Spring in Highland Park arrived, and nobody noticed

Originally uploaded by chmoss.

Spring arrived - I went out to get some pictures of people in spring in Highland Park. Everybody else stayed indoors, almost, The high was 79F - not enough to get peple outside. Very wierd.

More thoughts to live by

This has been widely posted, so I do not know how to properly attribute it - but I find it very funny and worth repeating. If it violates a copyright, please let me know.

• Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.
• Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.
• If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
• If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
• Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me, either; just leave me the heck alone.
• It's always darkest before dawn. So if you're going to steal your neighbor's newspaper that's the time to do it.
• Don't be irreplaceable; if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
• Give a man the fire and you'll keep him warm for one day. Set the man on fire -- and you'll keep him warm for the rest of his life.
• No one is listening until you make a mistake.
• Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.
• It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
• It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
• Some days you are the bug, some days you are the windshield.
• Good judgement comes from bad experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgement.
• There are two theories to arguing with women. Neither one works.
• Generally speaking, you aren't learning much when your mouth is moving.
• Never miss a good chance to shut up.
• Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

Severely edited subset of my pictures from India

Chinese nets

I have selected a few of my favorite pictures from our trip to India and put them up here on Flickr

Pictures from India

At last I have finished culling the pictures I took last December in India. Click on the image to see all of them.

We visited Poughkeepsie and Tenafly last week

Poughkeepsie was cold - below zero Fahrenheit. We visited our dear, old friend Brenda who had a massive stroke in January. Her recovery will be a long slow process. She has not regained her speech. It is very sad to see her in this state - she was a very active, vital person, now reduced to a vegetative state.

Digital Domesday Book lasts 15 years, not 1000

The "showcase for Britain's electronic prowess" - the Digital Domesday Book - has proven itself to be just that. Its is now unreadable, reported the Observer
in a recent article.
So, to preserve your records for posterity, you can:

• Print them using pigment based inks on your digital printer

or

• Put them up on a website and hope that a web archive project crawls your site. You can ask them to do so, and access the result with the Wayback Machine.

Molasses

I have had no time to edit/post any more India photos :( but I am still working on them. Watch this space ). It is amazing to me how much the details of running a life impede on time spent on hobbies. In retirement I thought that I would not need to manage my time efficiently. I would have at least 12 hours a day extra to do whatever I wished. Ha!
So, I have started organizing myself along the lines suggested by the "Getting things done" cult. So far, I feel much better. I have lots of lists of things I need to do. I do many of them every day. However, the harder I work at the lists, the behinder I get.
But...having lists of all things that I have not done is very liberating. I don't worry about them any more - except for taxes, and the market, and...

More pictures from India

I am slowly getting my India pictures posted online. This latest set is from the eleventh day AC (After Chicago), which corresponds to the 2nd day WB (With Bags).

I can't make Blogger show a picture now, so I will go with this text link.

This is the set from Agra

Propinquity - someone wants to bring the term into more general use

I am listening to a podcast by Dr. Karen Stephenson - she wants to get the word propinquity into more general use. Seems like a good idea to me. Propinquity is the foundation of functional mailing lists and internet groups.
Propinquity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

D-Wave Demonstrates First Quantum Computer: Practical Uses

This minor announcement may be equivalent of the first computer in 1837.
D-Wave Demonstrates First Quantum Computer: Practical Uses

The Build-a-War Workshop

At last the obvious has been officially discovered. Now it is time to throw them in jail. See The Build-a-War Workshop.

"The inspector general did not recommend criminal charges against Mr. Feith because Mr. Rumsfeld or his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, approved their subordinate’s “inappropriate” operations. The renegade intelligence buff said he was relieved."

But how about charges against Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Cheney?

Microsoft Office 2007

Today I attended the launch event in Chicago for Microsoft Office 2007. Not very exciting. Very proprietary and server based. Their technology seems to have stood still for several years. Web based applications will do to Microsoft what Microsoft did to IBM.
This blog entry is being prepared as I wait for a train. They run every hour - I missed the last one by 5 minutes!

Back from India

We toured India for three weeks in December - hence the long break in posting. It is impossible for me to comprehend such a vast and diverse country in a three weeks - three years would be too short. The population of India is over three times that of the USA, The country about 1/3 the size of the USA.
Travelers from time immemorial have not hesitated to form opinions based on a short visit so I will conform to precedent.
I observed and felt:

• Tremendous diversity at all levels - like walking on a strange planet in a scene from the movie "Starwars"
  
• Huge disparities of wealth
• Spirituality in all aspects of life
• Public filth, personal cleanliness
  
• I was seeing the world as was 5,000 years ago
  

We visited Delhi, Jaipur, Ranthambore, Agra, Varanasi, Cochin, and Mumbai - and many points in between - we drove a lot. We did not see the high tech area in Bangalore.

My pictures are slowly being posted at:
http://clive.smugmug.com/Travel/274602

Interesting analysis of Apple vs Microsoft

This discussion by Daniel Eran is worth reading.

