The book itself was a pretty quick read. It wasn’t exactly the best narrative I’ve come across, but it worked well enough. The story does a pretty good job of explaining Wall Street culture, and though my own personal experience with those who work on Wall Street is very limited, it did back up my gut feeling about the general atmosphere. These traders and investment bankers truly are different from the rest of the world: I’d compare them to teenage frat boys who suddenly come into boatloads of money, with all that entails (it’s not being sexist to call them boys: least back in the 80s, it did consist mainly of males, and what few women traders existed had to fit in or be crushed). Frankly, given the recent tone-deaf comments from AIG workers who think they still deserve bonuses, it’s pretty clear that they still believe they are made of a different stuff. Are they truly deserving of the accolades they shower upon themselves, these people who claim that they make the machinery of the free market work? Lewis makes a pretty convincing argument that, in fact, they are not the brightest of the bright, the personification of the “invisible hand” that makes our economy run.

It was also very interesting to read all about the invention of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), the very same instruments that were at the root of the recent meltdown. The way that CDOs were used and abused in the 80s by Savings and Loans was, when you get right to the heart of it, much the same way that they were used and abused in the aughts. It was eery to read about the damage caused by CDOs back then, although that’s probably because a feeling of “We knew all this and didn’t do anything to stop it?!” would have been too depressing to acknowledge.

“Liar’s Poker” shows that investment banking can, at times, be exactly what opponents think it is: nothing more than a middleman that makes money by screwing over people who are unsophisticated. The book posits no solutions, however. For that, we have to look elsewhere

• Current Mood: Decrepit

As time went on, though, the shortcomings of Ghost became apparent. The biggest one is speed: by running Ghost in a DOS environment, I was limited to USB 1.1 speeds. Ghosting a 20 GB Windows 7 partition would take around 40 minutes. When you are ghosting many machines at once, the quicker you can do it, the better. I knew of a great, free alternative in Clonezilla, but would it work for what I needed?

I have been using Clonezilla for backing up my home computer for a while, but running it in interactive mode once every month or two is a lot different from running it constantly (I only use Clonezilla at home to back up my Windows partition; my data is backed up daily using WinRAR). Most important was the ability to detect the model that the external drive was plugged into so it could grab the right image. My DOS COM file wouldn’t run under Linux, so I either needed to port it over, or find an alternative.

After a short foray into assembly programming in Linux, I figured that somebody smarter than me would have figured this out before, and I was right: dmidecode will pull that information from the BIOS, no problem. After fiddling around with a shell script, I was able to get the model information from the BIOS and automatically select the image. It took a few days to work out all the kinks, since my Linux expertise is very low, but I was able to get everything to work.

The results? Creating a disk image was sped up by a factor of two or three, and putting that image back onto a disk by a factor of four or five. Being able to put an image on a computer in less than ten minutes makes a big difference.

The only difference between Ghost and Clonezilla is that Clonezilla does not have a utility to change the Windows computer name and SID after the image is put onto the disk. In the past, it was considered that needing to change the SID was required or else all sorts of network errors would happen, so we used Symantec Ghostwalker to do so. However, even Microsoft says that it’s not necessary anymore, so we’ll give it a try. We aren’t in a Windows domain environment anyway, so it shouldn’t cause too many problems. Plus, we change the computer name manually as a matter of course regardless.

I always try to use free, open-source software whenever I can, and getting Clonezilla to do what I need it to do was a real victory.

