Random Data

Social Engineering Risks

2011-09-19T07:52:00.001-06:00

I had an experience this morning that once again leads me to think about social engineering, primarily here in Ontario under the Liberal auspices, though frankly the only real difference between the left, far-left, and right on these matters is the passivity of the effort. True conservatives engineer mostly indirectly, whereas true liberals and socialists engineer actively. (As a point of disclosure, the experience is that I have been walking my 5-year old into the school the past few weeks, and I have been asked to stop that and let her go in at the outer door with the rest of the class. The actual event is a shrug to me, as the only effect it has is to move the moment of separation slightly, while increasing the direct management load on the teachers. That being part of their job, I bow to the request with good nature, aware that ultimately it will benefit my daughter, and it saves me about 5 minutes in the morning. Frankly, it can’t make my present say-to-day life much worse, as it consists of being a slave to work, family and duty. A bit more abuse is irrelevant in the larger scheme.)

Some time ago the Ontario Liberal Party created full-day kindergarten, and essentially changed the structure of how children are reared. Ostensibly this is following the effort of Norway, which in its sum total assessment thus far hasn’t had bad results. Problematically, of course, Ontario (and Canada in general) is not Norway, and consequent to that the lack of integration of this effort with others shows some cracks that Norway hasn’t had to deal with. But those are for stronger stomachs to investigate and qualify. My real stepping off point is the general consideration about how this social engineering effort is coming into play in twenty years time.

A few observations and revelations first:

I am not one of those people who believes coddling children is particularly wise, but nor do I really believe it harmful in the long-term scheme of things. It does tend to form attachments, and attachments in balance are critical to maintaining the fabric of societies. At the same time, I am less than impressed when the burden of child-rearing is arbitrarily taken by a state, any state. The problem I see in that arbitrary claim of the responsibility is that it erodes the purpose of family. Now, I am not a “family first” type, and I have no religious inclinations, nor do I have much real belief that modern families re any better (or worse) than those of old. What I do know, though, is that indoctrination at a young age, even mild and initially formless, is a people-management mechanism, not a necessity. A child left to their own accord for a decade will still learn, will still excel if they have a natural bent in some field, etc. The sole purpose of “early education” is indoctrination, to address either a structural management issue or a social one. That has to be the case, because learning has absolutely nothing to do with “schools.” Knowing many graduates of University proves it.

What concerns me about all this is that when liberal engineers act, they tend to create extensions of the nanny-state syndrome, because parochial thinking stains political liberalism so deeply. The idea that the machine knows better than the mere human beings it claims to serve has been, and remains, a strong liberal view. This concerns me because historically this kind of renormalisation of society has led to a number of problems, the worst end of the spectrum being Nazi Germany prior to World War II, where the socialisation effort was so powerful it reshaped young minds to accept prejudicial tripe without any question. Now I am not suggesting modern liberalism is anything like the socialist roots of Nazism, but what I am observing is that once a mechanism is in place, its use is not restricted to the present. This has never been the case; it will never be the case; it is not humanly possible to refuse the inclination to encompass and control. By embedding the even earlier separation of parents and children into the mechanism of social control, the stage is set for the introduction of unperceived social risk.

My field for more than the last decade has been about practical risk management, and part of what I have learned in that time is that the risks most critical, the real game-changers, are the unperceived ones. BP in the Gulf is an example, at the core of it: no one really thought a blowout preventer would fail, so no one conceived any real solution if that happened 5000 feet under the ocean. Of course, that doesn’t shift the responsibility, or excuse the pathetic paralysis that was visible inside and outside the company. Nor does it excuse the short-sighted view that led to this environmental disaster. What it does, though, is illustrates the idea of the unperceived risk, and clarifies that we are not talking about “unknown” risks, but ones that are widely known the instant your blinders are removed, and can be both seen and managed by anyone who is looking. BP was struck by its narrowness of vision, not an unknown. At best it was unexpected; at worst it was absolute negligence at play. But probably it fell into the same realm as the social risks I can see coming from an incomplete, unmanaged, sloppy plan to indoctrinate youth before they have even formed comprehensive personalities.

What strikes me in the Ontario vision of education is that the engineers of the plan are so blindly ignorant of the potential risks of extending the role of the state to effectively eliminate early parenting. Rather than list a handful that come to mind, I’ll focus on the one risk I suspect will be the most complex one to manage – and it is not the risk that future governments use this indoctrination model to foist a nationalist stance upon us.

When you take young children and place them in regimental settings you are creating conformist beings earlier than ever before. It is fine to say that “play matters” (and right now that dictum is evident in the system), but there is no way to alter the side-effect of someone who disagrees with that coming along and enforcing more regular curriculum. And that will happen, when politicians pander to the obvious side-effect of earlier parental disconnects. “How do I know how my child is doing?” will eventually be asked at earlier ages, and the only way to offset the perception of a vacuum is to fill it. Eventually, “report cards” will end up issued as young as full-day junior kindergarten. And this will further detach the actual parents, whose authority is undermined by the disconnect and further obliterated by the false expression of connection of some “official” measure. This thread left to the reader to consider, I return to the risk of regimental thinking, which while fine in mundane applications has potentially deadly consequences in the real world.

Mankind is on the cusp of climate change, and regardless of why it is so, we have three choices how to face it: hide from it, pretending it isn’t obvious until it is far too late to even engage the problem; attack it aggressively with existi9ng ideas that have, for the most part, proven untenable as aspects of a solution; or breed an imagination in successive generations that allows them to tackle these vast, complex problems more effectively than we can. And yet we are increasingly churning out mechanisms to quash the imagination…and therein lies a deadly risk. A risk that is obvious, but ignored by reason of convenience.

I won’t belabour the idea, but offer it as grist for mental mills. I will leave one question to stand: When a society acts to detach the social compact between parents and children at earlier and earlier junctures, creating a mechanical and regimental substitute, what is the likelihood that children raised in that environ will be attached enough to preceding generations to act in accordance with the broader social need rather than the selfish one?

Bell Canada Customer Care

2011-09-12T09:02:00.001-06:00

Okay, so the very title of this post is a form of sarcasm, since the idea of customer care is so foreign to any of these large corporations as to be laughable. Nonetheless, a short remark or two to alleviate some of the awareness I have once again had several minutes of my life stolen by these vultures.

Today I got the customary email telling me that my satellite TV bill was ready. I dutifully clicked…to find it was not, in fact, ready. As this is the sixth time in six months that I have got my “it’s ready!” email only to discover it was not, I decided I would contact bell and suggest to them that the email might best be sent after the actual bill was ready. After all, the customer is in this case saving them the cost of printing a bill. So, a little effort to stop wasting the customers’ time seemed warranted.

Well, my mistake was caring. I clicked on a support link to drop them an email, to find out that…well, you can click “contact us” in seventeen places (I counted) and never once can you get an email location to send a basic customer comment. (I’m sure one was hidden somewhere, but so well hidden it was inscrutable to me, and I wasted enough of my life looking as it was.) My options were to…call. Now, being aware that a call would cost me time sitting on the phone listening to crappy music, or static, I decided they can go stuff themselves on their own time.

Really, I should probably contact the Board of Directors and make an observation about the fundamental disconnect with consumers this represents, and thus the inherent loss of business over time, but they “care” in roughly the same fashion as their customer support cares…which is not at all.

Bell Canada, yet another company run by complacent fools, which will someday succumb to the basic problems clearly represented in their customer service model.

BP: Texas City, the Gulf, and Texas City Again

2010-08-11T14:13:00.001-06:00

Do a Google search on Texas City and BP and you’ll come up with links aplenty to provide the references this post is hinging itself upon. The Gulf mess, if you have to search at all, is even easier to find. There are far too many sources to even bother citing single ones here.

Basically, in BP we have a company that is fairly representative not just of the oil companies of the world, but of all corporations. Now lest anyone think this is painting the lot with one brush, read on before taking that view.

So, about BP, with timing measured from the date of this post back:

A few years ago, a number of ongoing problems at the Texas City refinery BP owns caused a series of explosions that killed 15 people, and injured 170 or so.
A few months ago, the company killed 11 more people by continuing the same shoddy disrespect toward risks they face daily in the industry.
A few days ago, we learned that at the same Texas City plant they were supposed to learn from (largest fine in history, I believe), BP is still so wilfully negligent that repeated recent warnings did nothing to prevent the failure of a piece of ill-maintained equipment that released untold quantities of toxic gases.

What do these things have in common?

Well, BP for one, a company that actions suggest has probably the worst internal culture one can imagine, where greed trumps everything. The old maxim that one should judge actions rather than words, is an ideal applicant to suss out just what BP’s real problems are. Then again, tuning in for five minutes to the former CEO claiming serial ignorance of all things BP is enough to make the point.

The other thing they have in common is this: they are events that reflect the natural evolution of allowing corporations to exceed a manageable scale.

Ultimately, like many other corporations, BP is so large it is not being risk managed operationally. The people making final decisions are so far removed from the operational realities, they seem incapable of making cogent decisions. And barring any evidence to the contrary, it is fairly easy to realise all corporations beyond a certain scale suffer the same problem. The farther the autonomous decision-makers are from operations, the less they understand the critical risks.

To make the point specifically for BP:

At Texas City, the explosion was a result of ages worth of poor risk management, caused because the people who had to OK operational management activities were too removed to grasp the inherent danger in allowing poor and no maintenance. The workers knew. Some even tried to observe the problems. But in the end, million dollar problems cannot be solved by a handful of workers who simply don’t get paid enough to sacrifice to solve the problem. Of course, the choice to work on, killed and injured many of those same workers. If even one of the people who had the authority to fix the known problems had to go into that workplace every day and sit there, risking their life, the problems would have been fixed – but folks like Tony Hayward have no actual experience, knowledge, or skills. (This opinion of the man is based solely on Hayward’s representations at the Congressional hearing where he essentially proclaimed himself ignorant of all things related to BP. Should he wish to now dispute that claim, I suspect the press would skewer him worse than they were doing prior to his foolish public mismanagement of the Gulf crisis, but I welcome his comments below. I would note, having skirted criminal charges to this point, by being incompetent, it might be unwise to claim otherwise now.)
The explosion on that rig, as evidence is already showing, was because production outweighed risk management to a degree where several dozen indications of integrity problems were simply overruled by bean-counters. The men killed that day, though, continued to work – and taking that risk cost them their lives. No one is clean when it comes to the circumstances that poisoned vast tracks of the Gulf, slaughtering animals indiscriminately, and destroying coastal economies. But then the likely outcome of their refusing the work, would have been being out of work – and the fact they proceeded means they knew that, and further reflects the industry standards. It certainly crystallises the view of BP’s true culture, where production needs (wealth return, better know as greed) generates a complete disregard for the resources used to extract the wealth. They could deny it, but the only explanation other than intent is total incompetence, which seems possible but would call into question the need for a safety review at every one of their facilities worldwide.
Now, the fact that the same Texas City plant was allowed to belch toxins, mere years after killing and injury workers, boggles the mind. My guess is that the people signing cheques, again, work very far away and at least downwind. When inspectors, government inspectors, are issuing tickets against a machine for months, which then fails, there is no falling back on the excuse that minimal damage was done. The actual problem has nothing to do with loss severity, but with the absolute negligence necessary to explain why even government warnings, at a site where you previously killed 15 people, didn’t motivate change. Any company that is that wilfully ignorant of cause and effect is a danger to themselves, and to the planet.

In every case, the culture is the problem, because the culture defines the actions of individual workers. BP has a large-scale corporate culture where the decision-makers are either negligent or ignorant of risks (which is, itself, negligence) of operations, but where those same people are the only ones with authority to make changes. If BP were unique (Google accidents in the industry worldwide and you know they are not; or look at the coal mining disasters worldwide), it would be impossible to allow such a company to continue to exist – the risk is too high. The problem, is that if anyone with the authority to do the right thing bothered to (seize BP’s assets and dismantle them, while charging the entire executive branch with criminal negligence causing death), it would start a domino effect. No large multinational would be safe.

Of course, there is an explanation for this: in a large company, it is too hard to actually manage operations effectively under status quo systems. That, it must be admitted, is true.

But, who can change that? The very people who rely upon it to excuse their negligence.

This final paragraph is where I make an admission that this view, written here, is solely mine. I work for a company that deals with risk management every day. I see this nonsense excuse thrown up at every turn, to avoid change, because if the systems in place worked – then the responsibility would be unavoidable. It is a disgusting side-effect of companies being too big for our greater good.

The Invisible God

2010-08-10T13:15:00.001-06:00

Anyone who knows me is well aware I’m not religious, and I never will be. At the same time, I’m not rampantly irreligious either, have read the Bible several times (and numerous other religious texts), and I think there is something potentially positive in faith. Believing in something is, to put it succinctly, not a bad thing.

Today I commented on a news article about the Taliban murdering a pregnant woman who was accused of an affair. Deplorable in every way, but hardly surprising. I remarked in the comment section of that article that the world was full of ignorant people who used belief in an invisible god to excuse their actions. (I paraphrase the comment her for clarity and brevity.) A reply to my comment from a Christian (an admission in their post), took me somewhat to task for my “blaming god for the disobedience of men.” I hesitated about whether to reply to that, but did, because it struck me how irrelevant communication is when we make assumptions about speakers we don’t know. Their assumption was that I was “blaming God,” when what I was actually doing was observing a fact: some ignorant people use faith as an excuse to commit atrocious acts. My observation, to anyone who really focuses on it, has nothing to do with a Christian or Islamic god, but was exactly what it appeared to be – a remark about how people twist faith to suit their own nefarious purposes. Not believing in god as defined by any religion I’ve come across, but not denying people the right to believe, I replied to clarify that it was a mistake, basically, to assume I was blaming a god, when I was merely making an observation. Hopefully, the person won’t take offence at that, though I added the observation it was a mistake to assume anything about me as a commentator, based upon what I had written, in the hope the message sinks in, the message being that rational expression, stripped of emotional and religious context, is not defining expression in the normal sense. It is just observation.

Observation is what makes me certain there is something deeply wrong in the fabric of Catholicism. I am not smearing the religion or its believers, when I question the Vatican’s destructive stance on homosexuality and children’s rights to live unmolested by people they are told to place their faith in. Now, a Catholic might argue I am painting the entire religion with the remarks I have sometimes made, but they would be colouring my views. Even when I have gone so far as to say, any body of people who condones such behaviour, or excuses it, is equally guilty as those perpetrating it, I am not bashing Catholics. I am, though, stating a fact about anyone who doesn’t speak out against it actively when given the chance. And all of this, has absolutely nothing to do with my beliefs about gods.

I think the phrase that offended in my comment off the Taliban post, or at least engendered the belief I must be god-bashing, were the words “invisible god.” It probably prompted the reply-writer to believe I was saying “does not exist,” though I was, in fact, saying, “cannot be seen.” I can’t generally see the air I breathe, either, and could refer to it as the invisible air, which tells you absolutely nothing about my belief system other than I admit to not seeing air. Being as I survive by breathing it, of course, I tend to believe it exists. For those of strong faith, I expect their belief in the invisible god (choose one, or several) has the same fortifying effect, at times, as does my taking a long draw of air. Who am I to harass them for their private beliefs?

But I can, I think, take them to task for making assumptions about my beliefs.

So, what do I actually believe? Well, I can say several things with certainty:

I believe people who rely upon faith over logic are making a mistaken assumption about their responsibility. Even if their is a god, of any form, I am certain that god would rely upon our choices to define our outcomes. God could not, and no evidence suggests in any religious text to state otherwise, be making every decision in the world. If so, then using Christian theology you run into an immediate problem – Christ died for nothing. We could not sin, and do no wrong, if god controlled our actions. Most Christians, I think, would even agree with that idea – that we have choices, and we make them, and the consequences are ours. The problem isn’t religious people who accept personal responsibility, but those who want it both ways, where they can be absolved without ever facing consequences of chosen actions, on some principle that it was god’s plan. God wouldn’t have a plan mankind could understand, if there was indeed a plan, and the arrogance necessary to think we could grasp the plan of a true creator being is deeply offensive to anyone of real, thoughtful faith. Logic dictates that we are autonomous beings, and that we interact for better or worse, and that we are responsible for outcomes. Let faith support without interfering with logic, and the world would be a better place.

I also believe though, that logic is not some panacea. By itself, logic is cold and hard, and leads to horrific and shameful acts. The Taliban, for example, is applying logic to kill women, to maintain a patriarchal hold on the region. Much the same way, the Vatican reshapes history to suit its lies about the priesthood regularly. That makes logic, like a handgun, a very dangerous tool. That is why I ascribe to the belief that logic, must be guided by some moral preconditions, whether religious or humanist. You cannot simply have logic exist in a vacuum, because logic has no way to value human lives, or even human conditions. It is a process-specific functional method of analysis, and nothing more. Yet, while I support the contention a moral framework is required to exercise logic safely, I do not, and never will, suggest religion provides one. Religion is, at its heart, a scam. Note that I am not saying god is a scam, or people of faith are foolish. I am talking about religion in two senses specifically. The first is the sense of religion as an organised system, which is not morally reliable simply because all systems suffer controller corruption. As soon as a priesthood and its attendant hierarchy become extant, all religion falters on the fundamental point of control. The second sense of religion I am talking about is the ritualistic sense, which is, after all, the whole core of religion. (To those who want to take offence, enjoy this aside: the vast majority of people claiming religion are lying to themselves, because religion requires ritual. If you are not practicing, you are not, strictly, religious, regardless of your faith.) Ritual cannot provide moral context, because it is a traditional and inflexible adherence to set rules, most of those rules created centuries ago. Moral structure is defined, as well, not by value-systems. Value-systems are constructs that nihilists created to excuse the need of morality. As to where we find moral systems, that I leave to much smarter people.

If I was to consolidate my beliefs about the invisible god, I would say this to people of faith: Do not rely upon the existence of god to excuse your decisions, because if you are wrong about there being a god you are an atrocity, and if you are right, you are a heretic at best, and probably worse. Rather, live a life that is focused on human compassion, try to understand the world as it is rather than as some fantasy believes it to be, and strive to make it better. Those goals, held close, will ensure that if there is a god, no offence is given. It is better not to believe in god, and live a commendable life, than to live a lie while claiming faith.

The United States and the Immigration Debate

2010-08-06T22:39:00.001-06:00

I was recently pleased to visit Montana, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. It had been over a decade since my last visit to the USA. Other than the rather miserable border guards, the people of I met reminded me – universally – of why the USA is such a great nation. It has, everywhere, great people of all colours, creeds, and denominations. It has people who came from stock that settled a difficult land, who made a decision when they founded their government to forge a constitution that, however flawed, is as near human beings could make to a document to set the heart by. The only reason I would say you find better people in Canada is because I’m a Canadian; but national pride aside, my guess is an honest assessment might tilt toward the idea that Americans, generally speaking, are a more impressive group. It is possible in the USA to hate the government of the day, and it never affects the pride people take in their states, their towns, or their opportunities.

But I won’t be too rosy. Americans also have a basic problem or two, in that they have allowed a handful of selfish people to cloud their minds with rhetoric that is likely to destroy the American Dream, and the very people the country was founded to serve.

One of the hottest debates in Salt Lake City was about immigration, and as an outsider looking in, I could see both sides of the debate. I could also see the propensity both sides, at a political level, had to lie about the debate.

In a nutshell, the problem the USA has with immigration is that a number of states have serious numbers of illegal immigrants. Some folks view that as a corruption of the system, and an affront to the American Dream they cherish. Those honest believers in the problem of illegal immigration worry that illegal aliens are draining stressed services, contributing to crime, and otherwise damaging their towns, cities, states, and their country. They believe that those illegal aliens are taking away jobs that are desperately needed. On the other side are people who will say that the problem, first of all, is small (it is, technically); and they will observe that it is the opportunity, the dream, that makes many illegal aliens cling to their place in the country. They will observe that services most stressed are not really affected by the small number of illegal immigrants, because they don’t have the registration to qualify for those services. And, they will observe that crime does not really have a predominant immigration link. They will also state that the jobs these folks do, are ones that simply wouldn’t get done otherwise – service and backbreaking labour jobs.

As an outsider, I can tell you that the arguments of both sides have some validity, but that the way the messages are manipulated by the people with political agendas is a sickening disservice to both sides. Political Democrats are generally too naive about the issues of illegal immigration; and Republicans are using it to create a police state mentality that is not a service to any American.

When you argue this topic, as soon as the political shades are drawn, you lose sight of a primary consideration – these illegal immigrants are just people. You stop asking what motivates them, and as soon as that occurs you dehumanise them. The next step is that you qualify them, and anyone who doesn’t realise that means “by observable traits” is either grossly stupid, or lying to themselves. And by observable traits, at least now, the illegal immigrant problem is being cast as “the Mexican problem.” As soon as that kind of slippage occurs in any debate, you lose the rationale ability to resolve a problem, and you risk creating perceived problems, or, worse, treating symptoms.

So, here goes a few thoughts:

Immigrants, being people, are motivated by the same basic instincts and desires that motivate citizens. If many illegal aliens are Mexican in origin, they are coming to the USA because the opportunity they perceive outweighs the risk. It isn’t important if their reasoning is true, but it is rational, and it is understandable. If every American concerned about this spent an hour considering an essential fact, they would recover some of the confidence that had made the nation so strong in the past. Why are these people coming? Because the USA is still capable of delivering such a vast opportunity it is worth risking everything to partake. Once, these folks who saw that would be considered real American stock. These immigrants are not leeches, they are people who are motivated by the very essence of what defined Americans in the past – they are grasping at a dream. That doesn’t excuse the illegality, but it does raise the question about whether these are the people one would be best to universally tar with a single brush. They people serve the country better by embracing them, and putting their desire to work for the greater good. Amnesty is foolish, of course, but methodical absorption is not.
People on both sides in the debate are right, but neither political party is even close. One party is trying to dismiss the need for action to avoid offending the Hispanic community, without considering most American Hispanics are no more pleased than Caucasians or Blacks. The other is trying to inflame passions to push an agenda that has nothing to do with immigration, and everything to do with exerting controls and stripping away basic freedoms. Building prisons to deal with illegal aliens, or increasing enforcement, will not work, because America is a melting pot, and anyone who has ever stirred a stew knows that all carrots are carrots, and nothing superficial can cue you to which carrots have rotten cores. But it is human nature to cue to superficialities, so how else can you “enforce” more unless you profile? Until the debate is wrested from the rhetoric, everyone will lose.
And when did Americans become afraid? In my lifetime, I have watched Americans (the people) consistently go from courageous, spirited people to a nation that seems to feel hunted. And I have watched people who treasure freedoms allow their own government to bastardise a constitution to create what is increasingly a police state, driven often by corporate agendas rather than social ones. To all those who point to 9-11 as a sign that America needs increased security, I would ask this, “At what point did the act of so few frighten so many to do so much to withdraw from the world?” The courageous America would have never fallen so far into fascism blindly, with bizarre body scanning technology and the like, for so little. And before anyone blanches at that statement, consider this: yes, 9-11 was terrible, an act or raw terrorism, but it was an act of a few. The correct response to terrorists is not to reform your society fearfully to try to make their atrocities impossible, but to thump the chest and laugh in the face of people who are so incredibly weak that they think an act of that type, craven cowardice, is enough to repress freedom. The America of the past would have stood and rejected a false security blanket, not let their own government cow them. Those people, the courageous, are the people to whom the solutions in this immigration debate would be obvious, easy, and equitable.

And what astonished me in my travels the most?

Well, the Americans I met were those people. Americans have not changed, at the heart of the matter. Americans are still capable of so much more. What is different is that the country’s systems, its government, has been allowed to rot in a sea of corruption and agenda, with one side manipulating liberalism while the other side manipulates religion, not to create change, but to maintain a status quo where the players in that system are granted great privilege by multinational masters who have no interest whatsoever in the wellbeing of the nation.

The Americans I met are the people who struggled past a racist legacy to try, even if sometimes failing, to build a fairer, better world. They are the people whose ingenuity created so much of what we take for granted in the world. They are the people who, when settling hostile lands, lived 12 to a single room, conserved everything, and conquered by way of that conservation and frugality.

When I think about that, and realise the people haven’t changed, I realise how truly corrupt all governments are becoming, corrupted by the influence of a few to the detriment of many. And it saddens me that the immigration debate is delivering what I fear is an advance display of the kind of changes that those interest cultivate. Will America use an excuse to expend enormous resources to project some show of chasing so few, to the betterment of the interest that will gain in that dumb-show? Or will Americans reclaim the debate, and realise that the only problem they actually have is a system that is not responding to their basic needs, reclaim their government, and return substance to the American Dream?

Immigration is about control for politicians, and control flies in the face of freedoms. Fascism is a slope, slippery and easy. My greatest hope lies, though, in the fact the people I met on my trip, not one of them, would allow that fall without a fight.

Rambling About Climate Change: Seeking Elegant Lies

2010-08-06T21:59:00.001-06:00

The more headlines I read of late, the more I notice that the vast majority of people are pleased to be lied to, so long as the lie is elegant. A complex lie, that requires effort to accept, will be rejected; but if the lie is simple and creative, the public largely bows to the will of the speaker and accepts that lie, as if acceptance of a lie renders them immune to the cost of the lie.

Climate change is such an issue.

For a moment I’m going to pretend I believe mankind has no part in creating climate change. I’m going to pretend the change is natural. Now, I’m going to tell you two elegant lies: the first is that natural climate change, being natural, is not something to be concerned about, because it is, after all, natural; and the second is that there is nothing we can do about climate change. Two elegant lies, apparently bought by most of the populace (or do we admit to grasping self-interest and indifference to our fellow beings?). What harm can come of these lies?

Let me rewind now and state a fact:

Climate change is happening. I don’t need scientists to observe it, being as in the 43 years I’ve been alive, I’ve lived through an array of increasingly erratic seasons. Anyone who lives off the land will admit it, even if they haven’t the sense to admit we must have some small role to play in that change happening. Now, anyone with an ounce of logic can also project from this fact, that the climate is changing, that we might wish to prepare ourselves for the side-effects of such a change. And yet…we don’t. We sit about pontificating, and our political priests spout enough hot air to accelerate the change themselves. I suppose we can blame this on the fact the truth, that we would be wise to try to affect moderation of the climate change juggernaut, is a hard truth. But how pathetic are we as a species? Will we continue to fiddle while the planet burns, or grasp the basic fact that we are not helpless, regardless of the causal factors of climate change?

I’m guessing the earth will be scorched.

Returning from my rambling, I want to observe that lies, however elegant, are deflections of responsibility, and barriers to solutions. You cannot solve a problem until it is specified, clarified, and analysed well enough to say that, yes, it is in fact the problem. At the same time, you cannot eschew action in favour of ongoing, endless, cyclic analysis. “We need more data,” is, I note, and elegant lie.

And this lie, that somehow we cannot act for lack of certainty, is always an elegant lie. Our ancestors didn’t suffer paralysis in the face of uncertainty. The acted, sometimes poorly but always with intent. They grasped what we, as a modern society, seem to be confused by – life is about actions, not fantasies. Life is hard, full of bitter choices, and does not wait for “further analysis.” And while we are thrashing, excusing our cowardice as intellectual exercise, we are allowing years of potential research in alternative energies, and other relevant fields that can save the species, to be absorbed by the very cowards who refuse, for selfish reasons, to act.

You would think this made me unhappy (like my chronically sore back), but it actually amuses me some, because I can project past a number of elegant lies with this truth: when the human race is long gone, the planet will grind onward, and produce other life. And our special epitaph will be: The human race ran too fast into the future to accept what it held, and acted too slowly to survive what it brought to them. Mankind was given a chance to act, or get off the stage, and chose to consider rather than conquer.” Whatever civilisation discovers our remains might read that, understand it, and chuckle at how a mix of arrogance, intelligence, and greed can kill not just a people, but a whole species.

BP: beyond pathetic

2010-05-05T18:21:00.001-06:00

No offence to BP here, but this idea (big box over oil) is unlikely to work. And since it is apparently the only idea these “experts” can come up with, that is “beyond pathetic.” What is plan C? I say, C, here, because B was “big box over oil.” Plan A, evidently, was, “bury head in ass and pray nothing went seriously wrong in the first place.” Is there even a follow-up to this plan? Would it be to hide in a cabin in the Appalachians? (I hope not, because that’s where the coal companies are ripping off mountain tops to find coal these days.)

Big oil deserve sits reputation, not because it isn’t useful, but because they downplay the risks of inherently dangerous and devastating operations, and do not manage risks effectively. There is no excuse for not managing risks.

Sadly, this disastrous spill will not engage any serious changes in how they function, because ultimately it will be excused as an accident. What it really was, and remains, is a deliberate failure to manage and control risk.

Obama, Goldman Sachs, and the “Environmental” Industry: Three Amigos Too Many

2010-05-02T18:39:00.001-06:00

The impression one gets when one reads the news is that the people reporting are in some part of the human race that could be classed “disinterested observer.” They seem incapable of drawing lines of logic; or don’t want to, because those lines expose the elite for what they are. Exposing your source of entertainment (which is what news seems to be today) is losing access to those folks, I suppose, but where is the integrity is soft-pedalling the news?

You can read the facts about Goldman Sachs anywhere now, and there are some especially interesting facts to be had about how manipulative they are. (This article in particular will teach you about who they actually are.) They treat their customers, for example, as sump holes – which is why it isn’t surprising they sold “shitty” deals to them. The goal of Goldman Sachs is to take from everyone for their own benefit.

Now, Goldman Sachs is one of the largest direct/indirect campaign contributors of Obama. (Follow the trail from here.) It is no surprise they got a fair hunk of the public money going into the Wall Street bailout, which was the kickback one would expect. Yes, I even wrote kickback, because even if not illegal, there is absolutely no way to describe it that avoids it fitting the definition. They helped to pay to elect a man who appointed past Goldman employees to positions of power, and an ex-Goldman employee spun a tale about “too big to fail” companies, and managed to put 11 or so billion in Goldman Sachs’ accounts. That folks, is pretty much a perfect description of political kickbacks.

Again, you can read all that in any of the links you can find using Google, or starting from the two links above.

What you might also find is this: President Obama opens new areas to offshore drilling. One of those approval areas is now gushing oil into the oceans at an embarrassing rate, destroying Louisiana fisheries for a while, at least, and posing a risk to any state along the fringes of the Gulf Stream. That risk, admittedly, is not presently high, but the problem is that there has been no progress stopping the flow of oil either, so every passing hour notches up the risk to Florida, etc.

Now, being as this disaster stalls oil supply enhancements, and considering Goldman Sachs participated in an investment process before to raise the price of oil significantly (one of many links here, but especially here), one wonders how long before they start that grind again. My guess is through various opaque derivatives they already have, because Goldman Sachs is never behind the game.

But here’s the rest of the logical line (you can Google your own proof of this and will, in doing so, discover much more).

You might note that Obama tied his environmental plan (Carbon Cap & Trade) to offshore drilling, by making the offshore initiative part of his American self-supporting model – and that is what we used to refer to as hypocrisy in action. It is not possible to encourage an environmentally dangerous activity as part of an environmental plan, and even mentioning oil and gas in the same bill as cap and trade is wrong-minded if you talk about expanding oil production.

You might also note one of his other big contributors was Exelon, the nuclear power company (well, its “employees,” but indirect is the same issue as direct when its that obvious).

Now, combine these and you will observe that in one bill he paid off his nuclear (clean power?) people, and his oil interests.

But…he also paid off Goldman Sachs indirectly, since between them and Al Gore the Chicago Climate Exchange structure will net them some big returns. (I’ll give you this link. And, yes, it is Fox News, which can’t generally get its own head screwed on right – but in this case they speak the truth. And if you really can’t stand Fox, try this. You’ll reach the same conclusion either way.)

For years I’ve been suspicious of the “Environmental” movement, because it struck me as too much of an “industry.” What I mean by that, was that the focal movement for things like “clean energy” have been driven by vested interests, and that people like Al Gore have never acted as environmental shepherds, but rather more like high priests. As soon as profit is to be made, the sharks have always circled, and can we ever trust them to speak the truth? They can’t, even if they wished they could, because they don’t grasp the concept of truth as something immutable.

Anyhow, here’s the actual logical line:

Certain “environmental” and “financial” interests paid large sums to help elect Obama; Obama has shaped bills to reward them; Obama has driven a cap and trade model to reward them.

Conclusion: Obama is at least as deep in the pockets of Wall Street and big industry as any other politician, but much more disturbing is that he has managed to blindside the entire American nation into paying his debts to his donors directly and indirectly, on a scale I think may be new.

Once, Obama was a hopeful sight. Now, he is probably the worst example of a craven political hack you can imagine. Sad for the States, and sad for the world that moral integrity falls by the wayside so absolutely when cash is involved.

US Dollar: Safe Haven?

2010-04-27T12:27:00.001-06:00

Read this.

I laughed when I read this for three reasons:

Anyone who thinks the US dollar is actually a safe haven must have been asleep the last two years. I know, I know, conventional wisdom says otherwise, but my gut says conventional wisdom is more like conventional stupidity on this matter. Right now the US Wall Street droids are readying to fight any regulation that restricts their greed-based decisions, so they can do business as usual. And while I understand the idea that most investors think the US is too big to fail, it isn’t. Look at the historical nature of debt default, and now ask yourself if the same recklessness is widespread in the financial sector in the US after that last debacle, how does that make them safe? You have a government pouring money they don’t have into businesses that don’t care about stability beyond their own private interests. The US is not yet a stable investment, and anyone who thinks it is must be ignoring the basic risks that show in its debt to GDP ratio, its political stalls, and its continued reliance on credit and debt to finances national and international operations. If the US was a company, no way would anyone think it a safe investment right now – and the fact is that same measure needs to be applied. Mind you, I’m not saying the US is about to fail, I’m just saying calling them safe because Greece is in the can is foolishness. If you want safe when Greece tanks, look for whomever competes in the markets that they nationally compete in – that’s your safe bet.
This decline here (not just of Canada's buck, but all of the currencies affected) is exposing the fact that currency markets are both misinformed and based on a false base. The US largely started the financial sector crisis, and we continue to measure almost all currencies against this unstable one? That’s kind of similar to measuring my height while being tossed between two strongmen. And for those who think that’s a misplaced metaphor, that’s the point. My height is not relative to whether two strongmen can bounce me around, any more than some of the currency shift we’re seeing is relevant to Greece’s debacle, or the US greenback. This is one more sign the currency traders are ignorant profiteers.
The last laugh came when I mused on Greece being near default. This is not the first time it has happened. Throughout the 1930s and into Word War II, Greece was in horrible shape in this regard. Before espousing on the relevance of Greece’s inability to manage its national finances to currency rates, try reading some history and figuring out why Greece is in trouble in the first place. The enlightenment that comes from history is clearly missing for the people thinking these connections are what they believe them to be.

Now I can return to my chuckling.

China: Land of the Muzzle

2010-04-27T10:17:00.001-06:00

Read this.

Freedom to be attacked by your own government at their whim. And we trade with them? Why? Will they monitor us next?

Women and Men: The Difference

2010-04-25T18:50:00.001-06:00

Last night in the wee hours of the morning, a persistent beeping made my wife crawl out of bed and go in search of it. After a few minutes, she called me, and I trolled out. The microwave was beeping, repeatedly, for no apparent reason, and she was tapping its buttons, trying to discern what was wrong. I said nothing – I just pulled the plug and went right back to bed.

And there in a nutshell is the difference between women and men.

The woman would have spent a good hour trying to qualify and discern the cause of this oddity, trying to understand the problem. (An admirable trait.)

The man eliminated the problem.

I now realise this is probably one of the only reasons women need men. We are linear to the point where our first reaction to any unknown is to eliminate it, and return to the previous task (in this case, sleeping). It makes us efficient when action is actually required, such as the destruction of bugs, moving stacks of objects to get to other objects, and silencing offensive microwave ovens.

Make what you will of it.

eHealth: A Developers View

2010-04-21T12:27:00.001-06:00

This article says it all.

