Dan York - All Feeds

47 degrees and rain in Vermont! (The snow-lover's worst nightmare....)

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 04:26:45 -0800

For those of us who love the snow and all the outdoor winter sports... downhill skiing, snowshoeing, X-C skiing... the impending reports of rain have been the stuff of nightmares. We want the snow to be here. We don't want it to melt! And what's even worse, we don't want the rain that will create a layer of ice on top of all of the snow! That just destroys so much of the fun you have in snow! (And already one of the snowmen we built in the front yard has toppled over.)

But yes, indeed, we've got warmer temps today... they are forecasting 47 degrees F today! Crazy! And this with a foot-and-a-half of snow on the ground! We will have a white Christmas... but odds are the white layer will be a whole lot thinner than it was looking. From the National Weather Service:

.TODAY...CLOUDY. A CHANCE OF RAIN SHOWERS THIS MORNING...THEN RAIN
SHOWERS THIS AFTERNOON. VERY WINDY WITH HIGHS IN THE UPPER 40S.
SOUTH WINDS 10 TO 20 MPH WITH GUSTS UP TO 40 MPH...INCREASING TO
20 TO 30 MPH WITH GUSTS UP TO 50 MPH THIS AFTERNOON. CHANCE OF RAIN
90 PERCENT.
.TONIGHT...RAIN SHOWERS UNTIL MIDNIGHT...THEN A CHANCE OF SNOW
SHOWERS AFTER MIDNIGHT. SNOW ACCUMULATION UP TO 1 INCH. VERY WINDY
WITH LOWS AROUND 30. SOUTH WINDS 25 TO 35 MPH WITH GUSTS UP TO
50 MPH...BECOMING SOUTHWEST 10 TO 20 MPH WITH GUSTS UP TO 35 MPH
AFTER MIDNIGHT. CHANCE OF PRECIPITATION NEAR 100 PERCENT.

Rain, rain, go away...

Internet Meme - Accent Quiz - Yep, I'm a Northerner...

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 07:01:13 -0800

First noticed this on Rich Lafferty's blog and it was too tempting NOT to try. My results were entertaining:

What American accent do you have? (Best version so far)

Northern

You have a Northern accent. That could either be the Chicago/Detroit/Cleveland/Buffalo accent (easily recognizable) or the Western New England accent that news networks go for.

Click Here to Take This Quiz
Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

Technorati Tags: language

The complete and utter stupidity of the 2008 US Presidential Primaries (a.k.a. it is now entirely ab

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:00:58 -0800

As expected, today Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed a bill moving Massachusetts primary up to February 5, 2008 (some background here).

Let's just call a spade a spade and completely call off the primary process this year! We have no primary "process" any more... we have a primary day!

And we all lose. But more on that in a minute...

Massachusetts officials offered this rationale:

Proponents of the earlier date argued that moving the primary will ensure that Massachusetts has some clout in a presidential race that may be all but decided after Super Tuesday.

Exactly.

For those not yet following the follies of the US election cycle this time around, in a race for "attention" the entire 2008 process has become, in my opinion, completely screwed up. In past election cycles, the "presidential primary process" provided a longer more deliberative process for choosing the nation's leader. It started off with the traditional Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary typically in mid- to late January. There were then a number of different state primaries leading up to "Super Tuesday" at the beginning of March where a large number of states voted. The remaining states then voted on different days going out through the beginning of June.

Take a look at the schedule for the 2004 primaries. Iowa and NH lead off on January 19 and 27. 18 states follow in the next month and then on March 2, Super Tuesday, 10 states voted including the major prize of California (which has a huge number of delegates at stake).

Now look at this year's primary schedule. Here's the Democratic schedule (the Republican schedule is similar):

Jan 3 - Iowa
Jan 8 - New Hampshire
Jan 15 - Michigan
Jan 19 - Nevada
Jan 26 - South Carolina
Jan 29 - Florida
Feb 5 - "Super Duper Tuesday"... 22 or so states... the game is over
.... and then the rest vote

Yes, indeed, February 5, 2008 is now being called "Super Duper Tuesday" or various other names. Desperate to "get more clout" the various states have now moved their primaries up to February 5. With big states in there like California and New York, there will be a huge number of delegates at stake on that one single day. Right now that Wikipedia page is showing 1,943 Democratic delegates up for grabs on Feb 5th (Democratic candidates need 2182 delegates to clinch the nomination) but that doesn't reflect Massachusetts. I would expect that other states like my own state of Vermont will now probably also look to move their primaries forward to February 5th. (Vermont continues to be on March 5th, which was the original "Super Tuesday" with the rest of New England (outside of NH), New York and California.)

Why shouldn't they? Effectively none of the primaries after February 5th really matter. It's almost certain that the candidate will be decided in the votes that occur on that one day.

