2013, The Year That Jumped the Shark

I spent New Year's Eve watching the made-for-TV movie Sharknado. I could explain the 86 minute plot, but here's the two minute version:



I started writing this post 6 days ago, but then got lost watching Breaking Bad episodes. That's all that was deserved for 2013, the year that jumped the shark.

Gold jumped the shark in 2013:



That may not be a bad thing, if it cures us of the insufferable gold bugs. King corn is down too. But Wall Street is up, so there will be no crying about gold or corn.

Hillary Clinton jumped the "guys out for a walk one night" shark at the beginning of the year:



Barack Obama jumped the "I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me" shark at the end of the year.



But don't cry for them either, Gallup says that at the end of the year, Barack and Hillary were the most admired man and woman in America. Shark jumping is only fatal if you fail to jump the shark.

Even a partial list of 2013 shark jumpers is quite impressive:

Fiscal Cliff
Lance "The Doper" Armstrong
Domestics Drones
Bradley "Chelsea" Manning
Edward Snowden and the NSA
Anthony "Tweets His Junk" Weiner
Miley "Twerking" Cyrus
Federal Government Shutdown
Legalized Marijuana in Colorado and Washington
Toronto Mayor Rob "One of My Drunken Stupors" Ford
Nelson Mandela funeral sign language interpreter
Phil Robertson's Duck Dynasty anatomy lessons

Not all of these shark jumpers made it, some landed in the shark pool and were eaten, others are still in the air. More than a few of them did make it, and most of us got over 2013 unscathed too.

The original shark jumper was Fonzie in Happy Days season 5, episode 3:



That was 1977, and Happy Days ran for 7 more years. That will bring us up to the end of this decade. Sharknado 2 is already in the works.

Merry Christmas 2013 from Cambridge, Mass.

Church of Saint Peter, 100 Concord, Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Nelson Mandela, the Lion Sleeps Tonight

In the jungle, the mighty jungle
The lion sleeps tonight

President Barack Obama called Nelson Mandela "the last great liberator of the 20th century" at the memorial service for him in South Africa today. And who among the assembled world leaders was going to stand up and say, "No, no, I am the last great liberator!"

South Africa is a nation of great wealth and beauty but many problems. While our President was cheered, they booed their current President. That is the lot of Presidents. It's quite likely many wanted to boo John Adams at George Washington's funeral.

The one problem South Africa no longer has is Apartheid. Mandela spent 27 years in prison for treasonous acts and conspiracy, but what possible claim of allegiance could the racist and manifestly unjust laws of Apartheid South Africa hold. From the speech he gave in court at his sentencing:

"During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realised. But, My Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

Ultimately, Nelson Mandela was the symbol of the moral suasion that prevailed in South Africa. He did one of those profoundly great things. He accepted the surrender of his political foes magnanimously, served one term as President, and then retired.

Near the village, the quiet village
The lion sleeps tonight.

There is only one fitting musical tribute. Perhaps you'd prefer the Happy Hippo Disney version, The Tokens pop version, or The Weavers folk version, but the final tribute goes to the original South African version by Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds:



Linda died in October 1962, the year Nelson Mandela was arrested, 51 years ago.

Waiting for Godot, I Wanted to Steal Gogo's Shoes

I saw Waiting for Godot at the Paramount in Boston last night.

I thought the play was over when the curtain dropped and the lights came up after the first act. All that was left on stage was Lucky's hat and Gogo's shoes. I wanted to steal those shoes, and the hat too.

A few people got up, but a lot of people stayed seated. I stood there puzzled, and spent a good half of what turned out to be the intermission waiting for the others in my row to get up to let me pass.

In the front lobby, a large man was holding forth before a small group struggling with their coats about how they were following the example of the mass exodus of the audience at the 1955 London premiere, except that those people were exiting in protest while their little group just had another place to be and had gotten a good taste of the experience.

Two thoughts then occurred to me. Those London audiences probably thought, like me, that the play was over. There was a second act still to come. I went in search of the bar. Three thoughts.

It's probably just as well that I didn't find the bar on the second floor until just after the call to return to seats. Getting liquored up would have opened me up to getting rolled by the drunks under the moonlight and the almost leafless trees of Boston Common on the walk back to the subway for the ride home. Samuel Beckettt, though, would have been proud.

Cambridge Breaks Out the Rulers in 2013 Election

You really haven't voted until you have voted in a Cambridge municipal election. Our proportional voting system lets you rank every single candidate, which means in this year's election you could vote for all 25 city council candidates and all 9 school committee candidates. That requires two dense ballots:



You will need an official voter pen:



A ruler, conveniently provided in each voting booth, comes in handy if you exercise your right to vote more than once. You see, you can vote only once per column and once per row, so you may need that ruler to ensure you haven't spoiled your ballot. Two people did need new ballots while I was voting at my polling station, and only six voters were there, a failure rate of 33%.

I vote at the Cambridge National Guard Armory, a sign at which informs "guests" that the building, despite principally containing a basketball court, is a military installation. I swear I did not move while I took this picture:



The system has two interesting quirks when it comes to incumbents. It's very hard to target a particular incumbent for defeat, as you'd have to lock up over 83% to 91% of the electorate to prevent the incumbent being reelected. At the same time, all the candidates run against all the other candidates, so interesting newcomers can end up pushing less interesting incumbents out of office.

This year, 2 incumbents on the city council were defeated and 2 seats were open, so 4 newcomers were elected to the 9 member council. Leland Cheung, the candidate who got the most votes and should be the next mayor, is also a relative newcomer.

