The two kinds of big government

Comment by Steve Rundio in the Tomah Journal from Tomah, Wisconsin. Rundio is billed as the sports editor, but for a jock he writes really well about politics.:

There are two types of big government. There’s big-government liberalism, in which the government administers broad-based entitlements (Social Security, Medicaid) and provides services collectively that individuals can’t purchase on their own (police protection, roads, public parks, etc.). Has this vision suffered from excess and waste? Of course. But it has raised the standard of living for most Americans. The elderly can’t buy affordable health insurance on the private market, and most individuals can’t purchase their own personal police or fire protection. At the very least, big-government liberalism’s heart is in the right place.

There’s nothing good about big-government conservatism. It’s an iron triangle of politicians, lobbyists and industry wallowing in the spoils of government contracting and favoritism linked to campaign contributions. The recipient of big-government liberalism is likely to be a 90-year-old who can’t get out of bed, or a pregnant teen in need of pre-natal care. The recipient of big-government conservatism is a Halliburton executive or someone who lobbies on Halliburton’s behalf. The owners of Lenco Industries certainly did well when the $180,000 Lenco BearCat assault vehicle landed in La Crosse.

(Via Sully.)

Mile High Gliding

This morning I drove up to Boulder Airport, to MileHighGliding, and spent a glorious 45 minutes or more soaring over the front range and downtown Boulder. It was my first time in a glider, and it was simply wonderful.Release the tow I was in the front seat with Chris, the pilot, behind me. We spent the first ten minutes being towed up from 5300 ft. (the altitude of the airport) to about 11000 ft.; then the tow was released. [See pic – click for larger.] We got a good thermal over the Flatiron formation (steeply inclined strata that make up the very edge of the Front Range), and spent about 10 minutes there without losing any height. After orbiting the Flatirons and Eldorado Canyon, we drifted southeast towards StorageTek (skirting the controlled airspace around Jeffco), before heading back towards the University and the industrial area to the east side of Boulder. Chris executed a couple of stalls and wingovers, which felt marvellous; we pulled around 2G climbing out of the stall. After that we crossed the airfield, pulled a tight left base, and landed on the “grass” (mostly gravel) to the north of the runway. Outstanding!

I took a number of pictures, though the quality isn’t particularly good: as you can see, the canopy gets in the way. I’ve also got a nice video clip of the landing, which I’ll put up as soon as I’ve figured where to do it.

What happened between Montoya and Pizzonia?

I’ve been following this morning’s Belgian Grand Prix via the BBC’s lap-by-lap reports on their website. I think I understand everything that happened, except for the Montoya-Pizzonia incident. Could someone who was watching the TV feed explain what happened? The BBC reported it thus:

Lap 42: Out of the blue, from second place, Montoya and Pizzonia clip one another – Pizzonia loses one of his front wheels, and Montoya ends up in the pit wall.

I know there were reports of drivers changing tyres throughout the race: was this simply a coming-together in the rain and mist? Anyway, congratulations to Kimi, and (I guess) to Alonso, who has almost clinched the title.

That concert: a gloriously mixed bag

The first thing to say was that the Boulder Philharmonic were excellent throughout. The “mixed bag” refers to the choice of pieces, not the quality of the playing. And the guest conductor (and candidate director), Leslie Dunner did a very nice job. So let’s look at the music.

  • Sibelius Andante Festivo
    I have to confess that for me Sibelius is something of a “two-hit wonder”. Both Finlandia and the Karelia Suite are the kind of pieces where everything just works and the result is an instant classic. The Andante Festivo has many of Sibelius trademark elements, but although I enjoyed this performance I wasn’t seized by it.
  • Brahms Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D major, Op.77 (Corey Cerovsek, violin)
    WOW! Cerovsek was absolutely thrilling: infectious energy, dazzling technique, and complete command of the piece. I was trying to think of the last violinist who affected me in this way, but although I can see and hear her – a veteran of the English establishment, playing with the dash of someone half her age, we saw her with the BSO a few years ago – I can’t remember her name at this moment. [UPDATE: Ida Haendel, of course!] Anyway, this was the most glorious classical performance I’ve been to in quite a few years. If you get a chance to see Corey Cerovsek, grab it!
  • Nielsen Symphony No. 4, Op. 29, ‘The Inextinguishable’
    How frustrating! There’s a lovely symphony in here, trying to get out. (And as Rick pointed out, it almost succeeds in the last half of the third movement.) But back in 1916, when this appeared, Nielsen was clearly trying to make a political point, with the various themes competing with one another, interrupting, warping the tempo, and successfully (if heavy-handedly) conveying a world of conflict. Eighty-nine years ago it might have been shocking, but since then we’ve had everything from Shostakovich and Stockhausen to the Sex Pistols. Since the piece can no longer shock, it remains as a collection of unfinished gems without a setting (in Rick’s nice image). Oh, well.