The view from the balcony at the SD59 convention:

Representative Tom Rukavina, candidate for governor, speaks to the SD59 convention:

Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller addresses the SD59 convention after being endorsed:

Mayor and candidate for governor R. T. Rybak addresses the SD59 convention:

Former Representative Matt Entenza, candidate for governor, speaks to the SD59 convention:

Representatives Diane Loeffler and Phyllis Kahn speak on behalf of Margaret Anderson Kelliher for Governor at the SD59 convention:

Congressman Keith Ellison talks at the SD59 convention:

Representative Paul Thissen, also running for governor, addresses the SD59 convention:

The uncommitted subcaucuses moved to the balcony:

• Current Mood: Monday
• Currently Listening To: "The Tourist", Radiohead

The convention got off to a fast start. Since there were no opponents for our current slate of elected officials (Rep. Diane Loeffler, Rep. Phyllis Kahn, and Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller), endorsing them took next to no time at all. Interspersed with the official convention business were speeches by people running for office, including several school board candidates, State Auditor Rebecca Otto, and a spokesperson from Secretary of State Mark Ritchie’s campaign. Candidates for the most contested race, for governor, either appeared (Rep. Tom Rukavina, former House Minority Leader Matt Entenza, Mayor R.T. Rybak, Rep. Paul Thissen) or had surrogates speak for them (Rep. Kahn and Rep. Loeffler spoke on behalf of Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher, and people spoke on behalf of John Marty and Tom Bakk as well).

There was a minor hangup when it was found that a person running for the Central Committee was, in fact, the Republican opponent to Rep. Loeffler two years ago and former president of the Log Cabin Republicans. Felix Montez was not at the convention to defend himself or explain his party switch, and there was much argument over how best to ensure he was not elected. In the end, another person stepped forward to run and the convention gladly elected him instead of Mr. Montez. Too bad he wasn’t there to speak; that would have been an interesting conversation.

Finally, we got down to the main business of the day: electing delegates to the state convention. We subcaucused and subcaucused again, joining an uncommitted subcaucus (“Uncomitted” eventually narrowly won the delegate count later), and both Julia and I tried to get elected as delegate. Julia narrowly lost a runoff to be a delegate/alternative, while I didn’t really come close. In the end, the delegate totals were: seven for Uncommitted, six for Kelliher, five for Rybak, two for Thissen, one for Marty, and one for Rukavina. If this convention is any indication, the race for governor will not be decided for a while.

One of these times I’d really like to get elected as a delegate to the state convention, but given my zero batting average so far, it may require moving to a part of the state with fewer activists!

I took a bunch of pictures at the convention, so they will be put up as soon as I am done processing them.

• Current Mood: Tired

Let’s face it: in America, the norm is not a collective, “we’re all in this together” sense of community. It’s the rugged individualism of myth. Most people have no problem with seeing others go without: be it jobs, education, shelter, or even food, the sense of a lot of people is that anybody here can just “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and acquire all of these things if they really tried, and if they don’t, it’s a problem of character. There are no widespread pushes to build public housing for all the homeless, and even a couple hundred dollars a month in food stamp benefits is seen by many as welfare that just leads to dependency. It’s our culture. Given the mythos that is drummed into us from an early age, these beliefs are at least somewhat understandable.

But when it comes to health care, it’s a bit different, and as a society we have seen fit to draw a line. Make no mistake: there are plenty of people in this country that die from homelessness or lack of food, and by and large, it is accepted, or at least not talked about seriously. But when it comes to health care, where the threat of death is immediate and in your face, at least most Americans don’t think that the poor and the uninsured should be left to figure things out for themselves. That’s why hospitals have to provide care, regardless of ability to pay. The fact that we mandate this without having a sane way to pay for it is troubling, but at least we say “no” to literally letting people die on the sidewalk outside of emergency rooms because they can’t pay for treatment.

The comments from some Republicans these days, however, show that even this level of human decency may be a bridge too far for them. It boggles the mind that they can have such a low level of empathy. Perhaps the reason is that a lot of them have always had heath care and insurance, and literally can’t think of what it would be like to go without. However, it has to go beyond that: I’ve been lucky (and I do ascribe some of it to luck, not just my “hard work”) to have never gone a long period without insurance in my life. But I know plenty of people who have not been as lucky, and I can put myself in their shoes. That’s what empathy means. Perhaps there are other, more sinister reasons. Our journalists, however, have not seen fit to ask them why they believe these things.

