I supported the notion of impeaching Cheney enough to make T-shirts, which very aggressively failed to sell. Now that Kucinich has introduced a bill to impeach Bush, it's worth thinking about again.

Briefly, the basic argument for impeachment is that Bush committed many impeachable offenses. But just as Supreme Court decisions are rooting more in counting to five than in pure application of legal theory, impeachment is a political, not legal act. Probably most presidents have committed impeachable acts; after all, the US has gone to war at least eight times since the Congress, the sole organ with Constitutional power to wage war, last passed a bill declaring war. But only two presidents have been impeached, and neither was convicted.

Politically, both Bush and Cheney would have to be impeached simultaneously, which would lead to the speaker of the house succeeding to the presidency, which puts Pelosi in a very awkward position and probably ends up as a strong incentive for her not to allow impeachment. The other standard political arguments against are that it will distract from more important issues, and than Bush will be out of office very shortly anyway.

The strongest argument for, I think, it to begin re-establishing the basic civil norm that politicians, even and especially the president, must obey the law, and that there will be consequences if they do not. From that perspective, Ford's pardon of Nixon morally enabled the disasters since. A commenter at Making Light argues that it literally enabled some of the disaster-makers:

... if [they] are impeached (House) and tried and convicted (Senate), they will not get Federal pensions and they will be ineligible for any Federal office.

This is what should have been done to Nixon and Reagan's cohorts -- if it had we wouldn't be dealing with the current criminals.

A third argument would be that impeachment might help restore international respect for the United States (and restore some of our "soft power"). Between that, re-establishing rule of law, and removing many dedicated imperialists from government permanently, I think impeachment is at least worth serious public discussion. Otherwise, it's business as usual.

Google Foundation has a program, RechargeIT, to promote plug-in hybrids. This is very exciting because a plug-in hybrid can have radically less impact than a regular hybrid. In a nutshell, a regular hybrid is just a standard gasoline car with some doodads to make it more efficient. But a plug-in hybrid is a real electric car, that can also use gasoline so you don't get stranded on the road.

And now for the details. First, although hybrid sometimes means an engine that can burn natural gas or ethanol in addition to gasoline, here we're talking only about gasoline/electric hybrids.

Cars burn gasoline to move you around. That is, they spray gasoline into cylindrical chambers of an internal combustion (e.g., "inside-burning") engine, mix it with air, and then explode the mixture with a spark. The hydrocarbons—molecules of hydrogen plus carbon—in the gas combine with the oxygen in the air to produce carbon dioxide and hydrogen dioxide—water— plus some energy. The resulting hot exhaust gas wants to be much bigger than the space at the top of the cylinder where we detonated the fuel/air mixture, so it pushes a piston in the cylinder. The motion of the pistons spin a shaft, and that drive shaft in turn connects to the wheels via the transmission, moving the car forward. But only about 35% of the energy from the gasoline makes it even as far as pushing a piston. The rest just heats up the engine block, which heats up the coolant fluid, which heats up the air passing through the radiator. Unless you live in Alaska and hence diverted a bit of that heat to warming up the inside of the car, it's purely wasted energy. And of the fraction of initial chemical energy that did go into pushing the pistons, almost half will be wasted in friction along the path between the driveshaft and road/rubber interface, so that only about 20% of the energy in the gasoline actually moves the car forward. At best.

The exhaust gas, meanwhile, has some impurities, such as incompletely burned carbon (carbon monoxide instead of dioxide, the former being far more toxic) and even raw gasoline. It travels through a device which catalyzes the incomplete chemical reactions into finishing (hence, a "catalytic converter"), various other devices to capture other impurities such as sulfur from the gasoline, a muffler, and out the tailpipe. If all of that equipment is modern and in good working order, the exhaust gas is actually fairly free of toxins and smog-producing chemicals. It does, however, have plenty of carbon dioxide, which of course is a greenhouse gas the emission of which will possibly turn Miami into another New Orleans by 2050.

A diesel is much the same except that it burns at a temperature so high it doesn't need a spark; because of the higher combustion temperature, a modern diesel engine can be more efficient than a gasoline engine.

So what's a gas/electric hybrid? Well, it's a gasoline engine car with a set of electric motors and really big batteries. Big as in hundreds of pounds of batteries. What's the point? Well, gasoline engines aren't especially flexible. They like to run at a certain speed. Even with a transmission—a set of gears that let the engine shaft turn at a different rate than the wheels—cars are finicky. My old Toyota MR2 had an unusually wide "power band", from about 2000 rpm to 7000, but even it didn't develop much power at 1000 rpm. And to get a range that wide, the engine computer has to play tricks like spraying in extra gasoline that won't get burnt (called a "rich" mix), or extra air (a "lean" mix). I hope you will not be surprised to learn that a rich mix is not good for your mileage, or, for that matter, your catalytic converter. I'll skip over the details of Carnot efficiency and stoichiometric ratios; what you need to know is that any particular gasoline-burning engine can be made very clean and very efficient, but only in a very narrow range of speed and power. The engine block design that got 30 miles per gallon in my 2500-pound MR2 at 60 miles per hour (or would have, if I hadn't driven it with a 21-year-old right foot) will not be as efficient in a two-ton truck. In fact, it won't even be as efficient in the MR2 at 30 miles per hour. And that's where hybrids come in.

The thing with energy is that it can't be created or destroyed, only transformed. Power plants don't create energy; they just transform the chemical energy in coal or oil or natural gas into the kinetic energy of a spinning turbine, and then into electrical energy. Dams and windmills, well, you can probably figure them out yourself.

The other thing with energy is that it's hard to store. So almost all of the energy that we generate—by generate I mean liberate from coal, or steal from rivers and breezes, etc—gets used right way. And I don't mean right away as in "your call is important to us" right away. I mean that if you flip a switch to turn on the light on the ceiling, at the same instant a turbine in a big industrial building somewhere shudders microscopically.

The total power output of the entire Western United States power grid at any moment equals the total power consumption. (Almost. About seven percent of the output is wasted in transmission, turning into heat and that eerie hum you hear around power lines.)

