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Today the Boogeyman died

Much to the dismay of leftists everywhere, Iraqis went to vote and became citizens of their country, rather than subjects of a dictatorship.

Today the boogeyman died in Iraq. Everyone said "the insurgents will get you if you vote", but the Iraqi people looked fear in the face and cast their vote to take control of their destiny. The blue finger of free people has been stuffed in the end of the rifles of the enemies of mankind.

Today the bigots lost. The bigots that say that "Arabs dont want to vote" or "Islam cant support Democracy" are now scratching their heads like the bigots did when they confronted in the 1940's with the reality of "lowly black men" flying P-51's with great proficiency. 10 years after Tuskeegee, those same black men wanted not only to vote but that their sons and daughters should go to school on an equal basis with the sons and daughters of white men. 40 years later in the same week that Iraqis became citizens overcoming 5,000 years of oppression, a black mans daughter became Secretary of State in the most powerful country the world has ever seen.

"Let Freedom Ring" the man said, and today it surely has. The ropes of the belltower of freedom are now pulled by the men and women of Iraq. They stand with men and women around the world who were once slaves to dictators and kings, who are now free.

Today, Osama sits in his cave eating top ramen with Mullah Omar, Saddam sits in a Cell in a Bagdhad prison awaiting his inevitable doom and they wonder where the dream of the new caliphate fell apart. They sit and take council with the ghosts of all tyrants and dicatators;in their dark corner sits the slowly fading shadow of the boogeyman that haunts the dark recesses in the souls of all mankind. The shadows that are now fading because of the bright antiseptic light of freedom that is flooding into Osamas cave and Saddams cell is not coming from North America and Europe, but from the middle east. More importantly, it is now beginning to get twilight in the chambers of goverments in Saudi Arabia, Syria and possibly even North Korea.

ed: Perhaps there is a "new boogeyman", free men and women, perhaps that is the scariest thing ever created. I guess so, if youre a murderous dicator or a theocratic thug...

Somehwere in Iraq is a woman and her daughter walking down the street to the market, both with blue fingers in brave defiance of all the threats of death and terror promised them. Iraqis are no longer slaves to their masters and will never be again. Arabs are free, by choice, and the world will be a better place for it.

Someday, 40 years from now, perhaps an Iraqi woman will be president of Iraq. Can anyone argue that the Arab world might also undergo the same kind of deep change? Why not,it's happened before. If Germany can go from a once strong militarist state that threatended the peace of the world, not once but twice, to one that is now totally pacifist,then anything is possible.

Once upon a time, farmers in Concord Massachusets took on the largest and strongest power in the world in defiance of everything that made sense to the people of the world at that time. That shot from that unknown farmer started a chain of events that has led to the liberation of millions of people around the world.

It was a simple idea really "no man is my master!", and it sure as hell has caught on, hasnt it!

Today, the slavemasters of the world lost. Today, those who look at the people in their country as their private property were told in no uncertain terms that given the chance to be free, all people will choose to be free. People will brave bullets to be free, people will lay down their lives for others to have just the chance be free.

Today, in the battlefield graveyards in Gettysburg Pennsylvania, Omaha Beach in France, Stavelot Belgium and in the Punchbowl in Hawaii, the souls of the men who died for freedom in their generation sigh in relief that the sacifices of their lives did not go wasted.

Today, at a streetside cafe in Berlin, a grandfather and son look across the street and think about the wall that once divided a nation and the hearts of all Germans. The grandfather looks up to see an aircraft and thinks back to the day long ago not so far from the cafe where as a child he caught a handkerchief parachute that held a bit of candy, dropped from a man he never knew and would never meet. He smiles to his son, in recognition of the small gift that once fell from the sky and the great gift that now sits before him, all encompassed in the light of a freedom his own father could never have thought possible. Their waiter is an Iraqi immigrant,as he picks up the tray, the grandfather looks at the waiters hand and sees that he has a blue finger. The waiter and the grandfather make eye contact, and in their heart, they know. yesterday they were two men on differnt journeys in their lives, but today, they are brothers.

Iraq is one of the birthplaces of civilization. In some ways I think that human civiliation has come home to its roots. I'm greatful that I lived to see the wall in Berlin come down. Im greatful I saw my friend Masooma vote in Afghanistan, and Im greatful for the courage of the Iraqi people in their struggle against tryanny.

This is a great time to be alive. My children may see the day when all men, everywhere are free. My grandfather could not see it, not my father, perhaps not even me, but my kids just might live in an age that could never have been conceived of when that farmer in Concord lined up his sights on that unknown redcoat 200 years ago.

Posted @ January 30, 2005 01:04 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Texas...

I'm in Texas fighting a rather large fire right now. I was scheduled for a good long vacation starting on Friday. You can imagine my mood right now...

