GuysBlog

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

So many companies have set up their incoming telephone lines with speech recognition options or button-pressing options. It can be very frustrating trying to reach a human. Now comes GetHuman, the “database” of magic codes that let you reach a live person. Let’s hope your bank, insurance company, credit company, and so on is listed here.

If it is not, and you get a voice recognition system on the line, swearing sometimes gets you to a human — even direct to Customer Relations. But if you are calling a medical facility, it just might get your call routed to the Psych Department.

According to Patricia Rains, the Vanilla Queen

At this moment, less than one percent of all the vanilla flavored and
scented products in the world contain pure vanilla. We are currently
balanced on the threshold of losing pure vanilla forever!

and

If you look at the ingredients on a container of many vanilla or
“vanilla bean” ice creams in the U.S., you will notice that it says
“natural flavor” on the package. While this may not sound suspicious,
“natural flavor” actually means vanillin made from plant substances
such as beets and paper pulp (conifers contain vanillin, which is why
Ponderosa pines smell somewhat vanilla-like). In fact, many premium ice
creams contain no pure vanilla at all. It is flavored with chemical
vanillin and has flecks of flavorless “exhausted” vanilla beans (left
over from the extraction process) added for appearance. For this, we’re
paying a premium price.

There was a shortage between 1999 and 2004, coupled with weather problems and political unrest in the areas from which we get vanilla.  It is not a domesticated crop, and is very labor-intensive to produce and harvest. Because of the shortage, companies found cheaper alternatives.  That drove the demand for pure vanilla lower, and now that some of the problems are behind us, the farmers cannot command the prices they were able to before 1999 and are abandoning the production of vanilla. 

At this time, tons of vanilla, worldwide, are going unsold. Why?
Because there isn’t a market for the beans. Historically, the frozen
dessert industry has been the largest buyer of vanilla. Because they
are now using synthetics, the pure vanilla is sitting in warehouses
around the world.

In 1998, 2300 metric tons of vanilla beans were used worldwide. In 2004, it was 1200 tons and dropping!

So, read your labels and at least shop intentionally.  Better yet, contact the manufacturers and push them for real vanilla.  Thanks to Accidental Hedonist for the tip.

My wife and two of her high school classmates decided in September that they need to orchestrate a 40-year reunion for the Covina High School class of 1968.  Their first step? A website.  But who gets to do that website?  hah.  So now, besides the websites for our church, my own graduating class, and my wife’s learning center, I have the new one to at least erect.  I find myself scanning almost 400 headshots from the yearbook. At least, I’m expanding my skills with CSS….

Back in the early 1960s, I became a fan of The Clancy Brothers.  Tom and Paddy Clancy from Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Eire, had come to the US in the late 40s and rambled through a variety of jobs before going into theatre.  When their younger brother, Liam, and a buddy of his, Tommy Makem joined them, a musical phenomenon was born. Recording first  on their own "Tradition" label, and later for Columbia, they delivered quite a series of albums of (mostly) Irish folk music.  Over the years the act was manned by a variety of Clancy kin, with and without Tommy Makem.  Later, Liam and Tommy did a few albums of their own.

On their "The Makem & Clancy Collection" (Shanachie, #52001, 1990) they included an Eric Bogle song.  He called it "No Man’s Land."  They called it ‘Willie McBride."  The lyrics are available in various versions but this site quotes it pretty much as I hear them singing it. 

Willie McBride    or    No Man’s Land

Well, how do you do, Private William McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile in the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
And I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the dead heroes in 1916,
Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

[chorus]
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they sound the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fire o’er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles sound The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

…
And I can’t help but wonder, now Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you "The Cause?"
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it’s all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

[chorus]

That site includes some other songs of a military vocation, including another of Eric’s: "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda," about the survivors of a WWI battle on the coast of Turkey.

