Review: A Long Way Gone

This one was a quick read for me. It was only about 250 pages long, but I also read it quickly because, as the protagonist’s story became ever darker, I pushed on as fast as I could to see him make it out of the whale and back to some semblance of a life.

Ishmael Beah was a normal kid in rural Sierra Leone in the early 90s. This changed when civil war destroyed his village and sent him on a long, painful journey. I was acquainted with many African refugees during my time in Portugal, but these were mostly from former Portuguese colonies: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau. They had some war stories, but nothing quite like this one. I vaguely recall some news reports about civil war in Sierra Leone but I had no idea it was this bad. This kid was dragged into a maelstrom of violence. His stories of run-ins and involvement with the militias that ruled the countryside are not for the faint of heart: the account of the violence is almost clinical, like a medical examiner, so that you almost forget that he is an eyewitness and (sometimes) a participant.

Despite the horror of the conflict, I was cheered by Ishmael’s determination to survive, especially when he made it away from the front lines and began the road to rehabilitation. I read the second half of the book in one sitting because I was so anxious to see what happened to him in the end. Ultimately the tone of the book is more sobering and reflective than depressing, and it certainly made me conscious of (and grateful for) the blessings we have in the United States.

When your iPod doesn't know it's not Christmas

We're big fans of Christmas at our house. Each year, Karla bakes a bunch of delicious treats, and the place abounds in wreaths, lights, and nativity displays. We also like Christmas music. I ripped a few of our Christmas CD's and purchased a few more so we have a nice holiday mix on the iPod. Of the 3000 or so music tracks on the iPod, Christmas music accounts for fewer than a hundred. This ratio has me convinced that the iPod has a hankering for Christmas music.

I know I have a habit of anthropomorphizing technology devices; it's a coping mechanism for dealing with computers all day long. I rant, lecture, or cajole my way through the hundreds of core systems I might touch over the course of a year. (And of course, there is Fisher-Price TiVo—I know that device has it in for me.)

Yet, the iPod’s preference for Christmas music is the clearest evidence thus far of some nascent ghost in the machine. Although I’ve put together some nice playlists, the shuffle feature is what gets me through the workday. I block out the cube-farm when I need to concentrate by slipping on my Sennheisers and setting the iPod to a reasonable level, as Milton Waddams would say. We have some pretty varied music, so a given hour might take me through U2, Johnny Cash, Coldplay, Diana Krall, Maire Brennan, Yo-Yo Ma, and Miles Davis. And, of course, a nice selection of Christmas favorites from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Elvis, Sinatra and/or John Rutter.

I haven’t taken a detailed account, but Christmas is definitely over-represented. There’s just no way a purely random process would select so many tracks from a group representing less than 3% of the total library. My only conclusion is that the iPod likes Christmas music, or at least following the lead of our big-box retailers: this morning as I made a quick stop at Wal-mart before work, I was serenaded by synthesized versions of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” and “Joy to the World.”

Review: The Omnivore's Dilemma

I just finished Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, and this rather lengthy review comes with a caveat: Reading this book will change the way you think about what you eat. Pollan pulls back the curtain on the way food is produced and consumed in America, and the level of detail is perhaps more than some people want to know. There is some gore and muck when the author delves into the Confined Animal Feed Operation (CAFO) facilities that provide a huge percentage of the meat sold and served in America. But Pollan is not Upton Sinclair, and his goal is not to expose the grisly so much as the unsustainable. The real head-scratching comes not because animals are suffering in cages—this is nothing new—but because the industrial food chain is so unnatural and unsustainable that it’s a wonder we got on this road at all.

The beginning of the road is the Iowa corn field, which seems innocuous enough until we learn that the relentless cultivation of a single crop is impossible without liberal application of synthetic fertilizer and pesticide. These elements stay with the corn as it wends its complex journey to beef cattle and literally hundreds of derived chemicals present in everything from carbonated soda to breakfast cereal. The animals fed on this corn are given their own chemical cocktails of growth hormones and antibiotics. The whole thing becomes a kind of agricultural Iron Triangle, with the genetic crop and fertilizer producers, pharmaceutical companies, and the USDA replacing the defense contractors and the Pentagon. What would Eisenhower think?

Okay, but this is all old news. Despite this unpleasantness, I’m not about to sign up with PETA or go vegan. The first shift for me in thinking about food occurred when Pollan described the results of a chemical analysis he had performed on a McDonalds combo-meal. Nearly all of the calories of the meal were derived from corn: Corn sweetener in the soda, corn-fed beef and cheese, and potatoes fried in corn oil. To me this was more like a Soylent Green nightmare than a fast-food meal—“Would you like a side of tasty corn with your corn? How ‘bout washing it all down with some refreshing corn?” Fast-food is not the exception, unfortunately: consulting the ingredients of virtually any processed food product in the grocery store reveals a depressing plurality of corn-based ingredients.

