Found in Translation

So our baby shower was amazing... if a little bit unusual. I'm hoping that this not knowing how to do things ability Anna and I seem to have cultivated in our wedding and shower rituals will apply equally well to all other aspects of domestic nuclear family life. We are both so completely grateful to Melissa and Mike, and to all our friends for pulling off the last great party of our Trucker-free lives. People have been calling us and dropping email for days, saying what a great party it was.

The power came on 30 minutes before our party started and, though I was tempted to throw the fuse downstairs to keep the candlelight interlude happening, by the time 11:00 rolled around and our dear friend Dave Raymond was drunkenly thrashing on the floor, I was glad to know that the only open flame in our house was safely hidden out of accidental kick reach within the protective steel of our kitchen oven.



And no, we did not play games that involved hats or blindfolds or balancing of any kind.

But that's not what I want to blog about tonight. I'm tying to finish some work right now, and I just have a few minutes, so I'll just put this link out there instead. Yes that is our ruler.

According to the Web site, he is pitching "a bizarre "genki" drink designed to keep overworked "salarymen" wide awake in those unpaid overtime hours. It contains nicotine among other stimulants and gets that heart rate right up there."

The San Francisco Chronicle says power should be restored here in about half an hour, but I don't believe it. It's been out for about 15 hours now and the experience has shifted from being a charming Yuletime fluke, to a possible drag. I'm blogging this via telephone, using my laptop's battery power, and we're starting to think about how this baby party tonight is going to work out without electricity.

When the power went out yesterday evening, our downstairs neighbors were preparing for a massive karaoke party -- something that is neither charming nor fluky, and which usually brings on fantasies of me taking an ax to their fuse box -- so when the power went out, I wanted to cheer.

Anna and I lit about a thousand candles and then, cautious new parents that we've become, left the house to inspect the damage. In North Beach, it really isn't bad. About four city blocks are out here, but everyone else seems to have power. In other parts of the city, it seems much worse, and they say about one third of all homes were cut.

Anna's cousin Martha is staying with us now, and before long, her brother, Rufus, and Vinnie, and Dave and Mike, and Melissa were here helping us trim the tree by candle light.

Right after the blackout, I'd jokingly told Vinnie that I expected him and Dave to figure out a way to power up the tree and -- Christmas miracle 2003 -- they showed up with a 50 foot extension cord and a car-lighter converter that let us have the one working Christmas tree on the block. At the end of the night, I made everyone go outside just to look into the window and marvel at our brightly burning tree surrounded by the dark and beautiful hulks of powerless buildings.

Shameless self promotion hour
Did you know that computers are bad at math? I guess I kind of always realized the thing about fractions being rounded, but it didn't quite compute. In an interesting twist, one of the guys I interviewed for this told me that the Patriot missile system was off by "over a minute" when the Scud strike occured. In reality, it was off by about 1/3 of a second. I guess humans have a way of miscalculating time too.

"It's a dirty secret. Floating-point arithmetic is wrong," said John Gustafson, a principal investigator with Sun, based in Santa Clara, California. "It only takes two operations to see that computers make mistakes with fractions."

The polls show you're doing a bang-up job, Mr. President

So I'm a registered Republican. I signed up because I find it far more interesting to be contacted by Republicans than Democrats or Greens. For example, witness the following IM exchange between me and Anna.

cpacd10: ha! some dude just called from the republican president re-election campaign for "mrs. mcmillan"
cpacd10: he wanted to survey me, so i said sure
idgnsbob: hehe
cpacd10: question 1:
cpacd10: do you approve/disapprove/or have no opinion of the job george w. bush is doing?
cpacd10: i said, "disapprove".
cpacd10: he said thanks, maa'm for your time. and hung up.
idgnsbob: think he had other questions?
cpacd10: not that he wanted my opinion on
cpacd10: i TOTALLY know he had other questions. he made it sound like we were settling in for a survey.