Boulder: the hinterland

Continuing my “Boulder weekend”, I spend this morning exploring the hinterland. (Feel free to follow along on the map.) Starting from Louisville, I drove up Route 36 into Boulder, then west along Canyon towards Nederland. After climbing for 15 miles (from about 5500 ft. to 8500 ft.) the road emerges next to a wholly improbably lake: this is Barker Meadow Reservoir in Nederland. Negotiating an unexpected roundabout (traffic circle) in the centre of Nederland, I headed north along Route 72, the Peak to Peak Highway. At its highest point the road is around 11500 ft.*, and there are several peaks nearby around 12-14K high. Eventually it joins Route 7 and drops to “only” 7500 ft. in Estes Park, where I arrived around 11:30.

I had planned to explore Estes Park and maybe have lunch there, but I quickly changed my mind. There were hoards of people there for the Longs Peak Scottish/Irish Highland Festival, many of them wearing inauthentic kilts and other unflattering garb. I hastily turned east on Route 36 back towards Boulder; as I left Estes Park the westbound traffic into the town was backed up for miles. I counted myself fortunate that I’d chosen the southern route.

I emerged from the front range in Lyons. The transition is startling: one minute you’re negotiating switch-back curves with cliffs towering above you, the next you’re driving across featureless rolling terrain with nothing much of geographical interest until you reach Kansas City, 600 miles to the east. After Lyons I decided to continue my explorations, so instead of continuing down Route 36 to Boulder I took Route 66 to Longmont. Downtown was hot, dusty, and deserted, but I found a decent lunch and a surprisingly good Hefeweizen at the Pumphouse Brewery. From there I headed down Route 287 through Lafayette (I think I blinked and missed it) to Broomfield, then drove back up Route 36 to my hotel in Louisville.

I took a bunch of pictures just north of Ward on Route 72 (altitude around 10K), and some more on Route 7 close to Mount Meeker. I’ve uploaded them to Flickr, as an experiment.

And one note for Chris: I passed lots of cyclists on the Peak to Peak Highway. Very impressive, at that altitude.

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* This is the only spot height I could find on the web, but it seems a bit high; 10K seems more likely. Does anyone have a topographic map of the area?

Euphoria

Back in the 1980s* there was an electronic composer called Larry Fast who performed under the name Synergy. Since few record labels were interested, he started his own, Audion. I bought a number of Audion recordings (on cassette), including some by Synergy and a couple by an English keyboard/programming wizard called Garry Hughes. The latter’s work really grabbed me; it reminded my of one of my favorite American synth instrumentalists, David Van Tieghem (who was on Private Music).

Time passed, and Audion failed, as most independent labels are destined to do. In the late 1990s I looked around to see if Gary Hughes’ and David Van Tieghem’s work was still available. David showed up at MP3.COM (remember them?), and I bought all of his CDs. Garry Hughes… nothing. A few comments on music discussion lists about “whatever happened to…”, but the trail was cold.

Last weekend I was going through a massive “media reorganization” at home: disposing of tons of books, moving CDs from racks to storage chests**, and so forth. At the bottom of a pile of forgotten stuff, I came across the Garry Hughes cassettes. I put them aside with the intention of eventually ripping them into iTunes, and that evening I decided to do a serious web search to find out what had happened to him. Fortunately the spelling of Garry with two r‘s is relatively rare, and I started to come across references to a producer by that name. Further searching revealed that he’d produced a group called Euphoria in 1999, and it then turned out that he was also a member of the group. Was it the same guy? According to Amazon.com, “Euphoria make slide-groove “guitronica,” blending spacey beats with looping spoken word, breathy vocals, multilayered guitar wash, and intense yet playful drum and keyboard programming.” A possible confirmation: one of my favorite Garry Hughes tracks was a piece called Inkstick, which features a sample of a woman saying, breathily, “I quite like that sound”, over and over.

