Steve's blog

American vs. Mexican passport experiences

2008-08-07T00:04:00.000-07:00

My passport was full and I’m starting an international trip tomorrow, so I spent part of today waiting in line at the San Francisco Passport Center. The bureaucracy was quick and easy; getting to the bureaucracy was the part that intrigued me.

The building the passport center is in is unmistakably a Federal building. Largely windowless cement walls, lots of cameras, a big sign on the door warning that the office is open only by appointment. Upstairs, in the office, was a scene that could perhaps be best described as cult-of-personality dictatorship meets Department of Motor Vehicles. After passing through the metal detector, I was instructed to take a number and wait a bit more than an hour in a big room full of rows of plastic chairs for my number to be called. An armed guard walked in circles around the room, constantly and intently scanning the crowd. The agents worked behind bulletproof glass. On the wall behind the agents were three pieces of decoration: A picture of George Bush, a picture of Dick Cheney, and an American flag.

Having finally been called up to one of the windows and been told to leave my passport and come back at 3, I walked down Folsom Street to my office. Passing through a sort of no mans’ land – a section of SoMa that neither Downtown nor Waterfront development has yet encroached upon, I came upon the Mexican Consulate, where the crowd was presumably on a mission similar to my own. Rather than being cooped up in a room, people milled about outside. Most intriguing, I thought, was the outdoor passport photography “studio,” set up in a vacant lot next door. I’m sure there’s lots of unpleasantness in the Mexican immigrant to the US experience, but the Mexican Consulate just looked like more fun than the American equivalent.

What I've been up to

2008-08-04T00:28:00.000-07:00

If anybody is still checking my blog -- and that seems like a stretch, given the months of persistence it would have required -- you'll have noticed that I've been pretty quiet here lately. Where have I been?

I suppose the story goes back to mid-March, as I was completing my gradual withdrawal from my old job at PCH, where I'd been working on various developing country Internet issues for the last five years. I was vaguely intending to become far more research focused and had been applying for research jobs. Then I got a call from ServePath, where I'd done some network architecture work as a consultant last time I was between jobs five years ago, asking me to come in and do some more consulting. I agreed to stay a month, and I've been there ever since, working with a great group of people on a variety of network architecture projects. Most recently, I've been working on network infrastructure for GoGrid, an automatically provisioned virtual server system, kind of like Amazon's EC2 (but better, of course), which is turning into a really neat project.

When I haven't been working on that, I've been working on a few smaller consulting projects, working on course materials for a class I'll be teaching for the first time a week from now, and sort of taking advantage of yet another beautiful California summer by still getting out on my bike occasionally. I've also managed to fit in some very nice trips: Two weeks in the Czech Republic and the former East Germany at the beginning of the summer, and a week in New York a month later. I'm off to Kathmandu and then Bangkok a few days from now -- turning what used to be my job into a self-supported hobby, I guess.

So, life is being a lot of fun, but also incredibly busy. I keep finding things I intend to write about, but in general the moment has passed before I find the time and motivation. As overly-trendy and Web 2.0ish as it sounds, one sentence Facebook status updates seem to be more my speed these days. I suppose the best advice if anybody really wants to hear from me -- besides phoning me of course -- is to friend me on Facebook.

A question on headlight security

2008-04-22T23:13:00.000-07:00

I've got an old mountain bike that I use for commuting and around-town riding. Since I use it for lots of short trips, sometimes when I'm in a hurry and sometimes when I don't want to be carrying lots of stuff around, my goal for the bike is to just be able to lock it up and leave it without having to worry about it too much. This means the ease of disassembly that I like on my nicer bikes is not acceptable. I don't need it to be ultra-secure (ultimately, the bike isn't worth all that much), but need it to not be the low hanging fruit on any given bike rack.

The easy part of securing the bike was getting rid of all the quick releases. I replaced the quick release skewers with allen-wrench skewers and gave up on trying to get the lock through the wheels a year ago, and haven't lost any wheels. I figure my wheels are about as likely to get stolen in this configuration as the allen-bolted parts are on other bikes, and I'm fine with that level of risk.

The next step was to go about securing my Cateye headlight and taillight, which proved to be a little more difficult. They're designed for really easy removal, but cutting the quick release tabs off the lights (such that releasing them from their brackets would require a small stick or screwdriver, as well as figuring out where to stick the tools) has so far kept anybody from removing the lights from their brackets. The Cateye taillight bracket uses a phillips head screw to clamp it to the seat post, and that one appears to be secure enough. What I haven't figured out is how to keep people from removing the headlight bracket from the handlebars. Cateye's headlight brackets are designed to be installed and removed without tools, and I haven't quite figured out how to get around that.

The first headlight I had on the bike had an older-style Cateye bracket, with a quick release lever that then had to be unscrewed a bunch of turns. It looked possible to replace the quick-release with a more conventional screw, but I hadn't gotten around to it yet when the light got stolen. $30 later I had a new headlight, but with a harder to modify mounting bracket. The new ones have a plastic ring that gets turned to tighten the bracket, meaning there's no hardware-store-purchasable screw that can replace it. I contented myself with tightening it to the point where it was really difficult to turn the other direction, and figured that at $30 per headlight -- less than the price of a tank of gas -- I could afford to replace it occasionally. Getting it off wasn't going to require tools, but required enough turns of the plastic ring that it wasn't going to be a quick process either. That one lasted eight months, but got stolen at the North Berkeley BART station last week. I replaced it with an identical headlight, to which I made the same set of modifications. The new one lasted two days, before getting stolen at the same bike rack as the last one. Presumably, if I replace it the same way, it will get taken by the same thief in a similar amount of time.

I suppose I could start buying headlights in bulk, and my headlight expense wouldn't look so bad if I compared it to downtown San Francisco car parking, but still I think $30 every two days is more than I'm willing to pay. Besides, doing the modifications to make the light last that long takes a while.

