Mike Wilson

Malcolm Gladwell is… well, he’s someone who writes pop non-fiction books with all the intellectual rigor of your average hippy trying to defend pot legalization on the basis of “hemp biomass” rather than just fessing up that he wants to smoke it.

Joel Spolsky is, on the other hand, an intelligent man; and he expresses some frustrations that have been plaguing me about this crap for some time…

Anecdotes

…This review captures what’s been driving me crazy over the last year… an unbelievable proliferation of anecdotes disguised as science, self-professed experts writing about things they actually know nothing about, and amusing stories disguised as metaphors for how the world works…

I liked Tipping Point.  It was cute.  What it is NOT is science.  I’m not sure I’d get behind it as accurate.  But it certainly was a fun read.  People are going to keep buying this guys books and I suppose good for him.  Within the next month I have no doubt I’ll be invoked in bar conversation on this topic several times.

But instead of reading creampuff Gladwell books so that you can pretend you’re smart, why don’t you read something that’s actually challenging and might teach you something?

Like Howard Bloom or Christopher Hitchens.

Office mate (confused after not getting the whole story): You paraphrase like a boy. We’re girls, we want to hear the truth.

Lancaster, Pennsylvania

From Overheard in the Office

(emphasis mine)

Listen.  I know most people reading this aren’t any closer to being economists than I am.  But here’s the deal with the automakers:

This isn’t the financial crisis.  It’s not the credit crunch.  It’s the latest episode in a long line of industry failures that’s spanned most of my life.

Right now the heads of the auto industry (including the insidious parasite the UAW) are before congress trying to terrorize them and you into writing them a check.

They are blitzing the media with advertising about what a catastrophe we’d have to endure if they didn’t get this check.  Millions of jobs in all kinds of industries spanning the country, they threaten.

They’re even confessing that this check is only to hold them over until they need the NEXT check in five to six months, because it’s really THAT bad.

I learned an interesting lesson about 16 years ago when a friend of mine was taking care of a little girl named Claire, a two and a half year old.  When it was time to go to the store, Claire was having none of it because she saw the choices on the table as go to the store or not (even though there wasn’t much of a choice.)  It took a bit of frustration before the position was reframed:  “We’re going to the store, do you want to walk or take the stroller?”  She described to me the look on this little girl’s face when she knew something was going on but couldn’t quite put her finger on it as neither choice would provoke the desired scene.

Well my friends the auto industry is doing the same thing to us, and this time it’s decidedly NOT in our best interest.  They’re framing their argument in an intentionally deceitful way:  Either they get the money or millions of jobs are going to disappear as they fail.  Right?  That’s the rhetoric from them and their advocates and shills in the media (Phil Lebeau from cnbc comes to mind.)

But there’s another option.

Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows these companies to continue operating, while restructuring internal and external contractual obligations.  It gives them the exact opportunity they need.  It frees them from the chokehold of the united autoworkers union, which is bleeding the industry dry.

Is it the nice happy path option?  No, certainly not.  But we’re in a time of serious economic pain and that’s a part of the process.

Fortunately (I can’t believe I’m saying this) we went through the TARP 700 billion dollar bailout (which neither Hank Paulson or the banks who received money are using for it’s intended purpose you might be interested to know) so Congress is almost justifiably skittish.

Listening to them ream these guys today was mildly heartening because they don’t want to get burned again and they’re mad as hell.

And it almost looks like they’re going to fold their arms and tell Detroit to go home and figure out their own damn mess.

But what else became clear to me today is that they are NOT hearing the inherent deceit in being asked whether they want to walk or take the stroller.  So what’s going to happen is the fear of “millions of lost jobs” is going to sink in to them in a way that can only happen to a politician whose career is on the line and frankly it will be Ghostbusters all over again (”and you’ll be saving the lives(jobs) of millions of registered voters.”)

So they’re going to grant them the money.

But don’t be fooled about what’s going on right now.  Detroit’s thrashing in the straight jacket like an addict in withdrawal.  They’ll say anything, promise anything they need to and offer nothing in return in order to get that check.  Then they’ll be back.

And the bitch of it all is that it is truly inevitable.  These industries will undergo major INVOLUNTARY restructuring be it via chapter 11, through massive mergers or whatever.  And this will happen whether they get the check or not.  This does nothing but forestall the inevitable a few months.

We did a good job letting Congress know how we felt about the bail out, but they were frightened in to action by a scaremongering Hank Paulson. (A side point is that the original proposal on the bailout was 3 pages, and Congress…. Congressed it to I think 680 so we really will NEVER know if the original plan would have worked.  It died in the first edit.)

