It has really gone too far. I don’t follow sports at all, but I heard the bullshit reasons for expelling one U.S. Team member prior to the closing ceremonies, now we read this:

The International Olympic Committee will investigate the actions of Canadian women’s hockey players who celebrated their gold medal victory Thursday night by swigging beer and smoking cigars on the ice in Vancouver.

A number of players, including 18-year-old superstar Marie-Philip Poulin, were drinking alcohol on the ice following the team’s 2-0 defeat of the United States. (The legal drinking age in British Columbia is 19.) Players lingered for more than 70 minutes after the awards ceremony reveling in the arena, which was empty except for media and arena staff.

For crying out loud! They’re Canadian! They drink and smoke, thus enjoying life, much like we used to here in the U.S.A. until we allowed religious zealots that are one hijacked plane away from being the next Bin Laden into our governmental process. Now, everything which makes life worth living is taxed out of existence and banned in most places you would want to do it. Our jobs are being shipped over seas and viciously poor quality product is coming back in return, along with payoffs into the pockets of the terrorists which have been put into government by those same religious zealots who claim abortion is killing yet blow up abortion clinics with patients and workers inside.

Let me go on record as telling this terrorist organizations the following: You may have fucked America beyond recognition by taxing and or removing alcohol, tobacco, and all real pleasure known by man, BUT LEAVE CANADA ALONE. All one has to do is take one glance at this debacle known as health care reform to know that one more religious zealot added to the mix would make us the next Iran, not something any country would want to be, except the “moral minority” bound and determined to force their religious practices upon the world…just like Bin Laden.

I guess I could also title this post “Are There Any Ethics Left in Technical Recruiting”, but everybody already knows the answer is “No!” In order to make anything blog worthy about that statement, one must be able to demonstrate just how non-existent ethics really are. This goes way beyond the typical practice of flying illegal aliens over, paying them on a 1099, and stacking them 8 deep in a room at Homestead Studio Suites. I’ve had a lot of smaller examples over the past few weeks, but one recent example really stands out and should serve as a good example for the industry.

Like many other bottom feeding consulting firms, this firm uses a precious stone/metal as its name. A more accurate name for the firm would be clinker, but that is an entirely different blog post. Like many other bottom feeding consulting firms, this one boats of its memberships in organizations which are supposed to improve IT and consulting in general. They claim to belong to ASA (American Staffing Association) which has a published code of ethics, and TechServe Alliance (formerly NACCB) which also has a Statement of Business Principles which also wraps up a code of ethics. The thing of it is that nobody actually audits to see if the firm meets any of the requirements or violates the code of ethics. A consultant or a client must crawl across broken glass filing complaints with the organizations with little hope of intervention.

Simply put, once the logo is on the company Web site, it’s business as usual for most of the members. Here’s a shiny example.

Here are your responsibilities as a technical recruiter:

1. To read up enough on the industry skill sets to know that the REQ in your hand requesting a Windows CICS developer is just wrong in so many ways. When a requirement comes in with an acronym you’ve never heard of it is your responsibility to research a definition before including it in your posting.

2. When you publish a phone number with your job/contract opening, it is your responsibility to respond either by email or phone to everyone who leaves a message within 2-3 business days. If you don’t want phone calls your ad must clearly state people are not to call and must not show a phone number.

3. When you present a candidate to a client it is your responsibility to keep the candidate up to date. If the position “ goes on hold” it is your responsibility to inform the candidate the same day. Yes, email is fine. At no time is it ever acceptable to hurl a resume over the wall and ignore the candidate.

4. It is never ethical, moral, and in most cases not even legal to tell a candidate to rewrite their resume to match the job posting with all of the buz words from the requirement highlighted.

5. It is your responsibility to talk with the candidate before presenting them, not only to agree to billing rate, but payment terms and contract duration. It is never acceptable to simply present a resume which came in via email at some point without contacting the person. You will need an email from them stating they have given you the right to present.

There used to be technical recruiting associations which actually enforced these rules…well…the email thing is a rather new addition…replacing fax…but these were basically the rules. They are actually squirreled away in a lot of the ethics codes out there, but you usually have to find a supporting document when interpreting things like:

DO NOT misrepresent a consultant’s pay rate, contract terms, assignment duration, or other subjects pertinent to the business relationship.

DO actively avoid misrepresenting a consultant’s skills or experience.

DO NOT defame clients, consultants or competitors.

To treat all applicants and employees with dignity and respect, and to provide equal employment opportunities, based on bona fide job qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, disability, or any basis prohibited by applicable law.

To maintain high standards of integrity in all advertising, and to assign the best qualified employees to fill clients’ needs.

So, over the course of eight business days I left a message each day with Variable_J. I never received an email or a return voice mail. Adding insult to injury the greeting on Variable_J’s phone sounds like he recorded it after smoking his fourth joint of the morning. It leaves a caller with the impression he is off satisfying the munchies and may not return for days.

After eight days, I had pretty much had enough of this. I called the main number and asked for Variable_J’s boss. I was told that was Variable_K and transferred to his phone. I left a message stating that I had been trying to contact Variable_J for eight business days without response. I also informed him that the greeting on the voice mail sounded like he was stoned, and that the combination was highly unprofessional.

