Tell me what I already believe… and make it funny

Scott Adams captures the zeitgeist:

All non-fiction best-selling opinion books are nothing more than your own opinions fed back to you with seasoning. Ann Coulter sells to conservatives who agree with her. Al Franken sells to liberals who agree with him. And they do it brilliantly, in my opinion.

And what happens if you violate the pattern?

I often have no opinion at all about how we should deal with a world issue because I rarely feel I have enough information to make a good call. What I do have is strong opinions on how we should be THINKING about a problem. I’m all about the process[…] Thinking about the best way to approach a problem is so rare and unexpected that it causes cognitive dissonance in many readers. They want me to have an opinion so they can agree with it or disagree. So they solve the dissonance by assigning me to an opinion they have heard before – “cheese-eating surrender monkey” for example. And then they attack the opinion they hallucinated me to have.

And of course the reason that I enjoyed this piece is because I agree with it…. Scott just served up one of my opinions, with seasoning. Which demonstrates that even his “process” bias represents an opinion that people can endorse or reject. (It’s turtles all the way down.)

The clash of cultures

In a piece entitled The Inanity of Dinesh D’Souza, Ed Brayton takes on the erstwhile right-wing wunderkind. Apparently D’Souza is now arguing that the real source of anti-western jihadism is not oil, or Saudi politics, or Iraq, or Palestinians: it’s all about the provocative nature of the Western liberal life-style. Brayton skewers this argument up beautifully: “they hate us for our freedom, so let’s get rid of our freedom.”
(I guess the Great War On Terrorism is just another skirmish in the The Great American Culture War. Are the neocons hoping to win Pat Buchanan back to their side? Sheesh!)

Progress report (fairly mundane stuff)

I’m coming up on the end of my fourth week at Amazon, and I’ve been in Seattle 30 days. So… how are things going?
On the work front, I’m enjoying myself immensely. The Amazon environment is dynamic and fast moving, which inevitably means confusing and surprising. One very useful thing is that everybody’s badge photo is displayed in their phone book entry.* (At Sun, this was a rarely-exercised option.) Things like coping with introduction overload, or figuring out who a particular email was from, or dealing with the frequent “Topic XYZ? Oh, you really need to talk to PQR!” all become much easier.
I got myself a Blackberry (8700c) on Tuesday, and planned to integrate it into the Amazon infrastructure yesterday. So far, no luck. I wonder if the fact that I chose to keep my old Massachusetts (617) phone number is complicating things. We’ll see. [UPDATE: New day, new server, new password: everything’s working OK now.] The device itself is neat, but the UI lacks the relentless focus on one-handed productivity that you see with PalmOS. If you’re going to give me a QWERTY keyboard, I want a dedicated key for “.”. “Alt+M” sucks, and the “Space+Space” hack only works for text.
I’m getting my office space sorted in a way that I never did at Sun. One touch: installing a small refrigerator. This allows me to enjoy (and offer to visitors) some of the dizzying range of American “energy drinks” and Japanese sodas and fruit drinks that are on sale in the Uwajimaya store. I tend to buy a random collection, without worrying about what I’m letting myself in for. It’s (usually) fun.** And when predictability is important, there’s a shelf full of iced tea.
The apartment progresses. I didn’t get much done over the long weekend, but last night I resumed my love affair with IKEA boxes and power tools. I’ve encountered three problems so far.

  • First, there was the box spring with a slash in the side from a fork-lift. IKEA replaced this.
  • Then it turns out that to attach the bedside tables to the bed frame*** I had to drill four pilot holes into the underside of the frame, and there isn’t room to fit my electric drill between the frame and the floor. It would have been easy to drill the holes before assembling the frame, but at this stage it’s quite hard. I’ve ordered myself a hand drill from Amazon.com (neither Lowes nor Home Depot were able to help), and this should do the trick.
  • Then last night I decided to assemble the coffee table. It’s a complicated and heavy piece, with two drawers. I finished the main structure and started on the drawers, only to find that the back wall of each drawer was the wrong part. It was dimensionally correct, but it wasn’t pre-drilled in the right places and had a non-functional slot cut at one end. I think I can salvage things with a handful of 1-1/2 inch wood screws, but it’s a bit frustrating.

