Politics

6 May 2008, 21:32

I have said almost nothing about politics in this election cycle.  I desperately want the Democratic Primary to end.  I don’t much care who wins.  I have, over time, developed a marginal preference for Obama.  But, I think both Clinton and Obama are flawed candidates.  (By “flawed” I mean mostly in the “all human beings, especially those that would be interested in the job of POTUS, are flawed” kind of way.)  Nonetheless, I would choose either of them over McCain in about a millisecond.  I used to have a lot of respect for him.  Now?  Not so much.

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Quote of the Day/Week/Month

5 May 2008, 09:09

A classic but a goodie.  On investing, of all things.  From Warren Buffett’s 1997 annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders:

A short quiz: If you plan to eat hamburgers throughout your life and are not a cattle producer, should you wish for higher or lower prices for beef? Likewise, if you are going to buy a car from time to time but are not an auto manufacturer, should you prefer higher or lower car prices? These questions, of course, answer themselves.

But now for the final exam: If you expect to be a net saver during the next five years, should you hope for a higher or lower stock market during that period? Many investors get this one wrong. Even though they are going to be net buyers of stocks for many years to come, they are elated when stock prices rise and depressed when they fall. In effect, they rejoice because prices have risen for the “hamburgers” they will soon be buying. This reaction makes no sense. Only those who will be sellers of equities in the near future should be happy at seeing stocks rise. Prospective purchasers should much prefer sinking prices.

And, since Becky and I are planning to be net savers for at least the next 30 years or so, I guess I should be happy about lower stock prices.

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Kevin

16 Apr 2008, 12:18

I wouldn’t exactly say that Kevin Granata was my friend.  Our wives were friends, certainly.  I knew his kids and had been to his house.  Occasionally, we had been in a meeting together regarding this or that.  And I liked him well enough, but we were more acquaintances than friends.  But on this, the anniversary of Kevin’s death at the hands of a gunman at Virginia Tech, I thought it fitting to tell a few stories of Kevin that are seared in my memory.

Christmas Morning, 2005

On Christmas morning, 2005, I was tiling our bathroom floor.  We were remodeling two bathrooms (which had previously been one bizarre bathroom), and I was doing much of the work myself.  I had thought of hiring someone to do the tile work, but the tile installers from our local home center (Lowe’s or Home Depot, I can’t remember which) wouldn’t do wall tile, only floor tile.  Since we planned to tile the tub surround in one bathroom, I figured that I might as well learn about laying tile by doing the horizontal floor first.  I rented a wet saw to cut the tiles.  Since I was doing two floors and a tub surround, I knew it would take a few days to get the tiles laid, and so I rented the saw over the long Christmas weekend to save some money.

Early Christmas morning, I started laying tile.  As often happens with home improvement tasks, you can read all the books in the world, but until you actually start doing something, you won’t really learn how it’s done.  So, I promptly smacked my head into the steep learning curve that is laying tile.  I remember being frustrated, but no more so than usual at the beginning of learning a new home improvement skill.  But Becky said it was the most frustrated she had ever seen me.  So, she called Linda, and Linda sent Kevin (who had laid some tile in his own home) right over.

Kevin helped me get the thinset mixed right (I had it a little too thick, if memory serves), then spread it (I was putting it on too thick), and lay the first few tiles.  I was embarrassed to be taking him away from his family on Christmas morning, but he didn’t seem to mind.  He was probably there less than an hour.  But after that, the rest of the tile went much more smoothly.  It was still time consuming — I used that wet saw until late into the night before it was due to be returned — but the project had become manageable.

Summer, 2006

Our house is in an eclectic neighborhood of Blacksburg.  There are big houses and tiny ones, new houses and older ones.  In particular, there is an old couple that lives in a tiny, tiny house on the corner just down the road from us.  This road, as it happens, is a road the Granata family travels daily, as their house is farther out from town than ours.  The couple’s mailbox had been smashed in repeatedly by marauding teenagers.  On this particular summer day, the mailbox had been destroyed again, and Linda sent Kevin and the boys out to replace it.  They bought one of those crazy heavy duty Rubbermaid mailboxes, with the notion that it would be well nigh impossible to smash, and they put it up.

I still see that mailbox almost every day when I take our dogs for a walk.  And when I see it, I always think of Kevin.  Replacing the mailbox was Linda’s idea, but I wonder how I would have responded if Becky had  tried to send me out with the same task.  I would surely have resisted, but now I hope that I remember and, remembering, don’t resist.

