Category: Other

Yesterday morning, as we wove our way around Old NC 20 in the pre-dawn light, we clicked on a station that was carrying BBC News and learned about the devastating tsunami.

I’m now working my way through my RSS feeds—even though old items automatically roll out of the feeds and no newspaper ever has more than a day’s worth of items, I still have about 1800 items to read—and have found the following about the tsunami:

• Photo gallery, taken out the window of a hotel in Phuket;
• Jeff Jarvis collects links about the tragedy
• Betsy Devine does likewise and points to Dan Gillmor’s suggestion that we all send money to the International Red Cross for tsunami relief. I can’t think of a worthier blogmeme.

Who knew? From the NY Times science section: At Mount St. Helens, the Big Eruption Is of Data, Not Lava. One of the big surprises of post-1980 volcanic research is the discovery that rising steam around a volcano can cause earthquakes that have a particular resonance frequency, signaling building pressure and possible eruption:

When an earthquake fault slips, breaking rocks, the seismograph reading is a messy, patternless jumble of squiggle. But around St. Helens, the seismic signal often contained a single characteristic frequency, almost as if the earth were singing a particular note.

Indeed, steam rising up through rock cracks resonates “almost like an organ pipe,” Dr. Chouet said. Such resonant earthquakes, particularly if nothing is occurring at the surface, indicates pressures are building, he said.

Christopher Reeve, September 25, 1952 – October 10, 2004. If you want a definition of courage, you could do no better than to look to this man.

Things have been a bit busy here at work. All I can say is, watch for an update by the end of the week. Hopefully I’ll post before then.

After too many years of squinting and watery eyes, particularly when reading at night or looking at highway signs, I can see again. It turns out that not only had the vision in my left eye declined substantially (from a -6.5 to a -7.75, according to my contacts prescription), but my astigmatism is finally bad enough to merit correcting.

And man, these new astigmatism-correcting contacts rock. I can see my laptop screen clearly from a distance of two feet. I can read small print without squinting to keep the letters from swimming and jittering. I can see street signs before I’m right up on them. (All of which should start to sound alarming to people who have ridden in a car with me recently. I certainly am a little alarmed to realize how bad it had gotten.)

It’s a bit like the first time I got glasses. I went to an optometrist in Hampton when I was a kid, off Mercury Blvd. in a “high-rise” office (read: more than three stories). When I got that first pair of glasses on and looked out the window, I was thrilled that I could see the outlines of leaves where the trees met the sky. It had always been a fuzzy blur before.

(This, of course, is probably funny to my more conservative readers who may be itchy to make jokes about short-sighted liberalism. Let it pass, kids.)

Sorry for the lack of posts today. I’ve been waiting for something to happen that I want to write about. I have very little patience, especially when I’ve eaten some of the M&Ms from the bowl outside my office door. (This is a tradition at Microsoft on some anniversaries. Today is my second anniversary as a full time Microsoft employee, and I decided that even though the second is not traditionally an M&M anniversary, I couldn’t pass it up.)

MetaFilter: The Godfather dies at 80. Pointer to CNN’s obituary.

Okay, so maybe I’m stretching this out a little. But I was surprised at how hard it was to buy the camera I wanted with my gift card.

I went to BestBuy.com today to buy the camera on line. Unfortunately, as far as I could tell looking on line, there was no way to specify that I wanted to use my gift card. The payment page offered credit cards and reward points as the only two options.

So I drove to the local retail store and explained my dilemma to the clerk. After we looked at some alternatives (and I got a chance to see the Nikon CoolPix 3200, which has the same body but a higher megapixel count for $100 more), I decided I really wanted the 2200. The clerk offered to place a custom fulfillment order for me. So I was ultimately able to place the order, even though it cost me an additional $30 in taxes and a lost 10% discount because I wasn’t able to buy it directly on line. Sigh. It should arrive later this week.

It was only a matter of time before the spectacular image quality evinced by sites like Then You Discover and 101-365 made me look twice at my photo equipment. Which currently consists of my trusty Nokia 3650 camphone, whose images, while occasionally artistic, are generally oversaturated and a little smeary, and the still camera on our Sony Mini-DV camera, which turns out images which are usually flat and lacking in detail. Both cameras max out at 640 x 480 resolution.

Put that together with an unexpected gift card to Best Buy, and I’m thinking about picking up some gear. The catch is that I don’t want to spend an arm and a leg. I’m not going to be printing photo quality stuff, so I don’t think I really need a five-megapixel camera. I just want something that will take decent quality, high(er) resolution images. I’m thinking about the Olympus Camedia D-395, which is a 3.2MP camera, but it’s new enough that no one has any feedback about it. Ideally $150 is the most I’d want to spend. Anyone else got any suggestions?

Fast Company: Depression Impression. The FC blog points to a study by the University of Michigan Depression Center (summary at the Business and Legal Review) that says that only 41% of employees suffering from depression feel that they “can acknowledge their illness and still get ahead in their careers.” This despite 90% of the respondents saying they have mental health coverage.

I don’t really have the words. BoingBoing is doing a good job of picking up pointers to blogosphere coverage (both local and otherwise) of the terrorist atttacks in Madrid that have so far claimed the lives of over 190 people. I’m reposting the illustration by Forges from El Pais below as a sign of my grief over the senseless loss of life.

The Yahoo newswire says that Canadian IT consulting firm CGI is buying American Management Systems (AMS), the consulting firm at which I was a principal before I left for business school. The interesting parts?

1. CGI is paying a 25% premium ($858 million) over the market cap ($657 million) of the stock (consistent with the feelings of many former and present AMSers that the stock was undervalued).
2. As part of the deal, the defense and intelligence assets of AMS are being sold, for $415 million… to AMS rival CACI.

I wonder how my old teammates are being affected by this. We beat CACI to win the Standard Procurement System award, but a lot has changed since 1997 and I’m sure there’s a lot of value in combining the joint resources of the two businesses.

Also, what a difference a few years (and the war on terror) make. Four years ago, I don’t think I would have predicted that the defense and intelligence businesses would have a market cap of almost half the total value of AMS.

Someone asked me last night to describe what my depression was like. It was interesting; except for sessions with my therapist I never had tried to put it in words to anyone.

I said: I found it hard to get out of bed in the morning. Sometimes I found it impossible to sleep at night. I lost interest in my work, in reading, in eating, in writing.

The worst part, though, was what my brain was doing. Or rather, not doing. I would stare at a computer screen for hours, berating myself for not doing anything constructive, then berating myself for wasting time berating myself. I would find myself confused and angry for being so stupid as to waste my own time and work, to spend days doing nothing and finishing nothing, but when I tried to do anything I would convince myself that it was such bad work that I could hardly bring myself to finish it.

I think this is what most studies of depression miss. Over time, it turns into a self reinforcing loop, a cycle that tears the sufferer apart.

When I was writing last night’s item about Easter eggs, I linked to my old project, Procurement Desktop – Defense, without following the link. This morning, I clicked the link and was pleased to see that the last release that I worked on, as a developer, system architect, and requirements lead, has finally gone out the door as Version 4.2. Going down the list of system features, I recognize many that I designed, coded, and fought for. It’s amazing that they were released in 2003 when the code was complete and entering testing in late 2000, but that’s life with the government.