Of TB and Mankind

So there’s some guy who is diagnosed with a hyper-resistant form of tuberculosis but gets on a plane anyway to get married in Greece.  The CDC tracks him down in Italy and tells him under no circumstances should he fly back home.  He does it anyway.  Now he’s in quarantine back in Atlanta.

For trying to emulate a modern-day Mary Mallon, the guys’ an asshole and he’s put people’s lives at risk because of his assholiness.  But I sense that we’re about to embark on a much deeper problem than that caused by a single idiot, that will change our lives:  Legislation to restrict unhealthy travelers in order to “protect” us from guys like him.

I’m worried about the fear-mongering aspect of this event and where it will lead.  NBC Dataline will write an exposé about it, followed by Fox News and Time Magazine.  Pretty soon Congress will start proposing restrictions on dangerously unhealthy people.  And then the first time a potential flu pandemic or some other medical scare hits the airwaves additional restrictions will be applied to what will be slippery slope legislation.

The Patriot Act was sold on protecting us from terrorists.  It has been commandeered into a vehicle by which we can be searched without warrant and have our phones secretly tapped.  In Buffalo, we’re about to have our travel to the closest economically prosperous region to the area – Ontario – burdened by another layer of not so cheap paperwork.  All this to protect us.

I can envision the same thing happening with the U.S. version of the Contagious Disease Act as well.

We are on the cusp of becoming our own pariah.

Tour de Cure

This coming Saturday, June 2^nd, is the Western New York Tour de Cure, a bike ride for the American Diabetes Association.  Last year it was 45 and raining the entire trip (we did the 65-miler).  I was cold and miserable and still felt great, like I could’ve done 100 miles.

It’s not too late to sign up.  There are actually 5 different routes – 6, 16, 30, 65 and 100 miles – inexperienced cyclists tend to do the shorter runs, but even the 65-miler is so flat than anyone who can do 30 up and down hills can do the 65-miler.  This year our group decided to do the 30-miler, and since the weather report calls for questionable conditions I think this was a good idea.  We’ll finish in two hours, eat some grilled food, hang out for a little while and head home knowing that we benefited a good cause.

The Amazing Digital Universe

I probably just violated the warranty, but hacking my cell phone was one of the more fun things I’ve done in a while.

The Motorola V325i can be hacked with a number of programs (check the Internet); all I really wanted to do was to transfer camera photos to my PC without emailing them from my phone.  The software I found does quite a bit more than this, including giving me complete access to all registers.  I don’t know what they all mean yet – most of them do not have descriptors but yet various bits are set – they must do something! – so now I have to traipse around the web to find out more.  Careful!  Setting or clearing the wrong bit can and will render the phone unusable.  This is shaky ground.

The digital universe is filled with a cacophony of digital stuff.  It never ceases to amaze.

The Cost of College

Both of my boys will be going to the same university next fall.  I was unable to get a “two-for-one” deal, so this afternoon was spent reading lots of directions and filling out yet more financial aid forms, signed copies of tax returns and other paperwork needed to complete the requirements for financial aid.  To get my boys through school requires a combination of scholarship, savings, student loans, parent loans and work study.  In January I will repeat the process with the FAFSA forms (one for each child) and in May do it all over again for the loans and work study applications.

I can’t imagine what parents with three or more college-bound kids must go through; two is a jolt.  We set aside money for college the day each of the boys was born, and that has saved us today.  Even though we’ll eventually have to borrow in order to finish paying for their education, it will be *reasonable* compared to the debt that some parents and their children will incur to get through four years of university.

The cost of a private college education has octupled since I went to school, while salaries have not quite tripled.  For a newborn today the cost of a public four-year education, in 2005 dollars, is estimated to be $92,000.  This article didn’t even bother to estimate the cost of a private education but the general rule of thumb would be to increase the costs by a factor of three, to roughly $270,000.  By that time there will be no such thing as a poor college students, as poor students will no longer be going to college.

The college inflation rate must come down soon, or institutions will price themselves out of existence.

Better start saving today for your yet unborn children.

House Cleaning

BEFORE

AFTER

I have two gutter-cleaning products that I recommend: Streak Getter, which I found somewhere on the Internet, and Krud Kutter which I purchased at Lowe’s. Both work about equally well. All it takes is a sprayer, a rag and some elbow grease followed by a water rinse. My streaked, gray gutters are nearly as white as when they were put on the house, 10 years ago. It’s clear that over time, tar and debris from the roof shingles greatly discolor the gutters, and the years do a number on the siding as well.

After the gutters were done, out came the vinyl siding cleaner, Olympic House Wash. This did not work very well when following the directions (spray on, wash off with a hose) but by using a rag and hand-washing the siding after spraying it on it all ended up much cleaner. What a difference!

