Alternative Fact: Public Records Are Leaks

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by Lisa

Alternative Fact:

Real Fact: Much like the “leak” regarding an employee’s termination where the leaker was Scaramucci himself … the “leaked” financial document was a public record completed by … Scaramucci. At some point, is this dude going to have to fire himself?

When taking a position in an administration that goes on and on about witch hunts, undertaking one’s own witch hunt is, in and of itself, a rife with risk. But in a witch hunt for leakers, maybe one should undertake extensive research to verify that they themselves are not the leaker in question.

Government by Threat

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by Lisa

Trump is reportedly threatening Alaska, hoping to garner enough votes to pass something health-care related. No matter how bad the bill might be, no matter how it may impact *his* voters, no matter how much money it will end up costing everyone (great, I save 20$ in taxes but I’m spending 20k on insurance each year instead of 6k).

A president looking to influence legislative decisions is certainly not new, but I question the legality and ethics of this technique. What is the point of “checks and balances” if the party that implements the policy and uses the budget uses their responsibilities to force legislative direction? Or threatens to abdicate their responsibilities to the same end?

I’m reminded of every bad mafia don show ever made — that’s a really nice building you got there, be a shame if something happened to it. The president has become this caricature! That’s some really lucrative mining we’re planning to approve for your area. Be a shame if someone lost this approval form.

Goofiness aside, this (if true) is the most frightening report to come out of the nascent Trump presidency. Well, maybe not the most frightening. That dubious honor, thus far, goes to Michael Lewis’s nuclear threat piece in Vanity Fair. I have to categorize the potential for nuclear destruction due to administrative ineptitude and malfeasance as worse than the breakdown of the entire system of American governance. Despite coming in a close second to nuclear annihilation … why in the world is there not an investigation into Trump’s strong-arming of Alaska for votes?

Why risk management is so hard

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by Lisa

I finally found someone who perfectly summarizes my awful experiences in risk management. Michael Lewis, in an article in Vanity Fair magazine, says “People are really good at responding to the crisis that just happened, as they naturally imagine that whatever just happened is most likely to happen again. They are less good at imagining a crisis before it happens—and taking action to prevent it”.

My experience goes farther — undertaking the academic exercise of imagining different variants of previous crises and hypothesizing unique scenarios … you get told you’re going down a rabbit hole. Wasting time. Talking about such an unlikely set of circumstances.

That’s the point! If it were a likely set of circumstances, then it would have happened already. Or there’d be mitigation in place already to prevent it. Shoving a bunch of explosives up your bum and greeting some head of state was absolutely crazy … until someone tried to do it.

Drafts of the non-beer variety

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by Lisa

Back when gays were banned from the military, I figured there was either an implied belief that we would never need to draft soldiers again or a big ‘*’ following the ban. Because unless they’re requiring video evidence of your disqualification, I’d happily claim to want to do chicks to avoid becoming cannon fodder. Hell, even if they demand evidence, I would do another chick to avoid being drafted. Became a moot point when the ban was lifted. And then came Trump.

Now trans individuals are banned from the military, can you instantly avoid conscription by claiming to be trans-gendered? The technical definitions I’ve seen are based on internal experiences and feelings – there’s no requirement to undertake reassignment surgery or ingest hormones. Which also brings into question the flimsy “their medical expenses are exorbitant” argument.

Beyond the actual maybe-a-policy-change that has been made, are tweets now considered official statements of government policy?! Or Trump’s got absolutely no intention of actually implementing the policy and just wanted a bunch of bigoted supporters to go back to loving him.

Furls CAL – Sun Hat

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by Lisa

WooHoo! The sun hat crochet along finally reached the pattern stage! I used the same cream coloured yarn for the main hat, but have a slightly iridescent light green yarn for the accent. I’m thinking about making Anya’s hat in reverse – using the green for the main yarn with cream as an accent. Partially because I don’t like having the exact same thing and partially because inverting the colours uses the yarn more efficiently (otherwise I am going to have a heap of the accent colour left over!)

Round four completed:

I have trouble keeping track of the start and end of rounds — not a problem unique to this pattern, Anya’s star blanket was just as tricky for me. Easy enough to re-count the stitches on early rounds — and frogging a few stitches isn’t such a big deal. As the project progresses to the point where a round comprises 40 or 50 stitches, adding or missing a stitch is a pain to correct. I’ve tried using those little round stitch markers, and honestly I just don’t get it. If they had splits in the rings and could easily slip back off of the project … that would make sense to me.

