Anyway, since Patrick White saw fit to publish his name, face, and contact information alongside a racist cartoon in a newspaper, I dropped him a line suggesting that something might be amiss, and he wrote back saying that no, he was proud to stand by his cartoon, so I shared my own feelings with him:
It is good to cheer on your sports team, but I suspect that if the sports team mascot when you were growing up had been a buck-toothed, squint-eyed Chinaman in a big peasant hat, that you might think twice about printing a Chinaman cartoon in the newspaper. If you were to have such respect for Chinese people and culture, perhaps Indians merit the same sort of respect.
When I was younger my school had an Indian Chief for a mascot. The dozens of our Native American students found it upsetting and it took a few decades of protesting before it was finally removed. While one side found it upsetting that their culture was caricatured to cheer on a sports team, fans of The Chief took offense that Liberal Elites wanted to destroy their culture by imposing Political Correctness on their Hallowed Tradition. So, you had folks insisting that they had to insult another culture in order to properly honor their own culture.
Anyway, some years after I graduated, The Chief got to retire. Alumni kept contributing money and people kept cheering on their team as they had before. Nothing positive was lost, and our school has since regained some respect it had lost during its years of overt racism.
You can make fun of me and rationalize printing racially offensive cartoons in the newspaper all you like, but somewhere deep down, you know it is not right, and you know that you are offending people and scaring away potential clients. Most people are too polite to raise a fuss. But this topic means something to me, so I thought I’d drop you a line and encourage you to think things through.
I don’t need to change Pat White’s mind, and I surely don’t need him to manage my wealth. On the whole, the world seems to be taking a step or two forward for each step back. But it sure is weird to see a racist cartoon published in a newspaper is 2012, 40 years after Stanford managed to figure out that American Indians deserve a little more respect.
I was poking around my CloudFlare Control Panel, and pulled up stats for the past month, from Oct 11 to Nov 11. It says it had blocked a bunch of attacks on my site, and consequently saved me over 5GB in bandwidth.
I said to myself, "I pay for bandwidth! Maybe this free service is saving me money?!"
“Really,” I said, “I pay for bandwidth, so if CloudFlare is saving me bandwidth, it is saving me money!”
But 5GB seemed kind of high. So, I checked my invoices from RackSpace. Here is the outbound bandwidth I have been charged for this year:
RackSpace charges me on the 11th of the month, and, conveniently enough, I started using CloudFlare around October 11th. The highlighted line above is my first month on CloudFlare. It is my lowest number of the year, and it is conceivable that I could have totaled 9.5 GB in October since I pushed more than that in February. I’m skeptical that they are saving me as much as they claim to be, but for a free service to speed up my web site and save me even a little money . . . that is a good deal in my book!
There will be friends you haven’t exchanged a word with in years, and one day you’ll meet and it is as if no time has passed, except that you are a little older, a little wiser, a little more foolish, and you have a bunch of gossip to catch up on.
There were friends before there were text messages, or email, or telephones, or letters, or even an alphabet or a language.
Which is just a long-winded way of suggesting you don’t need to worry too much who is texting you back. Years from now you’ll know who some of these best friends from today are, and it won’t have much to do with who texted you back this week.
(From some unsolicited advice posted to a nephew on Facebook.)
Or, if that video isn’t available, just Google “UC Davis Pepper Spray”
You want to know why your fellow Americans are in the streets? You want to know what their message is? The message is that the power and the money are in the hands of fewer people, and that these folks at the top feel entitled to grab more and more and stomp on anyone who gets in their way. Getting angry over numbers is a little difficult, so this cop decided to illustrate the core problem by simply spraying peaceably assembled young people in the head.
The Occupy movement is giving voice to our collective anger. It is an anger we too often stifle for the sake of getting along in our own lives, but most of us know that things have gotten out of whack and this country needs to correct the way it manages things. Oh, but you say you want a fully-formed political agenda? I don’t have one. Nobody does and nobody should. Its called Democracy. But here are a few things, off the top of my head, that we could do:
Raise taxes on the rich. The top marginal tax rate has been as high as 90% and our nation somehow survived.
Simplify the tax code. Capital gains is income. No more deductions. As an upper-income American seeking to buy an expensive house, I say get rid of the damn mortgage interest deduction. It only benefits a minority of upper-income Americans who buy expensive homes. Children need a good education more than I need to save a few bucks on an expensive house.
Stock transaction tax. There are people who make money simply by looking at the squiggly lines in the market and making intelligent bets where those squiggly lines will go. The purpose of the stock exchange is to efficiently allocate capital to companies who will use it to invest in our economy. Betting money on squiggly lines is a distraction.
If corporations are people, and a corporation commits a capital offense, the corporation is to be executed. All of its assets will be seized and sold and the money goes to the victims as restitution.
