A Reflection on the Fragility of Life...

Today, I attended a funeral...

It wasn't a "normal" funeral...you know, one where the deceased has lived a long, full life, is in his or her 70s or 80s or 90s, and even though there is sorrow at the passing, there's not shock or devastation at the sudden, inexplicable loss that happened too soon...

Today, I went to a funeral for the son of a friend, a man I work with. His son, just 19 years old, was killed sometime shortly after 3AM this past Sunday. In the rain, which made the roads slick, in the middle of the night, he wrecked his car, got out, tried to cross the interstate to get to safety, and was hit by a semi-truck and killed.

It's not the details of the accident that provide the shock, though they are shocking enough. It's the sense of senseless loss, the end of an all-too-young life in an instant, the tragedy for a father and mother and four-year-old brother he leaves behind, of instantly being robbed of a bright light in their lives. As a father myself, I cannot fathom, nor do I hope that I will ever have to, the profundity of their loss. Fathers are not supposed to bury their sons...not supposed to bear the pain of going on after having someone so precious taken from them...

And, as for this child's mother...I cannot ever claim that I can know what she must feel. I have always been (just the tiniest bit) jealous of the bond between my wife and our children...she carried them inside her for 9 months, felt them, literally, as a part of her...gave them life, and then nurtured and fed that life, all in a way that I, of course, could not, a bond I can never share. No matter how much Dad must feel that his heart has been wrenched out of his chest, his grief, his pain, must pale in comparison to that of his wife...

This is the third time in just over ten years that I have attended a funeral like this one. The first, in November, 1997, was for the daughter of a friend of mine, a child who suffered from Shone's Syndrome, and lost her hard-fought battle at the tender age of 8 1/2. The second, in June, 2004, was a friend of my son's, an almost 8-year-old boy who died when, while riding his bike, he collided with a pickup truck. And now this one...

It is these times, when a life ends so suddenly, that we're reminded just how fragile and how precious life is. It is times like this when you realize that you may not get the time to mend a broken friendship, or to renew a relationship with a relative. Life is oh so short, oh so tenuous, and each day lived is a victory over death. In our rapid-fire culture here in the US, it seems sometimes as though we always live for tomorrow. If we work just a little harder now...if we invest ourselves in our careers a little more now...if we labor to make progress now, so that someday...SOME day...we might be able to slow down a little, take a breath, and smell the proverbial roses.

We see commercials on television that tell us we need "a plan" for our retirement, that play on our baby-boomer sensibilities, that tell us we can have our cake and eat it too, our sense that there is a future to which we are entitled...

We are entitled to nothing...

I am certainly not preaching a "live for today, to hell with the future" philosophy...certainly we should never fail to plan...but we must also learn to live, to wring every drop from life each and every day, because tomorrow is not guaranteed. The very title of this blog captures the essence of what I'm talking about..."Il dolce far niente"... literally, the sweetness of doing nothing...the idea that in those moments we can steal from the grind of daily life, obligation, work...one can find the sweetness that is what living is truly about...

Recently, on Countdown with Keith Olbermann (if you read this blog, you know Keith is my hero), there was a short piece about a man in the United Kingdom, 101 years old, who was preparing to run the London marathon. When asked what he does to prepare, the first thing he said was that he wakes up every morning...good prep!

There's no lesson here (I'm not qualified to offer one even if there were), and I'm not even sure why I'm writing this, except perhaps for catharsis for myself.

For each of my friends, I cannot know your grief and your pain, and I pray that I never shall, and I do not know what I can do to help you with yours, other than to pray for you, for your children, and for myself and mine...

Rush Limbaugh is a fucking moron...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23176099/

“I would like today to announce a tentative decision — I’m still thinking about it — to endorse Barack Obama,” he said, his head cocked slightly toward his 18-karat-gold-plated microphone, his hands spread wide like the wings of his sleek G4 jet. His microphone is 18 karat gold plated?? These are the kinds of people that, when a revolution happens, the poor, hungry, and disenfranchised seek out first, and tar and feather, or disembowel, or behead. I'm sorry...was daydreaming there for a second...

“Folks, can we agree, just between us,” he told his listeners, sotto voce, on Wednesday, “has it not been brilliant how strategically I have inserted myself in this campaign?” Is this guy actually for real??

I'm heartbroken...I really am...at the level to which political discourse has fallen in our country.

Soldier blogs from beyond the grave...

As I was perusing msnbc.com this morning, I came across the story of Major Andrew Olmsted, killed in Iraq on January 3 (seven more American service people have died since him, bringing the US death toll to 3, 915). He had been blogging for some time, under a nom de plume, about the war, his experiences, life in general...

Major Olmsted wrote (and apparently revised a couple times) a final blog entry to be posted in the event of his death. It's a worthwhile read, as, I'm discovering, so much of what he wrote is...

Requiescat in pacem...

http://www.andrewolmsted.com/

2007...goodbye and good riddance

Sometimes, the world feels turned upside down to me, and never more, it seems, than this last year...