I’m an atheist, but I do know the meaning of the phrase “There but for the grace of god go I.” A lot of so-called Christian Republicans seem to have forgotten the meaning of that phrase entirely. When people can be so callous to the plight of the health of the truly poor and destitute in this country, when they can tell them to just figure it out on their own, it is troubling for the very fabric of our society. The thinking behind these statements moves away from a lack of empathy to a place that is even more dark. The question is, can it be stopped?

• Current Mood: Walking Subcaucus Time!
• Currently Listening To: "Girl With No Eyes", It's A Beautiful Day
• Just Watched: Into The Wild

I don’t think it’s horrible because black boxes shouldn’t exist, or that they infringe upon privacy. On the contrary: my major problem with this is that it is far too private: only Toyota has access to the data, despite the fact that the owner of the car paid for the black box and the driver of the car is the one generating that data. Toyota should not store this data in a proprietary format that only Toyota has access to, and only when Toyota wants to divulge the information. The owner of the vehicle should have full access to the data at all times and should be able to control it.

Advancing technology has put a premium on data. In the past, nobody cared where you drove your buggy or what your shopping habits were at the general store, because such information was too unwieldy to be agglomerated and analyzed. Today, however, with inexpensive computing power, ubiquitous sensors, and a hyper-networked infrastructure, such data is incredibly valuable. Where you shop, what your likes and dislikes are, and your demographic information are worth a lot of money to banks, marketers, and other businesses. Credit report agencies and web ad marketers like DoubleClick are just two of the many businesses that make money by buying and selling information on consumers.

What’s lost in the current jungle of regulations, though, is that much of the time consumers are not only not compensated for this data that other businesses are profiting from, they sometimes have no control over the data whatsoever. True, by law credit bureaus have to give consumers a process for disputing erroneous items in a credit report, but what about all the other businesses out there that are accumulating data for sale? The vast majority of the time, consumers have no idea that this data on them even exists, let alone what do do about it.

That’s why I think that taking ownership of this valuable data is going to become a very pressing issue in the near future. There’s nothing wrong with collecting this data, but the subjects of this data should be aware of it, and should have some control over its accuracy and sourcing. Hence my displeasure at Toyota: the data should be available to those that create it, and not just to Toyota themselves. Businesses are going to need to come up with policies for handling, correcting, and securing this data. Governments will have to do so as well.

As for proprietary formats, there’s little use in data that you can’t use, and I’m against their use too. I’m a strong believer in open-source and standards-compliant formats, and again, I think that these issues will become more important as time goes on. Especially when it comes to government archives, data from 50 years ago is completely useless if the file format it is stored in is some proprietary format that disappeared when the company that created it went out of business 30 years ago. Open-source applications can have better security implications as well.

As we surround ourselves with more and more data, these issues grow in importance. This is exactly why I’m excited about studying some of these issues in the MSST program.

• Current Mood: Friday
• Currently Listening To: "Cityscape", Matt Hunstad

If you are in a corporate IT environment, you know the drill for setting up a computer: install all the software you need, configure everything for the user, make a disk image of that setup, and then distribute it. Pretty simple stuff, and there are many, many tools out there to help you do it. One part of that process is setting up the Default Profile, the profile that all new users start out with. In the past, with Windows XP, setting up the default profile was easy: you get a user profile the way you want it, copy that profile over to the Default Profile folder in Documents and Settings, and voilà! Easy as pie.

Not anymore. Windows 7 has seen fit to change this. It is now impossible to copy a profile to the default profile. Instead, you have to follow an insanely complicated process using the Windows Automated Installation Kit and sysprep and a bunch of other things that are overkill for creating a default profile. I don’t want to create a fancy automatic Windows setup script, I just want to copy over an existing profile to the default!

Microsoft really needs to create a simple tool for users to do this, without having to get involved with WAIK and Windows Images and all that nonsense. Creating a default profile is so common, and so necessary for IT folks, that making it this complicated is a huge inconvenience.

