Duck over rice, yum! This is about 50 meters from my lodging in Sukhumvit, Soi 38, Bangkok, Thailand

It is ~33 Thai Baht to 1 USD. That makes this a $1.20 dish.

Habit and Nature

Some might suggest we are human doing, rather than human being. I believe it was Aristotle who suggested it is what we do that makes us what we are. There is no essential being underneath our actions, per se, but the actions and the beings are concomitant. If so, then what we do right now is of vital importance. Our habit, what we do regularly, is what we are.

Habit and the Future

In some strong sense the future is about change, otherwise it would be as Lao Tze would have it, that if people kept their customs and worshiped the ancestors, he could tell you what life would be like in 10 generations. The point is that people do not keep customs and worship the ancestors as was done in the past. Things change, and even people change. This means that habits can change.

De futuris contingentibus non est determinata veritas. –Aristotle

How Then, Change?

How, then do we change? And is the discourse of change, or of the future, a part of this change? Or can it be a false substitute for taking action? I know I have been as guilty as anyone in terms of talking about the future more than taking the necessary steps to bring it into being.

The Role of the Discourse of Change in Actual Change

Of course it is possible that talking about the future is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for it to come into being. Sort of how we need to talk about change, engender belief in change, before we can have a candidate for change, who then can be elected and actually create change (we hope).

End of part 1…

The man then announced that he would now pay $20 for each one. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again. Soon the supply diminished even further and again they ere ever harder to catch, so people started going back to their farms and forgot about monkey catching.

The man increased his price to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so sparse that it was an effort to even see a monkey, much less catch one. The man now announced that he would buy monkeys for $50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on his behalf.

While the man was away the assistant told the villagers. ‘Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has bought. I will sell them to you at $35 each and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.’ The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys. They never saw the man or his assistant again and once again, there were monkeys everywhere. Now you know how the stock market works.

via email.

Confused

I have been confused, and quite annoyed as well, by this whole bailout fiasco. My sense was don’t do it. Now I am reaching the conclusion that it needs to be done (but not how it was done). Thereby we may actually have doomed ourselves, rather than doing good. But the predominant experience of all of this is still quite a bit of confusion. I think now I know why…

What Happened

It all comes down to policies. but there are several different kinds of policies. If we can parse them out, perhaps this will all make more sense. Let’s rehearse the policy timeline:

• Congress, with the help of McCain and Bush, deregulate investment banks, making reporting to, and regulation by, the SEC optional. Big news, none of those banks actually reported to the SEC.
• Billions (trillions?) of dollars in bad loans were created based on the demand for the most profitable financial instruments, US mortgage-backed securities.
• Those companies which were the first to create these securities, slice and dice them up, and sell the parts, have all failed, been acquired, or (the final two in existence) transformed themselves into commercial banks. No more investment banks exist.
• With the failure of mammoth Lehman Brothers, credit markets effectively seized up. Short term credit had become the vital lifeblood that an astoundingly large segment of the financial sector to survive, as leverage had gotten out of hand.
• So the cause of all of this is bad judgment which was able to grow to the scale it had through a combination of greed and lack of oversight.

The Bailout

• Secretary of the Treasury Paulson and Chairman Bernake should serve terms in Prison for criminal negligence, as far as I can tell. A cell mate should be Chairman Greenspan. They had been overseeing the crisis (bailing out Freddie and Fannie, etc.), and came to the conclusion that the only way to deal with this issue is to encourage the banks to get some transparency into their books.
• The way they could do this, the thinking went, would be to reward transparency with purchase of bad debt. Hence the $700bn bailout package was aimed at banks in that way. The basic concept was that transparency would somehow help restart the seized credit situation.

The Policy Problem

• The problem with the bailout is that trying to solve a monetary problem, caused by a regulatory problem, with a fiscal solution. Let’s parse through these different policy areas and see what goes where.
• Monetary policy has to do with the amount of money in circulation. The only real lever on this is the interest rate for central banks to lend to commercial banks. Greenspan realized that we had lost control over monetary policy during the last rate increase he oversaw because as he raised interest rates, the flow of money was not thereby controlled. Why? Because the world had become global and money was raised offshore, from the Chinese government and other sovereign wealth funds. Note that the Federal Reserve comes under the Executive branch of the US Government.
• Regulatory policy is the ability of Congress to regulate commerce as well as international trade. The regulatory gutting which began with Regan, continued under Bush Sr. and Clinton, reached a frenzied spectacle and apotheosis under W. and the Republican-held congress.
• Fiscal policy is the budget making process which is held by Congress. Of course the Executive can veto, but Congress can override.

