Reinke Faces Life

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2007/12/09/half-an-hour

Half an Hour December 9, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts

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Today, December 9th 2007 the clocks go back in Venezuela – by Half an Hour.

Half an hour?

Yes, half an hour. That may sound a bit like the craziest thing a whole country has ever done in recent times but actually it’s just a reversion to the time zone which was used previously by Venezuela between 1912 and 1964 in the twentieth century.

The new official time zone of Venezuela is determined by meridian 67° 30? west of Greenwich, in South East London, UK. This meridian divides Venezuela into two almost symmetrical areas and represents a -4:30 hour offset from Greenwich Mean Time.

So what’s the time now? Here, very near Greenwich when it’s eight o’clock in the morning 8.00am – GMT, in Caracas, Venezuela it will be half past three: 3.30am.

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It does sound like a “dumb idea”. For the life of me, I never understood why people don’t just set their clocks on GMT and organize their lives around whatever time they need. What’s so sacred about working 9to5? Who cares if you go to bed at 11PM, 2300 local, or 0400+1? I know at my employer, GMT would save a lot of time zone confusion providing across the USA. When I was in the USAF many many decades ago, everything was ZULU this or ZULU that. Guess that’s politically incorrect now? But, there was never any time zone confusion. When I returned to my civilian employer and tried to bring this insight to our datacenter operations, everyone poo pooed it. Every years I’d watch them struggle with Daylight Savings Time or a national time zone confusion. Sigh. Some memes are just too powerful to change. I guess?

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Notice the fine hand of gooferment in the people’s lives.

Not to make things simpler. But to make a role for themselves.

Why not just go to GMT and allow people to organize themselves. It’s not like businesses could figure out what time they should open to best serve their Customers. It’s not like people couldn’t figure out what time they should hit the sack or get up. It’s not like life wouldn’t go on regardless of what digits were on someone’s clock!

In protest, I’m going to be GMT. As soon as I can find my watch!

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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=4

Annals of Medicine
The Checklist
by Atul Gawande

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Instead, they came up with an ingeniously simple approach: they created a pilot’s checklist, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing. Its mere existence indicated how far aeronautics had advanced. In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft into the air might have been nerve-racking, but it was hardly complex. Using a checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a driver backing a car out of the garage. But this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of any pilot, however expert.

With the checklist in hand, the pilots went on to fly the Model 299 a total of 1.8 million miles without one accident. The Army ultimately ordered almost thirteen thousand of the aircraft, which it dubbed the B-17. And, because flying the behemoth was now possible, the Army gained a decisive air advantage in the Second World War which enabled its devastating bombing campaign across Nazi Germany.

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While focused at medicine, this article certainly drives home the value of checklists. I’m going to figure out how I can incorporate this in my daily life. I’ve had enough disasters that I could use some “crash avoidence”. Seems so simple. But, then so is any “great idea”.

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FROM A EMAIL EXCHANGE

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>I have had it with Recieving Phising Emails
>Posted by: “Cy Witherspoon”
>Mon Dec 3, 2007 12:13 pm (PST)
>Have you ever received emails from some relative that you don’t know in
>Nigeria, UK, or some other far land? Explaining that you won/
>inherited some large sum of money?

Dear dotcomeraden! Cy:

I share your frustration. But it IS always NICE to hear from long lost relatives in Area Code 419!

I reformulated some of my form letters that I use (i.e., “Job hunting help”, “why would you want to network with me”, “why would I want to network with you”, and my personal favorite “I’m dropping you from my network, you ass”) to incorporate some of the principles in many of the Nigerian spam letters. Some do a very good job of communicating their feigned concern for the reader’s benefit. Better than my honest concern for the unfortunate job seeker suddenly out of work, or the lost soul who thinks I’m a good networking contact in the “left handed paperhanging field as a right handed paper hanger”. If these folks are successful with these lame excuses for an email, then I want to learn to make my real ones better.

But what really prompted me to write this email is the following comment:

>I am not sure of the legal ramifications, but I am all for some type of
>legislation to ban these types of fraudulent emails.

Oh, please NO! Don’t ask the politicians, who think the inept is a bunch of pipes like plumbing, to “help” us. We’ll be filling out forms for each email , paying more taxes, and be forced to use only approved email vendors. And, who knows what else they will think of?

Remember politicians’ only motive is to be reelected, from whence they can (in priority order): (1) feather their own nest; (2) reward their friends; and (3) punish their enemies. Remember you ask for their help and they see a job for their brother-in-law.

We don’t need legislation. We NEED ivy, public key encryption, and some self-defense.

IVY will give us a fully authentic network; No more forging IP addresses. Public key encryption ensures authenticity of who’s on the other end of the email. And, some self-defense.

I can give you a strategy that have virtually rendered me immune — create dedicated emails. You can use GMAIL’s plus feature. Or just lots of GMAIL ids for dedicated email addresses. Or Yahoo has spamguard. Or, if you have your own domain, then you can spawn all the addresses you need.

So here’s how I have it working, when I sign up for CITIBANK, I give them a unique email address. (It might be MYID+123456 @ gmail.com, FOOTLOOSE-CITI @ yahoo.com, or CITI-123456 @ reinke.cc. It really doesn’t matter.) Any communication coming in purporting to be from CITIBANK, that doesn’t come in on the “correct” email address, is prima facie spam and I delete immediately. One email per sensitive use, and you don’t have to pay any attention to your “relatives” in 419 land.

But, please don’t ask the gooferment to help. The “cure” will be worse that then “disease”.

>dotcomeraden!

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Readers here have seen my use of dotcomeraden. So no need to repeat.

