Trained in the Ways of Men

The world premiere of the documentary film, "Trained in the Ways of Men", debuted at Cinquest in San Jose last week. There's a collage of interviews with the many players in our social system who are supposed to educate, support, and lead our youth to becoming fully functional, productive adults. Obviously, they all failed badly in preventing the brutal murder of Gwen Araujo, a transgendered woman. Everyone involved had an opportunity to present his/her perspective on the horrible tragedy, including Gwen's mother, the prosecuting attorney, the defense attorneys, high school counsellors, university sociologists, and so on.

I learned a lot from the documentary. I did not realize that transgendered people are so psychologically committed to their preferred sex that in their minds they are that sex even though the physical evidence suggests otherwise. So in her mind, a transgendered woman is not engaging in deceit when she flirts with a man in a bar.

I found myself wondering how many transgendered people are among us? The popuation of the U.S. is roughly 300 million. Homosexuals are estimated at 10% of that population or 30 million. So what is the number of transgendered? The film did not address this.

I also found the film very thought provoking and educational in that it addresses and explains the transgendered individual, whereas other films have treated the subject solely as an entertainment vehicle. These are films like "The Crying Game", "Boys Don't Cry", "Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert", "Transamerica", and "Hedwig and the Angry Inch".

I hope that Shelly Prevost, the director of the film, will do a little more editing, and find an appropriate commercial distribution channel. It would be a good film for high school students to learn many important lessons about sexuality and responsibility concerning sexuality.

I understand that California no longer accepts the "gay panic" defense as an excuse for murder as a result of this murder and the efforts to bring these issues to light.

One solution to software licensing issues

There is so much mis-information about software licensing, that I have figured out a way to side step at least one of the issues.

My employer, InterWorking Labs, makes a high end test suite (or tester) for testing the SNMP protocol. We call it SilverCreek, the official SNMP Test Suite (see www.iwl.com).

Often what happens when you license software is that the prospective customer's Legal/Purchasing Departments make some assumptions. They assume that the software is going to become a component of the company's manufactured products. Thus, they want guarantees, assurances, commitments, etc. about the licensed software, because of the risk of incorporating software from a third party on 10,000 or 100,000 units per month. From their point of view, if some aspect of the software is found to be infringing on some patent, they would be subject or at risk for millions of dollars of damages for all the products they shipped. It is a very valid concern and they are quite correct in being very vigilant. It is obviously a very serious risk and they should do everything possible to prevent it.

In our case, our software is installed on a Windows, Linux, or Solaris machine and used as a piece of test equipment in the lab. It sends pathological packets (tests) to the device under test and evaluates the results as a PASS, FAIL, UNINTIATED, etc. This way our customer can find and fix bugs in the protocol implementation of their product prior to shipping their product to the general public.

Our software, SilverCreek, is NOT incorporated in the customer's manufacturered product.

All the ideas in SilverCreek, all the software we developed was our own original work so we are not worried about patent infringement. However, the Patent and Trademark Office has issued patents for some questionable inventions, so it is always possible they will inappropriately grant a patent on something that is obvious or predates the application and then there will be a problem. However, if this happened, we would find a work-around and supply that to the customer. It is a very small risk.

Nevertheless, the Legal/Purchasing Departments demand $100,000 worth of insurance and contract negotation for a matter that is less than $5,000. So what is the solution?

Package the software on cheap hardware. Then, the purchase goes through a different route within the big company. It becomes a "commodity" purchase, and it drives home the fact that SilverCreek is, essentially, a piece of test equipment.

If you step back and look at the big picture, almost everything you purchase has software in it -- cars, trucks, watches, radios, kitchen range hoods, can openers, pencil sharpeners, etc. The purchasing department does not enter into a complex negotiation regarding the software licensing issues when they buy a pencil sharpener, so why should SilverCreek be any different? The answer is package it in a piece of hardware and then it is over.

IP Lawyers in our area charge about $300 per hour, so two hours of one is the equivalent of a Dell laptop.

