We are going to war. Shall I stay silent?

I’m having a not-infrequent crisis of confidence, brought on by the failure of the administration’s incompetent, amateurish, hypocritical diplomacy… no, wait, let me start over.

I’m having a not-infrequent crisis of confidence, brought on by the nearness of the war and the lives being placed in danger on both sides. Prayer seems called for but pointless. Part of me says I should be supportive of our troops and not question their leader’s motives for bringing us to this point. And I do wish our troops Godspeed and a quick and decisive action, with no innocent blood spilt.

Part of me says I should just ignore it, that it will quickly go away, and that the stock market rebound will fix everything. (If it happens.) That’s not a very big part of me.

But I can’t stay silent. Even without questioning the president’s motives (which is tempting), I have to question his actions when they seem to fly in the face of everything I ever learned about this country and what it stands for.

I have to question his statement that we are legally justified in going to this war when the evidence to the contrary is strong.

I have to question his claims that Iraq poses a clear danger and possesses weapons of mass destruction, when all evidence of these weapons has proven to be based on fabricated documents, plagiarized British war dossiers, unreliable and discredited speculation, and misinterpreted reports.

I will not stay silent. These are my duties in this war:

  1. It is my duty as a citizen to be informed.
  2. It is my duty as a blogger to inform others.
  3. It is my duty as a Christian to pray for the safety of our troops.
  4. It is my duty as a patriot to question and challenge.

Esta: back, without photos

Esta reports on her trip home to the family ancestral stomping grounds, where they visited Dave and Sally’s home at Betty’s Cove on Bear Creek, and came away with memories but no photos:

Through the entire expedition I’d been taking pictures like a madwoman, with my aunt joking about Pulitzer prizes. I had my Dad’s camera slung around my neck, and took rather painstaking care with focus and light, hunting for unique perspectives. From the cove we went to Antioch church, where my grandparents and many other relatives are buried. I took more pictures of the headstones, documenting dates and relations for future reference. Willie, Johnnie and Alice; distant cousins I hadn’t known existed, all dead before they reached 25. A Lunsford ancestor who died in the Spanish-American war. Obidiah and Polly O’Dell — I don’t have enough time for all the stories about them.

Yeah, lots of pictures. Too bad there wasn’t any film in the camera.

I talked to her late yesterday morning as she was driving home. She’s bringing back a stack of recipes from my grandmother’s collection. Apparently most of them are clipped rather than written down, since she mostly made up what she cooked, except for cake recipes. But we’re still hopeful to find some gems.

Top Five Learnings from 9/11 and how we ignore them

It’s probably long past time to do anything constructive with this, but Steve Kirsch’s listing of the top five learnings from 9/11—and how the administration’s actions have ignored them—is pretty persuasive. And his conclusions echo a lot of my thoughts:

  1. Disarmament of foreign powers is not sufficient because our own weapons can easily be used to attack us
  2. Increasing homeland security is not sufficient because there are way too many holes and we still can’t even plug one of them after years of trying
  3. Attacking governments who support terrorists is not sufficient because it is not unfriendly governments who are the threat today; it is now the people from friendly nations who are attacking us
  4. The root cause of the attack is that people don’t like us overseas because of our hegemonic foreign policies, not because they are jealous of us
  5. The biggest threat to our world may be in our own reactions, and not the incident itself

…We should be asking ourselves two key questions:

  • What could we have done that would have reduced the chance that this would have happened?
  • What should we do now to reduce the chance of this happening again?

The answer is obvious. We should put our efforts on addressing the root causes of this terrorism, not the symptom. We need to make it less likely that people will want to fund and/or participate in such activities.

  • We should have a Department of Peace and International Cooperation and Assistance, not a Department of Homeland Security.
  • We should be supporting international treaties, not backing out of them.
  • We should be a leader in seeking peaceful solutions to conflicts, not a leader in the pre-emptive strike.
  • We should be respectful of foreign leaders, not insulting them by calling them pygmies.
  • We should respect foreign governments, not label them “evil.”
  • We should be having talks with our adversaries, not refusing to talk (as we are with North Korea).

In short, we should be doing exactly the opposite of what we are doing now.

Incidentally, this is the same Steve Kirsch who is the founder and CEO of Propel. When I met him in January of 2001, he was talking about energy policy mismanagement in California. Sounds like he found himself a bigger target.

Playing telephone

I am currently burning off some consultancy karma. Or to look at it another way, I’m getting paid back for every time I misunderstood a client’s requirements and delivered something they didn’t ask for, couldn’t use, and wouldn’t pay for.

My job is to define business requirements (from the perspective of the marketing team where I sit) for various internally-facing tools. Today I had someone from the IT group on the phone explaining to me that, in the course of developing the estimate for building one of these tools, they had scoped the effort as including a data warehouse, OLAP capabilities, and a custom report builder. “!!!!” I replied. “All we really want is some easy reports with standard parameters. And the data set only has four dimensions; how the heck could we even get anything out of an OLAP cube?”