So back to the time line. I’ve been here just a few weeks, and I’m quite pleased with how things are going. Bouncing back and forth between the temporary apartment and the one I’m furnishing is complicated****, but I’m going to resist the temptation to rush the completion and move-in. I’ll take another week or two to get things right.
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* You can choose to substitute a different picture, but the original is just a click away.
** Right now I’m enjoying a Calpico Peach.
*** Necessary – they’re not free-standing.
**** Further complicated by the fact that half the time my RFID card won’t work for the Uwajimaya car park. They keep promising to fix it, copy down the numbers, type stuff into the computer… all to no avail.

Seattle Locks Cruise

We took the Seattle Locks Cruise this morning, starting from the southern end of Lake Union and finishing up at Seattle’s Pier 56. There are a bunch of photographs here in my gallery. Yes, I did snap the “Sleepless In Seattle” floating house, but I think the rest of the pictures more than make up for this momentary lapse.
Seattle cranes
All in all, a very pleasant way to spend 2 1/2 hours on a summer Sunday morning.

Time to switch?

For the last year and a half I’ve relied on my Treo 650 for mobile phone service, web browsing, corporate and personal email, ad hoc photography, and the occasional game. It’s served me well in the US, India, and Europe; I’ve even used it to blog.
But it looks as if I’m going to be switching. Amazon.com‘s collaboration infrastructure is based on MS Exchange, and VPN access is rigidly controlled. An IMAP client (even with SSL) doesn’t cut it. But they do support Blackberry‘s enterprise services, and so I think I’ll be getting a Blackberry – specifically, a Blackberry 8700c. It looks like a nice device: it’s a bit lighter and slimmer than the Treo, with a better keyboard. I have no idea how the web browser and email client compare with those on the Treo, nor how well they’re integrated with the phone client. Can I easily dial a phone number in a web page or email message? Is it possible to access both my corporate email and my personal IMAP server? I’ll find out.
The two obvious gaps are (1) fewer applications, and (2) no camera. The first probably doesn’t matter (quality is more important that quantity), but the second…? I seem to remember talk of BlueTooth-enabled digital cameras, but a quick web search suggests that only two came to market, and both have disappeared. Oh, well. So much for convergence.

Seattle Japanese Garden

Today I discovered one of the most beautiful places in Seattle: the Japanese Garden in the Arboretum. It’s “a 3 1/2 acre formal garden designed and constructed under the supervision of world-renowned Japanese garden designer Juki Iida in 1960.” Only one thing went wrong: I left my camera back at my office, so no pictures. But I’ll return soon. In fact I was toying with the idea of visiting it once a month, to record the seasonal changes. (Yes, I know: that sounds far too organized for me. We’ll see.)

How to profit from spam

This just in from Boing Boing

David sez, “A fellow on the CISSP mailing list set up a simulation of a portfolio whose strategy was simply, sell short every stock he got a spam about. He ‘made’ $8K in two weeks.”

Now, why didn’t I think of that? (Hint: What’s the opposite of Schadenfreude?) (Oops: Wikipedia provides the answer: mudita.)

Apartment progress

Today was another IKEA day. I love the fact that as you approach the freeway exit, there’s a sign listing IKEA as a “Tourist Attraction”. Well, yes.
The most urgent reason for my visit was to arrange for a replacement box spring. [This used to be called a “foundation” in England – is it still?] I showed a photograph of the 4-inch slit in the side to a woman in Customer Service, and she simply shook her head, muttered something about “fork lift truck”, and scheduled a delivery truck to drop off a replacement and pick up the damaged one.
With that taken care of, I was free to roam the store. Side tables, lighting, bedding, that kind of thing. Yes, I had meatballs for lunch 😉 And then back to the apartment to unload. It’s a sad comment on the state of my problem-solving skills that after nearly two weeks I’ve only now worked out the best way to transfer all of my purchases to the apartment:

  1. Park under the supermarket.
  2. Grab a shopping cart.
  3. Load cart with boxes from IKEA, Office Depot, Best Buy, etc.
  4. Take it through the residents-only door to the elevator that goes up to the apartments.
  5. Transfer load to my apartment.
  6. Return cart to the car park under the supermarket.

I imagine that I’m not supposed to do that (all of the shopping carts appear to have RFID tags, and large placards warning of the consequences of misuse), but it works just fine.
The bed and bedside tables are assembled, as are the office desk and chair. I won’t have any assembly time on Monday, but on Tuesday I’ll have to spend several hours at the apartment. IKEA is due to deliver a new box spring, and Millennium Cable should coming by to fix a provisioning issue. I’m tied up all Labor Day weekend (September 2-4), but if all goes well I should be able to move in by September 10 or 17