21. June 2009 by admin.

When Barack Obama was running for President last year, much was made of his statement that he was willing to negotiate with our adversaries.  Some thought he was hopelessly naive, while others (including myself) thought it was preferable to the policies of then-President Bush to reach for the blunderbuss whenever the opportunity presented itself.

In all of the discussions, nobody brought out the corollary of Obama’s position: that in being willing to negotiate with one’s adversaries, one must accept their  policies and actions.  If you say, “I want to talk, but what you’ve done is unacceptable,” you’ve ended the conversation very quickly.

So now we have the Iranian elections, in which the incumbent Ahmadinejad officially won with over 65% of the vote, despite pre-election data suggesting a close race.  President Bush, or any other President in recent memory, would have criticized the Iranian government for trampling the will of the people.

But not Obama.  He has described the election issue as the problem for a sovereign state, which should properly be resolved by that state without our intervention.  He has remarked that he doesn’t want the Iranian government to have any cause to blame us for their situation.

It’s a charming thought, except the Iranians are blaming us anyway.  Truth never stood in the way of good propaganda.

On Friday, the religious leader of Iran called for a halt to demonstrations, or else severe consequences would follow.  A curtain of silence has fallen across the country, as the government has imposed increasing restrictions on the foreign press.  We know that the demonstrations are continuing, and that the authorities are responding.  Whether this is simply riot control, or something darker, is unknown.

But our President can’t say anything about it, lest the Iranians use it against us.

Posted in Iran, Barack Obama | No Comments »

14. June 2009 by admin.

This morning’s Daily News brought a color casino advertising supplement: all the latest shiny places to have fun.  The charm of casino gambling, for those of us who can’t afford to lose $10,000 at a clip, escapes me.  I went to Las Vegas a few years ago with my wife, and was actually bored.  But if you enjoy it, go and have fun: it’s a free country.

I was idly turning the pages until I saw a picture of a vaguely industrial-looking casino building, framed by a vaguely industrial-looking steel arch.  It was the Sands Bethelehem, built on the site of the former Bethlehem Steel plant in northeastern Pennsylvania.

When I was a kid, I used to see construction sites in the city, many of them for skyscrapers, and many of them had signs that read, ‘Bethlehem Steel.’  I wasn’t quite sure about the connection between the steel in the buildings and Jesus’s birthplace, but it was clear that these were big buildings going up.

So it’s come to that: what was formerly a locus of productive activity has now become a facility for depleting thousands of people of their savings.  But the people keep showing up, eager to be depleted, and the community where the facility is located is happy to have it there, because it brings tax revenue.

Didn’t the United States used to be a nation that accomplished things?

Posted in Things Falling Apart, Money | No Comments »

13. June 2009 by admin.

Earlier this week, the Iranians held their Presidential elections.  The two major candidates were the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Iran has been troublesome for the United States for many years, and under its Ahmadinejad, those troubles have continued.  He has threatened to destroy Israel, pushed for the development of Iranian nuclear weapons, and Iran has been a sponsor of terrorist groups in the Middle East.

His opponent, Mousavi, wants to improve relationships with the West, improve the economy, and address some of the excesses of the morals police.  To be sure, he couldn’t go that far with it: Iran’s civil government is controlled by its religious leadership, who had to approve all of the candidates.  But at least it was a step in the right direction.

Preliminary polling data suggested that the election would be a close race: those favoring Mousavi, and his efforts for reform, would be closely matched by those favoring Ahmadinejad, his religious perspective, and the Iranian government subsidies provided under his leadership.

But the preliminary data were wrong: the incumbent Ahmadinejad swept the election with over 65% of the vote.

Either the election was rigged, or the Western pollsters and media somehow managed to disregard Ahmadinejad’s political base.

I don’t know which is the case.  I suspect that (a) the Iranians won’t be particularly anxious to investigate the results, and (b) they won’t let others investigate, either.  So we’ll probably never know for sure.

But why did we let ourselves believe that another alternative was possible?

