Space Jobs Program
Mark Wade has an excellent blog discussing things space. His posts are infrequent and always worth the wait. He has been taking NASA, the Administration and Congress to task for the Constellation Program (with its Orion Apollo-esque crew module and Ares I and V shuttle-derived boosters). NASA is busy doing what it does best: running top-heavy over-bureaucratized, political pork programs that procure overpriced hardware designed to inflated and/or unrealistic specifications using contracting terms that essentially guarantee cost overruns.

I'm hoping that the nascent private space industry — typified by Scaled Composites, Virgin Galactic, Bigelow Aerospace, Rocketplace Kistler, Blue Origin and SpaceX — continues to garner successes and interest. With NASA as the only game in town we might never get off of this rock.

Even the Mighty Casey Couldn't Carry It
The better team clearly won the World Series this evening. The Cardinals got better production out of the batters, had stronger overall pitching, and didn't kill their own cause with errors the way that the Tigers did. Game Three will not be spoken of here. In Game Four, it looked like the Tigers might have some life left in them, but the tank ran dry before the game was over and the Cards ran by them to win. Tonight's Game Five was more of the same.

The bright spot for the Tigers was Sean Casey — unfortunately his one-man batting clinic couldn't carry the whole team.

I hope the Tigers can keep it together, tune things up and make a run for it again next year.

Work Metaphors Run Amuck
I'm a mid-level manager in a large IT organization. Isn't that statement one of the more profoundly depressing things you've encountered all day? Warts and all, it is a good job — maybe even a great job — but I am increasingly dissatisfied with it. My boss is great, but the organization as a whole is hampered by a crushing lack of vision and imagination. Budgetarily, the wagons have been circled for so long that people can't remember that we used to use those wagons to actually GO someplace. We used to have a goal in mind and were progressing towards it. Alas, that is no more. If we could just scoot the wagons a little closer together for cover and throw the occasional sacrificial offering out to the marauding budget gods, we'll be fine — for at least a little bit longer.

Part of our stasis is due to senior management in our organization calcifying in place, another part is that our larger organization has had several executive officer changes in recent years. Each major change at that level seems to freeze things in amber for a year or two. Then, just when it looks like a decision might get made, another executive officer leaves and throws everything back into stasis again. Sounds like a great morale improvement scheme, eh?

I am, however, reasonably content with the way my group operates. We do have the occasional bit of HR fun to contend with, and our complex system of systems sometimes zigs when it should have zagged, but for the most part things run well. Our customers are satisfied and, thanks to some stats collection my staff implemented, senior management started looking elsewhere to cut budgets when they had some hard numbers to show how successful we are.

I never used to consider myself an adrenaline junky — you'd never find me jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, for example — but with the workplace running like a top, I'll admit to being a bit bored. The job was more interesting when I was racing from fire to fire.

It is with this background that I am going to lunch with the friend I mentioned in an earlier post ("Bidness") to discuss a new business idea. It's nothing earth-shattering, it's certainly not the next Google, but in our little corner of the universe I suppose it well could be. One of the nice things we've been focusing on is how to get the new venture off of the ground without necessarily having to punt on our existing jobs just yet. It all may end up being much ado about nothing, but at least it is something to think about while watching the current job's plate spinning.

Nanowrimo
I've decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month — Nanowrimo. The goal is to write a 175 page novel (50,000 words) during the month of November. If you do it, you're a winner! You don't get anything — other than being called a winner. Sounds good!

As a would-be writer who has two incomplete novels to his credit (one 154 pages and the other 218 pages), this little project will triple my output and, hopefully, get me over viewing whatever I write as entirely too precious. Speed is the order of the day (month?) here.





If you were wondering, I looked up:

flash fiction — shorter than 1,000 words
short story — 1,000-7,500 words, although some count up to 20,000 words
novelette — 7,500-17,500 words
novella — 20,000-40,000 words (another source says up to 60,000 words)
novel — more than 40,000 words (another source says more than 60,000 words)
epic — 200,000 words or more

Funny how the length of the work gets longer as the name gets shorter...