The power grid notwithstanding, it is actually possible store power on a smaller scale. And that's what a hybrid car does. Each wheel has its own electric motor, and they all connect to a big battery. The big battery in turn connects to the engine. It tries to keep the engine running at its optimal speed, and when that speed produces more power than the car needs to move, the extra power at the drive shaft is converted, via an alternator, into electricity stored in the battery. When the driver asks for more power than the engine can efficiently produce, the battery sends electricity to the wheel motors to supplement the power coming from the transmission. Electric motors are more efficient over a much wider range of speeds and powers, especially in starting from zero, than gas engines attached to mechanical transmissions, so this can work out quite well. In particular, hybrids will often use only battery power at low speeds, with the gas engine helping push the car only at faster or freeway speeds.

With all of this extra gear, you can play some extra tricks. The coolest one is regenerative braking. Electrical motors can easily reverse; that is, they can turn motion into electricity instead of vice versa. So when you tap the brakes in a hybrid, the car does not need to push brake pads into rotors, thus converting your precious energy of motion into hot brakes. Instead, the motors turn into little generators, with your car wheels playing the role of the rushing river. The wheels get slowed and the battery gets topped off. If everything were perfectly efficient, you could start at the top of the Grapevine with a dead battery and empty tank of gas, roll several miles down the hill, brake to a halt, enjoy an In-n-Out burger, then turn around and roll all the way back up on battery power. (This would work better if the Earth didn't have any air to cause wind resistance, but then the milkshakes probably wouldn't taste right.)
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Regenerative braking is unique to hybrids, because you need both the electric motors and big battery. But the other trick hybrids can play is simply to turn the gas engine off whenever it's not needed. In particular, an idling engine always gets zero miles per gallon regardless of how efficient it might be. (Similarly, a really expensive Lamborghini which is lost and going in circles isn't any faster than a Hyundai, though it's much funnier to watch go past you the second time around.) This is something that most new gasoline cars are supposed to start doing Real Soon Now, since improvements in gas engine technology mean that starting the engine no longer wastes a minute worth of gas, the way it used to when Eisenhower was president.

The upshot of all of this technology and cleverness is that the current batch of hybrid gas/electric cars, most famously the Toyota Prius but also plenty of Hondas, Fords, and so forth, get maybe a quarter more energy out of a gallon of gas. So the Prius gets about 45 mpg. By the way, there's all sorts of controversy about how the US government calculates mileage. One of the things RechargeIT is doing is driving some Priuses around with lots of instrumentation; among other things, they are averaging 44.6 mpg over the last year. That's pretty good, but it's barely better than a diesel Jetta, which doesn't have the hundreds of pounds and thousands of dollars of extra equipment. And VW claims to have 60 mpg Jettas on sale in the US in months.

To make sense of this apparently poor performance, you have to remember is where a gas/electric hybrid gets its energy from. Yes, it has an electric battery, but what charges that battery? The Toyota Prius doesn't plug into anything. The only way that you add energy to the car is by pumping gasoline into the tank. The battery charges only when the engine is running. So all that fancy technology merely makes the car a really, really efficient gas-powered car. But gasoline engines have efficiency limits; the hybrid system lets the car spend more time at those limits, but cannot exceed them. The bottom line is that current hybrids are still 100% gasoline-powered.

I wrote about this when I first drove a hybrid Honda in Seattle's Flexcar fleet, five years ago. I wrote then that "by putting electric technology into a non-masochistic package (unlike the EV1 or earlier Honda Insight) that will actually sell tens of thousands of units, familiarizing consumers and generating real-world trial experience, it's a medium-sized technological step towards true renewable-resource cars." Well, Toyota's sold a million Priuses, gas has passed US$4/gallon, and the next step is at hand. The next step is plug-in hybrids. The difference between a regular hybrid and a plug-in is $10,000 worth of extra equipment and lots more batteries. Enough batteries for the car to hold forty miles worth of electrical energy. And instead of filling the batteries by burning gasoline, you can plug the car into regular 120-volt outlets. Suddenly, that entire second drivetrain, previously slave to the gas tank, is liberated. To be sure, it's still going to be slave to oil, natural gas, and coal-fired power plants, but the frying pan is a better place to be than the fire: even coal plants can be well over 40% efficient, and an electrical drivetrain is much more efficient than a mechanical transmission. Of course, from a climate change perspective we probably want to look at pounds of CO₂ emitted mile traveled, which is a research topic for another day, but remember that you can use zero-emission wind, solar, and nuclear power as well. So a plug-in hybrid is the best of both worlds: you can use clean electrical power for shorter trips, plug in anywhere to recharge, and if you don't have time to recharge or want to go more than 40 miles, you've got a gasoline motor and gas tank that give you all the freedom of a very efficient regular car.

How well does it work in the real world? Again, RechargeIT has equipped a fleet of cars with sensors, in this case four cars, and they end up getting 66.2 mpg. Since every single trip is recorded down to the second, you can start getting at the why of the numbers. Here's a trip from yesterday:

Speed (mph):

Engine RPM

Battery (%)

Even though the trip was only 3.6 miles and never broke 40 mph, it looks like the gas engine still kicked in 11 times, almost once per minute. And of course on a long freeway trip, you're going to completely deplete the pre-charged battery and then all of your energy will come from the gas tank. So I guess there's still a ways to go. Even so, over the last year the plug-ins' mileage averages about 50% better than the stock hybrids, and the greenhouse gas emissions are 29% lower per mile. I think the GHG numbers are based on the Googleplex using all solar power, in which case the plug-in charge is emission-free. I would want to know if they take into account drivers' plugging in at home or elsewhere, in which case you'd want to charge the plug-ins with the GHG emission per Wh of power sources for the Bay Area power company. And of course a true lifecycle analysis would take into account the GHG emitted building the cars, shipping them to Mountain View, etc etc. Even so, plug-ins are almost certainly another step in the right direction.

Oh, and one other thing. Remember before when we were talking about the power grid in the US, and how it doesn't have any ability to store power? Well, what if we attached a bunch of batteries to the grid, and charged them up at night, when there is surplus (and more efficient) capacity, and then dumped it back into the grid at noon, when demand peaks and the old, less economical, heavily polluting power-plants have to be maxed out to prevent brownouts? A fleet of plug-in hybrids, of course, could do that. Apparently, if you play your cards right and all the regulation falls into place, your plug-in hybrid could be a profit center.

One thing on the RechargeIT blog really surprised me:

Not the Lexus hybrid; I've even seen them on the street here in Singapore. But I had assumed that when a hybrid motor is put into a luxury car, producing only a 1-2 MPG efficiency improvement, it was pretty much a farce, a bit of greenwashing. But what this graph points out:

is that an improvement from 10 MPG to 12 MPG is worth as much as an improvement from 30 to 60. So maybe those hybrid limos and SUVs aren't completely ridiculous. But don't get carried away; 30 is still much than 12.