Some time later my cell phone rang with a RESTRICTED number. Naturally I didn’t answer. Telemarketers call like that now I’ve been told. A few minutes after that failed Variable_K called back from a regular number. He told me it was not cool to call the boss of a recruiter even if the recruiter wasn’t doing their job. He said never to bother him again and hung up.

You know, there was a time when the New York Attorney General would take the time to file wire fraud charges against such a place. Then again, that same AG tended to book a date with a hooker right after such a filing, so I guess justice must be somewhat limited in the world. Isn’t it really wire fraud to post membership logo’s on your corporate Web site, then adhere to none of the ethics codes those logos imply?

http://www.americanstaffing.net/members/code_of_ethics.cfm

http://www.techservealliance.org/about-techserve/techserve-business-principles.cfm

If you’ve worked in IT for any length of time you have encountered every type of bottom feeding technical recruiter. Some firms in the Chicago area have standing instructions with their receptionist to route all job related phone calls directly to a voice mail box and to empty that mail box any time it is full. I have heard of greeting messages from some, supposed heads of technical recruiting, that they would not be returning any voice mail left regarding a job opening.

It’s pretty obvious that ASA, TechServerAlliance, and all the rest of these agencies don’t bother policing their membership otherwise “clinker” wouldn’t be able to have their logos on its Web site.

I remember quite some time ago when there was an ad campaign which simply said “vote the crooks out of office”. Any money it raised went into running more ads. There were even T-shirts sold to fund the campaign. The campaign didn’t care what political party the candidate was in. Rather, it had a simply philosophy, every incumbent was obviously a career criminal which needed to be moved further away from the tax payer’s wallet.

Funny how things come back into style. I’m seeing a lot of the same campaign. Some say crook and others say criminal, but they have the same sentiment. We’ve all been royally screwed by both Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. No, I’m not talking about Clarence Thomas, who said “no job is worth this” during his confirmation hearings, then took the robe and voted in favor of his former client, Monsanto, during a genetics trial which screwed farmers world-wide, not just in America, and every American tax payer that eats. I’m talking about the recent decision by the Supreme Court which said the limits on corporate campaign dollars were unconstitutional. Any entity can now spend as much as they want promoting the candidate of their choice, so now, big corporations are simply going to put forth one of their own employees and spend shareholder’s money promoting the employee, who is expected to help enact legislation no ethical person would enact.

Today, we are all watching as the checkbooks are open and the sky is the limit when it comes to trampling down health care reform. I would believe the healthcare companies have actually spent more in lobbying efforts than they spent in executive bonuses and stock options over the past 4 years.

Let’s be real here. We have the Post Office. We also have UPS and FedEx. The Post Office couldn’t turn a profit on a bet given its charter, and I’m OK with that. Six days per week a mail carrier delivers mail to every address in the country. Anyone that currently is inside of our borders can write a letter, place it in an envelop, and mail said letter to any address in the continental U.S. for under a buck. Not only is the cost low, but the letter will arrive within 3-5 business days…even on Saturday…for no extra charge. We always joke about the Post Office delivering the Christmas mail in June, but for the most part, it’s a money losing business which does a good job. UPS and FedEx have found ways to both compete with and utilize the Post Office. Those who have money and don’t like the Post Office have other options. Those who don’t have much in the way of money, still have service. Even if you never mail a letter, the Post Office will continue to deliver mail to your address.

I’m a Republican, though it hurts to say that out loud after two terms of snot-nosed-George. I want a public option. We already have Gubmint Motors putting out shitty cars and other manufacturers putting out better ones. Yes, you “could” get by with a Gubmint Motors vehicle, but after the screwing they gave the tax payer, nobody who pays taxes would even consider adding insult to injury by purchasing a new Gubmint Motors vehicle. Admittedly, in the future, I’m sure Congress and/or the White House will authorize pissing even more tax dollars down that abyss and funding programs to get low income people new Gubmint Motors vehicles to help clean up the environment. Of course, since many states have a mandatory insurance law, that program will simply be there to help fill the prisons faster.

I didn’t want Gubmint Motors. I was vehemently against giving any faction of those lying-thieving-inept-bastards one red cent from the federal treasury. We ended up with Gubmint Motors. While they will cook the books in Aurthur Andersen accounting style to “show” a profit, they can never pay back enough to the treasury to cover the royal *(&)_(*&ing we got by them ducking out on their pension and healthcare liabilities. Until they cover all of that along with every cent we’ve had to pay every former GM employee in unemployment and health insurance benefits, they haven’t turned a profit. I want to see a law enacted which garnishes the wages of GM’s upper management and Board of Directors taking 70% of their wages and 100% of all bonus and stock options from them until they pay back every last red cent of that debt.

On the flip side, I want a public option. I want a government run health plan which provides all of the basic coverage needed by both individuals and families and I want every citizen to have the option of signing up without any exclusions. Rather than basing the premiums on the current industry trend, I want the premiums to be based upon a person’s ability to pay. At some point your income will be low enough your coverage is free. Those people making more than $180K/yr (based upon adjusted gross on their 1040) would find the premiums quite high compared to regular commercial plans. The Gubmint Insurance option would never make money, but it would force a nationwide ethical threshold for insurance.

Right now we have absolutely nothing establishing a bottom. Each state licenses the health insurance providers it allows to operate within its borders. Naturally, there have been an awful lot of bribes and some states only have one or two “licensed” providers. This really hit home recently.