Let's review:

• There are now 3,900 US military personnel dead in Iraq (and counting)...3,900... that's 25% more than perished in the attacks on 9/11...and all in a war entered into on false pretenses, invented facts, and outright lies -- assertions which the demon-in-chief knew to be false when he made them...and a war on a country that had NOTHING to do with 9/11. Yes, I know all those who are either too uninformed, or too blind to the truth or just plain morons will shout that al quaeda is all over Iraq. BUT THEY WEREN'T THERE BEFORE WE INVADED!! Which came first? We invaded. We failed to plan for what would happen when we won (you know, nation-building, that thing Dubya said no administration of his would do -- that's one promise he's actually kept...), and the vacuum(s) that followed were opportunistically filled by al quaeda...in fact, more than one student of the situation has observed that there has never been a greater recruiting tool for al quaeda than our invasion of Iraq. Meanwhile, Afghanistan languishes, the Taliban is resurgent, Osama bin Laden remains at large (you know, the guy actually responsible for 9/11)... As a great bumper sticker I saw said, "Nobody died when Clinton lied..." That about sums it up.
  
• Scooter Libby was convicted -- CONVICTED -- of one count of obstruction, two counts of perjury and one count of lying to the FBI about how he learned of Valerie Plame’s identity and whom he told (Note here...the revisionist history on this one is that she wasn't really a covert operative. Plame was a "NOC" -- non-official cover, meaning so secret, in the terms of the old Mission Impossible television series, that "the secretary" will deny all knowledge...and, by the way, the guy responsible for the law that made it a crime to reveal the identity of a covert agent -- known officially as the "Intelligence Identities Protection Act" -- was the high priest of the republican party, Ronald Reagan.) And then, facing 30 months in jail -- itself a travesty compared to the crime -- his sentence is commuted by the criminal-in-chief, effectively pardoning him, and thus guaranteeing that the details of how Plame's identity came to be leaked will remain known only to the criminals responsible (in case you've lost count, Richard Armitage, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby himself, and of course, Mr. C-Average, "W"). I wonder how many foreign agents, recruited by Valerie Plame, and working for us -- you know, the good guys -- lost their lives because she was outed, and they were traced to her...
• That (rhymes with "punt") Coultergeist (as my hero, Keith Olbermann calls her)...for so many things, but my favorite... "We just want Jews to be perfected, as they say." Won't somebody just shoot her?
• Here's another of my favorites, courtesy of the deceiver-in-chief...the fact that the US Intelligence community knew that Iran ceased its efforts to build a nuclear bomb in 2003 is proof that they intend to build a nuclear bomb... OK, my head is going to explode now...maybe all those kids who never paid attention in class were right, and I was wrong...if I were stupid, this might all make sense...
• Mitt Romney saw his father march with Martin Luther King...oops! That never happened...no, it was that the NRA endorsed him when he ran for governor of Massachusetts...oops! That never happened either! Wait, wait, he's pro-life...doh!!! There he was, speaking at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser in 1994! What a charlatan! The mormons can keep him...America doesn't need him...
• The Democratic congress is ineffectual, because they can't stop Bush...I get so weary of this! If you understood how our government works, you know, according to the US Constitution...that thing that controls, well, how our government works, you'd understand that there need to be enough Democrats in congress to override a presidential veto...the specific language, from Article 1, Section 7, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution, "Every Order, Resolution, or Vote to which the Concurrence of the Senate and House of Representatives may be necessary (except on a question of Adjournment) shall be presented to the President of the United States; and before the Same shall take Effect, shall be approved by him, or being disapproved by him, shall be repassed by two thirds of the Senate and House of Representatives, according to the Rules and Limitations prescribed in the Case of a Bill." Read it here... So, don't piss on the Democrats for not having enough power to defeat this bastard...we, the people, didn't give it to them!!
• And the latest, today, Benazir Bhutto is assassinated...I'm looking over my shoulder for the apocalypse...

But, there were two good things that did happen in 2007...Jerry Falwell and Henry Hyde, the devil's own minister, and the whoremaster of the US House of Representatives, died. Go straight to hell, boys...there's a special corner reserved just for you...I'm reminded of a passage (one of many) from the bible: Matthew 23:14 "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation." If you know me, you know I'm not a particularly religious person, but I loathe hypocrisy...

I, for one, am happy to see this year pass...I only hope that 2008 is somehow better...I pray that it not be worse...

Daylight Savings Time woes...

If you own a computer... :-)

Here's a link to Microsoft's web site page on the DST issue, with some question driven guides to help you ensure that your device(s) don't choke...

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst

People in glass houses....

I've always believed (and said in this blog) that I thought that the Republican-led witch hunt against Bill Clinton for, let's face it, lying about getting a blowjob from a woman who was not his wife in the Oval Office was a far greater travesty than what he did. In fact, I pretty much don't care about what Bill Clinton did (or does) in his personal life, and when you look back on life as an American under Clinton compared to life under the current waste of human flesh who stole the office, well, 'nuff said. I also pointed out that the "holier than thou" Republicans who led the charge, such paragons of moral virtue like Henry Hyde, an adulterer, and Robert Livingston, erstwhile heir apparent to the Speakership of the House and, by the way, an adulterer, were hardly in a position to judge Clinton. It now turns out that that other self-appointed arbiter of all that is good and moral was himself, while spearheading the effort to impeach Clinton (!!!), having an extramarital affair. Newt, we're surprised, shocked even (NOT!):
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17527506/

More Republican Hijinx....or, Ode to a Lost Constitution

Just when you think that there must be something they won't do...some level they won't stoop to...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17453555/

Turns out Pete Domenici, Republican Senator from New Mexico, may have called a U.S. Attorney in his home state to pressure him to issue indictments against Democrats implicated in a kickback investigation before the mid-term congressional elections last fall. The prosecutor, David Iglesias, was later fired, he says (with some evidence), because he resisted the pressure by Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson, another NM Republican to rush the indictments. Iglesias is one of eight U.S. Attorneys fired in December, some without cause, all under similar circumstances.