There is absolutely no way this solution-set costs what it is costing. This is another boondoggle, or a case of extreme incompetence in action. My gut feel is 90% of the cash here was put into “planning” and the rest wasted elsewhere. Projects like this matter, and action is the predictor of success, not a pretence of action.

James Cameron & the Oil Sands: Self-Serving Hollywood Style

2010-04-21T12:25:00.001-06:00

Read this article.

I won’t question Mister Cameron's environmental credentials (he has none, really), and I won’t argue his convictions about the environment (maybe he has some of those), but I will observe that the oil sands have been around for a good long time, and it seems mightily suspicious to me he leaps upon the bandwagon a few days before his Avatar is released on DVD/Blu-Ray. It strikes me as a self-serving move, to drop that disc on Earth Day, and to top it off by speaking negatively about something he has zero grasp about. Now, once he has all the information he needs from the green crowd, I’m sure that qualifies him to be speaking even louder – a completely one-sided view being so much easier to carry.

The oil sands are not pretty, and the environmental toll is real, but pardon me for observing that the demand for oil is what inspires the oil sands, not some bizarre self-abuse whereby companies do the projects to bankrupt themselves. Someone is willing to pay for that dirty oil, folks, and that is largely a group made from an urban population (only because urbanites outnumber the rural folks). If you want to criticise the oil sands, criticise the cause rather than the effects – if the world wasn’t buying that oil, it wouldn’t be processed.

So, maybe Mister Cameron should observe that his lifestyle may be part of the overall problem, and maybe before he uses this issue to push his movie even more than the hype allows presently, he should do something constructive. It is easy to criticise an effect, but give us some suggestions how to address the cause – there lies the key.

Lately, this issue bugs me as much as the kids who tell me I’m environmentally unsound, but have a new cell phone annually, ever gadget known to mankind, etc. I’m not a strong proponent of oil sands projects, as I think they can be done cleaner, but I have a serious problem with anyone casting stones when they are part of the cause of the problem.

Catholic Crap: The Sequel to the Sequel to the Sequel

2010-04-20T08:40:00.001-06:00

More bent priests.

I’ll leave the defending of Catholicism to the stupid now. I’m sorry, but as a rational human being, I’m having serious challenges believing this Church is anything but a corruption of the most basic values of Christianity. I’m sure my Bible doesn’t say, “go ye forth and bugger children,” or, “thy priestly robe entitle ye to mess with the innocent.” So, flat out, I’ll view this Pope as a criminal now, the head of a conspiracy to allow paedophiles to prey on children. Not just average children though,m but the children of the stupid people who are least likely to report it effectively – the people who are dumb enough to “believe in the Church.”

But, I know, this is all a case of the media and irreligious types attacking the true Church. I expect the Vatican will now attack reporters, police, judges, etc. Attacking the victims failed, calling us all Jews didn’t work, and crocodile tears didn’t work in Latin America. Okay, maybe not crocodile tears. I’m sure he was weeping because they got caught harbouring the scum of the world.

Thank the gods, any one of them except the one who condones abusing children, I’m not Catholic.

Visual Studio 2010: Bug-Away Spray

2010-04-19T12:50:00.001-06:00

Since I posted two blogs about the intermittent, frustrating bugs I was suffering, I figure it only fair to post that I seem to have overcome them. At least for the last 4 hours the product has been stable. So, in the interest of sharing, here’s what I did.

Reinstalled the Operating System (Windows 7 64-bit) from the original media rather than a ghost.
Install all my applications.
Reinstall VS 2010.

So far, that seems to have given me a stable build, which raises the head-scratching question about what may have gone wrong. Obvious, a dependency, but what one?

I’m just hoping the thing now stays fixed.

Sikh Parade: One More Sign People Are Sheep

2010-04-18T21:42:00.001-06:00

Read this article.

I have nothing against the Sikh religion. I know too little about it to have an opinion, and while I’ve known two folks who were of that faith, for the most part I couldn’t tell much about them except that they liked hockey. Still, I can comment on the article referenced above, which is basically about how the organisers of a religious festival/parade have allowed it to be hijacked by political influences.

My first comment is this: mixing politics and religion is a deadly game, because you risk painting an entire religion by its extremists. Not too many non-Sikh people know enough (anything) about Sikhs to be aware enough to avoid the mistaken impression it is a political movement that goes against the will of the majority here in Canada, who while possibly ignorant beyond belief, are still the majority in what claims to be a democracy.

My second comment is even more blunt, and it is directed to anyone of any brand of religion and political bent: when you leave your nation or origin to come to Canada, leave your former arguments behind. We are not a nation of convenience, and if you treat us that way, go away. We have enough home-grown morons without importing idiots from foreign hellholes. And, before anyone complains about the use of the term “hellhole,” I’m making a point – the reason most immigrants from difficult regimes come to Canada is to get away from the conflicts that do not serve them as individual people. By importing the conflicts, it completely eliminates the purpose of your choice, making you stupid and us unlucky enough to have to bear your presence.

Now, I am too old and too reasonable to think all Sikhs support the posting of martyrs faces on a float in a parade meant to celebrate the religion. My guess is that most of the Sikh population in Canada thinks extremism is a painful waste of time and thought, or they wouldn’t have moved here in the first place. But I’m also too aware to think that slipping a politically charged float in at the 11th hour is not intentional, not political, and not an abuse of the relationship that allows groups in Canada (of almost any stripe) to have rallies. Frankly, I would outright reject next years permit request, based upon the fact the parade organisers intentionally violated the spirit of their agreement. They proved themselves undeserving of the trust-relationship.

This is one more sign people are sheep, when a large group allows a small fractured contingent within that group to dictate actions that have an intent that will sour their community relationships. By doing that the sacrifice made by the community is that they project an image that is unfair to the majority within. And when you are a minority within a mostly ignorant majority, you must accept the consequences of what you allow to be projected.

My message to the Sikh community would be this: Reject the extremist wedge that will cause you future grief. Canada is not a forum for extra-national arguments that condone violence. We have enough of our own pathetic stupidity, and you do your entire religion a disservice if you are seen to be supportive of these martyrs, who, by the way, are, like all martyrs, stupid and selfish and in no way heroic. Real heroes build bridges, and eschew destroying them.

More Catholic Angst: Archbishop of Toronto calls sex-abuse 'exceptions'

2010-04-18T11:35:00.001-06:00

Read this article.

Nothing this Archbishop said is untrue except for one bit near the end, which is the hopeful belief this all happened in the past. Paedophiles don’ts top offending, and my guess is these “scandals” will recycle every decade or so, which is how long it will take the next crop of victims to process what has happened to them. But it is true the majority of priests are not criminal perverts, and his point about it is well taken.

What he fails to address though is in his apparent inability to realise the world isn’t actually disturbed by the pervert priests so much as the fact the Church’s systematic conspiracies to cover the abuse, at the cost of hundreds and maybe thousands of additional victims. Not recognising the problem is the conspiracy is similar to an alcoholic believing the problem to be the alcohol itself, rather than the disease that compels them to drink.

Visual Studio RTM: More Bugs You Wouldn't Expect Given the Effort

2010-04-17T22:41:00.001-06:00

Further to the previous post, I have drained away 18 hours of life trying to pinpoint a large array of editor issues. The latest one is the closest I have got to an actual target where the error is occurring. (It faults fpeditax.dll and blows the entire development environment off its wheels; and again I wasted some time filing the bug.)

I find this a depressing post, because I was looking forward to using VS 2010 for a new project, but based upon the last four days of almost constant aggravation, I have to say that I may be rolling back the install and fishing my away back to VS 2008, which while not as powerful in many regards is definitely more stable.

What happened with this error, the first where the IDE crashed with some actual explanation, was the following:

I opened an ASPX page;
I dragged an AJAX control element to the page (this also can happen with a standard ASPX button, etc.);
I realised I had dragged the wrong one (I hardly ever use the designer view);
I deleted the control bys electing and pressing the delete key;
I switched to Source View;
I noticed the editor looked “funky” (borders got a few pixels wider);
I clicked the Design view button just to see if the display quirk remained;
The IDE window refused to switch to Design view, grinding on the request, and eventually just remaining there and ignoring the request;
I closed the document;
I reopened the document;
The IDE faulted in the fpeditax.dll library (FrontPage Editor!), crashing the entire IDE.

Now, I did some research and found that users of Expression Blend have experienced this problem for a while, with no fix in sight. So, apparently, knowing about the issue, it was considered wise to toss that library at hardcore developers?

The most frustrating aspect of this new IDE is that its promise (strong and obvious) is killed outright by this kind of behavioural failure.

In addition to the issues reported in the previous post (after a 100% rebuild of the machine), I can add the following:

Occasionally pasting to any document window will simply fail to paste;
Typing text at the top of an existing CSS document (style sheet) will, when you save, lose everything you typed (more frequent if you type a single line than multiple ones, and when you type a line and hit the Enter key, the empty line will always act as a buffer and you only lose the first line).
Adding items to the toolbox, and saving the project, etc., does not guarantee the items remain in the toolbox; and if they do you cannot actually be certain they will function next time you use them.
Editing a document (code of any kind) can result in a crash if you select by clicking to thee far left of the margin region when word wrap is on.

There are about fifteen other ones I’m too tired to write out, and I’m certainly not filing them all as bugs given the fact most of them are intermittent and aren’t leaving a trail to find the actual crash module. Strangely, too, they got significantly worse in number after a clean install.

A sad, sad day for Visual Studio on my development boxes.

Visual Studio 2010 RTM: Some Thoughts About Software Quality

2010-04-16T23:33:00.000-06:00

Software isn’t easy to develop, and the larger the product and broader its audience the less pleasant the experience is on the development side of the equation. This is made worse today by the quality of some dependencies, foundation parts of systems that are sometimes the equivalent of moving targets the size of fleas. It is also burdened by configuration issues, which can blow away a perfectly solid application through no fault of the developer. My favourite example of the second form of dependency failure that is common today is seen in any web application that has even a moderately rich user interface, because it faces a tonne of challenges on the client-side, with people who have various bits of the browser turned off, corrupted, extended, etc.

Another trend that the old dog in me find deeply disturbing is that the quality of the tools we now use to do development seems to be declining.

I installed the Visual Studio 2010 Release To Manufacturing build on my primary development machine this week. The product is complex, the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is pretty much revamped down to the core, riding on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) component introduced a couple years back, and given its scale I never expected it to be entirely bug-free. Still, my experience with the Beta 2 and RC (Release candidate) builds was so generally positive I was prepared to forgive the quirks. What I wasn’t prepared for was the number and nature of the quirks that really do qualify as bugs, even when they cannot be reproduced reliably.

Before I wax moronic about quality, it’s sensible to post an example or two of the quirks I’ve discovered in the last 20 hours:

Now, this first quirk is a crashing bug, which I can reproduce sporadically (about 1 every 10 tries) by doing the following: Open a valid CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) document with some styles in it; create a new empty CSS document; copy any lines from the existing CSS (valid style definitions); paste them to the empty CSS. Now this usually works just fine, but about 10% of the time the editor window will crash the entire IDE. After the entire development environment crashes, and when it restarts it resets all the settings (merges them from a backup). This suggests a corruption of the settings file that is active, but as to actual cause I am entirely blind, because this crash does not file a log entry anywhere on the system. Nor can I reproduce it exactly, because while I have found while consistently capable of crashing, it is not a specific style definition causing it, and nor is it relevant how one copies or pastes. It just happens. And when it happens, there is no trail to follow. More to the point, being as I work for a living, I can’t spend an inordinate amount of time investigating this kind of bug exclusively – actual work is required. I dutifully reported it to the connect site where bugs get filed, but fully expect it to be flagged as not reproducible, because my gut tells me it is likely a configuration issue on this box, which while new built, may never have been in a reliable state. The point of this admission being that since VS 2010 has such a slew of dependencies, I’m already aware that any of a dozen points of conflict could cause this.
My second example is not entirely different, and even more peculiar in some ways. The editor itself is a tabbed document interface, and occasionally I can make it crash by closing a tab. The steps are consistent, though the crash result is not: open any two tabs (content type of the tabs is irrelevant), set the focus to the second (rightmost tab), and then try to use the wee X (close icon) on the first tab. If that first tab is inactive when you click, it will crash the whole IDE instantly, with no logged errors. My gut feel is that what happens is that some code is trying to set focus to the editor pane (show whatever file the tab holds) and that some other code closes that tab before the focus is set, causing the focus to encounter a missing object, and thus crashing. I surmise this because it seems that if I first click the tab, to set focus, and then close, I can never make this crash happen. I also notice that if the tab contents are not saved, since the IDE will ask if I want to save, this never crashes the IDE. I also filed this bug, but with the same expectation it will be marked not reproducible, mostly because it probably is. I can only make it happen about one in a hundred times (yes, it is persistent enough I managed to count that). Of course, the obvious likely factor here is a timing issue – if the focus is set in the background before the document window is destroyed the close works without crashing, is what my guess would be. But…how can a guess be valid when the actual cause is unknown?

At first glance these two crash conditions probably seem like a shrug, but this product underwent massive end-user testing. It also had large teams working on the code-base. Disturbingly, the intermittent nature of these crashes suggests that the actual problem may lie somewhere below the top-layer code, which makes the crashes symptomatic – and that makes finding the underlying cause almost impossible.

Now, in both cases, I can observe that the WPF is what the editor lives on, and I’m suspicious that the problem will end up being in that dependency. More than twenty years of experience suggests the culprit will turn out to be some low-level feature in WPF that is broken, meaning the whole IDE is at its mercy. It doesn’t inspire confidence for that reason, or because of how intermittent the crashing is. I can’t even fathom how the telemetry on the crash would look, given it is so unclear if the cause is indirect or direct.

When your tools are suffering…what can you do about imparting quality on the down-line side? How can software I create be reliable if the tools that made it are not?

I’m not really raining in VS 2010 here, and want to clarify that. This is a good tool, with great features, but that it is quirky and unstable at this stage of the development cycle (release) makes me wonder if the IDE change to run on WPF was a mistake, because those two crashes aren’t the only oddities of the tool. Crashes are bad in themselves, but the reality is that it is sometimes the other quirks that aren’t crashing that are the more brutal quality indicators.

A few of note:

Intellisense, the feature that pops up those wee helpers, is a great feature, but in this release the display is laboured to pitch some of the Intellisense up. In many cases the tooltip is misaligned and obscures the actual list of offered choices, usually obscuring the first item almost entirely – but not always. The most frequent obscuring seems to be when the IDE is trying to offer True/False in a popup, where any tooltip above the line will obscure the False choice almost entirely. This is most evident when a function tip appears (showing the parameters). Now, small as this irritation is, it points to a problem not with Intellisense, but with the display code it relies upon. WPF again? Or just bad coding somewhere? Or a display adapter side-effect? Or…and the list goes on.
Drag-and-drop of toolbar items to ASP.NET pages (web pages) is a hit and miss operation, with it being damn near impossible at times to tell where the element you drop will end up, or whether it will render at all. This seems to be because of how the selection code is working, because rather than just showing an insertion bar where the drop will manifest, it sometimes selects the nearest element (DIV tag, whatever). Depending on where that selection starts, the resultant drop can get interesting. Again, a minor quirk, but not a strong indicator of reliable behaviour. If I can’t reliably say that drag and drop will always behave as hoped, I can’t actually use it. (I don’t use it much, frankly, but before it used to seem to work.)
Code selection in the editor windows is another challenging experience at times, because depending on the position of the mouse, certain movements of it will select entire words or lines. Not as active selections, though, but as some sort of visual cue, I guess, because try typing over the selected text and you can never be sure where it will end up. My guess is this is a feature that went wrong, but it shows something about quality considerations in itself. You need the contextual expectations to be maintained. In all other contexts the selection of some element is making it active, and you act upon it – but in the IDE that isn’t always apparently going to be the case. It’s disconcerting.

Again, all these are probably side-effects of WPF, which seems a step back in some ways.

Ultimately, though, these gripes all suggest that maybe “quality of use” wasn’t really a focus of the effort – and they only rankle at all because some of these issues were evident in earlier builds, and most of them were in some form evident in Beta 2. Has the dependency chain on Visual Studio become so complex that during those remedy phases, the symptoms of underlying bugs were hacked away, leaving the underlying problems unaffected? Or is this just a case of a dependency gone wrong that has nothing to do with the editor designers, etc.

The problem, of course, is that for those of us who use this kind of tool to build tools for other people, we’re now left with the possibility the tool itself isn’t entirely reliable as a productivity enhancement. And software tool quality does affect the software built with those tools.

What I take away form all this is that in all probability this is a WPF issue or two surfacing, which inclines me to reject WPF as a platform option. Why would I build my products on a platform base so quirky that the tools meant to build for it can’t harness its warts? The other possibility is even less pleasant, because it is that the problem lies in the development tool set itself, and the idea that the product got buggier since the RC (Release Candidate) stage is troublesome.

Now the old dog will return to searching for some explanation as to why three of four web browsers can display a page correctly that was designed by a tool built by the company whose web browser can’t display the page correctly. But that’s another post, maybe.

More Vatican Bullshit

2010-04-13T10:37:00.001-06:00

This declaration that gay folks are responsible for child abuse is stupid. Paedophiles are not homosexuals, they are sexually aberrant – unless they are Priests, evidently. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Are Catholics really buying into this?

The Culture of Artificial Urgency

2010-04-10T19:13:00.001-06:00

We have a modern culture that seems to believe everything is urgent, and this is especially damaging in business, politics, and social relationships. I’m increasingly convinced that people need to rethink their lives, not just professionally, but in all other aspects of what makes them human beings.

I was thinking today that the most common problem I see in businesses now is this sense of urgency, completely artificial, which overwhelms the ability to manage. After all, if you can’t identify priorities, how can you actually manage toward objectives? If everything around you takes on a feverish sense of urgency, how can you identify what really needs attention versus the shrill backdrop of noise? You can’t, and from that comes what I’ll called the management muddle – a state where nothing gets managed precisely because the managers can’t figure out what needs to be managed.

Of course, the management is generally driving this artificial sense of urgency, by creating a scattergun approach to communication. They ask for reams of paper because they have no ability to focus on what they need. This absence of precision comes directly from how managers are bred into business now – and it might as well be termed “the dual-endpoint effect.” Far too many companies are managed by MBA graduates without enough real experience (or none, in many cases), or floaters who end up as managers by virtue of privilege that seldom translates to effective skills. Almost all of them can speak (well, not all), but an even higher percentage can’t “communicate,” which requires knowing the topic, the audience, the terminology, and the purpose behind conversation.

Out of this communication failure comes the sense of artificial urgency, and that is why the majority of businesses today are inefficient.

Notably, this thought extends from the fact I am presently building another tool to manage associative risk, which is exposing me to the basic fact none of the clients seem capable of recognising the difference between real risk and sludge.

More Catholic Clutter

2010-04-09T21:16:00.001-06:00

Read this and tell me the problem isn’t endemic. Pathetic.

Now We Know the Pope’s View

2010-04-09T14:54:00.001-06:00

I won’t repeat the contents of the revelations of how as Cardinal this creature now called the Pope handled his own Bishops desperate pleas to clear the Church of child molesters. It can be read here. What I will say is we now know the Pope’s view: children matter less than the acquisition and retention of power. I wish I believed there was a God, similar to what Christians propose, because it would amuse me greatly to trust that any such God will see these pathetic excuses for human beings roast in a Hell all their own. Any vague sympathy I might have had for the Vatican in this matter is now where it should be – long gone.

But then the Church either dictates or reflects the values of its parishioners, I suppose. What does that suggest? Nothing good at all.

The Pope’s View?

2010-03-30T12:05:00.001-06:00

Now, I’m not a fan of Catholicism for many reasons – the worshipping of idols, the conflicts caused in the name of spreading “Christian love,” and several downright scary Popes all make me consider Catholicism rather less respectable than devil worship, which is at least honest about its proclivities. Lately, I’m stunned though, by the fact Catholics have put up with the Vatican, which, folks, whether you have faith or not, is certainly not representing God on earth these days. Satan maybe…that is, unless God supports deflecting justice away from child molesters.

But let’s step back for a moment from the disgusting details of all this, and just examine the view being espoused by the Holy See, which seems to be that it (the Vatican, the Pope, the Church) is somehow a victim. To really clarify the issue, let me put this in statements that have nothing to do with religion. Based then upon how the Pope and his cronies see the issue:

If I had a neighbour who raped children, and I knew about it, it would be okay if I loaned the neighbour money to visit a children’s park and never said a word about his proclivities. And to extend this stupidity, it would be perfectly fine for me to label myself a victim if the kids he buggered with ever complained.

Now, those statements will rankle people of blind faith, but even Priests in the Catholic Church must have almost had enough of this horseshit. I’ve known some Catholic Priests, and to my knowledge none of the three I knew well have ever hauled a kid into the rectory for a quick blow job, etc. (There was a great joke in there about rectory and rectal, but I didn’t have the heart – well, maybe I did.) How offensive is it to the majority of the priests in the faith to have these aspersions cast on them? How hard is it to counsel people on sin when you represent a Vatican that systematically, for decades, has not only been in denial, but now has begun to fairly openly chastise the victims produced by their conspiratorial ignorance?

This is a problem with Catholicism, specifically, though not exclusively. And contrary to apologist beliefs (and some immensely ignorant believers) this has zilch to do with celibacy vows (child molesters are child molesters, and always will be). This has to do with a religion that is obedient to a hierarchy, where a cloister of the self-appointed dictate to the masses. Any religion that requires priesthood is susceptible to this sort of foolishness.

What strikes me as really odd here, though, is this is the first time in my 40+ years I recall the blaming of victims being part of the usual blather from the Vatican. Denial, and enforced blind-eye behaviour was common for decades – but to blame children for being upset they were abused? That inspires me to think that maybe denial isn’t enough now, because some of the chicken-hawks are in the henhouse, since normal paedophile behaviour usually does involve believing their victims complicit.

So what is the Pope’s view, I wonder?

Now, having raised my question, I’ll end with my view of the scenario that I had above that it seems the Vatican would consider perfectly reasonable behaviour, just so maybe the religious folks of the world can grasp the idea of morality. If I had a paedophile neighbour, and even suspected it, I would be apt to speak to someone with authority to change that. If I knew it, beyond a doubt, I would absolutely do something – and then I could stand by the victims with some sense of having tried to do right, rather than pretending to be one of them. That, is called the effect of having a moral compass – and not needing a priest of any sort to explain it to me.

Patent Sense

2010-03-30T09:33:00.001-06:00

U.S. judge strikes down patent on cancer genes

The first clear decision in patent law in years that is founded on actual sense – you cannot patent a pre-existing state.

The High Price of Honour

2010-03-25T21:53:00.001-06:00

I’ve been mulling today on the idea of honourable behaviour in business dealings, and its high price.

First, I’m well aware business is business, and I know it is essentially mercenary by nature. People in business behave for their own best interests, as they perceive them. They very often, much to my dismay, have such a warped perception of what benefits them, they tend to behave in purely irrational ways. They basically act out, like children, without considering the consequent damage down to what are inherently trust-based relationships. Sometimes this is because they are corrupt, and other times because they are simply misguided, and occasionally because they are incompetent. Increasingly the incompetent category seems to be expanding beyond all rational scale.

In my business dealings, I have always believed that the word given is a literal bond. Yes, I know verbal contracts are implied rather than by nature provably explicit, but my rational mind tells me that people I work with, for and alongside must be trusted to make the cooperative relationship effective. If someone says something to me, I act upon that information in good faith, and the higher the risk in the relationship, the more faith I end up having to place – or I walk away. But I am not, and never have been, someone to walk away lightly, because I have a specific sense of duty that comes into play when I give my word. This is summed in the idea that I honour my obligations, as defined by my communications with people I serve. And to serve the relationships, I will go above and beyond the specific scope of an agreement when that is necessary to provide the best service, especially when that effort provides maximum return on my investment, as well. In other words, the mercenary in me is focused on mutual benefits, and I will do a great deal more than expected to deliver higher returns.

When I started out in the business I’m in, which is providing real solutions to real problems, I found that sense of a bond for mutual benefit was serviceable, and reliable. I also learned, early on, the high personal price paid when one party in a trust relationship dishonours that relationship. I say personal price, because not having dishonoured my word in business, though I have come damn near it at times, I am apt to deliver above what I promise even when it is clear I have been used, played upon, and otherwise dismissed by a customer.

Three times in my roughly 24 year career, I have suffered immensely for refusing to abandon my promises, regardless of the consequences. In one case I ended up holding a shared debt a partner left me with, having trusted them to fulfil payments on our behalf, because I would not abandon creditors who served in good faith to me. In another, I completed work for a company that had already broken the contractual bond, because I believe that solutions exist beyond the commercial exchange, and I felt compelled to do the honourable thing rather than be petty. In the third, I invested heavily in a failed commercial idea, time wise and effort wise, because I was conscious that the other party had maintained their sense of honour in the exchange, even as the exchange itself became utterly valueless. Hundreds of other relationships lived, and naturally ended, without any loss of benefit or sense of imbalance.

But there are times when this sense of honour about delivering the goods traps you, hurts you, and abuses all that is good in the feeling of accomplishing a solution for another human being.

Carrying the mutual debt I was left with when a past partnership collapsed put me in an awkward, terrible and financially devastating position. I suddenly had a debt equivalent to half the mortgage on my house, taken on while the partner waltzed away. The price of that decision, to do what was right by the creditor that had trusted us, was one that eventually led me near the brink of bankruptcy, and taught me that banking systems have no ability to gauge honourable behaviour. In retrospect, had I dissolved the business and abandoned that debt, it would have been less cumbersome than taking it in hand, because banking today is all about spreadsheets, not about trust. The relationship we have with banks is entirely one-sided, at least in Canada, because they have no appropriate level of human contact. We are numbers on a sheet to them, and their expectation is that the trust is a one-way trust. They will say, “You trust us, and we will distrust you, as a matter of behavioural insurance.”

In the second case I mentioned, I learned another lesson: it is more painful to anticipate harming a friendship than it is to shrug off payment for a project. I would rather save the few real friendships I have than argue about a few dollars, or even many. There is nothing to be gained and everything to be lost, and it is never honourable to allow a friend who is stuck in a mess to become a victim of the behaviours they could not control in an organisation. Unlike the lesson about taking on debt, this one I have to mark as entirely positive. It was a powerful feeling to be able to place human relationships above mere money, and stand by principles rather than accept the entrenched bad behaviour of an organisation just to get their cash. This proves not all lessons in humility are bad.

And likewise my third example, really, where I saw the collapse of an idea (a good one), but expended efforts to try to do duty to the person behind it, because I felt they had formed an honourable relationship with me beyond any commercial scope. To have done that, stood by an idea of quality, not our of friendship so much as respect, reinforced for me the vital importance of ideas, solutions, and the work that I do. It reminded me that I do it because I am not only good at what I do, but I respect the power of a practical solution. I respect the elegance of something that works, and sometimes, when you can, you have to allow yourself to taste the passion that drove you to your pursuits.

The point of this is to observe that I am distinctly aware money isn’t everything. In fact, it means very little beyond what it can buy, and I am not a complex person. I don’t drive a fancy car, I live in a house most of those with half my income would balk at owning, and I dress like a 50s punk more than a normal human being because it’s comfortable.

And this brings me to the crux of my looming problem.

For the last decade, almost, I have been engaged in a pursuit that has been frustrating in every practical sense, but is founded upon an exquisite core ideal. The tooling I’ve built to support this core, the theories I created to explain it, and the opportunities represented by those methods and tools leave me breathless when I sit back and realise what they are. But on the purely mechanical side, I never have made any money doing this. My income, in fact, over the period, is about a quarter of what I could have earned taking on opportunities I passed up because I believed so strongly in what I was pursuing. My mercenary side was betrayed, I would observe, by my respect for the ideas, and by the bond of honour I made to deliver the ideal in some workable fashion.

The idea is still right, powerful, and it lives actively when allowed – but it is essentially a commercial failure. Like all elegant solutions, it requires resources to actualise and commercialise, and the company I serve doesn’t have the resource pool to execute the delivery of commercial success. The company is a Research and Development company in the truest sense, run by someone who might actually be an altruist, and cobbled together otherwise.

In the past I could learn my lessons about how high the personal price of honour is without much of a flinch, because I was single and/or without a child. I am neither of those things now, and wavering now about whether a business relationship can or should exist when the honour in it is lopsided. My reality has changed, and I wonder if I have the luxury of endangering my family in pursuit of ideals, however fine. I also notice that now, even the smallest signs of an imbalance are seen and remarked, and create pools of immense interpersonal stress in the relationships that matter. It inclines me to believe honour in business is dead, and that it has been for ages, not because it lacks mutual value but because people have become so self-absorbed and skewed in their perception of mutual value they fail to see the benefits.

But then my family motto contains the words “Non Inferiora Secutus,” which roughly means, “following not the inferior.” This is combined with a long standing secondary cry, which translates loosely as, “for honour, in fidelity, with courage.” So maybe, raised to believe that, I was destined to pursue a fine cause to my own destruction, or at least my dissolution.

The night now demands its own price, and I will therefore lay down arms and retreat not to bed, but to the tasks that drive me.

Dear Big Brother…

2010-03-25T00:02:00.001-06:00

Okay, I understand the context for this idea (see Google blog post here), but…what’s next? Read the actual emails and analyse them to make sure my diction is the same across them? There are some things you just have to wonder about.

Check Your Brain At the Border, the Ann Coulter Story

2010-03-24T22:59:00.001-06:00

I wondered if I should post this in my political bog, and decided no. It’s just too obscure.

Recently Ann Coulter came to Canada, and I believe as I write this she is in Calgary. She stirred the pot in Ottawa yesterday or the day before. For anyone who doesn’t know who she is, I say, “bless you for choosing not to litter your brain with that knowledge.” If you want to have a chuckle, Google her. She’s amusing at times…though I think she takes herself seriously.

Now, the reason this was almost a political blog is that I’m political. I’m a conservative, a real one though, not a disguised religious fundamentalist. My conservatism is the old style fiscal conservatism that believes the bottom line is that governments should have limited scope, provide only sustainable services, and then get the Hell out of the lives of the people. Beyond that, I have no need of government, public service, or any of that nonsense. I’ve been tagged by people who know me as the most liberal conservative of all time, and it probably fits, because I truly believe people should go about their lives privately, without interference, no matter how weird, unless they start harming others. Gay marriage? I’m straight, married, and couldn’t give a damn about whether two gays marry. Let them marry; but don’t ask me to marry another man. First, I have no interest in it; second, my wife would protest. Sex education in school? people, the only sex education I ever got was in school. Likewise, I think many of my generation. Trust me, having a qualified nurse practitioner or some such say, “This is how you put a condom on a banana,” cannot be as harmful as having “Dirty Jake”, that smelly kid with too many eyebrows provide the gist of it while describing how he had sex with a cow. Just knowing how to dress a banana isn’t the reason underage kids have sex. And my point is, a real conservative knows the difference between fundamentalist tripe and conservatism.

Ann Coulter is either crazy or really hasn’t thought about her diatribe. It hardly ever stands to logical scrutiny, and she’s inflammatory to a degree that, really, proves its intentional. Anyone who takes her seriously is being duped by a propagandist in the guise of a demagogue. And yet, she pulls big crowds; and her book sold millions of copies! Who buys into this? Do these people even listen to her? If you want stupid, uninformed, trivial, and ignorant remarks…read my blog for free. I make several every week, I’m sure. But if you want to really check your brain at the door, or the border, just tune into Ann – the poster-child for lazy thought.

One of my pet peeves with her is not only her problem, and that’s really what I want to comment upon. she’s just a fine celebrity example of the problem:

Whenever you hear a person blaming someone else, it isn’t about the blamed party, it’s because they haven’t the intelligence to take responsibility for their condition. Coulter typifies this deficit of self, with her blatantly dumb statements about “groups” of people. It shows her degree of deep ignorance, or – and I suspect this strongly – her manipulative awareness. After all, what’s going to sell more books? An actual discussion of the nature of cross-cultural relations, or slapping a towel-head label on anyone whose skin isn’t quite porcelain? We all know the answer.

The problem with people who blame rather than solve, is that their assignment of blame is necessarily both self-serving and predatory. They always pick a target that will benefit their status, and they stalk the prey that is weakest. Given the Middle East mess, Islam is the target of the day for weaklings. Why? Because you can’t effectively attack what people are, and what they know, but you can attack what they don’t know and fear.

I get the impression that a hundred years ago people that have this shallow depth of thought would be lynching brown people, or fifty years ago lynching gays. (Okay, I know, lynching brown people is pretty common now, so too with gays – it’s just more sophisticated.) Weaklings, to the last. Not brainless, but too lazy to think past the superficial fallacies. These are the people, who made the mess around us, who mistake symptoms for causes.

It isn’t wrong for someone like Ann Coulter to speak freely. It’s right for her to speak freely. I would even go so far as to shrug at the notion she incites hate. The fact is anyone dumb enough to be incited by her drivel already hates. What is scary to me is how many otherwise thoughtful people are willing to take the easy out and identify with this dull bulb. There lies the problem.

Why Wal-Mart Will Fail

2010-03-24T22:19:00.001-06:00

I hesitate to admit this, but as a father of a young kid, living in an area where Wal-Mart has long since destroyed most of the stores, I spend a lot at Wal-Mart. This last year I spent almost ten grand at the Wal-Mart in Taber, Alberta. I know the arguments about the devastating effect Wal-Mart has on the local economy, and such, but, frankly, show me a middle class family that doesn’t need the lowest prices they can get in one central place. And tell me how I can shop somewhere else in a community where there is almost no other option, literally. No, I didn’t think you could. Trust me, if I could…I would have years ago.

I had an experience today that is not the first one I’ve had at Wal-Mart (I’ve never had it at any other store, actually, so there you go). I followed it by a second and third experience, that…but I ramble.

Let’s start simply, shall we?

Today I was shopping at Wal-Mart for Band-Aids, Easter goodies for my daughter, and Zhu-Zhu pets. In our travels we saw an item on the shelves, a PC game where she can be the Zhu-Zhu hamsters. While only four, she’s a computer user, because she has the coordination, and, really, decent software exists to make learning fun. She’s therefore attuned to this sort of product, and upon sight she recognised it for what it was. Good for her. of course, not so good, because when I got to the cash, it tanked upon being scanned. It spat up “not for sale,” confusing the cashier and adding a good ten minutes to our checkout process. It required a call to the department, and one of those “Customer Service Managers” (CSM) to determine they couldn’t sell it to me, since it was “not for sale.” Now, my kid is a good kid, and even while she loves the Zhu-Zhu hamsters she didn’t carry on, or get upset. My wife was pissed off, because this is the forth time we have faced a similar thing in the last 6 months, but what can you do?

What you can do, or so my brain thought – stupid me – is say what I said, which was, “There are more of those on the shelf back there, so you might want to go remove them.” In a snotty tone, the CSM said, “That’s not our responsibility.” The tone was what did it, really. As a customer I was just refused a good they posted for sale in the their store, forced to wait ten minutes because not one of them had the brains to grasp the words “sale not allowed,” and I still had the wherewithal to let them know that, basically, they would have the same problem again. I was dismissed, with attitude.

I got half way out the door, sent my wife and daughter to the van, went back and asked to see a manager. This is what I call stupid mistake two, as ten minutes later some fat little ingrate came up waving the good, and said, “It’s not my fault I can’t sell you this.” No introduction by name, not question as to my concern, and immediately after saying those words skittered around to hide behind the service desk. I asked him how long had he been a manager, and he proclaimed 13 years. I observe here for the record, I have also done some things badly for 13 years, though never my job. I told him what I was irritated by. The précis goes thus: product on the floor that is not for sale annoys me, waiting ten extra minutes in checkout annoys me, but all this was fine. What really set me off was the condescending, rude tone of the CSM, when I did the right thing – suggested they take a very popular branded product off the shelf if it cannot be sold. His response, after looking at me with a dullard’s expression: “I was never rude to you.” Proof he hadn’t bothered to listen to a word I said.

