The Crapolla According to Fek'Lar

You Know You're DOOMED When...

airliners veer off course because your neighbor's christmas display has become a magnetic anomaly.

You've stumbled onto another issue of The Crapolla, a journal written for software professionals. No not the managers; I mean the people who do the work.

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In This Issue...

A Stage Three Vacation.

When the Hell is This Crap Going to be Over?

I'm really getting sick and tired of this. No, not the election. That's toast. I mean the idiotic power crisis in California. Here we are building stuff that sucks down major wattage and we're running low of electricity. And just how did we screw ourselves into this? Politics!

We decided that deregulation would drive down prices. So we decided that companies like PG&E would have to sell their power plants and buy power from a collective market. Now in general, competition tends to lower prices in open markets. But in California, we haven't had an open market, and you can argue that we still don't. Many conflicting forces have made this new market a violent maelstrom.

The price of retail electrical power has had a cap for years. In fact, this is the last part of the deregulation that will take place in 2002. This means no matter what happens to the wholesale price of power, retail customers do not have to pay over the capped price. This has brought California to the brink of rolling black-outs. The distributors of power in the state are paying hundreds of times more for power than the cap. (If you sell a product for less money than you pay for it, people usually call you a dot com.) This is threatening the very existence of these companies. Getting rid of the cap will not lower the price of power, it will just pass on the cost to the consumer and save the companies. Keeping the cap, or getting rid of it does not solve our problem.

Our real problem is that California does not generate enough power to satisfy its needs. We are not building new power plants fast enough to keep pace. There are three major reasons for this.

We are importing more people everyday. Our infrastructure, whether it is housing, streets, water, or power, can not keep up. What are these people doing? They are building more and more high tech stuff, which incidentally uses electricity. Last night I heard that the six Exodus server farms in the Bay Area use enough power to eat all of the production of one power generating plant. Think of it, one company, one power plant!
That's the new demand we've created. What about the supply? This summer, the big question in the southern part of San Jose was whether a new power plant would be approved. The plant would serve an area called Coyote Valley where Cisco and a bunch of other companies want to build. The residents said, "No!" Even the Major of San Jose said no. They said we had enough power. Okay, fine. I say black-out these people first!

We don't have enough power. Not in the summer when we want to run air conditioning, and not in our relatively mild winters when we want heat. There's not enough power because people don't want the plant in their backyard. So we buy our power from out-of-state, where plants charge what the market will bear.

I'm sorry to say that the environmentalists also have to carry some of the blame. I'm saying this as a former Sierra Club Hike Leader. As an organization that helps people develop an appreciation of the outdoors, the Sierra Club is wonderful. They also do good work when they make people who don't hike more aware of the hit the environment is taking. However, the Sierra Club has become the leader of a militant rabble whose aim is to shutdown any power generating plant that is not solar or wind powered. They don't even like geo-thermal power. So whenever someone shows up wanting to build a power plant in California, the Sierra Club protests the project to death. Hence, we have a lot fewer power plants in California.

So the people of San Jose who voted against the power plant should be the first to get a rolling black-out, but the Sierra Club Headquarters in San Francisco should have it's power permanently switched off. This isn't some game here. The sixth largest economy in the world is swinging in the cold like a Florida chad. (You didn't really think I was going to let the election get away, did you?) California has the tightest environmental regulations on power plants in the universe. Anyone who says no to one of these needs to disconnect from the grid.

When is all this crap going to end? When we all start bitching enough, that's when. (It's no different than Staff meetings.) It's time to start planning communities for a change. To date, planning a community in California has meant finding open ground and building houses on it. That's why there is no more open space and we have grid-lock on the freeway. It's time to start thinking about where people are going to live, where the industrial parks will be, and how the infrastructure will support the plan. It's also time to tell people that power plants in their backyard are cheaper, and cleaner since the power plant back east is allowed to pollute more. Finally, we're going to have to start thinking about the difficult problem of population growth. Very soon, we're going to have to light the "No Vacancy" neon on the "Welcome to Sillycon Valley" sign. On that day, The Valley's boom days will be over.

Yup, It's Sillycon Valley

Surfing
Ellis Street in Mountain View

Vacation

It's the final two weeks of the year/century/millennium. I'm on vacation. Just before leaving I was doing my Forrest Gump at WTHAIS, "You know what vacation is? It's when you go away and never come back." Of course this is just to keep them wondering.

To me there are two types of vacation. One where you go someplace and do so much that you need a vacation when you get back, and the other where you sit around the house and watch the cartoon network all day and drink Diet Coke. I'm doing the latter. Yesterday, I got up at 11 AM, puttered around the house until I decided I was hungry. Took at shower and ate lunch. The rest of the day, I worshipped my Sony.

Today I was an over-achiever. I called Moockie and set up a lunch for later in the week. Then I worshipped my Sony for the rest of the afternoon. Tomorrow I might do some Christmas shopping, but I need to pace myself. After the past few days, a mall hike could give me the bends. Maybe I'll get a massage first.

If you're in dire search of my point, it's that sometimes it's right to work very long hours, and sometimes it's right to do nothing. In fact, I'm doing nothing so well, that I've managed to remove the usual Christmas stress, where I freak out looking for stuff to buy people. I'm almost disengaged from Christmas, and some people on my list may not get anything this year. Maybe I'll videotape some cartoons for them -- if the freaking power stays on.

One thing that Mrs. Fek'Lar and I have done this season is drive around The Valley looking at people's decorations. All bright and flashing in the middle of the Stage 3 Power Emergency. Even the City of San Jose keeps their stuff lit while telling people to conserve. I love Christmas lights. I happen to live in a neighborhood where people really put on quite a show. However, a few could use some lessons in design.

Some home owners seem to think more is better. I disagree. The best displays are subtle. A small tree decorated in all red lights of varying size is my favorite this year. I stare at the shear spectral beauty of it. Then two houses later, it looks like Las Vegas threw up on a Nativity Scene. This house had two baby Jesus figures. One was on a high ledge, and the other was on the front lawn. So were these the before and after scenes of an attempted suicide? Did one of the three wise men push Jesus? This looked so much like Vegas, I kept searching for the buffet.

Sometimes less is more. Less activity on my vacation is more relaxing, and fewer lights on your house looks better.

This Issue's Headline submission to the National Daily World Enquiring Globe.

Madonna Gets Married

Scotland Smokes a Cigarette

Let's play, "Who said this?"

Heard in the halls of various software companies.

"That's how I made it in, you didn't interview me."

"I would have loved to have been the little bunny for that experiment."

"You suck up just enough."

"Why haven't they filtered that? I mean, "Betty Crocker" could be an anagram for "Mofo Whore"!

"You're much nicer in email."

"I'm very rarely awake when I'm doing this sort of thing."

Excuse Me

The Coyote is painting a tunnel on the rock. I love this bit.

Fek'Lar
(Inventor of Chocolate Cheesy Bunny - Morale Officer - The Last Honest Geek)

Remember: The Crapolla contains my personal opinions. That's right they're mine, so get your own! And you kids get off my lawn! This whole mess is copyright © 2001 by LowComDom Performances, all rights reserved. Wanna send this to your friends? Go ahead and pass out the URL.

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EOJ

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