Bush likes to attack Kerry for being soft on terrorism, and what’s more depressing is that a large portion of the American people seem to agree with him. If I were Kerry, I would attack Bush for being dumb on terrorism.

It truly boggles my mind how Bush thinks he will win the war on terrorism especially with the situation in Iraq. Does he expect to quell terrorism by eliminating all terrorists? Call me a hopeless optimist, but isn’t it a better idea to build world peace by bridging the cultural gaps and helping out our fellow human beings? People aren’t born hating each other are they?

One consequence of surrounding yourself with Yes-men as the Bush administration has done is that you always think you’re right because everyone agrees with you. There is no trusted advisor who can intervene and present honest differing opinions with reasonable credibility. Colin Powell could have been that force in the build up to the war with Iraq, but his voice was lost in a cacophony of hawkish tones presented by Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. The problems go deeper than just that of course. The intelligence that the administration received about Iraq was tuned exactly for the ears of the President. The most trivial and unproven pieces of evidence which confirmed the administrations beliefs were held up as fact, while even solid dissenting evidence was quickly discredited or classified. It’s really no surprise that Bush got exactly the damning intelligence he needed to justify his war. And now the American public is paying the price.

Separately, Taiwan is in the news. There have been talks that Taiwan wants to acquire offensive weapons capabilities which China would treat as a prelude to war. This would not be good. 2/3 of Americans would not support sending US troops to Taiwan to defend them. I’m with the majority here and my parents are Taiwanese. I can’t see how sending US troops would be good in any way. It’s an unsolvable problem if there is a war.

I’m learning a lot at work. Information retrieval is a much more interesting field than I thought. There’s lots of interesting algorithms in web search, most of them have been done by Google or others. But there’s still a lot of space in the markets for more search engines. The PageRank algorithm is a bit easier to implement than I thought. It’s not that easy to do on a large scale of course, but conceptually it’s not that difficult to understand. The research today is in the fields of image and video retrieval.

I’ve had to read a bunch of papers on how to search the web and crawl large amounts of data. I am pretty familiar with the tools and the architecture for large systems, but now I know a lot more about the algorithms which you’d use to build a search engine. The environment at work is a lot more academic than I’m used to. We have a lot of PhD’s considering our size. My background is a little different because it’s much more software engineering oriented. Software engineering actually has very little to do with algorithms and a lot to do with software process. I’ve almost never had to implement a sort or a hash table. I’m more used to dealing with systems management and process improvement. This job is a nice change because I feel like I’m learning really interesting and different types things.

I’m doing a bit more database work than I’m used to. It’s a bit ironic, because for a very long time I’ve tried to avoid being the database guy. But now I’m doing more of it at work than I’ve ever done before. I’m doing more mysql than I have ever needed to know, but that’s actually a been more fun than I thought it’d be.

Tracy is happy that she brought a new client to her firm, so she gets a bonus for that. If you’re in need of legal services, she’d be happy to hook you up.

Just some random notes…

My friend Dave put up a blog about poker and politics(though not necessarily together).

Ichiro Suzuki is on track to set the 84 year old single season hit record of 257 set by George Sisler.

We’re running into some strange things at work. Our application uses Java 5, and linux 2.6 on Dell servers and the servers are just crashing randomly. No unusual errors or anything, they just die. Mysql is really fast. I am continually impressed by the speed(though not the SQL feature set). Linux

Went to my first baby shower lunch this weekend. The baby shower games weren’t bad, but the food was good. Tracy and I had previously not liked Buca Di Beppo when we had gone, but this time I was pleased with the food.

This hurricane season is brutal for Floridians. Hurricane Jeanne will be the 4th major hurricane to make landfall on the state.

It’s really damn annoying that the electronic bills that I get from credit card issuers don’t have an automatic “pay in full” option. There is only a “make minimum payment” option on my e-bill statement. I missed a credit card payment for the first time in probably 6-8 years because I have to manually make full payments every month, and it cost me $5 in finance charges. Damn them.