I'll be right back with a couple of good long posts.

Sit tight.

Update: Back. Exhausted. 4 hours of sleep since Wednesday. I've been on the raised floor for 3 days, my lips are chapped from the lack of moisture, my ears are ringing from the air conditioning fans and I have the kind of phyiscal fatigue that makes it feel like you are walking on the ocean floor.

Oddly, I'm too tired to sleep, and too dull witted to write.

Posted @ January 27, 2005 12:11 AM | Comments (0)

No Bucks, No Buck Rodgers

With great pomp and with the whir of cameras everywhere, the Europeans announced the launch of the Airbus A380, an aircraft slated to carry over 800+ passengers. The Europeans are justifiably excited about this occasion, as they can no claim the crown of the “ world largest commercial aircraft”.

Now, If you’ve been to this site often enough you know I love aircraft, any aircraft, flying or not. I even like the looks of the Wilga. My wife calls my obsession “ air porn”, and I tend to agree with her. I think that flying is the ultimate expression of technological man. You can talk all you want about big computer programs and big system wiring diagrams but there’s just nothing better than making an airplane with your own two hands, sitting in the pointy end and doing something that was impossible just a 100 years ago. Flying is freedom personified.

So, I don’t want anyone to think I’m just ‘banging on the Euros’ here. I like the A380, and I hope it will be successful. However the challenges the A380 faces are not aerodynamic, they are in another science altogether, once that is far less understood and more often than not ignored. That science is economics.

It’s also an area that the Euros in particular have had a hard time with. That is in the field of Aerospace Economics. For examples, I offer the “Dornier DO-X”, “Bristol Brabazon” and the “Saunders Roe Princess”. All three aircraft were the wonders of their time; all three were built and heavily subsidized by their governments. All three were unmitigated financial disasters, which eventually lead to the destruction of the indigenous aerospace industries the governments were trying to protect. All three aircraft neglected the expressed market needs in their development. The Brabazon and the Princess were built not because of, but in spite of market conditions.

More recently, The Concorde serves as another aircraft, magnificent in its engineering but horribly deficient in its ability to capture market. The Concorde was highly subsidized by the people of France and the United Kingdom, and for both governments to get the investment back, they would need to see a minimum of 250 orders. What they got was 16 and all were made to their own government owned airlines. To the credit of the staffs of British Airways, they were able to get the aircraft in the black after the Thatcher government cut subsidies back in the 1980’s.

Was the Concorde a bad aircraft? No, from an aerodynamics achievement standpoint, it was and is a magnificent achievement in the world of aeronautics, and the teams of engineers fitters, mechanics, pilots and flight crew are to be congratulated for their work.

Was Concorde a successful aircraft? No, in the economics of it, Concorde was a disaster.

Our own experience with poor economics vs. great aeronautical achievements can best be found in the Space Shuttle. This spacecraft, while amazing in its capability and achievement in aeronautics is a huge disaster. When you compare what it has been doing to what it was originally designed to do, you can see very quickly that its never come close to living up to its mission. It was originally hoped that there would be one shuttle mission per week; then it was revised down to one per month. The reality is the Space Shuttle has a failure rate of once every 50 flights and is so expensive to fly; it makes almost no economic sense to launch the Shuttle. It makes even less sense if you are a NASA crew member as your chance of dying on a space shuttle flight are higher than flying in the most intense period of combat in either WWII or Vietnam.

Is the Space Shuttle a great achievement? Yes. Is it a Success, No.

It’s at this point that we get back to the subject of the A380. The question on many peoples minds was “why didn’t the US make an aircraft that could compete with the A380?” My answer is that we did, and we did it in 1972, it was called the 747, and right now there are Airline Boneyards full of them.

Why? Because the 747 is not a “great plane”? No, airlines that use the 747 love it. It not aeronautics that are putting the 747s in the boneyards, its economics. The economic factor that most effects the 747 is that there just aren’t as many passengers as there once were.

And this is the problem with the A380. What’s worse is that they have admitted as much with their deployment of the aircraft as something that can be configured between 500 and 800 seats, depending on the need of the airline. Richard Branson let on to this problem when he said that they would fill the aircraft with many amenities including a health spa and possibly queen sized beds. (If youre not interested in carrying lots passengers, why the hell are you buying a big airplane? Simple ,so you can say you have the biggest...)

You see, if the 747 was in demand, that would tell you something about mass market travel needs. If there were no 747’s sitting in the boneyards you could quickly conclude that it was carrying capacity that was in demand. But if the 747 is not in demand and max passenger size is roughly half the size of the A380, what does that say for the viability of the A380?