Just a thought.

Standing up for Tea Drinkers

Today is day 69 of our kitchen remodeling project. I won't blog about it -- that's just too suburban, middle class, and dull.

This entry is about tea.

The dust and disarray from the remodelling project have taken their toll on my emotional health, so I checked into a Bed and Breakfast. Studies show 69 days is the absolute limit for living without cleanliness and tidiness; 100% of the population cracks up on day 70. I had to get out and the B&B was a quick solution.

I stayed at the Cliff Crest Inn at 407 Cliff Street near the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. I could write about the Cliff Crest, but it would just be redundant with the entry at http://www.cliffcrestinn.com/ and how many synonyms are there for charming? Answer: not that many and they connote witchcraft which would be way off base.

I stayed in the Apricot Room, it was pleasant, quiet, citrus-smelling. I heard a few sirens in the middle of the night, but very little traffic noise.

At breakfast in the morning, I was offered fresh persimmons from the garden, but unfortunately, I never acquired a taste for them, so I declined. Then I asked for tea. I did not see a kettle of hot water and only a few tea bags labelled "Lipton" in a small basket. This is not a good sign. I became very concerned.

Before I get into the horrors and terrors of Lipton tea, I know that hostesses prefer coffee drinkers. They are the majority and coffee is easier to serve and prepare. I used to be a coffee drinker. It is part of the my cultural heritage from the super cold North of my youth. Come in from the cold to a home, an office, a store in the Northland, and you are greeted with "How about a cup of coffee?" Afterall, you need to warm up so you say, "Sure." "You betcha."

One cup of coffee changes me for the worse. The very worse. Before your very eyes, a pleasant, soft-spoken woman transforms into an attack dog leaping for your jugular. After a few incidents with these unwelcomed, coffee-induced, personality changes, I switched to tea.

Tea is an acquired taste. Teas offer bouquets, like wine. The tea plant produces a flush of a full complement of leaves on the average of every 40 days. The flush of leaves is plucked and the gathering of the flushes is called a crop. The first flush of leaves in the Spring are the most tender and best tasting tea leaves. The second flush is less tasty. At the end, the tea leaves are tough and quite bitter.

I believe Lipton tea is made from the last flush, using the toughest and most bitter leaves. So if you want to offer the worst possible tea to a discerning tea drinker, serve Lipton and demonstrate to everyone that you are leading an inauthentic life.

When Plato described the cave imagery in the Republic, this is exactly what he had in mind. Plato said that in our quest for truth and beauty we are chained like slaves only seeing the shadows on the wall at the back of the cave. The real objects are behind us, illuminated by the light from the mouth of the cave, but we are only seeing the shadows on the back wall of the cave. Mere two-dimensional reflections, the shadows are sans light, sans color. Seeing the shadows are not even close to perceiving the true nature of the objects casting them.

Lipton tea is an inauthentic, insubstantial shadow of what true tea should be.

However, I am sorry to say the situation worsened. I asked "is there any other tea?" The hostess brought me a basket containing two kinds of green tea, chamomile tea, English Breakfast tea and one other herbal tea.

Ah... green tea. Huge health benefits. Very au courant in the Western world. Hugely variable quality. I have not developed a taste for it yet.

Chamomile tea. Great if you have a stomach ache or want to calm down and go to sleep. Not the type of tea to motivate you to get up and do what needs to be done first thing in the morning.

English Breakfast Tea. This tea could only be produced by the same country that offers you a piece of bread, fried to death, in grease from last night's dinner. (I am not making this up. I was offered this for breakfast on my first trip to England and I never set foot there again.) Strong tea but obviously also made from the last flush. If "flush" and "last" makes you think of the last thing in your body and a toilet, you would be having the right associations and images for this tea.

So, what should a Bed and Breakfast offer to their tea drinking guests?

