Life, Politics, and the Fourth of July
Today's the Fourth of July
Another June has gone by
and when they light up our town I just think
what a waste of gunpowder and sky

Aimee Mann, Fourth of July

Actually, I like fireworks. And the above isn't even relevant to my hometown. Santa Cruz does not have a Fourth of July fireworks celebration. You'd have to drive up to Scotts Valley for that. (SV, BTW, is the kind of place that would gladly have accepted Mr. Rumsfeld's suggestion that they structure their Fourth around the war in Iraq. Heck, they probably did.) What we do have is a fireworks celebration in October to celebrate the founding of the city. The first year I lived here, I thought it was a little weird. Now I really like it; we can walk down to the beach on a beautiful fall evening with friends and neighbors and watch a fantastic display over the big curve of the bay. And there are no tourists around to clog up the roads and the beach and act stupid.

Favorite bumpersticker: "They call it tourist season, so why can't we shoot them?"

But I digress. The real question is, does failure to wrap ourselves in the flag indicate we (including me) are unpatriotic? Or does it indicate that we/me believe that symbolic gestures ultimately don't amount to much? Well, since I served my country/pay taxes/vote (most elections)/etc., I choose the latter.

I love my country. I'm still willing to give my life to defend it. America is an oasis in human history - there have been others, but we're the biggest and longest-lasting one. But I don't subscribe to the "my country, right or wrong" point of view. That's unworthy of any thinking adult. What we are - as a nation, a society, and a culture - still falls short of what we could be. And we should aspire to be more than what we are - to be truly great (not merely powerful); to advance the causes of freedom and justice; to bring prosperity to all; to live up to all of our ideals. Thomas Jefferson reputedly said "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance". What we need to remember is that Jefferson was warning us against internal enemies as much as external ones; our history is, among many other things, a constant battle between those who would defend the letter and spirit of our founding fathers' legacy and those who would sacrifice it for their own self-interest. The only way that ever ends is if we give away our liberty. We're still a long way from that, but we're not winning the battle either.

This shouldn't be taken as a polemic against the current administration. All of our politicians on both sides of the aisle are failing us. A few notable exceptions (e.g., Robert Byrd, John McCain) are isolated and mostly powerless. And it's a bad time for the system to have become corrupted. We're well into one of those great transformations in human history that fundamentally alter our world. As Peter Drucker puts it, "Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation...Within a few short decades society rearranges itself - its worldview; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born" (Peter Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society). Is our current and future leadership up to the task of successfully guiding us through this transformation? Or are they going to follow the lead of so many elites in history who abdicated their responsibilities in order to enrich themselves?

Today, the most fundamental act of patriotism may be to look at our society, decide what we don't like about it, and then do something about it. Then again, has that ever not been the case?

War and Peace
"Microsoft Word documents are notorious for containing private information in file headers which people would sometimes rather not share". Looks like Tony Blair's people forgot to cover up their tracks. One more piece of evidence that the WMD hype went way, way over the top.

Perhaps that's why a poll indicates the majority of Americans believe the administration stretched the truth about the Iraqi WMD's and alleged ties to al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.

No WMDs have been found. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, though battered, are still out there and active. The Administration is trying to create an international peacekeeping force to take some of the burden off of the overstretched US military forces. Unrest in Iraq may be on the rise.

Some good news. Protests in Iran appear to have resumed. Colin Powell has stated that the US does not intend to intervene, suggesting it would be wiser to leave the internal conflict in Iran to play itself out.

Theology
Robert Martin writes: "For millenia we have searched the heavens to find messages from the gods. Today we found such a message...Now we know what God thinks of us".

Software, Work, and Learning
My last day at my old job. Thinking back, I'm appalled to realize how little I learned over the past year working there. Almost everything was a rehash of what I've done before or work that wasn't worth doing. And I'd already had the experience of watching bad management run a perfectly good company into the ground. It hadn't hit me before, because I've learned so much outside of my day job. My other milestone today was that I finally finished the first alpha version of Chrysalis and sent out an announcement to a bunch of other developers I know. Even if it never goes beyond being a vanity project, the time and effort I've invested have totally been worth it. I've deepened and refined my skills, learned lots of new stuff (ant, xml, html, various dusty corners of Java, etc.), and put together something that amounts to an on-line portfolio of my work. I don't know if my new employer looked at Chrysalis after I told them about it, but I think they were at least impressed by the fact that I'd done my own Open Source project and was more than willing to show them my actual code. Slam-dunking most of their interview questions probably helped, too ;-).

I'm looking forward to the new job. It will be real learning experience, I have no doubt, and there's good reason to be optimistic about how successful they'll be. I want to write a book about high-performance techniques in Oracle and this will be the perfect job to give me lots of real-world feedback. Work on Chrysalis will slow down for a little while, but that's OK. It's got enough momentum now to sustain itself for a long time; I expect to be working on it for the next few years.

Software
Fred Brooks was right when he wrote that turning a simple program into a programming systems product took 9X the effort of just writing the simple program. A big part of that 9X is writing user docs in HTML.