It means if you are a government owned airline, you are probably going to have an A380 in your inventory pretty soon, just to stay out of trade wars with Europe. Airbus hasn’t announced what their "break even" number is for the aircraft in terms of orders, but my guess is that its about 300 airframes. I think this will be achievable, but only if the A380 is sold as a freighter, where I think it will do very well indeed. But as a passenger carrying aircraft, it will face some real problems, and those problems may eventually lead to the distruction of Airbus as an industry leader.

Another indicator of issues with the A380 is that Boeing looked at the market with their customers with two designs, First the BWB(my personal favorite) and then with the Sonic Cruiser. What their customers told them was clearly and emphatically “No thanks”, “we really just want a bigger more efficient 737”. So, no “flying wing”, no-almost-a concede-without-all-the-mess-and-expense-of-sonic-flight, Just give us a bigger version of the guppy and make it cheaper to fly.

In short, “No Bucks, No Buck Rodgers”.

So, Boeing released the 737-800 and the “Dreamliner”. How are they doing? The 737-800 is now the best selling aircraft of all time, and the “Dreamliner” has already achieved its breakeven numbers before the first aircraft is complete.

Are they sexy? Well, you’d have to be pretty drunk to think the 737-800 is sexy. I do, but I’m a weirdo, as I said, I like the Wilga. The “dreamliner” is nice, but it lights you up the way a Honda sedan does a former owner of a 1968 V-8 5 speed Camaro(Sure consumer reports likes it, the wife likes it, but its just a ride, its not like my Camaro…)

The Dreamliner talks to the accountants. The A380 talks to the penis.

And guess who writes the checks…

Posted @ January 23, 2005 01:42 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Honk if You Love Losers

My absolute favorite thing about todays political world is how the right has stolen the color red from the left.

My second favorite thing is how the left is now making a fetish of losing.

My third favorite thing is that the left has been converted from a political force of means to people having the credibility of the callers to the Art Bell show on "ghost story" night.

Posted @ January 15, 2005 03:13 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Welcome Neighbor!

At the end of your block sits a house. Its state of disrepair and unkempt nature drives down the property values of your neighborhood. What’s worse? The home is occupied by a nefarious gang of outlaws to terrorize you and your neighbors. You stay inside; you don’t dare leave your home unoccupied for any length of time, as it will assuredly be robbed.

While the police are at the house once a week to check into some form of problem, they seem unable to get at the issue or to actually change anything. While there are individual arrests, the gang itself continues to occupy the house as a whole. Individual players come and go but the terror remains. You and your neighbors go to the city council to complain, only to be told that there’s nothing that can be done. They take a vote and decide to start a “neighborhood watch program” and to implement a “drug free zone”. Funds are drawn from the coffers for city workers to erect the signs on light posts in the neighborhoods.

Within weeks, each of the signs has been vandalized.

You are losing money in the investment of your home; your family lives in trauma of the violence that may occur at any moment. You cannot take the law into your own hands, or the very forces that should be taking out the criminal gang, will instead take find it very easy to persecute you.

You and your fellow citizens decide to take action. At the next election, a new Sheriff is elected. He goes to the City council and asks, “ Is there any new business?” to which you and your neighbors take the podium to make clear the situation with the house at the end of your street. You make your case as such:

It is a notorious crack house. Crime in the neighborhood is at an all time high, you are in fear of your life. At all hours, newly paroled criminals take up residence in the home and begin robbing and extorting from their neighbors.

While this is being done, the Chairman of the City Council promises to “look into the matter”. The Sheriff, newly elected and without any political baggage asks:

“Why hasn’t this been taken care of?”
“Who is responsible for this?”

The City Council responds that while complaints have been received, the matter has been looked into and the hands of the police have been tied by the DA’s legal and with individual cases against the gang pending, they could not comment further.

After the meeting, the Sheriff, over cups of late night coffee with many of the older hands of the police force, he begins to form an opinion of the real situation at hand:

“The police force has been bought off by the gang. It may go as high as the DA. The entire city organization may be bribed or compromised by these people”.

He visits the neighborhood. He sees the situation. He goes through old police reports to see the level of violence in the neighborhood. After talking to many of the people who live in the neighborhood, he begins to form a plan.

The sheriff asks for a special meeting of the city council. All city council meetings are open to the public for participation. The sheriff asks the people of the neighborhood to attend the meeting and to be prepared with specific dates and details of the crimes and give public testimony at the city council meeting.

He also invites his friend from the Federal DEA to attend the meeting, but says nothing to the police force or the other members of the council.

As the meeting convenes, the city council tries to slip around the Sheriff and his agenda, but it wont work. The sheriff asks for public comment, and by doing so neighbor after neighbor steps to the podium to relate with specific dates and times stories of crimes committed.

The DEA agent begins to take notes. At one point, one neighbor relates a tale of machine guns being fired. Another tells of seeing boxes of ammunition taken inside. The agent reaches for his cellphone and walks into the hallway. As the meetings beings to disburse, other agents of the DEA arrive to begin taking depositions from the neighbors.