Only teas using leaves from the first and second blush and these teas:

Darjeeling
Earl Grey
Hojicha (a roasted green tea)
Lapsang Souchong
Constant Comment (a general purpose orange pekoe)

In the herbal tea family:
Chamomile
Cranberry
Peach
Lemon

Constantin, the proprietor of the Cliff Crest, asked me if I enjoyed my stay enough to return. I said yes, but, I would actually only return if they provided the teas indicated above, or, I brought my own tea.

Gideon's Trumpet - beginning of the decline

I just finished reading Gideon's Trumpet by Anthony Lewis. The book is a sort of legal history of the famous Supreme Court Case, Gideon v. Wainwright. In this case, the Supreme Court decided that an indigent defendant, accused of a crime, would be appointed an attorney if he could not afford one.

The year was 1963.

Prior to this Supreme Court decision, it was up to each individual state to determine their policies and procedures for representation. In Florida, where Gideon was accused and convicted of a crime, he had to represent himself. Of course, he lost. While he was in prison, he figured out how to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court decided to hear his case. As a result, the Supreme Court determined that the 6th and 14th amendment were intended to mean that all defendants must be represented by counsel in order to get a fair trial.

What I found interesting about this book was the absolute joy and enthusiasm that Anthony Lewis conveyed about the wonderful workings of the U.S. Judiciary system. He relishes the idea that a poor, somewhat pathetic man, like Clarence Earl Gideon, can have his day in court. Literally. Anthony Lewis is definitely an UBER fan of the U.S. system of government. He is almost like a sales person for the American judiciary.

The copyright on the book is 1963. Authors usually finish writing a book the year before the copyright, so probably Anthony Lewis finished it in 1962. In November of 1963, President John Kennedy was assassinated.

I don't think anyone has written a positive, enthusiastic book about the U.S. Government since.

We launch a new product -- Internet speedbump -- iSpeedbump

Product launches are always an adventure. We finally got our new product "iSpeedbump" out the door. Since it is very different than our other products (network protocol test products), we thought it should have its own website: www.ispeedbump.com

Since "speedbump" was taken as a URL, we added the "i" for Internet speedbump. That's exactly what our new product does. It gives priority to classes of traffic for small offices and home offices.

So, if your teenagers are playing "Worlds of Warcraft" and you are trying to use VoIP to talk to your sister who is stationed in Lagos, Nigeria, you can give the voice traffic higher priority than the game traffic. If you have a website in your house and outside users are constantly downloading photos or home movies, you can give that much lower priority. So basically you are in control of what traffic gets what priorities.

Another version of iSpeedbump can go into your colo to help you manage the billing situation with your ISP. Many ISPs use the 95th percentile billing model. This means that if you are at all close to using your available bandwidth, you could have a big problem and get a much bigger monthly bill than you planned. ISPs check every few minutes to see if you are using more than the available bandwidth you contracted. If you are, but you are doing it less than 5% of the time, then no problem, but once you go over 5%, they put you in the next up billing category! So, instead of paying $300 per month for DSL, you get a bill for $1,000 because you went into T1 territory. So, how do you avoid that problem? iSpeedbump checks every few minutes just like the ISPs are doing, but unlike the ISPs, iSpeedbump will throttle back your traffic. That's right, iSpeedbump will intentionally slow it down so that you stay within the 5% limit. Keep in mind that it doesn't take much to get a big surge in traffic that puts you over. Good things can make it happen -- like a favorable story in the Wall Street Journal about you or your website. Or, bad things can make it happen -- like a scandal or negative news. You don't want to have to turn off your website, you just want to slow down access.

iSpeedbump is not for everybody, but for people who have the issues described above, it is great value for the money! Less than $500 for the little box. See www.ispeedbump.com.

Hemingway in Mendocino

We drove to Mendocino last week. It is a different sort of coastal California here. The air is very clean. Black hawks fly above the ocean cliffs. Deers congregate on the nearby fields at dusk. I can see all this from our room at the Heritage House.

