chuck.goolsbee.org

9/11 Conspiracy Theories ‘Ridiculous,’ Al Qaeda Says

This was posted a while back, and like other famous Onion features, it is satire that turns out to be prophecy. Proof that our world is absurd. No?

I love practical jokes, but most years I forget about the license to do them on others that is the 1st of April. It just escapes my mind until it is too late.

This year however I was inspired by something that happened back in December. My friend (and client) John Welch posted something of a love letter to my employer on his website. Basically it said “You’ll never see a “bandwidth quota exceeded” page on my site because my hosting provider doesn’t do that sort of thing.”

That is true, but when I saw it I thought to myself, what a great practical joke this will make! … and made a note in my calendar to do this on 4/1/2008.

So when people went to John’s site today this is what they saw:

That “(reference)” link on the “bandwidth exceeded” page goes right to John’s post that inspired the prank.

I actually wanted to make the joke more John-specific… like “This user has expended the maximum number of input keystrokes allowed” or “this user has been suspended for excessive profanity” or something… Unfortunately I spent the day yesterday at our facility in Vancouver BC replacing a broken switch, and fixing a broken server, so I didn’t have the time to write up the HTML. Bill Dickson however, whipped up the PHP code required to pull off the stunt, and wrote that HTML page. Without his help, this one would not have been pulled off.

I hope John liked it.

This is a photo from my 2003 “Summer Roadtrip” with Nick. It is a view of him passing time with his gameboy as we drove from Colorado to Washington in the Jaguar. Note the rainbow out the window.

That trip was indeed magical and I have many fond memories from that week. Nick was nine years old, and a joy to travel with. I had hoped to go on another road trip with him (and his older brother) this week. I was planning to drive down to southern California with one kid, then have the other fly down and send the southbound kid home by plane as well. We have some Jag friends down there that would be fun to pay a return visit. Then I’d return home with the other boy. Chris will be leaving for College in the fall, and I’d dearly like to spend some quality time with them both in the meantime. This week would have worked well since it is spring break for both.

Unfortunately the car is still up on jacks in the barn (I need to order a new body heat shield … more on that later) and it is snowing. WTF is up with that?

I wrote a lengthy bit about communications as a key to surviving an IT disaster, which in many ways was a written version of the session I delivered at the MacIT conference at Macworld Expo last month. I tackle the stereotype of geeks as poor communicators, and lay out a strategy for getting IT departments into the communication habit. The stunning revelation that lead me down this road is a conclusion I came to when discussing an outage with a “layperson”… that is a user of technology rather than a maintainer of it. To him awareness was more important than downtime. Downtime didn’t bother him so much, so long as he was kept informed of what was going on, why, and when things would be back up. Forewarning would be even better. His downtime came about during a datacenter migration. A light bulb went off over my head, as I had successfully pulled off more than one datacenter migration within the past few years. Did everything go perfectly? Of course not, but the difference was that I put a huge emphasis on communication with our customers way before, before, during, and after the moves. I’m not some IT genius by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m not the first to use this tool effectively. It just seems that most IT professionals forget this critical part of their management strategy.

Anyway, for the terminally curious, the series is linked below. My editor wisely split it into two parts.

Part One

Part Two

I’m a compulsive reader. My whole life I’ve rarely let much time go by without some book as my constant companion. I try to keep my website here in sync with what I’m reading, but I’ve failed miserably over the last year. I think two books were listed the whole year, while I likely plowed through 4x that number. Right now it still lists “Fiasco“… which was an excellent read. I’ve been through a couple of other books since - I just forgot to update my site here. So in penance, here are a few mini-reviews of stuff I’ve read of late. I will update the site soon with the book I am *actually* reading at the moment.

One of the most profound books I read this past year was “A Nation Of Enemies” about Chile under Pinochet. I have a partially written essay about it stashed away in my “drafts” database, so you’ll have to wait for that.