Full disclosure - I used an Apple II in the early 1980s, (as a portable would you believe - I schlepped it on planes in a large plywood box), an Apple III in 1982/83, Macs all the way to 1990 -- and hated them all.
I now own Apple stock, my wife's machine is an iMAC bought by me, and my next system (pun intended) will most likely be an Intel based MAC. The performance of the MAC was shackled by its poor price/performance before it switched to Intel chips, and the OS sucked before they moved to the Mach kernel/neXt based based, 64 bit Operating System. Now that I can use Parallels to run my old apps, I am switching - as soon as the next Mac Pro is available.

The elections came and went...

I did my bit, and the counters get the correct answer - even though the Senate count was a bit of a cliffhanger. Now let's see what happens in two years.

The elections are coming...

TV news has become so opinionated and paradoxically content free that comedians are taking over as the most credible source of news. I discovered long ago that simply stating truths in the simplest possible language causes people to laugh. I built a successful (at least successful enough for me) career on this phenomenon. I made recommendations, people laughed, then went away and did what I said, never knowing why they did it. It just felt good to them.

Honesty always feels good, if a little funny.

The good humor induced by honesty could explain the lack of humor exuded by our current administration. They are not honest - and dishonesty is never funny.

The Daily Show exploits the humor in unadulterated truth; so do many of the late night talk shows. Click here to see Barack Obama (who is smart and funny and truthful) on the Daily Show. It is a six minute video.

Unfortunately the American voting public has not valued smarts, humor, or honesty in recent elections. Similarly, many democracies elect leaders with none of these qualities. Simply because a majority in a geographic region vote for a leader does not guaranty that the elected leader will have any laudable qualities.

Fall in Chicago

Botanic Gardens - but click on the picture to get the real fall in Chicago.

Not your father's colonoscopy | CRAVE : The CNET Gadget Blog

Everybody my age should appreciate this device.
Not your father's colonoscopy | CRAVE : The CNET Gadget Blog

It gets weirder

Before attending the CSO concert this evening, we went to the rehearsal in the morning and the pre-concert lecture. Both were very interesting; however, I learned more about the story behind the music than is good for anybody's mental health.
The concert included works by Dvorák and Janacek. Both of them continued this weeks Chicago tradition of psychopathic stories about psychopathic characters. I commented on "The Pillowman" and "Salome" earlier this week.

The Dvorák piece (The Golden Spinning Wheel, Op. 109) tells of a young king who falls in love with a girl. She is murdered and dismembered by her stepmother who sends her own daughter off to marry the king. The girl's feet, hands, and eyes are later sent along to the king’s castle. An old man finds the rest of her remains and undertakes a makeover process that involves a golden spinning wheel. After much mucking around, the king races to the forest where he finds the original girl alive and well after the makeover! "Although the King has the murderers torn apart by wolves, Dvořák’s ending is uncomplicated and unequivocally happy." In summary this is how Phillip Huscher (the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) describes the work. Honest. I could not make this up.

"Jenůfa is Janáček's tragic tale of repression, infanticide, and redemption" says the teaser on the CSO website. No kidding. We saw act II (no redemption yet). Here, the step-mother kills her daughter's illegitimate child who was fathered by her nephew whose older brother slashed the daughter's face because he was in love with her and he did not want his brother to be married to her while she was beautiful. As a reward, the step-mother offers the daughter to the slashing brother as a bride.

What has gotten into the producers of Chicago art this week? Halloween, maybe?

Talking about wierd art...

... tonight we went to the new Chicago Lyric Opera performance of "Salome" by Richard Strauss. Last Sunday we saw "The Pillowman" by Martin McDonagh at the Steppenwolf Theatre.

First things first, the Pillowman was billed as a "dark comedy". It is much more dark than comedy. The plot is a tad implausible - but not really. It explores the mind of the psychopath (all the characters are indeed psychopaths) and as a result it appears to be implausible - but that is what psychopathic minds are - they see the implausible as plausible. "The Pillowman" draws one into the minds of psychopaths and treats them as if they are almost normal, but a little odd.

I often said (when I was gainfully employed) that I did not know what I thought until I wrote it down. This blog entry is a prime example of that. I started off intending the slam "The Pillowman" as an over the top piece of writing that delivered neither insight nor amusement. By writing what I thought, I discovered that it did indeed deliver insight - but its amusement quotient is, to me, still fairly low. So, if you want insight with minimal amusement, go see "The Pillowman." Be warned - the writer is a poor editor - the work runs for 2 1/2 hours - way too long.

"Salome" is, of course, a classic. It is also a tad tedious. Some of the music is, well, musical. Much of it sounds like Strauss trying to be Wagner, but never reaching the gut emotional impact that Wagner delivers. The "Dance of the Seven Veils" for me always raises the memory of Peter Sellers and "The Dance of the Seven Army Surplus Blankets." This sort of dilutes the emotional impact of the moment. The Dilbert book "Bring Me the Head of Willy the Mailboy" also came to mind all to often. Despite being based on Oscar Wilde's play, Salome delivered no insights to me. I am a big time fan of Oscar Wilde's works, but the mix of Germanic music and Irish wit just does not work. Mercifully, it was over in 105 minutes with no intermission.