I know that many homeowners will hire crews to do this kind of work, and many other homeowners won’t even bother to ever clean the exterior of their home; but to some of us it’s a labor of love. I needed a long weekend to get psyched to do the work, but the result is a noticeably brighter exterior.

Now I need to find a good cleaner for the brickwork on the front of the house, and maybe those pesky building inspectors will stay away for a while.

Cast Away

My family is watching Cast Away.  I cannot join them.  For me it’s not a movie about perseverance and overcoming the odds.  For me its about being an island in a sea of humanity.

Cast Away hits me hard.  For many years I felt like I was on a deserted island.  That the movie ends in yet another form of isolation is what messes me up.

I’ve told my wife many times that “I’m going first”.  This movie is a harbinger of how I’ll feel if I’m wrong about that.

In Memoriam

I hope everyone who reads this pauses for a moment to remember our soldiers who have died not just in Iraq but in all past battles.  They are rarely part of the battlefield decision-making process, yet they followed orders anyway and paid with their lives so we could continue to live ours.

This Memorial Day will see roughly 1,000 more dead soldiers than last Memorial Day.  Right now I can’t help but think that these brave men and women died in vain.  I hope and pray that years from now, historians will prove me wrong and will prove President Bush right, so that the sacrifices made by our military will have been worth the effort.

Be Careful What You Wish For

So the current Administration holds up Turkey as the quintessential democratic government that should be a model for Middle East governments.

Funny, they never talk about the other democratically-elected government in the Middle East in that way.  You know, the Hamas-led, democratically-elected government of Palestine.  I guess it’s just not convenient.

I think the Bush Administration’s opinion of Democracy is not so democratic as it is to be “just like us”. 

Graduation Night

My youngest is now a high school graduate, looking forward to his first semester in college come September. The St. Francis graduation ceremony at the OLV Basilica was great. Kudos to the St. Francis high school chorus and to all the speakers who kept their speeches short. It was over in an hour and a half.

Good luck to my son and all the new graduates of St. Francis High School.

 

Godwin’s Law to the Nth

Wal-Mart has had the propensity to use blitzkrieg tactics as it blasts its way into new territories, sort of like Hitler and Nazi Germany only with a lot less direct killing.  After having captured virtually all of the U.S. (it has over 4,000 stores here employing 1.4 million) it’s now attacking China.  Store number 1 opened there in 1996, and today Wal-Mart has at least 184 stores in China.

Does Wal-Mart sell any U.S.-manufactured goods in China?  Do Chinese citizens have the right to protest big-box construction plans the way some Buffalonians go after Bass Pro?  (Answer: a surprising yes!  See reference to Shanghai’s concerns about a 100,000 square foot supercenter.)  Do the Chinese worry about suburban sprawl? Or pollution?

China has been paying a lot of homage to manufacturing and retail growth, and has opened its arms to retail giants like Wal-Mart and Carrefour.  The concurrent energy production is mainly through coal, and any real concern for the environment has been ignored by the Chinese manufacturing and retail sectors alike.  The country is building a new power plant every week and polluting its air and water at an alarming rate – in order to grow at a really wicked economic pace.  Are they thinking about their children or just their own standard of living?  This article indicates that if they don’t change their thinking on pollution controls, they won’t have any children to worry about.

The Three Percent Solution

Joel Giambra suggests dedicating a fixed percentage of the county property taxes to the area arts.

The catch is that some county-approved committee will have to be “accountable” for doling out the money.

How long before THAT becomes political?

Nice Day

Nice Day.

I was driving over the south Grand Island bridge late this afternoon.  It was a beautiful day, wasn’t it?  Only it wasn’t very beautiful as I got to the Tonawandas.  There was this very gray haze – smog – hanging over the 190 almost all the way to the Scajaquada.  It smelled like petroleum so I figured it must have been either the Noco storage tanks or Dunlop.  The smoke and smell just hung there.

I vaguely recall, as a little boy, seeing and smelling the same haze over most of South Buffalo and Lackawanna.  As much as this area has suffered from the loss of heavy industry, I do not miss the pollution.

It was the first day in many years that I recalled a day as polluted as today.

Wegman’s Sushi

Needs work. 

Stick with the local restaurants.

Supporting Entrepreneurialism in Western New York

My friend Tom is trying to start his own business.  He and his partner are discussing the business opportunity with potential angel investors.  He’s been doing this on his own, on evenings and weekends and lunch hours.

Yesterday he let me know that he’s being let go from his job in the school district where he works.  They argued that his off-hours activities were affecting his on-hours performance.  I’ll bet that if his wife just had a baby they wouldn’t be using that argument.  More likely his boss resented his trying to start a new career.