I could recount having rendered my opinion of him, but frankly I make more in a quarter than he clears in a year. For 13 years he’s toiled incompetently in a role he’s not suited to. But i was so pissed off I walked away, with an insight. This, this type of customer experience, is what is going to kill Wal-Mart.

I spend a lot of money, and as I got into the van today, I said to my wife, “I won’t shop there again – ever.” Yes, I will have to drive 20 extra minutes to shop elsewhere (in Canada, Zellers has the same Chinese junk I mostly buy at Wal-Mart), but Wal-Mart succeeded in ensuring their cut of my cash dropped by about ten grand today, because I did the right things and they hired people who are not managers – they are not even gatekeepers. This creature (I cannot call him a man, as he hid behind his desk instantly) just cost them a large percentage of his salary in a five minute conversation, because his theory is evidently, “Where else will you shop?”

Wal-Mart will die because its management is weak.

As a side-note the Taber store is really the problem, because as someone who has shopped in more than twenty Wal-Mart’s over the years, it is the only one I have ever been in where managers hide from customers, this no-sale on stock occurs fairly regularly, there are enough boxes in aisles for days on end to be unsafe, and frequently at peak times there may be one cashier alone at the front, while two CSM types wander and chat.

Now, did I complain to the regional Wal-Mart management? No…because I wasted my time even trying to be a good customer. My complaint is in the form of my wallet, made possible because:

All my electronic needs? Amazon is cheaper and efficient.
Groceries? The local Safeway is overall about the same cost when you average goods.
Clothes? Well, my kid is growing fast, but, you know what, if I have to drive to Zellers, I’ll be okay with that. Price is comparable, and it’s a shrug.

The point is, the list of what Wal-Mart provides that I can’t get elsewhere, competitively, is too short to care. Will I never shop there again? probably I will, occasionally, for convenience. Will I ever shop in the Taber store again? No, because I don’t have to. And that, Wal-Mart, is why you are doomed – because people like me, who have a lot of disposable income opportunities, really aren’t averse to shopping elsewhere when you make the experience of shopping a challenge.

Comments, Where Art Though Comments

2010-03-03T19:44:00.001-07:00

I used to allow comments without moderation to generate quality discussion (a high hope on the Internet), and then had to moderate them due to an increasing number of Chinese character spam that one couldn’t delete. Now, being as half the commentary I am asked to publish, etc., is spam, I am about to turn off comments for what I consider the worst reason – time drain.

When the technology puts you in a position where the choice is to ditch it, or essentially crippled it, though, the next obvious step will be to ditch it altogether. Sad.

Olympic Marketing Junket

2010-02-18T20:24:00.001-07:00

I was going to title this “The Olympic games,” but figured the title I chose instead was pretty much descriptive. The top three problems with the Olympics:

I can see the same millionaires (hockey, and several other sports) compete weekly on national TV without the bullshit hype;
I’m pretty sure when you can’t afford to run a hospital system, fix roads, etc., pissing away public money on games is reprehensible; and
The only real purpose of these “games” any more is a marketing mechanism – most people know sweet fuck all about the athletes they cheer for, but know that McDonald’s puts those wee dollies in their Happy Meals.

When did we all become such pathetic shits, to abandon the idea of amateur Olympic competition in favour of celebrating millionaires?

Factoid: At a projected cost of 11.6 billion (and rising), with the raw cost of a gold medal being about $300 (Wikipedia), we could mint 386,667 gold medals, give several to every athlete, and achieve the same complete waste of resources.

If the Olympics were about sport I might feel different, but this is about marketing, pure and simple; and so long as we can’t pay for necessary services, we ought to be universally ashamed of ourselves.

PS: As a result of the Pope declaring contraceptive devices wrong in Africa, how many folks have died of AIDS just this past year? Different issue, but only barely – more bullshit heaped upon us by rich folks with high opinions of themselves.

Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2003

2010-01-27T18:35:00.001-07:00

Way back when I wrote a blog about this topic. (Click here for the original.) Since for whatever reason I still cannot reply to comments effectively on the blogger site here, it seemed about time I updated this post somewhat.

A lot of folks are having serious challenge setting the FPSE (FrontPage Server Extensions) to install. As Juan points out (in comment 1), the standard install fails for the FPSE, refusing to impersonate a user, etc. It is possible to manually configure this, but my gut feel is it is now a waste of time to do so. Far better to just configure XP Mode for old projects running IIS, and use a Virtual Machine. Everything basically works in there.

That said, when the directions were posted, they worked flawlessly, but I notice the most current release of that FPSE package doesn’t.

Anyhow, with Visual Studio coming out…all this is moot anyhow, I suppose.

I Haiti to Say It…

2010-01-16T13:09:00.001-07:00

Haiti suffered a major earthquake, turning a cesspool into an even worse cesspool. Now, lest anyone from Haiti think I am dismissing the people of Haiti, I am not; I am merely observing the people most devastated by this were living in a cesspool prior to the earthquake. All this natural disaster did was give the media a thrill, and brought the plight to a critical shriek so that something half-assed might get done…for a few months. It allows us to pretend we give a shit, toss some cash at a place most of us couldn’t have given a shit about had it been coated in 24 carat gold, and soothe our consciences with the belief we are doing “the right thing.”

Now, I hate to go on, but I have to observe that the Haitian people have several disadvantages: they are governed by corruption more than anything sensible (read their history and you can see a decent people, who gained freedom by way of slave rebellion, and who have been suppressed at every turn since); they are widely known as producing some great weed (my point being this is almost all most people know about Haiti); they are viewed as the voodoo capital of the world (the other “fact” most people believe about the country, which regardless of truth is warped because Hollywood voodoo is the only voodoo perception people have); they are the only predominately French-speaking country in that region (and we know that’s weird); and, much to their ultimate disadvantage, they are predominately brown. You couldn’t point to a better poster child for all the reasons why the pretence that we give a shit is insulting. (Though, to be fair, 30% to 40% of their national budget is from foreign government sources; so at least we have been giving their corrupt ruling class cash for years, so we are about to behave consistently.)

Leaving everything else aside, what I’m really getting around to writing here is this: Haiti is Africa in the Americas, and just like with Africa we treat them like a third-world country because we believe they are. That we have now pitched cash at their new disaster to soothe ourselves makes me want to vomit. This is a country whose governing classis highly corrupt, and this is the moment when we should be encouraging them to reform as a nation, and doing the unthinkable – make the aid contingent upon it. Why? Well, not because we know best, since we don’t, but because from a human vantage unless we do, shortly after this is no longer news, we will relegate them to the same old grinding poverty we didn’t care about prior to the earthquake. Nothing will change for the average Haitian, and that disgusts me. For all the lip service we pay to our humanity, we really still, clearly, don’t give a shit about their long-term opportunities.

On a related note, I might ask a few questions if I were being really hard (and this has nothing specific to do with Haiti):

When did it become the responsibility of taxpayers in, say, for example, Canada, to divert tax dollars we don’t have (we have a massive structural deficit) to foreign nations whenever disaster strikes? Does no one in this world recognise that image isn’t important when it comes to this crap? If we want to help people, could we, just for once, try doing it before they have a critical need? And could we rationalise that maybe before we start pitching money we don’t have at problems we don’t understand, we might be well-advised to actually fix our systemic problems at home? Could it be, for example, that maybe this kind of situation should not be funded at all through public funds, but rather the governments of nations do something horribly useful like, say, give a whopping tax break for those who wish to send their money to the aid organisations by choice. My gut feel is that wealthy people would do it, because some of them are decent at heart, it would result in more rapid funding, and it would overall prevent a race to the bottom in terms of quality of contingent services. Of course, I do realise I am now a bastard for wondering this, even if I am right in as much as this is not the role of any sane government.
When did natural disasters start to generate victims? I have heard that word applied to Haitians so many times in the past few days I want to strike it from the dictionary. While I grasp that purely by raw definition you could say it applies, what is it with the need to have everyone who suffers be a victim? Technically, they have been victims of poverty, politics, etc., since long before the earthquake. We didn’t care then. Now, we made them globally recognised victims of a natural occurrence that doesn’t give a twitch about human life, didn’t choose to strike Haiti, and did not create “victims.” What they are, at least the people we pretend to want to help, are “survivors.” But we won't say that, we will instead speak of the victims, because no one will pony up a dime for “survivors” – though the people we will be helping are, by perfect definition, the survivors, not the victims. Have we, as a species, descended to a point where we have no damn ability to do what is decent unless someone has been victimised? (Oh, Hell, forget it: obviously we have descended that low.)

The Haitian people don’t need us to soothe ourselves, they need help; and they will get it in a roundabout way, by happenstance. Just like over half the world, of course, they will be no better off afterward for two basic reasons we want to ignore: we are doing this for the wrong reasons; and we will cut them loose to their sad fate as soon as something shinier comes along.

PS: I made my donations, because I recognise that it is a kindness; and yet I still question the validity of this “international aid effort.” Humans helping humans doesn’t need government interference on either end.

You Can Bank On It…

2010-01-16T12:39:00.001-07:00

My ongoing enjoyment of the world of banking continues, with two new events worthy of a blog.

Apparently even giving a bank a pile of cash doesn’t guarantee the absence of a hold. I speak of the wonderful CIBC, yet again; the bank that considers service to have been defined by the George Carlin skit wherein he uses the phrase “bend over.” A direct deposit of a bank draft is clearly not a cash equivalent in their universe, but then I’m so tired of the run-around I won’t even bother to call them a few extra times to ascertain the challenge such an activity faces. I’m old anyhow, and stupid, and still under the impression it is my money. I keep forgetting it is their money, and I am their servant. I can’t even be bothered to create a new description of their management style; I’ll just stick with the sociopathic pricks analogy that upset them before. I will note, however, this is merely an opinion based upon years of experience dealing with their crappy service, and overpriced banking “products.” In no way does my opinion reflect reality – but only because I’m being too generous with them, and I haven’t the vocabulary or patience left to really describe them for what they are.

But this month, oh exciting month!, I have another bank to poke in the eye: the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), with whom I have a car loan since the crash that destroyed my beloved Saturn. I’m not upset with them, but I am scratching my head as to where contract law and them have parted ways, as I noticed that while my payment contract specifies payments on the 5th and 20th of each month, they have arbitrarily changed the dates to the 1st and 15th. I had to fight with them and Chrysler to even start taking payments, achieved that, and have discovered that apparently contracts that specify dates are passé. I mean, why bother even putting them in? Why not just casually insert a phrase like, “we’ll grab some cash from your account twice a month, in no particular pattern you can discern, just to see if you have the financial capability to bear our buggering about.” Did the idea of a contract become that casual overnight, or did the slow decline occur at a glacial pace that I somehow missed?

You have to wonder, given the awesome ability of the banks to screw their clients at every turn, why no one has come up with an alternative. Of course, anyone with the wherewithal to do so is a greedy, sociopath themselves, so maybe the question has a self-evident answer. You don’t generally get and stay rich by being decent, though I will observe I have known some reasonably wealthy people in many walks of life who are decent. I have even known, gods forbid, a handful of really decent lawyers and a few decent politicians. And yet never, in my 40+ years, have I yet to actually meet a decent banker above the level of branch manager. I guess the scum rise to the top in the industry for a reason.

So, here’s my list of what, when dealing with banks, you can “bank” on:

If they screw up something because they are idiots, you can bank on it being your fault for not catching it sooner.
If they lie to you about something, you can bank on it being your ears that misheard the blatant lie.
If they lose all your retirement savings because they are playing with your investments, you can bank on it being your fault for trusting the markets.

Oh, Hell; I surrender. I don’t even have the energy to be amusing about it. It’s just too damn exhausting.

What Ever Happened To Management?

2010-01-13T09:36:00.001-07:00

A recent third-hand conveyance of a comment about the enterprise software product I created and manage prompts this blog. The comment went more or less along the lines of, “it requires a lot of maintenance.” In a longer form, for clarity, what they were commenting on was that the product, an expert risk management system, requires a lot of quality data to really return exceptional value. There was no argument against the purpose or scope of the application, or against its value – that was evidently accepted as meaningful; the comment was simply that getting it to return value required effort, with the added observation it was unlikely to fly with many or most people since they are in constant crisis management mode. I mulled this since yesterday when it was passed along, though frankly it isn’t the first time I had such a comment.

My mulling has led me to the question, “What ever happened to management?” When did people surrender to crises of their own design, in favour of managing before crises develop? And when did it come to pass that working became an issue of seeking to do nothing in favour of actual effort? What in the depth of Hell does this kind of thinking say about our species? We resist quality returns on the basis of it requiring effort Has mediocrity really become such a core aspect of our society?

But to return to my main question, what did happen to management? If I was managing people who thought this way I would be apt to fire them all. Working is about delivering increasing value, not about avoiding effort to maintain unproductive behaviours.

But maybe if I had an MBA I would think differently.

Enough said.

Spamming Grief

2010-01-13T09:29:00.001-07:00

After ages of having no grief related to my blog – I never deny a comment just because I may not agree – I have had to turn on comment moderation because of Chinese spam. So now I have Chinese heavy metals in most of the products I buy, Chinese poisons in a percentage of the food I buy, and Chinese spam on my blog. Yippee!

This is the entire sum of my thoughts about China these days: for a country with such a long and amazing history, they have become an embarrassment to themselves.

Words, Words, Glorious Words and the Tool Called the Dictionary

2009-12-21T11:30:00.001-07:00

I have about as much focus and energy today as can be expected of someone who slept poorly, shovelled ten inches of snow a couple hours ago, has another sick cat to deal with later today, and spent the night unnecessarily buggering about with words: words, the bane of all mankind, so easily misconstrued and so widely misunderstood – and yet vital. I could wax pathetic on the poor vocabulary of the average modern human being, but that would be unfair to the handful of people who have a decent vocabulary, and it would obscure the actual topic of this blog, which is an altogether more specific gripe of mine: the inability/lack of desire of folks to use tools like, oh, dictionaries…for example.

My immediate gripe is about the differences between the words efficiency and efficacy. I won’t post all the definition options here, but will stick with the main ones:

Efficiency means “the state or quality of being efficient;” and
Efficacy means “capacity for producing a desired result or effect.”

Now, most everyone grasps the meaning of the word efficiency, but it seems that efficacy escapes many, despite it being interchangeable with the term effectiveness. (Yes, I could always use the word effectiveness and eschew the use of the word efficacy altogether, but gods above, that seems like a pointless reduction of the vocabulary of language just to suit ignorance, and that rubs me the wrong way.)

You might be thinking, “But what’s the beef?” Well, the meat in my grief sandwich over this is that for the fifth time in a year I have had someone insist that the two words are synonymous, and declare that with a degree of self-righteous authority that is deeply frustrating. When I became so annoyed I said, “look up the definitions,” I got a reply that doesn’t bear repeating, but it translated along the lines that dictionaries weren’t meant for synonyms. Whether that is true (it isn’t) more or less remained irrelevant to the efficacy of my suggestion, which was that this ignoramus needed to educate themselves by use of a tool that would, if used, have made it possible to observe that the two terms are not synonyms at all – they means different things altogether. (They could also spend a moment to look up the word synonym, which might further free them of a delusion about what it means.)

Now, I realise that the actual issue here is the person in question is stubborn and arrogant (so am I, but I still use a dictionary to self-check), but the deeper issue is that they are convinced a dictionary is good for only one purpose – spelling! I mean, really, if you cannot come within ten miles of spelling a word, how will a dictionary help you? It can’t; it is about defining words more than spelling them, which is proved by the basic fact it contains, of all magical things, definitions. Stunning though that may be, I find it twice as fascinating to know that there is a human being alive who doesn’t even know the purpose of the tool itself. (As an aside, dictionaries can be useful for spelling, too. And they even have synonyms and wild animals called antonyms.)

Still, all considered now, when did the world’s appreciation of words as tools fade? No one sent me a memo that read, “You must always use the absolute most common term, with no variation of form or tone, in all communications.” I’m certain I would have remembered that. Well, fairly certain…I think.

My gripe is nearly done, but I have this to add: when a language is stripped of all variations, archaic and colloquial, it is dead; and when readers have no compulsion to self-check against a word’s meaning, they are doing themselves a disservice. It is not only the variant subtleties of meaning that get lost, but the opportunity to turn a phrase neatly, and a loss of the flowers that spring from language.

CIBC: The People versus the Evil Empire

2009-12-11T14:06:00.001-07:00

This is my follow-up to my semi-annual rant against CIBC, because I stand by a policy of disclosure of the solution/problem/etc.

I spoke to the local branch, and came away with an understanding of the events that clarified the failure:

Deposit made: 5250
Hold applied: 4250
Deposit deemed NSF (not CIBC’s fault)
Deposited amount withdrawn: 5250 (but it did not post till this morning, and so there was no clear visible explanation in the online transaction logs – which is the first step to creating a service problem)
Hold on deposit not lifted: 4250 (again, no actual indicator in the online transactions to clue the customer in – adding to the problem)
Combined amount of hold & withdrawn deposit: 4250 + 5250 = 9500
9500 exceeded amount in account, so accessible balance was < 0.
Customer (me) tries to pay bill, gets insufficient funds message, and notices weirdness on balance. BUT, there was no indication anywhere online to even show the deposit was withdrawn (bad, bounced, NSF). Customer, therefore, is confused and makes first mistake…that being an expectation of service.
Customer calls CIBC customer services (turns out there are at least 3 separate “customer service” numbers – who knew).
Customer wastes a good 20+ minutes on hold listening to music that is too loud, etc..
Customer Service Representative # 1 (CSR 1) confuses the living daylights out of already confused customer, to the point where customer gives up all hope. The only valid advice CSR 1 gave was deal with it at the branch. At this juncture, the customer is confused because CSR 1 didn’t clarify the deposit had tanked; using the term charge-back rather than hold regarding an amount of 4250, which was obscuring the truth about what it was. The end result of all this was that as a customer, being confused and somewhat perturbed already, the customer was bedazzled and gave up.
Wife asks for details…customer (me) gives confusing account, courtesy of CSR 1. Wife balks, and customer calls again after digging around for more information.
CSR # 2 (CSR 2) gets at least half the mystery resolved, cluing in confused customer to the fact the 4250 is related to the deposit itself, same as the 5250. CSR 2 also basically confirms the suspicion that the deposit was NSF-returned to the depositor (the client deposits the cheque third-party). I suspect had I not been so confused, and had not pressed for a definition of the term “charge back” this poor bastard might actually have eliminated the confusion, because in retrospect he was on the right track. But at this juncture CSR 1 had me focused on the 4250 as some mysterious other amount that was going to be yanked from the account on the 14th of December. Customer, in retrospect, makes his own life more miserable. To CSR 2’s credit, at least he left me with a fairly certain belief the account was not compromised. Still, by then, it was hopeless.
Customer has sleepless night, largely due to semi-annual CIBC “customer service” experiences that always absorb hours and lead to nothingness. The fallacious thought this is some kind of weird NSF fee gone awry is embedded in poor customer’s head, along with a fear that if the rest of the service experience continues to generate this much confusion it will take forever.
Decide to message CIBC support, and after website fails twice, send a third message to the effect George Carlin wasn’t creating a training video when he was referring to customers being bent over. Unable, at that juncture, to do anything more since the service experience is low by that instant it can only be seen by digging into the earth.
Wake up to message form CIBC in online message centre, and become annoyed when an attempt to read it returns “presently unavailable” on the first 3 tries. Then I get to it, and reply don’t bother even forwarding it when I do get there, since by now I’m too annoyed to care anymore, and already committed to go to bank anyhow.
At 10 AM on Friday, wife takes two hours off work to take care of daughter, and customer (yeah, still me, sadly) goes into branch. I am polite, the issue is explained without any yelling (I know it isn’t their fault), and within minutes we discover that it is already fixed. (See the rest of this missive.) I then get this explanation, which I will note here before continuing my CIBC customer service experience:

When deposit was made, the hold of 4250 was set to expire on the 14th (totally legitimate).
When the deposit was determined NSF, the transaction system flagged it as coming back out, but instead of automatically dusting the hold and just withdrawing the cash, the hold was left on.
When the withdrawal of the NSF deposit was noted, the hold remained on. Since the gross amount on-hand less that deposit was less than 4250, the account was essentially at a < 0 available balance.
It turns out, while I was there, at the branch, it “fixed itself.” (See point 20!)
Still, I have no explanation for $14.11 credit that occurred, but I was too tired to flog that dead horse at that instant.

Went to spend time with daughter at Stay’n’Play; got home to receive CIBC support message. Already annoyed by CIBC, so I called back and I was irritable. What lit my fuse again was that the person who called (CSR 3) said it was “about my blog.” Bad choice of words, really, because it raised two issues: first, how did they connect my phone number to my blog without accessing my account information, and was that a valid protection of privacy; and, second, why is it a blog entry gets a response but two calls to support result in such poor communication I end up more confused than I started? I grumbled and vented in my return message, which might have been avoided if the first time I called them back the CIBC phone system didn’t dump me into a void, making me stew for a five minute stretch before cutting me off. (And, as a note, bad customer service that results in a blog is usually bad enough that at that point even attempting to contact the person is going to annoy them.)
CSR 3 called back after I left my bitter message, and I did the civil thing, apologising for making my angst her problem – she, after all, was not the failure point. I conveyed the idea that what this really was, was a problem created by poor customer service: concerned customer calls twice and gets no clarity; communication is so bad they are, in fact, more concerned after two calls; and the historical experiences with CIBC customer service only make the situation worse. In essence, the NSF was what it was, and it happens; the problem here though arose because no one communicated effectively.
CSR 3 reveals she actually lifted that hold amount manually, explaining why at the bank it was magically lifted. (Now, assuming she had not, then technically it would have been on there till Monday?).
I tell CSR 3 to look into that credit of $14.11 because I doubt it is correct, mostly because nobody can tell me where it came from. maybe it is valid, but I detest not understanding even a credit. CSR 3 says she will try to discover the credit source, and will leave a message about it when discovered.
CSR 3 offers $100 by way of apology, which I decline, observing all I wanted, and all I ever wanted, was the problem to be fixed – it is fixed, so I intend to go on my merry way.
CSR 3 reveals that the numbers I called were, in fact, a source of less reliable support than the one she was reachable at. (Who knew there were multiple support centres? Why are there?)

Now, I still stand by my statement CIBC executives are sociopathic pricks, and if they all died in a fiery explosion we would be better off, but I need to observe that, weird as it may be, the problem with CIBC is not its workers. The workers are decent, and try to be helpful, and I am sure that CSR 2 and CSR 3 were both trying their damndest to be helpful. (I am not so sure about CSR 1.) My guess is that my confusion made the job of CSR 2 harder, and obscured the opportunity that I grasp the problem sooner. And I know for sure CSR 3’s job must suck something awful, since I doubt very much most people as frustrated as I am are as polite as I try to be to actual humans. I apologised to CSR 3 a few times for my tone, etc., and it was due to them – because they are of the people, and not the “Evil Empire.”

Still, here are some additional thoughts about why the CIBC empire sucks a tailpipe:

Yes, the client buggered the cheque and it ended up NSF, and CIBC should have withdrawn the deposit. BUT, their system should have instantly reconciled that the “hold” (never say charge-back to a customer when hold makes actual sense) and cancelled it. What they created by not having that happen was a condition where the actual negative balance potential existed; they made that happen; they created the root problem, regardless of how it was triggered. That kind of double-dipping is probably an intentional “feature” of their system, because I can see how in large deposit business accounts that could neatly give the bank possession of funds for longer stretches. I may just be a confirmed cynic, but since this kind of behaviour is a banker’s standard, you just know it was a by-design condition.
Second, when such a transaction is taking place, post a note to the online transaction list. The thing reflects payments out in real time, so there is no way it could fail to reflect that transaction. That is, unless there is a reason not to; but it would be a stretch to make one up. Someone chose to create a lag there, for a reason, and whatever that reason is, it must be beneficial to the bank. Now, I get the need to prevent drawing on cash related to a deposit that fails, regardless of why, but to not post the details to clarify it is asking for grief.
Third, when a hold is attached to a deposit, and that deposit fails to clear, there is no rational reason to have that hold not automatically die with the transaction reversal. The fact someone manually reset it, or took it off, or whatever, suggests a by-design situation. But what conceivable reason would there be for that? Are the banks systems that badly designed? Or, is it intentional?
Forth, when you have “customer service” it needs to be delivered by one contact point, all the time, because otherwise (even if the support tiers are valid) you are assuming your customers can decipher those tiers by themselves. Had I been able to speak to CSR 3 on the first call, I would never have had an issue. After all, CIBC isn’t at fault for the rubber cheque, and had they done a handful of things differently, there would never have been a problem.

In fact, let me wax longwinded a moment about how this should have happened technically:

Deposit in.
Hold applied.
Deposit bounces away.
Deposit withdrawn; hold removed.

Had that happened, my beef would have been with the NSF cheque and the client, and CIBC would never have heard from me at all.

But that didn’t happen, because their system is not discarding holds on defunct transactions. Sadly, I expect that earns them cash, since the customer who ends up with no available balance, even where one should exist, is essentially prevented from using their cash. The longer a bank holds a deposit, the longer they work it. For large accounts that could easily give them access to millions for days at a time.

Yet, even after such a failure, there was ample opportunity to turn a seriously irritated customer into a pussycat. The steps are easy:

Have one customer service number, so the client is talking to the right person the first time, or at least doesn’t waste a good 30 minutes trying to figure our which point of contact to try.
Train CSRs to avoid industry terms, and focus on clarifying for the customer rather than adding to the confusion, and who come across like they want to assist rather than bored. (That’s a polite observation about the impression CSR 1 left; and an observation that charge-back, while probably a correct term, is not something most folks are familiar with.)
Provide access to people who can identify the problem, for real, and give the customer the necessary understanding to deal with it. In some cases, it is all about knowledge.
Provide access to people who can fix the obvious problems, and will, because they know it’s right to do right. My whole dance would have been reduced to a 10 minute call had I access to a person with knowledge, because the issue was pretty obvious in the end.
And, while an aside, if you want us to use the online systems, make sure they work, because every time a point of contact fails, the issue grows more complex.

CIBC as an organisation is like the Evil Empire of Star Wars, in that it is too big and run by nefarious MBA graduates and the like. Individually its workers are trying to help, but they are hampered by an intentionally complex model that benefits the bottom line. That is where the problem lies; it satisfies the greed of the executive suite to leave it as-is..

As a final note, since I need a whopping big post just so I know my venting is complete, NEVER offer the customer/client cash to try to make them happy. That will work for the limited few who value cash above all things, but the vast majority of people want to have a solution, not what, after so much forced customer contact, feels like hush money. For a lot of us, it is a tad insulting, because it suggests our good opinions can be bought. They cannot, and many of us resent any company that thinks otherwise. Yes, I know, banks are about money – CIBC is not the only greedy cesspool in that industry, not by a long shot – but, shocking though it may be, most people are not as greedy as their bank. All we want is to be serviced without feeling like the purpose of the service is to bend us over a table and give us a limp.

There, now I feel satisfied I vented well.

Next time I might just vent about something more useful than a bank.

CIBC: The Bank Who Works Its Customers Hard

2009-12-10T22:27:00.001-07:00

For the past several years I have been regularly involved in doing work for my bank, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). I never get paid for it, since it is work correcting their errors on my time, at my cost, wading through their tiers of mostly useless customer support. You can count on CIBC to make simple errors large, and painful, and to abuse you as a customer at every turn. They have no moral, ethical, or even rational substance, since almost always in the end this sort of nonsense takes a toll on all involved, and yet, paralytic ignorance of service and greed combine for them to test the patience of saints.

Let me tell you a story (only the most immediate in along line of sometimes even more ridiculous fumbles I have suffered at the hands of these corporate shills).

I get paid well to do what I do. I am far from wealthy, since I have a family and debts, and like all people the tax man carves a huge hunk of my money away before I even get to see it. I am stolidly middle class, but essentially self-employed, and so I have no benefits, and nothing like a medical plan. I pay for myself and my family, work hard, and have no shame about what I own, because I worked damn hard for it. As a self-employed person, I am an anathema to banks in general, yet I have never missed a payment on anything, not even a bill, and have never overdrawn my accounts anywhere; I have a low level of commercial debt (credit cards, etc.), and spend hours a month declining more credit; and I have an excellent functional credit rating, which I maintain diligently as I am nearing freedom from my debts. In any rational world, I am the customer a bank should treat with some respect, because I use their services, I always pay what I owe in full and on time, and I hardly ever cost them anything in terms of their time – I almost never even walk to the counter. I am a low-maintenance, potentially high-value client.

Yet CIBC believes that George Carlin’s skit about bending the customer over was a training video rather than a sarcastic jab in the eye of multinational commercial entities.

I presently work pretty much exclusively for a single client, and twice a month they deposit money directly to my CIBC account. The cash goes in, the bank holds it to rape it for interest for a week or whatnot, and then they charge me various fees to use my money. Such is the world, and this is accepted by all involved. Now, as a self-employed person, I pay my GST, my taxes, etc. My clients have in the past buggered up a deposit, and I accept that this happens. I even accept the NSF fee that adheres to a bounced deposit, though I wonder how the CIBC rationalises this to cost $42.50 when it is largely automated. Still, this, a bouncing deposit, is where my adventure of the day begins…

Prior to the deposit I had a couple grand sitting in the account in question, free and clear of holds and other encumbrances. After all, being Christmas and that I have a 3 year old daughter, I thought having some ready cash was possibly useful for helping Santa along. I also had some in there to cover sundry bills, being as life costs.

The deposit went in, and I ignored it as I usually do, knowing well it is all earmarked for the tax man, etc. Basically, half of what I earn services various expenses of the business, taxes, and all the rest of those costs that make it possible to earn a living at all. I know this, and I seldom cut into what I call the mid-month deposit, because it is spoken for. In a weird sense, there is/was no pressing reason I needed access to this cash; I could survive days without even seeing it. (Of course, it can take 5 to 10 days to clear at times, so I do tend to recognise it has gone it; I like being paid to work, and do remain conscious of the obligations I have that are paid from these funds.)

Tonight, I had a mobile phone bill – business-specific – and decided since the cash had gone in, and would clear whenever, I would pay the bill. It was a mere $60, which meant that even if the entire deposit was held, I had about two grand in there; somehow, my arithmetic implied $60 was less than $2,000. So, I went online – saving the bank service effort – and entered the bill, surprised to read the feedback “insufficient funds.” I assumed at first I had mistyped the amount, but then noticed I had an available balance of zero (the actual balance line was correct). I scratched my head, since according to every visible part of the online system it said the same thing – the money, even if partly held, was there.

So, I committed the first act of bravery for any CIBC customer – I called customer support. I was deafened by music, on hold a couple dozen minutes, and finally pressed enough buttons to speak to a human being. She gave me the impression I was a hindrance to her, and was useless in terms of explaining this phenomenal loss of access to all my money. This customer service representative (CSR) told me there were two pending ‘charge backs,” totalling about $9,500. She would not even confirm the source of these, though I immediately realised one was the amount of deposit, and so probably the client had done me a NSF favour (yes, sarcasm). She claimed the charge-back equalling $4,250 was a mystery to her,and advised only my local branch could discover its source. She provided me with such a wonderful CIBC-specific level of service I eventually gave up, and sat in my stressful state hoping the account had not been compromised.

My wife was not pleased I had given up, so I ended up having to call back, to get an explanation of what a charge-back was in this context, and see if I would win the CIBC service lottery, which is the rare moment when the only decent CSR is free enough to actually try to help. I managed some success, and the chap confirmed several points: the larger charge-back was because the client cheque was NSF; the other charge-back was also spawned by that same transaction; and on the 14th I would actually owe them about $2,200. (Nice to know; Merry Christmas to all CIBC executives, and may your multimillion dollar homes be invaded by aliens with probes who can introduce you to the experience you provide cheerily for your customers.) In essence, I was being charged about $9,500 for the cheque the client bounced. The CSR had no way to help, and no knowledge of the cause of this massive second charge-back. He advised only the local branch could help, but did at least reassure me the account was not compromised.

Now, at this point I had wasted a couple hours I should have been working; and I wasted another to call the client and confirm that yes, despite their being sufficient funds, the cheque did manage to come back to them. I was therefore armed with at least a confirmation that, even if an erroneous NSF moment, the deposit had failed to take. In that conversation the client grumbled the other charge-back was madness, and observed they were charged about $50.00 for an NSF, this remark in passing. And it was a remark that spawned my next wasted block of time.

I wasted another 30 minutes of my life searching the CIBC website to discover that their NSF fee was $42.50, which, suspiciously, is two decimal places away from the mysterious charge-back value of $4,250. This implies some clerical error misplaced a decimal. Of course, the side-effect of this is that I now have no money, and on Monday I may be $2,200 in the hole – all because CIBC made a mistake, could not even fathom it during two “service” calls, and has the arrogance to make it my management task to physically appear at the branch to argue my case. (I do realise the fault is ultimately all mine for banking with these infuriating pricks, and I am feeling chastised by my stupidity – expecting them to treat me as customer. Ha!)

I expect that many people are familiar with this sort of customer-centric service, of which CIBC is a mastermind. Yes, they will probably bow and correct the error, and I may even get my money back; and my credit rating may not suffer a black eye because they are stupid to the last shred of their inhumanity; but, at the crux of the issue, the problem is that in making me manage their stupidity, they are treating their customer with an absolute indifference, at least, and more pointedly with disrespect. I am not probably wealthy enough to qualify as a “good customer,” and their attitude is, “let him manage our inability to provide service.”

Now, my wife cautioned I should be nice to the local branch manager. I will be, I observed, but I ought not to have to be. Tomorrow, I will add to the 4 wasted hours tonight. I expect it will cost at least 2 more hours, not because any of the local people are ignorant in any way, but because the systemic structure CIBC has in place is designed to fuck the customer. I will therefore have to prove that I am right; and meanwhile they will hold me hostage at their whim. And they will, based upon my past experiences, slip a probe into the collective asses of their own frontline people, making it almost impossible to help me efficiently. They have no moral, ethical, or even rational basis for this type of behaviour other than that it is accepted; and that the people who perpetrate this sort of business behaviour are untouchable.

Here is what will probably happen: I will go in when they open at 10 AM and wait, explain myself fully, and they will then have to confirm it with at least two tiers of defence of the bank’s interests. It will matter not one whit I am obviously correct, or that everyone agrees it is ludicrous to charge me a fee for an NSF deposit a client made that is almost the size of the deposit itself. Everyone will agree that the number was improperly keyed somewhere along the way, because no other possibility will exist; everyone will agree it is wrong – and no one will have the authority to just fix it. They will leap and grind like crack whores, trying to resolve the simple wrong their organisation committed, and possibly even succeed – but it will take two hours; maybe even more. Maybe I will even hear the words, “It should be corrected by Monday.” No matter how hard they try, no matter how much the local branch wishes to help, it will be made complex and more frustrating because they too are meat in the CIBC grinder. The only thing CIBC loathes more than its customers are its workers.

Here is what has already happened:

I spent 4 hours tonight figuring out what was wrong for the bank, which I could have spent with my wife and daughter, or earning money, or just picking my nose.
I am now stressed near Christmas by bankers’ stupidity, because even a few days delay here can cause a cascading mess for me with credit ratings, bill payments, presents for my daughter, etc. (Thankfully, CIBC doesn't give a fuck, which is at least some solace, and removes some of the angst I feel. Really, it does, because I would feel so much worse if they were ashamed of themselves for being so organisationally incompetent.)
Tomorrow, when I am supposed to be at a Stay’n’Play session with my daughter, which is the highlight of my week, I will be in a bank, doing the job of the bank, for free, losing time with my daughter that cannot be valued in dollar terms. Again, thank the gods CIBC couldn’t give a shit.
Tomorrow, my wife will have to take time off work to care for my daughter, losing her pay, while I work for the CIBC again.

