Monthly Archives: July 2004

Gilmour’s Albums

The Handel harp concerto was one of Gilmour’s theme songs, at least in the sixties when I made a point of listening to his program.  One of the neat things about Clyde’s use of this theme was variation–always the same piece, but an array of recordings, each with strengths and weaknesses, all with something to appreciate.  A good lesson.

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Stopgap Solutions

While I really dislike the short term limits we’ve put on the legislature, I don’t see this connection.  Methought one purpose of the term limits was to reduce the proportion of career politicians in office, thus reducing those officials’ institutional commitments and freeing up the creative juices.  That objective was certainly worthwhile, and ought to still apply.

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Fabulous Ruins

Lowell’s tribute to Tiger Stadium is a wonderful thing.  Read it, and read all the Detour panels about the stadium.  Read it even if you hate baseball, and despised the old ballyard.  This is love, and it’s something beautiful.

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Herding Data

Greg’s perspective is very different from mine, but we seem to be watching the same issues….

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Unintended Consequences

In short, all the failings attributed to government happen in private enterprises too. These failings are a fixture of human nature and organizational dynamics.

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Republican Primary

The national gerrymander habit must die.  The practice of routinely creating one-party election districts undermines political discourse, and subverts republican government.  One party elections encourage extremism, and create a climate where debate, discussion, and compromise are impossible–on many issues, the practice permits folks to honestly believe that reaching a compromise is indecent.  Few politicians, and few citizens, are naturally extremist, but we’ve created a system which encourages an extremist culture.  Party advantage is not a healthy basis for defining political boundaries, and ideology needs to be tempered by honest discussion.  We ought to do better than this.  We must do better than this.

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Sales Pitch

Sunday afternoon, fifteen years or so ago….

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I’m here to help

Dear old Rands is at it again.

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Boom Town

John Clum, Wyatt & Sadie/Josie Earp, George Parsons, Nellie Cashman–all lived in Tombstone in 1881, all lived long lives, and all spent many years in mining camps in many places. This short paragraph expresses an important force in all those lives, and in the lives of many less heralded folks who mined, or lived near mines. To all appearances, everyone on this list would have lived pretty much the same life with or without the savage gunfight which appears to define the Tombstone story.

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From Model to Reality

The legal changes gave us reason and opportunity to rethink and rebuild our processes. First we implemented a jury-rig on the old system; it was clumsy and ignored the spirit of the legal changes, but adequately met the intention of the law. More or less simultaneously we began work on an Invitation to Bid for a replacement system which would meet our “corporate” needs. Much of the planning effort went into improving process flows, of course; another intention was to move much of the activity to the state website, so our customers could interact directly with the system. While adapting the old system to the new law was not considered feasible, it contained millions of data records and microfilm images, so moving the data and the images to the new system would be a major part of the undertaking and was a major cause for concern.

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