After 24 hours, a federal weapons warrant has been sworn out after testimony before a federal judge. The Sheriff is asked to assist with the serving of the warrant. The Sheriff neglects to tell the police or the city council of the issuance of the warrants, which he will excuse later as simply being “new to the job”.

Federal agents surround the home and with lightning speed take it over and arrest the members of the gang. During the arrest, two members of the gang shoot it out with the federal officers and are killed.

Children are found in the home in an abused state and turned over to Child Protection Services. Many women are found in the home being used as prostitutes having been addicted to drugs. Cell phones and other phones found at the home are confiscated and their phone records are found to lead to a number of other gangs that are also distributing Meth and Crack cocaine. Individual members of the gang are interrogated for information and in return for lighter sentencing being to give it to the federal agents, who continue breaking the back of the gang. Members of the police force and the city council are found to have received favors from the gang and are removed from their positions.

After a few months, the home is sold to pay back property taxes and fines. The new homeowner is a young couple, who proceed take the distressed property and begin to turn it back into a home from a crack house. Within a year, the home is a spectacular example of homes in the neighborhood.

Oddly, While, a great deal of methamphetamine producing chemicals was found in the house while the gang was there, no more than a trace of “Meth” is ever found on site. There were also no signs of the “Machine guns” found in the house as was stated on the initial warrant.

Epilogue: When the law begins to act as a shield for criminal activity, it is not a crime to use the law against itself. I do not care if we found a single WMD in Iraq. I would have called for the invasion of Iraq for no other reason than it has supported terrorists and has a long border with Iran and Syria. It was the Tikriti Clan in control of Iraq that was the danger, not what they had in the paint locker.

It is always a fetish for the left to concentrate on the weapon, rather than the criminal. Usually you see this portrayed in its obsession against private ownership of pistols but in this case its WMDs; but the situation is the same.

We’ve removed a criminal element from the neck of the people of Iraq, and it was our duty as fellow of the world citizens to do it. If you needed the threat of WMD to go and stop that nightmare, then it served its purpose. But it should have taken much less, and shame on you that it didn’t, and shame on us all for waiting so long to stop it, but there is no shame that we didn't find the weapons.

Posted @ January 15, 2005 01:51 PM | Current Events | Comments (0)

Eight Notes for Hugh Hewitt.

1. You’re surprised by the Thornburg/Boccardi report? Let me get this straight, a major media outlet goes out of its way to sink the Presidents re-election campaign with a clear vendetta, gets caught and exposed in the execution of the story and then tries to slink away into the night rather than admit it publically. And yet, you are surprised, somehow expecting what exactly? This is hardly news; this is common behavior for large ossified organizations. What is news this time is that they got caught, caught publically and just like Jayne Mansfield discovering a bit too late that her scarf was just a bit too long, CBS News has also nearly lost it's head over this one issue. Much like the Polish Calvary realised in 1939, CBS has realized too late that the world has changed, and there are now thousands and thousands of media outlets, many of which can actually tell when they are being defrauded. The biggest issue for CBS News to deal with is this - if you cant tell this story was a fraud, then what good are you? If we can't trust you with simple things, should we give you the benefit for the big things?

My Dear Mr. Hewitt, you not should be at all surprised that CBS News has taken the "line of least resistance" in resolving this issue. They were never going to hop up barefooted on the conference table and run straight through the plate glass window falling all the way down to the street from the 77th floor while screaming “WE GOT CAUGHT!!!”. We know they got caught, they know we caught them, to expect them to do anything else except issue a heavily vetted,legally "safe" document and "fire" a few underlings would be to expect something out of character for people who are far "too much lawyer" and not enough Sam Fuller to be men about it and admit when they've clearly been had. If you think a single word in this report wasn't reviewed by 100 lawyers before it was released, you're just not paying attention.

Frankly, there are still legions at CBS News who lament not the story and its basis, but the "getting caught", and that is a damn shame for everyone.

2. Mary Mapes did not get fired, She got a promotion. This is not the end of her career but the start of her ‘sainted victimhood’, where she will publish endless piles of books on the subject of the right wing cabal and appear breathless at fundraisers, while appearing thrice daily on Air America and NPR to opine on the latest great offence from the 'scabknucked bohunks' that inhabit the White House in the Bush Administration.

3. CBS news is toast. They would be better off selling the airtime back to the affiliates or to Ron Popeil. With it will go soon ABC and NBC Nightly News. They simply do not make enough money to justify their grotesque cost. When they do finally go away, not one of them will understand that when they started to sell opinion as actual news, that they lost all credibility in the eyes and ears of the viewers and they began to look elsewhere. What has totally surprised CBS is not that they went looking, but that they’ve found it. They've found it in the blogosphere.