My mantra for food and dieting is “moderation in all good things” which comes from personal experience as well as religious teachings. The corn-based industrial food chain is the antithesis of this; what’s worse, this concentrated corn feast is swimming in a synthetic cocktail of industrial additives. I can see dipping my toe in, but when the majority of my meal is thus doused, I lose my appetite.

The second shift was when Pollan looked at the organic food industry. The problem with organics, he writes, is that the term is so loosely defined as to become almost meaningless. A hole cut in the wall of a massive chicken house leading to a narrow run constitutes “free range”; “organically fed” beef are still fed corn, and the controls on that corn are loose and undefined. Thus the consumer at Whole Foods is, in a way, duped into thinking the extra $2/pound he pays goes to a sustainable, humane industry.

Pollan’s solution to this is to investigate the small but growing culture of local “grass farmers” who utilize a heavily-managed, ever rotating cycle of cattle and chickens in their fields. These folks eschew the industrial corn complex, and so avoid the requisite fertilizers, pesticides and antibiotics. Yet this approach has an inherent catch: while it is sustainable, it is not scalable. Until there is a major shift in the way Americans acquire their food, this kind of “grass farming” will remain a niche market.

Overall, Pollan’s book has caused me to hone my instinct for moderation. It’s easy for us to throw a couple of pounds of ground beef in the shopping cart and base three or four meals a week on it. It’s also easy to load up the cart with processed foods (on which I subsisted before I married a wonderful cook). It takes some real thought to form a more balanced diet that is light on processed food and meat. I suspect it will be an ongoing process, but well worth the effort.

Thoughts on the Republican Presidential Debate

We watched the Republicans duke it out last night in Michigan. The debate focused on economic issues, which left some of the second-tier, single-issue candidates with little to say. This one was moderated by Chris Matthews and Maria Bartiromo. I don't watch CNBC, so this was my introduction to Ms. Bartiromo, and I was not impressed by her moderating skills. Perhaps it was the generally poor acoustics of the auditorium, but none of the candidates seemed to understand her staccato-delivered questions the first time she asked them. Matthews was his usual shrill self, though I prefer his moderation style immensely to the poor attempts of Wolf Blitzer in the earlier debate sponsored by CNN.

The most interesting exchange was between Romney and Giuliani: The Press suggests they were battling about which was more of a tax cutter, but my following of the exchange had Romney attacking Giuliani on the line item veto, while suggesting their positions on taxes are similar.

To us, the biggest non-story of the debate was Fred Thompson. We're used to the Arthur Branch pontifications that made him somewhat endearing on L&O, and none of that spirit was evident in the debate. To me he appeared tired and off-balance as he rambled in and out of focus on the issues. At least he knew who the PM of Canada was.

In relation to my previous post: Perhaps Fisher-Price TiVo reads this blog and is unhappy with my slamming it: Several times when we paused or rewound the debate to catch a missed phrase (the acoustics and microphones really were awful), the screen would go black for a few seconds, then gray, as though FPT was toying with us, before returning the somber political visages to the screen. This is a new thing, so stay tuned.

Attack of the Fisher-Price TiVo

I purchased my first TiVo digital video recorder in 2001, while I was in the Bay Area living a hedonistic, 20-something-working-for-a-dot-com lifestyle. The job didn't last, but the TiVo did. I was immediately charmed not only by the basic premise of timeshifting, but also the great user interface and intelligence behind the concept. When I moved back to Utah, TiVo moved with me.

When we set up shop in Herriman, we ended up replacing the brand-name TiVo with a Dish Network DVR, mostly because Dish gave us all the channels we needed for less money each month. The DVR did not have all the gee-whiz of TiVo, but it was reliable and easy to use (think Chevrolet instead of Cadillac).

Fast-forward and we are now apartment-dwellers in Texas, waiting for our home in Utah to sell. Because we're in an apartment, we opted against Satellite TV. This meant we couldn't use the TiVo (my original TiVo is a Satellite receiver and does not work with cable). Dish's DVR was also out. We signed up with Time Warner Cable and added the DVR option, reasoning it would provide an approximation of the function of TiVo or, at least, the Dish DVR unit.