So, now the lighting question: How do I make the light stay on my bike? Does anybody still make headlights that bolt onto the bike by default, without modification? If I can find an older Cateye bracket, where the quick release thing should be replaceable with a hardware store screw, will it be compatible with newer Cateye headlights (which are a lot brighter than the old ones)? Or should I install yet another new Cateye bracket, but squirt some superglue into the thumb screw? I'm assuming in the superglue case, I could cut the plastic strap on the bracket if I really needed to take it back off.

Oh, and if anybody encounters somebody selling a pair of Cateye HL-EL220s with the quick release tabs broken off, they're mine.

Peaceful non-torch-relay protests

2008-04-09T17:19:00.000-07:00

The Olympic Torch Relay was supposed to go past my consulting client's office today, so some co-workers and I went outside to watch.

The torch relay got moved by protest-scared organizers to a previously-undisclosed and spectatorless route, so we didn't see that. What we did see was one of the most peaceful and harmonious protest/counter-protest sets I've ever seen. Bands of anti-China and pro-China protesters marched down the Embarcadero in large numbers, sometimes with the two sides trailing each other, and sometimes mixed into the same groups. I saw no violence and no arguments. Everybody seemed to be getting along -- a model of civil discourse.

I'm sorry not to have seen the torch, but I'd have been more sorry to have missed what I did see today. And I'm sad the world missed receiving the message that could have been sent by including the torch in today's demonstration of peaceful free speech.

I took lots of pictures.

George Lakoff on why Obama is going to win

2008-02-14T21:51:00.000-08:00

I saw a fascinating talk by George Lakoff yesterday, on why he thinks Barack Obama is going to win the Presidential race. Obama talks in ways people think, he said, while Hillary Clinton and much of the Democratic establishment not only don't, but don't understand that they're doing anything wrong. Obama talks in terms of ideology, and then brings up issues to fit the ideology. Clinton talks about issues, and then tries to make the ideology fit the issues.

Here is Lakoff's Huffington Post article on the topic. Like the talk, it's interesting reading.

Many thanks to Sylvia Paull for organizing yesterday's session

Berkeley and Military Recruitment

2008-02-12T12:43:00.000-08:00

Berkeley, where I live, has been in the news a lot in the last few weeks, The City Council, at the urging of some protesters, passed a resolution saying Marine recruiters weren’t welcome in town. It’s been controversial, and has been being pitted as yet another liberal vs. conservative battle. That perspective is unfortunate, as there are plenty of good liberal arguments against the actions of the protesters and the Council.

The war in Iraq has been a series of tragic and perhaps malicious errors on the part of the US Government’s civilian leadership. But even if the protesters were protesting military recruitment in general (which they’re not, but more on that later), their protests would be misguided. The US has been a remarkably stable democracy for over 200 years in no small part because our military follows orders from the civilian government. No matter how much many of us in Berkeley take pride in thinking for ourselves and not following orders (I would certainly make a terrible soldier), our military following orders is something we should be very happy about.

Countries where militaries second-guess civilian governments abound in the world – Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Thailand to pick some recent examples – and the results are not good. Over and over again, all over the world, elected governments do things that spark protests. Militaries decide their help is needed and overthrow the elected governments. Populations cheer briefly, and then discover that their military rulers are less competent and less responsive than their elected leaders were. By that point, it’s too late. Election mechanisms have had to be declared invalid to justify the coups, the military leaders are afraid of personal consequences if they give up power, and chances are several of what would have been election cycles go by before the situation gets resolved, often violently.

We in Berkeley may not like what our military does, but if we believe in democracy – our right to elect our leaders, and our right to protest – we should be thanking them anyway. But we also need to recognize the responsibility imposed on us by having a powerful military that does what our elected leaders tell it to. Because the military does not have a choice about what battles it goes into, we who elect the government have a responsibility to the military, and to those our military is told to help or attack, to elect a government with good judgment. I’m all for protesting the war, but those who do so should direct their anger where it belongs: at the President and Congress, not at our high level military officials, and certainly not at people with no decision making authority in a local recruiting office.

All that said, the targeting of the protests is perhaps less of an issue than what the protesters and Council have asked for. They have not asked for an end to military recruiting; they have asked for an end to military recruiting in Berkeley. There might be confusion about whether this was an ideological or jurisdictional stance, but they’ve answered that with rhetoric about military recruitment being a violation of Berkeley’s pacifist traditions. This follows campaigns in previous years to get military recruiters out of the local high school, in the guise of keeping Berkeley’s young people safe. This, I believe, is where the protests go from being a misguided publicity stunt to being blatantly self-serving. The protesters are not only protesting the wrong people; they’re protesting the wrong thing. They’re not asking for an end to a war pursued by their own elected government. They’re just asking to have it fought by those from less powerful towns.

I will grant that slipping into that sort of self-interest is tempting. At a time when US military action was mostly humanitarian, my high school friends and I used to take great pride in the things we had said to get the local Army recruiter to stop bothering us. Sergeant Maxwell was pretty annoyingly aggressive. After the 9/11 attacks, one of the first things I did was to read the rules on the military draft, and was quite glad to see that my chances of getting drafted were very low. I like to think that I have more to contribute to the world than I could contribute by being shot at, but realistically so do most of the people in the military. In other words, I’m a wimp, I’ve let my government’s war become somebody else’s problem, and even recognition of that won’t make me go enlist. But the US does need a loyal military, and those of us who aren’t part of it ought to be all the more grateful to those who are.

Press

2007-10-18T11:11:00.000-07:00

Breaking months of silence in this blog...

I appear to have made it into newspapers or newspaper websites twice in the last couple of weeks:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1010/p01s01-ussc.html (I'm in the fifth to last paragraph on the last page).

And, much more fun:

http://www.abqtrib.com/videos/2007/oct/17/147/

Bush's new-found liberalism

2007-07-02T15:46:00.000-07:00

I'd been trying to come up with explanations George Bush could use for a pardon or commutation for Scooter Libby, but I'd largely convinced myself that such a thing was implausible.