And in the end, I will probably get what I want: access to my money, this erroneous charge-back corrected, and all of it done in a reasonable amount of time (mostly because I will not leave until it is fixed). What I will not get are tonight’s 4 hours of lost productivity, the lost 2 hours of playing with my daughter, my wife’s lost pay, or an apology that matters. What I will not get is the satisfaction that would come from lining up the CIBC bank executives, pathetic cowards that they are, and punching each one in the face for all the folks like me who are sick of being ass-reamed by their inability to manage the simplest service requirements that should exist in a banking institutions.

Why would punching these human wastes in the face matter? Well, because if it was possible, CIBC would not operate the way it does. That, is the actual core issue: if banks were managed by human beings with faces, who had to explain themselves to their “customers,” who could be held accountable for their failures, the failures would never occur. It would never occur for the same reason the local branch manager will genuinely try to help me, because to her I will be a real human being. I will be a human being who she cannot imagine away, whereas her masters are self-important sociopaths who cannot even conceive that they have a level of responsibility to their customers. When corporations became too large, and faceless, they realised that their sole purpose could be raping the society they once served, and any pretence otherwise is lost when one considers that actions do speak louder than words. CIBC – the bank founded by greedy pimps who view their clients as whores, to be abused and sold as necessary to pay for the next big bonus – mastered this method of business long ago, and will never have to change.

Am I angry? Yes. Will I take it out on the small people? No. Should I? probably; because the small people make up the large entity.

Taking away the humanity, I can say three things that are true (though horrible):

Kill every bank executive alive and there would be a net gain in human society instantly, because they are worthless cowards to the last;
Regulate banks into straightjackets and there would be a net gain in society (and this is a shocking statement from me, because I am a pure capitalist); and
I actually can understand why people become so frustrated by institutions they resort to violence, because the institutions are designed to perpetrate violence.

Now, I will basically exist until 10 AM when I can resume my work for the bank that forgets its time is never as valuable as the time of those it pretends to serve.

Thoughts About eBooks

2009-12-04T09:22:00.001-07:00

I have been spending the last few weeks wrestling with changes to a free eBook I posted to Smashwords, since I think any reader who enjoyed the book enough to offer some proofing feedback deserves to be taken seriously. I’ve written previously that some of the suggestions were more obvious than others, and noted even the simplest ones end up absorbing a lot of time. As a writer, you tend to have a structure to your writing and process that is inevitably time-consuming, because if you actually write you tend to care enough to bother, and caring is a groin-kick of an experience. Still, many of the suggestions were spot-on, and this experience is an indirect trigger for the topic of this post…the effects of freeness. (I only just discovered “freeness” is considered a real word!)

A writer who publishes traditionally has a technical support system, and while never what one would call a well-paid profession (the Stephen Kings of the world are exceptions to the rule), the support model provides some compensation for the enormous expenditure of time it takes to construct even a bad book, short story, or article. The cost of producing a title in the traditional model is so high that publishers have no incentive to take a risks. So, we have shelves lined with genre pieces, most of them utter crap, to pay for the few gems – many of those gems selling almost nothing compared to the fast-reads that genre pieces supply. But regardless of quality (recently, I discovered 107 obvious typographical spelling errors in a 348 page book by a well-known and decent author!), those support systems offer some offset for the time, and make it possible to earn a reasonable living writing once you can crack the entrance to that world.

Freeness changes all the rules, and my experience with the eBook I’m tweaking is an example of it. While I make decent money doing my real job, it also requires time – and I have a 3-year-old who requires even more time – and I have a wife who gets shorted time regularly. (I have given up having much time for myself, as in the near-term it seems a pointlessly depressing pursuit.) The same time-consumption exists to write a book, as always, and the more you give a shit the more time that amounts to; but because your publication is unlikely to generate cash, it creates a pure cost scenario that, frankly, makes writing almost impossible unless you can afford to spend the time without any hope of recovery. In itself that isn’t a bad thing, because most writers are obsessive narcissists, and we love nothing more than to express ourselves. What it means though is the lack of traditional systems can turn the working process into something far more time-critical.

Freeness also means the following:

You will never perfect the manuscript for grammar, because no writer can revisit the same text often enough to either explain their cleverness or excise the side-effects. It’s a depressing reality, because while most of us would gladly pay a professional to proof a book, the cost is too high to excuse when you will make nothing from the work. If there was even a way to guarantee enough return on the investment to bring the net cost to zero, it would be a standard approach – but it amounts to layering pure financial cost onto pure time cost, and taking a loss that is impossible for most writers to bear for long.
You will have to publish much more slowly to avoid a glut of complaints. People make no allowances for freeness, expecting some quality level that meets their personal standards (often exceeding them, in fact), without really honestly asking how this is to be achieved when the producer is handing the entertainment away for free. We all do it, and that is human nature, but from a publication perspective it is difficult when you are the writer, because you are conscious of the quality deficit and often torn between publishing as-is, or maybe never having the time to revisit the manuscript at all. Do you let the piece go to be enjoyed somewhat, or seek some level of perfection and never release? (And once pinned, do you do what I decided to do and invest further time, or flip the readers a bird and chuckle? We all want to do the former, but the cost of it is extraordinary.)

The real crux of this, of course, is that freeness is an expectation on the Internet. It is an issue of economics. When faced by the choice to pay to read the last 50% of a book you like versus reading a free one you also like, we all know the choice that will be made. (Statics I have support the contention, and numbers also support that even a decent selling eBook earns nothing near enough to pay for professional support like proofing.)

The public at large just will not pay for unknown authors, for the most part, because they perceive the value proposition differently. Buy a hardcover and you get a physical product to wrap the intellectual one; it is not the case when you read an eBook. You get nothing physical, and the so the economic view is different. People simply never think about the enormous investment in time a writer made to shape the book, and this is doubly true if the book is enjoyable and you lose yourself in it.

Will eBooks be successful in the long-term? Yes, they will. Will there be stars of the eBook world? Certainly. But will they ascend in quality or descend over time? The latter, I expect, since the compensation model is different; and that represents a cultural challenge.

eBooks are likely to destroy the publishing industry as we know it today, not because of content issues, but purely because reading is a personal experience. There will come a tipping point where the majority of casual readers reject paying for material, and exclusively consume free works. Since there will never be an end to free works, it will reshape the concept of a book (probably lowering quality over time, since most writers will be working gratis).

Will I stop publishing? No. Will I decelerate the process? Yes, because I care about the quality enough to realise I have no option but to do it. I don’t have the spare time to continue to write new works, act as an editor, etc. So, I will end up with far fewer publications, possibly of slightly better quality, and certainly with a much more hardened attitude toward the process. Maybe some day, I will also be proved wrong, and sales of eBooks will reach a level where decent writers can afford to engage a support system to improve the broader cultural landscape. I won’t hold my breath though, as I doubt anyone can hold it quite that many decades.

Character Tracking

2009-11-19T19:40:00.001-07:00

A good friend of mine recently asked a question about how a writer keeps track of all the characters in a given story. I thought it would serve as a good topic for a blog, since anything remotely requiring focus is pointless tonight due to an ongoing disagreement with my back. (It disagrees with my contention it is here to hold me upright.) This will neither be comprehensive, nor particularly deep thinking for the same reason – lack of focus. Still, I will attempt to generate some sensible insights.

The flippant answer to his question is most writers don’t keep track of their characters closely…not at all.

Look at any television show and you can see this where in any given episodic teleplay some actor portrays a character who is stuck with the most obtuse lines, necessary to advance the story, but against the established grain of the character. Only a deeply talented thespian can pull off a role like that and not look ridiculous, and even then it is not uncommon to cringe when some poor bastard has to produce a dialogue mash-up. One that comes to mind as I sit here, is on the program Criminal Minds, where the characters routinely spout dialogue that would require the average genius to be a walking encyclopaedia. While the show can be entertaining, and several of the actors are top-rate, absolutely any episode of the show can produce a handful of glaring dialogue twists to advance the story in favour of maintaining the integrity of the character. I suspect when Mandy Patinkin left it had a great deal to do with a worthy actor feeling exhausted by a character that was horribly inconsistent; that he made the character watchable was testament to his enormous skills.

While far less common in novels, and even less common in short stories, there are still examples aplenty in the world where a character suddenly makes a pronouncement that is painfully obvious as a plot device. Some marvellous writers, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, manage to embody this plot progression naturally in a character of such precision and depth that you hardly notice (Sherlock Holmes, in Doyle’s case), and other writers are less subtle (Agatha Christie comes to mind, where Miss Marple has a few enormously amusing expositions here and there, which if read aloud are wonderful but ring false against all the remaining dialogue). In both cases these are brilliant writers, avoiding the precise narrative context since human beings grasp context better via dialogue. This awareness explains, neatly, why so many writers use the mechanism.

The number of times even good writers contort a character to give a necessary plot performance is painful to witness (from a writer’s view), but I think most writers also agree you have to, in some circumstances, advance the plot over characterisation. Otherwise, you get a stagnation that can kill the characters as fast as it can kill the flow of the story. These intentional twists can usually be excused, and are why even the best dialogue is an artificial projection. You have to use the words coming from characters to expose their participation in the plot flow.

As usual, I meander like a hungry cow on a rich pasture, but I do it to get to a destination most cows would not perceive at all, being endlessly enamoured by their browsing.

There are different schools of writing, and the answer to my friend’s question would depend entirely on what school a writer subscribes. In my case, I am a naturalist when it comes to dialogue. I believe three key truths about all dialogue: it cannot be too clean; it is the main formative substance for any character; and it is the core method to advance the story emotionally. Any naturalist will largely agree with those keys, and some on the fringe will add that dialogue must be exceedingly imprecise to maintain authenticity. I don’t go quite that far, since it seems to me that writing is an act of sacrifice, and you need to maintain a balance in plot and character, or the reader will find themselves blocked by the inconsistency of the thematic flow.

What does all this have to do with keeping track of characters?

When I write, I begin in four quadrants with every character, even the smallest. I call those quadrants: history, placement, emotional context, and dialogue formation.

I often write complete biographies for the characters, ending them about the time the story I want to tell is beginning. This gives me a substantial detail pool to tap, and forms a reliable historical basis for interacting the characters. You need to know a great deal more about a central character than will ever show up in the book, including formative details that may have little bearing on the core story being told, because those formative details inform their responses. As a naturalist, I require this level of detail to be in place to obey the dialogue constraints as best as is possible. The more detailed the characterisation in the context of the story, the more detailed the historical biography for that character. (Sadly, what often slows me enormously in developing new stories is that I often have hundreds of pages of life experience notes for any character, even smaller ones, which imparts so many constraints I can then struggle to excise the details more than provide for them in the story itself.) The first pass of these histories is always mechanical, with chronological integrity, a coldness of a distant God, and cause-and-effect linear awareness. Most of this, if used well, is never visible in the final story, but shapes its interactive elements.

Once history is developed thematically, woven inside that history will be “placement,” which is a physical practicality. If a character grew up in Spain, for example, I need to be in Spain with them. I need to see the location at all times, as they would, usually myopically, through a fog of inefficient memory. This is especially true if the story is fantasy, because then the geographical reality has to be impressive (not in the sense people would ever say, “wow,” but in the sense it must have impressed itself upon the function of the characters). Every physical location that informs the character needs to be documented, and woven into the history effectively. If, for example, a given character was drunk the entire time h3e was in Scotland in his youth, it is vital the memory of those locations be flawed by that obscuring condition. There is nothing more disruptive to a naturalist writer than over-descriptive writing that is not informative to the characters. (A deep aversion I have is to describing, in unnecessary detail, the physical aspects of a location that is familiar to the character. No one, in life, save a few oddball geniuses, is capable of providing a sensual inventory of even their bedroom. As soon as a writer flings a five paragraph scene placement at me, I rebel mentally, because it has two deadly side-effects: first, it steps outside the capacity of a normal being, the character, to provide such discrete descriptive inventory; and, second, and far more devastating, it relegates the reader to a passive participant – and I believe, right or wrong, the reader is integral to the story and its perception as a whole.) If a particular location is formative, I will usually go so far as to model it in three dimensions, though I will almost never allow the depth of detail to survive the first pass edit on a story, since it is distracting.

Emotional context then comes into play, and is layered into the history. Contrary to what one might assume, the context here isn’t what I think, but always what “they” think, with “they” being the specific character. When two characters are interactive in their historical context, there will always be variations of perception, and I frequently find reading my own notes introduces new texture to following scenes. What I mean by this is that every character gets their own emotional context, and their own pre-story arcs: this defines them at the outset of the story, and predicts their future reactions to any events. It also, hopefully, when done decently, gives an emotional weight to their presence; the reader can begin to feel their viewpoint, but can also probably perceive the context for that, allowing that sometimes the view of any character can be horribly malformed. This humanity-factor is critical, because we are, after all is done, defined by our emotional context. People today take tonnes of pictures (and then never look at them), because they fear the fade of the tactile and its replacement by the confusion of emotional context. And yet, it is the emotional avenue that informs us about the true personality; it is the emotional avenue that allows us to like or dislike a character, and perhaps even change that perception as a story progresses.

The final formative factor for me is “dialogue formation,” which is the use of the other three quadrant elements to create a structural integrity for their dialogue. For example, I strongly prefer to have a character say only what they can know; and by having these three elements in place first, I can then set the parameters of their dialogue. This is also the place where I can test the interactive quality of a character, and that sets the voice for the story that will follow from those interactions. That voice becomes the fundamental narrative voice, and as a naturalist I prefer to surrender the right of the voice to the interactions of characters, rather than impose my voice. (We all do, eventually, have to do so if we want clarity; but the goal is to avoid it as long as possible. Of course, this is where I stylistically run afoul of so many people: I reject the consistent singular narrative voice for the convergent one that forms by interactions of characters, and this does affect the integrity of the narrative structure for anyone who is used to a single-voice narrative, whether it is first- or third-person.

These rambling remarks finally allow me to provide a sort of answer to the question asked.

How does a writer keep track of characters?

The answer, at least in how I write, is that I tend to know these characters better than I know human beings I coexist with daily. I know their history, the placement within physical terms, their emotional context, and the permissive boundaries for their dialogue. There is no challenge then to writing for them, or keeping track of them, because they are fully formed before the story ever rises. The challenge is not burdening the story with every miniscule detail I know; keeping track of them as characters is easy – they exist.

Probably a more interesting question is whether this form of writing works at all, or whether it is fundamentally flawed. That is for greater minds by far.

Before I close this blog, I’ll add a few tangential thoughts:

Keeping track of characters during the storyline flow is a matter of simply extending what is known against the contrivances of the plot (all plots are contrived; try writing something that isn’t and readers will wish death upon your ancestors in mere seconds). You already know how the people will react, because you know their historical context; and, yet, it is enormously satisfying when a character refuses to conform. That is a true heroic moment, and they are fun to write.
Visualisations are vital, and I admit to having sketches and photographs of all my characters (at least while writing them). But I came to a conclusion long ago, which was that it is better to allow the reader to project their emotional acceptance on the visual element of most characters, rather than force them to accept the imposition of too much detail. I also subscribe to a theory that says , in writing, it is impossible to precisely convey subtleties of facial expression and body language. This being so, it is critical dialogue be informative in itself, and the nuances be left to the blunt instrumentation all readers can grasp. I know there are a dozen ways to say a person was sad, and a precise reader will be aware that despair and sorrow are near the top register of sadness, but it is seldom wise to be too precise with that kind of conveyance; the vast majority of readers will not make the differentiation, and you will distract them from the creative infusion of their perception if you are too demanding of either their vocabulary, or their conscious mind.

Now, i will retire my back to its hunched state of pain.

Every Writer Needs a Proofer Who Cares

2009-11-08T22:18:00.001-07:00

A quick blog tonight, as I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck. I suspect I’ll survive whatever it is that’s wrong with me, but I have been physiologically depressed for two weeks now, and it is starting to rankle. At the very least my mood has improved from two weeks ago, which allows me to write a little more in the stolen hours, though my overall productivity is pathetic. (My wife can attest to the fact I have yet to finish the renovations, and have been listless and cranky.) Anyhow…

I have been absorbing the proofing provided about the second book online, and I’m alternatively irritated and overjoyed. It seems a worthy post to describe that duality.

No writer, good, bad, or indifferent (and I am at least decent), enjoys having his stories subjected to insight. It actually matters not at all if the insight is kind, indifferent, or downright vicious. The same rule applies to what a writer writes as we apply to our children: we can criticise them, but damn anyone else who does. The emotional reaction is impossible to avoid, even when the truth is self-evident. It requires enormous willpower to detach long enough to absorb the insight, and even then there is always an edge of reactionary impetus. It is a childish reaction, sure, but functionally impossible to avoid given how much time a book takes to construct. (In my case, I have books I continue to revise and consider twenty years after having first written them; and in some cases the notes and details of character lives comprise more words than the actual books contain many times over.)

A writer who cares about his characters and stories is always imperfectly able to convey the substance, because it is either too painful to lay the ideas entirely bare, or too exhausting to stand back and report the events. To me, at least, what and who I write about are as real to me as I am to myself. My affection or disgust for the characters is real, and my heart can break having to place them in a context that hurts them. Whenever you have that kind of emotional investment you are defensive by nature, especially if you betray the characters in any way. You will be either sarcastic, flippant, or otherwise snappish – often shades of all of those reactions creeping in to jumble the response to any criticism. The more you care, the more reactionary you will be, and the more closed you become. It takes enormous resistance to offence and willpower to be open to even positive input, because it always exposes the a flaw all writers suffer – we can never express entirely what we are trying to express. Our expression is always imperfect, and we suffer the knowledge of it. The courage it takes to expose a story and the characters to the public is draining, because no writer is a hero. If we were, we wouldn’t be writing about heroes.

The key problem, of course, is that a writer who actually cares has to be open to insight, despite the fact it will always leave them raw. I am reminded of this as I mull the proofing I received a couple days back. Even where I might be apt to say I disagree with it on principle (or some equally weak excuse for protectionism), it is valuable because it forces me to address my weaknesses. It forces me to look into the guts of the story told, and almost always exposes that I have failed as a writer. An earlier post exposed some of that, when I admitted the problem in at least one circumstance was I was too clever for my own good. It means, obviously, all criticisms are personal attacks of the worst kind, because the fault has to lie in the expression or the content, and the writer is responsible for both.

Every writer needs a proofer who cares for two basic reasons: we are always too close to catch our cheats; and we are always too close to catch when we fail to express clearly enough that the reader captures our intent.

The problem is, of course, a writer who gives a damn is subjected to a harsh reality the instant anyone who gives a rat’s behind bothers to engage.

In my case, I am technically a sound writer, but I am also a strong believer that technicalities have no place getting in the way of storytelling, and I’ve grown more experimental as the years have gone by. My audience (me, always), lives about a nanometre left of the writer, which is where the problem arises. When you experiment, you have to be brutal about it to find your voice, and you have to write a lot of junk to achieve occasional bursts of decent prose. But if you then have to self-edit, and, worse, self-proof, you are engaging a part of the process in your brain that cannot ever separate entirely from the creative. The number of times I have intentionally tossed in a split infinitive to keep my mind alive probably numbers in the hundred thousands. The number of times I’ve played tricks with language, abusing words for my pleasure, certainly exceeds that. The number of times this has returned to slice off the larger part of my arse leaves me wheezing.

A good proofing agent, or editor, catches these sleights of hand and calls them to notice. This gut-punch leaves a writer reeling because telling me I shouldn’t have split an infinitive is like saying, “Your baby is ugly!” More often than not it stings because I knew about the flaw, but didn’t fix it intentionally, with some weird belief that was my right. Raymond Chandler once complained to an editor along the lines they were his damned split infinitives, and the proofreaders who corrected them could damn well leave them that way. (See the citation 20 in this article, at the end of the History of the controversy section.) This Chandler syndrome exists for every writer, and extends to our worst and vaguest sins against the languages we write in. Yet without this assist, nothing improves, and how does one gauge the acceptability of one’s sins without having someone observe them?

I wrote above I was alternatively irritated and overjoyed, and that deserves an explanation.

The irritation comes from the knowledge I can easily spend a full day mulling a single word change in some sentences (other changes are obvious flubs, of course). How dare anyone inspire me to do something so self-abusive? (Yes, that’s a joke.) I suppose I should be pleased I still care enough to suffer for the words, but given how little time is available to suffer, it’s a raw irritation to find myself spending hours before bed wondering if the word use I chose should stand because it was intentional, or change because I was unclear. In either case, I recognise the failure as mine, but how does one address it without it costing time? You can’t, and so it is irritating.

The joy comes from the a dual awareness: someone else actually took the time to read carefully enough to catch what I often knew was there; and as long as I can manage the time investment the end result will probably improve, at least slightly, and sometimes quite a lot.

The ultimate challenge, of course, is to find a proofer who has some skills at the task (you have to suggest without risking contextual or voice modulation, and that is hard to do at times), and to invest the time to take the suggestions as grist. And the more you care about what you write, the more likely it is when a proofer does arise, you will exercise immense efforts and think deeply on every suggestion. Only a fool would do otherwise.

Of course, were I Chandler, I would just dismiss the advice altogether, being I could afford to based upon reputation. Having none to risk, I could also probably be ignorant of the opportunity, but then I wouldn’t care, and, much to my detriment most days, I do.

Thankfully, blogs don’t require me to invest as much time reviewing them as writing them.

The Audience

2009-11-08T09:39:00.001-07:00

As I mull this morning, waiting for adventures to begin, I am thinking about “the audience” in a general way. When I say “the audience,” I don’t mean those reading this post, but rather the internal audience in a writer’s head. That audience is more important, more reliable in many ways, and more appropriate for consideration because it is the one we address with every word we scribble.

“A writer writes,” I was once told by a teacher. He went on to say, “You can choose to write, or you can choose to think about writing, but you can’t do both. The problem with most writing today, is the writer is too concerned with the profession, and less concerned with the purposeful expression of ideas. You can instantly tell a good writer, regardless of their commercial value, by examining the conversation they are having with themselves. It is the only conversation that can matter, because it is the conversation they control and express.” I recall those words verbatim for two reasons: I wrote them down a minute after they left his mouth, and they impressed me as true. The truth, or the truth we perceive, tends to stick with us throughout our lives.

This idea, the idea the actual audience is in a writer’s head, has some interesting connotations. First and foremost, it provides some evidence of why writing is a solitary obsession. My guess is that all the best writers are compelled to write, or otherwise express themselves, and that this stems from trying to satisfy the audience inside. (It also explains why so much of what we write is self-involved crap, but that’s entirely another blog in the making.) I suspect that somewhere beneath every writer is a desire to connect, not to other human beings, but other internal voices that have a sympathetic resonance. The degree of selfishness involved in this type of connection, one that a writer can never actually experience directly, is probably the stuff of psychoanalysis.

Bafflegab aside, it is interesting to think about the audience of one, because it implies that whatever we write is speaking first and always to that internal sounding board. It implies, for example, that when I was recently writing a throwaway piece, I was probably talking to myself about something, even if in retrospect I couldn’t convey that to anyone. It implies, as well, that we will always be protective of the work, and always manage to take offence when it is belittled, even if we have skin approximately as thick as a rhinoceros. To attack the writing, which is part of a writer, is a personal attack because it is an attack on that audience.

Staying open to inputs is vital to growth, but the internal audience must always be protected, and I noticed this way back when I was being paid for technical articles, pieces of fluff, and so on. The editors seemed to grasp that even the most boring drivel required cruelty wrapped in kindness, and I can’t recall ever having an editor fail to guard the relationship with that audience. In fact, as I mulled this morning, I recollected an editor once saying to me (the name, sadly, I forget, but he was a blustery fellow with an amazingly good sense of humour about life), “I could publish this without those two changes, or you could talk about them in your head a few days and look smarter than you think you are.” At the time, I took his advice, easily, because he expressed it in a way that protected the audience, rather than the ego.

This brings me to my actual point, which is more exploration of the ill effects of mass communication when the quality of expression is so low.

A question I ask myself is, “Who is the audience for the body of awful trash on the Internet?” (Trash like one finds in my blogs whenever an hour is spare.) If we are all writing for that internal audience, how twisted does the populace actually have to be?

I ask these questions, because of a recent conversation I had in a computer programming forum. The forum was called something along the lines, “.NET Data Services.” (Name altered slightly to protect the forum from trolls.) Now, one would assume the conversations in that forum would be about .NET, which is a Microsoft technology, and that the data services part would imply something about the substance. I came across, in the forum, a post by a newbie (such an amusing word) who was confused about how to walk a set using something called a “For…Each” loop. Of the four responses, one was wrong (it happens to the best of posters, who are usually in a rush), and this set off the other trio. One berated the responder for a typo, but was at least civil, though they didn’t correct the code sample; one used the phrase “f**king retard” to describe the responder, and proceeded to espouse how crappy .NET was and how much better Java is; and one went on some diatribe about Linux being superior. I added a minor correction to the code, correcting the typo, and the original poster later replied with thanks to the appropriate person (the initial responder who took the time to bother), adding a nod to me for correcting a typo that they themselves had already corrected.

One has to wonder what compelled the other trio to bother answering. There was a person willing to criticise but not assist, yet they took the time to type a reply, exposing how little value their time had to them. There was a person who actually entered a forum about a product technology and proceeded to ramble (for five paragraphs!) about an unrelated technology, which seems ludicrous. And, we had a person who couldn’t even manage to focus on the programming aspect of the forum, and wrote three paragraphs on the value of Linux. (No argument on the point about Linux, but there is a time and place for such expression, and a forum about a specific programming language and technology within is not that place.)

Were these people writing to that internal audience? What gratification odes their audience demand if they have to be rude, vulgar, and superior? What are they like in their daily life?

As a confirmed narcissist, in the most clinical sense of that term, even I still maintain some vague awareness of appropriateness of expression. If I want to rant, this is the place, for example; but to seek a forum outside my scope of control to rant? What kind of psyche requires that payoff?

It is with this consideration in mind I want to add to my mentor’s thoughts about writing: Writers do write, and they do write to their internal audience, but those ideas are lost to the world if that internal audience feeds the ego rather than the conscious mind. What separates writers from the masses (regardless of their skills), is a desire to find that other audience like their own, without any need to know it happened. It makes us all romantics, who must believe that some value comes from resonance beyond provision of an ego boost.

Now, my daughter awaits a ride in the van, so I am done rambling. Maybe some future people will find this drivel and get a chuckle.

Discussing Dialogue

2009-11-07T11:47:00.001-07:00

I’m struggling right now with some revision suggestions (struggling in the sense I’m actually thinking about them). The meat of the struggle is the issue of grammatical concerns within dialogue. (And I stress at the outset of this, the proofing I received thus far is excellent feedback, so absolutely none of this is critical of that, only exposing some thought processes that make this kind of work so hard for a writer.)

Obviously, clarity demands consideration of dialogue as a mechanism for conveying story, and in that regard the decisions of form of expression, word choices, etc., all come heavily into play since they may affect the ability of a reader to grasp the information being imparted. Word choice can sometimes be critical, and so when any proof-reader suggests a change, you have to seriously assess it. If the dialogue is obscuring clarity, it needs to be fixed; but you also have to look across the scope of the arc of each character to determine if the change is feasible given their personality, their communication skills, etc.

The problem one faces when writing (any writer can attest it, professional or otherwise), is that dialogue is not narrative prose. That fact makes skimming dialogue for grammatical integrity complex, since no human being speaks with true grammatical integrity. Even when attempting it, the patois and cadence of language have a distinct effect on how we speak, and this is often more vital in defining us than what we say. I am a true believer in the idea dialogue is the core of character, and as such has to reflect the imperfections of the characters who speak it. I also know, as we all know, that people have an unerring ability (and it is ability, not lack thereof) to choose their words poorly, to be evasive rather than precise, and to generally speak in a very loose way when trying to obscure their own infirmities. All of these traits of language use are part of the definition of characters.

Misplaced Brilliance

Sometimes, as a writer, you make choices that seem brilliantly done, only to question them later. As an example, I can cite a sentence early in the second novel published recently on Smashwords. It reads, “Precisely: Retain perfect grammar in your paper, and say nothing in the most concise and complicated manner you possibly can. I got through school on that tact.” The proofer (is that even a real word?) observed correctly that the actual word should have been tack, not tact. The problem I face is, in my misplaced brilliance, I intended tact. I probably could have got away with it had I italicised it, but I didn’t, and I got trapped by the fact the proof correction is technically right; but, if I were to make it, I lose the intent. It was a subtle inclusion, placed at the end of the last sentence in that dialogue, to punctuate an inside joke. How many times has someone who is being “precise” scuttled their own intent by a badly chosen word? Or, when they are smarter than due, intentionally chosen a word that is wrong just to make their point? In this case I intended the latter, since the character is far smarter than they probably need to be, and is speaking to someone they respect as an equal. The expectation of the character is that the linguistic flaw will be detected by their audience, and that the subtle self-deprecation will be endearing to that listener (in this case the other character, not necessarily the reader). Yet the word choice is technically wrong, and it probably failed as a subtlety, so…does one change it? (Or just slam in some italics to point out the intent more effectively? Or, maybe, add a sentence to allow us to bask in the intended brilliance…though that would burn the subtlety to ashes, and is self-defeating.)

The real challenge is that the proofing suggestion for the sentence is correct. The reader who caught it, caught everything there but the intent of the writer, which is indicative the writer failed. So how does one fix it? Does one just slice it away and do the correction, or search some more observable method of embedding the subtle play as a definition for the character? And if the latter is done, can it even be done without changing the flow of the dialogue around it? (I might note here it is wonderful to have feedback that catches something like that at all, as most people get caught in the story and can’t see the tree in that forest.) None of the options is a clear path, and it illustrates how a single word can be such a challenge for someone who writes with intent. It will take hours of consideration to even choose, and no matter the choice the outcome will never be satisfactory.

Intentional Specific Form

Another line of dialogue does an even finer job of illustrating a challenge found in character-specific dialogue. The line was written as, “The order came down….” The proofing suggestion is again technically correct, which is that a sentence like that should probably read, “An order came down.” The challenge there lies not in the obviousness of the correct form, but in the cadence of the words, and the word choice emphasis some people make. This example illustrates something of the absolute nature of choices, and how certain people express those choices. Here the character who says these words is talking to a subordinate, and trying to sound authoritative, and so borrows a fairly common military linguistic protocol. In the military (and there is no absolute rule on this), what one frequently hears is “the order,” since in context there is only one order of relevance for any circumstance. In choosing that use, the intent of the character then comes into play, and it serves from the writer’s view for two reasons: it varies the form of expression in a way that will be observed by many readers, and it allows an insight into the character’s personality if someone wants to dig in that deeply. People who are entirely confident in a role they take seldom use language that excuses behaviour in the specific. By saying “the order” it personalises the remainder of the dialogue, and allows an excuse for behaviour as necessary to meet some specific, focused, and unavoidable condition. “I was given the order to do this, and so it will be done,” is contextually much different than, “An order was given and this is how I choose to obey it.” I think former military can attest how often people uncomfortable with command hide it by choosing absolute forms; and my intent here was to expose the discomfort command was causing this individual character, by having them try and fail to distance the choice they were making.

Having said that, the issue with something like this in dialogue is challenging because the variance is so minor it isn’t worth arguing, and you can’t argue it in the flow of the story anyhow. To do so would be tedious. So, I have to sit and mull the specific suggestion, and ask myself if a publishing house was poking me on that use of a word, would I just do it, or would I try to explain myself? (Knowing me, I’d do the latter, but would it be worthwhile?) Still, maintaining intentional specific form is like maintaining the use of a split infinitive – it’s not a crime, just a choice. (Yes, I support the right to use split infinitives, and damn near anything else that makes the language dance.) Another example of why such considerations can absorb so much time.

Colloquial Abuse

Later in the same stretch I used a sentence ending, “…what do you really think about artificial persons?” The proof question was did “people” serve better than “persons.” Again, this was the correct question to ask. My answer to such a question is entertaining to write out in long form (at least to me, and this is blogging, and so all that matters is me):

I enjoy “colloquial abuse,” though I have no idea whether it is a convention in writing or just one of my peculiarities. What I mean by that is it amuses me deeply to choose “engineered” words and insert them in dialogue where a more obviously correct form is available. It makes my skin crawl to hear people in the real world abuse the language, but I know the problem is mine, not theirs, so when I write I allow my dialogue to abuse the privilege. I find it especially endearing to use it in a form that unintentionally creates pomposity of language. After all, who the Hell says, “persons” when they mean people? (I know anyone reading this just had horrific flashes of a half dozen pompous people who do, in fact, say persons.) Throw back to times when social class was much more defined and rigidly adhered, and you can locate a thousand examples of writing where “persons” was the normal. It’s infuriatingly divisive language, and grows ever more frustrating when people use this kind of language as a colloquial substitution, because they so seldom mean it as divisive. Often, in fact, they think it makes their statement inclusive.

To give some context, I wrote the word “persons” intentionally to do two things: to show it as an intentional substitution (on part of the character) that attempts to make it colloquially inclusive; and to reveal the underlying reality of those types of substitutions (stressed respect being the intent, separation being the result). Consider any time you have heard a phrase such as, “the persons involved,” and consider its actual use is to separate the people involved from the mass of people who surround them, though most using it are convinced they are elevating those people. Yet the people are dehumanised by the highly formal terminology. (A more painfully obvious example of this is when an accident occurs the people involved become the involved parties, rather than the human beings involved. It is a linguistic distancing from humanity. When I did this in the book, it was an intentional use of a form of language that separates.)

Having written all that, I’m not sure I can defend the choice beyond whim, and I will probably never be motivated to change something like that, so long as my gut tells me I liked doing it. It doesn’t make me right, but it is one of those awful self-indulgent privileges of writing. I do wonder though how many other writers think along these lines, and wish I could garner feedback on that point, though I doubt I have the time to dedicate to such an interesting study.

Human Foibles

The next sample of the inherent difficulty in editing dialogue is in the sentence, “Their learning curve, as I think now to mention it, is approximately four times less steep than that of the average human being.” The proof remark about that was, “this is a personal pet hate of mine that is creeping into even science journals, four times less is nonsense.” I couldn’t agree more, and may in fact alter that sentence, though I observe it was intentional when written. I tend to keep copious notes (making this process of editorial work so much harder on occasion), and I converted all of them to OneNote ( a great snippet tool). That made it easy to find that this gem of insipid misuse of language was borrowed from a paper on mechanical stressors as applied to human bones, which read, “The sheering force required to shatter bone, is four times less steep than that required to break the bone under direct application.” (My apology to the author of that line, if I missed a word here and there, as my handwriting from twenty years back is impossible to read most days, so I’m possibly misreading part of it.) The sentence came from a medical journal in the very early 80s, written by an expert in kinetics, or some such. I used it because I absolutely hate nonsense language (though I use a lot of it myself). The actual sentence, of course, would and should be, “Their learning curve, as I think now to mention it, is approximately a quarter as steep as that of the average human being.” The only challenge is whether to make a change because it is right, or allow it to stand incorrect as a character quirk. If the former, it resolves the objection neatly, but it makes the character saying it less culpable. Does the chap in question deserve to be let off the hook, or does the writer take it on the proverbial chin and let it stand? You can’t win, as the writer, in either case.

Human foibles are hard to convey in writing for many reasons, not the least being you can do it in different voices: you can hope the subtle transference comes across in dialogue, or you can use the narrative absolute to expose the foibles directly. I could have, in the case of this chap (Rubenstein), written something like, “As a scientist, his skills were perhaps unquestioned, but as a human being he had a habit of being ignorant of his awkwardness, and he was too frequently unaware of the lack of clarity he imparted by talking in a verbose way that defeated his intent. His worse crime against communication was that as soon as any aspect of it touched him as a human being, he immediately regressed to obscuring words, imprecision, and a depressing habit of confusing his own purpose.” The problem with doing so is that it would bring focus to a character that, while defined clearly by my notes, isn’t entirely relevant to the arc of the story beyond a short scene.