A rare moment of frankness

It's always fun when someone accidentally sends you email you're not supposed to get. Awhile back, I got this internal PR memo about how somebody at the Wall Street Journal had "taken the bait," on a PR pitch. I sent it to some people at my company to see if we could figure out what the news was and within 30 seconds the WSJ reporter was emailing back the PR people saying "what's this about me taking the bait."

Embarassing.

Anyhow, I'm on the Governator's press list, and this accidentally got sent to us last night:


Julie Dobie
12/11/2003 10:15 PM
To: Press , Katherine McLane , Denise Davis
cc: (bcc: Robert McMillan/NEWS SERVICE/IDG)
Subject: hotsheet 12/11/03 9:41pm


The following are the hot topics heading into tonight and a bit about what we are currently saying about each of them:
Groping: No calls on this today. All groping calls are being forwarded to the lawyer.
Support for Plan, Budget, etc: We sent out the following statement tonight with regard to the California Recovery Plan from the Governor:
"By approving my California Recovery Plan tonight, the Assembly has taken the first step to put California back on sound financial footing. I commend them, Democrats and Republicans, for putting aside "politics as usual" and working together with me to craft a plan that includes a balanced budget requirement to prevent us from facing such a disastrous fiscal crisis again. I look forward to the Senate's action tomorrow so we can complete our work in time to place these measures on the March ballot and let the people join us in putting California on the road to recovery."
We also sent out bullet points noting the highlights of the plan.
Stutzman emphasized the idea that the victory is that what was passed tonight will prevent the legislature from ever again spending more than what the state takes in.
We await the Senate ("adults" according to Mr. H. Dizzle Palmer) to pass this tomorrow.
VLF Backfill: We received several calls regarding this today.
We said the following on the record: The Governor supports the Brulte bill and the ball is in the legislature's court. The Gov has proposed mid-year reductions to help with the backfill, but again, it is up to the legislature to take action.
Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates also sent out a release today threatening to sue the Governor over the VLF backfill. Vince pushed back with our message about the ball being in the legislature's court on this issue.
SB60/Boycott: We're still not saying much more. MT did not go on the record on this today. We are still saying that we'll deal with it next session when the Governor's security and insurance concerns are addressed by Senator Cedillo et al.
Members of the Latino community are planning a boycott of American society/California society tomorrow. The California Chamber of Commerce called us with a heads up on the fact that local Chambers were calling them and asking them to ask the Governor to do something about this issue.
Appointments: We have received calls on both the Walter Allen and Frank Aguiar appointments today. We did not go on the record for either but referred reporters to an "echo chamber" of supporters willing to go on the record.
Transportation Cuts: The LAT will run a story detailing the transportation cuts tomorrow. HD is in the story pushing back about the real meaning of the cuts.
On the Education Bond: The Governor has said and continues to say: "I would prefer if the school bond is moved to November, because otherwise you hit people with too many things in one shot. That's my preference. And that's, again, something that we have to work out with the CTA and with the people that are involved. There are several entities involved."
Hummer Fuel Cell Retrofit: We are saying the following per Secretary Taminen: Engineers at Hummer Corp. are currently designing the system. The Governor isn't interested in a one time fix. He is looking for alternative fuel systems that any Hummer owner can use to convert their car. They are evaluating other alternative fuel systems other than hydrogen including ethanol and hybrids.
Sierra Nevada Framework: Things have died down but should flare up again in January when the final paper is released.
Unemployment Bailout: The Feds bailed the state out today so the fund is now solvent. We got one call, but never talked to the reporter about it today.
We have been saying in general: As for unemployment benefits, Schwarzenegger does not plan on lobbying the feds for a third extension for unemployment, and freezing the amount that workers get will probably happen (off the record answer), but is just one of the many things the governor will consider (on the record).