My other beef with Microsoft is this: it took me over a day to download WAIK because the download kept failing in the middle of the process. Please, please release torrents for files like these. Torrents are incredibly useful for legitimate file distribution; they are not just for pirates. Here’s a perfect example: I downloaded the latest version of Open Office the other day. Downloading it from their server would have taken over an hour. The torrent took less than ten minutes. For tiny files, a torrent may not matter. When you are trying to download a 1.7 GB file and it fails an hour later after downloading 1.2 GB…believe me, your users will thank you if a torrent is available.

• Current Mood: Sunny
• Currently Listening To: "Have a Cigar", Pink Floyd

First, a bit of background. I started thinking about continuing my education around four years ago. While not nailing doing a specific focus, I find the issues of data security and data privacy to be very interesting, from the gadgetry of security like encryption algorithms (On my bookshelf sits Applied Cryptography, written by a renowned security expert) to the legal aspects of collecting, storing, securing, buying, and selling all the data that corporations, governments, and other groups collect about people. I knew that I wanted to educate myself in that field, as it combined my interests while also being very desirable from a career point of view.

I looked at Masters programs in Information Security and Information Technology, but I found them to be lacking. For one thing, many of these programs were offered by online-only universities, about which I could find very little information. In addition, these programs tended to be far too tech-oriented: while I would be okay with learning how to better configure a firewall or utilize SSL, I wanted to learn about policy as well.

I thus went in the other direction completely, and looked at law school. Being a political science major/philosophy minor, law school seemed to be right up my alley. It would give me the legal and policy knowledge I was looking for, and could set me up for any number of careers. I even took the LSAT (twice!) and moved to Boston to attend law school.

What stopped me from attending law school was the significant downsides. First, there is the time commitment: almost three years. Second was the enormous expense involved, which would have put me into six figures of debt. Since I wanted to do public interest law or some other kind of non-lucrative position, the debt would have really put me under a lot of pressure. Finally, and most importantly, I didn’t really want to be a lawyer. I wanted to learn all about it, and use it, but I didn’t want to do all those lawyerly things that aren’t on TV but make up 90% of the job of a lawyer.

That said, the time commitment wasn’t too bad, but the expense and not really wanting to be a lawyer were the major issues. Had I been able to go to a good school on a full-tuition scholarship, that would have eliminated objection two (and, indirectly, objection three, because I wouldn’t be forced to try to be a lawyer to pay off my mortgage-sized debt). Unfortunately, although I came close to that scholarship, I just couldn’t pull it off. Blame my two Fs during my junior year of college.

That left me back at square one last summer, and I didn’t know what to do next. Then one day, Julia heard a story on MPR about the new MSST program. It sounded exactly like what I was looking for: a balance between the technical side of security and the legal/policy side. It threw in other areas of study that I find interesting, such as the human psychology of security. I went to an information session in November, and learned even more: that the program was one of its kind in the Midwest, that it allowed students to choose which areas of security to specialize in, that it would be taught by the best professors from all the schools at the U….in short, I was hooked. The fact that it was part-time, allowing me to work, and took only 14 months didn’t hurt either. I put in my application, had my interview, and I’m happy to say I was admitted.

It took me longer to find a program than I had hoped, but I think the end result will be worth it. Although I had become discouraged at several points in my grad school search, I kept on looking and didn’t lose sight of my goal to find the right program for me, not just a program that was close enough. Classes don’t start until June, but so far I feel safe saying that patience definitely paid off in this case.

• Current Mood: Full
• Currently Listening To: "The End", The Doors

Julia and I live in Ward 3 Precinct 4 in Northeast Minneapolis, and we caucused at the Spring Street Highrise. There were around 40-50 people in attendance, far fewer than caucus I attended in St. Paul two years ago. In the straw poll for governor, which is the most exciting part of the night as it is the one that is neatly packaged for media coverage, Mayor R.T. Rybak won with 13 votes, followed by 9 for Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher, 7 for undecided, and the rest with 4 or less.