4. People who look pretty and read from Teleprompters are not “reporters”. When people who read from telepromters refer to themselves as being a "reporter" our natural reaction should be to violently laugh and buckle over horizontally at the hips. "Reporters" are men like Sam Fuller, Ernie Pyle and William Shirer. There are no men like this today, the media's legal staff would simply not permit it.

5. Anchormen are thrice removed from everyday human beings and cannot be expected to understand the culture and life of the average man-in-the-street. They know better than us, or so they think which is why they are going extinct. No one likes a wiseass, Americans particularly don’t like that sort of thing.

6. ‘Big Media’ began to die when someone said; “E.J.Dionne is a smart guy, let’s book him for the Sunday Shows”.

7.The current leftist fetish of “Talking truth to power” marks the end of the modern profession of journalism. If journalism were correctly practiced, this concept would never have seen the light of day in any class with even a basic sense of ethics.

8. The study of "Journalism" has become a place for high school students who cannot act well enough to go further in Drama, think well enough to progress in Science and are not allowed near anything sharp, and thus cannot take any Shop Class. And before you go there, don’t. There’s never once in recorded human history been a big media type who was once an A/V Geek, and there’s a good reason for it. We A/V types have out standards. We might have worn high water pants and listened to Doctor Demento, but there are some things that are just-not-done.

Posted @ January 11, 2005 01:03 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Michael Crichton can’t say that! (Can he?)

A review of ‘State of Fear’

Somewhere in a bar in West Hollywood sits a “Big Time Media Agent” drunkenly explaining to his bartender how screwed he is. It seems that he’s Michael Crichton’s Agent, and he didn’t vet his clients most recent book before publishing, assuming as any of us would, that its automatically “Hollywood gold” because of course, “Michael Crichton wrote it”.

Then someone drops the bomb and tells him the book has two evil protagonists First, an Environmentalist Lawyer and second and far worse, A bloviating actor who “plays the president on a weekly TV show” and drives with great pride, an electric car! Worse still, most of what is made out as laughable by the author is the idiocy that makes up the sanctimonious liberal ‘for a cause’ culture that makes up much of the free time of the Hollywood elite.

Lawyers always suffer at the hands of Michael Crichton, if you’ll remember the scene in Jurassic Park where “The Lawyer” while sitting in a toilet, is eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

I remember the scene because the audience I was with, clapped.

You can make a movie or have a TV show about lawyers, it happens all the time. You can generate thousands of miles of footage about the evil “military industrial complex”, you can have all priests portrayed as pederasts, all cops as crooks and all ex-military types are Nutcase-Rambo-Time-Bombs, but you cannot under any circumstances make fun of “Hollywood Actors” as they go about making the world safe for us common people to live in.

I applaud Michael Crichton for writing a book that dares Hollywood to make it into a movie. However, if there’s a buck in it, they will try, only they will do to him what they did to Tom Clancy on “Sum of All Fears” where they changed the evil characters into safe to hate “Neo-Nazi’s” from the politically incorrect ‘Palestinian Terrorists’. Clearly the potential loss of market share in the middle-east vs. the potential loss of market in Hayden Lake Idaho had something to do with this decision.

This book is guaranteed to really piss some people off. If you are someone who takes the doctrine of environmentalism seriously, you might try reading something less inflammatory, like Ann Coulter instead. There is simply nothing for you in this book as there is nothing in the Da Vinci Code for the serious Catholic.

This is a book of heresy to the followers of the holy church of “mother earth” and my Birkenstock brothers are likely to take after Mr. Crichton with a pitchfork the way they did to Bjorn Lomborg.

Here’s the story in short summary:

A wealthy benefactor is about to make a large grant to an environmental advocacy group. They are working on a lawsuit for the poor put upon people of a south pacific atoll. The problem? Global Warming, and we all know who caused that! That’s right the good ole USA.

While looking for information on the case, the advocacy group is also doing what it can to actually cause targeted environmental disasters. One disaster prophetically told is that of a Tsunami generated in the South Pacific, aimed at the shores of California.

The story line gives Mr. Crichton a chance via his story proxy to tear into the absolute crap that passes for scientific discourse in the minds of those who believe in “global warming”. As such, I enjoyed the hell out of the book. You will find it interesting to read, just to check out the footnotes and detailed information that he practically begs you to go look up. I actually think that he should re-title the book “ Go look it up, Dipwad!” as that is really the point of much of the story. You are really missing half the story if you simply read what is written, go into the footnotes and you can find a treasure trove of facts and figures that will really make you the "man to be avoided" at the next NRDC fundraiser.

I laughed out loud at several points in the book and some of the items in it are eminently quotable. If you want to skim while in the bookstore, go directly to Appendix I in the back of the book. I think it should be moved to the preface of the story, it's that good.