I’ve come up with an easy method to keep track of rounds — a water soluble marker I use for marking dress patterns. Test it on your yarn to make sure it comes off completely (and mark in an inconspicuous spot just in case). Which stitch it makes sense to highlight will vary by pattern. Here, the chain stitch which starts each round does not count as the first stitch. I chose to mark this ‘skipped’ stitch. The round should end immediately before the marked stitch, and the first hdc from the round into which the last hdc is slip stitched is immediately after it. Chain one and mark again. See the little blue marks on the “inside” of the hat? Those are my ch stitches. Voila, two rounds without frogging anything 🙂

On Firing People

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by Lisa

The new press guy @ the White House told the press he was planning Michael Short, and then seemed dismayed that the press somehow knew the fellow was being fired before it happened. Goofy, really, but not the worst thing the Trump admin’s going to do this week. What struck me, though, is the way Scaramucci expressed his displeasure. “The fact that you guys know about it before he does really upsets me as a human being and as a Roman Catholic. You got that? So I should have the opportunity if I have to let somebody go to let the person go in a very humane, dignified way”.

Not saying I disagree with him – there are some things that should be done in person and without previous publicity. There’s a reason victims names are withheld until family is notified. There’s a reason texting someone to break up with them has such a bad reputation. And there’s a reason that James Comey delivering a speech while seeing his termination broadcast on national television was such a horrifying way to fire someone. The juxtaposition made Scaramucci’s complaint extra ironic.

Visual Studio Code

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by Lisa

We found a free, open source code editor from Microsoft called Visual Studio Code — there are downloadable modules that include formatting for a variety of programming languages (c#, cpp, fortran), scripts (perl, php), and other useful formats like MySQL, Apache httpd config files. It also serves as a GUI front end to git. And that is something I’ve been trying to find since I inherited a git server at work — a way for people to avoid having to remember a dozen different git commands.

Business Practices To Avoid

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by Lisa

Don’t ignore your customers. Seems obvious, but failing to engage customers undermines large corporations. I worked for one of Novell’s last big customers back in 2000-2010. We had the misfortune of being in the same territory as their biggest customer, FedEx, so got little sales attention. We were having problems managing computers without using the Active Directory domain — the dynamic local user Zen component that hooked the Novell GINA and created/maintained local user accounts had been used before an NT4 domain even existed within the company. In perusing their web site, I identified a product that perfectly met our needs *and* managed mobile devices (which was an up and coming ‘thing’ at the time). Why, I asked the sales guy, would you not pitch this product to us when we tell you about the challenges we are trying to address? No good answer, but it really was a rhetorical question. There wasn’t a downloadable demo available, you had to engage your sales rep to get a working demo copy — I asked for one, and he said he’d get one to me when he got back to his office.

Nothing. Emailed him a week later in case he just forgot. Oh, yeah, I’ll get that right out to you. A few weeks later, emailed him again. A few weeks later — well, let’s be serious here. We started using Exchange in 2000, and had an Active Directory domain licensed for all users anyway. We were willing to consider paying real money for the Novell product because the migration path was easier … but from a software licensing perspective, switching workstation authentication to AD was a 0$ thing. Needed a few new servers to handle authentication traffic – I think I went with five at about three thousand dollars each. Deployment, now that’s a nightmare. I wrote custom code to re-ACL the user profile directory and modify the registry to link the new user.domain SID to the re-ACL’d old profile directory. It got pushed out via automated software deployment and the failures would call in each morning. Even a 1% failure rate when you’re doing 10,000 computers a week is a lot of phone calls and workstation re-images. (At a subsequent employer, we made the same change but placed workstations into the domain as they were re-imaged for other reasons. New computer, you’re in the domain. Big problems with your OS, you’re in the domain. Eventually we had a couple hundred computers not yet in the domain and the individual users were contacted to schedule a reimage. Much cleaner process.)

The company didn’t last much longer — they purchased SuSE not much later. The sales guys came back – we used RHEL but would have happily bundled our Linux purchases into the big million dollar contract. How much are you looking to charge for updates? Dunno. How much is support? Dunno. Do you know anything about the company’s sales plan for SuSE? Not a thing. Well … glad you could stop by? I guess.