I heard about a credit card from Fidelity Investments which gives you %2 back annually into a 529 savings plan(a tax deferred education savings plan). Of course you have to open the accountwith Fidelity, but still %2 is pretty damn good.

It’s only natural to compare Iraq to Vietnam. I took a history class in college about the History of the Vietnam War(only because I was forced to fulfill a requirement). I got a C in the class because I can’t write worth a damn, but I do remember one thing that my professor(I think it was Lieberman who still teaches this course today) said about Vietnam. His assertion was that nearly every president succeeded in what they set out to do in Vietnam. However, the presidents in office did not share the same objectives as the American public. The American public wanted an outright defeat of Communism and the Viet Cong or some liberals wanted a complete withdrawal from Vietnam. But the presidents wanted only two things: 1: to not lose the war and 2: to minimize the number of troops sent to Vietnam. The two objectives are nearly incongruous of course. An attempt to achieve a true victory would have required an extraordinary effort by almost all accounts: another 5-10 years of ground warfare and significantly more troops than had already been lost. A war of that scale would be unpalatable to an already disgruntled American populace.

The other day on NPR, a speaker said that the Bush administration portrays Iraq as the key to the war on terrorism. Much like Vietnam was a key to the war on Communism. Much like Vietnam, I expect it to be a long, drawn out, nearly unwinnable war.

I am continually impressed at how the Bush administration fails to acknowledge the problems in Iraq. When everyone else believes the problems with Iraq are significant, Bush puts on his blinders and talks about all the great things that have happened, which of course is a pretty short list. You’re left with the conclusion that he’s lying or stupid. Of course he’s a politician so you know he’s lying sometimes. But the magnitude of his self-deception probably means he’s not very smart either. He has a stubbornness and arrogance that is unmatched in modern leaders of democratic countries. His hubris has set our country onto a treacherous path we won’t recover from for decades. Having strong convictions and the courage to follow them is great for a warrior, it’s not so good for a politician.

As usual, here are pictures from the Pacific Grove Triathlon. These are courtesy of Action Sports International and Brightroom. I was in some major trouble during the run, so that pained look on my face is about how good I felt at that moment.

Not too much else going on really. Busy at work as usual. We are getting free dinner from Waiter.com 4 nights/week, which is a clear indication that 1: it’s crunch time. 2: we are hungry.

I have to delve into politics because the stakes are so high for this election year. No president has ever been such an affront to my beliefs. I am a lifelong Democrat, but this goes way beyond that. No Republican has ever evoked the kind of outrage and disgust that I feel about George Bush.

Yes 9/11 changed the way we view the world, but we went way overboard. When the US launched a campaign into Afghanistan to hunt down Al-Qaeda no other countries complained, that was a reasonable response to catch the responsible parties. But it is clear today that there are no ties between Al-Qaeda and Iraq.

The successful overthrow of the Hussein government was no surprise. No country can stand up to the full force of the US military. What is astounding to me is the difference between what Bush administration expected in post-war Iraq and the actual result. The need for continued occupying forces and the inability to build a legitimate Iraqi government can only lead to two conclusions. 1: The Bush administration was hopelessly optimistic with their expectations. 2: The intelligence around Iraq was severely flawed. Both conclusions are true. I don’t know anything about intelligence gathering but that’s where the administration would of course like to place the blame. But clearly the intelligence community can not take all the blame for the decision to go to war.

The ramifications of the war in Iraq will last for generations. It could be worse than Vietnam in my mind. While the human casualties won’t be as great, the effect on foreign policy will last indefinitely. The Vietnam war at least had the support of other other countries. Iraq will leave America alone and isolated both in Iraq and the future as well. The war in Iraq is only going to fuel the fires of extremism.

There are just so many things wrong with the justifications of the war with Iraq that it is embarassing. Everything about the Bush administration is horrifying to me. I still don’t understand how Bush continues to lead in the polls. I am sad to be an American.

Here’s pictures from our Labor Day Weekend trip. Nothing too exciting really, although damn I’m looking huge.