Meanwhile, California's regulators, CARB, seem to have done a decent job over the last few decades in standing up to car manufacturers to force them to improve the environmental impact of their cars. But the terminology can get confusing: LEV, for Low-Emission Vehicle, ULEV for ultra-low, and on and on to the latest: AT-PZEV, "Advanced Technology Partial Zero Emission Vehicle". This refers to different levels of pollution coming out of the car, like sulfer dioxide and carbon monoxide. The confusing thing is that, when they use "emission", they aren't talking about carbon emissions. So a car can be ATPZEV and still be pumping out the CO₂ that will ultimately put Miami and Bangladesh underwater. Perhaps one day CARB will start regulating greenhouse gases tracking that as well, though for all I know that's tied up in a lawsuit or something. Apparently RechargeIT is lobbying CARB on the issue.

By the way, the head of the EPA, which is federal as opposed to the California state CARB, has been going to absurd, and possibly illegal, lengths to stall on doing anything about GHGs. Watch for yourself:

Yay! George Takei is getting married! E! Online incorrectly refers to him as "the once and forever Lt. Sulu", but of course we all know that he is now Captain Sulu.

Today's good news:

Spain's re-elected Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced a government Saturday which for the first time included more women than men and a female defence minister. —AP

Meanwhile in Singapore:

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong reshuffled his Cabinet on Saturday, as part of a process to groom the next generation of leaders for Singapore.

The most eye-catching in the slew of changes announced by PM Lee was the appointment of Mr K. Shanmugam as Law Minister and Second Minister for Home Affairs from May 1. —Straits Times

The newspaper featured pictures of twenty faces: from the PM and Minister Mentor and Senior Minister to the various Ministers. As many as five looked Indian or had Indian names; at least one had a Muslim name. None appeared Malay, and none were women.

This is both a symptom and a problem. It's a problem because it restricts the viewpoints present in discussion by Singapore's ruling group (though, arguably, not any more than one-party rule). Some Singaporeans brag about the meritocratic government recruitment system, but it's a poor excuse for meritocracy that doesn't raise up any women or many minorities.

The equivalent for the US: five women out of twenty one. Four ethnic minorities out of twenty one. For most cabinet members I've never heard anything about their religion, so I would assume all are professed Christians.

Side note: Did one second of Google on that assumption, and found the most adorable Hegelian dialog within the Radio Islam web site (that's Farrakhan):

• Jews in Bush’s Cabinet? Don’t Hold Your Breath
• USA´s Rulers -They are all Jews !

It's not quite as tasty as it looks, since the first link is a reprint from the New York Observer and the second refers to Clinton's administration. But it did lead me here, which (taken with, obviously, a very large grain of salt) suggests that there are no Jews in Bush's cabinet. I'm sure there are no Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists. I can just barely imagine one of them being a (very discreet) atheist, but I haven't heard anything. Of course I wouldn't be the first to suggest that many of them appear to actually practice Manichaeism. This is getting a bit off-topic and I'm using too many fancy words, so let's just re-iterate the positive: a majority female Spanish cabinet, and female heads of government in Argentina, Chile, Germany, and Liberia. This post should not be construed as a declaration of partisanship in the US Democratic Presidential Primary race of 2005-2008.

It's a cop action/procedural story, like 24 or CSI or something. But it's set in 1974. And it's about crimes against books. And it's a graphic novel, not a TV show.

Ninety percent of the housing for Singapore's 4.5 million residents is HDB, public housing. The rest has gotten far more expensive in the last two years. The chart shows a roughly 50% increase between 2005 and 2007, but people have told me anecdotes of 100% increase. The latest government data shows an increase in rental rates in the central district of over 40% in 2007 alone. My scholarship at LKYSPP included a stipend and partial tuition waiver (later increased to full), but no housing. The LKY school occupies part of the beautiful and historic Bukit Timah campus of NUS (the National University of Singapore), a campus dating back to colonial times in the 1920s, when the design was selected through an "Empire-wide" competition. The downside to this is that there is no cheap housing for a several-kilometer radius around the school. In this context, and with a dog, I ended up roommates with another American student in an apartment less than a mile from school, Naga Court.

(As a side note, this very interesting column makes a very interesting argument. To paraphrase: the price for real estate is the measure of how much stuff those who want property will have to give to get it from those that have it. Since property owners tend to be older than buyers, the price level in the real estate market indicates the rate of wealth transfer from the young to the old. So "falling markets are bad news for the old, good news for the young." And presumably, rising markets are opposite.)

One interesting phenomenon in the Singapore real estate market is the "en bloc" sale. If 80% of the residents of a condominium agree to sell, everybody is compelled to sell. This is usually followed by the building or complex being demolished and a newer, bigger one being built. Naga Court was sold en bloc in 1999, but was still standing in 2007, despite the real estate bubble. Most of the residents had moved out, but a company specializing in these projects came in and subdivided many of the large apartments (~2000 square feet). My classmate and I signed a lease for a two-bedroom apartment roughly a thousand square feet in size. It had originally comprised the living room, kitchen, utility washroom, and a small sideroom that might have been the maid's quarters. With the addition of some paper-thin walls, the living room was split in half and the whole thing was isolated from the rest of the apartment, which was turned into three more apartments (master bedroom and its bathroom, two small bedrooms sharing a bathroom, and another room that I never got to snoop around in). The carpet was disgusting, the kitchen featured disintegrating particleboard cabinetry (complete with bugs) and no hot water, the bathroom was unfortunate; but it was spacious, dogs were allowed, and it was easy walking distance to campus. The buildings to either side lease apartments for S$10,000 a month or more, and we were paying S$2600 (US$1700 at the time). When we signed the one-year lease in July 2007, we were assured profusely that the building was not supposed to be demolished until August 2008. Perhaps you can already tell where this story is going?

We lived in blissful ignorance until I overheard some kind of building inspector having a cell phone chat in the front lobby, and the month December being mentioned. We were therefore not completely surprised when we got an one-month eviction notice on November 30, but the timing was inconvenient, given that final exams were in a week, followed by a school trip to Malaysia and then and my roommate was going to India for a month immediately after. So when the company showed us another apartment (as they were contractually obliged to do), we took it, even though it was S$600/month more. Perhaps the only compensation was that they provided the movers and moving truck.