Equity compensation to executives doesn’t even begin to vest until about three years after its awarded. Don’t fudge the numbers to make the numbers work for the quarter, manage the business for long-term success!
I’m sure you have got an idea or two that may be worth talking about as well. Let us talk about these ideas. Let us promote these ideas. Heck, maybe we could even pass some of these ideas in to law. And let us give thanks to the radicals out there who by provoking Power provoke the anger within each of us.
UPDATE:studentactivism.net has an excellent summary of the events and their aftermath, and excrementalvirtue.com has good commentary regarding the above video, which if you can stand to watch through the first six minutes, you then see the angry student protesters calmly invite the cops to leave: “You can go! You can go!” Although one guy is waving tear gas canisters in the air, the cops huddle and back-step away. (Some of the cops have very clear body language that they do not want to be there.) “Whose quad? Our quad,” the students cheer upon the retreat of the police force. The eight-minute video is a beautiful illustration that starts with an abuse of false authority which rapidly gives way to a retreat by the abusers as the people proudly and non-violently secure their right of peaceful assembly.
These Davis students deserve an A for demonstrating how non-violent resistance can overcome oppression.
Note to modern web designers: since the displays are becoming wide and short, please do not squander vertical screen space. Here’s a good example of what not to do:
Viewed full size, you see a window that is 705 pixels tall. The OS claims 24 pixels, the web browser claims 90 pixels, and the web application claims 250 pixels. So, by the time you hit the actual content, 50% of the window has been wasted!
Squinting into a tiny pane to read news makes me angry. Google, you can do way way better than this!
Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.
Most good programmers should be able to write out on paper a program which does this in under a couple of minutes. Want to know something scary? The majority of comp sci graduates can’t. I’ve also seen self-proclaimed senior programmers take more than 10-15 minutes to write a solution.
Huh? I remember when a CTO explained that a SysAdmin should have at least mediocre programming skills. So, I have always aspired to have at least mediocre programming skills. (More important, SysAdmins are extremely well-served when they can write programs to make their work easier!)
I haven’t written C code in a long while, but I fired up vim and had this compiled and running in a few minutes:
#include
void main() {
int i, fb;
for( i = 1; i < = 100; i++ ) {
fb = 0;
if( i % 3 == 0 ) { printf("Fizz"); fb++; }
if( i % 5 == 0 ) { printf("Buzz"); fb++; }
if( fb == 0 ) { printf("%d", i); }
printf("\n");
}
}
I recall at least one interview with Google and probably other companies where I have done something like this on a white board, with the interviewer challenging me with compiler-like errors to help me repair syntax errors.
Patrick's point is that when you work with excellent people, you see your skills in that context, and will tend to be unduly modest. But when you step back a bit and look at your skills in the context of the industry as a whole, you may well be among the best on the market.
Here in the Silicon Valley, there are plenty of tech jobs, but there is also plenty of competition, which means that the folks you come to associate with will tend to be toward the top of their field.
Patrick's further point would be that you need to take your skills, and develop the capacity to convey the value that those skills can bring to an organization.
Leonard Kleinrock tells the story of the Internet’s birth. First word was LO:
And then, he shows us the world’s first router, which they were going to throw out:
My first experience of the Internet was a 1200 baud dialup connection to a USENET host that connected upstream twice a day at 2400 baud. That would have been around 1992 or 1993. (I was a broke highschool kid who couldn’t afford the $30/mo+ for a proper Internet connection.) My first email address was dannyman@netwrk21.chi.il.us, and I lost that address when my network uplink failed to pay his phone bill. Oh well!
When I started college in January, 1995, and had access to labs and labs and labs of computers directly connected via Ethernet, with Mosaic and Netscape installed, it was like I had found my Nerd Nirvana! It only got better when I took a C programming course on the Sun workstations in the basement of the DCL . . .
A friend posted a link about some iPad App that will show you recipes. My reaction was one of being condescendingly underwhelmed, and here’s the gist of what I’d really like to see in a “cookbook app”:
“Will it plan a week’s menus based on seasonal ingredients and give you a shopping list? Because that’s the fucking time-consuming part the computers need to fix.
Any clown can convert a menu book to an App . . . and any clown can find a recipe, drive to the store, spend 45 minutes trying to find some ingredient they don’t know about which is out of season, pay a bunch of money, get home, if they still have the energy maybe cook something sorta edible . . .
. . . but this being the 21st century, an electronic cookbook ought to be able to suggest recipes for you based on the ingredients you have ready access to. (In your pantry, in your growing region, partner with a supermarket…) I have found a website that does a mediocre job of this. This thing is begging to be invented.
Anyway, what I’m saying is–cookbooks in an app–that’s like lets transcribe 15th century technology into silicon. I say hell no, with all this information technology let’s leverage the information to really make it easy for the people to cook healthy, inexpensive meals at home. THAT is the revolution that will make us all better off.”