Before the vote, though, were the elections to the next conventions (Julia and I are going to the Senate District 59 convention), and resolutions. Ahh, resolutions. Definitely the most entertaining part of the evening, as you get to learn which personal pet issues your neighbors are angriest about. Some people take them very seriously, agonizing over every whereas clause and turn of phrase. I try to keep conversation to a minimum: you never know who you might accidentally antagonize by pointing out their resolution is already in the party platform, for example.

Our caucus wrapped up just after 8, on schedule. The senate district convention in a bit more than three weeks will be very interesting.

• Current Mood: Grassrooted
• Currently Listening To: "Welcome to the Machine", Pink Floyd

I can’t remember where I first heard of the book, but I do know I came across it on the internet and it looked interesting. I thought I would check it out despite the fact that Luntz is a big part of the Republican machine, since he is an expert when it comes to these focus groups. This led to the first disappointment with the book: not that he is a Republican, but because he starts off pretending that his book is going to be unbiased despite his political leanings. It unsurprisingly turns out not to be completely on the level (I didn’t realize that only Democrats had bad public love affairs!), and the false promise not to be rang hollow. I’ve long been a believer in the folly of being objective: everybody is biased, and the best thing to do is simply acknowledge it. I know Luntz is conservative, I don’t need an unfulfilled promise to read his book.

The books starts out well enough. The first chapter is about what Americans do in their daily lives, which I found to be interesting since I am definitely not a typical American. Few Americans commute to work via mass transit, for example; few watch as little TV as I do, and so forth. For businesses looking to connect with their customers, there is some good information. Ditto for what Americans really want, which is usually more money. I’d go with time, again because I’m not the typical American who would like more goods. The information about what people want in their jobs isn’t too earth-shattering, but still pretty good.

It begins to go downhill when it comes to two major issues, politics and religion. The section on politics is pretty vague when it comes to solutions, whereas I was hoping for more concrete policy answers based on what the majority of Americans really want. Given the fact that people in this country are typically wildly inconsistent when it comes to politics, though (such as valuing a balanced budget without willing to cut funding for things like education, the environment, and defense) it’s probably not Luntz’s fault that the answers to all of our political problems can’t be found in focus groups. Similarly, the section on religion was vague and had the least amount of new information in my opinion.

The book then moves onto a section on the youth of America, and while I don’t quite fall into the Millennial Generation, I’m close enough that much of it was familiar: although sexting didn’t exist even when I was in college, I’m one of those people for whom giving up the internet would hurt a lot more than giving up TV. Because I can readily identify with people in the Millennial Generation, I didn’t find anything that was terribly new and shocking, but for people older than myself it could be of use.

Something I couldn’t identify as much with was the section on what Americans want out of retirement, which was probably the most depressing part of the book. True, given the recent economic crisis and the resulting devastation to people’s retirement portfolios and plans, it would be hard to write an upbeat section on retirement, but the sense of desperation and defeat that many people express when they voluntarily or involuntarily cease working is somewhat hard to read. Like the section on politics, this section has no good answers simply because there aren’t any. We’ll just have to deal as we go along.

The book then ends with a list of nine priorities that people really want. I won’t get into details so as not to spoil the surprise, but given Luntz’s political leanings you can probably guess what a few of them are. I will say, though, that his slights against atheists, intentional or not, rubbed me the wrong way: he makes it sound that non-belief is a path that leads to certain unhappiness. I’d like to remind him that correlation does not imply causation, and that there are plenty of non-believers such as myself that lead happy, fulfilling lives.

Overall, I’d give this book a B-. It has information about the vast majority of people in this country I am not like that I found to be interesting and possibly useful, but on a few occasions his own personal beliefs got in the way when there was really no need. Like I said, had he not led off professing ideological neutrality in this book it would have been more forgivable, but that kind of statement means being held to a higher standard. That said, I’m sure most people would be able to get something useful out of this book.

• Current Mood: Relaxed
• Currently Listening To: "Dream On", Depeche Mode