As far as software companies go, this is ancient history. But it’s something I think of a lot when dealing with Microsoft these days. There’s a free mechanism that allows you to use your existing Active Directory to store local workstation admin account passwords. Local workstations manage their own passwords — no two passwords are the same; you can read the individual computer’s password out of AD and provide it to the end user. Expire the computer’s local admin password and next time it communicates with the domain, the password will be changed. Never heard of it from the MS sales guy – someone found LAPS through random web searching. Advanced Group Policy Management that provides auditing and versioning for group policies – not something our MS reps mentioned. Visual Studio Code – yet another find based on random web searching. I know it isn’t the sales guy’s job to tell me about every little bit of free add-on code they have created, but isn’t it in their best interest to ensure that the products that we have become an intrinsic part of our business processes? I tell our SharePoint group that all the time — there are a lot of web based content management platforms. If all you use it for is avoiding web coding … well, I’ve got WordPress that does that. Or some Atlassian wiki thing. And some Jive wiki thing. And some Xerox document repository that has web pages. You need to make something unique to your product intrinsically entwined with business oeprations so no one would ever think of replacing your product.

Soap Fluff Explosion

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by Lisa

I made our saboun al ghar inspired soap today. First attempt at hot processing soap, and I had a massive soap explosion. I’d read that your container should be at least three times the volume of soap you are processing. I went with five times in an attempt to stave off a big mess. Blended my pomace olive oil and lye/water/salt mixture to a light trace, and set it over medium heat. It thickened, just like it supposed to. It turned into a gloopy oily mess, just like it supposed to. For future reference — the gloopy oily mess stage is where you want to keep a close eye on it and don’t look away for a minute. I turned back around and saw odd foamy soap stuff pouring out of the pot. Oops!

I scooped the soap fluff off the side of the pot and back into the pot and stirred it down. The fluff quickly turned into a slick substance that did look exactly like petroleum jelly. I added the laurel berry oil, stirred well to incorporate, and let cook for a few more minutes until it looked like petroleum jelly again.

The whole mess was glopped into my large silicon lined wooden soap mold. Now it just needs to set for a while and harden.

24/7 Campaign

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by Lisa

How can you be the president of the entire country if you cannot even be the president for the entire military?

The address Trump gave at the commissioning of the USS Gerald Ford may reflect the increasingly long campaign cycle or it may reflect his complete misunderstanding of government (not to mention a complete misunderstanding of how military health care works!). He encouraged (ordered? Not speaking to intent; but as the ostensible head of the military, it would behoove him to use more care in selecting what will be communicated to military personnel) those assembled to “call those senators to make sure you get health care”.

A generous interpretation would be that he isn’t letting an opportunity to push for his legislative agenda pass by – this will be televised, reported … but who stands up at a guy’s retirement party to laud himself and ignore the retiree? Or at a commencement to congratulate yourself … oh, wait. That’d be Trump too. A man seemingly incapable of participating in an event and not making it about himself. Even the generous interpretation is essentially “I’m too self-centered to let your thing be the highlight here”.

But beyond the optics of using the commissioning of a naval vessel as a campaign rally, the ACA does not have a whole lot to do with health care for the active duty military personnel to whom he was ostensibly speaking. TRICARE covers them. It qualifies as insurance under the ACA, so they’re set. Given Trump’s other outright nonsensical ramblings on health care, this in and of itself is telling. Enlisted persons have no more need to lobby for whatever ACA replacement is currently on the table than members of Congress. It’s not going to fuck up their coverage.

Worse, though, the military may report to the president like employees report to the CEO … but it isn’t like we changed out the military for a Republican one in January. They may fight to defend the country, but they are not obligated to support the legislative initiatives of the current administration. From his speech at the CIA Memorial Wall bemoaning how unfairly the press treats him — imagine a similar topic being delivered in front of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall — to this most recent address, Trump seems ignorant of the fact there are liberal government employees and military staff. There are Libertarians. Red scare McCarthyism aside, there are probably socialists too. Point being — there were people in the audience who do not want either of the current Congressional health care plans to pass (given it’s approval rating, the majority of the crowd may even feel that way!) and how insulting is it that the speaker would co-opt what was meant to be a naval celebration to rally support for something to which you object?!