I will only quote once and it’s a quote that he lifts from someone else.

“When the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit for knowledge becomes a quest for power”

This is the core of the message behind the book. These are dangerous times that we live in, not because of the way we’ve treated the environment but because of the incessant need to “do something” and he makes clear the very real risks for following some of the idiocy that is presented to the public as “ caring concern for the environment”.

As someone who has had long friendships end because of my stand on “global warming” I can say that the book was a hit for me in a very big way. The book also brought out a new concept that I had not considered before. Much as been made of the “Military Industrial Complex” in our culture, but Mr. Crichton brings out a new idea, the “Political-Legal-Media Complex” where certain agencies are interested in hyping a “State of Fear”. I found this idea in the book to be the most interesting thing about it, as today we saw the release of the Rathergate report where two of the three legs of the PLM milk stool has taken a pretty bad beating.

There are many, many people who will find this book offensive, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Posted @ January 10, 2005 11:45 PM | Book Reviews | Comments (0)

Road Warrior

His cubicle was across the aisle from mine, we were rarely in them at the same time. We were “Road Warriors”. We were only in the office on occasion to drop off expense reports, have meetings with company management or attend classes provided by any number of vendors for the products we used. Due to company tradition, everyone had to have a cubicle, even if they were never in it. They thought it to be a perk, we thought it just silly.

He and I had cubicles that shared an aisle at a company’s headquarters. But we never really worked there together.

He lived in upstate New York, I lived out west and the office was in San Francisco. Our families never met and we only knew each other at work. But the work of a 'road warrior' wasn’t like the normal 9 to 5 job. We worked out in the field. We worked until we dropped at client sites and then we flew home, only to turn around the next week and do it all over again. No matter what town we were in we saw the same three things and usually only those three things, The Car Rental Desk, the Hotel Lobby and the client’s windowless raised floor basement. We came in before the sun came up; we went home after it got dark, no matter what time of year it was.

Back then, we all had the “uniform”. White tennis shoes, polo shirts that commemorated some past corporate event in a badge-like emblem, 501 jeans or “dockers” and of course, a leather bomber jacket. We carried laptops and cellphones in our daily service like our fathers and grandfathers carried M1's and hand grenades in theirs. We knew the airline routes the way cab drivers (for the right price…) in Manhattan know how to get to LaGuardia in 15 minutes at rush hour.

We worked like fiends while we were in the field. He was one of my “team” and I was his manager. My crew got all the bad jobs, the most difficult customers, the projects of the greatest risk. I didn’t care, because I had the best team. There were nine of us, men and women all from various backgrounds, abilities and skills and even when we didn’t get along, we wouldn’t trade any of us for anyone else in the world. When you are a manager and you have good people, you have everything you need. Good people, and good people who can work well together are am extremely rare commodity. You treasure a cohesive creative hardworking technical team like oxygen. When you lose one of your team, you grieve over it for years, even if they just take another job.

My weekly ritual was to pack on Sunday, and be ready for the Monday morning flight out. It was a habit I had for years. This time the ritual was interrupted. The call came in the middle of my packing and it came out of nowhere.

“Joe's dead”. Said Jeff, another road warrior who lived near Joe in New York.

Two words. Nothing more. I knew it was real, that he wasn’t kidding. You always know when "the call" really comes. No one calls on Sunday to screw around. I sat slackjawed at the news, and after it was over I instinctively called my manager to inform him and the company CEO, as it was a small company, and we had all known Joe for years. Working in small company is good for your ego, as every individual makes an impact. Joe made a very big impact in our small company, but he would have done the same in the ranks of IBM.

Joe had been complaining of stomach pain before we left the last project together earlier that month. None of us, or Joe himself thought much about it. He just took aspirin and went on about his business with a smile. He never complained, he just went about his job, no matter the circumstances.

He had died of a stomach cancer that had not been diagnosed until just that week. From diagnosis to death, he had 72 hours. He had time to say goodbye to his family, his wife and two girls, put his affairs in order and it was all over. On that Sunday, while packing for a trip that would never happen, I lost a friend and a teammate and my life would never be the same again. On Monday, I would have to be at headquarters to clear out his desk and prepare paperwork for his family, and do what I could to get the word out to the many friends he had made over the years. I made a long list of phone calls to people who were equally shocked and stunned to learn that a man of our age, had died of an old mans disease. All of us sharing the dual paralysis that comes from both the feeling of powerlessness that comes with a death and the recognition that for the grace of god and with enough time, eventually and inevitably there go we all…

Usually, going into headquarters was joyous and fun-filled as it was “slack time”. Time to gab with the cute admins, go shopping and eat and just visit San Francisco. This trip was the opposite of joyous. I drove in early, all the way into the city, despite the expense and difficulty of parking in downtown San Francisco.