. . .
How well I remember that terrible day
When our blood stained the sand and the water
And how in that hell that they called Suvla Bay
We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter.
Johnny Turk he was ready
Oh he primed himself well.
He rained us with bullets,
And he showered us with shell.
And in five minutes flat,
We were all blown to hell
Nearly blew us back home to Australia.
.  .  .

Today, let us remember all the veterans, of wars declared and merely "authorized."

[Department of deja vu] In USA Today for October 27, 2004, Kevin Maney’s Technology column takes us back….

The highlights:

There was another election season, back in 1952, when a presidential contest seemed too close to call, America worried it was vulnerable to attack, and a single company dominated computing.

…

The Republican candidate was Dwight Eisenhower. The Democrat, Adlai Stevenson. Polls showed them in a dead heat.

…

By 8:30 p.m. ET — long before news organizations of the era knew national election outcomes — Univac spit out a startling prediction. It said Eisenhower would get 438 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 93 — a landslide victory. Because every poll had said the race would be tight, CBS didn’t believe the computer and refused to air the prediction.

…

In fact, the official count ended up being 442 electoral votes for Eisenhower and 89 for Stevenson. Univac had been off by less than 1%. It had missed the popular vote results by only 3%. Considering that the Univac had 5,000 vacuum tubes that did 1,000 calculations per second, that’s pretty impressive. A musical Hallmark card has more computing power.

…

(more…)

Slashdot has an interesting posting entitled “Indian Techies Answer About ‘Onshore Insourcing’” in which we see questions and answers like the following [edited for space]:

How much experience do most Indian programmers have?

It’s common here for new grads (slang term: “freshers”) to spend up to six months in a low-paid or even unpaid internship before they get a “‘real” job. This is true not only of programmers and other IT people, but in almost all white collar positions. …

Many US business pundits claim that the US is only outsourcing the low end code monkey and support jobs, and is keeping the higher end, more prestigious “project management” and architect jobs in the US?

“Ha, ha, ha, ha. It is the same everywhere. Some of us are good at this work, but many aren’t. There are code monkeys everywhere. Real programmers, too, and real programmers here call code monkeys ‘code monkeys’ here same as anywhere else. Pass me another beer, will you?”

What does a decent 2 bedroom apartment cost per month?

How about food for 1 month?

Utilities, etc?

I was asking this question in New Delhi, India’s capital city, and living costs in India vary as much as they do anywhere else depending on where you live. I met programmers who lived in apartments and houses that cost anywhere between $200 and $500 per month, and a few who lived in compounds their families had owned for generations. The consensus was that $11,000 or $12,000 (US) per year was plenty to support a middle class lifestyle. But “middle class” there is not the same as in the U.S. …

Bottom line: You can have a decent life in New Delhi for around $12,000 US per year — but to earn that much you’ll probably need to have source of income from another country…

I work for a company founded from the get-go with two offices in India and HQ in Silicon Valley. About half our techical staff is in India. What I am observing is that “freshers” arrive, work for several months, and move on. Reminds me of the dot boom here in the valley.

Take the Dolphin Stress Test. As the site says:

It’s a simple test designed to indicate whether people have too much stress in their life.

Do you ever read fiction when you are depressed or to cheer yourself up?

Do you often read alone?

Now help is available: American Literature Abuse Society (ALAS)

UPDATE Sept 9, 2004

Michael McGrorty, of LibraryDust, claims authorship of the Literature Abuse piece.

Dave Winer pointed out a nice story about Art Carney, who died this week. According to a posting in
“Bob Stepno’s Other Journalism Weblog,” Art was a genuinely nice guy.

Some 25 years ago, Stepno was working for the Hartford Courant newspaper. He published a photo of Art leaving a local hospital after a several-day stay being treated for a heart problem. Stepno created a caption about Carney saying farewell to the hospital. The photo appeared to show Carney thumbing his nose. Art phoned to say it really was a great place. Stepno published a correction. Carney sent him a thank you note.

We’ll miss you, Art.