A friend from NY asked me what I did for health insurance. I said I went to this eHealthInsurance.com Web site, answered some questions, and took a real 80/20 policy which costs less than $500 every two months. I told him there were dozens of providers selling insurance there. We are in the same age bracket and industry. In NY there were about three different companies providing insurance and the “cheap” policy was pricing out at $1700/month if you wanted anything other than a “surgery only” policy. Just for grins he changed his zipcode to mine and wa-la! There were about a dozen competing insurance companies and he found premiums of under $500.

Will Gibmint Insurance help me? Yes, but not as much as it will help him and everybody else in that boat. People in those markets will flock to Gubmint Insurance simply until the premiums in their area drop to an acceptable level. I expect there would be a shuffling of premium pricing in IL. Whenever book sales are high and I’m working a lot of overtime consulting, my current insurance would be best. When there is another slow down and the income stream drops to around $20K, Gubmint Insurance based on ability to pay would be best.

It’s up to us to fix this. The midterm elections are coming up. Not only must we vote the criminals out of office by making certain no incumbent returns, but we must replace said incumbent with any third party candidate vying for the seat. We went through this back in the days of Ross Perot. Before the dude went weird and dropped out of the election, America was set to elect its first third party candidate. No matter how awful of a president he turned out to be, he would have been better than what we ended up with. One thing happened though. During the debates and the interviews, the two main party candidates fell all over themselves to point out just how much like Ross they were.

I’m not normally very political, but this is pissing me off. It’s obvious the bill of sale has been completed by the healthcare industry for every public official in Washington at this time. It’s time we flood Washington with people from all of those “other” parties who’ve never held public office, never had a taste of lobbyist dollars, and never forced an earmark into a bill just to get some lobbyist project funded.

Vote the crooks out of office and send in the third party candidates. It is the only way to effect change at this point.

Those of us who see the destruction and devastation all around us find it difficult to condone what others pursue as “a good business practice.” We have heard for years about stock market players (in particular mutual fund and hedge fund managers) pursuing short term gains to juice their overall portfolio. We have watched corporations which were once the model for the world sell their future down the drain in order to make a fast buck this quarter (think GM and its pension plan.) Hell, we the tax payer, have had to bail most of them out this year, yet their executives still demand multi-million dollar compensation packages.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it has finally hit agriculture in an end-of-the-industry way. I’ve watched it happening for the past couple of decades. I’m not talking about the huge corporate farms poisoning the world in order to make a fast buck. Eventually the excess population would be weeded off and the remaining people would simply quit buying stuff from supermarket chains. Perhaps China would claim jurisdiction over the corporate executives who poisoned so many. After all, in China they have public executions for people that poison consumable products.

What is happening now is a perfect storm which will leave the land unable to grow enough food and no trick of technology will help it. I’m not some alarmist tree hugger. I’m simply someone whose made a living over the past 20+ years being a problem solving analyst. I can find nothing which will solve this problem. But I can find historical evidence to back up my statements though.

The information is a bit hard to find on-line without buying DVDs, but the History Channel has run at least one show covering the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and how the continual irrigation to grow things in a desert lead to “salted earth.” You can even find textbooks covering the subject of irrigation failure. http://mygeologypage.ucdavis.edu/cowen/~GEL115/115CH17oldirrigation.html

Irrigation, however, is only a tiny portion of the problem. In fact, irrigation was the first warning sign we were headed down the path of short term gains destruction. Today, all the stops have been removed and we are running flat out towards world wide starvation, all for the sake of a fast buck.

As always, MBAs are at the root of this problem. After having trashed every industry they have touched, they moved into agriculture. First it was just the equipment manufacturers, then it was the packing plants, and then into livestock production. Since they couldn’t control enough that way, they bribed the politicians with lobbyist dollars to change the tax laws. Just about the only way to pass on a family farm to your heirs became the LLC-trust tool. If you didn’t use it, the government would take 75% of the estimated value of all assets in death taxes. The LLC-trust tool eventually puts all family farms under the control of a corporation, and guess who runs the corporations? Nice huh?

Most of you will have no idea this is going on. Most of you simply see the advertising on the product packaging showing a hard working family farmer, his picturesque little plot of land with a big red barn, and perhaps a small family. Wide open spaces, happy livestock, and a person who is one with the land. Subconsciously you buy into this because you want to believe it. The simple fact is, nothing could be further from the truth. Every year Willie Nelson and a bunch of others put on an event called Farm-Aid, but every year, fewer and fewer understand what is behind it. The simple truth is, they are trying to save the last few remaining family farms which actually live up to that picturesque marketing image. Most of them have “gone corporate” in some fashion. Sometimes they simply are forced into a contract to raise livestock in an un-healthy manner (watch the documentary Food, Inc. for some memorable images of this.) Other times the LLC-trusts they are forced to do business with force them into a raping of the land.

When the trusts first started out, they weren’t a purely evil thing like they are today. The entire focus and charter of the trust was the care and husbandry of the land. Back then the trust would partner with a farm family on a 50/50 or similar basis. Buildings and equipment on premises were maintained, and soil tests were regularly done on the land to ensure it was improving every year.

Today, the MBAs have put the industry in a death spiral. The entire focus is squeezing every risk free dollar possible out of this goose until it quits laying golden eggs. Massively high cash rents are requested, and bottom feeders pony up. There is no soil testing nor soil care plan. The bottom feeders over plant and provide the soil with no additional inputs. The soil is strip mined in the truest sense of the word, only this kind of strip mining doesn’t leave a gaping hole in the ground. You “see” this strip mining in the average yield movement or relative to fields around them.