Education: O'Connell put out a letter today saying that he does not support suspending Prop 98. We did not get any calls about it. Riordan will also be in the Bee tomorrow laying out his plans for education. MT is in the story providing a little distance between his ideas and those of the Governor.
Healthy Families Cap/DDS;HHS: We have talking points on all of this and of course this was a big story this morning. Vince pushed back on a lot of this over the past couple of days essentially saying that the Governor does not like the cuts, but he also wants to make sure the state does not go bankrupt because a bankrupt state cannot provide one service to anyone.
HD reports that there will be a Bee story coming soon on cuts to the elderly and whether or not it is less expensive to make the cuts, or as advocates claim, more expensive because more people would be placed in expensive nursing homes. DOF is running the numbers.
The talking points say something like the following: Governor Schwarzenegger is supportive of the Healthy Families program and believes it is a good program for the children of California. He is an advocate for children and makes children's issues a priority. Healthy Families currently serves approximately 700,000 children and the Governor would like to enroll all eligible children into the program. However, the Governor is also focused on putting California's financial house in order. Unfortunately, that involves making painful short term decisions to ensure the longevity of such important programs as healthy families. This is why he has decided to cap enrollment, ensuring the same number of children receiving benefits today will be receiving them tomorrow. The Governor is interested in the longevity of programs as important as Healthy Families. If California goes into financial failure, no children will be provided for by the Healthy Families program. This is a risk the Governor is not willing to take. Also adding that there is about a 17,000 child attrition rate each month meaning not many children will ever be placed on a waiting list.
Regulations: The nurse-patient ratio is going into effect on Jan 1. We are telling reporters this along with giving them a little background about the process DHS would go through to change them once they are implemented (which is the regular process any reg would go through).
House Hunt: No update, still looking. Maria said at the lunch that she hopes to someday become at least a part time resident of Sacramento but that it will not be soon. We also got a visit from Jake Henshaw today looking to do a fluffy color texture story tomorrow on the Gov, where he likes to eat, his favorite lunches, etc. We gave him some details, but not much. The only question remaining is confirmation on whether or not the Gov is paying his own way at the Hyatt (which we believe to be the case and are asking for a firm answer on).
Parole Board: We are doing another roundtable with reporters interested in this issue so stay tuned for date and time. Tell Julie if someone calls on this. We have the case of Maria Suarez coming up. This is a VERY high profile case and we'll be getting calls either Friday or Monday about this. We also had another non-review come up today, we may get calls about it tomorrow.
Clemency: Dec. 17th the BPT will be setting an execution date. This is the first execution in several years in California. Stay tuned for the Governor's decision about how to handle these cases.
General Prison Issues: There were several liberal victims rights protests today. We got a couple of calls and essentially gave the reporters are general statement on parole and not much else.
BRAC: We're starting to get calls about the next round of military base relocations and closures (BRAC). Any questions regarding the Governor's strategy for the time being should be deflected by simply saying the Governor is committed to improving the business climate in California and keeping assets and growing jobs in the state. The Governor will stay engaged in the process and work to keep jobs in California. For internal info: Our strategy is still being developed, and while we will obviously strive to keep bases active in CA, we're likely to get hit hard simply by virtue of the large number within the state.
Workers Comp: AP is working on a story which is predicted to be a real hatchet job on the Governor's plan. Vince will be calling the reporter to discuss the issue and we are also trying to get some legislative allies to talk about it.
Branson airline: On the talks between Branson and the Gov. regarding opening an airline at LAX, Virgin Blue. We said that as of now we know that talks did take place and that the Gov. is encouraging Branson to open the airline here in order to bring more jobs to California and better the economy. We had a few calls yesterday on this. Branson told some press that he's spoken with the governor within the past several days.