“Oh,” came the reply. “That’s good; that should drive the estimate down quite a bit.”

Sigh. I know I’ve done the same thing more than once to my old customers, but it doesn’t make me feel any happier. It still feels like a game of telephone.

Weekend with friends

We saw Shel, Vik and Kris off a few hours ago. We spent today at Stevens Pass. The snow was granular to icy, but still plenty ski-able, if you don’t mind the occasional slip. Lisa and I chickened out: no snowboards for us. Instead we spent the day on blue runs until we accidentally strayed onto a black diamond that wasn’t clearly posted. After that it was back to the bunny slopes to hang out with our friends (and continue to be thankful we were still alive).

Incipit lamentationem

Early spring is also Lent. For years I celebrated Lent, and especially Holy Week, with the Suspicious Cheese Lords. We would provide music for a Tenebrae service at a church—including, over the years, the Church of the Epiphany, St. Matthew’s Cathedral, and the Franciscan Monastery—generally the Tallis Lamentations. We would also host a Tenebrae service at the Georgetown University chapel.

What great music. Over the years, we debuted members’ original compositions, sang Allegri’s Miserere, Byrd’s “Ave Verum Corpus,” Pärt’s “De profundis” (my directorial debut), and dozens of other works, including my introduction to Gregorian chant.

This year, with Mæstro di Capella under their belts, the group is branching into radio gigs, including a live performance on XM radio a week ago and a coming episode of Millennium of Music. Should be good listening. I wish I could be there to sing.

Turning to spring

It was sunny and pleasantly cool as I drove in this morning after a couple days of hard rain. I had the sunroof open. The ornamental cherry trees in the parking lot outside my building are in full bloom. It must be approaching springtime.

Naturally, we’re going skiing this weekend. This time we’ll stay local, but we’re going with Shel, her fiancé Vik, and her sister Kris. They’ve threatened to take us snowboarding. Should be fun.

Gibson on the ending of Neuromancer

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone explain the end of Gibson’s seminal novel Neuromancer. Gibson answers a discussion group question on his blog today to provide that explanation:

And his voice the cry of a bird
Unknown,
3Jane answering in song, three
notes, high and pure.
A true name….

As to what the word is, well, I never considered it to be a word, really, though 3Jane, teasingly, calls it one. It is in fact three “notes”, something akin to birdcall. The key to the cipher, that is, is revealed as being purely tonal, musical, rather than linguistic. Case’s “cry”, a species of primal scream, the voicing of the emotionality he’s been walled off from throughout the narrative (and his life), torn finally from the core of his being, is what actually forces 3Jane to give up the key. Call and response, of some kind. Hearing him, she can’t help herself. When she taunts him (“Take your word, thief.”) she’s in fact daring him, and assuming he can’t — just as she was, a moment before, daring Molly to kill her.

So Neuromancer as therapy narrative. A new category of theses is born.

Finding parts for a 17-year-old computer

I seem to have obsessions with mechanical things in their late teens. My second car was a 1977 MGB that I drove from 1991 until 1996, when it turned 19 (and caught fire, but that’s another story). Now I’m working on this surplus old Mac.

It’s not a Fat Mac, as I originally reported (and was told by the donor), but it was free, and came with some goodies. An extra keyboard, in the original box. An external floppy drive. And a replacement motherboard, internal floppy, and back chassis. (The back chassis is the part that was signed by the original Mac development team; to look at it for the first time is kind of awe inspiring.)

It did not come with the tool needed to open it, which is a specialty long handled Torx 15 wrench only available from Sears these days. It also didn’t come with a replacement PRAM battery, which was originally an Eveready 523 but which can apparently be replaced by the Exell A123 4.5 volt battery.

Next steps: figure out how to get to the yoke on the CRT to fix the bad solder joint.

Supporting weblog research

Wil Wheaton points to a survey of bloggers being conducted as part of a thesis investigation at Georgetown University. It appears to be a fairly well thought out survey with a good variety of demographic and behavioral questions about blogging.

Though I have a few criticisms of the survey (the caps on the choices numbers of daily and weekly visitors are really low, and the sample she’ll get will be nowhere near random), I still think that research on blogs is worthwhile and encourage you to visit the survey.

License to sample?

Creative Commons discusses adding a potential new commons license that explicitly grants sampling rights. Interesting idea, and they quote Don Joyce of Negativland: “[A sampling option would] stop legally suppressing it and start culturally encouraging it — because it’s here to stay.”

While I respect Mr. Joyce’s work, I’d like to hear from other musicians on this one. I can’t help but think that putting a license that grants blanket rights to sample might be opening the door for free riders. An artist like Negativland sampling something is one thing: someone pulling a P. Diddy and creating a new song that practically clones the original is something else, and I’d want to be sure that I was protected against that by default.

Besides, if someone creates a new hit song whose hook, chorus, or other major melodic element is wholly derivative of my performance, I’d want recompense in the form of royalties. The draft broadly proposed at Creative Commons doesn’t appear to allow for that option.