The irony of all this is that all of these states moved up their date to "play a greater role in the primary process", but in so doing they really have wound up losing out. It's no longer a game of "retail politics"... of going around and visiting states. The states are no longer accorded much individual attention. It now becomes purely a game of advertising dollars. Whoever has the most dollars to put the most advertising out on the mass media in the most states will probably win. If you are not Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John Edwards in the Democratic race, you might as well fold your cards are go home. Your odds of winning are next to zero. It's all now about money. Who has it and who can spend it.

Certainly you could argue that it's always been about money, but in the past races the thing was that lesser-known candidates had a chance because they could do well in New Hampshire and Iowa and build upon that to go into the other races. Bill Clinton did exactly that in the 1992 election. He placed second in NH and built upon that to win subsequent primaries. (I remember this quite clearly as I was living in New Hampshire and was active with the Clinton campaign (although after the primary)).

There was more time for a lesser-known candidate to emerge.

Now, there is no time. The NH primary is 43 days away. "Super Duper Tuesday" is 71 days away. Game over. It's all about who has the most money to get out to the most states right now to win elections on that day. February 5th, 2008.

To me this is a rather sorry state of affairs. We all lose, in my opinion. There are some very good candidates on both sides of the election who don't have the money that the front runners do. In another election cycle, they might have honestly had a chance of being seen as a contender. We all might have had more of a chance to hear from them. Now, we probably won't, despite however much they might try.

Some will say it's a good thing that the race is over so quickly... candidates will be chosen and they can start bashing each other in preparation for the actual election in November 2008. Perhaps. Some will say that NH and Iowa unfairly get more attention and play a disproportionate role in helping elect candidates (and are not representative of the US population). This is why the parties were moving Nevada and South Carolina forward... in an effort to give more diversity and yet still have smaller races where less-monied candidates could have a chance. But then all the other states wanted to jump in there and so we have the mess we have today... where it all will come down to advertising dollars... and whatever slim chances there were for actual deliberation and evaluation of candidates get completely tossed out the window.

We all lose.

Technorati Tags: politics

Wondering about the purpose of this blog anymore...

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 06:27:32 -0800

I have found myself wondering about what to do with this blog lately. Most of my writing these days is over at either Disruptive Telephony or Disruptive Conversations, with a little bit also occurring on the VOIPSA weblog. I'm also in the process right now of setting up some new weblogs for Voxeo, my new employer, which will further scatter my writing.

I've left this blog intact primarily because of the history of my writing but also in part as kind of a "relief valve"... a place to toss in writing that doesn't fit anywhere else. Perhaps that is just how I'll leave it. Random writing about curling or Vermont... maybe I'll actually post some of the poetry I write... maybe I'll talk about public policy issues. I don't know.

In the meantime, if you are following this blog or RSS feed, you'll probably find I'm not posting here all that often (as has been the case in recent months). Please standby while I figure out what, if anything, further I will do with the site. (Suggestions are always welcome, of course.)

Technorati Tags: administrivia

Any Vermonters out there interested in carpooling up to FacebookCamp Montreal on Wednesday (Nov 7th)

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:55:23 -0800

Are there any readers of this blog in the Burlington, Vermont, area who want to head up to Facebook Camp Montreal on Wednesday? I'm planning to go and given that the event starts at 6pm (and goes to 10pm) I'm figuring to start driving up around 2 or 3pm to avoid rush hour. Normally it's only about a 1.5-2 hour drive, but I've always found the traffic in the late afternoon to be horrid in Montreal.
Anyway, if there are any Vermonters reading this who want to head up, it would be great to carpool. Please drop me an email or call (802-735-1624).
P.S. If you don't speak French, no worries... neither do I. (Outside of the 20 or so random words I picked up from living in Ottawa for 5 years.)

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebookcamp, facebookplatform

Opposites DO attract - what is it with geeks and artists?

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 13:36:34 -0700

I was fascinated and amused to be reading a recent post from head-alpha-geek Jon Udell and see this:

The test subject was my wife, an artist who has lots of images of her work and needs to rearrange them in various ways for various purposes.

My wife, of course, is an artist. A good friend of mine who also ranks quite high on the geek scale is married to a poet. My former boss (quite the engineer/techie/geek himself) is married to an artist. I can list other techie/geek friends who wound up marrying artists, poets and writers. What is it that seems to bring us together?

Fascinating how opposites really DO attract!

Technorati Tags: life

5-yr-olds and leukemia - all my issues pale in the face of that

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 05:43:11 -0700

Sometimes one is reminded of what is truly important in life.

Wednesday was a rather exhausting and emotionally draining day for me. I was up in Ottawa at Mitel for an intense day of meetings to transition various different efforts over to other people - as well as dealing with phone calls and email messages around potential options for what comes next. Around 5:30pm or so, I made my usual call back home to speak with my wife and daughter. I expected that we'd have the normal kind of conversations that we have around what's been going on in each of our days.

