In the swamp of their bureaucracy

We need to get the latest Treasury Daily Variable Interest Rate on a nightly basis. It's published on their website. We avoid screen scraping both due to the complexity of the layout of the information and the risk that the page format will change unexpectedly. So we get a feed from Treasury nightly, right? Wrong.

We've been trying for several months to get a feed. We've talked to people at all levels and in all areas of Treasury and been stonewalled at every point. In our efforts many other people have come forward and noted they had the same problem and ultimately resolved it by paying a private company to provide them with a feed.

So you have several different federal agencies spending taxpayer dollars to get a feed of publicly available information that is quite clearly already in electronic format. I find it interesting that there are hundreds of banks and financial services companies that get a feed from Treasury every night and we can't. One of the government managers noted that we need to have someone higher up contact Treasury to get any response, observing that "If you don't have clout in DC, you won't get anything from anyone no matter what."

Once again, I note that this project has accomplished in two short years what two decades of Republican rhetoric could not: it has made me an advocate of smaller government.

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Baby, check it all out

From NPGMusicClub.com:

MTV Networks, BET and Columbia Records announced that, for the first time in history, MTV, MTV2, VH1, VHI Classic and BET will broadcast a single program on the same night, at the same time -- a ground breaking, 30 minute television special featuring performances and interviews with 2004 Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame inductee Prince. The special will be road blocked across all of the participating music channels, and will air on Wednesday, April 28th, from 9:00 PM to 9:30 PM (ET). Check local listings in your time zone for more information. Four of the participating networks will air the special under the title Prince: The Art of Musicology, while BET has dubbed their broadcast Music & Words by Prince.

Recorded before a live audience at New York City's Webster Hall, the one of a kind television event features brilliant performances of material from Prince's eagerly awaited new release Musicology, including the critically acclaimed title track and the powerful "Dear Mr. Man." Also included is an historic acoustic solo performance of a medley of deep classics from Prince's catalog.

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We're turning again

We are on Yet Another Death March. We're Doomed! Again. So we are having a weeklong SWAT event to try and jumpstart everything. The new new methodology we are using has a requirement that a Use Case equals 40 hours of work. There was some confusion about this early on, wherein people thought that if a use case was projected to require more than 40 hours, it would be broken into two use cases. This is stupid. And yet it was done for a long enough period of time that we now have a fairly entertaining situation.

We are tacking on critical functionality from use case A onto the beginning of use case B, even though this functionality is clearly a seperate process from all of use case B. Why? Because use case A hit 40 hours, was submitted to the client and approved, and now no one is willing to pull it out of approved status to make it correct. Because that would be taking a step back.

It appears that I did retain something of those many years of math. While discussion interest rate calculation formulas the question came up "what's the difference between interpolation and extrapolation". I was a little concerned that they've been throwing these terms around for months with no idea what they mean, but whatever. I explained it like so (not 100% accurate, but correct in the context of their business): Interpolation is deriving the interest rate for a term within the range, extrapolation is for deriving it for a term outside the range. Inter, extra. Maybe I didn't learn that in math, maybe I learned it in English...

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Try to scream but it only comes out as a yawn

Must work on Narnia's sleep schedule. She's started having a fussy period about 4.30am. She doesn't actually wake up, but she's fussing and squawking and it wakes me up. This generally goes in fits and starts until about 5 or 5.15, at which point there's no sense in going back to bed. Who needs sleep?

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Down pale corridors of routine, where life falls unatoned

I've gotten far more done this weekend than I had expected, and yet still feel no sense of accomplishment. Probably because all I accomplished has been steps and not full projects. I've framed up the surround for the hearth, and really there's not much left to do but bang on a facing and top and make the edges pretty.

I've also gotten a working but still alpha stage port of PABlog for Plone (and I've written in my mind the port to vanilla Zope). For another project I'm delving back into core Zope and working without a net on some content management issues for a fairly large site. It's fun stepping out of the Plone/CMF "all the tools are there but are horrendously convoluted" and back to a clean and simple framework, even if it means I have to build the tools myself. I think I may pull punitiveart back to vanilla Zope once life calms down a bit.