The Gambler
The Tigers won last night, bringing the series even at 1-1. Of course all anyone seems to want to talk about is the "foreign substance" that Kenny Rodgers had on his pitching hand in the first inning. Whatever it was was gone for the second inning and, as many should note as they breathlessly report on the whole situation, his pitching didn't seem to suffer a bit after the ablutions.

The near-rally by St. Louis in the 9th inning probably had pacemakers and implantable defibrillators working overtime all over southeastern Michigan. I'm glad it didn't get any more exciting!

Serious Speaking About Stupidity and Arrogance
Alberto Fernandez is a senior State Department official who, in an Arabic interview on Al-Jazeera, said that the United States would be remembered for "stupidity" and "arrogance" in its handling of the war in Iraq. I admit to not reading the whole article when it came out the other day, but I was pleased to hear that at least one senior person in the administration had his head out of his ass.

Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, was asked about the quote and gave the standard he-must-have-been-misquoted response that you give when you don't know what the hell is going on. The BBC (a news source that more of us should be paying attention to — its in the links of the right) noted that their Arabic speakers confirmed that he said what he was reported to have said.

Probably shocking no one, Mr. Fernandez has now issued a non-retraction retraction, saying:

"Upon reading the transcript of my appearance on Al-Jazeera, I realized that I seriously misspoke by using the phrase 'there has been arrogance and stupidity' by the U.S. in Iraq," Alberto Fernandez said in an e-mail sent to reporters by the State Department and attributed to him.

"This represents neither my views nor those of the State Department. I apologize."

Yeah, that should clear things up. Everything is once again right with the world. I hope that the whole world can see our steely resolve in the face of the enemy.

The Democratic Party is Still Dead
While searching for something else, I ran across the following article from way back in 2001 by Robert B. Reich in the Washington Post: The Democratic Party is Dead. Isn't serendipity great? It's real short piece — I'll wait while you read it.

I guess what I find the most surprising and depressing is how true the basic premise of Secretary Reich's article still is. Before the current administration I would have classified myself as centrist leaning towards Republican. Now I have no idea what I am, but I know, based on deeds, not rhetoric, that there is no way in Hell that I am a Republican. Go to any extremist left-wing, pinko, commie web page to find out why. Pretty much everything those whack jobs have been ranting about for the last couple of decades is true. I'm sorry it took me so long to get to the party.

But that's the problem! Where is the party? The primary organizing principle of the Democratic Party seems to be, "Well, at least we're not the goddamn Republicans!" Okay, great, but where's the beef? With a couple of weeks before the elections to go, the fact that I can't tell you what the Democrats are about should be a huge red flag for somebody. I'm very afraid that the current status quo that has so badly bungled Iraq and Afghanistan and has been gleefully chipping away at our civil liberties while jobs head overseas and, in my state, foreign trash gets shipped in to our landfills, will sit unchanged after the election with its voting, vote fraud, tampering and legal posturing.

I suppose I can always hope for a Libertarian surge this year...

Tigers Yawn
I'm not a huge baseball fan, but I can usually be counted on to at least check out the World Series each year. The fact that the local team is in the series for the first time in 22 years means I actually might pay attention. I watched last night's game and watched the Tigers do almost nothing. What a yawn and quite the bummer after the media build-up. Of course almost nothing lives up to the hype — yet the media hypes and we buy in every time.

I hope today's outing is more interesting!

Bidness
I just got off the phone with a friend of almost 20 years (Yikes! I can see my advertiser demographic already slipping away!). He's very excited about a business opportunity. It plays into his strengths and, not entirely coincidentally, mine. I hope something comes of this. He is very motivated and has already started doing all of things that the various experts tell you to do when you want to start a business.

The only real downer in all of this is that he is in a position to seriously consider doing this new business venture because of the absolutely horrible (and probably legally actionable) way he has been treated in his current job. If living well is the best revenge, I hope I can eventually watch him enjoy the fruits of his labors.

Welcome!
Hello and welcome to my corner of Senator Stevens' interweb!