One of the real challenges of addressing humanity in the context of a tertiary character (if Rubenstein even qualifies, as he appears nowhere else in the book), is it often leads to the writer creating a tone of speech that can fail for the reader. An excellent example of that failure comes a few paragraphs on, where I wrote of Rubenstein, “With an apologetic smile, he said, ‘I am afraid my eyes are light sensitive. I cannot see holograms when there is a background glare of natural light.’” The proofing produced a pair of valid observations worth noting.

The first was, “it is the normal function of eyes to be light sensitive, otherwise they would not be eyes, I think he means to say his eyes are hypersensitive or otherwise defective, which is then explained in the following sentence,” and this commentary deserves some real thought as observations go. He does mean that he is hypersensitive, of course, though that doesn’t necessarily imply defective. The problem with having him say it outright is that it conflicts with the character’s descent into befuddled confusion as soon as his self-perceived weaknesses come into play. How many times have we heard good communicators descend to awkward constructions, horrible abuses of languages, and so on as soon as something personal arose in context of a lecture? The arrogant become aggressive in this circumstance, and the self-possessed tend to become frazzled.

The second observation was the use of the word “natural,” rather than “ambient.” Again, absolutely correct; though given Rubenstein's personality, I would have been foolish to return his precision in the midst of that awkward moment. Like most scientific types, the better the mind, the more awkward the transition to the personal tends to be. Most scientists I’ve met are brilliant, decent people, but they do lean toward social awkwardness. I always thought it was because when you think with clarity in a field of expertise, you expend so much focus there the instant you get into a less reliable ground your balance is off. I was maintaining that lack of personal certainty for the character, by allowing loose word use, which in context of the rest of what he says isn’t the normal for him.

(Unrelated to all this, the book raises the weird issue that no one in the age needs glasses, yet then tosses in two scientists who appear to: Angus wears them unnecessarily, because he refused to get his eyes fixed entirely; Rubenstein could do with something to aid his hypersensitivity, but then he would be wearing glasses rather than squinting, and that would raise the personal insecurity to the forefront for him. This was done to highlight two separate aspects of character, which are not really specific to scientists, but probably explains why so many good scientists seem eccentric. In the case of Angus, he is rebelling against perfection, because he finds the antiseptic commonality of what is possible to be dehumanising. I never state it in the book, and wouldn’t dare, but it is an underpinning of his character. In Rubenstein’s case, it isn’t about rebellion, but insecurity. At his core, he feels personally insecure about an imperfection that couldn’t be corrected even if attempted. I never state it explicitly, but the difference between needing glasses and them serving a benefit is relevant to note. Rubenstein’s eyes are normally fine, and are mildly hypersensitive to background light; but this is neither a disease or an issue for correction – it is an issue of acuity. My underlying thought there was that this would make him twice as uncomfortable about the condition, because it isn’t repairable in a normal sense, since it is perceptive for than physiologically incorrect. For someone who does believe in rigid perfection, this would be a motivating reason he fumbles his personal context.)

Final Thoughts

To be gifted by insight from any reader has an enormous value, because it helps one understand where the intent was lost. In a sense, that is a more important issue than whether a word is misplaced, or a construction is wrong. It provides a degree of insight into the audience perception you cannot get reading your own writing. Having said that, the challenge for editing dialogue is enormous, and quite often as a writer you’re faced by a choice of maiming your intent, or sacrificing intent for clarity. Neither option is easy, which is why I can spend an hour writing this before the day gets busy, and yet will spend hours on every suggestion before being able to engage any of them. (And a few, not mentioned here specifically, were obvious slips I made.)

Writing is thankless work, and highly personal (much like editing). This is even truer today than ever before, because the mass audience isn’t, in many cases, attuned to grammar, or even spelling. That doesn’t make them any less respectable, it just implies a different focus, and any writer who ignores the thunderous impact of modern culture on storytelling is a fool. You cannot, for example, dare to set a book in modern times and not recognise the existence of hip-hop as a subculture of enormous importance, any more than you can ignore the increasingly obscured boundary between what defines male and female. The latter informs dialogue for any modern setting in at least North America, since it is no longer a cultural movement identified solely with the poverty of inner city settings. Hip-hop language is poetic, highly personal, and affects how we talk to each other. Much the same, the issues of definition of gender are almost universally alive today, not because of homosexuality, but because the women’s movement changed the way men are defined even more so than how women are defined. Consider that fifty years ago the occupation of an individual was a large aspect of the definition of their gender, and now consider that most of those occupations hold no gender definition at all outside some archaic adherence to historical prejudices. (My example: good luck finding a female cop even thirty years ago; good luck not seeing one daily now.) The removal of the peripheral definition of gender leaves a modern writer struggling to impress the emotional substance of a character. Cops, for example, are no longer inherently tougher than secretaries. (They never were, but the point is that the inference is lost now.) So, as a writer, you are forced to recognise these mechanisms as faulty, and you need to reform your descriptive writing – and yet you need to still make these variances stand, because they are at a human level real.)

A good writer (and I won’t claim to be one), is pressed on all sides by three influences that have always existed: bad writing; audience perception; and social flow.

Bad writing is what it is, and is increasingly overwhelming decent writing. Pick up any newspaper and you can read 300 random words that tell you nothing loudly, give you no ability to see further, and impress upon you no understanding of the intent of the writing. Most writing (especially on the Internet) is awful, regardless of its grammar, because it simply doesn’t communicate well, if at all. (Some of the best blogs are minefields of bad grammar, but communicate so well it honours one just to read them.) As a writer, though, even a decent one, you are constantly hammered by this degrading effect. If you fight to hard against the tide, of course, you detach from the society you exist as a part of, and become an isolated oddity. If you embrace it too much, your writing suffers enormously.

Audience perception remains a heavy component of the pressure points, but it has changed dramatically since the Internet became the primary vehicle for human contacts. Now, anyone who writes is exposed to ridicule/praise/indifference in a forum where normal social rules fall by the wayside. The number of times I have been called an idiot online in a single month exceeds the number of times in my lifetime I have been called one in person. Whether it is the absence of governing reactions (no one punches you in the face online), or just a sad failure to maintain basic social manners, this democratising of communication has made the audience management issue one that writers face more than they probably should. As a writer, regardless of whether I’m any good, I am driven tow rite by an obsessive need for self-expression in a structure form. It is significantly different today to do that, and to expose oneself, because whether you have a thick skin or not, the populace can hammer you instantly, directly, and without any real consequences to them. It is so easy to encounter hatred, even if you divest yourself of the emotional context, you have this negativity washing over you constantly. So, you have to stand your ground now, as a writer, without the benefit of a barrier between you and your audience. This is especially true on a site like Smashwords, where such a large number of folks are real writers. Regardless of their skills, we should be celebrating their efforts, because it takes guts to throw your work on the mercy of the public, when they can rake you over the coals without any real defensive opportunity. Even fifty years ago, a writer had almost no contact at all with readers, and that was, I think, probably abetter time in terms of productivity.

The last element, social flow, may be the most devastating of all pressures on writers today. Society is changed by the nature of human contact, by electronic media, and by the fact it is falsely democratic. People are all equal, we’re told, and any writer who exposes that lie is vilified. We have taken political correctness to a level of painful self-suppression, and spawned movements like hip-hop, etc., in direct response to that imposition of banality. But for a writer, unlike a singer, there is almost no allowance made to change the acceptable forms of expression that serve as their tools. The writer is disallowed the use of poetic cadence more often than not, because it is hard to maintain over a longer form; and the writer has to create a rhythm in the text that cannot be enhanced by any other senses. The rapper can allow a beat (wisely chosen by the best of them) to enhance the mood of the piece, whereas the writer needs to create a sympathetic rhythm while conveying the meaning and maintaining the functional integrity of the work. No where is this stress of balance more observed in writing than it dialogue, where the writer is asked to embody human communication without straying too far from the grammatical acceptability. The death of good dialogue is perfect grammar, but the death of all writing is no grammar at all.

Now, while I wish I could proof these thoughts, I will have to be content with publishing them for the world to ignore. I do, of course, look forward to more proofing ideas, because what cannot be lost in all this is that what the readers think does matter. Even when one can’t correct what was written, one can usually correct what will be written, and that has educational value.

Blackberry Blogging: Spelling

2009-10-29T11:41:00.001-06:00

I am Mister Mum today, and learning to type (with a pencil eraser) on the Blackberry. I thought a blog would be warranted, to test the Blackberry (and my pencil).

I changed my biographical blurb again, as I have started to feel less cranky (though I proclaim the H1N1 flu shot the worst needle I have ever suffered, including a spinal tap, of which I had several when I was sick a couple decades back).

Today I want to meander on the idea of spelling. Sentences will get shorter as the eraser-typing gets harder.

Spelling is variable worldwide, even in like languages, and I am mulling whether I need to start to Americanise my spelling (or Americanize, as Americans would have it). Part of my resistance to feedback is sparked, often, by the first words out of most folk’s mouths, which are along the lines, “Why did you spell neighbour wrong?” or the dreaded, “You put the quotes in that line after the comma, but that’s not right.” The endless hours one can spend discussing these valid variances are so exhausting as to be soul-killing. I used to say, “I stand by the King’s English,” but have long since surrendered the pretence I have any memory of that or any other English. I once even used to use a writing style guide (NCR, I think it was called), and Fowler’s Modern English Usage was a part of my desk to the point where they blended. These days it seems so much jargon crept into the language, and variability is so broad, it is almost worthless to adhere to any standards.

Who won the spelling war? That’s really the question. Does the American way govern in the publishing world to a degree where spelling should be entirely of the American form for the English language? I know here in Canada we increasingly see it, and, frankly, Canadian Press guides are an embarrassment (as is what passes for journalism). But does defeat extend from assimilation, or does it open a vibrant opportunity?

As my eraser-typing cause a hand cramp, I leave these thoughts without conclusions. In a perfect world I might make a few, but then it would imply I was qualified to do so, and I very much doubt I am. What I am qualified to observe is that typing on a Blackberry is surprisingly much easier than my thumbs thought. Apparently, the pencil is mightier than the thumbs where typing into such a device is concerned. Now, if only this wee thing had a useful spellchecker.

“Foot in Gullet” Disease

2009-10-28T09:54:00.001-06:00

I spend most of my days amused by how often my mouth ends up the recipient of my foot (often my whole leg).

I would have written this as a comment below Rhian’s comment on the last post, but as usual my blogger account rejects all attempts at commenting on anything, so I was prevented remarking in that forum. I attempted to send Rhian a direct email (and hope I have the right Gmail address, or some poor soul will be scratching their head for certain), but regardless of that I decided to post today to make a few additional remarks. (Possible, as I wait on a text suite for the application I’m maintaining.)

I won’t withdraw my core argument about criticism, but I did a poor job of expressing it. Most critical reviews are raw opinion, with no technical foundation at all, and I was trying to observe that. Using the experience that prompted the thoughts gave the false impression I was being both sarcastic and dismissive of the review Rhian gave. I wasn’t trying to do either (though the sarcasm is part of the defensive nature of self-expression). I appreciated that review, genuinely, and respected it. I was deeply pleased the reviewer liked the story and characters.

I won’t excuse my poor self-expression, but I can explain in part. The frustration that seeped into the blog posting was a result of ten “proofreaders” reading the book prior to its upload. It proved the theory most people can’t proofread at all. With the exception of one reader (Tim), I got almost no technical feedback. Given the choice between never releasing the story (no time to dedicate to further mechanical processing), or releasing it for what it was worth, I made the latter choice – and that was why it was free. There’s no knock against the ten folks who read it, either, because proofreading isn’t a common skill – and every one of them claimed the story moved them, which is largely why they caught few technical errors. When ten people tell you the story is worthwhile, you tend to err on the side of becoming a fool – I released it and was damned, in the generic sense of the word.

When you write obsessively, one of the greatest challenges of all is time. This becomes especially true when you have a three-year-old, five cats, a business, etc. Tossing in flu shots (making me crabby), a recent auto accident that totalled my favourite car (I named her Martha), a sick cat, and a pile of other distractions…and you end up distinctly aware there isn’t enough time to do justice to present works (let alone those from the past). I not only had to scan in the book, and saw the joy of awful optical character recognition at work when the paper is old, but I suffer from “the writer’s curse.” Ask me to proof someone else and I can, but give me my own story and ask, and my brain goes into rewrite mode, losing almost all traction where technical editorial control is concerned. Writer’s make awful proofreaders, at least of their own writing, because they can’t disengage from the process of the story. I wouldn’t have it any other way – the story has to matter more to me, or it will never be worthwhile – but the gods would smile the day a proof-reader actually appeared in my desk drawer (my desk, of course, would first have to have a drawer). [An aside, why is it this damnable spellchecker accepts the plural proofreaders, but chokes on proof-reader unless it has a dash?]

I spend what little time I have to write (a few hours a week) moving ahead with new writing, and at some point I came to realise I either sacrificed the option to publish the stories, or the belief I can write well (which, I can, but with all the usual foibles). Given the two options, I think my age inclines me to choose the embarrassment of poor writing over having mould eat the stories to dust.

Being Canadian, I find that no matter what I do I get the side-effect of hearing about spelling errors that, at least in our dictionary here, are not errors at all. I once had a person argue with me for an hour about my spelling of the word recognise, which while perfectly valid, did not suit their belief it was spelled only with a “zee.” It wasn’t the first time that sort of thing happened, and probably won’t be the last, but it was the moment when I made the decision to be wary of taking to heart “technical” complaints about writing. (This, of course, was the deepest flaw in my assumption about how I responded to Rhian’s review – an improper assumption that because most people waste time trying to Americanise my spelling, technicalities are somehow all after that same fashion. It was disrespectful to make any assumption, and I committed the cardinal sin that I allowed my humour to overwhelm my consideration that the reviewer deserved respect.)

While I would rather write endless reams here than attend real work, I have a flashing icon that says the test script is complete.

I close by noting I care deeply about the stories I write, and more about the characters than I often do about real people. Anyone who knows me personally is aware I consider writing important, and can attest I am a wonderfully ignorant human being. I have an often unfortunate sense of humour, and a fairly thick skin, and I am not usually as considerate of the world as I should be. So, my apologies to Rhian for not making it very clear I appreciated her review, and for letting my frustration obscure that sincere appreciation. I enjoy being wrong, and by the comment she left on the previous post, I can see that very likely her technical considerations have merit. I would enjoy very much hearing them, since I would be a fool to dismiss kindness.

Have a great week, all.

PS: No more proofreading jokes, but an admission I really do have little time to ever proofread a blog post (and that grates on me, which is why I deflect the angst with humour).

The Critic in All of Us

2009-10-27T11:58:00.001-06:00

This morning I got a review of the second novel (click here, and scroll down), and it made me chuckle for many reasons, compelling me to edit my biographical blurb (click here). As I got two flu shots yesterday, and real work is challenging when both arms hurt, I decided to wax moronic a while on the idea of being a critic.

First, contrary to what might be expected, I took real pleasure in the review, harsh though it might have been. It reminded me of a review I once read about a Stephen King book, where the reviewer slammed his skills, yet admitted they liked the book. I was, in fact, downright pleased to know the reviewer of my novel read it all the way through, though I do remain fascinated how they managed (or why!) if it was as wickedly bad as they proclaimed it. It’s a long book – over 120,000 words – and I know I haven’t the dedication to read anything that long unless it grips me. So, being as I actually don’t care much about even my own opinions, I can’t but value the review for what it’s worth. About the end of the first few sentences, I believe the point was made, which was that despite all following complaints, the story and characters were appealing. Being as it is free to anyone who wishes to read it, and will remain so, I daresay the entertainment value must have been there. As a writer, while I do wish the reader had been able to stretch back to the early Science Fiction books this was a homily to (the reason some of the dialogue was intentionally written to produce a grin), I’m gratified someone took the time to enjoy the story and characters. (Now, if I was charging for the writing, I probably would have a proof-reader, editor, etc. But being as I write these books and don’t charge, “y’all get what the revenues afford.”) Not being able to thank the reviewer directly, I can only say thank you here in this forum.

But the drift of this blog is really about being a critic. We all are, yet none of us (even professional critics) are qualified for the task, and most of our opinions are so inherently narcissistic it calls into question the entire idea of reviewing anything for any purpose. For every person who hates something, someone likes or loves it; for every day the weather sucks (cold and raining/snowing here), someone else thinks the weather is wonderful just where I presently sit. We are, in a grand sense, speaking to ourselves when we criticise – and revealing an enormous amount about ourselves, more so than about what we review.

A case in point is my original thoughts about the Battlestar Galactica movie that launched the TV series that recently ended. I hated it; it was a depressing film, with no redeeming qualities. I stand by that view, even though I know I was wrong then and now. What I actually meant was, “This darkness doesn’t appeal to me, because I fondly remember the corny old TV series. Therefore, I dislike this new vision.” Had I proclaimed that, I would have been right; by saying, “This movie is awful,” I was not only incorrect, but displaying the failure of all critics – I was forgetting my opinion is worthless about the same instant it passes my lips. Worthless, that is, to any of the folks who disagree.

In this modern world, the Internet seems to have levelled the entire planet into some amorphous form of plebeian democracy. (Plebeian in the sense of the term as it refers to commonness; and democracy in the worse sense of the term, where social conscience is sacrificed to the will of individuals.) That isn’t a smart trend, because it produces a world where opinion becomes fact, and fact obscures truth. If enough people say a thing, it is fact, but that will never make the facts truthful.

The Star Wars trilogy comprising the arc where Anakin Skywalker rises and falls (Episodes I, II, and III) is a perfect example of the ill-effect of the Internet. No one would call those films the greatest of their era, but anyone who says they are somehow inherently worse than the original trilogy is forgetting those films entirely. They were all popcorn movies, made as a homage to the past science fiction works, and had highly visual sense of humour. If the Internet had governed when the original trilogy was released, it would have been necessarily considered a flop (by critics), because it was essentially a kid’s movie (that brought out the kid in all of us). So too were the latest ones…but somewhere along the way the opinions online took some substantive life on, and damaged the relationship fans of the new trilogy have with their favoured films. (Yes, wankers of the world, some folks actually even like Jar Jar Binks.)

Now, I won’t lump my critic in with those folks who spew unfocused hate, because unlike most critics the opinion wasn’t founded entirely in the realm of the unsupportable. It was perhaps unnecessarily harsh in its tone, but for all I know it could be entirely correct, so perhaps that’s neither here nor there. (Another effect of the Internet as a levelling tool is the chase down to the lowest common communication forms, which amount to misplaced aggression, and it affects even the best-intentioned writers.) It is entirely valid to say, as my critic did, that the book has structural sentence errors. I know I have never read one that doesn’t have a few, especially if there is a dialogue involved or thought-flow inside paragraphs. Often, I have discovered that the error was intentional, to entertain the writer; or not so much an error as an exposure of my narrow grasp of expression. (For anyone who wants to encounter sentences that are structured in odd ways, or amazing words, try Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels. They are the best “historical” seafaring novels ever written, and they are either awful or marvellous depending entirely on your tastes.) In my critic’s case, at the very least the opinions expressed have some potential validating component. (And, after all, they liked the story enough to read it, which says more than anything else.) And yet, regardless, the fact is the “review” as a form of expression is inherently too personal to be of any real value beyond the individual. That review will resonate with those who hated the book (though, frankly, most of those folks won’t be returning to the page to read it), and irk those who like it (who may, in fact, some day return to that page). Weirdly, it may actually make a few people read it who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered, as folks do love to enjoy a good derailment.

Substantively, most “reviewers” are not as cogent as the chap who took the time to review my book; but then I suspect most readers are not as discriminating as to grammar and sentence structure. Again, I use this as an example to expand a thought: the problem with all criticism is that it implies a shared possibility where none exists. The experience of any entertainment (books, music, and movies) is too personal an experience to make critique of much value. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t remain critics, but it does imply we should consider whose payoff we are delivering; and it doesn’t preclude being polite. Realistically, a polite review, even when the end result is negative, carries more weight than one that comes across as self-defeating. (Really, the main reason the review amused me so much, was basically that if you look at its context, you come away with the idea this must be a damn fine book, since it was deeply flawed somehow and yet the person read it cover to cover.)

But again, I meander, when I should be fetching my cat from the vet. I’ll close with some obscure observations:

As an art form the novel is overrated, but as an entertainment it is probably the finest form if you can find an appealing core;
I grow increasingly depressed by the pathetic quality of communication in general, and wish grammar and sentence structure mattered at all, but I know it doesn’t; and
The best criticisms are the constructive ones, rather than those that come across as dismissive or aggressive.

Now, I must go…and, sadly, I have no time to proof-read this. ;-)

Second Novel Online

2009-10-11T21:53:00.001-06:00

I released a second novel (God. Speak.) to Smashwords this evening. As with the last book, I wrestled with whether to charge, and while this one might be a better book I decided in honour of the folks who bought the first I would, at least initially, charge nothing for it. We’ll see if as a result of it being free I can exceed my current downloads for Forbidden.

Happily, enough folks have at least sampled Forbidden to make it a worthwhile experience. A few even seemed to have read it.

Now, I’ll end this post before I begin to ramble.

Windows 7 and FPSE on IIS 7

2009-10-05T10:19:00.001-06:00

I would have replied directly to Juan, who left a comment on an earlier post, but as luck would have it there was no contact data available (private profile, etc.), so this post is a reply to that comment.

When I got this to work I had compatibility for IIS 6 components installed under IIS 7, which may be where your error came from. I also ran the installer in full administrative mode. It worked without any errors, and barring any other oddities those may have made it work.

But, regardless, since then I have been running VS 2003 without any of that installed, directly on 64-bit Windows. It does the job well enough to support legacy code.

Support for the Troops

2009-09-23T20:51:00.001-06:00

This is a short post, with one simple message: whether you agree with the Afghanistan mission or not, every Canadian needs to support the troops. Right now they are doing what they were asked by a democratically elected government, and the mission objectives are admirable, even if the execution has been hampered. Save the politics for less important issues – support the troops.

Separating the Mind

2009-09-20T10:30:00.001-06:00

I decided last night to separate my political posts. My normal “random rants” will remain here on Random Data, and the political posts will appear now exclusively on Conservative X. That way, people who hate politics can muse on my rambling madness without choking on the political components; and, as well, I can put some serious work into my political thoughts. I added a new gadget to the sidebar that will link directly to the blog from this site. Enjoy.

Integrity of Communications

2009-09-17T19:37:00.001-06:00

Lately, I’ve been forgetting one of the key rules of writing, and working, and life: “Never let your emotions govern your statements or responses.”

I was reminded of this when a chap I respect pointed out I was uncharacteristically flawed in my grammar and spelling on a recent blog post. For someone who tries to remain rational, even when amusing himself with ranting prose, this made me pause and consider why it was happening. Every writer who is even half good enjoys playing with the rules, and breaking proper grammar is both fun and important in communication. Try writing a novel with flawless grammar and you rapidly discover it doesn’t serve the purpose of the novel, whatever that purpose may be, because the novel is an emotional form of expression. People do not talk with precision, or think with precision, and certainly do not read with precision. So, to evoke anything emotional you often have to suppress the correct in favour of the communicative. Contractions, abbreviated thoughts, and all manner of amusing word substitutions can evoke emotional responses that no amount of grammatically correct prose can manage.

One of the reasons the degrading quality of “journalism” irks me so deeply is that the whole point of the original journalistic style was to excise emotional context and report factual context. At some point the prose turned into sensationalising tripe, almost universally at the same moment, and it is an embarrassing statement of the times where we live. Journalists today routinely and intentionally insert emotionally charged language (and horrific clichés) to evoke reader response, turning factual reporting into something resembling mass entertainment and diverting the purpose of reporting in favour of marketing. This destroys its value in society, and reduces intelligent discourse to a minimalist exchange of barbs rather than a complex interplay and exchange of ideas. When I hear a modern journalist decry the ‘sound bite,” I dismiss them instantly as ignorant that their profession created the phenomenon.

Yet, I have drifted toward this. It is a shameful condition; and I am hipped to discover how far I have descended to this same base level, where I manipulate words rather than try to convey meaningful messages.

Why? There are several related reasons, I’m sure.

Perhaps foremost, I lost my respect for the blog as a form of communication. I have read so many blogs that are essentially personal pulpits, seeking nothing of intrinsic human value, projecting nothing shared or common, creating no constructive communication, I began to reflect that in my own communications online. By way of comment sections on blogs, I have become increasingly conscious reading has become an archaic skill. Even outside blog writing, people now routinely contact me after reading something I wrote, and ask questions/make comments that reveal how low the comprehension level of the average reader has become. This becomes especially evident when one uses sardonic prose, as it seems no one actually understands irony, or true written sarcasm, or anything like inflection. A risk management document I wrote recently exemplifies this, where I wrote the sentences, “Safety is evidently something we do, rather than create, or so one would think given how we base our measures of it on counts of obscure activities. But then, I suppose it is rather safer than not to wear a Band-Aid on one’s nose stud to prevent it getting caught in a machine. Quickly, let’s count this practice and generate a safety index.” I had two people contact me, one berating me with some rather vulgar terms for suggesting that practice, and the other writing they had never considered how important it might be, and were now considering implementing a procedure to control for facial jewellery. Frankly, I was stunned, because I can’t conceive, even taken out of its full context, how anyone with even remedial comprehension skills could mistake the sarcasm in those words. When reading comprehension in educated people is so low, what is the actual point of making an effort to communicate in full sentences, with shading and substance? Blogs have, in a sense, highlighted the futility of communication for me, and I fell into the trap of allowing myself to care less about my messages.

Another aspect of my growing disappointment with the world, specific to communication, is the general degraded quality of language. I have a substantial vocabulary, but I was taught by the few real teachers I had to suppress it. ‘Write,’ they said, ‘for the common reader.’ People do not read enough now to have large vocabularies, so one writes at some level where there is a chance they will not disengage entirely. An example of language that kills comprehension hopes is the word “hipped,” as used above. How many people actually know what it means? When it was taught to me, I took this lesson to heart, but I have noted that over the last twenty years the vocabulary that remains, when one excises the unusual and archaic, is now probably below five thousand words (excluding fabricated terminology, or jargon). How, in the name of anything representative of a breathing idea, can such a minimal vocabulary serve to give texture? This is not even an issue of ignorance, but of vapid laziness, where the inclusion of even a perfectly useful word becomes editorially significant. I was told recently to remove the word “efficacious” from a business document, and ended up in a bitter argument about it. They wanted the word to be replaced by “efficient,” and I was compelled to observe efficacious does not mean efficient. I lobbied for “effective,” which is at least close, but observed the term was not going to grab the mind to the same degree, but become lost in the abuse of that word as it exists today. “Efficacious,” I argued, “is seldom seen, and will pause the reader to consider what is really being said.” I lost that battle, and shrugged off another effort as wasted, as the editing proceeded to reduce an elegant argument to a statement of opinion in business jargon that loses its logical effect. How can communication be elegant when it is crushed by this simplistic need to divest itself of words that are the core of the language, in favour of short-speak?

I think in the past few months my disappointment in my work has driven me to a point of disgust, and that disgust has emotionally charged my efforts.

As I began this piece, I reminded of the rule in writing that demands emotion must not govern statements or responses, specifically in the realm of the discourse that attempts to engage readers. This is true even when the point is to engage an emotional responses, because it recognises that to write well, to convey the substance of an idea or emotion, you must experience it at a different level than you feel it. Otherwise, you will create a subjective statement, or an argument of sorts that is exclusionary. This means, in a basic way, you will end up writing to only those who already believe, and the faithful, of course, are blind to the need for logic. The reason we cannot govern today is because we fail to include ideas, burying them in ideals that are poorly, if ever, expressed with any honesty.

To become trapped in a communications cycle where emotion overrides objective language, where inflammatory rhetoric is substituted for discussion, ought to be criminal. It is what made the world as it is, and keeps it from betterment. I hope I can undo my own failure in the near future, though I doubt this post begins that recovery. Weariness compels me to surrender to the reality that it might not matter even if it did.

Leadership, Lies, and Logic

2009-09-13T16:46:00.001-06:00

Since an election is likely, I thought I would try again to define leadership. I’ll even by apolitical this time.

Leaders do not follow trends, and they do not set them. They decide based upon available information, execute the decision, and take ownership of the consequences. They don’t stand up and threaten, because they know it’s pointless, and they don’t cajole the world with empty promises and “principles.” Generally, leaders are boring and quiet, and simply hunch their backs and lift heavy issues away. They do it not to satisfy people, or to engage people, or glean respect, or earn kudos. They do what they do because it is who they are internally, and they are driven by a sense of necessity and confidence. They do not care if the world loves them, or even if it agrees with them, and they don’t spend miserably long hours attacking others – they are too busy doing. You can’t make leaders, though you can shape them; and leaders do not, and never will, surrender their leadership because someone else tells them to.

And now to be political…since I am, as most beings, driven by a sense of social compact.

Jack Layton is not a leader, he is an egotist. A leader would not have come out and tried to manipulate the public to believe he was a statesman (NDP to support government on a per bill basis?), after a long record (75 bills, I believe) of voting against government while proudly announcing the party would do so without even first seeing the bill. That is an ideologue trapped in his own self-importance, who is right now scrambling not because he gives a damn about what Canadians want, but because he lives in absolute terror of what the electorate will do when reminded of his smug expression when he sighed a post-election pact to overthrow the minority government and replace it with a coalition of fools and separatists. (And the coalitions real offence was not in whether it was technically allowed, since it is in our system, but because it was a post-election pact that was intent on disavowing the will of the electorate. If you want to form a coalition, tell us during the election, and we will vote based on that. After the fact it smacks of disrespect.)

Michael Ignatieff is not a leader, but something very like a megalomaniac. I used to believe he was just your standard insulated academic, but the more I’ve read of his own words, the more aware I have become he believes his press. Self-aggrandizement is a fine thing, but there is no leadership component drawn from it, or lending to it. To dictate is not to lead; and to dictate in the press is nothing short of mocking the institution one claims to serve. Unlike Layton, who at least has some sense of what reminders of the coalition will do to him at the polls, Ignatieff is so absolutely self-involved he thinks saying he didn’t sign any such thing is sufficient to offset the physical reality that he did. Much like Bob Rae, who seems deluded lately, Ignatieff has so little respect for the electorate that he figures it advisable to scatter accusations of lying at his opponents, while lying, in the same sentence, against all common sense. This is a sign of two things: a tyrannical bent, probably created by teaching far too long; and a proof that sophistication doesn’t denote a lack of stupidity.

May, whose first name I can’t even write as it makes me feel ill to think too much about her behavioural issues, doesn’t even qualify as a follower. A sea urchin migrates slowly for the purpose of bettering its survival chances, but here we have a woman willing to leap across the country to leverage the false impression BC is more a home for the Greens than any other place. (Technically, of course, this is partly because the Greens must soon start to attack the Atlantic provinces since their oil and gas works will start polluting in the near future.) I could probably write a book about how ludicrous it was to give this person any credence at all, but history will do that for me, when the world wakes up and realises that she was, is, and always will be a self-promoting charlatan who sold out her own cause often enough to make one question the cause itself.

Steven Harper is a leader, but possibly not a great one, or otherwise we wouldn’t be in this mess again so soon. Then again, maybe it is because he has some leadership qualities that he is in this fix. Leaders do tend to decide, and then execute, and often are seen as inflexible. If he has a problem, it is that as a leader he is too isolated; that lack of transparency hurts him. It deflects the awareness people might have of what he does as a leader, versus how those decisions come out at the end of the system. (And this goes for all Prime Ministers, who deserve some respect even if they are Paul Martin and Kim Campbell. The system is not designed to allow people to lead, but to filter decisions into some abysmal acceptable pap. This tends to make most Prime Ministers look foolish many times, because the good choices made are blindly suppressed by the system.)

Finally, Gilles Duceppe is a real leader. He may also be seen as a bastard, a whiner, or an ingrate – but those are fallacies. he leads his political brand deftly, and has managed to make a party that should be irrelevant into one that often holds immense power over the House. He does this because he can lead. Now, just because his cause isn’t palatable to many outside Quebec, does nothing to detract from his leadership skills. They remain obvious.

My sketches of the “leaders” aside, the main problem we have in a coming election is we can’t choose a leader. We were reminded after the last election, depending on the results, we may not be allowed to even choose a government. If the other players dislike our choice, they will simply try to exercise an affront against the will of the electorate post-election. (Had they just proposed the possibility, and used it to leverage the government, no one would have blinked. But they pushed it too far, attempting to overthrow the minority position and create even more instability when times were clearly troubled.) Barring an ability to choose a leader, we are faced with parties – and therein lies the problem with the idea of leadership in Canadian governance.

The political parties in Canada that are possible candidates to govern are not cohesive. We can discard the Greens (who will never elect a member, because their primary supporters simply don’t engage in political process enough) and the Bloc (because they are regionally restricted). That leaves us with three, but the NDP can’t be left in the mix because, no matter how one addresses the issue, they simply have no substantive central policies. Canadians are centrists at heart, and unions simply haven’t the clout necessary to push the NDP agenda. We are, also, not socialists. That leaves then the right-of-centre CPC, and the left-of-centre LPC.

Now, how does one judge leadership in a party? You can’t go by the “leaders” themselves, because really the problem is our system isn’t leadership-driven. It’s collective-driven. How then to judge? Do you go on track record? (Show me a party that isn’t chock full of lies, betrayals, etc. The system makes pure ideology impossible to maintain and forward.) Do you judge by way of platform? (The CPC has one, and it hasn’t changed a whole lot in 5 years; the LPC still doesn’t seem to, though I’m willing to admit it may just be hidden. And, no, “trust us,” is not a platform.)

In the last year the CPC led us through a recession. Now, the argument spending created deficit is unarguable, but to blame the CPC for deficit conditions ignores both the world-situation that created the impetus, and the back the entire opposition array demanded the spending. Pretending for a moment we think it was unnecessary (I do), who do we blame? Do we blame the PM and CPC for cooperating with that demand, or do we blame the opposition parties for making it? (They all behaved like idiots.) Now, the added problem (and here I’m touching upon leadership and perception) we have is if this becomes an election issue, the logic isn’t going to function very far for anyone (focusing here on the two possible governments).

First, the LPC logic highlighted:

Statement: The CPC put us in deficit after years of LPC rule where we were in surplus.

Observation: The whole world was in a serious economic downturn due almost entirely to regulation failures in the US markets. You demanded even more spending than the CPC initiated, and got roughly 2/3rds of what was demanded. So, isn’t that actually you that put us in deficit, since as a minority it’s not like they CPC could refuse? And, wasn’t that famed surplus actually generated primarily by breaking the back of the provinces over transfer payments?

Statement: The spending hasn’t gotten out there fast enough.

Observation: Accepting that, since the economy is starting to turn around, then you were wrong to demand it? Or, assuming you were right, why is the economy improving? And if it is, why should we not curtail that spending and avoid deficit to some degree given there is clearly no need for further injection (and a danger of inflationary pressure)?

Statement: The economy is improving because the global economy is improving.

Observation: Then, since what’s pulling us out is improving global economies, wasn’t the PM actually right when he said “we” didn’t have a problem?

Statement: PM Harper lied before the last election.

Observation: You all lie; but assuming he did, then you are allowing he wasn’t blindsided by this at all, and since we neither fell as far or recovered as slowly as some economies, he must have actually been managing it?

The point is, of course, the logic is circular and implausible. There’s no traction possible given the only way the CPC can be made to look wickedly foolish requires Harper to have lied, which requires him to have known more than every other leader in the free world; which in turn would imply he’s a brilliant man, though potentially dishonest. How many people wouldn’t prefer a brilliant liar to an honest moron? As well, the issue falls apart when you try to ascertain how the CPC acted stupidly: they weren’t going to spend, they aren’t releasing stimulus fast enough, yet the economy is improving lockstep now with the world economy, never having been hit even half as hard? Doesn’t that end up implying they were right? Basically, the logic can’t support itself without ignoring its own foundations, which makes it…well, not really logic.