After finals, my roommate packed her stuff and left on vacation. I packed at a leisurly pace—we don't have that much stuff between the two of us—while the exodus proceeded:

Kona was not allowed in the swimming pool, and by the time I got around to checking out the pool on the last day to see if she could finally take a swim, it was already being drained:

The new place is much nicer. Same template, a two-bedroom apartment carved out of a living room and kitchen, one small maid's bathroom with jury-rigged shower. But the building hasn't been on death row for eight years, so the decay has barely started. Tile floors, no carpet. Hot water in the kitchen, and our own washer and dryer (built in Singapore, and the washing machine often gets stuck mid-cycle and runs water through your clothes for six hours or more if not stopped). We are a few blocks from the big shopping district (Orchard Road), which is more bad than good because it "justifies" (or at least motivates—we had a signed contract and I'm sure we couldn't have unilaterally started paying S$600 less rent, so nothing will ever justify the increase to me, but when you don't have good alternatives you don't have power, and when you don't have power, you get screwed) the rent increase while at the same time we are more than twice as far from school. On balance, though, I like the new place better.

When we signed the new, shorter lease, the leasing company agents assured us that this building would not be emptied before our lease expired. At least a year, they said. Definitely no problem. Probably. How long are you staying again? Meanwhile, the property is adjacent to no less than three different construction projects:

A few weeks later there were movers in the elevators, as the owners started fleeing. One mover asked, "when are you shifting?" "Why, what do you know?" He shrugged. Here's what I saw on the next floor up: (Incidentally, a classmate who is an expat for a big MNC said his moving allowance is two containers. That's two forty-foot shipping containers. The expat package is alive and well.)

Next I asked the nice people at the desk. They had no idea when the building would be destroyed, they said, but at least a year.

A few weeks after that I saw someone in the elevator with a "Far East" shirt, Far East being the property company that owns this building along with half of the hill. No idea, he said. October, he said.

So we'll see. Personally, I figure 50/50 odds of our being displaced again before July.

Kucinich and Dodd best matched my values. Of the big three, I can visualize any of them as an excellent president and I can visualize (and have seen) all three of them disappoint. For context, here are a few of my beliefs:

1. Bill Clinton was a big disappointment as president. He compromised far too many liberal values. The economy was good, including by more stringent standards such changes in income inequality. On balance, the best thing about Clinton was that things didn't get worse.
2. The only people who really love a candidate unreservedly and never get disappointed, are probably those who are getting paid to do so. The nature of politics is compromise, especially with 100,000,000 million voting constituents. If you turn your nose up at this, you give up your voice; there isn't another, better, cleaner, purer system of government hiding in the back.
3. The nature and quality of a candidate's advisors are probably better predictors of performance than their rhetoric.
4. I'm thrilled that there will be a major-party nominee for president of the US who is not a white male. Symbolism often matters.

Since Washington State's primary doesn't affect delegate apportionment, I didn't bother to get an absentee ballot. In the general election, I'll happily vote for whichever one is nominated.

As much schadenfreude as I get from this story of conservative authors suing the ultra-right-wing Regnery press, what prompted me to post is the quote below. The authors accuse Regnery of selling books very cheaply to wholly owned subsidiaries such as the "Conservative Book Club", thus reducing the royalties paid to authors.

"The difference between 10 cents and $4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books," Mr. Miniter said. "It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance." He added: "Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?"

I love the cognitive dissonance. The thought process implied here starts with tribalism: "everyone in my tribe is good and everyone in your tribe is bad", taken to the next level: "everything bad is in your tribe". If a conservative business is acting poorly, by definition it's acting non-conservatively. E.g., it's impossible for anything sharing my ideology to be bad, so it must actually have your ideology. It must be a betrayal.

Any similarity to the mainstream conservative thought these last years, or to the stabbed in the back meme, is no doubt coincidental.

Today's good news: conservative San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders gives a speech explaining why he changed his mind and supported a city council action in support of gay marriage.

Very nice to see this instead of the usual thanking of God for miracles:

Kevin Everett voluntarily moved his arms and legs on Tuesday when partially awakened, prompting a neurosurgeon to say the Buffalo Bills' tight end would walk again -- contrary to the grim prognosis given a day before.
[...]
"It's totally spectacular, totally unexpected," Green told The Associated Press by telephone from Miami.
[...]
"I don't know if I would call it a miracle. I would call it a spectacular example of what people can do," Green said. "To me, it's like putting the first man on the moon or splitting the atom. We've shown that if the right treatment is given to people who have a catastrophic injury that they could walk away from it."
Green said the key was the quick action taken by Cappuccino to run an ice-cold saline solution through Everett's system that put the player in a hypothermic state. Doctors at the Miami Project have demonstrated in their laboratories that such action significantly decreases the damage to the spinal cord due to swelling and movement.
"We've been doing a protocol on humans and having similar experiences for many months now," Green said. "But this is the first time I'm aware of that the doctor was with the patient when he was injured and the hypothermia was started within minutes of the injury. We know the earlier it's started, the better."

I bought a new backpack in Seattle, specifically for school, and I love it. It's actually made in Seattle; you can go to the showroom in South Downtown, and see the sewing machines. At the moment it holds:

• In the inner main compartment:
  • my laptop (in its Brain Cell)
  • two library books, by Immanual Wallerstein, whom I was hoping would have some interesting alternative ideas to IR Realism and Neoliberalism for the paper due in a week, and he does, and he's a very smooth writer, but about half of his writing triggers my BS meter, especially the Krondratieff cycle, which in his writing has so many exceptions and special cases that it reminds me of anthropogenic climate change deniers' charts in that it features facts being fixed around the policy
  • A plastic folder with my name placard, blank paper, relevant assignments for the day
• In the outer main compartment:
  • The totally awesome (if a bit too hot for this climate) Seattle Sombrero
  • A flimsy, cheap folding umbrella
  • The power cable for the laptop
• In the little top pocket:
  • A Jimi wallet with my EZ-link card, student card, and one or two bills. The plastic hinge has started to tear so I'm careful not to overfill it.
  • US Army handkerchief from the Fort Lewis PX. And, if I remember, a tissue package since hawker centers don't hand out free napkins
  • Keyring on the short lanyard, with mini Swiss army knife, house key, small nail clippers, and USB drive
  • Sunglasses
• In the left side pocket:
  • Palm Pilot Vx in blue hardshell(still ticking from 2001)
  • cell phone, turned off
  • Uni-ball Signo Gel Grip pens, 0.7 and 0.38mm
  • iPod Shuffle. I was happy with my original shuffle but it died a slow death so now I have a 2nd gen shuffle which I overpaid for at Mustafa Center before I realized that, despite the horribly overstuffed and crowded store, they aren't actually cheap.
  • headphones in case
• In the mesh pocket
  • Nalgene OTG water bottle.