April, 2008

I don’t remember the exact date.  It was Monday.  It might have been April 2.  It might have been April 9.  Maybe it was even March.  In any case, we had managed to maroon one of our cars at church.  Becky wasn’t feeling well, and I needed to go retrieve the car.  So we called Linda, who sent Kevin.  I remember dreading the two and half mile trip a bit.  Kevin and I were both quiet souls, and I wondered what, if anything, we’d have to say to each other.

But he picked me up, and I directed him towards our church.  We talked about this and that, and he commented that he had seen my name a lot in the funding list that our Office of Sponsored Programs sent to faculty, listing recently awarded research grants and contracts.  ”I like that list,” he said.  ”It’s all good news, celebrating accomplishments without putting anyone down.”  Incidentally, the Office of Sponsored Programs stopped sending out that list a few months ago.  They say it’s all on the web, but I miss that listing of good news amidst the junk in my faculty mailbox.

So, those are my stories of Kevin.  They represent just about all I knew of him.  I’ve turned those stories over in my mind time and again during the last twelve months.  I decided early on that the loss of 32 precious souls taken senselessly from our campus was too much to contemplate.  So, I focus instead on the loss of Kevin and on what he meant to his family, friends, and colleagues.  And I try to be a good friend to his family, who are getting along as well as any family might after losing a husband and father.  But when I look at that collection of stories, I’m sorry that I didn’t know him better.  

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Computing in the Cloud

31 Mar 2008, 10:20

In the couple of months since it was announced, I think the meaning of the MacBook Air has become clear. I think that Merlin Mann had the best explanation of where Apple is going. It’s all about the cloud, baby. Of course, this causes one to wonder why the MBA didn’t include 3G wireless support, but it is a first generation product.

My initial plan for life with two computers was to basically partition the tasks that I do on the computers. I would use the MacBook Air for virtually everything except for photography, those tasks which require a virtual machine (Quicken and the occasional Office document with macros), and those tasks which require lots of storage (like digital movies, which I have very few of). The MacBookPro would live at home, as most of its functions are home-centric. This would have been mostly workable. I have heard of several people with multi-computer lives who do just this. It may still be what I do at first, depending on how much preparation I am able to get done before the MacBook Air arrives. But, there are several flaws.

First, I want to be able to access data remotely. Since I don’t have a static IP address at home (and my past experiences with dynamic DNS have been unimpressive), this basically means that the data will have to live at work. At first, this seemed like no problem, as I already have a couple servers in the lab with plenty of disk space. But then I realized that my lab servers are administered by my graduate students, and I have sensitive (student grades, recommendation letters, student application materials, etc.) and ITAR (if you don’t know what ITAR is, be thankful; if you must know Google it) data on my machine. Although I trust my graduate students completely, putting sensitive data on a student-managed server would be negligent and perhaps illegal; putting ITAR data on a machine administered by an international student could cause me to go to jail.

Second, my recent laptop repair made me realize that I really wanted the ability to hot swap laptops if needed. So, if something were to happen to the MacBook Air, I’d like to be able to pick up the MacBook Pro and keep working with minimal interruption or downtime. If tasks are partitioned, this simply isn’t possible.

New Hardware

In order to solve either of these problems, I was going to need some new hardware, capable of serving files, in my office at work. For reasons to be detailed in the next section, I decided to go with another Mac. Since I already have an external monitor on my desk at work, my first thought was to get a Mac Pro. But Mac Pros are expensive, I thought, and they are far, far more computer than I need; the rack-mounted Xserve is even worse. And the other headless Mac option, the Mac mini, has the opposite problem — it really isn’t a sufficient computer to act as a server. So, I had settled on an iMac, and planned to move my current external monitor home.

Before I ordered the iMac, though, one of my grad students came to me saying that they need more computing power. Apparently Student M is running simulations nearly full-time on the current simulation server, and Students D and R, who are planning to graduate this summer, have quite a few simulations to run, too. Because I aim to be sure that my students have the resources they need to get their work done, this clearly demanded a Mac Pro, which I promptly ordered.

Software

My initial thought was to do something naive and just sync my home directories between the machines using Unison, omitting the things that I didn’t want on each machine. This might even have worked, if I had carefully tweaked which directories to sync, but I couldn’t find much information on making it work.

