Weather, LinkedIn, and Easy Eddie

Yesterday’s high temperature was 42. The temperature now is –9 with a wind chill of –37. That’s about an 80 degree drop, based on wind chill, and it’s not done yet. Ah, winter weather in Minnesota.

Now that I’ve gotten the obligatory weather comment out of the way, on to other musings . . .

I got an invitation to join someone’s network at linkedin.com. That’s a website where you can register and then look around for your friends, past business associates, classmates, and so on. It’s really the same as Facebook and similar social networking sites, but the emphasis is on business connections. It’s advertising-based; when I added “beekeeping” as an interest, targeted ads for beekeeping supplies started popping up.

Sites like this are oddly compelling. I ended up fiddling around for an hour or so, adding stuff to my profile and looking for folks I knew. When I apply logic to this whole social networking phenomena, it seems to be something that we should have gotten over in about sixth grade, when we were making lists of friends. (Maybe they do that in second grade now.) But come on . . . “I have more people in my Facebook Friends List than you do.” Doesn’t that sound just so junior high?

These things that we can do now, that we were never able to do before. Reach out to the whole world. Try to connect. Is it a good thing? I suppose.

Changing the subject . . .

Yesterday I got an email from the uncle who sends me jokes and morality stories. It was a mushy tale about Butch O’Hare, the aviator that O’Hare airport is named for, and his dad Easy Eddie, who was a lawyer for Al Capone. The story was explaining to me that Easy Eddie decided to squeal on Capone in order to be able to hand down to his son a good name. This is a fine example of how you can spin facts in different ways. The facts are that Butch O’Hare was a hero, and that his dad was Easy Eddie who was a lawyer for Capone and testified against him. It’s also a pretty good bet that Eddie was killed on orders of Capone. But did he testify because he wanted to provide a legacy for his son, or to stay out of jail himself?

The saying is “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Sometimes it rolls quite a ways. I’ve known a few folks, including one person who grew up in the same “occupation” as Easy Eddie, who ended up quite different than the saying would predict.

Future Combat System

There’s an article in today’s Washington Post about the development of a new software system – the Future Combat System. This software is intended to allow the Army to, for example, “conduct a video teleconference in a tank rumbling about 40 mph in the haze of battle.” It’s a $200 billion project.

Talk about damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

On the one hand, how could you not try to provide your troops with the best technology available? If you don’t, and the forces you’re pitted against have better technology, you’re at a distinct disadvantage.

But the track record for large computer systems is bleak. This effort dwarfs Microsoft Windows, and look at how many years it has taken for Windows to develop into something approximating reliable. Windows was the product of a huge team, but they all worked for one corporation; the Future Combat System is the product of “dozens of contractors working across the nation, including in Clear Lake, Tex.; Huntsville, Ala.; Philadelphia, Mesa, Ariz.; Red Bank, N.J.; Seattle; and here, in Southern California, in an old rocket factory.”

This looks like another boondoggle like the FBI’s Virtual Case File system. I don’t think that it’s realistically possible to build a system this big that is reliable enough to actually use on the battlefield.

What to do? Aim a little lower? Try for simple systems that actually work, and build on demonstrated success?

Back from Peoria

I’m back.

As I mentioned in the last blog entry,
I was deployed to Peoria, IL to assist with the response to flooding in central Illinois. The picture included here is from Watseca. Route 24 (note the route marker) is the main road through the middle of town. I’m surprised that this event didn’t get more publicity in the media, as it did affect quite a few people. Even in Peoria, which is only about 100 miles away, there was little coverage. I got out for a half day off and several of the people I talked with were not aware of the flooding.

I spent my entire time at the headquarters in Peoria. We supported two service centers, one in Watseca and one in Pontiac. There was also a shelter. Each of the service centers had a satellite dish, as did the headquarters.

And now for a very specialized picture. Someone came up with this idea for installing temporary wiring on the ceiling. The traditional method is to use a cable tie around the ceiling hook. This method uses the material that’s used for spiral-binding a report, widely available at any office supply store. The advantage is that if you give the cables a good tug, they come down easily, and then you just have to take down the ceiling hooks. One of our crew measured the room and assembled the whole wiring harness in the warehouse, and then we were able to put it up in a few minutes one morning before the workers arrived. (The initial implementation used wireless for all the workstations, but it’s always more reliable to wire them.)

It was a good deployment and a good crew. I learned a lot, as usual. There are always a few new quirks and innovative ways of getting around them.

Peoria deployment

Just a quick note to explain why no wonderfully witty and informative blog updates for the past week or so.