My husband and I are here for a few days to help his recuperation. He suffers from back injuries that prevent him standing or even walking more than a short distance. He has been spiraling downward emotionally; constant pain takes its toll. A change of scenery seemed like a good idea.

Our room at the Heritage House is Deerfield Seven. It is done in a sort of faux French provincial; a throwback to the 1950s. One critical Internet reviewer called it "decorated like your grandma's house". I don't mind much. Sometimes all the modern marble and granite and shades of beige in modern hotels can get rather boring. This place evokes memories of the 1950s -- cocktail hour, the Cold War, and Hemingway.

It is different; a change of scenery.

Our room looks out on a field and cliffs and the ocean. This is a big view. A panorama. One wall of the room is all windows with a big sliding glass door. We look through this wall of windows and view the ocean while we are comfortably seated in the blue upholstered swivel chairs in our French provincial parlor.

There's no television in the room, no phone, no Internet access, and no cell phone service. My husband dozes off, reads a little, and watches the ocean. I am reading and re-reading Hemingway. Every hour or so I get up and stretch. I check out the effect of the light and wind on the water. Then I go back to Hemingway.

I finished "A Farewell to Arms". I was vaguely hoping that the story would have a different ending and that Catherine Barkley would become a feminist in her old age. Of course it did not happen. I still enjoyed re-reading the novel.

I forgot how much the characters drink in Hemingway's novels. Reading about all the drinking has made me thirsty. Our room has a complimentary minibar (first complimentary one I have ever seen), so although I would normally have a cup of tea, I decide to plunge into the total Hemingway experience and fix myself a gin and tonic. It is very refreshing.

The taste of hard liquor brings me furthur back to the 1950s and now I start in on "For Whom the Bell Tolls". I have never read it before and I am feeling the thrill of reading a classic for the first time. Unfortunately, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" is harder going. The cast of characters are mostly Republican banditos fighting the Fascists in Spain's civil war. They are not very likeable. One is a drunk. The others like to argue a lot and bait each other into arguments. It seems like a sort of competition of aspiring alpha males. This does not interest me. These unlikeable people are banded together on a mission to blow up a bridge.

Time to get up and stretch and look at the light and wind on the ocean. It dawns on me that there is a reason women readers like Hemingway's novels. Hemingway's male characters are realistically drawn, heterosexual men who develop deep feelings for women. Of course, they are interested in sex, but they are also deeply connected to one woman. I think this is comforting to most women. Hemingway's universal theme -- that none of us goes through life without significant pain and loss -- makes his work appealing to all readers. Love, pain, and loss.

Now it is time to awaken my husband to dress for dinner.

Do Financial Planners Come from Hell?

My husband and I have been working with a financial planner for a couple of years. The financial planner is Steve Brown of Asset Planning & Management in Aptos, California. In general, the financial planner has done a better job of managing our investments than we would have done on our own.

We had a meeting scheduled today to specifically discuss the plan for my retirement. After reviewing the status of some of our assets, Steve Brown, turned to me and said "Your last email to me is a complete waste of my time."

A copy of that email follows.

----------------------------Email Start---------------------------------------
4/14/2006
To: Steve Brown
From: Chris Wellens

Steve,

I think that you, my husband, and I need to have a meeting to get back on the same page. We seem to be going in different directions and that is not going to work out very well for our financial future.

When we first met with you and started this process, you felt that we had a "mishmash" of investments and you were going to straighten that out. I think we got started on that path and made some progress. However, now we seem to have wandered back into mishmash.

I would like to see a coherent plan to get us to our goals. I think we should be defining how much of each type of investment we should have (real estate, stocks, bonds, cash, gold, art, etc.), by what date, so we can live off the interest and dividends. I would like to start with my end goal of retirement, and work backwards from there.

Please let me know when we can have this meeting.

-----------------------------------Email End----------------------------

(1) If financial planners are not coming up with a plan for your retirement, then what are they doing?

(2) Is it normal for financial planners to tell their clients that the client's questions and goals are a waste of time?