July 2009 – Page 3

Goldman Sachs punked by inside-man code liberator? Please let it be so!

John July 6, 2009 February 25, 2013I Fear These Things, My Thoughts Exactly

According to this article on the Zero Hedge site (which references a fascinating article from Reuters), Vito Corleone and the Mob, er. . . sorry, I mean the Masters of the Universe at Goldman Sachs may have had some very snazzy software purloined by a software engineer who used to work in their “quants” section– presumably coding highly technical stuff where milliseconds count. The FBI has been called in; an arrest has been made. There are mysterious indicators that something fishy has been going on at the New York Stock Exchange. Billions of dollars possibly at risk. Software uploaded to some site in Germany. Oh, it sounds so juicy. I hope the wildest speculations (see the comments at the Zero hedge site) are true! I hope I hope! For starters, the guy the Feds nabbed is a Russian immigrant.

Conspiracy theories! Hardcore software geekery! Regulatory agency malfeasance! This could be a Wetmachine perfect storm!

Hat tip to Dail Kos diarist bobswern for another layer of analysis and for bringing the Zero Hedge site to our attention.

As to my momentary confusion of Goldman Sachs with a vicious nearly omnipotent criminal syndicate with tentacles in every branch of government, I can’t imagine where that came from.

It's time for the NOFA Awards!

Harold July 2, 2009 February 25, 2013Tales of the Sausage Factory, The Stimulus Package (ARRA)

No, not the actual giving out of money, silly. My snarky commentary on yesterday’s unveiling of Broadband.gov.

I’ll preface by saying I absolutely still love and respect the folks I know on the inside who struggled with this stuff for months. I know how hard it is to actually implement this stuff, especially with this kind of ridiculous schedule and no one appreciating what it takes to coordinate among this many agencies and how utterly devestated the federal workforce was following 8 years of the Bushies refusing to invest in information technology, outsourcing everything to contractor cronies, and elevating political loyalty over actual talent.

Nor do I have much patience with those who are all “they sold us out blah blah blah . . .” Engineers don’t whine about how unfair it is that trees bloom in the spring and screw up line of sight with their leaves. You deal with it. Same in politics. You want good policy? Then you roll up your sleeves and get ready to fight for it rather than whining like little babies about how Obama the Deliverer failed to smite our enemies for us or persuade incumbents to put the public interest over their corporate interests and magically made all the problems of getting human beings to cooperate with each other go away. Because unless you’re willing to make some actual phone calls to members of Congress like Dittoheads do when Rush gives them the word, then I don’t want to hear it.

And the fact that there are some real issues does not negate all the good this NOFA will do. Anyone who claims that getting a less than perfect result means we pissed this away and it’s just as bad as Bush and blah blah does not know what they are talking about. I’d rather have this than more hymn singing from the worshipers of the gods of the marketplace. The fact that this turns out to be incremental rather transformative, a stepping stone rather than the whole edifice, doesn’t make it crap.

And finally, I promise to do real deep policy analysis soon.

But my selfish indulgence in unfair snarkiness below . . . .

Looking for my inner Billy Mays

John July 2, 2009 February 25, 2013My Thoughts Exactly, Writing

Last week I was down in Manhattan pimping my books at a software developer’s conference. (Man, was that a dead conference. 15 people at a “Keynote”. Evidently there’s a recession going on, people.) A nice man named Noah Sussman approached the table where I was selling stuff & explained that he was a blogger with a site called Nerdabout New York. So of course I asked him to blog about me & my sublime geeky books, whereupon he whipped out his camera, about this size of a quarter, and said, “Why don’t you make your own pitch, and I’ll put it on the site.” Well that was very nice of him, don’t you think? So I looked into his little camera and commenced bullshitting away.

Today he kept his word with a very generous blog posting and including this video (below). I think the vid came out well enough for an impromptu thing, although I don’t know what’s with my weird Tourettes-like shaking in the first bit, and I wonder why I slouch so. And must I mumble so much, and how did I get so fat and bald and when did my teeth become so Austin Powerish? And why am I clutching my wallet as if it contains the Nukular Launch Code??? Oh well. I do think I’m a pretty good pitchman in person–Fred knows I’ve done it long enough–but working for the camera is not my metier, as we say around Place D’Italie. I need to work on that. Billy Mays, the infomercial king who recently departed this mortal coil, was good at what he did. I respect him for that. I wish I had had him pitch my books for me while he was still available for the job. But I guess I’ll just have to work on my own game. Meanwhile, here’s a shout-out and thank you to Nerdabout New York.

Untitled from Noah Sussman on Vimeo.

P.S. I think it goes without saying that, Billy being unavailable, I would happily settle for Ellie from the Rocketboom site in Howard Stearns’ “Inventing the Future” post just before this one.