Nope.

Before I'd even said anything about my day, my wife told me news that rendered me completely speechless (which most folks know is nearly impossible to do). She and our 5-yr-old daughter had spent part of the day visiting the hospital where the 5-year-old daughter of a friend of ours was suddenly brought into the hospital with a diagnosis of leukemia! She's now in there for a week undergoing chemotherapy.

In the face of all that, all my issues with employment (or lack thereof) seem insanely trivial.

We've known the mother and daughter for the two years we've been here in Burlington, and the daughter in fact started kindergarten at the same school as our daughter, albeit in a different class. While we haven't been able to spend a whole lot of time with them in recent months, they've definitely been part of our lives here in Vermont.

Needless to say, this was a complete and total shock.

From what I understand, the daughter started seeming rather tired and worn-down in recent days. But she'd just started at a new school and there's a number of other events in their lives that could cause stress... I'm not sure what exactly prompted the mother to have her daughter checked out, but the net of it was that a blood test on Monday came back with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) and Wednesday the daughter had to enter the hospital for seven days of chemotherapy. This is just the beginning, of course. She won't be returning to school (germ magnets that they are) and will be beginning a very different life as she fights this disease.

I can't even begin to imagine receiving that devastating news.

Like my wife and I imagine many others connected to this couple, I'm just starting to learn about this ALL form of leukemia and what it's all about. Our thoughts/prayers/etc. will will certainly be with them and we're looking to do what we can to help them. Meanwhile, it's a stark reminder to me when I find myself worrying a bit about what comes next for me in terms of jobs, contracts, paychecks, etc.... comparatively those are all trivial problems. We're alive and healthy. In the end, that is what is REALLY important.

I'm still in shock.

Technorati Tags: leukemia, cancer

Fun with the Parallels Transporter... and my inability to copy over a Windows XP system

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 19:44:43 -0700

Having just purchased an Apple MacBook Pro, one of the initial things I wanted to do was install Parallels so that I can run Windows on top of the MacBook Pro. Given that the laptop is to replace one of my Windows XP machines, it seemed like running Parallels Transporter would be a great thing to do. Copy the Windows XP system over to the MacBook Pro, make sure it was all happy... and then consign the old system to the recycling process.

However, it didn't work out that great so far. Everything seemed to work out at first. I installed the Parallels Transporter Agent on the XP system. I installed (after purchasing) Parallels on my MacBook Pro. Then came problem #1 - Transporter on the Mac couldn't find the Transporter Agent running on the network, so the XP PC wasn't listed in the choice of systems I had to choose from. I tried providing the IP address of the XP system and that still had no luck. Thankfully, I'm a network geek with plenty of different kinds of cables around, so I simply put a crossover cable between the two of them, manually configured their IP addresses and... ta da... Transporter could see the Transporter Agent! All looked good.

The migration began but then when the blue progress bar had moved maybe 1/4 of the way across the screen, it stopped suddenly with this error:

During disk(s) migrating an error has occurred.

Nice! Wonderfully descriptive! I retried with the same effect. I then set to work on the XP system... I did "Disk Cleanup", then I defragged... then I defragged again. Still the same problem. Judging by this thread on the Parallels forums, it seems like it might be some issue with a single file somewhere on the disk. Now, the curious thing is that when I do the Disk Defrag, it tells me that a file was unable to be defragmented, but doesn't say what the file is! The box where this is to be indicated is empty! So perhaps this is the issue... or perhaps not.

Anyone out there have a similar problem with Parallels Transporter? If so, did you ever get it to work? (And what did you do?) Thanks!

My 94-year-old (and wired) grandmother - and the value of play

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 03:34:34 -0700

Something like 10 or 15 years ago we got my grandmother a computer and an AOL account and I went over to her house to set it up. Actually, I think the very first one was one of my older computers that I no longer needed... I don't know... she's upgraded a couple of times since. We figured at the time that since she would regularly type out letters and snail-mail them to people, the transition to email would be pretty easy. Indeed it was and she's been emailing like crazy for all these years. It's been great to see first-hand the applicability of online communication to that age population and it's been admittedly fun to hear my father providing tech support to her after all the years that I provided tech support to him! In any event, she recently forwarded me a piece that's circulating on the Internet called "The Computer Swallowed Grandma" and included a note at the top thanking me for that introduction of a computer all those years ago. Down at the bottom of the forwarded message, though, were these words that I found incredibly important and true:

We do not stop playing because we grow old;
We grow old because we stop playing

Indeed!

