Month: October 2008

Exit German Special Forces, enter, German (or French) AWACs to defend against the Taliban (Air Force/Farce)??? WTF?

Your services are no longer required...I guess.

Your services are no longer required…I guess.

For three year a crack German commando team has sat in Afghanistan and stared at the Sun. They’ve been deployed in combat operations ZERO (that’s 0) times and Germany politicians are starting to demand that they return. Fair enough. You’re not going to use them because of the political decision not to actually do anything of value in Afghanistan, you might as well pull them back and hunt neo-Nazi’s in the former East Germany.

But what gets really funny is how the Europeans want to substitute for this ‘non-needed’ special forces–they want to send great big hulking AWACs aircraft. Planes designed to steer combat aircraft into Russian fighters and other hostile air forces are going to be sent to Afghanistan to defend against…the Tabliban Air Force? Ummm…does that make sense?

But wait, it gets better. France say no, there is no Taliban Air Force–don’t send German AWACS, because… we want to send our French AWACs to Afghanistan instead.

Yea, this will help....

Yea, this will help….

As a gesture of goodwill, Steinmeier said he would consider replacing the KSK soldiers with NATO AWACS reconnaissance planes for Afghanistan that are based in Germany and have largely German crews.

NATO’s decision on whether to deploy the planes has been delayed because of a bizarre attempt to block the move by the French. First, Paris claimed the mission would be too expensive. Then they said it made no sense because the Taliban has no air force that the flying radar facilities could be used against. At the same time, however, Paris offered to deploy its own AWACS aircraft.

WTF?

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Should I buy a gun?

I’ve been thinking about it for awhile. I’m still not entirely sure what the right answer is just yet though. Before you go off on the standard arguments, let me give you a bit of background.

I live in the country. Very isolated country. I have five neighbors, one of whom is a drug dealer. There is a one mile forest on one side of me, a US Navy reservation on the other, the water for about 15 miles to the East and a few lower income homes to the West up a big hill. We are easily 5-10 minutes from any hope of law enforcement in a crisis situation. We also have a wide variety of woodland critters, from foxes to snakes (many of the latter, one of which can be poisonous).

We live outside of DC, about 35 miles away. Our town is a bit off of one of the major evacuation routes of the city, and yes, we do think about mass evacuation and terrorist attacks living in DC. We also have natural disasters mainly in the form of hurricanes, the last of which resulted in the National Guard being deployed and checkpoints to keep out looters.

Now here are the negatives. I don’t want a gun.

While I understand it is a tool for things like wild animals, and I might actually use it more than others, it’s not something I suspect I’ll need anytime soon. I also have a kid, and the thought of him ever finding it scares the hell out of me (I should note that if we do get one, we’re having our contractor build a secure and nearly ‘invisible’ safe area where it will be stored, a la James Bond). It would be my goal for him to never know it was here.

Finally the idea that society is broken to such an extent that I have to arm myself is one that I haven’t quite gotten my head around just yet. I don’t think that is necessarily the case, though I may actually have my head in the clouds a bit. I do fear a major breakdown in civil order, i.e. a mass evacuation of biologically infected people following a terrorist strike or something, but I’m not sure that is on the horizon just yet (and as crazy as that sounds, just go watch the near riot situations in the evacuations from Hurricane Ike and Rita down in Texas). I don’t think we’re in a zombie status, but folks outside of the DC area never quite ‘get’ the terrorist threat like you do living in a target zone. It’s something that you do think about here when you drive past the armed checkpoints on Capitol Hill or see the anti-aircraft missiles hidden away on military bases in DC.

So for now, I’m still thinking about it. I don’t think it will be a purchase this year though, but it will be something I think about some more.

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Exiled to the backyard…

What it looks like after 36 hours in front of a computer monitor.

I’m sitting outside on the deck for probably the first time this year.

