In other news, how about that Office of Strategic Influence? That's where the US is going to plant stories that are favorable to us infidels in the Arab press. Which would have been just fine had we not told them our plans - just like McSoft did a couple of years back using the same sort of initiative to alter US public opinion. First if you're gonna' tell lies, it's stupid to come out in a news conference and say you're creating a department to tell lies. You're forever stuck in that childhood paradox; everything I say is a lie. Besides, whatever happened to Voice of America and Radio Free Europe? Don't we already have resources assigned to this task? Why not just hire a couple of Farsi speaking folks at these places rather than create a whole new beauracracy? Oh right - this is the government.

Seems the only way we can get out of California's high priced long term energy contracts is to break the contracts. And it seems the only way we can do that is by proving that the energy market was dysfunctional when the contracts were signed. I would think this to be a cakewalk for any recent law grad from Stanford, but it seems to be impossible for the senior partners hired by the state.

Likewise I knew that Israel had restricted chairman Arafat's movements a bit - but I didn't know that he'd been holed up under virtual house arrest with tanks outside his bedroom window for two months. This is part of their strategy of public humiliation of the chairman. Did anybody ever embarrass you in public? How did this affect your relationship with that person? Wouldn't this be like the one person in your life that you've never forgiven? The Israeli government have painted themselves into a corner. They'll never at this point be able to negotiate any kind of meaningful settlement with Arafat. They'll probably have to kill him in order to get a new leader to deal with, and the killing will of course screw things up for another decade or two. There are no other Palestinians willing to fill those shoes and run a puppet state. Arafat will settle for a state, knowing he'll be a puppet; but knowing also that it's a start. Now even that possibility has probably slipped away. It's usually during times like this that the Israeli governing coalition tends to collapse and we start over again.

Was reminiscing a bit about my former life as a software designer - I mean long before my forays into the lower ranks of management. What I loved about it was the art form of writing really neat stuff that uses the language to tell you what it's doing. Comments galore, although the sign of well-written software is the readability of the code itself, because that's ultimately where everything is happening. Then at Netscape, the code was called intellectual property and had to be protected from thieves. That which I worked on is in an archive somewhere of old server code. Doubt that anything remains in the commercial product that Sun/iPlanet are selling now. And so it is also with the software libraries of the companies we ruthlessly acquired. All gone now. Our competitors, gone. Merged into other companies. Well, all except one. That's the flaw with writing software - it doesn't often live very long; and if it does, eventually it will be unrecognizable by the original author. That which he/she created now mutated into something completely alien.