On the one hand, you could say my efforts to get less materialistic have failed completely. On the other hand, you could say that if this backpack and its contents replace my old productivity pod, then I'm downsizing quite nicely.

Today's good news: Gays can get married in Iowa. Probably it will be stayed and then overturned on appeal, but let's keep our fingers crossed.

Here. Here is where I'll build my secret island fortress.

Ever since I read that a GE90 jet engine could empty out all the air in Madison Square Garden in one minute, I've been keen to see jet engines more broadly integrated into our daily lives. Here's a good start.

The immigration authority text messaged me last week that my student visa was ready, so during an unexpected break in classes I headed down to ICA for the fourth time. Despite not having my original claim ticket, I was in and out (successfully) in under 20 minutes. I spent more time than that beforehand, running around the VIVO City mall following bad directions trying to get my NETS card charged with S$100 to pay for the visa. First I went to an HSBC branch to pick up my ATM card, finally, three weeks after I opened my account; their first attempt to mail it to me failed and they didn't see fit to mention that until I called asking where the hell it was. I showed them the NETS card I bought at a 7-11, but they said they couldn't charge it there. Turns out I have a NETS cashcard, not a bank-linked "NETS card". I asked if they could give me a NETS card but they said I would have to go to a local bank. I asked if they were a local bank and they said they were not. I pointed to the slogan on the wall behind the nice lady and asked if that meant they were going to remove that bullshit (), and she said no, it didn't. Long story short, you can only change your cashcard in a 7-11, and they take a minimum of 0.5% per charge. So your payment options in Singapore include NETS, which stores value on the card itself and goes into a reader, and is linked to your bank account in a way I don't know and don't care to know; NETS cashcard which is similar but not linked, and which are allegedly but not actually accepted anywhere NETS is; EZ-Link, which is a contactless stored-value card used mostly on mass transit; the spectrum of credit and ATM cards; or cash. If you have a car and drive downtown you have to have a NETS card to put into your on-board card reader in order to drive into the downtown congestion zone. Last time I was in Hong Kong, five years ago, they seemed to be standardizing on Octopus, which is actually the same technology as EZ-Link, to handle both transit and other transactions. Hopefully NETS will die out soon.

We have two core classes and two electives, plus I'm overloading with one extra elective, plus 5501 is split into Micro and Macro and each appears to have a full course load of reading and assignments. I've been trying to get my readings done this weekend; yesterday at quarantine I read a bunch of very dry definitional material on PPP, HDI, GDP, etc. Nothing new, just underscoring that, with tremendous international effort and investment over many decades, we now have statistical measures that are only mostly misleading guesswork. Then on to Public Administration and Public Affairs by Nicholas Henry. I was going to see if there was an IVLE forum where I could post my notes, but two of my six modules still aren't available online (going into week 2!) so you get to read my notes on Henry here.

• Totally and completely US-centric. Drat.
• p 7: "When Daniel Shays ignited his ill-conceived Rebellion in 1786 ... the nation's political leaders discovered that no arm of 'American government,' such as it was, had been authorized or organized to put down the disturbance, and eventually that chore fell to the Massachusetts state militia." The substance of this paragraph may be true, but I don't care for the wording. It gives me the impression that the "leaders" were sitting around in a pub when word came in of the revolt, and somebody (who were these leaders in the pre-Constitutional period?) said, where's the secretary of the Army?, and somebody else said, oh shit, we don't have a War Department, and somebody said, what about an FBI? Do we have one of those? Because an FBI would be very handy right about now. I imagine it as a scene out of Get Your War On.
• p 14: "[In 1900] government workers at all levels accounted for less than 2 percent of the American population ... Today ... more than 7 percent". How much of that is military? Hmm. Apparently there are 2.7 million federal employees, less than 1% of American population, and 16.1 million state and local government employees. That's around 7 percent. Half of them are teachers. There are no other big categories. All of these figures exclude the military, which with 1.4 million active-duty people would be the second biggest category if counted together.
• p 30. POSDCORB: Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, Coordinating, Reporting, Budgeting. That sounds vaguely familiar
• p 36. "Publicness and privateness in society are comprised of three dimensions ..." Ack!
• Finished the first two chapters. Well, it's readable. I'm not falling asleep or skimming rapidly.
• Watch out when the word "locus" shows up. "Nevertheless, locus is retained in public administration's current paradigm because the locus-centered Paradigm 5 — public administration as public administration—continues unaltered." Uh, sure buddy, whatever you say. "Our definitions of public administration—institutional, normative, and organizationsal—are in no way mutually exclusive; rather, they are mutually reinforcing. Together, they form the 'public' in public administration, the locus of both the field and the profession." So what you're saying is that your definition of public defines public? Great. Inconsistent use of spaces around em dashes is sic.
• I don't know if it's this book, or a reaction to textbooks in general after years of cultivating my cynicism, but I find myself looking for blogs and wanting to fact-check footnotes and alternate narratives...

Update: this blog post has been corrected.

I'm generally very excited about the classes I'm going to take, optimistic about the professors, and feeling that I did the right thing coming here. (News that my scholarship was just increased to cover all tuition, which is the offer I had in 2006 before I deferred a year and lost part of the scholarship, certainly helped!) That said, on to the kvetching....

I'm sitting in on a lot of classes I don't intend to attend, just to get a taste of the instructors and topics. All of the classes are packed—I guess other people are shopping too. Today I sat in on law seminar from a guest lecturer on threats to secularism in India. It was incredibly interesting but I had to leave very early to catch the beginning of the Ethics class. After 45 minutes of boilerplate introductory material about ethics in general, somebody interrupted with the obvious question: "how does this relate to civil servants? How does this deal with corruption?" The answer was fairly unsatisfactory: "(paraphrase) I have nothing to say about corruption because, ethically, we all agree it's bad; and because pure philosophy is helpless with the practical problem of corruption." The pure philosophy might be interesting, but in a one-year program populated mostly by civil servants, I think we were all expecting something more immediately applicable to decision-making or to anti-corruption policies.