Call or send an email to your Congressman.  It just might be possible to stop this crap from going through.

It’s NOT an all or nothing deal.  They’re lying.

One of the things in “Daniel Amen”’s book of things Mikey does to exhaserbate his ADD (among which are pretty much all the things that make me me, which ought to be a shock to precisely no one) is consume caffeine as a self-medication.

My caffeine intake primarily comes from diet soda, namely Diet Mountain Dew and Coke Zero.  And I drink (drank) those at a rate of about 4 liters a day.

Now I know that’s bad and I even have some grasp of how bad it actually is; so upon reading that I decided I was going to knock that shit off.  Not completely of course.  I’m not fool enough to think that quitting caffeine cold turkey has a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding.

But I decided not to have it in the fridge any more.  Sure I need to go grab a Red Bull to mitigate the headaches and I’ll suck down a Coke if I get pizza (also on the new ‘rarely’ list.) But no more daily trips to Key Food for 4 2-liter bottles of whichever of my poisons I hadn’t depleted their stock of completely.

So now that’s what I do.  Except today.  Today I’m sinking it like I invented it.  I bought a 2-liter zero and couldn’t wait so I also got a cold one at the stupidmarket to drink while I walked the two blocks home.

Because today I have an exceptional hangover and the market closed below 8000 and I just don’t give a shit.

*buurrrrp*

So I’ve been grinding on the WordPressWikiPlugin and it’s in pretty good shape.  In fact, it’s in such good shape that I’m going to use this post as the documentation page for a while and see how that works out.

Currently the feature set (meager as it is) looks like this:

The WordPressWikiPlugin is a rendering time filter.  It scans the content of a post looking for WikiWords (two or more words capitalized, jammed together, no consecutive caps.)  When it finds them it does two important things:

1. Scans the database for posts with a title matching that WikiWord and replaces that text with a link to the post in question.
2. IF the page does NOT exist and a blog author is logged in, it uses the original WikiWiki convention of placing a link with the text ‘?’ after the WIkiWord.  If that link is clicked it takes you to the CreateNewPost page with that title filled in.

It doesn’t do any additional formatting, since WordPress handles that relatively well.  I will probably add some complex external linking stuff as time goes on.

CurrentIssues:

• There is a perfect lack of documentation of the “User Level” field of the user data structure.  So the “if an author is logged in” is a bit wonky at best.  It DOES detect if someone is logged in and if their user level is 10.  But I think that’s the admin level.  Tough to tell with no documentation.  I’m going to have to experiment with this.

And no, it’s not uploaded to this site just yet.  I have a bit more testing to do on my local installation before it’s ready to be released into the wild.

UPDATE: Ok, I’ve activated it on this blog (dogfooding and all) but I don’t have so many things linking back and forth yet, so it’s a little sparse. That’s ok. Notice that the link in the first line does indeed bring you to this post though. When I look at it, the missing links do have the “page does not exist” question mark link, which works really well. So I’m pretty happy with that so far.

I’m trying to decide what the path between here and public release is. There’s not really so much I want in the 0.1 version that’s not there now. I have to fix the user level thing. But it might be ready to go after that.

I’ve been using bloglines as my feed reader for several years now. But over the past few months I’ve been beginning to get the sense that it’s starting to buckle under it’s own weight.

The functionality itself has always been pretty damn good.  But it’s reaction to what appears to be load, be it my 239 feeds or it’s own server-side load, does not exactly inspire confidence.

See, I don’t just use it for reading feeds, but for storing articles of reference interest as well.  So, with 239 feeds I have upwards of 20,000 saved items.  Now granted, most of this is just schlock and should probably be deleted.  But there’s an awful lot of it that I go back to.

Sure, I could save the links to del.icio.us or something. But aside from the fact that it would take damn near forever is the problem that an awful lot of those links are defunct.

That’s been one of those things that’s great about the service.  It actually saves the article bodies instead of just the links.

I suppose I could whip some greasemonkey script together that I could tell to somehow export eveything.   but that’d be awfully complex. (Hmm… is this a job for selenium + greasemonkey?)

But either way I have to start looking for a new reader.  I haven’t looked at google’s in a while, so that may be a good place to start.

It’s too bad though.  Bloglines, when it works, is solid.  But I haven’t been able to read updates for the last hour.

Which, at 2:00 am is probably just as well frankly.

So like I was sayin’. I’d gotten to thinking and something’s bugging me about the tendrils of my online presence.

It’s all summed up pretty well in facebook. I found/was found by a friend of mine from high-school. We caught up a bit and it was nice. I linked up with my junior year roommate and I saw in their “friend” lists tendrils that spanned that environment years in either diretion.

