Category Archives: Random Access

Random Access, the op-ed.

CTO-I & II

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CTO-I

CTO stands for Chief Technology Officer.
CIO stands for Chief Information Officer.
CSC stands for Cyber Security Czar.

I own Motorola stock. The reason this disclosure is important will become obvious below.

Dear Mr. President:

Welcome to your new stature as the nation’s Number One Temporary Employee.

Business Week reports that you have two executives in mind for your newly minted position of federal Chief Technology Officer, one from Cisco Systems and one from the Washington, D.C., government.

Padmasree Warrior was CTO at Motorola before joining Crisco. She directed research for the Motorola “semiconductor unit and ran its energy systems group before being appointed CTO in 2003—when she was placed in charge of a 4,600-person R&D lab.”

She has impressive qualifications on paper. The facts on the ground look a bit different. During her tenure at MOT, the number of innovative products dwindled, the stock price tumbled, and the company slashed employment including reportedly more than half the R&D staff. Motorola employees are … wary … of Ms. Warrior. And I have lost thousands of dollars on Motorola stock. On paper.

Ms. Warrior “could sing and dance ably, but her words and ideas were empty,” one Motorolan told me.

Mr. Kundra looks just as good on paper. He has served as a technology officer for Virginia and, in D.C., runs “his 600-person staff like a startup, experimenting in … cutting-edge technologies.” He already advises you on technology issues.

Common sense suggests we need people in government who innovate and build. Due diligence means we need people who look even better on the ground than they do on paper.

Be very wary; the bright and shiny object you want may be a mylar balloon filled with hot air. Please choose wisely.

CTO-II
President Barack Obama is the first geek to become president; we real life geeks and nerds certainly applaud his personal knowledge of the Internet and his hands-on skill with the Barackberry (even I don’t have a smartphone). The only other politicians who come close may be Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and former DNC Chair Howard Dean.Mr. Obama will focus heavily on technology early in his new administration. That’s a good thing. He intends to create a Chief Technology Officer (and the accompanying Chief Technology Office) to complement the federal Chief Information Officer (and her accompanying Chief Information Office) and the equally new federal Cyber-Security Czar (and the accompanying Cyber-Security Office). That may not be a good thing.

“The President-elect clearly recognizes the importance of technology,” Technology Association of America’s Jeff Lande told BusinessWeek, “and is elevating them to the appropriate level of importance in his Administration.”

Swell.

Why does the Federal government need so many high level people to build empires that do pretty much the same job?

I may be a bear of very little brain but I have some trouble finding enough honey in the tree to keep all these offices out of each others’ hair.

If it were my job, I’d form a committee to create an office to consider the problem of studying the offices. No. Scratch that. If it were my job, I would spend 30 or 40 seconds of Deep Thought (>==note big blue pun) and realize that I can handle only so many direct reports. I would decide that the Cyber Czaring is a Homeland Security issue. I would determine that the Information Office and Technology Office are complementary bodies that need a single head.

OK, I’m done. I may not have solved all of the problems of the Federal Gummint but I have whittled them down a little.

Conservation of Resources

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It is more important to honor Martin Luther King Jr. than to honor blacks.

It is also more important to honor George Washington and Abraham Lincoln than to honor “Presidents.”

And it is more important to honor Mollie Beattie than to honor women.

What? You’ve never heard of Mollie Beattie?

Black History Month is celebrated each February in the United States and Canada and in October in the UK. This month-long homage highlights contributions of black people and events.

Presidents Day (note the lack of an apostrophe) is a federal holiday here in the United States. We celebrate not on February 12 or February 22 but rather on the third Monday of the month so we can have a three day weekend.

Women’s History Month in March is major commemoration of the economic, political and social achievements of women.

Wow.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that American women can now own entire properties by bequest or outright purchase. The farmhouse we bought in Vermont came with an interesting history: the first Mrs. Stevens to live here outlived the first Mr. Stevens to live here (this was originally the Stevens farm). Mr. Stevens, apparently worried that his children would turn their mother out, bequeathed to her the use of a bedroom, “cooking facilities,” and the cellar for storage.

I’m glad that American politicians can now spend endless time on world-altering events like declaring holidays and then going on them.

And I’m glad that Americans, whether black or white or purple or green can now buy houses, build businesses, go to school, marry, and vote. When I lived in New Jersey, the election judge who signed me in was a black man named Harper. He looked at my ID, looked at his name badge, and looked at my ID again.

“Oh,” he said, “You’re from the other side of the family.”

I was pleased but someday, we won’t notice which side of the family we came from.

We certainly need Presidents. Without them, Congress would have run amok with all this holidaying far sooner and the now-233 year history of this particular democratic experiment would have been written in about 87 years.

Martin Luther King Jr. started out as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Alabama. As arguably the strongest voice for civil rights, he was first a man people might never heard of.

Mollie Beattie was a Vermonter and the first woman to lead the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. As arguably the strongest single voice for wildlife conservation, she was a woman most people still have never heard of.