This will be a fun fun week. Off to the other office for 8am-5pm meetings all week in the hopes that by throwing people at the problem we can finalize the several hundred use cases that have been languishing in bureacratic hell for months (or years in some cases). Mythical Man Month. It should be very very very fun. I can't wait.

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Just Like Me

Another entry for the STLBloggers poetry contest, something I wrote almost precisely 10 years ago today:

I work hard all day, trying to make ends meet
I suppress my personality
I do what I'm told, and try to never think
sometimes I forget that I'm free
I don't agree with all that I'm told
I just do my job

Maybe right now you can't see
you tell me that you hate me
You say you can't respect me
but someday you'll be just like me

My train of thought derails
life's a liquid poisonous dream
memory starts to fail
floating, stopped, caught in midstream

As I've lived my life, I've seen lots of shit
and I've learned to deal with it
I've learned the importance of situational ethics
and I find I've no regrets

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I really want to thank you

kt: ah yes, I would like to thank the programming community, and everyone in general for this award. I knew the application was solid, it was functioning great, but I decided to open and close a few files and processes on different machines using different applications at the same time...what a great achievement. special chars hidden in the code are truly fun.
rev: roflmao

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Don't you miss the feeling music gave you back in the day?

I have been a Prince fan for a long time. A very very long time. I have New Power Soul, Rave un2 the Joy Fantastic, N.E.W.S., and Rainbow Children, all albums most people never heard of. From this perspective I can say that Musicology is his strongest album in 10 years. Not that the others were slouchers, but this has got, for lack of a better term, "the funk", as it were. Most strongly informed by the SOTT era work, particularly the unreleased and non album tracks, this draws elements from his full twenty five years of recording.

more...

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Open like a child's mind

Jack and Narnia

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They're all hypocrites, so sing along with us

from Freeway Blogger<

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Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful

Thought of the day: New boyfriends are about as much work as babies - anon

I believe she is correct in that. And I'm sure she means that in a nice way.

I've been using XP at work for almost two months now. My extended thoughts on the experience can be boiled down very easily to: I prefer Linux.

I also realized that you can't reply to a blog entry if you're looking at the detail view. That's fixed.

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Linux -vs- Windows

I moved from Red Hat Linux 8.0 to Windows XP on my computer at work just over a month ago. I haven't used Windows at all for over two years and I've never used XP before. I found Windows 2000 to be a usable and fairly stable platform, but the limitations and frustrations were enough that I continued working more and more with Linux and Mac OS and just stopped using Windows altogether. As basically a new Windows user, these are my thoughts on the major areas that I consider to be important in an operating system.

System:
* Dell Precision 350
* 2.2Ghz P4
* 1G RAM
* 20G Western Digital HD
* AtI Radeon 64M AGP 4x
* Windows XP Professional

Reference System:
* homemade Athlon XP 2000
* 512M RAM
* 20G Western Digital
* Nvidia 32M AGP 4x
* Fedora Core Linux 1.0 (this system mirrors the Dell I had at work before I got the new XP machine as well, except that I was running Red Hat Linux 8.0)

I do basically the same thing on both:
* email
* websurf
* listen to MP3s
* read/write documents
* basic graphics editing (crop, resize, create web graphics for navigation)
* web development (Zope, JSP, Python, Java, PHP, ASP) using WebSphere Studio and boa-constructor.
* burn cds
* administer remote servers with SSH/SCP
* convert audio from analog tape to mp3

For my specific tasks, it's almost a wash. My personal preference is for Linux, as I can get things done quicker in Linux than in Windows. Someone who was more comfortable in Windows than in Linux would most likely have the opposite experience.