Other tidbits… I’ve been using RSS for a while now and it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I like browsing tech deals at sites like: Gizmodo, techbargains.com, slickdeals.net. The new amusing one is woot.com where they have only one deal every day and it lasts exactly one day or until it sells out. Woot recently had on sale a “random bag of crap” for $5(which included s+h) which for some people included randomness like PowerRanger Underoos, or a mini speaker system, or a lone Zip disk.

I was in Monterey and got to visit my friend Kevin, back from my old days at Citibank. He has a 3 year old daughter who broke a leg and has been in a full lower body cast for a couple of months. She can’t go out because she doesn’t fit in a car seat, and she can’t move around much by herself. It was funny and sad to see a little girl stuck like that, but she’ll be out of it soon and back to her normal active self.

This weekend I was in Pacific Grove again for my second attempt at the Pacific Grove Triathlon. I say attempt because I feel like I failed, given how poor my run was. I ran a full 7 minutes slower than last year, although my bike wasn’t bad and my swim was ok. My transitions were pretty good because I went without socks again. That was a mistake though because I got some bad blisters by the middle of the run. I had my worst run since the Half-Ironman, and that was twice the distance, so that was horrible.

Here are the times of me and some of my friends. Last year Bo won his age group in the sprint distance, but he hadn’t been training much this year, so his time wasn’t as great as I’m sure it could have been.

Tango had his best ever run, congrats. He’s lost quite a bit of weight, and he’s been training really well and his run times have dramatically improved.

Kojo did much better than he expected his training had sucked but he still smoked me.

giving up triathlons for golf. That way I won’t feel like I suck so bad.

The problem with me is that I want to find a sport that

• 1: doesn’t require much special equipment
  
• 2: doesn’t require a special location
  
• 3: doesn’t require other people
  
• 4: I am reasonably good at
  

Unfortunately, the sports that I am reasonably good at tend to be ball sports, and those pretty much always require other people. Maybe I should be taking up the hacky-sack.

Oh and Tim said he talked to my old high school classmate Ty Olson a while ago. He needed a neurosurgical consult on something and he knew that Ty was at Columbia doing neurosurgery, so he called him up. I guess Ty is getting married sometime soon so congrats to him.

Ten things I hate about Dubya:

• 10. His idea of progress is making the rich richer.
  
• 9. He doesn’t care about the environment
  
• 8. He believes that intimidating other countries will quell terrorists
  
• 7. He believes all other countries and people want to be like the US
  
• 6. He turns judicial nominations into partisan politics
  
• 5. He believes that communicating to the people through the press is beneath him
  
• 4. He doesn’t feel like he has to answer to Congress or the American people
  
• 3. He doesn’t believe in civil rights
  
• 2. He turns science into partisan politics
  
• 1. He believes he is always right
  

We went to New York this weekend for Labor Day. Got to hang out with my new nephew Nathan and my 1 year old twin niece and nephew Elizabeth and Jacob. Hung out with the family and did a lot of eating out and such. Tim treated us to a nice meal at Peter Luger’s world famous steakhouse. The relatives are all doing well. We had a party for my dad’s 70th birthday, we spent a day at the beach, we went to the US Open, we played some volleyball, we played some tennis. I’ll put some pictures up, once they get collected. The babies are all doing well. We got to see what it is really like to have kids. They seems kind of troublesome. I think my Counter-strike skills might suffer if I had one.

At the US Open we saw 3rd and 4th round matches with Andy Roddick, Serena Williams, Jennifer Capriati, and Tommy Haas. None of the matches were close. Roddicks serve was amazing. The National Tennis Center is a really nice facility, the courts are great of course, but it’s also a nice venue.

Got my new PC today. I hope to take it out for some test gaming soon.

Oh also had my Fantasy Football Draft. It wasn’t great, mostly because I missed my first 11 of 15 picks because I was in a meeting. I had ranked some players for selection beforehand, but that is never that great when everyone else is doing the draft live.