###

For Ti-Cats fans only

Continuing in my incessant stream of namedropping, I interviewed Bob Young, the owner of the Hamilton Tiger Cats today, and asked him what he thought about the Ti-Cats former owner, Harold Ballard.

He said, "What I'm trying to undo is all the damage that Harold Ballard caused. He created a business culture in Hamilton that was completely counterproductive to running a successful franchise.

"He bought it so that he could go to the grey cup and be the big man in town... so he just threw money at it... In the front office there is no sense of responsibility: 'Somehow, someone will bail us out; it's not our job to turn this into a good business.'"

OK I admit it. I posted this only because I think it will impress my mom.

--Buy her a paintbrush.

So this book, The Expectant Father arrived by mail yesterday. Anna was here when it came, and when I got home she had affixed a Postit to page 68, which is an entire page of things I should do to show her I care. I flip the page backward, and see it's actually a continuation of a list that began midway through page 67. Guiltily, I tabulate. I start to get an uneasy suspicion that she's actually done more of these things for me than I have for her. Then there's the obvious question: Why is this book arriving at month 8 of the pregnancy?

The thing I've learned about these books (in the last couple of weeks, as I've actually bothered to look at them), is that they include a lot of filler.

Here are a few of the things I cannot ever imagine myself doing, as suggested in The Expectant Father.

--If you're travelling on business, ask a friend to take her to dinner
--If she arrives home after you, have a candlelight dinner on the table, complete with sparkling cider. (Sparkling cider; by this, I assume they mean no booze, which is a no go)
--Buy a toy or outfit for the baby, have it gift-wrapped, and let her unwrap it
--Buy her a Mother's Day gift
--Learn easy recipies
--Make a new will that includes your baby
--Join a health club together

OK this is geeky, but it's also fucking funny if you've been following the whole SCO thing, which I've devoted a serious amount of time to over the last six months.

SCO published an open letter on copyrights on their Web site today, in response to a position piece written by a Columbia law professor on SCO's claims that the Linux kernel illegally includes code that SCO has rights to.

This is a long and complex case that essentially boils down to this: Linux is a clone of Unix. That means that by analyzing the input and output you get while running the Unix operating system, the Linux crowd has essentially rewritten it. SCO thinks they cheated while doing this, and the Linux folks think SCO is grasping at straws.

People are paying a lot of attention to this case because they think it will be a bellwether on whether or not people in high technology can get away with cloning other technology. I think, at essence the debate is about whether people can own ideas or not. Traditionally, US law has said, you can own a copyright on a string of words, but you can't own rights on the ideas they represent (like the theory of evolution, for example. Darwin could own copyright on The Origin of Species but, luckily, he couldn't charge Mendel for using his theory of evolution to conduct experiments with beans). In the SCO case, the idea is Unix, which for many people is more than an operating system. It is certainly more than an assemblage of copyrights.

Anyhow, the case is way more complex than just that, but in the long run I think whether or not people in technology can take a good idea and run with it is what's at stake.

So today I was swapping email with the guy who created Linux, asking him for an on-the-record comment on SCO's latest statement for a story I was writing. SCO has been trying to portray the Linux crowd as anti-capitalist hippie types who think all IP should be in the public domain. In their paper, SCO criticizes the idea of Copyleft as an anti-democratic assault on our American freedoms. In reality, it's just a bunch of guidelines for doing a generous thing with the stuff you write. In fact, Linux's software license (which is sometimes called Copyleft) requires copyright to be enforced.

Here's what the US Consitution says about copyright. It gives Congress the right:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

SCO says the by "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" the authors of the Consitution meant "make money." The copyleft people say no.

This is what Linus said.



Linus Torvalds
12/04/2003 01:23 PM
To: Robert McMillan/NEWS SERVICE/IDG@IDG
cc:
Subject: Re: Fw: AN OPEN LETTER FROM DARL McBRIDE, PRESIDENT & CEO OF SCO




On Thu, 4 Dec 2003 Robert_McMillan@idg.com wrote:
>
> So I take it you don't want to eliminate the copyright law? If you did,
> how would the GPL be enforced?

I'm a big believer in copyrights. In fact, of all the IP, copyright IP is
the only one that is expressly designed so that individual people can (and
do) get them without having scads of lawyers on their side. Anything
original you write is automatically copyrighted by you, and indeed, the
GPL itself depends 100% on copyright law.

Calling it "copyleft" is a play on words, which is obviously a concept
that Darl McBride has problems understanding, since humor and wordgames
too aren't directly tied to money (and are thus likely to be considered
unconsitutional by SCO).

It's called copyleft not because it is against copyright law, but because
it is against the notion that copyright law has to always be about money.
The common use of copyright law, after all, is to further yourself
economically. However, last I heard, it still wasn't unconstitutional to
want to further yourself in other ways.

