Lueders Haus Blog

This article came in via my news reader this afternoon. Its nice to see that xenophobia is alive and well in the software industry. The article is a reaction to a interview Bill gave to a columnist for the Washington Post where he supported raising the cap on H-1B. Bill wrote an Op-Ed to this effect last weekend as well. 

The writer had some problems with the starting salary Gates mentioned but that was fairly debunked in the comments. (Bill was including the cost of benefits.) His main theory was that Gates was making up the labor shortage as a way to import more cheap foreign workers. Keeping down the wages for all software developers. He of course ignores the fact that many of these foreign workers have just received graduate degrees from fine American intuitions.

Immigration is a complex subject and it’s hard to find a source of information that does not have an agenda behind it. It seems too easy to me to blame this all on the foreign guys down the hall. Interest in math and science is dropping, there is a shortage of talent, and I think the reasons go deeper then just the pay.

Finally finished Absurdistan. It was good. not the masterpiece that The Russian Debutante’s Handbook was. The fat jokes were funny, but the hijinks in this novel were generally not as entertaining. It reminded me of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty in that it was too “ripped from the headlines”. Are we going to have to page through every authors take on the conservatives now? Now it might finally be time to start Against the Day.

We had a snow filled Saturday at Stevens Pass Nordic area. We climbed the nordic trails all the way up to the chairlift on the back side of Stevens downhill ski area. It was snowing pretty much the whole time and we found ourselves in the middle of a Biathlon. After getting back to Seattle we took our hunger to Via Tribunali. The atmosphere and pies were good. I would say we still prefer Tutta Bella even if it has high chairs. Afterwards we strolled up Broadway to Coco La Ti Da for some very hip deserts.

The Soft got slapped with a $1.52 billion fine for the use of the MP3 format by Alcatel-Lucent yesterday. That is a mighty large number, where did it come from?

Alcatel argued that the damages should be based on a royalty of 0.5 percent of the total value of Windows computers sold.

Ok, so 1.52 x  200 = 304 billion.

We have two more years of this? It all started with these comments David Geffen made to Maureen Dowd after a fund raiser for Obama:

Mr. Geffen said the Clintons lie “with such ease, it’s troubling” and that the Clinton political operation “is going to be very unpleasant and unattractive and effective.” Mr. Geffen called Mr. Clinton a “reckless guy” who had not changed in the last six years, and suggested that Mrs. Clinton was too scripted.

Clinton’s camp responded by calling on Obama to return all $1.3 million raised.

“While Senator Obama was denouncing slash-and-burn politics yesterday, his campaign’s finance chair was viciously and personally attacking Senator Clinton and her husband,” Howard Wolfson, the Clinton campaign communications director, said in a statement.

Obama?

Bill Burton, a spokesman for Mr. Obama, responded with a statement less than an hour and a half later, saying it was “ironic that the Clintons had no problem with David Geffen” when he was “raising them $18 million and sleeping at their invitation in the Lincoln Bedroom.”

I remember the Lincoln Bedroom! I wonder if Laura remodeled?
How about McCain, what has he been up to?

Although McCain had once lavished praise on the vice president, he said in an interview in his Senate office: “The president listened too much to the Vice President . . . Of course, the president bears the ultimate responsibility, but he was very badly served by both the Vice President and, most of all, the Secretary of Defense.”
McCain added: “Rumsfeld will go down in history, along with McNamara, as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history.”

It’s not nice to hit people while they are down. I’m not sure how McCain gets away with criticizing the President while still being such a vocal supporter of the war.

… they’re in Bellevue. The Stranger finally got hip to the Udupi Palace at Crossroads in Bellevue and made the trek over the water for some South Indian dosa action.  Not so much a restaurant review as a fawning ode to the dosa:

My masala dosa was crispy and airy and buttery; I kept eating long after I was full. The spiced potatoes inside seemed like they’d been cooked for days (a good thing) and the overall combination of flavors delighted me. “You’re looking rather pleased with yourself,” my wife said, and I grinned. Dosas make me happy.

