't possibly expect a poor, underdeveloped country like Saudi Arabia to send native agents capable of infiltration, can you?
What I wonder (given the degree of truth bending here) is how far can you go? Does it depend on who you are? What agency ultimately sells the ad? How deep your pockets are?
It's become obvious that advertising, in all of its forms (for all that I hate it) has become a significant part of the political process. I'm incredulous that a commercial is somehow supposed to influence my opinion, but hell, I never understood the flyers or phone calls either (stop by, tell me why, that I get, otherwise, I'm going to read about it ). And yet, there will be at least a billion dollars spent this year on advertisements aimed to sway our vote on the presidency.
I'd bet that at least $2 billion will be spent publicizing issues and people that I'm voting on this year. Since a big chunk of that money is aimed at me, the prototypical swing voter (and my other friends in the 10 to 20% category), I probably ought to feel good, but I don't. It's such a waste. Get quoted often, have many debates on radio and TV, all of which require public access rights. That's how it used to work.
It's a sad state of affairs when we piss away probably $30 billion nationwide (it's a WAG, but I don't believe its far off) mostly to tell one another how incompetent the other candidate is. That money could be used in so many more useful ways (you want better educated kids, make headstart eligibility automatic, that seems like a good use of a couple billion per year).
Why is this happening? Media (sadly, all or at least most of it) is for sale. It goes to the highest bidder and if you want coverage, you are going to have to pay for it. In this day and age it should be possible to find thousands of papers with different voices on every topic. Even if it's important, good luck finding six. The public interest is only looked out for by the tiny outfits looking for a way to break in (and once they have sponsorship, they usually have a spin).
There are rules in place, but no one pays them any attention.
A very belated congratulations to the Conejo Valley Little League kids who amazingly won the US Title over a very good, highly competitive team from Texas.
Baseball is a game of little things, and Curacao simply found a way to get things going in the first inning and maintained from there. For all their experience (they've been in the last two LLWS), the kids from Curacao had a heck of a lot more riding on this than any of the kids from the Conejo Valley.
For those who know my sea stories, my only visit there was the one where it was announced that we were moored, a bunch of people fell down (all ahead 1/3 into a bulkhead can be traumatic if you don't expect it) and then an all stop was requested. Oops.
Curacao was my first gambling resort... I spent my $5 and that was that (outside of silly stuff like office football and basketball pools).
Curacao was also the first place that I ever experienced dramatic, organized poverty. The people who served the wealthy lived in what most Americans would consider squalor (or worse). Yet, being midway up the thousands of tin huts on a hillside was considered middle class. Twenty three years later, I still don't quite understand the many people I met and interacted with, although I do know that these folks worked hard and expected little. Seeing this made it easier to accept the really crazy lives of peoples we encountered in Africa and Asia, but did nothing to make it more easily acceptable.
To the children on both sides, you have my congratulations and best wishes.
