Cardboard Spaceship

Renovation Time in the Spaceship

I finished my chemo for the Attack of Lumps on Friday, and took the last of the follow up drugs this morning, so now, I am officially in convalescence mode.  I was surprised to be told that I should not expect to go to work much before November, as I will need to recuperate more than I had expected.  I've never been even really trivially ill before, so I really have no handle on what this takes to recover from.  I am a bit anaemic, white blood cell count okay, and so on.  I have lost a lot of muscle though, and I am being encouraged to do physio to get that coming back on.  In reality, I suppose it remains the old saw - time will heal.

In addition, as scheduled a long time ago, we are having the main kitchen in the house completelöy replaced, and that started this morning, with the wrecking crew turning up, and as we speak they are bashing amazingly fast and effective holes in the house, taking out the old rather oddly laid out kitchen, and getting ready for the new one.  It has drven the entire crew up into my studio office upstairs, which fortunately for us, still had a functional kitchen, so we are able to eat and drink still.   It's all a bit bonkers though.

Hugh of Gaping Void Unfriends Facebook and Twitter

Interestingly enough, Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void, an old friend from school days and since, has renounced Facebook and Twitter, for reasons that he explains in a thoughtful post. 

I spoke with Hugh on the phone for an hour or so the other days, for the first time in a long time, and he was sounding in very good fettle, life seems to be agreeing with him.   The call was prompted by him giving me a bit of support, and getting news about the now vanquished Attack of Lumps, and it was a timely and supportive thing to do, so I was very touched. 

So, while I really didn't talk about blogging per se with Hugh, I actually have been asking myself the question, in light of recent events, "why am I still blogging?" 

For me, it's become a kind of public diary that family and friends can also dip into, so I guess that I am never going to get 20 million hits in a day, but that's not now why I am doing it, it's just a good way to capture thoughts and musings for myself, and anyone who is interested. 

I tried Facebook and hated it, and I cannot for the life of me see the point of Twitter.  It would be like having a continuous flow of SMS spam on your mobile. 

"Much sound and fury, signifying nothing."  Too much network, too little signal, I can see exactly here Hugh is coming from on that one...

HP - Ouch!

Leo Apotheker was CEO at SAP in the interlude between the brilliant Professor Henning Kagermann, and the Dynamic Duo of Bill McDermott, and Jim Hagemann Snabe, who do sales and tech respectively, and are both rather good at what they do.  

He got ousted after nine months in the middle of some considerable pushback from the German workforce, who decided, more or less en masse, that they didn't like him.  (I have no special knowledge of the situation, but I have worked for SAP for nigh on 20 years and know that you can't fight the sandal wearing denizens of Walldorf without mighty peril.)

He is now CEO of HP, the largest manufacturer of PCs in the world, and has recently announced some radical changes in the organisation's goals:  quit the PC business, buy a search software company in the UK, and drop the WebOS that they bought of of Palm for some billions. 

Well, that saw a 20% drop in the share price, and a lot of very surprised people in the business, after all, HP was saying until recently that the PC and tablet space was one that they were in it to win it.  Except admittedly they didn't. 

We've seen some real tidy up deals in the business recently, Nokia's disastrous decision to implode and use Windows as the OS, Oracle buying Sun, (makes no sense to me at all that one), etc.  

This one strikes me as being similar.  We'll see. 

At Last, Some Summer, and the Collapse of Western Civilization

Sitting here in the garden at the Spaceship, clearly in a lighter frame of mind now that the Attack of Lumps is in abeyance.  Finally, like the rest of Europe, rain has turned into some sunshine, and I am taking advantage of a bit of time in the hammock, all of which is balm for the soul. 

The three recurring themes of the summer remain valid.

The Euro will collapse on current form, especially given the huge vacumn of leadership that seems apparent in the Eurozone.  The options remain the same: fuck the PIIGS, fuck the German and French banks, or fuck it all, by not deciding which of the former two is the least bad option.  Right now, lamentably, the third option looks like the default, pun intended.

Fukushima is now the greatest unreported disaster in history, likely to have now exceeded Chernobyl comfortably, and may yet render large swathes of Japan uninhabitable.  Yet we hear not one sound in the mainstream media.  Is it because there is no point in talking about something that cannot be changed? 

Finally, the Arab Spring has rolled on, and it looks like the end game may be approaching in Libya, and Syria is now the bad boy of the scene, with the West piling on to try and get Assad to go. 

Hmmm. 

I am staying in the hammock, and watching the show over my bare toes. 

Lumpdate III - Good News

Well, I went to see Head of Lumps at the local hospital today, having done a CT PET Scan last week, and apparently there is no remaining trace of the erstwhile Attack of Lumps. 

Obviously this is good news.