It turned out that the first, eponymous album by Euphoria was available through iTunes. One short sample was promising, so I plonked down my electronic dosh and bought the whole album.*** It’s wonderful, with contributions from some of my favorite musicians and composers (Anne Dudley from Art of Noise, pedal steel wizard B. J. Cole, and Roy Babbington from Soft Machine). The basic sound comes from the interplay between Ken Ramm’s slide guitar and Garry Hughes’ programming. (And if it’s not the same Garry Hughes, the coincidence is remarkable.) Highly recommended. In fact I think I’ll just download their second album, Beautiful My Child….

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* I may have got some of the history wrong; I haven’t researched it recently. Corrections are welcomed.
** If the music is all on computer and iPod, may as well store the original CDs out of the way.
*** Some time I must write about how iTunes has finally killed the idea of deferred gratification.

Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra

This weekend I’m going to set work aside and immerse myself in Boulder. Tonight I met some old friends for dinner and a stroll along the Pearl Street Mall. Tomorrow evening I’m going to a concert by the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Leslie Dunner:

  • Sibelius Andante Festivo
  • Brahms Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D major, Op.77 (Corey Cerovsek, violin)
  • Nielsen Symphony No. 4, Op. 29, ‘The Inextinguishable’

7:30pm at the Macky Auditorium. As for Sunday… well, we’ll just have to see.

Approaching the end of a hectic week

As I mentioned, I’m visiting the StorageTek facility in Louisville, Colorado this week and next. I find that there are two distinct aspects to what I’m doing here. The obvious bits are the formal meetings – reviewing engineering processes, planning various meetings between Sun and StorageTek engineers* (including a big colloquium next week), and coming up to speed on key programs and technologies. Those are keeping me pretty busy. Less obvious are the ad hoc interactions, on topics ranging from programming tools to document archival, from differences in IT infrastructure to the various techniques used for gathering customer requirements.

If you think about it for a minute, the task of integrating two large companies is truly daunting. There’s a fine balance to be struck. At one extreme would be treating StorageTek as “separate but equal”, operating it as a wholly-owned subsidiary with little or no day-to-day interaction. At the other extreme would be Borg-style “assimilation”, submerging all traces of StorageTek’s culture and practices. Neither is appropriate to this situation. StorageTek is a successful, profitable company, highly regarded by its customers: it’s critical that we preserve that. But both Sun and StorageTek have been limited in what we can do historically: Sun because of an incomplete approach to storage, and StorageTek by a “plug compatible” business model that inhibited innovation at the edge of their systems. The value of the merger is that each company offers new possibilities to the other. Together we have more choices: more ways to address the acquisition, processing, and storage of data from end to end. For me, the way to achieve the right balance is to encourage the business unit managers to conservatively adapt the organization, projects and products to ensure business continuity, while at the same time developing a network of the key innovators – architects, researchers, engineers – to open up the possibilities of radical synergy.

Back to the daunting nature of the task. Like all such endeavours, the elements usually turn out to be simple: meetings of individuals or teams to identify and solve pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. And the ad hoc interactions provide the “jiggling” that allows the pieces to fit together (or sometimes identifies a piece that’s in the wrong place). We never budget for these activities, but without them it’s really hard to finish the picture.

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* Yes, I know that we’re all Sun now, but I need some language to refer to the two groups. Maybe oSUNW and oSTK, for “originally Sun” and “originally StorageTek”.

Buddy, can you spare a dime

What’s all this in the Los Angeles Times? “The U.S. will halt construction work on some water and power plants in Iraq because it is running out of money for projects, officials said Wednesday. Security costs have cut into the money available to complete some major infrastructure projects that were started under the $18.4-billion U.S. plan to rebuild Iraq. As a result, the United States is funding only those projects deemed essential by the Iraqi government. […] Less than half of the U.S. reconstruction money has been spent, but in some sectors, such as electricity and water, security costs have eaten up much of the budget.”

Not a good way to impress the Iraqis with American efficiency and win hearts and minds.