Dosas make me happy, too. (Although I don’t understand why its taken The Stranger four years to realize dosas are just a short drive away.) Like writer Chris McCann, I too searched Seattle a dosa fix when I first moved to the area, not realizing how lucky I was to have relatively easy access to the Udupi Palace on Devon in Chicago … until the Crossroads location opened. Sure, it’s in Bellevue. Yes, it’s in a mall. But dosas! Just reading about them made me want one …

Finally got around to reading the piece on Toyota in last Sunday’s magazine. It’s fascinating to see the similarities between engineering the next Tundra and engineering the next OS or browser. Toyota has gone from selling just 288 cars in 1958 to outselling Ford and soon GM. I tried to pick out as much of the “Toyota Way” as I could for the reader:

Toyota is as much a philosophy as a business, a patchwork of traditions, apothegms and precepts that don’t translate easily into the American vernacular. Some have proved incisive (“Build quality into processes”) and some opaque (“Open the window. It’s a big world out there!”).

Some of Ohno’s and Toyota’s ideas also had a deeply subversive quality. It is human nature to cover up a problem rather than call attention to it. At a Toyota plant, the identification of a problem became imperative and exciting. Because then it could be addressed.

Improving efficiency in the factory, though, doesn’t necessarily lead to greater profits. Savings on the assembly line can mean a nicer dashboard without making the customer pay more for it. “If you’re efficient in the things the customer doesn’t see, then you can put it into the things the customer does see,” Ron Harbour, a consultant whose company rates the efficiency of auto plants, told me. A result is a car more popular with customers. Success on the assembly line, in this way, begets success in the showroom.

The Internet is all abuzz about the rescue on Mt. Hood today, but it’s not just the hikers that were rescued. So was their black Lab! Most everyone has come out against them bringing their dog along for the climb. I would have to agree, leave the dog at home and not in a hot car. It brings to mind the video we had to watch before heading into the backcountry at Glacier National Park. Dogs are not allowed in the backcountry because of “unpleasant encounters with wildlife”. Mainly the grizzlies might eat them.

I’m not sure about requiring personal locator beacons for all climbers. Is it the same as requiring helmets for bike riders or wearing your seat belt in a car? It can’t hurt but they are not fool proof. Even if the climbers from last year had a PLB the rescuers might have not been able to reach them in time with the storm holding up the search.

I think the press overstates the risks in climbing and hiking by promoting the tragic without mentioning the hundreds of other uneventful climbs. Earlier this winter the local news’ coverage of a missing snowshoe’er off of I-90 made it seem like snowshoeing was a daredevil sport when in reality it can be quite tame. Only 3.5% of rescues in Oregon are climbing related. Vehicles, ATV, and Snowmobiles are 20.5% of the rescues. We don’t see TV footage of rescue crews out looking for drunk snowmobilers.

It might not look like much changed, but everything has. I finally figured out that my site host provided a pretty neutered version of Wordpress. After some googling I figured out how to setup my own version of Wordpress on my site. Now we should be able to tweak our own theme.

We made the drive over to central Oregon last weekend to get in some cross-country skiing on Mt. Bachelor. Good times. It looked like the snow had been getting a little slushy, but we had quite a bit of fresh snow fall while we were out on the trails, and while six inches of fresh powder may be a dream going downhill, it made the classic cross-country skiing, well, challenging. But the upshot is we’re much more adept and going up and down hills in the crazy world of cross country than we were before the trip.

We stayed at the McMenimins (Old St. Francis School) in downtown Bend. McMenimintasic, if strangely difficult to get a seat in the movie theater. This happened to us when we stopped in Bend last summer, too. It sounds like a sweet deal to be able to catch a movie for free as a guest — but the Bend crowd shows up seriously early for movies — who knows when those people arrived to camp out on the coveted couches? We checked out some local brewery action instead, hitting the Bend Brewing Company on Friday (after hours of heavy traffic), which had been recommended for its local authenticity, but we found the food to be rather ehe — certainly nothing to blog about. On Saturday, after skiing about 25 kilometers, we decided to embrace our status as tourists and dragged our tired selves down the street to the Deschutes Brew Pub — good food, good beer, and the bizarre entertainment of watching a nearby diner proceed to garnish his coffee and, yes, his meal, with copious amounts of chalky sweet Coffeemate. Who knew non-dairy creamer was a condiment?

As for the drive home, we decided to skip out on highway 26 and pointed the truck north up highway 197 so we could drive back through the Columbia River Gorge and hit Hood River for lunch. (Sadly for J., the Full Sail brew pub was closed for renovations.) It was a beautiful drive — at least when we weren’t driving through low-lying clouds on our way up through the central Oregon hills.