“The Looming Tower” is a fascinating read concerning just about everything we know about Al Qaeda, right up to 9/11. It’s origins in Eqyptian Islamic thought, the principle players, their lives, their philosophies, their methodologies, etc. Right alongside that is a study of the intelligence community, specifically the CIA & FBI, and their continual stumbling over each other due to their basic, fundamental differences of philosophy. The CIA (subject of the book I’m reading now) had always been externally facing and saw the world as a whole, and understood how US Law was irrelevant in many respects in remote places of the world. I may or may not agree with that stance, but the book does detail how the CIA solution to Al Qaeda was to just kill it’s leadership. This was attempted a few times under the Clinton administration, but did not succeed. It was stopped on all but one occasion by the FBI, whose “law & order” mentality conflicted deeply with the CIA’s “kill ‘em” plan of action. The FBI wanted to prosecute and punish, which of course requires evidence, due process, etc. They created elaborate schemes to capture bin Laden and extradite him to stand trial for the embassy bombings and the USS Cole. The delays, along with an administration change lead to neither happening. The events of September 11, 2001 therefore were not really a surprise to those in the intelligence community. They knew who it was, why, and in a lot of ways what and when it was going to happen. In hindsight perhaps the CIA’s option would have been a lot more effective and less expensive, but then again we would have been enjoying another decade of peace and prosperity had they did what the CIA suggested.

That leads us to “Fiasco”. To those that feel that the Bush Administration was a united front concerning Iraq, this book contrasts that sharply. On the one side you have the Department of Defense (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et. al.) + Cheney, forging ahead with rosy projections - minimal troop commitments, self-funding effort through oil revenues, “They’ll greet us as liberators!” and PowerPoint based sales pitches. On the other hand you have the State Department asking tough questions … and getting no answers… from anyone. The Military of course does what the American military does best, Logistics… all the while ignoring Strategy, Intelligence, Counterinsurgency, post-war infrastructure, sealing the borders, not to mention exit strategies. They assumed the State Department had all that stuff worked out. What resulted was of course, a Fiasco. A fascinating read, I highly recommend it.

I’ve also read the classic text “This Kind of War” by T. R. Fehrenbach, which covers the Korean War. Fehrenbach is a blunt, plain spoken man with a keen awareness of Military History. Korea is a largely forgotten conflict but it set the precedent for post-atomic ground wars, both politically and militarily. An excellent read though do not expect a coolly detached historian’s view. An interesting aspect of reading this book for me is firing up Google Earth and having a look at the actual terrain being described. I wholeheartedly suggest anyone reading a book about any sort of military conflict do this simple thing. Terrain is a significant part of how battle is played out, and seeing the relief (Korea is an exceptionally hilly place) truly puts a lot in perspective. The simplistic map in the book of “The Gauntlet” run by the 2nd Division on the Sunch’on - Kunu-ri Road, November 30th 1950 is what lead me to look at the actual terrain. From that moment I was hooked.

At the moment I’m reading my Xmas gift from John Welch (Thanks John!), I’ll try to summarize it once I’m done.

“The future may look something like the 20th century in reverse. The unfree nations will grow so quickly that they will overwhelm free nations with their economic might.”

That quote is from Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Just one of the many very interesting tidbits found in this article.

Well worth the read. The article (by Rowan Callick) raises many questions about how Free-Market Capitalism is coexisting with repressive government in China, in direct opposition to western enlightenment and the Hume/Smith governmental philosophy and economic theory.It should not work, but somehow it is. Is this due to cultural differences? It also explores the extension of “soft power” over the globe and the influence it has (far GREATER than “hard power” … a lesson our current leaders have somehow either forgotten or never learned!) Probably the most interesting thing I have read in a while.

I have my own thoughts about this subject, but I’m interested in hearing yours… if you have them.

To add one of my obscure bits of hardware to: The BeBox Registry.

I literally stumbled upon this site this morning, as I was considering putting the old box up on eBay or something. You see I have a rather vast collection of odd computer hardware stashed away in a few places. Mostly Non-Intel CPU workstations and servers. One of these is a BeBox. About 1800 of these were built and I managed to snag one from a friend of mine about 8 years ago (Hi Jeff!)

…

Then I came to my senses… I can’t put this on eBay. What I have is a collection of obscure, high-end systems from the 90s. These are the last gasp of non-Intel driven errata before that branch of computing lost its momentum. I have PPC, Motorola 68K, Sun Sparc, MIPS and Alpha boxes. I imagine if you liken the pre-PC era like the Brass Era of automobiles, these machines are like the explosion of brands pre-WW2. I have the computing equivalent of Auburns, Cords, Dusenbergs, REOs, Pierce-Arrows and the like. Names like Be, NeXT, SGI, Sun, and of course Apple. They are like used cars now, like those REOs in the 40s; old cars from failed, or merged into some larger entity companies, whose usefulness is gone and whose parts are unavailable. They have little value now, but it should grow over time. I even have a few “one of a kind” machines - unshipped prototypes.

So no eBay. Instead I’ll catalog them here over time. (You’ll note I created a new category for this subject .) Should be fun.