I’ve meant to do this for awhile as the weather has broken and Fall has arrived, but it’s been a rather hectic year with things and I never seem to find the time. Tonight I tried to take a nap (more in a moment) but was thrown upstairs by the nanny who saw me and made a scary face. If my son sees me around dinner time, it will be an hour of playing and no time for eating, so I’ve been, in essence, exiled to the upper floors until dinner is finished.

I spent about 36 hours this weekend trying to rebuild a database. This is probably the fourth or fifth time in the last three years I’ve had a major database meltdown, but unlike other cases, this time I had a pretty good back and the reasons for the meltdown were kind of strange.

Somehow, our database server crashed and a file got corrupted, hosting most of the information. Using the standard reboot procedures failed (curiously) so they had to move all of our data out of the folder and start again. But once they started again, the recovery tools (accidently left in a file) prevented the machine from restarting properly.

I spent the last 36 hours manipulating the backups on three different servers in the house, preparing them for uploading and getting the formats just right. Unfortunately we’re talking about 3 to 5 gigabyte files, and moving them around can take hours over a cable modem. Even moving them between machines in the house is a multi-minute affair. Running the reload command on the server takes nearly 2 hours. But we weren’t able to do that until they fixed all the bugs. This was a weekend in which I could have really used probably 4 monitors hooked up to my machine downstairs, not just two (and for those who don’t have two monitors, you don’t have any idea what you are missing–it changes everything).

This morning about 11 they fixed everything and we reloaded the data. We probably lost a few days worth of data, but I’m not that concerned. Actually I have the data here but I’m debating “two to three days to extract it vs. well, whatever” and the latter is winning out. Maybe later I’ll play with it a bit.

Our company is winding down. The developments in our space and the overall economic crisis have not bode well for things, though it looks like I may take repossession of some of the assets I brought to the table and be able to run them again as I see fit. This will be nice–no longer answering to others about this that and the other thing. Perhaps I’ll blog more about that later. This article on how to ‘fail’ with a startup has some very true points…

So now, I need to eat and take a nap (I didn’t get one earlier because the phone kept ringing) but I’m sort of stuck upstairs without any food and having to run out in a few hours to run an errand. Guess I’ll just post on the blog for awhile.

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Did JP Morgan secretly bring down Lehman Brothers

The London Times has a whiff of a scandal and is all over it. Apparently JP Morgan withheld $17 billion from Lehman, causing their financial crisis last month that led to their collapse. Bankruptcy hearings are underway and the details are expected to be brought up in open court.

Of course, they were asked to give them $17 billion 48 hours before they went bankrupt, so maybe they knew what they were doing. Expect several more things like this in the next few weeks.

JP MORGAN has been accused by its Wall Street rivals of dealing the final hammer blow that forced Lehman Brothers into collapse in a sensational claim that threatens to spark a colossal legal battle.

The giant American bank is alleged to have frozen $17 billion (£9.6 billion) of cash and securities belonging to Lehman on the Friday night before its failure.

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My electricity usage over the last two years with charts.

When you think about electric bills, you often have a picture of the massive sprawl being built out West, saying to yourself ‘all those damn air conditioners killing the environment. If only they lived in the NorthEast they could clean the air from all the pollution.”

Not so fast.

It’s been known and published for awhile that cooling a house is often a cheaper endeavor than heating one. Going from say 30 degree outside to 70 is a lot harder than going down from 90 to say 75, so the theory goes.

So I decided to check into it myself. Using my own power bills for the last two years, I took a look at the usage vs. the temperature and found, not all that surprising, that in my all electric house (heat pump/ac) it cost me the most money in the coldest months.

Anyway, kind of interesting. Here are the raw numbers. I’m going to take a closer look at what this all entails (the heat pump & water heater are the bulk of this expense I think, but I do have a lot of computers and other things running in the house nearly 24/7).

