Always behind... but catching up

Spending last Sunday on an airplane left me more behind that usual (today has been my Sunday with the exception of one meeting I had to attend remotely — it's hard to dodge people when you're walking around with eight years of operational trivia in your head and have a bad habit of volunteering information).

I'd seen Leonard refer to something which was eating random($foo) bandwidth like crazy but didn't have any time to find out what it was before leaving for the airport. Today's meanderings brought me back to it and now that I've seen the Crossfire session with Jon Stewart and read a whole lot of other opinions about it, I think he's right. Yes, Stewart has a nice little safe place to fall back to when he points out that he just hosts a comedy show but that doesn't let mainstream media off the hook. I've seen some clips from the Daily Show but have never really watched it (e.g. the Squabble in Coral Gables). I guess I'll have to ask the boys what they think of it. By the way, an interview taped before the CNN episode will be shown on 60 Minutes this Sunday...

I learned that Pierre Salinger died last weekend when the owner/driver of the service I've been using mentioned it on Sunday on the way to the airport. Salinger's son Stephen had apparently called (or already flown out). Someday, I'll be able to search frantically for news even from a car on 101 South even during a rain storm. Not there yet...

The New Republic came out this week with an endorsement of John Kerry for President (I didn't expect that one). They also carried the most relevant statement of the week (to me) in Conscientious Objector, by Robert A. George of the New York Post. While I don't agree entirely, it's a good read and reflects many of my feelings regarding both candidates.

Finally, I did something really stupid...

Actually, I had a good week of that; on Monday I told a VP that her way of managing priorities was 'pretty stupid' (artificially raising a project priority for 60 days to force the evaluation of a project which is going to take at least 120 days of R&D work is beyond pointless) and on Tuesday by jumping up in another meeting to emphatically tell the same VPs project gopher that we weren't doing something that would have been a complete waste of time (and money). I also ended up yelling at someone later Tuesday (on the phone) about absolute architecture limits that don't consider extensions by new products (I'm beginning to have a rather short fuse for engineers who don't have the ability to think for themselves — product based definition is just one small part of the ultimate system).

Anyway, having fallen into a combative mood, I encountered a fellow worker who'd IM'd something stupid to someone else, but when pushed professed to be a traditional conservative. So I lit into him trying to determine which part of 'compassionate' or 'conservative' he thinks this administration adheres to. I asked about a number of issues and he gradually retreated to his office (probably when he tried to defend the tax cuts as a fiscally sound move). I was an ass because I did it in public (I could have taken it back into a private discussion). He's just a simple guy (a Republican who believes) who thinks Fox is getting a bum deal.

Funny how things change though... the next day I got to be the rational guy when tempers were lost.