This isn't to say that granting Libby some leniency wouldn't have been the right thing to do, if done right. After all, it's widely assumed that at least Dick Cheney, if not Bush himself, was really behind Libby's leaking and lying, and it's not very responsible to make somebody else take the fall for one's own misdeeds. There was a responsible, even honorable, path that Bush and Cheney could have taken here -- to announce that they had been responsible for the crimes Libby had been convicted of, that they and not Libby should face the consequences, and then to pardon Libby and do whatever it is that a President is supposed to do after admitting to a felony. But when has either Bush or Cheney acted honorably or responsibly? The scenario seemed thoroughly implausible, which meant that the only scenario that didn't involve Libby going to jail would have been for Bush to announce that the law did not apply to members of his administration. He's hardly hidden that view in the past, but a pardon of Libby would have been just too blatant to ignore.

Or not. Bush's commutation of Libby's prison sentence made no mention of responsibility. It instead focused on the loss to Libby's reputation that being convicted caused, the severity of even the remaining punishment involving fines and probation, and the suffering of Libby's wife and children. Suddenly, Bush is sounding like the sort of liberal he usually disdains. America's poorer neighborhoods are full of children suffering because their parents are in prison. America's prisons are full of people who could argue that they, too, have suffered greatly from the loss of their reputations, and have been punished enough. Bush, so far, has seemed pretty insensitive to such issues.

Now the real test begins. Bush has a bit more than 18 months left in office. During that time, he can either show his new-found commitment to saving the children of America's convicts from their parents' excessive punishment, or not.

CircleID

2007-05-03T19:38:00.000-07:00

My Geographic Implications of DNS Infrastructure Distribution paper got linked to from CicleID.

A Stereotypically California Week

2007-05-03T19:27:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, we had a freeway interchange collapse. Yesterday, we had a small earthquake, a power failure, and then there was a guy wandering through my neighborhood playing a guitar.

All in all, it's been a very stereotypically California week.

Published

2007-04-12T18:08:00.000-07:00

The Internet Protocol Journal has published my paper, Geographic Implications of DNS Distribution, which I've been obsessing over for the last year and a half. The abstract is as follows:

The domain name system, without which most Internet applications don't work, depends on reliable access to DNS information. Failure scenarios therefore exist where two Internet hosts may have connectivity to each other, but can't communicate because they lack a path to a DNS server in another location. A previous paper touched on this problem in the general case. This talk will look at the DNS in greater detail, and how the placement of DNS servers for various top level domains affects their reliability in different parts of the world.

It looks like they haven't posted an HTML version yet. Here is the PDF of the journal. My paper starts on page 12.

Since information on DNS deployment changes rapidly, I've also posted some updates to the data used in the paper.

Hotels vs. Airlines -- Comfort vs. Mystique

2007-04-06T16:57:00.000-07:00

I was haggling with United Airlines’ customer service representatives over frequent flyer status last week, and started musing on the differences between how hotels and airlines treat different classes of customers.

Airlines have a mystique to maintain, the sense that even though your travel experience isn’t all that glamorous, somebody’s is. You see it in the airport with the imposing doors to the club lounges, so that the unworthy can imagine the luxurious goings on inside. Those who pass through those doors, however, are greeted by a security desk where documentation will be scrutinized in search of a reason to turn them away. If they get past that, there’s a room full of chairs, more comfortable than the chairs in the departure area and quieter, but nothing that would compare to anybody’s living room. If the passengers are lucky, there may be some pre-packaged pastries. But still, there’s a mystique to maintain. From the main lounge, there’s usually another imposing door through which few can pass: The first class lounge.

It continues on the plane as well. Those crammed in the back and fending for themselves for food are treated to announcements of meal services for the higher classes (even though anything else communicated in the first class cabin is done so without the PA), and announcements of their banishment from the first class bathrooms, which are airplane bathrooms like any other. Those in business class, like their coach class brethren, are treated to in flight magazines full of pictures of the beds they could use if only they had shelled out more money for first class. To further maintain the air of exclusivity, curtains are drawn across the aisle, or more crudely ropes, at the class boundaries to emphasize to those behind them the line they cannot cross.

Hotels are different. Unless there’s a problem, a fancy hotel will never challenge anybody’s right to be in its lobby, or generally even wandering the halls. If there were any chance that the person might be a hotel guest, questioning that would be incredibly rude, so they don’t. Hotels do have different classes of rooms, and different floors for those different classes. Classes of rooms start at the “superior” room and work their way up from there. A customer staying in a superior room will never be told that they’re missing something by not having booked a room of a higher class. When hotels have amenities available only to those in higher classes of rooms, they hide them where those in the lower class rooms will never see them, so as not to remind anybody that they aren’t getting the full service the hotel is proud of.

Google FTTC

2007-04-01T19:36:00.000-07:00

According to a link on www.google.com, Google has launched their Fiber to
the Commode product:

http://www.google.com/tisp/

They've even got self-install kits:

http://www.google.com/tisp/install.html

I'm guessing the offer expires at midnight tonight. :)

More photos

2007-03-23T18:40:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to posting my pictures from Singapore and Bali.

Indonesia

2007-03-06T06:09:00.000-08:00

I’m on my way home from a bit more than a week in Indonesia. I had meant to post a running travelogue here during the trip, but, as often happens, there was enough going on that I generally didn’t feel like spending the time to write about it.

I spent the first week in Nusa Dua, Bali, at the annual APRICOT (Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies) meeting, where I taught a half-day tutorial the day after I arrived, talked to lots of people, and did a bit of sight seeing. Then I went on to a day of meetings in Jakarta.