Now, to be fair, the CPC logic highlighted:

Statement: The opposition forced us to engage stimulus spending and the deficit ballooned as a result of external forces.

Observation: So, you weren’t governing, your were…what? Reacting fearfully? Picking your noses while the House burned?

Statement: No one in the world saw the degree of the problem.

Observation: Accepting that, then the opposition was right about the spending? And if so, why were you resistant for so long?

Statement: The economy is improving.

Observation; So, was it because of the spending (making you wrong) or would it have done so without (making you wrong to fold to the opposition demands)?

Statement: PM Harper was caught off guard by the US market collapse like everyone else.

Observation: Okay, then he isn’t really responsible for the recovery, except perhaps accidentally?

Again, the point is the arguments will be so superficially false about the issue, you can’t define a leadership factor for either party from them. So how do you decide?

And here I wrap up my aggravating meander with a shred or two of what is probably true (though I have no insider knowledge).

Canada was in a good position to whether the recessionary pressures because they were external/ Shockingly, both the LPC and CPC have done a decent job of helping that position. PM Chretien (and Martin under him) did brutalise transfers, but it forced a false surplus that enforced a “more with less” cycle down to municipalities. The CPC followed that with tax cuts that, while miniscule, cycled cash directly to communal choices through participatory consumerism. In other words, we were put in the oddball position of actually having the power to choose to suppress the impact of the recession as individual consumers. This happy accident took both LPC and CPC ideas, in stages, to create it.

Now, as to the logic above, I have a scenario that explains a great deal: the Prime Minister knew something was afoot, but not to the degree of it, because I did – I had been observing for a year the problem of junk markets seemed to be growing. If I could know just because I taught Economics, and knew about investment models, they he had to know. But he couldn’t have known the extent of the following meltdown. At the same time, he was 100% right when he initially resisted stimulus spending, because he recognised the fact of such a response – it couldn’t inject fast enough to avoid the external pressures on our economy. All the domestic spending in the world can’t isolate us from the financial collapse of a major trading partner. he also knew that when the coalition threat rose, he was in a bad spot, and that to continue to govern he needed to bow to the demand of stimulus, and by then I would wager he knew he had to do it anyhow, since the world was doing it. (Every cent the US spent would have weakened our relative position in the mid-term.) So, he arranged it, injected several billion in an effort to satisfy the whims of the people who thought GM and Chrysler were useful (they weren’t and aren’t), and then I believe intentionally delayed the bulk of the spending with a certain knowledge that we would fall neither so far, nor recover so slowly as some. This means, that technically we have a massive deficit, but we also haven’t yet spent cash we don’t have. If the economy improves (as it will) for the next four quarters, the deficit spending will be half of what it was declared. In other words, he knew injection wasn’t the answer since the problem wasn’t Canadian made. He was right, and may prove wise to have gone slowly.

So, considering that (I’ll gladly lay out the pure logic that does support the contention, some day), maybe he is a leader more than even I think, because it would have been politically expedient to take the old LPC approach of spend-spend-spend.

Oh, who am I kidding – logic had nothing to do with governance.

Socialism

2009-09-13T15:40:00.001-06:00

Socialism is absurd, but not because of its pretentious idea that the mob-mind can better serve the interests of the individual, or because it is elitism masquerading as publican; rather, it is absurd on the pure basis it functions on the assumption its cause represents a Universal best interest. It eschews any concern that a vast number of people are fundamentally opposed to being told what to do. And, after all, socialism is defined by its tell.

There are some positive ideals behind socialism. The one that always floats to my mind is the idea of a caring society where individuals can rely upon a collective support when their fortunes fall below a certain level; another is the idea of health care that is accessible, sound, and generally decently available. (Note for those who have not smoked the reality: accessible and available are different by a long shot.)

The problem lies not with the ideas of socialism though, but in its probable implementation in any society. And here I turn to several real examples of the problems inherent in socialism.

First, dash the idea socialism serves the common man. Far from it, it is intended to engage and solidify the class divisions. It institutionalises the haves and ensures the have-nots are never to suffer to a degree where revolution occurs, but only just. This is an assertion many of my socialist acquaintances decry, but the reality of it is displayed easily in our society. Who do our resident federal socialist (NDP) work for? They may claim the middle class, but notice that whenever their core support is in conflict with the larger middle class, they immediately abandon that pretence. Else, how could any NDP-minded politician have supported the massive corporate welfare condition that settled on our backs recently when GM and Chrysler stole billions from taxpayers to support a handful of union jobs? All the false arguments aside (I’ll gladly respond to any posted), the fact is that this deal cut no quality cloth for anyone but union employees and corporate buffoons. 80% of the population, who have no pension plans, just bailed out less than 1% who do. Socialism would screech if it were a thing rather than a false front, because in no way would the ideal support what amounts to hierarchal advancement of one class over another. If the NDP implemented their brand of socialism, preferential treatment would be given to union members over all others by virtue of the bizarre belief this is socialism in action. (Well, I give Layton too much credit; he is a self-aggrandising dilettante and has no actual concern for anyone but himself. He does make a fine sociopathic poster child for the modern age, though.)

Next, let us pause and consider health care. This white elephant is considered sacred, but even so, here in Alberta we now have transsexuals suing the public system because sex change operations were delisted. I use this example to illustrate a point for two distinct reasons: at once it is an exemplar of how implementing any socialist agenda goes horribly wrong as soon as entitlement sets in; and on the flipside it amuses me greatly. The point I wish to make, if it isn’t leaping out of these sentences, is that health care in Canada is a perfected example of why socialism fails. This medical care system we have was founded in the 70s, really, and hasn’t fundamentally changed in at least 30 years. Meanwhile the actual world of medicine has changed so dramatically a doctor from that era is an outdated dinosaur. So too is the system, which tries to take modern science and medicine and ram it into a framework that didn’t work even 30 years ago, and certainly fails now. It can’t resolve necessary medical care as some element of the system, and so we have every fad and fancy making it onto lists to be paid for by the system (us). Now, I’m not going to argue against the transsexual’s right be what they wish, or are, but I am going to observe this is not a medical issue. They will not die because they are male as opposed to female, and so forth. Just as I won’t die because my back aches all the time, come to think – but at least my back may have a vague connection to medicinal health; at least it may be a handful of pills and a swift kick in the arse will straighten my spine some. The day the health care system failed was when it became part of a socialist agenda, proclaiming itself all things to all people for all purposes, rather than what it should be – it should be a line of defence against lost productivity. And no, I’m not saying only workers should receive health care, I’m speaking in the larger sense to say it should be a system that understands its purpose of to provide a collective response to an otherwise costly social dilemma. It should maximise the scarce resources by focusing on practical treatments, and stop fiddling about trying to reengineer basic biology for preferential reasons. Now, connecting this to socialism in action, the problem with medical care in this country is that it is socialist in its mindset, making no distinction between need and want, or practical and impractical. And that is why it is unsustainable.

At its core socialism is a front for elitism, because it seeks to create a generalised sense of entitlement, which is then used to manipulate thoughts and emotions for the purposes of those making the decisions. And the danger in socialism isn’t complex, but extraordinarily simple: socialism creates false levelling, and suppresses the growth that comes from the differences of individuals. Its reward system is fixed, and therefore dynamic rewards for the most powerful growth factors are not allowed.

But then again, maybe I’m just an idiot, too, for believing a caring society is possible while embracing the variations in humanity, without perverting governance.

Stupidity

2009-09-02T20:13:00.001-06:00

Count Michael Ignatieff (I shudder in awe at his nobility) is in the process of saving us from himself. He seems to epitomise the modern trend where intelligence does not exclude stupidity, and where intelligence exists within some narrow confines indeed. This push for an election is political suicide. Of course, Bob Rae must be rubbing his hands together gleefully, though he too will fall on his own sword if he thinks himself a leader – and doesn’t grasp the context of this fatalistic push.

First, disclosure requires me to admit I am a conservative (small C); except that I am a liberal (small L) in most humanitarian regards. Oddly, I am also an actual environmentalist. Not a tree hugger by miles, but an actual environmentalist who has a clear vision of what can be done to save the environment, as I understand a fair bit of the science and its limitations. And, I am a women’s rights advocate, who is convinced human rights might be best just Universally applied and gender left in a heap. I’m all things, to…myself, at least. Sorry, I got distracted; confusing myself with my brilliance. My hubris got in the way of the few functioning brain cells I have. You could almost say my intelligence, my wisdom, and my ego overwhelmed me to the point of stupidity.

Enough meandering sarcasm.

An election this fall, or in the next 12 months, will produce a result that looks remarkably, if not exactly, like the present one. The problem the LPC has (and mostly this is Ignatieff’s problem) is a bizarre inability to understand that Harper, for all his flaws, has a legitimate increasing minority. In his first two years, he managed to pull some of the left-of-centre voters and undecided into his fold, increasing his minority position. Contrary to what the LPC, NDP and Bloc claim, the CPC is not wavering in support at all. It is, mistakes included, managing to hold the centre position in the present mishmash of parties. At the core of that is a staunch support, and none of those people will be swayed by any argument against the CPC. Even assuming they represent merely 30% of the population, given the split-vote mechanisms of first past the post, it is almost impossible to unseat the CPC presently. The arithmetic is against it. And, when pollsters tell us whatever they think they tell us, while it may sway the undecided (most of whom never vote, I might observe), nothing they say will propel a staunch Conservative voter to the Liberal fold, or vice versa. That said, the reality being what it is, the LPC will be fighting the NDP and the Bloc more than the CPC. And vote-splitting in that scenario is what got us where we are today.

A few observations might help make the point (not that Count Ignatieff could grasp it, given his ego obviously obscures his intelligence).

The LPC has always been a patriarchal party, with a strong entitlement mentality; a belief, in many ways reinforced by experience, that they are the natural governing party of Canada. This seemed to some extent to be true, because once the LPC actually represented central viewpoints, with a strong tolerance for variations, a strong support (active, and true) for minority advancement, and an honest defence of the fundamental ideas behind Medicare, etc. This was what Canadians believed, and so by extension the LPC held a strong hold on governance. It wasn’t that they were naturally aligned with the nation, though, but that they tended to reflect the will of the public. Canadians, on the whole, liked being taken care of in the broad sense. Social welfare wasn’t forced upon us, but delivered to us by our mistaken assumptions about economy and growth always overtaking the costs of these benefits. The problem, which the LPC doesn’t seem to understand, is that successive recessions in the 80s, 90s, and now first decade of the new millennium have made even the average Canadian aware that while our social systems may be enviable, they were never strictly modelled for sustainability. So, when recession hits – and it always does at some point – we now see the fragility of those systems, and we are also increasingly aware of the fiscal impossibility of sustaining them. This makes people in the middle class hesitant about taking on any more tax burdens, because in concert with this clearly unsustainable public enterprise we have, private industry hasn’t managed to keep our standard of living rising. Consequently, the discretionary income spread is failing (it’s what got us into the credit reliance cycle that’s killing us long-term), and that means even if we earn twice what our parents did, we have less discretion in how it is spent (the % expenditures people have on student loans, heat, food, and other basic necessities is exceeding any previous generation’s levels by almost double). The point, of course, is that the LPC hasn’t changed at all; but the population has. The vast middle class, the middle ground of any election battle, is far less tolerant of fiscal invasion. In a sense, what has happened to the LPC is they are an anachronism, and will remain one until they reassert the values that lay beneath their party and made them synchronous with the public’s centrist view. We are increasingly all fiscal conservatives, because the society has made it so, and we are unlikely to embrace liberalism on a whole again until it accounts for the fact we have an inkling the social systems it represents must change to become sustainable. By many this detachment is viewed as LPC arrogance, but is really just the kind of imbecilic ignorance that comes from any institutional body too entrenched to change.

As well, it should be observed that contrary to what rabid Liberals imply, the CPC doesn’t carry any more rubes and nutcases than any other party we have on the slate. Oh, there are a few dunces of impressive scale, but most of the CPC is made up of non-fundamentalist middle-class voters who believe, right or wrong, that the CPC has a better fiscal stance than the LPC, NDP, or otherwise. It isn’t relevant if its true, which is the part other parties seem to misunderstand. The relevant issue is that trying to paste the “fundamentalist Christian” label on CPC members, or supporters, is ludicrous and insulting. Every soft-supporter that hears it is offended deeply, because they can’t fit that mould, but being told you’re an idiot for voting Conservative is tantamount to saying to someone, “You can’t be trusted to have an opinion.” How does that kind of foolishness translate to swaying voters? What the LPC was always good at (Chretien was the master, and I honour him for it) was dividing the country effectively and carving out urban cores that offset any rural loses. They did it with this approach: raise the status of urbanites and denigrate the unwashed rural population. This became increasingly nasty over the 80s, and by the 90s there was a clear divide between east and west, with the Atlantic provinces garrotted into submission by Federal money. The problem with it as a strategy was what toppled Martin, who actually was foolish enough to mistake past success for present value. He was gutted in his election run by two factors: the west is rising in urban population and was irritated by being depicted as second-class citizens, despite being as sophisticated as Torontonians; and, increasingly, minority immigration was eroding LPC strongholds, because as it turned out many of those minorities were ill-served by a party that was not operating as a centrist representation, but as a fiefdom. The real issue though is the contention, which many Liberals I know well still make, that the CPC is somehow the home of every crackpot alive. Yet, technically, it has more female, minority, and varied Members of Parliament than any of the other parties in terms of raw numbers. It is also led by a man who, while no starving middle class droid, is certainly not a rich lawyer – and, if he had more charisma, would probably be unstoppable. You cannot effectively divide-and-conquer an electorate who is wary and weary of the tactic. Paul Martin exposed it, and it lost its power. The fact is, most CPC supporters are not much different than those people in most LPC strongholds, and yet the LPC continues to reject the commonalities and lose the mindshare.

During the last election the LPC under Dion, a decent if befuddled man who had the word fool tattooed on his forehead by his own party, depicted itself as rudderless. It was largely because without developing a coherent platform, it promoted a Carbon Tax concept that was untenable. Not wrong, mind you, but simply impossible to implement in the context of the modern economy as it was in that time frame. Since, gutting that proposed platform within days of its introduction, the LPC has proposed nothing. Despite some of the people I know who are LPC to the core, they can’t articulate how they would govern any differently than the CPC has/is. By not offering an alternative, they then face the 30% core CPC support who dismiss them outright, and the nearly 20% wavering centre. Some of those votes went to the LPC, NDP and Greens last time, but throw another election at these voters now, and the problem is they have no impetus not to vote their anger – and that anger will be directed at whomever has forced this election, since, rationally, the arguments against the CPC are hollow for the most part. For example, blaming the CPC for the deficit condition is untenable, because it then forces the question why we have one, which is going to raise the answer it is because the opposition parties forced the government to deliver a massive subsidy budget. Now, as some of my Liberal friends have tried, toss in the “the CPC is stalling on delivering those billions,” and the retort is plain: and yet the economy is still shifting around. So, ultimately, by being slow out of the gate with stimulus money, the CPC has probably prevented an 80 billion dollar deficit in favour of a deficit that will probably track in at 50 billion. So, the stimulus was mostly unnecessary? Wouldn’t that prove Harper’s contention it was? And if he was right, wouldn’t that place the deficit on the shoulders of the opposition? After all, what could he do but play to their demands given he had a bare minority? My point, of course, is that the central deciders in this election will need an issue to hang onto that is practical, because we are all sick of hearing personalities in opposition to each other. Frankly, I think most people couldn’t care less if Harper was “a nice guy.” or Ignatieff was a “brilliant mind.” What they want is a government that does something (anything would be nice) with minimal impact on their lives. And to try to make EI reform the platform issue is suicide. No working person will support the idea of working 45 days for a year of funding, because its abuse factors are too obvious; and no one will support more taxes in a fragile recovery to implement it. It would slaughter consumer confidence, which is already hampered by credit conditions. The old standby, “Harper is evil,” is a failure out of the gate, because while Ignatieff vacationed in Europe this summer, and Layton was mostly silent (small blessings), Harper was everywhere domestically. Hell, the man even shored up our Arctic Circle efforts. And the point isn’t whether this was photo-opportunity horseshit (largely, anything a PM does is just that), but that he was visible. He was working to deliver a sense of purpose, while everyone else popped up occasionally to bitch and moan, then returned to their elitist pursuits.

Finally, any right-minded Liberal (and there are a few) has to be terrified of the Obama effect. Obama is a dud, at least visibly, who is saddling the US with what will be 14 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years, and he is locked in a politically destructive fight on the domestic front about health care. His numbers are dropping, but more than that, people are starting to see that his oratory skills, and his real human skills, are not capable of moving the USA toward a better place. He is a President in search of an option right now, and Canadians as a whole are less enamoured of him daily. (Note that none of this is because Obama isn’t a decent, smart man. He is. The problem is he has no room to move, given the construct of the states.) How will Ignatieff sell himself then? He doesn’t dare try the “close to Obama” marker (he isn’t, anyhow, as he is much closer ideologically to Bush in his writings). He can’t, in fact, even attempt to do a comparative governance spiel, since by all practical measures Harper is doing better than Obama since Canada is doing better than the US, which given our close trading ties is a technical shocker. (Personality deficit aside, Harper is smart enough to not promise the moon, and what he delivers then seems reasonable.) I suppose Ignatieff could try pinning the economy’s woes on Harper, but that won’t likely work, since of all the worlds many democratic nations, Canada never fell as far, and so hasn’t had to recover as fast to be comparably positioned.It also makes the “have it both ways” problem real, which is that if Harper was at fault, he’s doing a damn fine job fixing his mess; and, I hope Ignatieff is not foolish enough to forget (assuming he ever knew) that it’s hard to find a Canadian who doesn’t forgive fellow Canadians their mistakes.

It is easy to appear intelligent, but to actually avoid being stupid requires some effort. Ignatieff isn’t achieving that. He is, in fact, more proof of what is often said of academics. When he speaks he appears arrogant, his choice of words is questionable, ad his habit of lecturing rather than talking to his audience is off-putting. He is surrounded by many others with even larger stones around their neck (rather than in their drawers, where stones belong), such as Bob Rae, who, true or not, is generally viewed as the man that started the destruction of Ontario’s economy on its way. Worse, perhaps, Ignatieff is running in a province he must win (Ontario), where the scandals keep piling up under a Liberal government. Ordinarily that wouldn’t matter (the BC Liberals are almost certainly Conservatives), except that the federal LPC hasn’t anything to clearly differentiate it from the Ontario Liberals. Hence, he starts in a deep hole, looks like a man who triggered an election for his own purposes (he is an opportunist, so that is no surprise), and will end up fighting a trench war against a man (Harper) who is better at politics. Yes, I know people hate our PM, and the labels affixed to him go beyond disrespect into nonsense, but anyone who has any self-respect will eventually listen to the two men speak. In Ignatieff they will hear a lecturing tone (always there, no matter what he speaks about), and get the unavoidable sense the man’s ego is beyond the pale. In Harper, they may come away thinking they can’t like him, but they won’t be able to accuse him of being an arrogant elitist. As for the appellation liar, it apples to every politician ever birthed, so its a neither here nor there tag – to use it would only remind the listener the speaker is a liar.

If Ignatieff was smarter, rather than brilliant, he would have been conscious of his personal deficits (Harper is well aware of his). All he will do in this election is one of two things: alienate the centrists, and further abuse the Liberal brand. He will, almost definitely, then return to Harvard.

My gut feel is that this is a bad decision, driven by ego and impatience. In fact, it may be Harper’s majority if the backlash comes. Taking such a risk now, when a year of recovery would have allowed the opposition to say, “our stimulus pressure won the day,” is stupid. It shows a basic lack of leadership, and no sense of strategic command. You never start a fight you can’t win.

Having said that, I can almost definitely list here what Ignatieff will try. He will try to split the NDP soft support and take Quebec from the Bloc, as well as buy Northern Ontario votes and Atlantic Province votes. (Ignatieff already promised Fed Nor changes to buy Northern Ontario.) This isn’t rocket science, but what is probably less obvious is that Ignatieff will actually try to engage Harper in a slugfest about policy. I think he may actually be self-involved enough to believe his oratory skills equal Obama’s, and I believe he is ignorant enough of the country at this time to think Canadians will be bowled over by rhetoric. He will try to score the dressed cheap shots that fall under divide-and-conquer, and I fully expect to have him misstep about the coalition effort last December. (Perfectly legal, by the way, but only true idiots would have tried it after an increase in minority position, as it stank of whinging inability to accept defeat.) As soon as the coalition issue rises (and Harper will make sure it does, as he is smart politically), Ignatieff has two possible responses: he didn’t like it, in which case he slits the throats of many running Liberals, and brands himself a liar then or now; or, it was perfectly fair and legal, in which case the overwhelming public angst that rose about it will mark him an elitist, opportunistic hack, regardless that it might truly have been allowed in our system. No matter, trying to go twelve rounds with Harper will expose him for what he is, which is an academic hack. Harper is a politician, and, good or bad, his skills are ideal for campaigning.

Ignatieff can’t win an election; Bob Rae can’t; and the LPC won’t until they remember that what had them in power was not their self-serving rhetoric, but charisma and an ability to be the central party. To get back there they need to rebuild properly, and accept that parachuting the elite into the war zone that is politics is a miscalculation of enormous proportions.

As a postscript, to any Greens, May is a joke. Recent evidence the under-24 crowd have the highest environmental awareness and worse environmental habits was no surprise. As it turns out the old dogs are actually better at walking the walk than those who talk the talk. That’s why middle-class core voters reject the Greens, because flagship hypocrites like David Suzuki and Al Gore have no traction with people who recycle, try to reuse, and genuinely have no choice but to be environmentally sound because they bear the tax burdens. Seeing rich folks blather about it doesn’t take with people who do it out of necessity. Hell, we’d all have solar if we could afford it, but few of us would have a fleeting of vehicles like Gore.

Service?

2009-08-30T17:15:00.001-06:00

The last couple weeks have been interesting, if interesting can be meant to mean “being reminded at every turn that the world is essentially a cache of incompetence welded firmly onto the frothy scum on the top of a cesspool.” I’ll stick with my theme here, which is “where oh where has the idea of service gone!”

Service Versus Self-Service

It was time for me and the wife to get our eyes checked, and so we dropped a couple hundred bucks to get the optometrist to ogle our retinas and such. Turns out we both needed prescription changes, my eyes having actually improved slightly. Good service, effective and fast, with minimal time wasting and at the end, while no one actually believes this should cost $100 a pop for maybe 10 minutes work, at least it left me feeling I had spent my money to some purpose.

Twenty minutes later, we arrange to get glasses made. We look at frames that are in no way worth the money charged. The day eyeglasses became primarily fashion statements the world must have shuddered, because out went the idea of “you need glasses to see” and in came “will this match my handbag” decision-making. Consequently the process of selecting frames, the up-sell to largely useless extravagances like “glare reduction,” and the rest of the varied time-wasting connected to actually getting the glasses renders these places incapable of real service. They’re too busy selling peripherals to actually focus on customer needs, and since they have a trapped market – if you actually need glasses, they own your soul – they can basically get away with being self-serving. At least they were polite, and delivered the product roughly when they promised. Of course, they didn’t make it themselves, almost definitely, but then who actually does. They just did the monkey-work of checking boxes on a form, faxing the prescription to the actual manufacturer, and so forth. Still, overall, a reasonable pretence of giving a rat’s arse worth of care. About $600 later, give or take, and we became the proud owners of cheaply manufactured fashion statements neither of us cared to make, which are have a warranty to last exactly as long as they know they’ll last, after which we can kiss our hopes goodbye.

This service model, if it were isolated just to the occasional shops (we don’t, any of us, buy eyeglasses every day), would probably be acceptable. Sadly, this all passes for “quality service: in modern parlance. And, it was clearly self-service for the business owner, especially because we had just seen actual service from the optometrist. When you can compare two experiences back-to-back, and one had more to do with getting the cash than providing the service or product, you know you’ve experienced self-service.

Plain-Old No Service

Okay, skip sideways to my Internet Service Provider (ISP), a company named Shockware Wireless. Never have got much quality service from them, nor any real service on occasion – the network DNS servers (required for any outbound connection at all) have had a reliability index of about 7.1, which means that 71% of the time the service would be available. Not good or stable, mind you, but at least running. The other 29% of the time, paid for in full since these service quality issues have no impact on the charges, there was no service at all. Granted, living in what amounts to the dead centre of nowhere, you get used to this crappy customer abuse; but I doubt any ISP is immune to greed.

But the real knee-slapper with Shockware is that it’s a pure customer-managed process. You have to call them to get them to tell you basic things like, “Oh, we changed those DNS server numbers a week ago,” or, “Oh, we knew about that problem last week.” And even then you talk to people who convey quite nicely that they are annoyed you called, and irritated you actually expect them to deliver you the service you paid for. Recently, not only did I have to call twice to alert them their DNS servers were unreachable, a week or so back I had to call to ask, “Why do I have no Internet service at all?” To which they replied, “You went over your limit.” To which I asked, “What limit?” “14 GB,” says the voice. (I’m not actually complaining about the limit, as it was a MS month, where they issued so many products I was doomed. I might observe in four cases multi-gigabyte downloads were scrubbed because the ISP lost their service and forced a restart, but hey, who am I to observe crappy service has its costs.) Anyhow, they nickel-and-dimed me for the privilege of having basic email, which I have, and I shrugged them off and contacted another provider (we only have two out here!), who may or may not give me a real option come Tuesday. (Here’s to hoping they show up, unlike the furnace salesman who made an appointment with me, but never bothered.)

My actual service observation here isn’t that anything related to computers sucks, which is largely true, but that in the specific case of the limit there was no posted information anywhere, in the contract I signed (I still have it), or on their website. There is some vague blather about limits, but no hard figure; and there is no way for the consumer to monitor their use. And it is this latter point I would categorise as the no-service example of all time. Consider that with all products today you regularly get sucked up to the Internet somehow. (Adobe Acrobat launches a licensing program and calls home every time it is launched, for example.) Now, if an ISP want to impose a fair-use limit, I”m 100% in support of it. ordinarily, I never use the kind of bandwidth that would cross one – and when I do, I’m comfortable paying for more if that’s the case. But two things have to happen to make this a service issue, rather than a no-service issue. There has to be a clearly posted limit somewhere, so the customer can know about it; and there has to be a way for the end-user to monitor and thus control their bandwidth use. Say, of all things, a wee bar graph that says, “Y’all used a GB of bandwidth so far this month.” Without both those elements, what we have is an arbitrary “trust me” approach that isn’t functional, because it doesn’t actually make it possible for the user to participate.

And, ultimately, regardless, if you cut off service, no matter who you are, you need to inform the customer. It’s kind of a thing, if we can define thing as a necessary step in correcting the customer/provider relationship. Otherwise, you probably have a customer who will grow weary of your crappy failure to provide service. When you, as the customer, have a no-service relationship to your service provider, and ask yourself what exactly you are paying for, you know the problem is insurmountable.

Exceptionally Bad Service

The last category of service I’m going to flog on here, or blog on if you prefer not to be poetically inclined, is that classic and all-too-common form of service that is so bad it took effort. Again, sadly, my example comes from the technical world, though I doubt it has to given how many examples cross my mind. This one just happens to be in the forefront.

I wanted to buy the wife a new computer, and needed a new test box at the same time, so I had a choice. Buy Dell (or from some other national pit), or go with the local chaps. I had a decent time of it with the local droids the last time, so I went with them again, figuring at least this way someone has a job outside East India, or wherever Dell and the boys employ people these days. So, I said to myself, “If they can even come close on price, within a couple hundred bucks, I’ll buy from them.” They did, about a hundred above the Dell bottom line, and so I said, “Build it and I shall come.” I was told, “Be ready for you Monday.” Then on Monday, “Sorry, Thursday.” Then on the next Monday, “The supplier blew it. Thursday 100% guaranteed.” Then on Thursday, calling since they are a 24 minutes drive I didn’t want to waste, “Sorry, nothing here like that.” Finally, the following week (Tuesday I think it was), I get it. It’s wrong, of course, missing a wireless network card, but I shrug as that is a luxury I can add later.

I take it home (I had existing hard drives and RAM for it, all basically brand new), and because I happen to actually be busy it sits and waits. I open it to discover the technician wedged the fan chassis of the case in the bottom slot, abrading the fan power line so badly it was almost down to bare wire; the power cables were looped back on themselves in one case; the front-side panel connectors were incorrectly connected (one dangling loose, which alerted me to the fact the hard drive light wire was cross over the power switch jumpers), and despite two separate manuals saying “configured for default HD Audio” and a case that supported it directly, the old AC’97 (that’s as in 1997) connector was jammed in instead of the HD Audio one that was about 1 inch to its left.

So, I fixed those problems, grumbled as to what exactly the charge for setup had been, and loaded the other parts in. I plugged it all in, switched the switch, and…nothing. That is, unless you count the fizzling sound of the bum power supply. A proof, that the technician couldn’t evidently be bothered to, oh, say, just on a chance, switch the power supply on to make sure it wasn’t a brick. As someone who has owned something in the neighbourhood of 30 PCs in the last 22 years, custom and off the shelf, and built at least a third of those from scratch, I recall an old rule. When you build a chassis with a motherboard, get the fucking cables in the right places (it’s called reading the labels) and then…switch it on. It doesn’t matter if it has a hard drive, because you are switching it on to…make sure it actually works. If it doesn’t, you have some possible causes, and if you address them and make sure it switches on, the customer – who paid you – will be much kinder.

Now, this is what one has to call exceptionally bad service. You really have to go out of your way to provide a customer experience that make the customer regret getting out of bed. And, what we have here, in this example, is the full-blown leery customer experience at its worst, because now as I go to battle to get anew power supply that actually, oh, works, I will be faced by the twin problems: trust they know what an actual product that works looks or sounds like; and realisation I paid them to assemble it, but they did it so badly I cannot risk them installing the new power supply. Hence, the carry-on version of this bad service model, where I will be doing what I paid them to avoid, which is building a box essentially from scratch. I could have, in the end, got a better deal on the parts from almost anywhere and saved the hassles.

The Point

The whole point of this is that the last two weeks have seen me run face into so much true bad service I have to wonder if it is possibly part of the reason for a shitty economy. I mean, really, we moan about the absence of local businesses, but look at the service models and you’ll see why. If service (what used to make local business function) is going to be exceptionally poor everywhere, why not buy it from the guys employing foreigners to pretend to care? The problems in the economy stand directly on this service model failure.

The Counterpoint

Now for the scary counterpoint to all this.

My other massive purchase this month was a twin bed for my daughter, with the requisite headboard, a night stand, mattress, and, of course, princess sheets. (She kind of wanted “Cars” sheets, but the wife nixed that, though I will probably sneak them in eventually. Yes, Holly, dear, that was a joke.) nearly a grand of cost, and because the Wal-Mart in Taber never has anything, a solo trip to Lethbridge to jam it all into my minute Saturn Ion. I drove, I bought, and Wal-Mart did the following: attached a human to me to carry the stuff out (she was small, but at least trying), sold it to me at a great price (Sears, the same basic product set was $700 more), and even wished me a nice day and thanked me. I brought it home, all the parts were there and worked, and my daughter (3 and change now) helped me put it together. Granted, her help consisted of breaking up Styrofoam and beating a box with a hunk of thick cardboard (her hammer), but we had fun.

Now, if Wal-mart can provide me service (even if it isn’t the best service), and make me say the words, “I’d buy this crap again,” how in the bowels of almighty Hell can people I pay to do almost nothing act like a bunch of crack-smoking chimps?

And that’s the ending harangue, with this thought for all the retailers who make the sign of the cross at the sight of Wal-Mart: They are not winning because they are cheaper, but because you are too damn lazy to offset the price differential with quality service. (You just know, with Sears, had I been willing or able to foot the extra cash, it would have been delivered to my door.)

Service is not about mechanical lies such as “thank you for your business,” or “free coffee.” Service is about taking our money, providing what we paid for, and making sure we are not doing your job.

Am I Happy?

2009-08-19T23:49:00.001-06:00

Every so often I get asked the question, “Are you happy?” Most often I am asked by people who seem to suspect I am unhappy, or who actually don’t care and are being polite. I don’t mind either way, but find it amusing no one ever asks unless they suspect the worst. Why is that? No…I suspect I know; it is because people today seem convinced happiness is a necessary requirement of life, they are too selfish to ultimately care about anyone but themselves, and they want to soothe themselves by being polite. Or, they actually do care, and are confused enough to think it matters to their happiness. I’m not sure which batch makes me chuckle more.

Strangely, I think about whether I am “happy” so seldom my usual answers are unsatisfactory to those asking. The follow-ups from those people who bother are such leading statements as, “You don’t seem happy,” or the infamous “You seem stressed.” I am often flummoxed by these statements, because frequently I am stressed and “happy” (if such a state is even real); or unhappy and stress-free (well, maybe not quite stress-free, thank the gods). Usually the folks asking are left with the lingering (and evident) suspicion I am being evasive, when in reality they clearly miss a few salient points about my world view. As I’ve been forced to think about this often lately, I decided to mull on it in blog form, mostly to wash away the stain of long technical posts I recently made.

My world view (as regards happiness) is summed up in a few statements:

I don’t (won’t) believe the human condition is such that people are meant to be “happy,” whatever that might mean. Life is a brutal struggle, from birth, and just staying alive is often an accomplishment. I don’t believe in bliss as a lasting state, and suspect happiness (if it does exist) is sentimental and overrated. Life is brutal; death is the end result of living; and, all considered, there are equal measures of pleasure and pain. Having written that, it is important to add I am not a pessimist. Yes, I believe the world is steadily getting worse in many ways, but people have not changed much in thousands of years. We have the most noble possibilities, and the worst instincts; we are the worst caretakers of the world, but have the most potential to change it for the better of all. I am not an optimist either, as I know that in almost every case selfishness overwhelms selflessness – as it should. I am just a realist; I know that people will be stupid, and wonderful, and disturbing…and I appreciate it all. What I won’t say is that it matters one whit whether most human beings are happy. So few matter to me I couldn’t much care; those few I care about can choose their own happiness, but I would caution making my state any component of theirs.
My personality is not such that I can be blissfully ignorant (I wish I were!), and as such I have a challenge from the outset where happiness comes into play. I can’t ignore the realities that preclude me being jubilant. I don’t consider blind anything of much value, whether it be faith or certainty in one’s own view. Every day we are proved wrong, and our choice is to accept it and change our views or be ignorant and foolish. Either way, I doubt happiness matters; the actual decision is what matters, and fools make the decision to be unmoved by the proof of their stupidity. I am a stupid human being, no better than an average ape, and my fallibility is a constant source of amusement and frustration to all who know me (and a few who think they do). In the worse sense of the word I am a narcissist who learned that behaviour battling his addictions; I have tried to shape my reality to suit my needs, rather than accept it. I fight that propensity now, but even in fighting it I am aware I win only by being vicious with myself. Part of this comes from the knowledge “the con” works on 95% of the population; and part comes because I really wouldn’t flinch if half the population of the earth dropped dead overnight – unless it included any of the handful of people whose fate I am intimately considerate of. (Yes, bad grammar, but the point remains.) My sociopathic lack of concern for my fellow man (save those I actually know) is a flaw that renders me incapable of caring that much about the universal state of happiness, and consequently I don’t consider my own nearness to that state very often.
I consider the very concept of “happy” flawed, because it is too subjective to be of any value. I have recently been gleefully pleased to have had a fresh bun I bought at the local grocery store, and would say in that instant I was definitely “happy.” I also recently paid down a whack of tax debt, which should make me happy according to some but just makes me feel tired. Tonight when my daughter unintentionally punched me in the scrotum I was in pain near tears, saw she was on the verge of crying, and buried my desire to curl up on the floor and weep by taking her onto my knee and trying to reassure her I was neither angry, nor permanently injured, because I love her so much I would just as soon be crushed by a ten tonne rock as have her cry because she hurt me. In that instant, trying to console her because she punched me in the crotch, I was “happy.” I was happy because I felt that my life had momentary meaning, because in this Universe my pain mattered enough to make her cry because she hurt me unintentionally. So, if that qualified as happiness in my life, who am I to judge happiness? To each their own; to a few real meaning; to most pure waste.