Email: I use Evolution, which I love. I bought a subscription to Ximian Desktop just to support them for the work they've done on Evolution. It is the best email client I've ever used, and if it ran on Windows I'd be using it at work as well. Linux works better for me here.

Websurfing: I use Mozilla an all platforms, including OS X. Firebird is ok, but fonts are garbage and many plugins don't work very well. Wash.

MP3 listening: Experience is the same on either. Slight advantage to Windows in that I can run iTunes on Windows.

Documents: Open Office handles everything I've thrown at it with no problems. Same on both platforms. Wash.

Graphics editing: Photoshop is of course the killer editor, but is overkill for anything I'm doing on Windows or Linux. If I have serious graphics work to do I'm on the Mac anyway. GIMP is lighter and faster than Photoshop, Photoshop is more familiar to me. Wash.

Web Development: WebSphere and boa-constructor work on both platforms, so the experience is largely the same except for performance (more on that later). For quick and dirty html/css work I use bluefish on Linux and homesite on Windows. HomeSite has a slight advantage because of it's very powerful ...

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Ain't talking 'bout Monday

My entry in the stlbloggers poetry contest.

(with apologies to Harry Akst and Grant Clarke)

Am I blue
Am I blue
Ain't these tears in my eyes tellin' you
Am I blue
You would be too
If you hadn't had your annual review
There was a time
I thought that I might
And know I know the hope of my plight, the hope, the hope
Was I glad, and am I sad
That I haven't had my annual review
Am I blue

Oh, you know I'm blue
Oh, you make me, make me so blue
Ain't these tears in my eyes tellin' you
Oh, you makin' me so blue
You know, you know, know you do
You would be too
If you hadn't had your annual review

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There's one for you nineteen for me

The government estimates it takes the average person over 28 hours to fill out their tax paperwork, assuming they are filling out the full 1040 and itemizing deductions. It's hard to say, as I did it in several stages as I found time this year, but I doubt it took me over 12 hours in total.

According to an AP Poll, most Americans would prefer a balanced budget over a tax cut. Particularly when the tax cut is going to increase your taxes down the road. I find it interesting that Republicans where screaming that a balanced budget is the most important thing in the world when Dems were in the White House, but now it doesn't seem to be an issue anymore.

The Tax Foundation declared April 11th to be Tax Freedom Day. They've been doing this for almost 40 years now, and have yet to get it right once. The problem being that they are basing it on the median tax, which is wildly inaccurate since there is such a disparity in taxes between the people who make nothing and the people who make tens of millions or more. A more accurate measure would be to base it on a mean range or a mode range. Medians are meaningless for any real analysis.

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Why d'you always miss the bus?

I'm beginning to think I should loosen my spam filters. Spam is starting to become more interesting than my actual mail. I could really see rockin it on Open Mic night with something like this:

Graves,
Govenment don't want me to sell
Check Your spouse and staff
Investigate Your Own CREDIT-HISTORY
hacking someone PC!
Disappear in your city
buckwheat,and then there

I chose a very windy day to start taking the bus again. And I need to get current schedules. It was nonetheless very relaxing. A much better way to start the day than driving to work, though I did miss NPR.

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all the mistakes and bad judgments I made

I learn, albeit slowly. At first, when Narnia would go to sleep for the night (meaning for an expected period of longer than 2 hours), I would see that as an opportunity to get done the many tasks I wasn't able to do while she was awake. Three months in, I have finally figured out that I will be in much better shape if I go to bed at the same time she does. She goes to bed at 7pm, I go to bed at 7pm. She goes to bed at 10pm, I go to bed at 10pm. That gets me much closer to a normal amount of sleep.

Consider this advice for new fathers (Kevin, this means you).

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How'd that asshole ever manage to get in?

I might argue based on that list that Nixon did more for the average American than any President since him. And I'm no fan of Nixon. I'm just less of a fan of everyone who came after him.

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I registered to vote, this pleasant land is free, so I took the inner city for democracy and peace

I have voted in three Presidential elections. I have voted for Ralph Nader all three times. I just finished reading his book "Crashing the Party", which I highly recommend for anyone who is affected by politics.