Talk about smothering the entrepreneurial spirit.  Too many employers around here treat the entrepreneurial employee as a threat or a slap in the face of corporate allegiance.  School districts in particular should be championing this cause rather than trying to stifle it.  Imagine getting a bunch of high school teenagers into the auditorium and rallying them:  “This is what we can do in Buffalo with a little energy and motivation!”.  Maybe if we showed them by example at an early age, more young people would take up the banner and take that risk to help better this area, rather than relying on others to do it.

Shame on the school district.  They are letting go of an intelligent, self-motivated, high-energy employee.  When they post the job listing for his replacement it will read “Looking for an intelligent, self-motivated, high-energy employee”.  They should also add “who is not interested in ever starting his own company”.

Short Lesson on the Shiites and the Sunnis

Sunnis	Shiites
Largest denomination by far, around 85%	Only around 10-15% of all Muslims
Found throughout the world	Found mainly in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon
Believe that Mohammed’s first four successors (caliphs) are the rightful leaders of all Muslims	Believe that the fourth caliph is the only rightful leader of all Muslims
Abu Bakr was chosen as caliph in 632 after Mohammed’s death	Ali ibn Abi Talib was chosen as caliph in 632 after Mohammed’s death
The Mahdi (think: supreme leader) has yet to arrive	The Mahdi has already arrived
Al Qaeda is predominantly Sunni	Hezbollah is predominately Shiite
Follow elected leaders (scholars and jurists)	Follow imams (formal clergy) rather than elected leaders
Do not venerate saints	Venerate deceased imams as saints
Similar in hierarchical structure to Protestantism	Similar in hierarchical structure to Catholicism
Tend to be more fundamental than Shiites	Tend to be less fundamental than Sunnis
Have had disdain to the point of killing Shiites since the Battle of Karbala in 680	Have had disdain to the point of killing Sunnis since the Battle of Karbala in 680
A minority in Iraq, but they controlled Iraq under Saddam Hussein	The majority in Iraq (about 60% of the population), they are tasting political domination for the first time

There are many other differences between these two groups of Muslims, much as there are differences between Protestants and Catholics. As the Christian groups recognize each other as Christians, Sunni and Shia recognize each other as Muslim. Their religious differences sprouted mainly from the political problems that occurred with their respective leadership shortly after Mohammed’s death. The Battle of Karbala in 680 became a rallying point for both groups, and the subsequent embellishment of the battle over time has only exacerbated the split between them.

Today, their differences appear to have reached a breaking point in Iraq, where territorial segregation is the only thing keeping them alive, and poorly at that.

And so, the U.S. finds itself not only in the middle of a civil war, but a religious civil war. This will not have a happy ending for anyone. Like the Battle of Karbala 1300 years ago, the U.S. will be remembered for the role it played in helping bring about all the bloodshed over the past four years. The real reasons, right or wrong, will be lost to embellishment.

Google Class

I took a Google class today. Jeff McCaskey, CEO of Aurora Consulting Group, did a presentation on Google’s capabilities at the Jacobs Management Center on Delaware Avenue.

Most people know that Google is much more than a search engine. The depth of its databases, and the sheer speed at which it is able to add to these databases, is unfathomable. The company’s ability to mine this data in various ways has allowed it to produce dozens and dozens of programs that give this capability to anyone with an internet connection. For free.

Example: Type in a UPC code in the search box. Just the 12-digit number, nothing more. Google will figure out that it’s a UPC code and provide all the product information associated with the code. The same is true if you type in just a vehicle’s VIN number. Or a FedEx tracking number. Google can determine the context based on just the codes, do a lookup in the appropriate database, extract the pertinent information, and display it in about as much time as it takes to blink.

One of my favorites was the view:timeline command, which will present information on any subject as a timeline. For example, type “October surprise storm view:timeline” and you’ll get references all the way back to 1900, which is pretty cool considering that the “October Surprise Storm” that I was referring to occurred in 2006 (the articles referring to this storm are categorized in time order starting around October 13, 2006, as would be expected).

Need a quote from Shakespeare? Books.Google.Com/Googlebooks/Shakespeare contains the complete works. Books.Google.Com allows you to search the full text of all books that Google has gotten permission to digitize, and then some.

Finally: Google has created Google 411, a voice-recognition system that allows you to call Google to get the number for any business in your local calling area. It will also dial the number for you. It doesn’t cost a penny, and it’s hands-free.

I find it likely that in my lifetime, virtually every word that’s ever been written down that can be digitized, will be digitized and absorbed into Google’s database. This is a mind-boggling amount of data. I can’t imagine what to do with this much data but I know there are brilliant minds coming up with myriad ideas.