What Really Happened - The Short Answer

Here we are back to the point of confusion. Why would the Executive (in terms of the Federal Reserve, which sets and executes Monetary policy) actually request of Congress a change to Fiscal policy, which was due to a lack of Regulatory policy?

• Short answer: Because we are in deep doo doo.
• Longer answer: Because Monetary policy doesn’t work very well anymore, and Regulatory policy is not well understood by people such as Secretary Paulson who has run organizations on Wall Street (and is himself worth hundreds of millions because of it) and whose career is avoiding such regulations.

What Should have Happened - And Will Happen Next

• It is likely that the credit markets are seizing up, and the $700bn didn’t actually solve anything (other than create another $700bn in debt for the US, which is not a good thing).
• We should have waited until the markets unwound and then went through all the books. That would have gotten us the transparency we needed.
• We should then (and still will likely have to) set some short-term Fiscal policies which will look like a bailout but would be (what it really is) a nationalization of certain market segments
• And finally, regulatory policies should be put in place that make sense and prevent a repeat of this same sorry state of affairs.

Sigh.

Update 2008-10-15

• Told you so

• Scribd could be consider the leader in this category, but there are several issues with this service.
• The most prominent problem is the way that they deal with illegitimate takedown requests. Who can trust a service that will not restore a document that is ones’ own when some other author has claimed that it is theirs? The inability to have private documents which are taken down for the same illegitimate reasons? While I liked Scribd in the beginning, they really need to get up to speed on legal issues. This is not only an issue of fair use (a copy of a paid for document uploaded and not shared), but an issue of actual intellectual property being denied inside of their service. No thank you.

Docstoc

• Docstoc is really the best out there in terms of functionality, though it is fairly ugly in terms of interface. Functionality beats beauty, however, in the absence of an equally functional competitor.
• There are friending/sharing options, as well as marking documents private.
• Unfortunately there is no group function, as there are (limited as they may be) in Scribd. This is one area I expect (and hope) there to be improvement soon.
• One great new application allows for direct synchronization between a desktop and the user file system on Docstoc. I am testing this out now, and it seems to be working pretty well.
• Docstoc also has a nice email attachments application that uploads and generates URLs for email automatically.
• Note that both Scribd and Docstoc do support more than PDFs for sharing.
• Friend me on Docstoc.

Issuu

• Issuu has a nice look and feel, and showed the real possibilities of flash paper, namely with artistic magazine layouts (as opposed to the business document). While this first overview and tour piqued my interest, a number of annoyances were soon encountered. There are some issues with Issuu…
• The uploader timed out at 100% when I tried an upload
• There were literally a dozen required fields before the upload would take, including several drop down menus (which are slow), as well as limited categories
• While there is an “invite my friends” option, when I used gmail to identify three friends who were users, it did not add them as people I am following. Presumably it sent them an invitation to friend me, but the people do have public profiles and potentially public documents to view, or at least documents tagged/favorited.

Edocr

• Edocr allows for uploading and public sharing, and their viewer is nice.
• Unfortunately they don’t appear to have any privacy settings.
• They do have groups to join and other uses can be added to buddy lists as well as messaging between users.
• The uploader was somewhat annoying with all fields required and a 10 word minimum in the description field (which wasn’t stated ahead of time, had to submit and get an error).

Slideshare

• I’ve included Slideshare here as a fifth possible option, because I was able to upload a regular (non slideshow) pdf and it showed up fine on their site (as a single slide vertically scrollable document). However, the embedded player doesn’t seem to work with this kind of document (player never finishes loading).
• Slideshare’s groups, follow, and privacy settings (with secret urls and embedding allowed for secret or private settings) are excellent. They have had a lot of latency and very slow to fix certain bugs in the past, however they have a good set of early adopters and there is a lot of good content up there as of now. This makes them hard to ignore.

Q: I can’t quite figure out what you do, can you tell me?

A: That’s an answer that would take more than 140 characters.

I cannot get this private twitter conversation out of my head. My suspicions are that the individual in question does not know what they do, or cannot say what they do. The answer simply cannot take more than 140 characters, at least the short answer. The beginning of the conversation is 140 characters or less.

Resource

• Write a 140 character resume for Business Week

Note: we cannot use the word sustain or sustainable because it is being used as a marketing term that is now completely devoid of meaning. Instead, let’s refer to what we mean here by ecologically sound practices (ESPs).