It is a campaign diary, but unlike most campaign diaries it isn't focused on what players they made deals with or what big names they met, but rather on average people with average problems and how they joined the campaign with the belief that they were making their world a better place. Nader talks about elementary school children who persuaded their teachers to include the Green Party in mock debates. He also takes every opportunity to educate the reader about the issues, about where campaign dollars come from but more importantly where they go to. Nader's basic premise is that the political parties aren't really about right -vs- left the way their marketing materials claim, but rather that they are about which group of corporations should have the most say in government. He makes a very convincing case, which is why I've voted for him three times.

Nader still insists he was not a "spoiler" in 2000, and firmly believes that he draws as many disaffected Republicans as he does Democrats. Based on my experiences at the Green Party convention in 2000, I would tend to agree with him.

---

Bonus special prize goes to whomever can identify the song in the title of this post...

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I'd gladly pay you Tuesday

Heard over the cube walls.

J: Are we having a team meeting today?
M: Yea
J: Can we have it tomorrow instead?
M: Why?
J: I'm off tomorrow

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With a gun they bought at Walmart discount stores

Wal-mart has a long, long, long history of controversy. Barbara Ehrenreich's excellent Nickel and Dimed nicely documents the sub-poverty wages they pay. I've heard plenty of anecdotal evidence of Wal-Mart refusing to pay local small contractors hired to build new locations because it's cheaper to go through court proceedings and drag it out until the contractor is bankrupt. There is no question at this point that a new store ensures downward pressure on local wages and standard of living.

Small independent businesses are forced out of business because they lack the buying power to force vendors to sell to them at razor thin margins. I would be interested in seeing how many vendors have gone out of business by catering to Wal-Mart's demands. They are currently pushing all their vendors to move to RFID tags in spite of the fact that there are still plenty of questions about the technology and the cost is prohibitive for many of the suppliers.

Traditionally, it has been savvy city councils and until the "liberal" Howard Dean the entire state of Vermont that shot down the establishment of Wal-Mart bulkheads. In Inglewood, CA the discounter decided enough was enough and decided to bypass a hostile city government and go to the people. This is democracy, this is a good thing. Wal-Mart placed an initiative on the ballot to allow them to open a store there. They spent over a million dollars promoting the initiative, this in an economically depressed part of the L.A. metro area. The measure was defeated two to one. This is democracy.

UPDATED: It seem that Wal-Mart not only lost, but they pulled some particular dirty (and probably illegal) tricks and still lost. According to this story, they lied and misrepresented in their mailers for the initiative.

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They got some coffee, eatin' right through the cup,

Fashion subversion.

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See you in the funny papers

I first read about Artificial Stupidity back in the 1980's. I thought it was a clever bit of satire of technology research and then thought no more of it. As I was doing the 4am feeding of my daughter, on this day of pranks and jokes good bad and indifferent, it came back to mind. I began thinking about the nature of comedy and computers. I realized the article is really exposing a fundamental truth about the limits of the anthropomorphism of technology.

Because it's certainly not at all like me to over intellectualize things. I do not believe that there will ever be a computer of any sort that can truly pass the Turing test because no computer will ever understand comedy.

Comedy is subjective. Computers are very very bad at subjective analysis. This may or may not improve over time, I don't think it will. In large part, comedy consists of ambiguity, absurdity, misdirection, misuse of language, willful misunderstanding. Computers are phenomenally bad at all of these. A computer will simply never comprehend why "orange you glad I didn't say banana" is hilarious to kids. Nor will one ever understand why Frank Zappa would just crack up when in the middle of a serious bit of music Ike Willis would suddenly lean into the mic and say "We're Beatrice". Be it the dry wit of Douglas Adams or the broad slapstick of Ernest, no manufactured device will be able to say "that's funny". They also suck at physical comedy, but that's a different issue.

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