Nusa Dua is described by the local guidebook in the hotel room as a resort put on a beach far from Bali’s population centers to protect the local culture from the influence of the tourists. The Lonely Planet “Southeast Asia on a Shoestring” guide describes it as Bali’s most expensive resort, and as a place for tourists who want to experience Indonesia in small, controlled, doses, if at all. It is a compound of several resort hotels, a conference center, and a shopping mall. Getting in to the hotels requires going through three security checkpoints – one at the entrance to the compound where cars are inspected before a big metal gate is opened, a repeat of that procedure at the entrance to the grounds of each hotel, and metal detectors and bag searches at the front doors of each hotel. Behind the hotels are beautiful gardens with spectacular swimming pools, and beyond that a gorgeous beach. A path along the beach connects the backs of all the hotel gardens, allowing movement between them within the security cordons. But for the large police presence on the beach, it would be easy to forget about being in a fortress. The only Indonesians I encountered within the compound were resort staff and conference attendees, and the main non-conference attending population appeared to be Russian tourists. Still, while providing no sense of where in the world it is, Nusa Dua is a beautiful place. It’s the sort of travel I tend to scoff at until I’m doing it, at which point it’s so thoroughly relaxing that it’s hard to imagine doing anything else.

Outside the gates things were very different. The opulent resort buildings gave way to mix of stores along the main road alternating fancy modern store buildings with cinder block shacks with corrugated metal roofs. Traffic was the typical Asian chaos, with scooters zooming between the packed in cars, somehow avoiding getting hit. A bit north, on the way to anywhere else, were Kuta and Legian, site of the 2005 Bali nightclub bombings, where the tourist bubble resumed. Fancy beachfront restaurants had their own security checkpoints outside, just like those at Nusa Dua. The street of nightclubs looked like the club district in any European city, other than the presence of a vacant lot with a banner quoting Nelson Mandela mounted to the fence and a big memorial across the street.

North of Kuta is Denpasar, and beyond that the rest of Bali, where I spent a couple of days of beautiful touring. The main roads are covered with workshops and galleries selling local crafts to tourists at grossly inflated prices. Off the main roads are lots of rice paddies, little villages, and on one of the days, hordes of people going to the temples with big baskets of offerings (mostly fruits and leaves, I think) on their heads. We saw a volcano complete with multiple cones, fresh looking black rock covering one of its sides, and a big lake in what was probably one of its older craters. We saw a couple of beautiful temple complexes, one on the edge of a lake, and one sticking out into the ocean on a big rock above a beach. In Ubud, fancy looking outskirts that reminded me of Santa Fe give way to a bazaar in the middle full of tiny shops also selling beautiful crafts with prices many times lower than the tourist shops on the main roads.

I took lots of photographs, which I’ll post once I have time to sort through them.

From Bali I went on to Jakarta. Little shacks in swampland near the airport give way to big skyscrapers surrounded by even more security than there was in Bali. The road in front of the hotel had ten lanes, and didn’t seen any bigger than the other major roads I saw. It was jammed. Little lanes with cinder block and corrugated metal shacks connected the main roads of skyscrapers, an interesting contrast to see. I didn’t manage to do any walking around, being driven in locked cars from security bubble to security bubble, but like so many places it seems like one I’d like to see more of sometime.

Random related thought: Immediately post-9/11, a lot of American office buildings put in cosmetic security. In the name of combating terrorism, it’s no longer possible to go up to somebody’s floor and talk to their receptionist, you’re first supposed to sign in with a security guard, who will check ID. As a theft protection measure it may be a good idea, but for its intended purpose it looks pretty worthless. The Indonesians take security seriously – given their history over the last few years, they have to. I didn’t get asked for ID the whole time I was there, but there were very few times I was driven into a parking lot without the car being searched for explosives. It felt very safe, but isolating and time consuming. I’m very glad to live in a place that, for all its rhetoric, doesn’t take security that seriously.

Bush's health insurance tax deduction

2007-01-23T18:28:00.000-08:00

President Bush just announced his health insurance tax deduction; $7,500 for single people or $15,000 for families. Sounds impressive. But, wait.

Looking just at how he described it in the speech (press coverage suggests that the actual proposal, which I haven't read, is even worse):

Bush said a family of four with an income of $60,000 will see a tax savings of $4,500 per year. $4,500 / 4 / 12 = $93.75 per person per month. Last time I was paying for health insurance, it was more than three times that expensive, and that was for a healthy 20-something person three years ago.

For the $7,500 single person example, we can assume that the people most desperate for it are probably in the 15% tax bracket (incomes between $7,500 and $30,650). $7,500 * .15 / 12 == $93.75 again. That seems to be the magic number. But note that, due to the $7,500 deduction, the single person's taxable income (after other deductions) needs to be at least $15,000 to get even that.

Those with even lower incomes get less.

Those with incomes above $344,060 ($336,560 + 7500) get $218 per month towards health insurance, almost covering the cost.

The Eternal Flame

2007-01-15T23:20:00.000-08:00

Today was Martin Luther King Day. Here's something I wrote and sent to some people in July, 2005:

I just had a rather surreal experience. I got on a fairly crowded Atlanta MARTA train on which I was one of maybe three white passengers. A few stops later, I got off and started walking through a very run down neighborhood, where most of the fences had razor wire on top, some of the houses were boarded up and those that weren't looked pretty desolate. It certainly didn't feel like a safe place to be. And, as far as I could tell, I was the only white person around. From the stares I was getting I may have been a pretty rare sight. Then, showing that I wasn't as lost as it looked like I was, I came upon a razor wire fence surrounding a bunch of busses that said "Ebenezer Baptist Church."

I passed a well-maintained old church building (Martin Luther King's old church), and looked across the street at an opulent new church building also labeled as the Ebenezer Baptist Church. Suddenly, instead of urban decay, I was surrounded by a very well maintained park, the Martin Luther King National Historic Site, and the most grandiose tomb I've ever seen in the US (although the torch next to it, labeled as the "Eternal Flame" was turned off). A multi-cultural group of tourists mingled about.