Jeff does the Google lecture to any group willing to make a donation to his non-profit benefit that provides copies of Buffalo Business First to high school students.

Highly recommended.

Buffalo’s National Reputation

Being from Buffalo, I was intrigued by a radio broadcast of a woman venting about how the media has distorted what shape her city is in.

“From calls that we get at the Convention and Visitors Bureau, people still think that the city is devastated because the media keeps showing archival footage of the city right after the storm.  It’s sexier…”

“There’s a lot of mis-perception out there about the condition that the city is in…”

Buffalo after the October Surprise, you might think.  Actually, it’s a comment about New Orleans after Katrina, taken from an interview done by NPR’s John Burnett.  But the problems with fair national media coverage are the same there as they are here.  Viewers want to see disasters, and the media is more than willing to stick with its “If it bleeds, it leads” emphasis.  The longer that disaster footage can be strung out, the better.  In New Orleans’ case as in Buffalo’s, any renewal taking place will get short shrift because to the media, it’s just not sexy.  Watching the knife fight is much more entertaining than watching the scars heal.

Buffalo is an urban environment blossoming with change.  In thirty years we have transformed from a nearly exclusive blue-collar, heavy industry-dependent city to one with diverse employment, one that has proven itself to be quite resilient and resistant to the economic cycles.  I’m not saying that we have enough jobs to go around – we don’t – but all the variety bodes well for the future.

We’ve taken some very hard knocks and had to hit bottom to get here, but I’m pretty sure that the worst is behind us.

Now if only we can get the media to report on this as often as they report on our snow.

 

The Estrogenation of the Great Lakes

As if invasive species of all types weren’t bad enough, the Great Lakes are beginning to suffer through a threat of a different type.

Birth control pills.  Estrogen, specifically.  The average concentrations are now detectable, and even though they are typically measured in parts per trillion, the effect on fish is being seen near Detroit and other places.  The synthetic estrogen in birth control pills is far more potent than naturally occurring estrogen, and with 100 million women worldwide taking the pill, our waterways are slowly being feminized.  The Great Lakes basin is no exception.  The effects of estrogen on male fish take time and if the pollution were to stop today, several generations of fish will come and go before the concentrations drop detectably.  We eat that fish.

Estrogens and estrogen-mimics (like Atrazine and other pesticides) are a serious concern since so many people – around 5 million – eat fish caught from the lakes.  The chemicals accumulate in the fatty parts of the fish, and we also accumulate them.  I wonder if this is one reason guys get man-boobs.

The EPA pretty much ignores the effects of birth control pills in our waterways but does express concern for pesticides and other estrogen-mimics.  I have no doubt that the EPA will do little to change this, until at least the next Administration takes over. 

Very little to date has been written about the feminization of our water.  Guess there are better fear-mongering topics elsewhere.

With Panic Comes Clarity

That’s my motto of late. I couldn’t find a reference to anyone famous who might have uttered this quote, so I claim first dibs on it.

My life has turned into one big procrastination. I cannot get fired up to work on major projects in a timely manner, and instead have waited until just before the deadline to dig into and finish them. The results have been adequate but getting up at 4 AM to go to work in order to complete a report that’s due at 9 AM is no way to live one’s life.

Even the choir pieces that I sang this past Saturday were sight-read that morning, and in my panic (and adrenalin rush) I was able to correctly sing everything but a surprise key change from B-flat to G. For me, that’s really clear thinking.

During my fits of panic things have gotten done, and as my plate clears of all the backlog, I can only hope a bit of normalcy returns to my career. Until then I will continue to find brief moments of clarity among hours of dawdling.

“With Panic Comes Clarity”, ™ 2007, Buffalo Blood Donor

Doing the Slow Burn at a Slow Mass

Sunday Mass at my church is normally unhurried, but today it was inordinately slow.  Today’s Mass took so long it nearly butted into the Mass scheduled to begin an hour and a half later.  Even my wife, who is by and large very patient about church-related activities, was frustrated.  It was inexcusably slow.  Everything about the service – including the music – was performed at a dirge-like pace. 

The readings, apparently, did not have, enough punctuation, to suit the lector, so he added, a few, punctuation marks, of his own.  Not.  Good.  Oratory.

There are parts of the Catholic Mass that demand – and should have – solemnity and time to contemplate.  But today had far too little contemplative delay and far too much delay related to preparation, delay getting to the music, delay in the readings, delay in just standing around.

This was delay to the point of frustration, and so I didn’t get much at all out of the service.  I love my church but this was one of those less-then-enjoyable moments that will be better off forgotten.

Here’s hoping for a turnaround next weekend.