Of course now, it is illegal for a realtor or anybody else to request the five year average yield report from the ASCS office. Only the owner can be given that. Why? Because once land has been had by a strip mine farming operation it is worthless. Nobody living locally will purchase it. The realtor has to sucker in an “investor” from far away promising the new owner the same continued high dollar cash rent which will pay for the land in no time. Most banks in or near a farming community will no longer issue a loan to anyone who says they expect the farming operation to pay for itself via cash rent. They’ve gone down that road before. Five years into the loan the land is ruined and absolutely worthless. The bank is left holding the bag in most cases. A bunch of money spent with lobbyists got the law changed so the buyer now has to take the realtor’s word for the yields when the current owner refuses to cough up the ASCS documentation.

I’ve been watching this happen a lot lately. In an effort to try and squeeze out every last nickel from the golden goose of LLC-trust land, the farm managers have ceased doing any and all maintenance on the property. They got the cash rent jacked up extra high because the farm came with on-site grain and equipment storage. A functioning grain dryer was also pointed out. Well, the grain bins have gone past their life expectancy and the dryer ceased functioning two years ago, but the rent hasn’t come down. The new trend now is to tell the tenant that they have to provide their own storage and drying facilities. The original farm family would roll over in their graves hearing this, but today it is considered “good business practice” by the MBAs and Farm Management Teams.

Perhaps it is easier for me to see living out in the farm area part time. I’ve watched one farm which, while not the best in the world, used to average 120-160 bushel per acre corn and 35-42 bushel per acre for soybeans. The farmer who had it died. Things changed hands a few times until it ended up in some kind of trust renting to a strip mine farming operation. The first few years they had the farm the auger cart made many trips across the fields hauling grain away from the combine. It was not uncommon to see the cart weighting for one of 4-6 semis to return from an elevator. Two years in, the auger cart was making far fewer trips and you got to see trucks waiting for hours to get filled. Just over a year ago I watched as the combine, the auger cart, and the first truck all left the bean field at the same time. Ah, but a big farming operation like that can play the insurance game filing claim after claim. The insurance companies don’t mandate inspections and proof of good farming practices. They simply cash the premium checks and hope for the best. In the mean time, everybody’s premiums go up around the country.

Once upon a time, these operations were an isolated case. Now they are common. In fact, the MBAs that run much of the Ag industry magazine business are starting to hold them up as shining examples of “best farmers” due to the size of their operations and the equipment leasing business they give the large equipment manufacturers.

What is overlooked in all of this is the fact the land cannot be magically healed once an operation like this is done with it. The land will have to lie fallow for three to five years getting treatments of manure and lime. That won’t get it back to healthy, but it will get it back to where some legitimate farming practices can begin to tend it.

The strip mining practice isn’t just an American problem. Most of the large operations have grabbed as many dollars as they can in this country and raced down to Brazil ( and a few other places) buying up cheap land and stripping it bare. The Ag magazines are always running stories about large farming operations which exist on multiple continents. Think about that. A farming operation existing on multiple continents. Obviously not that picturesque family farm you see on the packages in the supermarket, so how come they are legally allowed to use those images?

I have always pondered this question. I ponder it seemingly every week when I listen to the news. No matter how large of a crime a lawyer participates in, it seems they never get disbarred. Let’s take a story most of you have been familiar with.

Back in 2005 we started seeing articles like the summary posted here:

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud093005.htm

(search for Navistar once you get to the page.)

In a 2006 Business Wire press release we read the following:

As part of the review of accounting issues, the company’s audit committee has completed an independent investigation into the propriety of accounting and auditing confirmation matters relating to vendor rebates in fiscal year 2005. T he investigation was conducted by an independent law firm and found no evidence of fraud or intentional misconduct.

You can find the article here:

http://ir.navistar.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=199251

Not long after this, October of 2007 in fact, we started seeing articles which contained the following:

The independent investigation also identified instances of intentional misconduct that resulted in some of the company’s smaller, but in some cases material, restatement adjustments. “ Most of the individuals who were involved in instances of misconduct are no longer employed by the company,” Navistar said.

http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/10045683/c_10023908

In October of 2009 we started seeing articles like the following:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Navistar-SEC-settle-apf-2643276182.html?x=0&.v=2

One cannot follow this progression without asking why did the SEC not disbar all of the attorneys involved in the 2006 statement. It’s rather obvious they were either willing participates in a cover up, or simply saying what they were paid to say without performing much (if any) of an investigation. The timing of the 2006 article made it appear as a rather obvious attempt to stop investors from bailing on the stock. It soon became obvious nobody was buying the bullshit, hence the back peddling in 2007.

My concern here isn’t with the sear sizzled books fresh from the barbecue, nor with the “deal” the SEC did on our behalf allowing the company to not admit any wrong doing (even after the company issued a statement saying evidence of it had been found.) No, My issue here is that the SEC didn’t serve the public interest by forcing disbarment of all lawyers involved in the 2006 release. We are never going to stop corporate fry cooks (accountants) from serving up mouth watering financial statements which have no basis in fact until we make it a death penalty offense. That is simply a given. We cannot begin to hope such frauds will be uncovered if the offenders can simply pay lawyers to say things which have no basis in fact in order to continue duping investors. At a minimum, the SEC settlement should have demanded disbarment for all.