On the other side of the park was the house King grew up in, beautifully maintained, as were most of the houses around it, also part of the park. But half a block beyond that a residential neighborhood started again, and again the houses appeared to be crumbling.

Then I wandered into the museum. A slew of exhibits, mostly targeted towards children, explained over and over again that segregation had been a system in which black people and white people lived in different neighborhoods, went to different schools, and shopped at different stores. They emphasized the bad condition of the black neighborhoods under segregation, and went on and on about how unimaginable this situation must be for today's children, for whom it would be a completely foreign concept.

I walked back outside, and noticed that right next door to the museum was the Martin Luther King Swimming Pool, a facility run by the City of Atlanta rather than by the National Park Service, and presumably serving the neighborhood rather than museum visitors. The roof was coming detached, and there were a few jagged basketball sized holes in the windows.

More pictures

Surpassing Al Jazeera

2007-01-14T23:24:00.000-08:00

Back in 2001, at the beginning of the war of terror, one of the big culture shocks was that Al Jazeera showed executions. People would get kidnapped and tapes with demands would get sent to Al Jazeera, and Al Jazeera would air them. Then the people would get killed and tapes of the killing would get sent to Al Jazeera, and Al Jazeera would air those too. Or so we heard. Al Jazeera wasn't generally available in the US, but what we heard of it sounded totally barbaric. Airing video of executions sounded barbaric to Americans. It just wasn't done.

In fairness to Al Jazeera, it isn't really the fringe network the American media made it out to be. It's a pretty standard part of hotel TV channel lineups in much of the world, including Western Europe. While I'm sure they do air the things we as Americans are told they air, it's never looked out of the ordinary when I've watched it. It's in Arabic, so I don't know what's being said and it doesn't really hold my attention, but it's always looked like a normal news channel to me.

A lot has changed in the US media in the last few years. Maybe it's that the war is sufficiently bloody that a non-bloody news broadcast is missing something. In addition, the rise of Internet video has caused lots of footage to get out that a tasteful news editor probably would once have held back. As a result, I've spent the last few weeks avoiding watching easily available video of Saddam Hussein getting killed. I know it happened. Even though he was a horrible person, I know killing people is wrong. I know it's created even more chaos and deserved anti-Americanism in the world. I don't want to watch it, and if an American TV station were to air it, I would have expected lots of agonizing over the appropriateness, and lots of warnings to the viewers that it was coming.

Apparently, I expected wrongly. I was watching the TV news this evening on one of the San Francisco broadcast stations. With no warning at all, they started airing the Saddam hanging video as stock footage, in the background, as part of another Iraq execution story. I changed the channel, so I'm not sure how much of it they actually aired, but when I flipped back again many seconds later it was still going. I'm disgusted.

I'm not a fan of censoring or otherwise hiding the news. When people get killed by our government, especially somebody as notorious as Saddam Hussein and with such an effect on public opinion in Iraq and the Middle East, it's news. But have we gotten so desensitized that our broadcast TV stations are showing executions casually, as background, without giving any indication that they've even thought about it? The implication that Al Jazeera had done that used to shock us.

Suburban memories

2006-12-04T23:43:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has an article about the Southern movement of the US auto industry. It’s a “tale of two cities” type of piece, a Northern industrial town declining, while a formerly small Southern town explodes into a Toyota factory town. The Northern town they focus on is Livonia, Michigan.

Livonia was where I had my second full time job, my first job in the Internet industry. It’s got lots of memories, but it’s not the sort of place one could get attached to. It was a six by six mile square on the western edge of Detroit – an old Northwest Ordinance township – of strip malls and subdivisions. It wasn’t walkable. Getting anywhere required driving. What made my office a convenient location was the freeway exit running almost to the front door. Headed out for lunch one day with a friend who had driven over from Ann Arbor, we tried to do what people from Ann Arbor did and walk to the restaurant a quarter mile away. After climbing over lots of walls between parking lots, we realized why that was a bad idea. When I quit my job there and started figuring out where to go next, I held up Livonia as the example of exactly what I didn’t want.

Still, at that stage in my life, there was something exciting about Livonia. It was bland suburbia, but I’d never known bland suburbia before. There was some excitement in the 14 lanes of traffic in front of the office. There was the awe of being able to drive miles past neighborhoods that looked pleasant enough, and having the scenery not change at all. Strip mall, subdivision, strip mall, subdivision, it all looked the same, but the scale was breathtaking.

And then there was the work. All those low slung boring looking office buildings had stuff going on inside. Electronics companies, pharmaceutical distributors, ad agencies, auto parts companies. Often, I didn’t know what exactly, but they all had people hard at work inside, and the ones I saw all wanted this new Internet thing. Stuff was going on in our own building too; we were building our little part of the new Internet thing. We didn’t really know what we were doing, but nobody else did either. There was lots of trial and error, but somehow it all worked most of the time.

The Times says, “The city has one of the Midwest’s largest industrial corridors, a six-mile strip of factories and warehouses along Interstate 96.” My office was in one of those warehouses, and most of them had full parking lots. Last I heard, our building was empty and for sale. The Times says Livonia’s vacancy rate has doubled since 1995, the year before I started working there.

Still, it seems odd to see Livonia’s boosters quoted talking about either Livonia’s past or its future as a vibrant community. Stuff was going on, sure, in cookie cutter neighborhoods and anonymous warehouses, but it was a suburban wasteland. Nobody went out unless surrounded by a couple tons of steel. It seemed in many ways a disposable town, with many more completely indistinguishable from it where it came from. An inner-ring suburb built to replace the City, being replaced by outer ring exurbs. A town of Michigan auto-workers wanting high UAW wages, being replaced by Kentuckians who are happy to work for less, while when I was there we were a band of Michigan tech workers happy to work for less than our counterparts in California, probably having since been supplanted by SBC employees in Texas.