I did it for the time alone. I wanted to talk to Joe one more time, and this was my last chance, even if it was just in my head.

The elevator opened to the lobby and I turned down the ornate marbled hall. I thanked God under my breath that the receptionist wasn’t looking up so as to begin having "the dreaded conversation" before I was prepared. I walked down the hall, row after row of empty cubicles, to our aisle. There at the end was my cubicle, and his. A large blowup Godzilla doll, from a release party held years before, marked our row. Godzilla was somewhat less than ominous has he was wearing a bra and a Chevy’s sombrero. For us, this Godzilla was the perfect mascot.

I hung up my jacket, sat my briefcase on the floor and sat down in my cubicle like I had a dozen times and like many times before I looked across the aisle to his cubicle. I just sat there and looked as the Sun began to rise over the Bay.

The pictures on the cube walls, the chair askance. A collection of toys from various trips arrayed behind his monitor, marking his passage to many of the towns we had worked in together. It was as if any minute he would appear around the corner, unaware of all that had occurred in our lives since “the call”. You always think that when someone dies, that its all a big mistake, that like some 60’s sitcom plot “a terrible case of mistaken identity occurred “ and instead of the “great horrible thing” it becomes a joyous case of near death experience and a good laugh is had by all.

But that is never the case. The empty cubicle is still empty and you are still waiting for the man, the friend, who never comes.

I leaned back, put my feet up on my desk and looked across to his cubicle, like I had done on the rare occasions when we were in the office together. I ran over the dozen conversations we had there, but would never have again anywhere.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a light on my desk. It was my phone. Over the holiday, I had not called to get my messages. Normally, I would have done so on Monday morning in preflight mode, but there was to be no flight today.

I clicked the keys and out came the message.

It was from Joe.

“Yo, dude, just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas, I gotta go into the hospital this afternoon but its no big deal so don’t worry. They are just going to take a quick look around, so nothing to get excited about. I should be in and out in no time. I’ll give you call when I get done, I’ll see ya after the first of the year…”.

On my desk, stored in an electronic device, as a series of magnetic blips was the voice of a dead man. The man was dead, but the recording of his voice and a message delivered before his death sentence was given was still there, living on inside my phone. According to the timestamp on the call, from that point till his death, he has 82 hours to live. He didn’t know anything was afoot when he made the message. In his voice was the sound of the Christmas to come and New Years to follow.

The voice echoed over my speakerphone as I played it over and over in the empty office, as if the sound of his voice would cause his spirit to take corporeal form there in front of me. His stuff was there, His voice was there, but he was not and would never be again.

As people began to arrive in the office, I stopped playing the message. And went about my unfortunate managerial duties. I cleared out his desk gingerly, looking for signs of the man I once knew in each knick-knack. I consoled coworkers and tried not to get upset at those who only slightly knew the man caterwauled and carried on like red-hot railroad spikes were being jammed through their feet. I was there, but I was really just going through the motions.

We all were.

After I had finished all the company paperwork, all the boxing of his things, and having made all the obligatory calls to coworkers and clients he had known, I took a walk down to the Embarcadero. I thought about when I had first met him and the things we had done together. I though of the code he had written and the comment blocks of source code running at companies all around the world that had his name in it. Code that was calculating and paying payrolls for hundreds of thousands of people all around the world, created by a man that was now dead and yet only his code block comments were left to show his passing. Thousands of people around the world getting paid accurately every week because of a system he had once had a hand in writing. Now the man was gone, but his code would continue to run, for awhile at least. As the sun went down I realized I had lived in a day that he had never lived to see. The sun had come up and gone down, and he was not there to witness it.

A week later, I was passing through O’Hare. I had arraigned for a long layover to have a little ritual. We used to joke with each other that when we died our souls would spend time changing gates at O’Hare before we passed on to the next world. I sat at the end of the empty area of the B gates and watched people go by, living their lives, unaware that death stalks each of us and can and will reach out to swat us down without warning or concern for our station in life. We are all temporary and nothing and no one lasts forever.

In the distance down the busy gates through the crowds, I caught the sight of a road warrior, and for half a second I thought I saw him. But I knew better. But for that half a second, it felt good to think that I had.

It took 6 months to get around to deleting the message on the phone.

Posted @ January 04, 2005 09:16 PM | Category 2 | Comments (0)

A Quick Retort

Everyone is always saying "America cannot be the world's Policeman". Ok, at some level I can agree with that.

However, no one ever asks " who is the world's Fire/EMT/Ambulance Department?".

If Europe wants to step up to the bar and act as a "counter balance to American Hegemony", they might consider taking on that task....

(UPDATE): Friend Harry says: Europe can have landscaping and barkeeping, leave Fire/EMT/Ambulance to Japan...

Posted @ January 04, 2005 11:55 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

You can't have anything nice.