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are larger than life now but they were just George and Abe to their families and to the people nearest them.

They all gave us something more. George and Abe share two important traits with Martin and Mollie: they did more than they thought they would and they all inspired us to do more than we thought we could. That’s heroic.

We need heroes. When we honor mere Presidents, all we get is another sale.

Sea Kittens Are Us

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PETA has gone off the deep end.

The terrorist group determined to end humankind’s position at the top of the food chain has learned to be soft and fuzzy. Probably from Al Gore, the Nobel laureate who has mastered the art of advertising to move most of a population away from real science.

PETA wants to rename fish.

Renaming fish is their 2009 contribution to political correctness.

Kindergarten educators (I can’t call them teachers because teachers know better) want to prevent kindergarten bullies from offending the less fortunate. The Political Correctness Police (ever wonder why that equates to PCP?) compel us to avoid upsetting the non-white, the homosexual, any female, the crippled, the ugly, the fat, or the stupid. One of my favorite Clint Eastwood movies is “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” The man in the lice-ridden poncho would lose a lot of punch if he starred in “The Good, The Goodness-Challenged, and The Unfortunately Handsomeness-Challenged.”

Political correctness comes in all flavors and all of them irk me.

I wonder whether Brazilians are annoyed by the name we have given (mostly) Bolivian almendra nut. The annual harvest of Brazil nuts is about 20,000 tons; Bolivia sends about half of those to market.

The American Fisheries Society moved Floridians to call the jewfish the “goliath grouper.” The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first usage of “jewfish” in this 1697 quote: “The Jew-Fish is a very good fish and, I judge, so called by the English because it hath scales and fins, therefore a clean fish, according to Levitical law.”

Seconds before his ouster in 1999, public advocate David Howard, was quoted thusly, “I will have to be niggardly with this fund…” The political firestorm came as others called this 700 year-old synonym for miserly, a “racist” epithet.

Muslims have castigated Prince Harry for calling a fellow cadet a “raghead.” (As an aside, I find it interesting that it is politically CORRECT for Muslims pledge to kill all American infidels and to shout *death to Israel*.)

The term “politically correct” traces back to Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book and was adopted in the 1960s by the radical left. RightSpeak (or in this case, LeftSpeak), ought to give us pause no matter what the origin. After all, the entropy of the universe never dwindles and once your peers decide they can trash your mental treasury, the penalties they impose grow larger with every alleged infraction.

The death of language comes when words lose their meaning in favor of their consequences.

Got to dial it back:

I do not use racial or ethnic slurs.

I do know that people who call me a redneck WASP show only their own brilliance.

I do know kids need to build immunity to germs both bacterial and conversational.

I do not tolerate RightSpeak or RightThink.

And now PETA wants us to call all fish, “sea kittens.”

“Nobody would hurt a sea kitten!” the group says on its website.

They hope to start their campaign to end “fishing” by retiring the name for good.

OK, OK, I understand that no one takes PETA seriously and the sea kitten campaign is at best laughable. I’m not laughing. PETA’s agenda is quite simply to destroy our meat and fish industries which, when you look at the expected results, means PETA’s agenda is to destroy humankind.

After all, it is already so illegal to catch or eat a kosher goliath grouper in Florida waters that the penalty for simply having one aboard may be forfeiture of one’s fishing boat.

Time to trot out my recipes for cat.

Happy New Year!

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Curmudgery.

I enjoy my role as a curmudgeon and we all know that Curmudgery sells newspapers better than kitten rescues. After all, we get a warm and fuzzy feeling in our hearts for the firemen who spend thousands of taxpayer dollars digging a bedraggled, mewling, critter out of a storm drain, only to have it procreate more brain-dead, sewer-jumping progeny to add to the gene pool. However, comma, that story doesn’t sell newspapers. It gets buried on page 34. Below the fold.

People want blood.

People want gore.

People want veins in their teeth.

At the race track we regularly repeated this litany that was true-to-life for most spectators:

Was there a crash? I hope there wasn’t a crash!
Was anybody hurt? I hope no one was hurt!
Was there blood? I hope there wasn’t blood!
Did anybody die?

Speaking of car wrecks, Happy New Year!

I most sincerely hope. You know the saying, “It can’t get any worse?” Well, of course it can but I doubt it can get any more surreal. I mean, who could make this stuff up? If I had written that Ken Lay went to jail but AIG CEO Martin Sullivan took $15 million in cash as his company but-for-the-grace-of-thee-and-me sank and that Merrill Lynch CEO Jeff Thain would ask for a $10 million bonus because he “kept the losses to only eleven billion dollars,” nobody would believe it.

It is dispiriting to have to hammer on the same bad behavior by crooks in business, crooks in finance, and congress critters.

So, here’s the deal. I want to smile more in this new year. Send me happy stories. I can’t guarantee I will spin all of them into columns but I can guarantee they will make me smile.