Since the “moderators” on the Publish-L newsgroup wouldn’t allow this post unless the correct descriptions of certain companies were removed, I have posted it here.

eBooks are pretty useless for any information which requires more than one font, an image, or anything resembling formatting. I have had many “professional” services attempt to convert books from “The Minimum You Need to Know” book series into ebook format and the final product was a useless puddle of bits.

The current “industry standard” is to use EPUB. I’m sure EPUB will succeed because like PDF, it is the poorest possible choice for a “standard”. Industry leaders and MBAs alike always embrace the poorest possible decision. The EPUB format we have now will not be compatible with the EPUB format we will use in 2011. The standard was rushed and from an IT/Geek standpoint it is bad bad bad bad unforgivably bad. Even Microsoft, father of most bad things to hit IT in the past 20 years, hasn’t written a poorer specification.

In this economy, people who spend $300+ on a reader are going to spend the bulk of their time reading through the 200,000+ “free” titles which come “bundled” with the reader. Unless there is _specific_ information they need from a book you have put out only in EPUB format, they aren’t going to spend any money on an EPUB format. “If” you happen to have a novel or other “lit” type book which happens to be getting a weekly mention on both Oprah and CNN (think “High on Arrival”) you will see “some” eReader owners plunking down cash on it.

Most books will be “zero value” which get put out via EPUB format. The readers are currently being hawked as portals to this large free library. Most marketers for the devices are also promising to continue expanding the “free” library. In less than two years each eReader supporting the EPUB format will have in excess of one million titles available for “free”. There are currently over 200,000 “classics” available. Each year there will be a new round of books which fall off the copyright protection merry go round plus there will be a new batch of books cranked out by publishers/authors which are released “free” in EPUB format.

Some of the new “free” books will be released in their entirety, and others will be released as a group of chapters. Those of you who think the current tech weenies will continue to be appeased by “first chapter free” sites are smoking something that isn’t sold over the counter. I have one technical book I will be releasing for free in PDF format once it has gone through editing. This will be the entire book. Due to the horrible limitations of EPUB, it will not be released in EPUB format. The book supports/covers an OpenSource Java class library which currently has over 5000 users/downloaders on SourceForge. The PDF will be bundled with the next major release of the library so new developers will have a much easier time getting up to speed with the library. Why did I spend 4 months of my time writing the book? I needed to use the library for a project and there wasn’t a single stitch of usable documentation. Why would I give such a book away for free? OpenSource users pay for nothing. Period. If it has anything to do with an OpenSource project on SourceForge, they expect it to be free and will simply look for a different library or tool rather than pay for a book. The book, however, is another book in “The Minimum You Need to Know” series. The rest of the series doesn’t cover OpenSource libraries from SourceForge. When the PDF gets bundled with the next downloadable update, I will have 5000+ developers that are now familiar with “The Minimum You Need to Know” book series. It may be two weeks or five years, but eventually they will need information on one of the topics covered by the series. If they liked the book they got for free, they will first look at my book series because they “know” it.

My current novel “Infinite Exposure” has been released in eBook form. I give away the first 18 chapters in both EPUB and PDF format. That version ends with a paragraph explaining that the readers have been reading a promotional version and they must purchase a retail version to find out how the book ends. Those who are curious enough about the book will spend the money. $4 for the eBook version or $24 for the hard cover (there will never be a paperback version.) Once you upload a “free” PDF version of your book to a couple of the “free” book sites you will find a strange thing happens. Set up a Google or other monitor for your title and have it send you updates. Every couple of weeks I find a new “free” book site has not only the PDF copy of the book, but has taken the time to either scrape and paste reviews of the book onto their site, or to provide links to book reviews. Some of the sites are kind enough to provide some kind of download count information. The “I want everything for free” crowd appears to number in the hundreds of thousands, if the counters are accurate. How many were simply download bots as opposed to actual people reading? No idea. When was the last time any of you put out a marketing packet/kit which was willingly _pulled_ 100,000 or more times? I’ll wager many of you paid money to send marketing out via one or more email marketing services only to see no sales and be completely unable to verify the hit counts they were sending to you in the weekly emails. I spent about half an hour chopping the novel off at a logical point, generating the PDF, and uploading it to two sites. Every couple of weeks I find it listed somewhere else. More importantly though, I find the glowing reviews listed along with it.

Microsoft, a company which has produced absolutely worthless software for decades, has trained most people to accept “good enough” as the way it is. Hell, Microsoft has to have years of great days all back to back along with the alignment of critical star configurations in order to have a product which can aspire to be “good enough”. Anybody who has had to endure pathetic products like Word, Windows, Vista, (the we are gonna charge you for these bug fixes Windows 7 “release”), Bob, Money, or the countless other “products” pushed out the door by Microsoft has found their attitude adjusting towards “good enough” being a forward looking goal rather than a fall back position.