Month Days Total KW Avg/Day Temp
Sep-08 32 2404 75.1 70
Aug-08 28 2548 91 74
Jul-08 34 3391 99.7 77
Jun-08 28 2317 82.8 75
May-08 31 2062 66.5 60
Apr-08 32 2733 85.4 55
Mar-08 29 3275 112.9 44
Feb-08 29 4050 139.7 37
Jan-08 33 4053 122.8 36
Dec-07 33 3836 116.2 40
Nov-07 31 2495 80.5 47
Oct-07 32 2098 65.6 64
Sep-07 29 2448 84.4 72
Aug-07 30 2939 98 77
Jul-07 32 3207 100.2 77
Jun-07 30 2578 85.9 73
May-07 33 2333 70.7 65
Apr-07 28 2115 75.5 50
Mar-07 31 2748 88.6 45
Feb-07 28 4083 145.8 28
Jan-07 33 3836 116.2 40
Dec-06 29 2547 87.8 43
Nov-06 30 2704 90.1 49
Oct-06 31 2300 74.2 55

In this table below, the Blue line is the KWH per month and the red line is the temperature.

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Is Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, a drug dealer?

Is he his brothers keeper?

Is he his brother's keeper?

The New York Times is asking that question today.

When Afghan security forces found an enormous cache of heroin hidden beneath concrete blocks in a tractor-trailer outside Kandahar in 2004, the local Afghan commander quickly impounded the truck and notified his boss.

Before long, the commander, Habibullah Jan, received a telephone call from Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, asking him to release the vehicle and the drugs, Mr. Jan later told American investigators, according to notes from the debriefing obtained by The New York Times. He said he complied after getting a phone call from an aide to President Karzai directing him to release the truck.

Afghanistan is a mess politically, so it’s entirely possible this is just a smear attack from his opponents. But then again, Afghanistan is also awash in corruption and drugs, and if something like this did touch into Karzai’s inner circle I don’t think anyone would be surprised.

Corruption is killing Afghanistan (as it is killing other countries as well). But unlike say China which has rampant corruption, Afghanistan doesn’t have the economic muscle (or internal security muscle) to keep people in line despite the bribes that have to be paid.

Fighting corruption worldwide is going to be the biggest battle we face in the next 20 years of foreign policy. With China, Russia and much of the developing world along with many large European companies in a sort of de facto alliance of ‘this is how we do business’ the fight against corruption may be one that we may not win.

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Somali pirates keep cutting price for tank ship. Kidnapped by K-Mart a reality.

Waiting to fire.

Waiting to fire.

A blue light special has been announced by the pirates who seized a ship full of Russian tanks off the coast of Somalia.

The pirates, who seized the ship last Thursday, initially demanded a $35 million ransom, then dropped it to $20 million and now it seems they are willing to settle for much less.

“It’s down to $5 million,” said Andrew Mwangura, program coordinator for the Seafarers’ Assistance Program in Kenya, which tracks pirate attacks and communicates with the families of crew members. “But this needs to be done quickly. The longer that ship stays in Somalia, the more people who are going to get involved and the greedier they’re going to get.”

A Russian frigate is due on station in a few days. They’ll probably blow up the ship (which is what should do too) but they’ll be doing it to hide evidence of dealings with the outlaw Sudanese regime.

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China 2008 Olympic gymnasts cleared in age controversy, but 2000 medalists under more scrutiny

The New York Times is reporting on a ruling that is ending the debate on the ages of China’s gymnasts in the 2008 Beijing games, but opening the debate about the 2000 Sydney team.

”We are satisfied with the information provided by FIG, and we now consider the (2008) matter closed,” said Emmanuelle Moreau, spokeswoman for the International Olympic Committee.

”Clearly they feel that there is more to be looked at for Sydney,” Moreau added. ”We encourage them to pursue their inquiry and shed some light on these cases. We now rely on them to get to the bottom of that and get back to us.”

Unfortunately, the report doesn’t say ‘why’ they believe this to be the case, what killer piece of evidence they’ve obtained or anything to that effect. We’ll have to see what comes out in the next few days.

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