Now, I’m 39. High school for me is about 25 years ago.

My 3 years at The Marvelwood School (I spent my freshman year in public) just might have been the three worst years of my life; and I had a childhood that sucked righteous wind. It was a horrible hellish experience and I hated just about every minute of it.

It was integral to my development as a human being, so I can’t really reject it’s influence. It took me an awfully long time to come to terms with who I was, how poorly I adapted to my mid-late teen years and to just move on and put it all past me.

I’m enjoying catching up with Lukas and Will a bit. They were good guys then and they sure seem to be good guys now. But I’ve spent decades working on the deficiencies in my character which became so terribly clear to me in those years and I don’t think I want it around.

I find that my distant past in general is something best left where it was. There are always exceptions in the form of people. There are a couple relationships I hope I’ll carry forward for the next 50+ years. You know who you are.

But the rest of them? The events and people of my past? The part they served in my life was to contribute to the ride, as I did to theirs (hopefully to the good. But even the small souled bullies from high-school and before ended up contributing positively to my character though I’m not sure I’d hold my fist to my side on sight, so who knows what constitutes a positive contribution to someone’s life.)

So that whole line of thought led me to realize that, while I’ve spent an awfully great deal of energy overcoming shyness (a hard few years in East Norwalk) I’m actually more comfortable keeping a pretty high wall around myself, though I come out to play frequently. My online presence is a very particular facet of my life and I have no qualms about letting out the truth, being who I am, etc. there are facets that simply don’t mix.

So yeah I’m doing some pruning on facebook (and elsewhere frankly.) I’m not trying to make some grand statement about the people I’ve left on, or out. I’m just feeling out my comfort zone.

I’ve got an awful lot more about this swirling around in my head. But I’ll get to that later.
UPDATE:  Ya know, ya never know who’s going to drift on to a post like this so I have to add something:  There are a couple/few people to whom I have behaved rather terribly and from whom I’ve subsequently become estranged.  I’m going to address that in general at some point in the near future in the hopes that it helps me gain the courage to deal with it specifically (the former here, the latter not likely.)  If you’re not one of those people then that’s going to seem exceptionally cryptic.

So I got to thinkin’ a while ago; ’bout an hour actually.

And one of the things．．．　Ｇｏｄ　ｄａｍｎｉｔ．　　ｔｈｅ　ｅｅｅ　ｊｕｓｔ　ｄｉｄ　ｔｈａｔ　ｔｈｉｎｇ　ａｇａｉｎ．　　ＷＴＦ！？！　　Ｎｏｗ　ｔｈｅ　ｆｏｎｔ’ｓ　ａｌｌ　ｓｃｒｅｗｙ；　ａｎｄ　ｔｈｉｓ　ｉｓ　ｉｎ　　ｆｉｒｅｆｏｘ，　ｎｏｔ　ＯｐｅｎＯｆｆｉｃｅ，　ｗｈｉｃｈ　ｍｉｇｈｔ　ｅｘｐｌａｉｎ　ｗｈｙ　Ｉcouldn’t find the setting in….. now it’s back again.

God DAMNIT this is driving me batshit.

I’ve got to be hitting something.  It’s something in combination with the shift key..

ａ　ＨＡ！　　Ｓｍａｒｔ　Ｍｉｋｅｙ，　ｇｅｔｓ　ｂｉｓｃｕｉｔ．　（Ｗｅｌｌ，　Ｉ’ｌｌ　ｈａｖｅ　ｔｏ　ｆｉｎｄ　ｓｏｍｅ　ｎｉｃｅ　ｙｏｕｎｇ　ｌａｄｙ　ｗｈｏ’ｌｌ　ｏｂｌｉｇｅ　ｍｅ　ｔｈｅ　ｃｏｌｌｅｃｔｉｏｎ　ｏｆ　ｓａｉｄ　ｐｒｉｚｅ，　ｂｕｔ　ｔｈａｔ’ｓ　ａ　ｔａｓｋ　ｆｏｒ　ａｎｏｔｈｅｒ　ｄａｙ．）

Hold down the shift key and tap the space bar and it toggles.

Phew.

Now, with my luck none of this will translate to the post and you people won’t have the FAINTEST idea what the hell I’m talking about.  s’ok.  I’m used to it.

America’s first Woman four-star general

WASHINGTON (AP) - Call it breaking the brass ceiling. Ann E. Dunwoody, after 33 years in the Army, ascended Friday to a peak never before reached by a woman in the U.S. military: four-star general.

Congratulations!

Yeah, it’s good.

It’s that good.