Then the conversation started to get interesting along these lines but I had to leave to hustle to quarantine to see Kona, and then back for the media class. The content is interesting but other classes are higher on the list. Snippets of audio from the wireless mike in another lecture hall keep blaring out on the loudspeakers. "ow-" and "the nationa-" and, most notably, "... not true!" Also, the instructor started with words guaranteed to keep me out of your class: "I teach by powerpoint." Sorry, buddy. You might lecture by Powerpoint, but people don't generally learn by looking at Powerpoint.

In one class I sat next to an exchange student who turns out to be Neena's and my next-door neighbor at Naga Court. (In the lobby one night I met two Jews on exchange from an Israeli university, one sabra and one from Pennsylvania, who are here for a semester. They said another resident told them the building might come down this December rather than next August. I guess we'll die in that pile of rubble when we get to it.)

Several classes had very enthusiastic professors who knew a lot about their subjects but didn't seem likely to offer a strong learning environment.

I also put two and two together and realized that Bob Herbold is actually on the faculty of LKYSPP as an Adjunctprofessor. He's a former COO of Microsoft, worth perhaps US$100 million. I had previously learned that his wife is the US ambassador to Singapore in a local newspaper article about how she decorated the residence. I guess he wanted something to do. He's not teaching any classes as far as I can tell. Perhaps there will be a Herbold building by the time I leave. But if LKS paid S$100 million to name Block A, I doubt Herbold can afford the larger Block B or the Tower Block.

Speaking of Microsoft: we all have Exchange email accounts with the school system. The mailbox limit is about 30 Mb. We get five to ten emails per day, and most of them have 300Kb to 2Mb attachments. This includes a steady stream of announcments for seminars and parties, "gentle reminders" for those seminars and parties, confusing "clarifications" from the staff with large attachments, the beginnings of standard mailing list pollution ("me too's", items for sale, requests for clarification (of "clarifications") which quote the originals in full, etc, all cc'd to the whole class), etc. I got an email warning that I was about to lose the ability to receive email, the correction of which apparently involved finding a department that I think only exists at the other campus, 45 minutes away, so I now work steadily, and by steadily I mean hour by hour, to weed my mailbox.

More generally, it doesn't seem like the administrative process is able to see the program from the perspective of students. This manifests in two ways. First, many different parts program seem well developed in isolation, but collectively dissonant. One example is that each syllabus seems to follow its own format (and two of my five classes still lack syllabi), but a much bigger example is the profusion of "groups". As best as I can tell, I'm in the following groups:

• All full-time students have to take some evening classes so that the part-time students can mix with the full-timers. For purposes of which evening classes I have to take, I'm in group D (out of A through E). This group was defined as "If you are in Groups C and D, you will not be attending any evening session in Semester 1. You will only be required to attend an evening session in Semester 2. More information regarding the modules will be given later." but that definition turned out to be inaccurate.
• For 5501, which is Wednesday mornings and then repeated Wednesday night, I was in the morning group (which comprises groups B, C, D, and E). But the morning group is very large, so I swapped with somebody in the night class (comprising group A and all part-time students). This means I have two evening classes this semester and may or may not have any next semester.
• For 5501 (Macro) data analysis exercise, I need to find somebody to form a group of 2.
• For 5501 (Micro), I'm in group 3 (of 27) with Helen and David. There was some confusion when I changed from D to A as to whether or not this would affect my membership in 3, put after about 20 emails back and forth it appears I can remain in 3.
• 5502 has a Monday evening combined segment, mandatory for full-timers and part-timers. Full-time students in group B, and all part-time students, stay for 3 hours. On some days, full-time students in group A (which is defined as groups A, C, D, and E from the other list) attend for only 1.5 hours, and then have another hour and a half session Tuesday morning. The rest of the time, those full-timers stay the full three hours Monday night and have no Tuesday morning session.
• For 5502, I'm in group 6 (of 10) with Nazmul, Rudy, Seon Joo, and Caroline.
• For 5136 (Applied Public Sector Economics), 5264 (States, Markets and International Governance), and 5524 (Negotiation and Conflict Management), I'm not aware of belonging to any groups.

Note further that, while IVLE has a provision for creating and tracking groups within a class, nobody's using it. Instead we get emails with 300K Word documents attached (which are of course included in each group reply).

The second kind of problem is stuff that just doesn't make sense for us newbies. The most trivial yet exemplatory example is the locker keys. Each student has a small cubbyhole in one of two student lounges. On the second or third day of orientation we all got keys, with instruction to get them duplicated and to return the original within a week. What kind of sense does it make to ask 68 people, many of whom have been in the country less than 48 hours, to each individually go and find a locksmith? Is this some kind of challenge to see if we can self-organize? Too, the key turns out to be an unusual size which most locksmiths don't have in stock. What a waste of time to have everybody deal with this individually. After three weeks and two attempts to make a copy, nobody's asked for my original back and I've stopped trying to get it copied.

So, lots of energy, lots of exciting things, not quite the polish to have everything go smoothly.

Update: This post has been corrected.

I'm in Singapore, having enjoyed a day of orientation stuff (speeches, etc), and now working on satisfying a peculiar variant of Maslow's Hierarchy: temporary housing, bank account, mobile phone, plug adapter, etc.

I was walking the dog in downtown Seattle when a man passing by pumped his raised fist as me and said, "Spoon!" As cool as that was, I was taken aback until I remembered I was wearing my Tick t-shirt .

Gus and I put a new website up, ReadyToImpeach.com. It sells t-shirts that say,

Call your representative's office and tell them, "I vote in district ___ and I want Representative _____ to co-sponsor H.R. 333, Articles of Impeachment Against Vice President Cheney.

Each shirt has the district, name, and phone number for about 20 representatives. We've got six and a half states covered so far.

Update 13 Jul 2007. The sample shirt I ordered arrived today, so I followed my own advice and called my rep. Jim McDermott's office said he gave a speech on the House floor two weeks ago advocating Cheney's impeachment and co-signed H.R. 333.

I've been using the 3007WFP for a few months now, and I'm generally quite happy. But I do want to document a few annoyances:

• My screen has one bad pixel. It's dark, and on a light background looks like a permanent speck of dust.
• The monitor accepts only DVI-D input, and prefers dual-link. You can't hook it up to a TV or DVD player, or to a game player. This is in sharp contrast to the 20" Dell, which is very promiscuous in its input, accepting DVI, VGA, S-video, and composite video.
• If it's plugged in but turned off, it makes a high-pitched whine.
• For a few minutes after being turned on, the backlight flickers.