I still have to do a couple more chemo, more or less as a belt and braces, but the prognosis is now very positive. 

Still absorbing that bit of news.

In a nice counterpoint, I got a card in the post this morning signed by a number of SAP UK friends, colleagues and associates, so that was very nice, all wishing me well, which is timely.  (Thanks everyone, much appreciated.)

 

F-22 and F-35 Jet Fighters ALL Grounded...

I saw in the middle of a long Internet noodling session, where I was looking for the latest financial news, this little, totally unrelated, gem:  Both the US advanced fighters, the F-22 Raptor, and the F-35 Lightning are completely grounded due to technical SNAFUs.  The F-22 oxygen system doesn't work, and the F-35 has a serious electrical fault. 

Wow, 80 billion dollars worth of lawn ornaments.  Might be seen as being a bit inconvenient, but fortunately they are designed to fight other superpowers, not AK-47 and RPG wielding locals, so that's OK then. 

That also goes well for the UK, as they have contracted to build two useless aircraft carriers, and they are to be filled, eventually, with the F-35, so that looks like having non-functional aircraft carriers with non-functional aircraft, for a non-specified purpose. 

Result. 

Thank God I moved to a land-locked country.

Good Old AEP of the Daily Telegraph on the Euro Crisis

You can always rely on Ambrose Evans Pritchard of the UK's Daily Telegraph for some clarity of thought, even if he can be alarmingly pessimistic sometimes.  Here he is on the Euro Crisis, unfolding as we speak.

"In a nutshell, unless the ECB is willing to step in – I mean really step in, not piss in the wind – until such a time as the revamped EFSF bail-out is ratified by all parliaments and is ready to take the baton (say November), and unless the EFSF itself is quadrupled in size and given to a €2 trillion mandate without all the German-imposed ifs and buts, then the game is up.

If the EU authorities refuse to do this, it is best for everybody that is recognized immediately and that arrangements are made for the orderly break-up of monetary union …  not next year, or next month, but next week."

Really not a nice concept, especially as trying to revoke a huge treaty like monetary union on an ad hoc basis would not be easy.  But one way or another, the banks are going to have liquidity freezes, and runs on consumer banking, unless some kind of resolution is apparent.  If you are in Greece, do you take out all the Euros you can, to avoid being in the Drachma again, or as a German do you drop the Euros in your account for something else like the Swiss Franc, to preserve value until the new DM comes in?  Either way, massive flows build up quickly into self-fulfilling prophecies. 

Keep watching.  Don't blink.

My Three Summer Panic Items, Number Three: Arab Sprung

Well, we hoped that there would be a sweep of democratic thought through Egypt, Libya, Syria, etc. 

No, turns out it isn't the dictators first rodeo, and they aren't giving up lightly.  The Libyans assassinated their rebel leader, and now that has collapsed into anarchy, with the West bombing stuff at random, while the Syrians are prepared to shell their own towns, and we just watch. 

Nasty business. 

My Three Summer Panic Items, Number Two: Fukushima

Latest news from Fukushima, they have found hotspots at 10 Seiverts an hour.  What's the context here?  Maximum safe annual exposure for a worker at the Tepco site was raised to 250 milliSeiverts a year, from the original non-emergency 100 milliSeiverts a year. 

Peter Burns, former chief executive officer of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, says given the scale of the Fukushima emergency, the high reading is to be expected.

"The levels reported of 10 sieverts per hour are very high levels and it's going to be very difficult to manage workers going into those areas and doing operations," he said.

"To put the 10 sieverts into context, that 10 sieverts is actually a lethal dose of radiation. So you can't afford to be exposed for more than a few minutes at those levels.

"It means you're directly exposed to fuel rods in the reactors or the spent fuel ponds very closely and while it's possible to get to those levels it means there is very little shielding going on there."

My calculation would be that you would get the yearly limit in two and half minutes, which means that manual work is not going to solve the Fukushima clean up.

In fact, it's going to take decades, say Japanese sources.   Now, the next fly to swallow is the idea that the safe zone round this mess is 20 km, which is barely credible.  so, what do you do if you have to evacuate a large portion of the habitable land of a densely populated island, during a decade long clean up operation? 

This one will be a long term one to watch. 

My Three Summer Panic Items, Number One: the Euro

Well, we knew the PIIGS were in trouble, and have been for some time, but now it is the turn of Italy and Spain, and that means game over for the Euro in one of two directions:  either full fiscal integration right now, like today, or a bust up. 

Problem is, neither is actually legally possible, and so no mechanism exists to save the situation, as outlined by none other than Baroso.

I am to some extent covered being in the wildly over-valued Swissy, but that's an illusion too in the long run, it's all interconnected.

Enjoy the Show, you haven't even started paying for the ticket.