View from the Mountain

Programmed for disaster

Sitting on the side of a mountain looking at blue mountains in the distance, it is hard to comprehend the enormity of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Since I spend much of my time on the North Carolina coast wandering around the waters near Emerald Isle, I do have an idea of the importance of the marshlands and the whole coastal environment.

I love to fish, and I know that losing the ability to fish in our area would be a tragedy that could not be measured.

Recently we made a trip back to the Va. mountains and brought with us three pounds of wild North Carolina shrimp that had been caught by one of our local shrimp fishermen.

They were well received here in the mountains of Virginia.  Many people have become so accustomed to the nearly tasteless imported, farmed shrimp that they are amazed at how tasty our own local wild shrimp can be.

We only have a small number of boats shrimping in our area.  The competition from imported shrimp is so intense that making money trawling for shrimp is a difficult proposition. 

Even with the Gulf out of shrimp production, shrimp prices have stayed the same while oyster prices have risen enough that one restaurant in our area has taken them off the menu.

What worries me even more than higher prices is that I doubt we have the resources to protect our shrimp nurseries any better than Louisiana did.  What would we do?

Would we close the ocean inlets and let the beaches take the brunt of the oil?  That would sentence beach goers to tar balls for the foreseeable future.

A friend forwarded me a link to an article about the Dutch offering to help with the oil spill by sending their highly efficient skimmers to work the spill.

Apparently we have turned them down until just recently. I have a hard time understanding how our government and one of the largest and most profitable corporations cannot get mobilized.

It is almost like our system is so messed up that we don't know how to deal with large problems.  Tonight on the news, I saw someone skimming oil with shop-vacs from Lowes.

So the question I want to ask is why weren't we prepared for such a disaster?  On top of that I would like to know why we aren't taking advantage of the absolutely best technology in the world to fight this spill.

I would think it is time to lose our homegrown pride and accept all the help we can find.  To turn down help is really stupid on lots of levels.

I wonder if it is the American propensity to fall back on the not invented here syndrome that keeps us from fully utilizing help from others.

That would be mean that are programmed to do things the hard way.

If that is true, it is a shame since time lost in solving this problem just means that things will get a lot worse before they get better.

Time to think of the other person

I have to stifle laughter when I hear the commercial that we should slow down health care reform.  If the reform process is much slower, I will be dead long before anything happens.  Health care reform reminds me of widening Interstate 81.  Everyone knows it needs to be done, but no one wants to pay for it or compromise on how it will be done.

The folks who do not drive on 81 certainly do not want to pay for it, just as the people who have benefits from their companies want nothing to do with health care reform.  The system is working fine so why should they want any change.

There was a time when Americans thought about doing what was right for the majority of people.  Years of nasty politics where the driving force was "if I can get more than my share, too bad for you" have turned our country into warring factions.

The facts are that we have a lot of people who do not have health care. Paying for health care in our system is a competitive drag on our economy.  It makes our businesses less competitive.

We already face rationing of care, but the rationing comes from fighting with insurance companies who know how to play the system.  They also can easily drop you or charge you a premium so high that you cannot afford to pay it.

There is something inherently right about society assuming the risks for those people whose health has failed them. Granted we all need to try to lead healthy lives, but we all know that people get diseases and die even if they live the healthiest of lives.

What is wrong is assuming that the system we have can work to cover everyone.  My family and I lived in Canada for seventeen years.  In fact all our children were born in Canada.  We had very good health care.  In talking to people still living there, the system has some problems, but it is a far more efficient system than ours.

There are only three kinds of people opposed to health care reform.  One is the politician whose soul is owned by the insurance companies.  Number two would be the people who are already covered by their companies and could care less about people who have no coverage.  The third group would be those who need health care and cannot accept the fact that unless the government is involved, we will always be at the mercy of the insurance companies.

My wife and I pay a lot of money for health care because we are older, and my company does not provide health care.  It is a constant worry that we might lose our coverage.

I have seen the Canadian system work.  Just the fact that you went to the doctor when you needed one without worrying about the cost was a huge positive when we were raising our kids.

Those who do not want something in the US where people do not have to worry about losing their coverage are blinded by their own ideology.

Making a bad decision on a grand scale

As someone who sold computers to Virginia universities for many years, I can testify that the latest problems showing Virginia will pay $9,000 over the life of a laptop are nothing new.

In the late eighties when I first submitted one of Apple Computer's bids in response to Virginia's Department of Information Technology (DIT) requests for bids, I was amazed that a process which in theory was designed to hold costs down had become warped in Virginia to the point that it actually increased the cost of computing.

DIT in its wisdom specified only certain bundled equipment that could be ordered by state institutions.  Unfortunately DIT was staffed by people who were on the trailing edge of technology while university customers were on the leading edge.

Universities switched quickly to high speed ethernet networks. DIT required them to buy low speed AppleTalk connectors with each computer even though they did not need them. It added fifty or sixty dollars to the cost of each computer.  There was one of the departments at the University of Virginia which had a closet filled to the ceiling with unused AppleTalk connectors.

The worst abuse of DIT was the drawn out process of bidding and the contract itself.  In a world of technology where products rarely lasted more than six months, the DIT process was designed for products that were around for eighteen months.

I solved Apple's problem by just no longer bidding on the state contract. At that point state agencies did individual bids or signed contracts directly with us which lowered their costs.

This latest outsourcing of IT fits the pattern.  Plenty of United State government organizations have in one way or another tried outsourcing their information technology.  Unfortunately I also got to see how poorly those worked.  The most infamous case was the Department of Navy outsourcing to EDS.