I believe that there will be no miracle resource such as oil that has been widely developed, but there will be many different miracle resources. For construction, we turn to the humble Bamboo, of which there are “91 genera and about 1,000 species” (Wikipedia article on Bamboo).

Bamboo is a group of woody perennial evergreen plants in the true grass family Poaceae, subfamily Bambusoideae, tribe Bambuseae. Some of its members are giant bamboo, forming by far the largest members of the grass family. Bamboo is the fastest growing woody plant in the world. Their accelerated growth rate (up to 3-4 feet/day (1.5-2.0 inches/hr)) is due to a unique rhizome system and is dependent on local soil and climate conditions.

Some interesting products using bamboo include the Dell Studio Hybrid, and the SimpleTech Redrive. There are bamboo houses, bamboo flooring, bamboo paper, and bamboo cloth and clothing. Of course there is the bamboo bicycle frame. Urban Addiction has a number of interesting and informative posts on Bamboo. And Softpedia has a nice article on all the various uses of bamboo. For folks in the USA there useful information site American Bamboo.

• http://www.eurodns.com
• http://www.europeregistry.com

Some are costly per year (100 euros or so) and better deals might be had, but for the one-off search across possible domains, both of these are great consumers of time.

Enjoy!

… Paved with Good Intentions

Now of course I was well intentioned; I wanted our network more secure. One part of my job was to assess, propose, and promulgate more and better security. After all, it would be harder for the bad guys to get to our company’s confidential data if we made the passwords harder to crack. I demonstrated this by running a network crack tool against the computers and thereby cracking somewhere between 10-20% of the enabled accounts.

Less Security, Not More

But the policy resulted in a less secure network. Why?

• People could not remember the new passwords, so they wrote them down on paper, and placed them near their computers.
• People could not remember the new passwords, so they had to be reset, which meant there was an amount of time when the people could not do their work because they were waiting for an administrator to help them (not to mention that the administrator could not do other work when helping them).

What is Security?

If we take a step back, we need to ask the question of security for what. That is, what does security mean? I have a presentation somewhere that flushes out all the meaning to the concept of access. Reliability, data integrity, access control, all of these come down to access. If security is cashed out in terms of accessibility, then we simultaneously denied access to our own resources to our own people, at the same time making those people who had a more secure password less secure by forcing them to create new and hard-to-remember passwords.

Yes, yes, I hear you say but there are mnemonics to help with password recollection and I completely agree. I have taught them to many people. However, what are we really doing here?

Intervention at the Edge

This approach of a monolithic policy caused havoc and a loss of productivity, while at the same time giving us a warm and fuzzy feeling of being more secure. We have an enforced policy! The lawyers were proud. A defensible position, in legal terms. We can contrast this with another approach, which I don’t have a good name for, but let’s call it intervention at the edge. This is where instead of creating a policy, let’s say about firing all people who watch pornography at work, we just drop in a network sniffer and send anonymous messages through the browser that those few people having a naughty peek at work shouldn’t be doing that. Wow, behavior changes, problems averted. No HR involved, no attorneys, no careers ruined. Much less time involved, results achieved.

Outsource Yourself

Those network administrators working in corporate IT departments should take as their goal their own outsourcing. That is the only way to really conceive of the changes that are going on in the industry and the appropriate response to them, professionally. This is also, paradoxically, the only way to make oneself valuable and prevent ones’ own outsourcing.

What I mean is this: consider that every action taken (policy or non-policy) will result in more work or less work in the future. Also consider that every action will result in more or less work for the non-IT people. Consider finally that every action will have an effect on access, the core concept of security.

If a course of action will take more of your time, more time of others, or give yourself or others less access to resources, it should be regarded with deep suspicion.

Folly of the Administrator

I have recently heard of the ongoing folly of administrators who do such things as block access to YouTube and Gmail. Why? If employees are spending company time and network resources on non-work activities, then there is a bigger problem that should be dealt with at the level of individual performance. However, is it conceivable that these and other blocked sites might be useful to an organization? If so, then blocking them is denying access to resources. In addition, the idea of turning wasteful employees into virtuous ones through legislation is a folly that has existed for millennia. There is plenty of evidence found in the histories of Seutonious and Tacitus.

Silicon Valley is considered the most productive place on the planet. This the place where Gmail and YouTube were invented, and no less consumed to the highest degree. And yet, this contradiction of dramatic productivity and equally dramatic time-consuming activity with these seemingly irrelevant resources doesn’t give pause?