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FROM AN EMAIL ABOUT PLAXO AND PRODUCTIVITY

>In order to use Plaxo though, he has to break up the files into groups under 65,000 which is a royal pain!

Bingo!

I was a fan of classic Plaxo (2?). In Outlook, I had divided my “world view” by community of interest — College alums, LinkedIn, xOldEmployer1, xOldEmployer2, Highschoolchums1, family, friends, acquaintances, dotcomaraden, etc etc. Plaxo1 only did contacts in one Outlook file. So when they then handled for files, all was right with the world. And, Plaxo was very useful. Now with version 3, there are all sorts of limits, and stuff. And, frankly, I don’t think it works. Plaxo is making deals with ISPs and modifying its software for that.

And, they imho have lost their essential value proposition. “Your data about other people can be kept up to date.”

There are certain basic principles that they are forgetting: (1) It’s MY data. (Don’t be “stealing” it for other purposes without my permission AND that of the poor slob who it is about!) (2) It doesn’t matter what they other person says; it’s mine. (I have people who forget who I am putting blanks that Plaxo replicate into my Outlook record. Argh!) (3) What is all this “limits” “barbara streisand”? (If I want to keep track of a million people AND I am paying you, then you figure out how to do it. Don’t tell me — years after we’ve started and you’ve taken my money — that we are now going to have limits!!).

So, clearly, I’m moving away form Plaxo and back to a more manual system. Sadly. I’m interested of what everyone else is doing.

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FROM AN EMAIL ABOUT A NON-ENGLISH SPEAKING BLOGGER DOING A BLOG IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH

>(hopefully, it’ll help me on the other hand to polish my English based financial vocabulary),

I’m sure your English is far better than my rudimentary Spanish.

Speaking of “polishing”, my best “practicing” story was when the USAF decided it would be simple a wonderful idea if I learned Thai, …

… (This of course overlooks the fact that -at the time- 95% of the Thais spoke fluent English thanks to the British Crown schools. And 85% could write in English better than we could. It was rumored that there were Thai bumpkins out in the countryside who couldn’t speak the Queen’s English. But I never met anyone who did not speak it perfectly. Humorous to see an Oriental face and hear english with just a hint of Brit accent.) …

… and we would go to our Teacher’s restaurant (Thais are stereotypical hard working folks who likely have a full time job, part time job, a business on the side, and gamble / horsetrade / barter in their spare time. You could get tired watching them.) and she would have us entertain the patrons with our language skills.

Imagine two students standing in front of a room full on natives speaking their language in a simulated conversation about something from a lesson book.

The restaurant patrons would laugh, hoot, and howl. The women would cover their eyes (i.e., how Thai women feign embarrassment). It was “soda thru the nose” time! (Most of them didn’t drink. Smoke like chimneys, yes; drink, no?)

When we graduating, the teacher shared with us that our mispronunciations of the tonal Thai language hit most of the bad words, or made absolutely no sense. Who knew that when we were discussing going to “fly our kites” referred to … … and “drinking bootleg gin” referred to … … Well you get the idea.

BTW business at the restaurant went up 50% when she would announce that her students were “coming for dinner”. She got us there to practice our Thai and learn the local culture. We didn’t know we were the stand up comic act. We were just polishing our language skills.

Having made a complete fool out of myself in front of that audience, you’ll hear no laughing from this end of the wire.

Sa Wah Dee there, partner, polish away. BTW, haven’t spoken any Thai since I left the Air Force decades ago. When I do run across a Thai these days, they still speak perfect English and laugh when I greet them in their native tongue. Maybe I’m offering to fly a kite for them? Any way, nobody dies of embarrassment which is all in one’s own mind. People will probably just think it’s new internet lingo. Or, typos.

:-)

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FROM AN EMAIL BY A FELLOW LINKEDIN-ITE

>Do you use any of the other online networking forums/tools such as Plaxo?

I’m very active on LinkedIn, Facebook, and have accounts on many other sites that I don’t use a lot. New one comes out I try it just to see if it’s the LinkedIn replacement.

I am a blogger here, so I spend a lot of time on that. I frequent a slew of LinkedIn related forums. As well as many Yahoo Groups

Plaxo is a strange duck. As an email address sync tool it was: lame in V1, good in V2, and broken in the new V3, what they call “beta”. I use that and Corex Card Scan, which was flawless, but is now just average and has intermittent problems.

Plaxo is now trying to morph into LinkedIn. LinkedIn is trying to morph into Facebook, Facebook is trying to morph into LinkedIn.

Nobody wants to focus on their own niche and focus on doing that well.

>I’d like to know which is most useful or if they all are useful in their own right.

The problem is no one is satisfied to just do something well. Every one wants to be a “swiss army knife”. SO your “useful” question can NOT be a static answer.

With the new limits of Plaxo and now ISPs becoming involved with Plaxo, it’s all muddled.

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http://www.bubbl.us

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“…a free website to help you brainstorm and organize ideas online.” “In traditional brainstorming, or “mind mapping”, one writes a central idea on a piece of paper, draws a circle around it and starts branching off with new ideas, creating a free form diagram.”

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Playing with it and it seem to be intuitive.

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FROM A FELLOW ALUM’S EMAIL

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See that’s why the citizens must take great care what they ask government to do. It can’t do it. There are always unintended consequences. And, if it does get anything done, it probably cost an order of magnitude more than it should have!

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So, don’t ask anyone to do anything for you, unless you absolutely have to.

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http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=9758&cn=353

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Journaling can provide a good outlet for times when you need to vent but don’t have anyone to vent to. Journaling couldn’t be simpler. You simply write about your experience and emotion. Whatever you might say to a confidant, you can simply write down in a journal entry. In effect, the journal itself becomes your confidant.

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Maybe that’s what I’m doing here?

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