What my web surfing did turn up, though, was information on network based home directories and (more importantly) mobile home directories, which are both natively supported in OS X. A mobile home directory is a home directory that is kept in sync with a version on a server when you are on the network, but works locally when you are detached from the network. Perfect!

There is a lot of information on the web on getting mobile home directories (MHDs) to work with non-Apple server solutions. It can be done, and it doesn’t even seem *that* hard to do. I even read that you can enable FileVault on the MHD, which might mean that I could do this safely using the student-administered server in the lab. But getting MHDs to work with a non-Apple server requires lots of work: setting up an LDAP server, setting up NFS on the server, and setting up appropriate automounts on the client machines. I am busy. And lazy. I just can’t see myself getting that deep in system administration to configure a service that only I will use.

Part of Apple’s Raison D’Etre, though, is making things easy. And there is an Apple product that makes setting up MHDs (among other things) easy: OS X Server. So, I’ve decided to purchase a license for OS X Server and put it on the new Mac Pro that I’ve ordered for my office. Besides, it’s a good excuse to gain some experience with Apple’s server OS.

The Mac Pro will then be at the center of my computing universe. Most of my computing tasks will be available and synced across all three computers, although the storage-intensive tasks will be restricted to the Mac Pro and the MacBook Pro. (The only downside with respect to the original iMac plan is that I won’t have an external monitor at home. Oh well.)

I don’t have my MacBook Air yet, but I’m hopeful that it will come soon. The Mac Pro is likely to arrive this week, I think. So, my computing world is about to change dramatically. I hope it’s for the better…

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Bank Annoyance…

26 Mar 2008, 22:10

I am very annoyed with our bank. Which is too bad, because I like our bank, or at least I did. In both Ithaca and Blacksburg, we settled on small community banks. In both cases, I wanted to go with a credit union. But in Ithaca the credit union ran me off before I even opened an account. (It was only open to Cornell employees. Since I was on a fellowship, and not an assistantship, I got paid in a lump sum once a semester and therefore didn’t have a regular pay stub. This was not acceptable to them.) And in Blacksburg, it took me about two months to get fed up with the credit union, which had given up on its core constituency to pursue customers in Roanoke.

Anyway, it all started when I did a proposal review for a foreign equivalent of the National Science Foundation. As is typical, the arrangement was that they would pay me a modest expert’s fee. (Which isn’t really equivalent to the value of the time that I put into the review, but I appreciate the thought.) Anyway, in order to fill out the paperwork to receive the fee, I had to get wire transfer information for my bank. In the process, I learned that my bank couldn’t accept international wire transfers directly. Instead, the money would be wired to another bank for further credit to my bank for further credit to me. It sounded a bit hairy, but I dutifully transcribed the instructions and sent them on.

Soon thereafter, I presented a short course at a foreign university. Their standard arrangement was to pay fairly well for the presentation of such courses, including an extra fee for copyright transfer, since they recorded the course on video. They were also reimbursing my expenses. Not surprisingly, since everyone in Europe uses wire transfers routinely, it seems, they asked for the same bank information, which I provided.

The NSF-equivalent organization issued the payment in mid February. I didn’t worry about it too much when I didn’t see it. It wasn’t much money, and I figured it would show up eventually. But after the university where I did the short course sent significant funds a couple of weeks ago and they also didn’t arrive, I became worried.

So, today, I went in to my local bank. I was hoping to see the branch manager because we know her — that’s a benefit of banking with a local bank — but she was with some other customers. So, I talked to one of the account representatives, instead.

I gave him the details on the transfers. He called the department at bank headquarters that handles wire transfers. They conferred. They concluded that they hadn’t received the transfers (which I basically already knew). I asked him if they could track them down, perhaps by contacting the third party bank that accepts their international transfers. He said no. Only the originating bank could trace the transfer, he said. He did confirm that the instructions that I had given the organizations were correct.

Now, it makes some sense to me that transfers have to be traced from the source. But it makes no sense to me that they wouldn’t call the third party bank and do a bit of poking around. I knew the exact date and amount of the first transfer, and I could get pretty close on the others. And if they really valued my business in the way that they should — we moved part of our mortgage to this bank and have paid them thousands of dollars in interest (a fact which he could surely see on his computer monitor) — then they should have offered to help me with tracing the transfers from the sources, too.