Lou Reed Takes the Last Walk on the Wild Side

Rock legend Lou Reed passed away today at age 71. He worked with Andy Warhol and developed a cultish following with The Velvet Underground before going solo in the 1970s. That was a Walk on the Wild Side:



The song I've been seeing posted on Facebook today is Perfect Day:



Another song they should be posting is Satellite of Love:



And of course "Standing on the corner, Suitcase in my hand:"



I can't play Sweet Jane without also playing March of the Wooden Soldiers:



Somewhere, I imagine, Lou Reed is Waiting for the Man:

Healthcare.gov, Good Enough for Government Work

The rollout problems at the healthcare.gov website continue to embarrass and plague the Obama administration.

So what if they spent $400 million on the website. Hey, I live in the state of Massachusetts where the Big Dig highway and tunnel project cost $14.6 billion and still a ceiling panel fell and killed someone shortly after it opened. Let's not even mention the ginsu guardrails.

http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2013-10-19/

I found the source of the problem in this AP article on The Huffington Post:

"Crammed into conference rooms with pizza for dinner, some programmers building the Obama administration's showcase health insurance website were growing increasingly stressed. Some worked past 10 p.m., energy drinks in hand. Others rewrote computer code over and over to meet what they considered last-minute requests for changes from the government or other contractors."

Some worked past 10pm? The programmers I know, myself included, do their best work from 10pm to 4am. If only some of the healthcare.gov coders worked past 10pm, no further explanation is needed.

Meanwhile, the new mantra is "we're listening — and improving every day". But is this really true:

"The initial consumer experience of HealthCare.gov has not lived up to the expectations of the American people."

It went about as well as Dilbert or I would have expected. Whose idea was it to roll out the whole website for all the states at once without going through either a beta test period or a pilot launch for a few states? The same folks who came up with this idea to fix it with a Tech Surge:

"To ensure that we make swift progress, and that the consumer experience continues to improve, our team has called in additional help to solve some of the more complex technical issues we are encountering."

Now, in my experience, adding more people to a programming project under stress will only make the project take longer. All those new people have to be brought up to speed. And who is going to take the time to teach them? It better be the best and brightest people on the existing team, the exact people you instead want hard at work fixing problems.

Update: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, President Obama's point person on Obamacare, was interviewed by Dr. Sanjay Gupta about the healthcare.gov launch problems on CNN. Watch Secretary Sebelius squirm over the so-called Tech Surge:

SEBELIUS: You heard [President Obama] yesterday in the Rose Garden and, you know, he is the first to admit that the Web site doesn't work the way we need it to work. So that's one of the reasons, Sanjay, we have announced this tech surge and bringing in new eyes and ears.

Jeff Zients, who's a colleague and friend of mine from this administration, is coming in as a management consultant to the administrator of CMS, to make sure we look at the whole management system. We want to make sure that we have the best and the brightest in terms of tech folks. We have gathered them together and asked the contractors to bring their A team to the table, have asked the presidential innovation fellows to add some strength, because we just want to make sure we get all the right answers and do what is needed to be done as quickly as possible to open up the doors of this marketplace.

GUPTA: Jeff Zients brings a CEO background with him.

SEBELIUS: He does.

GUPTA: What about tech people? We hear the best and the brightest. Are there people or companies that we're going to recognize? Can you give us some names?

SEBELIUS: Well, right now, we've asked all of our contractors to look at their teams on the ground and bring in their absolute A team. And I am confident that that is happening every day. While we also, the presidential innovation fellows --

GUPTA: The contractors didn't do such a great job so far.

SEBELIUS: Well, I --

GUPTA: I mean did -- why didn't they bring their A team in in the first place?

SEBELIUS: I can't tell you --

GUPTA: Why are we saying in three weeks now bring your A team into this whole equation?

SEBELIUS: We have hoped that they had their A team on the table, but I -- I am talking to CEOs and urging them to make sure that we have the talent that they have available. I think all of them have folks who are assigned to a project.

It's painfully obvious that she doesn't know what she is talking about. Of course the contractors brought their A teams in the first place, grading on a scale because the sort of companies who get hired for government work can't actually recruit A talent for such projects unless they promise them they only have to do C work.

But that wasn't the problem, the problem was the website just wasn't ready to go live. They either didn't know that they had a buggy system that wasn't quite ready or they did know and went live anyway. Either way it's incompetent management, not incompetent team players. Trust me, all software starts out life buggy and no software is bug free. The skill is finding and fixing the important bugs before release.

All that aside, here was the real hubris moment:

SEBELIUS:... If we had an ideal situation and could have built the product in, you know, a five-year period of time, we probably would have taken five years. But we didn't have five years.

In the real world, you don't get five years to build a website and if it takes you five years that is so not ideal.

After watching the interview, I spent some time on healthcare.gov myself. I looked up health plan rates in 4 states without any great difficulty. Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington had their own websites. Iowa required staying on healthcare.gov. It turns out that the states whose governors and legislators oppose Obamacare got the clunky federal website, while the state governments that are supportive of Obamacare built their own better websites. That seems fair enough.

My whole session took about 40 minutes, or 10 minutes per state, while I continued to watch television. It was no harder than searching for plane tickets. True, I did not attempt to enroll or buy anything. I did have to refresh the page and restart my search once or twice, just like on the airline websites.

The individual health insurance I get now through the small business I work for costs $492.92 a month. There were plans with comparable prices, including many with a lower premium. Frankly, I might do better to get paid in cash rather than benefits and buy on the exchange where I would have actual choices rather than just the plan my small employer picks.