Ruminatrix
getting technical
And life takes another turn. Two weeks ago I started a new job, which is once again taking up time otherwise available for posting.
The firm makes software for financial institutions running mutual funds, pension funds and the like. Clients use it to model investment portfolios and to create strategies for neutralizing various forms of market risk. I can't describe anything in detail here -- and your eyes would glaze over if I did -- but the architecture of this strange vessel in which I work is a flowchart: databases, engines, modular bits and other thingummies behind a shiny graphic interface.
New components are being added all the time: position-loading is being transformed into XML; yield curves are described; scenarios (or sudden market shifts) modeled. Then another computation engine handles the analytical processes: comparing portfolios to benchmarks, calculating the effect of assorted changes users wish to make to their positions.
I'm just responsible for the docs: the user manuals, support and help screens and other technical materials. Translating engineer-speak and (some) financialese into something less arcane. It means using language that is
- precise
- unambiguous
- terse
- affectless
In the evenings i'm not much good for more than a little browsing and lurking. But my hope is that the daily discipline of writing the technical material will get me back in the habit of producing other stuff. Anyone have a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance around?
Wednesday, Sep 17, 2003
where the time goes
I just can't believe it's been a month since my last post. My bar job at M0rrell's (now mercifully at an end) was a big drain on my mental resources and my physical energy. I felt tired all the time. And for some reason it made me feel perpetually hungry too...
But now I'm working days and Theo's room (a construction zone for the past three weeks) is just about put back together again, so it's time to resume posting. Gotta hit the post button now now now. Aaaah, I feel better already.
Wednesday, Aug 20, 2003
cui bono?
Whoever blew up hotel housing the United Nations' Baghdad HQ yesterday did something cleverly nasty. Attacking U.N. personnel rather than soldiers challenges the US military's claim to be fully in control of Iraq, to be the "controlling authority". Earlier attacks blowing holes in pipelines and water mains posed no more than an inconvenience to a population which has survived both embargo and invasion. Persuading the U.N. to pull its personnel out, on the other hand, could be a major setback to U.S. efforts to legitimize the new regime it wishes to sponsor. Opposition to the occupation does not appear to be tailing off, pace Mr Wolfowitz.
Of course it's impossible to tell who did it, but my money would be on anyone except the Ba'athist remnants -- it looks much more like outsiders' work. And Iraq has pretty open borders all around.
Speaking of Mr Wolfowitz (who famously finds the post-1945 history of France to be an apt model for the present political development of Iraq), I'm currently reading Robert Gildea's Marianne in Chains, a study of West-Central France (the lower Loire valley in particular) under the German occupation of 1940-45. At the mouth of the Loire lies St Nazaire which was an important base for the Kriegsmarine's U-boats, like La Rochelle further south. Towards the end of the war, both cities were encircled in "pockets" which lasted until the fall of Berlin, but weren't really attacked either.
Enough time has now elapsed for the myth of constant shortages, repression and ardent resistance to give way to a more nuanced view of everyday wartime life, and collaboration of all types. For example, it's long been known that most resistance activity until the summer of 1944 was organized by PCF (i.e. Communist Party) militants known as FTP, who were hostile to the London-based Gaullists. The Catholic majority of the population (most ardently anti-communist) agreed with the German occupiers that such acts constitured "banditry" and "terrorism." They blamed reprisals such as the shootings of hostages on the resisters themselves, especially if the hostages were Jews or Freemasons. Gildea, (a disciple of the late historian Richard Cobb) discovers in the archives the stories of public officials who played very morally ambiguous roles, quite incompatible with the myth of heroic resistance and evil collaborators... I'll post more on the book later.
Saturday, Aug 16, 2003
service interruption
Sounds of the big blackout, likely soon to be forgetten: the explosive silence I heard at 8 Friday morning when a loud generator, the only one in the neighborhood, suddenly cut out and died; and the rolling cheers of unseen voices all around as the juice came back on at 9:03 last night. Laughter and the sound of guitars, during our backyard cookouts the last two nights.
I was in midtown at work when the electrical failure hit us Thursday afternoon around 4:15. We had a few stressed-out folks stop in to get some shade and water, but the crowds of commuters started their long walks home within a half hour, as if people just knew what to do, even with cell-phone networks down. We put stuff into fridges, locked up, hit the streets.
It's the third time I've been in huge crowds of New Yorkers in the past two years (9/11, February's chilly antiwar march, this) and people are used to getting on with things. Pedestrian traffic shared the streets with cars, with surprisingly little fractiousness or impatience despite the lack of traffic lights. On the walk home in the East Village, car radios were on, providing the only source of information on the scale of the failure. Autonomous power systems mounted on rubber tires -- how clever!
The vibe was even warmer on Clinton -- LES residents really know how to hang out on the street. Everyone was happy not to be stuck underground or in a high-rise elevator. Some kid had a monster sound system blasting merengue from the back of his trike.
Yesterday MB drove Theo out to Long Island (she's going on a camping trip with her cousins Derek and Deedee) so I went along for the ride, a fix of air-conditioning (!) and to hear some radio news. There wasn't much to hear -- the causes are still obscure, but it wasn't triggered by excess demand. No solutions were being suggested, but the grid was being brought back slowly online.
However if this outage does lead to improvements in the supply network, it does seem ironic that this most anti-big-government of Presidents would oversee a project requiring massive public spending and even energy price re-regulation.
As others have noted, it would be good practice to have one of these power outages once in a while. I found it useful:
- --to be reminded of the need for unmediated human contact and conversation;
- --to see how much we depend upon the electric grid (and just how little I know about the way it works);
- --to show me how little I really need some other things: TV, cell phones, DVDs, devices that require more than four batteries...
- --to be reminded that some problems are quite unrelated to the endless War on Terror.
We now resume regularly scheduled programming...