There are so many things wrong with this... first off, it is a violation of Congressional ethics for a member of congress to communicate with federal prosecutors about ongoing criminal investigations. But even if Domenici and Wilson skate by on ethics, this kind of behavior smacks of the Gestapo. The Gestapo, during its tenure, operated without any restrictions by civil authority, meaning that its members could not be tried for any of their police practices. This unconditional authority added an elitist element to the Gestapo; its members knew that whatever actions they took, no consequences would arise. Sound familiar...?

At least we hung the Nazis...will we actually let these criminals retire with pensions funded by our taxes, earned with our sweat and labor?

Ann, you ignorant slut...

If there's anybody left who wonders whether there's actually any conservatism or morality (or decency) left in the conservative wing of the Republican party, well, apparently you've been sleeping in a cave... At a meeting of CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference), following an address by Mitt Romney (and they said Bill Clinton was slick!), Ann Coulter, perhaps the most vile creature since Adolph Hitler, said

"I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I -- so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards."

(Romney, by the way, distanced himself almost immediately from her remark -- he could scarcely do anything else -- yet, revealingly, refused to go the extra mile...to do the only decent thing that a decent human being would do...and distance himself from her...)

Wow...here's a guy (Edwards) who came from the working class, has spent the last four years, out of the limelight, meeting and talking with ordinary folks about their lives, what they want from their government, what they need, perhaps the most decent human being in politics, regardless what you think of his views. And oh, by the way, devoted husband to a wife who has fought and overcome breast cancer. Faggot? Ann, you are such an asshole. "Faggot" is a slur against gay men, Ann. Sort of like "dike," you know, kinda like you, Ann? You know he's not gay...and even if he were, rabidly, flamingly, homosexual, what's the point of calling him a faggot? Do you think, somehow, that that's cool? That it appeals to conservatives? Are you that stupid, Greenwich Girl, or does an Ivy League pedigree these days qualify you to be nothing more than a boil on society's ass?

Shortly after the faggot remark, when responding to questions, Coulter said that "Romney is the best candidate we have." She said Rudy Giuliani is too liberal -- "when both candidates for president support abortion I think we can hang it up as a country." After dumping on McCain, and saluting Gingrich as a brilliant guy who's time has passed she embraced Romney: "He tricked liberals into voting for him. I like a guy who hoodwinks the voters so easily."

(http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/48765/)

Ah, this I like even better...endorsing deception of the people by the people's elected representatives...what hole did this thing crawl out of??

Actually, Ann Coulter is the walking, breathing, living exemplar of the case for working ceaselessly to preserve abortion rights in our country. Her mother would have done society a great service by aborting her...

Look, one of the great things about our country is that you can say anything, and your right to do so is enshrined in our Constitution. However vile and below contempt I may find this creature, I defend her right to spew such trash. But, because you can do a thing is not always reason to actually do it. This kind of garbage does not elevate the political discourse in our country. In fact, it reduces us to the level of animals...appealing to the basest of base instincts, our fear and hatred of that which we do not understand, that which threatens our complacency, our narrowly defined and defended view of how things ought to be. What's ironic, and in a twisted way, kinda funny, is that the most notable "faggots" of recent news have come from the same sewer as Ann (Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, Ken Mehlman?)...

Ann, and others like her, speak, act, and live without a conscience, without that internal system of checks and balances that makes one think about the effect and consequences of one's actions...either she does not consider them, or she doesn't give a damn...in either case, she is a vile creature. For certain, she lives in good company...other notable people in history who spoke and acted without conscience include Hitler, Stalin, Mao, GeeDubya... One day, Ann will get her comeuppance. I can't wait. The base instincts which she arouses in me leave me anticipating the day with great enthusiasm...

Musings on life outside the United States...

I've been extremely fortunate, in that the career I've chosen has enabled me to travel broadly. I've been all over Europe, over much of Asia, Latin America, and most of the lower forty-eight states.

I'm increasingly struck by the extent to which we Americans have isolated ourselves from the rest of the world. By that, I mean we know very little about the rest of the world, very little about what's going on in the rest of the world, and the saddest part of all, we don't really seem to want to know about anything east of the Atlantic, or west of the Pacific, and even those things which happen north or south of the border are viewed through a very xenophobic lens.