I am currently deployed for a disaster operation for the Centeral Illinois Floods. This event has gotten little news coverage, but it did affect quite a few people. There are two service centers open, and still one shelter open. The headquarters is in Peoria, which is where I'm currently assigned.

I expect that I'll be here about another week. When I get back I'll probably have more to say.

Technorati

I’m not a big blog fan. I don’t spend hours checking out a few dozen blogs on a daily basis. But I do have a few that I try to keep up with.

One of these is Zack’s blog. Zack mentioned in an email recently a web site named Technorati that is supposed to be a place where you can list your favorite blogs, then go to one place to see which ones have been updated. It’s a nice concept, but doesn’t seem to be working very well. The information on when the blog was last updated isn’t accurate. Technorati says that they get notified when a blog is updated on one of the major hosts (like this one) so that they can send their spider to take a look, but it doesn’t seem to be picking up updates for several blogs I checked (including this one).

Even so, it’s a convenient place to consolidate a list of the blogs you want to watch. It’s a good place to see what everyone else likes and perhaps discover blogs that are worth your time to read.

Which reminds me of another observation . . . I enjoy using the Blogger Play facility to watch what’s being uploaded to blogs at blogger.com. But I continue to be surprised at the number of blogs that are not in English. I suppose that if you’re going to create a personal blog, you’re more likely to use your native language than if you’re commenting on a forum or making a web site. This impression that English is the language of choice on the Internet is a somewhat shallow one.

Savings? What's that?

I stumbled on to an article in today’s Washington Post that contains some interesting statistics:

As 401(k)s have taken off, the number of private-sector U.S. workers who can count on monthly checks from pension plans after retirement has dropped to 18 percent in 2005 from 39 percent in 1980.

As many as 35 percent of all workers have less than $10,000 in total savings and investments, excluding the value of their homes and any traditional pension, and 48 percent have less than $25,000 socked away.

50 percent of those age 25 to 34 have less than $10,000 put aside.

Is the pendulum swinging back to where it was before things like Social Security were instituted to attempt to provide some quality of life for folks when they stop working? I don’t know how these numbers compare to the same statistics a decade ago. Perhaps I am more sensitive to the issue because of the house fire Friday night, where I saw the family that had lost all their material possessions and I’m sure that they had no resources to start over . . . but no alternative but to do so.

Quilt pictures

We’ve been trying to document our quilts by capturing them on photos. It’s not as easy as one might expect. My first reaction was to use multiple images, stitched together, to be able to have enough resolution to do justice to the fabrics. The stitching software does a particularly bad job in this application, however. So I ended up using a single exposure. The resolution isn’t what I want it to be when I zoom in to see the individual fabrics. But the primary motivation is to document the quilts, and these images do that. (Remember that you can see a larger image by clicking on the one in the text.)

The first one is “Exploring the Stash.” [The collection of fabric, built over the years, is referred to as the quilter’s “stash”.] Cathy designed and built much of this quilt before we moved from Chicago and finished piecing it after we got here. I thought it would be neat to quilt it, so after working on some learning projects, I did the quilting. It’s the project that got me hooked on quilting.

The second one is my first project done from scratch. I had help matching the fabrics, but did all the piecing and quilting myself. “Exploring the Stash” inspired the design. It is a generous lap size, and intended to keep me warm while working upstairs this winter. Its name is “Puff the Magic Lap Quilt,” and the reason for that is explained in the last paragraph.

The third one isn’t a quilt and I didn’t have anything at all to do with it, but that didn’t keep me from including it in my blog. This is a wall hanging that Cathy made. The bird pictures are fabric panels that she bought for the quilt she made for her mom (next paragraph) but they were too large to include in the quilt. So she saw this idea of using woodgrain fabric to build something that looks like window frames. It turned out very nice.

Finally there’s the above-mentioned quilt for Mom. It is built from fabrics that feature birds, lakes, grass, and even has a garden in the corner. It’s not a traditional quilt with a pieced design, though it is built on an 8-inch square. Cathy designed it on the design board. My tiny contribution was to quilt it, and the idea was that the quilting should disappear. I like this one a lot. The picture doesn’t do it justice.

The last picture illustrates the influence of the batting – the material between the quilt front and the backing fabric. The quilt on the right, the thickest one, is Puff . . . its batting is wool, and it’s the thickest. The middle quilt – the one that’s the cat bed – is Mom’s garden quilt, and its batting is 50% cotton and 50% bamboo. The left one is the “Exploring the Stash” quilt, with cotton batting. It’s warm, but not as warm as Puff.