The only publishers I see making anything at all out of the current EPUB trend are the publishers with a “long tail.” This “tail” can extend both forward and backward, if you happen to have some kind of trademarked series such as my “The Minimum You Need to Know” or, as other publishers have with “for dummies”, “for idiots”, etc. (I haven’t checked lately, but I believe “for Complete MBAs” is still available. That would cover dummies, idiots, and Godless genetic misfits without infringing on the other trademarks.) I expect it will take up to a year for all 5000+ current users of that OpenSource library to pull down updates. I haven’t done much tracking to see how many new adopters are coming along, but there are continued improvements to the library, so there will be at least a trickle of new users each year. Every copy of my $45-$90 titles which goes out the door after the release will pretty much be payback for the time I put into generating this marketing material. Note that I didn’t write the book specifically to be a marketing tool. I had to do the research anyway, so why not do just a little bit more and write a book? The application I was going to write got done inside of four months instead of one month, but it got done, and I wasn’t on a delivery schedule.

Roland Hughes, President

Logikal Solutions

http://www.logikalsolutions.com

http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com

http://www.infiniteexposure.net

I read Mark Peters article in “the Writer” magazine today and had to take some time to comment. It’s not that I’m offended by the definition of this phrase:

http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/metric_buttload/

I just think the definition is completely wrong. You see, I’m a child that is old enough to remember the 70s because I wasn’t old enough to actually live it at the time. I missed out on the summer of love and the “free love” craze, and haven’t quite gotten over missing out on a time when you could have all the sex you wanted without dying from it. Life just isn’t fair!

More importantly, I remember the gas rationing, gas lines on the news, and the governments ill-fated attempt to force the God-awful metric system down our throats. I believe it was during eighth grade math when they really started to shove that at us. Once the national test scores for math plummeted through the floor boards, they quickly re-adjusted the curriculum so we didn’t have to be bothered with such things again. It wasn’t that we couldn’t learn it, we just outright refused. Trying to force a bunch of farm kids who can tell you the acre size of a patch of ground by glancing at it to start talking in square kilometers was a bad idea from the beginning. We dealt with CCs and grams because we had to get through physical science, and, if the scale already had the notches cut in it, we simply didn’t care about the units. We had grown up all our lives knowing that a bushel of soybeans and a bushel of corn were different sizes. We had no trouble wrapping our minds around the fact 16 fluid ounces was only a pound when you were talking about water or something very close to it. If you wanted us to start weighing herbicide in grams and pesticides in CCs we could care less, just provide the correct scale and measuring cup and 24 will be 24 to us.

No, where the “gubmint” really screwed the pooch was making the auto industry start using metric. This was a classic government operation, meaning, it was a debacle from start to finish. A “ phased in” approach meant that we now had to have two sets of sockets and wrenches with us at all times. Yes, we probably each owned four sets, but they were scattered out across multiple tractors and trucks around the farm. On a good day you could find a complete set in the tool shed where they belonged, but we didn’t have that many good days. Even today, more than 20 years later, you still have to have two complete sets of tools to work on a %*&%(*ing car, on top of the specialty tools!

Ah, but the “gubmint”, in its infinite wisdom, was thinking about all of the European tourist dollars they could get if the speedometers all had kilometers on them. They were also thinking about how wonderful it would be to export American cars to European markets. Obviously they weren’t forward thinking enough to simply mandate every vehicle sold abroad come with a complete set of SAE wrenches and sockets. I mean, at the time, $40 would get you a pretty nice set in a carrying case. Today, roughly $20 will get you a Walmart special set of knuckle skinners. I’m sure if Ace Hardware had suddenly started moving 70,000 sets per year of its Ace brand wrench and socket sets via Detroit that the prices would have come down even sooner.

No, the “gubmint” didn’t think this whole “metric conversion” thing through. Randomly changing nuts and bolts on the vehicles we had to fix pissed us off, but putting Kilometers Per Hour on the speedometer along with MPH told us just how screwed we where. You see, we had just had the gas rationing, endured the Chevy Citation, and watched the incendiary Ford Pinto on numerous news reels. Our “ gubmint” had just told us we couldn’t have a Chrysler 300 with a massive V8 engine which came stock with factory installed dual quad carbs. We had just been told we could no longer have a car, under factory warranty, which would seat six comfortably and do close to 180MPH. That was simply un-American. Now they were trying to play the numbers game with us and change the units at the same time. They wanted us to only have the capability to go 160, but they always ran out of air when they said the units…trying to get us to agree that trimming the limit 20 wouldn’t be so bad. All we had to do was get behind the wheel to know we would never have a fast car again. There before us in blue and white on black was living proof that 160 was only about 120 MPH, and that was considered a ho-hum family sedan, not a fast car, let alone a muscle car.

Shortly after that, they tried to make every car ride like a rail. Detroit kept cutting corners and using more “European Engineering” to lighten the load rather than make a more efficient engine. First came the coil springs, then the struts. Kids these days have probably never ridden in a car that rides like a real car. No matter how much money you throw at it, coil springs and struts do not give you the ride of four leaf springs and a shock. I still have a full sized Jeep Grand Wagoneer with an AMC 360 V8. I can fire that thing up and take it, unfeeling, down roads which throw drivers of modern vehicles through the windshield. Even my 2006 Buick Rendezvous rides like sh*t compared to that thing and a Buick is supposed to have the “boatiest” old-man ride on the planet.

No, I think you need to update the definition of “metric buttload” to what it really is. Something trying to sound like a whole lot more than what it is. Distance runners love the metric system! It’s a lot easier to run 8K than it is 8 miles. HR people love talking about salaries in terms of K meaning a thousand when those of us in the computer field know that K = 1024 and we know they stiffed us on our paycheck because we only made 80,000 instead of the 80K we were promised.