Livonia seemed designed to left behind. Heading East took me into Detroit, with its hulking empty buildings and its grand and ornate but desolate 1930s skyscrapers. Heading West, past Interstate 275 and over the big hill on M-14, led into the new exurbs, tight-packed blue or brown McMansions that had been farmland when I first got to know the neighborhood a few years before, hiding behind dirt mounds in a feeble attempt to block the freeway noise. Just beyond there, past Godforsaken Road and into Washtenaw County, was actual farmland, and then Ann Arbor, and the real walkable neighborhoods that I couldn’t bring myself to abandon. From my apartment on the Northwest side of Ann Arbor to my office in Livonia was 25 miles, but driving it took only 22 minutes and involved two stop signs and two traffic lights

Livonia’s fate seems sad, but it somehow feels inevitable.

Voting for Schwarzenegger

2006-11-07T12:43:00.000-08:00

I held my nose and did it. I voted for my first ever Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger. As mentioned here before, I don’t much like Schwarzenegger. I disagree with him on issues most of the time, and I’d been looking forward to the chance to get rid of him. I woke up this morning an undecided voter, a state I’d never before experienced, or understood, in an election of this magnitude. Ultimately, I just couldn’t convince myself to vote for Phil Angelides, his Democratic challenger.

The Angelides campaign got off to a late start. When I started pondering not voting for him, I said I just wanted to hear him campaign, to hear that he wanted the job, after months of the candidate’s seeming disappearance. Then he started campaigning, and it got worse from there. While Schwarzenegger had been talking about what he’s done and wants to do for California, Angelides talked about his dislike of Schwarzenegger. Period. He’s been showing video of Schwarzenegger endorsing George W. Bush. Poor judgment on Schwarzenegger’s part, to be sure, but Schwarzenegger is a Republican. He’s been accusing Schwarzenegger of having all sorts of other political positions I don’t agree with, and most of those charges are true, but I already knew that. Even the TV commercials starring Phil Angelides, in which he could presumably have said whatever he wanted, just showed him making fun of Schwarzenegger.

The big question, then, was what did Angelides actually want to do as Governor. He kept saying he would “stand up to Arnold Schwarzenegger.” This seemed unconvincing, both because he wasn’t doing a very good job of it where it counted, and because if he were elected, Schwarzenegger would no longer be a factor to stand up to. He briefly ran TV commercials claiming to be “a leader, not an actor.” Again, it was unconvincing. When really pressed, he seemed able to quickly rattle off some stock sound bytes from the Democratic Party platform, but it didn’t sound like anything he’s put much thought into.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s endorsement of Schwarzenegger summed up what I’d been thinking of Angelides:

His Democratic opponent, Treasurer Phil Angelides, has not demonstrated the leadership traits required to build coalitions that can overcome the egos, ambition and partisan rivalries that stand in the way of progress in Sacramento. Angelides has struggled to inspire Democrats in this election. In his meeting with us, many of his answers gave no indication that he either heard or cared about the question -- time after time, he defaulted to his wind-up stump monologues about education or closing tax loopholes.

The lack of excitement about Angelides is not just about his deficiencies in campaign donations and charisma. He has yet to articulate a compelling case that his election would make a difference in Sacramento. His increasingly strident appeal to Democratic loyalties is not resonating with the many Californians who worry less about party label than whether Republicans and Democrats are working together in their interest.

The Chronicle also posted video of their editorial board’s meeting with Angelides. A part I found particularly telling was where he was asked why he was having so much trouble connecting with voters. He launched into a diatribe about how the evil Schwarzenegger campaign had been defining him through negative ads, and how unfair this was. This struck me as strange. I’d seen lots of campaign ads in the last few months, including quite a few from Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger barely mentioned Angelides. He didn’t need to. Angelides sure ran a lot of negative anti-Schwarzenegger ads, but Angelides barely mentioned Angelides either.

This is not to say that I agree with the Chronicle’s praise of Schwarzenegger. Ultimately, I agree with a lot of what Phil Angelides said about him. I just wish Angelides, or the Democratic Party, had provided a palatable alternative.

An effect of high oil prices?

2006-11-06T14:19:00.000-08:00

I have no idea if this is just a pricing model fluke or an effect of high oil prices, but I noticed something surprising while making some travel reservations today. At least for one day and a half period in Seattle next week, it's cheaper to rent an SUV from some car rental companies than a compact car.

For a day and a half of car rental at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport on November 16 and 17, National, Avis, and Hertz all show the SUV as their cheapest option. With their Emerald Club discount, National's website lists the Midsize SUV at $121.90 for my 1.5 day period and their standard SUV at $125.90, while the compact car is $134.00. For the same period, also at SEA-TAC, Travelocity shows the rates as follows:

National:
Intermediate SUV: $169.35
Standard SUV: $174.62
Compact Car: $211.36

Hertz:
Intermediate SUV: $205.46
Standard SUV: $213.35
Compact Car: $215.99

Avis:
Intermediate SUV: $180.04
Standard SUV: $187.95
Compact Car: $216.91

It's the compacts that are expensive here. The Travelocity listing shows these SUV rates as right in line with the competition, while the more consumer-focused companies have compact cars for as little as $46. Still, what's up with the business travel-focused companies? Are high gas prices or SUV stigma pushing up the demand for compact cars? Are unsold SUVs getting dumped into the rental fleets at rates faster than they can be rented? Or is this just some fluke of the pricing model?

Political Disillusionment

2006-10-28T16:08:00.000-07:00

BERKELEY – There’s an election coming up. It seems to be of great importance nationally, but in California it seems awfully hard to get excited about. This is a very solidly Democratic region in a somewhat solidly Democratic state, so nothing is particularly contested. The Democrats are going to win just about everything except Governor, arguably the most important state office. In that race, they’ve responded to the Republican incumbent’s waning popularity by barely bothering to put up a candidate. The Democrats, the good guys, are going to win almost everything again. Why is this disappointing? It’s because the candidates all seem so uninspired.