As I write, I'm sitting in my hotel room in the UK, Berkshire, about 40 miles west of London. On television, I'm watching CNN. Yes, CNN. I've found that it's available in most of the countries to which I've traveled, but, apart from the logo in the upper left corner of the screen, most Americans who've never traveled outside the US might not recognize it. Right now, World News is on...and they're covering, truly, stories from around the world... A sampling:

• Tornadoes in Alabama
• Bus crash in Atlanta
• Incest case in Germany
• Anna Nicole Smith's funeral
• The trend of young Indians, educated abroad, returning to India
• Riots in Copenhagen
• Six Sunnis assasinated in Iraq
• Iran's president visiting Saudi Arabia ahead of a meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan
• UK sending a team to Ethiopia to find missing tourists
• World weather (North and South America, Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia)
• Roger Federer wins in Dubai
• Scandal at Walter Reed
• etc...

Some of the regular programs which appear on CNN:

• Inside Africa
• Inside the Middle East
• Inside Asia
• World Sport (which truly covers the world...feature story today on the debut of Daisuke Matsuzaka with the Boston Red Sox, and the Tennis Channel Open in Las Vegas, the Qatar Total Open, among others)
• etc.

So, who cares? Well, we should...this is CNN, not the BBC, not Al Jazeera. It's an American network, headquartered in Atlanta, and yet the CNN programming I can watch in the US represents only a small subset of the outstanding, worldwide programming that is being produced by them. Why don't they show this stuff at home? Likely, because there's no demand for it by Americans. I realize that this is a sweeping generalization, but in my experience, people outside the US are much more knowlegeable about world events, including those happening in the US, than we are, and in some cases, they seem to understand more about what's happening inside the US than we do...

I've just finished reading Bushwhacked by the late Molly Ivins, and her co-author, Lou Dubose. Ms. Ivins, for those not familiar with her, was a down home, Texas journalist who had a particular knack for political commentary. She was, to be certain, a liberal, a populist, and a Democrat. In Bushwhacked, published in 2003, Ivins and Dubose chronicle the misadventures of GeeDubya and his administration. It is an account of a tenure that I am confident will be viewed by history as the single most incompetent, destructive (of civil liberties, human rights, the US Constitution, the separation of church and state, some sense of balance between the social strata in the US ... I could go on and on), and downright criminal administrations in the history of the United States. Period. I'm fairly well-read, and yet I learned things in this book that I was completely unaware of, things which the US press has simply not covered...

There's a saying in the US (I think it's just the US) that we get the leadership we deserve...we'd best wake up, and soon. We are no longer viewed in the world as a benevolent superpower, or for that matter, a superpower at all...I fear for the world my children are growing up in...

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story...

Marketing has been defined in a number of ways, by a number of people, for a number of years, but, basically, the definition is something similar to "the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service"... interestingly, I've not been able to find any definition that makes any reference to marketing having to actually be reflective of reality or, dare I say it, the truth.

So it shouldn't really have surprised me to learn that the marketing folks at IBM are foisting yet another...oh, let's call it a "good story" upon the world of business again. Reuters carried the story (http://www.reuters.com/article/technology-media-telco-SP/idUSN2845453020070228), which was picked up by a host of other outlets, including the Washington Post... Basically, the new, earth-changing news is that IBM has reached a deal with Google to embed Google Gadgets into WebSphere Portal pages for IBM customers. The article goes on to blather about how IBM is (for the first time, you would believe) making it possible for businesses to leverage the really cool stuff that Google provides for business. Sounds great...except that it's not really a big deal. People seem to fail to understand that web stuff is web stuff, and portals are, well, portals. Making a big deal out of this is kinda like DirecTV boasting about bringing HBO to its customers, as though nobody had done it before (or could).

As evidence for my opinion, I offer http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint/playground/Shared%20Documents/Gadgets.aspx.

Look, I have nothing against good marketing. I do, though, have a problem with misleading marketing...

'Nuff said.

Musings on recent happenings...

I haven't blogged in a while... too many things going on, and nothing terribly interesting to say, I guess... but I've been away long enough...

Anna Nicole Smith... sweet Lord... a Florida appeals court has finally lifted the stay (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17379805/) that was preventing the guarian ad litem for her daughter from burying her, finally, next to her son, in the Bahamas. With all the silliness that has ensued since her death (not unlike a lot of the silliness that surrounded her life), the thing that struck me is how little everybody -- except, interestingly, Howard K. Stern -- seemed to care about her wishes, what was best for her daughter, and so on. Her mother was especially galling, from my perspective. A true mother would not question, for a New York minute, her daughter's desire to be buried beside her son, in the place where she had chosen to make a new life... In fact, this whole circus has been about garnering advantage, and, ultimately, access to her estate...what a sad, sad state of affairs, and what absolutely shameful behavior by her mother!

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ... I suspect that most of the folks who have been so thoroughly absorbed in the Anna Nicole story don't even know who Schlesinger is (was) (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17392935/?s). He was a Camelot insider...one of the mythic people who were part of a mythic time in American history, and he was one of its most learned chroniclers. It amazes me, always, how little appetite we have in this country for history, ours or anybody else's, so it's no great surprise that Schlesinger was not more of a rock star, outside of a certain group...