Perhaps we could call “Metric Buttload” a Maadoff Performance Measurement?

At my age, I should really know better. It was late when I got home, but I wanted an update on that poor Asian Yale student, so when I got home I turned on The Jerry Springer Network which pretty much goes under the call letters CNN these days. There, on the AC*360 segment “Keeping Them Honest”, I got to witness the left hand of al-Qaeda in all its glory.

Two people with absolutely no idea what security costs or what national security really is yacking on about a pair of border crossings in Montana which were lightly used, but both getting $33 million in upgrades as part of the stimulus. Not only did they name the towns and show the sites, they even publicly stated that the crossings were closed in the evening. The camera shots showed there was obviously no eye-in-the-sky camera on a pole providing 360 degree surveillance and no significant barricades stopping someone from driving around the location at night.

Thanks guys. You really know how to do Bin Laden’s job for him. Should we name the next terrorist attack to occur on U.S. soil after you? It seems only fitting.

Apparently these two guys don’t watch news reports from any other network either. If they had, they would have known that it took Canada a while to start tightening its entry requirements and most intelligence communities suspect a large pool of sleeper cells is sitting in Canada where border crossing into the U.S. is much easier. God knows it would be tough for them to get across the Mexican border now. The odds of them getting mowed down by the drug dealers thinking their human trafficing business was being infringed upon are quite high. For several months I’ve actually been wondering how the various government agencies were going to spin it in the press when a terrorist cell stupid enough to try crossing that border did get mowed down my people not in uniform. In truth, I’ve been pondering how come someone hasn’t manufactured evidence for drug lord consumption showing that the white supremacists/vigilantes/Minute Men/whatever-they-are-called-in-the-press-this-week slipping across the border offing their troops. If even half of the news reports are correct about those boys spoiling for a shooting war, all it is going to take is for the first drug dealer to open fire on them and the world ammo supply will drop considerably. I’m actually finding it hard to believe it hasn’t happened already. As Adolf Hitler showed the world, no matter how big, advanced, and battle hardened your army is, a war on two fronts with natural barriers will grind it down.

I was too stunned for words when I watched this segment. I didn’t know if I was more stunned that a full tactical unit from Homeland Security wasn’t coming in and confiscating the video, or that the Jerry Springer Network had been this desperate for ratings. Maybe the two guys doing the report thought that if Robert D. Novak and the Washington Post could blatantly breach national security without receiving death sentences that they had no fear of prosecution either.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/20/AR2005102000874.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair

Since neither of these guys understand anything about the cost of security upgrades, let me ’splain a few things to them.

1. National Security is only as strong as its weakest point. This is especially true when we are talking about border crossings.

2. Getting reliable high speed Internet to a remote location isn’t cheap.

While there may very well be only 5 vehicles per day crossing at one of those points, it only takes one van full of fertilizer getting through and meeting another van with barrels of diesel fuel in the back to create something like Oklahoma City (Yes, that particular bombing had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, but you can all remember seeing the pictures of the damage from about that much homemade explosive.)

To the guys who have apparently always lived in huge cities and complained about having to drive over 5 hours to get to the border crossing, let me throw some realities out for you. Trenching nothing more than regular phone cable costs about $8K per mile. Dial up isn’t good enough when you want a 360 degree camera system feeding live high-res photos back to some central Homeland Security location where a massive computer system with complex facial recognition software can scan and identify detainees in a matter of seconds, at most 1 minute. That is the required response time. Your agents can bobble around for at best 3 minutes over at a terminal or walking around with a camera, but you have to try hitting a 1 minute window for transmit+process+response.

Don’t even think you can do this with the lower cost satellite Internet service providers. I had a Satellite provider for years. I finally got rid of them and went with Verizon Wireless. Regular retail satellite service fizzes out when it gets cloudy. It doesn’t have to be raining or storming, just heavy clouds. Anyone who has ever had a satellite ISP knows this. You don’t really want to have security on all but cloudy days, do you? There is a bandwidth problem with retail satellite ISP service. While they could probably tweak a few things for government accounts, they can’t get around current physical limitations without new equipment in orbit.

Maybe they could get a wireless company to build cell towers out there, but I’m guessing they would want the feds to pick up the tab on that. We all saw the video, there’s nothing around. Wireless service is also susceptible to jambing. It is, after all, a very low powered radio. All you need is a transmitter with more power.

That leaves us with trenching a cable. In this day and age, I would hope that they bust for a fiber optic cable big enough to provide phone and TV service to all of the communities along the route. It’s not that I want someone free loading on my tax dollars, just that copper eventually rots and glass doesn’t. You should od things right the first time. 5*70*8000 = 2,800,000 just for the trenching costs. That doesn’t include the equipment needed at multiple points for tapping stations/hubs, or the price of the cable. That is also assuming you could trench straight through without having to route around an oil or other pipe line. Now we need the hi-res high speed all weather camera equipment, secure routers, etc. Let us not forget also that one of the buildings shown had a roof which obviously wasn’t holding back water anymore and the fact there were no visible concrete barricades or other breaching defenses to stop people from driving around the crossing.

Do I believe the political banter about all of the jobs the projects will create? Nope. Not one of those jobs is permanent. In less than a year each of the projects should be completed and all of those people will be looking for work again.