How to talk like a Canadian - a 12-step program

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 13:11:23 -0700

Back in June 2007, a podcaster I know expressed interest in attending a conference in Canada, but said his "Canadian was a bit rusty" on a mailing list of podcasters. It was the next day at 5:15am when I read this, and wrote the following post. Other podcasters in Canada enjoyed it, added their tips, and then asked when I was going to blog it. It's been on my list for a while and I just figured this was something fun to post before the Labo(u)r Day holiday. I'll post my 12-step program first, along with a summary of initial comments from some Canadians after that. Please feel free to leave your own.

On 6/6/07, <name> <snip> wrote:

Sounds like a fun event. I'd love to go but my Canadian is a bit rusty

To help, I'll provide a basic recipe for how to talk like a Canadian (from the perspective of an American working for a Canadian company):

1. End every 4th or 5th sentence with the very fast question "eh?", as in "That sounds like a good plan, eh?" (And yes, even after leaving Canada 2 years ago, my ~5 years there infected me and you will still here this occasionally in my FIR reports or my own podcast.)

2. Practice a slightly different intonation of vowels and emphasis on different syllables. The oft-cited and extreme case is where "abOUT" becomes more like "abOOT". One I run into all the time is where the American "praw-CESS" become "PRO-cess" (with stronger emphasis on first).

3. Never say "I went to college" as that implies a lower-level, more trade-type school. Say instead "I went to university" even if the school you went to was, in fact, called a College.

4. Drop out "the" in certain key phrases like "the accident victim was sent to hospital" versus "to the hospital". You won't really have any idea where you should drop out the "the", so just do it randomly.

5. Realize that the capital of Canada is, in fact, Ottawa, despite the opinions of those who live within the greater Toronto area.

6. They have a "Prime Minister" instead of a President. Their current one is Stephen Harper who is basically a more polite version of George Bush with nicer hair. He probably won't last long - and they at least have a system where they can bring down governments they don't like.

7. Learn about hockey, as it will factor into many if not most conversations. As a point of reference, despite the fact that it is June and 80 degrees out, the Ottawa Senators were just now playing the Anaheim (yes, as in Disneyland and California) Ducks (formerly "Mighty Ducks") in this little contest they call the "Stanley Cup". The Ducks just won last night, so be prepared for intense hand-wringing and concern that an American team won (even though all NHL teams are pretty much just a different group of Canadian, Czechs, Finns and Russians with a few token Americans thrown in) and of course the view from the Torontonians that the Maple Leafs would have done better. Realize, too, that all the discussion will shift to analysis of the games and of the season and then into preparations for the next season which will start in a month or two. Also realize that while most Americans might be playing baseball, football or soccer right now, many Canadians are playing "ball hockey" which is essentially hockey without the ice... this helps them prepare for hockey season which will start in a month or two as soon as everyone returns from their summer "cottages".

8. Obsess about the US and what Americans think about Canada and the latest Canadian political moves. (Even though 99% of Americans generally don't think about Canada at all and would be hard-pressed to provided any information whatsoever about Canadian politics or who is in charge.)

9. Remind any American who uses the term "American" that the term is arrogant and forgets the fact that "the Americas" also includes Canada, Mexico and a host of other countries.

10. Complain about the health care system. Everyone has a story of their great aunt Millie who had to wait eight months to get an MRI scan. (Don't point out that they could just buy more MRI machines - and whatever you do, don't bring up the massive spreadsheets you have to maintain under the US system to ensure adequate reimbursement, the large out-of-pocket expenses you have to spend or the massive gaps in coverage... let them continue to suffer under the delusion that its better down here.)

11. Get and use your Facebook account. If you are Canadian, you have to have one. (http://blog.facebook.com/blog .php?post=2398302130 )

12. Be polite. Be very polite. (Unless, of course, you are engaged in a televised political debate or are getting into an argument about hockey.)

If you follow this 12-step program, you should have little problem talking and interacting with Canadians.

A couple of Canadian podcasters indicated that the list should also include these facts:

Canadians don't talk about guns because they don't have/carry/need guns.
Canadians have real beer.
Canadians generally don't talk about murder or drugs because those generally aren't issues.
Many Canadians will nod their heads and be polite to US colleagues, but once they're out of earshot they will say things like "could that guy be any more of a Yank?"
Canadian money comes in multiple colo(u)rs, not just all green. They also have a $1 coin ("loonie") and a $2 coin ("toonie").
When you go into a restaurant in Canada, never ask for the check (which they spell "cheque"). A check means you're getting money. Ask for the "bill".

Finally, once podcaster suggested that you weren't a true Canadian until you could understand the sentence: "Please pass me a serviette. I've spilled poutine on the chesterfield." (The scary aspect, of course, is that the sentence made perfect sense to me.

In any event, I hope you've enjoyed this little trip through the common language that divides our two nations and that it might help you should you ever journey to the great white north.

Comments and additional examples are certainly welcome. Please just do the Canadian thing and be polite, eh?