Posted in Iran | No Comments »

10. June 2009 by admin.

It’s long been my contention that the Blackberry device, with its instant ability to send and receive e-mail, is a detriment, rather than an asset, to one’s professional abilities.  I’ve known too many people who fire off an instant Blackberry response to an easy question or to good news, but disappear for weeks when asked something requiring actual thought.  And I’ve had too many instances of confusion over someone’s half-baked Blackberry answer.  (For my part, I have a cell phone with Windows that can send and receive e-mails.  But it will only do it when I ask: it won’t poke me in the ribs when a message comes in.  And I usually wait until I’m at my computer to answer the e-mails, unless it’s genuinely urgent or the phone is the only device at hand.)

Now the Blackberry has tripped up the apparently former Majority Leader of the New York State Senate, Malcolm Smith.  There are 32 Democrats and 30 Republicans in the State Senate, and Smith is the leader of the Democrats.

But this week, two Democratic state senators decided that they would caucus with the Republicans instead, tipping the balance of the Senate.

And how did this happen?  Apparently some time in the recent past, Smith had a meeting with Tom Golisano, one-time candidate for Governor, who recently moved to Florida, amid considerable publicity, to avoid heavy New York State taxes.  And at this meeting, Smith apparently offended Golisano by paying more attention to his Blackberry than his guest.  So Golisano set the wheels in motion for a Republican coup.

As far as my reaction to the coup itself, I have none.  The New York State Legislature is a nexus of evil in the modern world, and I don’t believe that it matters which party is in power.  I can’t say that the Republicans are better or worse than the Democrats (within the NY legislature), and I can’t say whether the coup was a blow for democracy or an exercise in corruption.

But it’s good to see a Blackberry addict get what he deserves.

Posted in New York State, Dysfunctional Government, PDA | No Comments »

9. June 2009 by admin.

There’s a new TV commercial for the Lincoln MKZ: sleek visuals of the vehicle, set to the Shiny Toy Guns’ version of ‘Major Tom (Coming Home).’ It’s an appealing commercial: the music is propulsive and exciting in a way that most current music isn’t.

This is in fact the second Lincoln commercial set to a Major Tom song; last year they did one with Cat Power’s version of ‘Space Oddity.’

Did anyone notice that, in the Major Tom songs, the Major’s vehicle suffers some kind of fatal malfunction and never returns home?

Posted in Media | No Comments »

6. June 2009 by admin.

For about the last month, I’ve had a problem with the phone in the office.  The keypad works for making phone calls and checking its own voice mail, but not for checking other voice mail or accessing extensions or access numbers at places that I call.

A brief test confirmed the problem: I called my own cell phone and poked the keypad: the tones from the keypad weren’t getting through to the other end.

OK, I know at this stage I’m supposed to call for tech support, but I’m an engineer, and tech support is for losers.  The phone is an IP phone, so I started with the phone’s IP address.  Looking it up revealed a Web control interface.  I diddled around with a couple of parameters; no luck.

The next step was the instruction manual.  Rummaging around, I found the following passage:

The phone supports in-band and out-of-band DTMF functionality. It prefers out-of-band DTMF, but, if the other party does not support it, the phone falls back to in-band DTMF. This standard phone behavior cannot be changed.

Oh, so it ‘prefers’ not to send the tones down the wire with the audio.  So nice of it!

More practically, this suggested that the problem originated not with the phone, but with the network, as the keypad worked just fine in the past.  Perhaps a firmware upgrade might help, but that could cause further trouble, and possibly get me in trouble with the Phone Police.  Time to heave a sigh and write a note to tech support.

Fifteen minutes later, a smiling techie visited my office, changed out my phone, and all is well. “We’ve had a bunch of complaints about this in the last couple of months,” he told me.

So now I have a new phone in my office.  It looks sexier, with multicolored indicator lights and a more detailed display, and it doesn’t require me to push an ‘enter’ button after dialing a phone number.  Other than that, it’s still… a phone.  It’s not going to cook my breakfast, or write my e-mails, or do anything like that.

And so I wonder: why replace a perfectly good phone to fix what is properly a network problem?  Was it really less expensive to replace the phones for everyone in the space?  Do they replace the phone because it looks like customer service?  Or is it just the modern way of doing business?

Is buying new stuff really that much cheaper than actual mental effort?

Posted in Networking (computer), Things Falling Apart | No Comments »