Oh, and then he mentioned that they could only receive wire transfers denominated in US Dollars, a fact that was never mentioned to me when I requested the wire transfer instructions originally. “You don’t do currency conversion?,” I asked. “Well, we can convert cash, but there is a fee. And it takes two weeks,” he replied. Now, I don’t expect my local bank to keep Egyptian Pounds behind the counter. But I’m talking about Euros here. It takes two weeks to get Euros? I could drive to AAA in Roanoke and have them in an hour. Sheesh.

My next steps are contacting the organizations who sent the wire transfers to trace the original transfers, opening an account at a bank that can receive international wire transfers directly and in currencies other than US Dollars, and asking that the transfers be resent to the new account, assuming that they can verify that the original transfers were returned. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to have to go see the branch manager and use my angry voice. And it’s all a big pain.

Update 1: Opened an account at Wachovia this morning.  I’m not sure how much I’ll use it.  At first, I’ll just use it to receive wire transfers.  But I was impressed, and I’m thinking about using it for other things, too.

Update 2: I just heard from the NSF-equivalent org, and they tracked down the bounced wire.  They are going to send me a check (or a cheque, as they say) within the next week.  Now if we can find the other money…

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Exercise…

23 Mar 2008, 22:13

I haven’t written much lately, as you might have noticed. I have been, and continue to be, extremely busy at home and at work, and I just haven’t had much to say. A few minutes ago, I did put up something about abortion that has been mostly finished for some time. There are actually a few more drafts of longish articles in the queue, but unlike that one, they weren’t as close to finished when I abandoned them.

If you’ve been following my Twitter feed, even in the sidebar, then you probably realize that I’m pretty close to reaching my weight loss goal (which is 170.0 lbs.). This morning, I weighed in at 172.0, although I was down to 171.2 a couple of days ago. Tomorrow may be bad, as I ate well for Easter. I may say more about the process and the experience once I reach my goal, but for the moment I’ll just say that on the whole, it has gone much faster than I expected when I started in December. Nonetheless, things have slowed down and become more difficult in the last couple of weeks. So, even though I’m starting exercise so slowly that I expect the impact on weight loss to be negligible, I’ve decided it is time to start the exercise plan.

I like to run. In a perfect world, I would start running again, as I think that’s my exercise of choice. I would eventually like to run a marathon. (I was training for a marathon a few years ago, and got within a few weeks of it, but for a variety of reasons decided to pull out.) But, since Charlie came into our life, running has been difficult. Becky stays home with Charlie during the day, and I tend to have primary Charlie herding duties when I’m home. Running means more time away from home, which leaves me with less Charlie time and increases the length of Becky’s stretches as sole caregiver, neither of which is palatable. And with a second child coming soon, I know that the apple cart is about to be overturned again, so I don’t want to start anything now without a plan to sustain it.

A few years ago, a friend of ours turned me on to The Hacker’s Diet. Although I went with a considerably simpler weight loss plan, The Hacker’s Diet is an intriguing engineering approach to weight loss. When I first read it, I remember thinking that the exercise plan, too, was interesting. But at the time, I didn’t see any reason that I couldn’t sustain a more “traditional” approach to exercise. When I recently ran across the Exercise chapter of The Hacker’s Diet again, though, I realized that it was perfect for my current situation.

The Hacker’s Diet exercise plan requires 15 minutes per day, every day. It is based on five simple exercises which require no equipment with a goal of achieving and maintaining a reasonable level of fitness for a lifetime. I can do the exercises in my home office in the morning before I take my shower or in the evening after Charlie goes to bed. I can also do them in any hotel room in the world. The exercises mostly focus on strength building, but there is a cardiovascular element. Supposedly, the general outlines of the program were developed from an exercise program used by the Royal Canadian Air Force.

The program is organized around a “fitness ladder” with 48 rungs. Each rung prescribes a number of repetitions of each exercise. Over time, you climb the rungs until you reach a level of fitness with which you are satisfied. I actually think that I’m reasonably fit for a guy who has let his exercise program wane for the last couple of years — when I have tried recently, I have still been able to run 3 miles without great difficulty. So, I probably could have started at a higher rung. But, I decided to follow the advice in the plan and start at rung 1, initially climbing 1 rung per week.

Anyway, I plan to mark my completion of the day’s prescribed exercise in Twitter, like I do with weight. It seems like is a boring way to use Twitter, but I do it more for my own benefit than for anyone else (although the idea of being accountable to others is nice). And since Twitter otherwise has almost no positive benefits that I can see — I’ve thought about dropping it from my life altogether — we’ll stick with this for now.

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