Tony K's Blog

Now the Cubs are all alone in the Major League Baseball futility standings. It's sad. I wish they would have won before my Mom died. She was a diehard Cubs fan. Team Last WS Win Cubs 1908 Indians 1948 Giants 1954 Rangers ---- Est. 1961 (Washington Senators) Astros ---- Est. 1962 Padres ---- Est. 1969 Expos/Nationals ---- Est. 1969 Brewers ---- Est. 1969 (as the Seattle Pilots) Mariners ---- Est. 1977 Pirates 1979 Phillies 1980 Cardinals 1982 Orioles 1983 Tigers 1984 Royals 1985 Mets 1986 Twins 1987 Dodgers 1988 A's 1989 Reds 1990 Blue Jays 1993 Rockies ---- Est. 1993 Braves 1995 Devil Rays ---- Est. 1998 Yankees 2000 Diamondbacks 2001 Angels 2002 Marlins 2003 Red Sox 2004 White Sox 2005

Woo hoo. They did it. White Sox win the World Series. First the Red Sox, now the White Sox. All we need now is the Cubs and we will have definitive proof that Hell has, in fact, frozen over.

Having grown up in Chicago, I am a long time victim of Chicago sports. Oh sure, there were a few bright spots (Jordan and the Bulls, Walter Payton and the Bears), but the record of futility may be unmatched. I have just watched the second world series game in 2005. The Chicago White Sox are now ahead 2 games to 0 and I am cautiously optimisitic that maybe, just maybe, the White Sox might have a chance of winning three world series games before once again breaking my heart. We'll see. World Series Tickets $185; Cub Fans At Home In October: Priceless I have been pondering something. In Chicago, you are either a Cubs fan or a White Sox fan. There is no middle ground. I know that most cities with more than one team are this way as well, but I think that Chicago it is a little more polarized than most places. Why is that? If anyone out there has insight on that I would like to hear from you. In my family, my mother was a diehard Cubs fan. I'm not sure why I became a White Sox fan th...

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...