I do believe, however, that if every border crossing is upgraded, we can then turn our attention to other methods of entry.

At my age, I should really know better. It was late when I got home, but I wanted an update on that poor Asian Yale student, so when I got home I turned on The Jerry Springer Network which pretty much goes under the call letters CNN these days. There, on the AC*360 segment “Keeping Them Honest”, I got to witness the left hand of al-Qaeda in all its glory.

Two people with absolutely no idea what security costs or what national security really is yacking on about a pair of border crossings in Montana which were lightly used, but both getting $33 million in upgrades as part of the stimulus. Not only did they name the towns and show the sites, they even publicly stated that the crossings were closed in the evening. The camera shots showed there was obviously no eye-in-the-sky camera on a pole providing 360 degree surveillance and no significant barricades stopping someone from driving around the location at night.

Thanks guys. You really know how to do Bin Laden’s job for him. Should we name the next terrorist attack to occur on U.S. soil after you? It seems only fitting.

Apparently these two guys don’t watch news reports from any other network either. If they had, they would have known that it took Canada a while to start tightening its entry requirements and most intelligence communities suspect a large pool of sleeper cells is sitting in Canada where border crossing into the U.S. is much easier. God knows it would be tough for them to get across the Mexican border now. The odds of them getting mowed down by the drug dealers thinking their human trafficing business was being infringed upon are quite high. For several months I’ve actually been wondering how the various government agencies were going to spin it in the press when a terrorist cell stupid enough to try crossing that border did get mowed down my people not in uniform. In truth, I’ve been pondering how come someone hasn’t manufactured evidence for drug lord consumption showing that the white supremacists/vigilantes/Minute Men/whatever-they-are-called-in-the-press-this-week slipping across the border offing their troops. If even half of the news reports are correct about those boys spoiling for a shooting war, all it is going to take is for the first drug dealer to open fire on them and the world ammo supply will drop considerably. I’m actually finding it hard to believe it hasn’t happened already. As Adolf Hitler showed the world, no matter how big, advanced, and battle hardened your army is, a war on two fronts with natural barriers will grind it down.

I was too stunned for words when I watched this segment. I didn’t know if I was more stunned that a full tactical unit from Homeland Security wasn’t coming in and confiscating the video, or that the Jerry Springer Network had been this desperate for ratings. Maybe the two guys doing the report thought that if Robert D. Novak and the Washington Post could blatantly breach national security without receiving death sentences that they had no fear of prosecution either.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/20/AR2005102000874.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair

Since neither of these guys understand anything about the cost of security upgrades, let me ’splain a few things to them.

1. National Security is only as strong as its weakest point. This is especially true when we are talking about border crossings.

2. Getting reliable high speed Internet to a remote location isn’t cheap.

While there may very well be only 5 vehicles per day crossing at one of those points, it only takes one van full of fertilizer getting through and meeting another van with barrels of diesel fuel in the back to create something like Oklahoma City (Yes, that particular bombing had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, but you can all remember seeing the pictures of the damage from about that much homemade explosive.)

To the guys who have apparently always lived in huge cities and complained about having to drive over 5 hours to get to the border crossing, let me throw some realities out for you. Trenching nothing more than regular phone cable costs about $8K per mile. Dial up isn’t good enough when you want a 360 degree camera system feeding live high-res photos back to some central Homeland Security location where a massive computer system with complex facial recognition software can scan and identify detainees in a matter of seconds, at most 1 minute. That is the required response time. Your agents can bobble around for at best 3 minutes over at a terminal or walking around with a camera, but you have to try hitting a 1 minute window for transmit+process+response.

Don’t even think you can do this with the lower cost satellite Internet service providers. I had a Satellite provider for years. I finally got rid of them and went with Verizon Wireless. Regular retail satellite service fizzes out when it gets cloudy. It doesn’t have to be raining or storming, just heavy clouds. Anyone who has ever had a satellite ISP knows this. You don’t really want to have security on all but cloudy days, do you? There is a bandwidth problem with retail satellite ISP service. While they could probably tweak a few things for government accounts, they can’t get around current physical limitations without new equipment in orbit.

Maybe they could get a wireless company to build cell towers out there, but I’m guessing they would want the feds to pick up the tab on that. We all saw the video, there’s nothing around. Wireless service is also susceptible to jambing. It is, after all, a very low powered radio. All you need is a transmitter with more power.

That leaves us with trenching a cable. In this day and age, I would hope that they bust for a fiber optic cable big enough to provide phone and TV service to all of the communities along the route. It’s not that I want someone free loading on my tax dollars, just that copper eventually rots and glass doesn’t. You should od things right the first time. 5*70*8000 = 2,800,000 just for the trenching costs. That doesn’t include the equipment needed at multiple points for tapping stations/hubs, or the price of the cable. That is also assuming you could trench straight through without having to route around an oil or other pipe line. Now we need the hi-res high speed all weather camera equipment, secure routers, etc. Let us not forget also that one of the buildings shown had a roof which obviously wasn’t holding back water anymore and the fact there were no visible concrete barricades or other breaching defenses to stop people from driving around the crossing.

Do I believe the political banter about all of the jobs the projects will create? Nope. Not one of those jobs is permanent. In less than a year each of the projects should be completed and all of those people will be looking for work again.

I do believe, however, that if every border crossing is upgraded, we can then turn our attention to other methods of entry.