I noticed that the EDS contract has been extended.  That comes as no surprise since once you implement one of these contracts, you no longer have the staff to do it yourself.  In fact you do not even have the people to evaluate whether or not the contract is saving you money or costing you money.

Typically these contracts have tons of modifications which keep driving the costs up.

My favorite example of a bad contract was NASA's Outsourcing Desktop Initiative or ODIN. NASA signed the contract for its computer procurement.  It resulted in second class, out of date technology in the hands of scientists who needed leading edge equipment. The contract had some real quirks that drove costs up.  Because it required external monitors, the vendors supplied useless 15" external monitors with each iMac.  The iMacs had a built-in monitor.  Scientists used them the extra monitors for doorstops.

Virginia's $9,000 laptop contract is particularly sad since my experience with Virginia taught me that some of the brightest minds in information technology are in Virginia. Virginia state universities have had to learn how to do more with less, and with just a few exceptions they have done just that.

Perhaps the state should have tasked one of its universities to manage its information technology. Certainly Va. Tech did a better job of lowering telecom costs than the state which tried to force universities to pay more for telecom just to help fund DIT.

The idea that a laptop, which is essentially a disposable item these days, could cost $9,000 to deploy and support over five years is laughable. It is a great example of government outsourcing gone bad.

I wonder how much it costs to support my $849 HP laptop that I bought two years ago?  The one thing I do know is that I could buy the same laptop with better specifications for under $600 today. 

Even if prices did not drop more I could buy a new laptop each year for five years and throw the old one away and still come in $6,000 cheaper than Virginia's contract.  At $40 per hour for support, with my $6,000, I could buy 150 hours or 30 hours of support per year.

If you need thirty hours of support a year to run a modern laptop, you need to retire and let someone else have your job.

I would think if your laptops are costing $9,000 over five years, then just maybe you should evaluate what operating system you are using and perhaps consider some alternatives.

Perhaps you should look at Apple products which cost more upfront but have been demonstrated to be nearly self supporting or Linux software which has been shown to be far more reliable and inexpensive than Windows products.

Even Apple laptops do not cost $9,000.

At this point, I suspect Virginia is out of options, they will have plenty of $9,000 laptops but fewer and fewer rest stops.

It is a sad commentary on what was once viewed by many as one of the most high tech of states.

When government really disappoints

I rarely write about government, mostly because I like to write about positive things and government unfortunately ends up being a negative force far too often.  While we elect politicians to be leaders, they often end up pandering to special interests or fighting ideological battles which ending up hurting the very same people they are supposedly trying to help.

For seventeen years, I drove up Interstate 81 to work in the Washington area.  I would often leave on a Monday or Tuesday and come home on Thursday or Friday.  It was a lot of travel, but I chose to do it because I thought the Roanoke Valley was a better place to bring up our children than the suburbs of Northern Virginia or Maryland.  While we will never know for sure, I think it was a good decision.

I have a long history with Interstate 81.  My first trips on it were in 1963 when I went off to military school in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  Then I followed it to college in Boston.  I watched Interstate 81 grow up.  I can remember driving home from college and being thankful when I hit the Shenandoah Valley and Interstate 81 at about sunrise.

I can remember being very thankful for the rest areas even back then in the sixties. My many work related trips to Northern Virginia were almost always by myself.  The drive from Roanoke to my daughter's townhouse in Northern Virginia took me almost exactly three hours and forty five minutes if I just stopped once for gas.

However, just as many who travel the Interstates, there were days when I left tired or late in the day after almost a complete day of work.  It was then that I really appreciated the rest areas.  Many times ten minutes of snoozing in one of the rest areas kept me from dozing at the wheel.  One of those naps may have saved my life.

I cannot believe Virginia has chosen to close rest areas on an Interstate highway that is among the most dangerous that I drive.  While I rarely head north on Interstate 81 these days, I often head south, and I am still amazed at how far over capacity Interstate 81 continues to be.

I spent a lot of time in North Carolina, and I cannot help but contrast Interstate 81 in Southwest Virginia with Interstate 40 east of Raleigh.  Both highways are four lanes and travel through some very rural areas.  The difference is that I40 has almost no trucks and all its rest areas are open.  The volume of traffic on I40 is far less than I81, and it is a much more pleasant drive than any part of I81 that I frequent.

I cannot count how many times that I have been by the rest stops near Radford and seen them overflowing with trucks.

Let me go on record as saying that closing rest stops on an already dangerous highway makes a joke out of representatives claiming they are working for the interests of the people.

If Virginia's government cannot do a better job with transportation than this, they should do us a favor and resign so some intelligent life can try to move this state forward.

North Carolina looks better and better.

A victory for responsibility

 I was interested to hear that President Obama made this statement last night.

"I screwed up...It's important for this administration to send a message that there aren't two sets of rules- you know, one for prominent people, and one for ordinary folks who have to pay their taxes..."

If we are going to have good government, we need to have people running government who can acknowledge their mistakes and take responsibility for them.

When I had a team of people working for me, the ones who drove me crazy were the ones who in their own mind never made mistakes.

I always welcomed anyone who acknowledged a mistake as "a learning experience." All that was important to me was to prevent a recurrence of a mistake and to solve whatever problem needed solving.

Energy used looking for someone to blame was always wasted.

In the same vein, once we agreed on a course of action as a team, complaints from someone who acknowledged the problems but refused to offer up any solutions were not welcomed.

There is nothing worse than complaints about a solution from someone who was not even willing to make an effort to solve a problem.

In my book nothing bad comes from saying "I screwed up."  Even leaders have to say it sometimes.  They usually end up being better leaders for having said it.