Iraq... more and more Americans are dying, and yet Bush and Cheney continue doggedly down the same path, doing the same things that have proven over and over again to not work... all this while nearly 90% of National Guard units don't have the equipment they need (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17390852/), the Taliban are re-emergent in Afghanistan (you know, the place where Osama bin Laden is still at large, where the people who actually attacked us on 9/11 are holed up... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10624157), and those brave young boys and girls who are leaving arms and legs and the innocence of their youth behind forever are being rewarded by a grateful government with decrepit accomodations shared with rats while they recover their physical and mental faculties (and, as usual for this administration, a scapegoat's been identified and fired, as though he was single-handedly responsible... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10624157).

Why do I increasingly get the feeling that we're living in the latter days of a modern Roman empire?

Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot (with apologies to Al Franken)

Update... the msnbc link is expired, but Rush's ranting on this subject are also found here http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/24/AR2006102400691.html and here http://mediamatters.org/items/200610240001

Read all about it at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15408508/

What a friggin' moron this guy is!!!

My grandmother suffered with Parkinson's for a little over 20 years at the end of her life. It is an insidious disease that slowly, systematically robs you of voluntary control of your body's movements.

I just can't think of words to describe what an indescribable asshole this guy is...

Rush, I hope you get Parkinson's some day...nobody deserves the disease, but it would be poetic justice...

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely!

The continuously expanding scandal regarding ex-Congressman Tom Foley's salacious emails and instant messages to male Congressional pages is really a study in so many base human behaviors. It's becoming increasingly apparent that lots of Republicans on the Hill knew about Foley's behavior as early as (latest news) 2000, but instead of immediately acting to protect the pages, they did things that appear to have been more calculated to make a quiet attempt to stop the behavior, but ensure that the fact that the behavior occurred at all never saw the light of day. Confronted about it, I've heard talking head after talking head comparing what Foley did to what Bill Clinton did or Barney Frank did. While neither is particularly a paragon of moral virtue, the following things are true about Foley, which are categorically not true about Clinton or Frank.

• Foley sent lewd emails and instant messages to 16-year olds. Monica Lewinsky was 21 when she went to work at the White House. In this country, 21 is the age at which you are considered to fully be an adult, NOT A CHILD! You can vote, drink, and have every other individual right and freedom which this society provides, which you cannot at 16! Barney Frank consorted with a male prostitute, who ran a prostitution ring out of Frank's basement. This man also was NOT A CHILD! And prostitution, whatever we may otherwise think about it, is the world's oldest profession (or is it politics?). Neither of these men was taking advantage of children!!
• Foley, it turns out, may have had sex with an underage page. Neither Clinton nor Frank had sex with anybody under age.

And, not once in this entire discussion have I heard a single Republican say, unequivocally, as the very first thing out of their mouths, "our obligation, first, foremost, and always is to protect our children, and we will not rest until everyone accountable has been discovered and appropriately punished". Hastert says, "As was once said in this town, the buck stops here" and then went on to weasel his way out of any responsibility or accountability for anything having to do with the entire matter, except for saying he's responsible. Saying and being ain't the same thing, Mr. Speaker! And oh, by the way, the person behind "as was once said in this town" was Harry S. Truman, asshole, a Democrat! "Give 'em hell" Harry would've been to the bottom of this one already, and heads would have rolled, already. I understand your not wanting to be identified with one of the most decent men, Democrat, Republican, or Whig ever to hold the highest office in the land, because you're frankly not fit to shine his shoes...

I love Keith Olbermann

I don't know where the inflection point was for Keith, when it was that he decided he was too angry to remain silent, but I'm glad it happened. Here's Keith on 9/11:
"And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have "forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President." Read the whole thing here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14687895/#060911b.

9/11 five years later...

Every year, on the anniversary of 9/11, I've sent email to friends and people close to me reflecting on the events of that day. Here's the one I sent this morning....

I can’t believe that this is the fifth of these emails that I have sent…I send them because I feel it is one small thing I can do to keep the memory of this tragedy alive, and to ensure that we never forget it…in many important ways, this is and will forever be the defining event of our generation.

On September 11, 2001, I was in the office early. I was to do a presentation on Microsoft’s Collaboration Strategy for a customer from Detroit in our EBC with my boss. He called me on his way in to ask me to stop by his office and pick up a couple things he needed for the demos we were planning to do. As I stepped out of my office to go retrieve them, my phone rang again, him again, to tell me that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. What a tragic accident!

By the time I got everything together and got up to the EBC, the second plane had hit, and there were reports that the White House had been hit, followed shortly thereafter by the news that it was the Pentagon, not the White House. We were at war…there was no doubt about that.

We stood, with the folks from the customer, gathered around a television in one of the displays that was then up at the EBC, and watched the live coverage, and watched as the first tower fell. Our customer was calling back to folks in their headquarters in Detroit. If somebody was hitting buildings symbolizing American capitalism, maybe their headquarters would be a target, too. “What about Microsoft?”, I wondered…surely, if people were targeting symbols of American capitalism, Microsoft was right up there…to say that it was a confusing, scary morning just doesn’t begin to capture it. There was going to be no collab strategy presentation this morning…

I called my wife…it didn’t take much to decide I needed to be with her and our children. She and I used to live in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the river from New York City. I worked then at Lotus’s NYC office on Whitehall Street, she worked in Greenwich Village at NYU. Each morning, we would board the PATH train from Hoboken, into the World Trade Center. I would head up the escalators from the PATH station, past the commuter bar (there was eerie video later of the commuter bar, looking like a moment in time, interrupted suddenly, but otherwise untouched), up the wide bank of escalators that led to the shopping mall in the basement of the center, past all the shops, up the last set of escalators that led to the doors and out to the street…and every day, I’d reverse that trip on my way home…