If Darl McBride was in charge, he'd probably made marriage
unconstitutional too, since clearly it de-emphasizes the commercial nature
of normal human interaction, and probably is a major impediment to the
commercial growth of prostitution. Let's get our priorities straight!
There's a lot of lonely girls out there who don't get paid enough!

Maybe he should be "Darl McPimp", since that "Bride" part is clearly
fundamentally against his belief system.

Linus

Sometimes I forget that government is, at its essence, a clumsy stab at drama of the WWF variety, but I was set straight this morning.

The motorcycle cops at the Marriott parking lot tipped me off that it was going to be a bitch getting into the cyber security event that I was covering today. One of them asked me for press credentials in order to park at the good parking lot, but being the serious "poor-excuse-for-a-reporter" (see below) that I am, I hadn't bothered to acquire any.

So after walking back from the far-away public parking garage, I was already late for the event, and worried that without any credentials, there would be no way I could get in to see a speech from the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Boy was I wrong. As it turned out, the only person who checked my ID was the guy in the parking lot. I could have been Osama bin Laden himself as I strolled into the room where Tom Ridge was speaking.

It was the first time I'd ever been in the same room as such a senior Bush staffer, and I didn't find it comforting. Ridge kept talking about cyber terrorism and how a few lines of code could wreak as much havoc as a handful of bombs, but, I wondered, what made him say this? Had this ever happened? Was there even such a thing as cyber terrorism? I talked with some other security experts, and some of them said, yes bad things can happen with computers, but then again bad things can happen with forklifts, and with hamburger, and even with baby's cribs.

It really struck home how completely disconnected from the reality of the situation this government policy really was. This guy didn't know anything about cyber security? He had no real ideas how to address it. Even the people he hired didn't seem to have any real ideas.

One guy I spoke with yesterday put it best. He said Ridge was going to make a speech and that I was going to report that he had talked about cyber security and that then it would sound like the government was doing something. But nothing significant was ever actually getting accomplished. Just like nobody ever really gets hurt in a WWF Smackdown, the art of the public spectacle is to create the illusion of significance while simultaneously avoiding it at all costs.

Oooh. Hate mail from an idiot. This guy is complaining because he thinks I was alarmist to write about a bug that had been discovered in Linux last September. Conveniently, he ignores the fact that virtually none of the Linux vendors issued a fix for the bug until yesterday. Too bad he didn't use a real email address, or we could have had a fun correspondence.


patron on UCSD Library public use INFOSTATION compuer
12/02/2003 11:30 AM
To: Robert McMillan/NEWS SERVICE/IDG@IDG
cc:
Subject: Serious Linux Security Flaw Found?


Here's a headline you should sell...

Serious poor-excuse-for-a-reporter and pathological alarmist exagerates
a long found and CORRECTED flaw with the Linux kernel, slithers his
way through popular media channels and ends up exposing, once again, his
mediocre reporting skills.

Whatta lamo.

Serious Linux Security Flaw Found
Tue Dec 2, 9:00 AM ET
Add Technology - PC World to My Yahoo!

Robert McMillan, IDG News DisService

Of course, as Michael Moore has illustrated, Americans are constantly in danger of Over-rating Canada. I lived in Vancouver for a year and I didn't find it particularly pedestrian friendly or really that much better than the suburbs. It has a nice stretch around where my friend Roxanne lives, but that's about it.

God bless Canada.

Recently, while musing about his retirement plans, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien said he might just kick back and smoke some pot. "I will have my money for my fine and a joint in the other hand," he said with a smile. The glibness of the remark made it nearly impossible to imagine an American president uttering it. But in a nation where the dominant west coast city, Vancouver, has come to be known as Vansterdam, few Canadians blinked

As I watch my fellow Americans blunder from one idiotic, morally bankrupt, hypocritical position to another the clean snows and blackflies and the sad beautiful playing Glenn Gould seem all the more appealing.

Laura's Advent calendar is cute.