Tony K's Blog

My name is Tony and I'm a planner. There I said it. Six years ago I was describing the work I was doing to someone and he said, "Oh, you're a planner." I was shocked to be called such a name. Today I am out of the closet. I am not a planner though in the mold that most organizations think of planners. In many places, planning is a combination of very mechanical rollups and dysfuctional negotiations; collect sandbagged data, add it all together, twist arms until people go back to what they were willing to live with, repeat yearly. This type of planning adds little if any value, but is very common. In many places, even the adding up of the data is extremely painful. We used to use Excel for adding up all our data. I have no problem with Excel, when used as designed. Once you start to treat it as a database, all kinds of bad things can happen. First, Excel has capacity limitations. The tool I had built in Excel had to contain 500 assets, 20 to 50 years looking forward of...

Castro made a very eloquent, apparently sincere, almost certainly politically motivated offer to help by sending 1,100 doctors to help in New Orleans. Our official response was to ignore him. How many people have died and will die because of this tacit refusal of aid? What if Bush had made a positive response? How might it have gone? "My fellow Americans. America and Cuba has an intertwined history going back hundreds of years. That came to an abrupt end in the late 1950s when Fidel Castro led a communist revolution in that country. Since the early 60s, the US has observed a trade and travel embargo with Cuba. "In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Cuba has made a historic offer of assistance to the United States.They have offered the services of 1100 physicians to assist in saving the lives of the desperate people of New Orleans. I know that there will be people who disagree with this decision, especially in Florida, where many former residents of Cuba still reside. This decisio...

I had heard that Cuba had offered help in the wake of hurricane katrina. I had no idea how eloquent Castro was. From Andrew Tobias' Website: TWO QUESTIONS FOR YOU Read the passage below. 1. Do you think the U.S. news media should have more widely reported this offer? 2. Do you think our government was wise to ignore it? If so, why? If not, why not? “Discuss.” Castro, addressing 1,586 doctors assembled to offer assistance to victims of Katrina. Havana Convention Center, September 4, 2005 Hardly 48 hours ago I . . . once again explicitly offered the United States to send a medical force with the necessary means to offer emergency assistance to the tens of thousands of Americans trapped in the flooded areas and the ruins Katrina left behind after lashing Louisiana and other southern states. It was clear to us that those who faced the greatest danger were these huge numbers of poor, desperate people, many elderly citizens with health situations, pregnant women, mothers and children ...

In all the debate around evolution and intelligent design, one thing has been lost--does it really matter what is taught? Evolution is a fact; intelligent design is poorly supported opinion. That's my bias on this. Darwinians can't necessarily give evidence-supported explanations of all the complexity of life. This doesn't mean that it didn't happen. Put all that aside though. Who cares? Geologists care. Evolutionary biologists care. From the standpoint of most science and engineering though, it doesn't matter at all. Solid state physicists don't care about evolution or the age of the earth; they care only about how semi conducting materials respond to electrical current. Software engineers don't care. Even doctors don't really care. What happened a million years ago on earth, and whether humans and apes have a common ancestor has zero impact on most people's daily lives. We do know that evolution happens at some scale. It is the reason bacteria beco...

I have Music in my life again. I don't mean that metaphorically, I mean it literally. With the advent of the iPod, iTunes, and MP3s, I have started listening to and appreciating music again. I have digitized my entire CD collection and downloaded a lot of songs from iTunes. now I have all my songs in one place and backed up. I bought an Airport Express to allow me to play directly from my computer to the stereo, so now I have instant access to my music through my stereo. This is all too cool. The other thing I did was buy an electric bass. I have always wanted to play, but somewhere stuck in my head was the idea that they did not make left-handed bass guitars. So I didn't do it. Then one day, I actually saw one in an instrument store. It was a revelation. I bought one and have started lessons from a CD. Unfortunately, my computer chewed up my CD, so I am going to have to get a new copy, but wow!! Rock is my life.

What Kind of American English Do You Speak? Your Linguistic Profile: 70% General American English 15% Yankee 5% Midwestern 5% Upper Midwestern 0% Dixie Kind of fun. No surprise here though.

OK. I'm not as young as I used to be. And I'm a little bit overweight... Actually, overfat. You see, the normal standards of weight vs height as expressed by the Body Mass Index are a bit flawed. I'm not tring to make excuses or anything, but focusing on weight alone can be counterproductive. The medical community has used the weight of average people in computing the range of acceptable BMIs, but it doesn't account for people outside of the norm. For example, Walter Payton, one of the greatest running backs ever to play football was 5'10" and weighed about 210 lbs. That gave him a BMI of 30.2--obese. He was not obese. He probably had about 10% body fat. That is why BMI has problems. It is used as a proxy for body fat percentage. The fact is though that today you can get a scale for under $100 that measures your body fat directly. So if you are an athlete or are somehow outside the norm, you can see your real progress. Which brings me to the topic of this note,...