When I think back on that day, I still can’t shake the thought that, had one or two life decisions gone differently, I could still have been at Lotus, in New York, on my way to work that morning…there, but for the grace of God…

Over the next couple of days, we learned of loss. One of my wife’s friends was on American Airlines flight 11, as were two other people I didn’t know directly, but was connected to. One was one of the earliest Lotus employees, who had gone on to found her own successful company, and the other was the daughter of a guy I worked with who had come over from IBM after they acquired Lotus. Five more of my wife's friends from college, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, were among the dead. And the number of friends we had who had lost husbands or wives or children or friends or knew someone who had was staggering…

I was back in New York in November, 2001, and was completely overwhelmed… Arriving at Grand Central Station, walking past endless, hastily erected bulletin boards with pictures of the missing, phone numbers to call if you knew anything about where they might be…as I made my way over to the Microsoft office, walking past fire stations, the sidewalks in front covered with flowers, pictures of the firefighters from that station who had perished taped up on the doors…a bronze statue of two firefighters, delivered on a flatbed trailer, and not yet unloaded, parked on the side of the street next door to a fire station…we all saw the footage on television, but it did not begin to convey the enormity of the loss…the sorrow and desperation of those who still, two months later, didn’t know, because very few intact bodies were recovered, whether their loved ones had perished, or might be in a hospital somewhere, or suffering amnesia…the scale of the devastation, the wreckage of the buildings still burning at ground zero the absolute silence on the streets down near ground zero, on Wall Street, on Broadway…

Five years later, everything is different, though we’ve become increasingly acclimated to what was called, early on, “the new normal.” Regardless your religious beliefs, regardless your political leanings, there’s no doubt that life today is different than it was five years ago this morning, and it’s not necessarily better. My wish and my prayer for all of you, and for myself, is that, out of this experience, we will all be a little more tolerant, a little more forgiving, a little more focused on the things which truly matter in life…

Thanks for reading. Never forget…

Collaboration -- The Next Holy Grail

I used to work for a now defunct software company called Lotus Development Corporation (now wholly subsumed into IBM, and a "brand" in IBM's software portfolio). I was fortunate to be there in the beginning, and later heyday, of Lotus Notes. In the early days of selling that product, we used to have a really difficult time describing what it was and could do for customers. We called it "groupware" or "collaborative software," and, mostly, people's eyes would glaze over. In late 1993, Lotus acquired a small company called SoftSwitch, and it was Mike Zisman, one of the founders, and later Lotus's CEO, who drove home to the Lotus sales force the idea that, whatever else it was, Notes was e-mail infrastructure, and that was how we ought to be selling it. That shift in positioning (coupled with IBM's financial backing following the acquisition, which enabled Lotus to dramatically lower the license cost, and restructure how the product was licensed) grew Notes from under 3 million seats sold in its first five years in market, to over 100 million seats sold by the close of the decade of the 90's.

But another fundamental shift happened during that same period, and that was the shift of collaboration from something that makes your eyes glaze over to an entire category of software, and, more recently, the next holy grail for business. There's plenty to read in places like Fortune and Forbes and Business Week and similar pubs about how collaboration is transforming business, or will, and how the most innovative companies are focusing on collaboration, but what blows my mind is that, seventeen years after Notes first shipped, everybody and their brother describes their product or service as somehow "collaborative," but

• nobody can really give you a concise definition of collaboration,
• nobody can really describe what collaboration means in a business context, and
• nobody can articulate, in real terms, what value collaboration adds to business.

In my current role at Microsoft, I spend a lot of time talking to customers who are looking to solve one or more problems that they've identified as "collaboration" problems, and many are evaluating alternative "collaboration platforms" to their current Notes environments. Some have a better handle than others on the issues and problems, but what has struck me (and others) recently is that most of them (and, frankly, most of us in the software industry) are dancing around the central problem, without realizing it. That problem is that we think, somehow, that better software will cure all our collaboration ills, and that's only half-right, and mostly the wrong way to look at it. (What on earth is he talking about??)

In most instances, in my experience, customers who have tried to implement a collaboration strategy (no matter how well thought-out) and failed, have done so precisely because they have attempted to implement pure collaboration strategies, as opposed to things like improvements to business process to provide better return on investment, faster time to market, or some other business deliverables. This raises a couple of important points:

• Collaboration is an attribute of business process, not technology. Collaboration is not distinct from business process. There is a great deal of activity that goes on in any business process that has to do with knowing how people interact and work, enabling that interaction and capturing its results, and making those work products manageable, reusable, indexable, and so on. It’s not often done, because it’s viewed as too expensive to build, and too difficult to enforce “good” behaviour. Multiple technology approaches have been tried, with limited success, and that limited success is due, largely, to a focus on solving “the collaboration problem,” which misses the point. If collaboration is viewed as somehow an overt activity, the chances of people doing it well, or making it relate to business process are slim. Success more typically results from having a long range, narrowly focused, business goal in mind, and a continuous focus on solving the problem. With this approach, the other “collaborative” things will fall in line along the way.
• Collaborative capabilities need to be pervasive, and pervasively implemented. This has broad implications for IT, as well as for users. There are a number of “core” capabilities which are common (or necessary) across a wide variety of business processes, and the technologies implemented to support those processes. These include:
  · Identity and authentication. This one is fairly self-evident. Organizations have invested significantly in the last five to ten years to reduce (ideally to one) the number of directories used to identify and authenticate users.
  · Rich presence. Keying off a user’s identity, rich information about his presence enables many things across a wide variety of business scenarios. If I am online, but on the telephone, a user having that information will know not to call me, but can decide to instant message me or email me for the information they need, or if I am in a meeting, knowing that may lead them to seek the information they need from another person, if having that information is time-critical. If I am online, but am not active on a computer, my email system may begin routing only high priority email to my registered mobile device. The ability to integrate rich presence information as a service into other applications enables new forms of customer service, and more effective ways to locate the right resources at the right time. For example, one Microsoft partner has built a SharePoint-based application which leverages presence information to assist in troubleshooting problems on oil wells. When a problem is identified, all maintenance records for the faulty part of the system are available online, as well as the identity of the last technician who serviced that part, and his or her presence information.
  · Workflow. The implementation of rich, customizable workflow as a service enables the core capability to be leveraged in a variety of contexts and applications, rather than needing to be rebuilt over and over. Pretty much all of the core business processes which can be automated have been. But the marginal value of software, in this case, is to bring people’s expertise and knowledge together with information available in systems to improve process, fix flaws, and drive that knowledge back into the systems to support continuous improvement of business process.
  · Rights Management. Securing and managing content within a particular container, while necessary, is no longer sufficient. Any user with appropriate rights to the container can take content stored there, copy it to another location, or forward it to an unauthorized user. Implementing digital rights management as a service makes it possible to extend access rights beyond the container in which the content is stored. In this way, access rights are made an attribute of the content itself, so that those rights are carried with the content, and enforced by the system, regardless where the content is taken.
• People, culture, and technology are all equally important. Undue focus in any one area will almost certainly lead to failure. Technology alone cannot solve business problems. People with brilliant ideas cannot solve business problems without technology that supports the solution. And a culture that does not encourage taking initiative and sharing information will not collaborate effectively, regardless how great its people's ideas, and how innovative the technology deployed to support them. As just one example, Microsoft has a very user-independent model of working. The company has a philosophy of hiring the smartest people we can find, and turning them loose. People are encouraged to do the things they need to do the way they want to do them, with an eye on the final result. They don’t ask permission to do things (and in fact, are encouraged not to). They are simply expected to use the tools, people, and information that are available to them to accomplish their tasks, and they are held accountable for the results. In this environment, lack of oversight is very important, and anything that blocks people’s ability to take initiative is an impediment to business process. However, all this apparent freedom doesn’t for one moment obviate the need to make everything manageable and auditable, and so people are trained annually so that they understand the requirements imposed on them to be responsible in their conduct, and in their usage of resources and information.
  Enabling people to intuitively interact with managed systems as a natural part of the way that they do their jobs has resulted in a rich, well-adopted and well-leveraged collaboration environment.
• Never underestimate the value and importance of "second order effects." What I mean here is that, if you focus relentlessly on solving a crisply defined business problem, and look at technology as an enabler, not a solution, things will emerge which you did not anticipate, which may add considerable value to the business process. I was always struck, in my years at Lotus, by the extent to which companies would try to do things with Notes which we never intended, and which we didn't necessarily support well with the technology. These were almost always second order effects, which emerged as useful or desirable in the course of solving the core business problem. That is where true innovation comes from. In our own experience at Microsoft, when we implemented Windows SharePoint Services internally, our goal was to reduce the number of network file shares. Those have obvious shortcomings (you can't manage them easily, you can't index the content easily - making it difficult to find the nuggets of valuable information stored there, you can't impose policy and governance easily - making compliance difficult or impossible, and you can't easily share the information that's there with others in context). So, our initial rollout was more about making IT's job easier. We built integration into Office (so I can do things like save a document to a WSS team page), we embedded presence information, and we built lifecycle management capabilities into WSS, all to make IT's job easier. What we've reaped, far beyond the ability to reduce file shares, is a rich, intuitive environment that has pulled people into not just storing content in WSS, but collaborating with one another there, and the ability to search, not just for content, but for expertise. The change in the way that people work at Microsoft in the last three or four years has been profound and palpable, and it is all the more astounding because it was never one of the goals of the technology change.

So, if there's an overriding message here, it's this: go back to basics...understand the challenges your business faces, crisply define the desired state, identify the gaps between where you are and where you want to be, and only then, evaluate available technologies, and decide which ones will most effectively support the desired state and build a plan to get you there. Remember that all business problems are exactly that, business problems, and should be solved with sound business practice. I assert that there isn't an organization on the planet that has a collaboration problem. There are plenty of organizations that have process problems, or could be more agile, or quicker, or more effective, and collaborating better may help those problems, but more effective collaboration is an ancillary benefit of innovative solutions to business problems...

