The Chris Motes Blog

Try To Remain Calm!

Lots of crazy things going on right now. The Market. Jobs. The Election.

I got this email today at work, which put everything in perspective for me:

=========

Employees:

 

Please use caution when using the trails surrounding the campus. This past Saturday, several trail users reported seeing a mountain lion within 100 yards of our campus, just north of XXXX near the trail of XXXXX Park.

 

If you plan to use the trails

Mountain lions are quiet, solitary and elusive, and typically avoid people -- attacks on humans are extremely rare.  However, conflicts are increasing as

California

’s human population expands into mountain lion habitat.

 

Here are a few tips to follow:

-Do not hike, bike or jog alone.

-Avoid hiking or jogging when mountain lions are most active—dawn, dusk, and at night.

-Keep a close watch on small children.

-Do not approach a mountain lion.

-If you encounter a mountain lion, do not run; instead, face the animal, make noise and try to look bigger by waving your arms; throw rocks or other objects.  Pick up small children.

-If attacked, fight back.

-If a mountain lion attacks a person, immediately call 911.

 

For more information about mountain lions, visit the California Department of Fish and Game:  http://www.dfg.ca.gov.

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The best part is "Pick up small children." I guess that makes it easier to throw them at the lion, or to position them between yourself and the lion. :)

Experience Killer: Worst Seat On The Plane

Worst_Seat_On_Plane
Originally uploaded by cmotes

We've all had this seat. The back row seat that doesn't recline. The seat that has about 6 inches less legroom than every other seat on the plane.

If you're going to force me into these seats, at least give me a discount. Or warn me right before I buy the ticket that I'm getting shafted so that I can pay slightly more on another airline and get a seat that does not suck. At least throw me extra peanuts.

Secret Questions Not So Secret

Great article from my friend Vinoo on Palin's hack email account.

The short version: Secret questions used to recover lost passwords are not so secret in the social web era. Here is a quote from the alleged hacker:

"Birthday? 15 seconds on wikipedia, zip code? well she had always been from wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes (thanks online postal service!)... “where did you meet your spouse?” did some research, and apparently she had eloped with mister palin after college, if youll look on some of the screenshits that I took and other fellow anon have so graciously put on photobucket you will see the google search for “palin eloped” or some such in one of the tabs.   

I found out later though more research that they met at high school, so I did variations of that, high, high school, eventually hit on “Wasilla high” I promptly changed the password to popcorn and took a cold shower…"

This is a high profile hack. I'd expect Yahoo! and other sites to respond to this pretty quickly with much harder secret questions.

The Return of $4 Gas

Hurricane Ike is driving up gas prices.

A CNN headline cites the "return of $4 gas".

Living in San Francisco, I can say that $4 gas is a great price around here!!

Built In Toaster

toaster
Originally uploaded by cmotes

This home we saw in Oakland has a toaster built in!

poop

poop
Originally uploaded by cmotes

This sign is at our local dog park.

Let's face it - 'feces' is a dead word. Just say 'poop'.

D-Day

I just finished Stephen Ambrose's incredible book D-Day which tells the story of the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944.

I've seen the movies... but they didn't prepare me for the stories from soldiers on those beaches about the incredible loss of life on that day and in that war.

Here are a few interesting facts and takeaways that I read in this book:

1. Averages Don't Tell The Right Story. There was 7% casualty rate on D-Day for all of Allied forces. In the first waves, casualty rates were over 50%. For some squads, >90%.


2. ROI Analysis in War Preparation? Rommel put hundreds of person years into the building of the fortifications in the Atlantic Wall. While those fortifications caused horrific loss of life... the Atlantic Wall held up the Allied Invasion by approximately 1 hour on Utah Beach and one day on Omaha Beach.


3. Beware of Reports of Failure. Many officers watched D-Day from battleships off the coast... radios were silent so status reports came from coxswain who had been to the beaches dropping off soldiers. They saw some horrible things and their reports were grim. Yet the beach was taken that day. After the war, Maj. Gen. Charles Gerhardt said that "No reports of disaster should be allowed. THEY ARE NEVER TRUE."


4. Adjust Strategy to the Situation. The D-Day plan was to clear the Atlantic Wall with heavy air and naval bombings prior to infantry landings. This went according to plan on several beaches, but not on Omaha beach. The Air Force and Navy all missed their targets. Soldiers landing at Omaha had been reassured that there would be nothing left once they got there. One soldier described the scene as his boat got close to Omaha beach: "My heart sank when I saw that Omaha beach looked peaceful and serene, not a single bomb had hit." As the landing craft got in front of the destroyers, the Navy ceased firing their rockets so as to avoid friendly fire casualties. If you saw Saving Private Ryan, then you know that Omaha beach was hell on earth that morning. After two hours of watching and waiting, some battleship skippers began to take action. Lt. Comdr. Ralph Ramey on McCook could see that troops were not getting up the bluff on Omaha, and he gave the command to start blasting away with his 5-inch guns at one of the Omaha beach exits. Other skippers followed suit. Destroyers came in as close as they could to the beach without grounding their ships (some did scrape bottom)... soldiers on the beach described the destroyers as "practically on the beach" (the Carmick went in to within 900 meters of the beach). Some soldiers who were on Omaha that day say that many more lives would have been lost but for the Navy's disregard of the order to not fire on the beach after landings began.


5. Delegate Decisions. Hitler's generals were not empowered to make all the decisions they needed - deployment of certain Panzer divisions required his direct approval. On D-Day, Hitler could not be reached until after noon because he was sleeping and no one was to wake up . Panzer divisions sat and waited and did not respond to the invasion that day. In contrast, Eisenhower and Churchill made exactly zero D-Day decisions. Complete delegation of authority to those who needed it.


6. Project Management in War. I've done my fair share of work managing projects, and I've complained about the sometimes massive effort involved to make a project happen. Consider this: D-Day required 175,000 men, their equipment and 50,000 vehicles to be carried or supported by 5,333 ships and 11,000 airplanes across a distance of 60-100 miles of open water, landing on a hostile shore against intense opposition... all in <24 hours. To put it another way: "it was as if the cities of Green Bay, Racine, and Kenosha, Wisconsin were picked up and moved - every man, woman, child, automobile and truck, to the east side of Lake Michigan, in one night." I'll stop complaining about my petty project management struggles now.

Ambrose made one shocking point that isn't a learning so much as a sobering realization of how horrible WWII was. Hitler said that stopping the Allied invasion of northern France would determine the outcome of the war. Defend the Atlantic Wall, and win the war. His thinking was that a failed Allied invasion would require months/years to regroup, morale would suffer, and Roosevelt would be less likely to be re-elected (Hitler even claimed that Roosevelt might get thrown in jail if the invasion failed!). Ambrose suggested another possible outcome: had the invasion failed, the United States might have been dropping atomic bombs on Berlin in 1945.

This was a great book.

Credit to Mr. Ambrose throughout this post for quotes taken from his book.

Thomas Friedman On Climate Change

He is so right...