I have a huge dislike for suburban spaces. I like rural areas and I love urban areas, but suburbia should be categorized as some form of disease. Given how popular it is in the American West I always have a hard time communicating the feeling.

 

I wish I could summarize my feelings in some articulate manner. I was trying to come up with something and, ends up, someone else wrote the presentation I wanted to create.

 

Thanks to a very smart PR move from BMW the TED conferences are now available for free. Not all of them, but many, and if you have time and desire for something intelligent you should check them out: http://www.ted.com.

 

I just watched the season finale of Lost. I want to write a letter full of profanity and obscenities to the writers and producers, but I don't think they would understand why. Their brains are probably wired differently and continuing to destroy a franchise that would probably sell millions of DVDs and turn into a cult series seems natural to them. They will continue to milk the series until irrelevance (defined as negative operational income).

 

Lost is following the same path as the Trojan Horse books (by J.J. Benitez). The first book was great, and ended in a cliff hanger. The second book was ok, and ended on a nonsensical cliff hanger. The third book was mediocre, and ended on a cliff hanger that made me question the author's intentions: death wish by enraged reader, maybe? 

 

I stopped reading on the fifth book because, as we say back home, Hope is the last thing to die, but it eventually does.

 

I searched Amazon.com and they already have 8 books on the Trojan Horse series. At this point the book is probably as good as Stephen Colbert's "Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure" book. Lost will have to improve a bit to catch up on entertainment value. 

I'm not sure every immigrant has a defining moment when they know they're no longer home. I had mine, and while lots of things were different when I landed on Chicago, my defining moment happened during the following flight to Seattle. I looked outside the window and I saw something similar to the pictures below repeated over and over.

 

The Brazilian countryside looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. Very few straight lines, if any, are the norm. I'm not sure I can explain the feeling, but it was very intense. I was puzzled, but filled with admiration for a country that organized and determined to win, despite a difficult terrain.

 

Of course years later came Katrina and the Bush government. With them the realization that this place can turn into a banana republic in no time just like everywhere else.

 

But my admiration for the people that keep this country rich and powerful just grows. They're the ones who know that building a house is much harder than burning it down. That building a society is much harder than finding edge issues and dividing people.

 

My boss has a new boss, and he is new to our group. To get to know the team and mix with non-managers he scheduled a get-together this Friday. Very cool, we would have a chance to see him and he would have a chance to stop by and chat with whoever he wanted.

 

It didn't go as I thought. He did mingle with some folks, but his secretary was going around asking if anyone would like to talk to him for 5 minutes "because he had a couple of 5 minute slots open". Needless to say the slots remained open.

 

Nothing spells "openness" like sending you secretary to offer a couple of 5 minute meetings to the peasants...

One of the strangest feelings I had down in LA was the feeling of racial tension. I can't feel much of it here in Seattle, but you can almost taste it in LA.

 

My family and I were waiting for the airplane on our way back and my daughter was running around where we were seated. This huge black guy sat on the next bench. He was dressed in full rap gear, i.e. he looked scary and non-educated (sorry rappers out there, that is exactly how you look). My three year old was completing another circle around us when she spotted this guy. She tried to stop on her tracks, but she was running too fast, tripped and hit the bench. I couldn't resist laughing really loud. The black dude looked at me like I was dressing a KKK uniform. My daughter would probably stop on her tracks if anyone on that seat were dressed like that, but I could see he was feeling discriminated.

 

The day before I was gladly eating breakfast at McDonalds when 20+ kids came running into the store, all of them dressing yellow shirts. I was surrounded by the kids trying to find seats before the first adult of the group entered, all four of them dressed in bright yellow. Their T-shirt said "Tabernacle Baptist Church Choir" and I was trying to read the rest when I noticed one of the adults was looking directly to me. And the guy was looking really upset, maybe too much for a church choir guy. He had that "why are you looking at black kids for, we have the right to be here" look. I couldn't resist, I smiled and waved a 'hi'. I don't know what he was expecting, but it was definitively not that.

 

No one should have to live with the feeling others don't like them for no reason. I think it is alright not to like people you know. But not being liked for no reason, even if it is only a false feeling, sucks. No one should have to feel that.

 

I just came back from Disney yesterday, after spending a week in California. I picked a next door hotel, did not rent a car and used a shuttle to go around. I had a very good time with my wife and daughter, mostly because of the dates we choose to travel. Disney was empty - I have wide angle pictures with literally no one else but my family on it.

I have a lot of stuff to write about and I'll write something up soon. I hope someone form Disney reads it because my vacation was almost perfect and I gained a lot of respect for their engineers. I can probably reproduce 3 of the 4 hologram techniques they use on their parks very cheap at home. I'll probably try :)

Democrats and Republicans cannot agree on how to get out of Iraq. The first group wants a deadline after which troops will get out, Iraqs ready or not. The other group says that is like setting a surrender date that would hurt America. Both sides agree that finding a solution fast is very important.

 

If solving it fast is a priority then the thing to do is to set a schedule with both rewards and punishments. Violence goes down? Troops leave another region under Iraq control. Violence goes up? Double the number of troops and reduce liberties, sell the city to Halliburton, freeze assets of local politicians or flatten the city - whatever is easier. Unfortunately the level of punishment necessary to keep things quiet is probably equal to the brutality Saddam delivered so America would sell its soul to the devil to accomplish this.

 

If doing it right takes priority over getting out of there fast then the US will have to reinstate the draft and train troops here in the US, in enough numbers to replace 2/3 of the current forces at least. Then increase troop levels to a point refugees and moderate middle-class folks can go back to their regular lives. That would also require a little more honesty giving away reconstruction contracts.

 

Without a moderate middle-class in Iraq I don't believe the US has a snowball-in-hell chance of winning hearts and minds of anyone there. But heck, what do I know?