You set up a website, you get all nice and decide to allow people to comment on your work. First, you have to teach people how to disagree without being disagreeable. No sooner do you accomplish that when you get hit with a series of DOS attacks, followed by a spam campaign. Nice ,real-freakin-nice.

Spam - comment spam particularly is the biggest and dumbest idea of all time. It is the web version of grafitti. It does not serve to educate, inform or even sell. It serves only to annoy. I would would like to feed the fingertips of any person who does it to the wolverines.

So why are comments off? Until I find a way to end the hundreds of spam entries that are hammering the site every hour, I have to leave them off.

Those of you that know me, know how to get in touch with me.

ETA - 72 hours.

Posted @ January 03, 2005 11:46 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Today, I was "Unprofessional"...

Over the past 6 weeks, I've been deeply enmeshed in one of those "go live at the end of the year" projects that we in the IT industry have learned to love. The kind where managers assume that since no one is working, why that would be the perfect time to go live!

Of course, it means that your doing complex work at the point of maximum distraction with many many holidays and no staff.

This year we had a major distraction, and I'm bothered that I described it that way.

On Christmas Day, a disaster visited the human race. Hundreds of thousands of people, quietly living their lives on the edge of the sea were killed. They were killed, not by suicide bombers or suitcase nukes or crazed men hijacking planes into buildings. They were killed with simple seawater. Those that were killed werent just simple minded fools who wandered lemming like out into the unusually low tide, only to be mowed down by the sudden flood. They were people enjoying the sights from the second story of a hotel when the ocean rose up to engulf them. The horror of it all hasnt even begun to sink in to most of us.

There is a tendancy in the western world to overlook the disasters of the third world. Unless it involves us "white folks", the press of the western world does not seem to care or think that we do. In this disaster, one example of disgusting western depravity could be found in the many press outlets that made big news out of a "supermodel" who was (gasp!!!) harmed in the disaster. Imagine if someone on September 12th had published a report that Zsa Zsa gabor and her poodle were put out by the lack of cabs in Manhattan. It made me sick to my stomach to see this item on the news.

Today, The Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that 5,000 Americans could not be accounted for, Sweden also announced roughly the same figure for their citizens.

Now we care. And shame on us all.

Today, during an afternoon conference that wrapped up my project of the last 18 months, one of my Euro collegues tossed this little turd out to no one in particular:

" See, this is why George Bush is so dumb, theres a disaster in the world and he sends an Aircraft Carrier..."

After which he and many of my Euro collegues laughed out loud.

and then they looked at me. I wasn't laughing, and neither was my Hindi friend sitting next to me, who has lost family in the disaster.

I'm afraid I was "unprofessional", I let it loose -

"Hmmm, let's see, what would be the ideal ship to send to a disaster, now what kind of ship would we want?

Something with its own inexhuastible power supply?

Something that can produce 900,000 gallons of fresh water a day from sea water?

Something with its own airfield? So that after producing the fresh water, it could help distribute it?

Something with 4 hospitals and lots of open space for emergency supplies?

Something with a global communications facility to make the coordination of disaster relief in the region easier?

Well "Franz", us peasants in America call that kind of ship an "Aircraft Carrier". We have 12 of them. How many do you have? Oh that's right, NONE. Lucky for you and the rest of the world, we are the kind of people who share. Even with people we dont like. In fact, if memory serves,once upon a time we peasants spent a ton of money and lives rescuing people who we had once tried to kill and who tried to kill us.

Do you know who those people were? that's right Franz, Europeans.

Theres is a French Aircraft carrier? where is it? Right where it belongs! In France of course! Oh why should the French Navy dirty their uniforms helping people on the other side of the globe. How Simplesse...

The day an American has to move a European out of the way to help in some part of the world it will be a great day in the world, you sniggering little f**knob..."

The room fell silent. My hindi friend then said quietly to the Euros:

"Can you let your hatred of George Bush end for just one minute? There are people dying! And what are your countries doing? Amazon.com has helped more than France has. You all have a role to play in the world, why can't you see that? Thank God for the US Navy, they dont have to come and help, but they are. They helped you once and you should all thank God they did. They didnt have to, and no one but them would have done so. I'm ashamed of you all..."

He left the room, shaking and in tears. The frustration of being on the other side of the globe, unable to do anything to assist and faced with people who could not set aside their asininity long enough to reach out and help was too much for him to bear. I just shook my head and left. The Euros stood speechless.

Later in the breakroom, one of the laughing Euros caught me and extended his hand in an apology. I asked him where he was from, he said "a town outside of Berlin". He is a young man, in his early 20's.

I asked him if he knew of a man named Gail Halvorsen.

He said no.

I said "that's a shame" and walked away to find my Hindi friend.

Posted @ January 03, 2005 08:25 PM | Current Events | Comments (0)