Policies should be about the Future

I have had the sad task of being a part of a committee promulgating network policies for a university. The experience was one where I found myself as the lone voice crying out for us not to legislate the current ad hoc administrative practices (turning them into rules that would then require action by the Board of Regents to actually change). As the only student on the committee, it was seen as natural by university administrators that my suggestion be ignored.

Policies should help guide future actions, not past practices. Policies should be about giving more access to more resources, and not restricting access. In other words, we need to do the exact opposite of what network administrators tend to do.

What is the same

• Atom 1.6ghz processor
• 1gb RAM
• Wifi, Bluetooth
• Headphone, microphone ports
• 1.3mp webcam
• WindowsXP and Ubuntu
• 8.9″ 1024×600 Intel UMA
• VGA out
• Media card reader
• Three USB

What is different

• Asus with linux = 20gb solid state vs. Dell 16gb solid state
• Asus 8.0 x 6.9 x 1.5″ and 2.42 pounds vs. Dell 9.03 x 6.77 x 1.07 and _ starting at_ 2.28 pounds–this is likely the same because starting-at would be for the smaller SSD
• Note that it is possible to get a Dell for $349 with 1/2gb RAM, 4gb SSD, no webcam and no bluetooth

Another Option

• I just noticed the nice and shiny Asus EeePC 1000H, which is a 10.2″ screen and larger form factor, including:
  • 80gb HDD
  • 10.2″ 1024×600 (same resolution, bigger screen)
  • 10.5 x 7.5 x 1.5″ and 3.19 pounds
  • around the same $500 pricetag

Other Options

• MSI Wind in 8.9 and 10.2″ models
• Acer Aspire One, with models that start at less than Dell’s entry level

Hmmmm… Decisions, decisions…

MyFax

• Myfax
• $10/mo or $110/year for receiving 100/sending 200 faxes, for the moderate to heavy organization. Free international faxing to a number of countries. Toll free or local number.
• Bottom line - Good for international outbound faxing. Costs only $10 for first month to begin using.

Interfax

• Interfax Is a great service that uses a pre-pay and per-fax model instead of subscription billing. A toll free number is the only option. Inbound phone number is $13.95/mo. Simple, easy-to-use interface works fine. Menu pricing for faxing to different countries.
• Bottom line - Costs as little as $10 to begin sending faxes, $25 to begin receiving. For heavy fax users, likely the most economical approach.

Efax

• Efax offers $12.95/mo in the US (different prices for different countries) for a local or toll-free number inbound and up to 130 pages faxing either direction.
• Bottom line - Free 30 day trial. Cheapest to begin using for inbound faxing (until we get to K7 and Faxaway offerings below).

Faxpipe

• Faxpipe has the lowest pricing per year ($3.95/mo = $47.40/year prepay for full year) for 25 pages faxed. The disadvantage is that they don’t actually allow you to manage your account via the website. This seems like a throwback to the early 1990s where every FAQ question is answered by a “call us at 1-888-blah-blah”. Free trial.
• Bottom line - Cheapest per year sending/receiving (until we get to K7 and Faxaway offerings below).

Faxzero

• Faxzero offers a free faxing service (3 per day, 3 pages max, advertisement supported) or low cost $1.95 (paypal only) fax up to 15 pages.
• Bottom line - Free or low cost per fax sending. Great for those who almost never send faxes and don’t need to receive them.

K7 Unified Messaging

• K7 Unified Messaging is definitely an I fell down the rabbit hole kind of offering. Free voicemail and fax reception? Um, ok… They require regular usage to keep the account (defined as once per month voicemail or fax reception). 206 (Seattle) area code only.
• Bottom line - Absolutely free receiving voicemail and faxes. Wow.

Faxaway

• Faxaway is another offering of the K7 folks. This offers the same inbound voice and fax, as well as an outbound faxing with a pre-pay ($10) and per minute transmission charges and a $1/mo account maintenance fee.
• Bottom line - It doesn’t get much better than this for the light fax user. Per minute charges higher than for Faxpipe.

Final Bottom Line

• Moderate to heavy international fax senders look at Myfax or Interfax
• Heavy users should probably go with the Interfax offering
• Light senders and receivers will like Faxaway
• Absolutely free one-off, 3 page fax can be sent via Faxzero
• Efax free trial for 30 days of inbound and outbound up to 130 pages