The young do not know enough to be prudent,
and therefore they attempt the impossible --
and achieve it, generation after generation.
Pearl S. Buck
Image of the Day
Which of the 15 Worst (Still Standing) SCOTUS Decisions Can You Name?
It goes without saying the infamous freaky "the penalty is a tax" Chief Justice Roberts' ObamaCare decision makes the list. I routinely rant against the Carolene Products (Congressional ban on filled milk products across state borders), Filburn (a farmer's consumption of his own crops constituted "interstate commerce"), and the Keto decision (eminent domain abuse). I have specifically criticized the racist Chinese Exclusion Act in discussing immigration policy. A good discussion of abysmal decisions by conceptually confused judicial whores; see if you can think of some other bad decisions.
The Moral Case For Cheap Fossil Fuels
A Rare Breed: A Conservative Artist
A Rare Compliment
I don't really use this blog to feed my vanity. But I got a compliment from a young female DBA today I was mentoring which has an uncanny similarity to a circumstance from 2001. I was working for a boutique Oracle consulting company in Los Gatos (near San Jose), CA in the fall of 2000. The venture capital company backing us became impatient, as the Nasdaq and the Internet economy bubble continued to melt down, with the company's red ink. Our CEO had just been terminated and replaced by the owners when I was sent to a sugar processing client in east LA. It was an unusual assignment because we had a local branch and DBA's in Los Angeles. The Native American IT manager for the client had a barebones operation; I think he had one direct report, more of a PC technician. The manager wore a number of hats, including administrating the company's ERP suite, one of my specialties. The first day he worked with me, he told me he learned more in two hours with me than over the previous 6 months with other (local) company DBA's. He was so pleased he arranged to extend my visit from 2 to 4 days. What I didn't know was that I had already been targeted for layoff, and my client's extension postponed the day of reckoning. (He then pursued me as an independent consultant with my former company's blessing.) [The latter went out of business within months.]
My junior colleague was struggling with various setups of a virtual machine database server, including kernel and package adjustments, OS users/groups, registering her Linux license, networking adjustments, etc. She kept taking notes the entire session and spontaneously told me she learned more in our session together today than since she joined the company a few weeks back.
It isn't often we get validation; I didn't get much from my 8 years of college teaching, the last 5 as a professor. There are a few that stand out I've mentioned in passing over the life of the blog: the middle-aged woman of color I helped with her COBOL program who called me a "great teacher", the Mexican student I taught at UTEP who gave me an invitation to his family's graduation celebration, another UTEP graduate, headed to Virginia's MBA program, who took my picture (I published it a few years ago in the blog), saying he wanted to keep photos of professors who made a difference, there was the UWM student who unwittingly admitted he learned more in my class than any other class he took (but I deserved none of the credit because he did it all by himself...), the UH student who called my class the first "real" college class/tests he ever had, the ISU student who felt his project's effort had been vindicated with my thoughtful critique of his work, the Asian female graduate student taking my human factors in IT class who was motivated to write a one-page critique of my class (where she admired the hard work I put into the course but gently suggested that I was teaching above the level of the class; she also attached the image below, which I believe was originally published by Cadillac in 1915). I don't think I ever lost my interest in academia, but I've not gotten an offer in more than a decade, but I'll always be a professor.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Olivia Newton-John, "Let Me Be There"