So, am I happy?

I don’t know an answer that satisfies most people, because I don’t concern myself with it. I am regularly pissed off at the world, feel weak and tired, and am certainly unhappy with my physical state (health and wellness escapes me lately). But I am constantly “happy” about certain things, and I can write them out easily, without feeling the least doubt.

I am happy to have the best daughter I could, who for all her flaws (most of them projections of mine, I add) is one of three reasons I wake up every day and bother to try to succeed. I would move the world for her if I thought it would make her comfortable, safe, and give her a moment of joy. I would die for her without a thought beyond whether it would save her in some way, and that knowledge gives me a deep peace. It tells me that while my decisions may make me a shitty father, I will at least be one who loves her enough to choose her above me. She matters more, after all, and that I know it makes me deeply pleased with myself. I wasn’t worth much before now, in real terms, and she has given me meaning.
I am happy to know I married upward in the chain of life. As difficult as things have at times been, I am always fascinated Holly is with me (she could do better, for sure). Even when she is driving me half nuts (well, maybe more than half) I am conscious I deserve the good and the bad of our relationship. I have found myself working hard to make more good than bad (often failing, but trying). When you wake up with the intent to do right by someone else, you are already better than the majority of the planet. My marriage is challenging, but good; and it is the foundation that will lift me up or cast me down…all of it because of my choices. I am aware I would never have had children by choice, but for having the right wife (who was that and more before we technically married). What meaning I found in being part of something more important than myself was the first step beyond myself, into something hopeful.
I am happy to wake up most days with some sense of purpose. I won’t waffle meaninglessly or poetically about this, as I presently hate my work, but I have purpose even where I have no desire to undertake tasks.

I also know I will never be happy with certain things that are the closest truths I have discovered:

I am not a good person. I never will be. I am a mercenary at heart, and my milk of human kindness is focal at best, curdled at its worst. I really have tried to care about the world, but I don’t; I can’t. My priorities are my daughter and wife, my cats, my business efforts (because they support the former), and staying alive long enough to be sure Katarina will stand on her own. Somewhere in the list I know I should exist, but I consider myself unworthy of inclusion in that august company; and I am convinced that is for the best. I am a true narcissist, and to manage that I need to be fifth business. I will never be happy with myself, in the psychic sense. It isn’t that I deserve to be smote (though I probably do), but simply that I am conscious I must matter for reasons that do not include my aggrandisement. Nothing I do will change what I am at the core; but what I choose not to do will make me a reasonable approximation of a decent human being. It won’t change that I dislike myself; it doesn’t have to.
I will also never be happy with the outcome of my business undertakings. I know the ideas and concepts are worth more than I gain from them, and it frustrates me to no end, though I understand it. Arrogance aside, I work too hard, get too little back from it, and feel cheated by the experience. That said, I’m not sure I have to be “happy” about these outcomes. I would settle for satisfied.

So, am I happy?

The fact is I am tolerably spry, most days, if not ignorantly satisfied. But as for happy? To be happy I would have to care whether I was, and I don’t. So, to those who want to know, for real, I would say this: I don’t consider my happiness relevant to my life. All I care about is that I have a life, and that it changes in ways that interest me. I will be sad, I will be happy, and that is all transient. If I was to focus on the consideration at all it would paralyse me, as it seems to have done for most of the world. When bad things happen in my life, I slog on because I don’t take it personally. I have sometimes failed to achieve that distancing from the crap of life, but I recover: a good self-pity usually does it for me. I mope, I regroup, and I piss in the face of fate…a safe decision, largely because I don’t believe in fate; I believe we choose our lives. We choose them, and unless we are cowards, we manage what those choices result in. Anything else is delusional.

A Vital Link About Operating System Architecture & Ring Protection

2009-08-13T17:08:00.001-06:00

For the history of this, check out this link: Wiki On Ring Protection.

Thoughts on Operating System Architecture

2009-08-12T18:08:00.000-06:00

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,Technical,Idea

Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit edition) is now my primary Operating System (OS). Working with Windows 7, really working with it rather than playing, has got me thinking about the core problems with most modern OS software.

User Account Control (UAC) – Protecting the User from the User

The UAC feature of the much-maligned Windows Vista exists inside Windows 7, but is a significantly less intrusive and annoying. I won’t argue UAC a bad idea, because it isn’t – it is perfectly aligned with the majority of computer users, who are ignorant of even the most basic behavioural use-risks they undertake daily. What I will observe is the very fact it exists, or needs to, is a sign none of the modern OS architectures is really a proper platform model. (And here I lump them all, because even Linux isn’t what one would call respective of this platform concept.)

We are expending enormous resources in modern systems by protecting the user from the user, essentially trying to substitute machine intelligence in place of the lack of human intelligence. One could argue (I won’t) that the real problem here is human, of course, but in every sense the actual problem is the OS design itself.

A properly designed OS would follow the model shown in the figure here (my own drawing, simplified to make a simple point). If this model was in place, we wouldn’t even have to protect the user from the user. These rings of privilege (getting ever closer to the hardware) would be sufficiently isolating to mean that something like a virus would be almost impossible to create without leaving at least a strong ownership signature. Yes, it would be a certificate control mechanism that really was harsh, and a loss of backward compatibility, but we have the latter anyhow, and it is about time someone tried to take this old idea of rings of privilege and returned it to the core of OS architectures. (And to those who argue Linux had this, it doesn’t. Yes, it is better, but you can still haul the entire OS down by a bad driver condition, which should be impossible.)

What this picture is really saying is the following:

At the core of a proper is the “OS Kernel” and it alone should sit in the central ring, the only object allowed to touch the CPU and RAM and other hardware directly. MS has tried to do this, but the fact is utilities can still grab resources directly by brute force if they are written appropriately, and that fact, allowing that, defeats any ring-defence design. Only the kernel should be in this place, because it is the only safe decision.
The “OS File System and Core Drivers” should come next, and be the only thing in that layer. And when I say Core Drivers, I don’t mean a fancy top-heavy printer driver, or any of those other device drivers that seem to be designed against the principle that compact is reliable. We are talking about the bus drivers and other low-level hardware requirements; basically, the plumbing of the OS. The fact that there are even third-party low-level drivers in the ecosystem today is a troublesome challenge because that introduces instability. The problem is even the makers of OS software violate this principle of separation, which makes it unlikely we will ever see the core stability we deserve. But mind that I’m not saying third-party drivers should be outlawed, which is foolish, but I am saying they should be small, purposed and all drivers should require the OS manufacturer to certify them for installation; and should enforce a layered management model to them. The low-level driver should be pipes, providing hardware hooks and on the top end a Core-Perimeter Hardware Programming Interface (HPI) to surface its outside attachments.
The “Presentation Layer and Hooks” should be the next ring, and should not include any third-party code at all. The layer below where third party Core-Perimeter HPIs are installed must by design adhere to a strict standard in how those HPIs are written, so this layer can expose an abstraction layer for those HPI interfaces, allowing communication management between that secondary ring and the ones above the tertiary ring. In this layer, for performance reasons, the OS Presentation Layer should exist, simply to avoid the bottlenecks that might come from trying to manage a cross-perimeter management of the Hooks. And yet, the Presentation Layer should use those same Hooks to reach below the layer, meaning all transport communications need to travel through this isolating interface. As well, the Presentation Layer should not include superficial Graphical User Interface (GUI), but rather only expose the classes necessary to run one through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This would create a chain of isolation through this third ring in the model, meaning that on the Core-Perimeter (the boundary below the third ring) all conversations would be through a strictly credential-approved HPI, and that on the Presentation Layer perimeter (the boundary above) all conversations would be through a strictly credential-approved API. Strictly speaking, all security should be isolated in this layer, “presenting” its input channels to the surfaces above with the underlying mechanisms using an accept/reject mechanism.
Then comes the “Local Software” layer, where local software should run at a trust level that is inherently isolating. This is where the OS GUI would run, alongside packages like your word processor. In simple terms, once installation is approved for a product it should be placed into a trust-cache in this layer. The argument against this is that if a malicious program got in here it would be destructive, but the point is that if this was an installer-only model, the system should require approved and ghost-checked credentials from all software to run on this layer. In layman’s terms, the packages themselves would have to be signed to work here, and this should rely upon a credential-checking mechanism that actually uses a private/public key model that reaches out and confirms a binary signature upon installation. Yes, it could be abused, but part of this model would include that to get that signature would require the actual software in it to adhere a strong-boundary principles. Again, in layman’s terms, it could be thought of like this: a piece of software I write could use my key-signing credentials to generate a certificate to reside on the OS manufacturers servers, with the credentialing process reflecting the purpose of my software. For example, if I write an image viewer I am using a read-only mechanism, and so it is much easier to credential my software, because its manifest tells the OS that I cannot write to the file system at all; or if I want a full-featured read/write product, the manifest may reflect that need and my credential process will be more complex. The whole argument here is that there has to be a trusted level of execution in place. We have read, read/write isolated, and read/write global conditions with most software now. That isn’t safe by its nature. (There is no reason, for example, that a word processor should ever be allowed to write to the OS directories; and yet, it can be done.) People would argue this credential mechanism impossible, but it isn’t based upon a simple principle of least-required-privilege. If my application is a fiery word processor, and I chose to mark its executable manifest with “reads and write sonly to its own isolated directories, or folders the user specifies during install” then we have protection that is rational. Basically, only software with this manifest model for privilege resolution should be allowed in this layer. Yes, it kills some handy utilities, but who cares; it would be more secure by design. Above this layer there would be an API with both networking and other basic virtual services exposed, with no write-back options at all.
The “Perimeter Software” layer is the wild west, and should be preserved for things like web browsers and the like. Virtualised access to the layer below is the key to protection, meaning that Local Software can call up, but any calls down from here have to pass a virtualisation layer. An example serves where web browsers are concerned, in the context of Antivirus software. When I run my browser the system would create a sandbox (a virtual representation of the PC) that isolated all its activities. To talk to any other application it would have to make a request to a trusted provider (something in the Software layer) to provide an execution context; to write a file it would write to a virtual file system image, where the file itself would be scanned by the Antivirus subsystems before it ever left that protected memory space (possible because they would live below, and be allowed to hook upward). Even then, with a downloaded executable file, the user would still have to copy the virtual file to the physical file system, ultimately preventing any payloads since that copy would be prevented ever reaching below the protected perimeter if there was no signature, a problem with the signature, and so forth. The worse case would be the virtual sandbox ends up corrupted, and tries to call down, which would prompt the governors of the Local Software layer to simply isolate and close the virtual environment. (I am not talking about pure PC virtualisation here, but about imaging the APIs to a defended single point through a governor that believes the software there is suspect by nature. By proper design this layer would allow saved-state virtualisation, meaning that even though your browser may live here, it would appear to the end-user to be no different than other software.

No one enforces this ring model now, or probably ever will, but the fact is it is workable model now more than ever because hardware is sufficiently powerful to manage it. (In OS design you can see many half-assed attempts at this.)

I also know the objections to this (but software X would fail, and I need software X!), but they are false. In terms of long-term usefulness of these tools, we need to introduce risk-averse architecture. Another objection is that this wouldn’t solve the problem of malicious payloads, but that is false as well, because it assumes the code-to model remains unchanged. What I am talking about is that development tools would be required to lead this advance, and code to the protected model. In other words, without a manifest in the executable header that adhered to the OS requirements, it would be a no-run scenario. This is Draconian, sure, but it is possible and has an inherent protective purpose – it would create a solid underlying tool-set moving forward. As to those who say it would kill shareware, I would observe it would likely have the opposite effect, since most decent shareware has a better track record of adhering to the least-privilege principle, and those few that need higher trust would be easily approved by marking their manifests to ensure the installer made explicit confirmation a requirement from the user. Finally, being as the model requires more user-involvement during installations, I can see the argument it would fail there, but the reality is only credential-bearing software would ever seek the approval (ex. Can this package access directories outside its own installation folders? If so, please specify which ones.)

Returning to what sparked this thought process, presently the UAC interface flops up a message for me every time I launch my Word Processor (MS Word 2007), because it is launched with “Run as Administrator” privileges. (A necessity as I run a macro-based package to help me with design documentation.) Now, since I elevated it by explicitly telling it to do that, one would think once would be enough; but it still warns me. This is A-OK with me, but senseless and pointless from the perspective it actually makes my machine less safe, because after awhile I don’t even see the pretty box it pops, I just click because I know I just tried to launch Word. There is absolutely no real reason this trusted tool should do this repeatedly, but it does. (MS, I know, has dished the idea of white list, but that is an arbitrary and foolish decision on their part. Users must be given the right to be stupid.) This problem would cease if the model discussed above existed. (And yes, I could turn of UAC, but it isn’t that annoying any more, and it is a handy reminder of when I am acting as an administrator.)

My next blog is likely to be about another annoyance in Windows 7, but as there are few, I anticipate returning to my usual ranting eventually. Probably soon.

Dual-Boot Partition Tricks: Windows 7 Clean-up

2009-08-09T21:42:00.001-06:00

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,Windows XP,Dual-boot,Partition,System Partition,Boot Manager

This is another of the technical posts, as a nod to recording this tricky little process (simple but damn inscrutable until you see it). First a description of how this happened, then the technical process to fix it.

The Problem

On the single physical drive I was running when I installed Windows 7 RC and Windows XP, XP was on the first partition (0) and Windows 7 was on the second (1). XP had been installed first, and several revisions of Windows 7 went on over time, always formatting the secondary partition before a clean install. Recently, upon migrating for good to Windows 7, I ended up with the standard problem that disk 0 (old XP partition) was both the “System” and “Active” partition. The “System” designation meant that the boot loader was on that partition, so to blow it away (not even possible in Windows 7 drive manager) would have destroyed the boot capability of Windows 7. In essence, some 200 GB of drive space was locked out by this.

The Desired Outcomes

I wanted to do three things:

Get rid of the damnable boot loader menu that offered Windows 7 or “Earlier version of Windows.”
Move the System and Active designations to the partition containing Windows 7 (the only way to accomplish outcome 3).
Reclaim that partition to use for other purposes (I won’t be dual-booting this physical drive any more).

The Solutions

1. Dusting the Boot Load Menu

The first order of business was easy enough. You can do it either using the bcdedit command from a command line (run as an administrator), or by downloading EasyBCD and using the GUI it provides. Being lazy (and because the applet is good), I chose the lazy method.

Download the EasyBCD utility, install it (works great on 64-bit Windows) and run it (run as an administrator is the surest approach);
Click the “Add/Remove Entries” button;
Select the “Earlier version of Windows,” or whatever it is named (might vary some depending on when you started dual booting);
“Delete” the entry; and
“Save” the changes.

You could do some other tweaking, but that alone will hide the boot menu and load Windows 7 without the requisite 30 second delay or required keystroke.

Two to go.

2. Move the System and Active Designations to the Partition Containing Windows 7

This one is a little more complex, or, shall I say, unnerving, but it can be done without ever leaving Windows 7 (again, requiring administrative privileges). It works every time, but probably isn’t for the fainthearted as there is some risk. That said, BACK UP YOUR SYSTEM FIRST. This is presented as workable solution, with no liability if you bugger it up. (I assume C: is the partition here, but as far as I know it could be any letter you have assigned to the partition you want your OS to live on; substitute your appropriate drive letter.)

Go to Control Panel, Folder Options, and on the View tab set it to “Show hidden files, folders, and drives” and below that uncheck “Hide protected operating system files,” and then “OK” or “Apply” that directive.
Open two explorer windows, one showing the drive that is the current “System” partition and one that is the partition you want to become the “System” partition.
In the current partition you will see a hidden system file named “bootmgr” and a folder called “Boot” in the root of the drive; and you can copy both to the partition you want to make the bootable “System” partition. During the copy a message will be flipped up telling you BCD is in use and can’t be copied; “Skip” that file (and probably a second BCD text document that will also complain it is in use).
Open a “Command Prompt” by right-clicking on it and running as administrator (privilege elevation is required here). Now do these sub-steps at the command prompt:

Type (without quotes): “bcdedit /export C:\Boot\bcd”
Hit the Enter key
For completeness type (again without quotes): “bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device partition=C:”
Hit the Enter key
Close the command prompt if you wish. (Steps 3 and 4 are not strictly necessary because the next step will change the “Active” partition, and that will override the entry in BCD).

Open Control Panel, Administrative Tools.
Open “Computer Management” and under “Storage” select ‘Disk Management.”
Right-click on the partition (C: in this example) you want to declare “Active” and choose “Mark Partition as Active.”
Confirm that directive (OK it).
Exit all those windows remaining open, and reboot the system.
You can return to the disk management utility (see step 6) to observe that the OS partition is now indeed the “Active” and “System” partition, meaning it has handled the boot loading. (If the partition isn’t marked “System” fairies must have been gnawing on your computer during the reboot. Truth told, the machine didn’t reboot at all if you screwed this up royally.)

One to go. (And, yes, some of this is probably doable by EasyBCD, but I find the command line more reassuring.)

3. Reclaim that Partition to use for Other Purposes

This one is as simple as the first solution.

Open “Computer Management” and under “Storage” select ‘Disk Management.”
On the partition you previously couldn’t get at, you can no format it, or even repartition it using the disk management interface. (Basically right-click and choose your command.)

You now have that drive space back to do with it what you will.

The Objection

Now, I know the purists out there are going to observe because of the order of the partitions (0 being reclaimed) the free space is almost certainly physically in front of the newly minted “System” partition. That means you cannot de-allocate the space on this old partition entirely and expand the “System” one. It would be much more effective to clean install to a fresh drive, and be done with all this, but…some people may not make that choice, and in case you’re happy with your Windows 7 install that went into that second partition, this will at least claim the first partition as usable. In my case I made two separate partitions out of the one, and now have a repository for setup files and a vault to store in-process backups.

Final Thoughts

I’m fairly sure this would work whether or not the partitions in question are on separate physical drives, but I would strongly suggest that a better way to do that would be to simply remove the old system drive, install clean, and then install it as a secondary later, since it can be reformatted that way easily.

Really, a utility to do solutions 1 and 2 would be fantastic, since it can all be done from inside Windows 7 without multiple reboots. But somehow the old command line just calls out to me.

Visual Studio 2003 Under Windows 7

2009-08-09T20:48:00.001-06:00

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,Visual Studio,VS 2003

The last post contained a mention of how useful XP Mode in the Virtual Machine (VM) environment is. A bit more tweaking has led me to abetter than virtual solution for using Visual Studio .NET 2003 (VS 2003) on Windows 7 (64-bit Ultimate). It is more efficient by far if you are developing web applications, as the VM is done away with in favour of a few tweaks.

The steps to get VS 2003 running on Windows 7 to do ASP.NET 1.1 web development are:

Install Internet Information Server (IIS) 7;
Install .NET 1.1 on Windows 7 (see How to install ASP.NET 1.1 with IIS7 on Vista and Windows 2008);
Install the FrontPage Server Extensions on IIS 7 (see Installing the FrontPage Server Extensions on IIS 7.0);
Install VS 2003 (see How to use Visual Studio 2003 in Windows Vista, which works for Windows 7, and you don’t need to mess with the UAC); and
When running the a project, remember to “start without Debugging” and then hook the worker process (also described in the link for step 4).

While not ideal, if you need to support a legacy application it works.

A few notes:

If you mark the shortcut to the VS 2003 development environment to run as administrator (compatibility mode under properties, which you get to by right-clicking) you can avoid much grief.
If you set the worker process identity that runs ASP 1.1 applications (process shown in link for step 4) to your user account, or some such, you can greatly ease the process, assuming that account is administrative and can access the project folders for the application.
Remember to attach to the worker process rather than the browser when attaching to item to be debugged.

I give a dutiful nod to the entries and articles linked above.

Windows 7 RTM: Transitional Thinking

2009-08-08T23:54:00.001-06:00

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,Setup,Configuration

On August the 6th, 2009, Windows 7 RTM, the gold release for the new Microsoft (MS) Operating System (OS), was released to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Having a good experience with the Release Candidate (RC), I decided it was time to bite the 64-bit bullet and transition not only from Windows XP as my primary OS, but from the 32-bit builds to the 64-bit Ultimate Edition of Windows 7. I downloaded the bits on the 6th, and on the 7th I took care of my wee princess, who was sick and needed me a lot more than the computer. After she went to bed around 7 PM, I dug in and began the transition from the old to the new. This blog post logs my experiences, and tosses in a record of some technicalities that may provide value to other hopeless folks who just need to take this plunge.

The Installation

A few points of observation:

There is no direct upgrade path from Windows XP regardless of where one heads, so none of this transitional work was as simple as slamming in a disc and sitting back; yet, despite the need to do a clean install, this was one of the most straightforward installers I have ever seen.
I installed to a secondary partition (I always have a couple OS sets going, just to amuse myself and experiment.), meaning I had zero-risk of loss of productivity. Even though the install is straightforward, I recommend anyone braving this transition do the same. Clear another partition and let the beast dual-boot until you get used to the new OS.
Phase 1 of the install (copying the guts an such) went smoothly and took ages (as expected), making for about 60% of the total install time. The only quirk noted was that on rebooting the boot loader list showed two entries for Windows 7. I had the RC on the partition before and while I chose to format the partition during the installation, mostly to check to see how the boot loader list handled the process. More about that shortly.
Phase 2 of the setup was the post-restart configuration, and much to my surprise the speakers on the box clicked (proof the driver was working, which was not the case with the RC); and the video resolution was set perfectly, along with the OS even identifying the make of monitor I have attached. In every way, this hardware detection process was flawless, and the best I have ever seen from a Windows install experience.
Phase 3 started with a pleasant surprise, though small, when the boot list erased the old Windows 7 entry and cleaned itself up (it wasn’t always that smooth in the old Windows days). The speakers clicked a few more times (was it the wrong driver?), and the network was detected and configured correctly as to its hardware components. The questions asked of me were few, and the end result was the only complaint I have is that the Software Key should be asked for and stored in the pre-detection phase – I’m sure an algorithm exists to approve it that early in the process, and not doing so is annoying.
Post-install the sound worked perfectly, the network was immediately functional, auto-updates went off without a hitch, and the new trouble-shooter immediately informed me my old flatbed scanner had no valid driver. It asked if I wanted it to make a suggestion, I let it, and it provided a direct link that got me within two clicks of a driver that worked on the first try.

Those technicalities aside, the general impression I have is that they did this correctly. I had a 64-bit system, a flawless install experience, and all the minor annoyances of the RC install were gone. That every system component had a valid 64-bit driver was a surprise to me, and that they worked perfectly made me classify this experience as an ideal OS install. I have been installing OS bits for 27 years now, and this was the least painful one of all time. Kudos to MS on the process and execution of an impressive technical install.

Kudos given, I do have to add a few quirky asides:

It would have been handy had MS provided some kind of upgrade path for Windows XP (the file settings gadget I didn’t try, but it is far too technical an idea for common folks). Most of the people who might like to upgrade to this OS simply have no path to it, and businesses are going to choke on the rollout costs of having to reconfigure boxes. Not having an easy upgrade path for XP is a head-scratcher.
As for the Vista upgrade path, one exists, but I wonder why anyone would bother. The bits are not that different internally, and the reality is the last Vista SP solved most of its remaining issues. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) here is a bit improved, but not enough to imagine Vista users will champ at the bit to get this build.
This leads me to my focused thought on upgrades: they are either too complex for normal people (from XP), or largely irrelevant to folks with newer systems (Vista). So, why even bother? Why not just force a clean install, but write a pre-installer utility to snapshot the old OS first, then merge out the main configuration elements?
Another thought that is valid here is why this OS has a 32-bit version. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone running older hardware (not worth the effort, as they will have XP and no easy path up), and given that almost all new machines are 64-bit capable, why bother with the other? I’m sure businesses will suggest they need it, but the reality is this system, like Vista, needs newer hardware to shine, and XP is still fine for an old banger of a box doing word processing. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the next client-side OS from MS will be pure 64-bit. They are transitioning Office 2010 to that world, and I can’t see them holding off much longer and maintaining the old builds much longer.

Overall, the installation of Windows 7 is a joy to behold, and the end result is a fairly clean disc, unlike many past versions of MS software.

Post-Installation Quirks & Impressions

I’ll preface this section about two enormous balls-on-ice quirks by observing that neither have to do with MS, and I’m not sure they could have resolved them easily if at all. Anyhow, there were two “issues” that arose after the post-install shutdown and restart. (I always do one hard shutdown after a successful install to get a feel for the raw OS load times from cold start.)

Shutdown didn’t work correctly. The OS shut down, but the fan on the machine kept whirring – a no power-down condition. I had to do a hard restart, and after a speedy reboot (the OS is rather quick compared to Vista) I dug around till I discovered that the issue was with the “VIA 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller.” It’s irrelevant exactly what it is (its a fire wire connection controller), but the cause of the shutdown failure turned out to be simple: the controller was monitoring for wake-up calls (to pull out of hibernation, etc., during an incoming data packet condition). For anyone who ever struggled with the issue, the device manager in control panel will get you to the controller entry (as named earlier) and if you right-click, select Properties, and go to the power management tab you can quash the issue by checking the box beside the words “Allow computer to shutdown…etc.” This resolved the shutdown issue immediately. (I imagine the BIOS could have killed this, but device manager is wiser most times when it works.)

After the shutdown and power-down was resolved, I ran the performance index utility and discovered the second oddity. My box was reporting a mere 3 GB of RAM (it had 4, and will have 8 Monday morning). This led me to dig, and discover the second quirk (again, no fault on MS).

Modern hardware is almost always 64-bit capable, with a host of powerful tricks built in. One such trick is memory mapping, which is an asinine way to allow 32-bit Windows to maximise the channels and get 3 GB instead of 2 GB off most common workstation motherboards. (The other 1 GB is usually punted to the video card, so it isn’t wasted. Technically Windows 32-bit editions should be able to address all 4 GB, but that isn’t possible in the morass that is physical address management on modern workstation boards – and, that explanation isn’t technically precise, but it gets the point across, so we’ll keep it simple.) Now, a 64-bit register set should have the ability to get 16 Terabytes or so, at least theoretically, but most workstation boards aren’t designed to come anywhere near that. The reality is that the cost of building a wide-address board is too prohibitive for most desktops (server boards often have much wider RAM options). In my case the maximum practical RAM is 8 GB (more than enough for me to do anything I could dream of doing). The technical lecture aside, though the memory mapping function in the BIOS on most boards like this can be called a pain in the proverbial arse, since when it is enabled to allow the 64-bit OS maximum breathing room, the 32-bit Windows versions will be dropped from 3 GB of usable memory to 2 GB. In itself that isn’t bad, per se, but it is a technical limitation that has no foundation in necessity – there isn’t a real defensible reason not to expose the whole RAM configuration to the OS and let it do whatever the hell it pleases, ignoring it as necessary. Having that setting is just an irritation for folks who will make the 64-bit transition.

After enabling memory mapping the OS saw its 4 GB spread, and was happier; and I can only imagine it will be much happier when I maximise its breathing space. I run several Virtual Machine (VM) sets and this extra RAM allows me to run them simultaneously without degrading host performance at all.

Now, for the impressions:

Windows 7 is faster than its predecessor;
Windows 7 is cleaner than its predecessor; and
64-bit Windows is a much better experience than 32-bit Windows, or at least feels more responsive on my hardware.

Overall, this is the best OS MS has released in 10 years, at least, and this is a statement from someone who would swear by a well-managed Windows Server ever since it was called by that appellation. That said, thee are some distinct negatives to note:

Some people will hate the new bottom taskbar interface, with its jump lists and such. You get used to it, but overall it is a pain to deal with initially. What is particularly jarring is that the visual differentiation between active programs and shortcuts is too subtle. You tend to initially spend a lot of time trying to figure out if you already launched the damn programs. That last a good few days, but once the light bulb goes off the transition comes fast. Still, MS should have considered a tutorial in the OS about the taskbar, given its massive overhaul.
I hate Windows Explorer (since Vista, really). The problem with it isn’t its look and feel (it’s chunky and hard to navigate around), but the absence of a “rooted view.” In XP I used to install a registry hack that would root a folder, making it possible to click a folder (Setup, perhaps) and “Explore from here.” The folder list then treated the folder as the root of the tree, and you could focus. The new navigation pane on the left always shows all folders, and the massive number of them makes dragging and organising files almost impossible. Maybe the feature is still hidden deep in the OS, but I’ll be damned if I can find it, and losing it is a productivity nightmare when you deal with large caches of files (like code libraries).
The last annoyance is how the new OS treats “hidden files.” Back in the XP era I could do something sneaking in my Programs folder (off the start button, which is now an orb). If you didn’t like the way an installer flung crap around in there, you could simply mark the folders and icons as hidden. Even if your OS was set to show you hidden files, the menu didn’t. In essence, you could rearrange to your hearts content without some installer buggering up because it thought a shortcut was missing (going into repair hell). This feature is gone, and in a sloppy world is sorely missed.

By the way, my performance index on this box (the hard drives are not the fastest on the face of the earth) rose to 6 just by turning on memory mapping. That’s meaningless in real terms, but it was nice to see the indexing system they used was thoughtful enough to revise based upon getting the extra GB of RAM to play with.

Applications…and Hell…and More Applications From Hell

I’m not a religious man, but I would like to think my curses on the people who build application installs at least make them go prematurely bald. because the OS was a fresh install, I had to reinstall my working set of applications, since I intend to stay with Windows 7 as my primary functional OS now. The list was long, and specific to my work in many ways, and…I quickly saw a clean OS turn into a hellish mash of crap (though it still runs better than XP ever did). This section is just gripes, with some observations:

AVG Anti-Virus: excellent utility, blistering decent pace, and a good installer. It put one folder in the menu, and asked at that, and even asked if I wanted to have a desktop icon (I said no). This was a good install…but it raised a point for me that I’ll jot here: Why do these installers not all ask these questions, and why, even still, are we still in the era where it is nearly impossible to avoid menus just being flung into the main one? Even AVG ended up as a menu in the main programs group, and frankly I prefer it to be in Accessories/System Tools/AVG where it belongs. (Why, you may wonder? Well, think of it this way. Like many such applications it sits in the notification tray and is fully accessible from there, so I never seek it in the menu unless something is horribly amiss. By sticking it in the programs folder direct, it ends up bloating that menu unnecessarily. It’s my machine; make it my choice.) Still, I’m not knocking AVG here, just observing even a good install can wreck a neat menu.
Windows Live (the messenger, blog writer I’m using now, photo gallery, etc.): A neat getting started menu off the main menu suggests these applications, and I installed the trio of ones that are deadly handy. Minimal fuss, a pleasant install, and good functionality for the fact they are free. No complaints on this one, though, again, Messenger will flutter into the damn taskbar now rather than the notification bar, and it’s annoying. Also, let me put the folder where I want it…easily.
Firefox (latest release): Backed up my configuration using an add-on in the XP partition, installed in the new one, installed that add-on (FEBE, for those who care), and let it restore everything. Perfect installer, perfect configuration approach, and it would be given the gold star but for its instance of jamming itself in a folder off the root. But, I renamed it Browsers and tossed the IE 8 shortcuts in there, then added Firefox to my taskbar. As easy as kiss my hand, I was back online properly – MS needs to take a lesson from Firefox as to configuration. Mind, IE 8 is a good, possibly great, browser; but Firefox is slicker.
Google Chat: Another decent install, though in this day and age…seriously, an uninstall icon? The OS has a gadget to uninstall junk. Quit with the extraneous icons! As well, let me put Google Chat in my Communications folder. I like it there for a reason, because again this applet sits in the notification tray. I can use it from there, without my main menu being sloppier.
Paint.NET (latest release): Easiest install of all time, adds one shortcut in the root menu, and bows away gracefully. This is a free graphics editor that is highly recommended. It doesn’t even get a grunt of displeasure.

I’ll leave the other utilities aside for now, and say that they all need better installers. Let me be in charge.

At this point, anyone who is still reading just knows I’m getting to something….

Let me preface this next section by saying I’m a developer, full time, and my clients are Windows users, so I am. I have no hate on for open source products, or Linux, or anything of the sort; I’m just bound to the environment my clients want, since they pay the bills. Consequently, since it feeds me, I am a “MS guy” in the sense that I use their tools, eat my own dog food so to speak (write my own utilities), and am bound by existing projects to some oddball configuration needs. You know this can’t go anywhere pleasant….

SQL Server Compact Edition: There’s a 64-bit version of this, and I tried to install it; it promptly informed me it required me to install the 32-bit version first. Now, I need this thing for work (on handheld components), so I did as it asked, but…what the hell is wrong with whomever built the 64-bit installer? If there’s a dependency, so be it, but bind the installer with all its dependencies. Then do a check, and if its there, skip to the butt end of the process. This kind of asinine oversight is the same as when I dial a phone lately. I dial ten numbers, and it says, “the number you’re calling is long distance and requires you to dial a one before it.” Okay, fair enough, but since you know this, machine, just do it! Same with failing to dial all ten, and going for the old 7-digit dial. It tells me this local number needs me to dial 403. If you know this, just do it! And if you know your installer will bitch and force the user to install another package first, just bind it and do it for them. It’s annoying.

And here we roam into the most bizarre adventure I had. To log onto MSDN and download the package I needed (no big deal), I launched IE since the download manager off MSDN needs that browser to work well. And I found out MSDN tanks with a 64-bit browser (the download manager is 32-bits). I had to manually launch the 32-bit IE (64-bit Windows has it, too). No big deal, still, but any website that needs a specific bit-width browser is being ridiculous. The install went fine once I got the bits downloaded.

SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition: There’s a 64-bit version of this engine, and I went for it. (Most client side tools are 32-bit, making for a sloppy directory structure.) A long install. but flawless except for the four thousand menu items it felt necessary. And here I come to my next gripe about menu folders. I know I just installed “Microsoft SQL Server 2008.” There is no need to jam Microsoft ahead of the SQL Server bit, or even jam 2008 after, really. And if you must, then you go with a folder structure like Microsoft/SQL Server/2008/etc. Make my menu smaller; and stop making every shortcut contain your corporate name! It’s annoying, and hard to read, and unnecessary. At least, if you must go there, give me a choice to eliminate the damn excess – and then respect my changes when I update the installs. If I rename “Microsoft SQL Server Studio” to “SQL Studio,” when I install the next Service Pack, is it really necessary to jam in a duplicate shortcut with the long name? I know the argument here is simple, and technical, but at this juncture an OS should know the shortcut by a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID). My choices should be respected, and that GUID can handle the installer duties adroitly. Excepting that annoyance, the Service Pack went on neatly, and the Books Online update did the same. 64-bit SQL Server is faster, and better than the 32-bit version. Kudos to the team.

So far, so good, right? Yeah, well, the devil’s own satanic herd of sodomites was lurking unbeknownst to me, the innocent MS guy.