(Don't ask why. There is no why.)

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On July 20, I'll be flying to Singapore for a one-year Master of Public Administration program at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. I hope to combine several of my interests: China, free software, and management. Perhaps when I'm done I can move up from project manager to bureaucrat.

The last time I lived in King County (Seattle's county), it was still named after William R. King, the thirteenth vice-president of the US. "King supported a conservative proslavery position, arguing that the Constitution protected the institution of slavery in both the Southern states and the federal territories...." Apparently it was renamed to honor MLK Jr in 2005. And now the county is working to change the logo to include an image of his face. As symbolic gestures go, this one is pretty good.

Today's good news:

President-elect Rafael Correa appointed seven women to his Cabinet on Wednesday, including Ecuador's first female defense minister, saying he wanted to promote gender equality in his South American nation.

Today's good news:

Sen. Robert Byrd has built a reputation in Congress and in West Virginia using special interest funding to bring federal jobs and money home, but the king of pork said he's willing to give up his projects for 2007 to find a way out of the "fiscal chaos" left by the outgoing Republican-led Congress. —Gannett News Service

Between this and not giving an impeached judge a committee chairmanship, this batch of Democrats is failing to completely suck. This is very disorienting.

If a female dog is spayed before her first heat cycle, her risk of developing breast cancer is only 0.05%. If she is spayed after having only one heat cycle, her risk of breast cancer jumps to 8%. If she is spayed after her second heat cycle, that risk becomes 26% [...] Spaying a dog after her third heat cycle may reduce the risk of mammary carcinoma (breast cancer) but not appreciably. [...] Ogilvie, Moore. Managing the Veterinary Cancer Patient: a practice manual. 1995 (source)

Researchers in Niger have found that farmers have rehabilitated three million hectares of severely degraded land by their own initiative.

"The scale and speed of this phenomenon is surprising," says Chris Reij, of Vrije University in the Netherlands. "Where few trees could be found in the mid-1980s, one now finds 20 to 150 trees per hectare." —SciDev.Net

New York Times columnist John Tierney (center-right, pro-Establishment) is usually somewhere between pointless and wrong, but he had a very nice uptick recently. Excerts from two recent columns:

"We're on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront," Bush said last week, "and we'll accept nothing less than complete victory."

When you define victory that way, when you treat one attack from a disorganized band of fanatics as a menace to civilization, you've doomed yourself to defeat and caused more damage than they could. You can't completely stop terrorism, but you can scare people into giving up liberties, wasting huge sums of money and sacrificing more lives than would be lost in a terrorist attack.

Take it from bin Laden, who bragged in 2004 that it was "easy to provoke and bait this administration."

"All that we have to do," he said, "is to send two mujahedeen to the farthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written Al Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses." And then Al Qaeda, no matter what losses it has suffered, will come off once again looking like the strong horse.

(12 Sep 2006)

and

Compared with past threats -- like Communist sociopaths with nuclear arsenals -- Al Qaeda's terrorists are a minor problem. They certainly don't justify the hyperbolic warnings that America's ''existence'' or ''way of life'' is in jeopardy, or that America must transform the Middle East in order to survive.

There undoubtedly will be more terrorist attacks, either from Al Qaeda or others, just as there were before 2001. Terrorists might strike Monday. There will always be homicidal zealots like Mohamed Atta or Timothy McVeigh, and some of them will succeed, terribly. But this is not a new era. The terrorist threat is still small. It's the terrorism industry that got big.

(9 Sep 2006)

Unfortunately he seemed to run out of ideas after that burst, and so followed up with "ripped-from-the-headlines" (or, more likely, "based-on-a-press-release") columns about for-profit philanthropy and a mathematical equation to predict how long celebrity couples will stay married. Here's my advice: just keep writing more columns spelling out, in your somber but serviceable prose, with a bit of detail and a few quotes per column, that the emperor has no clothes. You won't run out of material for years.

When I got back from a trip to Vancouver and Seattle, I booted up my desktop, put my Palm Pilot in the dock and synced. Something about the port configuration that the rebooting machine put together didn't satisfy the Palm, and it crashed. Hard. Soft reset did nothing. Hard reset did nothing.

This happened once before, a few months ago, and at the time it occured to me to let the battery run down and see if it would really reset itself. It has a remarkably long-lasting, built in lithium battery, and it took a day or so before it occured to me to take it out of the charging cradle; from that point, it was over a week before it wound down. In fact, I happened to check it when it was down to maybe 5% battery, and it had awoken from its mystery crash in order to announce that it was almost out of battery power. I promptly put it back in the cradle and all was fine.

So, if I didn't want to lose the notes I had taken on the trip, I would have to set it aside, but check it regularly, and hope to spot the window after the battery was low enough to trigger the warning that uncrashes it, but before it actually ran out of energy and erased itself. And hope that that was the problem, not something more serious.

In the meantime, I was going crazy without my Palm, so I got the cheapest new model, the Z22. It does everything that the Vx does, costs $100 new (my original V was about $300 in 1999; after I lost it 2001, I replaced it with a Vx that I bought used in Hong Kong for US$130), and has 32 Mb instead of 8, a color screen, and USB instead of serial. I considered the other, more expensive Palms, but they are all bigger and heavier, and do things I don't want my Palm to do, like take phone calls (no thanks), connect to the internet over wireless (too, too tempting), or play music (got a Shuffle for that).

After a few days, I reached my conclusion: I don't care for the Z22. The color screen is too bright in the dark and too dim in direct sunlight. There's no cover, so when you put it in your pocket it likes to wake itself up; keylock is a pain in the ass. Palm lost a lawsuit over Graffiti, and the new Graffiti 2 sucks in comparison. I followed some instructions to hack the old Graffiti on, and I like how it shows your strokes when you write in the main area, but it crashed whenever I wrote anything in the special writing area. The battery seemed to run down a lot faster than the Vx, as well. The Vx's screen is perfectly readable in direct sunlight and the Indiglo mode is sexy in the dark. Dropping the Vx into the cradle is much more satisfying than putting the Z22 on the desktop and plugging in a loose cable. And the Vx's thin, shiny aluminum shell is simply far more attractive than the Z22's mundane glossy plastic.