We could not have been more wrong. Within seconds of firing the sucker up, it received (and still holds) the title "Fisher Price TiVo" in our household. (In the car analogy above, this wouldn't even make GM's lineup. Maybe a Yugo?) Everything in the user interface, from the colors and fonts to the resolution, remote control and menu scheme, seems dumbed down to the point of absurdity. The manufacturer threw out all the accumulated DVR wisdom since TiVo's inception at the dawn of the decade, and attempted to make the product as similar to a VCR as possible. Because, you know, going back 30 years for user interface and functionality is all the rage now.

Case in point: to access recorded programs, you actually "tune" this DVR to the "DVR channel" on the unit. Nevermind that it's accessing a recorded program on the unit's disk drive; we must maintain the pretense of snagging pixels from the ether. I still haven't figured out how to get back to live TV when a recorded program ends, without fumbling through at least 3-4 buttons; the sucker just says "DVR Channel" until you do something.

Second case in point: Selecting a program to record involves searching a channel guide grid and pressing the record button when you finally find the program. I suppose this maintains the analog paradigm of sifting through grids in TV Guide or the newspaper, except that 1) you only get to see four channels and two hours at a time, and 2) you can only look a day or so ahead. Trying to see programming three days hence results in the cryptic "No Data Found" message, implying to the analog user that all TV broadcasting ceases at that point.

I could go on, but given that our stay in this apartment is temporary, we figured that we could live with Fisher-Price TiVo for a few months (one of the few virtues of the arrangement is that there is no contract).

Yet, last week we discovered another irritation, one that seems to expand the design goal of this product to include not only the interface and functionality of 1977, but the reliability as well. We're following a few new shows this season (which is often the kiss of death for a new show, since about the time I decide I really like it, the network cancels it). We dutifully scrolled through the grids, thumb blisters developing as we pumped the "next" button on the remote, for each program we wanted to record. Then, a couple of days ago, the unit inexplicably dropped all its scheduled recording plans, reminiscent of a 1970's VCR's flashing 12:00. Why, I do not know, since the product allegedly has the afore-mentioned disk drive, which should immunize it from power outages. Yet, for some reason, it chose to lose the schedule.

When I moved from California to Utah, my TiVo not only remembered the programs I had on order, but automatically found them in the new time zone and new local channels, without any input from me. That was in 2001. Why is Time Warner stuck in 1977?

So what's all the fuss about? Lots of people don't even have a DVR.

If you've never used a DVR before, let me explain the paradigm shift. When you are accustomed to watching your chosen programming anytime you want, commercial free, your viewing habits change. You see or hear about a program you would normally not have dedicated any time to, just to see if it's any good. (Our threshold has been anywhere from five minutes to three episodes.) If it doesn't work, you just delete it from your queue. But this depends on having reliable tools that are easy to use. Otherwise you're stuck with the TV Guide way of doing things. And having loved and lost (like Frank has), you are definitely worse off than having never gone down the TiVo rabbit hole.

In sum, Fisher-Price TiVo will not be following us to our new abode. I hear TiVo calling...

How Not to Turn Down a Job Offer

The IT industry may be slow and cranky when it comes to hiring, but apparently we don't hold a candle to the hiring quirkiness of the legal community. As a couple of family member lawyers have recently changed jobs, I thought this story might be interesting. Note to self: Calling into question your erstwhile future employer's professional credentials is a bad idea. As is doing so in an email message that is then broadcast all over the net. (As an aside, I've been in the same situation as the young lady in the story, of having an employer "revise" the offered salary. My approach was to negotiate, ultimately resulting in my employer meeting me halfway. I have to say, "bla, bla, bla" is a more creative response, however unrewarding.)

Typhoon Hits Vietnam

The AP reports that Typhoon Lekima came ashore in North-Central Vietnam last night, causing at least two fatalities and destroying hundreds of homes. The provinces affected are north of where our boy is, but I bet the orphanage still got soaked. With our move to Texas, the weather activities in the Gulf of Mexico have been foremost, but we'll have our eyes on another coastal region as well--at least for the next couple of months.

Where the Techies Work

Apparently, it's map day. This one shows the percentage of the workforce in each metro area working in the information technology field. Of course Silicon Valley wins, but Washington is #2 (and, surprising to me, has a higher number of tech workers total than in the Bay Area). Austin makes the top ten.

Housing Data: Interactive Map

From the posts I've made so far, you might think the only thing I read online is the Wall Street Journal. I do read other sites (mostly during long conference calls I've been dragged into as an after-thought), but I have to confess the folks at WSJ are always putting up the coolest stuff. Case in point: this interactive map tracking the housing market across the nation. I'm pleased to see the Utah numbers still look pretty good, although this data is only though Q2. Let's hope things stay strong (at least until our place sells)!