Outlook 2003: I own several versions of Office, and never saw the need to upgrade Outlook past the 2003 version. So, I install it every time I rebuild. And…I bitch about how awkward the install is. Then I bitch because the settings files never quite return to life, and I have to rebuild them. The folders are fine, but all considered this is one of those stupid installers. It throws junk in fifty-seven different directories (literally; I watched it), installs bits you explicitly say not to, and then creates at least six folders that are empty. They remain empty, and make the Windows Explorer navigation panel harder to use. And, of course, the application always wants to smack in data files where it wishes them, making it feel like the entire data structure model was designed by a retarded chimpanzee. A sloppy installer; not a pleasure; a sign of things yet to come.
Office 2007 (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote; I don’t need the rest): If the Office 2003 installer is a vicious baboon, the Office 2007 one is an asteroid the size of Earth hurtling directly down to smash into the groins of all living things…at light speed. Aside from the over one hundred folders it flings around, it also pulls a billion pounds of updates (larger than the entire install set at this point by about 20%). And then it commits murder on the menu, by insisting everything is in “Microsoft Office 2007,” and “Microsoft Word 2007,” or “Microsoft Excel 2007.” It tops it off by putting “Microsoft Office Tools” inside the first folder, and dropping in a few more “Microsoft” prefixed shortcuts in there. I arbitrarily shorten these later to “Office,” containing “Word,” “Excel;,” etc. and even make the sub-folder into the neatly named “Tools.” I know this is a small gripe, but the OS has to start enforcing rational thinking if the vendors won’t do it themselves. On my very wide display the names of these shortcuts get attenuated and end up with a trailing ellipsis. Why go to that bother when the solution is to be rational with the shortest names possible? (And since the hidden file trick no longer works, future serve packs will rename my choices.) The products are good; why isn’t the process? And to whomever decided the settings wizard was to be dropped for the 2007 edition, a pox on your house! It took two-and-a-half hours to get Office restored as I like it. (yes, I know the OS File Settings wizard might have worked, but I was testing a theory of mine.)

And there is indeed more pain on the horizon. If you’re still reading, you know you’re bored.

Visual Studio 2008: I need this tool, so I install it (and its blasted service packs). It’s another product that loves long names, and long folder names. Really, would it be so hard to have a folder like Microsoft\Visual Studio\2008\etc.? Or better yet let me name my shortcuts…like…oh…VS 2008, in the Development folder? This install was painful, but went smoothly overall; and kudos to those involved.
Visio Enterprise Architects Edition (2007, but the regular 2007 lacks the drivers necessary to do what I do): I use this for database modelling discussions. It’s handy; but its tied to VS 2005, and since I refuse to install that for this, I end up having to hack in a fix. MS…you gave me the product, let me use it without hacking at it! It’s stupid and unnecessary, and this brings me to my next universal gripe: the OS needs to evolve to solve this kind of horseshit tying. Something to store all keys, save them in a portable file, and make them hook to a single user private key…should allow the OS to activate and restore the settings to any application that complies with the rules.

And now we come to the topper, which is about OS transitions, and about realities:

For my legacy applications I need Visual Studio .NET 2003. It’s a requirement, since some folks will not pay to have the code bases updated when the application functions as desired. Vista killed the VS 2003 product because the debugger got buggered; Windows 7 is the same. Now, that’s fine; that’s acceptable transitional progress. But why is it so damn hard to install VS 2003 in a Virtual Machine running a copy of Windows XP SP3, 32-bit version? Six hours, and three tries…and finally a functional VS 2003 in a VM. Unacceptable only because the problems were avoidable, and focused around strange quirks like setup failing due to long path names because of network shares. In a 64-bit host system, this should be avoidable; in a well-designed VM it should be easily rectified. Of all the installs, this was the most wickedly damaging, because to even install a development tool (and that’s all) I had to install web services (though I didn’t need them in the VM), extensions the tool doesn’t even use, and jump through flaming hoops to get anything to work. (XP Mode in VM settings is nice, though.) Still, six hours? It was a punishing process after a smooth OS install. And…ultimately, all because the upgrade path doesn’t exist.

Last Thoughts

Windows 7 is good, capable, and solid; but the absence of an XP upgrade path, and the complications of rebuilding a workstation from scratch, will hinder its uptake except on new boxes. That’s a shame, and could have been solved so easily.

Final Advice for Anyone Needing VS 2003 in a VM

Beware you need to update the XP Mode image Windows 7 uses to contain IIS and the FrontPage Server Extensions before launching the installer. It will choke otherwise.
Beware you need to move the installers et to a local folder, or map to a drive, to shorten the paths, It will choke otherwise.
Beware you cannot develop mobile products on the emulated VM, because an emulator cannot run inside an emulator. Sensible, but problematic if you have old CE handheld code.
You can access the host web server if you pull a fast one:
- Set the host IIS (Internet Information Server) to bind (www.mySite.com for example);
- Set the host to have a static IP;
- Edit the VM hosts file (system32/drivers/etc/hosts) to point the static IP at the pretend host name (192.168.2.2 www.mySite.com, for example); and
- from that point you can browse the host Internet Information Server for development purposes.
You can also configure IIS 7 under Windows 7 to run ASP.NET 1.1 applications if you wish, and configure FrontPage Extensions to the IIS 7 environment. With some tweaking you can even debug remotely against it from the VM.

Ciao for now. The next posts will be very, very short.

Conservative Bashing…Not Much Different Than Gay Bashing?

2009-07-21T23:35:00.001-06:00

This is about the almost certain political fallout after Tony Clement denied support for the Montreal Gay Festival.

Everyone who knows me knows I’m the most prejudiced human being alive. I like so few people, I could be said to be prejudiced against everyone for one reason or another. Sarcasm aside, though, I am deeply prejudiced. We all are, and those who deny it are worse than those of us who admit it.

My main prejudice is against ignorance, and anyone who chooses to deny taking responsibility for the choices that shape their life. I have many others, but none of them are particularly relevant to this missive. I certainly don’t have a gay prejudice, but largely because I couldn’t care less what people do when the lights go out. I ended up in a gay bar once, almost two decades ago, because someone I was out drinking with was proudly gay. I’m no great looker (that picture on the blog here is actually pretty close to my actual face), but I remember getting propositioned that night by some dude with way too much aftershave on. I can still recall my thought process, in terms of options: a) punch him in the face; b) run for it; or c) politely decline and perhaps observe I wasn’t on that side of the fence. (Many years later I realised the fact that I never had “d) go for it” on my list must have been meaningful.) I chose option c, even when stone drunk, because it dawned upon me it was actually flattering to think this drunken gay dude must have thought I looked worth hitting on. The point of the amusing aside is just to point out that my gay prejudice is either not there, or buried even deeper than any prejudice I have against long sentences.

Back to the actual blog now.

This denial of giving cash to the gay festival will be framed as if every conservative out there is a homophobe. The fact that’s the way it will go amuses me at some level, but disturbs me deeply for a couple reasons:

Anyone who generalises to the necessary degree to imply all conservative thinkers are homophobes is probably a secret homophobe, because to give that idea any credence requires a predisposition. If the defenders of gayness are that focused on negative imagery, who are they to be making that defence? My defence of gay would be better, which is “it’s not my damn business, and so long as you’re not humping each other on my lawn, it’s cool with me.” (Yes, a joke of sorts, though, frankly, I don’t want anyone, gay or straight, to be humping on my lawn. It’s a decency issue being as I have a kid, who has enough weirdness to deal with.) Generalisations expose narrow-minded lack of thought; they do nothing to improve any of us.

As well, I think that anyone who can make such an assertion is raising politics too high. To define any person by their political view is an affront. It would be like me saying Ignatieff is a pretentious fool because he’s a Liberal. I have said that, but it’s because I’ve read something like seven of his books and fifty-so articles, and I find he projects himself as a pretentious fool. It’s perfectly fine to offer an opinion, even on someone you have never met, but it should at least be founded on the impression they made first-hand. (For example, while practically every negative advertisement about Ignatieff is true in as much as it uses his words against him, only a truly foolish person would be swayed by those. The point of them, of course, is to get people to question them, and then do something like Google Ignatieff, who can easily be hung by his own words and actions.) Regardless of what a person is politically, the shallow view that it defines them is disturbing because it is so common.

Regardless of why the government didn’t fund the gay festival, I would place odds it was purely technical, because I can tell you that none of the Conservative Ministers I know, and I know a few, are quite as stupid as to expose themselves as homophobes over an irrelevant issue like this. The problem, of course, is the media wants it to be homophobia, rather than observe a boring probability that it is just mechanics in action.

The message her is simple: if you want to attack anyone, attack them because of what they do, not what you wish they did to make them into villains. There are plenty of sound attacks against political ideologies that have nothing to do with personalities, and those attacks carry far more weight than any empty argument that projects how you feel onto the people who suffer your prejudices.

I’ll end with some examples of appropriate political attacks:

Conservatives today deserve to be questioned about why they have abandoned the conservative fiscal principles that define their ideology. I haven’t abandoned it, but my party of choice did for purely political reasons. Right or wrong, it raises questions about the ideological principles, and that is a serious concern – it implies that perhaps there is no real conservative ideology.
Liberals today deserve to be questioned about why they have no defined policy framework even after a brutal election, and why they appointed a leader rather than using their own party mechanism. The former suggests they have no policy, or it is hidden because it is problematic; and the latter suggests they have no democratic faith in their own membership to choose.
NDPs today deserve to be questioned about why they have defined socialist policies, but why their leadership has consistently avoided expressing those views whenever the political imperative presented. They have no government to lose, so lack even the poor political excuse the Conservatives have. Does their inability to stand by their own socialist view imply they don’t have faith in it?
The Bloc today deserves to be questioned as to their relevance given their founding principle (separation and independence of Quebec) seems to have been abandoned. Do they still believe it, and if so why are they not capitalising on the present situation aggressively? I don’t have to be a separatist to know that the country is in a weak position right now to fight separation. The Liberals left us with a scandal surrounding the last defence, and the economy is such that there wouldn’t be a strong fight if the ideology was strong.
The Greens, who I include just for the amusement, deserve to be asked one simple question: when will they present a political foundation that isn’t essentially an interest group that vote splits rather than lobbies the Ottawa system? Their leader epitomises the worst political hacking of all time, essentially selling her own party out in the last two elections to throw implied support to another party. The whole handing her to the senate if coalition happened was curious, and begs as to why? It certainly couldn’t have been a policy issue, and it looked like a pay off, but what was it really?

I could go on; I won’t.

The question in the title still remains to be answered: the answer is, yes, conservative-bashing is much different than gay-bashing. Why? Well, because a conservative being based is facile and superficial, since we are so clearly not defined as people by something as inconsequential as our political views. When you bash someone for their inherent sexuality, you are attacking a significant part of their identity; that’s much worse. Nonetheless…neither one is right, and doing either is ignorant.

Looking for Echoes in the Thought Pool

2009-07-21T22:58:00.001-06:00

This is probably one of those blogs I’ll regret. Well, no, I won’t, because I don’t actually give a rat’s ass what anyone thinks of me anymore, but if I did I might regret it as it’s likely to be snotty, sharp, and viciously antagonistic.

Or not; maybe it will just offend sensibilities of idiots.

Here’s where I begin: the listeriosis outbreak and the report that recommends changes based upon it.

First point…this took a year? Only a bureaucrat of truly useless order could believe it would have taken more than a couple hard months to examine this issue. yes, I know the data gathering took a while, but the fact is the science is clear – there never was any question where the bacteria came from, or how it actually got there. It is a known bug, and as such has tonnes of available obvious information at hand. Taking a year to clarify a systemic failure like this one is shameful, and a sign of how useless the public service and its adherents are. Even if the recommendations are valid, they are, to say the least, too late to be relevant to anyone.

Second point…this is political? The media takes the blame for this, along with every politician alive today. This is an issue of food safety with no political trappings. To suggest any politician would knowingly scuttle a system for food inspection is ludicrous, and far too much energy has been wasted on trying to pin blame on some political flag. To those who want to waste time on politics when public safety is at risk, I dearly do hope you suffer some illness related to a similar (and ultimately certain) repeat of this model for disaster. To the media, it moves me not a shred to say I’ll laugh when one of you fools chokes on a piece of ham for trying to politicise a public health disaster, and missing the opportunity to open a valid discussion about concentration of production.

Third point…the level of ignorance this has exposed is frightening. The real issue here was never the outbreak itself, because this bacterial scourge is common and many people suffer it every year; yet, because no one bothered to actually address the real underlying cause for concern, we have learned absolutely nothing from this. If we live in a society where we substitute rote mimicry for actual thought, we are already doomed. Doomed, because at the end of this event we are absolutely configured for a repeat, probably worse, regardless of whether every one of those recommendations in the report are implemented.

For the last 8 years I have focused on the concept of risk management, and I see the actual risk here is not one of a minor mess in some machine causing sickness (that affects the dead folks directly, and their families indirectly, but, frankly, unless you knew one of those people it was a shrug). The risk we face is that our food production mechanisms and manufacturing for resale structures are concentrated to a degree where an outbreak in one plant can kill indiscriminately across the entire country. This concentration of production is the actual risk, because the reality is bacteria and the like will get a foothold at some time in practically every machine ever created, no matter how one tries to avoid it. It is only a matter of time, since we haven’t any desire to examine the real problem, before it repeats. And at some point it will be worse. (Imagine, for a moment, a deadly substance in beer. Beer production is almost entirely centralised, and if that happens at one brewery, thousands might die before it was even detected.)

Since we never addressed this reality of modern production, our problem remains.

I called this blog by its title (see above, because I am not typing it again!), because what this event has proved is we have no substantive thought behind much of what passes for thoughtful reflection today. If this report represents the state of incident analysis, we are truly doomed, because it made no real gain in analysing the underlying or root causes. It simply parroted the known, and tried to lay blame without appearing to. Blame is worthless (and the ones to blame already took responsibility, which is better than blame). Blame does nothing to reverse the consolidation trend that created the severity impact of this problem.

For anyone who cares, the logic of this analysis is simple: if there was a deli meats packing plant in even every province, the impact of this would have been reduced significantly. A plant in Ontario, for example, would have killed a few people in the distribution vicinity; as it is, you can buy meat in Nova Scotia and end up dead because some bug clings to a machine in Ontario. That isn’t only unacceptable, but it is problematic because distribution itself complicates recall. By the time the message gets out, the distribution chain is so complex there are only two choices: panic everyone, or kill people while the information filters along.

You cannot manage public health risks, especially in food chains, by ignoring the severity impact of consolidated production. Doing so is managing risks by finger-crossing and raw ignorance.

Every society has something I call a “thought pool,” which represents the collective awareness of the society. One of those aspects of the thought pool is risk awareness, which is required to manage risks. The thought pool concept asserts that collectively, awareness will be conveyed by interaction, and in a solid communicative society you will end up with broad awareness of risks that must be managed to serve social ends. The “echo effect” as related to that is the idea that so long as any appreciable percentage of the members of a society is aware, the others can become aware because that awareness will echo when events triggers a reactionary cycle.

What should have happened with this report was one conclusion above all, which would have been we are at serious risk of repeating this disaster because production of critical food supplies is concentrated so much a single problem can rapidly expand beyond control to encompass a geographical region that cannot be managed effectively. To anyone who says that is asking too much, or the risk is insolvable even if identified (we can’t force companies to break down production), you can now move to the back of the line and try for some further grey matter at the next roundabout. The whole point is, until one recognises and states the underlying risk, it cannot even be managed to suppress consequences.

What happened instead was the authors (idiots would be a better word) parroted the known, and tried to sidestep the actual risk identification process, probably because they weren’t qualified in the first place (and I don’t care how many damned PhD papers they have; they are idiots by proof of action).

Now, having made a point, I want to observe this isn’t some isolated irritant. We’re seeing a preparatory repeat in the works now: H1N1 was treated exactly the same way by the media. They started in panic mode, reflecting the weak-minded idiots at the WHO, and then slipped into what I call shrug mode, where the story isn’t sexy enough to follow closely.

Even a shallow risk analysis would expose some facts of vital importance:

People who had Spanish Influenza are evidently immune to H1N1, which implies some ancestral connection (as yet unproved) that ought to give us pause for thought, because the Spanish Influenza was deadly once it took hold. If we repeat now, we have no system of sanatoriums, we now have mass/fast travel from distant points that will spread it faster, and those most susceptible to peripheral health problems now make up a significant majority of our population.
Initially, people dying from this had almost all had other health issues working into the mix. That is changing now, because the spread is broadening slowly, and the resource stress is starting to show. We have no reliable mechanism to fight this flu, or even treat it separate from other illnesses, and so the death toll will almost certainly rise as the sick folks stagger into hospitals.
We have not taken basic precautions to date, and once an epidemic threshold is passed, we will not have time to respond to slow the spread. If even 10% of the population gets this illness, our systems will be entirely incapable of handling the stress and maintaining other services. Worse, without a reliable vaccine, the frontline medical personnel will almost definitely be hit hard by this flu when it expands.

There are other facts, but the point isn’t to spew facts till one turns blue. The point is to view this in context of the listeriosis nonsense, and examine what public service response did there – nothing much, even a year later. So, what we have here is an assurance that if H1N1 takes flight, we will see responses that are slow, inefficient, and ultimately pointless from government sources. And, being as how the media repeats its approach, by the time we are in the midst of an actual pandemic influenza disaster, they will have squandered the opportunity to educate us as individuals as to how to slow the spread and suppress the systemic damage.

All this makes me think my whole theory about thought pooling is one I should abandon, as the depressing fact appears to be that there are no echoes to be had. No one appears to be thinking, no communication channels appear to be sharing, and at the end of it all we appear to have decided the individual isolation exceeds the value of society.

Now, I don’t think H1N1 will kill us all, and it may actually not be any worse than a bad flu at the end of its run (because it is taking its time spreading, it implies some inherent resistance effect is in play, meaning some people are immune to its worst potential effects). What I do think is that we are doomed unless we start to consider these events as a risk matrix, and start to make some effort to deflect or suppress risks. Whether that means creating a stronger public health focused food distribution model, or looking to change public health models to address future epidemic risks, we should be doing something – and writing stupid reports that miss the actual risk doesn’t qualify.

Real Men

2009-07-12T21:37:00.001-06:00

There are so few real men in the world today, I suppose the “real man” is almost an incomprehensible concept. Then again, I have a fairly strong suspicion real men have been lacking for a long time, perhaps since the beginning of the species, since times have not changed so much as people sometimes pretend.

This rant was prompted by an article about Winnipeg, where evidently craigslist is acting as a go-between for pimps and their chattel. I say chattel, rather than children and women, because evidently we still live in a world that considers them such…or we, the real men, would put an end to it. Since we haven’t, then it stands to reason my first surmise is right (and there are too few real men to make any difference), or we must not think of it as heinous (objects deserve no remorse). Of course, exploit the children of ten politicians and the law would be changed in under 6 months; as long as it’s poor people (and First nations people), I suppose it isn’t quite as bad?

I could take this wellspring of thought many places, from the absence of nobility in the world (not such a bad thing, as nobility is imbecilic), to a rant about how pathetic we are to consider crimes against women and children as anything short of an attack against the species (which they are given women give birth, and children become the extension of our species), but I’ll go in a more mundane direction.

Real men don’t create victims.

I could blather on about what defines a real man, but that one statement is enough of a clue to make any other definition irrelevant.

It is very easy to victimise people, because most people, to be indelicate, are lemmings with less hair and more mass. (Witness any of a number of reprehensible financial schemes, Jonestown, and so forth.) It takes all of five minutes to tag and bag a sucker, and even an ugly dog of a boy with confidence can score a loose woman at most pubs on a Friday night. Likewise, beating a child down is easy, especially since they can’t fight back; and, sadly, twice as easy since they often won’t, since children actually have the naive belief they can trust the people who “love” them. The fact all these things happen every minute, somewhere in the world, is a strong support that real men are scarce.

It would be a total cop out for me to not provide some definition of a real man, and also un-instructive, because it leaves the impression I’m clinging to an ideal. I’m not, so here goes…my short list of what makes a real man:

Real men don’t wear women’s clothes. That isn’t a shot at transvestites, as some of the ones I’ve known can belt out a great tune, but just an observation tongue-in-cheek. The actual point I’m rendering is real men don’t want to be women, in any way, shape or form. Real men have an identity, not an identity crisis, and they act within the scope of themselves, not as confined or predicted by their society. Quite shockingly, I’ve known a number of gay men who therefore qualify as real men, like my Uncle Robert (died many moons ago), who was comfortable in his own skin later in life, and had and held his identity despite the then enormous pressure to just not “be gay.” In blunt terms, good and bad, real men are comfortable being themselves.
Real men are made, not born. I’ve known boys who were hellish little drips when young, the kind of guys who were regularly deposited in lockers at their school, who turned into real men when they finally shouldered away the wreckage of the past and walked into their future intentionally. I’ve also known testosterone puppets who couldn’t keep their wobbly bits in check for five minutes, felt the need to bloody ever lesser nose, and very few of those ever became real men – they mostly became large, dysfunctional boys. Cut to the core, the reality is we are made by our experiences, and a real man will always surface past adversity because at some instant, maybe one that no outside being can detect, they will stop being boys, suddenly grasp their will, and actually progress beyond playing to actual living.
Real men are not pretty (well, sometimes, I suppose they are), and often are barely tolerable. Why? Well, it isn’t because a pretty-boy can’t be a real man, and it isn’t because real men can’t be tolerable. It amounts to a conditional perception issue that comes into play, because a real man won’t bury his thoughts, won’t subdue his irritating desire to “solve problems,” and can’t – I’m sure generically this will be proven – back down when he has faith in the rightness of his stance. At the same time, oddly, a real man will openly accept his responsibility when he is proved wrong.
Real men don’t have women as their “best friends,” because one golden reality is that a real man isn’t as capable of displaying his emotions as he is of having them. (Any woman alive who even thinks it possible a real man can be her best friend is deluded.) Having said that, despite the proof often cited, real men are not pigs. for one thing, pigs are much cleaner on average; but, mostly, it comes down to the fact real men haven’t the emotional expressiveness necessary to be pigs. To be a pig you would have to grasp an explanation of why it is wrong to drool when viewing a naked woman, and most real men can’t process that concept beyond a sad-puppy expression.

I could ramble now, but the points, while written with a smirk, are fairly truthful on several levels. They lead me to the actual substance of my rant.

Real men are not spectacular, nor easy to spot, and they are not generally the men most women lust after, or even admire. They tend to be the solid fools who plod on because they have a personal mission, not to better the world, but to live their identity to its fullest. They tend not to be mountain climbers, or race car drivers, or pretty-boy actors, or musicians, or any of those things. They tend to be men who will live and die quietly, and will never lose their ability to be outraged, disappointed, or disgusted by the society we’ve allowed. That’s because a real man doesn’t ever define himself on the basis of having conquered anyone other than himself, and knows that leaving victims is far too easy to be anything but pathetic.

If we had a few more real men, maybe we would actually realise a shared purpose that made the world a better place, rather than hide behind the freedom of individuality that makes it acceptable not to shut down a service that exploits women and children (and probably a few men). Craigslist…virtual pimping at its best.

The Failure of Democracy

2009-07-09T23:14:00.001-06:00

I am a conservative, both fiscally and temperamentally, but I am not a traditionalist. This puts me at odds with the vast majority of folks in the conservative movement, and in a position diametrically opposed to the present crop of autocratic liberals staining society. It does allow me to scoff at the socialists, I suppose, but that can easily be done without any emotional context, or idealistic context, since they have about as much to offer modern capitalist society as a gunshot wound to the temple has by way of imparting peace of mind. It also allows me to be wary of the environmentalists, and to look with ripe disdain upon the republicans disguised as democrats who are increasingly imposing their warped world-view here in Canada.

Unlike most of the conservatives I know, I actually know the difference between a democracy, an autocracy, a republic, and a half dozen other forms of popular government. I am not in any way a fan of government as anything but a utilitarian mechanism to express shared public will, so sadly I tend to fall on the right-wing fringe side of some arguments. I often feel terrible when that occurs, because I’m distinctly conscious of the perception others have of stances I have taken. It saddens me, really, because so few people today seem capable of separating sound policy, principles of governance, and such, from ideology and personal beliefs. A case in point is the criminal code nonsense that protects the rights of the accused in isolation of the accuser’s rights, which while noble is a farcical substitution of systematic process for direct justice. of course, stating such a thing is so politically incorrect today that as soon as those words escape me, a fairly significant pile of beings leap on me and bludgeon me with my inhumanity, not for a moment even considering the actual statement and instead interpreting it in their own ethical/moral context.

Not being a traditionalist, and not wishing to live in a republic (the USA can keep theirs), I find very little representation in our modern government mechanics to appeal to me. I am the sort of conservative who would abolish the Senate not because it is partisan (which it definitely is, always being stacked by one party or the other), but because it is archaic and unnecessary if the parliamentary system is reformed to be representative. I am also the sort of conservative who would have let the major auto companies die quickly, rather than arranging their slow death, all the while weakening the few competitors who didn’t need a handout, because I firmly understand that government interference never creates progressive enterprises. The goals of government and private enterprise are too much in opposition to ever make such interference workable. (As much as I admire Obama for his ideas, he is the worst kind of interfering politician, and I expect history will expose his deficit spending as a fatal mistake.)

Yet, because I am conservative I tend to express some fairly direct views that seem destined to be rendered inoperable because a significant number of weak-minded right-wing lunatics support the same conclusions without any benefit of substance or support. Harkening to my earlier example touching upon criminal justice, making it more specific, I can confirm for all I am personally and entirely accepting of the need for a death penalty in our system. As soon as that is said, of course, I suddenly align with a horde of idiotic reactionaries, even though my support for such has nothing at all to do with their causes. Try to argue the rationale stance, though, and modern society cannot even bear the discussion – largely because the conclusion is inescapable when one argues raw logic. I won’t claim myself right here, but observe that the absence of rationale discussion will never prove either proponents or opponents right. An inability to talk about vital topics is the death of participatory politics, and we have suffered that death.

The failure of democracy is not systemic, but because the participants have failed to engage the process of democracy to our collective advantage. Illustrations of this abound.

Take for instance the idea of proportional parliamentary representation. It is, when one examines its mechanics, perfectly suitable to introduce a better form of representation, but the resistance to it is immense because it is the first step to the destruction of the traditional party systems that govern at all levels today. Consequent to that resistance, the only forms we are ever offered are skewed to suit the political imperatives rather than the societal imperatives. In its raw form, representation by collective percentages would be truly democratic (and probably inflammatory), but we will never get this pure form because it will essentially cripple the traditional political class – it is almost impossible to buy an election under such a system, and it eschews adversarial stance in favour of true cooperative governance.

The problems we face today as a society are clear enough that a trip to a coffee shop will reveal most of them in a few hours, expressed casually in overheard conversations, but nothing changes; nothing changes because the people governing us have no stake in the society, since they are of a class above it. Try getting elected to parliament in this country as an independent, on the basis of ideas, and you will rapidly find one insurmountable barrier: the system is aligned to cost such an amount as to make winning a seat nearly impossible. If you are not fairly wealthy, or beholding to those who are, your finances will undo any chance of success. And this means we are governed by a privileged class, of largely professional politicians, whose skill-sets have nothing to do with improvement of the society. leaders do not exist in political realms except by pure happenstance, and then they lead their party at best, not the nation.

This might all beg the question as to what is better than democracy if it has failed, but again it is no a systemic failure. Democracy’s failure lies not in some fundamental flaw of the idea, but in how it is projected into our system mechanically. Part of this is the Trudeau legacy, where the country was positioned as a socialist one, shaping the modern mindset over decades to believe such bizarre assertions as healthcare is a universal right, or that there must be such a fantasy as social justice. These are false predicates, and the beliefs that have grown around these fallacies are the essential points of failure that make our democracy dysfunctional.

The problem with making changes to reflect the future needs of our society is that the governing class has made us dependents, and is eroding our freedoms by imposing rights in place of the social privileges we previously enjoyed. An exemplar of this is the embedding of “religious freedoms” in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There is absolutely no reason any secular democracy needed to create such a connective reference to religion, and by doing so we now expend enormous energy arguing religion in politics. There is no place for such arguments in government, because it raised the context of governance above its requirement. The same could be said of equality rights, which while fundamentally correct, have no place as a by-product of government. In our nation, now, since Trudeau, we have equality rights as defined by the narrow range of law, and the privilege of enjoying equality has been taken from us. Every time government usurps a privilege in favour of embedding a right, we create a scenario where exercising freedom is mastered not by societal acceptance, but by enforceable law.

This entire idea of degrading freedoms is at the root of democratic decay.

Consider a moment the pederast. By definition it is loosely any man who has sexual relations with boys. How many in society find this acceptable? Few, I would suggest. I would further suggest this same high percentage against pedophilia exists across the range of sexuality. As a barb to other conservatives (of the religiously confused sort), you will find very few openly gay men who find this acceptable, and I would hazard that in raw terms fewer gay men would consider it acceptable than straight ones. Realistically, the vast society has absolutely no compunction about declaring these fiends to be refuse. And yet, because of the rights imposed our freedom to exercise this social agreement is severely impugned. A referendum held with a question such as, “Should child molesters, once convicted beyond doubt, be sentenced to permanent incarceration?” would probably win a majority for such a stance; but because of the Charter conditions created by successive years of challenges where individual rights have superseded social ones, such a decision by society would almost invariably be overturned in a court. Why? Simply because we have no privilege to make such a choice collectively, and at the most basic level we would be advised that parliament can only act to change the law within the context of the charter. Permanent incarceration would be deemed cruel and unusual punishment, and the result would be struck.

By making the law (a system) the overseer of democracy (a process), we have probably deflected some potential abuses of the democracy, but we have also indirectly crippled the will of society, because dramatic change is nearly impossible. Both the governing class (politicians and their ilk) and the courts (more politicians, really) are to preserve privilege, and that means reinforcing traditional mechanisms to maintain authority.

The saddest aspect of the reality we have now is reflected neatly in the lack of democratic participation. Our voter turnout is pathetic, and while there are many contributors to this, the key one is that we have no form of responsible representation. What we have a wealthy men (and increasingly women) who are playing at politics, using public funds to feel important.

I remember, as I write this, an amusing conversation I once had with a friend who proposed the system would change when more women got involved. I recall laughing and saying this: “Women in politics will not change the politics, the politics will change the women from women into politicians.” Power is, as it always has been, corrupting. The only hope would have been that these women forced a change to the method we elect representatives, pushing pure population as a mechanism. They couldn’t, and so were converted to the same political animals they decried.

The problem is that the problem isn’t what people believe it to be. Democracy is workable; autocracy is not – and we are increasingly living in a society where class divisions allow those above us financially to “represent” us. But they do not, because they represent no one but themselves.

As a conservative I view government as utilitarian when at its best, because I am also a humanist; and government cannot impose nobility or wisdom upon human beings. What I mean is that a government must never forget its mechanical purpose, and must never aspire beyond it, else it becomes concerned with social engineering more than social facilitation.

Again, an example: one cannot dictate tolerance, because all the dictation does is bury the problem. In our country we have an increasingly oriental component in our society (like the entire world), and as such a great many older people have a certain degree of fear for their “way of life.” You can see the impact of this in Vancouver when “Asian gangs” are discussed. Never mind the vast majority of Asians have no great like for these few scum, your average Caucasian Canadian manages to step right to “too much immigration.” That the gang members are largely illegal immigrants is overlooked (by even the media), and that they generally prey on people of their own background is overlooked. So, government imposes some regulatory force (hate laws) and Human Rights Commissions rise as champions of minorities. Consequently, the anger at those dysfunctional commissions becomes ingrained, though largely unexpressed, and instead of ignorance driving opinion, the opinion is reshaped and buried with a visible proof (the focal commission). Governments cannot impose awareness.

The problem as it stands, obviously, is that our government began social engineering in a vast way in the 1970s, and out of that experiment a few good components arose (our health care system is one of the best in the world, regardless of individual experiences). Those few components were saddled with universality, without ever considering sustainability, and so now we have sacred cows wandering the landscape and we are paralysed by them. Where we should view these programmes as works in progress, never finished and always requiring managed change, we have in successive waves imposed such rights that we now have no capability to even ask the difficult questions, and certainly very little room to make the difficult choices.

This missive must end shortly, because my fatigue is getting in the way of my desire to see it to a logical conclusion in one posting. But I can return to the core of the idea, its kernel, and observe that what we have now is a system where we should have had a process, and as long as we allow that we will see a continuing weakening of our national, social fabric. This has nothing to do with immigrants, gays, straights, children, adults, polluters, or the like; it has to do with a significant failure on our part to restrict our government to its primary role. May the gods forbid the outcome we face if we continue to surrender our freedom for the rights as defined and interpreted by a system effectively created by a separated class of dilettantes and fools.

Holy Stupidity…and Politics…Again.

2009-07-09T19:33:00.001-06:00

Yes, another rant…much shorter than the last one; this one prompted by the recent outrage by some as to whether the Prime Minister ate or pocketed a communion wafer at the former Governor General’s funeral. This level of ingrained stupidity in our race is genetic, certainly; but, regardless, are we in a race to annihilate the species by compounding our ignorance at new levels of accomplishment? (Can ignorance be seen as an accomplishment? If not, why do we try so hard to project our extreme achievement as the most ignorant species ever dreamed?)

The issue, as the media would have it be, was whether the PM ate the wafer, pocketed the wafer, whether an aide lied, and so on; the religious nutcases who clung to this stupidity saw it as a “why was he even stepping forward to snag a cookie since he is Protestant?” Appropriate shrill outrage and denouncements followed on all fronts.

Now, I won’t defend anyone here (they’re all examples of people who have far too much leisure time), but I will say this: the priest who bitched about this stepped to the pew where the PM was, the PM looked a tad confused and tried to shake hands, then accepted the offered wafer. He didn’t step forward, didn’t ask for one of the damn things, and having the idiot priest who handed him the damned thing turn around and blast him for taking it/not eating it is just plain ludicrous. Worse is a media that gave this story any traction at all. I don’t care what your political bent, there is zero need to flog this dead horse. It was a non-starter, and disrespectful toward everyone involved. If you want to slam Harper, I can lend you my short list of reasons to be irritated by the man and this present government. (I’m a staunch conservative, and this current governments behaviour is against conservative principles, to say the least.)

But that’s all fluff; the larger issue for me is a simple one….

In this age why is any religion practising ritual cannibalism? Holy communion is just that, and in the Roman Catholic faith it maintains a literal interpretation that can make it nothing else. Even pretending for a moment it isn’t freakish, one would be hard pressed to find anything pleasant in the idea of eating one’s saviour (the bread represents the body of Christ, the wine Christ’s blood). This is the same behaviour the barbaric picts I descended from got vilified for. How does its context change just because some guy with a large pointy hat says its correct? Is eating one’s saviour somehow less vile than having a snack on the tribal leader who kept his people from freezing to death in dark ages Scotland? This was the story, missed by the entire media, who are apparently so gutless as to not question the inappropriateness of such dark ages practices. (Yeah, I know, questioning the Pope is a no-no, I’m clearly a heretic, but really…eating the saviour? Rethink that.)

Okay, ridiculous exaggerations and bemused outrage aside, I end here with some political observations that have been floating in my head for some time:

Given we have a secular governance model (supposedly), why is it religion is ever spoken of in the same breath as politics? Have we actually forgotten where religion in governance led us? Do we really want to restart an Inquisition, begin burning witches again (invariably women who questioned male dominance), and travel down those paths to war? And even if we forget all that, what in the name of any god, goddess, or gopher does religion have to do with what governments should be providing us? Then again, maybe if we had a priest bless roadwork it wouldn’t degrade so fast…bless this asphalt, may God make the heaving of stones by way of the mighty frost be resisted by the newly created blacktop.
Given we have a brutalised economy, poor governance at every level of government, lax to nonexistent environmental progress, and all those other social ills, why do we value the idea of government so little we treat dead politicians as anything other than rotting meat? This past Governor General was a political hack; all Governors General are political hacks these days. far from the Governor Generalship representing Canadians, it represents rather the governing class. If you want a real Canadian Governor general, try handing the job to a First Nations person, preferably one who hasn’t been a politician. Until this kind of nonsense changes, at least drop the pretence that these losers are more than corpses with pedigree. Not one of the living politicians in the Federal Parliament is possessed of even a middling aspect of leadership, none of them have our interests as a nation in mind, and not one deserves to be glorified by a state funeral. Politicians are not and have never been leaders; and leaders are seldom politicians.

I now have a headache, and must go see my daughter, whose cat died recently. This is somehow so much more important than this post I am completely oblivious to whether what I wrote has any value at all.