I wonder if this can be blamed on term limits. The promise of the proponents of term limits was that it would get rid of the entrenched career politicians (those with experience), and gives others a chance to serve. What it seems to do in California is cause the career politicians to be shuffled – moved from obscure offices where they have experience to whatever office happens to be available. Thus we have the Insurance Commissioner becoming Lieutenant Governor, and the Lieutenant Governor becoming Insurance Commissioner. We have the Attorney General becoming the Treasurer. And, continuing the shuffle, the Treasurer, Phil Angelides, has become the candidate for Governor.

The Democratic establishment fought hard in the Gubernatorial Primary, when another candidate dared to try to disrupt the natural order of things by running against Angeledes. Indeed, the establishment seemed more excited about their chosen candidate than they had about anybody since former Governor Gray Davis, who they refused to put up a replacement candidate for long after his complete failure had become apparent, paving the way for Schwarzenegger’s election the first time. But it was an entirely negative, visionless, campaign (on both sides). Having won the primary, and having declared themselves in control of their party’s nomination process, the campaigning stopped, and Angelides disappeared for months. Some press reports have suggested this was a result of having spent all his money on the primary and not having anything less, rather than of not having anything to say. Either way, whether he has nothing to say, or can’t figure out how to budget for a campaign, it’s not encouraging.

So, who to vote for Governor? I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life. I may well vote Democratic on principle, but I can’t say I’d be happy if the Democratic candidate won. Schwarzenegger has seemed somewhat destructive when not running for reelection. He’s done some great things in the last few months, but I’m skeptical about whether it will continue. Still, he’s going to win, and given the circumstances it may be for the best.

There are also a bunch of ballot proposals, some of which are scary, and some of which seem like good ideas that it would be better to have go through the legislative process. Al Gore gave an impassioned speech in Berkeley on behalf of one of them on Monday, and drew a huge crowd. That was neat to watch. Too bad we can't find somebody of his caliber willing to be Governor.

In other news, there’s a neat website we were playing with a couple of days ago (yet another Google product). Gapminder lets you graph a whole bunch of demographic factors for a large number of countries, looking at how they relate and change over time. One stat that I found kind of interesting from a telecom development perspective is that while income level in a country has a huge impact on phones or Internet users per capita, percentage of the population that’s urban appears have had less and less of an impact over time. For the current data, that correlation is visible at all only for the poorest countries. Of course, this all assumes an accurate source of data, and it doesn’t say where it’s getting its data from.

Travel burnout and travel redemption

2006-10-14T18:56:00.000-07:00

“There’s no glamour in business travel.” People used to tell me that – people heading off to exotic destinations I only dreamed of seeing – and I didn’t believe a word of it. I’d go to interesting places. I’d always give myself extra time to look around. People who didn’t like it just weren’t doing it right. I believed it fervently for a few years after I started traveling a lot, and I still do to an extent. But now and then I have my doubts. For a while, each trip had to top a previous one, but that wasn’t sustainable. As my reaction to exotic foreign cities becomes a groan of, “oh, another city…” and as spending time at home starts to seem like a great luxury, I start to wonder why I don’t just stay home. But often, something happens to remind me.

So it was with my most recent trip, one that involved going to Europe for less than a week. I know not to go to another continent for a week. I’ve done it before. It’s painful. Every time I do it, I swear I won’t do it again. But life intervened, my planned week in France ended up being a week in Berkeley and Minneapolis, and there was something immovable the next week. So I spent five days plus a few hours in Amsterdam, a beautiful city of picturesque canals, which I’ve seen before. I really do like Amsterdam, but I was burned out before I even got there. Even when it wasn’t raining, even when I wasn’t in a windowless meeting room, even when I was wandering around and watching the crowds of cyclists glide by, my mood was often one of “oh, another city.”

I gave a talk at a conference. I saw some other interesting talks. I talked to lots of nice people about various interesting things. It was certainly well worth going, just a little hard to get excited about.

I went on from there to St. Louis, to another conference including lots of the same people. I was far more exhausted and burned out than when I had gotten to Amsterdam. What is there to do in St. Louis, people kept asking. The common response seemed to be that there’s an arch. And there’s an arch. And there’s an arch. As a native Midwesterner, I find it hard to conjure up the distaste for Midwestern towns that seems to be expected of the globe trotting elite, and I saw early on that the walk along the Mississippi River was quite beautiful, but it’s still hard to escape the feeling of, “we went from Amsterdam to this?” I met some very nice relatives I hadn’t met before, which would have made the trip worthwhile by itself. But on my last evening there I stumbled into two totally unexpected experiences that even after glamorous Amsterdam were the highlight of the trip.

The first was a party at the City Museum, an amazing three story space full of multi-story slides, bizarre wire tubes between floors to crawl through, and a network of fake caves big enough to get thoroughly lost in. It was clearly a place intended for ten year olds, and those of us adults who tried to take full advantage of it ended up pretty bruised, but it was amazingly fun. After a bus ride back to the hotel, we were given directions to a blues club a few blocks away, BB's Jazz, Blues, and Soups, and started walking towards it. We walked out of the downtown area, under some elevated freeways, and into a seedy seeming area that had several members of our group threatening to turn around. The bar we were looking for certainly didn’t look like much from the outside, but we went in. It was dark and a little smoky, as a blues club should stereotypically be. There were maybe twenty of us, and probably three or four other people in the place. Then the band started to play, and we watched and listened in awe. They were really good, and seemed as surprised and thrilled to have an audience as we were to find them. It was the sort of place I expect to find in movies, not in the real world. Having an early flight the next morning, it was hard to drag myself away sometime after midnight.