A week later, I put the Vx in the cradle for a few minutes, and it came back to life. I lost a few days of data from the trip, but I had my lovely machine back. The Z22 went back to Best Buy, unlamented.

Today's good news, a twofer of adjacent articles in the Times. First, PepsiCo corporation selected an Indian-born woman as CEO. Second, parts of India are banning Coke and Pepsi. Unfortunately, they're banning them because they think they have pesticides, not because they are unhealthy sugar water that shouldn't be sold in schools. But I guess that's now Ms. Nooyi's problem.

If you are following the story of Dzongkha localization in Bhutan (as previously mentioned here; the short form is that Bhutan paid $500k to get a version of Windows in their native language, but the effort was complicated by a suspect vendor and, apparently, an effort (based on incorrect linguistic assumptions) by Microsoft to be sensitive to Chinese suppression of Tibetan culture), then you may be pleased to learn that Bhutan last month released a localized version of Debian Linux.

"A constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration died in a Senate cliffhanger Tuesday ..." Those of us who hate America's ideals (or who hate that some Americans try to use America's constitution to ban acts of political speech which they find repugnant) can breath a sigh of relief.

Today's good news:

A campaign to reduce lethal errors and unnecessary deaths in the nation's hospitals has saved an estimated 122,300 lives in the last 18 months, the campaign's leader said Wednesday. —AP

A reminder that most of the things that make a difference in most peoples' lives aren't newsworthy (though they should be).

The phone companies all provide lousy service, and pay hundreds of millions of dollars in protection racket money to federal government to preserve their legal right to make money at the expense of fair competition, and generally do everything possible to put the customer last. There's not much we can do about it, since they're all in it together. Skype and other voice-over-IP technology is part of the solution (my last ten overseas phone calls have been either free or 2 euro-cents per minute, depending on if I was calling another skype user or a regular phone). I get my phone service from the cable company, but the service isn't any better, and it's really just trading one evil for another.

So I am very happy to see that one of the phone companies has differentiated themselves in a positive way:

The telecommunications company Qwest turned down requests by the National Security Agency for private telephone records because it concluded that doing so would violate federal privacy laws...

My nomination for the emacs key binding that most seems pointless yet gets used surprisingly frequently: C-x t, for transposing a character and its immediate predecessor

Two points of background for today's good news. First, if you want a society to change, you have to change most people in the society. That Johnson ordered troops to escort black students to school was fantastic and a necessary step, but only when it became socially unthinkable to specificy exclude blacks or jews or women from any part of society had Johnson realized a victory. (A partial victory, but let's not get into that now.) If the fear of lawsuits prevents companies from dumping toxic chemicals into drinking water, that's good; if any middle manager who proposes doing so is shamed by everybody else in the room, that's better. My point is, if you think your ideas are right and good for society, it's important to look for support among people you don't consider "on your side."

Second: The point of governments is to do what other groupings of citizens cannot do. Large-scale basic research is a good example. The return on society's investment in science is enormous, especially if the results are widely disseminated. When private entities siphon off the results of research, such as by partnering with publically funded universities but patenting the results of research, they are worse than thieves. They are not only stealing the original investment from society, they are also destroying the multiplier effect of publishing results and thus preventing government from serving one of its essential functions.

With that in mind, I'm happy to see that Joseph Lieberman and John Cornyn, two senators I rarely agree with, are sponsoring a bill that "would require 11 government agencies to publish online any articles that contained research financed with federal grants." Bravo.

The Times obligingly prints the predictable arguments from the journal publishers: that it would weaken the connection between the journals and their readers, hurt ad revenue, and lead to dangerously incorrect results being published. But the Times misses or avoids the real story: the recent revolution in scientific publishing caused by the internet. Many scientists are rebelling against the petty empires of the publishers, who use volunteer scientists to do the hard work of peer review, and collect monopoly rents for their services as typesetters.

These scientists have started their own cheap or free peer-reviewed journals online, and are competing directly with the journals. For example, "[o]n December 31, 2003 the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned due to pricing policies of Elsevier Press. ... On January 21, 2004 the ACM Publications Board approved a proposal for a new journal dedicated to Algorithms ... [its] editorial board is the editorial board that resigned from Journal of Algorithms." (Resignation letter, and see Knuth's excellent letter for, as you would expect from Knuth, a far more comprehensive and detailed exposition then you can quite comprehend).

So let's hope Lieberman and Cornyn's bill passes, and let's applaud them for taking a progressive position.

Today's good news (okay, so this feature isn't exactly coming out daily...)

After seven days of deliberation, the nine men and three women rebuffed the government's appeal for death for [Zacarias Moussaoui]

I upgraded my shredder, from an entry-level model that was a gift to a slightly sturdier Staples model that does cross-cutting, with a nominal 8-sheet capacity and a credit card slot. Its ability to chew through junkmail is not only gratifying, but provides a sense of power that overwhelms the futile anger junkmail had previously caused. In the big picture, junkmail is still an example of the tragedy of the commons, and a net destroyer of wealth, and a (misdemeanor) crime against humanity, but each envelope bugs me less than before.

I'm pleased to announce that, after some study, a fair amount of paperwork, more than one outlay of cash, and a four-hour-long multiple-choice test, I am now a certified Project Management Professional. I was motivated in part by my belief in being professional about my job, and that entails continuing education, communication with other people in the same profession, teaching, and all that other good stuff. The Project Management Institute is the 900 pound gorilla of professional organizations in this line of work, incorporated in 1969 "to promote a unifying influence in the advancement of the field of Project Management ...." I'll have more to say about that, and about the certification process, in a later post.

The other part of a professional certification is of course its utility in hustling for jobs. So, if you know anyone—especially a non-profit— in need of the services of a certified project manager, be it a Technology Needs Assessment, Requirements Development, Usability Testing, or general-purpose Managing of Projects, drop me a line.

This is the kind of news I like to wake up to:

The Dodgers win big and Cardinals fans get their hearts broken.

Remember, it's not enough to win. The other guy has to lose, too.

When fifty thousand people gather a block from your home on a sunny, comfortably cool Sunday afternoon to march for immigrant rights and human dignity, what else can you possibly do but join them? Si, se puede! ("Yes, we can!")

Bonus points: "Attendance for yesterday's march topped that of the largest known San Diego march, a 1994 'March for Jesus' that drew 25,000 to 40,000 people to the waterfront." San Diego Union-Tribune