Curly, Moe, and Shemp

A few days ago, Curly (Bush), Moe (Cheney) and Shemp (Rumsfeld) all addressed various national conventions of veterans' associations. Curly addressed the American Legion in Salt Lake City (His speech is here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/02/20060224.html), Moe addressed the VFW in Reno (His speech is here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060828-4.html), and Shemp also addressed the American Legion (His speech is here: http://www.defenselink.mil/Speeches/Speech.aspx?SpeechID=1033). I am flabbergasted, ashamed, mad as hell, and just can't believe my own eyes and ears. There have been some great editorials about these fiascos (my personal favorite is Keith Olbermann: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12131617/#060830b, see also the Washington Post - that bastion of commies, fascists, and generally everything threatening to Republican lawlessness and bullshit :-) : http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/30/AR2006083003177.html?sub=AR). But, the best one, I think, comes from that other bastion of left-wing opinion, Military.com:
http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,112087,00.html

...I have to agree with James Carville. If the Democrats can't win in this environment, "we have to question the whole premise of the party."

Technology, schmeknology

There was a ZDNet article the other week by Peter Galli about IBM's announcement of Sametime 7.5 on Linux (http://linux.webbuyersguide.com/news/4282-wbglinux_news.html). My favorite quote (by Scott Handy, IBM VP of WW Linux Strategy):

"We have now proven to ourselves that this single programming model that spans Windows, Linux and the Mac is now ready. This follows our single programming model for the server, where we standardized on Java," he said.

Some observations from a customer who has been testing Sametime 7.5, based on "gold" code released by IBM earlier this month:

• Sametime 7.5 client takes 30 to 60 seconds to launch depending upon workstation
• Sametime 7.5 client takes 30 to 60 seconds to authenticate depending upon workstation
• Sametime 7.5 client reported as extremely unstable on Citrix 32-bit and 64-bit test servers
• Sametime 7.5 requires desktop to be rebooted almost daily, or memory leak will consume all resources
• The dependency on the Java Virtual Machine has proven problematic with multiple COE images containing different JVMs
• Issues utilizing AWM web-based tool have been experienced after installing Sametime 7.5. Resolution uninstall Sametime and JVM and reinstall JVM.
• Privacy Settings (allow to see me online/offline) are not saved and must be reset after restart
• Users with a Sametime 6.5 server are unable to save changes to their buddylist
• Intermittent Client Crashes when saving Preferences
• User interface is cluttered and difficult to navigate. Multiple levels of options are difficult to locate. Out of the box settings are not standard/best practice settings.
• Intermittent issues with HTML being transmitted to non 7.5 users during a conversation instead of plain text
• Video Codes have not been updated since 1999 and are not part of IBM's strategic direction for the product, must use third party vendor
• Install file is not SMS compatible and requires the user to have administrative rights to the desktop
• Install file has grown from 10MB to 48MB which impacts the ability to distribute the client
• Intermittent issues with thee Screen capture functionality will not work for 7.5 to 7.5 conversations
• Business Card and Image functionality not supported using Domino authentication (Requires LDAP, which is not possible due to the size of our directory)
• No integration with TeamSites, Outlook or Office Applications - planned for 2H 07
• No integration with desktop authentication/active directory - planned for 2H 07
• No stress tool available to validate capacity information - planned for 1H 07
• User who is removed from Sametime Directory and denied accecss can continue to use Sametime until they logout - planned for 2H 07
• Client is based upon Ecliple platform, however, the implementation has been customized and is no longer a standard Eclipse implementation, therefore standard Eclipse applications do not function as expected with Sametime 7.5 This was done to improve performance, but now limits the integration capabilities

Yep, sounds proven and ready to me...

Touring southern Italy...

I spent two glorious weeks with my wife (no kids!!) wandering through parts of the Amalfi coast. We flew into Naples, and took a bus from there to Sorrento, where we stayed in a small, charming hotel (called Del Mare), just a stone's throw from the bay. Sorrento has two marinas, Marina Piccola (which is actually the larger, commercial marina, where the various boats and ferries which shuttle along the Amalfi coast come into Sorrento) and Marina Grande (the smaller one!) which functions as a small fishing village. Our hotel was at Marina Grande, out of the main tourist crush, among the locals.

From Sorrento, we took day trips. Danielle and I both like ancient ruins, so we visited Herculaneum and Pompeii, both of which were buried (Herculaneum by mud, Pompeii, ash) when Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. The two present some interesting contrasts. Pompeii was a thriving Roman (earlier, it was Greek) city, a center of trade in the Roman empire, which attracted merchants, craftsmen, freed slaves, and all of the requisite "industries" one would expect in any large city. Herculaneum was a seaside resort for wealthy Roman citizens (including many from Pompeii). The modern city of Ercolano sits above the ruins, only 30% of which have been excavated, because of the city sitting over it. What was, prior to the eruption, the beach, is now the base of a 60+ foot wall of dirt, deposited there during the eruption. Because Herculaneum was covered in mud (whereas ash rained down on Pompei), Herculaneum, overall, is in a better state of preservation, with much of the structural wood in the homes, and even some random artifacts like a length of rope, and a wooden clothes press surviving nearly 2000 years.

More in my next post...

Rumsfeld, Pace, Abizaid and the US Senate Armed Services Committee

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