Noma

2006-09-30T10:56:00.000-07:00

I'm in Minneapolis for my step step grandmother's memorial service. Noma and I weren't especially close -- we saw each other once or twice a year and had long and sometimes amazing conversations, but rarely talked between visits. Noma was an amzing woman, warm and friendly, driven by a need to do what was right. Offended by the treatment of a black college friend, she ended up as the only white staff member at NAACP headquarters in New York in the 1940s, traveling the Northern US working to convince communities to integrate their schools, and spending her time in New York with a cast of characters including Thurgood Marshall, W.E.B. DuBois, and her rommate Shirley Graham (later Shirley Graham DuBois, W. E. B. DuBois's wife). This was ten years before Marshall's school desegregation victory in Brown v. Board of Education, and 20 years before Martin Luther King and the official Civil Rights Movement. An amazing story teller, she was especially good at bringing this period of history to life, with stories of dancing at the Cotton Club with her friend Thurgood, and of the future Supreme Court Justice, already the US's leading civil rights lawyer, antagonizing the racist doorman in
her apartment building.

Most worth remembering, though, was Noma's insistence that injustices shouldn't be left unchallenged.

Press: Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Voices of Civil Rights.

Different worlds

2006-09-25T00:43:00.000-07:00

New York Times columnist Nick Kristoff frequently writes fascinating columns about travels through the developing world. Last spring, he ran an essay contest for a college student to win a trip to Africa with him and blog about it. I’ve been reading the results of that for the last couple of weeks, Casey Parks’ blog of her first trip outside of the US, traveling across central Africa. It is fascinating.

Parks writes of her background growing up in poverty in the American South, and contrasts that to what she’s seeing in Africa.

My background isn’t anything like Parks’. I grew up in Ann Arbor, Palo Alto, and Oxford, spending many of my summers in Southern France or elsewhere in Europe. My first experience with American poverty was in my junior year of high school. A girlfriend got me involved with a student organization at the University of Michigan that was teaching classes for middle school students from Detroit. After a summer of letting wide-eyed kids from the projects loose on the campus in Ann Arbor, we switched to running programs at a middle school in Detroit. I remember walking through the dark hallways, black kids lined up against the walls, staring at us and saying “hello, white people,” as we walked past. There were chains on most of the outside doors to keep people from being let in where security couldn’t see them, but which would also have prevented the kids from getting out if there had been a fire. Classes were huge and unruly. There was talk of a recent shooting in front of the school, and while my friends were worrying about getting into college, these kids were worried about surviving the next week. The sixth and seventh graders we were working with insisted they didn’t know how to write sentences.

And yet, there seemed to be hope. Small things really seemed to make a big difference. The kids who said they couldn’t write loved to tell stories. Getting them talking and then stopping them and saying, “write that down, exactly like you just said it,” showed them that they could in fact write. Bringing in a couple of obsolete computers that they could play with as long as they were typing really got their attention.

I don’t know what became of any of those kids, but they opened my eyes to a world I hadn’t known existed, to my power to make a difference, and to the ongoing state of problems I’d been told about in history classes. I still didn’t know poverty, but I thought I’d seen it. Which brings us to Parks’ writings.

Two years ago, having spent lots of time in the moneyed world of the Internet industry, I’d gotten a job at a non-profit working on Internet infrastructure in places I hadn’t heard of. I didn’t really understand what we were working on. I knew important Internet infrastructure. It was big, and expensive, and moved lots of traffic. Why were we sending little Ethernet switches to places that weren’t on my peers’ maps? I wanted to understand, and somewhat impulsively I ended up on a plane to a conference in Kathmandu.

I’d seen movies set in developing countries, and the only thing I could think of bouncing out of the Kathmandu airport in a hotel van was that I was in one of those movies. I wrote at the time:

"The van ride to the hotel was my first real glimpse of Kathmandu, driving very fast on one lane dirt streets, lined with cramped run down houses, the streets a chaotic mix of people, cars, tiny electric busses, rickshaws, dogs, and cows. Rather than having any of the usual rules of right of way, Nepali driving seems to consist of everybody honking a lot, to make sure everybody else knows they’re there, and then dodging each other as they make random traffic moves."

Almost seeming to fit right into the scene were the street kids having a fight. One ran across the street with his face covered in blood, while others chased. Nobody in the crowded street seemed to be paying attention. The van driver drove straight on, right past the police post in the next block.

Over the next two weeks, I had my eyes opened. Importantly for my job, I learned about Internet access in a place where the average person makes $200 per year, and International Internet bandwidth costs $5,000 per month for one megabit per second, or about two thirds the capacity of a typical DSL line. I learned about how differently things are done in an economy where local labor is cheap, but anything imported is really expensive (for instance, if somebody has a car they probably also have a driver, as a driver costs almost nothing compared to the cost of a car).

The group I was with was regarded as visiting experts, and everywhere we went people told us what they needed. We got taken to a college, and shown the difference between American computer books and their Indian copies, printed in black and white on paper barely above newsprint grade. But we also got shown classrooms full of students eagerly learning. Importantly for our work, we got shown the satellite connections at the ISPs, and told of the college’s difficulties getting big learning materials over the expensive satellites, but we also saw the local ISPs working on their own locally priced infrastructure to carry local content.

There were other experiences. There were the incredibly smart street kids, who spoke perfect English and one of whom could even rattle off the capitol of any country in the world. The kids spent their time scamming tourists on behalf of shop owners they were terrified of, but I certainly couldn’t offer them a better alternative. And there were the amazing tourist experiences, including the “mountain flight” past Mount Everest. It didn’t seem to fit in with the situation on the ground at all, but was breathtaking.

Parks, in one of her last blog posts from Africa, writes of wondering what it will be like to be home again, with Western conveniences, but without smiling Africans, African markets, and African huts. I remember having the same thoughts, wishing I could step back and forth between the two worlds, the interesting and the comfortable. What I noticed most about my return from Kathmandu was the silence, but also the orderliness of Berkeley, the calm, the prosperity. Walking down the street and nobody striking up a conversation. The things people wanted seeming absolutely decadent. People driving in silently in straight lines, like zombies. I’ve been to other developing countries since then. They’re still neat to see. But nothing compares to seeing that sort of place for the first time.